The White Princess (Cousins' War) Read online

  We move out of the city to the Palace of Sheen, but Edward cannot be released from his rooms in the Tower to come too. “How can I take him with us?” Henry demands of me. “Can you doubt for a moment that if he was outside the safety of those walls then someone would get hold of him and next thing we would hear of him would be at the head of an army?”

  “He would not!” I say despairingly. I begin to think that my husband will hold my little cousin in prison for life, he is so overly cautious. “You know Edward would not run away from us to lead an army! All he wants is to be in the schoolroom doing his lessons again. All he wants is to be allowed to ride out. All he wants is to be with his sister.”

  But Henry looks at me with hard eyes as dark as Welsh coal, and says: “Of course he would lead an army. Anybody would. And besides, they might not give him any choice.”

  “He’s twelve!” I exclaim. “He’s a child!”

  “He’s old enough to sit on a horse while an army fights for him.”

  “This is my cousin,” I say. “This is my own cousin, the son of my father’s brother. Please, be kingly, and release him.”

  “You think he should be released because he is the son of your father’s brother? You think your family were so kindly when they had power? Elizabeth, your father held his own brother, Edward’s father, in the Tower and then executed him for treason! Your cousin Edward is the son of a traitor and a rebel, and the traitors shout his name when they muster against me. He won’t come out of the Tower until I know that we are safe, all four of us, my mother, you and me, and the true heir: Prince Arthur.”

  He stamps to the door and turns to glower at me. “Don’t ask me again,” he orders. “Don’t dare to ask me again. You don’t know how much I do for love of you, already. More than I should. Far more than I should.”

  He slams the door behind him and I hear the rattle as the guards hastily present arms as he marches by.

  “How much do you do?” I ask the polished wood panels of the door. “And for love?”

  Henry does not come to my room for all of Lent. It is traditional that a devout man would not touch his wife in the weeks before Easter, though the daffodils flood into gold alongside the riverbanks, the blackbirds sing love songs in a penetrating trill every dawn, the swans set about building huge bulky nests on the river path, and every other living thing is filled with joy and seeking a mate; but not us. Henry observes the fast of Lent as an obedient son of his mother and the Church, and so Maggie is my bedfellow and I become accustomed to her kneeling for hours in prayer and whispering her brother’s name over and over again.

  One day I realize that she is praying to St. Anthony for her brother, and I quietly turn away. St. Anthony is the saint for missing things, for forlorn hopes and lost causes; she must feel that her brother is near to disappearing—an invisible boy like my own brothers, all three of them lost to their sisters, gone forever.

  The court fasts throughout Lent, eating no meat, and there is no dancing or playing. My Lady wears black all the time, as if the ordeal of Christ has a special message for her, as if she alone understands His suffering. She and Henry pray together in private every evening as if they have been called to endure the coldness of the hearts of Englishmen to the Tudors, just as Jesus had to endure the loneliness of the desert and the failure of his disciples. The two of them are as martyrs together; nobody understands what they suffer but themselves.

  Around My Lady and her son is a tight little world: the only advisor that she trusts, John Morton, her friend and confessor; Jasper Tudor, Henry’s uncle who raised him in exile; the friend who stood by him, John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and the Stanleys, Lord Thomas and his brother Sir William. There are very, very few of them, isolated in such a great court, and they are so afraid of everyone else, it is as if they are always under siege in their own safe home.

  I really begin to think that they experience a different world from the rest of us. One day, My Lady and I are walking together by the dazzling river, sun on our faces, white blossom on the hawthorn bushes, and the sweet light scent of nectar on the air, when she remarks that England is indeed a benighted desert of sin. My mother, light-footed on the spring grass, a bunch of dripping-stemmed daffodils sticky in her hand, hears this and cannot stop herself laughing out loud.

  I fall back among my ladies to walk beside my mother. “I have to talk to you,” I say. “I have to know what you know.”

  Her smile is serene and lovely as always. “A lifetime of learning,” she teases me. “An understanding of four languages, a love of music and appreciation of art, a great interest in printing and in writing in English as well as Latin. I am glad to see that at last you apply yourself to my wisdom.”

  “My Lady the King’s Mother is ill with fear,” I point out to her. “She thinks the English springtime is a benighted desert. Her son is all but dumb. They trust no one but their own circle and every day there are more rumors in the outside world. It’s coming, isn’t it? A new rebellion? You know the plans and you know who will lead them.” I pause and lower my voice to a whisper. “He’s on the way, isn’t he?”

  My mother says nothing for a moment but walks beside me in silence, graceful as ever. She pauses and turns to me, takes a daffodil bud, and tucks it gently into my hat. “Do you think I have said nothing to you ever since your marriage about these matters because it slipped my mind?” she asks quietly.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Because I thought you had no interest?”

  I shake my head.

  “Elizabeth, on your wedding day you promised to love, honor, and obey the king. On the day of your coronation you will have to promise, before God in the most solemn and binding of vows, to be his loyal subject, the first of his loyal subjects. You will take the crown on your head, you will take the holy oil on your breast. You cannot be forsworn then. You cannot know anything that you would have to keep from him. You cannot have secrets from him.”

  “He doesn’t trust me!” I burst out. “Without you ever telling me a word he already suspects me of knowing a whole conspiracy and keeping it secret. Over and over again he asks me what I know, over and over again he warns me that he is making allowances for us. His mother is certain that I am a traitor to him, and I believe that he thinks so too.”

  “He will come to trust you, perhaps,” she says. “If you have years together. You may grow to be a loving husband and wife, if you have long enough. And if I never tell you anything, then there will never be a moment where you have to lie to him. Or worse—never a moment when you have to choose where your loyalties lie. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between your father’s family and your husband’s. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between the claims of your little son and another.”

  I am horrified at the thought of having to choose between Tudor and York. “But if I know nothing, then I am like a leaf on the water, I go wherever the current takes me. I don’t act, I do nothing.”

  She smiles. “Yes. Why don’t you let the river take you? And we’ll see what she says.”

  We turn in silence and head back along the riverbank to Sheen, the beautiful palace of many towers which dominates the curve of the river. As we walk towards the palace I see half a dozen horses gallop up to the king’s private door. The men dismount, and one pulls off his hat and goes inside.

  My mother leads the ladies past the men-at-arms, and graciously acknowledges their salute. “You look weary,” she says pleasantly. “Come far?”

  “Without stopping for sleep, all the way from Flanders,” one boasts. “We rode as if the devil was behind us.”

  “Did you?”

  “But he’s not behind us, he’s before us,” he confides quietly. “Ahead of us, and ahead of His Grace, and out and about raising an army while the rest of us are amazed.”

  “That’s enough,” another man says. He pulls off his hat to me and to my mother. “I apologize, Your Grace. He’s been breathless for so long he has to talk now.”