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Welcome*
My name is Hilary Llewellyn.
My work-in-progress is a novel: Right of Answer.
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In 1321, Baroness Margaret de Badlesmere was the first noblewoman
imprisoned — along with her five children — in the Tower of London.
Her incarceration was illegal.
The injustice fomented a civil war and emboldened a queen.​
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I was inspired to write this story when I discovered
the key personalities in the drama
— Margaret de Badlesmere, Baron Badlesmere,
King Edward II, and Queen Isabella —
are my nineteenth great-grandparents.​
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RIGHT OF ANSWER
CHAPTER 1
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Leeds Castle, County of Kent
The Second Week of October in 1321
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Normally, Margaret de Badlesmere sent teams of kitchen servants on regular expeditions to the neighbouring farms, manors, and abbeys. Normally, hunters from the garrison prowled the forests that surrounded the castle, searching for deer and beating the undergrowth for wild fowl. Normally, those efforts were enough to maintain the regular stores—the drying room’s salted and smoked meats, the pantry’s grain barrels and its bins of turnips and onions, the kegs of ale lying in the cool of the buttery, and the feed in the granary for the stables and the henhouses.
Yet the times were not normal. Much more than the regular food-stores must be collected; soon, Leeds Castle might come under siege.
Now, armed guards must ride with the kitchen servants, driving the provision carts deeper and deeper into the countryside to buy, barter, and confiscate. But ceaseless rainfall had once again plagued the summer with flooded fields and ruined harvests, and the returning servants drove half-empty wagons up to the castle’s kitchen doors.
Now, her hunters in the woods found little game. The deer had moved further inland, away from the sodden forest’s exhausted browsing sites. All the ground-dwelling birds had followed the deer, and there was nothing in the air to shoot since the migratory birds had fled to Spain and the coasts of Africa. When the hunters trudged back into the courtyard, they carried flat game sacks and full quivers.
Margaret ordered half-rations for the scores of hungry people living within the castle walls.
Each evening, when she led council meetings with her garrison officers, she split into two selves. On the surface, she talked and acted as a seasoned leader, never resting against her cushioned chair-back as she listened, questioned, and planned. A wide landscape of problems spread before her, which she considered in its full breadth. But beneath that surface … although she held her back straight, she must hide her hands among the folds of her skirts to conceal their faint tremor.
Siege.​
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