They find him within a few days. Henry seems to know exactly where to look for him, almost as if he had been bundled, drugged, thrown out of a boat onto the riverbank, and left to sleep it off. They say that he had gone up the valley of the Thames, on foot, stumbling on the tow path, splashing through marshes, following the course of the river through thick woodland and over hedged fields, to the charterhouse at Sheen, where the former prior had once been a good friend to my mother, and where the current prior took the boy in and gave him sanctuary. Prior Tracy himself rode to Henry, asked for an audience, and begged for the young man’s life. The king, bombarded with pleas for clemency, with a holy prior down on his knees refusing to rise until the boy is granted his life, once again decides to be gracious. With his mother seated beside him, as if they are both judges on the Last Day, he rules that the boy should stand on a scaffold of empty wine barrels for two days, to be seen by everyone who passes by, mocked, cursed, scorned, and a target for any urchin with a handful of filth, and then be taken to the Tower of London, and there be imprisoned pending the king’s pleasure: that is, forever.
THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1498
They keep him in the Garden Tower. I imagine Henry laughing his new overconfident ringing laugh at the irony of the boy who said he was Prince Richard being returned to where Prince Richard was last seen. They put the boy in the very rooms where Prince Richard and Prince Edward were kept.
The window that overlooks the green was where their little faces could sometimes be seen, and sometimes they would wave at people who gathered on the green to see them or, coming out of chapel, call a blessing to them. Now there is one pale face at the window—the boy’s—and people who see him closely say that he has lost his looks, he is almost unrecognizable for the bruises on his face. His nose has been broken and is ugly, squashed cross-wise against his handsome face. He has a bloody scar behind his ear where someone kicked him when he was down, and the ear itself is half torn away and has gone sticky and fetid.
No one now would mistake him for a York prince. He looks like an alehouse brawler, injured many times, who has gone down once too often and cannot rise again. No one will fall in love with his smile now that his front teeth have been kicked in. No one ever again will be swayed by his York charm. No one gathers on the green now to wave at him, no one reports that they have seen him, as if seeing him is an event, something to write home to a village: I have seen the prince! I went to the Tower and I looked towards his window. I saw him wave, I saw his radiant smile.
Now he is a prisoner, like any other in the Tower. He has been sent there to avoid attention and little by little everyone will forget him.
His wife, Lady Katherine, will not forget him, I think. Sometimes I look at her downturned face and I think she will never forget him. She has learned a deep fidelity that I do not recognize. She has changed from her eternal hemming of fine linen to working on a thick homespun. She is sewing a warm jacket, as if she knows someone who lives inside damp stone walls and who will never again bask in the sun. I don’t ask her why she is making a warm thick jacket lined with silks of deep red and blue—and she does not volunteer a reason. She sits in my rooms, her head bent over her sewing, and sometimes she glances up and smiles at me, and sometimes she puts down her work and gazes out of the window, but she never says one word about the boy she married, and she never ever complains that he broke his parole, broke his word to her, and is paying for it.
Margaret comes to visit court, traveling from my son’s court in Ludlow, and of all the places in my rooms, she chooses a seat beside Lady Katherine, saying nothing. Each young woman takes a silent comfort from the other’s nearness. It is part of Henry’s great joke on the House of York that Margaret’s brother, Teddy, is housed in the same tower as Katherine’s husband; he lives on the floor below. The two boys, one the son of George Duke of Clarence, and one who claimed to be the son of Edward King of England, are in rooms so close that if the boy stamped on the floor then Teddy would hear him. Both of them are walled up behind the thick cold stones of our oldest castle for the crime of being a son of York, or—worse—claiming to be one. Truly, it is still a cousins’ war; for here is a pair of cousins, imprisoned for kinship.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1498
The child I am carrying sits heavily against my spine and my legs ache as if I have an ague. Sitting, lying, walking, all cause me pain. This is the child that we conceived the night of Henry’s deep joy that the boy had run from court and broken his parole. I think he weighs so heavily on my back because his father lay so heavily on me that night, because there was no pleasure in our coupling, there was no love in it, there was Henry bearing down on me, on England, on the boy, aroused by his own triumph.
I miss my mother in this season, when the leaves fall like a blizzard of brown and gold and my windows are hazy with mist in the morning. I miss her when I see the bright shiver of yellow birch leaves reflected in the gray of the river water. Sometimes I can almost hear her voice in the plashing of the water against the stone pilings of the pier, and when a seagull suddenly cries, I almost start up, thinking it is her voice. If it is her son in the Tower, I owe it to her, to him, to my house, to try to get him released.
I approach My Lady the King’s Mother first. I speak to her when she is kneeling in the royal chapel; she has finished her prayers but she is resting her chin on her hands, her eyes on the beautifully jeweled glass monstrance, the wafer of the Host gleaming palely within. She is transfixed, as if she is seeing an angel, as if God is speaking to her. I wait for a long time. I don’t want to interrupt her instructing God. But then I see her settle on her heels and sigh, and put her hand to her eyes.
