The White Queen (37 page)

“Wait like a dog out here,” I say cruelly. “Or go back to the Shore whore and tell
her that she can service you now, for the king has finished with you both.”

“I’ll wait,” he says. “He will ask for me. He will want to see me. He knows I am here
waiting to see him. He knows I am out here.”

I walk past him to the king’s bedchamber, and I close the door so he cannot even glimpse
the man he loves, fighting for breath in the big four-poster bed.

Edward looks up when I come in. “Elizabeth.”

I go to him and hold his hand. “Yes, love.”

“You remember I came home to you and told you I had been afraid?”

“I remember.”

“I am afraid again.”

“You will get well,” I whisper urgently. “You will get well, my husband.”

He nods and his eyes close for a moment. “Is Hastings outside?”

“No,” I say.

He smiles. “I want to see him.”

“Not now,” I say. I stroke his head. It is burning hot. I take up a towel and soak
it with lavender water and gently bathe his face. “You are not strong enough to see
anyone now.”

“Elizabeth, fetch him, and fetch every one of my Privy Council who is in the palace.
Send for Richard my brother.”

For a moment I think I have caught his sickness, as
my belly turns over with such a pain; then I realize this is fear. “You don’t need
to see them, Edward. All you need to do is rest and grow strong.”

“Fetch them,” he says.

I turn and say a sharp word to the nurse, and she runs to the door and tells the guard.
At once, the message goes out all through the court that the king has summoned his
advisors, and everyone knows that he must be dying. I go to the window and stand with
my back to the view of the river. I don’t want to see the water; I don’t want to see
the glimmer of a mermaid’s tail; I don’t want to hear Melusina singing to warn of
a death. The lords file into the room, Stanley, Norfolk, Hastings, Cardinal Thomas
Bourchier, my brothers, my cousins, my brothers-in-law, half a dozen others: all the
great men of the kingdom, men who have been with my husband from the days of his earliest
challenge, or men like Stanley, who are always perfectly aligned to the winning side.
I look at them stony-faced, and they bow to me: grim-faced.

The women have propped Edward up so he can see the council. Hastings’s eyes are filled
with tears, his face twisted with pain. Edward reaches out a hand to him, and they
grip each other as if Hastings would hold him to life.

“I fear I have not long,” Edward says. His voice is a rasping whisper.

“No,” whispers Hastings. “Don’t say it. No.”

Edward turns his head and speaks to them all. “I
leave a young son. I had hoped to see him grow to a man. I had hoped to leave you
with a man for king. Instead, I have to trust you to care for my boy.”

I have my fist to my mouth to stop myself from crying out. “No,” I say.

“Hastings,” Edward says.

“Lord.”

“And all of you, and Elizabeth my queen.”

I step to his bedside and he takes my hand in his, joins it with Hastings’s, as if
he were making us wed. “You have to work together. All of you have to forget your
enmities, your rivalries, your hatreds. You all have scores to settle; you all have
wrongs you can’t forget. But you have to forget. You have to be as one to keep my
son safe and see him to the throne. I ask you this, I demand this of you, from my
deathbed. Will you do it?”

I think of all the years that I have hated Hastings, Edward’s dearest friend and companion,
the partner for all his drinking and whoring bouts, the friend at his side in battle.
I remember how Sir William Hastings, from the very first moment, despised and looked
down on me from his high horse when I stood at the roadside, how he opposed the rise
of my family and always and again urged the king to listen to other advisors and employ
other friends. I see him look at me and, even though tears are pouring down his face,
his eyes are hard. He thinks I stood at the roadside and cast a spell on a young boy
for his ruin. He will never understand what happened that day between a young man
and a
young woman. There was a magic: and the name of it was love.

“I will work with Hastings for my son’s safety,” I say. “I will work with all of you
and forget all wrongs, to put my son safely on the throne.”

“I too,” says Hastings, and then they all say, one after another, “And I.”

