The quick glance she throws towards me would tell him nothing. I know she is thinking that at least our boy Richard is safely away in Flanders, but she is expressionless.
“My brothers are missing?” she repeats, wonderingly.
“They are likely dead,” I say, pain making my voice harsh.
“You don’t know where they are?” she asks the king.
“I wish to God that I did,” he says. “Without knowing where they are or if they are safe, everyone will think they are dead and blame me.”
“They were in your keeping,” I remind him. “And why would anyone take them as hostages without telling? At the very least, you have let my boy die while you were fighting to keep the throne which was his by right.”
He nods as if to accept that much of the blame and turns to go. Elizabeth and I watch in silence as he unbolts the door.
“I won’t forgive this wrong done to me and my house,” I warn him. “Whoever it was that killed my boys, I shall put a curse on their house that they will have no firstborn son to inherit. Whoever took my son will lose his son. He will spend his life longing for an heir. He will bury his firstborn and long for him, for I cannot even bury mine.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “Curse him, whoever did it,” he says indifferently. “Blight his house. For he has cost me my reputation and my peace.”
“We two will curse him,” Elizabeth says, standing beside me, her arm around my waist. “He will pay for taking our boy. He will regret this loss that he has dealt to us. He will be sorry for this terrible cruelty. He will suffer remorse. Even if we never know who did this.”
“Oh, but we will know him,” I chime in like a coven’s chorus. “We will know him by the death of his children. When his son and heir dies, we shall know him then. We shall know that the curse we lay on him now is working, all down the years, generation after generation, until his line dies out. When he puts his own son in the grave, it will be our curse that buries him. And then we shall know who it was who took our boy, and he will know that our curse has taken from him what he took from us. When he has only girls to inherit, we will know him then.”
He steps through the doorway and looks back at the two of us, a wry smile twisting his mouth. “Do you not know yet that there is only one thing worse than not getting your wish?” he asks. “As I have done? I wished to be king and now I am king and it has brought me no joy at all. Elizabeth, has your mother not warned you to take care what you wish for?”
“She has warned me,” she says steadily. “And since you took my father’s throne, and took my uncle and my beloved brothers, I have learned to wish for nothing.”
“Then she would do well to warn you against the working of your curse.” He turns to me with a bitter smile. “D’you not remember the wind that you whistled up to destroy Warwick, which blew him away from Calais so his daughter lost her baby at sea? That was a weapon for us that no one else could have summoned. But d’you not remember that the storm went on too long and nearly drowned your husband and all of us that were with him?”
I nod.
“Your curses last too long and strike at the wrong people,” he says. “Maybe one day you will wish that my right arm was strong enough to defend you. Maybe one day you will regret the death of someone’s son and heir, even if they were guilty, even if your curse runs true.”
The revenge of Richard the king falls heavily on the lords and leaders of the rebellion; he forgives the lesser men for having been misled. He discovers that Margaret Beaufort, the wife of his ally, Lord Stanley, was the mistress of the plot and the go-between for her son and the Duke of Buckingham, and he banishes her to her husband’s house and orders her to be kept close. Her allies-Bishop Morton and Dr. Lewis-escape out of the country. My son Thomas Grey has got clean away and is at the court of Henry Tudor in Brittany. It is a court of young men, hopeful rebels, filled with ambition and desire.
King Richard complains of my son Thomas Grey as a rebel and an adulterer, as if treason and love were both alike crimes. He charges him with treason and puts a price on his head. Thomas writes to me from Brittany and tells me that, if Henry Tudor could have landed, the rebellion would have gone our way for sure. Their fleet was scattered by the storm that Elizabeth and I called down on Buckingham’s head. The young man who said he was coming to save us was nearly drowned. Thomas has no doubt that Henry Tudor can raise an army great enough to defeat even a York prince. He tells me that Henry will come again to England, as soon as the winter storms have died down, and that this time he will win.
And put himself on the throne, I write to my son. There is no longer any pretense that he is fighting for the inheritance of my boys.
My son replies: “No, Henry Tudor fights for nobody but himself, and probably always did and always will. But the prince, as he calls himself, will bring the crown to the House of York, for he will marry Elizabeth, and make her Queen of England, and their son will be King of England.
“Your son should have been King of England,” Thomas writes. “But your daughter still could be queen. Am I to tell Henry that Elizabeth will marry him if he defeats Richard? It would bring all of our kinship and affinity to his side, and I cannot see what future you and my half sisters have while the usurper Richard is on the throne, and while you are hiding in sanctuary.
I write back:
Tell him, I am still as good as the word that I gave to his mother, Lady Margaret. Elizabeth will be his wife when he defeats Richard and takes the throne of England. Let York and Lancaster be as one and let the wars be over.
I pause, and add a note.
Ask him if his mother knows what happened to my boy Edward.
DECEMBER 1483
I wait till the turning of the year, the darkest night of the year, and I wait for the darkest hour, the hour between midnight and one, then I take a candle and throw a warm cape over my winter gown and tap on Elizabeth’s door. “I am going now,” I say. “Do you want to come?”
She is ready. She has her candle and her cape with the hood pulled forward over her bright hair. “Yes, of course. This is my loss too,” she says. “I want revenge too. Those who killed my brother have put me a step closer to the throne, a step further away from the life I might have made for myself, and into the heart of danger. I don’t thank them for that, either. And my brother was alone and unguarded, taken away from us. It would have to be someone made of stone to kill our prince and that poor little page boy. Whoever it was has earned a curse. I will curse him.”
“It will be on his son,” I warn her, “and his son after him. It will end their line.”
Her eyes shine green in the candlelight like a cat’s eyes. “So might it be,” she says, as her grandmother Jacquetta would say when she was cursing or blessing.
I lead the way and we go through the silent crypt, down the stone stairs to the catacombs, and then down again, another flight of cold stone stairs, icy damp underfoot, until we hear the lapping of the river at the water gate.
Elizabeth unlocks the iron door and together we pull it open. The river is high, at the level of a winter flood, dark and glassy, moving swiftly by us in the darkness of the night. But it is nothing to the storm that Elizabeth and I called up to keep Buckingham and Henry Tudor out of London. If I had only known that someone was coming for my son that night, I would have taken a boat on that flood and gone to him. I would have gone on the deep waters to save him.
“How shall we do this?” Elizabeth is shivering from the cold and from fear.
“We do nothing,” I say. “We just tell Melusina. She is our ancestor, she is our guide, she will feel the loss of our son and heir as we do. She will seek out those who took him, and she will take their son in return.”