The White Queen (50 page)

He steps through the doorway and looks back at the two of us, a wry smile twisting
his mouth. “Do you not know yet that there is only one thing worse than not getting
your wish?” he asks. “As I have done? I wished to be king and now I am king and it
has brought me no joy at all. Elizabeth, has your mother not warned you to take care
what you wish for?”

“She has warned me,” she says steadily. “And since you took my father’s throne, and
took my uncle and my beloved brothers, I have learned to wish for nothing.”

“Then she would do well to warn you against the
working of your curse.” He turns to me with a bitter smile. “D’you not remember the
wind that you whistled up to destroy Warwick, which blew him away from Calais so his
daughter lost her baby at sea? That was a weapon for us that no one else could have
summoned. But d’you not remember that the storm went on too long and nearly drowned
your husband and all of us that were with him?”

I nod.

“Your curses last too long and strike at the wrong people,” he says. “Maybe one day
you will wish that my right arm was strong enough to defend you. Maybe one day you
will regret the death of someone’s son and heir, even if they were guilty, even if
your curse runs true.”

The revenge of
Richard the king falls heavily on the lords and leaders of the rebellion; he forgives
the lesser men for having been misled. He discovers that Margaret Beaufort, the wife
of his ally, Lord Stanley, was the mistress of the plot and the go-between for her
son and the Duke of Buckingham, and he banishes her to her husband’s house and orders
her to be kept close. Her allies—Bishop Morton and Dr. Lewis—escape out of the country.
My son Thomas Grey has got clean away and is at the court of Henry Tudor in Brittany.
It is a court of young men, hopeful rebels, filled with ambition and desire.

King Richard complains of my son Thomas Grey as a rebel and an adulterer, as if treason
and love were both
alike crimes. He charges him with treason and puts a price on his head. Thomas writes
to me from Brittany and tells me that, if Henry Tudor could have landed, the rebellion
would have gone our way for sure. Their fleet was scattered by the storm that Elizabeth
and I called down on Buckingham’s head. The young man who said he was coming to save
us was nearly drowned. Thomas has no doubt that Henry Tudor can raise an army great
enough to defeat even a York prince. He tells me that Henry will come again to England,
as soon as the winter storms have died down, and that this time he will win.

And put himself on the throne,
I write to my son.
There is no longer any pretense that he is fighting for the inheritance of my boys.

My son replies: “No, Henry Tudor fights for nobody but himself, and probably always
did and always will. But the prince, as he calls himself, will bring the crown to
the House of York, for he will marry Elizabeth, and make her Queen of England, and
their son will be King of England.

“Your son should have been King of England,” Thomas writes. “But your daughter still
could be queen. Am I to tell Henry that Elizabeth will marry him if he defeats Richard?
It would bring all of our kinship and affinity to his side, and I cannot see what
future you and my half sisters have while the usurper Richard is on the throne, and
while you are hiding in sanctuary.

I write back:

Tell him, I am still as good as the word that I gave to his mother, Lady Margaret.
Elizabeth will be his wife when he defeats Richard and takes the throne of England.
Let York and Lancaster be as one and let the wars be over.

I pause, and add a note.

Ask him if his mother knows what happened to my boy Edward.

I wait till the turning of the year, the darkest night of the year, and I wait for
the darkest hour, the hour between midnight and one, then I take a candle and throw
a warm cape over my winter gown and tap on Elizabeth’s door. “I am going now,” I say.
“Do you want to come?”

She is ready. She has her candle and her cape with the hood pulled forward over her
bright hair. “Yes, of course. This is my loss too,” she says. “I want revenge too.
Those who killed my brother have put me a step closer to the throne, a step further
away from the life I might have made for myself, and into the heart of danger. I don’t
thank them for that, either. And my brother was alone and unguarded, taken away from
us. It would have to be someone made of stone to kill our prince and that poor little
page boy. Whoever it was has earned a curse. I will curse him.”

“It will be on his son,” I warn her, “and his son after him. It will end their line.”

Her eyes shine green in the candlelight like a cat’s eyes. “So might it be,” she says,
as her grandmother Jacquetta would say when she was cursing or blessing.

I lead the way and we go through the silent crypt, down
the stone stairs to the catacombs, and then down again, another flight of cold stone
stairs, icy damp underfoot, until we hear the lapping of the river at the water gate.

Elizabeth unlocks the iron door and together we pull it open. The river is high, at
the level of a winter flood, dark and glassy, moving swiftly by us in the darkness
of the night. But it is nothing to the storm that Elizabeth and I called up to keep
Buckingham and Henry Tudor out of London. If I had only known that someone was coming
for my son that night, I would have taken a boat on that flood and gone to him. I
would have gone on the deep waters to save him.

“How shall we do this?” Elizabeth is shivering from the cold and from fear.

“We do nothing,” I say. “We just tell Melusina. She is our ancestor, she is our guide,
she will feel the loss of our son and heir as we do. She will seek out those who took
him, and she will take their son in return.”

I unfold a piece of paper from my pocket and give it to Elizabeth. “Read it aloud,”
I say. I hold the two candles for her as she reads it to the swiftly moving waters.

