The White Princess Read online

  For a moment she stands watching us, her mouth a little open, drawing a breath, and as she stays there, I lean my head towards Henry as if I am going to rest it on his shoulder. He is smiling proudly, his face flushed, thinking that she is enjoying the sight of her son, her adored only son, in his wedding bed, a beautiful bride, a true princess, beside him. Only I understand that the sight of me, with his shoulder under my cheek, smiling in his bed, is eating her up with jealousy as if a wolf had hold of her belly.

  Her face is twisted as she closes the door on us, and as the lock clicks shut and we hear the guardsmen ground their pikes, we both breathe out, as if we have been waiting for this moment when we are finally alone. I raise my head and take my hand from his shoulder, but he catches it and presses my fingers to his collarbone. “Don’t stop,” he says.

  Something in my face alerts him to the fact that it was not a caress but a false coin. “Oh, what were you doing? Some spiteful girlish trick?”

  I take my hand back. “Nothing,” I say stubbornly.

  He looms towards me and for a moment I am afraid that I have angered him, and he is going to insist on confirming the marriage by bedding me, inspired by anger, wanting to give me pain for pain. But then he remembers the child that I carry, and that he may not touch me while I am pregnant, and he gets up bristling with offense, and throws his beautiful wedding robe around his shoulders and stirs the fire, draws a writing table to the chair and lights the candle. I realize that the whole day has been spoiled for him by this moment. He can declare a day ruined by the mishap of a minute and he will remember the minute and forget the day. He is always so anxious that he seeks disappointment—it confirms his pessimism. Now he will remember everything, the cathedral, the ceremony, the feasting, the moments that he enjoyed, through a veil of resentment, for the rest of his life.

  “There was I, fool that I am, thinking that you were being loving to me,” he says shortly. “I thought you were touching me tenderly. I thought that our marriage vows had moved your heart. I thought that you were resting your head on my shoulder for affection. Fool that I am.”

  I can make no reply. Of course I was not being loving to him. He is my enemy, the murderer of my betrothed lover. He is my rapist. How should he dream that there could ever be affection between us?

  “You can sleep,” he throws over his shoulder. “I am going to look at some requests. The world is filled with people who want something from me.”

  I care absolutely nothing for his ill temper. I will never allow myself to care for him, whether he is angry, or even—perhaps as now—hurt, and by me. He can comfort himself or sulk all night, just as he pleases. I pull the pillow down under my head, smooth out my nightgown across my rounded belly, and turn my back to him. Then I hear him say, “Oh! I forgot something.” He comes back to the bed and I glance over my hunched shoulder and I see, to my horror, that he has a knife in his hand, unsheathed, the firelight glinting on the bare blade.

  I freeze in fear. I think, dear God, I have angered him so badly that he is going to kill me now in revenge for making him a cuckold, and what a scandal there will be, and I did not say good-bye to my mother. Then I think irrelevantly that I lent a necklace to little Margaret of Warwick to wear on my wedding day, and I should like her to know that she can keep it if I am going to die, and then finally I think—oh God, if he cuts my throat now, then I will be able to sleep without dreaming of Richard. I think perhaps there will be a sudden terrible pain and then I will dream no more. Perhaps the stab of the dagger will thrust me into Richard’s arms, and I will be with him in a sweet sleep of death together, and I will see his beloved smiling face and he will hold me and our eyes will close together. At the thought of Richard, of sharing death with Richard, I turn towards Henry and the knife in his hand.

  “You’re not afraid?” he asks curiously, staring at me as if he is seeing me for the very first time. “I’m standing over you with a dagger and yet you don’t even flinch? Is it true then? What they say? That your heart is so broken that you wish for death?”

  “I won’t beg for my life, if that’s what you’re hoping,” I say bitterly. “I think I’ve had my best days and I never expect to be happy again. But no, you’re wrong. I want to live. I would rather live than die and I would rather be queen than dead. But I’m not frightened of you or your knife. I’ve promised myself that I will never care for anything that you say or do. And if I were afraid, I would rather die than let you see it.”

