The White Queen (16 page)

I press my face to his chest as if I would bury myself into his body. “My love. My
love. So will you go back with your guards and arrest him?”

“No, he’s too powerful. He still commands most of the north. I hope we can make peace
again. He knows this rebellion has failed. He knows it is over. He is cunning enough
to know that he has lost. He and George and I will have to patch together some reconciliation.
They will beg my pardon, and I will forgive them. But he has learned that he cannot
keep me and hold me. I am king now; he can’t reverse that. He is sworn to obey me
as I have sworn to rule. I am his king. It is done. And the country has no appetite
for another war between more rival kings. I don’t want a war. I have sworn to bring
the country justice and peace.”

He pulls the final pins from my hair and rubs his face against my neck. “I missed
you,” he said. “And the girls. I had a bad moment or two when they first took me into
the castle and I was in a cell with no windows. And I am sorry about your father and
brother.”

He raises his head and looks at my mother. “I am more sorry for your loss than I can
say, Jacquetta,” he says frankly. “These are the fortunes of war, and we all know
the risks; but they took two good men when they took your husband and son.”

My mother nods. “And what will be your terms for
reconciliation with the man who killed my husband and my son? I take it you will forgive
him that also?”

Edward makes a grimace at the hardness in her voice. “You will not like it,” he warns
us both. “I shall make Warwick’s nephew Duke of Bedford. He is Warwick’s heir; I have
to give Warwick a stake in our family, the royal family; I have to tie him in to us.”

“You give him my old title?” my mother asks incredulously. “The Bedford title? My
first husband’s name? To a traitor?”

“I don’t care if his nephew has a dukedom,” I say hastily. “It is Warwick who killed
my father, not the boy. I don’t care about his nephew.”

Edward nods. “There is more,” he says uncomfortably. “I shall give our daughter Elizabeth
in marriage to young Bedford. She will make the alliance firm.”

I turn on him. “Elizabeth? My Elizabeth?”

“Our Elizabeth,” he corrects me. “Yes.”

“You will promise her in marriage, a child of not yet four years old, to the family
of the man who murdered her grandfather?”

“I will. This has been a cousins’ war. It has to be a cousins’ reconciliation. And
you, beloved, will not stop me. I have to bring Warwick to peace with me. I have to
give him a great share of the wealth of England. This way I even give him a chance
at his line inheriting the throne.”

“He is a traitor and a murderer, and you think you will marry my little daughter to
his nephew?”

“I do,” he says firmly.

“I swear that it will never happen,” I say fiercely. “And more: I tell you this. I
foresee it will never happen.”

He smiles. “I bow to your superior foreknowledge,” he says, and sweeps a magnificent
bow at my mother and me. “And only time will prove your foreseeing true or false.
But in the meantime, while I am King of England, with the power to give my daughter
in marriage to whom I wish, I shall always do my very best to stop your enemies ducking
you two as a pair of witches, or strangling you at the crossroads. And I tell you,
as I am king, the only way to make you and every woman and her son in this kingdom
as safe as she should be is to find a way to stop this warfare.”

Warwick returns to court as a beloved friend and loyal mentor. We are to be as a family
that suffers occasional quarrels, but loves one another withal. Edward does this rather
well. I greet Warwick with a smile as warm as a frozen fountain dripping with ice.
I am expected to behave as if this man is not the murderer of my father and brother,
and the jailer of my husband. I do as I am commanded: not a word of my anger escapes
me, but Warwick knows without any telling that he has made a dangerous enemy for the
rest of his life.

He knows I can say nothing, and his small bow when he first greets me is triumphant.
“Your Grace,” he says suavely.

As ever with him, I feel at a disadvantage, like a girl. He is a great man of the
world, and he was planning the fortunes of this kingdom when I was minding my manners
to my lady Grey, my husband’s mother, and obeying my first husband. He looks at me
as if I should still be feeding the hens at Grafton.

I want to be icy, but I fear I appear only sulky. “Welcome back to court,” I say unwillingly.

“You are always gracious,” he replies with a smile. “Born to be queen.”

My son Thomas Grey makes a small exclamation of anger, raging like the boy he is,
and takes himself out of the room.

Warwick beams at me. “Ah, the young,” he says. “A promising boy.”

“I am only glad he was not with his grandfather and beloved uncle at Edgecote Moor,”
I say, hating him.

“Oh, so am I!”

He may make me feel like a fool, and like a woman who can do nothing; but what I can
do, I will. In my jewelry box is a dark locket of black tarnished silver, and inside
it, locked in the darkness, I have his name, Richard Neville, and that of George,
Duke of Clarence, written in my blood on the piece of paper from the corner of my
father’s last letter. These are my enemies. I have cursed them. I will see them dead
at my feet.

At the very darkest hour of the longest night in the heart of the winter solstice,
my mother and I go down to the River Thames, black as glass. The path from the Palace
of Westminster garden runs alongside the water, and the river is high tonight, but
very dark in the darkness. We can hardly see it; but we can hear it, washing against
the jetty and slapping against the walls, and we can feel it, a black wide presence,
breathing like a great sinuous animal, heaving gently, like the sea. This is our element:
I inhale the smell of the cold water like someone scenting her own land after a long
exile.

“I have to have a son,” I say to my mother.

And she smiles and says, “I know.”

In her pocket she has three charms on three threads and, careful as a fisherman baiting
a line, she throws each of them into the river and gives me the thread to hold. I
hear a little splash as each one falls into the water, and I am reminded of the golden
ring that I drew from the river five years ago at home.

