The White Queen: A Novel

by Philippa Gregory

  I sigh as if I am overwhelmed by his logic. “And if I refuse?”

  He draws close to me and speaks low. “I fear that he will break sanctuary and take you and all your family out of here,” he says very quietly. “And all the lords think he would be right to do so. No one defends your right to be in here, Your Grace. This is a shell around you, not a castle. Let the little Prince Richard out and they will leave you here, if that is your wish. Keep him here and you will all be pulled out, like leeches from a glass jar. Or they can smash the jar.”

  Elizabeth, who has been looking out of the window, leans forward and whispers, “Lady Mother, there are hundreds of Duke Richard’s barges on the river. We are surrounded.”

  For a moment I do not see the cardinal’s worried face. I do not see the hard expression of Thomas Howard. I do not see the half dozen men who have come with him. I see my husband going into the sanctuary at Tewkesbury with his sword drawn, and I know that from that moment sanctuary was no longer safe. Edward destroyed his son’s safety that day—and he never knew. But I know it now. And thank God I have prepared for it.

  I put my handkerchief to my eyes. “Forgive a woman’s weakness,” I say. “I cannot bear to part with him. Can I be spared this?”

  The cardinal pats my hand. “He has to come with us. I am sorry.”

  I turn to Elizabeth and I whisper, “Fetch him, fetch my little boy.”

  Elizabeth leaves in silence, her head bowed.

  “He has not been well,” I say to the cardinal. “You must keep him wrapped up warm.”

  “Trust me,” he says. “He will come to no harm in my care.”

  Elizabeth comes back with the changeling page boy. He is in my Richard’s clothes, a scarf tied round his throat, muffling the lower part of his face. When I hold him to me, he even smells of my own boy. I kiss his fair hair. His little-boy frame is delicate in my arms, and yet he holds himself bravely, as a prince should do. Elizabeth has taught him well. “Go with God, my son,” I say to him. “I shall see you again at your brother’s coronation in a few days.”

  “Yes, Lady Mother,” he says like a little parrot. His voice is scarcely more than a whisper but audible to them all.

  I take him by the hand and I lead him to the cardinal. He has seen Richard at court, at a distance, and this boy is hidden by the jeweled cap on his head and the flannel round his throat and his jaw. “Here is my son,” I say, my voice trembling with emotion. “I resign him into your hands. I do here deliver him and his brother into your safekeeping.” I turn to the boy and say to him, “Farewell, mine own sweet son, the Almighty be your protector.”

  He turns his little face to me, all wrapped in the concealing scarf, and for a moment I feel a sweep of real emotion as I kiss his warm cheek. I may be sending this child into danger instead of my own, but he is still a child, and it is still danger. There are tears in my eyes when I put his little hand in the big soft palm of Cardinal Bourchier, and I say to him over the little head, “Guard this boy, my boy, please, my lord. Keep this boy safe.”

  We wait as they take the boy, and file from the room. When they are gone, the scent of their clothes lingers. It is the smell of the outdoors, horse sweat, cooked meats, a fresh breeze blowing over cut grass.

  Elizabeth turns to me and her face is pale. “You sent the page boy for you think it is not safe for our boy to go to the Tower,” she observes.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “So you must think that our Edward is not safe in the Tower.”

  “I don’t know. Yes. That is my fear.”

  She takes an abrupt step to the window and for a moment she reminds me of my mother, her grandmother. She has the same determination—I can see her puzzling away at the best course. For the first time I think that Elizabeth will make a woman to be reckoned with. She is not a little girl anymore.

  “I think you should send to my uncle and ask him for an agreement,” she says. “You could agree that we give him the throne, and he names Edward as his heir.”

  I shake my head.

  “You could,” she says. “He is Edward’s uncle, a man of honor. He must want a way out of this as much as we do.”

  “I will not give up Edward’s throne,” I say tightly. “If Duke Richard wants it, he will have to take it, and shame himself.”

  “And what if he does that?” she asks me. “What happens to Edward then? What happens to my sisters? What happens to me?”

