The White Queen (8 page)

“He is Warwick’s puppet,” my brother says cruelly. “Lord Warwick decided to back him,
just as Warwick’s father backed Edward’s father. Without the support of Warwick, neither
your lover nor his father would have been able to make anything of his claim to the
throne. Warwick is the kingmaker, and he has made your lover into King of England.
Be very sure he will make the queen too. He will choose who Edward is to marry, and
Edward will marry her.”

I am stunned into silence. “But he didn’t. He can’t. Edward married me.”

“A play, a charade, mumming, nothing more.”

“It wasn’t. There were witnesses.”

“Who?”

“Mother, for one,” I say eventually.

“Our mother?”

“She was witness, along with Catherine, her lady-in-waiting.”

“Does Father know? Was he there?”

I shake my head.

“There you are then,” he says. “Who are your many witnesses?”

“Mother, Catherine, the priest, and a boy singer,” I say.

“Which priest?”

“One I don’t know. The king commanded him there.”

He shrugs. “If he was a priest at all. He is more likely some fool or mummer pretending
as a favor. Even if he is ordained, the king can still deny that the marriage was
valid and it is the word of three women and a boy against the King of England. Easy
enough to get you three arrested on some charge and held for a year or so until he
is married to whatever princess he chooses. He has played you and Mother for fools.”

“I swear to you that he loves me.”

“Maybe he does,” he concedes. “As maybe he loves each and every one of the women he
has bedded, and there are hundreds of them. But when the battle is over and he is
riding home and sees another pretty girl by the roadside? He will forget you within
a sennight.”

I rub my hand against my cheek and find that my cheeks are wet with tears. “I’m going
to tell Mother what you said,” I say weakly. It is the threat of our childhood; it
didn’t frighten him then.

“Let’s both go to her. She won’t be happy when she realizes that she has been fooled
into pushing her daughter into dishonor.”

We walk in silence through the woods and then over the footbridge. As we go by the
big ash tree I glance at the trunk. The looped thread has gone; there is no proof
that the magic was ever there. The waters of the river where I dragged my ring from
the flood have closed over. There is no proof that the magic ever worked. There is
no proof that there is such a thing as
magic at all. All I have is a little gold ring shaped like a crown that may mean nothing.

Mother is in the herb garden at the side of the house and, when she sees my brother
and me walking together in stubborn silence, a pace apart, saying nothing, she straightens
up with the herbs in her basket and waits for us to come towards her, readying herself
for trouble.

“Son,” she greets my brother. Anthony kneels for her blessing and she puts her hand
on his fair head and smiles down on him. He rises to his feet and takes her hand in
his.

“I think the king has lied to you and to my sister,” he says bluntly. “The marriage
ceremony was so secret that there is nobody of any authority to prove it. I think
he went through the sham ceremony to have the bedding of her, and he will deny that
they were married.”

“Oh, do you?” she says, unruffled.

“I do,” he says. “And it won’t be the first time he has pretended marriage to a lady
in order to bed her. He has played this game before, and the woman ended with a bastard
and no wedding ring.”

My mother, magnificently, shrugs her shoulders. “What he has done in the past is his
own affair,” she says. “But I saw him wedded and bedded, and I wager that he will
come back to claim her as his wife.”

“Never,” Anthony says simply. “And she will be ruined. If she is with child, she will
be utterly disgraced.”

My mother smiles up at his cross face. “If you were right and he was going to deny
the marriage, then her prospects would be poor indeed,” she agrees.

I turn my head from them. It is only a moment since my lover was telling me how to
keep his son safe. Now this same child is described as my ruin.

“I am going to see my sons,” I say coldly to them both. “I won’t hear this and I won’t
speak of it. I am true to him and he will be true to me, and you will be sorry that
you doubted us.”

“You are a fool,” my brother says, unimpressed. “I am sorry for that, at least.” And
to my mother he says, “You have taken a great gamble with her, a brilliant gamble;
but you have staked her life and happiness on the word of a known liar.”

