Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

Anthony lifts me into the pillion saddle behind my master of horse and I hold on tightly to his belt. I am awkward now, in the seventh month of my pregnancy. A sudden wave of the darkest anxiety comes over me, and I look from my brother to my two sons, real fear clutching at me. “Take care,” I say to Baby.

“Look after him,” I say to Anthony. “Write to me. Don’t let him take jumps on his pony. I know that he wants to, but he’s too small. And don’t let him get chilled. Don’t let him read in poor light, and keep him away from anyone with illness. If there is plague in the town, then take him right away.” I cannot think what I should warn them against; I am just flooded with anxiety as I look from one smiling face to another. “Really,” I say weakly. “Really, Anthony: guard him.”

He steps up to the horse and takes hold of the toe of my boot and shakes it gently. “Your Grace,” he says simply. “Really. I am here to guard him. I will guard him. I will keep him safe.”

“And you,” I whisper. “You keep safe too. Anthony, I feel so afraid, but I don’t know what to fear. I don’t know what to say. I want to warn you, but I don’t know what danger there is.” I look over to where my son Richard Grey is leaning against the castle gateway, a young man grown tall and handsome. “And my Grey son,” I say. “My Richard. I cannot tell you why, but I am fearful for you all.”

He steps back and shrugs his shoulders. “Sister mine,” he says tenderly. “There is always danger. Your sons and I will be men, and we will face it like men. Don’t you go frightening yourself with imaginary threats. And have a safe journey and a safe confinement. We are all hoping for another prince as good as this one!”

Edward gives the order to move out and leads the way, his standard going before him, his household guard around him. The royal procession starts to unroll like a scarlet ribbon through the castle gates, the bright red of the livery studded with the rippling standards. The trumpets sound; the birds fly up from the castle roofs and whirl in the sky announcing that the king and queen are leaving their precious son. I cannot stop the onward march, and I should not stop it. But I look back over my shoulder at my little son, at my grown son, and at my brother, until the fall of the road from the inner keep down to the outer wall has hidden them, and I see them no more. And when I can see them no more I am filled with such darkness that for a moment I think night has fallen and there will never be a dawn again.

We halt at the town of Shrewsbury on the way back to London in the last days of July for me to go into confinement in the guest rooms of the great abbey. I am glad to be out of the glare and the heat of summer and into the coolness of the shuttered room. I have ordered them to set a fountain in the corner of my stonewalled chambers, and the drip, drip of the water soothes me as I lie on the day bed and wait for my time.

This is a town built around the sacred well of St. Winifred, and as I listen to the dripping fountain of her water and hear the ringing of the hours for prayer I think of the spirits that move in waters of this wet land, both the pagan and the holy, Melusina and Winifred, and how the springs and streams and rivers speak to all men, but perhaps especially to women, who know in their own bodies the movement of the waters of the earth. Every holy site in England is a well or a spring; the baptismal fonts are filled with holy water that goes back, blessed, to the earth. It is a country for Melusina, and her element is everywhere, sometimes flowing in the rivers, sometimes hidden underground but always present.

In the middle of August the pains start, and I turn my head to the fountain and listen to the trickle as if I were seeking the voice of my mother in the water. The baby comes easily, as I thought he would, and he is a boy, as my mother knew he would be.

Edward comes into the chamber, though men are supposed to be banned until I have been churched. “I had to come and see you,” he says. “A son. Another son. God bless you and keep you both. God bless you, my love, and thank you for your pains to give me another boy.”

“I thought you did not mind if it was a boy or a girl,” I tease him.

“I love my girls,” he says at once. “But the House of York needed another boy. He can be a companion to his brother Edward.”

“Can we call him Richard?” I ask.

“I thought Henry?”

“Henry for the next one,” I say. “Let’s call this boy Richard. My mother herself named him to me.”

Edward bends over the cradle where the tiny boy is sleeping, and then he understands my words. “Your mother? She knew you would have a boy?”

“Yes, she knew,” I say, smiling. “Or at any rate, she pretended to know. You remember my mother. It was always one part magic and one part nonsense.”

