Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

The younger girls go half mad in their release from confinement. Every day I catch them doing something forbidden: swimming in the swift deep river, climbing the haystacks and ruining the hay, up in the apple trees breaking off the blossom, running into the field with the bull and dashing to the gate, screaming when he lifts his big head and looks at them. They cannot be punished for such an overflow of joy. They are like calves released into the field for the first time in their lives. They have to kick up their heels and run about, and don’t know what to do to express their amazement at the height of the sky and the wideness of the world. They are eating twice what they ate in sanctuary. They hang around the kitchen and badger the cook for scraps, and the dairymaids delight in giving them fresh-churned butter to eat on hot bread. They have become lighthearted children again, no longer prisoners, afraid of the very light.

I am in the stable yard, dismounting after a morning ride, when I am surprised to see Nesfield himself ride up to the main door of the house. Seeing my horse, he turns to come round to the yard and gets off his hunter, throwing the reins to a groom. From the very way he dismounts, heavily and with his shoulders bowed, I know that something bad has happened. My hand goes out to my horse’s neck and I take a handful of thick mane for comfort.

“What is it, Sir John? You look very grave.”

“I thought I should come and tell you the news,” he says shortly.

“Elizabeth? Not my Elizabeth?”

“She is safe and well,” he assures me. “It is the king’s son, Edward, God keep him, God bless him. God take him to his heavenly throne.”

I feel a pulse in my temple hammer like a warning. “He is dead?”

“He was always frail,” Nesfield says brokenly. “He was never a strong boy. But at the investiture he looked so well we called him Prince of Wales and thought he was certain to inherit-” He breaks off, remembering that I too had a son who was Prince of Wales and seemed certain to inherit. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean…anyway, the king has announced mourning for the court. I thought you should know at once.”

I nod gravely, but my mind is racing. Is this a death from Melusina? Is this a working of the curse? Is this the proof that I said we would see-that the son and heir of the murderer of my son and heir would die, and thus I would know him? Is this her sign to me that Richard is the killer of my son?

“I will send the king and Queen Anne my sympathy,” I say, and turn to go to the house.

“He has no heir,” John Nesfield repeats as if he cannot believe the gravity of the news he has brought me. “All this, all that he has done, his defense of the kingdom, his…his acceptance of his throne, all this that he has done, all the fighting…and now he has no heir to follow him.”

“Yes,” I agree, my words like frozen stones. “He did all this for nothing, and he has lost his son and his line will die out.”

I hear from my daughter Elizabeth that the court falls into mourning as if it was an open grave, and none of them can bear to live without their prince. Richard will not hear laughter or music; they have to creep about with their eyes on the ground and there are no games or sports, though the weather is getting warmer and they are in the very heart of greening England, the hills and the dales all around them are teeming with game. Richard is inconsolable. His twelve-year marriage to Anne Neville gave him only one child, and now he has lost him. It cannot be possible that they will have another at this late stage and, even if they do, a baby in the cradle is no guarantee of a Prince of Wales in this savage England that we Yorks have made. Who knows better than Richard that a boy must be fully grown and strong enough to fight for his rights, to fight for his life, if he is to be King of England?

He names as his heir Edward the son of his brother, George of Clarence, the only York boy known to be left in the world; but in a few months I hear a rumor that he is to be disinherited. This comes as no surprise to me. Richard has realized that the boy is too weak to hold the throne, as we all knew. George, Duke of Clarence had a fatal mixture of vanity and ambition and outright madness: no son of his could be a king. He was a sweet, smiling baby but slow of wit, poor child. Anyone who wants the throne of England will have to be fast as a snake and wise as a serpent. He will have to be a boy born to be a prince, reared in a court. He will have to be a boy accustomed to danger, raised to be brave. George’s poor half-wit boy could never do it. But if not him, then whom? For Richard must name an heir and leave an heir, and the House of York is now nothing but girls, for all that Richard knows. Only I know for sure that there is a prince, like one in a fairy tale, waiting in Tournai, living like a poor boy, studying his books and music, learning languages, watched over at a distance by his aunt. A flower of York, growing strong in foreign soil and biding his time. And now he is the only heir to the York throne, and if his uncle knew he was alive, perhaps he would name him as his heir.

I write to Elizabeth.

I hear the news from court and I am troubled by one thing-do you think that the death of Richard’s son is Melusina’s sign to us that Richard is the murderer of our boys? You see him daily-do you think he knows it is our curse that is his destruction? Does he look like a man who has brought this grief on his own family? Or do you think that this death was just chance, and it was another man who killed our boy, and it will be his son who must die for our revenge?

I am waiting for my girls to come home from court on a frosty afternoon in the middle of January. I expected them in time for dinner and I am striding up and down on my doorstep, blowing on my gloved fingers to keep my hands warm as the sun sets, red as a Lancaster rose, over the hills to the west. I hear hoofbeats and I look down the lane and there they come, a great guard for my three girls, almost a royal guard, and the three bobbing heads and rippling dresses in the middle. In a moment their horses are pulled up and they have tumbled off and I am kissing bright cheeks and cold noses quite indiscriminately and holding their hands and exclaiming at how tall they have grown and how all equally beautiful they are.

They romp into the hall and fall on their dinner as if they are starving, and I watch them as they eat. Elizabeth has never been in better looks. She bloomed, once out of sanctuary and out of fear, as I knew she would. The color is high in her cheeks, her eyes sparkle, and her clothes! I take another disbelieving look at her clothes: the embroidery and the brocade, the insetting of precious stones. These are gowns as good as I wore when I was queen. “Good God, Elizabeth,” I say. “Where do you get your gowns from? This is as fine as anything I had when I was Queen of England.”

Her eyes fly to mine, and her smile dies on her face. Cecily gives an abrupt snort of laughter. Elizabeth rounds on her. “You can shut your mouth. We agreed.”

“Elizabeth!”

“Mother, you don’t know what she has been like. She is not fit to be maid-in-waiting to a queen. All she does is gossip.”

“Now girls, I sent you to court to learn elegance, not to quarrel like fishwives.”

“Ask her if she’s been learning elegance!” Cecily whispers loudly. “Ask Elizabeth how elegant she is.”

“I certainly shall, when we are talking and you two are in bed,” I say firmly. “And that will be early if you cannot speak politely one to another.” I turn from her to Anne. “Now, Anne.” My little Anne looks up at me. “Have you been studying your books? And have you been working at your music?”