The White Queen (42 page)

For a moment I am persuaded. More, I am tempted. Perhaps everything can end happily.
Then I think of my brother Anthony and my son Richard Grey imprisoned together in
Pontefract Castle, and I hesitate. I have to pause and think. I have to keep them
safe. While I am in sanctuary, my safety and my son Richard’s safety balances their
imprisonment like the weights in a pair of scales. They are hostages for my good behavior,
but equally Duke Richard dare not touch them for fear of enraging me. If Richard wants
to rid himself of Riverses he has to have all of us in his power. By keeping out of
his reach, I protect those of us he does have, as well as those who are free. I have
to keep my brother Anthony safe against his enemies. I have to. This is my crusade:
like the one I would not let him ride. I have to keep him safe to be the light in
the world that he is.

“I cannot release Prince Richard to you,” I say, my voice filled with false regret.
“He has been so ill lately, I cannot bear anyone should care for him but me. He is
not yet well, he has lost his voice, and if he were to have a relapse, it could be
worse than his first illness. If you want him and his brother to be together, then
send Edward to join us here, where I can care for them both and know that they are
not in danger. I long to see my oldest son by King Edward, and know that he is safe.
I pray you, send him to me, to safety. He can be crowned from here, as well as from
the Tower.”

“Why, madam,” says Thomas Howard, bristling like the bully that he is. “Can you name
any reason why they should be in danger?”

I look at him for a moment. Does he really think that he is likely to trap me into
confessing my enmity to the Duke Richard? “All the rest of my family are either run
away or imprisoned,” I say flatly. “Why should I think that I and my sons are secure?”

“Now, now,” the cardinal interrupts, nodding at Howard to silence him. “Anyone in
prison will be tried before a court of their peers as they should be, and the truth
of any accusation will be proved or denied. The lords have ruled that no charge of
treason can be brought against your brother Anthony, Earl Rivers. That should satisfy
you that we come in good faith. You cannot imagine that I, I myself, should come to
you in anything other than good faith?”

“Ah, my lord cardinal,” I say. “I don’t doubt you.”

“Then trust me when I give you my word, my personal word, that your boy will be safe
with me,” he says. “I shall take him to his brother and no harm will come to either
of them. You distrust the Duke Richard, and he suspects you—this is a sorrow to me,
but you both have your reasons—but I will swear that neither the duke nor any other
will harm your boys and they will be safe together, and Edward will be crowned king.”

I sigh as if I am overwhelmed by his logic. “And if I refuse?”

He draws close to me and speaks low. “I fear that he will break sanctuary and take
you and all your family out of here,” he says very quietly. “And all the lords think
he would be right to do so. No one defends your right to be in here, Your Grace. This
is a shell around you, not a castle. Let the little Prince Richard out and they will
leave you here, if that is your wish. Keep him here and you will all be pulled out,
like leeches from a glass jar. Or they can smash the jar.”

Elizabeth, who has been looking out of the window, leans forward and whispers, “Lady
Mother, there are hundreds of Duke Richard’s barges on the river. We are surrounded.”

For a moment I do not see the cardinal’s worried face. I do not see the hard expression
of Thomas Howard. I do not see the half dozen men who have come with him. I see my
husband going into the sanctuary at Tewkesbury with his sword drawn, and I know that
from that moment sanctuary was no longer safe. Edward
destroyed his son’s safety that day—and he never knew. But I know it now. And thank
God I have prepared for it.

I put my handkerchief to my eyes. “Forgive a woman’s weakness,” I say. “I cannot bear
to part with him. Can I be spared this?”

The cardinal pats my hand. “He has to come with us. I am sorry.”

I turn to Elizabeth and I whisper, “Fetch him, fetch my little boy.”

Elizabeth leaves in silence, her head bowed.

“He has not been well,” I say to the cardinal. “You must keep him wrapped up warm.”

“Trust me,” he says. “He will come to no harm in my care.”

Elizabeth comes back with the changeling page boy. He is in my Richard’s clothes,
a scarf tied round his throat, muffling the lower part of his face. When I hold him
to me, he even smells of my own boy. I kiss his fair hair. His little-boy frame is
delicate in my arms, and yet he holds himself bravely, as a prince should do. Elizabeth
has taught him well. “Go with God, my son,” I say to him. “I shall see you again at
your brother’s coronation in a few days.”

“Yes, Lady Mother,” he says like a little parrot. His voice is scarcely more than
a whisper but audible to them all.

I take him by the hand and I lead him to the cardinal. He has seen Richard at court,
at a distance, and this boy is hidden by the jeweled cap on his head and the
flannel round his throat and his jaw. “Here is my son,” I say, my voice trembling
with emotion. “I resign him into your hands. I do here deliver him and his brother
into your safekeeping.” I turn to the boy and say to him, “Farewell, mine own sweet
son, the Almighty be your protector.”

He turns his little face to me, all wrapped in the concealing scarf, and for a moment
I feel a sweep of real emotion as I kiss his warm cheek. I may be sending this child
into danger instead of my own, but he is still a child, and it is still danger. There
are tears in my eyes when I put his little hand in the big soft palm of Cardinal Bourchier,
and I say to him over the little head, “Guard this boy, my boy, please, my lord. Keep
this boy safe.”

We wait as they take the boy, and file from the room. When they are gone, the scent
of their clothes lingers. It is the smell of the outdoors, horse sweat, cooked meats,
a fresh breeze blowing over cut grass.

Elizabeth turns to me and her face is pale. “You sent the page boy for you think it
is not safe for our boy to go to the Tower,” she observes.

“Yes,” I say.

“So you must think that our Edward is not safe in the Tower.”

“I don’t know. Yes. That is my fear.”

