The White Princess (14 page)

He nods. “Not you. You’re not coming. You’re not to travel, Mother thinks it better that you should rest in London. She and I are going north. She thinks that I should be seen by as many people as possible, visit towns, spread loyalty. Confirm our supporters in their posts, befriend former enemies. The Tudors need to stamp their mark on this country.”

“Oh, she definitely won’t want me there then,” I say spitefully.
“Not if it’s a Tudor progress. She won’t want a York princess. What if people preferred me to you? What if they looked past her, past you, and cheered for me?”

He rises to his feet. “I believe she was thinking of nothing but your health, and the health of our baby—as was I,” he says sharply. “And of course the kingdom has to be made loyal to the Tudor line. The child in your belly is a Tudor heir. We are doing this for you and for the child you carry. My mother is working for you and for her grandson. I wish you could find the grace to be grateful. You say you are a princess, I hear all the time that you are a princess by birth—I wish you would show it. I wish you would try to be queenly.”

I lower my eyes. “Please tell her I am grateful,” I say. “I am always, always grateful.”

My mother comes to my rooms, her face pale, a letter in her hand.

“What d’you have there? Nothing good by the looks of it.”

“It’s a proposal from King Henry that I should marry.”

I take the letter from her hands. “You?” I ask. “You? What does he mean?”

I start to scan the paper but I break off to look at her. Even her lips are white. She is nodding her head, as if she is lost for words, nodding and saying nothing.

“Marry who? Stop it, Mother. You’re frightening me. What is he thinking of? Who is he thinking of?”

“James of Scotland.” She gives a little gasp, almost a laugh. “There at the very bottom of the letter, after all the compliments and praising my youthful looks and good health. He says I am to marry the King of Scotland, and go far away to Edinburgh, and never come back.”

I turn to the page again. It is a polite letter from my husband to my mother in which he says that she will oblige him very much
by meeting with the Scottish ambassador and accepting his proposal of marriage from the King of Scotland, and agree to the date, which they will suggest, for a wedding this summer.

I look at her. “He’s gone mad. He can’t command this. He can’t tell you to marry. He wouldn’t dare. This will be his mother’s plan. You can’t possibly go.”

She has a hand to her mouth to hide her trembling lips. “I imagine that I will have to go. They can make me go.”

“Mother, I can’t be here without you!”

“If he orders it?”

“I can’t live here without you!”

“I can’t bear to leave you. But if the king commands it, we’ll have no choice.”

“You can’t marry again!” I am shocked at the very thought of it. “You shouldn’t even think of it!”

She puts her hand over her eyes. “I can hardly imagine such a thing. Your father . . .” She breaks off. “Elizabeth, my dearest, I told you that you had to be a smiling bride, I told my sister Katherine that she of all people knows that women have to marry where they are bid, and I agreed to the betrothal of Cecily to Henry’s choice. I can’t pretend that I am the only one of us who must be spared. Henry won the battle. He now commands England. If he orders that I marry, even that I marry the King of Scotland, I will have to go to Scotland.”

“It’ll be his mother,” I burst out. “It’ll be his mother who wants you out of the way, not him!”

“Yes,” my mother says slowly. “It probably is her. But she has miscalculated. Not for the first time she has made a mistake in her dealings with me.”

“Why?”

“Because they will want me in Edinburgh to make sure that the Scottish king holds to the new alliance with England. They’ll want me to hold him in friendship with Henry. They’ll think that if I am queen in Scotland then James will never invade my son-in-law’s kingdom.”

“And?” I whisper.

“They’re wrong,” she says vengefully. “They’re so very wrong. The day that I am Queen of Scotland with an army to command and a husband to advise, I won’t serve Henry Tudor. I won’t persuade my husband to keep a peace treaty with Henry. If I were strong enough and could command the allies I would need, I would march against Henry Tudor myself, come south with an army of terror.”

“You would invade with the Scots?” I whisper. It is the great terror of England—a Scots invasion, an army of barbarians sweeping down from the cold lands of the North, stealing everything. “Against Henry? To put a new king on the throne of England? A York pretender?”

She does not even nod, she just widens her gray eyes.

“But what about me?” I say simply. “What about me and my baby?”

We decide that I shall try to speak with Henry. In the weeks before he goes on his progress he comes to my room and sleeps in my bed every night. This is to give weight to the claim of a honeymoon baby. He does not touch me, since to do so would be to damage the child that is growing in my broadening belly, but he takes a little supper by the fireside, and he comes into bed beside me. Mostly he is restless, disturbed by dreams. Often he spends hours of the night on his knees, and I think then that he must be tormented by the knowledge that he made war on an ordained king, overturned the laws of God, and broke my heart. In the darkness of the night his conscience speaks louder than his mother’s ambitions.

Some nights he comes in late from sitting with his mother, some nights he comes in a little drunk from laughing with his friends. He has very few friends—only those from the years of exile, men he knows that he can trust for they were there when
he was a pretender and they were as desperate as him. He admires only three men: his uncle Jasper, and his new kinsmen Lord Thomas Stanley and Sir William Stanley. They are his only advisors. This night he comes in early and thoughtful, a sheaf of papers in his hands, requests from men who supported him and now want a share in the wealth of England—the barefoot exiles queuing for dead men’s shoes.

