The White Princess

  “She’s not at peace,” Lady Margaret concludes. “She is going on and on fighting the war that you Yorks have lost. She’s not made peace with us, and now she’s at war with you, her own daughter.”

  I give a little wail and sink down in the window seat, my hands hiding my face. There is a silence as Lady Margaret crosses the room and seats herself heavily beside me.

  “It’s for her son, isn’t it?” she asks wearily. “That’s the only claim she would fight for in preference to yours. That’s the only pretender that she would put against her grandson. She loves Arthur as well as we do, I know that. The only claim she would favor over his would be that of her own son. She must think that one of her boys, Richard or Edward, is still alive and she hopes to put him on the throne.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” I am crying now, I can hardly speak. I can hardly hear her through my sobs.

  “Well, who is it?” she suddenly shouts, flashing out into rage. “Who else could it be? Who could she put above her own grandson? Who can she prefer to our Prince Arthur? Arthur that was born at Winchester, Arthur of Camelot? Who can she prefer to him?”

  Dumbly, I shake my head. I can feel the hot tears pooling in my icy hands and making my face wet.

  “She would throw you down for no one else,” Lady Margaret whispers. “Of course it is one of the boys. Tell me, Elizabeth. Tell me all that you know so that we can make your son, Arthur, safe in his inheritance. Does your mother have one of her boys hidden somewhere? Is he with your aunt in Flanders?”

  “I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “She would never tell me anything. I said I don’t know, and truly, I don’t know. She made sure that there was never anything that I could tell you. She did not want me ever to have an inquisition like this. She tried to protect me from it, so I don’t know.”

  Henry comes to my rooms with his court before dinner, a tight, unconvincing smile on his face, playing the part of a king, trying to hide his fear that he is losing everything.

  “I’ll talk with you later,” he says in a hard undertone. “When I come to your room tonight.”

  “My lord . . .” I whisper.

  “Not now,” he says firmly. “Everyone needs to see that we are united, that we are as one.”

  “My mother cannot be held against her will,” I stipulate. I think of my cousin in the Tower, my mother in Bermondsey Abbey. “I cannot tolerate my family being held. Whatever you suspect. I will not bear it.”

  “Tonight,” he says. “When I come to your rooms. I’ll explain.”

  My cousin Maggie gives me one single aghast look and then comes behind me, picks up my train, and straightens it out as my husband takes my hand and leads me into dinner before the court, and I smile, as I must do, to the left and to the right, and wonder what my mother will have for her dinner tonight, while the court, that once was her court, is merry.

  At least Henry comes to me promptly, straight after chapel, dressed for bed, and the lords who escort him to my bedroom quickly withdraw to leave us alone, and my cousin Maggie waits only to see if there is anything that we need, and then she goes too, with one wide-eyed glance at me, as if she fears that next morning I will have disappeared as well.

  “I don’t mean your mother to be enclosed,” Henry says briskly. “And I won’t put her on trial if I can avoid it.”

  “What has she done?” I demand. I cannot maintain the pretence that she is innocent of everything.

  “Do you mean that?” he shoots back at me. “Or are you trying to discover how much I know?”

  I give a little exclamation, and turn away from him.

  “Sit down, sit down,” he says. He comes after me and takes my hand and leads me to the fireside chair where we used to sit so comfortably. He presses me down into the seat and pats my flushed cheek. For a moment I long to throw myself into his arms and cry on his chest and tell him that I know nothing for sure, but that I fear everything just as he does. That I am torn between love for my mother and my lost brothers, and love for my son. That I cannot be expected to choose the next King of England and finally, most puzzling of all for me, I would give anything in the world to see my beloved brother again and know that he is safe. I would give anything but the throne of England, anything but Henry’s crown.

