The White Queen
Page 20
“You must be with me for the birth of another prince. You would want to see a Prince of York christened as he should be,” I say plaintively, as if promising her a treat if she will only stay. “You would be his godmother. I would put him in your keeping. You could choose his name.”
“Richard,” she says at once. “Call him Richard.”
“So get well and stay with me and see Richard born,” I urge her.
She smiles and I see now the telltale signs that I had not seen before. The weariness even when she holds herself upright in her chair, the creamy color of her face, and the brown shadows under her eyes. How could I not have seen these before? I who love her so well that I kiss her cheek every day and kneel for her blessing—how could I not have noticed that she has grown so thin?
I throw the silks aside and kneel at her feet, clasp her hands, suddenly feel that they are bony, suddenly notice they are freckled with age. I look up into her tired face. “Mother, you have been with me through everything. You will never leave me now?”
“Not if I could choose to stay,” she says. “But I have felt this pain for years, and I know it is coming to an end.”
“Since when?” I ask fiercely. “How long have you felt this pain?”
“Since the death of your father,” she says steadily. “The day they told me that he was dead, that they had beheaded him for treason, I felt something move deep inside me, like my heart breaking; and I wanted to be with him, even in death.”
“But not to leave me!” I cry selfishly. And then cleverly I add, “And surely, you cannot bear to leave Anthony?”
She laughs at that. “You both are grown,” she says. “You both can live without me. You must both learn to live without me. Anthony will go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as he longs to do. You will see your son grow to be a man. You will see our little Elizabeth marry a king and have a crown of her own.”
“I’m not ready!” I cry out like a desolate child. “I can’t manage without you!”
She smiles gently, touches my cheek with her thin hand. “Nobody is ever ready,” she says tenderly. “But you will manage without me, and through you, and your children, I will have founded a line of kings in England. Queens as well, I think.”
SPRING 1472
I am in the last months of my pregnancy, and the court is at the beautiful Nonesuch Palace at Sheen, a palace for springtime, when we are all convulsed by the enormous, delicious scandal of the marriage of Edward’s brother Richard. All the more wonderful since who would ever have thought Richard would be scandalous? George, yes, with his incessant seeking of his own interest. George would always give the gossip grinders sackfuls of grist since he cares for no one but George himself. No honor, no loyalty, no affection prevents George from suiting himself.
Edward, too, will go his own way and care nothing what people say of him. But Richard! Richard is the good boy of the family, the one who works hardest at being strong, who studies so that he can be clever, who prays devoutly so that he can be favored by God, who tries so hard for his mother’s love and always knows he is eclipsed. For Richard to cause a scandal is like my best hound dog suddenly declaring that she won’t hunt anymore. It is quite out of nature.
God knows, I try to love Richard, since he has been a true friend to my husband, and a good brother. I should love him: he stood by my husband without thinking twice of it when they had to flee England on a tiny fishing boat; he endured exile with him, and came home with him to risk his life half a dozen times. And always, Edward said, that if Richard had the left wing, he could be sure that the left wing would hold. If Richard’s troop was bringing up the rear, he knew there would be no surprise attack from the road behind. Edward trusts Richard as a brother and a vassal, and loves him dearly—why can I not? What is it about the young man that makes me want to narrow my eyes when I look at him, as if there is some flaw that escapes me? But now this young puppy, not yet twenty years old, has become a hero, a hero from a ballad.
“Who would have thought that dull little Richard would have such passion in him?” I demand of Anthony, who is seated at my feet in a bower looking down to the river. My ladies are around me with half a dozen young men from Edward’s court singing and playing with a ball and generally idling and flirting. I am plaiting primroses for a crown for the victor of a race they are going to run later.
“He is deep,” Anthony pronounces, making my sixteen-year-old son Richard Grey choke with laughter.
“Hush,” I say to him. “Respect for your uncle, please. And pass me some leaves.”
“Deep and passionate,” Anthony continues. “And all of us thought he was nothing but dull. Amazing.”
“Actually, he is passionate,” my son volunteers. “You underrate him because he is not grand and loud like the other York brothers.”
My son Thomas Grey nods beside him. “That’s right.”
Anthony raises an eyebrow at the implied criticism of the king. “You two go and get them ready for their race,” I say, sending them away.
The court has been transfixed by poor little Anne Neville, the young widow of the boy Prince Edward of Lancaster. Brought to London as part of our victory parade after the battle of Tewkesbury, the girl and her fortune were immediately spotted by George, Duke of Clarence, as his way to the entire Warwick fortune. With the Neville girls’ mother, the poor Countess of Warwick, taking herself off to a nunnery in complete despair, George planned to gain everything. He owned half of the Warwick fortune already through his marriage to Isabel Neville, and then he made a great show of taking her young sister into safekeeping. He took little Anne Neville, condoled with her on the death of her father and the absence of her mother, congratulated her on her escape from her nightmare marriage to the little monster, Prince Edward of Lancaster, and thought to keep her under his protection, housed with his wife, her sister, and hold her fortune in his sticky hands.
