The White Queen (51 page)

She giggles and her face lights up at the thought of it.

“Your grandmother married her husband’s young squire the moment she was widowed,”
I remind her. “Or think of King Henry’s mother, who married a Tudor nobody in secret.
At least when I was a widow I had the sense to fall in love with the King of England.”

She shrugs. “You are ambitious. I am not. You would never fall in love with someone
who was not wealthy or great. But I don’t want to be Queen of England. I don’t want
my poor brother’s throne. I have seen the price that one pays for a crown. Father
never stopped fighting from the day he won it, and here we are—trapped in little better
than prison—because you still hope we
can gain the throne. You will have the throne even if it means I have to marry a runaway
Lancastrian.”

I shake my head. “When Richard sends me his proposals, we will come out,” I say. “I
promise you. It is time. You won’t have another Christmas in hiding. I promise you,
Elizabeth.”

“We don’t have to come out to glory, you know,” she says plaintively. “We could just
go to a pleasant house, and be an ordinary family.”

“All right,” I say, as if I think we can ever be an ordinary family. We are Plantagenets.
How could we be ordinary?

I hear from
my son Thomas Grey, in a letter which comes to me travel-stained from Henry Tudor’s
ragamuffin court in Brittany, dated Christmas Day 1483.

As he promised, he swore to his betrothal to your daughter Elizabeth in the cathedral
in Rennes. He also claimed the title of King of England and was acclaimed king by
all of us. He received our homage and oaths of loyalty, mine among the others. I heard
one man ask him how he could claim to be heir, when the young King Edward might be
living for all we know. He said something interesting . . . he said that he had certain
proof that the young King Edward is dead, and that his heart is sore for it, and that
we should have revenge on his murderer—the usurper Richard. I asked him what proof
he had, and reminded him of your pain without a son to bury, nor any knowledge of
him; and he said that he knew for a fact that Richard’s men had killed your boys.
He said they had pressed them under their bedding as they slept, and then buried them
under the stair in the Tower.

I took him to one side and said that at the very least we could place servants or
suborn those who are there and order them to find the bodies if he would only tell
me where they are, which stair in the Tower. I said that if we found the bodies as
his invasion of England began, we could accuse Richard of murder, and the whole country
would be on our side. “Which stair?” I asked. “Where are the bodies? Who told you
of the murder?”

Lady Mother, I lack your skills of seeing into the dark hearts of men, but there was
something about him that I couldn’t like. He looked away, and said it was no good,
he had thought of it already, but a priest had lifted their bodies and taken them
away in a chest to give them a Christian burial, and buried them in the deepest waters
of the river, never to be found. I asked him the name of the priest but he did not
know it. I asked him how the priest knew where they were buried and why he put them
in the river instead of taking the bodies to you. I asked him if it was to be a Christian
burial then why put them in the water? I asked him which part of the river and he
said he did not know. I asked him who told him all this, and he said it was his mother
Lady Margaret, and that he would trust her with his life. It will be just as she has
told him; he knows this for a fact.

I don’t know what you make of this.

It stinks to me.

I take Thomas’s letter and put it into the flames of the fire that burns in the hall.
I take up a pen to reply to him, trim the nib, nibble the feather at the top, and
then write.

I agree. Henry Tudor and his allies must have had a hand in the death of my son. How
else would he know they were dead and how it was done? Richard is to release us this
month. Get away from the Tudor pretender and come home. Richard will pardon you and
we can be together. Whatever vows Henry takes in church and however many men show
him homage, Elizabeth will never marry the murderer of her brothers, and if he is
indeed the killer, then he carries my curse to his son and his grandson. No Tudor
boy will live to manhood if Henry had a hand in the death of my son.

The end of the twelve days of Christmas and the return of the Parliament to London
brings me the unwelcome news that Parliament has obliged King Richard and ruled that
my marriage was invalid, that my children are bastards and that I myself am a whore.
Richard had declared this before, and no one had argued with him. Now it is law and
the Parliament, like so many moppets, nods it through.

I don’t make any objection to the Parliament, and I don’t command any friends of mine
to object for us. It is the first step in freeing us from our hiding place that
has become our prison. It is the first step in turning us into what Elizabeth calls
“ordinary people.” If the law of the land says that I am nothing more than the widow
of Sir Richard Grey, and the former king’s former lover, if the law of the land says
that my children are merely girls born out of wedlock, then we are of little value
alive or dead, imprisoned or free. It does not matter to anyone where we are, or what
we are doing. This, on its own, sets us free.

More important, I think, but I do not say, not even to Elizabeth, that once we are
living in a private house quietly, my boy Richard might be able to join us. As we
are stripped of our royalty my son might be with me again. When he is no longer a
prince, I might get him back. He has been Peter, a boy living with a poor family in
Tournai. He could be Peter, a visitor to my house at Grafton, my favorite page boy,
my constant companion, my heart, my joy.

