The White Princess (69 page)

“No!” It is such a contradiction of what my servants have told me about the boy in the Tower, a boy quite without his own will. “He is not! It’s not possible. He does not have the strength!”

“With Warwick.”

Now I know that it is a lie. Poor Teddy would plot with no one, all he wants is someone to talk to. He swore loyalty to Henry when he was a little boy; his years in terrible solitude have only made his decision more certain for him. He thinks of Henry now as an all-seeing, all-powerful god. He would not dream of plotting against such a power, he would tremble with fear at the thought of it. “That can’t be so,” I say simply. “Whatever they have told you about the boy, I know that it can’t be said of Teddy. He is loyal to you and your spies are lying.”

“I say it is so,” he insists. “They are plotting and if their plots are treasonous, they will have to die as traitors.”

“But how can they?” I ask. “How can they even plot together? Are they not kept apart?”

“Spies and traitors always find ways to plot together,” Henry rules. “They are probably sending messages.”

“You must be able to keep them apart!” I protest. Then I feel a chill as I realize what is, more probably, happening. “Ah, husband, don’t tell me that you are letting them plot together so that you can entrap them? Say you wouldn’t do that? Tell me that you would not do such a thing? Not now, not now that the boy is in your power, and broken on your orders. Tell me that you wouldn’t do such a thing to poor Teddy, not to poor little Teddy, who will die if you entrap him?”

He does not look triumphant, he looks anxious. “Why would they not refuse each other company?” he asks me. “Why should I not test them and find them true? Why would they not stay silent to each other, turn away from men who come to tempt them with stories of freedom? I have been merciful to them. You can see that! They should be loyal to me. I can test them, can’t I? It is nothing but reasonable. I can offer them each other’s company. I can expect that they shrink from each other as a terrible sinner? I am doing nothing wrong!”

I feel a wave of pity for him, as he leans forwards to the little fire, and I am shaken by nausea at what I fear he is planning. “You are King of England,” I remind him. “Be a king. No one has the power to take that from you. You don’t have to test their loyalty. You can afford to be generous. Be kingly. Release them to exile and send them away.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t feel generous,” he says meanly. “When is anyone ever generous to me?”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, WINTER–SPRING 1499

I go to our most beautiful palace for my confinement and Henry and My Lady the King’s Mother prepare a celebration dinner in the great hall in January. Everyone is there to celebrate my confinement but my sister Cecily. She is staying away. She has lost her second child, her daughter Elizabeth, and having made a loveless marriage to further her rise in the Tudor world, finds that she is a childless widow; she has gained nothing.

This is bitter for any woman, and especially hard on Cecily. She will stay away from court until she has put off her black gown. I am sorry for her, but there is nothing that I can do, so I say farewell to the court and step into my beautiful rooms for my first confinement without her.

My Lady the King’s Mother has the best rooms adjoining Henry’s as usual, but I like my own set of rooms that I have prepared for my confinement. They face the river and I order my ladies to pin back the dark tapestries showing scenes from the Bible that My Lady has hung for my edification, and instead I watch the boats going by and people, wrapped up against the cold, striding up and down the riverbank, hugging themselves, their breaths making little clouds around their muffled heads.

I am not well with this baby; it was an unlovely conception and I fear a difficult birth. While I am confined I cannot help
but think of the two in the Tower, my cousin and the boy who called himself my brother, and I wonder what they can see from their windows and if the winter afternoons and evenings when the sun sets so early and the sky is so dark seem so very long to them. Poor Teddy must be accustomed, it has been nearly thirteen years since he was free; he has grown to manhood in prison, knowing nothing but the cold walls of his chamber and the little square panes of his window. When I think of him I believe that the baby stirs in me, and I know that I have been very wrong not to save him from this life that is more like death. I have failed him, my kinsman, my cousin. I have failed as a cousin and I have failed as a queen.

Now another young man looks out of a small window at a darkening sky and sees the winter day slide away, and I put my hand on my broad belly and whisper, “Never. That will never happen to you,” as if I could save my baby though I cannot save my brother.

Lady Katherine Huntly comes into confinement with me for company and stitches an exquisite nightcap in white pin-tucked linen for my child, though she is never allowed to see her own. She is allowed to visit the prisoner in the Tower and she is away for a day and a night and comes back in silence, and bends over her sewing, trying to avoid speaking to anyone of what she has seen or heard.

I wait till the ladies are at the door of my chamber, taking the dishes for dinner from the servants at the threshold and bringing them in to spread on the big table before the fire so that we can feast and be merry during our long time of waiting before Lent reduces the choice. “How is he?” I ask shortly.

At once she glances around to see if they can hear us, but there is no one in earshot. “Broken,” she says simply.

“Is he ill?”

“Wasted.”

“Does he have books? Letters? Is he very alone?”

“No!” she exclaims. “People are constantly allowed to come
in to see him.” She shrugs. “I don’t understand why. Almost anyone can go and speak to him. He lives in a presence chamber, the door standing open, any fool in London can come in and pledge allegiance. He is hardly guarded at all.”

“He doesn’t speak to them, does he?”

A little shake of her head shows that he says nothing.

