Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

Anthony nods, conceding the point. “But I don’t see why you concentrate your hatred on George. The king’s entire family are as bad as each other. His mother has loathed you and all of us since we first emerged at Reading, and Richard is more awkward and surly every day. Peace doesn’t suit him, for sure.”

“Nothing about us suits him,” I say. “He is as unlike his two brothers as chalk to cheese: small and dark, and so anxious about his health and his position and his soul, always hoping for a fortune and saying a prayer.”

“Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.”

I laugh. “Well, I would like Richard better if he was as bad as the rest of you,” I remark. “And since he has been married, he is even more righteous. He has always looked down on us Riverses; now he looks down on George too. It is that pompous saintliness that I cannot stomach. He looks at me sometimes as if I were some kind of…”

“Some kind of what?”

“Some kind of fat fishwife.”

“Well,” my brother says. “To be honest, you’re getting no younger, and in certain lights, y’know…”

I tap him on the knee with my riding crop, and he laughs and winks at Baby Edward on his little pony.

“I don’t like how he has taken all the north into his keeping. Edward has made him overly great. He has made him a prince in his own principality. It is a danger to us, and to our heirs. It is to divide the kingdom.”

“He had to reward him with something. Richard has laid down his life on Edward’s gambles over and over again. Richard won the kingdom for Edward: he should have his share.”

“But it makes Richard all but a king in his own domain,” I protest. “It gives him the kingdom of the north.”

“Nobody doubts his loyalty but you.”

“He is loyal to Edward, and to his house, but he doesn’t like me or mine. He envies me everything I have, and he doesn’t admire my court. And what does that mean when he thinks of our children? Will he be loyal to my boy, because he is Edward’s boy too?”

Anthony shrugs. “We are raised up, you know. You have brought us up very high. There are a lot of people who think we ride higher than our deserts, and on nothing more than your roadside charms.”

“I don’t like how Richard married Anne Neville.”

Anthony laughs shortly. “Oh sister, nobody liked to see Richard, the wealthiest young man in England, marry the richest young woman in England, but I never thought to see you take the side of George, Duke of Clarence!”

I laugh unwillingly. George’s outrage at having his heiress sister-in-law snatched from his own house by his own brother has entertained us all for half the year.

“Anyway, it is your husband who has obliged Richard,” Anthony remarks. “If Richard wanted to marry Anne for love, he could have done so, and been rewarded by her love. But it took the king to declare her mother’s fortune should be divided between the two girls. It took your honorable husband to declare the mother legally dead-though I believe the old lady stoutly protests her continuing life, and demands the right to plead for her own lands-and it was your husband who took all the fortune from the poor old lady to give to her two daughters, and thus, and so conveniently, to his brothers.”

“I told him not to,” I say irritably. “But he paid no attention to me on this. He always favors his brothers, and Richard far above George.”

“He is right to prefer Richard, but he should not break his own laws in his own kingdom,” Anthony says with sudden seriousness. “That’s no way to rule. It is unlawful to rob a widow, and he has done just that. And she is the widow of his enemy and in sanctuary in a nunnery. He should be gracious to her, he should be merciful. If he were a truly chivalrous knight, he would encourage her to come out of the nunnery and take up her lands, protect her daughters, and curb the greed of his brothers.”

“The law is what powerful men say it shall be,” I say irritably. “And sanctuary is not unbreakable. If you were not a dreamer, far away in Camelot, you would know that by now. You were at Tewkesbury, weren’t you? Did you see the sanctity of holy ground then when they dragged the lords from the abbey and stabbed them in the churchyard? Did you defend sanctuary then? For I heard everyone unsheathed their swords and cut down the men who were coming with their sword hilts held out?”

Anthony shakes his head. “I am a dreamer,” he concedes. “I don’t deny it, but I have seen enough to know the world. Perhaps my dream is of a better one. This York reign is sometimes too much for me, you know, Elizabeth. I cannot bear what Edward does when I see him favor one man and disregard another, and for no reason but that it makes himself stronger or his reign more secure. And you have made the throne your fief: you distribute favors and wealth to your favorites, not to the deserving. And the two of you make enemies. People say that we care for nothing but our own success. When I see what we do, now that we are in power, I sometimes regret fighting under the white rose. I sometimes think that Lancaster would have done just as well, or at any rate no worse.”

“Then you forget Margaret of Anjou and her mad husband,” I say coldly. “My mother herself said to me on the day we rode out for Reading that I could not do worse than Margaret of Anjou and I have not done so.”

He concedes the point. “All right. You and your husband are no worse than a madman and a harpy. Very good.”

I am surprised at his gravity. “It is as the world is, my brother,” I remind him. “And you too have had your favors from the king and me. And now you are Earl Rivers and brother-in-law to the king, and uncle to the king to be.”

“I thought we were doing more than lining our own pockets,” he says. “I thought we were doing more than putting a king and a queen on the throne who were only better than the worst that could be. You know, sometimes I would rather be in a white tabard with a red cross, fighting for God in the desert.”

I think of my mother’s prediction that Anthony’s spirituality will one day triumph over his Rivers worldliness and he will leave me. “Ah don’t say that,” I say. “I need you. And as Baby grows and has his own prince’s council, he will need you. I can think of no man better fitted to guide him and teach him than you. There’s no knight in England better read. There’s no poet in England who can fight as well. Don’t say you will go, Anthony. You know you have to stay. I can’t be queen without you. I can’t be me without you.”

He bows to me with his twisted smile and takes my hand and kisses it. “I won’t leave you while you have need of me,” he promises. “I will never willingly leave you while you need me. And, for sure, good times are coming soon.”

I smile, but he makes the optimistic words sound like a lament.

Edward beckons me to one side after dinner one evening at Windsor Castle and I go to him smiling. “What do you want, husband? Do you want to dance with me?”

“I do,” he says. “And then I am going to get hugely drunk.”

“For any reason?”

“None at all. Just for pleasure. But before all that, I have to ask you something. Can you take another lady into your rooms as a lady-in-waiting?”

“Do you have someone in mind?” I am instantly alert to the danger that Edward has a new flirt that he wants to palm off on me, and that he thinks I will make her my lady-in-waiting to make his seduction the more convenient. This must show in my face, for he gives a whoop of laughter and says, “Don’t look so furious. I wouldn’t foist my whores upon you. I can house them myself. No, this is a lady of unimpeachable family. None other than Margaret Beaufort, the last of the Lancastrians.”