The White Queen

DECEMBER 1483

I wait till the turning of the year, the darkest night of the year, and I wait for the darkest hour, the hour between midnight and one, then I take a candle and throw a warm cape over my winter gown and tap on Elizabeth’s door. “I am going now,” I say. “Do you want to come?”

She is ready. She has her candle and her cape with the hood pulled forward over her bright hair. “Yes, of course. This is my loss too,” she says. “I want revenge too. Those who killed my brother have put me a step closer to the throne, a step further away from the life I might have made for myself, and into the heart of danger. I don’t thank them for that, either. And my brother was alone and unguarded, taken away from us. It would have to be someone made of stone to kill our prince and that poor little page boy. Whoever it was has earned a curse. I will curse him.”

“It will be on his son,” I warn her, “and his son after him. It will end their line.”

Her eyes shine green in the candlelight like a cat’s eyes. “So might it be,” she says, as her grandmother Jacquetta would say when she was cursing or blessing.

I lead the way and we go through the silent crypt, down the stone stairs to the catacombs, and then down again, another flight of cold stone stairs, icy damp underfoot, until we hear the lapping of the river at the water gate.

Elizabeth unlocks the iron door and together we pull it open. The river is high, at the level of a winter flood, dark and glassy, moving swiftly by us in the darkness of the night. But it is nothing to the storm that Elizabeth and I called up to keep Buckingham and Henry Tudor out of London. If I had only known that someone was coming for my son that night, I would have taken a boat on that flood and gone to him. I would have gone on the deep waters to save him.

“How shall we do this?” Elizabeth is shivering from the cold and from fear.

“We do nothing,” I say. “We just tell Melusina. She is our ancestor, she is our guide, she will feel the loss of our son and heir as we do. She will seek out those who took him, and she will take their son in return.”

I unfold a piece of paper from my pocket and give it to Elizabeth. “Read it aloud,” I say. I hold the two candles for her as she reads it to the swiftly moving waters.

“Know this, that our son Edward was in the Tower of London held prisoner most wrongly by his uncle Richard, now called king. Know this, that we gave him a companion, a poor boy, to pass for our second son Richard but got him away safe to Flanders, where you guard him on the River Scheldt. Know this, that someone either came and took our son Edward, or killed him where he slept; but, Melusina! we cannot find him, and we have not been given his body. We cannot know his killers, and we cannot bring them to justice nor, if our boy still lives, find him and bring him home to us.” Her voice quavers for a moment and I have to dig my nails into the palms of my hands to stop myself from crying.

“Know this: that there is no justice to be had for the wrong that someone has done to us, so we come to you, our Lady Mother, and we put into your dark depths this curse: that whoever took our firstborn son from us, that you take his firstborn son from him. Our boy was taken when he was not yet a man, not yet king-though he was born to be both. So take his murderer’s son while he is yet a boy, before he is a man, before he comes to his estate. And then take his grandson too, and when you take him, we will know by his death that this is the working of our curse and this is payment for the loss of our son.”

She finishes reading and her eyes are filled with tears. “Fold it like a paper boat,” I say.

Readily she takes the paper and makes a perfect miniature vessel; the girls have been making paper fleets ever since we were first entrapped here beside the river. I hold out the candle. “Light it,” I whisper, and she holds the folded paper boat into the flame of the candle so the prow catches fire. “Send it into the river,” I say, and she takes the flaming boat and puts it gently on the water.

It bobs, the flame flickers as the wind blows it, but then it flares up. The swift current of the water takes it, and it turns and swirls away. For a moment we see it, flame on reflected flame, the curse and the mirror of the curse, paired together on the dark flood, and then they are whirled away by the rush of the river and we are looking into blackness, and Melusina has heard our words and taken our curse into her watery kingdom.

“It’s done,” I say, and turn away from the river and hold the water gate open for her.

“That’s all?” she asks as if she had expected me to sail down the river in a cockleshell.

“That’s all. That’s all I can do, now that I am queen of nothing, with missing sons. All I can do now is ill-wishing. But God knows, I do that.”