The White Queen: A Novel

by Philippa Gregory

  And then I think of how my mother will take her loss, and that it will be me who has to tell her that he had a traitor’s death for fighting in my cause, after fighting all his life for the other side. I think of all of this, and I feel weary and sick to my soul, wearier and sicker than I have ever felt in all my life, even worse than when Father came home from the battle of Towton and said that our cause was lost, even worse than when my husband never came home at all from St. Albans and they told me he died bravely in a charge against the Yorks.

  I feel worse than I have ever done before, because now I know that it is easier to take a country into war than to bring it to live at peace, and a country at war is a bitter place to live, a risky place to have daughters, and a dangerous place to hope for a son.

  I am welcomed in London as a heroine, and the city is all for Edward; but it will make no difference if that butcher Warwick kills him in prison. I make my home for now in the well-fortified Tower of London with my girls and my Grey sons—they are obedient, scared as puppies now that they see that not every battle is won, and not every beloved son comes safe home. They are shaken by the loss of their uncle John and they ask every day for the safety of the king. We are all grieving: my girls have lost a good grandfather and a beloved uncle, and know that their father is in dreadful danger. I write to my kinsman the Duke of Burgundy and ask him to prepare a safe hiding place in Flanders for me, my Grey sons, and my royal girls. I tell him that we must find a little town, one of no importance, and a poor family who can pretend to take in English cousins. I must find somewhere for my daughters to hide that they will never be found.

  The duke swears he will do more than this. He will support the City if they turn out for me and for York. He promises men and an army. He asks me what news I have of the king. Is he safe?

  I cannot write to reassure him. The news of my husband is inexplicable. He is a king in captivity, just like the poor King Henry. How can such a thing be? How can such a thing continue? Warwick is still holding him at Middleham Castle, and persuading the lords to deny that Edward was ever king. There are those who say that Edward will be offered the choice: either to abdicate his throne for his brother, or climb the scaffold. Warwick will have either the crown or his head. There are those who say it is only days now before we hear that Edward is thrown down and fled to Burgundy; or dead. I have to listen to such gossip in the place of news, and I wonder if I am to be widowed in the same month that I have lost my father and my brother. And how shall I bear that?

  My mother comes to me in the second week of my vigil. She comes from our old home at Grafton, dry-eyed and somehow bowed, as if she has taken a wound to her belly and is bent over the pain. The moment that I see her I know that I won’t have to tell her that she is a widow. She knows she has lost the great love of her life, and her hand rests on the knot of her girdle all the time, as if to hold in a mortal wound. She knows that her husband is dead, but no one has told her how he died, or why. I have to take her into my private room, close the door on the children, and find the words to describe the death of her husband and son. And it was a shameful death, for good men, at the hand of a traitor.

  “I am so sorry,” I say. I kneel at her feet and clasp her hands. “I am so sorry, Mother. I will have Warwick’s head for this. I will see George dead.”

  She shakes her head. I look up at her and see lines on her face that I swear were never there before. She has lost the glow of a contented woman, and her joy has fallen away from her face and left weary lines.

  “No,” she says. She pats my plaited hair and says, “Hush, hush. Your father would not have wanted you to grieve. He knew the risks well enough. It was not his first battle, God knows. Here.” She reaches inside her gown and gives me a handwritten note. “His last letter to me. He sends me his blessing and his love to you. He wrote it as they told him he would be released. I think he knew the truth.”

  My father’s handwriting is clear and bold as his speech. I cannot believe I will not hear the one and see the other again and again.

  “And John…” She breaks off. “John is a loss to me and to his generation,” she says quietly. “Your brother John had his whole life before him.”

  She pauses. “When you raise a child and he becomes a man, you start to think that he is safe, that you are safe from heartbreak. When a child gets through all the illnesses of childhood, when a plague year comes and takes your neighbors’ children and yet your boy lives, you start to think he will be safe forever. Every year you think another year away from danger, another year towards becoming a man. I raised John, I raised all my children, breathless with hope. And we married him to that old woman for her title and her fortune, and we laughed knowing that he would outlive her. It was a great joke to us, knowing that he was such a young husband, to such an old woman. We laughed to make mock of her age, knowing her to be so much closer to the grave than he. And now she will see him buried and keep her fortune. How can such a thing be?”

  She breathes a long sigh, as if she is too tired for anything more. “And yet I should know. Of all the people in the world, I should have known. I have the Sight, I should have seen it all, but some things are too dark to foresee. These are hard times, and England is a country of sorrows. No mother can be sure that she will not bury her sons. When a country is at war, cousin against cousin, brother against brother, no boy is safe.”

  I sit back on my heels. “The king’s mother, Duchess Cecily, shall know this pain. She will have this pain that you are feeling. She will know the loss of her son George,” I spit. “I swear it. She will see him die the death of a liar and a turncoat. You have lost a son and so shall she, my word on it.”

