Philippa Gregory - The White Princess

Uncle Jasper gives me a long, cool look from his blue eyes as if he disagrees.

“Not directly,” Henry concedes. “She shot her last bolt with the kitchen boy’s rebellion. I’ve got nothing that identifies her with these scattered troubles.”

“So she could come into confinement with me.”

“Very well,” he decides. “She’s as safe inside with you as she is inside the abbey. And it shows that she is a member of our family, to anyone who still dreams that she represents York.”

“May I write to her today?”

He nods, takes my hand, and kisses it. “I can refuse you nothing,” he says. “Not when you are about to give me another son.”

“What if it’s a girl?” I ask, smiling at him. “Will you send me a bill for all these favors if I have a girl?”

He shakes his head. “It’s a boy. I am certain of it.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1489

My mother promises to come from Bermondsey but there is so much illness in London that she will not come into confinement with me straightaway but waits in her rooms for a few days to make sure that she is not carrying the pox, which comes with a painfully hot fever and terrible red spots all over the body.

“I wouldn’t bring it in on you,” she says when she finally comes in through the door, padded for silence, which opens so rarely on the outside world.

In a moment I am in her arms and she is hugging me and then stepping back to look at my face, and my big belly, and my swollen hands.

“You’ve taken all your rings off,” she remarks.

“They were too tight,” I say. “And my ankles are as fat as my calves.”

She laughs at that. “That will all be better when the baby comes,” she says, and presses me down to the day bed, sits at the end of it, takes my feet into her lap, and rubs them firmly with her strong hands. She strokes the soles, pulling gently at the toes until I almost purr with pleasure and she laughs at me again.

“You will be hoping for a boy,” she says.

“Not really.” I open my eyes and meet her gray gaze. “I am hoping that the baby is well and strong. And I would love a little girl. Of course we need a boy . . .”

“Perhaps a girl now, and a boy next,” she suggests. “King Henry is still kind to you? At Christmas he looked like a man in love.”

I nod. “He’s been most tender.”

“And My Lady?”

I make a face. “Most attentive.”

“Ah well, I’m here now,” my mother says, acknowledging that no one can outmatch My Lady the King’s Mother but herself. “Does she come in here for her meals?”

I shake my head. “She dines with her son. When I am in confinement she takes my place at the high table in the court.”

“Let her have her moment of glory,” my mother counsels. “And we’ll eat better in here without her. Who do you have as your ladies-in-waiting?”

“Cecily, Anne, and my cousin Margaret,” I say. “Though Cecily will do nothing for anyone as she is with child herself. And of course I have the king’s kinswomen, and those his mother insists that I keep about me.” I lower my voice. “I am sure that they report to her everything I do and say.”

“Bound to. And how is Maggie? And her poor little brother?”

“She’s allowed to visit him,” I say. “And she says that he is well enough. He has tutors now and a musician. But it’s no life for a boy.”

“Perhaps if Henry gets a second heir he’ll let poor Teddy out,” my mother says. “I pray for that poor boy, every night of his life.”

“Henry can’t let him out while he fears that the people might rise up for a duke of York,” I say. “And even now there are constant uprisings in the country.”

She does not ask me who is rising, or what they are saying. She does not ask me which counties. She goes to the window and draws back a corner of the thick tapestry and looks out as if she has no interest, and from this, I know that Henry is wrong and that my mother has not shot her last bolt of rebellion. On the contrary, she is in the thick of it again. She knows more than I do, she probably knows more than Henry does.

“What’s the point of it?” I ask impatiently. “What’s the point of going on and on causing trouble, while men risk their lives and have to run away to Flanders with a price on their heads? Families are ruined and mothers lose their sons just as you did, women like my aunt Elizabeth, bereft of her son John, her next boy under suspicion. What d’you hope to achieve?”

She turns and her expression is as tender and as steadfast as ever. “I?” she says with her limpid smile. “I achieve nothing. I am just an old grandmother living in Bermondsey Abbey, glad of a chance to visit my darling daughter. I think of nothing but my soul and my next dinner. Causing no trouble at all.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 28 NOVEMBER 1489

The pains start in the early hours of the morning, waking me with a deep stir in my belly. My mother is with me the moment that I groan, and she holds my hands while the midwives mull some ale and set up the icon so that I can see it while I labor. It is my mother’s cool hand on my head when I am sweating and exhausted, and it is her gaze, locked on mine, quietly persuading me that there is no pain, that there is nothing but a divine cool floating on a constant river, that takes me through the long hours until I hear a cry and realize that it is over and that I have a baby and they put my little girl into my arms.

“My son commands that you honor me with naming Her Grace the Princess for me.” The sudden appearance of Lady Margaret jolts me back to the real world and behind her I see my mother folding linen and bowing her head and trying not to laugh.

“What?” I ask. I am still hazy with the birthing ale and with the magic that my mother manages to weave, so that pain recedes and the time passes.

“I shall be very glad to be her name-giver.” Lady Margaret pursues her own thought. “And it is so like my son to honor me. I only hope that your boy Arthur is as good and as loving a son to you, as mine is to me.”

My mother, who had two royal sons who adored her, turns away and puts the linen into a chest.

“Princess Margaret of the House of Tudor,” My Lady says, savoring the sound of her own name.

“Is it not vanity, to name a child after yourself?” my mother inquires, dulcet from the corner of the room.

“She is named for my saint,” Lady Margaret replies, not at all disconcerted. “It is not for my own glory. And besides, it is your own daughter who chooses the name. Is it not, Elizabeth?”

“Oh yes,” I say obediently, too tired to argue with her. “And the main thing is that she is well.”

“And beautiful,” my beautiful mother remarks.

Because so many have the pox in London, we don’t hold a big christening, and I am churched privately and return to my rooms and to the life of the court without a great feast. I know also that Henry is not going to waste money on celebrating the birth of a princess. He would have had a public holiday and wine flowing in the public fountains for another boy.

“I’m not disappointed in a girl,” he assures me as he meets me in the nursery and I find him with the precious baby in his arms. “We need another boy, of course, but she is the prettiest, daintiest little girl that was ever born.”

I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.