The Red Queen (11 page)

“So how do you know what to do?” I ask. “Does God tell you?” I think it most unlikely that God would speak to Jasper, whose skin is so very freckled, even now in March.

He laughs. “No. God does not speak to me, so I try to keep the faith with my family, with my king, and with my country in that order. And I prepare for trouble and hope for the best.”

I draw close to speak to him quietly. “Do you think that Richard of York would dare to take the king’s throne, if the king were to be ill for very long?” I ask. “If he does not get better?”

He looks bleak. “I would think it a certainty.”

“So what am I to do if I am far from you and a false king takes the throne?”

Jasper looks consideringly at the baby. “Say that our King Henry dies and then the prince, his son.”

“God forbid.”

“Amen. Say that they die the one after the other. On that day this baby is the next in line to the throne.”

“I know that well enough.”

“Do you not think that this might be your calling? To keep this child safe, to teach him the ways of kingship, to prepare him for the highest task in the land—to see him ordained as king and take the holy oil on his breast and become more than a man, a king, a being almost divine?”

“I dreamed of it,” I tell him very quietly. “When he was first conceived. I dreamed that to carry him and give birth to him was my vocation, as to bring the French king to Rheims was Joan’s. But I have never spoken of it to anyone but God.”

“Say you were right,” Jasper goes on, his whisper binding a spell around us both. “Say that my brother did not die in vain, for his death made this boy the Earl of Richmond. His seed made this boy a Tudor and so half nephew to the King of England. Your carrying him made him a Beaufort and next in direct line to the King of England. Say this is your destiny, to go through these difficult times and bring this boy to the throne. Do you not think this? Do you not feel it?”

“I don’t know,” I say hesitantly. “I thought I would have a higher calling than this. I thought I would be a mother superior.”

“There is no more superior mother in the world,” he said, smiling at me. “You could be the mother of the King of England.”

“What would they call me?”

“What?” He is distracted by my question.

“What would they call me if my son was King of England but I was not crowned as a queen?”

He thinks. “They would probably call you ‘Your Grace.’ Your son would make your husband a duke, perhaps? Then you would be ‘Your Grace.’”

“My husband would be a duke?”

“It’s the only way you could be a duchess. As a woman you could hold no title in your own right, I don’t think.”

I shake my head. “Why should my husband be ennobled, when it will be me who has done all the work?”

Jasper chokes back a laugh. “What title would you have?”

I think for a moment. “Everyone can call me ‘My Lady, the King’s Mother,’” I decide. “They can call me ‘My Lady, the King’s Mother,’ and I shall sign my letters ‘Margaret R.’”

“‘Margaret R’? You would sign yourself ‘Margaret Regina’? You would call yourself a queen?”

“Why not?” I demand. “I shall be the mother of a king. I shall be all but Queen of England.”

He bows with mock ceremony. “You shall be My Lady, the King’s Mother, and everyone will have to do whatever you say.”

We do not speak of my destiny again, nor of the future of England. Jasper is too busy. He is gone from the castle for weeks and weeks at a time. In the early summer he comes back with his force in tatters and his own face bruised, but smiling. He rode down and captured William Herbert; the peace of Wales is restored; and the rule of Wales is again in our hands. Wales is held by a Tudor for the House of Lancaster, once more.

Jasper sends Herbert to London as a proclaimed traitor, and we hear that he is tried for treason and held in the Tower. I shudder at that, thinking of my old guardian, William de la Pole, who had been in the Tower when I, a little girl, had been forced to declare myself free of him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jasper tells me, hardly able to speak for yawning over dinner. “Forgive me, sister, I am exhausted. I shall sleep for all of tomorrow. Herbert won’t go to the block as he deserves. The queen herself warned me that the king will pardon and release Herbert, and he will live to attack us again. Mark my words. Our king is an expert at forgiveness. He will forgive the man who raises a sword against him. He will forgive the man who raises England against him. Herbert will be released, and in time he will come back to Wales, and he and I will fight all over again for the same handful of castles. The king forgives the Yorks and thinks they will live with
him in charity. This is a mark of his greatness, really, Margaret—you strive for sainthood and it must run in your family, for I think he has it. He is filled with the greatest of kindness and the greatest of trust. He cannot bear a grudge; he sees every man as a sinner striving to be good, and he does what he can to help him. You cannot help but love and admire him. It is a mark of his enemies that they take his mercy as a license to go on as they wish.” He pauses. “He is a great man, but perhaps not a great king. He is beyond us all. It just makes it very hard for the rest of us. And the common people only see weakness where there is greatness of spirit.”

“But he is well now, surely? And the court is back in London. The queen is living with the king again, and you hold Wales for him. He may stay well, their son is strong, they might have another child. Surely the Yorks will settle themselves to live as great men, under a greater king. They must know that this is their place?”

