The White Queen: A Novel

by Philippa Gregory

  “And Edward?” she asks.

  I meet her hopeful gaze without evasion. “Elizabeth, I think he must be dead, for I cannot see who would have taken him and not told us. I think Buckingham and Henry Tudor must have had both of the boys killed, not knowing that we had Richard safely hidden, thinking to open their way to the throne and put the blame on King Richard. If Edward is alive, then pray God he will find his way to me. And there will always be a candle in the window to light his way home, and my door will never be locked, in case one day it is his hand on the latch.”

  Her eyes are filled with tears. “But you don’t expect him anymore?”

  “I don’t expect him,” I say.

  APRIL 1484

  My new home of Heytesbury is in a pretty part of the country, Wiltshire, in the open rolling countryside of Salisbury Plain. John Nesfield is an easy guardian. He sees the benefits of being at the side of the king; he doesn’t really want to play nursemaid over me. Once he was assured of my safety and judged that I would not attempt to run away, he took himself off to the king at Sheriff Hutton, where Richard has established his great court in the north. He is making a palace fit to match Greenwich among the people of the north who respect him and love his wife, the last Neville.

  Nesfield orders that I am to run his house as I please and very quickly I have the furniture and things around me that I request from the royal palaces. I have a proper nursery and a schoolroom for the girls. I am growing my favorite fruits in the gardens, and I have bought some good horses for the stables.

  After so many months in sanctuary I wake every morning with a sense of utter delight that I can open the door and walk out into the air. It is a warm spring and to hear the birds singing, to order a horse from the stables and ride out is a joy so intense that I feel reborn. I set duck’s eggs under the hens and watch the ducklings hatch and waddle about the yard. I laugh when I see them take to the duck pond with the hens scolding on the bank, fearful of water. I watch the young foals in the paddock and talk with the master of horse as to which might make a good riding horse and which should be broke to the cart. I go out in the fields with the shepherd and see the new lambs. I talk with the cowman about the little calves and when they should be weaned from their mothers. I become again what I was once before, an English country lady with her mind on the land.

  The younger girls go half mad in their release from confinement. Every day I catch them doing something forbidden: swimming in the swift deep river, climbing the haystacks and ruining the hay, up in the apple trees breaking off the blossom, running into the field with the bull and dashing to the gate, screaming when he lifts his big head and looks at them. They cannot be punished for such an overflow of joy. They are like calves released into the field for the first time in their lives. They have to kick up their heels and run about, and don’t know what to do to express their amazement at the height of the sky and the wideness of the world. They are eating twice what they ate in sanctuary. They hang around the kitchen and badger the cook for scraps, and the dairymaids delight in giving them fresh-churned butter to eat on hot bread. They have become lighthearted children again, no longer prisoners, afraid of the very light.

  I am in the stable yard, dismounting after a morning ride, when I am surprised to see Nesfield himself ride up to the main door of the house. Seeing my horse, he turns to come round to the yard and gets off his hunter, throwing the reins to a groom. From the very way he dismounts, heavily and with his shoulders bowed, I know that something bad has happened. My hand goes out to my horse’s neck and I take a handful of thick mane for comfort.

  “What is it, Sir John? You look very grave.”

  “I thought I should come and tell you the news,” he says shortly.

  “Elizabeth? Not my Elizabeth?”

  “She is safe and well,” he assures me. “It is the king’s son, Edward, God keep him, God bless him. God take him to his heavenly throne.”

  I feel a pulse in my temple hammer like a warning. “He is dead?”

  “He was always frail,” Nesfield says brokenly. “He was never a strong boy. But at the investiture he looked so well we called him Prince of Wales and thought he was certain to inherit—” He breaks off, remembering that I too had a son who was Prince of Wales and seemed certain to inherit. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean…anyway, the king has announced mourning for the court. I thought you should know at once.”

  I nod gravely, but my mind is racing. Is this a death from Melusina? Is this a working of the curse? Is this the proof that I said we would see—that the son and heir of the murderer of my son and heir would die, and thus I would know him? Is this her sign to me that Richard is the killer of my son?

