The Sunne in Splendour: A Novel of Richard III by Sharon Kay Penman Page A

theatened to cut it up into mock battle standards for his endless games of warfare. Cecily plucked now at the faded gold wool with nerveless fingers, thinking of her youngest alone out in the dark upon the treacherous English Channel without the talisman he seemed so desperately to need.
She was so immobile that Anne became uneasy, slipped a small hand into the sleeve of Cecily's gown in a gesture of uncertain consolation, Cecily smiled at her great-niece, and tucked the blanket securely around her, saying steadily, "There. ... This is Richard's blanket. He left it for you. Sleep now, Anne."
    With the frayed familiar wool drawn up to her chin, Anne was content, and all at once, very sleepy. "Can
I keep it till Dickon comes home?"
"Yes, dearest. . . till he comes home." As if she were sure that one day her sons would, indeed, be able to come home.
CECILY softly closed the door of Anne's bedchamber, stood irresolute for the space of several deep breaths. Within, Anne's elder sister Isabel slept, curled up in a tangle of coverlets at the foot of the bed.
Cecily's flaring candle had tracked the trail of tears on the girl's face; shone upon the swollen puffy eyelids, upon the thumb, long since freed from its nightly bondage to Isabel's mouth and now suddenly pressed back into its former servitude. Cecily had backed out stealthily, now struggled to control her rage, rage directed at Nan Neville, her niece.
Warwick's wife had never been a favorite of hers. When word reached London of Warwick's rout at St
Albans, she'd done her best to console his stricken wife, insisted that Nan and her daughters leave the
Herber for Baynard's Castle, but her sympathies were strained through a finely veiled contempt. Nan had no reason to think her husband dead. Yet for three days now, she'd scarcely ventured from her bed, and when Cecily had ushered her frightened little girls into the chamber, she'd outraged Cecily by drawing her daughters tearfully to her and sobbing so incoherently that both Anne and Isabel at once became hysterical.
Now Cecily thought of Nan sequestered in her bedchamber while Isabel cried herself to sleep and Anne was compelled to seek comfort from her eight-year-old cousin, and she felt a terrible anger. Nan was very much in love with Warwick, she knew that. But she herself had been in love with Richard
Plantagenet, the man who'd been her playmate in childhood, then friend, lover, companion, and husband during an enduring and eventful marriage, and she had not permitted his children to see her weep for him.
The urge was overwhelming in its intensity to confront her niece in her tear-sodden bed, to accuse her of an unforgivable indifference to the daughters who needed her more than Richard Neville, Earl of
Warwick, ever would, to vent upon Nan all of the anguish and rage and frustration of the past seven weeks. She was not a woman, however, to give in to urges. She'd speak to Nan, but tomorrow . . .
tomorrow, when the anger had congealed into ice.
She found her daughter Margaret in the solar, wrapped in a fur cover before the fire, blonde head bent over a book. Cecily stood unobserved in the doorway, watching the girl. Margaret was nearly fifteen.
Too pretty, by far. It was a thought alien to the world as Cecily had known it before
    Sandal Castle, a fear she'd never have expected to feel for a daughter of hers.
"Ma Mere?" Margaret had looked up at last. "Did you see George and Dickon safe on board?"
Cecily nodded. Her daughter's eyes were suspiciously circled, her eyelids reddened; it was Margaret who had acted as a surrogate mother to her younger brothers during Cecily's frequent absences.
"Were you weeping, Meg?" she asked softly, and Margaret gave her a startled look, for her mother alone of all the family preferred to address her children by their Christian given names. She dropped the book by the hearth, went to Cecily. They were, by temperament and training, a restrained and undemonstrative family; only Margaret and her