The White Queen

SPRING 1476

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 A

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 wi

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 A

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 pla

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.”

The mare comes and puts her head over the half door to sniff at my shoulder. I stand still, so as not to frighten her. Her warm oaty breath blows on my neck. “You’re very tender of his talents,” I say suspiciously. “Why are you so admiring of him all of a sudden?”

He shrugs his shoulders, and at that small gesture, wifelike, I am on to him. I step forward and take both his hands in mine so he ca

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The new one. The new whore. The one who likes Anthony’s poetry,” I say bitingly. “You never read it yourself. You never had such a high opinion of his learning and his destiny before. So someone has been reading to you. My guess is that she has been reading it to you. And if my guess is right, she knows it because he has been reading it to her. And probably Hastings knows her as well, and all of you think she is utterly lovely. But you will be bedding her; and the others sniffing round like dogs. You have a new and agreeable whore, and that I understand. But if you think you are going to share her stupid opinions with me, then she will have to go.”

He looks away from me, at his boots, at the sky, at the new mare.

“What’s her name?” I ask. “You can tell me that, at least.”

He pulls me towards him and folds me in his arms. “Don’t be angry, beloved,” he whispers in my ear. “You know there is only you. Only ever you.”

“Me and a score of others,” I say irritably, but I don’t pull away from him. “They go through your bedroom like a May Day procession.”

“No,” he says. “Truly. There is only you. I have only one wife. I have a score of whores, perhaps hundreds. But only one wife. That is something, is it not?”

“Your whores are young enough to be my daughters,” I say crossly. “And you go out into the city to chase them. And the city merchants complain to me that their wives and their daughters are not safe from you.”

“No,” my husband says with the vanity of a handsome man. “They are not. I hope that no woman can resist me. But I never took anyone by force, Elizabeth. The only woman who ever resisted me was you. D’you remember drawing that dagger on me?”

I smile despite myself. “Of course I do. And you swearing that you would give me the scabbard, but it would be the last thing you ever gave me.”

“There is no one like you.” He kisses my brow and then my closed eyelids and then my lips. “There is no one but you. No one but my wife holds my heart in her beautiful hands.”

“So what is her name?” I ask as he kisses me into peace. “What’s the name of the new whore?”

“Elizabeth Shore,” he says, his lips on my neck. “But that doesn’t matter.”

Anthony comes to my rooms as soon as he arrives at court, having made the journey from Wales, and I greet him at once with an absolute refusal to let him go away.

“No, truly, my dear,” he says. “You have to let me go. I am not going to Jerusalem, not this year, but I want to travel to Rome and confess my sins. I want to be away from the court for a while and think of things that matter and not things that are of the everyday. I want to ride from monastery to monastery and rise at dawn to pray and, where there is no religious house for me to spend the night, I want to sleep under the stars and seek God in the silence.”