The Red Queen Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Margaret, you are so …” She breaks off, and I wait to hear what I am that makes her toss her head like this and frown. “You are so very serious.”

  “Yes.” I nod. “That is true. I am very serious, Lady Mother. I would have thought you would have known that by now. I have always been a serious person, a studious person. And you said something about my father that I think I have a right to understand. I take it seriously.”

  She gets up and walks to the window, looking out as if admiring the dark evening. She shrugs her shoulders at the awkwardness of this daughter, her only Beaufort child. Her lady-in-waiting looks up at her in case she needs anything and I see the glance that passes between them. It is as if I am known to be a difficult girl, and I flush with embarrassment.

  “Oh,” sighs my mother. “It’s such a long time ago now,” she says. “How old are you now? Thirteen? For heaven’s sake, it is twelve years ago.”

  “Then you can tell me. I am old enough to know. And if you don’t, then someone is bound to tell me something. You surely don’t want me to ask the servants?”

  The flush that comes to her face tells me that she does not want me to ask the servants, that they have been warned never to discuss this matter with me. Something happened twelve years ago that she wanted to forget, that she wanted me never to know. Something shameful happened.

  “How did he die?” I ask.

  “By his own hand,” she says quickly and quietly. “If you must know. If you insist on knowing his shame. He left you and he left me, and he died by his own hand. I was with child, a baby that I lost. I lost a baby in my shock and my grief, a baby that might have been a son for the House of Lancaster; but he didn’t think about that. It was days before your first birthday; he didn’t care enough for either of us even to wait to see you into your second year. And that is why I have always told you that your future lies in your son. A husband can come and go; he can leave on his own account. He can go to war or get sick or kill himself; but if you make your son your own, your own creation, then you are safe. A boy is your guardian. If you had been a boy, I would have poured my life into you. You would have been my destiny.”

  “But since I was a girl you did not love me, and he did not wait to see my birthday?”

  She looks at me honestly and repeats the dreadful words. “Since you were a girl, of course not. Since you were a girl you could only be the bridge to the next generation; you could be nothing more than the means by which our family gets a boy.”

  There is a short silence while I absorb my mother’s belief in my unimportance. “I see. I see. I am lucky to be valued by God, since I am not valued by you. I was not valued by my father.”

  She nods as if it does not matter much. Still she does not understand me. She will never understand. She will never think that I am worth the effort of understanding. To her I am, as she so frankly tells me, a bridge.

  “So why did my father kill himself?” I return to her first revelation. “Why would he do such a thing? His soul will have gone to hell. They must have told a string of lies to get him buried in holy ground.” I correct myself. “You must have told a string of lies.”

  My mother comes back and sinks onto the bench by the warm fire. “I did what I could to protect our good name,” she says quietly. “As anyone of a great name would do. Your father came back from France with stories of victory, but then people started to whisper. They said he had done nothing of any value, indeed he had taken the troops and money that his commander Richard of York—the great hero—needed to hold France for England. Richard of York was making progress, but your father set it back. Your father set siege to a town, but it was the wrong town, owned by the Duke of Brittany, and he had to return it to them. We nearly lost the alliance with Brittany through his folly. That would have cost the country dear, but he did not think of it. He set a tax to raise money in the defeated areas of France, but it was illegal; and worse, he kept all the revenue for himself. He said he had a great campaign plan; but he led his men round in circles and then brought them home again without either victory or plunder, so they were bitter against him and said that he was a false lord to them. He was dearly loved by our king, but not even the king could pretend that he had done well.

  “There would have been an inquiry in London about his conduct; he escaped that shame only by his death. There might even have been an excommunication from the pope. They would have come for your father and accused him of treason, and he would have paid with his life on the block, and you would have lost your fortune, and we would have been attainted and ruined; he spared us that, but only by running away into death.”

  “An excommunication?” I am more horrified by this than anything else.

  “People wrote ballads about him,” she says bitterly. “People laughed at his stupidity and marveled at our infamy. You cannot imagine the shame of it. I have shielded you from it, from the shame of him, and I get no thanks for it. You are such a child you don’t know that he is notorious as the great example of his age of the change of fortune, of the cruelty of the wheel of fortune. He could not have been born with better prospects and better opportunities; but he was unlucky, fatally unlucky. In his very first battle in France, when he rode out as a boy, he was captured, and he was left in captivity for seventeen years. It broke his heart. He thought that nobody cared enough to ransom him. Perhaps that is the lesson that I should have taught you—never mind your studies, never mind your nagging for books, for a tutor, for Latin lessons. I should have taught you never to be unlucky, never to be unlucky like your father.”

  “Does everyone know?” I ask. I am horrified at the shame I have inherited, unknowingly. “Jasper, for instance? Does Jasper know I am the daughter of a coward?”

  My mother shrugs. “Everyone. We said that he was exhausted by campaigning, and died of his service to the king. But people will always gossip about their betters.”

  “And are we an unlucky family?” I ask her. “Do you think I have inherited his bad luck?”

  She will not answer me. She gets to her feet and smooths the skirt of her gown as if to brush away smuts from the fire, or to sweep away ill fortune.