“And I’

“And I.”

“My brother Richard is to be his guardian,” Edward says. I flinch and would pull my
hand away, but Hastings has it in a tight grip. “As you wish, Sire,” he says, looking
hard at me. He knows that I resent Richard, and the power of the north that he can
command.

“Anthony, my brother,” I say in a whisper, prompting the king.

“No,” Edward says stubbornly. “Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is to be his guardian
and Protector of the Realm till Prince Edward takes his throne.”

“No,” I whisper. If I could only get the king alone, I could tell him that, with Anthony
as protector, we Riverses could hold the country safe. I don’t want my power threatened
by Richard. I want my son surrounded by my family. I don’t want any one of the York
affinity in the new government that I will make around my son. I want this to be a
Rivers boy on England’s throne.

“Do you so swear?” Edward says.

“I do,” they all say.

Hastings looks at me. “Do you swear?” he asks. “Do you swear that, just as we promise
to put your son on
the throne, you promise to accept Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as protector?”

Of course I do not. Richard is no friend of mine, and he commands half of England
already. Why would I trust him to put my son on the throne, when he is a York prince
himself? Why would he not take the chance to seize the throne for himself? And he
has a son, a boy by little Anne Neville, a boy who could be Prince of Wales in place
of my own prince. Why would Richard, who has fought half a dozen battles for Edward,
not fight one more for himself?

Edward’s face is gray with fatigue. “Swear it, Elizabeth,” he whispers. “For my sake.
For Edward’s sake.”

“Do you think it will make Edward safe?”

He nods. “It is the only way. He will be safe if you and the lords agree, if Richard
agrees.”

I am trapped. “I swear it,” I say.

Edward releases his hard grip on our hands and falls back on his pillows. Hastings
howls like a dog and puts his face down in the cover and Edward’s hand finds its way
blindly to touch his old friend’s head as in a blessing. The others file out, Hastings
and I are left on either side of the bed, and the king dying between us.

I have no
time for grief, no time to measure my loss. Inside, my heart is breaking for the
man I love, the only man whom I ever loved in all my life, the only man whom I will
ever love. Edward, the boy who rode up to me when I waited for him. My beloved. I
have no
time to think about this when my son’s future and my family’s prospects depend on
my being hard of will and dry-eyed.

That night I write to my brother Anthony.

The king is dead. Bring the new King Edward to London at all possible speed. Bring
as many men as you can command as a royal guard—we will need them. Edward foolishly
named Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as protector. Richard hates you and me equally
for the king’s love and our own power. We must crown Edward at once and defend against
the duke, who will never give up the protectorate without a fight. Recruit men as
you march, and collect the weapons that are stored in hiding on the way. Prepare yourself
for battle, to defend our heir. I will delay announcing the death as long as I can,
so Richard, who is still in the north, does not know what is happening yet. So hurry.
Elizabeth

What I don’t know is that Hastings is writing to Richard, blotting the page with his
tears, but legible enough, to say that the Rivers family are arming around their prince
and that, if Richard wants to take up his role as protector, if he wants to guard
the young Prince Edward against the boy’s own rapacious family, he had better come
at once, with as many men from his heartlands of the north as he can muster, before
the prince is kidnapped by his own kin. He writes:

The king left all under your protection—goods, heir, realm. Secure the person of our
sovereign Lord Edward V and get you to London before the Riverses flood us out.

What I don’t know, and what I don’t allow myself to think, is that, having learned
to fear the constant wars for the throne of England, I am just starting one on my
own account, and that at stake this time is the inheritance and even the life of my
beloved son.

He kidnaps him.

