The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  “You must be with me for the birth of another prince. You would want to see a Prince of York christened as he should be,” I say plaintively, as if promising her a treat if she will only stay. “You would be his godmother. I would put him in your keeping. You could choose his name.”

  “Richard,” she says at once. “Call him Richard.”

  “So get well and stay with me and see Richard born,” I urge her.

  She smiles and I see now the telltale signs that I had not seen before. The weariness even when she holds herself upright in her chair, the creamy color of her face, and the brown shadows under her eyes. How could I not have seen these before? I who love her so well that I kiss her cheek every day and kneel for her blessing—how could I not have noticed that she has grown so thin?

  I throw the silks aside and kneel at her feet, clasp her hands, suddenly feel that they are bony, suddenly notice they are freckled with age. I look up into her tired face. “Mother, you have been with me through everything. You will never leave me now?”

  “Not if I could choose to stay,” she says. “But I have felt this pain for years, and I know it is coming to an end.”

  “Since when?” I ask fiercely. “How long have you felt this pain?”

  “Since the death of your father,” she says steadily. “The day they told me that he was dead, that they had beheaded him for treason, I felt something move deep inside me, like my heart breaking; and I wanted to be with him, even in death.”

  “But not to leave me!” I cry selfishly. And then cleverly I add, “And surely, you cannot bear to leave Anthony?”

  She laughs at that. “You both are grown,” she says. “You both can live without me. You must both learn to live without me. Anthony will go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as he longs to do. You will see your son grow to be a man. You will see our little Elizabeth marry a king and have a crown of her own.”

  “I’m not ready!” I cry out like a desolate child. “I can’t manage without you!”

  She smiles gently, touches my cheek with her thin hand. “Nobody is ever ready,” she says tenderly. “But you will manage without me, and through you, and your children, I will have founded a line of kings in England. Queens as well, I think.”

  SPRING 1472

  I am in the last months of my pregnancy, and the court is at the beautiful Nonesuch Palace at Sheen, a palace for springtime, when we are all convulsed by the enormous, delicious scandal of the marriage of Edward’s brother Richard. All the more wonderful since who would ever have thought Richard would be scandalous? George, yes, with his incessant seeking of his own interest. George would always give the gossip grinders sackfuls of grist since he cares for no one but George himself. No honor, no loyalty, no affection prevents George from suiting himself.

  Edward, too, will go his own way and care nothing what people say of him. But Richard! Richard is the good boy of the family, the one who works hardest at being strong, who studies so that he can be clever, who prays devoutly so that he can be favored by God, who tries so hard for his mother’s love and always knows he is eclipsed. For Richard to cause a scandal is like my best hound dog suddenly declaring that she won’t hunt anymore. It is quite out of nature.

  God knows, I try to love Richard, since he has been a true friend to my husband, and a good brother. I should love him: he stood by my husband without thinking twice of it when they had to flee England on a tiny fishing boat; he endured exile with him, and came home with him to risk his life half a dozen times. And always, Edward said, that if Richard had the left wing, he could be sure that the left wing would hold. If Richard’s troop was bringing up the rear, he knew there would be no surprise attack from the road behind. Edward trusts Richard as a brother and a vassal, and loves him dearly—why can I not? What is it about the young man that makes me want to narrow my eyes when I look at him, as if there is some flaw that escapes me? But now this young puppy, not yet twenty years old, has become a hero, a hero from a ballad.

  “Who would have thought that dull little Richard would have such passion in him?” I demand of Anthony, who is seated at my feet in a bower looking down to the river. My ladies are around me with half a dozen young men from Edward’s court singing and playing with a ball and generally idling and flirting. I am plaiting primroses for a crown for the victor of a race they are going to run later.

  “He is deep,” Anthony pronounces, making my sixteen-year-old son Richard Grey choke with laughter.

  “Hush,” I say to him. “Respect for your uncle, please. And pass me some leaves.”

  “Deep and passionate,” Anthony continues. “And all of us thought he was nothing but dull. Amazing.”

  “Actually, he is passionate,” my son volunteers. “You underrate him because he is not grand and loud like the other York brothers.”

  My son Thomas Grey nods beside him. “That’s right.”

  Anthony raises an eyebrow at the implied criticism of the king. “You two go and get them ready for their race,” I say, sending them away.

  The court has been transfixed by poor little Anne Neville, the young widow of the boy Prince Edward of Lancaster. Brought to London as part of our victory parade after the battle of Tewkesbury, the girl and her fortune were immediately spotted by George, Duke of Clarence, as his way to the entire Warwick fortune. With the Neville girls’ mother, the poor Countess of Warwick, taking herself off to a nunnery in complete despair, George planned to gain everything. He owned half of the Warwick fortune already through his marriage to Isabel Neville, and then he made a great show of taking her young sister into safekeeping. He took little Anne Neville, condoled with her on the death of her father and the absence of her mother, congratulated her on her escape from her nightmare marriage to the little monster, Prince Edward of Lancaster, and thought to keep her under his protection, housed with his wife, her sister, and hold her fortune in his sticky hands.

  “It was chivalrous,” Anthony says, to irritate me.

  “It was an opportunity, and I wish I had seen it first,” I reply.

  Anne, a pawn in her father’s game for power, widow of a monster, daughter of a traitor, was still only fifteen when she came to live with her sister and her husband George, Duke of Clarence. She had no idea, no better than my kitten, as to how she would survive in this kingdom of her enemies. She must have thought that George was her savior.

  But not for long.

  Nobody knows quite what happened after that; but something went wrong with George’s agreeable plan to own both Neville girls, and keep their enormous fortune to himself. Some say that Richard, visiting George’s grand house, met Anne again—his childhood acquaintance—and they fell in love, and that he rescued her like a knight in a fable from a visit that was nothing less than imprisonment. They say George had her disguised as a kitchen maid, to keep her away from his brother. They say he had her locked in her room. But true love prevailed, and the young duke and the young widowed princess fell into each other’s arms. At all events, this version of the story is all desperately romantic and wonderful. Fools of all ages enjoy it very much.

  “I like it told that way,” my brother Anthony says. “I am thinking of composing a rondel.”

  But there is another version. Other people, who admire Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as much as I, say that he saw in the newly widowed lonely girl a woman who could deliver to him the popularity in the north of England that her maiden name commands, who could bring him massive lands that adjoin what he has already got from Edward, and give him a fortune in her dowry, if only he could steal it from her mother. A young girl who was so alone and so unprotected that she could not refuse him. A girl so accustomed to being ordered that she could be bullied into betraying her own mother. This version suggests that Anne, imprisoned by one York brother, was kidnapped by another and forced to marry him.

  “Less pretty,” I observe to Anthony.

  “You could have stopped it,” he says to me with one of his sudden moments of seriousness. “If you had tak