  “Are we unlucky?” I ask. “Lady Mother?”

  “Well, I am not,” she says defensively. “I was born a Beauchamp, and after your father’s death I married again and changed my name from his. Now I am a Welles. But you might be unlucky. The Beauforts may be. But perhaps you will change the luck,” she says indifferently. “You were lucky enough to have a boy, after all. Now you have a Lancaster heir.”

  They serve dinner very late; the Duke of Buckingham keeps court hours and is not troubled by the cost of candles. At least the meat is better cooked and there are more side dishes of pastries and sweetmeats than at Pembroke Castle. I see that at this table where everything is so beautiful, Jasper’s manners are positively courtly, and I understand for the first time that he lives as a soldier when he is in his border castle on the very frontiers of the kingdom, but he is a courtier when he is in a great house. He sees me watching him, and he winks at me as if we two share the secret of how we manage our lives when we do not have to be on our best behavior.

  We eat a good dinner and afterwards there is an entertainment, some fools, a juggler, and a girl who sings. Then my mother nods to me and sends me to bed as if I were a child still, and before the grand company I can do nothing but curtsey for her blessing and go. I glance at my future husband as I leave. He is looking at the girl singer with his eyes narrowed, a little smile on his mouth. I don’t mind walking out after I see that look. I am more sick of men, all men, than I dare to acknowledge to myself.

  Next day, the horses are in the stable yard, and I am to be sent back to Pembroke Castle until my year of mourning is finished and I can be married again to the smiling stranger. My mother comes to bid me farewell and watches the manservant lift me onto the pillion saddle behind Jasper’s master of horse. Jasper himself is riding ahead with this troop
of guards. The rear file are waiting for me.

  “You will leave your son in the care of Jasper Tudor when you marry Sir Henry,” my mother remarks, as if this arrangement has just occurred to her this minute, as I am leaving.

  “No, he will come with me. Surely, he will come with me,” I blurt out. “He must come with me. He is my son. Where should he be, but with me?”

  “It’s not possible,” she says decidedly. “It is all agreed. He is to stay with Jasper. Jasper will care for him and keep him safe.”

  “But he is my son!”

  My mother smiles. “You are little more than a child yourself. You cannot look after an heir to our name, and keep him safe. These are dangerous times, Margaret. You should understand that by now. He is a valuable boy. He will be safer if he is at some distance from London, while the Yorks are in power. He will be safer in Pembroke than anywhere else in the country. Wales loves the Tudors. Jasper will guard him as his own.”

  “But he is my own! Not Jasper’s!”

  My mother comes closer and puts her hand on my knee. “You own nothing, Margaret. You yourself are the property of your husband. Once again I have chosen a good husband for you, one near to the crown, kinsman to the Nevilles, son of the greatest duke in England. Be grateful, child. Your son will be well cared for, and then you will have more, Stafford boys this time.”

  “I nearly died last time,” I burst out, careless of the man seated before me on the horse, his shoulders squared, pretending not to listen.

  “I know,” my mother says. “And this is the price of being a woman. Your husband did his duty and died. You did yours and survived. You were lucky this time; he was not. Let’s hope you take your luck onwards.”

  “What if I am not so lucky next time? What if I have the Beaufort luck, and next time the midwives do as you ordered them and let me die? What if they do as you command and drag a grandson out of your daughter’s dead body?”

  She does not even blink. “The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding the women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.”

  “I think it is my tragedy, if you are telling my midwives to let me die!”

  She all but shrugs as she steps back. “These are the chances that a woman faces. Men die in battle; women die in childbirth. Battle is more dangerous. The odds are with you.”

  “But what if the odds are against me, if I am unlucky? What if I die?”

  “Then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you made at least one son for the House of Lancaster.”

  “Mother, before God,” I say, my voice shaking with tears, “I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!”

  She shakes her head, smiling at me as if my sense of outrage is like a little girl shouting over her toys. “No, truly, my dear, there is nothing more for you,” she says. “So do your duty with an obedient heart. I will see you in January, at your wedding.”

  I ride back to Pembroke Castle in a surly silence, and none of the signs of the coming spring down the greening lanes give me any pleasure at all. I turn my head away from the wild daffodils that make the high meadows a blaze of silver and gold, and I am deaf to the insistent, joyous singing of the birds. The lapwing soaring blunt-winged over a plowed field and calling out his sharp whistle means nothing to me, for everything means nothing to me. The snipe diving downwards making a sound like a roll of drums does not call to me. My life will not be dedicated to God, will not be special in any way. I shall sign myself Margaret Stafford—I won’t even be duchess. I shall live like a hedge sparrow on a twig until the sparrowhawk kills me, and my death will be unnoticed and unmourned by any. My mother herself has told me that there is nothing in my life that is worth doing, and the best I can hope is to avoid an early death in childbirth.

  Jasper spurs on ahead as soon as he sees the high towers of Pembroke, and so greets me at the castle gates with my baby in his arms, beaming with joy. “He can smile!” he exclaims before the horses even come to a standstill. “He can smile. I saw it. I leaned over his cradle to pick him up, and he saw me, and he smiled. I am sure it was a smile. I did not think he would smile so early. But it was a smile for sure. Perhaps he will smile at you.”

