The White Princess (2 page)

“The new King Henry is going to be a good king to his loyal people,” I say, despising myself as I parrot the words that Sir Robert Willoughby said to me as he gave me my mother’s letter. “And he has summoned all of us children of the House of York to London.”

“But he’ll be king,” Cecily says flatly. “He’s going to be king.”

“Of course he’ll be king! Who else?” I stumble over the question I have inadvertently posed. “Him, of course. Anyway, he has won the crown. And he will give us back our good name and recognize us as princesses of York.”

Cecily makes a sulky face. In the last weeks before Richard the king rode out to battle, he ordered her to be married to Ralph Scrope, a next-to-nobody, to make sure that Henry Tudor could not claim her as a second choice of bride, after me. Cecily, like me, is a princess of York, and so marriage to either of us gives a man a claim to the throne. The shine was taken off me when gossip said that I was Richard’s lover, and then Richard demeaned Cecily too by condemning her to a lowly marriage. She claims now that it was never consummated, now she says that she does not regard it, that Mother will have it annulled; but presumably she is Lady Scrope, the wife of a defeated Yorkist, and when we are restored to our royal titles and become princesses again, she will have to retain his name and her humiliation, even if no one knows where Ralph Scrope is today.

“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.”

ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, AUTUMN 1485

The journey south is easy in the mild September weather, and I tell our escort that there is no need to hurry. It is sunny and hot and we go by short stages as the younger children are on their ponies and cannot ride more than three hours without a rest. I sit astride my horse, the chestnut hunter that Richard gave me for my own, so that I could ride beside him, and I am glad to be on the move, leaving his castle of Sheriff Hutton, where we had planned a palace to rival Greenwich, abandoning the gardens where we walked together and the hall where we danced to the best musicians, and the chapel where he took my hand and promised that he would marry me as soon as he came back from the battle. Every day I am a little more distant from the place and hope to forget my memories of it. I try to outride my dreams but I can almost hear them, cantering like constant ghosts behind us.

Edward is excited by the journey, reveling in the freedom of the Great North Road, and taking pleasure in the people who turn out all along the way to see what is left of the royal family of York. Every time our little procession halts, people come out to bless us, doffing their caps to Edward as the only remaining York heir, the only York boy, even though our house is defeated and people have heard that there is to be a new king on the throne—a
Welshman that nobody knows, a stranger come in uninvited from Brittany or France or somewhere over the narrow seas. Teddy likes to pretend to be the rightful king, going to London to be crowned. He bows and waves his hand, pulls off his bonnet, and smiles when the people tumble out of their houses and shop doorways as we ride through the small towns. Although I tell him daily that we are going to the coronation of the new King Henry, he forgets it as soon as someone shouts, “
À
Warwick!
À
Warwick!”

Maggie, his sister, comes to me the night before we enter London. “Princess Elizabeth, may I speak with you?”

I smile at her. Poor little Maggie’s mother died in childbirth and Maggie has been mother and father to her brother, and the mistress of his household, almost before she was out of short clothes. Maggie’s father was George, Duke of Clarence, and he was executed in the Tower on the orders of my father, at the urging of my mother. Maggie never shows any sign of a grudge, though she wears a locket around her neck with her mother’s hair in it, and on her wrist, a little charm bracelet with a silver barrel as a memorial for her father. It is always dangerous to be close to the throne; even at twelve, she knows this. The House of York eats its own young like a nervous cat.

“What is it, Maggie?”

Her little forehead is furrowed. “I am anxious about Teddy.”

I wait. She is a devoted sister to the little boy.

“Anxious about his safety.”

“What do you fear?”

“He is the only York boy, the only heir,” she confides. “Of course there are other Yorks, the children of our aunt Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk; but Teddy is the only son left of the sons of York: your father King Edward, my father the Duke of Clarence, and our uncle King Richard. They’re all dead now.”

I register the familiar chord of pain that resonates in me at his name, as if I were a lute, strung achingly tight. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, they are all dead now.”

