The White Princess (67 page)

“Walked out?” Henry repeats.

“He had a key.”

“Walked out?”

“Perhaps he drugged the guards.”

Some strange prescience teaches me to look, not at Henry’s well-manifested surprise and growing anger, but at his mother. She is looking at him, not with her usual expression of approbation and approval, but as if she has never seen him before, as if he is doing something which surprises even such a wily old plotter as herself. I sink back down into my chair again.

“How could he have got a key? How could he have got drugs?” Henry demands, loud enough to be heard through the door in the presence chamber where anyone could be waiting to wish him the best of the day, ears pricked for gossip.

Nobody replies that the boy could have got anything he wanted, since Henry himself had given him free run of the court and an allowance of money which would cover the price of some leather trim for his saddle, or a feather for his hat, or indeed cheap sleeping powders and a fee to a locksmith. Nobody points out that if the boy wanted to escape, he could have walked down to the stables and taken his horse and ridden away any day since last October. He did not have to wait till the nighttime, when he would be locked in and then need a key to get himself out. The whole story has a fairy-tale quality to it, like his name, like his history. Now the boy, who once passed as a prince only because someone dressed him in a silk shirt, disappears from a locked room in the dead of night.

“He must be recaptured!” Henry shouts.

He snaps his fingers for one of his clerks and the man bustles in, his tonsure shining, his writing desk around his neck, his quills sharpened at the ready. Henry rattles off a string of orders: the ports to be locked shut, the sheriffs of every county to be on alert to look for the boy, messengers to ride down the main highways to alert all the inns and guesthouses along the way.

“Pay a reward for his recapture, dead or alive,” his mother suggests.

I keep my gaze on my plate and I don’t say quickly, “Oh, they are not to hurt him!” I am a princess of York and I know that the stakes are always those of life or death. And he will have known this too; he will have known, when he slipped away into the darkness, that he was signing his own death warrant. Once he broke his parole they would be certain to go after him with a sword.

“I think I’ll tell them to bring him in alive,” Henry says carelessly, as if it does not much matter either way. “I would not want to distress Lady Katherine.”

“She will be distressed,” I observe.

“Yes, but now she must see that her husband has run away and left her, run like a coward and left her as if he did not regard himself as married anymore,” Henry said firmly to me, impressing me with his view. “She must see that he can care nothing for her if he would just go—abandon her completely.”

“Faithless.” His mother nods.

“You had better go and break the news to her,” Henry says. “Tell her that he organized his own escape and he did it quite without honor, drugging a guard and sneaking out like a thief. Leaving her alone, and their son fatherless. She must despise him for this. I expect she will get her marriage annulled.”

I rise from my seat and as he pulls back the heavy wooden chair for me I turn and face him, my gray eyes looking into his dark ones. “I shall certainly tell her that you think she should despise him, I shall certainly tell her that you think she should regard herself as a single woman, as you have always done. In addition, shall I assure her that your motives are chivalrous when
you call for her marriage to be annulled?” I ask icily, and I walk out and leave him and his mother to call for a map of the kingdom and calculate where the boy might be.

That night, Henry comes to my bedroom, surprising me and Cecily, who was going to be my bedmate for the night. She scuttles from the room, pulling her robe around her as Henry strolls in, bringing a jug of mulled ale, and a glass of wine for me, just as he used to do when we were happy together.

He gives me my glass, sits at the fireside, pours himself a tankard of ale, and drinks a deep draft, like a man who has reached a safe haven and can afford to celebrate.

“He was plotting, you know,” he says shortly. “Plotting his escape with Flanders, with France, with Scotland. The usual allies. The friends who never forget him.”

I don’t ask who “he” is. “They helped him get out?” I ask.

Henry chuckles, puts out his booted foot, and kicks a log that is teetering on the edge of the fire. “Well, someone certainly helped him. Bundled him out and set him free.”

I find that I am looking at him coldly, trying to understand what he is saying. “Was he drugged like his guards?” I ask eventually. “Was he drugged and kidnapped and put out of the castle?”

Henry does not meet my eyes. Again, he reminds me of Harry, who will twist his finger in his hair and look at his boots and tell me whatever little lie would best suit his case.

“How would I know?” Henry says. “How ever would I know what these traitors will do?”

“So where is he now?”

He chuckles. This, he is willing to admit. “I know where. I’ll give him a few days to know his predicament. He’s on his own, he has no supporters. He’ll sleep cold and damp. I’ll pick him up tomorrow, or the day after, soon.”

I curl my feet up in my chair. “And why is this a triumph for us? Since you come to me to celebrate?”

He smiles at me. “Ah, Elizabeth. You know me so well! It is a triumph, though it is a hidden one. I had to break this new habit, this accidental accord that had come about. I never thought he would be like this, at the heart of my own court! There he was, happy as a pig in clover, sneaking into his wife’s rooms—don’t deny it, I know he was—and dancing with the ladies, writing poems, singing songs, going hunting, all at my expense, dressed like a prince and everywhere greeted like one. That’s not what I wanted when I dragged him out of sanctuary and named him as a common pretender. I had him in chains at Exeter. I had him confessing everything I put before him. He signed anything I wanted, he took whatever name I gave him. He was humbled to dirt, the son of a drunk boatman. I didn’t expect him to bob up, bob up into her bedroom. I didn’t expect him to come to court and charm everyone he met. I didn’t expect him to live like a prince when I had made him confess that he was a liar and a cheat. I didn’t think she would . . . who would have dreamed that she would . . . a princess?”

