The White Queen (43 page)

“Lady Margaret believes that the Duke of Buckingham could be persuaded,” he says,
leaning forward to speak only into my ear. “She thinks he is starting to have doubts
as to his leader. She thinks he would be interested in other, greater rewards than
those the Duke Richard can offer him, and he is a young man, not yet thirty years
old, easily swayed. He is afraid that the duke plans to take the throne for himself;
he is
afraid for the safety of your sons. You are his sister-in-law, these are his nephews
too. He is concerned for the future of the princes, his little kinsmen. Lady Margaret
bids me say to you that she thinks that the servants in the Tower can be bribed, and
she wants to know how she can serve you in what plans you have to restore the Princes
Edward and Richard to freedom.”

“It is not Richard . . .” I start to say when, like a ghost, from the door to the
river, Elizabeth comes up the steps, the hem of her gown sodden.

“Elizabeth. What on earth are you doing?”

“I went down to sit by the river,” she says. Her face is strange and pale. “It was
so quiet and beautiful at first this morning, and then it became more and more busy.
I wondered why the river was so busy. It was almost as if the river would tell me
herself.” She turns to regard the doctor. “Who is this?”

“He is a messenger from Lady Margaret Stanley,” I say. I am looking at her wet gown,
which drags behind her like a tail. “How did you get so wet?”

“From the barges that went by,” she says. Her face is pale and hostile. “All the barges
that went down the river to Baynard Castle, where Duke Richard is holding a great
court. The wash from their passing was so great that it came in over the steps. What
is happening there today? Half of London is on a barge going to the duke’s house,
but it is supposed to be the day of my brother’s coronation.”

Dr. Lewis looks awkward. “I was about to tell your royal mother,” he says hesitantly.

“The river itself is a witness,” my daughter says rudely. “It washed over my feet
as if to tell me. Anyone could guess.”

“Guess what?” I demand of them both.

“The Parliament has met and declared that Duke Richard is the rightful king,” he says
quietly, though his words echo in the vaulted stone hall as if he were shouting a
proclamation. “They ruled that your marriage with the king was held without the knowledge
of the rightful lords, and achieved by witchcraft by your mother and yourself. And
that the king was married already to another lady.”

“So you have been a whore for years and we are bastards,” Elizabeth finishes coolly.
“We are defeated and shamed. It is over, all over. Can we take Edward and Richard
and go now?”

“What are you saying?” I ask of her. I am as bewildered by this daughter of mine with
her gown like a wet tail, like a mermaid come in from the river, as I am at the news
that Richard has claimed the throne and we are cast down. “What are you saying? What
were you thinking as you sat by the river? Elizabeth, you are so strange today. Why
are you like this now?”

“Because I think we are cursed,” she flings out at me. “I think we are cursed. The
river whispered a curse to me, and I blame you and my father for bringing us into
this world and putting us here, in the grip of ambition, and yet not holding strongly
enough to your power to make it right for us.”

I snatch at her cold hands tightly, and I hold her
as if I would keep her from swimming away. “You’re not cursed, daughter. You are the
finest and rarest of all my children, the most beautiful, the most beloved. You know
that. What curse could stick to you?”

The gaze she turns on me is darkened with horror, as if she has seen her death. “You
will never surrender, you will never let us be. Your ambition will be the death of
my brothers, and when they are dead you will put me on the throne. You would rather
have the throne than your sons, and when they are both dead, you will put me on my
dead brother’s throne. You love the crown more than your children.”

I shake my head to deny the power of her words. This is my little girl, this is my
easy, simple child, this is my pet, my Elizabeth. She is the very bone of my bone.
She has never had a thought that I did not put in her head. “You cannot know such
a thing; it’s not true. You cannot know. The river cannot tell you such a thing, and
you cannot hear it, and it’s not true.”

“I will take my own brother’s throne,” she says as if she cannot hear me. “And you
will be glad of it, for your ambition is your curse, so the river says.”

