The White Queen (33 page)

Edward does not
tell me what he says to this, his most difficult brother, and not for the first time
I wish my mother was still with me: I need her advice. After a few weeks of sulking
and refusing to dine with us, stalking around the palace as if he were afraid to sit
down, drawing away from me as if my very gaze might turn him to stone, George announces
that Isabel, in the last months of her pregnancy, is ill: sickened by the air, he
announces pointedly, and he is taking her from court.

“Perhaps it’s for the best,” my brother Anthony says to me hopefully one morning as
we walk back to my
rooms after Mass. My ladies are behind me, except for Lady Margaret Stanley, who is
still on her knees in chapel, bless her. She prays like a woman who has sinned against
the Holy Ghost itself, but I know for a fact that she is innocent of everything. She
does not even bed her husband; I think she is quite without desire. My guess is that
nothing stirs that celibate Lancastrian heart but ambition.

“He has everyone asking what Edward has done to anger him, and he is insulting to
both of you. He’s got people talking about whether Prince Edward resembles his father,
and how anyone can know if he is your true-born son, since he was born in sanctuary
without proper witnesses. I asked Edward for permission to challenge him to a joust.
He cannot be allowed to speak of you as he does. I want to defend your name.”

“What did Edward say?”

“He said better to ignore him than give any support to his lies by challenging them.
But I don’t like it. And he abuses you and our family, our mother too.”

“It’s nothing to what he does to his own,” I remark. “He calls our mother a witch,
but his own he names as a whore. He is not a man who is afraid to slander. I am surprised
his mother does not order his silence.”

“I think she has done so, and Edward has reprimanded him in private, but nothing will
stop him. He is beside himself with spite.”

“At least if he is away from court he will not be forever whispering in corners and
refusing to dance.”

“As long as he does not plot against us. Once he is far
away in his house surrounded by his retainers, Edward will know nothing of who he
is summoning, till he has men in the field again, and Edward has a rebellion on his
hands.”

“Oh, Edward will know,” I say shrewdly. “He will have men watching George. Even I
have a paid servant in his house. Edward will have dozens. I will know what he is
doing before he does it.”

“Who is your man?” Anthony asks.

I smile. “It does not have to be a man to watch and understand and report. I have
a woman in his household, and she tells me everything.”

My spy, Ankarette, sends me weekly reports, and she tells me that George is indeed
receiving letters from France, our enemy. Then just before Christmas Day she writes
of the failing health of his wife, Isabel. The little duchess gives birth to another
child, her fourth, but does not recover her strength, and only weeks after her confinement
she gives up the struggle to live, turns her face away from the world, and dies.

I pray for her soul with genuine feeling. She was a terribly unlucky girl. Her father
Warwick adored her and thought he would make her a duchess, and then thought he could
make her husband a king. But instead of a handsome York king, her husband was a sulky
younger son who turned his coat not once but twice. After she lost her first baby
in the wild seas in the witches’ wind off Calais she had two more children, Margaret
and Edward. Now they will have to manage
without her. Margaret is a bright clever girl, but Edward is slow in understanding,
perhaps even simple. God help both of them with George as their only parent. I send
a letter expressing my sorrow, and the court wears mourning for her—the daughter of
a great earl, and the wife of a royal duke.

We mourn for her, but George has barely buried her, barely blown out the candles,
before he comes strutting back to court, full of plans for a new wife, and this time
he is aiming high. Charles of Burgundy, the husband of our Margaret of York, has died
in battle and his daughter Mary is a duchess and heiress of one of the wealthiest
duchies in Christendom.

Margaret, always a Yorkist, and fatally blind to the faults of her family, suggests
that her brother George, so fortunately free, should marry her stepdaughter—thereby
consulting the needs of her York brother more than her Burgundy ward; or so I think.
George, of course, is at once on fire with ambition. He announces to Edward that he
will take either the Duchess of Burgundy or the Princess of Scotland.

“Impossible,” Edward says. “He is faithless enough when he has a duke’s income paid
by me. If he were as rich as a prince with an independent fortune, none of us would
be safe. Think of the trouble he would cause for us in Scotland! Dear God, think of
him bullying our sister Margaret in Burgundy! She’s only just widowed, her stepdaughter
newly orphaned. I would as willingly send a wolf to the two of them as George.”

George broods over his brother’s refusal and then we hear outrageous news, news so
extraordinary that we start by thinking it must be an exaggerated rumor: it cannot
be true. George suddenly declares that Isabel died not of childbed fever, but of poisoning,
and bundles the poisoner into jail.

“Never!” I exclaim to Edward. “Has he run mad? Who would have hurt Isabel? Who has
he arrested? Why?”

“It is worse than arrest,” he says. He looks quite stunned by the letter in his hand.
“He must be crazed. He has rushed this woman servant before a jury and ordered them
to find her guilty of murder, and he has had her beheaded. She is dead already. Dead
on George’s word, as if there were no law of the land. As if he were a greater power
than the law, greater than the king. He is ruling my kingdom as if I had allowed tyranny.”

“Who is she? Who was she?” I demand. “The poor serving girl?”