I receive a message from Lady Margaret. I had been wondering when I would hear again
from this my dearest friend and ally. The storming of the Tower that she planned failed
miserably. Her son tells the world that my sons are dead, and says that his mother
alone knows the details of their death and burial. The rebellion that she masterminded
ended in defeat and my suspicions. Still her husband is high in favor with King Richard,
though her part in the rebellion is well known. For sure, she is an unreliable friend
and a doubtful ally. She seems to know everything, she seems to do nothing, and she
is never punished.

She explains she has not been able to write, and that she cannot visit me herself,
for she is cruelly imprisoned by her husband Lord Stanley, who was Richard’s true
friend, standing by him in the recent uprising. It turns out now that Stanley’s son
Lord Strange raised a small army in support of King Richard; and that all the whispers
that he was marching to support Henry Tudor were mistaken. His loyalty was never in
doubt. But there were enough men to testify that Lady Margaret’s agents had gone back
and forth to Brittany to summon her son Henry Tudor to claim the throne for
himself. There were spies who could confirm that her great counselor and friend Bishop
Morton persuaded the Duke of Buckingham to turn against his lord Richard. And there
were even men who could swear that she had made a pact with me, that my daughter should
marry her son, and the proof of that was Christmas Day in Rennes Cathedral when Henry
Tudor declared that he would be Elizabeth’s husband and swore that he would be King
of England; and all his entourage, my son Thomas Grey among them, knelt and swore
fealty to him as King of England.

I imagine that Margaret Beaufort’s husband Stanley must have had to talk fast and
persuasively to convince his anxious monarch that, though his wife is a rebel and
a plotter, he himself had never for a moment thought of the advantages that might
come to him if his stepson took the throne. But he seems to have done it. Stanley
“Sans Changer”
remains in favor with the usurper, and Margaret his wife is banished to her own house,
forbidden her usual servants, banned from writing or sending messages to anyone—especially
her son—and robbed of her lands and wealth and inheritance. But they are all given
to her husband on the condition that he keeps her under control.

For a powerful woman she does not seem much disheartened by her husband taking all
her wealth and all her lands into his own hands, and imprisoning her in her house,
swearing that she shall never write another letter and never stir another plot. She
is clearly right not to be too disheartened, for here she is, writing to
me and plotting again. From this I think I can assume that Stanley
“Sans Changer”
is faithfully and loyally following his own best interests as perhaps he has always
done—promising fealty to the king on one hand, letting his wife plot with rebels on
the other.

Your Grace, dear sister—for so I should call you who is mother to the girl who will
be my daughter, and who will be mother to my son
, she starts. She is flowery in style and emotional in life. There is a smudge on
the letter as if she has overflowed with tears of joy at the thought of the wedding
of our children. I look at it with distaste. Even if I did not suspect her of the
wickedest of betrayals, I would not warm to this.

I am much concerned to hear from my son that your son Thomas Grey thought to leave
his court and had to be persuaded to return to them. Your Grace, dear sister, what
can be the matter with your boy? Can you assure him that the interests of your family
and mine are the same and that he is a beloved companion to my son Henry? Please,
I beg of you, command him as a loving mother to endure the troubles that they have
in exile to make certain of the rewards when they triumph. If he has heard anything,
or fears anything, he should speak to my son Henry Tudor, who can put his mind at
rest. The world is full of gossips and Thomas would not want to appear a turncoat
or fainthearted now.

I hear nothing, locked away as I am, but I understand that the tyrant Richard is planning
to have
your older girls at his court. I do beg you not to allow them to go. Henry would not
like his betrothed to be at the court of his enemy, exposed to every temptation, and
I know you as a mother would feel such revulsion to have your daughter in the hands
of the man who murdered your two sons. Think of putting your girls in the power of
the man who murdered their brothers! They themselves must be unable to bear the sight
of him. Better to stay in sanctuary than force them to kiss his hand and live under
the command of his wife. I know you will feel this as I do: it is impossible.

For your own sake at least, command your girls to stay with you quietly in the country
if Richard will release them, or peacefully in sanctuary if he will not, until that
Happy Day when Elizabeth shall be queen of her own court and my beloved daughter as
well as yours.

Your truest friend in all the world, imprisoned just as you are,

Lady Margaret Stanley

I take the letter to my Elizabeth and watch her smile broaden until she laughs outright.
“Oh my God, what a crone!” she exclaims.

“Elizabeth! This is your mother-in-law to be!”

“Yes, on that Happy Day. Why does she not want us to go to court? Why do we have to
be protected from temptation?”

I take back the letter and reread it. “Richard will
know that you are betrothed to Henry Tudor. Tudor announced it so that everybody knows.
Richard knows that will put the Rivers affinity on Tudor’s side. The House of York
follows you now. You are our only heir. It would be in his interest to take all you
girls to court and marry you well within his own family and friends. That way Tudor
is isolated once more, and you York heiresses are married to commoners. The last thing
Lady Margaret wants is you dancing off with some handsome lord, leaving her Henry
looking like a fool, without his bride and without your supporters.”