The White Queen

WINTER 1470-71

We spend Christmas in sanctuary. The London butchers send us a fat goose, and my boys and little Elizabeth and I play cards and I make sure that I lose a silver sixpence to her, and send her to bed thrilled to be a serious gamester. We spend Twelfth Night in sanctuary, and Mother and I compose a play for the children, with costumes and masks and enchantments. We tell them our family story of Melusina, the beautiful woman, half girl, half fish, who is found in the fountain in the forest and marries a mortal for love. I wrap myself in a sheet, which we tie at the feet to make a great tail, and I let down my hair, and when I rise up from the floor, the girls are transported by the fish woman Melusina and the boys applaud. My mother enters with a paper horse’s head taped on the stick of a broom, wearing the doorman’s jerkin and a paper crown. The girls don’t recognize her at all and watch the play as if we were paid mummers at the greatest court in the world. We tell them the story of the courtship of the beautiful woman who is half fish, and how her lover persuades her to leave her watery fountain in the wood and take her chance in the great world. We tell only half the story: that she lives with him and gives him beautiful children and they are happy together.

There is more to the story than this, of course. But I find that I don’t want to think about marriages for love that end in separation. I don’t want to think about being a woman who cannot live in the new world that is being made by men. I don’t want to think of Melusina rising from her fountain and confining herself to a castle while I am held in sanctuary, and all of us, daughters of Melusina, are trapped in a place where we cannot wholly be ourselves.

Melusina’s mortal husband loved her, but she puzzled him. He did not understand her nature, and he was not content to live with a woman who was a mystery to him. He allowed a guest to persuade him to spy on her. He hid behind the hangings in her bath house and saw her swim beneath the water of her bath, saw-horrified-the gleam of ripple on scales, learned her secret: that although she loved him, truly loved him, she was still half woman and half fish. He could not bear what she was, and she could not help but be who she was. So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature-and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature. He could not stand to think of her secrecy, that she had a life hidden from him. He could not, in fact, tolerate the truth that Melusina was a woman who knew the unknown depths, who swam in them.

Poor Melusina, who tried so hard to be a good wife, had to leave the man who loved her and go back to the water, finding the earth too hard. Like many women, she was unable to fit exactly with her husband’s view. Her feet hurt: she could not walk in the path of her husband’s choosing. She tried to dance to please him, but she could not deny the pain. She is the ancestress of the royal house of Burgundy, and we, her descendants, still try to walk in the paths of men, and sometimes we too find the way unbearably hard.

I hear that the new court has a merry Christmas feast. Henry the king is back in his senses, and the House of Lancaster is triumphant. From the windows of the sanctuary we can see the barges going up and down the river as the noblemen go from their riverside palaces to Whitehall. I see the Stanley barge go by. Lord Stanley, who kissed my hand at my coronation tournament, and told me his motto was “Sans Changer,” was one of the first to greet Warwick when he landed in England. It turns out he is a Lancaster man after all; maybe he will be unchanging for them.

I see the Beaufort barge with the flag of the red dragon of Wales flying at the stern. Jasper Tudor, the great power of Wales, is taking his nephew young Henry Tudor to court to visit the king, his kinsman. Half outlaw, half prince. Jasper will be back in the castles of Wales again, and Lady Margaret Beaufort will weep tears of joy all over her fourteen-year-old son, Henry Tudor, I don’t doubt. She was parted from him when we put him with good York guardians, the Herberts, and she had to endure the prospect of his marrying the Yorkist Herbert girl. But now William Herbert lies dead in our service, and Margaret Beaufort has her son back in her keeping. She will be pushing him forward at court, pushing him forward for favors and places. She will want his titles restored; she will want his inheritance guaranteed. George, Duke of Clarence, stole both the title and the lands, and she will have named them in her prayers ever since. She is a most ambitious woman, and determined mother. I don’t doubt she will have the earldom of Richmond off George within the year and, if she can, her son will be named as the Lancaster heir after the prince.

I see Lord Warwick’s barge, the most beautiful on the river, his rowers going in time to the beat of the drummer in the stern, moving swiftly against the tide as if nothing can stop his onward progress, not even the flow of the river. I even make him out, standing in the prow of the boat as if he would rule the very water of the river, his hat pulled off and held in his hand so that he can feel the cold air in his dark hair. I purse my lips to whistle up a wind, but I let him go. It makes no difference.

Warwick’s older daughter Isabel may be hand in hand with my brother-in-law George in the seats at the back of the barge as they go past my subterranean prison. Perhaps she remembers the Christmas that she came to court as an unwilling bride and I was kind to her, or perhaps she prefers to forget the court where I was the Queen of the White Rose. George will know I am here, the wife of his brother, the woman who stayed loyal when he did not: living in poverty, living in half darkness. He will know I am here; he may even feel me watching him, my narrowed eyes overlooking him-this man who was once George of the House of York, and is now a favored kinsman at the court of Lancaster.

My mother puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t ill wish them,” she warns me. “It comes back on you. It is better to wait. Edward is coming. I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt him for a moment. This time will be like a bad dream. It is as Anthony says: shadows on the wall. What matters is that Edward musters an army big enough to defeat Warwick.”

“How can he?” I say, looking out at the city that now declares itself all for Lancaster. “How can he even begin?”

“He has been in touch with your brothers, and with all our kinsmen. He is raising his forces, and he has never lost a battle.”

“He has never fought Warwick. And Warwick taught him everything he knows about war.”

“He is king,” she says. “Even if they now say that it meant nothing. He was crowned, he is divinely ordained, he has had the holy oil on his breast-they cannot deny that he is king. Even if another crowned and ordained king sits on the throne. But Edward is lucky, and Henry is not. Perhaps it comes down only to that: if you are a lucky man. And the Yorks are a lucky house.” She smiles. “And of course he has us. We can wish him well, no harm in a little spell for good luck. And if that does not improve his chances, then nothing will.”