The White Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  I hug his arm. “My son, some things are safer left unsaid.”

  He turns to face me, his innocent face puzzled. “Lady Mother, if Mr. Warbeck is indeed who he said he was, if he is being allowed the run of the court for that reason, then he has a greater right to the throne than my father. He has a greater right to the throne than me.”

  “And that is exactly why we will never have this conversation,” I reply steadily.

  “If he is who he says he is, then you must be glad he is alive,” he pursues, with all the doggedness of a young man in pursuit of the truth. “You must be glad to see him. It must be as if he were snatched from death, almost as if he were risen from the dead. You must be happy to see him here, even if he never sits on the throne. Even if you pray that he never sits on the throne. Even if you want the throne for me.”

  I close my eyes so that he does not see the glow of my happiness. “I am,” I say shortly; and he is a wise young prince, for he does not speak of this again.

  We have dancing and celebrating, a joust and players. We have a choir sing most beautifully in the royal chapel, and we give away sweetmeats and gingerbread to two hundred poor children. The broken meats from the feast feed hundreds of men and women at the kitchen door for the twelve days. Henry and I lead out the dancers on the first day of Christmas, and I look behind me, down the line and see that Lady Katherine is dancing with her husband, and they are handclasped, both flushed, the handsomest couple in the room.

  Every day provides a new entertainment. We have a masque hunt led by a great giant of a man playing the Spirit of the Greenwood on a big bay horse, we have mummers and a performance of strange tall men, Egyptians, who eat live coals and are so terrifying that Mary ducks her head into my lap and Margaret cries and even Harry leans back in his little chair to feel my comforting hand on his shoulder. And all through the dancing and masquing and jockeying for position, there is Lady Katherine Huntly, the most beautiful woman at court, in her black velvet. There is my husband, quite unable to take his eyes off her, there is her husband always half a pace to the left or the right of her, always with her, but only rarely her partner, exchanging one swift unreadable glance with her before she goes forwards to the king, in obedience to his beckoning wave, and curtseys to him and waits, composed and lovely, for him to make awkward conversation.

  I see that in this season of celebration he prefers to watch entertainers with her, or ride beside her, or dance with her, or listen to music, anything where he does not have to find words to say. He cannot speak to her. For what could he say? He cannot court her: she is the wife of his prisoner, a proclaimed traitor. He cannot flirt with her: there is something very sobering about her dark black gown and her luminously pale face; he cannot fall to his knees and declare his love for her, though truly I think this is what he would most naturally do, because that would be to dishonor her since she is in his keeping, to dishonor me, his faultless wife, and to dishonor his own name and position.

  “Shall I take her to one side and simply tell her that she must demand to go back to Scotland?” Maggie asks me directly. “Shall I tell her that she has to free you from this constant insult?”

  “No,” I say, taking a careful stitch of a plain shirt. “For I am not insulted.”

  “The whole court sees the king looking hound-eyed at her.”

  “Then they see a king making a fool of himself; he is not making one of me,” I say sharply.

  Maggie gasps at my daring to speak against the king.

  “It’s not her at fault,” I continue. We both glance across the sunny chamber to where Lady Katherine is sitting, hemming a collar for a poor man’s shirt, her dark head bowed over the task.

  “She has the king dancing to her tune like she was a tuppenny fiddle player,” Maggie says bluntly.

  “She does nothing to encourage him. And it keeps her husband safe. While the king is besotted with her, he will not kill her husband.”

  “It’s a price you’re prepared to pay?” Maggie whispers, shocked. “To keep the boy safe?”

  I cannot help but smile. “I think it’s a price that both she and I are paying. And I would do so much more than this, to keep this young man safe.”

  Maggie sees me to bed as if she were still my chief lady-in-waiting instead of a beloved visitor, and blows out the candle by my bedside before leaving the room. But I am wakened by the tolling of the chapel bell, and someone hammering on my door and then bursting into the room. My first thought is that despite his passive appearance, the boy has raised a secret army and is coming against Henry, and there is an assassin with a naked blade in the palace. I jump out of bed and grab at my robe and scream: “Where is Arthur? Where is the Prince of Wales? Guards! To the prince!”

