The White Princess (54 page)

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, WINTER 1496

Maggie comes into my room with so rapid a step and with so fierce a glance towards me that I can tell, knowing her as I do, that she is desperate to speak with me. I am sitting with My Lady the King’s Mother, with sewing in my hands, listening to one of her women reading one of her eternal homilies on religion, reading aloud from a hand-copied manuscript, for God knows no one would bother to print such a dirge, and Maggie curtseys to us both and sinks to a stool and takes up some sewing and tries to look composed.

I wait till the end of a chapter and for the girl to turn the manuscript page, and I say, “I will walk in the garden.”

My Lady looks out of the window where a gray full-bellied sky promises snow and says, “You had much better wait until the sun comes out.”

“I’ll wear my cloak, and my muff and my hat,” I say, and my ladies, after a little hesitating glance at My Lady the King’s Mother in case she is going to overrule me, fetch my things and wrap me as if I were a bulky parcel.

My Lady lets them do their work, as she has no appetite for countermanding me in my own rooms anymore. Since the death of Jasper she has aged a dozen years. I look at her now and
sometimes I no longer see the powerful woman who dominated me and my husband, but instead a woman who spent all her life on a cause, sacrificed the love of her life for her son, and now waits to hear if the cause is lost and her son is on the run again.

“Margaret, will you give me your arm?” I ask.

Maggie rises with careful lack of interest, as if she had planned to stay indoors, and puts on her own cloak.

“You must have a guard,” My Lady rules. “And you three—” she points to the nearest women, barely looking to see who they are “—you three shall walk with Her Grace.”

They do not look very pleased at the thought of a cold walk with snow coming, but they rise and fetch their capes from their rooms and with a guard before and behind us, and ladies around us, finally Maggie and I are alone together and we can talk without being overhead.

“What?” I say tersely as soon as the guards are ahead and the women lagging behind. Maggie takes my arm to save me from slipping on the frosty ground. Beside us the gray, cold river is rimmed with white on the banks, while a seagull, no whiter than the frost, calls once overhead and then wheels away.

“He’s married,” she says shortly.

She never needs to say his name. Indeed, we maintain the convention that we have no name for him.

“Married!” At once I have a clutch of fear that he has married beneath himself, some sympathetic serving girl, some opportunistic widow who has loaned him money. If he has married badly, then Henry will crow with joy and scorn him, calling him Peterkin and Perkin all the more, the son of a drunkard and a drudge, now wedded to a slut. Everyone will say that it proves he is no prince, but a lowly pretender. Or they will say that he has learned common ways, vulgar ways, to be dazzled by the widow of some minor grandee and marry her for her dower money. If his bride is unchaste, some slattern in a hovel, he might as well give up and go home.

I stop still. “Oh, dear God, Maggie. Who is she?”

She is beaming. “A good marriage, even a great marriage. He has married Katherine Huntly, kinswoman to the King of Scotland himself, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, the greatest lord of Scotland.”

“The Earl of Huntly’s daughter?”

“And they say she is a beauty. She was given in marriage by King James himself. They were betrothed before Christmas, they are married now, and they are already saying that she is with child.”

“My little bro . . . Ri . . . he is married? The boy is married?”

“And his wife with child.”

I take her arm and we walk on. “Oh, if only my mother could have seen this.”

Maggie nods. “She would be so glad. So glad.”

I laugh aloud. “She would be delighted, especially if the girl is beautiful and has a fortune. But Maggie, do you know where they married? And how they looked?”

“She wore a gown of deepest red, and your bro . . . he wore a white shirt and black hose and a black velvet jacket. They held a great tournament to celebrate.”

“A tournament!”

“King James paid for everything, it was all done very well. They are saying it was as grand as our court, some say better. And now the king and the new couple have gone to his hunting palace at Falkland in Fife.”

“My husband knows all this.” I state the obvious.

“Yes. I know it from Sir Richard, who has to go to Lincoln to muster an army for war with Scotland. He had it from one of the king’s spies. The king is in his council right now, commanding the repair of the castles in the North of England and preparing for an invasion from Scotland.”

“An invasion led by the King of Scotland?”

“They say it is a certainty this spring, now that he is married
into the royal family of Scotland. The King of Scotland is certain to put him on the throne of England.”

I think of my brother as I last saw him, a handsome little boy of ten with fair hair and bright hazel eyes and an impish smile. I think of the tremble of his lower lip when we kissed him good-bye and wrapped him up warmly and sent him out of sanctuary, all on his own, into the boat to go downriver, praying that the plan would work and that he would get overseas to our aunt Margaret the duchess and that she would save him. I think of him now, fully grown, a man on his wedding day dressed in black and white. I imagine him smiling his impish smile, and his bride beautiful at his side.

