Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

“My lord says that Richard fears you and your power, but he would not make war on his own nephews. All the boys are safe with him.”

“Does Hastings have news of my brother and my son Richard Grey?” I whisper.

She nods. “The Privy Council have refused to charge your brother with treason. They say he has been a good and faithful servant. Duke Richard wanted to charge him with kidnapping the young king, but the Privy Council disagreed-they won’t accept a charge. They have overruled Duke Richard, and he has accepted their opinion. My lord thinks your brother and son will be released after the coronation, Your Grace.”

“Duke Richard will make a settlement with us?”

“My lord says that the duke is much opposed to your family, Your Grace, and your influence. But he is loyal to the young king for King Edward’s sake. He said you can be certain that the young king will be crowned.”

I nod. “Tell him I shall be glad of that day, but I shall stay here till then. I have another son and five daughters and I would prefer to keep them safely with me. And I don’t trust Duke Richard.”

“He says you have not been so trustworthy yourself.” She drops into a deep curtsey and keeps her head down as she insults me. “He orders me to tell you that you cannot defeat Duke Richard. You will have to work with him. He orders me to tell you that it was your husband himself who made the duke lord protector, and that the Privy Council prefer his influence to yours. Excuse me, Your Grace, he commanded me to tell you that there are many who dislike your family and want to see the young king free of the influence of his many uncles, and the Riverses out of their many places. It is noticed also that you stole the royal treasure away into sanctuary with you, too, that you took the Great Seal, and that your brother the Lord Admiral Edward Woodville has taken the entire fleet to sea.”

I grit my teeth. This is to insult me and everyone of my family, especially my brother Anthony, who influences Edward more than any other, who loves him like his own, who this very day is imprisoned for him. “You can tell Sir William that Duke Richard must release my brother without charge at once,” I snap. “You can tell him that the Privy Council should be reminded of the rights of the Rivers family and the king’s widow. I am still queen. The country has seen a queen fight for her rights before: you should all be warned. The duke has kidnapped my son and ridden into London fully armed. I will bring him to account for it when I can.”

She looks frightened. She clearly does not want to be a go-between for a career courtier and a vengeful queen. But this is where she is now called, and she will have to do her best. “I will tell him, Your Grace,” she says. She makes another deep curtsey and then she goes to the door. “May I express my sympathy for the loss of your husband? He was a great man. It was an honor to be allowed to love him.”

“He didn’t love you,” I say with sudden spite, and I see her pale face whiten.

“No, he never loved anyone like he loved you,” she replies so sweetly that I cannot but be touched by her tenderness. There is a little smile on her face, but her eyes are wet again. “There was never any doubt in my mind but there was one queen on the throne and the same queen in his heart. He made sure that I knew that. Everyone knew that. It was only ever you for him.”

She slides the bolt and opens the little door inside the great gate. “You too were dear to him,” I say, driven, despite myself, to be fair to her. “I was jealous of you because I knew that you were very dear to him. He said you were his merriest whore.”

Her face lights up as if a warm flame had flared inside a lantern. “I am glad he thought that of me, and that you are kind enough to tell me,” she says. “I was never one for politics or place. I just loved to be with him, and if I could to make him happy.”

“Yes, very well, very well,” I say, rapidly running out of generosity. “So Godspeed.”

“And God be with you, Your Grace,” she says. “I may be asked to come again with messages for you. Will you admit me?”

“As well you as any of the others. God knows, if Hastings is going to use Edward’s whores as messengers, I shall admit hundreds,” I say irritably, and I see her faint smile as she slips through the half-opened door and I slam it closed behind her.

Hastings’s reassurances do not delay me. I am set on war against Richard. I shall destroy him, and free my son and my brother and release the young king. I shall not wait, obedient as Hastings suggests, for Richard to crown Edward. I don’t trust him, and I don’t trust the Privy Council or the citizens of London, who are waiting, as turncoats, to join the winning side. I shall put us on the attack and we should take him by surprise.

“Send the message to your uncle Edward,” I say to Thomas, my younger Grey son. “Tell him to bring in the fleet battle-ready, and we will come out of sanctuary and raise the people. The duke sleeps at Baynard’s Castle with his mother. Edward must bombard the castle while we break into the Tower and get Edward our prince.”