  “I don’t know,” I say cautiously. “We may have to fight; we may have to argue. But we don’t give up. We don’t surrender.”

  “And that little boy,” she says, nodding to the door where the page boy has gone, his jaw tied up with flannel so he does not speak. “Did we take him from his father, and bathe him and clothe him and tell him to be silent as we sent him to his death? Is that how we fight this war, using a child as our shield? Sending a little boy to his death?”

  SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 1483: CORONATION DAY

  “What?” I spit at the quiet dawn sky like an angry cat whose kittens have been taken away for drowning. “No royal barges? No booming cannon from the Tower? No wine flowing in the fountains of the city? No banging of drums, no ’prentice boys howling out the songs of their guilds? No music? No shouting? No cheering along the procession route?” I swing open the window that looks over the river and see the usual river traffic of barges and wherries and rowing boats, and I say to my mother and to Melusina, “Clearly, they don’t crown him today. Is he to die instead?” I think of my boy as if I were painting his portrait. I think of the straight line of his little nose still rounded at the tip like a baby, and the plump roundness of his cheeks and the clear innocence of his eyes. I think of the curve of the back of his head that used to fit my hand when I touched him, and the straight pure line of the nape of his neck when he was bent over his books in study. He was a brave boy, a boy who had been coached by his uncle Anthony to vault into a saddle and ride at the joust. Anthony promised that he would be fearless by learning to face fear. And he was a boy who loved the country. He liked Ludlow Castle, for he could ride into the hills and see the peregrine falcons soaring high above the cliffs, and he could swim in the cold water of the river. Anthony said he had a sense of landscape: rare in the young. He was a boy with the most golden future. He was born in wartime to be a child of peace. He would have been, I don’t doubt, a great Plantagenet king, and his father and I would have been proud of him.

  I speak of him as if he is dead, for I have little doubt that since he is not crowned today, he will be killed in secret, just as William Hastings was dragged out and beheaded on Tower Green on a baulk of wood with the axeman hurriedly wiping his hands from his breakfast. Dear God, when I think of the nape of the neck of my boy and I think of the headsman’s axe, I feel sick enough to die myself.

  I don’t stay at the window watching the river that keeps flowing indifferently, as if my boy were not in danger of his life. I dress and pin up my hair and then I prowl about our sanctuary like one of the lionesses in the Tower. I comfort myself with plotting: we are not friendless, I am not without hope. My son Thomas Grey will be busy, I know, meeting in secret at hidden places those who can be convinced to rise for us, and there must be many in the country, in London too, who are beginning to doubt exactly what Duke Richard means by a protectorate. Margaret Stanley is clearly working for us: her husband Lord Thomas Stanley warned Hastings. My sister-in-law Duchess Margaret of York will be working for us in Burgundy. Even the French should take an interest in my danger, if only to cause trouble for Richard. There is a safe house in Flanders, where a well-paid family is greeting a little boy and teaching him to disappear into the crowd of Tournai. The duke may have the upper hand now, but there are as many who will hate him, as hated us Riverses, and many more will be thinking fondly of me, now I am in danger. Most of all there will be the men who want to see Edward’s son and not his brother on the throne.

  I hear the rush of hurried footsteps, and I turn to face new danger as my daughter Cec
ily comes running down the crypt and throws opens the door to my chamber. She is white with fright. “There is something at the door,” she says. “Something horrible at the door.”

  “What is at the door?” I ask. At once, of course, I think it is the headsman.

  “Something as tall as a man, but looking like Death.”

  I throw a scarf over my head and I go to the door and slide open the grille. Death himself seems to be waiting for me. He is in black gaberdine with a tall hat on his head and a long white tube of a nose hiding all his face. It is a physician with the long cone of his nose mask stuffed with herbs to protect him from the airs of the plague. He turns the glittery slits of his eyes on me, and I feel myself shiver.

  “There is none with plague in here,” I say.