  “Safe.” Maggie comes running in, her hair down in its nighttime plait, barefooted, wearing only her nightgown. “Richard has him safe. But there is a fire, you must come at once.”

  I throw a robe over my gown and hurry out of the door with her. There is a babel of noise and confusion, the bell ringing and men shouting and people running from one place to another. Without needing to say a word, Maggie and I dash side by side to the rooms of the royal nursery and there, thanks to God, are Harry, Margaret, and Mary, the two older ones tumbling down the stairs with their nursemaids shrieking to them to go as fast as they can but to be careful, and Mary big-eyed in the arms of her nursemaid. I drop to my knees and hold the oldest two to me, feeling their warm little bodies, feeling my heart thud with relief that they are safe. “There is a fire in the palace,” I tell them. “But we are not in danger. Come with me and we will go outside and watch them put it out.”

  A guard of yeomen go running past me, carrying flails and buckets of water. I tighten my grip on my children’s hands. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go outside and find your brother and your father.”

  We are halfway down the gallery to the great hall when the door to Lady Katherine’s room flies opens and she dashes out, her black cape flung over her white nightgown, her dark eyes wide, her hair a rich tumble around her face. When she sees me she halts. “Your Grace!” she says and curtseys low and stays down, waiting for me to go past her.

  “Never mind that, come at once,” I say. “There is a fire, come at once, Lady Katherine.”

  She hesitates.

  “Come!” I command. “And all your household with you.”

  She pulls her hood over her hair and hurries to walk behind me. As I go on with my children I just glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, the young man that is called Perkin Warbeck, wrapped in a cloak, slide from Lady Katherine’s inner private room and fall in behind us, with my household.

  I glance back to be sure, and he meets my gaze, his smile warm and confident. He shrugs and spreads his hands, a gesture wholly French, completely charming. “She is my wife,” he says simply. “I love her.”

  “I know,” I say, and hurry onwards.

  The front doors are wide open and they have made a line of people passing pails of water up the stairs. Henry is in the stable yard, making them hurry, drawing water from the well, urging the lad to work harder at the pump. It is painfully slow, we can smell the acrid hot smoke on the wind and the bell tolls loudly as the men shout for more water and say that the flames are taking hold. Arthur is there with Sir Richard, his guardian, wearing nothing but his breeches and a cape over his bare shoulders.

  “You’ll freeze to death!” I scold him.

  “Go and get a jacket from our traveling carts,” Maggie orders him. “They’re not unpacked yet.”

  Arthur ducks his head in obedience to her and goes to the stables.

  “It’s a terrible fire, in the wardrobe rooms, you’ll lose your gowns, and God knows how many jewels!” Henry shouts at me above the noise. I can hear a crack as the expensive window glass shatters in the heat and then there is a noise like a blast as one of the roof beams caves in and the flames shoot upwards like an explosion.

  “Is everyone out of the building?” I shout.


  “As far as we can tell,” Henry says. “Except . . . my love, I am sorry . . .” He steps away from the line of men frantically slopping pails of water one to another. “I am so sorry, Elizabeth, but I am afraid the boy is dead.”

  I glance behind me. Lady Katherine is there, but the boy has melted into the crowds of people milling around the front doors of the palace, starting back as another roar comes from the fire and flames lick out of an upper window.

  “Will you tell her?” Henry asks me. “There is no doubt that he is lost to the blaze. He was sleeping in the wardrobe rooms, of course, and they were locked. It’s where the fire started. We must prepare ourselves for his death. It’s a tragedy, it’s a terrible tragedy.”

  Something about Henry alerts me. He is strangely like our son Harry, when he looks at me with his blue eyes as honest and as open as a summer sky and tells me some great fib about his homework, or his sister, or his tutor.

  “The boy is dead?” I ask. “He has died in the fire?”