  “I will send the king and Queen Anne my sympathy,” I say, and turn to go to the house.

  “He has no heir,” John Nesfield repeats as if he cannot believe the gravity of the news he has brought me. “All this, all that he has done, his defense of the kingdom, his…his acceptance of his throne, all this that he has done, all the fighting…and now he has no heir to follow him.”

  “Yes,” I agree, my words like frozen stones. “He did all this for nothing, and he has lost his son and his line will die out.”

  I hear from my daughter Elizabeth that the court falls into mourning as if it was an open grave, and none of them can bear to live without their prince. Richard will not hear laughter or music; they have to creep about with their eyes on the ground and there are no games or sports, though the weather is getting warmer and they are in the very heart of greening England, the hills and the dales all around them are teeming with game. Richard is inconsolable. His twelve-year marriage to Anne Neville gave him only one child, and now he has lost him. It cannot be possible that they will have another at this late stage and, even if they do, a baby in the cradle is no guarantee of a Prince of Wales in this savage England that we Yorks have made. Who knows better than Richard that a boy must be fully grown and strong enough to fight for his rights, to fight for his life, if he is to be King of England?

  He names as his heir Edward the son of his brother, George of Clarence, the only York boy known to be left in the world; but in a few months I hear a rumor that he is to be disinherited. This comes as no surprise to me. Richard has realized that the boy is too weak to hold the throne, as we all knew. George, Duke of Clarence had a fatal mixture of vanity and ambition and outright madness: no son of his could be a king. He was a sweet, smiling baby but slow of wit, poor child. Anyone who wants the throne of England will have to be fast as a snake and wise as a serpent. He will have to be a boy born to be a prince, reared in a court. He will have to be a boy accustomed to danger, raised to be brave. George’s poor half-wit boy could never do it. But if not him, then whom? For Richard must name an heir and leave an heir, and the House of York is now nothing but girls, for all that Richard knows. Only I know for sure that there is a prince, like one in a fairy tale, waiting in Tournai, living like a poor boy, studying his books and music, learning languages, watched over at a distance by his aunt. A flower of York, growing strong in foreign soil and biding his time. And now he is the only heir to the York throne, and if his uncle knew he was alive, perhaps he would name him as his heir.

  I write to Elizabeth.

  I hear the news from court and I am troubled by one thing—do you think that the death of Richard’s son is Melusina’s sign to us that Richard is the murderer of our boys? You see him daily—do you think he knows it is our curse that is his destruction? Does he look like a man who has brought this grief on his own family? Or do you think that this death was just chance, and it was another man who killed our boy, and it will be his son who must die for our revenge?

  JANUARY 1485

  I am waiting for my girls to come home from court on a frosty afternoon in the middle of January. I expected them in time for dinner and I am striding up and down on my doorstep, blowing on my gloved fingers to keep my hands warm as the sun sets, red as a Lancaster rose, over the hills to the w
est. I hear hoofbeats and I look down the lane and there they come, a great guard for my three girls, almost a royal guard, and the three bobbing heads and rippling dresses in the middle. In a moment their horses are pulled up and they have tumbled off and I am kissing bright cheeks and cold noses quite indiscriminately and holding their hands and exclaiming at how tall they have grown and how all equally beautiful they are.

  They romp into the hall and fall on their dinner as if they are starving, and I watch them as they eat. Elizabeth has never been in better looks. She bloomed, once out of sanctuary and out of fear, as I knew she would. The color is high in her cheeks, her eyes sparkle, and her clothes! I take another disbelieving look at her clothes: the embroidery and the brocade, the insetting of precious stones. These are gowns as good as I wore when I was queen. “Good God, Elizabeth,” I say. “Where do you get your gowns from? This is as fine as anything I had when I was Queen of England.”

  Her eyes fly to mine, and her smile dies on her face. Cecily gives an abrupt snort of laughter. Elizabeth rounds on her. “You can shut your mouth. We agreed.”

  “Elizabeth!”

  “Mother, you don’t know what she has been like. She is not fit to be maid-in-waiting to a queen. All she does is gossip.”