“He must not speak to anyone!” I say with sudden energy. “His safety depends on his not speaking to them, to anyone.”

“They speak to him,” she tries to explain to me. “His guards don’t keep the door shut, they force it open. He is surrounded by people who come and whisper promises to him.”

“He must not reply!” I take her hands in my anxiety that she understands. “He will be watched, he is being watched. He must do nothing that could cause suspicion.”

She looks up and meets my eyes. “He is himself,” she says. “He has caused suspicion all of his life. Even if he does nothing but breathe.”

The labor is long and I am faint with pain by the time that I hear a little weak cry. They give me birthing ale and the familiar scent and the taste remind me of when I had Arthur and my mother was there with her strong arms around me and her voice leading me into dreams where I felt no pain. When I wake, hours later, they tell me that I have given birth to a boy, another boy for the Tudor dynasty, and that the king has sent his congratulations and a rich gift, and his Lady Mother is on her knees for me in her chapel even now, giving thanks that God continues to smile on her house.

They take him away to be christened Edmund, which I take to be the morbid choice of My Lady, as he was a martyred king; but when it is time for me to be churched I find that I am unwilling to leave the confinement chamber. The heaviness and the weariness that came with the baby do not leave me, not even when they
take him with his wet nurse to the palace at Eltham and Lady Margaret’s confessor, John Morton, puts aside his great cope and mitre as Archbishop of Canterbury and comes like a parish priest to the grille in my chamber and invites me to confess my sins, be blessed, and return to the world. I go slowly to the ironwork grille and rest my hands on the twisted Tudor roses, and I feel imprisoned like the boy, and unlikely to be freed.

“I have a sin of fear,” I say to him, my voice very low so that he can only just hear me in the empty chamber.

“What do you fear, my daughter?”

“Years ago, a long, long time ago, I cursed a man,” I whisper.

He nods. He will have heard worse things than this, I have to remember that he will have heard far worse things than this. I also have to remember that everything I say will almost certainly be reported to My Lady the King’s Mother. There is hardly a priest in England who does not come under her influence, and this is John Morton, whose life has intertwined with hers and who thinks her half a saint already.

“Who was it you cursed, my child?”

“I don’t know who it was,” I say. “My mother and I swore a curse against the man who killed the princes. We were so heartbroken when we heard they were missing. My mother especially . . .” I break off, not wanting to remember that night when she sank to her knees and put her head to the stone floor.

“What curse was it?”

“We swore that whoever had taken our boys would lose his own,” I say, the words barely audible, I am so ashamed now of what we did then. I am so fearful now of the consequences of the curse. “We swore that the murderer would be left with only a girl as his heir, and his line would die out. We said he would lose a son in one generation and a son in the next—he would lose a young son and then a young grandson in their boyhood.”

The priest sighs at the magnitude of the curse, even as the politician in him calculates what this means. We kneel together in silence. He puts a hand on his ivory crucifix.

“You regret this now?”

I nod. “Father, I deeply regret it.”

“You wish to lift this curse?”

“I do.”

He is silent, praying for a moment. “Who is it?” he asks. “Who killed the princes, your brothers? Who d’you think? Where will your curse fall?”

I sigh and lean my forehead against the iron Tudor rose of the grille, feeling the forged petals bite into my skin. “Truly,” I say. “Before God, I don’t know for sure. I have suspected more than one; but still I don’t know. If it was Richard, the King of England, then he died without an heir, and he saw his son die before him.”

He nods. “Does that not prove his guilt? Do you think it was him? You knew him well. Did you ask him?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I say fretfully. “He said it was not him, and I believed him then. That’s what I always tell everyone. I don’t know.”

He pauses as a thought strikes him. “If the princes, or even one of them, had survived, then whoever kills him now will receive the curse.”

I can feel him flinch as I glare at him through the screen, as he arrives so slowly at understanding. “Exactly,” I say. “That’s the very thing. I have to lift the curse. Before anything else happens. I have to do it now.”

He is aghast at the prospect that is opening before him. “The curse would light on the man who ordered your brother’s death,” he says, as rapidly as prayer. “Even if it were a just death. Even if it were a legal execution. The curse would fall on he who ordered it?”

“Exactly,” I say again. “It would take his son and his grandson when they were still children. It would mean that such an executioner would find his line ends after two generations, with a girl. If it were the man who killed my brother Edward he would be doubly cursed.”

The archbishop is white. “You must pray,” he says fervently. “I will pray for you. We must give alms, set a priest to pray daily. I will give you spiritual exercises, prayers for every day. You must go on pilgrimage and I will tell you alms that you must give to the poor.”

“And will that lift the curse?”

He meets my eyes and I see my own terror reflected back at me, the Queen of England, mother to three precious beloved sons. “No one has power to curse,” he says staunchly, repeating the official belief of the Church. “No mortal woman. What you and your mother said was meaningless, the ravings of distressed women.”

“So nothing will happen?” I ask.

He hesitates and he is honest. “I don’t know,” he says. “I will pray on it. God may be merciful. But it may be that your curse is an arrow into the dark and you cannot stop its flight.”

THE ISLE OF WIGHT, SUMMER 1499