Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

“It was chivalrous,” Anthony says, to irritate me.

“It was an opportunity, and I wish I had seen it first,” I reply.

Anne, a pawn in her father’s game for power, widow of a monster, daughter of a traitor, was still only fifteen when she came to live with her sister and her husband George, Duke of Clarence. She had no idea, no better than my kitten, as to how she would survive in this kingdom of her enemies. She must have thought that George was her savior.

But not for long.

Nobody knows quite what happened after that; but something went wrong with George’s agreeable plan to own both Neville girls, and keep their enormous fortune to himself. Some say that Richard, visiting George’s grand house, met Anne again-his childhood acquaintance-and they fell in love, and that he rescued her like a knight in a fable from a visit that was nothing less than imprisonment. They say George had her disguised as a kitchen maid, to keep her away from his brother. They say he had her locked in her room. But true love prevailed, and the young duke and the young widowed princess fell into each other’s arms. At all events, this version of the story is all desperately romantic and wonderful. Fools of all ages enjoy it very much.

“I like it told that way,” my brother Anthony says. “I am thinking of composing a rondel.”

But there is another version. Other people, who admire Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as much as I, say that he saw in the newly widowed lonely girl a woman who could deliver to him the popularity in the north of England that her maiden name commands, who could bring him massive lands that adjoin what he has already got from Edward, and give him a fortune in her dowry, if only he could steal it from her mother. A young girl who was so alone and so unprotected that she could not refuse him. A girl so accustomed to being ordered that she could be bullied into betraying her own mother. This version suggests that Anne, imprisoned by one York brother, was kidnapped by another and forced to marry him.

“Less pretty,” I observe to Anthony.

“You could have stopped it,” he says to me with one of his sudden moments of seriousness. “If you had taken her into your keeping, if you had made Edward order Richard and George not to pull her apart like dogs over a bone.”

“I should have done,” I say. “For now Richard has one Neville girl, the Warwick fortune, and the support of the north, and George has the other. That’s a dangerous combination.”

Anthony raises an eyebrow. “You should have done it because it was the right thing to do,” he says to me with all of an older brother’s pomposity. “But I see you are still only thinking of power and profit.”

My mother’s skill at foretelling the future is borne out. Less than a year after she warned me her heart would not last much longer, she complains of fatigue and keeps to her rooms. The baby I was carrying in the garden the day of the primrose races came early, and for the first time I go into my confinement without my mother’s company. I send her messages from my darkened room and she replies cheerfully from hers. But when I come out with a frail newborn girl, I find my mother in her chamber, too weary to rise. I take the baby girl, light as a little bird, and lay her in my mother’s arms every afternoon. For a week or two, the two of them watch the sun sink below the level of the window, and then like the gold of the sunset they slip away from me together.

At dusk, on the last day of April, I hear a calling noise, like a white-winged barn owl, and I go to my window and push open the shutters and look out. There is a waning moon rising off the horizon, white against a white sky; it too is wasting away, and in its cold light I can hear a calling, like a choir, and I know it is not the music of owls, nor singers nor nightingales, but Melusina. Our ancestor goddess is calling around the roof of the house, for her daughter Jacquetta of the House of Burgundy is dying.

I stand and listen to the eerie whistling for a while and then I swing the shutters closed and go to my mother’s room. I don’t hurry. I know there is no need to hurry to her anymore. The new baby is in her arms as she lies in her bed, the little head pressed to my mother’s cheek. They are both pale as marble, they are both lying with their eyes shut, they both seem to be peacefully asleep as the shadows of the evening darken the room. The moonlight on the water outside the chamber window throws the reflection of ripples onto the whitewashed ceiling of the room, so they look as if they are underwater, floating with Melusina in the fountain. But I know that they are both gone from me, and our water mother is singing them on their journey down the sweet river to the deep springs of home.

The pain of my mother’s death is not closed for me by her funeral; it is not healed with the months that go slowly by. Every morning, I wake and miss her, as much as the first morning. Every day I have to remember that I cannot ask her opinion, or quarrel with her advice, or laugh at her sarcasm, or look for the guidance of her magic. And every day I find I blame George, Duke of Clarence, even more for the murder of my father and my brother. I believe it was at the news of their deaths at his hand, under the orders of Warwick, that my mother’s loving heart broke, and if they had not been traitorously killed by him, then she too would be alive today.

It is summer, a time for thoughtless pleasure, but I take my sorrow with me, through the picnics and days as we travel through the countryside, on the long rides and nights under a harvest moon. Edward makes my son Thomas the Earl of Huntingdon, and it does not cheer me. I don’t speak of my sadness to anyone but Anthony, who has lost his mother too. And we hardly ever speak of her. It is as if we cannot bring ourselves to speak of her as dead, and we cannot lie to ourselves that she is still alive. But I blame George, Duke of Clarence, for her heartbreak and her death.

“I hate George of Clarence more than ever,” I say to Anthony as we ride down the road to Kent together, a banquet ahead of us and a week spent traveling in the green lanes between the apple orchards. My heart should be light as the court is happy. But my sense of loss comes with me like a hawk on my wrist.

“Because you’re jealous,” my brother Anthony says provocatively, one hand holding the reins of his horse, the other leading my young son, Prince Edward, on his little pony. “You are jealous of anyone Edward loves. You are jealous of me, you are jealous of William Hastings, you are jealous of anyone who entertains the king, and takes him out whoring, and brings him home drunk and amuses him.”

I shrug my shoulders, indifferent to Anthony’s teasing. I have long known that the king’s pleasure in deep drinking with his friends and visiting other women is part of his nature. I have come to tolerate it, especially as it never takes him far from my bed, and when we are there together it is as if we were married in secret that very morning. He has been a soldier on campaign, far from home, with a hundred doxies at his command; he has been an exile in cities where women have hurried to comfort him, and now he is the King of England and every woman in London would be glad to have him-I truly believe that half of them have had him. He is the king. I never thought I was marrying an ordinary man, with moderate appetites. I never expected a marriage where he would sit quietly at my feet. He is the king: he is bound to go his own way.

“No, you are wrong. Edward’s whoring doesn’t trouble me. He is the king, he can take his pleasures where he wants. And I am the queen, and he will always come home to me. Everyone knows that.”