The White Queen (20 page)

Warwick is back in power, and now it is my husband and my brother Anthony and my brother-in-law
Richard who are the fugitives, and God knows what wind will ever blow them back to
England again. And the girls and I, and the baby in my belly, are the new hostages,
the new prisoners. I may be in the royal apartments of the Tower for now, but soon
I shall be in the rooms below, with the bars over the window, and King Henry will
sleep in this bed again, and I shall be the one who people say should, for Christian
charity, be released, so that I do not die in prison, without sight of the free sky.

“Edward!” I see him look up, almost as if he can hear me call for him in my sleep,
in my dream. “Edward!” I cannot believe that he could leave me, that we could have
lost our fight for the throne. My father laid down his life that I might be queen;
my brother died beside him. Are we now to be nothing but pretenders, dismissed after
a few years of good luck? A king and a queen who overreached themselves and for whom
the luck ran out? Are my girls to be the daughters of an attainted traitor? Are they
to marry small squires on country estates and hope to live down their father’s shame?
Is my mother to greet Margaret of Anjou on her knees, and hope to worm her way back
into favor again? Am I to have the choice of living in exile or living in prison?
And what of my son, the baby not yet born? Is Warwick likely to let him live—he who
lost his own grandson and only heir, as we closed the gates of Calais to him, his
daughter losing
her baby in rough seas with a witch’s wind blowing them on shore?

I scream out loud: “Edward! Don’t leave me!” and the terror in my voice starts me
into full wakefulness, and next door my mother lights a candle from the fire, and
opens the door. “Is he coming? The baby? Is he early?”

“No. I had a dream. Mother, I had a most terrible dream.”

“There, there, never mind,” she says, quick to comfort. She lights candles at my bedside;
she stirs up the fire with a kick from her slippered foot. “There, Elizabeth. You’re
safe now.”

“We’re not safe,” I say certainly. “That’s the very thing.”

“Why, what did you dream?”

“It was Edward, on a ship, in a storm. It was night, the seas were huge. I don’t even
know if his ship will get through. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, Mother, and
he was facing an ill wind. It was our wind. It was the gale we called up to blow George
and Warwick away. We called it up, but it has not blown away. Edward is in a storm
of our making. Edward was dressed like a servant, a poor man: he had nothing, nothing
but the clothes he stood up in. He had given away his coat. Anthony was there; he
didn’t even have his cape. William Hastings was with them, and Edward’s brother Richard.
They were all that had survived, they were all that could run. They were . . .” I
close my eyes trying to remember. “They were leaving us, Mother. Oh Mother,
he’s left England, he’s left us. He’s lost. We’re lost. Edward has gone, Anthony too.
I am sure of it.”

She takes my cold hands and rubs them in her own. “Perhaps it was just a bad dream,”
she says. “Perhaps nothing but a dream. Women with child, near their time, have strange
fancies, vivid dreams . . .”

I shake my head, I throw back the covers. “No. I am certain. It was a Seeing. He is
defeated. He has run away.”

“D’you think he has gone to Flanders?” she asks. “To take refuge with his sister,
the Duchess Margaret, and Charles of Burgundy?”

I nod. “Of course. Of course he has. And he will send for me, I don’t doubt him. He
loves me, and he loves the girls, and he swore he would never leave me. But he has
gone, Mother. Margaret of Anjou must have landed, and she will be marching here, to
London, to free Henry. We have to go. I have to get the girls away. We can’t be here
when her army comes in. They will imprison us forever if they find us here.”

My mother throws a shawl around my shoulders. “Are you sure? Can you travel? Shall
I send a message to the docks and shall we take a ship?”

I hesitate. I am so afraid of the voyage when my baby is near to his time. I think
of Isabel, crying out in pain on a rocking ship, and nobody to help her with the birth,
the baby dying and not even a priest to christen him. I can’t face what she had to
face, with the wind screaming in the rigging. I am afraid that the wind I whistled
up is still blowing down the sea roads, its ill
nature unsatisfied by the death of one baby, looking around the horizon for unsteady
sails. If that wind sees me and my girls on the heaving sea, then we will be drowned.

“No, I can’t bear it. I don’t dare. I am too afraid of the wind. We’ll go into sanctuary.
We’ll go to Westminster Abbey. They won’t dare hurt us there. We’ll be safe there.
The Londoners love us still and Queen Margaret wouldn’t break sanctuary. If King Henry
is in his wits, he would never let her break sanctuary. He believes in the power of
God working in the world. He will respect sanctuary and make Warwick leave us alone.
We’ll take the girls and my Grey sons and go into sanctuary. At least until my son
is born.”

When I had
heard of desperate men claiming sanctuary by hanging on to the ring on the church
door and yelling defiance at the thief takers, or dashing up the aisle and putting
their hand on the high altar as if they were playing a childhood game of tag, I always
thought that they must live thereafter on the wine of the Mass and the bread of the
Host, and sleep in the pews pillowed on hassocks. It turns out that it is not as bad
as this. We live in the crypt of the church built in St. Margaret’s churchyard, within
the precincts of the abbey. It is a little like living in a cellar, but we can see
the river from the low windows on one side of the room and we can glimpse the highway
through the grille in the door, on the other side. We live like a poor family, dependent
on the goodwill of Edward’s supporters and the citizens of London, who love the family
of York and continue to do so, even though the world has changed again, the family
of York is in hiding, and King Henry is acclaimed king once more.

