The White Queen (47 page)

“But two boys were killed in the bed . . .”

Were they? Oh were they? How are you so very sure of this? I keep my face as still
as marble as he turns from me, and bows and goes to the door.

“Tell Lady Margaret I beg her to guard my son in the Tower as if he were her own,”
I say.

He bows again and is gone.

When the children
wake, I tell them I am ill and I keep to my chamber. Elizabeth I turn away at the
door and tell her that I need to sleep. I don’t need sleep, I need to understand.
I hold my head in my hands and walk up and down the room barefoot, so that they don’t
hear that I am pacing, racking my brains. I am alone in a world of master conspirators.
The Duke of Buckingham and Lady Margaret are working together, or perhaps they are
working for themselves. They are pretending to serve me, to be allies, or perhaps
they are loyal and I am wrong to mistrust them. My mind goes round and round and I
pull the hair at my temples as if the pain could make me think.

I have ill-wished Richard, the tyrant, but his death can wait. He imprisoned my boys,
but it is not he who is spreading the rumor that they are dead. He was holding them
in prison against their will, against my will;
but he was not preparing the people for their deaths. He has taken the throne and
he has taken the title Prince of Wales by lies and deception. He does not need to
kill them to get his own way. He is triumphant already, without murdering my son.
He got all he wanted without blood on his hands, so there is no need for him to kill
Edward now. Richard is safe on the throne, the council has accepted him, the lords
have accepted him, he is on a royal progress in a country that greets him with joy.
There is a rebellion in the making, of my making; but he thinks Howard has put it
down. As far as he knows he is safe. He need only keep my boys imprisoned until I
am ready to accept my defeat, as Elizabeth urges me to do.

But the Duke of Buckingham has a claim to inherit the throne that would follow that
of Richard’s line—but only if my sons were dead. His claim is no good unless my sons
are dead. If Richard’s sickly son were to die and Richard were to fall in battle and
Buckingham were leading the victorious rebellion, then Buckingham could take the crown.
Nobody would deny that he is the next heir—especially if everyone knew that my sons
were already dead. Then Buckingham would do just as my Edward did when he claimed
the crown; but there was a rival claimant in the Tower. When my Edward entered London
at the head of a victorious army, he went straightaway with his two brothers into
the Tower of London, where the true king was prisoner and they killed him, though
Henry had no more strength than an innocent boy. When the Duke of Buckingham defeats
Richard, he will march into London and into the Tower saying he will have the truth
about my boys. Then there will be a pause, long enough for people to remember the
rumors and start to fear, and Buckingham will come out, tragic-faced, and say that
he has found my boys dead, buried under a paving stone, or hidden in a cupboard, murdered
by their wicked uncle Richard. This is the truth of the rumor that he himself started.
He will say that, since they are dead, he will take the throne and there will be nobody
left alive to deny him.

And Buckingham is Constable of England. He has the keys to the Tower in his hands
right now.

I nibble my finger and pause at the window. So much for Buckingham. Now let me consider
my great friend Lady Margaret Stanley and her son Henry Tudor. They are the heirs
of the House of Lancaster; she might think it time England turned to Lancaster again.
She has to ally with Buckingham and with my followers; the Tudor boy cannot bring
in enough foreign recruits to defeat Richard on his own. He has lived his life in
exile: this is his chance to come back to England and come back as king. She would
be a fool to take such a risk as rebelling against Richard for anything less than
the throne. Her new husband is an essential ally of Richard’s; they are well placed
in this new court. She has negotiated her son’s forgiveness and safe return to England
with Richard. She has been allowed to hand her lands over to her son, as his inheritance.
Would she throw all this into jeopardy for the pleasure of putting my son on the
throne to oblige me? Why would she? Why ever would she take such a risk? Is she not
more likely to be working for her own son to claim the throne? She and Buckingham
together are preparing the country to learn that my sons are dead, at Richard’s hand.

