The year is 1464.
The War of the Roses rages on; a great showdown between Lancaster and York.
Yet, asleep in her bed, fiery-haired Melissa Woodville dreams of splintered shields, broken swords, and the resounding screams of wounded men in the Battle...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
WHEN HER ELDEST sister married for the first time, Melissa had not even been born yet. Growing up at Grafton Manor, she barely even knew Elizabeth, who — though she lived a day's ride away — rarely visited. As such, and though the Woodville family had always been rife with girls, Melissa never having lacked sisters to play with, Elizabeth's second marriage to the king was the first wedding she had ever attended — and even then, they had hardly had a proper ceremony.
One might ask that with so many children, why Elizabeth was the only one who had been wed before 1465. The simple answer was that Melissa's parents' marriage had put the family in a unique position. There were many members of the landed gentry who were willing to part with their sons or daughters for a child of Woodville get, but Jacquetta Rivers had always thought her children to be worthy of higher marriages than that. The only reason she had parted with her eldest was because the family had needed the money that John Grey of Groby would be able to give them, and he was heir to a barony besides.
Now, teaching one's children to aim for spouses of higher blood and wealth than theirs was all good and well, but there was a clear problem with that mentality. None of the nobility were willing to wed their heirs and daughters to the children of a woman who had disgraced herself by marrying a lowly squire, and so Melissa's eldest sisters became what many referred to as "old maids". Anne, at twenty-seven, was the eldest Woodville yet unmarried, and for the longest time, the red-head had feared that they would all follow her fate as miserly virgins and stale, trussed up knights.
It was not to be, though, for Elizabeth married the king, and mother's long period of waiting seemed to pay off. Anne would marry Viscount Bourchier, Mary was betrothed to the Earl of Pembroke, Anthony had just wed Baroness Scales, and (most shameful of all) Elizabeth had somehow managed to convince her husband to bind John to his elderly aunt, Katherine Neville, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who was sixty-five years old to his nineteen. That had thrown most of the court — if not all — into a terrible outrage, with some even calling it a "maritagium diabolicum" — a diabolical marriage.