  “I am Dr. Lewis of Caerleon, the Lady Margaret Beaufort’s doctor,” he says, his voice echoing weirdly from the cone. “She says you are suffering from woman’s maladies, and would benefit from a physician.”

  I open the door. “Come in, I am not well,” I say. But as soon as the door is closed to the outside world, I challenge him. “I am perfectly well. Why are you here?”

  “The Lady Beaufort—Lady Stanley, I should say—is well too, God be praised for her. But she wanted to find a way to speak with you, and I am of her affinity, and loyal to you, Your Grace.”

  I nod. “Take off your mask.”

  He takes the cone from his face and pushes back the hood from his head. He is a small dark man with a smiling, trustworthy face. He bows low. “She wants to know if you have devised a plan to rescue the two princes from the Tower. She wants you to know both she and her husband the Lord Stanley are yours to command, and she wants you to know that the Duke of Buckingham is filled with doubt as to where the Duke Richard’s ambition is leading him. She thinks the young duke is ready for turning.”

  “Buckingham has done everything to put the duke where he sits now,” I say. “Why would he change his mind on this day of their victory?”

  “Lady Margaret believes that the Duke of Buckingham could be persuaded,” he says, leaning forward to speak only into my ear. “She thinks he is starting to have doubts as to his leader. She thinks he would be interested in other, greater rewards than those the Duke Richard can offer him, and he is a young man, not yet thirty years old, easily swayed. He is afraid that the duke plans to take the throne for himself; he is afraid for the safety of your sons. You are his sister-in-law, these are his nephews too. He is concerned for the future of the princes, his little kinsmen. Lady Margaret bids me say to you that she thinks that the servants in the Tower can be bribed, and she wants to know how she can serve you in what plans you have to restore the Princes Edward and Richard to freedom.”

  “It is not Richard…” I start to say when, like a ghost, from the door to the river, Elizabeth comes up the steps, the hem of her gown sodden.

  “Elizabeth. What on earth are you doing?”

  “I went down to sit by the river,” she says. Her face is strange and pale. “It was so quiet and beautiful at first this morning, and then it became more and more busy. I wondered why the river was so busy. It was almost as if the river would tell me herself.” She turns to regard the doctor. “Who is this?”

  “He is a messenger from Lady Margaret Stanley,” I say. I am looking at her wet gown, which drags behind her like a tail. “How did you get so wet?”

  “From the barges that went by,” she says. Her face is pale and hostile. “All the barges that went down the river to Baynard Castle, where Duke Richard is holding a great court. The wash from their passing was so great that it came in over the steps. What is happening there today? Half of London is on a barge going to the duke’s house, but it is supposed to be the day of my brother’s coronation.”

  Dr. Lewis looks awkward. “I was about to tell your royal mother,” he says hesitantly.

  “The river itself is a witness,” my daughter says rudely. “It washed over my feet as if to tell me. Anyone could guess.”

  “Guess what?” I demand of them both.

  “The Parliament has met and declared that Duke Richard is the rightful king,” he says quietly, though his words echo in the vaulted stone hall as if he were shouting a proclamation. “They ruled that your marriage with the king was held without the knowledge of the rightful lords, and achieved by witchcraft by your mother and yourself. And that the king was married already to another lady.”

  “So you have been a whore for years and we are bastards,” Elizabeth finishes coolly. “We are defeated and shamed. It is over, all over. Can we take Edward and Richard and go now?”

  “What are you saying?” I ask of her. I am as bewildered by this daughter of mine with her gown like a wet tail, like a mermaid come in from the river, as I am at the news that Richard has claimed the throne and we are cast down. “What are you saying? What were you thinking as you sat by the river? Elizabeth, you are so strange today. Why are you like this now?”

  “Because I think we are cursed,” she flings out at me. “I think we are cursed. The river whispered a curse to me, and I blame you and my father for bringing us into this world and putting us here, in the grip of ambition, and yet not holding strongly enough to your power to make it right for us.”

