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Part 1: Daughter
1: Home
Anne was a timid child. She was frightened by the sweaty reek of the soldiers clattering through the fortress, and the great horses that lumbered into the courtyard striking sparks from the cobbles with their iron hoofs. Although she slept in the same bed as her sister Isabel she was terrified of the dark, and she had nightmares about being drawn up with the drawbridge and impaled by the portcullis. She was afraid of the sharp-nosed hounds which followed her father around, lashing their tails like whips, and she hated it when he picked her up and threw her into the air, shouting that she still weighed less than a feather. He always caught her safely, but there was that panic-stricken moment every time when she could see the floor far below and feel herself plunging fatally towards it.
Her father did not so much scare as overawe her. He was a very important man. Not only had the hounds fawned on him. The bright gentlemen who sauntered about the hall stopped whispering and sniggering whenever he came in and bent towards him with loud rustlings of silk and brocade. Anne and her mother and sister had to curtsey to the ground as he appeared, and not stand up until he commanded them. Once she had mixed up her foot with the hem of her kirtle and instead of standing up she fell over. He was not cross with her, but neither did he laugh like her least favourite among the gentlemen. He had looked at her thoughtfully for a moment as she struggled to her feet, and then turned away with a slight shake of his head. Later her nurse scolded her for her clumsiness.
'It's bad enough as it is, lady, without your making it worse.' Anne tried unsuccessfully not to cry. What was bad enough as it was she did not know, but she was sure it was her fault.
Everything seemed to be well when she went out into the streets. Roars of enthusiasm greeted her, which were twice as loud when her father was there. His eyes would light up as he waved right and left to the motley groups of townsfolk, but Anne went stiff among the cushions of her litter, her stomach a hard lump of lead, dreading the grinning faces and dirty hands which thrust through the curtains.
Once a week at least the whole family left the fortress and progressed through the raucous streets to hear mass in the church. This was quite beyond Anne's comprehension, since there was a snug little chapel inside the fortress with coloured paintings of angels on the wall and a shiny golden cross on the altar, and a ceiling low enough for her to see. The town church had a roof so high and gloomy that it was out of sight even when she dared to look up, which was not often. Although her confessor had told her reassuringly that devils lived underneath the earth and would only come and take her away if she was very wicked, she was convinced that some of them lived up there in the roof of the church, echoing mockingly the words spoken by the distant priest on the steps of the sanctuary. Sometimes the thought of those monsters with staring eyes and scaly wings and forked tails sitting up above leering at her drove every word of the mass out of her head and she could not even remember her Pater Noster. One Sunday she foolishly glanced upwards as they left the church, and caught a glimpse of one of them. It was hunched on the corner of the porch, grey and still, its mouth wide open showing jagged broken teeth - broken, she supposed, by the number of lost souls it had chewed up. She never told anyone about that.
Indeed there was no one to tell. It would not have entered her head to confide in her father. He was often away, doing wonderful things, she gathered dimly, like sweeping the Dons' fleet from the seas, whatever that meant, defeating murderous mobs single-handed, and escaping miraculously from disasters. When he was there she hardly dared open her mouth in his presence, even to answer his enquiries as to how she fared.
