The White Queen

“I know,” I say gently. “But if it is your destiny, you will have to do your duty. You will be a good queen, I know. And I will be there with you.”

“I wanted to marry a man that I loved, as you did Father,” she says. “I wanted to marry a man for love, not a stranger on the word of his mother and mine.”

“You were born a princess, and I was not,” I remind her. “And even so, I had to take my first husband on the say-so of my father. It was only when I was widowed that I could choose for myself. You will have to outlive Henry Tudor and then you can do as you please.”

She giggles and her face lights up at the thought of it.

“Your grandmother married her husband’s young squire the moment she was widowed,” I remind her. “Or think of King Henry’s mother, who married a Tudor nobody in secret. At least when I was a widow I had the sense to fall in love with the King of England.”

She shrugs. “You are ambitious. I am not. You would never fall in love with someone who was not wealthy or great. But I don’t want to be Queen of England. I don’t want my poor brother’s throne. I have seen the price that one pays for a crown. Father never stopped fighting from the day he won it, and here we are-trapped in little better than prison-because you still hope we can gain the throne. You will have the throne even if it means I have to marry a runaway Lancastrian.”

I shake my head. “When Richard sends me his proposals, we will come out,” I say. “I promise you. It is time. You won’t have another Christmas in hiding. I promise you, Elizabeth.”

“We don’t have to come out to glory, you know,” she says plaintively. “We could just go to a pleasant house, and be an ordinary family.”

“All right,” I say, as if I think we can ever be an ordinary family. We are Plantagenets. How could we be ordinary?

JANUARY 1484

I hear from my son Thomas Grey, in a letter which comes to me travel-stained from Henry Tudor’s ragamuffin court in Brittany, dated Christmas Day 1483.

As he promised, he swore to his betrothal to your daughter Elizabeth in the cathedral in Re

I take Thomas’s letter and put it into the flames of the fire that burns in the hall. I take up a pen to reply to him, trim the nib, nibble the feather at the top, and then write.

I agree. Henry Tudor and his allies must have had a hand in the death of my son. How else would he know they were dead and how it was done? Richard is to release us this month. Get away from the Tudor pretender and come home. Richard will pardon you and we can be together. Whatever vows Henry takes in church and however many men show him homage, Elizabeth will never marry the murderer of her brothers, and if he is indeed the killer, then he carries my curse to his son and his grandson. No Tudor boy will live to manhood if Henry had a hand in the death of my son.

The end of the twelve days of Christmas and the return of the Parliament to London brings me the unwelcome news that Parliament has obliged King Richard and ruled that my marriage was invalid, that my children are bastards and that I myself am a whore. Richard had declared this before, and no one had argued with him. Now it is law and the Parliament, like so many moppets, nods it through.

I don’t make any objection to the Parliament, and I don’t command any friends of mine to object for us. It is the first step in freeing us from our hiding place that has become our prison. It is the first step in turning us into what Elizabeth calls “ordinary people.” If the law of the land says that I am nothing more than the widow of Sir Richard Grey, and the former king’s former lover, if the law of the land says that my children are merely girls born out of wedlock, then we are of little value alive or dead, imprisoned or free. It does not matter to anyone where we are, or what we are doing. This, on its own, sets us free.

More importantly, I think, but I do not say, not even to Elizabeth, that once we are living in a private house quietly, my boy Richard might be able to join us. As we are stripped of our royalty my son might be with me again. When he is no longer a prince, I might get him back. He has been Peter, a boy living with a poor family in Tournai. He could be Peter, a visitor to my house at Grafton, my favorite page boy, my constant companion, my heart, my joy.

MARCH 1484

I receive a message from Lady Margaret. I had been wondering when I would hear again from this my dearest friend and ally. The storming of the Tower that she pla

She explains she has not been able to write, and that she ca