The White Queen

JULY 1473

We halt at the town of Shrewsbury on the way back to London in the last days of July for me to go into confinement in the guest rooms of the great abbey. I am glad to be out of the glare and the heat of summer and into the coolness of the shuttered room. I have ordered them to set a fountain in the corner of my stonewalled chambers, and the drip, drip of the water soothes me as I lie on the day bed and wait for my time.

This is a town built around the sacred well of St. Winifred, and as I listen to the dripping fountain of her water and hear the ringing of the hours for prayer I think of the spirits that move in waters of this wet land, both the pagan and the holy, Melusina and Winifred, and how the springs and streams and rivers speak to all men, but perhaps especially to women, who know in their own bodies the movement of the waters of the earth. Every holy site in England is a well or a spring; the baptismal fonts are filled with holy water that goes back, blessed, to the earth. It is a country for Melusina, and her element is everywhere, sometimes flowing in the rivers, sometimes hidden underground but always present.

In the middle of August the pains start, and I turn my head to the fountain and listen to the trickle as if I were seeking the voice of my mother in the water. The baby comes easily, as I thought he would, and he is a boy, as my mother knew he would be.

Edward comes into the chamber, though men are supposed to be banned until I have been churched. “I had to come and see you,” he says. “A son. Another son. God bless you and keep you both. God bless you, my love, and thank you for your pains to give me another boy.”

“I thought you did not mind if it was a boy or a girl,” I tease him.

“I love my girls,” he says at once. “But the House of York needed another boy. He can be a companion to his brother Edward.”

“Can we call him Richard?” I ask.

“I thought Henry?”

“Henry for the next one,” I say. “Let’s call this boy Richard. My mother herself named him to me.”

Edward bends over the cradle where the tiny boy is sleeping, and then he understands my words. “Your mother? She knew you would have a boy?”

“Yes, she knew,” I say, smiling. “Or at any rate, she pretended to know. You remember my mother. It was always one part magic and one part nonsense.”

“And is this our last boy? Did she say? Or do you think there will be another?”

“Why not another?” I say lazily. “If you still want me in your bed, that is. If you have not had enough of me? If you are not tired of me? If you don’t prefer your other women?”

He turns from the cradle and comes to me. His hands slide under my shoulder blades and lift me up to his mouth. “Oh, I still want you,” he says.