The White Princess (82 page)

We walk in silence through the woods and then over the footbridge. As we go by the big ash tree I glance at the trunk. The looped thread has gone; there is no proof that the magic was ever there. The waters of the river where I dragged my ring from the flood have closed over. There is no proof that the magic ever worked. There is no proof that there is such a thing as
magic at all. All I have is a little gold ring shaped like a crown that may mean nothing.

Mother is in the herb garden at the side of the house and, when she sees my brother and me walking together in stubborn silence, a pace apart, saying nothing, she straightens up with the herbs in her basket and waits for us to come towards her, readying herself for trouble.

“Son,” she greets my brother. Anthony kneels for her blessing and she puts her hand on his fair head and smiles down on him. He rises to his feet and takes her hand in his.

“I think the king has lied to you and to my sister,” he says bluntly. “The marriage ceremony was so secret that there is nobody of any authority to prove it. I think he went through the sham ceremony to have the bedding of her, and he will deny that they were married.”

“Oh, do you?” she says, unruffled.

“I do,” he says. “And it won’t be the first time he has pretended marriage to a lady in order to bed her. He has played this game before, and the woman ended with a bastard and no wedding ring.”

My mother, magnificently, shrugs her shoulders. “What he has done in the past is his own affair,” she says. “But I saw him wedded and bedded, and I wager that he will come back to claim her as his wife.”

“Never,” Anthony says simply. “And she will be ruined. If she is with child, she will be utterly disgraced.”

My mother smiles up at his cross face. “If you were right and he was going to deny the marriage, then her prospects would be poor indeed,” she agrees.

I turn my head from them. It is only a moment since my lover was telling me how to keep his son safe. Now this same child is described as my ruin.

“I am going to see my sons,” I say coldly to them both. “I won’t hear this and I won’t speak of it. I am true to him and he will be true to me, and you will be sorry that you doubted us.”

“You are a fool,” my brother says, unimpressed. “I am sorry for that, at least.” And to my mother he says, “You have taken a great gamble with her, a brilliant gamble; but you have staked her life and happiness on the word of a known liar.”

“Perhaps,” my mother says, unmoved. “And you are a wise man, my son, a philosopher. But some things I know better than you, even now.”

I stalk away. Neither of them calls me back.

I have to wait, the whole kingdom has to wait again to hear who to hail as king, who shall command. My brother Anthony sends a man north, scouting for news, and then we all wait for him to come back to tell us if the battle has been joined, and if King Edward’s luck has held. Finally, in May, Anthony’s servant comes home and says he has been in the far north, near to Hexham, and met a man who told him all about it. A bad battle, a bloody battle. I hesitate in the doorway; I want to know the outcome, not the details. I don’t have to see a battle to imagine it anymore; we have become a country accustomed to tales of the battlefield. Everyone has heard of the armies drawn up in their positions,
or seen the charge, the falling back and the exhausted pause while they regroup. Or everyone knows someone who has been in a town where the victorious soldiers came through determined to carouse and rob and rape; everyone has stories of women running to a church for sanctuary, screaming for help. Everyone knows that these wars have torn our country apart, have destroyed our prosperity, our friendliness between neighbors, our trust of strangers, the love between brothers, the safety of our roads, the affection for our king; and yet nothing seems to stop the battles. We go on and on seeking a final victory and a triumphant king who will bring peace; but victory never comes and peace never comes and the kingship is never settled.

Anthony’s messenger gets to the point. King Edward’s army has won, and won decisively. The Lancaster forces were routed and King Henry, the poor wandering lost King Henry who does not know fully where he is, even when he is in his palace at Westminster, has run away into the moors of Northumberland, a price on his head as if he were an outlaw, without attendants, without friends, without even followers, like a borderer rebel as wild as a chough.

His wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, my mother’s one-time dearest friend, is fled to Scotland with the prince their heir. She is defeated, and her husband is vanquished. But everyone knows that she will not accept her defeat, she will plot and scheme for her son, just as Edward told me that I must plot and scheme for ours. She will never stop until she is back in England
and the battle is drawn up again. She will never stop until her husband is dead, her son is dead, and she has no one left to put on the throne. This is what it means to be Queen of England in this country today. This is how it has been for her for nearly ten years, ever since her husband became unfit to rule and his country became like a frightened hare thrown into a field before a pack of hunting dogs, darting this way and that. Worse, I know that this is how it will be for me, if Edward comes home to me and names me as the new queen, and we make a son and heir. The young man I love will be king of an uncertain kingdom, and I will have to be a claimant queen.

And he does come. He sends me word that he has won the battle and broken the siege of Bamburgh Castle, and will call in as his army marches south. He will come for dinner, he writes to my father, and in a private note to me he scribbles that he will stay the night.

I show the note to my mother. “You can tell Anthony that my husband is true to me,” I say.

“I shan’t tell Anthony anything,” she says unhelpfully.

