Portrait of an Unknown Woman (28 page)

           
His mother had always been determined to make sure her family was involved in the bringing up of her royal heir—to push them in the faces of the reluctant nobility and make sure they had positions of influence. The rest of the children, his ten-year-old self included, were still with their mother in London. So all he knew of what followed was what his mother told them. With her eyes scarily open; her eyebrows working; her breath coming fast.

 
          
Two days after their father’s death, when the funeral preparations were only just beginning, the town criers in London proclaimed Edward king. Edward V. There were so many funerals in their childhood that he was used to wearing black into church and hearing the chant of
“De profundis
 
clamavi ad te, Domine, Domine.”
 
But his mother said there were worse things than death. He was lucky, she said tartly, to have escaped the terrifying memories that she and his sisters had, of the time just before he was born, when his father had been usurped by Neville’s armies, with Uncle George waiting hopefully in the wings in case he got to marry Neville’s daughter and be made king; when his father had run away to Fland
ers, and she’d had to take her little girls into sanctuary at Westminster and give birth to Edward there. “Alone,” she added melodramatically, as if none of the people with her had counted.

 
          
Like chess pieces, the rival family members now moved on London.

 
          
The old hatred between his father’s family and his mother’s surfaced: the rage the Yorks felt against his mother, the nobody woman with the heart-shaped face and the willowy body who, with her own secret royal marriage, had interrupted their strategic plan to marry Edward to a French princess. The woman who’d moved her relatives into power with her and 
displaced England’s magnates.

 
          
Two weeks after their father’s death, Rivers armed two thousand men and set off with the new king from Ludlow. “Thank God, thank God,” the new king’s mother said, melting down into near tears when she received the message. “He’ll be safe with Anthony.”

 
          
He wasn’t. One week after that, Uncle Richard and his friend Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, headed Edward and his entourage off and arrested Rivers. His mother wept and paced and wrung her hands.

 
         
He remembered trying to comfort her; half frightened, half bored; putting a small hand in hers and saying, timid as a child, “Don’t cry, Mother; don’t cry.”

 
          
And he remembered her beautiful eyes raised slowly, dramatically, tragically toward him, glittering above her black weeds, and the splendidness of her embrace as she gathered him in her arms. “A mother’s love knows no bounds,” she said; a declamation. “I can’t help but worry.” Little Richard stifled the thought that Uncle Richard was only doing the job his 
father had asked him to—becoming lord protector of the realm while Edward was still a child—by taking the new king out of Woodville hands.

 
          
It was another four days before the royal entourage arrived in London, escorted by the dukes. His mother hadn’t waited; the funeral had already been held at Windsor. But the whole city was ready for the new king. The mayor, the aldermen, and five hundred citizens in velvet came out to meet Edward on 4 May. There was a banquet for him at Hornsby Park. He 
stayed with Uncle Richard at Crosby’s Place until they put him in the royal apartments in the Tower.

 
          
The boy Richard didn’t see any of this. His mother snatched them up and moved them into sanctuary at Westminster—a tactic that had worked before—and railed against fate from that safety. “That any child of mine should fall into the hands of that scheming fiend is a tragedy,” she said, weeping. Little Richard felt his older sister Elizabeth stiffen as she listened. He nearly laughed. Round-faced, implacable Elizabeth had been in love with dour old Uncle Richard, with his hatchet face and his dull administrator’s manners, since before he could remember; her life was devoted to imagining that her uncle’s wife would die and he would choose her as his next spouse.

 
          
But a few days later his mother called her to him, with a letter in her hand, an earnest expression, and secret hope in her eyes. “My darling,” she said, “you are to go and join Edward in the royal apartments.” She must have caught a look of astonishment on his face. “Edward is lonely. And, as Richard says, you both need tutoring; you should be together.”

 
          
He couldn’t remind her of what she’d been saying so recently about Uncle Richard. It would only have enraged her. So he stifled his misgivings and his fears and let himself be sent off through the city. He was ten.

 
          
It was true that Edward was lonely. His face lit up at the sight of his brother walking into the big, echoing apartment. He looked six inches taller than at Christmas, and much thinner. But they were children who didn’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. All Edward said, through his huge smile, was: “Knucklebones?”

 
          
And then they played, and waited, and played, and waited, and heard nothing more. Later he found out that all Edward’s most prominent supporters were being arrested: Thomas Stanley; Thomas Rotherham, the bishop of York; John Morton, the bishop of Ely; Oliver King, their father’s old secretary, who had started working for Edward but now abruptly 
stopped; and even his father’s mistress, Jane Shore.

 
          
But at the time all he noticed was the day it went quiet. There was a fitting for the coronation clothes, so it must have been before 22 June.

 
          
When they finished with the pins and tweakings, the guards wouldn’t meet their eyes. Their mother sent a note through their tutor, the tubby Italian man who came into the Tower every morning for mass and lessons.

 
          
It was a scrawl. “A rumor is being spread—a groundless, damaging rumor—about your birth. Believe nothing you hear. It’s lies, all lies. Trust no one,” the note said.

 
          
They read it together. They exchanged meaningful looks and raised jokey eyebrows at each other. Children’s bravado. Edward put the note down and opened his books. But after their Latin lesson, he went to help the Italian put on his cloak. “Dr. Gigli,” he said quietly, with the dignity that was coming to him with his new height and role, “what is the rumor my mother’s letter talks about?”