Would Henry Tudor be hard enough of heart to march into the Tower declaring he is
bent on rescue, strangle two boys, and come out with the dreadful news that the princes,
for whom he was bravely fighting, are dead? Could he and his great friend and ally
Buckingham divide up the kingdom together: Henry Tudor taking his fiefdom of Wales,
Buckingham taking the north? Or if Buckingham was dead in battle, would Henry not
be the uncontested heir to the throne? Would his mother send her servants into the
Tower, not to save my boy, but to suffocate him as he sleeps? Could she bear to do
that, saintly woman as she is? Would she countenance anything for her son, even the
death of mine? I don’t know. I can’t know. All I can know for certain is that the
duke and Lady Margaret are spreading the word, even while they are marching out to
fight for the princes, that they believe the princes are already dead, and her ally
lets slip that the two boys are killed in bed. The only man not preparing the world
to mourn their deaths, the only man who does not benefit from their deaths, is the
one whom I thought was my mortal enemy: Richard of Gloucester.

It takes me all day to measure my danger, and even at dinnertime I cannot be sure
of anything. The lives of my sons may depend on who I sense as my enemy and
who I trust as my friend and yet I cannot be certain. My suggestion—that my son Richard
at least is safe and away from the Tower—should give any murderer pause; I hope I
have bought some time.

In the afternoon I write to my brothers as they are raising men in the southern counties
of England, to warn them of this plot that may be hatching like a snake in its egg
inside our plot. I say that our enemy Richard is still our enemy; but his ill-will
may be nothing to the danger posed by our allies. I send out messengers, uncertain
if they will ever reach my brothers, or reach them in time. But I say clearly:

I believe now that the safety of my sons, of myself, depends on the Duke of Buckingham
and his ally Henry Tudor not reaching London. Richard is our enemy and a usurper,
but I believe if Buckingham and Tudor march into London in victory they will come
as our killers. You must stop Buckingham’s march. Whatever you do, you must get to
the Tower ahead of him and ahead of Henry Tudor and save our boy.

That night I stand at the window over the river and listen. Elizabeth opens the door
of the bedroom where the girls sleep and comes to stand behind me, her young face
grave.

“What is the matter now, Mother?” she says. “Please tell me. You have been locked
up all day. Have you had bad news?”

“Yes,” I say. “Tell me, have you heard the river singing, like it did on the night
that my brother Anthony and my son Richard Grey died?”

Her eyes slide away from mine.

“Elizabeth?”

“Not like that night,” she qualifies.

“But you hear something?”

“Very faintly,” she says, “a very soft, low singing like a lullaby, like a lament.
Do you hear nothing?”

I shake my head. “No, but I am filled with fear for Edward.”

She comes and puts her hand on mine. “Is there new danger for my poor brother, even
now?”

“I think so. I think that the Duke of Buckingham will turn on us if he wins this battle
against the false King Richard. I have written to your uncles, but I don’t know if
they can stop him. The Duke of Buckingham has a great army. He is marching along the
River Severn in Wales and then he will come into England, and I don’t know what I
can do. I don’t know what I can do from here to keep my son safe from him, to keep
us all safe from him. We have to keep him from London. If I could trap him in Wales,
I would.”

She looks thoughtful and goes to the window. The damp air from the river breathes
into the stuffy rooms. “I wish it would rain,” she says idly. “It’s so hot. I so wish
it would rain.”

A cool breeze whispers into the room as if to answer her wish, and then the pit, pat,
pit of raindrops on the leaded panes of the open window. Elizabeth swings
open the window wider so that she can see the sky and the dark clouds blowing down
the river valley.

I go to stand beside her. I can see the rain falling on the dark water of the river,
fat drops of rain that make the first few circles, like the bubbles from a fish, and
then more and more, until the silky surface of the river is pitted with falling raindrops
and then the storm comes down so hard that we can see nothing but a whirl of falling
water as if the very heavens are opening on England. We laugh and pull the window
shut against the storm, our faces and arms running with water before we get the clasp
bolted, and then we go to the other rooms, closing the windows and barring the shutters
against the weather that is pouring down outside, as if all my grief and worry were
a storm of tears over England.

