The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  I shake my head, I cannot think. It is the gravest question I will ever face in my life, and I am stupid with grief. “I can’t think,” I say desperately.

  “Try,” he says. “You know who your allies are. Your secret friends. My hidden enemies. You know what they might do. You know what they promised you, what you plotted with them. Think.”

  I put my hands to my head, and I walk a few steps up and down. Perhaps Richard is lying to me, and he has killed Edward and the poor little page boy, and is here to throw the blame on others. But against that—as he says—he has no reason to do so, and also, why should he not admit it, and brazen it out? Who would even complain now that he has put down the rebellion against him? Why come here to me? When my husband murdered King Henry, he had his body shown to the people. He gave him a fine funeral. The whole point of killing him was to tell the world that the line was ended. If Richard had killed my sons to end Edward’s line, he would have announced it, now as he returned to London in victory, and given me the bodies to bury. He could say they had fallen ill. Better yet, he could say that Buckingham killed them. He could throw the blame on Buckingham, and he could give them a royal funeral and no one could do anything but mourn them.

  So perhaps the Duke of Buckingham had them killed, the truth behind his rumor of their deaths? With the two boys gone, he was two steps nearer to the throne. Or would Lady Margaret have them killed, to clear the way for her son Henry Tudor? Both Tudor and Buckingham are the greatest beneficiaries from the deaths of my sons. They become the next heirs if my boys are dead. Could Lady Margaret have ordered the deaths of my sons, while claiming to be my friend? Could she have squared her holy conscience to do such a thing? Could Buckingham have killed his own nephews while swearing to set them free?

  “You have searched for their bodies?” I ask, my voice very low.

  “I have turned the Tower upside down, and had their servants questioned. They say that they put them to bed one night. In the morning they were gone.”

  “They are your servants!” I burst out. “They follow your commands. My sons have died while in your keeping. Do you expect me to really believe you had no hand in their deaths? Do you expect me to believe they have vanished?”

  He nods. “I want you to believe that they died or they were taken, without my order, without my knowledge, and without my consent, while I was far away preparing to fight. To fight your brothers, actually. One night.”

  “Which night?” I ask.

  “The night that it started to rain.”

  I nod, thinking of the soft voice that sang a lullaby to Elizabeth, so quiet that I could not even hear it. “Oh, that night.”

  He hesitates. “Do you believe me, that I am innocent of their deaths?”

  I face him, the man that my husband loved: his brother. The man who fought beside my husband for my family and my sons. The man who killed my brother and my Grey son. The man who may have killed my royal son Edward. “No,” I say coldly. “I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you. But I am not certain. I am horribly uncertain of everything.”

  He nods, as if to accept an unjust judgment. “It’s like that for me,” he remarks, almost as an aside. “I don’t know anything, I don’t trust anyone. We have killed certainty in these cousins’ wars and all that is left is mistrust.”

  “So what will you do?” I ask.

  “I’ll do nothing, and say nothing,” he decides, his voice is bleak and weary. “No one will dare to ask me directly, though they will all suspect me. I shall say nothing and let people think what they will. I don’t know what has happened to your boys, but nobody will ever believe that. If I had them alive, I would produce them and prove my innocence. If I found their bodies, I would show them and blame it on Buckingham. But I don’t have them, alive or dead, and so I cannot defend myself. Everyone will think that I have killed two boys in my care, in cold blood, for no good reason. They will call me a monster.” He pauses. “Whatever else I do in my life, this will cast a crooked shadow. All that everyone will ever remember of me is this crime.” He shakes his head. “And I didn’t do it, and I don’t know who did it, and I don’t even know if it was done.”

  He pauses. “What will you do?” he asks as it occurs to him.

  “I?”

  “You were here in sanctuary so that your girls should be safe when you believed that their brothers were in danger from me,” he reminds me. “That worst thing has now happened. Their brothers are now gone: What will you do with your girls, with yourself? There is no point in staying in sanctuary now—you are no longer the royal family with an heir who might make a claim. You are the mother of nothing but girls.”

  As he says this, the loss of Edward suddenly hits me, and I give a moan, and take the pain in my belly, like the pangs of his birth all over again. I drop to my knees on the stone floor and I bend over my pain. I can hear myself groaning, and I can feel myself rocking.

  He does not rush to comfort me, or even to raise me up. He stays seated in his chair, his dark head leaning on his hand, watching me as I keen like a peasant woman over the death of her firstborn son. He says nothing to deny my grief nor staunch it. He lets me cry. He sits beside me for a long long time and he lets me cry.

  After a while, I take the hem of my cloak and I rub my wet face and then I sit back on my heels and look at him.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” he says formally, as if I were not kneeling on a stone floor with my hair falling down and my face wet with tears. “It was not of my ordering, nor of my doing. I took the throne without harming either one of them. I would not have harmed them after. They were Edward’s sons. I loved them for him. And God knows, I loved him.”

  “I know that, at any rate,” I say, as formal as he.

  He gets to his feet. “Will you leave sanctuary now?” he asks. “You have nothing to gain by staying here.”

  “I have nothing,” I agree with him. “Nothing.”

  “I will make an agreement between you and me,” he says. “I will promise the safety and good treatment of your girls if you come out. The older ones can come to court. I shall treat them as my nieces, honorably. You can come with them. I shall see them married to good men, with your approval.”

  “I shall go home,” I say. “And take them with me.”

  He shakes his head. “I am sorry, I can’t allow that. I will have your girls at court, and you can live at Heytesbury in the care of Sir John Nesfield for a while. I am sorry, but I cannot trust you among your tenants and affinity.” He hesitates. “I cannot have you where you might raise men against me. I cannot allow you to be where you would find men to plot with. It is not that I am suspicious of you, you understand: it is that I cannot trust anybody. I never trust anybody, anywhere.”

  There is a footstep behind him, and he whirls around and draws his dagger to hold before him, ready to strike. I scramble up and put my hand on his right arm and push it easily down: he is terribly weak. I remember the curse I have laid on him. “Put up,” I say. “It will be one of the girls.”

  He steps back and Elizabeth comes out of the shadows to my side. She is in her nightgown with a cape thrown over it and her hair in a plait under her nightcap. She is as tall as me now. She stands beside me and regards her uncle gravely. “Your Grace,” she says, with the smallest of curtseys.

  He hardly bows to her; he is staring at her in amazement. “You are grown, Elizabeth,” he hesitates. “You are the Princess Elizabeth? I would hardly have known you. I last saw you when you were a girl and here you are…you.”

  I glance at her, and to my amazement I see that the color is rising in her cheeks. She is blushing under his bewildered look. She puts her hand to her hair, as if she wishes she were dressed and not barefoot like a child.

  “Go to your room,” I say abruptly to her.

  She curtseys and turns, obedient at once, but she pauses at the door. “Is it about Edward?” she asks. “Is my brother safe?”

  Richard looks to me to see if she can be told the