  “I don’t know all of it,” he says, sitting heavily opposite me, his chin on his fist, looking at the flames. “That’s the worst thing: I don’t know all of it. But she has been writing to your aunt Margaret in Flanders, and Margaret is mustering an army against us. Your mother has been in contact with all the old York families, those of her household, those who remember your father or your uncle, calling them to be ready for when Margaret’s army lands. She has been writing to men in exile, to men in hiding. She has been whispering with her sister-in-law, Elizabeth—John de la Pole’s mother. She’s even been visiting your grandmother Duchess Cecily, her mother-in-law. They were at daggers drawn for all of her marriage but now they are in alliance against a greater enemy: me. I know that she was writing to Francis Lovell. I have seen the letters. She was behind his rebellion, I have evidence for that now. I even know how much she sent him to equip his army. It was the money I gave her, the allowance that I granted her. All this I know, I have seen it with my own eyes. I have held her letters in my own hands. There is no doubt.”

  He exhales wearily and takes a sip of his drink. I look at him in horror. This evidence is enough to have my mother locked up for the rest of her life. If she were a man, they would behead her for treason.

  “That’s not the worst of it,” he goes on grimly. “There is probably more; but I don’t know what else she’s been doing. I don’t know all her allies, I don’t know her most secret plans. I don’t dare to think.”

  “Henry, what do you fear?” I whisper. “What do you fear that she has been doing, when you look like this?”

  He looks as if he is being harried beyond bearing. “I don’t know what to fear,” he says. “Your aunt the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy is raising an army, a great army against me, I know that much.”

  “She is?”

  He nods. “And your mother was raising rebels at home. Today I had my council here. I’m in command of the lords, I’m sure of that. At any rate . . . they all swore fealty. But who can I trust if your mother and your aunt put an army in the field, and at the head of it is—” He breaks off.

  “Is who?” I ask. “Who do you fear might lead such an invasion?”

  He looks away from me. “I think you know.”

  I cross the room and take his hand, horrified. “Truly, I don’t know.”

  He holds my hand very tightly and stares into my eyes as if trying to read my thoughts, as if he wants more than anything else in the world to know he can trust me, his wife and the mother of his child.

  “Do you think John de la Pole would turn his coat and lead the army against you?” I ask, naming my own cousin, Richard’s heir. “Is it him you fear?”

  “Do you know anything against him?”

  I shake my head. “Nothing, I swear.”

  “Worse than him,” he says shortly.

  I stand before him in silence, wondering if he will name the enemy that he fears the most: the figurehead who would be more potent than a York cousin.

  “Who?” I whisper.

  But it is as if the ghost has entered our private room, the ghost that everyone speaks of, but no one dares to name. Superstitiously, Henry will not name him either.

  “I’m ready for him,” is all he says. “Whoever it is that she has to head her army. You can tell everyone that I am ready for him.”

  “Who?” I dare him to speak.

  But Henry just shakes his head.

  And then, the very next morning, John de la Pole is missing from the chapel at the service of Lauds. I glance down from my raised seat in the gallery and notice that his usual place is empty. He is missing at dinnertime too.

  “Where is my cousin John?” I ask My Lady the King’s Mother as we wait after
dinner for the priest to finish the long reading that she has commanded for all the days of Lent.

  She looks at me as if I have insulted her. “You ask me?” she says.

  “I ask you where is my cousin John?” I repeat, thinking that she has not heard me. “He was not at chapel this morning, and I haven’t seen him all day.”

  “You should perhaps ask your mother, rather than me,” she says bitterly. “She may know. You should perhaps ask your aunt Elizabeth of York, his mother—she may know. You should ask your aunt Margaret of York, the false Dowager Duchess of Burgundy: she certainly knows, for he is on his way to her.”

  I gasp and put my hand over my mouth. “Are you saying that John de la Pole is going to Flanders? How can you think such a thing?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it,” she says. “I would be ashamed to say such a thing if there was any doubt. He is false, as I always said he was. He is false and he sat in our councils and heard our plans for our defense, and heard our fears of rebellion, and now he runs overseas to his aunt to tell her everything we know and everything we fear, and he asks her to put him on our throne, because she is of York, and now he says he is wholly for York, he was always wholly for York—just like you and all your family.”

