The Red Queen (40 page)

“Buckingham is dead?”

“They took off his head in Salisbury marketplace. The king would not even see him. He was too angry with him, and he is filled with hate towards you. You said that Queen Anne was welcome to her city, that she had been missed. You bowed the knee to him and
wished him well. And then you sent out messages to every disaffected Lancastrian family in the country to tell them the cousins’ war had come again, and that this time you will win.”

I grit my teeth. “Should I run away? Should I go to Brittany too?”

“My dear, how ever would you get there?”

“I have my money chest; I have my guard. I could bribe a ship to take me. If I went down to the docks at London now, I could get away. Or Greenwich. Or I could ride to Dover or Southampton …”

He smiles at me and I remember they call him “the fox” for his ability to survive, to double back, to escape the hounds. “Yes, indeed, all that might have been possible; but I am sorry to tell you, I am nominated as your jailer, and I cannot let you escape me. King Richard has decided that all your lands and your wealth will be mine, signed over to me, despite our marriage contract. Everything you owned as a girl is mine, everything you owned as a Tudor is mine, everything you gained from your marriage to Stafford is now mine, everything you inherited from your mother is mine. My men are in your chambers now collecting your jewels, your papers, and your money chest. Your men are already under arrest, and your women are locked in their rooms. Your tenants and your affinity will learn you cannot summon them; they are all mine.”

I gasp. For a moment I cannot speak, I just look at him. “You have robbed me? You have taken this chance to betray me?”

“You are to live at the house at Woking, my house now; you are not to leave the grounds. You will be served by my people; your own servants will be turned away. You will see neither ladies-in-waiting, servants, nor your confessor. You will meet with no one and send no messages.”

I can hardly grasp the depth and breadth of his betrayal. He has taken everything from me. “It is you who betrayed me to Richard!” I fling at him. “You who betrayed the whole plot. It is you, with an eye to my fortune, who led me on to do this and now profit from my destruction. You told the Duke of Norfolk to go down to
Guildford and suppress the rebellion in Hampshire. You told Richard to beware of the Duke of Buckingham. You told him that the queen was rising against him and I with her!”

He shakes his head. “No. I am not your enemy, Margaret; I have served you well as your husband. No one else could have saved you from the traitor’s death that you deserve. This is the best deal I could get for you. I have saved you from the Tower, from the scaffold. I have saved your lands from sequestration; he could have taken them outright. I have saved you to live in my house, as my wife, in safety. And I am still placed at the heart of things, where we can learn of his plans against your son. Richard will seek to have Tudor killed now; he will send spies with orders to murder Henry. You have signed your son’s death warrant with your failure. Only I can save him. You should be grateful to me.”

I cannot think, I cannot think through this mixture of threats and promises. “Henry?”

“Richard will not stop until he is dead. Only I can save him.”

“I am to be your prisoner?”

He nods. “And I am to have your fortune. It is nothing between us, Margaret. Think of the safety of your son.”

“You will let me warn Henry of his danger?”

He rises to his feet. “Of course. You can write to him as you wish. But all your letters are to come through me, they will be carried by my men. I have to give the appearance of controlling you completely.”

“The appearance?” I repeat. “If I know you at all, you will give the appearance of being on both sides.”

He smiles in genuine amusement. “Always.”

It is a long, dark winter that I face, on my own at Woking. My ladies are taken from me, accused of plotting treason, and all of my trusted friends and messengers are turned away. I may not even see them. My household is chosen by my husband—my jailer—and they are men and women loyal only to him. They look at me askance, as a woman who has betrayed him and his interests, a faithless wife. I am living among strangers again, far from the center of court life, isolated from my friends, and far—so very far—from my defeated son. Sometimes I fear I will never see him again. Sometimes I fear that he will give up his great cause, settle in Brittany, marry an ordinary girl, become an ordinary young man—not a boy chosen by God for greatness and brought into the world by his mother’s agony. He is the son of a woman who was called to greatness by Joan of Arc herself. Can he become a sluggard? A drunkard? A boy who in the pothouses tells people that he might have been a king but for bad luck and a witch’s wind?

I find a way to send him one letter, before Christmas. It is not a letter of goodwill or Christmas cheer. The days are too dark for the exchange of gifts. It has been a bad year for the House of Lancaster. I have no joy to wish anyone. We have long, hard work to do if he is to reach his throne, and Christmas Day is the very day to start again.

I have time to meditate on the vanity of ambition and the sin of overthrowing an ordained king in the long winter nights of a miserable Christmas and a cheerless new year, as the impenetrable dark yields slowly to cold gray mornings. I go on my knees to my God and ask him why my son’s venture to gain his rightful place in the world was not blessed; why the rain was against him; why the wind blew his ships away; why the God of earthquake, wind, and fire could not calm the storm for Henry as He calmed it for Himself in Galilee? I ask Him that if Elizabeth Woodville, Dowager Queen of England, is a witch as everyone knows, then why should she come out of sanctuary and make an agreement with a usurping king? How can she get her way in the world when my own is blocked and mired? I stretch out on the cold tiles of the chancel steps and give myself up to holy and remorseful grief.

And then it comes to me. In the end, after many long nights of
fasting and prayer, I hear an answer. I find that I know why. I come to an understanding.

At last I recognize that the sin of ambition and greed darkened our enterprise, our plans were overshadowed by a sinful woman’s desire for revenge. The plans were formed by a woman who thought herself the mother of a king, who could not be satisfied to be an ordinary woman. The fault of the enterprise lay in the vanity of a woman who would be a queen, and who would overturn the peace of the country for her own selfish desire. To know oneself is to know all, and I will confess my own sin and the part it played in our failure.

I am guilty of nothing more than a righteous ambition and a powerful desire to take my rightful place. It is a righteous rage. But Elizabeth Woodville is to blame for everything. She brought war to England for her own vanity and revenge; she it was who came to us filled with desire for her son, filled with pride in her house, puffed up with belief in her own beauty; and I should have refused to ally with her in her sinful ambition. It was Elizabeth’s desire for her son’s triumph that put us outside the pale of God’s patience. I should have seen her vanity and turned from it.

I have been much at fault, I see it all now, and I beg God to forgive me. My fault was to ally with Buckingham, whose vain ambition and ungodly lust for power brought down the rain on us, and with the Queen Elizabeth, whose vanity and desire were unsightly in the eyes of God. Also, who knows what she did to call up the rain?

I should have been, as Joan was, a woman riding out alone, with her own vision. By allying myself with sinners—and such sinners! A woman who was the widow of Sir John Grey. A boy who was married to Katherine Woodville.—I received the punishment for their sins. I was not sinful myself—and God who knows everything will know this—but I let myself join with them; and I, the godly, shared the punishment of sinners.

It is agony to me to think that their wrongdoing should destroy
the righteousness of my cause; she a proclaimed witch, and the daughter of a witch, and he a peacock for all his short life. I should not have stooped to ally myself with them; I should have kept my own counsel and let them raise their own rebellion and do their own murders, and kept myself free of it all. But as it is, their failure has brought me down, their rain has washed away my hopes, their sin is blamed on me; and here I am, cruelly punished for their crimes.

All the winter and all of the spring, I meditate on their wrongdoing, and I find I am glad that the queen is still locked in sanctuary. While I am imprisoned in my own home, I think of her, trapped in the gloomy crypt beside the river, facing her defeat in the darkness. But then, in the spring, I have a letter from my husband.