“Perhaps,” my mother says, unmoved. “And you are a wise man, my son, a philosopher.
But some things I know better than you, even now.”

I stalk away. Neither of them calls me back.

I have to
wait, the whole kingdom has to wait again to hear who to hail as king, who shall
command. My brother Anthony sends a man north, scouting for news, and then we all
wait for him to come back to tell us if the battle has been joined, and if King Edward’s
luck has held. Finally, in May, Anthony’s servant comes home and says he has been
in the far north, near to Hexham, and met a man who told him all about it. A bad battle,
a bloody battle. I hesitate in the doorway; I want to know the outcome, not the details.
I don’t have to see a battle to imagine it anymore; we have become a country accustomed
to tales of the battlefield. Everyone has heard of the armies drawn up in their positions,
or seen the charge, the falling back and the exhausted pause while they regroup. Or
everyone knows someone who has been in a town where the victorious soldiers came through
determined to carouse and rob and rape; everyone has stories of women running to a
church for sanctuary, screaming for help. Everyone knows that these wars have torn
our country apart, have destroyed our prosperity, our friendliness between neighbors,
our trust of strangers, the love between brothers, the safety of our roads, the affection
for our king; and yet nothing seems to stop the battles. We go on and on seeking a
final victory and a triumphant king who will bring peace; but victory never comes
and peace never comes and the kingship is never settled.

Anthony’s messenger gets to the point. King Edward’s army has won, and won decisively.
The Lancaster forces were routed and King Henry, the poor wandering lost King Henry
who does not know fully where he is, even when he is in his palace at Westminster,
has run away into the moors of Northumberland, a price on his head as if he were an
outlaw, without attendants, without friends, without even followers, like a borderer
rebel as wild as a chough.

His wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, my mother’s one-time dearest friend, is fled to
Scotland with the prince their heir. She is defeated, and her husband is vanquished.
But everyone knows that she will not accept her defeat, she will plot and scheme for
her son, just as Edward told me that I must plot and scheme for ours. She will never
stop until she is back in England
and the battle is drawn up again. She will never stop until her husband is dead, her
son is dead, and she has no one left to put on the throne. This is what it means to
be Queen of England in this country today. This is how it has been for her for nearly
ten years, ever since her husband became unfit to rule and his country became like
a frightened hare thrown into a field before a pack of hunting dogs, darting this
way and that. Worse, I know that this is how it will be for me, if Edward comes home
to me and names me as the new queen, and we make a son and heir. The young man I love
will be king of an uncertain kingdom, and I will have to be a claimant queen.

And he does come. He sends me word that he has won the battle and broken the siege
of Bamburgh Castle, and will call in as his army marches south. He will come for dinner,
he writes to my father, and in a private note to me he scribbles that he will stay
the night.

I show the note to my mother. “You can tell Anthony that my husband is true to me,”
I say.

“I shan’t tell Anthony anything,” she says unhelpfully.

My father, at any rate, manages to be pleased at the prospect of a visit from the
victor. “We were right to give him our men,” he says to my mother. “Bless you for
that, love. He is the victorious king and you have put us on the winning side once
more.”

She smiles at him. “It could have gone either way, as always,” she says. “And it is
Elizabeth who has turned his head. It is she he is coming to see.”

“Do we have some well-hung beef?” he asks. “And John and the boys and I will go hawking
and get you some game.”

“We’ll give him a good dinner,” she reassures him. But she does not tell my father
that he has greater cause for celebration: that the King of England has married me.
She stays silent, and I wonder if she too thinks that he is playing me false.

There is no sign of what my mother thinks, one way or another, when she greets him
with a low curtsey. She shows no familiarity, as a woman might do to her son-in-law.
But she treats him with no coldness, as surely she would if she thought he had made
fools of us both? Rather, she greets him as a victorious king and he greets her as
a great lady, a former duchess, and both of them treat me as a favored daughter of
the house.