  He laughs shortly and says, as if to himself, “Stubborn as a mule, just as I warned my Lady Mother . . .” Then he says out loud, “No, this is not to cut your pretty throat but only your foot. Give me your foot.”

  Unwillingly, I stretch out my foot, and he throws back the rich covers of the bed. “Seems a pity,” he says to himself. “You do have the most exquisite skin, and the arch of your instep is just kissable—it’s ridiculous that one should think of it, but any man would want to kiss just here . . .” and then he makes a quick painful slash that makes me flinch and cry out in pain.

  “You hurt me!”

  “Hold still,” he says, and squeezes my foot over the sheets so that two, three drops of blood fall on the whiteness, then he hands me a linen cloth. “You can bind it up. It will hardly show in the morning, it was nothing more than a scratch, and anyway you will put on stockings.”

  I tie the cloth around my foot and look at him. “There’s no need to look so aggrieved,” he says. “That has saved your reputation. They’ll look at the sheets in the morning and there’s the stain that shows that you bled like a virgin on your wedding night. When your belly shows, we will say that he was a wedding-night baby, and when he is born we will say that he is an eight-month baby, come early.”

  I put my hand to my belly where I can feel nothing more than a couple of handfuls of extra fat. “What would you know about an eight-month baby?” I ask. “What would you know about a show on the sheets?”

  “My mother told me,” he says. “She told me to cut your foot.”

  “I have so much to thank her for,” I say bitterly.

  “You should do. For she told me to do this to make him into a honeymoon baby,” Henry says with grim humor. “A honeymoon baby, a blessing, and not a royal bastard.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1486

  I am the wife of the King of England, but I don’t have the queen’s apartments in Westminster Palace. “Because you’re not queen,” Henry says simply.

  Mouth downturned, eyes hostile, I just look at him.

  “You’re not! And besides, my mother works with me on the state papers and it is easier for us to share a private room. It’s easy if our rooms are adjoining.”

  “You use the secret passage which goes from your bedroom to hers?”

  He flushes. “It’s hardly secret.”

  “Private, then. My father built it so that he could join my mother in her rooms without the whole court escorting him. He had it made so that he could bed her without the whole court knowing when he was going to her. They liked to be together in secret.”

  His quick flush rises to his cheeks. “Elizabeth—what’s the matter with you? My mother and I often have supper together, we often talk together in the evening, we pray together,” he says. “It’s easier for us if she can come and see me or if I need to see her.”

  “You like to walk in and out of each other’s rooms, night and day?” I ask again.

  He pauses, irritated. I have learned to read his expressions and this tightening of his mouth and narrowing of his eyes shows me that I am embarrassing him. I love to set him on edge, it is one of the only pleasures of my marriage.

  “Do I understand that you want to move into the queen’s rooms so that I can walk in and out of your bedroom night and day, without notice? Have you developed a taste for my attention? Do you want me at your bedside? In your bed? Do you want me to come to you secretly for love? For love which is not for the procreation of children but for lust? Like your parents with
their secret sinful meetings?”

  I drop my eyes. “No,” I say sulkily. “It’s just that it looks odd that I don’t have the queen’s rooms.”

  “Is there anything wrong with the rooms you have? Are they not furnished to your liking? Are they too small?”

  “No.”

  “Do you need better tapestries on the walls? Are you deficient in the matter of musicians? Or servants? Are you going hungry, shall the kitchens send you more little plates?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Oh, do tell me if you are starving to death? If you are lonely or chilled?”

  “My rooms are quite adequate,” I say through my teeth.

  “Then I suggest you let my mother stay in the apartments that she uses, which she needs as my principal advisor. And that you keep the rooms that she has allotted to you. And I will visit you every night, until I go on progress.”

