The White Queen (45 page)

“The Stanleys were there, as they promised?”

“They were, and Buckingham’s men. None in their livery, of course, but they all wore
a white rose. It was strange to see the white rose again. And strange to be fighting
to enter a place that we own. I shouted to Edward to be of good cheer, that we would
come for him, that we would not fail him. I don’t know if he heard. I don’t know.”

“You’re hurt,” I say, suddenly noticing the cut on his forehead.

He rubs it, as if his blood were dirt. “It is nothing. Elizabeth, I would rather have
died than come back without him.”

“Don’t speak of death,” I say quietly. “Pray God he is safe tonight and was not frightened
by this. Pray God they just take him to a more secure room inside the Tower and don’t
think to take him away.”

“And it may only be for another month,” he says to me. “Richard said to remind you
of that. Your friends are arming, King Richard is riding north with only his personal
guard. Buckingham and Stanley are in his train, they will persuade him not to turn
back. They will encourage him to go on to York. Jasper Tudor will bring an army from
Brittany. Our next battle will come soon. When the usurper Richard is dead, we will
have the keys to the Tower in our hands.”

Elizabeth straightens up, her sisters’ cloaks draped neatly over her arm. “And do
you trust all your new friends, Mother?” she asks coldly. “All these new allies who
have suddenly come to your side but don’t succeed? All of them ready to risk their
lives to restore Edward to his throne when they all ate well and drank deep at Duke
Richard’s coronation just a few weeks ago? I hear that Lady Margaret carried the train
of the new Queen Anne, just as she used to carry yours. The new queen kissed her on
both cheeks. She was honored at the coronation. Now she calls out her men for us?
Now she is our loyal ally? The Duke of Buckingham was the ward who hated you for marrying
him to my aunt Katherine, and he still hates you. Are these your true allies? Or are
they loyal servants of the new king set out to entrap you? For they play both parts,
and they are traveling
with him now, and feasting at Oxford. They weren’t there in danger at the Tower, rescuing
my brother.”

I look at her coldly in return. “I cannot choose my allies,” I say. “To save my son,
I would plot with the devil himself.”

She shows me the ghost of a sour smile. “Perhaps you already have.”

The summer grows very hot and Lionel slips out of sanctuary and out of London to join
our brothers and our allies in the rebellion that is to defeat Richard. Without him
I feel very much alone. Elizabeth is quiet and distant, and I have nobody to share
my fears. Downriver my son remains a prisoner in the Tower, and Jemma tells us that
nobody sees him or the little changeling playing in the Tower gardens anymore. They
had been practicing archery on the green, but nobody sees them at the butts now. Since
our rescue attempt their guardians have kept them close inside, and I start to fear
the danger of plague in the heat of the city and think of them in those small dark
rooms.

At the end of August there is a shout from a boatman on the river, and I swing open
the window wide and look out. Sometimes they bring me gifts, often just a creel of
fish, but this man has a ball in his hand. “Can you catch, Your Grace?” he asks, seeing
me at the window.

I smile. “Yes, I can,” I say.

“Then catch this,” he says, and tosses a white ball up to me. It comes soaring through
the window over my head, and I reach up and catch it double-handed and
laugh for a moment at the fun of playing again. Then I see it is a ball wrapped in
white paper and I go back to the window; but the man has gone.

I unwrap it and smooth out the paper and I put my hand to my heart and then to my
mouth to silence my cry as I recognize the childish round hand of my little boy Richard.

Dearest Lady Mother,

Greetings and blessings
[he starts carefully].
I am not allowed to write often, nor to tell you exactly where I am, in case the letter
is stolen, except to say that I arrived safely and it is quite all right here. They
are kind people and I have learned how to row a boat already and they say I am good
and handy. In a little while I am to go away to school for they cannot teach me all
I need to know here, but I will come back for the summer and go fishing for eels,
which are very nice when you get used to them, unless I can come home to you again.

Give my love to my sisters and my love and duty to my brother the king, and my honor
and love to you.

Signed,

your son Richard, Duke of York.

Though now I am called Peter, and I remember to answer to Peter always. The woman
here, who is kind to me, calls me her little Perkin, and I don’t mind this.

I read the words through tears, then I mop my eyes and read them again. I smile at
the thought of his being called handy, and I have to take a breath to stop myself
crying out at the thought of his being called Perkin. I want to weep at his being
taken away from me, so young, such a small boy; and yet he is safe, I should be glad
that he is safe: the only one of my children away from the danger of being of this
family in this country, in these wars, which will start again. The boy who now answers
to Peter will go quietly to school, learn languages, music, and wait. If we win, he
will come home as a prince of the blood; if we lose, he will be the weapon they do
not know we have, the boy in hiding, the prince in waiting, the nemesis of their ambitions;
and my revenge. He and his will haunt every king who comes after us, like a ghost.

“Mother Mary, watch over him,” I whisper, my head in my hands, my eyes shut tight
on my tears. “Melusina, guard our boy.”

