I glance at the doctor and wonder if she has a fever. “Elizabeth, the river cannot speak to you.”

“Of course it speaks to me, and of course I hear it!” she exclaims in impatience.

“There is no curse…”

She wheels around and glides across the room, her gown leaving a damp stain like a trail, and throws open the window. Dr. Lewis and I follow her, fearful for a moment that she has run mad and means to jump out; but at once I am halted by a high sweet keening from the river, a longing sound, a song of mourning, a note so anguished that I put my hands over my ears to block it out and look to the doctor for an explanation. He shakes his head in bewilderment, for he hears nothing but the cheerful noise of the passing barges as they go down for the king’s coronation, trumpets blaring and drums pounding. But he can see the tears in Elizabeth’s eyes and sees me shrink from the open windows, blocking my ears from the haunting sounds.

“That’s not for you,” I say. I am choking on my grief. “Ah, Elizabeth, my love, that’s not for you. That’s Melusina’s song: the song that we hear for a death in our house. That’s not a warning song for you. This will be for my son Richard Grey; I can hear it. It’s for my son and for my brother Anthony, my brother Anthony, whom I swore I would keep safe.”

The doctor is pale with fear. “I can hear nothing,” he says. “Just the noise of the people calling for the new king.”

Elizabeth is at my side, her gray eyes as dark as a storm on a wave at sea. “Your brother? What d’you mean?”

“My brother and my son are dead at the hands of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, just as my brother John and my father were dead at the hands of George, Duke of Clarence,” I predict. “The sons of York are murdering beasts, and Richard is no better than George. They have cost me the best men of my family and broken my heart. I can hear it. I can hear this. This is what the river is singing. The river is singing a lament for my son and for my brother.”

She steps closer. She is my tender girl again, her wild fury blown away. She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Mother-”

“Do you think he will stop here?” I burst out frantically. “He has my boy, he has my royal son. If he dares to take Anthony from me, if he could bear to take Richard Grey from me, d’you think he will stop at taking Edward too? A brother and a son he has robbed from me this day. I will never forgive him. I will never forget this. He is a dead man to me. I will see him wither, I will see his sword arm fail him, I will see him turn around looking for his friends like a lost child on the battlefield, I will see him fall.”

“Mother, be still,” she whispers. “Be still and listen to the river.”

It is the only word that can calm me. I run down the length of the room and throw open all the windows, and the warm summer air breathes into the cold darkness of the crypt. The water babbles low against the banks. There is a stink of low tide and mud, but the river flows on, as if to remind me that life goes on, as if to say that Anthony has gone, my boy Richard Grey has gone, and my boy the little Prince Richard has gone downstream to strangers on a little boat. But we still might flow deep once more.

There is music coming from some of the passing barges, noblemen making merry at the accession of Duke Richard. I cannot understand how they cannot hear the singing of the river, how they do not know that a light has gone out of this world with the death of my brother Anthony and my boy…my boy.

“He would not want you to grieve,” she says quietly. “Uncle Anthony loved you so much. He would not want you to grieve.”

I put my hand on hers. “He would want me to live, and to bring you children through this danger to life,” I say. “We will hide in sanctuary for now, but I swear we will come out again to our true place. You can call this the curse of ambition if you like, but without it I would not fight. And I will fight. You will see me fight, and you will see me win.

“If we have to set sail to Flanders, we will do that. If we have to snap like cornered dogs, we will do that. If we have to hide like peasants in Tournai and live on eels from the River Scheldt, we will do that. But Richard will not destroy us. No man of this earth can destroy us. We will rise up. We are the children of the goddess Melusina: we may have to ebb but surely we will flow again. And Richard will learn this. He has caught us now at a low and dry place, but by God he will see us in flood.”

I speak very bravely, but once I am silent I slide into grief for my Grey son, and for my brother, my dearest brother Anthony. I think of Richard Grey as a little boy once more, sitting so high on the king’s horse, holding my hand at the side of the road as we waited for the king to come by. He was my boy, he was my beautiful boy, and his father died in battle against one York brother and now he is dead at the hands of another. I remember my mother mourning her son and saying that when you have got a child through babyhood you think you are safe. But a woman is not safe. Not in this world. Not in this world where brother fights against brother and no one can ever put their sword aside, or trust in the law. I think of him as a baby in the cradle, as a toddler when he learned to walk holding on to my fingers, up and down, up and down the gallery at Grafton till my back ached from stooping, and then I think of him as the young man he was, a good man in the making.