  Henry looks down, shrugs his shoulders, heaves a sigh, puts his hand over his eyes as if weeping. “He can’t have got out of that,” he said. “It was raging by the time anyone knew of it, it was like hell.” He puts out his hand to me. “He won’t have suffered,” he says. “Tell her that it would have been merciful and quick. Tell her that we are all so sorry.”

  “I’ll tell her what you say,” is all I promise, and I leave my husband to command the men who are bellowing for sand to fling on the flames and “Water! More water!” I walk back to where Lady Katherine is standing with Harry and Margaret beside her.

  “Lady Katherine . . .” I beckon her out of their hearing and she drops a quick kiss on my son’s copper head and comes to me.

  “The king believes that your husband was in his bed in the wardrobe rooms,” I say levelly. There is no intonation in my voice at all, I am as bland as milk.

  She nods, expressionless.

  “The king fears that he must have died in the blaze,” I say.

  “It is the wardrobe rooms that are on fire?”

  “It’s where the fire started, and it has taken hold.”

  Both of us absorb the curious fact that the fire should start not in the kitchen, nor the bakery, nor even in the hall where there are great fires always burning, but in the wardrobe rooms where the strictest watch is kept, where the only naked flames are the candles, which are lit when the seamstresses are at work and doused when they leave for the evening.

  “I suppose,” I observe, “that since the king thinks that your husband is dead, he will not look for him.”

  She is very still as she takes in this thought, then she looks up at me. “Your Grace: the king holds our son, my little boy. I could not leave without him. And my husband will not leave without us. I see that he has a chance to escape, but I don’t even have to ask him what he will do; he would never leave without us. He would have to be carried out half-dead to go without us.”

  “It may be that this chance has come from God,” I point out. “A fire, confusion, and the expectation of his death.”

  She meets my eyes. “He loves his son, and he loves me,” she says. “He is as honorable . . . as honorable as any prince. And he has come home now. He will not run away again.”

  Gently, I touch her hand. “Then he had better reappear soon, with some explanation,” I advise her shortly, and I walk away from her to stand with my children, and promise them that their ponies will have been taken from their stables and are safely turned out in the damp winter fields.

  In the morning the flames are doused down but the whole palace, even the gardens, smells terribly of wet timbers and dank smoke. The wardrobe rooms are the great storehouse of the palace and priceless treasures have been lost to the flames, not just the costly gowns and ceremonial costumes, but the jewels and the crowns, even the gold and silver plate for the table, some of the best pieces of furniture and stores of linen. Thousands of pounds of goods have been destroyed, and Henry pays men to sift through the embers for jewels and melted metals. They bring up all sorts of rescued objects, even the lead from the windows has melted and twisted out of shape. It is terrible what has been lost; it is amazing what has survived.

  “How did Warbeck ever get out of this alive?” Lady Margaret bluntly demands of Henry, as the three of us stand, looking at the ruin that was the king’s apartments, the charred roof beams open to the sky still smoking over our heads. “How could he survive it?”

  “He says that his door caught fire and he was able to kick it open,” Henry says shortly.

  “How could he?” she asks. “How could he not die of the smoke? How could he not be burned? Someone must have let him out.”

  “At least no one was killed,” I say. “It’s a miracle.”

  The two of them look at me, their faces like a mirror of suspicion and fear. “Someone must have let him out.” The king repeats his mother’s accusation.

  I wait.

  “I shall make inquiry among the servants,” Henry swears. “I will not have a traitor in my palace, in my own wardrobe rooms, I will not be betrayed under my own roof. Whoever is protecting the boy, whoever is defending him, should take warning. Whoever saved him from the fire is a traitor, as he is. I have spared him so far, I will not spare him forever.” Suddenly he turns on me. “Do you know where he was?”

  I look from his flushed angry face to his mother’s white one. “You would do better to discover who set the fire,” I say. “For someone has destroyed our most valuable goods to burn the boy out. Who would want him dead? It was no accidental blaze in those rooms, someone must have heaped up clothes and kindling and put a flame to it. It could only be someone trying to kill the boy. Who would that be?”