Every day I get news of the arming and preparing of our people, not just in the counties
where my brothers are active but all around the country. As the news slowly spreads
that Richard has taken the crown, more and more of the common people, the small squires
and market traders, and their betters: the heads of guilds and the small landlords,
the greater men of the country, ask: How shall a younger brother take the inheritance
of his dead brother’s son? How is any man to go quietly to his Maker if such a thing
can happen, unchallenged? Why should a man strive all his life to make his family
great if his little brother, the runt of the litter, can step into his shoes the minute
he weakens?

And there are many, at the many places we used to visit, who remember Edward as a
handsome man and me as his beautiful wife, those who remember the girls in their prettiness
and our strong bright little boys. Those who called us a golden family who had brought
peace to England and a quiver of heirs to the throne; and these people say that it
is an outrage that we should not be in our palaces with our boy on the throne.

I write to my son the little King Edward and bid him be of good cheer, but my letters
have started to
come back without being opened. They come back untouched, the seals unbroken. I am
not even spied upon. It is as if they are denying that he is even at the royal rooms
in the Tower. I fret for the outbreak of the war that will free him and wish we would
bring it forward, and not wait for Richard’s slow vainglorious progress northward
through Oxfordshire, then Gloucestershire, then to Pontefract and York. At York he
crowns his son, the thin and sickly boy, as Prince of Wales. He gives my Edward’s
title to his son as if my boy was dead. I spend this day on my knees praying for God
to give me revenge for this affront. I dare not think that it might be worse than
an insult. I cannot bear to think that it might be that the title is vacant, that
my son is dead.

Elizabeth comes to me at dinnertime and helps me to my feet. “You know what your uncle
has done today?” I ask her.

She turns her face away from me. “I know,” she says steadily. “The town crier was
shouting it all around the square. I could hear him from the doorway.”

“You didn’t open the door?” I demand anxiously.

She sighs. “I didn’t open the door. I never open the door.”

“Duke Richard has stolen your father’s crown, and now he has put his son in your brother’s
robes. He will die for this,” I predict.

“Haven’t enough people died already?”

I take her hand and turn her towards me so she has
to face me. “We are talking about the throne of England here, your brother’s birthright.”

“We are talking about the death of a family,” she says flatly. “You have daughters
too, you know. Have you thought of our birthright? We have been cooped up here like
rats for all summer, while you pray all day for revenge. Your most precious son is
imprisoned or dead—you don’t even know which. You sent your other out into the darkness.
We don’t know where he is, or even if he is still alive. You thirst for the throne,
but you don’t even know if you have a boy to put on it.”

I gasp and step back. “Elizabeth!”

“I wish you would send word to my uncle that you accept his rule,” she says coldly,
and her hand in mine is like ice. “I wish you would tell him that we are ready to
come to terms—actually any terms that he chooses to name. I wish you would persuade
him to release us to be an ordinary family, living at Grafton, far away from London,
far away from plotting and treason and the threat of death. If you surrendered now,
we might get my brothers back.”

“That would be for me to go right back to where I came from!” I exclaim.

“Were you not happy at Grafton with your mother and father, and with the husband who
gave you Richard and Thomas?” she asks quickly, so quickly that I do not prepare my
answer carefully.

“Yes,” I say unguardedly. “Yes, I was.”

“That is all I want for myself,” she says. “All I want
for my sisters. And yet you insist on making us heirs to your misery. I want to be
heir to the days before you were queen. I don’t want the throne: I want to marry a
man whom I love, and love him freely.”

I look at her. “Then you would deny your father, you would deny me, you would deny
everything that makes you a Plantagenet, a princess of York. You might as well be
Jemma the maid if you don’t desire to be greater than you are, if you don’t see your
chances and take them.”

She looks steadily back at me. “I would rather be Jemma the maid than you,” she says,
and her voice is filled with the harsh contempt of a girl. “Jemma can go home to her
own bed at night. Jemma can refuse to work. Jemma can run away and serve another master.
But you are locked to the throne of England and you have enslaved us too.”

I draw myself up. “You may not speak to me like this,” I say to her coldly.

“I speak from my heart,” she says.

“Then tell your heart to be true but your mouth to be silent. I don’t want disloyalty
from my own daughter.”

“We are not an army at war! Don’t speak to me of disloyalty! What will you do? Behead
me for treason?”

“We are an army at war,” I say simply. “And you will not betray me, nor your own position.”

I speak truer than I know, for we are an army on the march and that night we make
our first move. The men of Kent rise first, and when they hear the rallying cries
Sussex rises up with them. But the Duke of Norfolk,
who remains true to Richard, marches his men south from London and holds our army
down. They cannot reach their comrades in the west; he blocks the only road at Guildford.
One man gets through to London, hires a little boat, and comes to the sanctuary water
gate, under cover of mist and rain.

“Sir John,” I say through the grille. I dare not even open the gate for the screech
of the iron on the wet stone, and besides, I don’t know him, and trust no one.

“I have come to tender my sympathy, Your Grace,” he says awkwardly. “And to know—my
brothers and I want to know—if it is your will that we support Henry Tudor now.”