The White Queen (52 page)

She shrugs. “As long as we get out of here, I am happy to live with you in the country,
Lady Mother.”

“I know,” I say. “But Richard wants you older girls at court, where people can see
you are safe in his keeping. You and Cecily and Anne shall go, and Bridget and Catherine
will stay with me. He will want people to know that I allowed you be with him, that
I consider you safe in his care. And I would rather you were out in the world than
cooped up at home.”

“Why?” she asks, turning her gray gaze on me. “Tell me. I don’t like the sound of
this. You will be plotting something, Lady Mother, and I don’t want to be in the center
of plots anymore.”

“You are the heir to the House of York,” I say simply. “You will always be at the
center of plots.”

“But where will you go? Why won’t you come to court with us?”

I shake my head. “I couldn’t bear to see that skinny stick Anne Neville in my place,
wearing my gowns cut
down to her size with my jewels around her scrawny neck. I couldn’t curtsey to her
as Queen of England. I couldn’t do it, Elizabeth, not to save my life. And Richard
will never be a king to me. I have seen a true king and loved him. I have been a true
queen. These are mere imposters to me—I cannot bear them.

“I am to be put in the charge of John Nesfield, who has guarded us here. I will live
at his manor of Heytesbury, and I think it will suit me very well. You can go to court
and you girls can get a little court training. It is time you were away from your
mother and out in the world.”

She comes to me like a little girl, and kisses me. “I shall like it better than being
a prisoner,” she says. “Though it will be so strange to be away from you. I have never
been away from you in all my life.” Then she pauses. “But will you not be lonely?
Won’t you miss us too much?”

I shake my head and draw her close to whisper, “I won’t be lonely, for I hope that
Richard will come home. I hope to see my boy again.”

“And Edward?” she asks.

I meet her hopeful gaze without evasion. “Elizabeth, I think he must be dead, for
I cannot see who would have taken him and not told us. I think Buckingham and Henry
Tudor must have had both of the boys killed, not knowing that we had Richard safely
hidden, thinking to open their way to the throne and put the blame on King Richard.
If Edward is alive, then pray God he will find his way to me. And there will always
be a candle in the window to light his way home, and my door will never be locked,
in case one day it is his hand on the latch.”

Her eyes are filled with tears. “But you don’t expect him anymore?”

“I don’t expect him,” I say.

My new home of Heytesbury is in a pretty part of the country, Wiltshire, in the open
rolling countryside of Salisbury Plain. John Nesfield is an easy guardian. He sees
the benefits of being at the side of the king; he doesn’t really want to play nursemaid
over me. Once he was assured of my safety and judged that I would not attempt to run
away, he took himself off to the king at Sheriff Hutton, where Richard has established
his great court in the north. He is making a palace fit to match Greenwich among the
people of the north who respect him and love his wife, the last Neville.

Nesfield orders that I am to run his house as I please and very quickly I have the
furniture and things around me that I request from the royal palaces. I have a proper
nursery and a schoolroom for the girls. I am growing my favorite fruits in the gardens,
and I have bought some good horses for the stables.

After so many months in sanctuary I wake every morning with a sense of utter delight
that I can open the door and walk out into the air. It is a warm spring and to hear
the birds singing, to order a horse from the stables and ride out is a joy so intense
that I feel reborn. I set duck’s eggs under the hens and watch the ducklings
hatch and waddle about the yard. I laugh when I see them take to the duck pond with
the hens scolding on the bank, fearful of water. I watch the young foals in the paddock
and talk with the master of horse as to which might make a good riding horse and which
should be broke to the cart. I go out in the fields with the shepherd and see the
new lambs. I talk with the cowman about the little calves and when they should be
weaned from their mothers. I become again what I was once before, an English country
lady with her mind on the land.

The younger girls go half mad in their release from confinement. Every day I catch
them doing something forbidden: swimming in the swift deep river, climbing the haystacks
and ruining the hay, up in the apple trees breaking off the blossom, running into
the field with the bull and dashing to the gate, screaming when he lifts his big head
and looks at them. They cannot be punished for such an overflow of joy. They are like
calves released into the field for the first time in their lives. They have to kick
up their heels and run about, and don’t know what to do to express their amazement
at the height of the sky and the wideness of the world. They are eating twice what
they ate in sanctuary. They hang around the kitchen and badger the cook for scraps,
and the dairymaids delight in giving them fresh-churned butter to eat on hot bread.
They have become lighthearted children again, no longer prisoners, afraid of the very
light.

I am in the stable yard, dismounting after a morning
ride, when I am surprised to see Nesfield himself ride up to the main door of the
house. Seeing my horse, he turns to come round to the yard and gets off his hunter,
throwing the reins to a groom. From the very way he dismounts, heavily and with his
shoulders bowed, I know that something bad has happened. My hand goes out to my horse’s
neck and I take a handful of thick mane for comfort.

“What is it, Sir John? You look very grave.”

“I thought I should come and tell you the news,” he says shortly.

“Elizabeth? Not my Elizabeth?”

“She is safe and well,” he assures me. “It is the king’s son, Edward, God keep him,
God bless him. God take him to his heavenly throne.”

I feel a pulse in my temple hammer like a warning. “He is dead?”

