The White Princess (10 page)

For a moment I am quite frozen with horror, looking into his lean face, then, to my surprise, he suddenly snatches my wrist but releases my waist, and I jump up from his lap and stand before him. For one last moment I think of wrenching my hand free and dashing for the door and running away, but the skin on my arm is burning where he grips me, and the hardness of his expression tells me that there will be no escape, no chance of escape. I flush scarlet and the tears come to my eyes.

“Please,” I say weakly. “Please don’t make me do this.”

He almost shrugs, as if there is nothing he can do but hold my wrist as if I were a prisoner, and with his free hand he makes a small lifting gesture to the hem of my gown, my Tudor green gown.

“I will come willingly to you tonight . . .” I offer. “I will come in secret, to your rooms.”

He gives a hard condemning laugh. “Smuggled into the king’s bed for old times’ sake? So you are a whore, just as I thought. And I shall have you like a whore. Here and now.”

“My father . . .” I whisper. “You’re in his chair, my father’s chair . . .”

“Your father is dead, and your uncle was no great protector of your honor,” he says and gives a little snorting laugh as if he is genuinely amused. “Get on with it. Lift your dress and climb on me. Ride me. You’re no virgin. You know how to do it.”

He keeps tight hold of me as, slowly, I bend down and lift the hem of my gown. With his other hand, he unlaces his breeches and sits back on the chair, his legs spread, and I obey his gesture and the tug on my hand and step towards him.

One hand is still gripping my wrist as his other hand raises my daintily embroidered linen, and he makes me straddle him as if I were the whore he calls me. He pulls me down onto him, where he is sitting in the chair, and thrusts upwards no more than a dozen times. His hot breath on my face is spicy from dinner
when he rears up towards me, and I close my eyes and turn my face to one side, holding my breath. I dare not think of Richard. If I think of Richard, who used to take me with such delight and whisper my name in his pleasure, then I will vomit. Mercifully, Henry groans in momentary pleasure, and I open my eyes and find that he is staring at me, his brown gaze quite blank. He has observed me like a prisoner on the rack of his desire, and he has got to his satisfaction without blinking.

“Don’t cry,” he says when I have climbed down and mopped myself with the hem on my fine linen shift. “How shall you walk out and face your mother and my court if you are crying?”

“You hurt me,” I say resentfully. I show him the red weal on my wrist, and I bend and pull down my crumpled shift and my creased new gown in the merry Tudor green.

“I am sorry for that,” he says indifferently. “I will try not to hurt you in the future. If you don’t pull away, then I won’t have to hold you so tightly.”

“In the future?”

“Your maid-in-waiting or your charming sister, or even your agreeable mother, will admit me to your rooms. I shall come to you. You won’t ever be in the king’s bed again, so don’t think of it. You can tell your sister, or whoever it is who sleeps with you, that she must bed elsewhere. I will come every night before midnight at a time of my choosing. Some nights I might be later. You’ll have to wait up. You can tell your mother that this is your wish and mine.”

“She’ll never believe me,” I say irritably, rubbing the tears from my face and nipping my lips to bring the color back to them. “She’ll never think I have summoned you for love.”

“She’ll understand that I want a fertile bride,” he says shrewdly. “She’ll understand that you are to be carrying my
child on your wedding day, or there will be no wedding. I won’t be such a fool as to be forced to marry a barren bride. We have agreed on this.”

“We?” I repeat. “We don’t! I don’t agree to this! I never said I agreed to this! And my mother would never believe that I consented to be shamed by you, that we have decided this together. She’ll know at once that this is not my wish but yours, and that you forced me.”

He smiles for the first time. “Ah no, you misunderstand me. I didn’t say ‘we’ meaning you and I. I can’t imagine speaking of you and me as ‘we.’ No; I meant me and my mother.”

I stop fussing with my skirt and turn to face him, openmouthed. “Your mother agreed that you should rape me?”

He nods. “Why not?”

I stammer: “Because she said she would be my friend, because she said that she saw my destiny! Because she said that she would pray for me!”

He is quite untroubled by this, seeing no contradiction in her tenderness to me and her command that I should be raped. “Of course she thinks it is your destiny,” he says. “All this”—his gesture takes in my bruised wrist, my red eyes, my humiliation, the rawness in my groin, and the ache in my heart—“All this is God’s will, as my lady mother sees it.”

I am so horrified that I can do nothing but stare at him.

He laughs, and stands to tuck his linen shirt back into his breeches and lace up the opening. “To make a prince for a Tudor throne is an act of God,” he says. “My mother would regard it almost as a sacrament. However painful.”

Roughly, I rub the tears from my face. “Then you serve a hard God and a harder mother,” I spit at him.

He agrees. “I know. It is their determination which has brought me here. It is the only thing I can count on.”