I put my hand to my belly, where I am growing a little Tudor, my brother’s enemy, the son of the man who usurped my brother’s throne.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Maggie says, seeing the smile die away from my face. “There is nothing either of us can do but hope to survive and pray that nobody puts the blame on us. And see what happens.”

In February I prepare for my confinement, leaving a court still subdued by mourning for Jasper, and still uneasy at the news from the youthful joyful court in Scotland where we hear that they spend their time hunting in the snow, and planning to invade our northern lands as soon as the weather is better.

Henry holds a grand dinner before I go into the darkened room, and the Spanish ambassador, Roderigo Gonzalva de Puebla, attends as an honored guest. He is a small man, dark and good-looking, and he bows low towards me and kisses my hand and then rises up to beam at me as if he is confident that I shall find him very handsome.

“The ambassador is proposing a marriage for Prince Arthur,”
Henry tells me quietly. “The youngest Spanish princess, the Infanta Katherine of Aragon.”

I look from Henry’s smiling face to the smug ambassador and understand that I am to be pleased. “What a good idea,” I say. “But they are still so young!”

“A betrothal, to indicate the friendship between our countries,” Henry says smoothly. He nods to the ambassadors and leads me to the top table out of earshot. “It’s not just to link Spain to our interests, a constant ally against France, it’s to get the boy. They have promised me if Arthur is betrothed, that they’ll tempt the boy to visit them with the promise of an alliance. They’ll get him to Granada and hand him over to us.”

“He won’t go,” I say certainly. “Why would he leave his wife in Scotland and go to Spain?”

“Because he wants the support of Spain for his invasion,” Henry says shortly. “But they will stand as our ally. They will give us their infanta in marriage, and they will capture our traitor to make sure that she marries the only heir to the throne. Their interests become our interests. And they are newly come to their thrones themselves. They know what it is like to fight for their kingdom. When they betroth their princess to our prince they sign a death warrant for the boy. They will want him dead just as we do.”

The court rise to their feet and acknowledge us, bowing low to me, and the server of the ewery comes to me with the golden bowl filled with warm water. I dip my fingers in the scented water and wipe them on the napkin. “But, husband—”

“Never mind,” Henry says shortly. “When you have had our new baby and come back to court we will talk of these things. Now you must receive the good wishes of the court, go to your confinement, and think about nothing but a good birth. I am hoping for another boy from you, Elizabeth.”

I smile, as if I am reassured, and I glance down the court where the ambassador de Puebla is seated, above the saltcellar,
an honored guest, and I wonder if he could be a man so two-faced, so inveterate in his own ambition, that he would promise friendship to a boy of twenty-two and betray him to his death. He feels my gaze upon him and looks up to smile at me, and I think, Yes, yes, he is.

PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, MARCH 1496

I enter my confinement with a heavy heart, still missing my little girl Elizabeth, and this labor is long and hard. My sister Anne laughs and says she will study how it is done as she is with child, but what she sees makes her fearful. They give me strong birthing ale after some hours, and I wish I had my mother with me to fix me with her cool gray gaze, and to whisper to me of the river and rest, and help me through the pain. At about midnight I can feel the urgency of the baby and I squat like a peasant woman and bear down and then I hear the little faint cry and I cry too, for joy that I have had another child, for sheer exhaustion, and I find I am sobbing as if heartbroken, missing the brother that I fear I will never see, and his wife that I will never meet, and their baby, a cousin to this child, who will never play with her.

Even with the new baby girl in my arms, even wrapped up in my great bed with my ladies praising my courage and bringing me warmed ale and sweetmeats, I feel haunted by loneliness.

Maggie is the only one who sees my tears and she wipes them from my face with a scrap of linen. “What’s wrong?”

“I feel like the last of my line, I feel as if I am utterly alone.”

She does not rush to comfort me, nor even disagree with me and point to my sisters, exclaiming over the baby as she is swaddled and bound and put to the wet nurse’s breast. She looks
grim, tired as I am from staying up all the night, her cheeks wet with tears like mine. She does not disagree with me. She makes the pillows comfortable behind me and then she speaks.

“We are the last,” she says quietly. “I cannot give you false words of comfort. We are the last of the Yorks. You, your sisters, me and my brother, and perhaps England will never see the white rose again.”

“Have you heard anything from Teddy?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I write, but he doesn’t reply. I am not allowed to visit. He is lost to me.”