“It was chivalrous,” Anthony says, to irritate me.
“It was an opportunity, and I wish I had seen it first,” I reply.
Anne, a pawn in her father’s game for power, widow of a monster, daughter of a traitor, was still only fifteen when she came to live with her sister and her husband George, Duke of Clarence. She had no idea, no better than my kitten, as to how she would survive in this kingdom of her enemies. She must have thought that George was her savior.
But not for long.
Nobody knows quite what happened after that; but something went wrong with George’s agreeable plan to own both Neville girls, and keep their enormous fortune to himself. Some say that Richard, visiting George’s grand house, met Anne again—his childhood acquaintance—and they fell in love, and that he rescued her like a knight in a fable from a visit that was nothing less than imprisonment. They say George had her disguised as a kitchen maid, to keep her away from his brother. They say he had her locked in her room. But true love prevailed, and the young duke and the young widowed princess fell into each other’s arms. At all events, this version of the story is all desperately romantic and wonderful. Fools of all ages enjoy it very much.
“I like it told that way,” my brother Anthony says. “I am thinking of composing a rondel.”
But there is another version. Other people, who admire Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as much as I, say that he saw in the newly widowed lonely girl a woman who could deliver to him the popularity in the north of England that her maiden name commands, who could bring him massive lands that adjoin what he has already got from Edward, and give him a fortune in her dowry, if only he could steal it from her mother. A young girl who was so alone and so unprotected that she could not refuse him. A girl so accustomed to being ordered that she could be bullied into betraying her own mother. This version suggests that Anne, imprisoned by one York brother, was kidnapped by another and forced to marry him.
“Less pretty,” I observe to Anthony.
“You could have stopped it,” he says to me with one of his sudden moments of seriousness. “If you had tak
en her into your keeping, if you had made Edward order Richard and George not to pull her apart like dogs over a bone.”
“I should have done,” I say. “For now Richard has one Neville girl, the Warwick fortune, and the support of the north, and George has the other. That’s a dangerous combination.”
Anthony raises an eyebrow. “You should have done it because it was the right thing to do,” he says to me with all of an older brother’s pomposity. “But I see you are still only thinking of power and profit.”
APRIL 1472
My mother’s skill at foretelling the future is borne out. Less than a year after she warned me her heart would not last much longer, she complains of fatigue and keeps to her rooms. The baby I was carrying in the garden the day of the primrose races came early, and for the first time I go into my confinement without my mother’s company. I send her messages from my darkened room and she replies cheerfully from hers. But when I come out with a frail newborn girl, I find my mother in her chamber, too weary to rise. I take the baby girl, light as a little bird, and lay her in my mother’s arms every afternoon. For a week or two, the two of them watch the sun sink below the level of the window, and then like the gold of the sunset they slip away from me together.
At dusk, on the last day of April, I hear a calling noise, like a white-winged barn owl, and I go to my window and push open the shutters and look out. There is a waning moon rising off the horizon, white against a white sky; it too is wasting away, and in its cold light I can hear a calling, like a choir, and I know it is not the music of owls, nor singers nor nightingales, but Melusina. Our ancestor goddess is calling around the roof of the house, for her daughter Jacquetta of the House of Burgundy is dying.
I stand and listen to the eerie whistling for a while and then I swing the shutters closed and go to my mother’s room. I don’t hurry. I know there is no need to hurry to her anymore. The new baby is in her arms as she lies in her bed, the little head pressed to my mother’s cheek. They are both pale as marble, they are both lying with their eyes shut, they both seem to be peacefully asleep as the shadows of the evening darken the room. The moonlight on the water outside the chamber window throws the reflection of ripples onto the whitewashed ceiling of the room, so they look as if they are underwater, floating with Melusina in the fountain. But I know that they are both gone from me, and our water mother is singing them on their journey down the sweet river to the deep springs of home.
SUMMER 1472
The pain of my mother’s death is not closed for me by her funeral; it is not healed with the months that go slowly by. Every morning, I wake and miss her, as much as the first morning. Every day I have to remember that I cannot ask her opinion, or quarrel with her advice, or laugh at her sarcasm, or look for the guidance of her magic. And every day I find I blame George, Duke of Clarence, even more for the murder of my father and my brother. I believe it was at the news of their deaths at his hand, under the orders of Warwick, that my mother’s loving heart broke, and if they had not been traitorously killed by him, then she too would be alive today.
It is summer, a time for thoughtless pleasure, but I take my sorrow with me, through the picnics and days as we travel through the countryside, on the long rides and nights under a harvest moon. Edward makes my son Thomas the Earl of Huntingdon, and it does not cheer me. I don’t speak of my sadness to anyone but Anthony, who has lost his mother too. And we hardly ever speak of her. It is as if we cannot bring ourselves to speak of her as dead, and we cannot lie to ourselves that she is still alive. But I blame George, Duke of Clarence, for her heartbreak and her death.
“I hate George of Clarence more than ever,” I say to Anthony as we ride down the road to Kent together, a banquet ahead of us and a week spent traveling in the green lanes between the apple orchards. My heart should be light as the court is happy. But my sense of loss comes with me like a hawk on my wrist.
