The White Princess Read online

  He comes to my room every evening, sometimes bringing a syllabub straight from the kitchen for me to drink while it is warm, as if we did not have a hundred servants to do my bidding. I laugh at him, carrying the little jug and the cup, neat as a groom of the servery.

  “Well, you’re used to having people do things for you,” he says. “You were raised in a royal household with dozens of servants waiting around the room for something to do. But in Brittany I had to serve myself. Sometimes we had no house servants. Actually, sometimes we had no house, we were all but homeless.”

  I go to my chair by the fire, but that is not good enough for the mother of the next prince.

  “Sit on the bed, sit on the bed, put your feet up,” he urges, and helps me up, taking my shoes and pressing the cup in my hands. Like a pair of little merchants snug in their town house, we eat our supper alone together. Henry puts a poker into the heart of the fire and when it is hot, plunges it into a jug of small ale. The drink seethes and he pours it out while it is steaming and tastes it.

  “I can tell you my heart turned to stone at York,” he says to me frankly. “Freezing cold wind and a rain that could cut through you, and the faces of the women like stone itself. They looked at me as if I had personally murdered their only son. You know what they’re like—they love Richard as dearly as if he rode out only yesterday. Why do they do that? Why do they cling to him still?”

  I bury my face in the syllabub cup so that he cannot see my swift betraying flinch of grief.

  “He had that York gift, didn’t he?” he presses me. “Of making people love him? Like your father King Edward did? Like you have? It’s a blessing, there’s no real sense to it. It’s just that some men have a charm, don’t they? And then people follow them? People just follow them?”

  I shrug. I can’t trust my voice to speak of why everyone loved Richard, of the friends who would have laid down their lives for him and who, even now after his death, still fight his enemies for love of his memory. The common soldiers who will still brawl in taverns when someone says that he was a usurper. The fishwives who will draw a knife on anyone who says he was hunchbacked or weak.

  “I don’t have it, do I?” Henry asks me bluntly. “Whatever it is—a gift or a trick or a talent. I don’t have it. Everywhere we went, I smiled and waved and did all that I could, all that I should. I acted the part of a king sure of his throne even though I sometimes felt like a penniless pretender with no one who believes in me but a besotted mother and a doting uncle, a pawn for the big players who are the kings of Europe. I’ve never been someone deeply beloved by a city, I’ve never had an army roar my name. I’m not a man who is followed for love.”

  “You won the battle,” I say dryly. “You had enough men follow you on the day. That’s all that matters, that one day. As you tell everyone: you’re king. You’re king by right of conquest.”

  “I won with hired troops, paid by the King of France. I won with an army loaned to me from Brittany. One half of them were mercenaries and the other half were murderous criminals pulled out of the jails. I didn’t have men that served me for love. I’m not beloved,” he says quietly. “I don’t think I ever will be. I don’t have the knack of it.”

  I lower the cup and for a moment our eyes meet. In that one accidental exchange I can see that he is thinking that he is not even loved by his own wife. He is—simply—loveless. He spent his youth waiting for the throne of England, he risked his life fighting for the throne of England, and now he finds it is a hollow crown indeed; there is no heart at the center. It is empty.

  I can think of nothing to fill the awkward silence. “You have adherents,” I offer.

  He gives a short bitter laugh. “Oh yes, I have bought some: the Courtenays and the Howards. And I have the friends that my mother has made for me. I can count on a few friends from the old days, my uncle, the Earl of Oxford. I can trust the Stanleys, and my mother’s kin.” He pauses. “It’s an odd question for a husband to ask his wife, but I could think of nothing else when they told me that Lovell had come against me. I know that he was Richard’s friend. I see that Francis Lovell loves Richard so much that he fights on even when Richard is dead. It made me wonder: can I count on you?”

  “Why would you even ask?”

  “Because they all tell me that you loved Richard too. And I know you well enough now to be sure that you were not guided by ambition to be his queen, you were driven by love. So that’s why I ask you. Do you love him still? Like Lord Lovell? Like the women of York? Do you love him despite his death? Like York does, like Lord Lovell does? Or can I count on you?”

  I shift slightly as if I am uncomfortable on the soft bed, sipping my drink. I gesture to my belly. “As you say, I am your wife. You can count on that. I am about to have your child. You can count on that.”

  He nods. “We both know how that came about. It was done to breed a child; it was not an act of love. You would have refused me if you could have done, and every night you turned your face away. But I have been wondering, while I was gone, facing such unfriendliness, facing a rebellion, whether loyalty might grow, whether trust can grow between us?”

  He does not even mention love.

  I glance away. I cannot meet his steady gaze, and I cannot answer his question. “All this I have already promised,” I say inadequately. “I said my marriage vows.”

  He hears the refusal in my voice. Gently he leans over and takes the empty cup from me. “I’ll leave it at that, then,” he says, and goes from my room.

  ST. SWITHIN’S PRIORY, WINCHESTER, SEPTEMBER 1486

  A rosy sun in saffron clouds is sinking below the sill of my window in the September evening as I wake from my afternoon nap and lie, enjoying the warmth on my face, knowing that this is my last day of sunshine. This evening I have to dress up, take the compliments of the court, receive their gifts, and go into confinement to await the birth of my baby. My confinement rooms will be darkened by shutters, my windows closed, even the feeble light of the candles will be shaded until the baby is born.

  If My Lady the King’s Mother was able publicly to declare when the baby was conceived—a full month before our wedding—she would have had me locked up four weeks ago. She has already written in her Royal Book that a queen must be confined a full six weeks before the expected date of a birth. She must give a farewell dinner and the court must escort her to the door of the confinement chamber. She must go in, and not come out again (God willing, writes the pious lady at this point) until six weeks after the birth of a healthy child, when the babe is brought out to be christened, and she emerges to be churched and can take her place at court once more. A stay in silence and darkness of a long three months’ duration. I read this, in her elegant black-ink handwriting, and I study her opinions about the quality of the tapestries on the walls and the hangings on the bed, and I think that only a barren woman would compose such a regime.

  My Lady the King’s Mother had only one child, her precious son Henry, and she has been barren since his birth. I think that if there were any chance that she would be put away from the world for three months every year, the orders on confinement would be very different. These rules are not to secure my privacy and rest, they are to keep me out of the way of the court so that she can take my place for three glorious long months every time her son gets me with child. It is as simple as that.

  But this time, wonderfully, the joke is on her, for since we have, all three of us, loudly and publicly declared that the baby is a honeymoon baby, the blessedly quick result of a January wedding, it should be born in the middle of October, and so by her own rules, I don’t have to go into confinement until now, the first week in September. If she had put me into darkness at seven and a half months, I should have missed all of August, but I have been free—big-bellied but gloriously free—and I have laughed up my sleeve for a month as I have seen this deception eat away at her.

  Now I expect to spend only a week or so before the birth in this gloomy twilight, banned from the