“This rain will bring a flood,” I predict, and my daughter nods in silence.

It rains all night. Elizabeth sleeps in my bed as she used to do when she was a child,
and we lie in the warm and dry, and listen to the pattering of the drops. We can hear
the constant wash against the windows and the splashing on the river. Then the gutters
start to fill and the water from the roofs runs with a sound like fountains playing,
and we fall asleep, like two water goddesses to the sound of driving rain and rising
water.

When we wake in the morning it is almost as dark as night, and it is still raining.
It is high tide, and Elizabeth goes down to the water gate and says the water is rising
over the steps. All the craft on the river are battened down for bad weather, and
the few wherries that are plying for trade are rowed by men hunched against the wind
with sacks over their heads, shiny with the wet. The girls spend the morning up at
the windows watching the soaked boats go by. They are riding higher than usual as
the river fills and starts to flood, and then the little boats are all taken in and
moored or hauled up as the river goes into spate and the currents are too strong.
We light a fire against the stormy day; it is as dark and wet as November, and I play
cards with the girls and let them win. How I love the sound of this rain.

Elizabeth and I sleep in each other’s arms, listening to the water pouring off the
roof of the abbey and cascading onto the pavements. In the early hours of the morning
I start to hear the dripping sound of rain leaking through the slate roof, and I get
up to start the fire again and put a pot under the drips. Elizabeth opens the shutter
and says that it is raining as hard as ever; it looks like it might rain all day.

The girls play at Noah’s Ark and Elizabeth reads them the story from the Bible, and
then they prepare a pageant with their toys and roughly stuffed cushions serving as
pairs of animals. The ark is my table upturned with sheets tied from leg to leg. I
let them eat their dinner inside the ark and reassure them before bedtime that the
great Flood for Noah happened a long long time ago and God would not send another,
not even to punish wickedness. This rain will do nothing but keep bad men in their
houses, where they can do
no harm. A flood will keep all the wicked men away from London, and we shall be safe.

Elizabeth looks at me with a little smile, and after the girls have gone to bed she
takes a candle and goes down through the catacombs to look at the level of the river
water.

It is running higher than it has ever done before, she says. She thinks it will flood
the corridor to the steps, a rise of several feet. If it does not stop raining soon,
it will come even higher. We are not at risk—it is two flights of stone stairs down
to the river—but the poor people who live on the riverbanks will be packing up their
few things and abandoning their homes to the water.

The next morning Jemma comes in to us with her dress hitched up, muddy to the knees.
The streets are flooding in the low-lying areas and there are stories of houses being
swept away and, upriver, bridges being destroyed, and villages being cut off. Nobody
has ever seen such rain in September and it still does not stop. Jemma says that there
are no fresh foods in the market as many of the roads are washed away and the farmers
cannot bring in their goods. Bread is more expensive for lack of flour, and some bakers
cannot get their ovens to light, for all they have is wet firewood. Jemma says she
will stay the night with us—she is afraid to leave through the flooded streets.

In the morning it is still raining and the girls, at the window again, report strange
sights. A drowned cow frightens Bridget as it floats by beneath the window; an
overturned cart has been swept into the waters. Timbers from some building go by rolling
over and over in the flood, and we hear the thud as something heavy hits the water-gate
steps. The water gate is a gate only to water this morning; the corridor is flooded
and we can see only the very top of the ironwork and a glimpse of daylight. The river
must be up by nearly ten feet, and high tide will pour water into the catacombs and
wash the sleeping dead.

I don’t look for a messenger from my brothers. I don’t expect that anyone could get
through from the West Country to London in this weather. But I don’t need to hear
from them to know what is happening. The rivers are up against Buckingham, the tide
is running against Henry Tudor, the rain is pouring down on their armies, the waters
of England have risen up to protect their prince.