The White Rose.

P A R A D I S E.

When she was just a girl she expected the world.

Isabella's life had been one of the utmost comfort, unlike the pauper across the channel, the one who called himself King every now and again. Isabella grew up with all the trappings of a princess. The title she was born with, but never bestowed upon her.

Though she felt the spurn of being called Lady Isabella, and not the title she should have been given at her birth her grandmother and two uncles, the Dukes of House York denied her nothing. Along with her Neville aunts, who married the York brothers; her uncles. The four of them, not having children of their own; though many babes came, however, none survived the cradle, showered their loved onto Isabella, a motherless child.

"Richie?" Her azure eyes bore into his dark eyes.

"Yes, Ellie?" He bops her nose making her giggle.

"Why is it that I do not have a mother?" She looks at her with her auburn hair fanned around her. "Why am I the only one without my mother?"

He does not have the heart to tell her that he watched her mother breathe her last breathe. Nor, the promise he made on her deathbed.

"Promise me, Richard. Promise me." The words were engrained in his mind, every time he shut his eyes he was in that damned nunnery in a room that smelled of blood and roses.

"She loved you more than life itself," he sighs, looking into blue eyes, she had her mother's eyes. "And sometimes we must be content with that kind of love, though we may not ever see it we can always feel it."

She scrunches her little nose, "But, where? Where can I find it?"

He puts his hand over her heart. "In here."

She looks up at him, her blue eyes understanding something that was a mystery to her before, "She is with me always, I know it. I can feel her presence and if I close my eyes really hard I can see flashes of raven hair and eyes as blue as mine. Is that my mother?"

"See, she is always there. Always." He kisses her on the head and wishes her sweet dreams, as he closes her chamber door, he curses the brother her idolized so much to leave a little girl like Isabella motherless.

But it was not until she was seven years old then she truly understand, why she was motherless and called a bastard by courtiers.

Though any man who dared called her bastard, was snared at by her uncle Richard and snubbed by her uncle George. Once their favor was lost, it was never regained.

She might have carried the title Isabella of York, but she never carried her half-sisters titles as princess of the realm.

"Gam Gam?" Pools of azure set in her face as eyes, cut across to the older woman across from her. Her eyes, the very ones she is told her mother had before her, bored into her grandmother's light sky-blue eyes. She can see tufts of her auburn mane, the same mane Isabella had, the mane her father had. Unlike all his other children, who inherited the Woodville mane, Isabella inherited her father's distinctive red-gold hair color.

"Yes, my poppet?"

"Why am I not called Princess? I am older than all my sisters, yet they have a title and respect of the court I do not." Isabella frowned, her tiny hands making a fist.

"Oh, my dear," Her Gam Gam stopped in the corridor, pulling her aside. "You were put in a position by birth that regards respect to be earned."

"Earned?" She questioned

"You see, you have an opportunity your sisters never will have be not having a title."

"How so?"

The Duchess of York looks at her with fire in her eyes, "You will not be sold off to ensure a political match, no you shall be the one in charge of making the match. You are worth ten York princesses, you will be something far greater threat than any York princess to do so you must be unassailable in your plight to be a the steel rose of House York."