The White Queen

SPRING 1476

I am proved right, it was by no means my last confinement. My husband continued as fertile as the bull in the water meadow that I accused him of being. In the second year after the birth of Richard, I was pregnant again and in November I had another baby, a girl whom we called Anne. Edward rewards me for my labors by making my son Thomas Grey, the Marquis of Dorset, and I marry him to a pleasant girl-an heiress to a mighty fortune. Edward had hoped for a boy and we had promised to name him George, as a compliment to the other York duke, and so that there are, once again, three boys of York named Edward, Richard, and George; but the duke shows no sign of gratitude. He was a spoiled greedy boy, and he has grown into a disappointed, bad-tempered man. He is in his mid-twenties now, and his rosebud mouth has drooped into a sneer of disdain. He gloried at being one of the sons of York when he was a hopeful boy; since then he was first in line for the throne of England as Warwick’s chosen heir, and then displaced when Warwick favored Lancaster. When Edward won back the throne, George became first in line to inherit, but then was pushed down to second at the birth of my baby, Prince Edward. Since the birth of Prince Richard, George drops down to third in line to the throne of England. Indeed, every time I have a son, the Duke George drops down one more step away from the throne and deeper and deeper into jealousy. And since Edward is famously uxorious, and I am famously fertile, George’s inheritance of the throne has become a most unlikely event and he is the Duke of Disappointment.

Richard, the other York brother, does not seem to mind this, but he turns against us after the Yorks come back from France without fighting a war but winning a peace. My husband the king, and every man and woman of sense throughout the entire country, rejoice that Edward has made a peace with France that should last for years, in which they will pay us a fortune not to claim our lands in France. Everyone is delighted to escape a costly and painful foreign war except Duke Richard, the boy who was raised on a battlefield and now cites the rights of Englishmen over our lands in France, clings to the memory of his father, who spent much of his life fighting the French, and all but calls his brother the king a lazy coward in not leading yet another expensive and dangerous expedition.

Edward laughs his good-tempered laugh, and lets the insult go, but Richard storms off to his lands in the north, taking his obedient wife Anne Neville with him, and sets himself up as a northern princeling, refusing to come south to us, believing himself to be the only true York of England, the only true heir to his father in his enmity with France.

Nothing troubles Edward, and he is smiling when he comes to find me in the stables, where I am looking over a new mare, a gift from the King of France, to mark the new friendliness between our countries. She is a beautiful horse, but nervous at the new surroundings, and will not even come near me, though I have a tempting apple in my hand.

“Your brother came to me today to ask permission to go on pilgrimage, and leave Edward in the care of his half brother Sir Richard for a little while.”

I come out of the stable and close the door carefully behind me to keep the horse safely inside. “Why? Where does he want to go?”

“He wants to go to Rome,” Edward says. “He tells me he wants time away from the world.” He gives me an odd crooked smile. “Seems that Ludlow has given him a taste for solitude. He wants to be a saint. He tells me he wants to find the poet in himself. He says he wants silence and the deserted road. He wants to find silence and wisdom.”

“Oh nonsense,” I say, with a sister’s scorn. “He has always had this idea of going away. He has been planning to go to Jerusalem ever since he was a boy. He loves to travel and he thinks that the Greeks and the Moslems know everything. He may want to go, but his life and his work are here. Just tell him no, and make him stay.”

Edward hesitates. “He has a great desire to do this, Elizabeth. And he is one of the greatest knights of Christendom. I don’t think anyone can defeat him at the joust when he is on his day. And his poetry is as fine as that written by anyone. His reading and his knowledge is so wide, and his command of languages is greater than anyone else’s in England. He is not an ordinary man. Perhaps it is his destiny to go far and learn more. He has served us well, none better, and if God has called him to travel, perhaps we should let him go.”

The mare comes and puts her head over the half door to sniff at my shoulder. I stand still, so as not to frighten her. Her warm oaty breath blows on my neck. “You’re very tender of his talents,” I say suspiciously. “Why are you so admiring of him all of a sudden?”

He shrugs his shoulders, and at that small gesture, wifelike, I am on to him. I step forward and take both his hands in mine so he cannot escape my scrutiny. “So who is she?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The new one. The new whore. The one who likes Anthony’s poetry,” I say bitingly. “You never read it yourself. You never had such a high opinion of his learning and his destiny before. So someone has been reading to you. My guess is that she has been reading it to you. And if my guess is right, she knows it because he has been reading it to her. And probably Hastings knows her as well, and all of you think she is utterly lovely. But you will be bedding her; and the others sniffing round like dogs. You have a new and agreeable whore, and that I understand. But if you think you are going to share her stupid opinions with me, then she will have to go.”

He looks away from me, at his boots, at the sky, at the new mare.

“What’s her name?” I ask. “You can tell me that, at least.”

He pulls me towards him and folds me in his arms. “Don’t be angry, beloved,” he whispers in my ear. “You know there is only you. Only ever you.”

“Me and a score of others,” I say irritably, but I don’t pull away from him. “They go through your bedroom like a May Day procession.”

“No,” he says. “Truly. There is only you. I have only one wife. I have a score of whores, perhaps hundreds. But only one wife. That is something, is it not?”

“Your whores are young enough to be my daughters,” I say crossly. “And you go out into the city to chase them. And the city merchants complain to me that their wives and their daughters are not safe from you.”

“No,” my husband says with the vanity of a handsome man. “They are not. I hope that no woman can resist me. But I never took anyone by force, Elizabeth. The only woman who ever resisted me was you. D’you remember drawing that dagger on me?”

I smile despite myself. “Of course I do. And you swearing that you would give me the scabbard, but it would be the last thing you ever gave me.”

“There is no one like you.” He kisses my brow and then my closed eyelids and then my lips. “There is no one but you. No one but my wife holds my heart in her beautiful hands.”

“So what is her name?” I ask as he kisses me into peace. “What’s the name of the new whore?”

“Elizabeth Shore,” he says, his lips on my neck. “But that doesn’t matter.”

Anthony comes to my rooms as soon as he arrives at court, having made the journey from Wales, and I greet him at once with an absolute refusal to let him go away.

“No, truly, my dear,” he says. “You have to let me go. I am not going to Jerusalem, not this year, but I want to travel to Rome and confess my sins. I want to be away from the court for a while and think of things that matter and not things that are of the everyday. I want to ride from monastery to monastery and rise at dawn to pray and, where there is no religious house for me to spend the night, I want to sleep under the stars and seek God in the silence.”

“Won’t you miss me?” I ask, childlike. “Won’t you miss Baby? And the girls?”

“Yes, and that’s why I don’t even consider a crusade. I can’t bear to be away for months. But Edward is settled in Ludlow with his playmates and his tutors, and young Richard Grey is a fine companion and model for him. It is safe to leave him for a little while. I have a longing to travel the deserted roads, and I have to follow it.”

“You are a son of Melusina,” I say, trying to smile. “You sound like her when she had to be free to go into the water.”

“It’s like that,” he agrees. “Think of me as swimming away and then the tide will bring me back.”

“Your mind is made up?”

He nods. “I have to have silence to hear the voice of God,” he says. “And silence to write my poetry. And silence to be myself.”

“But you will come back?”

“Within a few months,” he promises.

I stretch out my hands to him, and he kisses them both. “You must come back,” I say.

“I will,” he says. “I have given my word that only death will take me from you and yours.”