  “You’re going on progress?” This is the first I have heard of it.

  He nods. “Not you. You’re not coming. You’re not to travel, Mother thinks it better that you should rest in London. She and I are going north. She thinks that I should be seen by as many people as possible, visit towns, spread loyalty. Confirm our supporters in their posts, befriend former enemies. The Tudors need to stamp their mark on this country.”

  “Oh, she definitely won’t want me there then,” I say spitefully. “Not if it’s a Tudor progress. She won’t want a York princess. What if people preferred me to you? What if they looked past her, past you, and cheered for me?”

  He rises to his feet. “I believe she was thinking of nothing but your health, and the health of our baby—as was I,” he says sharply. “And of course the kingdom has to be made loyal to the Tudor line. The child in your belly is a Tudor heir. We are doing this for you and for the child you carry. My mother is working for you and for her grandson. I wish you could find the grace to be grateful. You say you are a princess, I hear all the time that you are a princess by birth—I wish you would show it. I wish you would try to be queenly.”

  I lower my eyes. “Please tell her I am grateful,” I say. “I am always, always grateful.”

  My mother comes to my rooms, her face pale, a letter in her hand.

  “What d’you have there? Nothing good by the looks of it.”

  “It’s a proposal from King Henry that I should marry.”

  I take the letter from her hands. “You?” I ask. “You? What does he mean?”

  I start to scan the paper but I break off to look at her. Even her lips are white. She is nodding her head, as if she is lost for words, nodding and saying nothing.

  “Marry who? Stop it, Mother. You’re frightening me. What is he thinking of? Who is he thinking of?”

  “James of Scotland.” She gives a little gasp, almost a laugh. “There at the very bottom of the letter, after all the compliments and praising my youthful looks and good health. He says I am to marry the King of Scotland, and go far away to Edinburgh, and never come back.”

  I turn to the page again. It is a polite letter from my husband to my mother in which he says that she will oblige him very much by meeting with the Scottish ambassador and accepting his proposal of marriage from the King of Scotland, and agree to the date, which they will suggest, for a wedding this summer.

  I look at her. “He’s gone mad. He can’t command this. He can’t tell you to marry. He wouldn’t dare. This will be his mother’s plan. You can’t possibly go.”

  She has a hand to her mouth to hide her trembling lips. “I imagine that I will have to go. They can make me go.”

  “Mother, I can’t be here without you!”

  “If he orders it?”

  “I can’t live here without you!”

  “I can’t bear to leave you. But if the king commands it, we’ll have no choice.”

  “You can’t marry again!” I am shocked at the very thought of it. “You shouldn’t even think of it!”

  She puts her hand over her eyes. “I can hardly imagine such a thing. Your father . . .” She breaks off. “Elizabeth, my dearest, I told you that you had to be a smiling bride, I told my sister Katherine that she of all people knows that women have to marry where they are bid, and I agreed to the betrothal of Cecily to Henry’s choice. I can’t pretend that I am the only one of us who must be spared. Henry won the battle. He now commands England. If he orders that I marry, even that I marry the King of Scotland, I will have to go to Scotland.”

  “It’ll be his mother,” I burst out. “It’ll be his mother who wants you out of the way, not him!”

  “Yes,” my mother says slowly. “It probably is her. But she has miscalculated. Not for the first time she has made a mistake in her dealings with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they will want me in Edinburgh to make sure that the Scottish king holds to the new alliance with England. They’ll want me to hold him in friendship with Henry. They’ll think that if I am queen in Scotland then James will never invade my son-in-law’s kingdom.”

  “And?” I whisper.

  “They’re wrong,” she says vengefully. “They’re so very wrong. The day that I am Queen of Scotland with an army to command and a husband to advise, I won’t serve Henry Tudor. I won’t persuade my husband to keep a peace treaty with Henry. If I were strong enough and could command the allies I would need, I would march against Henry Tudor myself, come south with an army of terror.”

