The White Queen (63 page)

“You know,
I
should be king,” ten-year-old Edward says, tugging at my sleeve. “I’m next, aren’t
I?”

I turn to him. “No, Teddy,” I say gently. “You cannot be king. It’s true that you
are a boy of the House of York and Uncle Richard once named you as his heir; but he
is dead now, and the new king will be Henry Tudor.” I hear my voice quaver as I say
“he is dead,” and I take a breath and try again. “Richard is dead, Edward, you know
that, don’t you? You understand that King Richard is dead? And you will never be his
heir now.”

He looks at me so blankly that I think he has not understood anything at all, and
then his big hazel eyes fill with tears, and he turns and goes back to copying his
Greek alphabet on his slate. I stare at his brown head for a moment and think that
his dumb animal grief is just like mine. Except that I am ordered to talk all the
time, and to smile all the day.

“He can’t understand,” Cecily says to me, keeping her voice low so his sister Maggie
cannot hear. “We’ve all told him, over and over again. He’s too stupid to believe
it.”

I glance at Maggie, quietly seating herself beside her brother to help him to form
his letters, and I think that I must be as stupid as Edward, for I cannot believe
it either. One moment Richard was marching at the head of an invincible army of the
great families of England; the next they brought us the news that he had been beaten,
and that three of his trusted friends had sat on their horses and watched him lead
a desperate charge to his death, as if it were a sunny day at the joust, as if they
were spectators and he a daring rider, and the whole thing a game that could go either
way and was worth long odds.

I shake my head. If I think of him, riding alone against his enemies, riding with
my glove tucked inside his breastplate against his heart, then I will start to cry;
and my mother has commanded me to smile.

“So we are going to London!” I say, as if I am delighted at the prospect. “To court!
And we will live with our Lady Mother at
Westminster Palace again, and be with our little sisters Catherine and Bridget again.”

The two orphans of the Duke of Clarence look up at this. “But where will Teddy and
me live?” Maggie asks.

“Perhaps you will live with us too,” I say cheerfully. “I expect so.”

“Hurrah!” Anne cheers, and Maggie tells Edward quietly that we will go to London,
and that he can ride his pony all the way there from Yorkshire like a little knight
at arms, as Cecily takes me by the elbow and draws me to one side, her fingers nipping
my arm. “And what about you?” she asks. “Is the king going to marry you? Is he going
to overlook what you did with Richard? Is it all to be forgotten?”

“I don’t know,” I say, pulling away. “And as far as we are concerned, nobody did anything
with King Richard. You, of all people, my sister, would have seen nothing and will
speak of nothing. As for Henry, I suppose whether he is going to marry me or not is
the one thing that we all want to know. But only he knows the answer. Or perhaps two
people: him—and that old crone, his mother, who thinks she can decide everything.”

TURN THE PAGE
to find an early ­excerpt from

The King’s Curse

Philippa Gregory’s final book
in The Cousins’ War series

In the moment of waking I am innocent, my conscience clear of everything. In that
first dazed moment, as my eyes open, I have no thoughts; I am only a smooth-skinned
tightly muscled young body, a woman of twenty-six, slowly waking with joy to life.
I have no sense of my immortal soul, I have no sense of sin or guilt. I am so deliciously,
lazily sleepy, I hardly know who I am.

Slowly, I open my eyes and realize that the light coming through the shutters means
that it is late in the morning. As I stretch out luxuriously, like a waking cat, I
feel that I was exhausted when I fell asleep and now I am rested and well. And then,
all in a moment, as if reality had suddenly tumbled down on me like a shelf piled
high with denouncements, I remember that I am not well, that nothing is well, that
this is the morning that I hoped would never come, for this morning I cannot deny
my deadly name, I carry it like a scar on my face, the mark of Cain. I am the heir
of royal blood, and my brother—guilty as I am guilty—is dead.

My husband, sitting on the side of my bed, is fully dressed in his red velvet waistcoat,
his red jacket making him bulky and wide, his gold chain of office as chamberlain
to the Prince of Wales splayed over his broad chest. Slowly, I realize that he is
waiting for me to wake, his face crumpled with worry. “Margaret?”

“Don’t say anything,” I snap like a child, as if stopping the words will delay the
facts, and I turn my face away from him and bury it in the pillow.

“You must be brave,” he says hopelessly. He pats my shoulder as if I were a sick hound
puppy. “You must be brave.”

I don’t dare to shrug him off. He is my husband, I dare not offend him. He is my only
refuge. I am buried in him, my name hidden in his, my dangerous self decapitated.
I am cut off from my title as sharply as if my name had been sliced off and rolled
away into a basket.

It is the most dangerous name in England: Plantagenet, and once I carried it proudly,
like a crown on my head. Once I was Margaret Plantagenet, niece of two kings—Edward
and Richard; my father was their brother George, Duke of Clarence; and my mother was
the wealthiest woman in England and herself the daughter of a man so great that they
called him Kingmaker. My brother, Teddy, was heir to the throne of England named by
our uncle King Richard as his heir, and between us—Teddy and me—we commanded the love
and the loyalty of half the kingdom. We were the noble Warwick orphans, saved from
fate, snatched from the witchy grip of the white queen, raised in the royal nursery
at Middleham Castle by Queen Anne herself, and nothing, nothing in the world was too
good or too rich or too rare for us.

But when the king was killed, we went overnight from being the heirs to the throne
to becoming pretenders—survivors of the old royal family, while a usurper took the
throne. What should be done with the York princesses? What should be done with the
Warwick heirs? The Tudors, mother and son, had the answer prepared. We would all be
married into obscurity, wedded to shadows, hidden in wedlock. So now I am safe, cut
down by degrees, until I am small enough to safely conceal under a poor knight’s name
in a little manor in the middle of England, where land is cheap and there is nobody
who would ride into battle for the promise of my smile.