 
          
The usually gossipy Giovanni Gigli winced, as if in agony, and looked longingly at the door. But he told. He hadn’t got to be archdeacon of London by failing to humor the whims of princes. The bishop of Bath and Wells was saying that their father had entered an earlier secret marriage before his secret marriage to their mother. He said that Edward IV had 
stood before him twenty-one years ago and sworn a legally binding marriage contract with a pretty young widow called Lady Eleanor Butler. He hadn’t bothered to actually get the marriage blessed in church after sleeping with her; instead of banns and a papal bull blessing a royal wedding, she got an austere cell in a nunnery until she died.

           
Robert Stillingfleet’s silence had been bought until now by his appointment to the bishopric of
 
Bath and Wells and a salary of £365 a year. But now the bishop’s royal protector was dead and his conscience was apparently suddenly troubling him.

 
          
No one on the streets or at the court would have believed the story, as Dr. Gigli said, “except that your father . . .” and his English failed him, and he raised plump shoulders in a shrug, then wiggled his fingers suggestively, as if there was a female body between his arms. If he’d been talking to someone else, Richard thought, the fat teacher might have sniggered.

 
          
Dr. Gigli waddled hastily off before this conversation could go further, with a regretful wave of his hand. But the boys didn’t need the rest explained. If this story was true, they were the offspring of a bigamous marriage. They were illegitimate.

 
          
“Don’t worry,” Richard said, more bravely than he felt. “Remember Mother’s letter. It’s just a rumor.” But there were no more knucklebones.

 
          
Edward prayed in muttering silence through the afternoon and took confession the next morning. Richard lay on his bed.

 
          
Uncle Richard joined them for midday mass, looking somber. Neither boy knew what to say to him. He looked carefully at Edward and said, “I see you’ve already heard. We won’t speak ill of the dead. But I’m sorry. Pray with me.” Afterward, just as dour, he told them: “The bishop will tell his story to Parliament. There’ll be a full hearing. But there will be pandemonium while it’s going on. I’m going to send you out of London until it calms down.”

 
          
Edward, in his muted way, seemed almost relieved. But young Richard saw the look in his uncle’s eyes. And what he saw was that for all the older man’s sanctimoniously pursed lips and the downturned corners of his mouth, he was secretly delighted. Young Richard could see there would never be a full hearing into Bishop Stillington’s allegations. It also crossed his mind that a part of his sister Elizabeth would be pleased, with her crush on Uncle Richard and her endless hope that his wife would die (she was a shoot off their father’s tree, all right). Now she could dream of being Richard’s queen.

 
          
The bishop of Ely, released from his cell, joined the three of them in their rooms; narrow-eyed and quick-tongued and decisive (but secretly almost breathless, the young Richard saw, at the scale of the events he was participating in). He stumbled over whether to call the boys’ mother the dowager queen or just the Lady Elizabeth, but he’d worked out a plan she would accept.

 
          
It took a while to put it into practice. The boys stayed in the Tower
      
when, four days after the date Edward’s coronation should have been held, Uncle Richard was crowned Richard III. The boys stayed through a sweltering summer in which, as they found out afterward, Uncle Richard had taken off the heads of Hastings, Buckingham, Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan. They stayed long enough for the young Richard, primed by the talkative Dr. Gigli, who brought the gossip of the streets of London to them, to be fully convinced that the bishop’s story had been nothing more than a ruse to help his uncle grab the throne. And in October they were taken away.

 
          
That was what Meg would want to hear now, all these years later, John Clement realized: where they went next.

 
          
He couldn’t dwell too much on logistics. On the to-ings and fro-ings of messengers; on his mother’s later decision to turn his sisters over to Uncle Richard’s care too; on the contradictory whispers that she was negotiating with Henry Tudor, the Lancastrian pretender planning his invasion from France, to marry Elizabeth off to him. His memories were flashes: like the memory of his silent fury when the undistinguished horses on which they’d mounted him and Edward, wearing rough dark cloaks, ambled past Crosby’s Place—where Uncle Richard was living now—as their anonymous cavalcade made its way out of London, his acid determination to come back and pay his uncle out and take back the throne.

 
          
But the older boy, Edward, didn’t want to plot revenge. Unlike young Richard, Edward believed their uncle to be telling the truth. Edward had given in.

 
          
What tormented John Clement now was remembering himself nagging at Edward over the months and years that followed to assert himself; to bide his time but start to plan ways to take back his throne; to turn his mind to justice and revenge. The young Richard had been always furious at being the younger brother who had no right to avenge the wrongs done 
against Edward.

           
Edward’s whispered response, between prayers, was always: “Richard, let it be. We can’t know what’s right. Let God’s will be done.”

 
          
John Clement cleared his throat. Looked at Meg’s tight face in the light of the one candle left burning, he realized from the birdsong that dawn would soon be coming. He spoke in the contemplative monotone of someone reciting a difficult past—with the emotion taken out. “A family friend took us in. We’d known him all our lives. We’d played with his 
children when we were smaller. He rode down from York and took us to where his family lived: Gipping, in Suffolk. The servants called us Lord Edward and Lord Richard and asked no questions. It was strangely easy.

 
          
We stayed on with him until long after Uncle Richard was killed two years later. His name was Sir James Tyrrell.”

 
          
Her gaze burned him. “Sir James Tyrrell killed you,” she said accusingly. “Miles Forrest and John Dighton held the pillows over your heads, but Tyrrell paid them.”