The White Queen

APRIL 1485

Mother, you must come to court, Elizabeth writes to me in a letter smudged in haste, folded twice, and double sealed.

It is all going terribly wrong. His Grace the king thinks he must go to London and tell the lords that he will not marry me, that he has never had any intention of marrying me, in order to scotch the rumors that he poisoned the poor queen. Wicked people are saying that he was determined to marry me and would not wait for her death or agreement, and now he thinks he has to announce that he is nothing to me but my uncle. I have told him that there is no need for such a declaration, that we could wait in silence for the gossip to die down, but he listens only to Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby, and they swear that the north will turn against him if he insults the memory of his wife, a Neville of Northumberland. Worse, he says that for my reputation I have to go away from court, but he won’t allow me to come to you. He is sending me to visit Lady Margaret and Lord Thomas Stanley of all terrible people. He says that Lord Thomas is one of the few men whom he can trust to keep me safe, whatever happens; and no one can doubt that my reputation is perfect if Lady Margaret takes me into her house. Mother, you have to stop this. I cannot stay with them: I shall be tormented by Lady Margaret, who must think I have betrayed my betrothal to her son, and who is bound to hate me for her son’s sake. You must write to Richard, or even come to court yourself, and tell him that we will be happy, that all will be well, that all we have to do is to wait out this time of gossip and rumor and we can marry in the end. He has no advisors whom he can trust, he has no Privy Council who would tell him the truth. He is dependent on these men whom they call the Rat and the Cat, and they fear that I will influence him against them, for revenge for what they did to our kin. Mother, I love him. He is my only joy in this world. I am his in heart and in thoughts and in body and all. You said to me that it would take more than love for me to become Queen of England: you have to tell me what to do. I cannot go to live with the Stanleys. What am I to do now?

In truth, I don’t know what she is to do, poor little girl of mine. She is in love with a man whose survival depends on his being able to command the loyalty of England and, if he were to tell England that he hopes to marry his niece before his wife is cold in the ground, he will have donated the whole of the north to Henry Tudor, in a moment. They won’t take kindly to an insult to Anne Neville, quick or dead, and the north is where Richard has always drawn his strength. He will not dare to offend the men of Yorkshire or Cumbria, Durham or Northumberland. He cannot even risk it, not while Henry Tudor recruits men and raises his army and waits only for the spring tides.

I tell the messenger to get some food, to sleep the night and be ready to take my reply in the morning, and then I walk by the river and listen to the quiet sound of the water over the white stones. I hope that Melusina will speak to me, or that I will find a twist of thread with a ring shaped like a crown trailing in the water; but I have to come home without any message, and I have to write to Elizabeth with nothing to guide me but my years at court, and my own sense of what Richard can dare.

Daughter, I know how distressed you are-I hear it in every line. Be brave. This season will tell us everything, and everything will be changed by this summer. Go to the Stanleys and do your best to please them both. Lady Margaret is a pious and determined woman; you could not ask for a guardian more likely to scotch scandal. Her reputation will render you as spotless as a virgin, and that is how you must appear-whatever happens next. If you can like her, if you can endear yourself to her, all the better. It is a trick I never managed; but at the very least live pleasantly with her, for you will not be with her for long. Richard is putting you in a safe place, far from scandal, far from danger, until Henry Tudor makes his challenge for the throne and the battle is over. When this happens, and Richard wins, as I think he must, he will be able to fetch you from the Stanleys’ house with honor, and marry you as part of the celebrations of victory. Dearest daughter, I don’t expect you to enjoy a visit to the Stanleys, but they are the best family in England for you to show that you acknowledge your betrothal to Henry Tudor and that you are living chastely. When the battle is over and Henry Tudor is dead, then nobody can say a word against you, and the disapproval of the north can be faced down. In the meantime, let Lady Margaret think that you are happy in your promise to Henry Tudor, and that you are hopeful of his victory. This will not be an easy time for you, but Richard has to be free to summon his men and fight his battle. As men have to fight, women have to wait and plan. This is your time for waiting and planning, and you must be constant and discreet. Honesty matters so much less. My love and blessing to you,

Your mother

Something wakes me early, at dawn. I sniff at the air as if I were a hare sitting up on my hind legs in a meadow. Something is happening, I know it. Even here, inland in Wiltshire, I can smell that the wind has changed, almost I can smell the salt from the sea. The wind is coming from the south, due south; it is a wind for an invasion, an onshore wind, and somehow I know, as clearly as if I could see them, the crates of weapons being loaded to the deck, the men striding down the gangplanks and jumping to the boats, the standards furled and propped in the prow, the men-at-arms mustering on the dock. I know that Henry has his force, his ships at the dockside, his captains plotting a course: he is ready to sail.