  “So will you, by that rule,” my mother warns me. “More and more deaths, and more feuds, and more fatherless children, and more widowed brides. Do you want to mourn for your missing son in future days, as I am doing now?”

  “We can reconcile after George,” I say stubbornly. “They must be punished for this. George and Warwick are dead men from this day. I swear it, Mother. They are dead men from this day.” I rise up and go to the table. “I will tear a corner from his letter,” I say. “I will write their deaths in my own blood on my father’s letter.”

  “You are wrong,” she says quietly, but she lets me cut a corner from the letter and give it back to her.

  There is a knock at the door and I wipe the tears from my face before I let my mother call “Enter,” but the door is flung open without ceremony, and Edward, my darling Edward, strolls into the room as if he had been out for a day’s hunting and thought he would surprise me by coming home early.

  “My God! It is you! Edward! It is you? It is really you?”

  “It is me,” he confirms. “I greet you too, My Lady Mother Jacquetta.”

  I fling myself at him, and as his arms come around me, I smell his familiar scent and feel the strength of his chest, and I sob at the very touch of him. “I thought you were in prison,” I say. “I thought he was going to kill you.”

  “Lost his nerve,” he says shortly, trying to stroke my back and take down my hair at the same time. “Sir Humphrey Neville raised Yorkshire for Henry, and when Warwick went against him nobody supported him; he needed me. He started to see that nobody would have George for king, and I would not sign away my throne. He hadn’t bargained for that. He didn’t dare behead me. To say truth, I don’t think he could find a headsman to do it. I am crowned king: he can’t just lop off my head as if it were firewood. I am ordained; my body is sacred. Not even Warwick dares to kill a king in cold blood.

  “He came to me with the paper of my abdication, and I told him that I couldn’t see my way to signing. I was happy to stay in his house. The cook is excellent and the cellar better. I told him I was happy to move my whole court to Middleham Castle if he wanted me as a guest forever. I said I could see no reason why my rule should not run from his castle, at his expense. But that I would never deny who I am.”

  He laughs, his loud confident laugh. “S
weetheart, you should have seen him. He thought if he had me in his power, that he had the crown at his bidding. But he found me unhelpful. It was as good as a mumming to see him puzzle as to what to do. Once I heard you were safely in the Tower I wasn’t afraid of anything. He thought I would break when he took hold of me, and I didn’t even bend. He thought I was still the little boy who adored him. He didn’t realize that I am a grown man. I was a most agreeable guest. I ate well, and when friends came to see me, I demanded that they be entertained royally. First I asked to walk in the gardens, then in the forest. Then I said I should like to ride out, and what would be the harm in letting me go hunting? He started to let me ride out. My council came and demanded to see me, and he did not know how to refuse them. I met them and passed the odd law or two so that everyone knew nothing had changed, I was still reigning as king. It was hard not to laugh in his face. He thought to imprison me and found instead he was merely bearing the cost of a full court. Sweetheart, I asked for a choir while I dined, and he could not see how to refuse me. I hired dancers and players. He started to see that merely holding the king is not enough: you have to destroy him. You have to kill him. But I gave him nothing; he knew I would die before I gave him anything.

  “Then one fine morning—four days ago—his grooms made the mistake of giving me my own horse, my war horse Fury, and I knew he could outrun anything in their stables. So I thought I would ride a little farther, and a little faster than usual, that’s all. I thought I might be able to ride to you—and I have done.”

  “It is over?” I ask incredulously. “You got away?”

  He grins in his pride like a boy. “I would like to see the horse that could catch me on Fury,” he said. “They had left him in the stable for two weeks feeding him oats. I was at Ripon before I could draw breath. I couldn’t have pulled him up if I had wanted to!”

  I laugh, sharing his delight. “Dear God, Edward, I have been so afraid! I thought I would never see you again. Beloved, I thought I would never ever see you again.”

  He kisses my head and strokes my back. “Did I not say when we first married that I will always come back to you? Did I not say I would die in my bed with you as my wife? Have you not promised to give me a son? D’you think any prison could keep me from you, ever?”

  I press my face to his chest as if I would bury myself into his body. “My love. My love. So will you go back with your guards and arrest him?”

  “No, he’s too powerful. He still commands most of the north. I hope we can make peace again. He knows this rebellion has failed. He knows it is over. He is cunning enough to know that he has lost. He and George and I will have to patch together some reconciliation. They will beg my pardon, and I will forgive them. But he has learned that he cannot keep me and hold me. I am king now; he can’t reverse that. He is sworn to obey me as I have sworn to rule. I am his king. It is done. And the country has no appetite for another war between more rival kings. I don’t want a war. I have sworn to bring the country justice and peace.”

  He pulls the final pins from my hair and rubs his face against my neck. “I missed you,” he said. “And the girls. I had a bad moment or two when they first took me into the castle and I was in a cell with no windows. And I am sorry about your father and brother.”