“From those three sons of York, there are no other sons anymore. Our Edward is the only boy left.”

She glances at me, uncertainly. Nobody knows what happened to my brothers Edward and Richard, who were last seen playing on the green before the Tower of London, waving from the window of the Garden Tower. Nobody knows for sure; but everyone thinks they are dead. What I know, I keep a close secret, and I don’t know much.

“I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to distress you . . .”

“It’s all right,” I say, as if to speak of the disappearance of my brothers is not pain on pain. “Do you fear that Henry Tudor will take your brother into the Tower as King Richard took both of mine? And that he won’t come out either?”

She twists her hand in her gown. “I don’t even know if I should be taking him to London,” she exclaims. “Should I try to get a ship and take him away to our aunt Margaret in Flanders? But I don’t know how. I don’t have any money to hire a ship. And I don’t know who to ask. D’you think we should do that? Get Teddy away? Aunt Margaret would guard and keep him for love of the House of York. Should we do that? Would you know how to do it?”

“King Henry won’t hurt him,” I say. “Not right now, at any rate. He might later on, when he’s established as king and secure on the throne, and people aren’t watching him and wondering how he’s going to act. But in the next few months he’ll be seeking to make friends everywhere. He’s won the battle, now he has to win the kingdom. It’s not enough to kill the previous king, he has to be acclaimed by the people and crowned. He won’t risk offending the House of York and everyone who loves us. Why, the poor man might even have to marry me to please them all!”

She smiles. “You’d make such a lovely queen! A really beautiful queen! And then I could be sure that Edward would be safe, for you could make him your ward, couldn’t you? You’d guard him, wouldn’t you? You know he’s no danger to anyone. We’d
both be faithful to the Tudor line. We’d both be faithful to you.”

“If I’m ever made queen I will keep him safe,” I promise her, thinking how many lives depend on me to make Henry honor his betrothal. “But in the meantime, I think you can come to London with us and we will be safe with my mother. She’ll know what to do. She’ll have a plan ready.”

Maggie hesitates. There was bad blood between her mother Isabel and mine, and then she was raised by Richard’s wife Anne, who hated my mother as a mortal enemy. “Will she care for us?” she asks very quietly. “Will your mother be kind to Teddy? They always said she was my family’s enemy.”

“She has no quarrel with either you or with Edward,” I say reassuringly. “You are her niece and nephew. We’re all of the House of York. She will protect you as she does us.”

She is reassured, she trusts me, and I don’t remind her that my mother had two boys of her own, Edward and Richard, that she loved more than life itself; but she couldn’t keep them safe. And nobody knows where my little brothers are tonight.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1485

There is no welcome party as we ride into London, and when one or two apprentices and market women catch sight of us in the narrow streets and cheer for the children of York, our escort closes up around us, to drive us as fast as they can into the courtyard of the royal Palace of Westminster, where the heavy wooden gates close behind us. Clearly, the new king Henry wants no rivals for the hearts of the city that he is calling his own. My mother is on the entrance steps, before the great doors, waiting for us with my little sisters, six-year-old Catherine and four-year-old Bridget, on either side of her. I tumble down from my horse and find myself in her arms, smelling her familiar perfume of rosewater and the scent of her hair, and as she holds me and pats my back, I find myself suddenly in tears, sobbing for the loss of the man I loved so passionately, and the future I had planned with him.

“Hush,” my mother says firmly, and sends me indoors while she greets my sisters and my cousins. She comes in after me, with Bridget on one hip and Catherine holding her hand, Anne and Cecily dancing around her. She is laughing, and looks happy and far younger than her forty-eight years. She is wearing a gown of dark blue, a blue leather belt around her slim waist, and her hair tied back into a blue velvet cap. All the children are shouting
with excitement as she draws us into her private rooms, and sits down with Bridget on her knee. “Now tell me everything!” she says. “Did you really ride all the way, Anne? That was very good indeed. Edward, my dear boy, are you tired? Was your pony good?”