The White Princess (11 page)

The delight in her face is answer enough. “Oh! My dear!”

“He has to marry me at once, I won’t be publicly shamed by them.”

“He’ll have no reason to delay. This is what they wanted. Fancy you being so fertile! But I was just the same and my mother was too. We are women blessed with children.”

“Yes,” I say. I can’t put any joy in my voice. “I don’t feel blessed. It’s not as if this is a baby conceived in love. Not even in wedlock.”

She ignores the bleakness in my voice, and the strain in my pale face. She draws me to her and puts her hand on my belly, which is as slim and flat as ever. “It is a blessing,” she assures me. “A new baby, perhaps a boy, perhaps a prince. It doesn’t matter that he was conceived under duress; what matters is that he grows strong and tall and that we make him our own, a rose of York on the throne of England.”

I stand quietly under her touch, like an obedient brood mare, and I know that she is right. “Will you tell him or shall I?”

At once she is planning: “You tell him,” she says. “He will be
happy hearing it from you. It will be the first good news that you can bring him.” She smiles at me. “The first of many, I hope.”

I can’t smile back. “I suppose so.”

That evening he comes early, and I serve him his wine and put up my hand to him in refusal as he goes to lead me to the bed.

“I have missed my course,” I say quietly. “I may be with child.”

There is no mistaking the joy in his face. His color flushes up, he takes my hands and draws me closer to him, almost as if he would wrap his arms around me, almost as if he wants to hold me with love. “Oh, I am glad,” he says. “Very glad. Thank you for telling me, it makes my heart lighter. God bless you, Elizabeth. God bless you and the child you carry. This is great news. This is the best news.” He takes a turn to the fire and comes back to me again. “This is such good news! And you so beautiful! And so fertile!”

I nod, my face like stone.

“And d’you know if it will be a boy?” he asks.

“It is too early to know anything,” I say. “And a woman can miss her course from unhappiness or shock.”

“Then I hope you are not unhappy or shocked,” he says cheerfully, as if he wants to forget that I am heartbroken and raped. “And I hope that you have a Tudor boy in there.” He pats my belly as if we were married already, a proprietorial touch. “This means everything,” he says. “Have you told your mother?”

I shake my head, taking a small defiant pleasure in lying to him. “I saved the happy news for you first.”

“I’ll tell my mother when I get home tonight.” He is quite deaf to my grim tone. “There’s nothing I could say that would be better. She’ll turn out the priest for a Te Deum.”

“You’ll be late home,” I say. “It’s after midnight now.”

“She waits up for me,” he says. “She never sleeps before I get in.”

“Why ever not?” I say, diverted.

He has the grace to blush. “She likes to see me to my bed,” he admits. “She likes to kiss me good night.”

“She kisses you good night?” I query, thinking of the hard heart of the woman who could send her son to rape me and then wait up to kiss him good night.

“There were so many years when she couldn’t kiss me before I slept,” he says quietly. “There were so many years when she didn’t know where I slept, or even if I was safely asleep at all. She likes to mark my forehead with the sign of a cross and kiss me good night. But tonight when she comes to bless me I will tell her that you are with child and I am hoping for a son!”

“I think I am with child,” I say cautiously. “But it is early days. I can’t be sure. Don’t tell her that I said I was sure.”

“I know, I know. And you will think I have been selfish, my mind only on the Tudor house. But if you have a boy, your family is of the royal house of England and your son will be king. You are in the position you were born to hold, and the wars of the cousins are ended forever, with a wedding and a baby. This is how it should be. This is the only happy ending that there can be, for this war and this country. You will have brought us all to peace.” He looks at me as if he wants to take me in his arms and kiss me. “You have brought us to peace and a happy ending.”

I hunch my shoulder against him. “I had thought of other endings,” I say, remembering the king that I loved, who had wanted me to have his son, and who said that we would call him Arthur, in honor of Camelot, a royal heir who was not made in cold determination and bitterness, but with love in warm secret meetings.

“Even now there could be other endings,” he says cautiously, taking my hand and holding it gently. He lowers his voice as if there could be eavesdroppers in this, our most private room. “We still have enemies. They are hidden but I know they are
there. And if you have a girl it’s no good to me, and all this will have been for nothing. But we will work and pray that it is a Tudor boy that you are carrying. And I will tell my mother that she can arrange our wedding. At least we know that you are fertile. Even if you fail and have a girl this time, we know that you can bear a child. And next time perhaps we’ll get a boy.”

“What would you have done if I had not conceived a child?” I ask curiously. “If you had taken me but no baby had come?” I begin to realize that this man and his mother have a plan for everything, they are always in readiness.

“Your sister,” he says shortly. “I would have married Cecily.”

I gasp in shock. “But you said she was to marry Sir John Welles?”

“Yes. But if you were barren I would still need to marry a woman who could give me a son from the House of York. It would have had to be her. I would have canceled her wedding to Sir John, and had her for my wife.”

“And would you have raped her too?” I spit, pulling my hand away. “First me and then my sister?”

He raises his shoulders and spreads out his hands, a gesture entirely French, not like an Englishman at all. “Of course. I would have had no choice. I have to know that any wife can give me a son. Even you must see that I’m not taking the throne for myself, but to make a new royal family. I am not taking a wife for myself but to make a new royal family.”

“Then we are like the poorest country people,” I say bitterly. “They only marry when a baby is on the way. They always say you only buy a heifer in calf.”

