The White Queen (31 page)

He steps up to the horse and takes hold of the toe of my boot and shakes it gently.
“Your Grace,” he says simply. “Really. I am here to guard him. I will guard him. I
will keep him safe.”

“And you,” I whisper. “You keep safe too. Anthony, I feel so afraid, but I don’t know
what to fear. I don’t know what to say. I want to warn you, but I don’t know what
danger there is.” I look over to where my son Richard Grey is leaning against the
castle gateway, a young man grown tall and handsome. “And my Grey son,” I say. “My
Richard. I cannot tell you why, but I am fearful for you all.”

He steps back and shrugs his shoulders. “Sister mine,” he says tenderly. “There is
always danger. Your sons and I will be men, and we will face it like men. Don’t you
go
frightening yourself with imaginary threats. And have a safe journey and a safe confinement.
We are all hoping for another prince as good as this one!”

Edward gives the order to move out and leads the way, his standard going before him,
his household guard around him. The royal procession starts to unroll like a scarlet
ribbon through the castle gates, the bright red of the livery studded with the rippling
standards. The trumpets sound; the birds fly up from the castle roofs and whirl in
the sky, announcing that the king and queen are leaving their precious son. I cannot
stop the onward march, and I should not stop it. But I look back over my shoulder
at my little son, at my grown son, and at my brother, until the fall of the road from
the inner keep down to the outer wall has hidden them, and I see them no more. And
when I can see them no more I am filled with such darkness that for a moment I think
night has fallen and there will never be a dawn again.

We halt at the town of Shrewsbury on the way back to London in the last days of July
for me to go into confinement in the guest rooms of the great abbey. I am glad to
be out of the glare and the heat of summer and into the coolness of the shuttered
room. I have ordered them to set a fountain in the corner of my stone-walled chambers,
and the drip, drip of the water soothes me as I lie on the day bed and wait for my
time.

This is a town built around the sacred well of St. Winifred, and as I listen to the
dripping fountain of her water and hear the ringing of the hours for prayer I think
of the spirits that move in waters of this wet land, both the pagan and the holy,
Melusina and Winifred, and how the springs and streams and rivers speak to all men,
but perhaps especially to women, who know in their own bodies the movement of the
waters of the earth. Every holy site in England is a well or a spring; the baptismal
fonts are filled with holy water that goes back, blessed, to the earth. It is a country
for Melusina, and her element is everywhere, sometimes flowing in the rivers, sometimes
hidden underground but always present.

In the middle of August the pains start, and I turn my head to the fountain and listen
to the trickle as if I were seeking the voice of my mother in the water. The baby
comes easily, as I thought he would, and he is a boy, as my mother knew he would be.

Edward comes into the chamber, though men are supposed to be banned until I have been
churched. “I had to come and see you,” he says. “A son. Another son. God bless you
and keep you both. God bless you, my love, and thank you for your pains to give me
another boy.”

“I thought you did not mind if it was a boy or a girl,” I tease him.

“I love my girls,” he says at once. “But the House of York needed another boy. He
can be a companion to his brother Edward.”

“Can we call him Richard?” I ask.

“I thought Henry?”

“Henry for the next one,” I say. “Let’s call this boy Richard. My mother herself named
him to me.”

Edward bends over the cradle where the tiny boy is sleeping, and then he understands
my words. “Your mother? She knew you would have a boy?”

“Yes, she knew,” I say, smiling. “Or at any rate, she pretended to know. You remember
my mother. It was always one part magic and one part nonsense.”

“And is this our last boy? Did she say? Or do you think there will be another?”

“Why not another?” I say lazily. “If you still want
me in your bed, that is. If you have not had enough of me? If you are not tired of
me? If you don’t prefer your other women?”

He turns from the cradle and comes to me. His hands slide under my shoulder blades
and lift me up to his mouth. “Oh, I still want you,” he says.

I am proved right, it was by no means my last confinement. My husband continued as
fertile as the bull in the water meadow that I accused him of being. In the second
year after the birth of Richard, I was pregnant again and in November I had another
baby, a girl whom we called Anne. Edward rewards me for my labors by making my son
Thomas Grey the Marquis of Dorset, and I marry him to a pleasant girl—an heiress to
a mighty fortune. Edward had hoped for a boy and we had promised to name him George,
as a compliment to the other York duke, and so that there are, once again, three boys
of York named Edward, Richard, and George; but the duke shows no sign of gratitude.
He was a spoiled greedy boy, and he has grown into a disappointed, bad-tempered man.
He is in his mid-twenties now, and his rosebud mouth has drooped into a sneer of disdain.
He gloried at being one of the sons of York when he was a hopeful boy; since then
he was first in line for the throne of England as Warwick’s chosen heir, and then
displaced when Warwick favored Lancaster. When Edward won back the throne, George
became first in line to inherit, but then was pushed down to second at the birth of
my baby, Prince Edward. Since the
birth of Prince Richard, George drops down to third in line to the throne of England.
Indeed, every time I have a son, the Duke George drops down one more step away from
the throne and deeper and deeper into jealousy. And since Edward is famously uxorious,
and I am famously fertile, George’s inheritance of the throne has become a most unlikely
event and he is the Duke of Disappointment.

