The White Princess (28 page)

Clearly, this is no surprise to her. “He got safely away?”

“As far as I know. But Lady Mother—”

She softens at once at the fear in my voice. “Yes, my dear. Of course you are anxious, you will be frightened. But I think that everything is going to change.”

“What about my son?”

“Arthur was born a prince, nobody can take that from him. Nobody would want to.”

“My husband?”

Almost she laughs out loud. “Ah well, Henry was born a commoner,” she says. “Maybe he will die as one.”

“Mother, I cannot have you making war against my husband. We agreed to a peace, you wanted me to marry him. Now we have a son, and he should be the next King of England.”

She rises up and goes in three paces across the small room to
look out of the window set high in the wall, to the quiet lawns and little convent church. “Perhaps so. Perhaps he will be king. I have never had a sense of it. I can’t see it myself, but it might happen.”

“Can’t you tell me?” I ask her. “Can’t you tell what’s going to happen?”

She turns and I see that her eyes are veiled and she is smiling. “As a seer, as my mother would have done? Or as a plotter? As a treasonous rebel?”

“As either!” I exclaim. “As anything! Can’t you, can’t
someone
tell me what is happening?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t be sure,” is all she will say.

“I have to go,” I say irritably. “I have to catch the tide back to Sheen. And then we’re going on progress.”

“Where to?” she asks.

I realize, as I tell her, that she will use this information. She will write to rebels as they muster, to enemies in England and overseas. As soon as I tell her so much as one word, that means I am working for York; I am spying for York against my own husband.

“Norwich,” I say tightly. “We’re going for Corpus Christi. Should I expect an attack now I’ve told you that?”

“Ah, so he thinks we’re invading the east coast,” she says gleefully. “So that’s what he’s expecting.”

“What?”

“He’s not going to Norwich for the pleasure of the feast. He’s going so that he can prepare the east coast for invasion.”

“They will invade? From Flanders?”

She puts a kiss on my forehead, completely ignoring my fearful questions. “Now don’t you worry about it,” she says. “You don’t need to know.”

She walks with me to the gatehouse, and then round the outside walls to where the pier runs out into the Neckinger River and my boat is waiting, bobbing on the rising tide. She kisses me and I kneel for her blessing and feel her warm hand rest gently
on my hood. “God bless you,” she says sweetly. “Come and see me when you return from Norwich, if you are able to come, if you are allowed.”

“I’m going to be alone at court without you,” I remind her. “I have Cecily and I have Anne, and Maggie, but I feel alone without you. My little sisters miss you too. And My Lady the King’s Mother thinks I am plotting with you and my husband doubts me. And I have to live there, with them, all of them, being watched by them all the time, without you.”

“Not for long,” she says, her buoyant confidence unchanged. “And very soon you will come to me or—who knows—I will find a way to come to you.”

We get back to Richmond on the inflowing tide and as soon as we round the bend in the river I can see a tall slight figure waiting on the landing stage. It is the king. It is Henry. I recognize him from far away, and I don’t know whether to tell the wherry to just turn around and row away, or to go on. I should have known that he would know where I was. My uncle Edward warned me that this is a king who knows everything. I should have known that he would not accept the lie of illness without questioning my cousin Margaret, and demanding to see me.

His mother is not at his side, nor any of his court. He is standing alone like an anxious husband, not like a suspicious king. As the little boat nudges up against the wooden pilings and my groom jumps ashore, Henry puts him to one side and helps me out of the boat himself. He throws a coin to the boatman, who rings it against his teeth as if surprised to find that it is good, and then disappears into the mist of the twilight river.

“You should have told me you wanted to go and I would have sent you more comfortably on the barge,” Henry says shortly.

“I am sorry. I thought you would not want me to visit.”

“And so you thought you would get out and back without my knowing?”

I nod. There is no point denying it. Obviously I had hoped that he would not know. “Because you don’t trust me,” he says flatly. “Because you don’t think that I would let you visit her, if it was safe for you to do so. You prefer to deceive me and creep out like a spy to meet my enemy in secret.”

I say nothing. He tucks my hand into the crook of his elbow as if we were a loving husband and wife, and he makes me walk, stride by stride, with him.

“And did you find your mother comfortably housed? And well?”

I nod. “Yes. I thank you.”

“And did she tell you what she has been doing?”

“No.” I hesitate. “She tells me nothing. I told her that we were going to Norwich, I hope that wasn’t wrong?”

For a moment his hard gaze at me is softened, as if he is sorry for the tearing apart of my loyalties; but then he speaks bitterly. “No. It doesn’t matter. She will have other spies set around me as well as you. She probably knew already. What did she ask you?”

It is like a nightmare, reviewing my conversation with my mother and wondering what will incriminate her, or even incriminate me. “Almost nothing,” I answer. “She asked me if John de la Pole had left court, and I said yes.”

“Did she hazard a guess as to why he had gone? Did she know where he had gone?”

I shake my head. “I told her that it was thought that he has gone to Flanders,” I confess.

