The White Queen Read online

  “These are chivalrous times,” I tell my father, smiling at his broad-faced puzzlement.

  But the winner of the day is Lord Thomas Stanley, a handsome man who lifts his visor and comes for his prize, pleased to have won. The motto of his family is shown proudly on his standard: “Sans Changer.”

  “What does it mean?” Richard mutters to his brother.

  “Without changing,” Thomas says. “And you would know if you studied rather than wasting your time.”

  “And do you never change?” I ask Lord Stanley. He looks at me: the daughter of a family that has changed completely, turned from one king to another, a woman who has changed from being a widow into being a queen, and he bows. “I never change,” he says. “I support God and the king and my rights, in that order.”

  I smile. Pointless to ask him how he knows what God wants, how he knows which king is rightful, how he can be sure that his rights are just. These are questions for peace, and our country has been at war too long for complicated questions. “You are a great man in the jousting arena,” I remark.

  He smiles. “I was lucky not to be listed against your brother Anthony. But I am proud to joust before you, Your Grace.”

  I bend from the queen’s box to give him the prize of the tournament, a ruby ring, and he shows me that it is too small for his big hand.

  “You must marry a beautiful lady,” I tease him. “A virtuous woman, whose price is beyond rubies.”

  “The finest lady in the kingdom is married and crowned.” He bows to me. “How shall we—who are neglected—bear our unhappiness?”

  I laugh at this, it is the very language of my kinsmen, the Burgundians who have made flirtation a form of high art. “You must endeavor,” I say. “So formidable a knight should found a great house.”

  “I will found my house, and you will see me win again,” he says, and at his words, for some reason, I feel a little shiver. This is a man who is not just strong in the jousting arena, I think. This is a man who would be strong on the battlefield. This is a man without scruple who will pursue his own interest. Formidable, indeed. Let us hope he is true to his motto and never changes from his loyalty to our House of York.

  When the goddess Melusina fell in love with the knight he promised her that she would be free to be herself if she would only be his wife. They settled it that she would be his wife and walk on feet but once a month, she might go to her own chamber, fill a great bath with water, and, for one night only, be her fishy self. And so they lived in great happiness for many years. For he loved her and he understood that a woman cannot always live as a man. He understood that she could not always think as he thought, walk as he walked, breathe the air that he took in. She would always be a different being from him, listening to a different music, hearing a different sound, familiar with a different element.

  He understood that she needed her time alone. He understood that she had to close her eyes and sink beneath the glimmer of the water and swish her tail and breathe through her gills and forget the joys and the trials of being a wife—just for a while, just once a month. They had children together, and they grew in health and beauty; he grew more prosperous and their castle was famous for its wealth and grace. It was famous also for the great beauty and sweetness of its lady, and visitors came from far away to see the castle, its lord, and his beautiful mysterious wife.

  As soon as I am crowned queen I set about establishing my family, and my mother and I become the greatest matchmakers in the kingdom.

  “Will this not cause more enmity?” I ask Edward. “My mother has a list of lords for my sisters to marry.”

  “You have to do it,” he assures me. “They complain that you are a poor widow from a family of unknowns. You have to improve your family by marrying them to the nobility.”

  “We are so many, I have so many sisters, I swear we will take up all the eligible young men. We will leave you with a dearth of lords.”

  He shrugs. “This country has been divided into either York or Lancaster for too long. Make me another great family that will support me when York wavers, or when Lancaster threatens. You and I need to link ourselves to the nobility, Elizabeth. Give your mother free rein, we need cousins and in-laws in every county in the land. I shall ennoble your brothers, and your Grey sons. We need to create a great family around you, both for your position and for your defense.”

  I take him at his word and I go to my mother and find her seated at the great table in my rooms, with pedigrees and contracts and maps all around her, like a commander raising troops.

  “I see you are the goddess of love,” I observe.

  She glances up at me, frowning in concentration. “This is not love; this is business,” she says. “You have your family to provide for, Elizabeth, and you had better marry them to wealthy husbands or wives. You have a lineage to create. Your task as queen is to watch and order the nobility of your country: no man must grow too great, no lady can fall too low. I know this: my own marriage to your father was forbidden, and we had to beg pardon from the king, and pay a fine.”

  “I would have thought that would have put you on the side of freedom and true love?”

  She laughs shortly. “When it was my freedom and my love affair: yes. When it is the proper ordering of your court: no.”

  “You must be sorry that Anthony is already married now that we could command a great match for him?”

  My mother frowns. “I am sorry that she is barren and in poor health,” she says bluntly. “You can keep her at court as a lady-in-waiting and she is of the best family; but I don’t think she will give us sons and heirs.”

  “You will have dozens of sons and heirs,” I predict, looking at her long lists of names and the boldly drawn arrows between the names of my sisters and the names of English noblemen.

  “I should do,” she says with satisfaction. “And not one of them less than a lord.”

  So we have a month of weddings. Every sister of mine is married to a lord, except for Katherine, where I go one better and betroth her to a duke. He is not yet ten years old, a sulky child, Henry Stafford, the little Duke of Buckingham. Warwick had him in mind for his daughter Isabel. But as the boy is a royal ward since the death of his father, he is at my disposal. I am paid a fee to guard him, and I can do with him what I want. He is an arrogant rude boy to me; he thinks he is of such a great family, he is so filled with pride in himself that I take a pleasure in forcing this young pretender to the throne into marriage with Katherine. He regards her, and all of us, as unbearably beneath him. He thinks he is demeaned by marriage to us, and I hear he tells his friends, boasting like a boy, that he will have his revenge, and we will fear him one day, he will make me sorry that I insulted him, one day. This makes me laugh; and Katherine is glad to be a duchess even with a sulky child for a husband.

  My twenty-year-old brother John, who is luckily still single, will be married to Lord Warwick’s aunt, Lady Catherine Neville. She is dowager Duchess of Norfolk, having wedded and bedded and buried a duke. This is a slap in the face to Warwick, and that alone gives me mischievous joy, and, since his aunt is all but one hundred years old, marriage to her is a jest of the most cruel sort. Warwick will learn who makes the alliances in England now. Besides, she must soon die, and then my brother will be free again and wealthy beyond belief.

  For my son, my darling Thomas Grey, I buy little Anne Holland. Her mother, the Duchess of Exeter, my husband’s own sister, charges me four thousand marks for the privilege, and I note the price of her pride and pay it so that Thomas can inherit the Holland fortune. My son will be as wealthy as any prince in Christendom. I rob the Earl of Warwick of this prize too—he wanted Anne Holland for his nephew and it was all but signed and sealed; but I outbid him by a thousand marks—a fortune, a king’s fortune, which I can command and Warwick cannot. Edward makes Thomas the Marquis of Dorset to match his prospects. I shall have a match for my son Richard Grey as soon as I can see a girl who will bring him a fortune; in the meantime he will