“He was always frail,” Nesfield says brokenly. “He was never a strong boy. But at
the investiture he looked so well we called him Prince of Wales and thought he was
certain to inherit—” He breaks off, remembering that I too had a son who was Prince
of Wales and seemed certain to inherit. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean . .
. anyway, the king has announced mourning for the court. I thought you should know
at once.”

I nod gravely, but my mind is racing. Is this a death from Melusina? Is this a working
of the curse? Is this the proof that I said we would see—that the son and heir of
the murderer of my son and heir would die,
and thus I would know him? Is this her sign to me that Richard is the killer of my
son?

“I will send the king and Queen Anne my sympathy,” I say, and turn to go to the house.

“He has no heir,” John Nesfield repeats as if he cannot believe the gravity of the
news he has brought me. “All this, all that he has done, his defense of the kingdom,
his . . . his acceptance of his throne, all this that he has done, all the fighting
. . . and now he has no heir to follow him.”

“Yes,” I agree, my words like frozen stones. “He did all this for nothing, and he
has lost his son and his line will die out.”

I hear from
my daughter Elizabeth that the court falls into mourning as if it was an open grave,
and none of them can bear to live without their prince. Richard will not hear laughter
or music; they have to creep about with their eyes on the ground and there are no
games or sports, though the weather is getting warmer and they are in the very heart
of greening England, the hills and the dales all around them are teeming with game.
Richard is inconsolable. His twelve-year marriage to Anne Neville gave him only one
child, and now he has lost him. It cannot be possible that they will have another
at this late stage and, even if they do, a baby in the cradle is no guarantee of a
Prince of Wales in this savage England that we Yorks have made. Who knows better than
Richard that a boy must be fully grown and strong
enough to fight for his rights, to fight for his life, if he is to be King of England?

He names as his heir Edward the son of his brother, George of Clarence, the only York
boy known to be left in the world; but in a few months I hear a rumor that he is to
be disinherited. This comes as no surprise to me. Richard has realized that the boy
is too weak to hold the throne, as we all knew. George, Duke of Clarence, had a fatal
mixture of vanity and ambition and outright madness: no son of his could be a king.
He was a sweet, smiling baby but slow of wit, poor child. Anyone who wants the throne
of England will have to be fast as a snake and wise as a serpent. He will have to
be a boy born to be a prince, reared in a court. He will have to be a boy accustomed
to danger, raised to be brave. George’s poor half-wit boy could never do it. But if
not him, then who? For Richard must name an heir and leave an heir, and the House
of York is now nothing but girls, for all that Richard knows. Only I know for sure
that there is a prince, like one in a fairy tale, waiting in Tournai, living like
a poor boy, studying his books and music, learning languages, watched over at a distance
by his aunt. A flower of York, growing strong in foreign soil and biding his time.
And now he is the only heir to the York throne, and if his uncle knew he was alive,
perhaps he would name him as his heir.

I write to Elizabeth.

I hear the news from court and I am troubled by one thing—do you think that the death
of Richard’s
son is Melusina’s sign to us that Richard is the murderer of our boys? You see him
daily—do you think he knows it is our curse that is his destruction? Does he look
like a man who has brought this grief on his own family? Or do you think that this
death was just chance, and it was another man who killed our boy, and it will be his
son who must die for our revenge?

I am waiting for my girls to come home from court on a frosty afternoon in the middle
of January. I expected them in time for dinner and I am striding up and down on my
doorstep, blowing on my gloved fingers to keep my hands warm as the sun sets, red
as a Lancaster rose, over the hills to the west. I hear hoofbeats and I look down
the lane and there they come, a great guard for my three girls, almost a royal guard,
and the three bobbing heads and rippling dresses in the middle. In a moment their
horses are pulled up and they have tumbled off and I am kissing bright cheeks and
cold noses quite indiscriminately and holding their hands and exclaiming at how tall
they have grown and how all equally beautiful they are.

They romp into the hall and fall on their dinner as if they are starving, and I watch
them as they eat. Elizabeth has never been in better looks. She bloomed, once out
of sanctuary and out of fear, as I knew she would. The color is high in her cheeks,
her eyes sparkle, and her clothes! I take another disbelieving look at her clothes:
the embroidery and the brocade, the insetting of precious stones. These are gowns
as good as I wore when I
was queen. “Good God, Elizabeth,” I say. “Where do you get your gowns from? This is
as fine as anything I had when I was Queen of England.”

Her eyes fly to mine, and her smile dies on her face. Cecily gives an abrupt snort
of laughter. Elizabeth rounds on her. “You can shut your mouth. We agreed.”

“Elizabeth!”

“Mother, you don’t know what she has been like. She is not fit to be maid-in-waiting
to a queen. All she does is gossip.”

“Now girls, I sent you to court to learn elegance, not to quarrel like fishwives.”

“Ask her if she’s been learning elegance!” Cecily whispers loudly. “Ask Elizabeth
how elegant she is.”

“I certainly shall, when we are talking and you two are in bed,” I say firmly. “And
that will be early if you cannot speak politely one to another.” I turn from her to
Anne. “Now, Anne.” My little Anne looks up at me. “Have you been studying your books?
And have you been working at your music?”