Philippa Gregory - The White Princess

“She wasn’t really ill,” I say. “She just never thrived. When she died it wasn’t a struggle at all, it was as if she just sighed, and then she was gone.”

He bows his head and puts his face against my hands in my lap. I can feel a hot tear on my fingers, and I bend over him and hold him tightly, I grip him as if I would feel his strength and have him feel mine.

“God bless her,” he says. “And forgive me for being away. I feel her loss more than you know, more than I can tell you. I know it seems that I’m not a good father to our children, and I’m not a good husband to you—but I care for them and for you more than you know, Elizabeth. I swear that at least I will be a good king for them. I will keep the kingdom for my children and your throne for you, and you will see your son Arthur inherit.”

“Hush,” I say. With the memory of Elizabeth, warm and limp in my arms, I don’t want to tempt fate by foretelling the future of our other children.

He gets up and I stand with him as he wraps his arms around me and holds me tightly, his face against my neck as if he would inhale comfort from the scent of my skin.

“Forgive me,” he breathes. “I can hardly ask it of you; but I do. Forgive me, Elizabeth.”

“You are a good husband, Henry,” I reassure him. “And a good father. I know that you love us in your heart, I know that you wouldn’t have gone away if you had thought we might lose her, and see, here you are—home almost before I had sent for you.”

He tips his head back to look at me, but he does not deny that it was his spies who told me that his daughter was dead. He did not hear it first from me. “I have to know everything,” is all he says. “That’s how I keep us safe.”

My Lady the King’s Mother plans and executes a great funeral for our little girl. She is buried as a princess in the chapel of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Archbishop Morton performs the funeral service, the Bishop of Worcester, who told me that the boy was coming home, serves the Mass with quiet dignity. I cannot tell Henry that the bishop was smiling the night that the beacons were lit for the landing of the boy. I cannot report on the priest who is burying my child. I fold my hands before me and I rest my head against them and I pray for her precious soul and I know without doubt that she is in heaven; and that I am left to the bitterness of a loss on earth.

Arthur, my firstborn and always the most thoughtful of my children, puts his hand in mine, though he is now a big boy of just nine. “Don’t cry, Lady Mother,” he whispers. “You know she’s with our lady grandmother, you know she has gone to God.”

“I know,” I say, blinking.

“And you’ve still got me.”

I swallow my tears. “I still have you,” I agree.

“You’ll always have me.”

“I’m glad of that.” I smile down at him. “I am so glad of that, Arthur.”

“And perhaps the next baby will be a girl.”

I hold him close to me. “Whether she is a girl or a boy, she can’t take the place of Elizabeth. Do you think if I lost you, I wouldn’t mind because I still had Harry?”

His own eyes are bright with tears but he laughs at that. “No, though Harry would think so. Harry would think it a very good exchange.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1495

My cousin Maggie comes to my privy chamber in Westminster, carrying my box of jewels by way of excusing her arrival. In these suspicious times we always make sure that when we are together we are clearly doing something; she fetches things for me, I send her on errands. We never look as if we have met only to put our heads together, whispering secrets. By the way she carries the box, in front of her, for all to see, demonstrating that we are going to look at my jewels, I guess at once that she wants to speak to me in private.

I turn to my maid-in-waiting. “Please fetch the dark purple ribbon from the wardrobe rooms,” I say.

She curtseys. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, I thought you wanted the blue.”

“I did, but I have changed my mind. And Claire—go with her and bring the matching purple cloak.”

The two of them leave as Margaret opens the box of jewels and holds up my amethysts as if to show me. The other women are closer to the fireside, and can see us but not hear what we are saying. Margaret holds the jewels to the light to make them sparkle with a deep purple fire.

“What?” I ask tersely as I seat myself before my looking-glass.

“He’s in Scotland.”

A little bubble of laughter, or perhaps it is a sob of fear, forms in my throat. “In Scotland? He’s left Ireland? You are sure?”

“Honored guest of King James. The king acknowledges him, is holding a great meeting of the lords, calls him by his title: Richard Duke of York.” She stands behind me, lifting up the amethyst coronal to show me.

“How d’you know?”

“My husband, God bless him, told me. He got it from the Spanish ambassador, who got it from the Spain dispatches—everything that they write to Spain they send a copy to us, the alliance between the king and the Spanish has grown so strong.” She checks that the women at the fire are engaged in their own conversation, puts the amethysts around my neck, and goes on. “The Spanish ambassador to Scotland was called in by King James of Scotland, who raged at him and said that our King Henry was a cat’s-paw in the hands of the Spanish king and queen. But he—James—would see the rightful king of England take his throne.”

“Is he going to invade?”

Margaret puts the coronal on my head. I see my wondering face in the looking-glass before me, my eyes wide, my face pale. For a moment I seem like my mother, for a moment I am a beauty as she was. I pat my white cheeks. “I look like I have seen a ghost.”

“We all look like that,” Margaret says, a weak reflected smile over my head as she fastens the amethysts around my neck. “We are all going around as if a ghost is on his way to us. They are singing in the streets about the Duke of York, who dances in Ireland and plays in Scotland and will walk in an English garden and everyone will be merry again. They say he is a ghost come to dance, a duke brought back from the dead.”

“They say it is my brother,” I say flatly.

“The King of Scotland says that he will put his life on it.”

“And what does your husband say?”

“He says there will be war,” she replies, the smile fading from her face. “The Scots will invade to support Richard, they will invade England, and there will be war.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1495

Henry’s uncle Jasper comes home from one of his long hard rides as pale as the men that he has tried and sent to the gallows, with deep lines of weariness grooved into his face. He is old, much more than sixty, and he has worked this year like a man desperate to see his nephew safe on his throne, terribly aware that time is running out for them both. Old age is dogging him, disaster is walking at Henry’s heels.

My aunt Katherine, always a dutiful wife, puts him to bed in their rich and comfortable rooms, calls physicians, apothecaries, and nurses to care for him, but she is elbowed aside by My Lady the King’s Mother, who prides herself on her knowledge of medicine and herbs and says that Jasper’s constitution is so strong that all he needs is good food, rest, and some tinctures of her own creation to get well. My husband Henry visits the sickroom three times a day, in the morning to see how his uncle has slept, before dinner to make sure that he has the very best that the kitchen can offer and that it is served to him first, hot and fresh, on bended knee, and then last thing at night, before he and his mother go to the chapel and pray for the health of the man who has been the keystone of their lives for so very long. Jasper has been like a father to Henry, and his only constant companion. He has been his protector and his mentor. Henry would have died without his uncle’s constant loving care. To My Lady, I think he has been the most potent of influences a woman can know: the love she never named, the life she never led, the man she should have married.