“What if Richard means nothing but to crown him?” he asks me. He is starting to write the message in code. Our messenger is waiting in hiding, ready to ride to the fleet, who are standing by in the deep water of the Downs.

“Then Richard is dead and we crown Edward anyway,” I say. “Perhaps we have killed a loyal friend and a York prince, but that will be ours to mourn later. Our time is now. We can’t wait for him to strengthen his command of London. Half the country will still not even have heard that King Edward is dead. Let us finish Duke Richard before his rule lasts any longer.”

“I should like to recruit some of the lords,” he says.

“Do what you can,” I say indifferently. “I have word from Lady Margaret Stanley that her husband is ours though he seems to be Richard’s friend. You can ask him. But those who did not rise for us as Richard came into London can die with him, for all I care. They are traitors to me and to the memory of my husband. Those who survive this battle will be tried for treason and beheaded.”

Thomas looks up at me. “Then you are declaring war again,” he says. “We Riverses and our placemen, our cousins and kinsfolk and affinity against the lords of England with Duke Richard, your brother-in-law, at their head. This is York against York now. It will be a bitter struggle and hard to end once it has started. Hard to win, as well.”

“It has to be started,” I reply grimly. “And I have to win.”

The whore Elizabeth Shore is not the only one who comes to me with whispered news. My sister Katherine, wife of the prideful Duke of Buckingham, my former ward, comes on a family visit, bringing good wine and some early raspberries from Kent.

“Your Grace, my sister,” she says to me, curtseying low.

“Sister Duchess,” I reply coolly. We married her to the Duke of Buckingham when he was an angry orphan of only nine. We won her thousands of acres of land and the greatest title in England, short of prince. We showed him that, although he was as proud as a peacock chick of his great name, greater by far than ours, still we had the power to choose his wife, and it amused me to take his ancient name and give it to my sister. Katherine was lucky to be made a duchess by my favor, while I was a queen. And now the circle of fortune goes round and round and she finds herself married not to a resentful boy but to a man of nearly thirty, who is now the best friend of the lord protector of England, and I am a widowed queen, in hiding, with my enemy in power.

She links her arm in mine as she used to do when we were girls at Grafton and we drift over to the window to look out at the sluggish water. “They are saying you were married by witchcraft,” she says, her lips hardly moving. “And they are finding someone to swear that Edward was married to another woman before you.”

I meet her frowning gaze. “It’s an old scandal. It doesn’t trouble me.”

“Please. Listen. I may not be able to come again. My husband grows in power and importance. I think he will send me away to the country, and I cannot disobey him. Listen to me. They have Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells-”

“But he is our man,” I interrupt, forgetting that there is no “us” anymore.

“He was your man. Not anymore. He was Edward’s chancellor, but now he is the duke’s great friend. He assures him, as he told George, Duke of Clarence, that Edward was married to Dame Eleanor Butler before he was married to you, and that she had his legitimate son.”

I turn my face away. This is the price I pay for having an incontinent husband. “In truth, I think he promised her marriage,” I whisper. “He may even have gone through a ceremony with her. Anthony always thought so.”

“That’s not all.”

“What more?”

“They are saying that Edward the king was not even his father’s son. He was a bastard foisted on his father.”

“That scandal again?”

“That again.”

“And who is serving up these cold old meats?”

“It is the Duke Richard, and my husband, talking everywhere. But worse, I think the king’s mother Cecily is ready to confess in public that your husband was a bastard. I think she will do it to put her son Richard on the throne-and your son to one side. Duke Richard and my husband are claiming everywhere that your husband was a bastard, and his son too. That makes Duke Richard the next true heir.”

I nod. Of course. Of course. Then we will be banished into exile and Duke Richard becomes King Richard and his whey-faced son takes my handsome boy’s place.

“And worst of all,” she whispers, “the duke suspects you of raising your own army. He has warned the council that you plan to destroy him and all the old lords of England. And so he has sent to York for men loyal to him. He is bringing an army of northerners down on us.”