  “Now girls, I sent you to court to learn elegance, not to quarrel like fishwives.”

  “Ask her if she’s been learning elegance!” Cecily whispers loudly. “Ask Elizabeth how elegant she is.”

  “I certainly shall, when we are talking and you two are in bed,” I say firmly. “And that will be early if you cannot speak politely one to another.” I turn from her to Anne. “Now, Anne.” My little Anne looks up at me. “Have you been studying your books? And have you been working at your music?”

  “Yes, Lady Mother,” Anne says obediently. “But we were all given a holiday at Christmastide, and I went to court at Westminster with all the others.”

  “We had suckling pig here,” Bridget tells her older sisters solemnly. “And Catherine ate so much marchpane she was sick in the night.”

  Elizabeth laughs, and that anxious look has gone from her. “I have missed you little monsters,” she says tenderly. “After dinner I shall play, and you can dance, if you like.”

  “Or we can play at cards,” Cecily offers. “The court is allowed cards again.”

  “Has the king recovered from his grief?” I ask her. “And Queen Anne?”

  Cecily shoots a triumphant look at her sister Elizabeth, who blushes deep red. “Oh, he has recovered,” Cecily says, her voice quivering with laughter. “He seems much recovered. We are all quite amazed. Don’t you think, Elizabeth?”

  My patience, which never lasts very long with female spite, even when it is my own daughter’s, is exhausted at this point. “Now that is enough,” I say. “Elizabeth, come to my privy chamber now; the rest of you can eat your dinner, and you Cecily can ponder on the proverb that one good word is worth a dozen bad ones.”

  I rise from the table and sweep from the room. I can feel Elizabeth’s reluctance as she follows me, and when we get to my room she shuts the door and I say simply to her, “My daughter, what is all this about?”

  For a second only she looks as if she would resist and then she quivers like a doe at bay and says, “I have so wanted your advice, but I could not write to you. I had to wait till I saw you. I meant to wait till after dinner. I have not deceived you, Lady Mother…”

  I sit down and gesture that she may sit beside me. “It is my uncle Richard,” she says softly. “He is—oh Lady Mother—he is everything to me.”

  I find I am sitting very still. Only my hands have moved, and I am gripping them together to keep myself silent.

  “He was so kind to me when we first came to court, then he went out of his way to make sure that I was happy with my duties as a maid-in-waiting. The queen is very kind, a very easy mistress to serve, but he would seek me out and ask me how I was doing.” She breaks off. “He asked me if I missed you and told me you would be welcome at court any time, and the court would honor you. He would speak of my father,” she says. “He would remark how proud my father would be of me if he could see me now. He would say that I am like him in some ways. Oh Mother, he is such a fine man, I can’t believe that he…that he…”

  “That he?” I echo her, my voice a little thread of an echo.

  “That he cares for me.”

  “Does he?” I feel icy, as if wintry waters are running down my spine. “Does he care for you?”

  She nods eagerly. “He never loved the queen,” she says. “He felt obliged to marry her to save her from his brother George, Duke of Clarence.” She glances at me. “You would remember. You were there, weren’t you? They were going to trap her and send her to a nunnery. George was going to steal her inheritance.”

  I nod. I don’t remember it quite like that; but I can see this makes a better story for an impressionable girl.

  “He knew that if George took her as his ward then he would take her fortune. She was anxious to be married, and he thought it was the best thing that he could do. He married her to secure her inheritance and for her own safety, and to put her mind at ease.”

  “Really,” I say. My recollection is that George had one Neville heiress and Richard snapped up the other, and they quarreled like stray dogs over the inheritance. But I see that Richard has told my daughter the more chivalrous version of the story.

  “Queen Anne is not well.” Elizabeth bows her head to whisper. “She cannot have another child, he is certain of it. He has asked the doctors, and they are sure she will not conceive. He has to have an heir for England. He asked me if I thought it possible that one of our boys had got away safely.”

  My mind suddenly sharpens like a sword throwing sparks on a whetstone. “And what did you say?”