He chuckles, not at all abashed. “Do they? Then I’m an Englishman indeed.” He ties the laces at his belt and laughs. “In the end I am an English peasant! I shall tell my Lady Mother tonight and she’ll be sure to come and see you tomorrow. She has prayed for this every night that I have been doing my business here.”

“She prayed while you were raping me?” I ask him.

“It isn’t rape,” he says. “Stop saying that. You’re a fool to call it that. Since we’re betrothed, it cannot be rape. As my wife you cannot refuse me. I have a right to you, as your betrothed husband. From now, till your death, you will never be able to refuse me. There can be no rape between us, only my rights and your duty.”

He looks at me and watches the protest die on my lips.

“Your side lost at Bosworth,” he reminds me. “You are the spoils of war.”

COLDHARBOUR PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS FEAST, 1485

To celebrate the days of Christmas I am invited to visit my betrothed at his court and am taken to the finest rooms of the palace of Coldharbour, where his mother holds her court. As I enter, with my mother and two sisters walking behind me, a hush spreads through the room. A lady-in-waiting, reading from the Bible, looks up and sees me, trails off, and there is silence. Lady Margaret, seated on a chair under a canopy of state as if she were a queen crowned, looks up and calmly regards us as we come forwards.

I sweep her a curtsey; behind me I see my mother’s carefully judged sinking down and rising up again. We have practiced this most difficult movement in my mother’s rooms, trying to determine the exact level of deference. My mother has a steely dislike for Lady Margaret now, and I will never forgive her for telling her son to rape me before our wedding. Only Cecily and Anne curtsey with uncomplicated deference, as a pair of minor princesses to the king’s all-powerful mother. Cecily even rises with an ingratiating smile, since she is Lady Margaret’s goddaughter and counting on this most powerful woman’s goodwill to make sure that her wedding goes ahead. My sister does not know, and I will never tell her, that they would have taken her, as coldly as they took me, if I had failed to conceive, and she would have
been raped in my place while this flint-faced woman prayed for a baby.

“You are welcome to Coldharbour,” Lady Margaret says, and I think it is well named, for it is a most miserable and unfriendly haven. “And to our capital city,” she goes on, as if we girls had not been brought up here in London while she was stuck with a small and unimportant husband in the country, her son an exile and her house utterly defeated.

My mother looks around the rooms, and notes the second-rate cloth cushions on the plain window seat, and that the best tapestry has been replaced by an inferior copy. Lady Margaret Beaufort is a most careful housekeeper, not to say mean.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I have the arrangements for the wedding all in hand,” she says. “You can come to be fitted for your gown in the royal wardrobe next week. Your sisters and your mother also. I have decided that you will all attend.”

“I am to attend my own wedding?” I ask dryly, and see her flush with annoyance.

“All your family,” she corrects me.

My mother gives her blandest smile. “And what about the York prince?” she asks.

There is a sudden silence as if a snap frost has just iced the room. “The York prince?” Lady Margaret repeats slowly, and I can hear a tremor in her hard voice. She looks at my mother in dawning horror, as if something terrible is about to be revealed. “What d’you mean? What York prince? What are you saying? What are you saying now?”

My mother blankly meets her gaze. “You have not forgotten the York prince?”

Lady Margaret has blanched white as white. I can see her grip the arms of her chair, and her fingernails are bleached with the pressure of her panic-stricken grip. I glance at my mother; she is enjoying this, like a bear leader teasing the bear with a long-handled prod.

“What d’you mean?” Lady Margaret says and her voice is sharp with fear. “You cannot be suggesting . . .” She breaks off with a little gasp, almost as if she is afraid of what she might say next. “You cannot be saying now . . .”

One of her ladies steps forwards. “Your Grace, are you unwell?”

My mother observes this with detached interest, as an alchemist might observe a transformation. The upstart king’s mother is riven with terror at the very name of a York prince. My mother enjoys the sight for a moment, then she releases her from the spell. “I mean, Edward of Warwick, the son of George, Duke of Clarence,” she says mildly.

Lady Margaret gives a shuddering sigh. “Oh, the Warwick boy,” she says. “The Warwick boy. I had forgotten the Warwick boy.”

“Who else?” my mother asks sweetly. “Who did you think I meant? Who else could I mean?”

“I had not forgotten the Warwick children.” Lady Margaret grasps for her dignity. “I have ordered robes for them too. And gowns for your younger daughters also.”

“I am so pleased,” my mother says pleasantly. “And my daughter’s coronation?”

“Will follow later,” Lady Margaret says, trying to hide that she is gasping, still recovering from her shock, gulping for her words like a landed carp. “After the wedding. When I decide.”

One of her ladies steps forwards with a glass of malmsey and she takes a sip and then another. The color comes back to her cheeks with the sweet wine. “After their wedding they will travel to show themselves to the people. A coronation will follow after the birth of an heir.”

My mother nods, as if the matter is indifferent to her. “Of course, she’s a princess born,” she remarks, quietly pleased that being a princess born is far better than being a pretender king.

“I wish any child to be born at Winchester, at the heart of the old kingdom, Arthur’s kingdom,” Lady Margaret states, struggling to regain her authority. “My son is of the house of Arthur Pendragon.”

“Really?” my mother exclaims, all sweetness. “I thought he was from a Tudor bastard out of a Valois dowager princess. And that, a secret wedding, never proved? How does that trace back to King Arthur?”