Richard, the other York brother, does not seem to mind this, but he turns against
us after the Yorks come back from France without fighting a war but winning a peace.
My husband the king, and every man and woman of sense throughout the entire country,
rejoice that Edward has made a peace with France that should last for years, in which
they will pay us a fortune not to claim our lands in France. Everyone is delighted
to escape a costly and painful foreign war except Duke Richard, the boy who was raised
on a battlefield and now cites the rights of Englishmen over our lands in France,
clings to the memory of his father, who spent much of his life fighting the French,
and all but calls his brother the king a lazy coward in not leading yet another expensive
and dangerous expedition.

Edward laughs his good-tempered laugh, and lets the insult go, but Richard storms
off to his lands in the north, taking his obedient wife Anne Neville with him, and
sets himself up as a northern princeling, refusing to come south to us, believing
himself to be the only true York of England, the only true heir to his father in his
enmity with France.

Nothing troubles Edward, and he is smiling when he comes to find me in the stables,
where I am looking over a new mare, a gift from the King of France, to mark the new
friendliness between our countries. She is a beautiful horse, but nervous at the new
surroundings, and will not even come near me, though I have a tempting apple in my
hand.

“Your brother came to me today to ask permission to go on pilgrimage, and leave Edward
in the care of his half brother Sir Richard for a little while.”

I come out of the stable and close the door carefully behind me to keep the horse
safely inside. “Why? Where does he want to go?”

“He wants to go to Rome,” Edward says. “He tells me he wants time away from the world.”
He gives me an odd crooked smile. “Seems that Ludlow has given him a taste for solitude.
He wants to be a saint. He tells me he wants to find the poet in himself. He says
he wants silence and the deserted road. He wants to find silence and wisdom.”

“Oh nonsense,” I say, with a sister’s scorn. “He has always had this idea of going
away. He has been planning to go to Jerusalem ever since he was a boy. He loves to
travel and he thinks that the Greeks and the Moslems know everything. He may want
to go, but his life and his work are here. Just tell him no, and make him stay.”

Edward hesitates. “He has a great desire to do this, Elizabeth. And he is one of the
greatest knights of Christendom. I don’t think anyone can defeat him
at the joust when he is on his day. And his poetry is as fine as that written by anyone.
His reading and his knowledge is so wide, and his command of languages is greater
than anyone else’s in England. He is not an ordinary man. Perhaps it is his destiny
to go far and learn more. He has served us well, none better, and if God has called
him to travel, perhaps we should let him go.”

The mare comes and puts her head over the half door to sniff at my shoulder. I stand
still, so as not to frighten her. Her warm oaty breath blows on my neck. “You’re very
tender of his talents,” I say suspiciously. “Why are you so admiring of him all of
a sudden?”

He shrugs his shoulders, and at that small gesture, wifelike, I am on to him. I step
forward and take both his hands in mine so he cannot escape my scrutiny. “So who is
she?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The new one. The new whore. The one who likes Anthony’s poetry,” I say bitingly.
“You never read it yourself. You never had such a high opinion of his learning and
his destiny before. So someone has been reading to you. My guess is that
she
has been reading it to you. And if my guess is right, she knows it because he has
been reading it to her. And probably Hastings knows her as well, and all of you think
she is utterly lovely. But you will be bedding her; and the others sniffing round
like dogs. You have a new and agreeable whore, and that I understand. But if you think
you are going to share her stupid opinions with me, then she will have to go.”

He looks away from me, at his boots, at the sky, at the new mare.

“What’s her name?” I ask. “You can tell me that, at least.”

He pulls me towards him and folds me in his arms. “Don’t be angry, beloved,” he whispers
in my ear. “You know there is only you. Only ever you.”

“Me and a score of others,” I say irritably, but I don’t pull away from him. “They
go through your bedroom like a May Day procession.”

“No,” he says. “Truly. There is only you. I have only one wife. I have a score of
whores, perhaps hundreds. But only one wife. That is something, is it not?”

“Your whores are young enough to be my daughters,” I say crossly. “And you go out
into the city to chase them. And the city merchants complain to me that their wives
and their daughters are not safe from you.”

“No,” my husband says with the vanity of a handsome man. “They are not. I hope that
no woman can resist me. But I never took anyone by force, Elizabeth. The only woman
who ever resisted me was you. D’you remember drawing that dagger on me?”

I smile despite myself. “Of course I do. And you swearing that you would give me the
scabbard, but it would be the last thing you ever gave me.”

“There is no one like you.” He kisses my brow and then my closed eyelids and then
my lips. “There is no one but you. No one but my wife holds my heart in her beautiful
hands.”

“So what is her name?” I ask as he kisses me into peace. “What’s the name of the new
whore?”

“Elizabeth Shore,” he says, his lips on my neck. “But that doesn’t matter.”

Anthony comes to
my rooms as soon as he arrives at court, having made the journey from Wales, and
I greet him at once with an absolute refusal to let him go away.

“No, truly, my dear,” he says. “You have to let me go. I am not going to Jerusalem,
not this year, but I want to travel to Rome and confess my sins. I want to be away
from the court for a while and think of things that matter and not things that are
of the everyday. I want to ride from monastery to monastery and rise at dawn to pray
and, where there is no religious house for me to spend the night, I want to sleep
under the stars and seek God in the silence.”