“Husband, I would talk with you.” I am sitting at the fireside in my nightgown, a red robe over my shoulders, my hair brushed loose. I have some warmed ale for him and some small meat pies.

“It’ll be about your mother,” he guesses at once disagreeably, taking in my preparations in one quick glance. “Why else would you attempt to make me comfortable? Why else would you go to the trouble to look irresistible? You know you are more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen in my life before. Whenever you wear red and spread out your hair, I know that you hope to entrap me.”

“It
is
about her,” I say, not at all abashed. “I don’t want her to be sent away from me. I don’t want her to go to Scotland. And I don’t want her to have to marry again. She loved my father. You never saw them together, but it was a marriage of true love, a deep love. I don’t want her to have to wed and bed another man—a man fourteen years younger than her, and our enemy . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .” I break off. “Truly, it is an awful thing to ask of her.”

He sits in the chair facing the fire and says nothing for a moment, looking at the logs that are burning down to red embers.

“I understand that you don’t want her to go,” he says quietly. “And I’m sorry for that. But half of this country still supports the House of York. Nothing has changed for them. Sometimes I think that nothing will ever change them. Defeat does not alter them, it just makes them bitter and more dangerous. They supported Richard and they won’t change sides for me. Some of them dream that your brothers are still alive, and whisper about a prince over the water. They see me as a newcomer, an invader.
D’you know what they call me in the streets of York? My spies write to tell me. They call me Henry the Conqueror, as if I were William of Normandy—a foreign bastard come again. As if I am another foreign bastard. A pretender to the throne. And they hate me.”

I stir, about to make up some reassuring lie; but he holds out his hand and I put my cold hand in his and he pulls me towards him, to stand before him.

“If anyone, any man at all, stood up with a claim to the throne, and he came from the House of York, he would muster a thousand, perhaps many thousands of men,” he says. “Think of it. You could put up a dog under the banner of the white rose and they would turn out and fight to the death for it. And I would be no further on. Dog or prince, I would have the whole battle to fight all over again. It would be like invading all over again. It would be like being sleepless before the battle of Bosworth again and dreaming of the day over and over again. Except for one thing—and it is all worse: this time I would have no French army, I would have no supporters from Brittany, I would have no foreign money to hire troops, I would have no well-trained mercenaries. I would have no foolish optimism of a lad in battle for the first time. This time, I would be on my own. This time, I would have no supporters but those men who have joined my court since I won the battle.”

He sees the contempt for them in my face and he nods, agreeing with me. “I know: timeservers,” he says. “Yes, I know. Men who join the winning side. D’you think I don’t realize that they would have been Richard’s greatest friends if he had won at Bosworth? D’you think I don’t know that they would flock to whoever won a battle between me and a new pretender? D’you think I don’t know that every one of them is my friend, my dearest friend, only because I won that single battle on that particular day? D’you think I don’t count the very, very few who were with me in Brittany against the very, very many who are with me in
London? D’you think I don’t know that any new pretender who beat me would be just as I am, he would do just what I have done—change the law, distribute wealth, try to make and keep loyal friends.”

“What new pretender?” I whisper, picking out the one word from his worries. At once I am frozen with fear that he has heard a rumor of a boy somewhere, hidden in Europe, perhaps writing to my mother. “What d’you mean, a new pretender?”

“Anyone,” he says harshly. “Christ Himself can’t know who is out there in hiding! I keep hearing of a boy, I keep getting whispers of a boy, but nobody can tell me where he is or what he claims to be. God knows what the people would do, if they heard just half of the stories that I have to listen to every day. John de la Pole, your cousin, may have sworn loyalty to me, but his mother is your father’s sister, and he was named as Richard’s heir—I don’t know if I can trust him. Francis Lovell—Richard’s greatest friend—is hidden away in sanctuary and nobody knows what he wants or what he plans, or who he is working with. God help me, I have moments when I even doubt your uncle Edward Woodville, and he has been in my household since Brittany. I am delaying the release of your half brother Thomas Grey because I fear that he won’t come home to England a loyal subject but just be another recruit for them—whoever they are, whoever they are waiting for. Then there is Edward Earl of Warwick, in your mother’s household, studying what exactly? Treason? I am surrounded by your family and I don’t trust any of them.”

“Edward is a child,” I say quickly, breathless with relief that at least he has no news of a York prince, no knowledge of his whereabouts, no revealing detail of his looks, his education, his claim. “And completely loyal to you, as is my mother now. We gave you our word that Teddy would never challenge you. We promised him to you. He has sworn loyalty. Of all of us, above us all, you can trust him.”

“I hope so,” he says. “I hope so.” He looks drained by his fears. “But even so—I have to do everything! I have to hold this country to peace, to secure the borders. I am trying to do a great thing here, Elizabeth. I am trying to do what your father did, to establish a new royal family, to set its stamp on the country, to lead the country to peace. Your father could never get an established peace with Scotland though he tried, just as I am trying. If your mother would go to Scotland for us, and hold them to an alliance, she would do you a service, and me a service, and her grandson would be in debt to her all his life for his safe inheritance of England. Think of that! Giving our son his kingdom with borders at peace! And she could do it!”