  I snatch at her cold hands tightly, and I hold her as if I would keep her from swimming away. “You’re not cursed, daughter. You are the finest and rarest of all my children, the most beautiful, the most beloved. You know that. What curse could stick to you?”

  The gaze she turns on me is darkened with horror, as if she has seen her death. “You will never surrender, you will never let us be. Your ambition will be the death of my brothers, and when they are dead you will put me on the throne. You would rather have the throne than your sons, and when they are both dead, you will put me on my dead brother’s throne. You love the crown more than your children.”

  I shake my head to deny the power of her words. This is my little girl, this is my easy, simple child, this is my pet, my Elizabeth. She is the very bone of my bone. She has never had a thought that I did not put in her head. “You cannot know such a thing; it’s not true. You cannot know. The river cannot tell you such a thing, and you cannot hear it, and it’s not true.”

  “I will take my own brother’s throne,” she says as if she cannot hear me. “And you will be glad of it, for your ambition is your curse, so the river says.”

  I glance at the doctor and wonder if she has a fever. “Elizabeth, the river cannot speak to you.”

  “Of course it speaks to me, and of course I hear it!” she exclaims in impatience.

  “There is no curse…”

  She wheels around and glides across the room, her gown leaving a damp stain like a trail, and throws open the window. Dr. Lewis and I follow her, fearful for a moment that she has run mad and means to jump out; but at once I am halted by a high sweet keening from the river, a longing sound, a song of mourning, a note so anguished that I put my hands over my ears to block it out and look to the doctor for an explanation. He shakes his head in bewilderment, for he hears nothing but the cheerful noise of the passing barges as they go down for the king’s coronation, trumpets blaring and drums pounding. But he can see the tears in Elizabeth’s eyes and sees me shrink from the open windows, blocking my ears from the haunting sounds.

  “That’s not for you,” I say. I am choking on my grief. “Ah, Elizabeth, my love, that’s not for you. That’s Melusina’s song: the song that we hear for a death in our house. That’s not a warning song for you. This will be for my son Richard Grey; I can hear it. It’s for my son and for my brother Anthony, my brother Anthony, whom I swore I would keep safe.”

  The doctor is pale with fear. “I can hear nothing,” he says. “Just the noise of the people calling for the new king.”

  Elizabeth is at my side, her gray eyes as dark as a storm on a wave at sea. “Your brother? What d’you mean?”

  “My brother and my son are dead at the hands of Richard, Duke of Gloucester
, just as my brother John and my father were dead at the hands of George, Duke of Clarence,” I predict. “The sons of York are murdering beasts, and Richard is no better than George. They have cost me the best men of my family and broken my heart. I can hear it. I can hear this. This is what the river is singing. The river is singing a lament for my son and for my brother.”

  She steps closer. She is my tender girl again, her wild fury blown away. She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Mother—”

  “Do you think he will stop here?” I burst out frantically. “He has my boy, he has my royal son. If he dares to take Anthony from me, if he could bear to take Richard Grey from me, d’you think he will stop at taking Edward too? A brother and a son he has robbed from me this day. I will never forgive him. I will never forget this. He is a dead man to me. I will see him wither, I will see his sword arm fail him, I will see him turn around looking for his friends like a lost child on the battlefield, I will see him fall.”

  “Mother, be still,” she whispers. “Be still and listen to the river.”

  It is the only word that can calm me. I run down the length of the room and throw open all the windows, and the warm summer air breathes into the cold darkness of the crypt. The water babbles low against the banks. There is a stink of low tide and mud, but the river flows on, as if to remind me that life goes on, as if to say that Anthony has gone, my boy Richard Grey has gone, and my boy the little Prince Richard has gone downstream to strangers on a little boat. But we still might flow deep once more.

  There is music coming from some of the passing barges, noblemen making merry at the accession of Duke Richard. I cannot understand how they cannot hear the singing of the river, how they do not know that a light has gone out of this world with the death of my brother Anthony and my boy…my boy.

  “He would not want you to grieve,” she says quietly. “Uncle Anthony loved you so much. He would not want you to grieve.”