The White Queen (28 page)

Edward, too, will go his own way and care nothing what people say of him. But Richard!
Richard is the good boy of the family, the one who works hardest at being strong,
who studies so that he can be clever, who prays devoutly so that he can be favored
by God, who tries so hard for his mother’s love and always knows he is eclipsed. For
Richard to cause a scandal is like my best hound dog suddenly declaring that she won’t
hunt anymore. It is quite out of nature.

God knows, I try to love Richard, since he has been a true friend to my husband, and
a good brother. I should love him: he stood by my husband without thinking
twice of it when they had to flee England on a tiny fishing boat; he endured exile
with him, and came home with him to risk his life half a dozen times. And always,
Edward said, that if Richard had the left wing, he could be sure that the left wing
would hold. If Richard’s troop was bringing up the rear, he knew there would be no
surprise attack from the road behind. Edward trusts Richard as a brother and a vassal,
and loves him dearly—why can I not? What is it about the young man that makes me want
to narrow my eyes when I look at him, as if there is some flaw that escapes me? But
now this young puppy, not yet twenty years old, has become a hero, a hero from a ballad.

“Who would have thought that dull little Richard would have such passion in him?”
I demand of Anthony, who is seated at my feet in a bower looking down to the river.
My ladies are around me with half a dozen young men from Edward’s court singing and
playing with a ball and generally idling and flirting. I am plaiting primroses for
a crown for the victor of a race they are going to run later.

“He is deep,” Anthony pronounces, making my sixteen-year-old son Richard Grey choke
with laughter.

“Hush,” I say to him. “Respect for your uncle, please. And pass me some leaves.”

“Deep and passionate,” Anthony continues. “And all of us thought he was nothing but
dull. Amazing.”

“Actually, he is passionate,” my son volunteers. “You underrate him because he is
not grand and loud like the other York brothers.”

My son Thomas Grey nods beside him. “That’s right.”

Anthony raises an eyebrow at the implied criticism of the king. “You two go and get
them ready for their race,” I say, sending them away.

The court has been transfixed by the story of poor little Anne Neville, the young
widow of the boy Prince Edward of Lancaster. She was brought into London as part of
our victory parade after the battle of Tewkesbury, the girl and her fortune were immediately
spotted by George, Duke of Clarence, as his way to the entire Warwick fortune. With
the Neville girls’ mother, the poor Countess of Warwick, taking herself off to Beaulieu
Abbey in complete despair, George planned to gain everything. He owned half of the
Warwick fortune already through his marriage to Isabel Neville, and then he made a
great show of taking her young sister into safekeeping. He took little Anne Neville,
condoled with her on the death of her father and the absence of her mother, congratulated
her on her escape from her nightmare marriage to the little monster, Prince Edward
of Lancaster, and thought to keep her under his protection, housed with his wife,
her sister, and hold her fortune in his sticky hands.

“It was chivalrous,” Anthony says, to irritate me.

“It was an opportunity, and I wish I had seen it first,” I reply.

Anne, a pawn in her father’s game for power, widow of a monster, daughter of a traitor,
was still only fifteen when she came to live with her sister and her husband
George, Duke of Clarence. She had no idea, no better than my kitten, as to how she
would survive in this kingdom of her enemies. She must have thought that George was
her savior.

But not for long.

Nobody knows quite what happened after that; but something went wrong with George’s
agreeable plan to own both Neville girls and keep their enormous fortune to himself.
Some say that Richard, visiting George’s grand house, met Anne again—his childhood
acquaintance—and they fell in love, and that he rescued her like a knight in a fable
from a visit that was nothing less than imprisonment. They say George had her disguised
as a kitchen maid, to keep her away from his brother. They say he had her locked in
her room. But true love prevailed, and the young duke and the young widowed princess
fell into each other’s arms. At all events, this version of the story is all desperately
romantic and wonderful. Fools of all ages enjoy it very much.

“I like it told that way,” my brother Anthony says. “I am thinking of composing a
rondel.”

But there is another version. Other people, who admire Richard, Duke of Gloucester,
as much as I, say that he saw in the newly widowed lonely girl a woman who could deliver
to him the popularity in the north of England that her maiden name commands, who could
bring him massive lands that adjoin what he has already got from Edward, and give
him a fortune in her dowry, if only he could steal it from her mother. A young girl
who was so alone and so unprotected that she could not
refuse him. A girl so accustomed to being ordered that she could be bullied into betraying
her own mother. This version suggests that Anne, imprisoned by one York brother, was
kidnapped by another and forced to marry him.

“Less pretty,” I observe to Anthony.

“You could have stopped it,” he says to me with one of his sudden moments of seriousness.
“If you had taken her into your keeping, if you had made Edward order Richard and
George not to pull her apart like dogs over a bone.”

“I should have done,” I say. “For now Richard has one Neville girl, the Warwick fortune,
and the support of the north, and George has the other. That’s a dangerous combination.”

Anthony raises an eyebrow. “You should have done it because it was the right thing
to do,” he says to me with all of an older brother’s pomposity. “But I see you are
still only thinking of power and profit.”

