The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  “You don’t believe that the man could hurt you from ill-wishing?” he demands. “He is no wizard. There is no such thing. It is a fairy tale to frighten children, Elizabeth.” He glances back at my children, who are appealing to Elizabeth for a ruling on a dropped catch.

  “George believes him. He paid him good money to foretell the king’s death and then some more to bring it about by overlooking. George hired this wizard to destroy us. Already his spells are in the air, in the earth, even in the water.”

  “Oh nonsense. He is no more a wizard than you are a witch.”

  “I don’t claim to be a witch,” I say quietly. “But I have Melusina’s inheritance. I am her heir. You know what I mean: I have her gift, just as Mother did. Just as my daughter Elizabeth has. The world sings to me and I hear the song. Things come to me; my wishes come true. Dreams speak to me. I see signs and portents. And sometimes I know what will happen in the future. I have the Sight.”

  “These could all be revelations from God,” he says firmly. “This is the power of prayer. All the rest is wishful thinking. And women’s nonsense.”

  I smile. “I think they are from God. I never doubt it. But God speaks to me through the river.”

  “You are a heretic and a pagan,” he says with brotherly scorn. “Melusina is a fairy story, but God and His Son are your avowed faith. For heaven’s sake, you have founded religious houses and chantries and schools in His name. Your love of rivers and streams is a superstition, learned from our mother, like that of ancient pagans. You can’t puddle them up into a religion of your own, and then frighten yourself with devils of your own devising.”

  “Of course, brother,” I say with my eyes cast down. “You are a nobleman of learning: I am sure you know best.”

  “Stop!” he throws up a hand, laughing. “Stop. You need not think I am going to try to debate with you. You have your own theology, I know. Part fairy tale and part Bible and all nonsense. Please, for all of our sakes, make it a secret religion. Keep it to yourself. And don’t frighten yourself with imaginary enemies.”

  “But I do dream true.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Anthony, my whole life is a proof of magic, that I can foresee.”

  “Name one thing.”

  “Did I not marry the King of England?”

  “Did I not see you stand out in the road like the strumpet you are?”

  I exclaim against his crow of laughter. “It was not like that! It was not like that! And besides, my ring came to me from the river!”

  He takes my hands and kisses them both. “It is all nonsense,” he says gently. “There is no Melusina but an old, half-forgotten story that Mother used to tell us at bedtime. There is no enchantment but Mother encouraging you with play. You have no powers. There is nothing but what we can do as sinners under the will of God. And Thomas Burdett has no powers but ill-will and a huckster’s promise.”

  I smile at him and I don’t argue. But in my heart I know that there is more.

  “How did the story of Melusina end?” my little boy Edward asks me that night when I am listening to his bedtime prayers. He is sharing a room with his three-year-old brother Richard, and both boys look at me hopefully, wanting a story to delay their bedtime.

  “Why would you ask?” I sit on a chair beside their fire and draw a footstool towards me so I can put up my feet to rest. I can feel the new baby stir in my body. I am six months into my time, and what feels like a lifetime yet to go.

  “I heard my lord uncle Anthony speak to you of her today,” Edward says. “What happened after she came out of the water and married the knight?”

  “It ends sadly,” I say. I gesture to them that they must get into bed, and they obey me but two pairs of unblinking, bright eyes watch me over their covers. “The stories differ. Some people say that a curious traveler came to their house and spied on her and saw her becoming a fish in her bath. Some say her husband broke his word that she was free to swim alone, and spied on her and saw her become fish again.”

  “But why would he mind? Edward asks sensibly. “Since she was half fish when he met her?”

  “Ah, he thought he could change her to be the woman he wanted,” I say. “Sometimes a man likes a woman, but then hopes he can change her. Perhaps he was like that.”

  “Is there any fighting in this story?” Richard asks sleepily, as his head droops to the pillow.

  “No, none,” I say. I kiss Edward’s forehead and then I go to the other bed and kiss Richard. They both still smell like babies, of soap and warm skin. Their hair is soft and smells of fresh air.

  “So what happens when he knows she is half fish?” Edward whispers as I go to the door.

  “She takes the children and leaves him,” I say. “And they never meet again.”

  I blow out a branch of candles but leave the other burning. The firelight in the little grate makes the room warm and cozy.

  “That’s really sad,” Edward says mournfully. “Poor man, that he could not see his children or his wife again.”

  “It is sad,” I say. “But it is just a story. Perhaps there is another ending that people forgot to tell. Perhaps she forgave him and went back to him. Perhaps he turned into a fish for love and swam after her.”

  “Yes.” A happy boy, he is easily comforted. “Good night, Mama.”

  “Good night and God bless you both.”

  When he saw her, the water lapping on her scales, head down in the bath he had built especially for her, thinking that she would like to wash—not to revert to fish—he had that instant revulsion that some men feel when they understand, perhaps for the first time, that a woman is truly “other.” She is not a boy though she is weak like a boy, nor a fool though he has seen her tremble with feeling like a fool. She is not a villain in her capacity to hold a grudge, nor a saint in her flashes of generosity. She is not any of these male qualities. She is a woman. A thing quite different to a man.What he saw was a half fish, but what frightened him to his soul was the being which was a woman.