  He raises his head and looks at my mother. “I am more sorry for your loss than I can say, Jacquetta,” he says frankly. “These are the fortunes of war, and we all know the risks; but they took two good men when they took your husband and son.”

  My mother nods. “And what will be your terms for reconciliation with the man who killed my husband and my son? I take it you will forgive him that also?”

  Edward makes a grimace at the hardness in her voice. “You will not like it,” he warns us both. “I shall make Warwick’s nephew Duke of Bedford. He is Warwick’s heir; I have to give Warwick a stake in our family, the royal family; I have to tie him in to us.”

  “You give him my old title?” my mother asks incredulously. “The Bedford title? My first husband’s name? To a traitor?”

  “I don’t care if his nephew has a dukedom,” I say hastily. “It is Warwick who killed my father, not the boy. I don’t care about his nephew.”

  Edward nods. “There is more,” he says uncomfortably. “I shall give our daughter Elizabeth in marriage to young Bedford. She will make the alliance firm.”

  I turn on him. “Elizabeth? My Elizabeth?”

  “Our Elizabeth,” he corrects me. “Yes.”

  “You will promise her in marriage, a child of not yet four years old, to the family of the man who murdered her grandfather?”

  “I will. This has been a cousins’ war. It has to be a cousins’ reconciliation. And you, beloved, will not stop me. I have to bring Warwick to peace with me. I have to give him a great share of the wealth of England. This way I even give him a chance at his line inheriting the throne.”

  “He is a traitor and a murderer, and you think you will marry my little daughter to his nephew?”

  “I do,” he says firmly.

  “I swear that it will never happen,” I say fiercely. “And more: I tell you this. I foresee it will never happen.”

  He smiles. “I bow to your superior foreknowledge,” he says, and sweeps a magnificent bow at my mother and me. “And only time will prove your foreseeing true or false. But in the meantime, while I am King of England, with the power to give my daughter in marriage to whom I wish, I shall always do my very best to stop your enemies ducking you two as a pair of witches, or strangling you at the crossroads. And I tell you, as I am king, the only way to make you and every woman and her son in this kingdom as safe as she should be is to find a way to stop this warfare.”

  AUTUMN 1469

  Warwick returns to court as a beloved friend and loyal mentor. We are to be as a family that suffers occasional quarrels, but loves one another withal. Edward does this rather well. I greet Warwick with a smile as warm as a frozen fountain dripping with ice. I am expected to behave as if this man is not the murderer of my father and brother, and the jailer of my husband. I do as I am commanded: not a word of my anger escapes me, but Warwick knows without any telling that he has made a dangerous enemy for the rest of his life.

  He knows I can say nothing, and his small bow when he first greets me is triumphant. “Your Grace,” he says suavely.

  As ever with him, I feel at a disadvantage, like a girl. He is a great man of the world, and he was planning the fortunes of this kingdom when I was minding my manners to my lady Grey, my husband’s mother, and obeying my first husband. He looks at me as if I should still be feeding the hens at Grafton.

  I want to be icy, but I fear I appear only sulky. “Welcome back to court,” I say unwillingly.

  “You are always gracious,” he replies with a smile. “Born to be queen.”

  My son Thomas Grey makes a small exclamation of anger, raging like the boy he is, and takes himself out of the room.

  Warwick beams at me. “Ah, the young,” he says. “A promising boy.”

  “I am only glad he was not with his grandfather and beloved uncle at Edgecote Moor,” I say, hating him.

  “Oh, so am I!”

  He may make me feel like a fool, and like a woman who can do nothing; but what I can do, I will. In my jewelry box is a dark locket of black tarnished silver, and inside it, locked in the darkness, I have his name, Richard Neville, and that of George, Duke of Clarence, written in my blood on the piece of paper from the corner of my father’s last letter. These are my enemies. I have cursed them. I will see them dead at my feet.

  WINTER 1469–70

  At the very darkest hour of the longest night in the heart of the winter solstice, my mother and I go down to the River Thames, black as glass. The path from the Palace of Westminster garden runs alongside the water, and the river is high tonight, but very dark in the darkness. We can hardly see it; but we can hear it, washing against the jetty and slapping against the walls, and we can feel it, a black wide presence, b
reathing like a great sinuous animal, heaving gently, like the sea. This is our element: I inhale the smell of the cold water like someone scenting her own land after a long exile.

  “I have to have a son,” I say to my mother.

  And she smiles and says, “I know.”

  In her pocket she has three charms on three threads and, careful as a fisherman baiting a line, she throws each of them into the river and gives me the thread to hold. I hear a little splash as each one falls into the water, and I am reminded of the golden ring that I drew from the river five years ago at home.

  “You choose,” she says to me. “You choose which one you draw out.” She spreads out the three threads in my left hand and I hold them tightly.

  The moon comes out from behind the cloud. It is a waning moon, fat and silvery; it draws a line of light along the dark water, and I choose one thread and hold it in my right hand. “This one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”