The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  “And Edward?” she asks.

  I meet her hopeful gaze without evasion. “Elizabeth, I think he must be dead, for I cannot see who would have taken him and not told us. I think Buckingham and Henry Tudor must have had both of the boys killed, not knowing that we had Richard safely hidden, thinking to open their way to the throne and put the blame on King Richard. If Edward is alive, then pray God he will find his way to me. And there will always be a candle in the window to light his way home, and my door will never be locked, in case one day it is his hand on the latch.”

  Her eyes are filled with tears. “But you don’t expect him anymore?”

  “I don’t expect him,” I say.

  APRIL 1484

  My new home of Heytesbury is in a pretty part of the country, Wiltshire, in the open rolling countryside of Salisbury Plain. John Nesfield is an easy guardian. He sees the benefits of being at the side of the king; he doesn’t really want to play nursemaid over me. Once he was assured of my safety and judged that I would not attempt to run away, he took himself off to the king at Sheriff Hutton, where Richard has established his great court in the north. He is making a palace fit to match Greenwich among the people of the north who respect him and love his wife, the last Neville.

  Nesfield orders that I am to run his house as I please and very quickly I have the furniture and things around me that I request from the royal palaces. I have a proper nursery and a schoolroom for the girls. I am growing my favorite fruits in the gardens, and I have bought some good horses for the stables.

  After so many months in sanctuary I wake every morning with a sense of utter delight that I can open the door and walk out into the air. It is a warm spring and to hear the birds singing, to order a horse from the stables and ride out is a joy so intense that I feel reborn. I set duck’s eggs under the hens and watch the ducklings hatch and waddle about the yard. I laugh when I see them take to the duck pond with the hens scolding on the bank, fearful of water. I watch the young foals in the paddock and talk with the master of horse as to which might make a good riding horse and which should be broke to the cart. I go out in the fields with the shepherd and see the new lambs. I talk with the cowman about the little calves and when they should be weaned from their mothers. I become again what I was once before, an English country lady with her mind on the land.

  The younger girls go half mad in their release from confinement. Every day I catch them doing something forbidden: swimming in the swift deep river, climbing the haystacks and ruining the hay, up in the apple trees breaking off the blossom, running into the field with the bull and dashing to the gate, screaming when he lifts his big head and looks at them. They cannot be punished for such an overflow of joy. They are like calves released into the field for the first time in their lives. They have to kick up their heels and run about, and don’t know what to do to express their amazement at the height of the sky and the wideness of the world. They are eating twice what they ate in sanctuary. They hang around the kitchen and badger the cook for scraps, and the dairymaids delight in giving them fresh-churned butter to eat on hot bread. They have become lighthearted children again, no longer prisoners, afraid of the very light.

  I am in the stable yard, dismounting after a morning ride, when I am surprised to see Nesfield himself ride up to the main door of the house. Seeing my horse, he turns to come round to the yard and gets off his hunter, throwing the reins to a groom. From the very way he dismounts, heavily and with his shoulders bowed, I know that something bad has happened. My hand goes out to my horse’s neck and I take a handful of thick mane for comfort.

  “What is it, Sir John? You look very grave.”

  “I thought I should come and tell you the news,” he says shortly.

  “Elizabeth? Not my Elizabeth?”

  “She is safe and well,” he assures me. “It is the king’s son, Edward, God keep him, God bless him. God take him to his heavenly throne.”

  I feel a pulse in my temple hammer like a warning. “He is dead?”

  “He was always frail,” Nesfield says brokenly. “He was never a strong boy. But at the investiture he looked so well we called him Prince of Wales and thought he was certain to inherit—” He breaks off, remembering that I too had a son who was Prince of Wales and seemed certain to inherit. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean…anyway, the king has announced mourning for the court. I thought you should know at once.”

  I nod gravely, but my mind is racing. Is this a death from Melusina? Is this a working of the curse? Is this the proof that I said we would see—that the son and heir of the murderer of my son and heir would die, and thus I would know him? Is this her sign to me that Richard is the killer of my son?

  “I will send the king and Queen Anne my sympathy,” I say, and turn to go to the house.

  “He has no heir,” John Nesfield repeats as if he cannot believe the gravity of the news he has brought me. “All this, all that he has done, his defense of the kingdom, his…his acceptance of his throne, all this that he has done, all the fighting…and now he has no heir to follow him.”

  “Yes,” I agree, my words like frozen stones. “He did all this for nothing, and he has lost his son and his line will die out.”

  I hear from my daughter Elizabeth that the court falls into mourning as if it was an open grave, and none of them can bear to live without their prince. Richard will not hear laughter or music; they have to creep about with their eyes on the ground and there are no games or sports, though the weather is getting warmer and they are in the very heart of greening England, the hills and the dales all around them are teeming with game. Richard is inconsolable. His twelve-year marriage to Anne Neville gave him only one child, and now he has lost him. It cannot be possible that they will have another at this late stage and, even if they do, a baby in the cradle is no guarantee of a Prince of Wales in this savage England that we Yorks have made. Who knows better than Richard that a boy must be fully grown and strong enough to fight for his rights, to fight for his life, if he is to be King of England?

  He names as his heir Edward the son of his brother, George of Clarence, the only York boy known to be left in the world; but in a few months I hear a rumor that he is to be disinherited. This comes as no surprise to me. Richard has realized that the boy is too weak to hold the throne, as we all knew. George, Duke of Clarence had a fatal mixture of vanity and ambition and outright madness: no son of his could be a king. He was a sweet, smiling baby but slow of wit, poor child. Anyone who wants the throne of England will have to be fast as a snake and wise as a serpent. He will have to be a boy born to be a prince, reared in a court. He will have to be a boy accustomed to danger, raised to be brave. George’s poor half-wit boy could never do it. But if not him, then whom? For Richard must name an heir and leave an heir, and the House of York is now nothing but girls, for all that Richard knows. Only I know for sure that there is a prince, like one in a fairy tale, waiting in Tournai, living like a poor boy, studying his books and music, learning languages, watched over at a distance by his aunt. A flower of York, growing strong in foreign soil and biding his time. And now he is the only heir to the York throne, and if his uncle knew he was alive, perhaps he would name him as his heir.

  I write to Elizabeth.

  I hear the news from court and I am troubled by one thing—do you think that the death of Richard’s son is Melusina’s sign to us that Richard is the murderer of our boys? You see him daily—do you think he knows it is our curse that is his destruction? Does he look like a man who has brought this grief on his own family? Or do you think that this death was just chance, and it was another man who killed our boy, and it will be his son who must die for our revenge?

  JANUARY 1485

  I am waiting for my girls to come home from court on a frosty afternoon in the middle of January. I expected them in time for dinner and I am striding up and down on my doorstep, blowing on my gloved fingers to keep my hands warm as the sun sets, red as a Lancaster rose, over the hills to the w