  It is the way that My Lady stammers that gives her away to me, listening for one of them to lie. “H—he h—has dozens of enemies, dozens,” she says flatly. “Everyone resents him as a traitor. Half the court would want to see him dead.”

  “By fire? In his bed?” I say, and my voice is as sharp as an accusation. She drops her glance to the ground, unable to meet my eye.

  “He’s a traitor,” she insists. “He is a lost soul, a brand fit for burning.”

  Henry glances at his mother, uncertain as to what we are saying. “Nobody can think that I wanted him dead,” he says. “All I have ever said is that it would have been better for Lady Katherine if she had never married him. No more than that. Nobody could think that I wanted his death.”

  His mother shakes her head. “Nobody could accuse you. But perhaps someone thought they were doing you a service. Protecting you from your own generosity. Saving you from yourself.”

  “If he had died, then Lady Katherine would be a widow,” I say slowly. “And free to marry again.”

  My Lady takes the cross at her belt firmly in her hands and holds it tightly, as if she is warding off temptation. I wait for her to speak but for once she chooses to be silent.

  “Enough of this,” Henry says suddenly. “We should not be troubled amongst ourselves. We are the royal family, we should always be united. We have been saved from the flames and our household is safe too. It is a sign from God. I shall build a new palace.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “We should rebuild.”

  “I shall call it Richmond, after my title and my father’s title before me. I shall call it the Palace of Richmond.”

  ON PROGRESS, SUMMER 1498

  The boy continues to sleep in the rooms of the wardrobe in the different houses as we go on our summer progress along the coast of Kent following the pilgrim road to Canterbury, the high hills of the Weald spreading out around us. As the warm sunshine makes the hedges green and the apple trees bob with white and pink blossom, Lady Katherine allows the king to buy her new clothes, she stops wearing mourning black like a widow, like a woman who has lost her husband, and instead puts on the king’s choice for her, a gown of tawny medley, trimmed with black velvet, which sets off her creamy skin, flushed now with early-summer sunshin
e, and her dark shining hair that she wears under the bonnet of tawny velvet that he orders for her.

  They ride together, quite alone, leading the court, and I and my ladies follow behind, the gentlemen of the court with us, the boy among them, sometimes riding near to me and smiling across.

  Henry orders a new riding coat for himself, tawny velvet—like hers—and he and the young woman match perfectly as their horses go side by side down the trim lanes of Kent, cantering when the ground is soft, walking on the stony roads, always a discreet distance ahead of the rest of us, until we come in sight of the sea.

  Henry talks to her now, he has found his voice, asking her about her childhood and her early years in Scotland. He never speaks of her husband, it is as if the two and a half years of her marriage never existed. They never speak of the boy, they never refer to him as they ride together. She is courteous, she never pushes herself forwards; but when the king orders a new saddle put on a new horse for her, she is obliged to ride with him and smile her thanks.

  I see the boy as he watches this, and I see his brave smile and the set of his head, as if he were not watching the wife he loves being taken away from him. He rides behind them, noting how she leans towards Henry to hear something he says, how Henry puts his hand on her reins, as if to steady her horse. When the boy sees this, his chin comes up and his smile brightens, as if he had sworn to himself that he will be afraid of nothing.

  For me, it is a curious pain to watch my husband of more than twelve years ride away from me with another woman, a beautiful young woman, at his side. I have never seen Henry in love before; now I see him shy, charming, eager, and it is like seeing him anew. The court is discreet, forever coming between me and the king and his constant companion, falling back to ensure they are uninterrupted, entertaining me so that I don’t watch them. It reminds me of Queen Anne, whose health was failing even then, silently watching her husband seek me out, and how I danced with him before her. I knew I was breaking her heart, I knew that she had lost her son to death and was now losing her husband to me, but I was too dazzled and too entranced to care. Now I know what it is to be a queen and see the young men of the court write poems and send letters to another woman, see someone else be named as the most beautiful woman of the court, the queen of everyone’s choice, and see your husband run after her too.