I glance at the doctor and wonder if she has a fever. “Elizabeth, the river cannot
speak to you.”

“Of course it speaks to me, and of course I hear it!” she exclaims in impatience.

“There is no curse . . .”

She wheels around and glides across the room, her gown leaving a damp stain like a
trail, and throws open the window. Dr. Lewis and I follow her, fearful for a
moment that she has run mad and means to jump out; but at once I am halted by a high
sweet keening from the river, a longing sound, a song of mourning, a note so anguished
that I put my hands over my ears to block it out and look to the doctor for an explanation.
He shakes his head in bewilderment, for he hears nothing but the cheerful noise of
the passing barges as they go down for the king’s coronation, trumpets blaring and
drums pounding. But he can see the tears in Elizabeth’s eyes and sees me shrink from
the open windows, blocking my ears from the haunting sounds.

“That’s not for you,” I say. I am choking on my grief. “Ah, Elizabeth, my love, that’s
not for you. That’s Melusina’s song: the song that we hear for a death in our house.
That’s not a warning song for you. This will be for my son Richard Grey; I can hear
it. It’s for my son and for my brother Anthony, my brother Anthony, whom I swore I
would keep safe.”

The doctor is pale with fear. “I can hear nothing,” he says. “Just the noise of the
people calling for the new king.”

Elizabeth is at my side, her gray eyes as dark as a storm on a wave at sea. “Your
brother? What d’you mean?”

“My brother and my son are dead at the hands of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, just
as my brother John and my father were dead at the hands of George, Duke of Clarence,”
I predict. “The sons of York are murdering beasts, and Richard is no better than George.
They have cost me the best men of my family and broken my
heart. I can hear it. I can hear this. This is what the river is singing. The river
is singing a lament for my son and for my brother.”

She steps closer. She is my tender girl again, her wild fury blown away. She puts
her hand on my shoulder. “Mother—”

“Do you think he will stop here?” I burst out frantically. “He has my boy, he has
my royal son. If he dares to take Anthony from me, if he could bear to take Richard
Grey from me, d’you think he will stop at taking Edward too? A brother and a son he
has robbed from me this day. I will never forgive him. I will never forget this. He
is a dead man to me. I will see him wither, I will see his sword arm fail him, I will
see him turn around looking for his friends like a lost child on the battlefield,
I will see him fall.”

“Mother, be still,” she whispers. “Be still and listen to the river.”

It is the only word that can calm me. I run down the length of the room and throw
open all the windows, and the warm summer air breathes into the cold darkness of the
crypt. The water babbles low against the banks. There is a stink of low tide and mud,
but the river flows on, as if to remind me that life goes on, as if to say that Anthony
has gone, my boy Richard Grey has gone, and my boy the little Prince Richard has gone
downstream to strangers on a little boat. But we still might flow deep once more.

There is music coming from some of the passing
barges, noblemen making merry at the accession of Duke Richard. I cannot understand
how they cannot hear the singing of the river, how they do not know that a light has
gone out of this world with the death of my brother Anthony and my boy . . . my boy.

“He would not want you to grieve,” she says quietly. “Uncle Anthony loved you so much.
He would not want you to grieve.”

I put my hand on hers. “He would want me to live, and to bring you children through
this danger to life,” I say. “We will hide in sanctuary for now, but I swear we will
come out again to our true place. You can call this the curse of ambition if you like,
but without it I would not fight. And I will fight. You will see me fight, and you
will see me win.

“If we have to set sail to Flanders, we will do that. If we have to snap like cornered
dogs, we will do that. If we have to hide like peasants in Tournai and live on eels
from the River Scheldt, we will do that. But Richard will not destroy us. No man of
this earth can destroy us. We will rise up. We are the children of the goddess Melusina:
we may have to ebb but surely we will flow again. And Richard will learn this. He
has caught us now at a low and dry place, but by God he will see us in flood.”

