I smile at him and I don’t argue. But in my heart I know that there is more.
“How did the story of Melusina end?” my little boy Edward asks me that night when I am listening to his bedtime prayers. He is sharing a room with his three-year-old brother Richard, and both boys look at me hopefully, wanting a story to delay their bedtime.
“Why would you ask?” I sit on a chair beside their fire and draw a footstool towards me so I can put up my feet to rest. I can feel the new baby stir in my body. I am six months into my time, and what feels like a lifetime yet to go.
“I heard my lord uncle Anthony speak to you of her today,” Edward says. “What happened after she came out of the water and married the knight?”
“It ends sadly,” I say. I gesture to them that they must get into bed, and they obey me but two pairs of unblinking, bright eyes watch me over their covers. “The stories differ. Some people say that a curious traveler came to their house and spied on her and saw her becoming a fish in her bath. Some say her husband broke his word that she was free to swim alone, and spied on her and saw her become fish again.”
“But why would he mind? Edward asks sensibly. “Since she was half fish when he met her?”
“Ah, he thought he could change her to be the woman he wanted,” I say. “Sometimes a man likes a woman, but then hopes he can change her. Perhaps he was like that.”
“Is there any fighting in this story?” Richard asks sleepily, as his head droops to the pillow.
“No, none,” I say. I kiss Edward’s forehead and then I go to the other bed and kiss Richard. They both still smell like babies, of soap and warm skin. Their hair is soft and smells of fresh air.
“So what happens when he knows she is half fish?” Edward whispers as I go to the door.
“She takes the children and leaves him,” I say. “And they never meet again.”
I blow out a branch of candles but leave the other burning. The firelight in the little grate makes the room warm and cozy.
“That’s really sad,” Edward says mournfully. “Poor man, that he could not see his children or his wife again.”
“It is sad,” I say. “But it is just a story. Perhaps there is another ending that people forgot to tell. Perhaps she forgave him and went back to him. Perhaps he turned into a fish for love and swam after her.”
“Yes.” A happy boy, he is easily comforted. “Good night, Mama.”
“Good night and God bless you both.”
When he saw her, the water lapping on her scales, head down in the bath he had built especially for her, thinking that she would like to wash-not to revert to fish-he had that instant revulsion that some men feel when they understand, perhaps for the first time, that a woman is truly “other.” She is not a boy though she is weak like a boy, nor a fool though he has seen her tremble with feeling like a fool. She is not a villain in her capacity to hold a grudge, nor a saint in her flashes of generosity. She is not any of these male qualities. She is a woman. A thing quite different to a man.What he saw was a half fish, but what frightened him to his soul was the being which was a woman.
George’s malice to his brother becomes horribly apparent in the days of the trial of Burdett and his conspirators. When they hunt for evidence, the plot unravels to reveal a tangle of dark promises and threats, recipes for poisoned capes, a sachet of ground glass, and outright curses. In Burdett’s papers they find not only a chart of days drawn up to foretell Edward’s death, but a set of spells designed to kill him. When Edward shows them to me, I cannot stop myself shivering. I tremble as if I had an ague. Whether they can cause death or not, I know that these ancient drawings on dark paper have a malevolent power. “They make me cold,” I say. “They feel so cold and damp. They feel evil.”
“Certainly they are evil evidence,” Edward says grimly. “I would not have dreamed that George could have gone so far against me. I would have given the world for him to live at peace with us, or at the very least to keep this quiet. But he hired such incompetent men that now everyone knows that my own brother was conspiring against me. Burdett will be found guilty and he will hang for his crime. But it is bound to come out that George directly commissioned him. George is guilty of treason too. But I cannot put my own brother on trial!”
“Why not?” I ask sharply. I am seated on a low cushioned stool by the fire in my bedroom, wearing only my fur-lined night cape. We are on our way to our separate beds, but Edward cannot keep his trouble to himself any longer. Burdett’s slimy spells may not have hurt his health, but they have darkened his spirit. “Why can you not put George on trial and send him to a traitor’s death? He deserves it.”
“Because I love him,” he says simply. “As much as you do your brother Anthony. I cannot send him to the scaffold. He is my little brother. He has been at my side in battle. He is my kinsman. He is my mother’s favorite. He is our George.”
“He has been on the other side in battle too,” I remind him. “He has been a traitor to you and your family more than once already. He would have seen you dead if he and Warwick had caught you and you had not escaped. He named me as a witch, he had my mother arrested, he stood by and watched as they killed my father and my brother John. He lets neither justice nor family feeling block his way. Why should you?”
Edward, seated in the chair on the other side of the fire, leans forward. His face in the flickering light looks old. For the first time I see the weight of years and kingship on him. “I know. I know. I should be harder on him, but I cannot. He is my mother’s pet; he is our little golden boy. I cannot believe he is so-”
“Vicious,” I give him the word. “Your little pet has become vicious. He is a grown dog now, not a sweet puppy. And he has a bad nature that has been spoiled from birth. You will have to deal with him, Edward, mark my words. When you treat him with kindness, he repays you with plots.”
“Perhaps,” he says, and sighs. “Perhaps he will learn.”
“He will not learn,” I promise. “You will only be safe from him when he is dead. You will have to do it, Edward. You can only choose the when and the where.”
He gets up and stretches and goes to the bed. “Let me see you into your bed, before I go to my own rooms. I shall be glad when the baby is born and we can sleep together again.”
“In a minute,” I reply. I lean forward and look into the embers. I am the heiress to a water goddess, I never see well in flames; but in the gleam of the ashes I can make out George’s petulant face and something behind him, a tall building, dark as a fingerpost-the Tower. It is always a dark building for me, a place of death. I shrug my shoulders. Perhaps it means nothing.
I rise up and go to bed and huddle under the covers, and Edward takes my hands to kiss me good night.
“Why, you’re chilled,” he says in surprise. “I thought the fire was warm enough.”
“I hate that place,” I say at random.
“What place?”
“The Tower of London. I hate it.”
George’s familiar, the traitor Burdett, protests his innocence on the scaffold at Tyburn before a cat-calling crowd and is hanged anyway; but George, learning nothing from the death of his man, rides in a fury from London and marches into the king’s council meeting at Windsor Castle and repeats the speech, shouting it in Edward’s face.
“Never!” I say to Anthony. I am quite scandalized.
“He did! He did!” Anthony is choking with laughter trying to describe the scene to me in my rooms at the castle, my ladies seated in my presence chamber, Anthony and I tucked away in my private rooms for him to tell me the scandalous news. “There is Edward, standing at least seven feet tall from sheer rage. There is the Privy Council looking quite aghast. You should have seen their faces, Thomas Stanley’s mouth open like a fish! Our brother Lionel clutching his cross on his chest in horror. There is George, squaring up to the king and bellowing his script like a mummer. Of course it makes no sense to half of them, who don’t realize George is doing the scaffold speech from memory, like a strolling player. So when he says “I am an old man, a wise man…” they are all utterly confused.”