She takes an abrupt step to the window and for a moment she reminds me of my mother,
her grandmother. She has the same determination—I can see her puzzling away at the
best course. For the first time I
think that Elizabeth will make a woman to be reckoned with. She is not a little girl
anymore.

“I think you should send to my uncle and ask him for an agreement,” she says. “You
could agree that we give him the throne, and he names Edward as his heir.”

I shake my head.

“You could,” she says. “He is Edward’s uncle, a man of honor. He must want a way out
of this as much as we do.”

“I will not give up Edward’s throne,” I say tightly. “If Duke Richard wants it, he
will have to take it, and shame himself.”

“And what if he does that?” she asks me. “What happens to Edward then? What happens
to my sisters? What happens to me?”

“I don’t know,” I say cautiously. “We may have to fight; we may have to argue. But
we don’t give up. We don’t surrender.”

“And that little boy,” she says, nodding to the door where the page boy has gone,
his jaw tied up with flannel so he does not speak. “Did we take him from his father,
and bathe him and clothe him and tell him to be silent as we sent him to his death?
Is that how we fight this war, using a child as our shield? Sending a little boy to
his death?”

“What?” I spit at the quiet dawn sky like an angry cat whose kittens have been taken
away for drowning. “No royal barges? No booming cannon from the Tower? No wine flowing
in the fountains of the city? No banging of drums, no ’prentice boys howling out the
songs of their guilds? No music? No shouting? No cheering along the procession route?”
I swing open the window that looks over the river and see the usual river traffic
of barges and wherries and rowing boats, and I say to my mother and to Melusina, “Clearly,
they don’t crown him today. Is he to die instead?” I think of my boy as if I were
painting his portrait. I think of the straight line of his little nose still rounded
at the tip like a baby, and the plump roundness of his cheeks and the clear innocence
of his eyes. I think of the curve of the back of his head that used to fit my hand
when I touched him, and the straight pure line of the nape of his neck when he was
bent over his books in study. He was a brave boy, a boy who had been coached by his
uncle Anthony to vault into a saddle and ride at the joust. Anthony promised that
he would be fearless by learning to face fear. And he was a boy who loved the country.
He liked Ludlow Castle, for he could ride into the hills and see
the peregrine falcons soaring high above the cliffs, and he could swim in the cold
water of the river. Anthony said he had a sense of landscape: rare in the young. He
was a boy with the most golden future. He was born in wartime to be a child of peace.
He would have been, I don’t doubt, a great Plantagenet king, and his father and I
would have been proud of him.

I speak of him as if he is dead, for I have little doubt that since he is not crowned
today, he will be killed in secret, just as William Hastings was dragged out and beheaded
on Tower Green on a baulk of wood with the axeman hurriedly wiping his hands from
his breakfast. Dear God, when I think of the nape of the neck of my boy and I think
of the headsman’s axe, I feel sick enough to die myself.

I don’t stay at the window watching the river that keeps flowing indifferently, as
if my boy were not in danger of his life. I dress and pin up my hair and then I prowl
about our sanctuary like one of the lionesses in the Tower. I comfort myself with
plotting: we are not friendless, I am not without hope. My son Thomas Grey will be
busy, I know, meeting in secret at hidden places those who can be convinced to rise
for us, and there must be many in the country, in London too, who are beginning to
doubt exactly what Duke Richard means by a protectorate. Margaret Stanley is clearly
working for us: her husband Lord Thomas Stanley warned Hastings. My sister-in-law
Duchess Margaret of York will be working for us in Burgundy. Even the French should
take an interest in my danger, if only
to cause trouble for Richard. There is a safe house in Flanders, where a well-paid
family is greeting a little boy and teaching him to disappear into the crowd of Tournai.
The duke may have the upper hand now, but there are as many who will hate him, as
hated us Riverses, and many more will be thinking fondly of me, now I am in danger.
Most of all there will be the men who want to see Edward’s son and not his brother
on the throne.

I hear the rush of hurried footsteps, and I turn to face new danger as my daughter
Cecily comes running down the crypt and throws opens the door to my chamber. She is
white with fright. “There is something at the door,” she says. “Something horrible
at the door.”

“What is at the door?” I ask. At once, of course, I think it is the headsman.

“Something as tall as a man, but looking like Death.”

I throw a scarf over my head and I go to the door and slide open the grille. Death
himself seems to be waiting for me. He is in black gaberdine with a tall hat on his
head and a long white tube of a nose hiding all his face. It is a physician with the
long cone of his nose mask stuffed with herbs to protect him from the airs of the
plague. He turns the glittery slits of his eyes on me, and I feel myself shiver.

“There is none with plague in here,” I say.

“I am Dr. Lewis of Caerleon, the Lady Margaret Beaufort’s doctor,” he says, his voice
echoing weirdly from the cone. “She says you are suffering from woman’s maladies,
and would benefit from a physician.”

I open the door. “Come in, I am not well,” I say. But as soon as the door is closed
to the outside world, I challenge him. “I am perfectly well. Why are you here?”

“The Lady Beaufort—Lady Stanley, I should say—is well too, God be praised for her.
But she wanted to find a way to speak with you, and I am of her affinity, and loyal
to you, Your Grace.”

I nod. “Take off your mask.”

He takes the cone from his face and pushes back the hood from his head. He is a small
dark man with a smiling, trustworthy face. He bows low. “She wants to know if you
have devised a plan to rescue the two princes from the Tower. She wants you to know
both she and her husband the Lord Stanley are yours to command, and she wants you
to know that the Duke of Buckingham is filled with doubt as to where the Duke Richard’s
ambition is leading him. She thinks the young duke is ready for turning.”

“Buckingham has done everything to put the duke where he sits now,” I say. “Why would
he change his mind on this day of their victory?”