  We both wait expectantly, looking into the dark blue eyes of the little baby. He is still strapped up as if ready for the coffin; only his eyes can move, he cannot even turn his head. He is swaddled into immobility.

  “Perhaps he will smile later,” Jasper says consolingly. “There! Did he then? No.”

  “It doesn’t matter, since I am to leave him within a year anyway, since I have to go and marry Sir Henry Stafford. Since I now have to give birth to Stafford boys, even if I die in the trying. Perhaps he has nothing to smile about; perhaps he knows he is to be an orphan.”

  Jasper turns with me towards the front door of the castle, walking beside me, my baby resting comfortably in his arms. “They will let you visit him,” he says consolingly.

  “But you are to keep him. I suppose you knew. I suppose you all planned this together. You, and my mother, and my father-in-law, and my old husband-to-be.”

  He glances down at my tearful face. “He is a Tudor,” he says carefully. “My brother’s son. The only heir to our name. You could choose no one better to care for him than me.”

  “You are not even his father,” I say irritably. “Why should he stay with you and not with me?”

  “Lady Sister, you are little more than a child yourself, and these are dangerous times.”

  I round on him and stamp my foot. “I am old enough to be married twice. I am old enough to be bedded without tenderness or consideration. I am old enough to face death in the confinement room and be told that my own mother—my own mother—has commanded them to save the child and not me! I think I am a woman now. I have a babe in arms, and I have been married and widowed and now betrothed again. I am like a draper’s parcel to be sent about like cloth and cut to the pattern that people wish. My mother told me that my father died by his own hand and that we are an unlucky family. I think I am a woman now! I am treated as a woman grown when it suits you all, you can hardly make me a child again!”

  He nods as if he is listening to me and considering what I have to say. “You have cause for complaint,” he says steadily. “But this is the way of the world, Lady Margaret; we cannot make an exception for you.”

  “But you should!” I exclaim. “This is what I have been saying since my childhood. You should make an exception for me. Our Lady speaks to me, the holy Joan appears to me, I am sent to be a light to you. I cannot be married to an ordinary man and sent away to God knows where again. I should be given a nunnery of my own and be an abbess! You should do this, Brother Jasper; you command Wales. You should give me a nunnery, I want to found an order!”

  He holds the baby close and turns away from me a little. I think he is moved to tears by my righteous anger, but then I see his face is flushed and his shoulders are shaking because he is laughing. “Oh, my lord,” he says. “Forgive me, Margaret, but oh, my lord. You are a child, a child. You are a baby like our Henry here, and I shall care for both of you.”

  “Nobody shall care for me,” I shout. “For you are all mistaken about me, and you are a fool to laugh at me. I am in the care of God, and I am not going to marry anyone! I am going to be an abbess.”

  He catches his breath, his face still bright with laughter. “An abbess. Certainly. And will you be dining with us tonight, Reverend Mother?”

  I scowl at him. “I shall be served in my rooms,” I say crossly. “I shall not dine with you. Possibly I shall never dine with you again. But you can tell Father William to come to me. I will have to confess trespassing against those who have trespassed against me.”

  “I will send him,” Jasper says kindly. “And I will
send the best of the dishes to your room. And tomorrow I hope you will meet me in the stable yard and I will teach you to ride on your own. A lady of your importance should have her own horse; she should ride a beautiful horse well. When you go back to England, I think you should go on your own fine horse.”

  I hesitate. “I cannot be tempted by vanity,” I warn him. “I am going to be an abbess, and nothing will divert me. You shall see. You will all see. You shall not treat me as a thing for trading and selling. I shall command my own life.”

  “Certainly,” he says pleasantly. “It is very wrong that you should feel we think of you like that, for I love and respect you, as I promised I would. I shall find you an expensive horse and you will look beautiful on his back and everyone will admire you, and it can all mean nothing to you at all.”

  I sleep in a dream of white-washed cloister walls and a great library, where illuminated books are chained to the desks and I can go every day and study. I dream of a tutor who will lead me through Greek and Latin and even Hebrew, and that I will read the Bible in the tongue which is closest to the angels, and I will know everything. In my dream, my hunger for learning and my desire to be special is quieted, soothed. I think that if I could be a scholar, I could live in peace. If I could wake every day to the discipline of the offices of the day, and spend my days in study, I think I would feel that I was living a life that was pleasing to God and to me. I would not care whether people thought I was special, if my life was truly special. It would not matter to me that people could see me as pious, if I could truly live as a woman scholar of piety. I want to be what I seem to be. I act as if I am specially holy, a special girl; but this is what I really want to be. I really do.

  In the morning, I wake and dress, but before I go for my breakfast I go to the nursery to see the baby. He is still in his cradle, but I can hear him cooing, little quiet noises like a duckling quacking to itself on a still pond. I lean over his cradle to see him, and he smiles. He does. There is an unmistakable recognition in his dark blue eyes, and the funny, gummy, triangular grin that makes him at once less like a pretty doll, and tremendously like a little person.