SEPTEMBER 1483

Every day I get news of the arming and preparing of our people, not just in the counties where my brothers are active but all around the country. As the news slowly spreads that Richard has taken the crown, more and more of the common people, the small squires and market traders, and their betters: the heads of guilds and the small landlords, the greater men of the country, ask: How shall a younger brother take the inheritance of his dead brother’s son? How is any man to go quietly to his Maker if such a thing can happen, unchallenged? Why should a man strive all his life to make his family great if his little brother, the runt of the litter, can step into his shoes the minute he weakens?

And there are many, at the many places we used to visit, who remember Edward as a handsome man and me as his beautiful wife, those who remember the girls in their prettiness and our strong bright little boys. Those who called us a golden family who had brought peace to England and a quiver of heirs to the throne; and these people say that it is an outrage that we should not be in our palaces with our boy on the throne.

I write to my son the little King Edward and bid him be of good cheer, but my letters have started to come back without being opened. They come back untouched, the seals unbroken. I am not even spied upon. It is as if they are denying that he is even at the royal rooms in the Tower. I fret for the outbreak of the war that will free him and wish we would bring it forward, and not wait for Richard’s slow vainglorious progress northward through Oxfordshire, then Gloucestershire, then to Pontefract and York. At York he crowns his son, the thin and sickly boy, as Prince of Wales. He gives my Edward’s title to his son as if my boy was dead. I spend this day on my knees praying for God to give me revenge for this affront. I dare not think that it might be worse than an insult. I cannot bear to think that it might be that the title is vacant, that my son is dead.

Elizabeth comes to me at dinnertime and helps me to my feet. “You know what your uncle has done today?” I ask her.

She turns her face away from me. “I know,” she says steadily. “The town crier was shouting it all around the square. I could hear him from the doorway.”

“You didn’t open the door?” I demand anxiously.

She sighs. “I didn’t open the door. I never open the door.”

“Duke Richard has stolen your father’s crown, and now he has put his son in your brother’s robes. He will die for this,” I predict.

“Haven’t enough people died already?”

I take her hand and turn her towards me so she has to face me. “We are talking about the throne of England here, your brother’s birthright.”

“We are talking about the death of a family,” she says flatly. “You have daughters too, you know. Have you thought of our birthright? We have been cooped up here like rats for all summer, while you pray all day for revenge. Your most precious son is imprisoned or dead-you don’t even know which. You sent your other out into the darkness. We don’t know where he is, or even if he is still alive. You thirst for the throne, but you don’t even know if you have a boy to put on it.”

I gasp and step back. “Elizabeth!”

“I wish you would send word to my uncle that you accept his rule,” she says coldly, and her hand in mine is like ice. “I wish you would tell him that we are ready to come to terms-actually any terms that he chooses to name. I wish you would persuade him to release us to be an ordinary family, living at Grafton, far away from London, far away from plotting and treason and the threat of death. If you surrendered now, we might get my brothers back.”

“That would be for me to go right back to where I came from!” I exclaim.

“Were you not happy at Grafton with your mother and father, and with the husband who gave you Richard and Thomas?” she asks quickly, so quickly that I do not prepare my answer carefully.

“Yes,” I say unguardedly. “Yes, I was.”

“That is all I want for myself,” she says. “All I want for my sisters. And yet you insist on making us heirs to your misery. I want to be heir to the days before you were queen. I don’t want the throne: I want to marry a man whom I love, and love him freely.”

I look at her. “Then you would deny your father, you would deny me, you would deny everything that makes you a Plantagenet, a princess of York. You might as well be Jemma the maid if you don’t desire to be greater than you are, if you don’t see your chances and take them.”

She looks steadily back at me. “I would rather be Jemma the maid than you,” she says, and her voice is filled with the harsh contempt of a girl. “Jemma can go home to her own bed at night. Jemma can refuse to work. Jemma can run away and serve another master. But you are locked to the throne of England and you have enslaved us too.”

I draw myself up. “You may not speak to me like this,” I say to her coldly.

“I speak from my heart,” she says.

“Then tell your heart to be true but your mouth to be silent. I don’t want disloyalty from my own daughter.”

“We are not an army at war! Don’t speak to me of disloyalty! What will you do? Behead me for treason?”

“We are an army at war,” I say simply. “And you will not betray me, nor your own position.”

I speak truer than I know, for we are an army on the march and that night we make our first move. The men of Kent rise first, and when they hear the rallying cries Sussex rises up with them. But the Duke of Norfolk, who remains true to Richard, marches his men south from London and holds our army down. They cannot reach their comrades in the west; he blocks the only road at Guildford. One man gets through to London, hires a little boat, and comes to the sanctuary water gate, under cover of mist and rain.

“Sir John,” I say through the grille. I dare not even open the gate for the screech of the iron on the wet stone, and besides, I don’t know him, and trust no one.

“I have come to tender my sympathy, Your Grace,” he says awkwardly. “And to know-my brothers and I want to know-if it is your will that we support Henry Tudor now.”

“What?” I ask. “What d’you mean?”

“We prayed for the prince, every day we did, and lit a candle for him, and all of us at Reigate are more sorry than we can say that we are too late for him. We-”

“Wait,” I say urgently. “Wait. What are you saying?”

His big face is suddenly aghast. “Oh God spare me, don’t say you did not know and I have told you like a great fool?” He wrings his hat in his hands, so the plume dips into the river water that laps at the steps. “Oh gentle madam, I am a fool. I should have made sure…” He glances anxiously up the dark passageway behind me. “Call a lady,” he says. “Don’t you go fainting now.”

I hold the grating in clenched hands, though my head swims. “I won’t,” I promise him through dry lips. “I don’t faint. Are you saying that the young King Edward is executed?”

He shakes his head. “Dead, is all I know. God bless your sweet face, and forgive me for being the one to tell you such dark news. Such bad news and I to bring it to you! When all we wanted to know was your wishes now.”

“Not executed?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing public. Poor boys. We know nothing for certain. We were just told that the princes were put to death, God bless them, and that the rebellion would go on against King Richard, who is still a usurper, but that we would put Henry Tudor on the throne as the next heir and the next best thing for the country.”

I laugh, a cracked unhappy sound. “Margaret Beaufort’s boy? Instead of mine?”

He looks around him for help, frightened by the ring of madness in my laughter. “We didn’t know. We were sworn to free the princes. We all mustered in your cause, Your Grace. So we don’t know what we should do, now your princes have gone. And Thomas Howard’s men are holding the road to your brother’s camp, so we couldn’t ask him. We thought it best that I should slip away quietly, and come to London to ask you.”