“Stand by him?”

“Go on loving him,” he says quietly. “When I had made him look a fool.”

“What did you want? What did you hope would happen?”

“I thought everyone would see that he was a pretender, like the other feigned lad, Simnel, my falconer. I thought they would cluster to see him and laugh at his impertinence and then forget all about him. I thought he would be humbled by being kept around us, I thought he would sink.”

“Sink?”

“I thought he would disappear into the crowd of hangers-on and placemen and toadies and beggars who go with us everywhere. Chased off now and then, reprimanded here and there, but always trailing along behind, living hand to mouth. I thought he would become one of them. I thought he would be the page
boy at the back of the procession, the one that no one likes, who gets a kicking when the Master of the Horse is drunk. I thought people would despise him. I didn’t expect him to shine.”

“I did nothing to recognize him.” I make it clear. “I never brought him into my company. He was never invited into my rooms.”

“No,” Henry says thoughtfully. “But he strolled in as if he belonged there. He made his own place. People liked him, gathered round him. He was just . . .” He pauses and then he says the one betraying word: “Recognized.”

I give a little gasp. “Someone recognized him as Prince Richard? My brother?”

“No. No one would be such a fool. Not at my court. Not surrounded by spies. He was recognized for himself. People saw him as a power, as a person, as a Someone.”

“People just happen to like him.”

“I know. I can’t have that. He has that damned charm that you all have. I can’t have him at court being happy, being charming, looking like he belongs here. But—and this was the problem—I had given my word to him when he surrendered to me. His wife went down on her knees to me, and I gave my word to her. And she held me to it. She would never have allowed me to imprison him or put him on trial.”

He frowns at the glowing embers of the fire, quite unaware that he is confiding to his wife the commands of his mistress.

“And there’s another thing. I established that he is the son of a Flanders boatman—which I thought a very good story at the time—but of course that makes him no subject of mine, so I can’t try him for treason. He’s not my subject, he’s not treasonous. I wish someone had warned me of that when we were going to such trouble to find his parents in Flanders. We should never have found them in Flanders, we should have found them in Ireland, somewhere like that.”

I absorb in silence the cynicism of the creation of the boy’s story.

“So now I have two bad choices: either I can’t try him for treason because he’s foreign, or—”

“Or?”

“Or he’s not foreign but the rightful king!” Henry bursts out laughing, swigs from his tankard, looks at me bright-eyed over the dull pewter. “You see? If he’s who I say he is, then I can’t try him for treason. If he’s who he says he is, then he should be King of England and I am the traitor. Either way I was stuck with him. And every day he grew more and more happy that I was stuck with him. So I had to get him out, I had to make him betray the sanctuary that I had given him.”

“Sanctuary?”

He laughs again. “Wasn’t he born in sanctuary?”

I take a breath. “It was my brother Prince Edward who was born in sanctuary,” I say. “Not Richard.”

“Well, anyway,” he says carelessly. “So the main thing is that I’ve got him out of his comfortably safe billet at my court. Now he’s on the run, I can prove that he’s plotting against me. He’s broken his word that he would stay at court. He’s dishonored his promise to his wife too. She thought he would never leave her; well, he has. I can arrest him for breaking his parole. Put him in the Tower.”

“Will you execute him?” I ask, keeping my voice light and level. “Do you think you will execute him?”

Henry puts down his tankard and throws off his cloak and then his nightgown. He gets into my bed naked, and I just glimpse that he is aroused. Winning excites him, catching someone out, tricking someone, getting money off them or betraying their interest brings him so much pleasure that it makes him amorous.

“Come to bed,” he says.

I show no sign of unwillingness. I don’t know what might depend upon my behavior. I untie the ribbons on my nightgown and I drop it to the floor, I slide between the sheets and he grabs me at once, pulls me beneath him. I make sure that I am smiling as I close my eyes.

“I can’t execute him,” he says quietly, thrusting inside me with the words. I keep my smile on my face as he makes love while speaking of death. “I can’t behead him, not unless he does something stupid.” Heavily he moves on me. “But the joy of him is that he is certain to do something stupid,” he remarks, and his weight bears down on me.

For a manhunt for a known traitor, a claimant to the throne, the ghost that terrorized Henry’s life for thirteen years, the pursuit is curiously leisurely. The guards who slept on duty are cautioned and return to their posts, though everyone expected them to be tried and executed for their part in the escape. Henry sends out messengers to the ports but they travel easily, setting out to north and west, south and east, as if riding for pleasure on a sunny day. Inexplicably, Henry sends out his own personal guard, his yeomen, in boats, rowing upstream, as if the boy might have gone deeper into England, and not to the coast to get back to Flanders, to Scotland, to safety.

His wife has to sit with me while we wait for news. She has not gone back into widow’s black but she is no longer gorgeous in tawny velvet. She wears a dark blue gown and she sits half behind me, so that I have to turn to speak to her, and so that visitors to my rooms, even the king and his mother, can hardly see her, hidden by my great chair.