“Know this, that our son Edward was in the Tower of London held prisoner most wrongly
by his uncle Richard, now called king. Know this, that we gave him a companion, a
poor boy, to pass for our second son Richard but got him away safe to Flanders, where
you guard him on the River Scheldt. Know this, that someone either came and took our
son Edward, or killed him where he slept; but, Melusina! we cannot find him,
and we have not been given his body. We cannot know his killers, and we cannot bring
them to justice nor, if our boy still lives, find him and bring him home to us.” Her
voice quavers for a moment and I have to dig my nails into the palms of my hands to
stop myself from crying.

“Know this: that there is no justice to be had for the wrong that someone has done
to us, so we come to you, our Lady Mother, and we put into your dark depths this curse:
that whoever took our firstborn son from us, that you take his firstborn son from
him. Our boy was taken when he was not yet a man, not yet king—though he was born
to be both. So take his murderer’s son while he is yet a boy, before he is a man,
before he comes to his estate. And then take his grandson too, and when you take him,
we will know by his death that this is the working of our curse and this is payment
for the loss of our son.”

She finishes reading and her eyes are filled with tears. “Fold it like a paper boat,”
I say.

Readily she takes the paper and makes a perfect miniature vessel; the girls have been
making paper fleets ever since we were first entrapped here beside the river. I hold
out the candle. “Light it,” I whisper, and she holds the folded paper boat into the
flame of the candle so the prow catches fire. “Send it into the river,” I say, and
she takes the flaming boat and puts it gently on the water.

It bobs, the flame flickers as the wind blows it, but
then it flares up. The swift current of the water takes it, and it turns and swirls
away. For a moment we see it, flame on reflected flame, the curse and the mirror of
the curse, paired together on the dark flood, and then they are whirled away by the
rush of the river and we are looking into blackness, and Melusina has heard our words
and taken our curse into her watery kingdom.

“It’s done,” I say, and turn away from the river and hold the water gate open for
her.

“That’s all?” she asks as if she had expected me to sail down the river in a cockleshell.

“That’s all. That’s all I can do, now that I am queen of nothing, with missing sons.
All I can do now is ill-wishing. But God knows, I do that.”

I make merry for my girls. I send out Jemma to buy them new brocade and we sew new
dresses, and they wear the last diamonds from the royal Treasury on their heads as
crowns for Christmas Day. The defeated county of Kent sends us a handsome capon, wine,
and bread for our Christmas feast. We are our own carolers, we are our own mummers,
we are our own wassailers. When finally I put the girls to bed, they are happy, as
if they had forgotten the York court at Christmas when every ambassador said he had
never seen a richer court, and their father was King of England and their mother the
most beautiful queen the country had ever seen.

Elizabeth my daughter sits late with me before the fire, cracking nuts and throwing
the shells into the red embers so they flare and spit.

“Your uncle Thomas Grey writes to me that Henry Tudor was going to declare himself
King of England and your betrothed in Rennes Cathedral today. I should congratulate
you,” I say.

She turns and gives me her merry smile. “I am a much married woman,” she says. “I
was betrothed to Warwick’s nephew, and then to the heir of France, d’you remember?
And you and Father called me La Dauphine,
and I took extra lessons in French and thought myself very great. I was meant to be
Queen of France, I was certain of it, and yet now look at me! So I think I shall wait
till Henry Tudor has landed, fought his battle, crowned himself king, and asked me
himself before I count myself a betrothed woman.”

“Still, it is time you were married,” I say almost to myself, thinking of her rising
blush when her uncle Richard said that she had grown so much he hardly knew her.

“Nothing can happen while we are in here,” she says.

“Henry Tudor is untested.” I am thinking aloud. “He has spent his life running away
from our spies, he has never turned and fought. The only battle he ever saw was under
the command of his guardian William Herbert, and then he fought for us! When he lands
in England with you as his declared bride, then everyone who loves us will turn out
for him. Everyone else will turn out for him for hatred of Richard, even though they
hardly know Henry. Everyone who has been deprived of their places by the northerners
whom Richard brought in will turn out for him. The rebellion has left a sour taste
for too many people. Richard won that battle, but he has lost the trust of the people.
He promises justice and freedom, but since the rebellion he puts in northern lords
and he rules with his friends. Nobody will forgive him that. Your betrothed will have
thousands of recruits, and he will come with an army from Brittany. But it will all
depend on whether he is as brave in battle as Richard. Richard is battle-hardened.
He fought all over England when he was a boy, under the command of your father. Henry
is new to the field.”

“If he wins, and if he honors his promise, then I will be Queen of England. I told
you I would be Queen of England one day. I always knew it. It is my fate. But it was
never my ambition.”

“I know,” I say gently. “But if it is your destiny, you will have to do your duty.
You will be a good queen, I know. And I will be there with you.”

“I wanted to marry a man that I loved, as you did Father,” she says. “I wanted to
marry a man for love, not a stranger on the word of his mother and mine.”

“You were born a princess, and I was not,” I remind her. “And even so, I had to take
my first husband on the say-so of my father. It was only when I was widowed that I
could choose for myself. You will have to outlive Henry Tudor and then you can do
as you please.”