The White Queen

“He is deep,” Anthony pronounces, making my sixteen-year-old son Richard Grey choke with laughter.

“Hush,” I say to him. “Respect for your uncle, please. And pass me some leaves.”

“Deep and passionate,” Anthony continues. “And all of us thought he was nothing but dull. Amazing.”

“Actually, he is passionate,” my son volunteers. “You underrate him because he is not grand and loud like the other York brothers.”

My son Thomas Grey nods beside him. “That’s right.”

Anthony raises an eyebrow at the implied criticism of the king. “You two go and get them ready for their race,” I say, sending them away.

The court has been transfixed by poor little A

“It was chivalrous,” Anthony says, to irritate me.

“It was an opportunity, and I wish I had seen it first,” I reply.

A

But not for long.

Nobody knows quite what happened after that; but something went wrong with George’s agreeable plan to own both Neville girls, and keep their enormous fortune to himself. Some say that Richard, visiting George’s grand house, met A

“I like it told that way,” my brother Anthony says. “I am thinking of composing a rondel.”

But there is another version. Other people, who admire Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as much as I, say that he saw in the newly widowed lonely girl a woman who could deliver to him the popularity in the north of England that her maiden name commands, who could bring him massive lands that adjoin what he has already got from Edward, and give him a fortune in her dowry, if only he could steal it from her mother. A young girl who was so alone and so unprotected that she could not refuse him. A girl so accustomed to being ordered that she could be bullied into betraying her own mother. This version suggests that A

“Less pretty,” I observe to Anthony.

“You could have stopped it,” he says to me with one of his sudden moments of seriousness. “If you had taken her into your keeping, if you had made Edward order Richard and George not to pull her apart like dogs over a bone.”

“I should have done,” I say. “For now Richard has one Neville girl, the Warwick fortune, and the support of the north, and George has the other. That’s a dangerous combination.”

Anthony raises an eyebrow. “You should have done it because it was the right thing to do,” he says to me with all of an older brother’s pomposity. “But I see you are still only thinking of power and profit.”

APRIL 1472

My mother’s skill at foretelling the future is borne out. Less than a year after she warned me her heart would not last much longer, she complains of fatigue and keeps to her rooms. The baby I was carrying in the garden the day of the primrose races came early, and for the first time I go into my confinement without my mother’s company. I send her messages from my darkened room and she replies cheerfully from hers. But when I come out with a frail newborn girl, I find my mother in her chamber, too weary to rise. I take the baby girl, light as a little bird, and lay her in my mother’s arms every afternoon. For a week or two, the two of them watch the sun sink below the level of the window, and then like the gold of the sunset they slip away from me together.

At dusk, on the last day of April, I hear a calling noise, like a white-winged barn owl, and I go to my window and push open the shutters and look out. There is a waning moon rising off the horizon, white against a white sky; it too is wasting away, and in its cold light I can hear a calling, like a choir, and I know it is not the music of owls, nor singers nor nightingales, but Melusina. Our ancestor goddess is calling around the roof of the house, for her daughter Jacquetta of the House of Burgundy is dying.

I stand and listen to the eerie whistling for a while and then I swing the shutters closed and go to my mother’s room. I don’t hurry. I know there is no need to hurry to her anymore. The new baby is in her arms as she lies in her bed, the little head pressed to my mother’s cheek. They are both pale as marble, they are both lying with their eyes shut, they both seem to be peacefully asleep as the shadows of the evening darken the room. The moonlight on the water outside the chamber window throws the reflection of ripples onto the whitewashed ceiling of the room, so they look as if they are underwater, floating with Melusina in the fountain. But I know that they are both gone from me, and our water mother is singing them on their journey down the sweet river to the deep springs of home.

SUMMER 1472

The pain of my mother’s death is not closed for me by her funeral; it is not healed with the months that go slowly by. Every morning, I wake and miss her, as much as the first morning. Every day I have to remember that I ca

It is summer, a time for thoughtless pleasure, but I take my sorrow with me, through the picnics and days as we travel through the countryside, on the long rides and nights under a harvest moon. Edward makes my son Thomas the Earl of Huntingdon, and it does not cheer me. I don’t speak of my sadness to anyone but Anthony, who has lost his mother too. And we hardly ever speak of her. It is as if we ca

“I hate George of Clarence more than ever,” I say to Anthony as we ride down the road to Kent together, a banquet ahead of us and a week spent traveling in the green lanes between the apple orchards. My heart should be light as the court is happy. But my sense of loss comes with me like a hawk on my wrist.