“You choose,” she says to me. “You choose which one you draw out.” She spreads out
the three threads in my left hand and I hold them tightly.

The moon comes out from behind the cloud. It is a waning moon, fat and silvery; it
draws a line of light along the dark water, and I choose one thread and hold it in
my right hand. “This one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

At once she takes a pair of silver scissors from her pocket and cuts the other two
threads so whatever was tied on is swept away into the dark waters.

“What were they?”

“They are the things that will never happen; they are the future that we will never
know. They are the children who will not be born and the chances that we won’t take
and the luck that we won’t have,” she says. “They are gone. They are lost to you.
See instead what you have chosen.”

I lean over the palace wall to draw on the thread and it comes from the water, dripping.
At the end is a silver spoon, a beautiful little silver spoon for a baby, and when
I catch it in my hand I see, shining in the moonlight, that it is engraved with a
coronet and the name “Edward.”

We keep Christmas
in London as a feast of reconciliation, as if a feast will make a friend of Warwick.
I am reminded of all the times that poor King Henry tried to bring his enemies together
and make them swear friendship, and I know that others at the court see Warwick and
George as honored guests and laugh behind their hands.

Edward orders that it should be done grandly and nearly two thousand noblemen of England
sit down to dinner with us on Twelfth Night, Warwick chief among them all. Edward
and I wear our crowns and the newest fashions in the richest cloths. I wear only silver
white and cloth of gold in this winter season, and they say that I am the White Rose
of York, indeed.

Edward and I give gifts to a thousand of the diners, and favors to them all. Warwick
is a most popular guest, and he and I greet each other with absolute courtesy. When
commanded by my husband, I even dance with my brother-in-law George: hand to hand
and smiling into his handsome, boyish face. Again, it strikes me how like my husband
Edward he is: a smaller daintier version of Edward’s blond handsomeness. Again I am
struck by how people like him on sight. He has all of the York easy charm and none
of Edward’s honor. But I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.

I greet his new bride Isabel, Warwick’s daughter, with kindness. I welcome her to
my court and wish her very well. She is a poor, thin, pale girl, looking rather aghast
at the part she has to play in her father’s scheme of things. Now she is married into
the most treacherous and dangerous family in England, at the court of the king that
her husband betrayed. She is in need of a little kindness and I am sisterly and loving
to her. A stranger at court, visiting us in this most hospitable season, would think
that I love her as a kinswoman. He would think I had not lost a father, a brother.
He would think that I have no memory at all.

I don’t forget. And in my jewelry case is a dark locket, and in the dark locket there
is the corner of the page of my father’s last letter, and on that scrap of paper,
written in my own blood, are the names Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and George,
Duke of Clarence. I don’t forget, and one day they will know that.

Warwick remains enigmatic, the greatest man in the kingdom after the king. He accepts
the honors and favors that are shown him with icy dignity, as a man to whom everything
is due. His accomplice, George, is like a hound puppy, jumping and fawning. Isabel,
George’s wife, sits with my ladies, between my sisters and my sister-in-law Elizabeth,
and I cannot help but smile when I see her turn her head away from her husband’s dancing,
or the way she flinches as he shouts out toasts in honor of the king. George, so fair-headed
and round-faced, has always been a beloved boy of the Yorks, and at this Christmas
feast he acts towards his older brother not only as if he has been forgiven but also
as if he will always be forgiven anything. He is the spoiled child of the family—he
really believes he can do no wrong.

The youngest York brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, now seventeen and a handsome
slight boy, may be the baby of the family, but he has never been the favorite. Of
all the York boys he is the only one to resemble his father, and he is dark and small-boned,
a little changeling beside the big-boned, handsome York line. He is a pious young
man, thoughtful; most at home in his great house in the north of England, where
he lives a life of duty and austere service to his people. He finds our glittering
court an embarrassment, as if we were aggrandizing ourselves as pagans at a Christian
feast. He looks on me, I swear it, as if I were a dragon sprawled greedily over treasure,
not a mermaid in silver water. I guess that he looks at me with both desire and fear.
He is a child, afraid of a woman whom he could never understand. Beside him, my Grey
sons, only a little younger, are worldly and cheerful. They keep inviting him out
to hunt with them, to go drinking in the ale houses, to roister round the streets
in masks, and he, nervously, declines.

News of our Christmas feast goes all around Christendom. The new court in England
is said to be the most beautiful, elegant, mannered, and gracious court in Europe.
Edward is determined that the English court of York shall become as famous as Burgundy
for fashion and beauty and culture. He loves good music, and we have a choir singing
or musicians playing at every meal; my ladies and I learn the court dances, and compose
our own. My brother Anthony is a great guide and advisor in all of this. He has traveled
in Italy and speaks of the new learning and the new arts, of the beauty of the ancient
cities of Greece and of Rome and how their arts and their studies can be made new.
He speaks to Edward of bringing in painters and poets and musicians from Italy, of
using the wealth of the crown to found schools and universities. He speaks of the
new learning, of new science, of arithmetic and astronomy and everything new and wonderful.
He speaks of arithmetic that
starts with the number zero, and tries to explain how this transforms everything.
He speaks of a science that can calculate distances that cannot be measured: he says
it should be possible to know the distance to the moon. Elizabeth, his wife, watches
him quietly, and says that he is a magus, a wise man. We are a court of beauty, grace,
and learning, and Edward and I command the best of everything.