“You are a son of Melusina,” I say, trying to smile. “You sound like her when she had to be free to go into the water.”
“It’s like that,” he agrees. “Think of me as swimming away and then the tide will bring me back.”
“Your mind is made up?”
He nods. “I have to have silence to hear the voice of God,” he says. “And silence to write my poetry. And silence to be myself.”
“But you will come back?”
“Within a few months,” he promises.
I stretch out my hands to him, and he kisses them both. “You must come back,” I say.
“I will,” he says. “I have given my word that only death will take me from you and yours.”
JULY 1476
He is as good as his word and returns from his trip to Rome in time to meet us at Fotheringhay in July. Richard has planned and organized a solemn reburial of his father and his brother Edmund, who were killed in battle, made mock of, and hardly buried at all. The House of York rallies together for the funeral and the memorial service, and I am glad Anthony comes home in time to bring Prince Edward to honor his grandfather.
Anthony is as brown as a Moor and full of stories. We steal away together to walk in the gardens of Fotheringhay. He was robbed on the road; he thought he would never get away with his life. He stayed one night beside a spring in a forest and could not sleep for the certainty that Melusina would rise out of the waters. “And what would I say to her?” he demands plaintively. “How confusing for us all if I fell in love with my great-grandmother.”
He met the Holy Father, he fasted for a week and saw a vision, and now he is determined one day to set out again, but this time go farther afield. He wants to lead a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
“When Edward is a man and comes to his own estate, when he is sixteen, I will go,” he says.
I smile. “All right,” I agree easily. “That’s years and years away. Ten years from now.”
“It seems a long time now,” Anthony warns me. “But the years will go quickly.”
“Is this the wisdom of the traveling pilgrim?” I laugh at him.
“It is,” he agrees. “Before you know it, he will be a young man standing taller than you, and we will have to consider what sort of a king we have made. He will be Edward V and he will inherit a throne peacefully, please God, and continue the royal House of York without challenge.”
For no reason at all, I shiver.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, I don’t know. A shiver of cold: nothing. I know he will make a wonderful king. He’s a real York and a real son of the House of Rivers. There could be no better start for a boy.”
DECEMBER 1476
Christmas comes, and my darling son Prince Edward comes home to Westminster for the feast. Everyone marvels at how he has grown. He is seven next year, and a straight-standing, handsome, fair-headed boy with a quickness of understanding and an education that is all from Anthony, and the promise of good looks and charm that is all his father’s.
Anthony brings both my sons to me, Richard Grey and Prince Edward, for my blessing and then releases them to find their brothers and sisters.
“I miss you all three. So much,” I say.
“And I you,” he says, smiling at me. “But you look well, Elizabeth.”
I make a face. “For a woman who is sick every morning.”
He is delighted. “You are expecting a baby again?”
“Again, and given the sickness, they all think it will be a boy.”
“Edward must be delighted.”
“I assume so. He shows his delight by flirting with every woman within a hundred miles.”
Anthony laughs. “That’s Edward.”
My brother is happy. I can tell at once, from the easy set of his shoulders and the relaxed lines around his eyes. “And what about you? Do you still like Ludlow?”
“Young Edward and Richard and I have things just as we want them,” he says. “We are a court devoted to scholarship, chivalry, jousting, and hunting. It is a perfect life for all three of us.”
“He studies?”
“As I report to you. He is a clever boy and a thoughtful one.”
“And you don’t let him take risks hunting?”
He grins at me. “Of course I do! Did you want me to raise a coward for Edward’s throne? He has to test his courage in the hunting field and in the jousting arena. He has to know fear and look it in the face and ride towards it. He has to be a brave king, not a fearful one. I would serve you both very ill if I steered him away from any risk and taught him to fear danger.”
“I know, I know,” I say. “It is just that he is so precious-”
“We are all precious,” Anthony declares. “And we all have to live a life with risk. I am teaching him to ride any horse in the stable and to face a fight without a tremble. That will keep him safer than trying to keep him on safe horses and away from the jousting arena. Now, to far more important things. What have you got me for Christmas? And are you going to name your baby for me, if you have a boy?”
The court prepares for the Christmas feast with its usual extravagance, and Edward orders new clothes for all the children and ourselves as part of the pageant that the world expects from England’s handsome royal family. I spend some time every day with the little Prince Edward. I love to sit beside him when he sleeps, and listen to his prayers as he goes to bed, and summon him to my rooms for breakfast every day. He is a serious little boy, thoughtful, and he offers to read to me in Latin, Greek, or French until I have to confess that his learning far surpasses my own.
He is patient with his little brother Richard, who idolizes him, following him everywhere at a determined trot, and he is tender to baby Anne, hanging over her cradle and marveling at her little hands. Every day we compose a play or a masque, every day we go hunting, every day we have a great ceremonial dinner and dancing and an entertainment. People say that the Yorks have an enchanted court, an enchanted life, and I cannot deny it.
There is only one thing that casts a shadow on the days before Christmas: George the Duke of Dissatisfaction.
“I do think your brother grows more peculiar every day,” I complain to Edward when he comes to my rooms in Whitehall Palace to escort me to dinner.
“Which one?” he asks lazily. “For you know I can do nothing right in the eyes of either. You would think they would be glad to have a York on the throne and peace in Christendom, and one of the finest Christmas feasts we have ever arranged; but no: Richard is leaving court to go back north as soon as the feast is over, to demonstrate his outrage that we are not slogging away in a battle with the French, and George is simply bad tempered.”
“It is George’s bad temper which is troubling me.”
“Why, what has he done now?” he asks.
“He has told his server that he will not eat anything sent to him from our table,” I say. “He has told him he will only eat privately, in his own room, after the rest of us have had dinner. When we send him a dish down the room to him as a gesture of courtesy for him to taste, he will refuse it. I hear he plans to send it back to us as an open insult. He will sit at the dinner table in company with an empty plate before him. He will not drink either. Edward, you will have to speak to him.”
“If he is refusing drink, it is more than an insult, it is a miracle!” Edward smiles. “George cannot refuse a glass of wine, not if it came from the devil himself.”
“It is no laughing matter if he uses our dinner table to insult us.”
“Yes, I know. I have spoken to him.” He turns to the retinue of lords and ladies who are forming a line behind us. “Give us a moment,” he says and draws me off to a window bay where he can talk without being overheard. “Actually, it’s worse than you know, Elizabeth. I think he is spreading rumors against us.”