  “John is false?” I repeat. I cannot believe what she is saying. If it is true, then perhaps everything else that they fear is true: perhaps there is an earl, a duke, perhaps even a prince of York somewhere out there, biding his time, planning his campaign. “My cousin John has gone to Flanders?”

  “False as a Yorkist,” she says, insulting me to my face. “As false as only a white rose can be, as a white rose always is.”

  My Lady the King’s Mother tells me that we will go to Norwich, in the early summer since the king wants to be seen by his people, and take his justice to them. I can tell at once from the strained look in her eyes that this is a lie; but I don’t challenge her. Instead I wait for her to become absorbed in the planning of her son’s progress, and one day at the end of April I announce that I am feeling unwell and will rest in bed. I leave Maggie to guard the door to my bedroom, and to tell people that I am sleeping, and I put on my plainest gown, wrap myself in a dark cloak, and slip down to the pier outside the palace and hail a wherry boat to take me downriver.

  It’s cold on the water with a biting wind that gives me an excuse to pull up my hood and wrap a scarf around my face. My groom travels with me, not knowing what we are doing but anxious because he guesses that it is forbidden. The boat goes swiftly with the tide downstream. It will be slower coming back, but I have timed my visit so that the tide will be running inland when we start for Sheen.

  The wherry takes me to the abbey’s water stairs and Wes the groom jumps ashore and holds out his hands for me. The boatman promises he will wait to take me back to Sheen, the twinkle in his eyes making it clear that he thinks I am a maid of the court creeping out to meet my lover. I go up the wet steps to the little bridge that spans the watercourse and walk round the walls of the abbey till I come to the main gate and the gatehouse. I pull on the bell and wait for the porter, leaning back against the dark flint and red-brick wall.

  A little door inside the great gate opens. “I want to see . . .” I break off. I don’t know what they call my mother now that she is no longer queen, now that she is under suspicion of treason. I don’t even know if she is here under her true name.

  “Her Grace the Dowager Queen,” the woman says gruffly, as if Bosworth had never happened, as if Plantagenets still grew green and fresh in the garden of England. She swings open the door for me and lets me in, gesturing that the lad must wait for me outside.

  “How did you know I meant her?” I ask.

  She smiles at me. “You’re not the first that has come for her, and I doubt you’ll be the last,” she says, and leads me across smooth scythed turf to the cells on the west of the building. “She is a great lady; people will always be loyal to her. She’s at chapel now.” She nods at the church with the graveyard before it. “But you can wait in her cell and she will come in a moment.”

  She shows me into a clean whitewashed room, with a bookshelf for my mother’s best-loved volumes, both bound manuscripts and the new print books. There is a crucifix of ivory and gold hanging on the wall, and the little nightgown that she is sewing for Arthur in a box by a chair by the fireside. It is nothing like I had imagined, and for a moment I hesitate on the threshold, weak with relief that my mother is not imprisoned in a cold tower or held in some poor nunnery, but is making her surroundings suit her—as she always does.

  Through an inner door I can see her privy chamber and beyond that her curtained bed with her fine embroidered sheets. This is not a woman starving in solitary confinement; my mother is living like a queen in retirement and obviously has the whole nunnery running to her beck and call.

  I sink down on a stool at the fireside until I hear a quick step on the paving stone outside and the door opens, and there is my mother, and I am in her arms and I am crying and she is hushing and soothing me and then we are seated by the fireside, and my hands are in hers and she is smiling at me, as she always does, and assuring me that everything will be well.

  “But you’re not free to leave?” I confirm.

  “No,” she says. “Did you ask Henry for my freedom?”

  “Of course, the moment you disappeared. He said no.”

  “I thought he would. I have to stay here. For now, at least. How are your sisters?”

