The White Queen (21 page)

“Nonsense,” my mother says buoyantly. “You retired from daylight itself, didn’t you?
Confinement? I should think no queen has ever been so confined. Who has ever been
confined to sanctuary before?”

It is not a proper royal birth with three midwives and two wet nurses, and rockers
and noble godmothers and mistresses of the nursery standing by, and ambassadors waiting
with rich gifts. Lady Scrope is sent by the Lancaster court to make sure that I have
everything I need, and I think this a gracious gesture from the Earl of Warwick to
me. But I have to bring my baby into the world with no waiting husband and court at
the door, and almost none to help me, and his godfathers are the Abbot of Westminster
and the prior, and his godmother is Lady Scrope: the only people who are with me,
neither great lords of the land nor foreign kings, the usual godfathers for a royal
baby, but good and kind people who have been trapped at Westminster with us.

I call him Edward, as his father wants, and as the silver spoon from the river predicted.
Margaret of Anjou, with her invasion fleet held in port by storms, sends me a message
to tell me to call him John. She does not want another Prince Edward in England to
rival her son. I ignore her words as from a nobody. Why would I listen to the preferences
of Margaret of Anjou? My husband named him Edward, and the silver spoon came from
the river with his name on it. Edward he is: Edward, Prince of Wales, he shall be,
even if my mother is right and he is never Edward the king.

Among ourselves we call him Baby, and no one calls him the Prince of Wales, and I
think as I drift into sleep after the birth, all warm with him in my arms, half drunk
from the birthing cup that they have given me, that perhaps this baby will not be
king. There have been no cannons fired for him and no bonfires lit on hilltops. The
fountains and conduits of London have not run with wine, the citizens are not drunk
with joy, there are no announcements of his arrival racing to the great courts of
Europe. It is like having an ordinary baby, not a prince. Perhaps he will be an ordinary
boy and I will become an ordinary woman again. Perhaps we will not be great people,
chosen by God, but just happy.

We spend Christmas in sanctuary. The London butchers send us a fat goose, and my boys
and little Elizabeth and I play cards and I make sure that I lose a silver sixpence
to her, and send her to bed thrilled to be a serious gamester. We spend Twelfth Night
in sanctuary, and Mother and I compose a play for the children, with costumes and
masks and enchantments. We tell them our family story of Melusina, the beautiful woman,
half girl, half fish, who is found in the fountain in the forest and marries a mortal
for love. I wrap myself in a sheet, which we tie at the feet to make a great tail,
and I let down my hair, and when I rise up from the floor, the girls are transported
by the fish woman Melusina and the boys applaud. My mother enters with a paper horse’s
head taped on the stick of a broom, wearing the doorman’s jerkin and a paper crown.
The girls don’t recognize her at all and watch the play as if we were paid mummers
at the greatest court in the world. We tell them the story of the courtship of the
beautiful woman who is half fish, and how her lover persuades her to leave her watery
fountain in the wood and take her chance in the great world. We tell only half the
story: that she lives
with him and gives him beautiful children and they are happy together.

There is more to the story than this, of course. But I find that I don’t want to think
about marriages for love that end in separation. I don’t want to think about being
a woman who cannot live in the new world that is being made by men. I don’t want to
think of Melusina rising from her fountain and confining herself to a castle while
I am held in sanctuary, and all of us, daughters of Melusina, are trapped in a place
where we cannot wholly be ourselves.

Melusina’s mortal husband
loved her, but she puzzled him. He did not understand her nature, and he was not
content to live with a woman who was a mystery to him. He allowed a guest to persuade
him to spy on her. He hid behind the hangings in her bath house and saw her swim beneath
the water of her bath, saw—horrified—the gleam of ripple on scales, learned her secret:
that although she loved him, truly loved him, she was still half woman and half fish.
He could not bear what she was, and she could not help but be who she was. So he left
her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature—and
he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature. He could not stand
to think of her secrecy, that she had a life hidden from him. He could not, in fact,
tolerate the truth that Melusina was a woman who knew the unknown depths, who swam
in them.

Poor Melusina, who tried so hard to be a good wife,
had to leave the man who loved her and go back to the water, finding the earth too
hard. Like many women, she was unable to fit exactly with her husband’s view. Her
feet hurt: she could not walk in the path of her husband’s choosing. She tried to
dance to please him, but she could not deny the pain. She is the ancestress of the
royal house of Burgundy, and we, her descendants, still try to walk in the paths of
men, and sometimes we too find the way unbearably hard.

I hear that
the new court has a merry Christmas feast. Henry the king is back in his senses,
and the House of Lancaster is triumphant. From the windows of the sanctuary we can
see the barges going up and down the river as the noblemen go from their riverside
palaces to Westminster. I see the Stanley barge go by. Lord Stanley, who kissed my
hand at my coronation tournament, and told me his motto was
“Sans Changer,”
was one of the first to greet Warwick when he landed in England. It turns out he
is a Lancaster man after all; maybe he will be unchanging for them.

