The White Queen Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Philippa Gregory Limited

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  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-6391-4

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-6391-1

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  For Anthony

  THE WHITE QUEEN

  In the darkness of the forest the young knight could hear the splashing of the fountain long before he could see the glimmer of moonlight reflected on the still surface. He was about to step forward, longing to dip his head, drink in the coolness, when he caught his breath at the sight of something dark, moving deep in the water. There was a greenish shadow in the sunken bowl of the fountain, something like a great fish, something like a drowned body. Then it moved and stood upright and he saw, frighteningly naked: a bathing woman. Her skin as she rose up, water coursing down her flanks, was even paler than the white marble bowl, her wet hair dark as a shadow.

  She is Melusina, the water goddess, and she is found in hidden springs and waterfalls in any forest in Christendom, even in those as far away as Greece. She bathes in the Moorish fountains too. They know her by another name in the northern countries, where the lakes are glazed with ice and it crackles when she rises. A man may love her if he keeps her secret and lets her alone when she wants to bathe, and she may love him in return until he breaks his word, as men always do, and she sweeps him into the deeps, with her fishy tail, and turns his faithless blood to water.

  The tragedy of Melusina, whatever language tells it, whatever tune it sings, is that a man will always promise more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.

  Contents

  SPRING 1464

  SEPTEMBER 1464

  MAY 1465

  SUMMER 1468

  SUMMER 1469

  AUTUMN 1469

  WINTER 1469–70

  SPRING 1470

  SUMMER 1470

  AUTUMN 1470

  NOVEMBER 1470

  WINTER 1470–71

  SPRING 1471

  MAY 3, 1471

  MAY 14, 1471

  MAY 21, 1471

  SUMMER 1471

  SPRING 1472

  APRIL 1472

  SUMMER 1472

  SEPTEMBER 1472

  JANUARY 1473

  SPRING 1473

  JULY 1473

  SPRING 1476

  JULY 1476

  DECEMBER 1476

  JANUARY 1477

  SPRING 1477

  SUMMER 1477

  WINTER 1477

  SPRING 1478

  SUMMER 1478

  SPRING 1479

  APRIL 1483

  MAY 1483

  JUNE 1483

  JUNE 17, 1483

  SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 1483: CORONATION DAY

  JULY 1483

  AUGUST 1483

  SEPTEMBER 1483

  OCTOBER 1483

  NOVEMBER 1483

  DECEMBER 1483

  CHRISTMAS 1483

  JANUARY 1484

  MARCH 1484

  APRIL 1484

  JANUARY 1485

  FEBRUARY 1485

  MARCH 1485

  APRIL 1485

  SPRING 1464

  My father is Sir Richard Woodville, Baron Rivers, an English nobleman, a landholder, and a supporter of the true Kings of England, the Lancastrian line. My mother descends from the Dukes of Burgundy and so carries the watery blood of the goddess Melusina, who founded their royal house with her entranced ducal lover, and can still be met at times of extreme trouble, crying a warning over the castle rooftops when the son and heir is dying and the family doomed. Or so they say, those who believe in such things.

  With this contradictory parentage of mine: solid English earth and French water goddess, one could expect anything from me: an enchantress, or an ordinary girl. There are those who will say I am both. But today, as I comb my hair with particular care and arrange it under my tallest headdress, take the hands of my two fatherless boys and lead the way to the road that goes to Northampton, I would give all that I am to be, just this once, simply irresistible.

  I have to attract the attention of a young man riding out to yet another battle, against an enemy that cannot be defeated. He may not even see me. He is not likely to be in the mood for beggars or flirts. I have to excite his compassion for my position, inspire his sympathy for my needs, and stay in his memory long enough for him to do something about them both. And this is a man who has beautiful women flinging themselves at him every night of the week, and a hundred claimants for every post in his gift.

  He is a usurper and a tyrant, my enemy and the son of my enemy, but I am far beyond loyalty to anyone but my sons and myself. My own father rode out to the battle of Towton against this man who now calls himself King of England, though he is little more than a braggart boy; and I have never seen a man as broken as my father when he came home from Towton, his sword arm bleeding through his jacket, his face white, saying that this boy is a commander such as we have never seen before, and our cause is lost, and we are all without hope while he lives. Twenty thousand men were cut down at Towton at this boy’s command; no one had ever seen such death before in England. My father said it was a harvest of Lancastrians, not a battle. The rightful King Henry and his wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, fled to Scotland, devastated by the deaths.

  Those of us left in England did not surrender readily. The battles went on and on to resist the false king, this boy of York. My own husband was killed commanding our cavalry, only three years ago at St. Albans. And now I am left a widow and what land and fortune I once called my own has been taken by my mother-in-law with the goodwill of the victor, the master of this boy-king, the great puppeteer who is known as the Kingmaker: Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who made a king out of this vain boy, now only twenty-two, and will make a hell out of England for those of us who still defend the House of Lancaster.

  There are Yorkists in every great house in the land now, and every profitable business or place or tax is in their gift. Their boy-king is on the throne, and his supporters form the new court. We, the defeated, are paupers in our own houses and strangers in our own country, our king an exile, our queen a vengeful alien plotting with our old enemy of France. We have to make terms with the tyrant ofYork, while praying that God turns against him and our true king sweeps south with an army for yet another battle.

  In the meantime, like many a woman with a husband