The White Queen Read online

  I cross myself. “God bless the poor little one,” I say. “Nobody would have wished that on them.”

  “Nobody did,” my mother says robustly. “But if Isabel had not taken ship with traitors, then she would have been safe in England with midwives and friends to care for her.”

  “Poor girl,” I say, a hand on my own big belly. “Poor girl. She has had little joy from her grand marriage. D’you remember her at court at Christmas?”

  “There is worse news,” my mother goes on. “Warwick and George have gone to his great friend King Louis of France, and now the two of them have met with Margaret d’Anjou at Angers, and another plot is spinning, just as we have been spinning here.”

  “Warwick still goes on against us?”

  My mother makes a grimace. “He must be a determined man, indeed, to see his own grandchild stillborn while his family is on the run, and go from a near shipwreck straight to forswear his oaths of loyalty. But nothing stops him. You would think a storm out of a blue sky would make him wonder, but nothing makes him wonder. Now he is courting Margaret d’Anjou, whom he once fought against. He had to spend half an hour on his knees to beg the forgiveness of her, his greatest enemy. She would not see him without his act of contrition. God bless her, she always did take herself very high.”

  “What d’you think he plans?”

  “It is the French king who is planning the dance now. Warwick thinks he is Kingmaker, but now he is a puppet. They call Louis of France the spider, and I must say he spins a finer thread even than us. He wants to bring down your husband and diminish our country. He is using Warwick and Margaret d’Anjou to do it. Margaret’s son, the so-called Prince of Wales, Prince Edward of Lancaster, is to marry Warwick’s younger daughter Anne to bind their lying parents together in a pact they cannot dishonor. Then I imagine they will all come to England to free Henry from the Tower.”

  “That little thing Anne Neville?” I demand, immediately diverted. “They would give her to that monster Edward, to make sure her father does not play false?”

  “They will,” my mother agrees. “She is only fourteen and they are marrying her to a boy who was allowed to choose how to execute his enemies when he was eleven years old. He was raised to be a devil. Anne Neville must be wondering if she is rising to be queen or falling among the damned.”

  “But it changes everything for George,” I say, thinking aloud. “It was one thing to fight his brother, the king, when he hoped to kill him and succeed him—but now? Why would he fight Edward when he gains nothing for himself? Why would he fight his brother to put the Lancaster king and then the Lancaster prince on the throne?”

  “I suppose he didn’t think such a thing would happen when he set sail with a wife near her time, and a father-in-law determined to win the crown. But now he has lost his son and heir, and his father-in-law has a second daughter who could be queen. George’s prospects are changed very much. He should have the sense to see that. But d’you think he has?”

  “Someone should advise him.” Our eyes meet. I never have to spell things out for my mother: we understand each other so well.

  “Shall you visit the king’s mother before dinner?” Mother asks me.

  I take my foot from the pedal of the spinning wheel and stop it with my hand. “Let’s go and see her now,” I suggest.

  She is sitting with her women sewing an altar cloth. One of them is reading from the Bible as they work. She is famously devout; her suspicion that we are not as saintly as she, worse, perhaps pagans, worst of all, perhaps witches, is just one of the many fears she holds against me. The years have not improved her view of me. She did not want me to marry her son, and even now, though I have proved my fertility and myself a good wife for him, she hates me still. Indeed, she has been so discourteous that Edward has given her Fotheringhay to keep her from court. As for me, I am not impressed by her sanctity: if she is such a good woman, then she should have taught George better. If she had the ear of God, she would not have lost her son Edmund and her husband. I curtsey to her as we enter, and she rises to curtsey low to me. She nods her women to pick up their work and go to one side. She knows I am not visiting her to inquire after her health. There is still no great love lost between us and never will be.

  “Your Grace,” she says levelly. “I am honored.”

  “My Lady Mother,” I say, smiling. “The pleasure is mine.”

  We all sit simultaneously in order to avoid the issue of priority, and she waits for me to speak.

  “I am so concerned for you,” I say sweetly. “I am sure you are worried about George, so far from home, proclaimed as a traitor, and all but entrapped with the traitor Warwick, estranged from his brother and from his family. His first baby lost, his own life in such danger.”

  She blinks. She had not anticipated my concern for her favorite George. “Of course I wish he were reconciled to us,” she says cautiously. “It is always sad when brothers quarrel.”

  “And now I hear that George is abandoning his own family,” I say plaintively. “A turncoat—not just against his brother but against you and against his own house.”

  She looks at my mother for an explanation.

  “He has joined Margaret d’Anjou,” my mother says bluntly. “Your son, a Yorkist, is going to fight for the Lancastrian king. Shameful.”

  “He will be defeated for certain: Edward always wins,” I say. “And then he must be executed as a traitor. How can Edward spare him, even for brotherly love, if George takes up the Lancaster colors? Think of him dying with a red rose at his collar! The shame for you! What would his father have said?”

  She is truly aghast. “He would never follow Margaret of Anjou,” she says. “His father’s greatest enemy?”

  “Margaret of Anjou put George’s father’s head on a spike on the walls of York, and now he serves her,” I say thoughtfully. “How can any of us ever forgive him?”

  “It cannot be so,” she says. “He might be tempted to join Warwick. It is hard for him to always come second to Edward, and—” She breaks off, but we all know that George is jealous of everyone: his brother Richard, Hastings, me, and all of my kin. We know she has filled his head with wild thoughts that Edward is a bastard and so he is the true heir. “And besides, what—”

  “What good does it do him?” I supplement smoothly. “I see what you think of him. Indeed, he always thinks of nothing but his gain and never of loyalty or his word or his honor. He is all George and no York.”

  She flushes at that, but she cannot deny that George has been the most selfish spoiled boy who ever turned coat.

  “He thought when he went with Warwick that Warwick would make him king,” I say bluntly. “Then they found that nobody would have George for king if they could have Edward. Only two people in the country think George is a better man than my husband.”

  She waits.

  “George himself and you,” I say precisely. “Then he fled with Warwick because he did not dare face Edward after betraying him again. And now he finds that Warwick’s plan has changed. Warwick will not put George on the throne. He will marry Anne his daughter to Edward of Lancaster; he will put the young Edward of Lancaster on the throne and become father-in-law to the King of England that way. George and Isabel are no longer his choice for King and Queen of England. Now it is Edward of Lancaster and Anne. The best that George can hope for is to be brother-in-law to the usurping Lancaster King of England instead of brother to the rightful York king.”

  George’s mother nods.

  “Little profit for him,” I observe. “For a great deal of work, and dreadful danger.”

  I let her think on this for a moment. “Now, if he were to turn his coat again and come back to his brother, penitent and truly loyal, Edward would have him back,” I say. “Edward would forgive him.”

  “He would?”

  I nod. “I can promise it.” I don’t add that I will never forgive him, and that he and Warwick are dead men to me and have been ever since they executed my fat