Warwick, the ascendant Lord Warwick, the murderer of my father and brother and the
kidnapper of my husband, enters London in triumph, George, his unhappy son-in-law,
at his side. George may be a spy in
their ranks, secretly on our side, or he may have turned his coat and turned it again
and now hopes for crumbs from the Lancaster royal table. At any rate, he gets no message
to me, nor does anything to guarantee my safety. He bobs along in the wake of the
Kingmaker, as if he had no brother, no sister-in-law, perhaps still hoping for a chance
at being king himself.

Warwick, triumphant, takes his old enemy King Henry from the Tower and proclaims him
fit to rule and fully restored. He is now the liberator of his king and the savior
of the House of Lancaster, and the country is filled with joy. King Henry is confused
by this turn of events, but they explain to him, slowly and kindly once a day, that
he is king again, and that his cousin Edward of York has gone away. They may even
tell him that we, Edward’s family, are hiding in Westminster Abbey, for he orders—or
they order in his name—that the sanctuary of the holy places shall be observed, and
we are safe in our self-imposed prison.

Every day, the butchers send us meat, the bakers send us bread, even the milkmaids
from the green fields of the city bring us pails of milk for the girls, and the fruit
sellers from Kent bring the best of the crop to the abbey and leave it at the door
for us. They tell the churchwardens that it is for the “poor queen” at her time of
trouble, and then they remember that there is a new queen, Margaret of Anjou, only
waiting for a fair wind to set sail and return to her throne, and they trip over their
words and finally say, “You know who I mean. But make sure she has it, for fruit from
Kent is
very good for a woman near her time. It will make the baby come easier. And tell her
that we wished her well and we will come again.”

It is hard for my girls to have so little news of their father, hard for them to be
kept inside in the few small rooms, since they were born to the best of things. They
have lived all their lives in the greatest palaces of England; now they are confined.
They can stand on a bench to look out of the windows at the river, where the royal
barge used to take them up and down between one palace and another, or they can take
turns to get on a chair and look out of the grating at the streets of London, where
they used to ride and hear people bless their names and their pretty faces. Elizabeth,
my oldest girl, is only four years old, but it is as if she understands that a time
of great sorrow and difficulty has come on us. She never asks me where her tame birds
are; she never asks for the servants who used to pet her and play with her; she never
asks for her golden top or her little dog, or her precious toys. She acts as if she
had been born and bred in this little space, and she plays with her baby sisters as
if she were a paid nursemaid, ordered to be cheerful. The only question she poses
is: Where is her father?—and I have to learn to become accustomed to her looking up
at me, a little puzzled frown on her round face, asking, “Is my father the king here
yet, Lady Mother?”

It is hardest of all on my boys, who are like confined lion cubs in the small space
and prowl around, bickering. In the end, my mother sets them exercises, sword
play with broom handles, poems to learn, jumping and catching games that they have
to do every day, and they keep a score and hope that it will make them stronger in
the battle they long for, which will restore Edward to the throne.

As the days grow shorter and the nights grow darker, I know that my time is coming
and my baby is due. My great terror is that I will die here, in childbirth, and my
mother will be left here alone, in our enemy’s city, guarding my children.

“Do you know what will happen?” I ask her bluntly. “Have you foreseen it? And what
will happen to my girls?”

I see some knowledge in her eyes, but the face she turns to me is untroubled. “You
aren’t going to die, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says bluntly. “You are a healthy
young woman and the king’s council is sending Lady Scrope to care for you, and a pair
of midwives. There is no reason to think that you will die, any more than there was
with any of the others. I expect you to survive this, and to have more children.”

“The baby?” I ask, trying to read her face.

“You know he is healthy,” she says, smiling. “Anyone who has felt that child kick
knows he is strong. There is no reason for you to fear.”

“But there is something,” I say certainly. “You foresee something about Edward, my
baby prince Edward.”

She looks at me for a moment and then she decides to speak honestly. “I can’t see
him becoming king,” she says. “I have read the cards and I have looked at the
reflection of the moon on the water. I have tried asking the crystal, and looking
into the smoke. Indeed, I have tried everything I know which is inside the laws of
God and is allowed in this holy space. But to tell you the truth, Elizabeth: I cannot
see him being king.”

I laugh out loud. “Is that it? Is that all? Dear God, Mother, I cannot see his own
father being king again, and he is crowned and ordained! I cannot see myself being
queen again, and I have had the holy oil on my breast and the scepters in my hand.
I don’t hope for a Prince of Wales here, just a healthy boy. Just let him be born
strong and grow to be a man, and I will be content. I don’t need him to be King of
England. I just want to know that he and I will live through this.”

“Oh, you’ll live through this,” she says. An airy wave of her hand dismisses the cramped
rooms; the girls’ truckle beds in one corner; the servants’ straw mattresses on the
floor in another; the poverty of the space; the chill of the cellar; the damp in the
stone of the walls; the smoking fire; the dauntless courage of my children, who are
forgetting that they ever lived anywhere better. “This is nothing. I expect to see
us rise from this.”

“How?” I ask her disbelievingly.

She leans over and she puts her mouth to my ear. “Because your husband is not growing
vines and making wine in Flanders,” she says. “He is not carding wool and learning
to weave. He is equipping an expedition, making allies, raising money, planning to
invade England. The London merchants are not the only ones in
the country who prefer York to Lancaster. And Edward has never lost a battle. D’you
remember?”

Uncertainly, I nod. Even though he is defeated and in exile, it is true that he has
never lost a battle.

“So when he comes against Henry’s forces, even when they are captained by Warwick
and driven on by Margaret of Anjou, don’t you think he will win?”

It is not
a proper confinement, as a queen should be confined, with a ceremonial retirement
from court six weeks before the date of the birth, and a closing of the shutters and
a blessing of the room.