“And is this our last boy? Did she say? Or do you think there will be another?”

“Why not another?” I say lazily. “If you still want me in your bed, that is. If you have not had enough of me? If you are not tired of me? If you don’t prefer your other women?”

He turns from the cradle and comes to me. His hands slide under my shoulder blades and lift me up to his mouth. “Oh, I still want you,” he says.

I am proved right, it was by no means my last confinement. My husband continued as fertile as the bull in the water meadow that I accused him of being. In the second year after the birth of Richard, I was pregnant again and in November I had another baby, a girl whom we called Anne. Edward rewards me for my labors by making my son Thomas Grey, the Marquis of Dorset, and I marry him to a pleasant girl-an heiress to a mighty fortune. Edward had hoped for a boy and we had promised to name him George, as a compliment to the other York duke, and so that there are, once again, three boys of York named Edward, Richard, and George; but the duke shows no sign of gratitude. He was a spoiled greedy boy, and he has grown into a disappointed, bad-tempered man. He is in his mid-twenties now, and his rosebud mouth has drooped into a sneer of disdain. He gloried at being one of the sons of York when he was a hopeful boy; since then he was first in line for the throne of England as Warwick’s chosen heir, and then displaced when Warwick favored Lancaster. When Edward won back the throne, George became first in line to inherit, but then was pushed down to second at the birth of my baby, Prince Edward. Since the birth of Prince Richard, George drops down to third in line to the throne of England. Indeed, every time I have a son, the Duke George drops down one more step away from the throne and deeper and deeper into jealousy. And since Edward is famously uxorious, and I am famously fertile, George’s inheritance of the throne has become a most unlikely event and he is the Duke of Disappointment.

Richard, the other York brother, does not seem to mind this, but he turns against us after the Yorks come back from France without fighting a war but winning a peace. My husband the king, and every man and woman of sense throughout the entire country, rejoice that Edward has made a peace with France that should last for years, in which they will pay us a fortune not to claim our lands in France. Everyone is delighted to escape a costly and painful foreign war except Duke Richard, the boy who was raised on a battlefield and now cites the rights of Englishmen over our lands in France, clings to the memory of his father, who spent much of his life fighting the French, and all but calls his brother the king a lazy coward in not leading yet another expensive and dangerous expedition.

Edward laughs his good-tempered laugh, and lets the insult go, but Richard storms off to his lands in the north, taking his obedient wife Anne Neville with him, and sets himself up as a northern princeling, refusing to come south to us, believing himself to be the only true York of England, the only true heir to his father in his enmity with France.

Nothing troubles Edward, and he is smiling when he comes to find me in the stables, where I am looking over a new mare, a gift from the King of France, to mark the new friendliness between our countries. She is a beautiful horse, but nervous at the new surroundings, and will not even come near me, though I have a tempting apple in my hand.

“Your brother came to me today to ask permission to go on pilgrimage, and leave Edward in the care of his half brother Sir Richard for a little while.”

I come out of the stable and close the door carefully behind me to keep the horse safely inside. “Why? Where does he want to go?”

“He wants to go to Rome,” Edward says. “He tells me he wants time away from the world.” He gives me an odd crooked smile. “Seems that Ludlow has given him a taste for solitude. He wants to be a saint. He tells me he wants to find the poet in himself. He says he wants silence and the deserted road. He wants to find silence and wisdom.”

“Oh nonsense,” I say, with a sister’s scorn. “He has always had this idea of going away. He has been planning to go to Jerusalem ever since he was a boy. He loves to travel and he thinks that the Greeks and the Moslems know everything. He may want to go, but his life and his work are here. Just tell him no, and make him stay.”

Edward hesitates. “He has a great desire to do this, Elizabeth. And he is one of the greatest knights of Christendom. I don’t think anyone can defeat him at the joust when he is on his day. And his poetry is as fine as that written by anyone. His reading and his knowledge is so wide, and his command of languages is greater than anyone else’s in England. He is not an ordinary man. Perhaps it is his destiny to go far and learn more. He has served us well, none better, and if God has called him to travel, perhaps we should let him go.”