❝I never sued to friend nor enemy

My tongue could never learn sweet smoothing word

But now thy beauty is proposed my fee,

My proud heart sues, and prompts my tongue to speak.❞

Richard III 

— ♛ —

𝑹ichard of Gloucester had been doomed since birth. 

Wicked.

Cursed.

Bewitched.

Born too soon, with a crooked spine and a stunted arm, he had been a hideous thing since the cradle, a creature so malformed and detestable that even the wetnurses that his horrified mother had sent to satiate his thirst didn't bear his presence too long before leaving Fotheringhay. Due to his position as the youngest of his brothers and his limping and the pain that had assailed his body ever since he had memory, he was meant to devote his life to God and, with the influence that his family exerted over the clergy, to become a priest, then a cardinal, then a bishop, and so on... But he refused that shameful fate for a son of York, to be locked for the rest of his days in a monastery when his blood yearned for the glory of the battlefield, and, rebelling against the doom that his condition carried, he became a soldier during the war against the Lancasters, and the fiercest of them all. He had slain uncountable men, from mere nameless soldiers whose faces he no longer remembered, to noblemen that deserved the agony his sword had inflicted upon them; he had killed the treacherous Warwick, and the fool king Henry, and yes, he had killed Edward of Westminster with his very own blade, a feat he wouldn't have thought himself capable of doing, until he saw the dark blood stain the fair locks of the young prince, and the life drifting away from his pupils...

Yes... He had killed his way to the glory, and yet, he was still a despicable, deformed  creature, plagued of scars and besieged by bad dreams. He was not his brother Edward, or his brother Clarence; his flesh wasn't made for idle affections, his lips weren't meant to be kissed, and his existence wasn't meant to be cherished. His only women would be the desperate harlots who could not lay with more noble men, and nothing else. The duke would never met the tenderness of a sincere embrace, the sweet pleasure of laying in bed with a legitimate wife, and the comfort of resting his weary head against a soft shoulder, as much as he wouldn't cradle a son in his arm and watch over his sleep, tenderly...

A soft sigh made him come back to his senses. He was not alone in that bedchamber; curled up under the coverlet, lady Anne slept. Her carelessly hair flowed like a river of silk over the cushions, her breath modulated and tranquil, quite the contrary of the past night, when he had assailed her with impious fondles and words so sinful no holy man would recall out loud. Now, there was no coming back for lady Anne; her virtue had been lost under the bedcovers of that bed, taken away by that villain, her name would never be pronounced with pity for the loss of her brave prince, but with contempt, and she would forever be stained with sin of having laid with him, and even more if —as he expected— she had resulted pregnant of the encounter. 

Her gown and her silver coronet rested in the cold stone floor, where he had thrown them in the middle of the encounter, ridden by the hunger of caresses he had never fully satiated with the wenches he had bedded before that fateful night, and that, he knew, he would not satiate with the women that would come after her. In the edge of the bed, his own doublet and his breeches were left forgotten and wrinkled, carelessly. He left the comfort of the bed and started to dress himself in silence; in the darkness, he thought, as he put on his clothes, he wasn't as hideous as under the daylight, as the Devil might be. 

When he finished, the Duke of Gloucester looked back at the lady, and he wondered whether that sweet creature that slept so peacefully by his side knew about his machinations, before he reached her shoulder and grasped it harshly, making her go back to the land of the awake.

"Wake up" he ordered her, handing her the gown, "Thou shall become my wife before the dawn arrives and the king knows."

She nodded and, now restrained by a modesty that she had completely forgotten the night before, when he embraced her for the first time, she started to get dressed under the coverlet. He sighed and a vile smile started to curve his thin lips. 

Oh, the gentle lady Anne had no idea of who he was going to be once he became her husband...

... But neither did him.