My mother’s skill at foretelling the future is borne out. Less than a year after she
warned me her heart would not last much longer, she complains of fatigue and keeps
to her rooms. The baby I was carrying in the garden the day of the primrose races
came early, and for the first time I go into my confinement without my mother’s company.
I send her messages from my darkened room and she replies cheerfully from hers. But
when I come out with a frail newborn girl, I find my mother in her chamber, too weary
to rise. I take the baby girl, light as a little bird, and lay her in my mother’s
arms every afternoon. For a week or two, the two of them watch the sun sink below
the level of the window, and then like the gold of the sunset they slip away from
me together.

At dusk, on the last day of April, I hear a calling noise, like a white-winged barn
owl, and I go to my window and push open the shutters and look out. There is a waning
moon rising off the horizon, white against a white sky; it too is wasting away, and
in its cold light I can hear a calling, like a choir, and I know it is not the music
of owls, nor singers nor nightingales, but Melusina. Our ancestor goddess is calling
around
the roof of the house, for her daughter Jacquetta of the House of Burgundy is dying.

I stand and listen to the eerie whistling for a while and then I swing the shutters
closed and go to my mother’s room. I don’t hurry. I know there is no need to hurry
to her anymore. The new baby is in her arms as she lies in her bed, the little head
pressed to my mother’s cheek. They are both pale as marble, they are both lying with
their eyes shut, they both seem to be peacefully asleep as the shadows of the evening
darken the room. The moonlight on the water outside the chamber window throws the
reflection of ripples onto the whitewashed ceiling of the room, so they look as if
they are underwater, floating with Melusina in the fountain. But I know that they
are both gone from me, and our water mother is singing them on their journey down
the sweet river to the deep springs of home.

The pain of my mother’s death is not closed for me by her funeral; it is not healed
with the months that go slowly by. Every morning, I wake and miss her, as much as
the first morning. Every day I have to remember that I cannot ask her opinion, or
quarrel with her advice, or laugh at her sarcasm, or look for the guidance of her
magic. And every day I find I blame George, Duke of Clarence, even more for the murder
of my father and my brother. I believe it was at the news of their deaths at his hand,
under the orders of Warwick, that my mother’s loving heart broke, and if they had
not been traitorously killed by him, then she too would be alive today.

It is summer, a time for thoughtless pleasure, but I take my sorrow with me, through
the picnics and days as we travel through the countryside, on the long rides and nights
under a harvest moon. Edward makes my son Thomas the Earl of Huntingdon, and it does
not cheer me. I don’t speak of my sadness to anyone but Anthony, who has lost his
mother too. And we hardly ever speak of her. It is as if we cannot bring ourselves
to speak of her as dead, and we cannot lie to ourselves that she is still alive. But
I blame George, Duke of Clarence, for her heartbreak and her death.

“I hate George of Clarence more than ever,” I say to Anthony as we ride down the road
to Kent together, a banquet ahead of us and a week spent traveling in the green lanes
between the apple orchards. My heart should be light as the court is happy. But my
sense of loss comes with me like a hawk on my wrist.

“Because you’re jealous,” my brother Anthony says provocatively, one hand holding
the reins of his horse, the other leading my young son, Prince Edward, on his little
pony. “You are jealous of anyone Edward loves. You are jealous of me, you are jealous
of William Hastings, you are jealous of anyone who entertains the king, and takes
him out whoring, and brings him home drunk and amuses him.”

I shrug my shoulders, indifferent to Anthony’s teasing. I have long known that the
king’s pleasure in deep drinking with his friends and visiting other women is part
of his nature. I have come to tolerate it, especially as it never takes him far from
my bed, and when we are there together it is as if we were married in secret that
very morning. He has been a soldier on campaign, far from home, with a hundred doxies
at his command; he has been an exile in cities where women have hurried to comfort
him; and now he is the King of England and every woman in London would be glad to
have him—I truly believe that half of them have had him. He is the king. I never thought
I was marrying an ordinary man, with moderate appetites. I never expected a marriage
where he would sit quietly at my feet. He is the king: he is bound to go his own way.

“No, you are wrong. Edward’s whoring doesn’t trouble me. He is the king, he can take
his pleasures where he wants. And I am the queen, and he will always come home to
me. Everyone knows that.”

Anthony nods, conceding the point. “But I don’t see why you concentrate your hatred
on George. The king’s entire family are as bad as each other. His mother has loathed
you and all of us since we first emerged at Reading, and Richard is more awkward and
surly every day. Peace doesn’t suit him, for sure.”

“Nothing about us suits him,” I say. “He is as unlike his two brothers as chalk to
cheese: small and dark, and so anxious about his health and his position and his soul,
always hoping for a fortune and saying a prayer.”

“Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and
George as though someone should give it to him for free.”

I laugh. “Well, I would like Richard better if he was as bad as the rest of you,”
I remark. “And since he has been married, he is even more righteous. He has always
looked down on us Riverses; now he looks down on George too. It is that pompous saintliness
that I cannot stomach. He looks at me sometimes as if I were some kind of . . .”