The White Queen

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, breathing 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.”

At once she takes a pair of silver scissors from her pocket and cuts the other two threads so whatever was tied on is swept away into the dark waters.

“What were they?”

“They are the things that will never happen; they are the future that we will never know. They are the children who will not be born and the chances that we won’t take and the luck that we won’t have,” she says. “They are gone. They are lost to you. See instead what you have chosen.”

I lean over the palace wall to draw on the thread and it comes from the water, dripping. At the end is a silver spoon, a beautiful little silver spoon for a baby, and when I catch it in my hand I see, shining in the moonlight, that it is engraved with a coronet and the name “Edward.”

We keep Christmas in London as a feast of reconciliation, as if a feast will make a friend of Warwick. I am reminded of all the times that poor King Henry tried to bring his enemies together and make them swear friendship, and I know that others at the court see Warwick and George as honored guests and laugh behind their hands.

Edward orders that it should be done grandly and nearly two thousand noblemen of England sit down to dinner with us on Twelfth Night, Warwick chief among them all. Edward and I wear our crowns and the newest fashions in the richest cloths. I wear only silver white and cloth of gold in this winter season, and they say that I am the White Rose of York, indeed.

Edward and I give gifts to a thousand of the diners, and favors to them all. Warwick is a most popular guest, and he and I greet each other with absolute courtesy. When commanded by my husband, I even dance with my brother-in-law George: hand to hand and smiling into his handsome, boyish face. Again, it strikes me how like my husband Edward he is: a smaller daintier version of Edward’s blond handsomeness. Again I am struck by how people like him on sight. He has all of the York easy charm and none of Edward’s honor. But I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.

I greet his new bride Isabel, Warwick’s daughter, with kindness. I welcome her to my court and wish her very well. She is a poor, thin, pale girl, looking rather aghast at the part she has to play in her father’s scheme of things. Now she is married into the most treacherous and dangerous family in England, at the court of the king that her husband betrayed. She is in need of a little kindness and I am sisterly and loving to her. A stranger at court, visiting us in this most hospitable season, would think that I love her as a kinswoman. He would think I had not lost a father, a brother. He would think that I have no memory at all.

I don’t forget. And in my jewelry case is a dark locket, and in the dark locket there is the corner of the page of my father’s last letter, and on that scrap of paper, written in my own blood, are the names Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and George, Duke of Clarence. I don’t forget, and one day they will know that.

Warwick remains enigmatic, the greatest man in the kingdom after the king. He accepts the honors and favors that are shown him with icy dignity, as a man to whom everything is due. His accomplice, George, is like a hound puppy, jumping and fawning. Isabel, George’s wife, sits with my ladies, between my sisters and my sister-in-law Elizabeth, and I cannot help but smile when I see her turn her head away from her husband’s dancing, or the way she flinches as he shouts out toasts in honor of the king. George, so fair-headed and round-faced, has always been a beloved boy of the Yorks, and at this Christmas feast he acts towards his older brother not only as if he has been forgiven but also as if he will always be forgiven anything. He is the spoiled child of the family-he really believes he can do no wrong.

The youngest York brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, now seventeen and a handsome slight boy, may be the baby of the family, but he has never been the favorite. Of all the York boys he is the only one to resemble his father, and he is dark and small-boned, a little changeling beside the big-boned, handsome York line. He is a pious young man, thoughtful; most at home in his great house in the north of England, where he lives a life of duty and austere service to his people. He finds our glittering court an embarrassment, as if we were aggrandizing ourselves as pagans at a Christian feast. He looks on me, I swear it, as if I were a dragon sprawled greedily over treasure, not a mermaid in silver water. I guess that he looks at me with both desire and fear. He is a child, afraid of a woman whom he could never understand. Beside him, my Grey sons, only a little younger, are worldly and cheerful. They keep inviting him out to hunt with them, to go drinking in the ale houses, to roister round the streets in masks, and he, nervously, declines.

News of our Christmas feast goes all around Christendom. The new court in England is said to be the most beautiful, elegant, mannered, and gracious court in Europe. Edward is determined that the English court of York shall become as famous as Burgundy for fashion and beauty and culture. He loves good music, and we have a choir singing or musicians playing at every meal; my ladies and I learn the court dances, and compose our own. My brother Anthony is a great guide and advisor in all of this. He has traveled in Italy and speaks of the new learning and the new arts, of the beauty of the ancient cities of Greece and of Rome and how their arts and their studies can be made new. He speaks to Edward of bringing in painters and poets and musicians from Italy, of using the wealth of the crown to found schools and universities. He speaks of the new learning, of new science, of arithmetic and astronomy and everything new and wonderful. He speaks of arithmetic that starts with the number zero, and tries to explain how this transforms everything. He speaks of a science that can calculate distances that cannot be measured: he says it should be possible to know the distance to the moon. Elizabeth, his wife, watches him quietly, and says that he is a magus, a wise man. We are a court of beauty, grace, and learning, and Edward and I command the best of everything.

I am amazed at the cost of running a court, of the price of all this beauty, even the charges for food, of the continual demands from every courtier for a hearing, for a place, for a slice of land or a favor, for a post where he can levy taxes or for help in claiming an inheritance.

“This is what it is to be a king,” Edward says to me as he signs the last of the day’s petitions. “As King of England I own everything. Every duke and earl and baron holds his lands at my favor; every knight and squire below him has a stream from the river. Every petty farmer and tenant and copyholder and peasant below him depends on my favor. I have to give out wealth and power in order to keep the rivers flowing. And if it goes wrong, at the least sign of it going wrong, there will be someone saying that they wished Henry was back on the throne, that it was better in the old days. Or that they think his son Edward, or George, might do a more generous job. Or, surely to God, there is another claimant to the throne somewhere-Margaret Beaufort’s son Henry, let’s have the Lancaster boy for a change-who might speed the flow. To keep my power, I have to give it away in carefully spaced and chosen pitchers. I have to please everyone. But none too much.”

“They are money-grubbing peasants,” I say irritably. “And their loyalty goes with their interest. They think of nothing but their own desires. They are worse than serfs.”

He smiles at me. “They are indeed. Every one of them. And each of them wants their little estate and their little house just as I want my throne and as much as you wanted the manor of Sheen, and places for all your kinsmen. We are all anxious for wealth and land, and I own it all, and have to give it out carefully.”