“May I speak with you?” I ask quietly.
She does not turn her head to glance at me, but her nod tells me that she is listening. “It will be about your bro . . .” she starts and then presses her lips together and her dark eyes flick towards the crucifix, as if Jesus Himself must take care not to hear such a slip.
“It is about the boy,” I correct her. The king and the court have quite given up calling him Mr. Warbeck or Mr. Osbeque. The names, the many names that they pinned on him, never quite stuck. To Henry he was for so long the juvenile threat, the naughty page, “the boy,” that now this is the name that signifies him: a boy. I think this is a mistake, there have been so many boys, Henry has feared a legion of boys. But still Henry likes to insult him with his youth. He is “the boy” for Henry, and the rest of the court follows suit.
“I can do nothing for him,” she says regretfully. “It would have been better for him, for all of us, if he had died when everyone said that he was dead.”
“You mean, after the coronation?” I whisper, thinking of the little princes and the grief in London, while everyone wondered where the children had gone, and my mother was sick with heartbreak in the darkness of sanctuary.
She shakes her head, her eyes on the cross, as if that one great statement of truth can protect her from her constant lies. “After Exeter, they reported him dead.”
I take a breath to recover from my mistake. “So, Lady Mother, since he did not die at Exeter . . . what if he were to agree to go quietly back to Scotland and live with his wife?”
For the first time she looks at me. “You know how it is. If your destiny puts you near to the throne you cannot take yourself away from it. He could go to Ethiop and there would still be someone to run after him and promise him greatness. There will always be wicked people who will want to trouble or unseat my son, there will always be evil snapping at the heels of a Tudor. We have to hold our enemies down. We always have to be ready to hold them down. We have to hold their faces down into the mud. That is our destiny.”
“But the boy is down,” I urge her. “They say that he has been beaten, his beauty is gone, his health is broken. He claims nothing anymore, he agrees to whatever they put to him, he will take any name you choose for him, his spirit is destroyed, he is no longer claiming to be a prince
, he no longer looks like a prince. You have defeated him, he is down in the mud.”
She turns her head away from me. “He could be diminished, he could be dirty, he could be starved, and yet he would still shine,” she says. “He always looks the part that he chooses to play. I heard it from someone who had gone to stare at him, they had gone to laugh at him, but they said that he looked like Jesus: battered and wounded and pained but still the Son of God. They said he looked like a saint. They said he looked like a broken prince, a damaged lamb, a dimmed light. Of course, he can’t be freed. He can never be freed.”
This vengeful old harridan is Henry’s chief and only councillor, so if she refuses me there is no point in approaching Henry. All the same, I wait until he has dined well and drunk deeply and we are seated in his mother’s comfortable private rooms. When she steps out for a moment, I take my chance.
“I want to ask for mercy for the boy,” I say. “And for my cousin Edward. While I am carrying a new child, a new heir for the Tudors, our line must be safe. Surely we can release these two young men? They can be no threat to us now. In our nursery already we have Prince Arthur and Henry, the two girls, and another child is on the way. I would be at peace in my mind, I would be at peace carrying our child, if I know that those two young men were released, into exile, wherever you wish. I would be able to give birth to my child if I could be easy in my mind.” It’s my trump card and I expect Henry to at least listen to me.
“It’s not possible,” he says at once, without even considering the request. Like his mother, he does not look at me as he tells me that my cousin and the boy who passed as my brother are lost to me.
“Why is it not possible?” I insist.
He extends his thin hands. “One”—he counts on his fingers—“the King and Queen of Spain will not send their daughter to marry Arthur unless they are sure our succession is certain. If you want to see your son married, we have to see the boy and your cousin dead.”
I nearly choke. “They can’t demand such a thing! They have no right to order us to kill our own kinsmen!”
“They can. They do. It is their condition for the wedding and the wedding must go ahead.”
“No!”
He continues listing his reasons. “Two—he’s plotting against me.”
“No!” It is such a contradiction of what my servants have told me about the boy in the Tower, a boy quite without his own will. “He is not! It’s not possible. He does not have the strength!”
“With Warwick.”
Now I know that it is a lie. Poor Teddy would plot with no one, all he wants is someone to talk to. He swore loyalty to Henry when he was a little boy; his years in terrible solitude have only made his decision more certain for him. He thinks of Henry now as an all-seeing, all-powerful god. He would not dream of plotting against such a power, he would tremble with fear at the thought of it. “That can’t be so,” I say simply. “Whatever they have told you about the boy, I know that it can’t be said of Teddy. He is loyal to you and your spies are lying.”
“I say it is so,” he insists. “They are plotting and if their plots are treasonous, they will have to die as traitors.”
“But how can they?” I ask. “How can they even plot together? Are they not kept apart?”
“Spies and traitors always find ways to plot together,” Henry rules. “They are probably sending messages.”
