The Red Queen (42 page)

“I will go.” He swings up into the saddle. “But I will leave you with Ned Parton over there.” He gestures to a young man standing beside a big black horse. “He is my messenger. He speaks three languages, including Breton, should you want to send him to Brittany. He has a safe pass through this country, through France and Flanders, signed by me as Constable of England. You can trust him to send messages to anyone you like, and no one can stop him or take them from him. King Richard may appear to be my master, but I don’t forget your son and his ambitions, and he is only one step from the throne this morning, and my beloved stepson as always.”

“But which side are you on?” I demand in frustration, as his men mount their horses and raise his banner.

“The winning side,” he says with a short laugh, and thumps his chest in a salute to me like a soldier, and is gone.

I wait. All I can do is wait. I send out letters by Ned Parton, and Jasper replies to me, courteously, as to a powerless woman, far away, who understands nothing. I see that the failed rebellion that cost them their army and their fleet also spoiled their faith in me as a coconspirator, as a woman of power in the country they hoped to take. In the hot summer days as the crops ripen in the fields and the haymakers go out with their scythes and cut the hay, I see I am become as marginal as the hares that run from the blades straight into the snares because they understand nothing.

I write, I send messages. I scold Elizabeth Woodville, the sometime queen, about the behavior of her daughters, which is reported to me in more and more detail: their beautiful clothes, their importance at the court, their beauty, their lighthearted joy, their easy Rivers charm as they flow from one amusement to another. There were many who said that their grandmother Jacquetta was a witch, a descendant of Melusina the water goddess, and now there are many who say that these girls weave their magic too. Finest of them all is the girl who is promised to Henry but behaves as if she has forgotten all about him. I write to Elizabeth Woodville to call her to account; I write to the vain girl, Elizabeth of York, to reprimand her; I write to Henry to remind him of his duty—and nobody, nobody, bothers to reply to me.

I am alone in my house; and for all that I have longed all my life
for a solitary routine of prayer, I am most terribly alone, and most terribly lonely. I begin to think that nothing will ever change, that I will live out my life here, visited occasionally by a jeering husband who will drink wine from my cellar and eat game from my fields with the special relish of a poacher. I will hear news from court, which indicates that nobody remembers me, or my one-time great importance. I will hear from my son, far away, and he will politely send his good wishes and, on the day of his birth, his acknowledgment of my sacrifice for him; but he will never send me his love nor tell me when I may look for him.

In my loneliness I consider that we were separated when he was such a little boy and since then we have never been close—not as a mother might be to her child, not as Elizabeth Woodville always has been to her children, that she raised herself, that she loved so openly. Now that I can be of no use to him, he will forget all about me. And in truth, in bitter truth: if he were not the heir to my house, and summit of all my ambitions, I would already have forgotten all about him.

My life comes down to this: a court that has forgotten me, a husband who mocks me, a son who has no use for me, and a God who has gone silent. It is no comfort to me that I despise the court, that I never loved my husband, and that my son was born only to fulfill my destiny, and if he cannot do that, I don’t know what use we are to each other. I go on praying. I don’t know what to do but that. I go on praying.

I have no one that I can trust to send but Ned Parton. But I have to take the risk. I send one line to Jasper.

Then I go to my chapel and kneel before the chancel rail, my face turned to the crucifix of the suffering Christ. “Keep him safe,” I whisper over and over again. “Keep my son safe. And bring him to victory.”

Within the month I have a reply. It is from Jasper, and short and to the point as always.

The court spends the Christmas season at Westminster, and the gossip of the household tells me that Richard has put on as great a show as his brother ever did. The news of the music, the playing, the clothes, and the feasting go round the kingdom and grow more glorious in the telling. My household brings in the yule log and mistletoe and holly and makes very merry without me in the kitchen and the hall.

I find the marble floor of the chapel very cold under my knees. I am without comfort, I am without place, I am without much hope. Richard at Westminster, in the glory of York power, is proudly invulnerable both to my boy and to my brother-in-law, poor pensioners of the enemy of England: France. I see them sinking into exile; I see them brought low and disregarded. I fear they will hang around the court of France for the rest of Henry’s life, and he will be known as a second-rank pretender: worth playing as a card in a game of treaties, worth nothing on his own account.

My husband writes one of his rare letters from Westminster, and I fall on it as a beggar might fall on a crust of bread. I am too poor in news to be proud.

I drop his book to the floor in sheer irritation at the thought of Elizabeth of York and her incestuous lover-uncle dancing in the Christmas feast, while that poor thing, Anne Neville, smiles on them as if she were part of a happy family at play. When Stanley taunts me with Henry’s silence, I have no riposte. In truth, I don’t know what he is doing; I have heard nothing since their flight to France when Jasper said he had hopes, but did not tell me what they were. I think Jasper has advised Henry not to write to me. I think they believe that Stanley’s messenger Ned Parton is unsafe; they believe he reports to my husband. They are surrounded by spies, and they have to be suspicious; but I fear that now they doubt me too. This was once our battle, our rebellion: we Tudors against the Yorks. Now they trust no one, not even me. I live far from everyone, everything. I know nothing but what my husband writes to me, and he writes as a man in triumph might taunt a defeated enemy.

Another day when I rise for matins, pray as always for patience to endure my imprisonment and enforced silence, pray for the success of my son and for the downfall of his enemies, find my mind wandering as I think how Richard’s downfall might come about, find myself dreaming of the humiliation of the York princess and the witch her mother, and recall myself to myself with a sudden start and see that the candles are burning down on the altar and I have been on my knees for two hours and my companions are restless behind me, giving the theatrical sighs of women who imagine they are badly treated.

I rise up and go to breakfast and see the relish with which my ladies fall on their food as if they were famished by having to come an hour or so late. They really are hopelessly venal creatures. If I could have lived in a nunnery in this time of imprisonment, at least I would have lived with holy women and not this collection of fools. I go to my room to deal with the business of my lands and the gathering of the rents, but there is almost nothing to do. It all goes to my husband’s steward now, and I am a tenant in the house that was once all my own.