Chapter Text
1. Failure to Thrive, June 1456, Warwick Castle
The black velvet of his doublet was sodden with rain. The water, falling in fat droplets from the undulations of its surface, the elbow, the shoulders, looked stained with ink. It collected on the ground, forming dark, dull puddles around his feet. He looked as though he were emerging from a pit.
Emerging from, perhaps, or descending into.
It was difficult to tell. The water obscured the truth of the image.
Such rain was unlucky in June. Indeed, it would have been considered unlucky at any time but now seemed doubly so: luck had departed the Nevilles in recent weeks.
A fortnight ago he had buried his Countess. Now, today, he had buried his daughter. Born late and yet still impossibly small, with limbs so pliant as to appear to lack the very bones by which they were formed, the child had not thrived. Rather, had confounded expectations by clinging so fiercely, and with such small hands, to life for this long.
He had begun to hope, to allow himself to think that their daughter had inherited the intractable resolve of her parents. Resolve for which he was famous, or infamous - depending on whom was speaking, but which he knew to be shared equally in his marriage.
But a baby’s grasp is never sure. And this child had proved too like her mother, for she too now had left him. Slipping silently away though, not torn like the screams he had heard wrought from the confinement rooms. A castle’s walls are not so very thick.
And still rain pooled at his feet. He ought to return inside but the rhythm of the water hitting his cheeks, eyes, throat, helped him to think. To concentrate on what he must now do. For a Neville cannot be unlucky for long, must not face the turning of fortune’s wheel with equanimity, but power it by his own hand till he mounted its summit and then arrested its forward momentum to remain there.
His mind already turning to that task, his calculations beginning to assuage his grief, he knew what was he needed. Anne, for all that she had been his steadfast Countess, had not been fertile: the Beauchamps were not breeding stock. But there was Isabelle. And there must be siblings for his Isabelle; the sole inhabitant of a large nursery that would become populous with more girls and, please God, sons.
Then, then, he would turn fortune’s wheel to his whim.
That was later though. Now he would loiter a while longer suspended from its bottom rung, feet submersing into their inky pool. Head bowed but mind alert to the wonderings of what his wife and daughter, his two Annes, might have done; what together they do now.
He focussed on that.
For now.