on my cheeks.
Next day, a messenger comes from the court for my husband, and he does not have the courtesy to send it on to me, so I have to go down to the stable yard, like a maid-in-waiting, to find him calling out his men and ordering them into the saddle. “What is happening?”
“I am going back to court. I have had a message.”
“I was waiting for you to send the messenger on to me.”
“It was my business. Not yours.”
I close my lips on an undutiful retort. Since he was granted my lands and my fortune he has not hesitated to behave as my master. I submit to his rudeness with the grace from Our Lady, and I know that She will make note of it.
“Husband, will you tell me please if there is danger or trouble in the land? I must be allowed an answer to that.”
“There is loss,” he says briefly. “There is loss in the land. King Richard’s son, the little Prince Edward, is dead.”
“God rest his soul,” I say piously, while my head spins with excitement.
“Amen. And so I must go back to court. We will be in mourning. It will strike Richard hard, I don’t doubt. Only one child ever born to them, and now he is gone.”
I nod. Now there is only Richard himself between my boy and the throne; there is no other heir but my son. We spoke of the heartbeats that blocked my son’s path to the throne, and now all the boys of York are dead. It is time for the Lancaster boy. “So Richard has no heir,” I breathe. “We serve a childless king.”
My husband’s dark eyes are on my face; he smiles as if he is amused by my ambition. “Unless he marries the York princess,” he teases me gently. “And they are fertile stock, remember. Her mother gave birth almost every year. Say Elizabeth of York gives him a quiver full of princes and the support of the Rivers family, and the love of the York affinity? He has no son from Anne-what should now stop him putting her aside? She might give him a divorce at once, and retire to a nunnery.”
“Why don’t you go back to court?” I ask, too angry to mind my tongue. “You go back to your faithless master and his York whore.”
“I will go.” He swings up into the saddle. “But I will leave you with Ned Parton over there.” He gestures to a young man standing beside a big black horse. “He is my messenger. He speaks three languages, including Breton, should you want to send him to Brittany. He has a safe pass through this country, through France and Flanders, signed by me as Constable of England. You can trust him to send messages to anyone you like, and no one can stop him or take them from him. King Richard may appear to be my master, but I don’t forget your son and his ambitions, and he is only one step from the throne this morning, and my beloved stepson as always.”
“But which side are you on?” I demand in frustration, as his men mount their horses and raise his banner.
“The winning side,” he says with a short laugh, and thumps his chest in a salute to me like a soldier, and is gone.
SUMMER 1484
I wait. All I can do is wait. I send out letters by Ned Parton, and Jasper replies to me, courteously, as to a powerless woman, far away, who understands nothing. I see that the failed rebellion that cost them their army and their fleet also spoiled their faith in me as a coconspirator, as a woman of power in the country they hoped to take. In the hot summer days as the crops ripen in the fields and the haymakers go out with their scythes and cut the hay, I see I am become as marginal as the hares that run from the blades straight into the snares because they understand nothing.
I write, I send messages. I scold Elizabeth Woodville, the sometime queen, about the behavior of her daughters, which is reported to me in more and more detail: their beautiful clothes, their importance at the court, their beauty, their lighthearted joy, their easy Rivers charm as they flow from one amusement to another. There were many who said that their grandmother Jacquetta was a witch, a descendant of Melusina the water goddess, and now there are many who say that these girls weave their magic too. Finest of them all is the girl who is promised to Henry but behaves as if she has forgotten all about him. I write to Elizabeth Woodville to call her to account; I write to the vain girl, Elizabeth of York, to reprimand her; I write to Henry to remind him of his duty-and nobody, nobody, bothers to reply to me.
I am alone in my house; and for all that I have longed all my life for a solitary routine of prayer, I am most terribly alone, and most terribly lonely. I begin to think that nothing will ever change, that I will live out my life here, visited occasionally by a jeering husband who will drink wine from my cellar and eat game from my fields with the special relish of a poacher. I will hear news from court, which indicates that nobody remembers me, or my one-time great importance. I will hear from my son, far away, and he will politely send his good wishes and, on the day of his birth, his acknowledgment of my sacrifice for him; but he will never send me his love nor tell me when I may look for him.
In my loneliness I consider that we were separated when he was such a little boy and since then we have never been close-not as a mother might be to her child, not as Elizabeth Woodville always has been to her children, that she raised herself, that she loved so openly. Now that I can be of no use to him, he will forget all about me. And in truth, in bitter truth: if he were not the heir to my house, and summit of all my ambitions, I would already have forgotten all about him.
My life comes down to this: a court that has forgotten me, a husband who mocks me, a son who has no use for me, and a God who has gone silent. It is no comfort to me that I despise the court, that I never loved my husband, and that my son was born only to fulfill my destiny, and if he cannot do that, I don’t know what use we are to each other. I go on praying. I don’t know what to do but that. I go on praying.
I have no one that I can trust to send but Ned Parton. But I have to take the risk. I send one line to Jasper.
Then I go to my chapel and kneel before the chancel rail, my face turned to the crucifix of the suffering Christ. “Keep him safe,” I whisper over and over again. “Keep my son safe. And bring him to victory.”
Within the month I have a reply. It is from Jasper, and short and to the point as always.