He is as good as his word and he visits me, like a man visiting the apothecary for leeches or medicine, without fail but without pleasure, every night. My mother, tight-lipped, changes my bedroom to one nearer the privy stairs that go down to the gardens and the pier for his barge. She tells Cecily that she is to sleep with her sisters, and I am now to sleep alone. Her white-faced fury prevents any comment or questions, even from Cecily, who is wild with curiosity. My lady mother herself admits Henry by the unbolted outer door, and escorts him in icy silence to my room. She never says one word of welcome to him; she walks him to and from the door as an enemy, her head held high in scorn. She waits for him in the privy hall with one candle burning and the fire banked low. She says not one word of farewell as he leaves, but opens the door for him and locks it behind him in a silent rage. He must have a determination of iron to walk in and out of my room past my speechlessly hating mother with her gray gaze burning like branding rods into his thin back.

In my room, I am silent too, but after the first few visits he becomes more assured, pausing for a glass of wine before he goes about his business, asking me what I have been doing during the day, telling me about his own work. He starts to sit in the chair by the fireside and eat some biscuits, cheese, and fruits before unlacing his breeches and taking me. While he is sitting, looking at the flames, he speaks to me as an equal, one who might have an interest in his day. He tells me the news of the court, the many men he is forgiving and hoping to bind to his rule, and his plans for the country. Despite myself, though I start the night in furious silence, I find that I volunteer what my father did in one county or another, or what Richard had planned to do in his reign. He listens with attention and sometimes says, “Good, thank you for telling me that, I didn’t know that.”

He is awkwardly conscious that he has spent his life in exile, speaks English with a foreign accent—part Breton, part French—and he knows nothing of the country that he calls his own except
what he has been taught by his devoted uncle Jasper and the tutors that he hired. He has a vivid affectionate memory of Wales from when he was a little boy and the ward of William Herbert, one of my father’s greatest friends; but everything else he knows from teachers, from his uncle Jasper, and from the confused and badly drawn maps of exiles.

He has one powerful memory that he relates like a fable, of going to the mad king’s court, when my father was the king in exile, and my mother and my sisters and I were trapped in the dark cold of sanctuary for the first time. He remembers it as the pinnacle of his childhood, when his mother was sure that they would all be restored and would be the royal family forever, and he suddenly believed her, and knew that God was guiding her to the Beaufort destiny and that she was right.

“Oh, we watched you go by on your barge,” I say, remembering. “I saw you on the sunlit river, sailing by to the court, while we were all locked up and sick of the darkness.”

He says that he knelt and was blessed by Henry VI and felt, at that brush of the royal hand on his head, that he had been touched by a saint. “He was more of a holy man than a king,” he says to me urgently, like a preacher who wants someone to believe. “You could feel it in him, he was a saint, he was like an angel.” Then he suddenly falls silent, as if remembering that this is the man who was murdered in his sleep by my own father, when the mad king was as foolish as a little child trusting to the unreliable honor of the House of York. “A saint and a martyr,” he says accusingly. “He died after he had said his prayers. He died in a state of grace. At the hand of those who were little more than heretics, traitors, regicides.”

“I suppose so,” I mutter.

Every time we speak we seem to remind each other of a conflict; our very touch smudges blood prints between us.

He is conscious that he has done a most vile thing by declaring his reign from the day before the battle that killed Richard. Everyone who fought on the side of the anointed king that day
can now be named as a traitor and legally put to death. It is to set justice upside down and to start his reign as a tyrant.

“No one has ever done such a thing before,” I remark. “Even the York and Lancaster kings accepted that it was a rivalry between two houses and that a man might choose one side or the other with honor. What you have done is to name men who have done nothing worse than suffer as traitors. You make them traitors for doing nothing worse than losing. You are saying that whoever wins is in the right.”

“It looks harsh,” he concedes.

“It looks like double-dealing. How can they be named traitors when they were defending the ordained king against an invasion? It’s contrary to the law, and common sense. It must be against God’s will too.”

He smiles as if nothing matters more than that the Tudor reign is established, without question. “Oh no, it’s certainly not against the will of God. My mother is a most holy woman, and she doesn’t think so.”

“And is she to be the only judge?” I ask sharply. “Of God’s will? Of the law in England?”

“Certainly, hers is the only judgment I trust,” he replies. He smiles. “Certainly I would take her advice before yours.”

He takes a glass of wine and then he beckons me to the bed with a cheerful briskness that I begin to think hides his own discomfort at what he is doing. I lie on my back as still as a stone. I never remove my gown, I never even help him when he pulls it up out of his way. I allow him to take me without a word of protest, and I turn my face to the wall so that the first time, the very first time, that he leans down to kiss my cheek, it falls on my ear, and I ignore it as if it were the brush of a buzzing fly.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, THE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, 1485

After three long weeks of this, I go to my mother.

“I have missed my course,” I say flatly. “I suppose that’s a sign.”