The White Princess Read online

  “He was not plotting!” I say urgently. “You say yourself it was your plot. It was not him and Teddy! He was innocent of anything but what you set men to do to him. He did nothing but agree to your plan.”

  “He threatens me by breathing,” Henry says flatly. “His broken smile is my undoing. Even in prison with a smashed face, he is a handsome prince. There is nothing for him but death.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1499

  Henry summons the council of all his lords to listen to the charges of treason against Teddy; they call him “Edward naming himself of Warwick” as if no one has a name that can be trusted anymore. They call the boy Perkin Warbeck and list dozens of named others. Alarmed, frightened into obedience, the council commands the sheriffs to pick out a jury from the citizens of London who will hear the evidence and choose a verdict.

  Lady Katherine comes to my rooms, her face whiter than the lace she has in her hand. She is making a trim for a man’s collar and the bright beads for the lace making tremble on the cushion.

  She kneels on the floor before me; slowly she removes her headdress and her hair tumbles down. She bows low, almost to my feet. “Your Grace, I beg for mercy,” she says.

  I look at her bowed head, the lustrous dark hair. “I have no power,” I say.

  “Mercy for my husband!”

  I shake my head. I lean forwards and touch her shoulder. “Truly, I have no power in this court. I had hoped that you would speak to the king for them both.”

  “He promised me,” she says, her voice a little whisper of sound. “He promised me this summer. But now my husband is to be tried before a jury.”

  I don’t offer her a lie that perhaps they will not convict, nor suggest that the evidence will not be damning.

  “Could you not persuade the king as you did once before?” I ask her. “Could you not find a smile for him, could you not allow him—allow him whatever he wants?”

  Her dark eyes flicker up to mine in one long look, as if to acknowledge the irony that I should urge her to seduce my husband to save the boy. We know what the boy means to both of us.

  “I paid my side of the bargain this summer, when he said my husband would be safe,” she says. “His Grace said that if he stayed quietly in prison he could be released, later. I gave the king what he wanted in return. I have nothing more to bargain with.”

  I roll back my head and close my eyes for a moment. I am beyond weariness, both of kings and the bargains they make and the women who have to find ways to please them. “You have lost your influence?”

  She nods, looking me straight in the eye and admitting her shame. “I have nothing left to tempt him.” She pauses to apologize to me. “I am sorry. I did not know what else I could do this summer when they told me that my husband was in prison and taking a beating. I had nothing else to offer.”

  I sigh. “I will speak with him,” I say. “But I have nothing to offer him either.”

  I send my chamberlain to request an audience with the king and I am shown into his privy chamber. His mother stands behind the throne and does not move when I enter. The groom of the chamber sets a seat for me and I face Henry across the polished dark table, his mother standing like a sentry against the world, behind him.

  “We know why you are here,” My Lady says briefly. “But there is nothing that can be done.”

  I ignore her and look at my husband. “My lord, I don’t come to plead for the two of them. I am here because I am afraid that you are putting us in danger,” I say softly.

  At once he is alert. This is a man always ready to be alert to danger.

  “We are in danger every day that the boy lives,” he replies.

  “Aside from that. There is a danger that you don’t know.”

  “You have come to warn us?” Lady Margaret asks scornfully.

  “I have.”

  Henry looks at me for the first time. “Has someone spoken to you? Has someone tried to recruit you?”

  “No, of course not. I am known to be completely faithful to you.” I look at his hard-faced mother. “Everyone at court but the two of you knows I am completely faithful.”

  “What is it then? Speak.”

  I draw a breath. “Years ago, when my mother and all my sisters and I were in sanctuary, Richard came to us to tell us that the princes were missing. Mother and I swore an oath against the man who had killed them,” I say.

  “That was Richard himself,” My Lady insists quickly.

  Henry’s hand stirs slightly as if to silence her.

  “Richard put them to death,” she repeats, as if repetition will make it so.

  I ignore her, and go on. “We swore that whoever had taken them and put them to death would himself see his own son die in childhood. And his grandson would die young also. And his line would end with a girl and she would have no heir.”

  “Richard’s son died, as soon as they named him Prince of Wales,” My Lady reminds her silent son. “It is proof of his guilt.”

  He turns and glances at her. “You knew of this curse?”

  She blinks like an old reptile, and I know that John Morton reported my words to My Lady as promptly as he prayed to God.

  “You did not think you should warn me?” Henry asks.

  “Why should anyone warn you?” she asks, knowing that neither of them can answer such a question. “We had nothing to do with their deaths. Richard killed the boys in the Tower,” she asserts steadily. “Or it was Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham. Richard’s line is ended, the young Duke of Buckingham is not strong. If this curse has any power it will fall on him.”

  Henry returns his hard gaze to me. “So what is your warning?” he asks me. “What is our danger? What can it possibly be to do with us?”

  I slide off my chair and I kneel before him as if he might judge me too. “This boy,” I say, “the one who claims to be Prince Richard of York . . . If we put him to death, that curse might fall on us.”

  “Only if he is the prince,” Henry says acutely. “Are you recognizing him? Do you dare to come here and tell me that you recognize him now? After all that we have been through? After claiming to know nothing all the time?”

  I shake my head and bow lower. “I don’t recognize him, and I never have. But I want us to take care. I want us to take care for our children. Husband, my lord, we might lose our son in his youth. We might lose a grandson in his youth. Our line might end with a girl and then with nothing. Everything that you have done, everything that we have endured might end with a Virgin Queen, a barren girl, and then . . . nothing.”

  Henry does not sleep that night at all, not in my bed nor in his own. He goes to the chapel and he kneels beside his mother on the chancel steps, and the two of them pray, their faces buried in their hands—but nobody knows what they pray for. That is between them and God.

  I know they are there, for I am in the royal gallery in the chapel, on my knees, Lady Katherine beside me. Both of us are praying that the king will be merciful, that he will forgive the boy and release him and Teddy, that this reign which began in blood with the sweat might continue with forgiveness. That the long Cousins’ War might end with reconciliation, and not continue to another generation. That the Tudor way might be merciful and the Tudor line not die out in three generations.

  As if he fears losing his nerve, Henry will not wait for the jury to take their places in the capital’s Guildhall. Impulsively, he summons his Knight Marshall and the Marshall of the Household to Whitehall in Westminster to give sentence. There is no evidence brought against the boy; oddly, they don’t even call him into court by name. Though Henry worked so hard to give the boy the dishonorable name of a poor drunk man on the watergate in Tournai, they do not use it on this one important document. Though they find him guilty, they do not inscribe the name of Perkin Warbeck on the long roll of the treasonous plotters. They leave his name a blank. Now, as they sentence him to death, they give him no name at all, as if nobody knows who he is anymore, or as if they know