“You must be able to keep them apart!” I protest. Then I feel a chill as I realize what is, more probably, happening. “Ah, husband, don’t tell me that you are letting them plot together so that you can entrap them? Say you wouldn’t do that? Tell me that you would not do such a thing? Not now, not now that the boy is in your power, and broken on your orders. Tell me that you wouldn’t do such a thing to poor Teddy, not to poor little Teddy, who will die if you entrap him?”
He does not look triumphant, he looks anxious. “Why would they not refuse each other company?” he asks me. “Why should I not test them and find them true? Why would they not stay silent to each other, turn away from men who come to tempt them with stories of freedom? I have been merciful to them. You can see that! They should be loyal to me. I can test them, can’t I? It is nothing but reasonable. I can offer them each other’s company. I can expect that they shrink from each other as a terrible sinner? I am doing nothing wrong!”
I feel a wave of pity for him, as he leans forwards to the little fire, and I am shaken by nausea at what I fear he is planning. “You are King of England,” I remind him. “Be a king. No one has the power to take that from you. You don’t have to test their loyalty. You can afford to be generous. Be kingly. Release them to exile and send them away.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t feel generous,” he says meanly. “When is anyone ever generous to me?”
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, WINTER–SPRING 1499
I go to our most beautiful palace for my confinement and Henry and My Lady the King’s Mother prepare a celebration dinner in the great hall in January. Everyone is there to celebrate my confinement but my sister Cecily. She is staying away. She has lost her second child, her daughter Elizabeth, and having made a loveless marriage to further her rise in the Tudor world, finds that she is a childless widow; she has gained nothing.
This is bitter for any woman, and especially hard on Cecily. She will stay away from court until she has put off her black gown. I am sorry for her, but there is nothing that I can do, so I say farewell to the court and step into my beautiful rooms for my first confinement without her.
My Lady the King’s Mother has the best rooms adjoining Henry’s as usual, but I like my own set of rooms that I have prepared for my confinement. They face the river and I order my ladies to pin back the dark tapestries showing scenes from the Bible that My Lady has hung for my edification, and instead I watch the boats going by and people, wrapped up against the cold, striding up and down the riverbank, hugging themselves, their breaths making little clouds around their muffled heads.
I am not well with this baby; it was an unlovely conception and I fear a difficult birth. While I am confined I cannot help but think of the two in the Tower, my cousin and the boy who called himself my brother, and I wonder what they can see from their windows and if the winter afternoons and evenings when the sun sets so early and the sky is so dark seem so very long to them. Poor Teddy must be accustomed, it has been nearly thirteen years since he was free; he has grown to manhood in prison, knowing nothing but the cold walls of his chamber and the little square panes of his window. When I think of him I believe that the baby stirs in me, and I know that I have been very wrong not to save him from this life that is more like death. I have failed him, my kinsman, my cousin. I have failed as a cousin and I have failed as a queen.
Now another young man looks out of a small window at a darkening sky and sees the winter day slide away, and I put my hand on my broad belly and whisper, “Never. That will never happen to you,” as if I could save my baby though I cannot save my brother.
Lady Katherine Huntly comes into confinement with me for company and stitches an exquisite nightcap in white pin-tucked linen for my child, though she is never allowed to see her own. She is allowed to visit the prisoner in the Tower and she is away for a day and a night and comes back in silence, and bends over her sewing, trying to avoid speaking to anyone of what she has seen or heard.
I wait till the ladies are at the door of my chamber, taking the dishes for dinner from the servants at the threshold and bringing them in to spread on the big table before the fire so that we can feast and be merry during our long time of waiting before Lent reduces the choice. “How is he?” I ask shortly.
At once she glances around to see if they can hear us, but there is no one in earshot. “Broken,” she says simply.
“Is he ill?”
“Wasted.”
“Does he have books? Letters? Is he very alone?”
“No!” she exclaims. “People are constantly allowed to come in to see him.” She sh
rugs. “I don’t understand why. Almost anyone can go and speak to him. He lives in a presence chamber, the door standing open, any fool in London can come in and pledge allegiance. He is hardly guarded at all.”
“He doesn’t speak to them, does he?”
A little shake of her head shows that he says nothing.
“He must not speak to anyone!” I say with sudden energy. “His safety depends on his not speaking to them, to anyone.”
“They speak to him,” she tries to explain to me. “His guards don’t keep the door shut, they force it open. He is surrounded by people who come and whisper promises to him.”
“He must not reply!” I take her hands in my anxiety that she understands. “He will be watched, he is being watched. He must do nothing that could cause suspicion.”
She looks up and meets my eyes. “He is himself,” she says. “He has caused suspicion all of his life. Even if he does nothing but breathe.”
The labor is long and I am faint with pain by the time that I hear a little weak cry. They give me birthing ale and the familiar scent and the taste remind me of when I had Arthur and my mother was there with her strong arms around me and her voice leading me into dreams where I felt no pain. When I wake, hours later, they tell me that I have given birth to a boy, another boy for the Tudor dynasty, and that the king has sent his congratulations and a rich gift, and his Lady Mother is on her knees for me in her chapel even now, giving thanks that God continues to smile on her house.