Richard moves faster and is better armed and more determined than any of us could
have imagined. He moves as fast and as decisively as Edward would have done—and he
is as ruthless. He waylays my son on his journey to London, dismisses the men from
Wales who were loyal to him and to me, arrests my brother Anthony, my son Richard
Grey, and our cousin Thomas Vaughan, and takes Edward into his so-called safekeeping.
My boy is not quite thirteen, in God’s name. My boy is still a boy of only twelve.
His voice is still fluting, his chin is smooth as a girl’s, he has the softest fair
down on his upper lip that you can only see when his face is in profile, against the
light. And when Richard sends his loyal servants away, his uncle whom he idolizes,
the half brother he loves, he defends them with a little quaver in his voice. He says
that he is certain that his father would have placed only good men about him, and
that he wants to keep them in his service.

He is only a boy. He has to stand up to a battle-hardened man who is determined to
do wrong. When Richard says that my own brother Anthony, who has been my boy’s friend
and guardian and protector for all his life, and my youngest Grey son Richard, must
leave his side, my little boy tries to defend them. He says that he is certain that
his uncle Anthony is a good man and a fine guardian. He says his half brother Richard
has been a kinsman and a comrade to him, that he knows that his uncle Anthony has
never done anything but that suits the great knight, the chivalrous knight that he
is. But Duke Richard tells him that all will be resolved and in the meantime he and
the Duke of Buckingham, my former ward, whom I married against his will to my sister
Katherine, and who now turns up in this surprising company, will be the prince’s companions
to London.

He is only a little boy. He has always been gently guarded. He does not know how to
stand up to his uncle Richard, dressed in black and with a face like thunder, two
thousand men in his train and ready to fight. So he lets his uncle Anthony go; he
lets his brother Richard go. How could he save them? He cries bitterly. They tell
me that. He cries like a child when no one will obey him, but he lets them go.

Elizabeth, my seventeen-year-old daughter, comes running through the shouting and
the chaos of Westminster Palace. “Mother! Lady Mother! What’s happening?”

“We’re going into sanctuary,” I snap. “Hurry. Get everything you want and all the
clothes for the children. And make sure they bring the carpets out of the royal rooms
and the tapestries. Get all that taken into Westminster Abbey—we are going into sanctuary
again. And your jewelry box, and your furs. And then go through the royal apartments
and make sure they are stripping them of everything of value.”

“Why?” she asks, her pale mouth trembling. “What has happened now? What about Baby?”

“Your brother the king has been taken by his uncle the lord protector,” I say. My
words are like knives and I see them strike her. She admires her uncle Richard; she
always has done. She was hoping he would care for all of us—protect us in truth. “Your
father’s will has put my enemy in charge of my son. We will see what kind of a lord
protector he makes. But we had better see it from safety. We go into sanctuary today,
right this minute.”

“Mother.” She dances on the spot with fear. “Should we not wait, should we not consult
the Privy Council?
Should we not wait here for Baby? What if Duke Richard is just bringing Baby safely
to us? What if he is doing as he should, as lord protector? Protecting Baby?”

“He is King Edward to you, not Baby anymore,” I say fiercely. “And even to me. And
let me tell you, child, that only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see
if they may prove to be friends. We will be as safe as I can make us. In sanctuary.
And we will take your brother Prince Richard and keep him safe too. And when the lord
protector comes to London with his private army, he can persuade me that it is safe
to come out.”

I speak bravely
to my brave girl, now a young woman with her own life blighted by this sudden fall
from being a princess of England to a girl in hiding; but in truth we are at a very
low ebb when we barricade the door of St. Margaret’s crypt at Westminster and we are
alone—my brother Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, my grown son Thomas Grey, my little
son Richard, and my girls: Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Catherine, and Bridget. When we
were last here I was big with my first boy, with every reason to hope that he would
lay claim to the throne of England one day. My mother was alive, and was my companion
and my greatest friend. And nobody could be afraid for long when my mother was scheming
for them, and making her spells and laughing at her own ambition. My husband was alive
in exile, planning his return. I never doubted that he would come. I never doubted
that he would
be victorious. I always knew that he never lost a battle. I knew he would come, I
knew he would win, I knew he would rescue us. I knew they were bad days but I hoped
for better.