The White Princess Read online

  Next is a dining table and six chairs, wine and water in beautiful Venetian glass jugs on the table, gold plates ready for serving dinner, a box with pastries in case of hunger.

  Nearest to us is a grand bed, with thick oak posts and rich curtains and tester. On an impulse I open the chest at the foot of the bed and there, neatly folded and interspersed with dried lavender flowers, are my favorite gowns and my best linen, ready for me to wear when they fit me again. There is a day bed, next to the chest, and a beautifully carved and engraved royal cradle, all ready with linen beside the bed.

  “What is this?” I ask as if I don’t know. “What is this? What is this?”

  “You are in confinement,” Lady Margaret says patiently, as if speaking to an idiot. “For your health and for the health of your child.”

  “What about Teddy?”

  “He has been taken to the Tower for his own safety. He was in danger here. He needs to be carefully guarded. But I will speak to the king about your cousin. I will tell you what he says. Without question, he will judge rightly.”

  “I want to see the king now!”

  She pauses. “Now, daughter, you know that you cannot see him, or any man, until you come out of confinement,” she says reasonably. “But I will give him any message or take him any letter you wish to write.”

  “When I have given birth you will have to let me out,” I say breathlessly. It is as if the room is airless and I am struggling to breathe. “Then I will see the king and tell him that I have been imprisoned in here.”

  She sighs as if I am very foolish. “Really, Your Grace! You must be calm. We all agreed you were entering your confinement this evening, you knew full well that you were doing this today.”

  “What about the dinner and bidding farewell to the court?”

  “Your health was not strong enough. You said so yourself.”

  I am so amazed by her lie that I gape at her. “When did I say that?”

  “You said you were distressed. You said you were troubled. Here there is neither distress nor trouble. You will stay here, under my guidance, until you have safely given birth to the child.”

  “I will see my mother, I will see her at once!” I say. I am furious to hear my voice tremble. But I am afraid of My Lady in this darkened room, and I feel powerless. My earliest memory is of being confined, in sanctuary, in a damp warren of cold rooms under the chapel at Westminster Abbey. I have a horror of confined spaces and dark places, and now I am trembling with anger and fear. “I will see my mother. The king said that I should see her. The king promised me that she would be with me in here.”

  “She will come into confinement with you,” she concedes. “Of course.” She pauses. “And she will stay with you until you come out. When the baby is born. She will share your confinement.”

  I just gape at her. She has all the power and I have none. I have been as good as imprisoned by her and by the convention of royal births which she has codified and to which I agreed. Now I am locked in one shadowy room for weeks, and she has the key.

  “I am free,” I say boldly. “I’m not a prisoner. I am here to give birth. I chose to come in here. I am not held against my will. I am free. If I want to walk out, I can just walk out. Nobody can stop me, I am the wife of the King of England.”

  “Of course you are,” she says, and then she goes out through the door and turns the key in the lock from the outside, and leaves me. I am locked in.

  My mother comes in at dinnertime, holding Maggie’s hand. “We’ve come to join you,” she says.

  Maggie is white as if she were deathly sick, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.

  “What about Teddy?”

  My mother shakes her head. “They took him to the Tower.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They shouted À Warwick when they fought Jasper Tudor in the North. They carried the standard of the ragged staff in London,” my mother says, as if this is reason enough.

  “They were fighting for Teddy,” Maggie tells me. “Even though he didn’t ask them to—even though he would never ask them to. He knows not to say such things. I’ve taught him. He knows that King Henry is the king. He knows to say nothing about the House of York.”

  “There’s no charge against him,” my mother says briefly. “He’s not charged with treason. Not charged with anything. The king says he is only acting to protect Teddy. He says that Teddy might be seized by rebels and used by them as a figurehead. He says that Teddy is safer in the Tower for now.”

  My laughter at this extraordinary lie turns into a sob. “Safer in the Tower! Were my brothers safer in the Tower?”

  My mother grimaces.

  “I’m sorry,” I say at once. “Forgive me, I’m sorry. Did the king say how long he will keep Teddy there?”

  Maggie goes quietly to the fireside and sinks down onto a footstool, her head turned away. “Poor child,” my mother says. To me she replies, “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. They took Teddy’s clothes and his books. I think we have to assume that His Grace will keep him there until he feels safe from rebellion.”

  I look at her, the only one of us who may know how many rebels are biding their time, waiting for a call to rise for York, seeing the last skirmish as a stepping-stone to another, and from that to another—not as a defeat. She is a woman who never sees defeat. I wonder if she is their leader, if it is her determined optimism that drives them on. “Is something going to happen?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  PRIOR’S GREAT HALL, WINCHESTER, 19 SEPTEMBER 1486

  I have to endure my confinement in a state of frightened misery. It is so like the long months in the darkness of the crypt below the chapel at Westminster that I wake every morning gasping for air and clinging to the carved headboard to stop myself jumping out of bed and screaming for help. I still have nightmares about darkness and the crowded rooms. My mother was pregnant, my father had fled overseas, our enemy was on the throne, I was four years old and Mary, my darling little sister now in heaven, and Cecily cried all the time for their toys, for their pets, for their father, not really knowing what they were crying for, only that our whole life was plunged into darkness, cold, and want. I used to look at my mother’s bleak white face and wonder if she would ever smile at me again. I knew that we were in terrible danger, but I was only four, I didn’t know what the danger was, or how this damp prison could keep us safe. Half a year we spent inside the walls of the crypt, half a year and we never saw the sun, never walked outside, never took a breath of fresh air. We became accustomed to a life in prison, as convicts become accustomed to the limits of their cell. Mother gave birth to Edward inside those damp walls, and we were filled with joy that at last we had a boy, an heir; but we knew we had no way of getting him to the throne—not even of getting him into the sun and air of his own country. Six months is a long, long time for a little girl of only four years old. I thought that we would never get out, I thought I would grow up taller and taller like a thin pale weed and die blanched like asparagus by the darkness. I had a dream that we were all turning into white-faced worms and that we would live underground forever. That was when I grew to hate confined spaces, hate the smell of damp, even hate the sound of the river lapping against the walls at nighttime, as I feared the waters would rise and rise and seep into my bed and drown me.

  When my father came home, won two battles one after the other, saved us, rescued us like a knight in a storybook, we emerged from the crypt, out of the darkness like the risen Lord Himself coming into light. Then I swore to myself a childish oath that I would never be confined again.

  This is fortune’s wheel—as my grandmother Jacquetta would say. Fortune’s wheel that takes you very high and then throws you very low, and there is nothing you can do but face the turn of it with courage. I remember clearly enough that as a little girl I could not find that courage.

  When I was seventeen and the favorite of my father’s court, the most beautiful princess in Engla