And Anthony my brother has been my dearest and most trusted friend and advisor since we were children together. Edward was right to call him the greatest poet and the finest knight at court. Anthony, who wanted to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and who would have gone had I not stopped him. Richard dined with the two of them at Stony Stratford when they met on the road to London, and talked pleasantly of the England that we would all build together, Riverses and Plantagenets, of the shared heir, my boy, whom we would put on the throne. Anthony was no fool but he trusted Richard-why should he not? They were kinsmen. They had been side by side in battle, brothers in arms. They had gone into exile together and returned to England in triumph. They were both uncles and guardians to my precious son.

In the morning when Anthony came downstairs to breakfast in his inn, he found the doors barred and his men ordered away. He found Richard and Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, armed for battle, their men standing stone-faced in the yard. And they took him away, with my boy Richard Grey, and Sir Thomas Vaughan accused of treason, though they all three were faithful servants of my boy the new king.

Anthony, in prison, awaiting his death in the morning, listens at the window for a moment, in case there is such a thing as the strong sweet song of Melusina, expecting to hear nothing, and then smiles when he hears a bell-like ringing. He shakes his head to clear the noise from his ears, but it stays, an unearthly voice that makes him, irreverently, chuckle. He never believed the legend of the girl who is half fish and half woman, the ancestor of his house; but now he finds he is comforted to hear her singing for his death. He stays at the window and leans his forehead against the cool stone. To hear her voice, high and clear, around the battlements of Pontefract Castle proves at last that his mother’s gifts and his sister’s gifts and her daughter’s gifts are real: as they always claimed, as he only half believed. He wishes he could tell his sister that he knows this now. They may need these gifts. Their gifts may be enough to save them. Perhaps to save all the family who named themselves Rivers to honor the water goddess who was the founder of their family. Perhaps even to save their two Plantagenet boys. If Melusina can sing for him, an unbeliever, then perhaps she can guide those who listen for her warnings. He smiles because the high clear song gives him hope that Melusina will watch over his sister and her boys, especially the boy who was in his care, the boy he loves: Edward the new King of England. And he smiles because her voice is that of his mother.

He spends the night not in praying, nor in weeping but in writing. In his last hours he is not an adventurer, nor a knight, nor even a brother or an uncle, but a poet. They bring his writings to me and I see that, at the end, at the very moment he was facing his death, and the death of all his hopes, he knew that it was all vanity. Ambition, power, even the throne itself that has cost our family so dear: at the end he knew it was all meaningless. And he did not die in bitterness at this knowledge, but smiling at the folly of man, at his own folly.

He writes:

Somewhat musing And more mourning, In remembering Th’ unsteadfastness; This world being Of such wheeling, Me, contrarying; What may I guess?

With displeasure, To my grievance, And no surance Of remedy; Lo, in this trance, Now in substance, Such is my dance, Willing to die

Methinks truly, Bounden am I, And that greatly, To be content; Seeing plainly Fortune doth wry All contrary From mine intent.

This is the last thing he does at dawn, and then they take him out and behead him on the orders of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the new lord protector of England, who is now responsible for my safety, the safety of all my children, and especially the safety and future of my son Prince Edward, the rightful King of England.

I read Anthony’s poem later, and I think that I particularly like “Fortune doth wry/ All contrary/ From mine intent.” Fortune has gone against all us Riverses this season: he was right in that.

And I shall have to find a way to live without him.


Something has changed between my daughter Elizabeth and me. My girl, my child, my first baby, has suddenly grown up, grown away. The child who believed that I knew everything, that I commanded everything, is now a young woman who has lost her father, and doubts her mother. She thinks I am wrong to keep us in sanctuary. She blames me for the death of her uncle Anthony. She accuses me-though never saying a word-of failing to rescue her brother Edward, of sending her little brother Richard out, unprotected, into the gray silence of the evening river.