The White Queen (54 page)

She is about to interrupt, but I raise my hand. “Truly, Elizabeth, I don’t want you
being named as his mistress, especially if you hope to be his wife.”

“But I love him,” she says simply, as if that is all that matters.

I look at her and I know my face is hard. “You can love him,” I say. “But if you want
him to marry you and make you his queen, you will have more to do than simply loving.”

She holds his letter to her heart. “He loves me.”

“He may do, but he will not marry you if there is a whisper of gossip against you.
Nobody gets to be Queen of England by being lovable. You will have to play your cards
right.”

She takes a breath. She is no fool, my daughter, and she is a York through and through.
“Tell me what I have to do,” she says.

I bid my daughters farewell on a dark day in February and watch their guard trot off
through the mist that swirls around us for all of the day. They are out of sight in
moments, as if they had disappeared into cloud, into water, and the thud of the hoofbeats
is muffled and then silenced.

The house seems very empty without the older girls. And in missing them, I find my
thoughts and my prayers go to my boys, my dead baby George, my lost boy Edward, and
my absent boy Richard. I have heard nothing of Edward since he went into the Tower,
and nothing of Richard since that first letter when he told me he was doing well and
answering to the name Peter.

Despite my own caution, despite my own fears, I start to hope. I start to think that
if King Richard marries Elizabeth and makes her his queen I will be welcomed at court
again, I will take up my place as My Lady, the Queen’s Mother. I will make sure that
Richard is trustworthy, and then I will send for my son.

If Richard is true to his word and names him as his heir, then we will be restored:
my son in the place he was born to, my daughter as Queen of England. It will not have
come out as Edward and I thought it would
when we had a Prince of Wales and a Duke of York and we thought, like young fools,
that we would live forever. But it will have come out well enough. If Elizabeth can
marry for love and be Queen of England, if my son can be king, after Richard, then
it will have come out well enough.

When I am at court, and in my power, I shall set men to find the body of my son, whether
it is under the convenient stair—as Henry Tudor assures us—or buried in the river,
as he corrects himself, whether it has been left in some dark lumber room, or is hidden
on holy ground in the chapel. I shall find his body, and trace his killers. I shall
know what took place: whether he was kidnapped and died by accident in the struggle,
whether he was taken away and died of ill health, whether he was murdered in the Tower
and buried there, as Henry Tudor is so very certain. I shall learn of his end, and
bury him with honor, and order Masses for his soul to be said forever.

Elizabeth writes to me briefly of the queen’s worsening health. She says no more—she
need say no more—we both realize that if the queen dies, there will be no need for
an annulment or the settlement of Queen Anne in an abbey; she will be out of the way
in the easiest and most convenient way possible. The queen is afflicted with sorrows,
she weeps for hours without cause, and the king does not come near her. My daughter
records this as the queen’s loyal maid-in-waiting and does not tell me if she slips
from the sick chamber to walk with the king in the gardens, if the buttercups in the
hedgerow and the daisies on the lawn remind her and him that life is fleeting and
joyful, just as they remind the queen that it is fleeting and sad.

Then one morning in the middle of March I awake to a sky unnaturally dark, to a sun
quite obscured by a circle of darkness. The hens won’t come out of their house; the
ducks put their heads under their wings and squat on the banks of the river. I take
my two little girls outside and we wander uneasily, looking at the horses in the field
who lie down and then lumber up again, as if they don’t know whether it is night or
day.

“Is it an omen?” asks Bridget, who of all of my children seeks to see the will of
God in everything.

“It is a movement of the heavens,” I say. “I have seen it happen with the moon before,
but never with the sun. It will pass.”

“Does it mean an omen for the House of York?” Catherine echoes. “Like the three suns
at Towton?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I don’t think any of us are in danger. Would you feel
it in your heart, if your sister was in trouble?”

Bridget looks thoughtful for a moment then, prosaic child, she shakes her head. “Only
if God spoke to me very loud,” she says. “Only if He shouted and the priest said it
was Him.”

“Then I think we have nothing to fear,” I say. I have no sense of foreboding, though
the darkened sun makes the world around us eerie and unfamiliar.

Indeed, it is not for three days that John Nesfield comes riding to Heytesbury with
a black standard before him and the news that the queen, after a long illness, is
dead. He comes to tell me, but he makes sure to spread the news throughout the country,
and Richard’s other servants will be doing the same. They will all emphasize that
there has been a long illness, and the queen has at last gone to her reward in heaven,
mourned by a devoted and loving husband.

“Of course, some say she was poisoned,” Cook says cheerfully to me. “That’s what they’re
saying in Salisbury market, anyway. The carrier told me.”

