The White Queen (32 page)

“Won’t you miss me?” I ask, childlike. “Won’t you miss Baby? And the girls?”

“Yes, and that’s why I don’t even consider a crusade. I can’t bear to be away for
months. But Edward is settled in Ludlow with his playmates and his tutors, and young
Richard Grey is a fine companion and model for him. It is safe to leave him for a
little while. I have a longing to travel the deserted roads, and I have to follow
it.”

“You are a son of Melusina,” I say, trying to smile. “You sound like her when she
had to be free to go into the water.”

“It’s like that,” he agrees. “Think of me as swimming away and then the tide will
bring me back.”

“Your mind is made up?”

He nods. “I have to have silence to hear the voice of God,” he says. “And silence
to write my poetry. And silence to be myself.”

“But you will come back?”

“Within a few months,” he promises.

I stretch out my hands to him, and he kisses them both. “You must come back,” I say.

“I will,” he says. “I have given my word that only death will take me from you and
yours.”

He is as
good as his word and returns from his trip to Rome in time to meet us at Fotheringhay
in July. Richard has planned and organized a solemn reburial of his father and his
brother Edmund, who were killed in battle, made mock of, and hardly buried at all.
The House of York rallies together for the funeral and the memorial service, and I
am glad Anthony comes home in time to bring Prince Edward to honor his grandfather.

Anthony is as brown as a Moor and full of stories. We steal away together to walk
in the gardens of Fotheringhay. He was robbed on the road; he thought he would never
get away with his life. He stayed one night beside a spring in a forest and could
not sleep for the certainty that Melusina would rise out of the waters. “And what
would I say to her?” he demands plaintively. “How confusing for us all if I fell in
love with my great-grandmother.”

He met the Holy Father, he fasted for a week and saw a vision, and now he is determined
one day to set out again, but this time go farther afield. He wants to lead a pilgrimage
to Jerusalem.

“When Edward is a man and comes to his own estate, when he is sixteen, I will go,”
he says.

I smile. “All right,” I agree easily. “That’s years and years away. Ten years from
now.”

“It seems a long time now,” Anthony warns me. “But the years will go quickly.”

“Is this the wisdom of the traveling pilgrim?” I laugh at him.

“It is,” he agrees. “Before you know it, he will be a young man standing taller than
you, and we will have to consider what sort of a king we have made. He will be Edward
V and he will inherit a throne peacefully, please God, and continue the royal House
of York without challenge.”

For no reason at all, I shiver.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, I don’t know. A shiver of cold: nothing. I know he will make a wonderful
king. He’s a real York and a real son of the House of Rivers. There could be no better
start for a boy.”

Christmas comes, and my darling son Prince Edward comes home to Westminster for the
feast. Everyone marvels at how he has grown. He is seven next year, and a straight-standing,
handsome, fair-headed boy with a quickness of understanding and an education that
is all from Anthony, and the promise of good looks and charm that is all his father’s.

Anthony brings both my sons to me, Richard Grey and Prince Edward, for my blessing
and then releases them to find their brothers and sisters.

“I miss you all three. So much,” I say.

“And I you,” he says, smiling at me. “But you look well, Elizabeth.”

I make a face. “For a woman who is sick every morning.”

He is delighted. “You are expecting a baby again?”

“Again, and given the sickness, they all think it will be a boy.”

“Edward must be delighted.”

“I assume so. He shows his delight by flirting with every woman within a hundred miles.”

Anthony laughs. “That’s Edward.”

My brother is happy. I can tell at once, from the easy
set of his shoulders and the relaxed lines around his eyes. “And what about you? Do
you still like Ludlow?”

“Young Edward and Richard and I have things just as we want them,” he says. “We are
a court devoted to scholarship, chivalry, jousting, and hunting. It is a perfect life
for all three of us.”

“He studies?”

“As I report to you. He is a clever boy and a thoughtful one.”

“And you don’t let him take risks hunting?”

He grins at me. “Of course I do! Did you want me to raise a coward for Edward’s throne?
He has to test his courage in the hunting field and in the jousting arena. He has
to know fear and look it in the face and ride towards it. He has to be a brave king,
not a fearful one. I would serve you both very ill if I steered him away from any
risk and taught him to fear danger.”

“I know, I know,” I say. “It is just that he is so precious—”

“We are all precious,” Anthony declares. “And we all have to live a life with risk.
I am teaching him to ride any horse in the stable and to face a fight without a tremble.
That will keep him safer than trying to keep him on safe horses and away from the
jousting arena. Now, to far more important things. What have you got me for Christmas?
And are you going to name your baby for me, if you have a boy?”

The court prepares
for the Christmas feast with its usual extravagance, and Edward orders new clothes
for
all the children and ourselves as part of the pageant that the world expects from
England’s handsome royal family. I spend some time every day with the little Prince
Edward. I love to sit beside him when he sleeps, and listen to his prayers as he goes
to bed, and summon him to my rooms for breakfast every day. He is a serious little
boy, thoughtful, and he offers to read to me in Latin, Greek, or French until I have
to confess that his learning far surpasses my own.

