#georgesofyork

[thfcrtuncte]

The York family had not been her choice, for as long as she could remember she had never entertained the idea of matrimonial bliss — if anything she had been kept to her mother’s skirts in some effort to keep her fortunate daughter safe from the outer influences of court life, their pomp and grandeur, their lies and torment spreading like wildfire. No, for many years there was little to admire beyond the walls of her nursery till Hal died — leaving the family thus uprooted, each daughter suddenly eyed as a potential Queen to a wealthy son. It just so happened that the next family of such wealth and prestige happened to have arranged two betrothals to royal blood. Margaret, and her older sister Katherine, sold onward to gain the best profit to the crown itself. 

Alas, she had not been prepared for the union to be met with anticipation and gruelling passions. For it took all of her, every inch, not to weave her hands into George of York’s hair as he whispered chivalric hymns into her ear. Rarely ever allowed to be formally alone, as was but a rule of their sect, it would then be a scandalous affair to know of their secret unions held in the inner sanctum of her rooms — or behind closed doors, or even amongst the rose bushes that blossomed with rich fragrance. Paris, with its glittering affairs of cobalt and gold, would barely be but a hindrance to this new way of life, but still, Margaret had a role to play as her father’s daughter, as a Princess and potential Queen. 

“If they find you here —” she began, her lips easing into a wide-set grin that echoed across her face in waves. “In these rooms…” Margaret continued, closing the shutters to the windows that overlooked the French affairs, rushing to the door of which he came to push it shut. “You will put in danger all that we have built, you don’t want that, do you?” She teased, twisting her form towards him, a sway adopted before she met his stance, her hands set upon the broad stretch of his chest, her breath hitched with her girlish whims. “Alas, stay. I would have no one else help me settle in this new airs." @georgesofyork

[lancastrie]

@georgesofyork

The Parisian climate had been benevolent to its English occupants, a conclave whose bloodline was, nevertheless, gritted to bear frigid, dripping climes; barren chills that penetrated the costliest of sable, whipped and roped at the vein-mapped countenance. The King’s dark-tressed curls brandished rust in the white-flaring sun; the balmy taste of optimism, like ripened apricot, dethawing on the lips. In the mirth and revelry of the day, the chime of laughter and of the tolling bells of Saint-Denis, in the company of crowns and bishops’ mantles, Henry derived no small iota of pleasure; indeed, the piquancy of summer had always boded well with the King. It was, after all, to the marshy, sunburned battlefield, and the bloated, impassable rivers of June, that he owed the victorious attainment of his holy crown – winter had served only misery, meted out only death and malady.

Henry’s movements were fluid, genial, as he glided across the warmed courtyard; the strides of a soldier, of Caesar stepping across the Rubicon, and no shrewd, miserly sovereign, ruling stubbornly, compactly, from a kingdom on the remotest fringes of the world; more populace in boars than noblemen. Henry was all ease, crinkled eyes, boisterous laughter. In splendid velvets, and in buoyant spirits, no one would dare presume that England was a realm that lay on the brink of anarchy. Nor, however, did circumstances allow Henry to forget this woebegone fact. Emerging from between a column of rippling pendants, the swaggering figure of George of York was as sobering as a spear’s tip, sliding at the throat. Hardly as insidious as their lord father, in whom the King possessed but little faith, Henry watched the Neville scions closely. It was in George, however, that he kindled the warmest of sentiments; Henry saw in him the babe he’d cradled in his arms, those liquid eyes, powdery scent, brought to a basin hung with gold-brocade and christened into the true faith, before all of England – shoving roots into a bond that would prove ineradicable. Though chiefly the boy’s sovereign lord, who asserted his authority energetically, the King would concede there was a deeper kinship that ran between a godfather and his godson, than a man in vicarious desire of a son; one that the discord sewn between dynasties could not supplant. And soon, very soon, they would be conjoined in all but blood.

Henry extended a hand, flashing with the heirloom he wore on his pinky, gesturing for the boy, grown into the strapping figure of a man, to draw nearer. ‘My lord York. As I accept you as my natural son, I ask you to allow me the honour of addressing you by your name. Little would bring the Queen’s highness, and myself, more pleasure than for our family to be the merriest in England.’