“Because you’re jealous,” my brother Anthony says provocatively, one hand holding the reins of his horse, the other leading my young son, Prince Edward, on his little pony. “You are jealous of anyone Edward loves. You are jealous of me, you are jealous of William Hastings, you are jealous of anyone who entertains the king, and takes him out whoring, and brings him home drunk and amuses him.”
I shrug my shoulders, indifferent to Anthony’s teasing. I have long known that the king’s pleasure in deep drinking with his friends and visiting other women is part of his nature. I have come to tolerate it, especially as it never takes him far from my bed, and when we are there together it is as if we were married in secret that very morning. He has been a soldier on campaign, far from home, with a hundred doxies at his command; he has been an exile in cities where women have hurried to comfort him, and now he is the King of England and every woman in London would be glad to have him—I truly believe that half of them have had him. He is the king. I never thought I was marrying an ordinary man, with moderate appetites. I never expected a marriage where he would sit quietly at my feet. He is the king: he is bound to go his own way.
“No, you are wrong. Edward’s whoring doesn’t trouble me. He is the king, he can take his pleasures where he wants. And I am the queen, and he will always come home to me. Everyone knows that.”
Anthony nods, conceding the point. “But I don’t see why you concentrate your hatred on George. The king’s entire family are as bad as each other. His mother has loathed you and all of us since we first emerged at Reading, and Richard is more awkward and surly every day. Peace doesn’t suit him, for sure.”
“Nothing about us suits him,” I say. “He is as unlike his two brothers as chalk to cheese: small and dark, and so anxious about his health and his position and his soul, always hoping for a fortune and saying a prayer.”
“Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.”
I laugh. “Well, I would like Richard better if he was as bad as the rest of you,” I remark. “And since he has been married, he is even more righteous. He has always looked down on us Riverses; now he looks down on George too. It is that pompous saintliness that I cannot stomach. He looks at me sometimes as if I were some kind of…”
“Some kind of what?”
“Some kind of fat fishwife.”
“Well,” my brother says. “To be honest, you’re getting no younger, and in certain lights, y’know…”
I tap him on the knee with my riding crop, and he laughs and winks at Baby Edward on his little pony.
“I don’t like how he has taken all the north into his keeping. Edward has made him overly great. He has made him a prince in his own principality. It is a danger to us, and to our heirs. It is to divide the kingdom.”
“He had to reward him with something. Richard has laid down his life on Edward’s gambles over and over again. Richard won the kingdom for Edward: he should have his share.”
“But it makes Richard all but a king in his own domain,” I protest. “It gives him the kingdom of the north.”
“Nobody doubts his loyalty but you.”
“He is loyal to Edward, and to his house, but he doesn’t like me or mine. He envies me everything I have, and he doesn’t admire my court. And what does that mean when he thinks of our children? Will he be loyal to my boy, because he is Edward’s boy too?”
Anthony shrugs. “We are raised up, you know. You have brought us up very high. There are a lot of people who think we ride higher than our deserts, and on nothing more than your roadside charms.”
“I don’t like how Richard married Anne Neville.”
Anthony laughs shortly. “Oh sister, nobody liked to see Richard, the wealthiest young man in England, marry the richest young woman in England, but I never thought to see you take the side of George, Duke of Clarence!”
I laugh unwillingly. George’s outrage at having his heiress sister-in-law snatched from his own house by his own brother has entertained us all for half the year.
“I told him not to,” I say irritably. “But he paid no attention to me on this. He always favors his brothers, and Richard far above George.”
“He is right to prefer Richard, but he should not break his own laws in his own kingdom,” Anthony says with sudden seriousness. “That’s no way to rule. It is unlawful to rob a widow, and he has done just that. And she is the widow of his enemy and in sanctuary in a nunnery. He should be gracious to her, he should be merciful. If he were a truly chivalrous knight, he would encourage her to come out of the nunnery and take up her lands, protect her daughters, and curb the greed of his brothers.”
“The law is what powerful men say it shall be,” I say irritably. “And sanctuary is not unbreakable. If you were not a dreamer, far away in Camelot, you would know that by now. You were at Tewkesbury, weren’t you? Did you see the sanctity of holy ground then when they dragged the lords from the abbey and stabbed them in the churchyard? Did you defend sanctuary then? For I heard everyone unsheathed their swords and cut down the men who were coming with their sword hilts held out?”
Anthony shakes his head. “I am a dreamer,” he concedes. “I don’t deny it, but I have seen enough to know the world. Perhaps my dream is of a better one. This York reign is sometimes too much for me, you know, Elizabeth. I cannot bear what Edward does when I see him favor one man and disregard another, and for no reason but that it makes himself stronger or his reign more secure. And you have made the throne your fief: you distribute favors and wealth to your favorites, not to the deserving. And the two of you make enemies. People say that we care for nothing but our own success. When I see what we do, now that we are in power, I sometimes regret fighting under the white rose. I sometimes think that Lancaster would have done just as well, or at any rate no worse.”