  George’s malice to his brother becomes horribly apparent in the days of the trial of Burdett and his conspirators. When they hunt for evidence, the plot unravels to reveal a tangle of dark promises and threats, recipes for poisoned capes, a sachet of ground glass, and outright curses. In Burdett’s papers they find not only a chart of days drawn up to foretell Edward’s death, but a set of spells designed to kill him. When Edward shows them to me, I cannot stop myself shivering. I tremble as if I had an ague. Whether they can cause death or not, I know that these ancient drawings on dark paper have a malevolent power. “They make me cold,” I say. “They feel so cold and damp. They feel evil.”

  “Certainly they are evil evidence,” Edward says grimly. “I would not have dreamed that George could have gone so far against me. I would have given the world for him to live at peace with us, or at the very least to keep this quiet. But he hired such incompetent men that now everyone knows that my own brother was conspiring against me. Burdett will be found guilty and he will hang for his crime. But it is bound to come out that George directly commissioned him. George is guilty of treason too. But I cannot put my own brother on trial!”

  “Why not?” I ask sharply. I am seated on a low cushioned stool by the fire in my bedroom, wearing only my fur-lined night cape. We are on our way to our separate beds, but Edward cannot keep his trouble to himself any longer. Burdett’s slimy spells may not have hurt his health, but they have darkened his spirit. “Why can you not put George on trial and send him to a traitor’s death? He deserves it.”

  “Because I love him,” he says simply. “As much as you do your brother Anthony. I cannot send him to the scaffold. He is my little brother. He has been at my side in battle. He is my kinsman. He is my mother’s favorite. He is our George.”

  “He has been on the other side in battle too,” I remind him. “He has been a traitor to you and your family more than once already. He would have seen you dead if he and Warwick had caught you and
you had not escaped. He named me as a witch, he had my mother arrested, he stood by and watched as they killed my father and my brother John. He lets neither justice nor family feeling block his way. Why should you?”

  Edward, seated in the chair on the other side of the fire, leans forward. His face in the flickering light looks old. For the first time I see the weight of years and kingship on him. “I know. I know. I should be harder on him, but I cannot. He is my mother’s pet; he is our little golden boy. I cannot believe he is so—”

  “Vicious,” I give him the word. “Your little pet has become vicious. He is a grown dog now, not a sweet puppy. And he has a bad nature that has been spoiled from birth. You will have to deal with him, Edward, mark my words. When you treat him with kindness, he repays you with plots.”

  “Perhaps,” he says, and sighs. “Perhaps he will learn.”

  “He will not learn,” I promise. “You will only be safe from him when he is dead. You will have to do it, Edward. You can only choose the when and the where.”

  He gets up and stretches and goes to the bed. “Let me see you into your bed, before I go to my own rooms. I shall be glad when the baby is born and we can sleep together again.”

  “In a minute,” I reply. I lean forward and look into the embers. I am the heiress to a water goddess, I never see well in flames; but in the gleam of the ashes I can make out George’s petulant face and something behind him, a tall building, dark as a fingerpost—the Tower. It is always a dark building for me, a place of death. I shrug my shoulders. Perhaps it means nothing.

  I rise up and go to bed and huddle under the covers, and Edward takes my hands to kiss me good night.

  “Why, you’re chilled,” he says in surprise. “I thought the fire was warm enough.”

  “I hate that place,” I say at random.

  “What place?”

  “The Tower of London. I hate it.”

  George’s familiar, the traitor Burdett, protests his innocence on the scaffold at Tyburn before a cat-calling crowd and is hanged anyway; but George, learning nothing from the death of his man, rides in a fury from London and marches into the king’s council meeting at Windsor Castle and repeats the speech, shouting it in Edward’s face.

  “Never!” I say to Anthony. I am quite scandalized.

  “He did! He did!” Anthony is choking with laughter trying to describe the scene to me in my rooms at the castle, my ladies seated in my presence chamber, Anthony and I tucked away in my private rooms for him to tell me the scandalous news. “There is Edward, standing at least seven feet tall from sheer rage. There is the Privy Council looking quite aghast. You should have seen their faces, Thomas Stanley’s mouth open like a fish! Our brother Lionel clutching his cross on his chest in horror. There is George, squaring up to the king and bellowing his script like a mummer. Of course it makes no sense to half of them, who don’t realize George is doing the scaffold speech from memory, like a strolling player. So when he says “I am an old man, a wise man…” they are all utterly confused.”

  I give a little shriek of laughter. “Anthony! They were not!”

  “I swear to you, we none of us knew what was happening except Edward and George. Then George called him a tyrant!”

  My laughter abruptly dies. “In his own council?”

  “A tyrant and a murderer.”

  “He called him that?”

  “Yes. To his face. What was he talking about? The death of Warwick?”

  “No,” I say shortly. “Something worse.”

  “Edward of Lancaster? The young prince?”

  I shake my head. “That was in battle.”

  “Not the old king?”

  “We never speak of it,” I say. “Ever.”

