It is a masque – a performance rich in symbols as well as an act of mourning. Nobody can see the royal family burying their forebear as if he were a king without reflecting how kingly is Edward, and his brothers, how reverent is the little prince, and how enchanting and queenly are Elizabeth and her daughters. I cannot help but think that they are more like actors than real kings and queens. Elizabeth the queen is so poised and beautiful, and her girls – especially the Princess Elizabeth – so conscious of themselves and their place in the procession. At her age I was frightened that I might step on my mother’s train, but little Princess Elizabeth walks with her head up, looking neither to left nor right, a little queen in the making.
I should admire her – everyone else seems to adore her, and perhaps if I had a daughter I would point to the princess and tell my little girl that she must learn the poise of her cousin. But since I don’t have a little girl, though I pray for one, I cannot look at the Princess Elizabeth without irritation, and think her spoiled and artificial – a precocious pet who would be better confined to the schoolroom rather than walking through a serious ceremonial as if she were taking the steps of a dance, revelling in all the eyes on her.
‘Minx,’ my sister says briefly in my ear, and I have to lower my eyes and suppress my smile.
As ever, with anything that Edward does, there has to be a banquet and a great show. Richard sits beside his brother and drinks little and eats less, as more than a thousand guests dine in the castle, and thousands more in beautifully dressed tented pavilions outside. Throughout the dinner there is music playing and good wines poured, between each course there is a choir singing solemn beautiful anthems and fruit served. Elizabeth the queen sits on the right hand of her husband as if she were a fellow ruler of the kingdom and not merely a wife, a crown on her head, dark blue lace covering her hair, and she looks around her with the serene beauty of a woman who knows that her place is safe, and her life beyond challenge.
She catches me staring at her, and she gives me the glacial smile that she always shows me and Isabel, and I wonder if she is thinking, at this ceremonial reburial of her father-in-law, of her own father who died a hasty criminal death at the hands of my father. My father hauled hers into the town square at Chepstow, accused him of treason, and beheaded him – without trial, without rule of law – in public. His beloved son John died beside him, his last sight would have been his son’s severed head.
Isabel, seated next to me, shivers as if someone had stepped on her grave. ‘D’you see how she looks at us?’ she whispers.
‘Oh, Iz,’ I reproach her. ‘What can she do to hurt us now? When the king loves George so much? When Richard is so honoured by them? When we two are royal duchesses? They went to France as allies, and they came home as good friends. I don’t think she wastes much love on us but there is nothing she can do to us.’
‘She can put us under an enchantment,’ she says very softly. ‘She can blow up a storm that nearly drowns us, you know that yourself. And every time my little Edward runs a fever, or is sleepless while he is cutting a tooth, I wonder if she has turned her evil gaze on us, and she is heating up his image, or putting a pin into his portrait.’ Her hand covers the swell of her belly beneath her gown. ‘I wear a specially blessed girdle,’ she says. ‘George got it from his advisor. It is specially blessed to ward off the evil eye, to protect me from Her.’
Of course my mind goes at once to Middleham and my own son, who could fall from his pony, or cut himself while practising jousting, catch a chill or take a fever, eat something bad, breathe a miasma, drink foul water. I shake my head to dismiss my fears. ‘I doubt she even thinks about us,’ I say stoutly. ‘I bet she thinks of nothing but her own family, her two precious sons, and her brothers and sisters. We are nothing to her.’
Isabel shakes her head. ‘She has a spy in every household in the land,’ she says. ‘She thinks about us, believe it. My lady in waiting told me that she prays every day that she never has to run into sanctuary again, that her husband holds his throne unchallenged. She prays for the destruction of her enemies. And she does more than pray. There are men who follow George everywhere he goes. She watches me in my household, I know she has a spy on me. She will have someone placed to watch you in yours.’
‘Oh really, Iz, you sound like George!’
‘Because he’s right,’ she says earnestly. ‘He is right to watch the king and fear the queen. You’ll see. One day you’ll hear that I have died suddenly, without good reason, and it will be because she has ill-wished me.’