“Did she not know already?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Was he expected?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will his family follow him, do you think? His brother Edmund? His mother, Elizabeth, your aunt? His father? Are they all faithless, though I have trusted them and taken them into my
court and listened to their counsels? Will they just take note of everything I said and take it to their kinsmen, my enemies?”

I shake my head again. “I don’t know.”

He releases my hand to step back and look at me, his dark eyes unsmiling and suspicious, his face hard. “When I think of the fortune that was spent on your education, Elizabeth, I am really amazed at how little you know.”

ST. MARY’S IN THE FIELDS, NORWICH, SUMMER 1487

The court travels east on muddy roads and we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi at Norwich, and we stay at the chapel of the college of St. Mary’s in the Fields and go into the wealthy town to observe the procession of the guilds to the cathedral.

The town is the richest in the kingdom, and every guild based on the wool business dresses up in the finest robes and pays for costumes, scenery, and horses to make a massive procession with merchants, masters, and apprentices in solemn order to celebrate the feast of the church and their own importance.

I stand beside Henry, both in our best robes as we watch the long procession, each guild headed by a gorgeously embroidered banner and a litter carrying a display to celebrate their work or show their patron saint. Now and then I can see Henry glance sideways at me. He is watching me as the guilds go by. “You smile at someone when he catches your eye,” he says suddenly.

I am surprised. “Just out of courtesy,” I say defensively. “It means nothing.”

“No, I know. It’s just that you look at them as if you wish them well; you smile in a friendly way.”

I cannot understand what he is saying. “Yes, of course, my lord. I’m enjoying the procession.”

“Enjoying it?” he queries as if this explains everything. “You like this?”

I nod, though he makes me feel almost guilty to have a moment of pleasure. “Who would not? It’s so rich and varied, and the tableaux so well made, and the singing! I don’t think I’ve ever heard such music.”

He shakes his head in impatience at himself, and then remembers everyone is watching us and raises a hand to a passing litter with a splendid castle built out of gold-painted wood. “I can’t just enjoy it,” he says. “I keep thinking that these people put on this show, but what are they thinking in their hearts? They might smile and wave at us and doff their hats, but do they truly accept my rule?”

A little child, dressed as a cherub, waves at me from a pillow of white on blue, representing a cloud. I smile and blow him a kiss, which makes him wriggle with delight.

“But you just enjoy it,” Henry says, as if pleasure was a puzzle to him.

I laugh. “Ah well,” I say. “I was raised in a happy court and my father loved nothing better than a joust or a play or a celebration. We were always making music and dancing. I can’t help but enjoy a spectacle, and this is as fine as anything I have ever seen.”

“You forget your worries?” he asks me.

I consider. “For a moment I do. D’you think that makes me very foolish?”

Ruefully, he smiles. “No. I think you were born and raised to be a merry woman. It is a pity that so much sorrow has come into your life.”

There is a roar of cannon, in salute from the castle, and I see Henry flinch at the noise, and then grit his teeth and master himself.

“Are you well, my lord husband?” I ask him quietly. “Clearly you’re not easily amused like me.”

The face he turns to me is pale. “Troubled,” he says shortly, and I remember with a sudden pulse of dread that my mother
said that the court was at Norwich because Henry expects an invasion on the east coast, and that I have been smiling and waving like a fool while my husband fears for his life.

We follow the procession into the great cathedral for the solemn mass of Corpus Christi, where My Lady the King’s Mother drops to her knees the moment that we enter, and spends the entire two-hour service bent low. Her more devout ladies-in-waiting kneel behind her, as if they were all part of an order of exceptional devotion. I think of my mother naming My Lady as Madonna Margaret of the Unending Self-Congratulation, and have to compose my face into a serious expression as I sit beside my husband on a pair of great matching chairs and listen to the long service in Latin and watch the service of the Mass.

Today, as it is such an important feast day, we will take communion and Henry and I go side by side up to the altar, my ladies following me, his court following him. At the moment that he is offered the sacred bread I see him hesitate, for one revealing second, before he opens his mouth and takes it, and I realize this is the only time that he does not have a taster to make sure his food is not poisoned. The thought that he might close his lips to the Host, to the sacred bread of the Mass, the body of Christ Himself, makes me shut my eyes in horror. When it is my turn, the wafer is dry in my mouth at that thought. How can Henry be so afraid that he thinks he is in danger before the altar of a cathedral?

The chancel rail is cold beneath my forehead as I kneel to pray and I remember that the church is no longer a place of holy safety. Henry has pulled his enemies out of sanctuary and put them to death; why should he not be poisoned at the altar?

I walk back to my throne, past My Lady the King’s Mother, who is still on her knees, and know that her anguished expression is because she is praying earnestly for her son’s safety in this country that he has won, but cannot trust.

When the service is over we go to a great banquet in the castle, and there are mummers and dancers, a pageant and a choir.
Henry sits on his great chair at the head of the hall and smiles, and eats well. But I see his brown gaze raking the room, and the way that his hand is always clenched on the arm of his chair.