The White Princess Read online

  It is a humbling experience, but I don’t feel humbled. I feel as if I understand something that I did not know before. I feel that now I have learned that love does not follow merit; I did not love Henry because he impressed me as a conquerer of England, as a victor of battle. I loved him because I first came to understand him, and then I pitied him, and then my love just flowered for him. And now that he does not love me, it makes no difference to how I feel. I love him still for I see him being, as he often is, mistaken, ill-judging, fearful, and this does not make me jealous but, on the contrary, it makes me tender towards him.

  And I am not even angry towards Lady Katherine for her part in this. When she dismounts from her expensive new horse at the end of a beautiful day and Henry puts her husband aside with one touch on his shoulder, so that she has to slide from her saddle into Henry’s arms, she sometimes looks over at me as if this is no joy but a trouble to her. Then I am not angry with her, but I am sorry for her, and for me. I think that no one could understand how I feel but another woman, no one could understand her dilemma but me.

  Lady Katherine comes to my rooms at the end of the day, to sit with my ladies, and finds that I smile at her gently, patiently, just as Queen Anne used to smile at me. I know she cannot prevent what is happening, just as I could not help myself with Richard. If the king honors a woman with his attention, then she is powerless under his admiration. What I don’t know is how she feels. I fell in love with Richard, who was King of England and the only man who could rescue me and my family from our descent into obscurity. What she feels for the King of England, married as she is to a declared traitor who is living on borrowed time, I can’t imagine.

  THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1498

  We come back to London and Henry rules that we will spend a week in the Tower before going to Westminster. The boy rides in under the portcullis, as taut as a bowstring. His eyes flick across to me just once and meet mine, blank to blank, and then he looks away.

  As usual, the lords who have homes in London go to their great houses and only a small court lives with us, the royal household, within the precincts of the Tower. The king, My Lady the King’s Mother and I are housed in our usual rooms in the royal apartments. The Lord Chamberlain’s office puts the boy in the Lanthorn Tower, with the other young men of the court, and I see him make a little gesture with his hand, as he turns towards the stone arch of the perimeter wall, and his smile grows brighter, the set of his head indomitable, as if he refuses to see ghosts.

  Edward of Warwick is in the Garden Tower, where the lost princes were once kept. Sometimes I see his face at the window when we are crossing the green, just as people used to say they saw my little brothers. I am not allowed to visit him; the king rules that it would distress him, and would upset me. I will be allowed to go later—in some unspecified better time. The boy never glances towards the face at the window, never strays towards the dark doorway and the tight spiral stone staircase that leads to the rooms over the archway. He walks around the Tower and the gardens and the chapel as if he were blind to the old buildings, as if he cannot and will not see the place where William Hastings was beheaded on a log of wood for loyalty to his old master my father, the place where the uncrowned King Edward used to play on the green, where the boy they called the little Prince Richard used to shoot arrows at the butts before they went inside to the darkness, and never came out again.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1498

  We come back to Westminster Palace early in the summer to celebrate Trinity Sunday in the abbey. In the morning when we go to chapel I look around for Lady Katherine, who is missing from my ladies. Her husband, the boy, is not in his usual place among the king’s favored companions. I lean towards Cecily in her dark dress, in double mourning for her husband and daughter, who died this spring, and say tersely: “In God’s name, where are they?”

  Dumbly, she shakes her head.

  Then, while Henry, My Lady, and I are breakfasting in the king’s privy chamber after chapel, two servants come in and kneel before the breakfast table, their heads down, saying nothing.

  “What is it?” Henry asks, though surely it is obvious to all of us that something has happened to the boy. I drop a piece of bread onto my plate, half rise to my feet, with a sense of sudden dread of what is going to come next.

  “Forgive me, Your Grace. But the boy has got away.”

  “Got away?” Henry repeats the words almost as if they have no meaning. “How do you mean: got away?”

  His mother glances at him sharply, as if she hears like me the detachment in his voice like a man repeating words he has prepared.

  “The boy?” she demands. “The Warbeck boy?”

  “Escaped,” one of them says.

  “How could he escape? He’s not imprisoned?” I ask.

  They bow their heads at the incredulity in my voice. “He had a key cut to fit the lock.” One of them looks up to tell me. “His companions were asleep, perhaps drugged, they slept so heavily. He opened the door and walked out.”

  “Walked out?” Henry repeats.

  “He had a key.”

  “Walked out?”

  “Perhaps he drugged the guards.”

  Some strange prescience teaches me to look, not at Henry’s well-manifested surprise and growing anger, but at his mother. She is looking at him, not with her usual expression of approbation and approval, but as if she has never seen him before, as if he is doing something which surprises even such a wily old plotter as herself. I sink back down into my chair again.

  “How could he have got a key? How could he have got drugs?” Henry demands, loud enough to be heard through the door in the presence chamber where anyone could be waiting to wish him the best of the day, ears pricked for gossip.

  Nobody replies that the boy could have got anything he wanted, since Henry himself had given him free run of the court and an allowance of money which would cover the price of some leather trim for his saddle, or a feather for his hat, or indeed cheap sleeping powders and a fee to a locksmith. Nobody points out that if the boy wanted to escape, he could have walked down to the stables and taken his horse and ridden away any day since last October. He did not have to wait till the nighttime, when he would be locked in and then need a key to get himself out. The whole story has a fairy-tale quality to it, like his name, like his history. Now the boy, who once passed as a prince only because someone dressed him in a silk shirt, disappears from a locked room in the dead of night.

  “He must be recaptured!” Henry shouts.

  He snaps his fingers for one of his clerks and the man bustles in, his tonsure shining, his writing desk around his neck, his quills sharpened at the ready. Henry rattles off a string of orders: the ports to be locked shut, the sheriffs of every county to be on alert to look for the boy, messengers to ride down the main highways to alert all the inns and guesthouses along the way.

  “Pay a reward for his recapture, dead or alive,” his mother suggests.

  I keep my gaze on my plate and I don’t say quickly, “Oh, they are not to hurt him!” I am a princess of York and I know that the stakes are always those of life or death. And he will have known this too; he will have known, when he slipped away into the darkness, that he was signing his own death warrant. Once he broke his parole they would be certain to go after him with a sword.

  “I think I’ll tell them to bring him in alive,” Henry says carelessly, as if it does not much matter either way. “I would not want to distress Lady Katherine.”

  “She will be distressed,” I observe.

  “Yes, but now she must see that her husband has run away and left her, run like a coward and left her as if he did not regard himself as married anymore,” Henry said firmly to me, impressing me with his view. “She must see that he can care nothing for her if he would just go—abandon her completely.”

  “Faithless.” His mother nods.

  “You had better go and break the news to her,” Henry says. “Tell her that he organiz