I see the Beaufort barge with the flag of the red dragon of Wales flying at the stern.
Jasper Tudor, the great power of Wales, is taking his nephew young Henry Tudor to
court to visit the king, his kinsman. Half outlaw, half prince. Jasper will be back
in the castles of Wales again, and Lady Margaret Beaufort will weep tears of joy all
over her fourteen-year-old son, Henry Tudor, I don’t doubt. She was parted from him
when
we put him with good York guardians, the Herberts, and she had to endure the prospect
of his marrying the Yorkist Herbert girl. But now William Herbert lies dead in our
service, and Margaret Beaufort has her son back in her keeping. She will be pushing
him forward at court, pushing him forward for favors and places. She will want his
titles restored; she will want his inheritance guaranteed. George, Duke of Clarence,
stole both the title and the lands, and she will have named them in her prayers ever
since. She is a most ambitious woman, and a determined mother. I don’t doubt she will
have the earldom of Richmond off George within the year and, if she can, her son will
be named as the Lancaster heir after the prince.

I see Lord Warwick’s barge, the most beautiful on the river, his rowers going in time
to the beat of the drummer in the stern, moving swiftly against the tide as if nothing
can stop his onward progress, not even the flow of the river. I even make him out,
standing in the prow of the boat as if he would rule the very water of the river,
his hat pulled off and held in his hand so that he can feel the cold air in his dark
hair. I purse my lips to whistle up a wind, but I let him go. It makes no difference.

Warwick’s older daughter Isabel may be hand in hand with my brother-in-law George
in the seats at the back of the barge as they go past my subterranean prison. Perhaps
she remembers the Christmas that she came to court as an unwilling bride and I was
kind to
her, or perhaps she prefers to forget the court where I was the Queen of the White
Rose. George will know I am here, the wife of his brother, the woman who stayed loyal
when he did not: living in poverty, living in half darkness. He will know I am here;
he may even feel me watching him, my narrowed eyes overlooking him—this man who was
once George of the House of York, and is now a favored kinsman at the court of Lancaster.

My mother puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t ill wish them,” she warns me. “It comes
back on you. It is better to wait. Edward is coming. I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt
him for a moment. This time will be like a bad dream. It is as Anthony says: shadows
on the wall. What matters is that Edward musters an army big enough to defeat Warwick.”

“How can he?” I say, looking out at the city that now declares itself all for Lancaster.
“How can he even begin?”

“He has been in touch with your brothers, and with all our kinsmen. He is raising
his forces, and he has never lost a battle.”

“He has never fought Warwick. And Warwick taught him everything he knows about war.”

“He is king,” she says. “Even if they now say that it meant nothing. He was crowned,
he is divinely ordained, he has had the holy oil on his breast—they cannot deny that
he is king. Even if another crowned and ordained king sits on the throne. But Edward
is lucky, and Henry is not. Perhaps it comes down only to
that: if you are a lucky man. And the Yorks are a lucky house.” She smiles. “And of
course he has us. We can wish him well, no harm in a little spell for good luck. And
if that does not improve his chances, then nothing will.”

My mother brews up tisanes and leans from the window and pours them into the river,
whispering words that no one can hear, throws powder on the fires to make them burn
green and smoke. She never stirs the children’s porridge without whispering a prayer,
turns her pillow over twice before she gets into bed, claps her shoes together before
putting them on to rid them of bad luck.

“Does any of it mean anything?” my son Richard asks me, one eye on his grandmother,
who is twisting a plait of ribbon and whispering over it.

I shrug. “Sometimes,” I say.

“Is it witchcraft?” he asks nervously.

“Sometimes.”

Then in March my mother tells me, “Edward is coming to you. I am sure of it.”

“You have foreseen it?” I ask.

She giggles. “No, the butcher told me.”

“What did the butcher tell you? London is filled with gossip.”

“Yes, but he had a message from a man in Smithfield who serves the ships that go to
Flanders. He saw a little fleet sailing northwards in the worst weather, and one
of them was flying the Sun in Splendor: the badge of York.”

“Edward is invading?”

“Perhaps at this very moment.”

In April, in
the early hours of the night, I hear the sound of cheering from the streets outside
and I jump from my bed and go to the window to listen. The abbey serving girl pounds
on the door and comes running into the room and babbles, “Your Grace! Your Grace!
It is him. It is the king. Not King Henry, the other king. Your king. The York king.
King Edward!”

I draw my nightgown around me and put my hand to the plait of my hair. “Here now?
Are they cheering for him?”

“Cheering for him now!” she exclaims. “Lighting torches to guide him on his way. Singing
and throwing down gold coins before him. Him, and a band of soldiers. And he must
be coming here!”

“Mother! Elizabeth! Richard! Thomas! Girls!” I call out. “Get up! Get dressed! Your
father is coming. Your father is coming to us!” I seize the serving girl by the arm.
“Get me hot water to wash in and the best gown I have. Leave the firewood, it doesn’t
matter. Who’s going to sit by that paltry fire ever again?” I push her from the room
to fetch the water, and I pull my hair out of the nighttime plait as Elizabeth comes
running into my room, her big eyes wide. “Is it the bad queen coming? Lady Mother,
is the bad queen here?”

“No, sweetheart! We are saved. It is your own good
father coming to visit us. Can’t you hear them cheering?”