He shakes his head and spoons himself another bowl of stewed beef and a slice of manchet bread. He is hungry; he has been riding with his men for weeks. “Truly, Margaret, I don’t think the Yorks can settle. They see the king, they do their best sometimes to work with him; but even when he is well he is weak, and when he is ill, he is entranced. If I were not his man, bound heart and soul, I would find it hard to be loyal to him. I would be filled with doubt as to what comes next. I cannot in my heart blame them for hoping to control what comes next. I never doubt Richard of York. I think he knows and loves the king, and knows that he is of the royal line but not a king ordained. But Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, I would trust no further than I could see an arrow flight. He is so accustomed to ruling all the north, he will never see why he cannot rule a kingdom. Both of them, thank God, would never touch an ordained king. But every time the king is ill it leaves the question: When will he get better? And what shall we do until he is better? And the question nobody asks out loud: What shall we do if he never gets better at all?

“Worst of all is that we have a queen who is a law to herself. When the king is gone, we are a ship without a tiller and the queen is the wind that can blow in any direction. If I believed that Joan of Arc was not a holy girl but a witch, as some say, I would think she had cursed us with a king whose first loyalty is to his dreams and a queen whose first loyalty is to France.”

“Don’t say it! Don’t say it!” I object to the slight on Joan and put my hand quickly on his, to silence him. For a moment we are hand-clasped, and then gently he moves his hand from under mine, as if I may not even touch him, not even like this, like sister and brother.

“I speak to you now, trusting that it all goes no further than your prayers,” he said. “But when you are married, this January, I will talk to you only of family business.”

I am hurt that he should take his hand from my touch. “Jasper,” I say quietly. “From this January, I will have nobody in the world who loves me.”

“I will love you,” he says quietly. “As a brother, as a friend, as the guardian of your son. And you can always write to me and I can always reply to you, as a brother and a friend and the guardian of your son.”

“But who will talk to me? Who will see me as I am?”

He shrugs. “Some of us are born to a solitary life,” he says. “You will be married, but you may be very much alone. I shall think of you: you in your grand house in Lincolnshire with Henry Stafford, while I live here without you. The castle will seem very quiet and very strange without you here. The stone stairs and the chapel will miss your footstep, the gateway will miss your laughter, and the wall will miss your shadow.”

“But you will keep my son,” I say, jealous as always.

He nods. “I will keep him, even though Edmund and you are lost from me.”

True to their word, my mother, Sir Henry Stafford, and the Duke of Buckingham come to Pembroke Castle in January, despite snow and freezing fog, to fetch me for my wedding. Jasper and I are beside ourselves trying to get in enough wood for big fires in every chamber, and to wrest enough meat from a hungry winter countryside to prepare a wedding feast. In the end we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that there can be no more than three meat dishes and two sweetmeat courses, and that there are very few crystallized fruits and only a few marchpane dishes. It won’t be what the duke expects; but this is Wales in midwinter, and Jasper and I are united by a sort of rebellious pride that we have done what we can, and if it is not good enough for His Grace and my mother, then they can ride back to London where the Burgundian merchants arrive with a new luxury every day for those rich and vain enough to waste their money.

In the end they hardly notice the poor fare for they stay for only two days. They have brought me a fur hood and gloves for the journey, and my mother agrees that I can ride Arthur for some of the way. We are to leave early in the morning, to catch as much as we can of the short winter daylight, and I have to be ready and waiting in the stable yard so as not to disoblige my new family and my silent husband-to-be. They will take me first to my mother’s house for our
wedding, and then my new husband will take me to his house at Bourne in Lincolnshire, wherever that is. Another husband, another new house, another new country, but I never belong anywhere and I never own anything in my own right.

When everything is ready, I run back upstairs and Jasper comes with me to the nursery for me to say good-bye to my son. Henry has grown out of his swaddling bands and even out of his cradle. He now sleeps in a little bed with high bars on either side. He is so near to walking alone that I cannot bear to leave him. He can stand, endearingly bowlegged, clinging onto a prayer seat or a low stool, then he eyes the next safe haven and flings himself towards it, taking one staggering step and collapsing on the way. If I am ready to play with him, he will take my hands and, with me bent double to support him, walk the length of the room and back again. When Jasper comes into the nursery, Henry crows like a cockerel, for he knows that Jasper will go up and down, and up and down, like an obedient beast turning the threshing wheel, tirelessly holding Henry’s little hands, while he pit-pats forwards on his fat little feet.

But the magic moment when he walks alone has not yet happened, and I was praying he would do it before I have to leave. Now he will take his first step without me. And every step thereafter, I know. Every step of his life, and me not there to see him walk.

“I will write to you the moment he does it,” Jasper swears to me.

“And write to me if you can make him eat meat,” I say. “He can’t live his life on gruel.”

“And his teeth,” he promises me. “I will write you as each new one comes in.”

I pull at his arm, and he turns towards me. “And if he is ill,” I whisper, “they will tell you to spare me worry. But it won’t spare me worry if I think he is ill but nobody would tell me. Swear you will write to me if he is ill at all, or if he has a fall or any sort of accident.”

“I swear,” he says. “And I will keep him as safe as I can.”

We turn towards the high-sided bed, where Henry is holding
the rail and beaming up at us. For a moment I catch a glimpse of the two of us reflected in the little lattice panes of the window behind him. I am nearly fifteen, and Jasper will be twenty-seven next birthday. In the darkened glass we look like the parents of our boy, we look like the handsome young parents of a beloved heir. “I will come to visit him as soon as I am allowed,” I say miserably.