The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  As the days grow shorter and the nights grow darker, I know that my time is coming and my baby is due. My great terror is that I will die here, in childbirth, and my mother will be left here alone, in our enemy’s city, guarding my children.

  “Do you know what will happen?” I ask her bluntly. “Have you foreseen it? And what will happen to my girls?”

  I see some knowledge in her eyes, but the face she turns to me is untroubled. “You aren’t going to die, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says bluntly. “You are a healthy young woman and the king’s council is sending Lady Scrope to care for you, and a pair of midwives. There is no reason to think that you will die, any more than there was with any of the others. I expect you to survive this, and to have more children.”

  “The baby?” I ask, trying to read her face.

  “You know he is healthy,” she says, smiling. “Anyone who has felt that child kick knows he is strong. There is no reason for you to fear.”

  “But there is something,” I say certainly. “You foresee something about Edward, my baby prince Edward.”

  She looks at me for a moment and then she decides to speak honestly. “I can’t see him becoming king,” she says. “I have read the cards and I have looked at the reflection of the moon on the water. I have tried asking the crystal, and looking into the smoke. Indeed, I have tried everything I know which is inside the laws of God and is allowed in this holy space. But to tell you the truth, Elizabeth: I cannot see him being king.”

  I laugh out loud. “Is that it? Is that all? Dear God, Mother, I cannot see his own father being king again, and he is crowned and ordained! I cannot see myself being queen again, and I have had the holy oil on my breast and the scepters in my hand. I don’t hope for a Prince of Wales here, just a healthy boy. Just let him be born strong and grow to be a man, and I will be content. I don’t need him to be King of England. I just want to know that he and I will live through this.”

  “Oh, you’ll live through this,” she says. An airy wave of her hand dismisses the cramped rooms; the girls’ truckle beds in one corner; the servants’ straw mattresses on the floor in another; the poverty of the space; the chill of the cellar; the damp in the stone of the walls; the smoking fire; the dauntless courage of my children, who are forgetting that they ever lived anywhere better. “This is nothing. I expect to see us rise from this.”

  “How?” I ask her disbelievingly.

  She leans over and she puts her mouth to my ear. “Because your husband is not growing vines and making wine in Flanders,” she says. “He is not carding wool and learning to weave. He is equipping an expedition, making allies, raising money, planning to invade England. The London merchants are not the only ones in the country who prefer York to Lancaster. And Edward has never lost a battle. D’you remember?”

  Uncertainly, I nod. Even though he is defeated and in exile, it is true that he has never lost a battle.

  “So when he comes against Henry’s forces, even when they are captained by Warwick and driven on by Margaret of Anjou, don’t you think he will win?”

  It is not a proper confinement, as a queen should be confined, with a ceremonial retirement from court six weeks before the date of the birth, and a closing of the shutters and a blessing of the room.

  “Nonsense,” my mother says buoyantly. “You retired from daylight itself, didn’t you? Confinement? I should think no queen has ever been so confined. Who has ever been confined to sanctuary before?”

  It is not a proper royal birth with three midwives and two wet nurses, and rockers and noble godmothers and mistresses of the nursery standing by, and ambassadors waiting with rich gifts. Lady Scrope is sent by the Lancaster court to make sure that I have everything I need, and I think this a gracious gesture from the Earl of Warwick to me. But I have to bring my baby into the world with no waiting husband and court at the door, and almost none to help me, and his godfathers are the Abbot of Westminster and the prior, and his godmother is Lady Scrope: the only people who are with me, neither great lords of the land nor foreign kings, the usual godfathers for a royal baby, but good and kind people who have been trapped at Westminster with us.

  I call him Edward, as his father wants, and as the silver spoon from the river predicted. Margaret of Anjou, with her invasion fleet held in port by storms, sends me a message to tell me to call him John. She does not want another Prince Edward in England to rival her son. I ignore her words as from a nobody. Why would I listen to the preferences of Margaret of Anjou? My husband named him Edward, and the silver spoon came from the river with his name on it. Edward he is: Edward, Prince ofWales, he shall be, even if my mother is right and he is never Edward the king.

  Among ourselves we call him Baby, and no one calls him the Prince of Wales, and I think as I drift into sleep after the birth, all warm with him in my arms, half drunk from the birthing cup that they have given me, that perhaps this baby will not be king. There have been no cannons fired for him and no bonfires lit on hilltops. The fountains and conduits of London have not run with wine, the citizens are not drunk with joy, there are no announcements of his arrival racing to the great courts of Europe. It is like having an ordinary baby, not a prince. Perhaps he will be an ordinary boy and I will become an ordinary woman again. Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.

  WINTER 1470–71

  We spend Christmas in sanctuary. The London butchers send us a fat goose, and my boys and little Elizabeth and I play cards and I make sure that I lose a silver sixpence to her, and send her to bed thrilled to be a serious gamester. We spend Twelfth Night in sanctuary, and Mother and I compose a play for the children, with costumes and masks and enchantments. We tell them our family story of Melusina, the beautiful woman, half girl, half fish, who is found in the fountain in the forest and marries a mortal for love. I wrap myself in a sheet, which we tie at the feet to make a great tail, and I let down my hair, and when I rise up from the floor, the girls are transported by the fish woman Melusina and the boys applaud. My mother enters with a paper horse’s head taped on the stick of a broom, wearing the doorman’s jerkin and a paper crown. The girls don’t recognize her at all and watch the play as if we were paid mummers at the greatest court in the world. We tell them the story of the courtship of the beautiful woman who is half fish, and how her lover persuades her to leave her watery fountain in the wood and take her chance in the great world. We tell only half the story: that she lives with him and gives him beautiful children and they are happy together.

  There is more to the story than this, of course. But I find that I don’t want to think about marriages for love that end in separation. I don’t want to think about being a woman who cannot live in the new world that is being made by men. I don’t want to think of Melusina rising from her fountain and confining herself to a castle while I am held in sanctuary, and all of us, daughters of Melusina, are trapped in a place where we cannot wholly be ourselves.

  Melusina’s mortal husband loved her, but she puzzled him. He did not understand her nature, and he was not content to live with a woman who was a mystery to him. He allowed a guest to persuade him to spy on her. He hid behind the hangings in her bath house and saw her swim beneath the water of her bath, saw—horrified—the gleam of ripple on scales, learned her secret: that although she loved him, truly loved him, she was still half woman and half fish. He could not bear what she was, and she could not help but be who she was. So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature—and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature. He could not stand to think of her secrecy, that she had a life hidden from him. He could not, in fact, tolerate the truth that Melusina was a woman who knew the unknown depths, who swam in them.

  Poor Melusina, who tried so hard to be a good wife, had to leave the man who loved her and go back to the water, finding the earth too hard. Like many women, she was unable to fit exactly with her husband’s view. Her feet hurt: she could not wa