Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

“Our Elizabeth,” he corrects me. “Yes.”

“You will promise her in marriage, a child of not yet four years old, to the family of the man who murdered her grandfather?”

“I will. This has been a cousins’ war. It has to be a cousins’ reconciliation. And you, beloved, will not stop me. I have to bring Warwick to peace with me. I have to give him a great share of the wealth of England. This way I even give him a chance at his line inheriting the throne.”

“He is a traitor and a murderer, and you think you will marry my little daughter to his nephew?”

“I do,” he says firmly.

“I swear that it will never happen,” I say fiercely. “And more: I tell you this. I foresee it will never happen.”

He smiles. “I bow to your superior foreknowledge,” he says, and sweeps a magnificent bow at my mother and me. “And only time will prove your foreseeing true or false. But in the meantime, while I am King of England, with the power to give my daughter in marriage to whom I wish, I shall always do my very best to stop your enemies ducking you two as a pair of witches, or strangling you at the crossroads. And I tell you, as I am king, the only way to make you and every woman and her son in this kingdom as safe as she should be is to find a way to stop this warfare.”

Warwick returns to court as a beloved friend and loyal mentor. We are to be as a family that suffers occasional quarrels, but loves one another withal. Edward does this rather well. I greet Warwick with a smile as warm as a frozen fountain dripping with ice. I am expected to behave as if this man is not the murderer of my father and brother, and the jailer of my husband. I do as I am commanded: not a word of my anger escapes me, but Warwick knows without any telling that he has made a dangerous enemy for the rest of his life.

He knows I can say nothing, and his small bow when he first greets me is triumphant. “Your Grace,” he says suavely.

As ever with him, I feel at a disadvantage, like a girl. He is a great man of the world, and he was planning the fortunes of this kingdom when I was minding my manners to my lady Grey, my husband’s mother, and obeying my first husband. He looks at me as if I should still be feeding the hens at Grafton.

I want to be icy, but I fear I appear only sulky. “Welcome back to court,” I say unwillingly.

“You are always gracious,” he replies with a smile. “Born to be queen.”

My son Thomas Grey makes a small exclamation of anger, raging like the boy he is, and takes himself out of the room.

Warwick beams at me. “Ah, the young,” he says. “A promising boy.”

“I am only glad he was not with his grandfather and beloved uncle at Edgecote Moor,” I say, hating him.

“Oh, so am I!”

He may make me feel like a fool, and like a woman who can do nothing; but what I can do, I will. In my jewelry box is a dark locket of black tarnished silver, and inside it, locked in the darkness, I have his name, Richard Neville, and that of George, Duke of Clarence, written in my blood on the piece of paper from the corner of my father’s last letter. These are my enemies. I have cursed them. I will see them dead at my feet.

At the very darkest hour of the longest night in the heart of the winter solstice, my mother and I go down to the River Thames, black as glass. The path from the Palace of Westminster garden runs alongside the water, and the river is high tonight, but very dark in the darkness. We can hardly see it; but we can hear it, washing against the jetty and slapping against the walls, and we can feel it, a black wide presence, breathing like a great sinuous animal, heaving gently, like the sea. This is our element: I inhale the smell of the cold water like someone scenting her own land after a long exile.

“I have to have a son,” I say to my mother.

And she smiles and says, “I know.”

In her pocket she has three charms on three threads and, careful as a fisherman baiting a line, she throws each of them into the river and gives me the thread to hold. I hear a little splash as each one falls into the water, and I am reminded of the golden ring that I drew from the river five years ago at home.

“You choose,” she says to me. “You choose which one you draw out.” She spreads out the three threads in my left hand and I hold them tightly.

The moon comes out from behind the cloud. It is a waning moon, fat and silvery; it draws a line of light along the dark water, and I choose one thread and hold it in my right hand. “This one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

At once she takes a pair of silver scissors from her pocket and cuts the other two threads so whatever was tied on is swept away into the dark waters.

“What were they?”

“They are the things that will never happen; they are the future that we will never know. They are the children who will not be born and the chances that we won’t take and the luck that we won’t have,” she says. “They are gone. They are lost to you. See instead what you have chosen.”

I lean over the palace wall to draw on the thread and it comes from the water, dripping. At the end is a silver spoon, a beautiful little silver spoon for a baby, and when I catch it in my hand I see, shining in the moonlight, that it is engraved with a coronet and the name “Edward.”

We keep Christmas in London as a feast of reconciliation, as if a feast will make a friend of Warwick. I am reminded of all the times that poor King Henry tried to bring his enemies together and make them swear friendship, and I know that others at the court see Warwick and George as honored guests and laugh behind their hands.

Edward orders that it should be done grandly and nearly two thousand noblemen of England sit down to dinner with us on Twelfth Night, Warwick chief among them all. Edward and I wear our crowns and the newest fashions in the richest cloths. I wear only silver white and cloth of gold in this winter season, and they say that I am the White Rose of York, indeed.

Edward and I give gifts to a thousand of the diners, and favors to them all. Warwick is a most popular guest, and he and I greet each other with absolute courtesy. When commanded by my husband, I even dance with my brother-in-law George: hand to hand and smiling into his handsome, boyish face. Again, it strikes me how like my husband Edward he is: a smaller daintier version of Edward’s blond handsomeness. Again I am struck by how people like him on sight. He has all of the York easy charm and none of Edward’s honor. But I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.

I greet his new bride Isabel, Warwick’s daughter, with kindness. I welcome her to my court and wish her very well. She is a poor, thin, pale girl, looking rather aghast at the part she has to play in her father’s scheme of things. Now she is married into the most treacherous and dangerous family in England, at the court of the king that her husband betrayed. She is in need of a little kindness and I am sisterly and loving to her. A stranger at court, visiting us in this most hospitable season, would think that I love her as a kinswoman. He would think I had not lost a father, a brother. He would think that I have no memory at all.

I don’t forget. And in my jewelry case is a dark locket, and in the dark locket there is the corner of the page of my father’s last letter, and on that scrap of paper, written in my own blood, are the names Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and George, Duke of Clarence. I don’t forget, and one day they will know that.

Warwick remains enigmatic, the greatest man in the kingdom after the king. He accepts the honors and favors that are shown him with icy dignity, as a man to whom everything is due. His accomplice, George, is like a hound puppy, jumping and fawning. Isabel, George’s wife, sits with my ladies, between my sisters and my sister-in-law Elizabeth, and I cannot help but smile when I see her turn her head away from her husband’s dancing, or the way she flinches as he shouts out toasts in honor of the king. George, so fair-headed and round-faced, has always been a beloved boy of the Yorks, and at this Christmas feast he acts towards his older brother not only as if he has been forgiven but also as if he will always be forgiven anything. He is the spoiled child of the family-he really believes he can do no wrong.