  “You would invade with the Scots?” I whisper. It is the great terror of England—a Scots invasion, an army of barbarians sweeping down from the cold lands of the North, stealing everything. “Against Henry? To put a new king on the throne of England? A York pretender?”

  She does not even nod, she just widens her gray eyes.

  “But what about me?” I say simply. “What about me and my baby?”

  We decide that I shall try to speak with Henry. In the weeks before he goes on his progress he comes to my room and sleeps in my bed every night. This is to give weight to the claim of a honeymoon baby. He does not touch me, since to do so would be to damage the child that is growing in my broadening belly, but he takes a little supper by the fireside, and he comes into bed beside me. Mostly he is restless, disturbed by dreams. Often he spends hours of the night on his knees, and I think then that he must be tormented by the knowledge that he made war on an ordained king, overturned the laws of God, and broke my heart. In the darkness of the night his conscience speaks louder than his mother’s ambitions.

  Some nights he comes in late from sitting with his mother, some nights he comes in a little drunk from laughing with his friends. He has very few friends—only those from the years of exile, men he knows that he can trust for they were there when he was a pretender and they were as desperate as him. He admires only three men: his uncle Jasper, and his new kinsmen Lord Thomas Stanley and Sir William Stanley. They are his only advisors. This night he comes in early and thoughtful, a sheaf of papers in his hands, requests from men who supported him and now want a share in the wealth of England—the barefoot exiles queuing for dead men’s shoes.

  “Husband, I would talk with you.” I am sitting at the fireside in my nightgown, a red robe over my shoulders, my hair brushed loose. I have some warmed ale for him and some small meat pies.

  “It’ll be about your mother,” he guesses at once disagreeably, taking in my preparations in one quick glance. “Why else would you attempt to make me comfortable? Why else would you go to the trouble to look irresistible? You know you are more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen in my life before. Whenever you wear red and spread out your hair, I know that you hope to entrap me.”

  “It is about her,” I say, not at all abashed. “I don’t want her to be sent away from me. I don’t want her to go to Scotland. And I don’t want her to have to marry again. She loved my father. You never saw them together, but it was a marriage of true love, a deep love. I don’t want her to have to wed and bed another man—a man fourteen years younger than her, and
our enemy . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .” I break off. “Truly, it is an awful thing to ask of her.”

  He sits in the chair facing the fire and says nothing for a moment, looking at the logs that are burning down to red embers.

  “I understand that you don’t want her to go,” he says quietly. “And I’m sorry for that. But half of this country still supports the House of York. Nothing has changed for them. Sometimes I think that nothing will ever change them. Defeat does not alter them, it just makes them bitter and more dangerous. They supported Richard and they won’t change sides for me. Some of them dream that your brothers are still alive, and whisper about a prince over the water. They see me as a newcomer, an invader. D’you know what they call me in the streets of York? My spies write to tell me. They call me Henry the Conqueror, as if I were William of Normandy—a foreign bastard come again. As if I am another foreign bastard. A pretender to the throne. And they hate me.”

  I stir, about to make up some reassuring lie; but he holds out his hand and I put my cold hand in his and he pulls me towards him, to stand before him.

  “If anyone, any man at all, stood up with a claim to the throne, and he came from the House of York, he would muster a thousand, perhaps many thousands of men,” he says. “Think of it. You could put up a dog under the banner of the white rose and they would turn out and fight to the death for it. And I would be no further on. Dog or prince, I would have the whole battle to fight all over again. It would be like invading all over again. It would be like being sleepless before the battle of Bosworth again and dreaming of the day over and over again. Except for one thing—and it is all worse: this time I would have no French army, I would have no supporters from Brittany, I would have no foreign money to hire troops, I would have no well-trained mercenaries. I would have no foolish optimism of a lad in battle for the first time. This time, I would be on my own. This time, I would have no supporters but those men who have joined my court since I won the battle.”