The White Princess Read online

  “What’s the point of it?” I ask impatiently. “What’s the point of going on and on causing trouble, while men risk their lives and have to run away to Flanders with a price on their heads? Families are ruined and mothers lose their sons just as you did, women like my aunt Elizabeth, bereft of her son John, her next boy under suspicion. What d’you hope to achieve?”

  She turns and her expression is as tender and as steadfast as ever. “I?” she says with her limpid smile. “I achieve nothing. I am just an old grandmother living in Bermondsey Abbey, glad of a chance to visit my darling daughter. I think of nothing but my soul and my next dinner. Causing no trouble at all.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 28 NOVEMBER 1489

  The pains start in the early hours of the morning, waking me with a deep stir in my belly. My mother is with me the moment that I groan, and she holds my hands while the midwives mull some ale and set up the icon so that I can see it while I labor. It is my mother’s cool hand on my head when I am sweating and exhausted, and it is her gaze, locked on mine, quietly persuading me that there is no pain, that there is nothing but a divine cool floating on a constant river, that takes me through the long hours until I hear a cry and realize that it is over and that I have a baby and they put my little girl into my arms.

  “My son commands that you honor me with naming Her Grace the Princess for me.” The sudden appearance of Lady Margaret jolts me back to the real world and behind her I see my mother folding linen and bowing her head and trying not to laugh.

  “What?” I ask. I am still hazy with the birthing ale and with the magic that my mother manages to weave, so that pain recedes and the time passes.

  “I shall be very glad to be her name-giver.” Lady Margaret pursues her own thought. “And it is so like my son to honor me. I only hope that your boy Arthur is as good and as loving a son to you, as mine is to me.”

  My mother, who had two royal sons who adored her, turns away and puts the linen into a chest.

  “Princess Margaret of the House of Tudor,” My Lady says, savoring the sound of her own name.

  “Is it not vanity, to name a child after yourself?” my mother inquires, dulcet from the corner of the room.

  “She is named for my saint,” Lady Margaret replies, not at all disconcerted. “It is not for my own glory. And besides, it is your own daughter who chooses the name. Is it not, Elizabeth?”

  “Oh yes,” I say obediently, too tired to argue with her. “And the main thing is that she is well.”

  “And beautiful,” my beautiful mother remarks.

  Because so many have the pox in London, we don’t hold a big christening, and I am churched privately and return to my rooms and to the life of the court without a great feast. I know also that Henry is not going to waste money on celebrating the birth of a princess. He would have had a public holiday and wine flowing in the public fountains for another boy.

  “I’m not disappointed in a girl,” he assures me as he meets me in the nursery and I find him with the precious baby in his arms. “We need another boy, of course, but she is the prettiest, daintiest little girl that was ever born.”

  I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.

  “Margaret for my mother,” Henry says, kissing her white-capped little head.

  My cousin Maggie steps forwards to take the baby from us. “Margaret for you,” I whisper to her.

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1491

  Two years pass before we conceive another child, and then at last it is the boy that my husband needed. He greets him with a sort of passion, as if this boy was a fortune. Henry is coming to have a reputation as a king who loves gold in his treasury; this boy is like a new-minted sovereign coin, another Tudor creation.

  “We’ll call him Henry,” he declares, as the boy is put into his arms when he visits me, a week after the birth.

  “Henry for you?” I ask him, smiling from the bed.

  “Henry for the sainted king,” he says sternly, reminding me that just when I think we are most happy and most easy, Henry is still looking over his shoulder, justifying his crown. He looks from me to my cousin Margaret as if we were responsible for the old king’s imprisonment in the Tower and then his death. Margaret and I exchange one guilty look. It was probably our fathers working together with our uncle Richard who held a pillow over the poor innocent king’s sleeping face. At any rate, we are close enough to the murder to feel guilt when Henry calls the old king a saint and names his newborn son for him.

  “As you wish,” I say lightly. “But he does look so like you. A copper-head, a proper Tudor.”

  He laughs at that. “A redhead, like my uncle Jasper,” he says with pleasure. “Pray God gives him my uncle’s luck.”

  He is smiling, but I can see the strain around his eyes, with the look I have come to dread, as if he is a man haunted. This is how he looks when he bursts out in sudden complaints. This is the look that I think he wore for all those years when he was in exile and he could trust no one and feared everybody, and every message that he had from home warned him of my father, and every messenger who brought it could be a murderer.

  I nod to Maggie, who is as sensitive as I am to Henry’s uncertain temper, and she takes the baby and gives him to his wet nurse, and then sits beside the two of them, as if she would disappear behind the woman’s warm bulk.

  “Is something the matter?” I ask quietly.

  He glares at me for a moment, as if I have caused the problem, and then I see him soften, and shake his head. “Odd news,” he says. “Bad news.”

  “From Flanders?” I ask quietly. It is always my aunt who causes this deep line between his brows. Year after year she goes on sending spies into England, money to rebels, speaks against Henry and our family, accuses me of disloyalty to our house.

  “Not this time,” he says. “Perhaps something worse than the duchess . . . if you can imagine anything worse than her.”

  I wait.

  “Has your mother said anything to you?” he asks. “This is important, Elizabeth. You must tell me if she has said anything.”

  “No, nothing,” I say. My conscience is clear. She did not come into confinement with me this time, she said she was unwell and feared bringing illness into the room with her. At the time I was disappointed, but now I have a clutch of apprehension that she stayed outside to weave treasonous plots. “I have not seen her. She has written nothing to me. She is ill.”

  “She’s said nothing to your sisters?” he asks. He tips his head to where Maggie sits beside the wet nurse, petting my son’s little feet as he sleeps. “She’s said nothing? Your cousin of Warwick? Margaret? Nothing about her brother?”

  “She asks me if he can be released,” I remark. “And I ask it of you, of course. He is doing nothing wrong—”

  “He’s doing nothing wrong in the Tower because he is powerless to do anything as my prisoner,” Henry says abruptly. “If he were free, God knows where he would turn up. Ireland, I suppose.”

  “Why Ireland?”

  “Because Charles of France has put an invasion force into Ireland.” He speaks in a suppressed angry mutter. “Half a dozen ships, a couple of hundred men wearing the cross of St. George as if they were an English army. He has armed and fitted out an army marching under the flag of St. George! A French army in Ireland! Why d’you think he would do that?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I find I am whispering like him, as if we are conspirators, planning to overthrow a country, as if it is we who have no rights, who should not be here.

  “D’you think he is expecting something?”

  I shake my head. Truly, I am baffled. “Henry, really, I don’t know. What would the King of France be expecting to come out of Ireland?”

  “A new ghost?”

  I feel a shiver crawl slowly down my spine like a cold wind, though it is a summer day,