The White Queen

JULY 1476

He is as good as his word and returns from his trip to Rome in time to meet us at Fotheringhay in July. Richard has planned and organized a solemn reburial of his father and his brother Edmund, who were killed in battle, made mock of, and hardly buried at all. The House of York rallies together for the funeral and the memorial service, and I am glad Anthony comes home in time to bring Prince Edward to honor his grandfather.

Anthony is as brown as a Moor and full of stories. We steal away together to walk in the gardens of Fotheringhay. He was robbed on the road; he thought he would never get away with his life. He stayed one night beside a spring in a forest and could not sleep for the certainty that Melusina would rise out of the waters. “And what would I say to her?” he demands plaintively. “How confusing for us all if I fell in love with my great-grandmother.”

He met the Holy Father, he fasted for a week and saw a vision, and now he is determined one day to set out again, but this time go farther afield. He wants to lead a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

“When Edward is a man and comes to his own estate, when he is sixteen, I will go,” he says.

I smile. “All right,” I agree easily. “That’s years and years away. Ten years from now.”

“It seems a long time now,” Anthony warns me. “But the years will go quickly.”

“Is this the wisdom of the traveling pilgrim?” I laugh at him.

“It is,” he agrees. “Before you know it, he will be a young man standing taller than you, and we will have to consider what sort of a king we have made. He will be Edward V and he will inherit a throne peacefully, please God, and continue the royal House of York without challenge.”

For no reason at all, I shiver.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, I don’t know. A shiver of cold: nothing. I know he will make a wonderful king. He’s a real York and a real son of the House of Rivers. There could be no better start for a boy.”