The White Princess Read online

  There is something different about the hall as I walk through the silent court and when I am seated, and can look around, I see what has changed. It is how they have seated themselves. Every night the men and women of our extensive household come in to dine and sit in order of precedence and importance, men on one side, women on the other of the great hall. Each table seats about twelve diners and they share the common dishes that are placed in the center of the table. But tonight it is different; some tables are overcrowded, some have empty places. I see that they have grouped themselves regardless of tradition or precedent.

  Those who befriended the boy, those who were of the House of York, those who served my mother and father or whose fathers served my mother and father, those who love me, those who love my cousin Margaret and remember her brother Teddy—they have chosen to sit together; and there are many, many tables in the great hall where they are seated in utter silence, as if they have sworn a vow never to speak again, and they look around them saying nothing.

  The other tables are those that have taken Henry’s side. Many of them are old Lancastrian families, some of them were in his mother’s household or serve her wider family, some came over with him to fight at Bosworth, some, like my half brother Thomas Grey or my brother-in-law Thomas Howard, spend every day of their lives trying to show their loyalty to the new Tudor house. They are trying to appear as usual, leaning across the half-empty tables, talking unnaturally loudly, finding things to say.

  Almost without trying to, the court has sorted itself into those who are in mourning tonight, wearing gray or black or navy ribbons pinned to their jerkins or carrying dark gloves, and those who are trying, loudly and cheerfully, to behave as if nothing has happened.

  Henry would be horrified if he saw the numbers that are openly mourning for the House of York. But Henry will not see it. Only I know that he is facedown on his bed, his cape hunched over his shoulders, unable to walk to dinner, unable to eat, barely able to breathe in a spasm of guilt and horror at what he has done, which can never be undone.

  Outside the storm is still rumbling, the skies are billowing with dark clouds and there is no moon at all. The court is uneasy too; there is no sense of victory, and no sense of closing a chapter. The death of the two young men was supposed to bring a sense of peace. Instead we are all haunted by the sense that we have done something very wrong.

  I look across at the table where Henry’s young companions always sit, expecting them at least to be cracking a jest or playing some foolish prank on each other, but they are waiting for dinner to be served in silence, their heads bowed, and when it comes they eat in silence, as if there is nothing to laugh about at the Tudor court anymore.

  Then I see something that makes me glance across to the groom of the servery, wondering that he should allow it—certain that he will report it. At the head of the table of the young men, where the boy used to sit, they have put his cup, his knife, his spoon. They have set a plate for him, they have poured wine as if he were coming to dine. In their own way, defiantly, the young men are showing their loyalty to a ghost, a dream; expressing their love for a prince who—if he was ever there at all—is gone now.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1499

  Henry is ill, desperately ill. He falls into illness as if he cannot face the brightness of the world after the storm. He keeps to his chamber and only his most trusted servants are allowed in and out and they will not tell anyone what is the matter with him. People whisper that he has taken the sweat, that the illness he brought to England has finally caught up with him. Other people say that he has a growth in his belly and point to the plates that return untouched from his room. He cannot eat, he is as sick as a dog, the cooks say. His mother visits him every day, sitting with him for a couple of hours in the evening. She has her physicians attend him, and once I see an alchemist and an astrologer going quietly up the private staircase to his rooms. Secretly, for it is against the law to consult astrologers or any sort of fortune-tellers, he has his stars drawn up; and they tell him that he will grow stronger, and he was right to kill an enemy, a weak defenseless enemy. His strength depended on the destruction of a youth in his keeping, it is quite all right to destroy the weak. It is quite all right to destroy a dependent helpless prisoner.

  But still the king gets no better, and his mother spends all her time in the chapel praying for him, or in his room begging him to sit up, turn his face from the wall, drink a little wine, taste a little meat, eat. The Master of the Revels comes to me to make plans for the Christmas feasts, the dancers must rehearse and the choristers practice new music, but I don’t know if we are going to have a silent court in mourning with an empty throne, and I tell him we can plan nothing until the king is well again.

  The other men charged with treason in the last plot for the York prince are all hanged or fined or banished. Occasional pardons are issued in the king’s name, with his initial weakly scrawled at the foot of the page. Nobody knows if he has locked himself up, sick with remorse, or if he is just too tired to go on fighting. The plot is over, but still the king does not come out of his chamber; he reads nothing and will see no one. The court and the kingdom wait for him to return.

  I go to visit My Lady the King’s Mother and find her with all the business of the throne on the table before her, as if she were regent. “I have come to ask you if the king is very ill,” I say. “There is much gossip, and I am concerned. He will not see me.”

  She looks at me and I see that the papers are shuffled into piles, but she is not reading them, she is signing nothing. She is at a loss. “It’s grief,” she says simply. “It is grief. He is sick with grief.”

  I rest my hand on my heart and feel it thud with anger. “Why? Why should he grieve? What has he lost?” I ask, thinking of Margaret and her brother, Lady Katherine and her husband, of my sisters and myself, who go through our days and show the world nothing but indifference.

  She shakes her head as if she cannot understand it herself. “He says he has lost his innocence.”

  “Henry, innocent?” I exclaim. “He entered his throne through the death of a king! He came into the kingdom as a pretender to the throne!”

  “Don’t you dare say it!” She rounds on me. “Don’t you say such a thing! You of all people!”

  “But I don’t understand what you mean,” I explain. “I don’t understand what he is saying. He has lost his innocence? When was he innocent?”

  “He was a young man, he spent his life aspiring to the throne,” she says, as if the words are forced from her, as if it is a hard confession, choked out of her. “I raised him to be like this, I taught him myself that he must be King of England, that there was nothing else for him but the crown. It was my doing. I said that he should think of nothing but returning to England and claiming his own and holding it.”

  I wait.

  “I told him it was God’s will.”

  I nod.

  “And now he has won it,” she says. “He is where he was born to be. But to hold it, to be sure of it, he has had to kill a young man, a young man just like him, a boy who aspired to the throne, who was also raised to believe it was his by right. He feels as if he has killed himself. He has killed the boy that he was.”

  “The boy that he was,” I repeat slowly. She is showing me a boy I had not seen before. The boy who was named for the Tournai boatman was also the boy who said he was a prince, but to Henry he was a fellow-pretender, someone raised and trained for only one destiny.

  “That was why he liked the boy so much. He wanted to spare him, he was glad to bind himself to forgive him. He hoped to make him look like a nothing, keeping him at court like a Fool, paying for his clothes from the same purse as he paid for his Fool and his other entertainments. That was part of his plan. But then he found that he liked him so much. Then he found that they were both boys, raised abroad, always thinking of England, always taught of England, always told that the time would come when they must sail for home and enter into the