I speak very bravely, but once I am silent I slide into grief for my Grey son, and
for my brother, my dearest brother Anthony. I think of Richard Grey as a little boy
once more, sitting so high on the king’s horse, holding
my hand at the side of the road as we waited for the king to come by. He was my boy,
he was my beautiful boy, and his father died in battle against one York brother and
now he is dead at the hands of another. I remember my mother mourning her son and
saying that when you have got a child through babyhood you think you are safe. But
a woman is not safe. Not in this world. Not in this world where brother fights against
brother and no one can ever put their sword aside, or trust in the law. I think of
him as a baby in the cradle, as a toddler when he learned to walk holding on to my
fingers, up and down, up and down the gallery at Grafton till my back ached from stooping,
and then I think of him as the young man he was, a good man in the making.

And Anthony my brother has been my dearest and most trusted friend and advisor since
we were children together. Edward was right to call him the greatest poet and the
finest knight at court. Anthony, who wanted to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and who
would have gone had I not stopped him. Richard dined with the two of them at Stony
Stratford when they met on the road to London, and talked pleasantly of the England
that we would all build together, Riverses and Plantagenets, of the shared heir, my
boy, whom we would put on the throne. Anthony was no fool but he trusted Richard—why
should he not? They were kinsmen. They had been side by side in battle, brothers in
arms. They had gone into exile together and returned to England
in triumph. They were both uncles and guardians to my precious son.

In the morning when Anthony came downstairs to breakfast in his inn, he found the
doors barred and his men ordered away. He found Richard and Henry Stafford, the Duke
of Buckingham, armed for battle, their men standing stone-faced in the yard. And they
took him away, with my boy Richard Grey, and Sir Thomas Vaughan accused of treason,
though they all three were faithful servants of my boy the new king.

Anthony, in prison, awaiting his death in the morning, listens at the window for a
moment, in case there is such a thing as the strong sweet song of Melusina, expecting
to hear nothing, and then smiles when he hears a bell-like ringing. He shakes his
head to clear the noise from his ears, but it stays, an unearthly voice that makes
him, irreverently, chuckle. He never believed the legend of the girl who is half fish
and half woman, the ancestor of his house; but now he finds he is comforted to hear
her singing for his death. He stays at the window and leans his forehead against the
cool stone. To hear her voice, high and clear, around the battlements of Pontefract
Castle proves at last that his mother’s gifts and his sister’s gifts and her daughter’s
gifts are real: as they always claimed, as he only half believed. He wishes he could
tell his sister that he knows this now. They may need these gifts. Their gifts may
be enough to save them. Perhaps to save all the family who named themselves Rivers
to honor
the water goddess who was the founder of their family. Perhaps even to save their
two Plantagenet boys. If Melusina can sing for him, an unbeliever, then perhaps she
can guide those who listen for her warnings. He smiles because the high clear song
gives him hope that Melusina will watch over his sister and her boys, especially the
boy who was in his care, the boy he loves: Edward the new King of England. And he
smiles because her voice is that of his mother.

He spends the night not in praying, nor in weeping but in writing. In his last hours
he is not an adventurer, nor a knight, nor even a brother or an uncle, but a poet.
They bring his writings to me and I see that, at the end, at the very moment he was
facing his death, and the death of all his hopes, he knew that it was all vanity.
Ambition, power, even the throne itself that has cost our family so dear: at the end
he knew it was all meaningless. And he did not die in bitterness at this knowledge,
but smiling at the folly of man, at his own folly.

He writes:

Somewhat musing

And more mourning,

In remembering

Th’ unsteadfastness;

This world being

Of such wheeling,

Me, contrarying;

What may I guess?

With displeasure,

To my grievance,

And no surance

Of remedy;

Lo, in this trance,

Now in substance,

Such is my dance,

Willing to die

Methinks truly,

Bounden am I,

And that greatly,