He is patient with his little brother Richard, who idolizes him, following him everywhere
at a determined trot, and he is tender to baby Anne, hanging over her cradle and marveling
at her little hands. Every day we compose a play or a masque, every day we go hunting,
every day we have a great ceremonial dinner and dancing and an entertainment. People
say that the Yorks have an enchanted court, an enchanted life, and I cannot deny it.

There is only one thing that casts a shadow on the days before Christmas: George the
Duke of Dissatisfaction.

“I do think your brother grows more peculiar every day,” I complain to Edward when
he comes to my rooms in Westminster Palace to escort me to dinner.

“Which one?” he asks lazily. “For you know I can do nothing right in the eyes of either.
You would think they would be glad to have a York on the throne and peace in Christendom,
and one of the finest Christmas feasts we have ever arranged; but no: Richard is leaving
court to go back north as soon as the feast is over, to demonstrate his outrage that
we are not slogging away in a battle with the French, and George is simply bad tempered.”

“It is George’s bad temper which is troubling me.”

“Why, what has he done now?” he asks.

“He has told his server that he will not eat anything sent to him from our table,”
I say. “He has told him he will only eat privately, in his own room, after the rest
of us have had dinner. When we send him a dish down the room to him as a gesture of
courtesy for him to taste, he will refuse it. I hear he plans to send it back to us
as an open insult. He will sit at the dinner table in company with an empty plate
before him. He will not drink either. Edward, you will have to speak to him.”

“If he is refusing drink, it is more than an insult, it is a miracle!” Edward smiles.
“George cannot refuse a glass of wine, not if it came from the devil himself.”

“It is no laughing matter if he uses our dinner table to insult us.”

“Yes, I know. I have spoken to him.” He turns to the retinue of lords and ladies who
are forming a line behind us. “Give us a moment,” he says, and draws me off to a window
bay where he can talk without being overheard. “Actually, it’s worse than you know,
Elizabeth. I think he is spreading rumors against us.”

“Saying what?” I ask. George’s resentment of his older brother was not satisfied by
his failed rebellion
and forgiveness. I had hoped he would settle into being one of the two greatest dukes
in England. I had thought he would be happy with his wife, the whey-faced Isabel,
and her enormous fortune, even though he lost control of his sister-in-law Anne when
she married Richard. But like any mean, ambitious man, he counts his losses more than
his gains. He begrudged Richard his wife, little Anne Neville. He begrudged Richard
the fortune that she brought him. He cannot forgive Edward for giving Richard permission
to marry her, and he watches every grant that Edward makes to my family and kinsmen,
every acre of land Edward gives to Richard. You would think England was a tiny field
that he feared losing a row of peas, such is his anxious suspicion. “What can he say
against us? You have been ceaselessly generous to him.”

“He is saying again that my mother betrayed my father and that I am a bastard,” he
says, his mouth to my ear.

“For shame! That old story!” I exclaim.

“And he is claiming that he made an agreement with Warwick and Margaret of Anjou which
said that at Henry’s death he should be king. So that he is rightful king now, as
Henry’s appointed heir.”

“But he killed Henry himself!” I exclaim.

“Hush, hush. Nothing of that.”

I shake my head and the veil from my headdress dances in my agitation. “No. You must
not be mealymouthed about that now, not between the two of us in
private. You said at the time that his heart gave out, and that was good enough for
everyone. But George cannot pretend that he is the man’s chosen and named heir when
he was his murderer.”

“He says worse,” my husband warns.

“Of me?” I guess.

He nods. “He says that you—” He breaks off and looks round to see that no one is in
earshot. “He says that you are a w . . .” His voice is so low he cannot speak the
word.

I shrug my shoulders. “A witch?”

He nods.

“He is not the first to say so. I suppose he will not be the last. While you are King
of England he cannot hurt me.”

“I don’t like it being said about you. Not just for your reputation but for your safety.
It is a dangerous name to attach to a woman, whoever her husband might be. And besides,
everyone always goes on to say that our marriage was an enchantment. And that leads
them to say that there was no true marriage at all.”

I give a little hiss like an angry cat. I care less about my own reputation: my mother
taught me that a powerful woman will always attract slander; but those who say that
I am not truly married would make bastards of my sons. This is to disinherit them.

“You will have to silence him.”

“I have spoken to him, I have warned him. But I imagine that, despite it all, he is
making a cause against
me. He has followers, more every day, and I think he may be in touch with Louis of
France.”

“We have a peace treaty with King Louis.”

“Doesn’t stop his meddling. I think nothing will ever stop his meddling. And George
is fool enough to take his money and cause me trouble.”

I look around. The court is waiting for us. “We have to go in to dinner,” I say. “What
are you going to do?”

“I shall speak to him again. But in the meantime, don’t send him any dishes from our
table. I don’t want him making a show of refusing them.”

I shake my head. “Dishes go to favorites,” I say. “He is no favorite of mine.”

The king laughs and kisses my hand. “Don’t turn him into a toad either, my little
witch,” he says in a whisper.

“I don’t need to. He’s that in his heart already.”