  “Well, George is going to speak of it now. He looks like a man ready to say anything. You know he is claiming that Edward is not even a son of the House of York? That he is a bastard to Blaybourne the archer? So that George is the true heir?”

  I nod. “Edward will have to silence him. This cannot go on.”

  “Edward will have to silence him at once,” he warns me. “Or George will bring you, and the whole House of York, down. It is as I said. Your house’s emblem should not be the white rose but the old sign of eternity.”

  “Eternity?” I repeat, hopeful that he is going to say something reassuring at this most dark time in our days.

  “Yes, the snake which eats itself. The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.”

  I put my hands over my belly as if to shield the child from hearing such dark predictions. “Don’t, Anthony. Don’t say such things.”

  “They are true,” he says grimly. “The House of York will fall whatever you or I do, for they will eat up themselves.”

  I go into my darkened bedchamber for the six weeks of my confinement, leaving the matter still unsettled. Edward cannot think what can be done. A disloyal royal brother is no new thing in England, no new thing for this family, but it is a torment for Edward. “Leave it till I come out,” I say to him on the very threshold of my chamber. “Perhaps he will see sense and beg for a pardon. When I come out, we can decide.”

  “And you be of good courage.” He glances at the shadowy room behind me, warm with a small fire, blank-walled, for they take down all images that might affect the shape of the baby waiting to be born. He leans forward. “I shall come and visit you,” he whispers.

  I smile. Edward always breaks the prohibition that the confinement chamber should be the preserve of women. “Bring me wine and sweetmeats,” I say, naming the forbidden foods.

  “Only if you will kiss me sweetly.”

  “Edward, for shame!”

  “As soon as you come out then.”

  He steps back and formally wishes me well before the court. He bows to me, I curtsey to him, and then I step back and they close the door on the smiling courtiers and I am on my own with the nurses in the small suite of rooms, with nothing to do but wait for the new baby to come.

  I have a long hard birth and at the end of it the treasure which is a boy. He is a darling little York boy, with scanty fair hair and eyes as blue as a robin’s egg. He is small and light, and when they put him in my arms, I have an instant pang of fear because he seems so tiny.

  “He will grow,” says the midwife comfortingly. “Small babies grow fast.”

  I smile and touch his miniature hand and see him turn his head and purse his mouth.

  I feed him myself for the first ten days, and then we have a big-bodied wet nurse who comes in and gently takes him from me. When I see her seated in the low chair and the steady way she takes him to her breast, I am sure that she will care for him. He is christened George, as we promised his faithless uncle, and I am churched and I come out of my darkened confinement apartment into the bright sunshine of the middle of August to find that in my absence the new whore, Elizabeth Shore, is all but queen of my court. The king has given up drunken bouts and womanizing in the bathhouses of London. He has bought her a house near to the Palace of Whitehall. He dines with her as well as beds her. He enjoys her company and the court knows it.

  “She leaves tonight,” I say briskly to Edward when, resplendent in a gown of scarlet embroidered with gold, he comes to my rooms.

  “Who?” he asks mildly, taking a glass of wine at my fireside, no husband more innocent. He waves his hand and the servants whisk from the room, knowing well enough that there is trouble brewing.

  “The Shore woman,” I say simply. “Did you not think that someone would greet me with the gossip as soon as I came out of confinement? The wonder is that they held their tongues for so long. I barely stepped out of the chapel door before they were stumbling over each other in their haste to tell me. Margaret Beaufort was particularly sympathetic.”

  He chuckles. “Forgive me. I did not know that my doings were of such gre
at interest.”

  I say nothing to this untruth. I just wait.

  “Ah beloved, it was a long time,” he says. “I know you were in your confinement and then in your time of travail, and my heart went out to you, but nonetheless a man needs a warm bed.”

  “I am out of confinement now,” I say smartly. “And you will have an icy bed—it will be a pillow of frost, it will be a counterpane of snow for you—if she is not gone by tomorrow morning.”

  He puts out his hand to me and I go to stand beside him. At once, the familiar touch and the scent of his skin when I bend down to kiss his neck overwhelm me.

  “Say you are not angry with me, sweetheart,” he whispers to me, his voice a lulling coo.

  “You know I am.”

  “Then say you will forgive me.”

  “You know I always do.”

  “Then say we can go to bed and be happy to be together again. You have done so well to give us another boy. You are such a joy when you are plump and newly returned to me. I desire you so much. Say we can be happy.”

  “No. You say something.”

  His hand slides up my arm and circles my elbow under the sleeve of my nightgown. As always his touch is as intimate as lovemaking. “Anything. What would you have me say?”

  “Say that she is gone tomorrow.”

  “She is,” he says with a sigh. “But you know, if you would but meet her, you would like her. She is a joyful young woman, and well read and merry. She is a good companion. And one of the sweetest-natured girls that I have ever met.”

  “She is gone tomorrow,” I repeat, ignoring the charms of Elizabeth Shore, as if I cared one way or another whether she was well read. As if Edward cared. As if he had the capacity to tell the truth about a woman. He chases after women like a randy dog after a bitch in heat. I swear he knows nothing about their reading or their temperament.

  “First thing, my darling. First thing.”