“Ankarette Twynho,” he says, reading the name from the letter of complaint. “The jury
says he threatened them with violence and made them bring in a verdict of guilty,
though there was no evidence against her but
his oath. They say they did not dare refuse him, and that he forced them to send an
innocent woman to her death. He accused her of poison and witchcraft, and of serving
a great witch.” He raises his eyes from the letter and sees my white face. “A great
witch? Do you know anything of this, Elizabeth?”

“She was my spy in his household,” I confess quickly. “But that is all. I had no need
to poison poor little Isabel. What would I gain from it? And witchcraft is nonsense.
Why would I cast a spell on her? I didn’t like her, nor her sister, but I wouldn’t
ill-wish them.”

He nods. “I know. Of course you didn’t have Isabel poisoned. But did George know that
the woman he accused was in your pay?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. Why else would he accuse her? What else could she have done to
offend him? Does he mean to warn me? To threaten us?”

Edward throws down the letter on the table. “God knows! What does he hope to gain
by murdering a servant woman but to cause more trouble and gossip? I shall have to
act on this, Elizabeth. I can’t let it go.”

“What will you do?”

“He has a little group of his own advisors: dangerous, dissatisfied men. One of them
is certainly a practicing fortune-teller, if not worse. I shall arrest them. I shall
bring them to trial. I shall do to his men what he has done to your servant. It can
serve as a warning for him. He cannot challenge us or our servants without risk to
himself. I only hope he has the sense to see it.”

I nod. “They cannot hurt us?” I ask. “These men?”

“Only if you believe, as George seems to think, that they can cast a spell against
us.”

I smile in the hope of hiding my fear. Of course I believe that they can cast a spell
against us. Of course I fear that they have already done so.

I am right
to be troubled. Edward arrests the notorious sorcerer Thomas Burdett, and two others,
and they are put to question and a farrago of stories of black arts and threats and
enchantments starts to spill out.

My brother Anthony finds me leaning my heavy belly on the river wall and staring into
the water at Westminster Palace on a sunny May afternoon. Behind me, in the gardens,
the children are playing a game of bat and ball. By the outraged cries of cheating,
I guess that my son Edward is losing and taking advantage of his status as Prince
of Wales to change the score. “What are you doing here?” Anthony asks.

“I am wishing this river was a moat that could keep me and mine safe from enemies
without.”

“Does Melusina come when you call her from the waters of the Thames?” he asks with
a skeptical smile.

“If she did, I would have her hang George, Duke of Clarence, alongside his wizard.
And I would have her do that to them both at once, without more words.”

“You don’t believe that the man could hurt you from ill-wishing?” he demands. “He
is no wizard. There is no such thing. It is a fairy tale to frighten children, Elizabeth.”
He glances back at my children, who are appealing to Elizabeth for a ruling on a dropped
catch.

“George believes him. He paid him good money to foretell the king’s death and then
some more to bring it about by overlooking. George hired this wizard to destroy us.
Already his spells are in the air, in the earth, even in the water.”

“Oh nonsense. He is no more a wizard than you are a witch.”

“I don’t claim to be a witch,” I say quietly. “But I have Melusina’s inheritance.
I am her heir. You know what I mean: I have her gift, just as Mother did. Just as
my daughter Elizabeth has. The world sings to me and I hear the song. Things come
to me; my wishes come true. Dreams speak to me. I see signs and portents. And sometimes
I know what will happen in the future. I have the Sight.”

“These could all be revelations from God,” he says firmly. “This is the power of prayer.
All the rest is wishful thinking. And women’s nonsense.”

I smile. “I think they are from God. I never doubt it. But God speaks to me through
the river.”

“You are a heretic and a pagan,” he says with brotherly scorn. “Melusina is a fairy
story, but God and His Son are your avowed faith. For heaven’s sake, you have founded
religious houses and chantries and schools in His name. Your love of rivers and streams
is a superstition, learned from our mother, like that of ancient pagans. You can’t
puddle them up into a religion of your own, and then frighten yourself with devils
of your own devising.”

“Of course, brother,” I say with my eyes cast down.
“You are a nobleman of learning: I am sure you know best.”

“Stop!” He throws up a hand, laughing. “Stop. You need not think I am going to try
to debate with you. You have your own theology, I know. Part fairy tale and part Bible
and all nonsense. Please, for all of our sakes, make it a secret religion. Keep it
to yourself. And don’t frighten yourself with imaginary enemies.”

“But I do dream true.”

“If you say so.”

“Anthony, my whole life is a proof of magic, that I can foresee.”

“Name one thing.”

“Did I not marry the King of England?”

“Did I not see you stand out in the road like the strumpet you are?”

I exclaim against his crow of laughter. “It was not like that! It was not like that!
And besides, my ring came to me from the river!”

He takes my hands and kisses them both. “It is all nonsense,” he says gently. “There
is no Melusina but an old, half-forgotten story that Mother used to tell us at bedtime.
There is no enchantment but Mother encouraging you with play. You have no powers.
There is nothing but what we can do as sinners under the will of God. And Thomas Burdett
has no powers but ill-will and a huckster’s promise.”

I smile at him and I don’t argue. But in my heart I know that there is more.

“How did the
story of Melusina end?” my little boy Edward asks me that night when I am listening
to his bedtime prayers. He is sharing a room with his three-year-old brother Richard,
and both boys look at me hopefully, wanting a story to delay their bedtime.