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...
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HER MOTHER HATED her.
Lady Margaret Stanley, formerly Tudor (née Beaufort) had always been quite sure of that. It no longer hurt her as much as it once did — she now only felt inconvenienced by it. But still, that did not negate the very fact that her mother well and truly hated her. For what reason, Margaret did not know; what she did know, was that Lady Beauchamp, the miserly woman who had given birth to her, was somehow still preventing her from seeing little Henry — her son.
When Margaret had married for the third time (John de la Pole, the second Duke of Suffolk, and Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond being her first and second husbands), she had hoped that she would finally be free of Lady Beauchamp's poisonous claws. It was not to be, however, as Sir Henry Stafford was as much of a pushover as one could conceive. He was not like de la Pole, who had always known what he'd wanted, or even like Tudor, her son's father, whom she had known for scarce a few months before he had gone and died — no, Stafford was weak.
Margaret thought of him with scorn, the way she had been forcefully saddled with a man like him as shameful. So many men had wanted her for her ancestry, even more so because she was little Henry's mother, but Lady Beauchamp had gone and chosen quite possibly the worst candidate she could have thought of — even though Stafford was to be the Duke of Buckingham. This was yet another reason Margaret was convinced her mother hated her, just for the sake of hating her; why else would she have chosen a man like Stafford when Jasper, her late husband's brother was right there? Noble, strong Jasper ... had she been married to him, no one would have dared look at her the way they do now.
Perhaps the only good thing that had come out of her marriage to Stafford was sitting in front of her — little Lionel, her second son, borne from her third union. With his head of oak brown hair and pair of hazel eyes that sparkled with intelligence, Margaret could reluctantly say that she could not fully regret marrying Stafford — not when this little boy existed.
