Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

It takes me all day to measure my danger, and even at dinnertime I cannot be sure of anything. The lives of my sons may depend on who I sense as my enemy and who I trust as my friend and yet I cannot be certain. My suggestion-that my son Richard at least is safe and away from the Tower-should give any murderer pause; I hope I have bought some time.

In the afternoon I write to my brothers as they are raising men in the southern counties of England, to warn them of this plot that may be hatching like a snake in its egg inside our plot. I say that our enemy Richard is still our enemy; but his ill-will may be nothing to the danger posed by our allies. I send out messengers, uncertain if they will ever reach my brothers, or reach them in time. But I say clearly:

I believe now that the safety of my sons, of myself, depends on the Duke of Buckingham and his ally Henry Tudor not reaching London. Richard is our enemy and a usurper, but I believe if Buckingham and Tudor march into London in victory they will come as our killers.You must stop Buckingham’s march. Whatever you do, you must get to the Tower ahead of him and ahead of Henry Tudor and save our boy.

That night I stand at the window over the river and listen. Elizabeth opens the door of the bedroom where the girls sleep and comes to stand behind me, her young face grave.

“What is the matter now, Mother?” she says. “Please tell me. You have been locked up all day. Have you had bad news?”

“Yes,” I say. “Tell me, have you heard the river singing, like it did on the night that my brother Anthony and my son Richard Grey died?”

Her eyes slide away from mine.

“Elizabeth?”

“Not like that night,” she qualifies.

“But you hear something?”

“Very faintly,” she says, “a very soft, low singing like a lullaby, like a lament. Do you hear nothing?”

I shake my head. “No, but I am filled with fear for Edward.”

She comes and puts her hand on mine. “Is there new danger for my poor brother, even now?”

“I think so. I think that the Duke of Buckingham will turn on us if he wins this battle against the false King Richard. I have written to your uncles, but I don’t know if they can stop him. The Duke of Buckingham has a great army. He is marching along the River Severn in Wales and then he will come into England, and I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know what I can do from here to keep my son safe from him, to keep us all safe from him. We have to keep him from London. If I could trap him in Wales, I would.”

She looks thoughtful and goes to the window. The damp air from the river breathes into the stuffy rooms. “I wish it would rain,” she says idly. “It’s so hot. I so wish it would rain.”

A cool breeze whispers into the room as if to answer her wish, and then the pit, pat, pit of raindrops on the leaded panes of the open window. Elizabeth swings open the window wider so that she can see the sky and the dark clouds blowing down the river valley.

I go to stand beside her. I can see the rain falling on the dark water of the river, fat drops of rain that make the first few circles, like the bubbles from a fish, and then more and more, until the silky surface of the river is pitted with falling raindrops and then the storm comes down so hard that we can see nothing but a whirl of falling water as if the very heavens are opening on England. We laugh and pull the window shut against the storm, our faces and arms running with water before we get the clasp bolted, and then we go to the other rooms, closing the windows and barring the shutters against the weather that is pouring down outside, as if all my grief and worry were a storm of tears over England.

“This rain will bring a flood,” I predict, and my daughter nods in silence.

It rains all night. Elizabeth sleeps in my bed as she used to do when she was a child, and we lie in the warm and dry, and listen to the pattering of the drops. We can hear the constant wash against the windows and the splashing on the river. Then the gutters start to fill and the water from the roofs runs with a sound like fountains playing, and we fall asleep, like two water goddesses to the sound of driving rain and rising water.

When we wake in the morning it is almost as dark as night, and it is still raining. It is high tide, and Elizabeth goes down to the water gate and says the water is rising over the steps. All the craft on the river are battened down for bad weather, and the few wherries that are plying for trade are rowed by men hunched against the wind with sacks over their heads, shiny with the wet. The girls spend the morning up at the windows watching the soaked boats go by. They are riding higher than usual as the river fills and starts to flood, and then the little boats are all taken in and moored or hauled up as the river goes into spate and the currents are too strong. We light a fire against the stormy day; it is as dark and wet as November, and I play cards with the girls and let them win. How I love the sound of this rain.

Elizabeth and I sleep in each other’s arms, listening to the water pouring off the roof of the abbey and cascading onto the pavements. In the early hours of the morning I start to hear the dripping sound of rain leaking through the slate roof, and I get up to start the fire again and put a pot under the drips. Elizabeth opens the shutter and says that it is raining as hard as ever; it looks like it might rain all day.

The girls play at Noah’s Ark and Elizabeth reads them the story from the Bible, and then they prepare a pageant with their toys and roughly stuffed cushions serving as pairs of animals. The ark is my table upturned with sheets tied from leg to leg. I let them eat their dinner inside the ark and reassure them before bedtime that the great Flood for Noah happened a long long time ago and God would not send another, not even to punish wickedness. This rain will do nothing but keep bad men in their houses, where they can do no harm. A flood will keep all the wicked men away from London, and we shall be safe.

Elizabeth looks at me with a little smile, and after the girls have gone to bed she takes a candle and goes down through the catacombs to look at the level of the river water.

It is running higher than it has ever done before, she says. She thinks it will flood the corridor to the steps, a rise of several feet. If it does not stop raining soon, it will come even higher. We are not at risk-it is two flights of stone stairs down to the river-but the poor people who live on the riverbanks will be packing up their few things and abandoning their homes to the water.

The next morning Jemma comes in to us with her dress hitched up, muddy to the knees. The streets are flooding in the low-lying areas and there are stories of houses being swept away and, upriver, bridges being destroyed, and villages being cut off. Nobody has ever seen such rain in September and it still does not stop. Jemma says that there are no fresh foods in the market as many of the roads are washed away and the farmers cannot bring in their goods. Bread is more expensive for lack of flour, and some bakers cannot get their ovens to light, for all they have is wet firewood. Jemma says she will stay the night with us-she is afraid to leave through the flooded streets.

In the morning it is still raining and the girls, at the window again, report strange sights. A drowned cow frightens Bridget as it floats by beneath the window; an overturned cart has been swept into the waters. Timbers from some building go by rolling over and over in the flood, and we hear the thud as something heavy hits the water-gate steps. The water gate is a gate only to water this morning; the corridor is flooded and we can see only the very top of the ironwork and a glimpse of daylight. The river must be up by nearly ten feet, and high tide will pour water into the catacombs and wash the sleeping dead.