  “They’re well,” I say. “Catherine and Bridget are in the schoolroom, and I’ve told them that you have gone on a retreat. Bridget wants to join you, of course. She says the vanity of the world is too much for her.”

  My mother smiles. “We meant her for the Church,” she says. “She’s always taken it very seriously. And my nephews? John de la Pole?”

  “Disappeared,” I say bluntly. Her hands grip me a little tighter.

  “Arrested?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Run away,” I say shortly. “I don’t even know if you are telling me the truth when you seem not to know.”

  She does not trouble herself to answer me.

  “Henry says he has evidence that you are working against us.”

  “Us?” she repeats.

  “Against the Tudors,” I say, flushing.

  “Ah,” she says. “ ‘Us Tudors.’ Do you know what exactly he knows?”

  “He knows that you were writing to my aunt Margaret, and calling up York friends. He mentioned my aunt Elizabeth and even my grandmother Duchess Cecily.”

  She nods. “Nothing more?”

  “Mother, that is more than enough!”

  “I know. But you see, Elizabeth, he might know more than this.”

  “There is more than this?” I am horrified.

  She shrugs. “It’s a conspiracy. Of course there is more than this.”

  “Well, that’s all that he told me. Neither he nor his mother trusts me.”

  She laughs out loud at that. “They hardly trust their own shadows, why would they trust you?”

  “Because I am his wife and queen?”

  She nods as if it hardly matters. “And where does he think John de la Pole has gone?”

  “Perhaps to My Lady Aunt Margaret in Flanders?”

  Clearly, this is no surprise to her. “He got safely away?”

  “As far as I know. But Lady Mother—”

  She softens at once at the fear in my voice. “Yes, my dear. Of course you are anxious, you will be frightened. But I think that everything is going to change.”

  “What about my son?”

  “Arthur was born a prince, nobody can take that from him. Nobody would want to.”

  “My husband?”

  Almost she laughs out loud. “Ah well, Henry was born a commoner,” she says. “Maybe he will die as one.”

  “Mother, I cannot have you making war against my husband. We agreed to a peace, you wanted me to marry him. Now we have a son, and he should be the next King
of England.”

  She rises up and goes in three paces across the small room to look out of the window set high in the wall, to the quiet lawns and little convent church. “Perhaps so. Perhaps he will be king. I have never had a sense of it. I can’t see it myself, but it might happen.”

  “Can’t you tell me?” I ask her. “Can’t you tell what’s going to happen?”

  She turns and I see that her eyes are veiled and she is smiling. “As a seer, as my mother would have done? Or as a plotter? As a treasonous rebel?”

  “As either!” I exclaim. “As anything! Can’t you, can’t someone tell me what is happening?”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t be sure,” is all she will say.

  “I have to go,” I say irritably. “I have to catch the tide back to Sheen. And then we’re going on progress.”

  “Where to?” she asks.

  I realize, as I tell her, that she will use this information. She will write to rebels as they muster, to enemies in England and overseas. As soon as I tell her so much as one word, that means I am working for York; I am spying for York against my own husband.

  “Norwich,” I say tightly. “We’re going for Corpus Christi. Should I expect an attack now I’ve told you that?”

  “Ah, so he thinks we’re invading the east coast,” she says gleefully. “So that’s what he’s expecting.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not going to Norwich for the pleasure of the feast. He’s going so that he can prepare the east coast for invasion.”

  “They will invade? From Flanders?”

  She puts a kiss on my forehead, completely ignoring my fearful questions. “Now don’t you worry about it,” she says. “You don’t need to know.”

  She walks with me to the gatehouse, and then round the outside walls to where the pier runs out into the Neckinger River and my boat is waiting, bobbing on the rising tide. She kisses me and I kneel for her blessing and feel her warm hand rest gently on my hood. “God bless you,” she says sweetly. “Come and see me when you return from Norwich, if you are able to come, if you are allowed.”