“How ridiculous! Who would poison the queen?” I ask.

“They say it was the king himself,” Cook says, putting her head to one side and looking
wise, as if she knows great secrets of the court.

“Murder his wife?” I ask. “They think he would murder his wife of a dozen years? All
of a sudden?”

Cook shakes her head. “They don’t have a good word to say of him in Salisbury,” she
remarks. “They liked him well enough at first and they thought he would bring justice
and fair wages for the common man, but since he puts northern lords over everything—well,
there’s nothing they would not say against him.”

“You can tell them that the queen was always frail, and that she never recovered from
the loss of her son,” I say firmly.

The Cook beams at me. “And am I to say nothing about who he might take as his next
queen?”

I am silent. I had not realized that gossip had gone so far. “And nothing about that,”
I say flatly.

I have been waiting for this letter ever since they brought me the news that Queen
Anne was dead and the world was saying that Richard would marry my daughter. It comes,
tearstained as always, from the hand of Lady Margaret.

To Lady Elizabeth Grey

Your Ladyship,

It has come to my notice that your daughter Elizabeth, the declared bastard of the
late King Edward, has sinned against God and her own vows and dishonored herself with
her uncle the usurper Richard, a process so wrong and unnatural that the very angels
hide their gaze. Accordingly, I have advised my son Henry Tudor, rightful King of
England, that he should not bestow his hand in marriage on such a girl alike dishonored
by Act of Parliament and by her own behavior, and I have arranged for him to marry
a young lady of birth far superior and of behavior far more Christian.

I am sorry for you that in your widowhood and your humiliation you should have to
bow your head under yet another sorrow, the shame of your daughter, and I assure you
that I shall think of you in my prayers when I mention the foolish and the vain of
this world.

I remain your friend in Christ,

To whom I pray for you in your old age that you may learn true wisdom and womanly
dignity,

Lady Margaret Stanley

I laugh at the pomposity of the woman, but as my laughter drains away, I feel cold,
a shiver of cold, a foreboding. Lady Margaret has spent her life waiting for the throne
that I called my own. I have every reason to think that her son Henry Tudor will also
go on waiting for the throne of England, calling himself king, drawing to him the
outcasts, the rebels, the disaffected: men
who cannot live in England. He will go on haunting the York throne until he is dead,
and it may be better that he should be brought to battle and killed sooner rather
than later.

Richard, especially with my daughter at his side, can face down any criticism and
should certainly win any battle against any force that Henry could bring. But the
cold prickling of the nape of my neck tells me otherwise. I pick up the letter again
and I feel the iron conviction of this Lancaster heiress. This is a woman whose belly
is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly
thirty years. I would do well to be wary of her now that she has decided that I am
so powerless she need not pretend friendship anymore.

I wonder who she intends for Henry’s wife now? I guess she will be casting about for
an heiress, maybe the Herbert girl, but nobody but my daughter can bring the love
of England and the loyalty of the York House to the Tudor claimant. Lady Margaret
may vent her spite, but it does not matter. If Henry wants to rule England, he will
have to ally with York; they will have to deal with us one way or another. I take
up my pen.

Dear Lady Stanley,

I am sorry indeed to read that you have been listening to such slander and gossip
and that this should cause you to doubt the good faith and honor of my daughter Elizabeth,
which is, as it has always been, above question. I have no doubt that somber
reflection on your part, and on his, will remind you and your son that England has
no other York heiress of her importance.

She is beloved of her uncle as she was beloved of her aunt, as she should be; but
only the whispers of the gutter would suggest any impropriety.

I thank you for your prayers, of course. I will assume that the betrothal stands for
its many manifest advantages; unless you seriously wish to withdraw, which I think
so unlikely that I send you my best wishes and my thanks for your prayers, which I
know are especially welcome to God coming from such a humble and worthy heart.

Elizabeth R

I sign “Elizabeth R,” which I never do these days; but as I fold the paper and drip
wax and stamp it with my seal, I find I am smiling at my arrogance. “Elizabeth Regina,”
I say to the parchment. “And I shall be My Lady, the Queen’s Mother, while you are
still Lady Stanley with a son dead on the battlefield. Elizabeth R. So take that,”
I say to the letter. “You old gargoyle.”

Mother, you must come to court,
Elizabeth writes to me in a letter smudged in haste, folded twice, and double sealed.

It is all going terribly wrong. His Grace the king thinks he must go to London and
tell the lords that he will not marry me, that he has never had any intention of marrying
me, in order to scotch the rumors that he poisoned the poor queen. Wicked people are
saying that he was determined to marry me and would not wait for her death or agreement,
and now he thinks he has to announce that he is nothing to me but my uncle.