Dinner is as successful as it is bound to be, given that my father is filled with
bluster and excitement, my mother as elegant as always, my sisters in their usual
state of stunned admiration, and my brothers furiously silent. The king bids his farewell
to my parents and rides off down the road as if going back to Northampton, and I throw
on my cape and run down the path to the hunting lodge by the river.

He is there before me, his big war horse in the stall, his page boy in the hayloft,
and he takes me into his arms without a word. I say nothing too. I am not such a fool
as to greet a man with suspicion and complaints, and besides, when he touches me,
all I want is his touch, when he kisses me, all I want are his kisses, and
all I want to hear are the sweetest words in the world, when he says: “Bed, Wife.”

In the morning
I am combing my hair before the little silvered mirror and pinning it up. He stands
behind me, watching me, sometimes taking a lock of golden hair and winding it round
his finger to see it catch the light. “You aren’t helping,” I say, smiling.

“I don’t want to help, I want to hinder. I adore your hair, I like to see it loose.”

“And when shall we announce our marriage, my lord?” I ask, watching his face in the
reflection.

“Not yet,” he says swiftly, too swiftly: this is an answer prepared. “My lord Warwick
is hell-bent on me marrying the Princess Bona of Savoy, to guarantee peace with France.
I have to take some time to tell him it cannot be. He will need to get used to the
idea.”

“Some days?” I suggest.

“Say weeks,” he prevaricates. “He will be disappointed and he has taken God knows
what bribes to bring this marriage about.”

“He is disloyal? He is bribed?”

“No. Not he. He takes the French money but not to betray me: we are as one. We have
known each other since boyhood. He taught me how to joust, he gave me my first sword.
His father was like a father to me. Truly, he has been like an older brother to me.
I would not have fought for my right to the throne if he had not been with me. His
father took my father up to the very throne and made him heir to the King of England,
and in his turn Richard Neville has supported me. He is my great mentor, my great
friend. He has taught me almost everything I know about fighting and ruling a kingdom.
I have to take the time to tell him about us, and explain that I could not resist
you. I owe him that.”

“He is so important to you?”

“The greatest man in my life.”

“But you will tell him; you will bring me to court,” I say, trying to keep my voice
light and inconsequential. “And present me to the court as your wife.”

“When the time is right.”

“May I at least tell my father, so that we can meet openly as husband and wife?”

He laughs. “As well tell the town crier. No, my love, you must keep our secret for
a little while longer.”

I take my tall headdress with the sweeping veil and tie it on, saying nothing. It
gives me a headache with the weight of it.

“You do trust me, don’t you, Elizabeth?” he asks sweetly.

“Yes,” I lie. “Completely.”

Anthony stands beside
me as the king rides away, his hand raised in a salute, a false smile on his face.
“Not going with him?” he asks sarcastically. “Not going to London to buy new clothes?
Not going to be presented at court? Not attending the thanksgiving Mass as queen?”

“He has to tell Lord Warwick,” I say. “He has to explain.”

“It will be Lord Warwick who will explain to him,” my brother says bluntly. “He will
tell him that no King of England can afford to marry a commoner, no King of England
would marry a woman who is not a proven virgin. No King of England would marry an
Englishwoman of no family and no fortune. And your precious king will explain that
it was a wedding witnessed by no lord nor court official, that his new wife has not
even told her family, that she wears her ring in her pocket; and they will both agree
it can be ignored as if it had never happened. As he has done before, so he will do
again, as long as there are foolish women in the kingdom—and that is to say forever.”

I turn to him and at the pain on my face he stops taunting me. “Ah, Elizabeth, don’t
look like that.”

“I don’t care if he doesn’t acknowledge me, you fool,” I flare out. “It’s not a question
of wanting to be queen; it’s not even a question of wanting honorable love anymore.
I am mad for him, I am madly in love with him. I would go to him if I had to walk
barefoot. Tell me I am one of many. I don’t care! I don’t care for my name or for
my pride anymore. As long as I can have him once more, that’s all I want, just to
love him; all I want to be certain of is that I will see him again, that he loves
me.”