My father, at any rate, manages to be pleased at the prospect of a visit from the victor. “We were right to give him our men,” he says to my mother. “Bless you for that, love. He is the victorious king and you have put us on the winning side once more.”

She smiles at him. “It could have gone either way, as always,” she says. “And it is Elizabeth who has turned his head. It is she he is coming to see.”

“Do we have some well-hung beef?” he asks. “And John and the boys and I will go hawking and get you some game.”

“We’ll give him a good dinner,” she reassures him. But she does not tell my father that he has greater cause for celebration: that the King of England has married me. She stays silent, and I wonder if she too thinks that he is playing me false.

There is no sign of what my mother thinks, one way or another, when she greets him with a low curtsey. She shows no familiarity, as a woman might do to her son-in-law. But she treats him with no coldness, as surely she would if she thought he had made fools of us both? Rather, she greets him as a victorious king and he greets her as a great lady, a former duchess, and both of them treat me as a favored daughter of the house.

Dinner is as successful as it is bound to be, given that my father is filled with bluster and excitement, my mother as elegant as always, my sisters in their usual state of stunned admiration, and my brothers furiously silent. The king bids his farewell to my parents and rides off down the road as if going back to Northampton, and I throw on my cape and run down the path to the hunting lodge by the river.

He is there before me, his big war horse in the stall, his page boy in the hayloft, and he takes me into his arms without a word. I say nothing too. I am not such a fool as to greet a man with suspicion and complaints, and besides, when he touches me, all I want is his touch, when he kisses me, all I want are his kisses, and
all I want to hear are the sweetest words in the world, when he says: “Bed, Wife.”

In the morning I am combing my hair before the little silvered mirror and pinning it up. He stands behind me, watching me, sometimes taking a lock of golden hair and winding it round his finger to see it catch the light. “You aren’t helping,” I say, smiling.

“I don’t want to help, I want to hinder. I adore your hair, I like to see it loose.”

“And when shall we announce our marriage, my lord?” I ask, watching his face in the reflection.

“Not yet,” he says swiftly, too swiftly: this is an answer prepared. “My lord Warwick is hell-bent on me marrying the Princess Bona of Savoy, to guarantee peace with France. I have to take some time to tell him it cannot be. He will need to get used to the idea.”

“Some days?” I suggest.

“Say weeks,” he prevaricates. “He will be disappointed and he has taken God knows what bribes to bring this marriage about.”

“He is disloyal? He is bribed?”

“No. Not he. He takes the French money but not to betray me: we are as one. We have known each other since boyhood. He taught me how to joust, he gave me my first sword. His father was like a father to me. Truly, he has been like an older brother to me. I would not have fought for my right to the throne if he had not been with me. His father took my father up to the very throne and made him heir to the King of England,
and in his turn Richard Neville has supported me. He is my great mentor, my great friend. He has taught me almost everything I know about fighting and ruling a kingdom. I have to take the time to tell him about us, and explain that I could not resist you. I owe him that.”

“He is so important to you?”

“The greatest man in my life.”

“But you will tell him; you will bring me to court,” I say, trying to keep my voice light and inconsequential. “And present me to the court as your wife.”

“When the time is right.”

“May I at least tell my father, so that we can meet openly as husband and wife?”

He laughs. “As well tell the town crier. No, my love, you must keep our secret for a little while longer.”

I take my tall headdress with the sweeping veil and tie it on, saying nothing. It gives me a headache with the weight of it.

“You do trust me, don’t you, Elizabeth?” he asks sweetly.

“Yes,” I lie. “Completely.”

Anthony stands beside me as the king rides away, his hand raised in a salute, a false smile on his face. “Not going with him?” he asks sarcastically. “Not going to London to buy new clothes? Not going to be presented at court? Not attending the thanksgiving Mass as queen?”

“He has to tell Lord Warwick,” I say. “He has to explain.”

“It will be Lord Warwick who will explain to him,” my brother says bluntly. “He will tell him that no King of England can afford to marry a commoner, no King of England would marry a woman who is not a proven virgin. No King of England would marry an Englishwoman of no family and no fortune. And your precious king will explain that it was a wedding witnessed by no lord nor court official, that his new wife has not even told her family, that she wears her ring in her pocket; and they will both agree it can be ignored as if it had never happened. As he has done before, so he will do again, as long as there are foolish women in the kingdom—and that is to say forever.”

I turn to him and at the pain on my face he stops taunting me. “Ah, Elizabeth, don’t look like that.”

“I don’t care if he doesn’t acknowledge me, you fool,” I flare out. “It’s not a question of wanting to be queen; it’s not even a question of wanting honorable love anymore. I am mad for him, I am madly in love with him. I would go to him if I had to walk barefoot. Tell me I am one of many. I don’t care! I don’t care for my name or for my pride anymore. As long as I can have him once more, that’s all I want, just to love him; all I want to be certain of is that I will see him again, that he loves me.”