  She smiles up at me. “I would trust him with the truth, I would trust him with anything; but I knew you would want me to lie,” she says sweetly. “I said we knew nothing but what he had told us. And he said again that it had broken his heart but he did not know where our boys are. He said if he knew now, he would make them his heirs. Mother, think of it. He said that. He said that if he knew where our boys were, he would rescue them and make them his heirs.”

  Oh would he? I think. But what guarantee do I have that he does not send an assassin? “That’s good,” I say steadily. “But even so, you must not tell him about Richard. I cannot trust him yet, even if you can.”

  “I do!” she exclaims. “I do trust him. I would trust him with my life itself—I have never known such a man.”

  I pause. Pointless to remind her that she has known no men. Most of her life she has been a princess kept like a statue of porcelain in a box of gold. She came of age as a prisoner, living with her mother and her sisters. The only men she ever saw were priests and servants. She has had no preparation for an attractive man working on her emotions, seducing her, urging her to love.

  “How far has this gone?” I ask bluntly. “How far has this gone between the two of you?”

  She turns her head away. “It’s complicated,” she says. “And I feel so sorry for Queen Anne.”

  I nod. My girl’s pity for Queen Anne will not stop her from taking her husband is my guess. After all, she is my daughter. And nothing stopped me when I named my heart’s desire.

  “How far has this gone?” I ask her again. “From Cecily, I take it that there is gossip.”

  She flushes. “Cecily doesn’t know anything. She sees what everyone sees, and she is jealous of me getting all the attention. She sees the queen favoring me, and lending me her gowns and her jewels. Treating me as a daughter and telling me to dance with Richard, urging him to walk with me, to ride with me when she is too ill to go out. Truly, Mother, it is the queen herself who commands me to go and keep him company. She says that no one can divert him and cheer him as I do, and so the court says that she favors me overmuch. That he favors me overmuch. That I am nothing more than a maid-in-waiting but I am treated as…�
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  “As what?”

  She bows her head to whisper. “The first lady at court.”

  “Because of your gowns?”

  She nods. “They are the queen’s own gowns; she has mine made to her pattern. She likes us to dress the same.”

  “It is she who dresses you like this?”

  Elizabeth nods. She has no idea that this fills me with unease. “You mean she has gowns for you made from her own material? To her own style?”

  My girl hesitates. “And, of course, she does not look well in them.” She says no more but I think of Anne Neville, grief-stricken, weary, ill, side by side with this blooming girl.

  “And you are first into the room behind her? You have precedence?”

  “No one speaks of the law which made us bastards. Everyone calls me princess. And when the queen does not dine, and often she does not, then I go into dinner as the first lady and I sit beside the king.”

  “So, it is Queen Anne who puts you into his company, even into her own place, and the world sees this. Not Richard? Then what happens?”

  “He says that he loves me,” she says quietly. She is trying to be modest, but her pride and her joy blaze in her eyes. “He says that I am the first love of his life and will be the last.”

  I rise from my chair and go to the window and pull back the thick curtain so I can look out at the bright cold stars over the dark land of the Wiltshire down. I think I know what Richard is doing, and I don’t for one minute think that he has fallen in love with my daughter, nor that the queen is making gowns for her out of love.

  Richard is playing a hard game with my daughter as pawn, to dishonor her, and me, and to make a fool of Henry Tudor, who has vowed to make her his wife. Tudor will hear—as quickly as his mother’s spies can take ship—that his bride to be is in love with his enemy and is known throughout the court as his mistress while his wife looks on smiling. Richard would do this to damage Henry Tudor even though he dishonors his own niece. Queen Anne would be compliant rather than stand up to Richard. Both Neville girls were boot-scrapers to their men: Anne has been an obedient servant from the first day of her marriage. And besides, she cannot refuse him. He is King of England without a male heir, and she is barren. She will be praying that he does not put her aside. She has no power at all: no son and heir, no baby in the cradle, no chance of conception; she has no cards to play at all. She is a barren woman with no fortune of her own—she is fit for nothing but the nunnery or the grave. She has to smile and obey; protests will get her nowhere. Even helping in the destruction of my daughter’s reputation will probably earn Anne nothing more than an honorable annulment.