I wish I could know where he will land. But I doubt that he knows himself. They will untie fore and aft, they will throw the lines on board, they will raise the sails, and the half dozen ships will nose their way out of shelter of the port. As they get to the sea the sails will billow, the sheets crack, and the boats rise and fall on the choppy waves, but then they will steer as best they can. They might head for the south coast-rebels always get a good welcome in Cornwall or Kent-or they might head for Wales, where the name of Tudor can bring out thousands. The wind will catch them and take them, and they will have to hope for the best, and when they see land, calculate where they have arrived, and then beat up the coast to find their safest haven.

Richard is no fool-he knew this would come as soon as the winter storms died down. He is in his great castle at Nottingham, at the center of England, calling out his reserves, naming his lords, prepared for the challenge that he knew would come this year, as it would have come last year but for the rain that Elizabeth and I blew up to keep Buckingham from London and away from my boy.

This year, Henry comes with a following wind: the battle has to be met. The Tudor boy is of the House of Lancaster, and this is the final battle in the cousins’ war. There is no doubt in my mind that York will win, as York mostly does. Warwick has gone-even his daughters Anne and Isabel are dead-there is no great Lancaster general left. There is only Jasper Tudor and Margaret Beaufort’s boy against Richard in his power with all the levies of England. Both Richard and Henry are without heirs. Both know that they themselves are their only cause. Both know that the war will be ended with the death of the other. I have seen many battles in my time as a wife and a widow in England, but never one as clear-cut as this. I predict a short and brutal battle and a dead man at the end of it and the crown of England, and the hand of my daughter, to the winner.

And I expect to see Margaret Beaufort don black to mourn the death of her son.

Her sorrow will be the start of a new life for me and mine. At last, I think I can send for my son Richard. I think it is time.

I have been waiting to set this part of my plan in motion for two years, ever since I had to send my boy away. I write to Sir Edward Brampton, loyal Yorkist, great merchant, man of the world, and sometime pirate. Certainly a man who is not afraid of a little risk and who relishes an adventure.

He arrives on the very day that Cook is gabbling the news that Henry Tudor has landed. Tudor’s ships were blown ashore to Milford Haven and he is marching through Wales recruiting men to his standard. Richard is levying men and marching out of Nottingham. The country is at war once more, and anything could happen.

“Troubled times again,” Sir Edward says to me urbanely. I meet him far from the house, on the banks of the river, where a willow copse shields us from the passing track. Sir Edward’s horse and mine crop the short grass companionably as we stand, both of us looking for the flicker of brown trout in the clear water. I am right to keep us out of sight: Sir Edward is a striking man, richly dressed, black-haired. He has always been a favorite of mine, a godson of Edward my husband, who sponsored his baptism out of Jewry. He always loved Edward for being his godfather; and I would trust him with my life, or with something more precious than life itself. I trusted him when he commanded the ship to take Richard away, and I trust him now, when I hope he will bring him back.

“Times that I think might be to the good of me and mine,” I observe.

“I am at your service,” he says. “And the country is so distracted by the summoning of the levies that I think I might do anything for you, unobserved.”

“I know.” I smile at him. “I don’t forget that you served me once before, when you took a boy on board your ship to Flanders.”

“What can I do for you this time?”

“You can go the town of Tournai, in Flanders,” I say. “To the St. Jean Bridge. The man who keeps the water gate there is called Jehan Werbecque.”

He nods, committing the name to his memory. “And what will I find there?” he asks, his voice very low.

I can hardly speak the secret that I have held in silence for so long. “You will find my son,” I say. “My son Richard. You will find him and bring him to me.”

His grave face lifts to me, his brown eyes shining. “It is safe for him to return? He will be restored to his father’s throne?” he asks me. “You have made an agreement with King Richard and Edward’s boy will be king in his turn?”

“God willing,” I say. “Yes.”

Melusina, the woman who could not forget her element of water, left her sons with her husband, went away with her daughters. The boys grew to be men, Dukes of Burgundy, rulers of Christendom. The girls inherited their mother’s Sight and her knowledge of things unknown. She never saw her husband again, she never ceased to miss him; but at the hour of his death, he heard her singing for him. He knew then, as she knew always, that it does not matter if a wife is half fish, if a husband is all mortal. If there is love enough, then nothing-not nature, not even death itself-can come between two who love each other.

It is midnight, the time we agreed, and I hear the quiet knock at the kitchen door and go down with my candle shielded by my hand to open the door. The fire casts a warm glow over the kitchen; the servers are asleep in the straw in the corners of the room. The dog lifts his head as I go by, but no one else sees me.

The night is warm, it is still, the candle does not flicker as I open the door and pause to see a big man and a boy, an eleven-year-old boy, on the doorstep.

“Come in,” I say quietly. I lead them into the house, up the wooden stairs to my privy chamber, where the lamps are lit and the fire is burning brightly and there is wine poured, waiting in the glasses.

