The White Princess Read online

  Sir Richard Pole has finally sailed for Ireland to try to find Irish chieftains who can be persuaded to hold to their alliance against the boy, and Maggie comes to my rooms every night after dinner and we spend the evening together. We always make sure to keep one of My Lady’s women with us, in earshot, and we always speak of nothing but banalities; but it is a comfort for me to have her by my side. If the lady-in-waiting reports to My Lady, and of course we must assume that she does, she can say that we spent the evening talking of the children, of their education, and of the weather, which is too damp and cold for us to walk with any pleasure.

  Maggie is the only one of my ladies that I can talk to without fear. Only to her can I say quietly, “Baby Elizabeth is no stronger. Actually, I think she is weaker today.”

  “The new herbs did no good?”

  “No good.”

  “Perhaps when the spring comes and you can take her into the country?”

  “Maggie, I don’t even know that she will see the spring. I look at her, and I look at your little Henry, and though they are so near in age, they look like different beings. She’s like a little faerie child, she is so small and so frail, and he is such a strong stocky boy.”

  She puts her hand over mine. “Ah, my dear. Sometimes God takes the most precious children to his own.”

  “I named her for my mother, and I fear she will go to her.”

  “Then her grandmother will look after her in heaven, if we cannot keep her here on earth. We have to believe that.”

  I nod at the words of comfort, but the thought of losing Elizabeth is almost unbearable. Maggie puts her hand on mine.

  “We do know that she will live in glory with her grandmother in heaven,” she repeats. “We know this, Elizabeth.”

  “But I had such a picture of her as a princess,” I say wonderingly. “I could almost see her. A proud girl, with her father’s copper hair and my mother’s fair skin, and our love of reading. I could almost see her, as if standing for a portrait, with her hand on a book. I could almost see her as a young woman, proud as a queen. And I told My Lady the King’s Mother that Elizabeth would be the greatest Tudor of them all.”

  “Perhaps she will be,” Maggie suggests. “Perhaps she will survive. Babies are unpredictable, perhaps she will grow stronger.”

  I shake my head on my doubts, and that night, at about midnight, when I am wakened by a deep yellow autumn moon shining through the slats of the shutters, my thoughts go at once to my sick baby. I get up and put on my robe. At once Maggie, sleeping in my bed, is awake. “Are you ill?”

  “No. Just troubled. I want to see Elizabeth. You go to sleep.”

  “I’ll come with you,” she says, and slips out of bed and throws a shawl over her nightgown.

  Together we open the door and the dozing sentry gives a jolt of surprise as if we are a pair of ghosts, white-faced with our hair plaited under our nightcaps. “It’s all right,” Maggie says. “Her Grace is going to the nursery.”

  He and his fellow guard follow us as we walk in our bare feet down the cold stone corridor, and then Maggie pauses. “What is it?” she asks.

  “I thought I heard something,” I say quietly. “Can you hear it? Like singing?”

  She shakes her head. “Nothing. I can’t hear anything.”

  I know what the sound is then, and I turn to the nursery in sudden urgency. I quicken my stride, I start to run, I push my way past the guard and race up the stone steps to the tower, where the nursery is warm and safe at the top. As I open the door the nurse starts up from where she is bending over the little crib, her face aghast, saying: “Your Grace! I was just going to send for you!”

  I snatch up Elizabeth into my arms and she is warm and breathing quietly but white, fatally white, and her eyelids and her lips as blue as cornflowers. I kiss her for the last time and I see her fleeting tiny smile, for she knows I am here, and then I hold her, I don’t move at all, I just stand and hold her to my heart as I feel the little chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and then become still.

  “Is she asleep?” Maggie asks hopefully.

  I shake my head and I feel the tears running down my face. “No. She’s not asleep. She’s not asleep.”

  In the morning, after I have washed her little body and dressed her in her nightgown, I send a short message to her father to tell him that our little daughter is dead. He comes home so quickly that I guess he had the news ahead of my letter. He has a spy set on me, as he has on everyone else in England, and that they have already told him that I ran from my bedchamber in the middle of the night to hold my daughter in my arms as she died.

  He comes into my rooms in a rush and kneels before me, as I am seated, dressed in dark blue, in my chair by my fireside. His head is bowed as he reaches blindly for me. “My love,” he says quietly.

  I take his hands and I can hear, but I don’t see, my ladies skitter out of the room to leave us alone. “I am so sorry I was not here,” he says. “God forgive me that I was not with you.”

  “You’re never here,” I say softly. “Nothing matters to you anymore but the boy.”

  “I am trying to defend the inheritance for all our children.” He raises his head but speaks without any anger. “I was trying to make her safe in her own country. Oh, dear child, poor little child. I didn’t realize she was so ill, I should have listened to you. God forgive me that I did not.”

  “She wasn’t really ill,” I say. “She just never thrived. When she died it wasn’t a struggle at all, it was as if she just sighed, and then she was gone.”

  He bows his head and puts his face against my hands in my lap. I can feel a hot tear on my fingers, and I bend over him and hold him tightly, I grip him as if I would feel his strength and have him feel mine.

  “God bless her,” he says. “And forgive me for being away. I feel her loss more than you know, more than I can tell you. I know it seems that I’m not a good father to our children, and I’m not a good husband to you—but I care for them and for you more than you know, Elizabeth. I swear that at least I will be a good king for them. I will keep the kingdom for my children and your throne for you, and you will see your son Arthur inherit.”

  “Hush,” I say. With the memory of Elizabeth, warm and limp in my arms, I don’t want to tempt fate by foretelling the future of our other children.

  He gets up and I stand with him as he wraps his arms around me and holds me tightly, his face against my neck as if he would inhale comfort from the scent of my skin.

  “Forgive me,” he breathes. “I can hardly ask it of you; but I do. Forgive me, Elizabeth.”

  “You are a good husband, Henry,” I reassure him. “And a good father. I know that you love us in your heart, I know that you wouldn’t have gone away if you had thought we might lose her, and see, here you are—home almost before I had sent for you.”

  He tips his head back to look at me, but he does not deny that it was his spies who told me that his daughter was dead. He did not hear it first from me. “I have to know everything,” is all he says. “That’s how I keep us safe.”

  My Lady the King’s Mother plans and executes a great funeral for our little girl. She is buried as a princess in the chapel of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Archbishop Morton performs the funeral service, the Bishop of Worcester, who told me that the boy was coming home, serves the Mass with quiet dignity. I cannot tell Henry that the bishop was smiling the night that the beacons were lit for the landing of the boy. I cannot report on the priest who is burying my child. I fold my hands before me and I rest my head against them and I pray for her precious soul and I know without doubt that she is in heaven; and that I am left to the bitterness of a loss on earth.

  Arthur, my firstborn and always the most thoughtful of my children, puts his hand in mine, though he is now a big boy of just nine. “Don’t cry, Lady Mother,” he whispers. “You know she’s with our lady grandmother, you know she has gone to God.”

  “I know,” I say, blinking.

&n