The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  Of course, it is almost unbearable for me to leave him, for we have not been an ordinary royal family. We have not had a life of formality and distance. This boy was born in sanctuary under threat of death. He slept in my bed for the first few months of his life—unheard of for a royal prince. He had no wet nurse; I suckled him myself, and it was my fingers that his little hands gripped as he first learned to walk. Neither he, nor any of the others, were sent away to be raised by nurses or in a royal nursery at another palace. Edward has kept his children close, and this, his oldest son, is the first to leave us to take up his royal duties. I love him with a passion: he is my golden boy, the boy who came at last to secure my position as queen and to give his father, then nothing more than a York pretender, a stronger claim to the throne. He is my prince, he is the crown of our marriage, he is our future.

  Edward comes to join me for my last month at Ludlow in June, bringing the news that Anthony’s wife, Lady Elizabeth, has died. She had been in ill health for years with a wasting sickness. Anthony orders Masses said for her soul, and I, secretly and ashamed of myself, start to wonder who might be the next wife for my brother.

  “Time enough for that,” Edward says. “But Anthony will have to play his part for the safety of the kingdom. He might have to marry a French princess. I need allies.”

  “But not go from home,” I say. “And not leave Edward?”

  “No. I see he has made Ludlow his own. And Edward will need him here when we leave. And we must leave soon. I have given orders that we will go within the month.”

  I gasp, though in truth I have known that this day must come.

  “We will come again to see him,” he promises me. “And he will come to us. No need to look so tragic, my love. He is starting his work as a prince of the House of York: this is his future. You must be glad for him.”

  “I am glad,” I say, without any conviction at all.

  When it is time for me to go, I have to pinch my cheeks to bring color into them, and bite my mouth to stop myself crying. Anthony knows what it costs me to leave the three of them, but Baby is happy, confident that he will come to court in London soon on a visit, enjoying his new freedom and the importance of being the prince in his own country. He lets me kiss him, and hold him without wriggling. He even whispers in my ear, “I love you, Mama,” then he kneels for my blessing; but he comes up smiling.

  Anthony lifts me into the pillion saddle behind my master of horse and I hold on tightly to his belt. I am awkward now, in the seventh month of my pregnancy. A sudden wave of the darkest anxiety comes over me, and I look from my brother to my two sons, real fear clutching at me. “Take care,” I say to Baby.

  “Look after him,” I say to Anthony. “Write to me. Don’t let him take jumps on his pony. I know that he wants to, but he’s too small. And don’t let him get chilled. Don’t let him read in poor light, and keep him away from anyone with illness. If there is plague in the town, then take him right away.” I cannot think what I should warn them against; I am just flooded with anxiety as I look from one smiling face to another. “Really,” I say weakly. “Really, Anthony: guard him.”

  He steps up to the horse and takes hold of the toe of my boot and shakes it gently. “Your Grace,” he says simply. “Really. I am here to guard him. I will guard him. I will keep him safe.”

  “And you,” I whisper. “You keep safe too. Anthony, I feel so afraid, but I don’t know what to fear. I don’t know what to say. I want to warn you, but I don’t know what danger there is.” I look over to where my son Richard Grey is leaning against the castle gateway, a young man grown tall and handsome. “And my Grey son,” I say. “My Richard. I cannot tell you why, but I am fearful for you all.”

  He steps back and shrugs his shoulders. “Sister mine,” he says tenderly. “There is always danger. Your sons and I will be men, and we will face it like men. Don’t you go frightening yourself with imaginary threats. And have a safe journey and a safe confinement. We are all hoping for another prince as good as this one!”

  Edward gives the order to move out and leads the way, his standard going before him, his household guard around him. The royal procession starts to unroll like a scarlet ribbon through the castle gates, the bright red of the livery studded with the rippling standards. The trumpets sound; the birds fly up from the castle roofs and whirl in the sky announcing that the king and queen are leaving their precious son. I cannot stop the onward march, and I should not stop it. But I look back over my shoulder at my little son, at my grown son, and at my brother, until the fall of the road from the inner keep down to the outer wall has hidden them, and I see them no more. And when I can see them no more I am filled with such darkness that for a moment I think night has fallen and there will never be a dawn again.

  JULY 1473

  We halt at the town of Shrewsbury on the way back to London in the last days of July for me to go into confinement in the guest rooms of the great abbey. I am glad to be out of the glare and the heat of summer and into the coolness of the shuttered room. I have ordered them to set a fountain in the corner of my stonewalled chambers, and the drip, drip of the water soothes me as I lie on the day bed and wait for my time.

  This is a town built around the sacred well of St. Winifred, and as I listen to the dripping fountain of her water and hear the ringing of the hours for prayer I think of the spirits that move in waters of this wet land, both the pagan and the holy, Melusina and Winifred, and how the springs and streams and rivers speak to all men, but perhaps especially to women, who know in their own bodies the movement of the waters of the earth. Every holy site in England is a well or a spring; the baptismal fonts are filled with holy water that goes back, blessed, to the earth. It is a country for Melusina, and her element is everywhere, sometimes flowing in the rivers, sometimes hidden underground but always present.

  In the middle of August the pains start, and I turn my head to the fountain and listen to the trickle as if I were seeking the voice of my mother in the water. The baby comes easily, as I thought he would, and he is a boy, as my mother knew he would be.

  Edward comes into the chamber, though men are supposed to be banned until I have been churched. “I had to come and see you,” he says. “A son. Another son. God bless you and keep you both. God bless you, my love, and thank you for your pains to give me another boy.”

  “I thought you did not mind if it was a boy or a girl,” I tease him.

  “I love my girls,” he says at once. “But the House of York needed another boy. He can be a companion to his brother Edward.”

  “Can we call him Richard?” I ask.

  “I thought Henry?”

  “Henry for the next one,” I say. “Let’s call this boy Richard. My mother herself named him to me.”

  Edward bends over the cradle where the tiny boy is sleeping, and then he understands my words. “Your mother? She knew you would have a boy?”

  “Yes, she knew,” I say, smiling. “Or at any rate, she pretended to know. You remember my mother. It was always one part magic and one part nonsense.”

  “And is this our last boy? Did she say? Or do you think there will be another?”

  “Why not another?” I say lazily. “If you still want me in your bed, that is. If you have not had enough of me? If you are not tired of me? If you don’t prefer your other women?”

  He turns from the cradle and comes to me. His hands slide under my shoulder blades and lift me up to his mouth. “Oh, I still want you,” he says.

  SPRING 1476

  I am proved right, it was by no means my last confinement. My husband continued as fertile as the bull in the water meadow that I accused him of being. In the second year after the birth of Richard, I was pregnant again and in November I had another baby, a girl whom we called Anne. Edward rewards me for my labors by making my son Thomas Grey, the Marquis of Dorset, and I marry him to a pleasant girl—an heiress to a mighty fortune. Edward had hoped for a boy and we had promised to name him George, as a compliment t