The White Princess Read online

  People believe that she has unearthly powers because her mother came from the royal house of Burgundy, and they can trace their ancestry back to the water witch Melusina. Certainly we can hear Melusina singing when one of her children dies. I have heard her myself, and it’s a sound I won’t forget. It was a cool, soft call, night after night, and then my brother was not playing on Tower Green anymore, his pale face was gone from the window, and we mourned for him as a dead boy.

  What powers my mother has, and what luck runs her way that she claims as her doing, is unknown, perhaps even to her. Certainly she takes her good luck and calls it magic. When I was a girl, I thought her an enchanted being with the power to summon the rivers of England; but now, as I look at the defeat of our family, the loss of her son, and the mess we are in, I think that if she does conjure magic, then she can’t do it very well.

  So I am not surprised that Henry does not die, though the sickness he has brought to England takes first one Lord Mayor of London, and then his hastily elected successor, and then six aldermen die too, almost in the same month. They say that every home in the city has suffered a death, and the carts for the dead rattle down the streets every night, just as if it were a plague year, and a bad one at that.

  When the illness dies out with the cold weather, Jennie my maid does not come back to work when I send for her, for she is dead too; her whole household took the sweat and died of it between Prime and Compline. No one has known such quick deaths before, and they whisper everywhere against the new king whose reign has started with a procession of death carts. It is not till the end of October that Henry decides that it is safe to call the lords and genty of the realm together to Westminster Abbey to his coronation.

  Two heralds bearing the Beaufort standard, the portcullis, and a dozen guards wearing the Stanley colors, hammer on the great door of the palace to inform me that Lady Margaret Stanley of the Beaufort family, My Lady the King’s Mother, is to honor me with a visit tomorrow. My mother inclines her head at the news and says softly—as if we are too nobly bred to ever raise our voices—that we will be delighted to see Her Grace.

  As soon as they are gone and the door closed behind them, we fall into a frenzy about my dress. “Dark green,” my mother says. “It has to be dark green.”

  It is our only safe color. Dark blue is the royal color of mourning, but I must not, for one moment, look as if I am grieving for my royal lover and the true king of England. Dark red is the color of martyrdom, but also sometimes, contradictorily, worn by whores to make their complexions appear flawlessly white. Neither association is one we want to inspire in the stern mind of the strict Lady Margaret. She must not think that marriage to her son is a torment for me, she must forget that everyone said that I was Richard’s lover. Dark yellow would be all right—but who looks good in yellow? I don’t like purple and anyway it is too imperial a color for a humbled girl whose only hope is to marry the king. Dark green it has to be and since it is the Tudor color, this can do nothing but good.

  “But I don’t have a dark green gown!” I exclaim. “There isn’t time to get one.”

  “We had one made for Cecily,” my mother replies. “You’ll wear that.”

  “And what am I supposed to wear?” Cecily protests mutinously. “Am I to come in an old gown? Or will I not appear at all? Is Elizabeth going to be the only one who meets her? Are the rest of us to be in hiding? D’you want me to go to bed for the day?”

  “Certainly, there’s no need for you to be here,” my mother says briskly. “But Lady Margaret is your godmother, so you will wear your blue and Elizabeth can wear your green, and you will make an effort—an exceptional effort—to be pleasant to your sister during the visit. Nobody likes a bad-tempered girl, and I have no use for one.”

  Cecily is furious at this, but she goes to the chest of clothes in silence and takes out her new green gown, shakes it out, and hands it to me.

  “Put it on and come to my rooms,” my mother says. “We’ll have to let down the hem.”

  Dressed in the gown, now hemmed and trimmed with a new thin ribbon of cloth of gold, I wait in the presence chamber of my mother’s rooms for the arrival of Lady Margaret. She comes by royal barge, now always laid on for her convenience, with the drummer beating to keep the time, and her standards fluttering brightly at prow and stern. I hear the crunching footsteps of her companions on the gravel of the garden paths, then beneath the window, and then the clatter of the metal heels of their boots on the stones of the courtyard. They throw open the double doors and she comes through the lobby and into the room.

  My mother, my sisters, and I rise from our seats and curtsey to her as equals. The height of this curtsey has been difficult to decide. We offer a middling one and Lady Margaret ducks in a shallow bob. Though my mother is now known as mere Lady Grey, she was crowned Queen of England and this woman was her lady-in-waiting. Now, although Lady Margaret sails in the royal barge, her son has not yet been crowned king. Though she calls herself My Lady the King’s Mother, he has not yet had the crown of England placed on his head. He just grabbed the circlet that Richard wore on his helmet and has to wait for his coronation.

  I close my eyes quickly at the thought of the gold crown on the helmet, and Richard’s smiling brown eyes looking at me through the visor.

  “I would speak with Mistress Elizabeth alone,” Lady Margaret says to my mother, not troubling with any word of greeting.

  “Her Grace the Princess Elizabeth of York can take you to my privy chamber,” my mother says smoothly.

  I lead the way. I can feel my back under her scrutiny as I walk and at once I become conscious of myself. I fear that I am swinging my hips, or tossing my head. I open the door and go into my mother’s private room and turn to face Lady Margaret, as she seats herself without invitation in the great chair.

  “You may sit,” she says, and I take a chair opposite to her and wait. My throat is dry. I swallow and hope that she does not notice.

  She looks me up and down as if I am applying for a post in her household and then slowly she smiles. “You are lucky in your looks,” she says. “Your mother was always a beauty and you are very like her: fair, slender, skin like a rose petal and that wonderful hair, gold and bronze all at once. Undoubtedly you will have beautiful children. I suppose you are still proud of your looks? I suppose you are still vain?”

  I say nothing, and she clears her throat and remembers the reason for her visit.

  “I have come to speak with you in private, as a friend,” she says. “We parted on bad terms.”

  We parted like a pair of fishwives. But I was sure then that my lover would kill her son and make me Queen of England. Now, as it turns out, her son has killed my lover and my fate is entirely in her white, heavily ringed hands.

  “I regret it,” I say with simple insincerity.

  “I too,” she says, which surprises me. “I am to be your mother-in-law, Elizabeth. My son will marry you, despite everything.”

  There is no point in my sudden pulse of anger at the “despite everything.” We are defeated, my hopes of happiness and being a beloved Queen of England went down under the hooves of the Stanley horsemen commanded by her husband.

  I bow my head. “Thank you.”

  “I will be a good mother to you,” she says earnestly. “You will find, when you come to know me, that I have great love to give, that I have a talent for loyalty. I am determined to do the will of God and I am certain that God has chosen you to be my daughter-in-law, the wife of my son, and”—her voice drops to an awed whisper at the thought of my destiny, at the divine promise of the Tudor line—“the mother of my grandson.”

  I bow my head again, and when I look up, I see that her face is shining; she is quite inspired.

  “When I was a little girl, no more than a child myself, I was called on to give birth to Henry,” she whispers, as if in prayer. “I thought I would die from the pain, I was certain it would kill me. I knew then that, if I survived, the child and I would h