I am Lady Pole. Not a princess, not a duchess, not even a countess, just the wife
of a humble knight, stuffed into obscurity like an embroidered emblem into a forgotten
clothes chest. Margaret Pole, young pregnant wife to Sir Richard Pole, and I have
already given him three children: two boys—Henry, named sycophantically for the new
king, Henry VII, and Arthur, named ingratiatingly for his son, Prince Arthur—and my
daughter, Ursula. I was allowed to call a mere girl whatever I wanted, so I named
her for a saint who chose to be martyred rather than married to a ­stranger and forced
to take his name. I doubt that anyone has observed this small rebellion of mine, I
certainly hope not.

But my brother could not be disempowered by marriage. Whoever he married, however
lowly she was, she could not change his name. He would still hold the title the Earl
of Warwick, he would still answer to Edward Plantagenet, he would still be the true
heir to the throne. When they raised his standard (and someone, sooner or later, was
bound to raise his standard) half of England would turn out just for that haunting
flicker of white embroidery, the white rose.

So since they could not take his name from him, they took his fortune and his lands,
and then they took his liberty, packing him away, like a forgotten banner, among other
worthless things, into the Tower of London, among traitors and debtors and fools.
But though he had no servants, no lands, no castle, no education, still my brother
had his name, my name. Still Teddy had his title, my grandfather’s title. Still he
was the Earl of Warwick, still he was the white rose, the heir of the Plantagenet
throne, a living constant reproach to the Tudors who captured the Plantagenet throne
and now call it their own. They took him into the darkness when he was a little boy
of eleven and they did not bring him out until he was a man of twenty-four. He had
not felt the grass under his feet for thirteen years. Then he walked across Tower
Green, perhaps enjoying the smell of the rain on the wet earth, perhaps listening
to the seagulls crying over the river, perhaps hearing beyond the high walls of the
Tower the shouts and laughter of free men, free Englishmen, his kinsmen, his subjects.
He walked to the scaffold and they beheaded him.

And that happened yesterday. Just yesterday. It rained all day. There was a tremendous
storm, a thunderstorm, as if the sky was raging against cruelty, rain pouring down
like grief, so when they told me, as I stood beside my cousin the queen in her beautifully
appointed rooms, we closed the shutters against the darkness as if we did not want
to see the rain that on Tower Green was washing the blood into the wet grass, my brother’s
blood, my blood.

“Try to be brave,” my husband murmurs again. “Think of the baby. Try not to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.” I twist my head clear of the pillow and speak over my shoulder.
“I don’t have to try to be brave. I have nothing to fear. I know that I am safe with
you.”

He hesitates. He does not want to remind me that perhaps I do still have something
to fear. Perhaps even his lowly estate is not humble enough to keep me safe. “I meant,
try not to show your grief. . . .”

“Why not?” It comes out as a childish wail. “Why should I not grieve? My brother,
my only brother is dead? Beheaded like a traitor when he was innocent as a child.
Why should I not grieve?”

“Because they won’t like it,” he says simply.

The queen herself comes down the great stair from her rooms in the palace to see us
leave Westminster after the Christmas feast, the king still keeps to his chamber.
His mother tells everyone that he is well, he just has a touch of fever, he is strong
and healthy and resting out the cold winter days beside a warm fire; but no one believes
her. Everyone knows that he is sick with guilt at the murder of my brother and the
death of the Pretender, who was named as a traitor, accused of joining in the same
imaginary plot. I note, with wry amusement, that the queen and I who have both lost
a brother, go white-faced and tight-lipped about our business, while the man who ordered
their deaths takes to his bed. But Elizabeth and I are accustomed to loss, we are
Plantagenets—we were raised on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak; Henry Tudor has
always had his battles fought for him.

“Good luck,” Elizabeth says shortly. She makes a little gesture towards the swell
of my belly. “Are you sure you won’t stay? You could go into confinement here? You
would be well served and I would visit you. Do change your mind and stay, Margaret.”

I shake my head. I cannot tell her that I am sick of London, and sick of the court,
and sick of the rule of her husband and his overbearing mother.

“Very well,” she says, understanding all of this without words. “And will you go on
to Ludlow when you are up and about again? And join them?”

She would rather I was at Ludlow with her boy Arthur than anywhere else. My husband
is his guardian in that distant castle and it comforts her to know that I am there
too.

“I’ll go as soon as I can,” I promise her. “But you know Sir Richard will keep your
boy safe and well whether I’m there or not. He cares for him as if he were a prince
of pure gold.”

My husband is a good man, I never deny it. My Lady the King’s Mother chose well for
me when she made my marriage. She only wanted a man who would keep me from public
view, but she happened upon one who cherishes me at home. And she got a bargain. She
paid my husband the smallest possible fee on our wedding day—I could almost laugh
even now, to think what they gave him to marry me: two manors, two paltry manors!
He could have demanded far more; but he has always served the Tudors for nothing more
than their thanks, trotted behind them only to remind them that he was on their side,
followed their standard wherever it might lead without cost or questions. Early in
his life he put his trust in Lady Margaret Beaufort, his kinswoman. She convinced
him, as she convinced so many, that she would be a victorious ally but a dangerous
enemy. As a young man he called on her intense family feeling and put himself into
her keeping. She swore him to the cause of her son and he, and all her allies, risked
their lives to bring her son to the throne and call her by the title she invented
for herself: My Lady the King’s Mother. Still, even now, even in unassailable triumph,
she clutches cousins to her, hoping that they will save her from unreliable friends
and fearsome strangers.