第21章 (第3/3页)
l sons and his five girls had all the character and good looks of 'their combined ancestry.
As a grandmother she could look on that crowd of children with a personal pride, and as a Princess of England she could look on them with assurance. The crown was safe in the York line for generations to come.
If anyone, looking in a crystal bail at that party, had told Cedily Neviil that in four years not only the York line but the whole Plantagenet dynasty would have gone for ever, she would have told it to be either madness or treason.
But what Miss Payne-Ellis bad not sought to gloss over was the prevalence of the Woodville clan in a Nevili Plantagenet gathering.
She looked round the room and wished that her daughter-in-law Elizabeth had been blessed either with a less generous heart or with fewer relations. The Woodville match had turned out far more happily than anyone bad dared to hope; Elizabeth had been an admirable wife; but the by-products had not been so fortunate. It was perhaps inevitable that the governorship of the two boys should have gone to her eldest brother; and Rivers, if a little nouveau riche in his liking for display and a little too obviously ambitions, was a cultured creature and an admirable person to have the boys in charge during their school-room days at Ludlow. But as for the rest: four brothers, seven sisters, and two sons by her first husband, were really too many by half to have brought into the marriage market in her wake.
Cecily looked across the laughing m锚l茅e of the children's blind man's buff to the grown-ups standing round the supper table. Anise Woodville married to the Earl of Essex's heir. Eleanor Woodville married W the Earl of Kent's heir. Margaret Woodville married to the Earl of Arundel's heir. Catherine Woodvilie married to the Duke of Buckingham. Jacquette Woodville to Lord Strange. Mary Woodville to Lord Herbert's heir. And John Woodville, disgracefully, to the Dowager of Norfolk who was old enough to be his grandmother. It was good that new blood should strengthen the old families-new blood had always seeped in-but it was not good that it should come suddenly and in a flood from one particular source. h was like a fever in the political blood of the country; a foreign introduction, difficult to be assimilated. Unwise and regrettable.
However. There were long years ahead in which that influx could be assimilated. This new sudden power in the body politic would cease to be so concentrated, would spread out, would settle down, would cease to be dangerous and upsetting. Edward for all his amiability had a shrewd common sense; he would keep the country on an even keel as he had kept it for nearly twenty years. No one bad run England with a more despotic power or a lighter hand than her acute, lazy, woman-loving Edward.
It would be all right eventually.
She was about to rise and join them in their discussion of sweetmeats-they must not think that she was being critical or aloof-when her granddaughter Elizabeth came breathless and laughing out of the scrimmage and swept into the seat beside her.
'I am much too old for this sort of ding,' she said between her gasps, 'and it is ruinous to one's clothes. Do you like my dress, grandmother?