The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  It bobs, the flame flickers as the wind blows it, but then it flares up. The swift current of the water takes it, and it turns and swirls away. For a moment we see it, flame on reflected flame, the curse and the mirror of the curse, paired together on the dark flood, and then they are whirled away by the rush of the river and we are looking into blackness, and Melusina has heard our words and taken our curse into her watery kingdom.

  “It’s done,” I say, and turn away from the river and hold the water gate open for her.

  “That’s all?” she asks as if she had expected me to sail down the river in a cockleshell.

  “That’s all. That’s all I can do, now that I am queen of nothing, with missing sons. All I can do now is ill-wishing. But God knows, I do that.”

  CHRISTMAS 1483

  I make merry for my girls. I send out Jemma to buy them new brocade and we sew new dresses, and they wear the last diamonds from the royal Treasury on their heads as crowns for Christmas Day. The defeated county of Kent sends us a handsome capon, wine, and bread for our Christmas feast. We are our own carolers, we are our own mummers, we are our own wassailers. When finally I put the girls to bed, they are happy, as if they had forgotten the York court at Christmas when every ambassador said he had never seen a richer court, and their father was King of England and their mother the most beautiful queen the country had ever seen.

  Elizabeth my daughter sits late with me before the fire, cracking nuts and throwing the shells into the red embers so they flare and spit.

  “Your uncle Thomas Grey writes to me that Henry Tudor was going to declare himself King of England and your betrothed in Rennes Cathedral today. I should congratulate you,” I say.

  She turns and gives me her merry smile. “I am a much married woman,” she says. “I was betrothed to Warwick’s nephew, and then to the heir of France, d’you remember? And you and Father called me La Dauphine, and I took extra lessons in French and thought myself very great. I was meant to be Queen of France, I was certain of it, and yet now look at me! So I think I shall wait till Henry Tudor has landed, fought his battle, crowned himself king, and asked me himself before I count myself a betrothed woman.”

  “Still, it is time you were married,” I say almost to myself, thinking of her rising blush when her uncle Richard said that she had grown so much he hardly knew her.

  “Nothing can happen while we are in here,” she says.

  “Henry Tudor is untested.” I am thinking aloud. “He has spent his life running away from our spies, he has never turned and fought. The only battle he ever saw was under the command of his guardian William Herbert, and then he fought for us! When he lands in England with you as his declared bride, then everyone who loves us will turn out for him. Everyone else will turn out for him for hatred of Richard, even though they hardly know Henry. Everyone who has been deprived of their places by the northerners whom Richard brought in will turn out for him. The rebellion has left a sour taste for too many people. Richard won that battle, but he has lost the trust of the people. He promises justice and freedom, but since the rebellion he puts in northern lords and he rules with his friends. Nobody will forgive him that. Your betrothed will have thousands of recruits, and he will come with an army from Brittany. But it will all depend on whether he is as brave in battle as Richard. Richard is battle-hardened. He fought all over England when he was a boy, under the command of your father. Henry is new to the field.”

  “If he wins, and if he honors his promise, then I will be Queen of England. I told you I would be Queen of England one day. I always knew it. It is my fate. But it was never my ambition.”

  “I know,” I say gently. “But if it is your destiny, you will have to do your duty. You will be a good queen, I know. And I will be there with you.”

  “I wanted to marry a man that I loved, as you did Father,” she says. “I wanted to marry a man for love, not a stranger on the word of his mother and mine.”

  “You were born a princess, and I was not,” I remind her. “And even so, I had to take my first husband on the say-so of my father. It was only when I was widowed that I could choose for myself. You will have to outlive Henry Tudor and then you can do as you please.”

  She giggles and her face lights up at the thought of it.

  “Your grandmother married her husband’s young squire the moment she was widowed,” I remind her. “Or think of King Henry’s mother, who married a Tudor nobody in secret. At least when I was a widow I had the sense to fall in love with the King of England.”

  She shrugs. “You are ambitious. I am not. You would never fall in love with someone who was not wealthy or great. But I don’t want to be Queen of England. I don’t want my poor brother’s throne. I have seen the price that one pays for a crown. Father never stopped fighting from the day he won it, and here we are—trapped in little better than prison—because you still hope we can gain the throne. You will have the throne even if it means I have to marry a runaway Lancastrian.”

  I shake my head. “When Richard sends me his proposals, we will come out,” I say. “I promise you. It is time. You won’t have another Christmas in hiding. I promise you, Elizabeth.”

  “We don’t have to come out to glory, you know,” she says plaintively. “We could just go to a pleasant house, and be an ordinary family.”

  “All right,” I say, as if I think we can ever be an ordinary family. We are Plantagenets. How could we be ordinary?

  JANUARY 1484

  I hear from my son Thomas Grey, in a letter which comes to me travel-stained from Henry Tudor’s ragamuffin court in Brittany, dated Christmas Day 1483.

  As he promised, he swore to his betrothal to your daughter Elizabeth in the cathedral in Rennes. He also claimed the title of King of England and was acclaimed king by all of us. He received our homage and oaths of loyalty, mine among the others. I heard one man ask him how he could claim to be heir, when the young King Edward might be living for all we know. He said something interesting…he said that he had certain proof that the young King Edward is dead, and that his heart is sore for it, and that we should have revenge on his murderer—the usurper Richard. I asked him what proof he had, and reminded him of your pain without a son to bury, nor any knowledge of him; and he said that he knew for a fact that Richard’s men had killed your boys. He said they had pressed them under their bedding as they slept, and then buried them under the stair in the Tower.

  I took him to one side and said that at the very least we could place servants or suborn those who are there and order them to find the bodies if he would only tell me where they are, which stair in the Tower. I said that if we found the bodies as his invasion of England began, we could accuse Richard of murder, and the whole country would be on our side. “Which stair?” I asked. “Where are the bodies? Who told you of the murder?”

  Lady Mother, I lack your skills of seeing into the dark hearts of men, but there was something about him that I couldn’t like. He looked away, and said it was no good, he had thought of it already, but a priest had lifted their bodies and taken them away in a chest to give them a Christian burial, and buried them in the deepest waters of the river, never to be found. I asked him the name of the priest but he did not know it. I asked him how the priest knew where they were buried and why he put them in the river instead of taking the bodies to you. I asked him if it was to be a Christian burial then why put them in the water? I asked him which part of the river and he said he did not know. I asked him who told him all this, and he said it was his mother Lady Margaret, and that he would trust her with his life. It will be just as she has told him; he knows this for a fact.

  I don’t know what you make of this.

  It stinks to me.

  I take Thomas’s letter and put it into the flames of the fire that burns in the hall. I take up a pen to reply to him, trim the nib, nibble the feather at the top, and then write.

  I agree. Henry Tudor and his allies must have had a hand in the death of my son. How else would he know they