Then I turn, and put down my candle with trembling hands, and look at the boy that Sir Edward Brampton has brought to me. “Is it you? Is it really you?” I whisper.

He has grown, his head comes up to my shoulder, but I would know him anywhere for his hair, bronze like his father’s, and his eyes, hazel. He has his familiar crooked smile and a boyish way of hanging his head. When I reach for him, he comes into my arms as if he were still my little boy, my second son, my longed-for boy, who was born into peace and plenty and always thought the world an easy place.

I sniff at him as if I were a mother cat finding a lost kitten. His skin smells the same. His hair is scented with someone else’s pomade, and his clothes are salty-smelling from the voyage, but the skin of his neck and behind his ears has the smell of my boy, my baby. I would have known him anywhere for my boy.

“My boy,” I say, and I can feel my heart heave with love for him. “My boy,” I say again. “My Richard.”

He puts his arms around my waist and hugs me tightly. “I have been on ships, I have been all over, I can speak three languages,” he says, muffled, his face against my shoulder.

“My boy.”

“It’s not so bad now. It was strange at first. I have learned music and rhetoric. I can play the lute quite well. I have written a song for you.”

“My boy.”

“They call me Piers. That’s Peter in English. They call me Perkin as a nickname.” He pulls back from me and looks into my face. “What will you call me?”

I shake my head. I cannot speak.

“Your Lady Mother will call you Piers for the time being,” Sir Edward rules from the fireplace, where he is warming himself. “You are not restored to your own yet. You have to keep your Tournai name for now.”

He nods. I see that his identity has become like a coat to him; he has learned to put it on or off. I think of the man who made me send this little prince into exile and made him hide in a boatman’s house, and sent him to school as a scholarship boy, and I think that I will never forgive him, whoever he may be. My curse is on him, and his firstborn sons will die, and I will have no remorse.

“I will leave you two,” Sir Edward says tactfully.

He takes himself off to his room and I sit in my chair by the fire and my boy pulls up a footstool and sits beside me, sometimes leaning back against my legs so that I can stroke his hair, sometimes turning around to explain something to me. We talk of his absence, of what he has learned while he has been away from me. His life has not been that of a royal prince, but he has been given a good education-trust to Edward’s sister Margaret for that. She sent money to the monks as a scholarship for a poor boy; she specified that he must be taught Latin and law, history and the rules of governance. She had him taught geography and the boundaries of the known world, and-remembering my brother Anthony-she had him taught arithmetic and Arabic learning, and the philosophy of the Ancients.

“And when I am older, Her Grace Lady Margaret says that I will come back to England and take up my father’s throne,” my boy says to me. “She says that men have waited longer and with worse chances than me. She says look at Henry Tudor thinking he has a chance now, Henry Tudor who had to run away from England when he was younger than me, and now comes back with an army!”

“He has had a lifetime in exile. Pray God, you will not.”

“Are we going to see the battle?” he asks eagerly.

I smile. “No, a battlefield is no place for a boy. But when Richard wins and marches to London, we will join him and your sisters.”

“And I can come home then? Do I come back to court? And be with you for always?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. We will be together again, as we should be.”

I reach out and stroke his fringe of fair hair from his eyes. He sighs and puts his head on my lap. For a moment we are very still. I can hear the old house creaking around us as it settles for the night, and somewhere out in the darkness an owl is calling.

“And what of my brother Edward?” he asks very quietly. “I have always hoped you had him in hiding, somewhere else.”

“Has Lady Margaret said nothing? Sir Edward?”

“They say that we don’t know, that we cannot be sure. I thought that you would know.”

“I am afraid he is dead,” I say gently. “Murdered by men in the pay of the Duke of Buckingham and Henry Tudor. I am afraid your brother is lost to us.”

“When I am grown, I will avenge him,” he says proudly, a York prince in every way.

I put my hand gently on his head. “When you are grown and if you are king, you can live in peace,” I say. “I will have taken vengeance. It is not for you. It is finished. I have Masses said for his soul.”

“But not for mine!” he says with his cheeky boyish grin.

“Yes, for yours, for I have to keep up a pretense just as you do, I have to pretend that you are lost to me as he is, but when I pray for you, at least I know that you are alive and safe and will come home. And besides, it will do you no harm to have the good women of Bermondsey Abbey praying for you.”

“They can pray to bring me safely home again then,” he says.

“They do,” I say. “We all do. I have prayed for you three times a day since you went, and I think of you every hour.”

He leans his head against my knees and I run my fingers through his blond hair. At the back, behind his ears, it is curly; I can wind the curls around my fingers like golden rings. It is only when he gives a little snore like a puppy that I realize we have sat for hours and he is fast asleep. It is only when I feel the weight of his warm head against my knees that I realize he is truly home, a prince come to his kingdom; and that, when battle is met and won, the white rose of York will bloom once more in the green hedgerows of England.