The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  I sigh as if I am overwhelmed by his logic. “And if I refuse?”

  He draws close to me and speaks low. “I fear that he will break sanctuary and take you and all your family out of here,” he says very quietly. “And all the lords think he would be right to do so. No one defends your right to be in here, Your Grace. This is a shell around you, not a castle. Let the little Prince Richard out and they will leave you here, if that is your wish. Keep him here and you will all be pulled out, like leeches from a glass jar. Or they can smash the jar.”

  Elizabeth, who has been looking out of the window, leans forward and whispers, “Lady Mother, there are hundreds of Duke Richard’s barges on the river. We are surrounded.”

  For a moment I do not see the cardinal’s worried face. I do not see the hard expression of Thomas Howard. I do not see the half dozen men who have come with him. I see my husband going into the sanctuary at Tewkesbury with his sword drawn, and I know that from that moment sanctuary was no longer safe. Edward destroyed his son’s safety that day—and he never knew. But I know it now. And thank God I have prepared for it.

  I put my handkerchief to my eyes. “Forgive a woman’s weakness,” I say. “I cannot bear to part with him. Can I be spared this?”

  The cardinal pats my hand. “He has to come with us. I am sorry.”

  I turn to Elizabeth and I whisper, “Fetch him, fetch my little boy.”

  Elizabeth leaves in silence, her head bowed.

  “He has not been well,” I say to the cardinal. “You must keep him wrapped up warm.”

  “Trust me,” he says. “He will come to no harm in my care.”

  Elizabeth comes back with the changeling page boy. He is in my Richard’s clothes, a scarf tied round his throat, muffling the lower part of his face. When I hold him to me, he even smells of my own boy. I kiss his fair hair. His little-boy frame is delicate in my arms, and yet he holds himself bravely, as a prince should do. Elizabeth has taught him well. “Go with God, my son,” I say to him. “I shall see you again at your brother’s coronation in a few days.”

  “Yes, Lady Mother,” he says like a little parrot. His voice is scarcely more than a whisper but audible to them all.

  I take him by the hand and I lead him to the cardinal. He has seen Richard at court, at a distance, and this boy is hidden by the jeweled cap on his head and the flannel round his throat and his jaw. “Here is my son,” I say, my voice trembling with emotion. “I resign him into your hands. I do here deliver him and his brother into your safekeeping.” I turn to the boy and say to him, “Farewell, mine own sweet son, the Almighty be your protector.”

  He turns his little face to me, all wrapped in the concealing scarf, and for a moment I feel a sweep of real emotion as I kiss his warm cheek. I may be sending this child into danger instead of my own, but he is still a child, and it is still danger. There are tears in my eyes when I put his little hand in the big soft palm of Cardinal Bourchier, and I say to him over the little head, “Guard this boy, my boy, please, my lord. Keep this boy safe.”

  We wait as they take the boy, and file from the room. When they are gone, the scent of their clothes lingers. It is the smell of the outdoors, horse sweat, cooked meats, a fresh breeze blowing over cut grass.

  Elizabeth turns to me and her face is pale. “You sent the page boy for you think it is not safe for our boy to go to the Tower,” she observes.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “So you must think that our Edward is not safe in the Tower.”

  “I don’t know. Yes. That is my fear.”

  She takes an abrupt step to the window and for a moment she reminds me of my mother, her grandmother. She has the same determination—I can see her puzzling away at the best course. For the first time I think that Elizabeth will make a woman to be reckoned with. She is not a little girl anymore.

  “I think you should send to my uncle and ask him for an agreement,” she says. “You could agree that we give him the throne, and he names Edward as his heir.”

  I shake my head.

  “You could,” she says. “He is Edward’s uncle, a man of honor. He must want a way out of this as much as we do.”

  “I will not give up Edward’s throne,” I say tightly. “If Duke Richard wants it, he will have to take it, and shame himself.”

  “And what if he does that?” she asks me. “What happens to Edward then? What happens to my sisters? What happens to me?”

  “I don’t know,” I say cautiously. “We may have to fight; we may have to argue. But we don’t give up. We don’t surrender.”

  “And that little boy,” she says, nodding to the door where the page boy has gone, his jaw tied up with flannel so he does not speak. “Did we take him from his father, and bathe him and clothe him and tell him to be silent as we sent him to his death? Is that how we fight this war, using a child as our shield? Sending a little boy to his death?”

  SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 1483: CORONATION DAY

  “What?” I spit at the quiet dawn sky like an angry cat whose kittens have been taken away for drowning. “No royal barges? No booming cannon from the Tower? No wine flowing in the fountains of the city? No banging of drums, no ’prentice boys howling out the songs of their guilds? No music? No shouting? No cheering along the procession route?” I swing open the window that looks over the river and see the usual river traffic of barges and wherries and rowing boats, and I say to my mother and to Melusina, “Clearly, they don’t crown him today. Is he to die instead?” I think of my boy as if I were painting his portrait. I think of the straight line of his little nose still rounded at the tip like a baby, and the plump roundness of his cheeks and the clear innocence of his eyes. I think of the curve of the back of his head that used to fit my hand when I touched him, and the straight pure line of the nape of his neck when he was bent over his books in study. He was a brave boy, a boy who had been coached by his uncle Anthony to vault into a saddle and ride at the joust. Anthony promised that he would be fearless by learning to face fear. And he was a boy who loved the country. He liked Ludlow Castle, for he could ride into the hills and see the peregrine falcons soaring high above the cliffs, and he could swim in the cold water of the river. Anthony said he had a sense of landscape: rare in the young. He was a boy with the most golden future. He was born in wartime to be a child of peace. He would have been, I don’t doubt, a great Plantagenet king, and his father and I would have been proud of him.

  I speak of him as if he is dead, for I have little doubt that since he is not crowned today, he will be killed in secret, just as William Hastings was dragged out and beheaded on Tower Green on a baulk of wood with the axeman hurriedly wiping his hands from his breakfast. Dear God, when I think of the nape of the neck of my boy and I think of the headsman’s axe, I feel sick enough to die myself.

  I don’t stay at the window watching the river that keeps flowing indifferently, as if my boy were not in danger of his life. I dress and pin up my hair and then I prowl about our sanctuary like one of the lionesses in the Tower. I comfort myself with plotting: we are not friendless, I am not without hope. My son Thomas Grey will be busy, I know, meeting in secret at hidden places those who can be convinced to rise for us, and there must be many in the country, in London too, who are beginning to doubt exactly what Duke Richard means by a protectorate. Margaret Stanley is clearly working for us: her husband Lord Thomas Stanley warned Hastings. My sister-in-law Duchess Margaret of York will be working for us in Burgundy. Even the French should take an interest in my danger, if only to cause trouble for Richard. There is a safe house in Flanders, where a well-paid family is greeting a little boy and teaching him to disappear into the crowd of Tournai. The duke may have the upper hand now, but there are as many who will hate him, as hated us Riverses, and many more will be thinking fondly of me, now I am in danger. Most of all there will be the men who want to see Edward’s son and not his brother on the throne.

  I hear the rush of hurried footsteps, and I turn to face new danger as my daughter Cec