The Red Queen (22 page)

I am speechless with rage at dinner that night; but my husband and Lord Herbert talk of the new king, of the likelihood of an invasion from France, of the danger of a Scots army marching down on England, as if these were our enemies and not our saviors. I find myself hating my husband for his easy good manners, and I keep my eyes on my plate, and I speak only in reply to a direct question. Indeed, Lord Herbert says almost nothing to me until I rise from the table to withdraw, and then he glances at my husband and says: “I would speak with both of you about young Henry Tudor. Shall we talk in the solar after dinner?”

“Of course,” my husband says, answering for me and so preventing a refusal. “I am sure Lady Margaret will have some good wine and fruit waiting for us when we join her there.”

I bow my head and leave them to their drink and their amiable chat, and then wait in my chair by the fireside. I don’t have to worry alone for long. The two of them come into the room, now talking about the hunting, and my husband is praising the game that can be hunted near the castle, as if it had not been preserved and guarded
by Jasper, as if it were not the inheritance of my son and this man were not an interloper, a poacher if he takes our game.

“I’ll be brief,” Lord Herbert says, putting himself before the fire and warming his backside as if the logs were his to burn. “I am to have custody of the boy Henry and he will live with me. The king will confirm that I am to be his guardian after Christmas.”

My head flies up, but my husband does not even look surprised.

“You will live here?” he asks, as if this is all that matters.

“Raglan,” Sir William says shortly. “It’s a better building, and my wife likes it. Henry will be brought up with our children with an education befitting his station. You will be welcome to visit him any time you wish.”

“That’s gracious,” my husband says when I am still silent. “I am sure Lady Margaret is grateful.” His admonitory look towards me prompts me to say something grateful, but I cannot.

“He should stay in my keeping,” I say flatly.

Lord Herbert shakes his head. “That would never have been allowed, my lady. Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for him and take him as his ward. In many ways you are lucky it is me. I don’t expect you to see it right now, but if a Neville had taken him as their ward, he would have had to go far away among strangers. With me, he can stay in Wales, he can keep his own servants about him, he can be in the country that he knows. My wife is a tenderhearted woman; he will be brought up with my children. He could have done a lot worse.”

“He is my son!” I exclaim. “He is a Lancaster boy, he is heir to—”

“We’re grateful,” my husband says, silencing me.

Lord Herbert looks at me. “Your son’s family connections are a mixed blessing, my lady,” he says. “I wouldn’t boast of them overmuch if I were you. His cousin, the former king, is in exile and plotting with the enemies of our country. His guardian and the head of his house, Jasper Tudor, is in exile with a price on his head as a
named traitor. His grandfather was beheaded for treason. I myself captured his father, and your own father’s end was less than glorious. I would be glad that he is to be raised in a loyal York household if I were you.”

“She is grateful,” my husband says again. He steps across to me and holds out a peremptory hand. I have to rise to my feet and hold hands with him as if we were in agreement. “We will tell Henry when he wakes in the morning, and we will go back to our own house in England, as soon as the guards and the horses can be ready.”

“Stay,” says Sir William pleasantly. “Stay till the boy is accustomed, stay as long as you wish. We can hunt some of those deer that Jasper has taken such trouble to preserve.” He laughs, and my husband, the turncoat, laughs with him.

We ride back to our house in Lincolnshire in stony silence, and when we reach home I devote myself to prayer and to my studies. My husband, after a few quizzical remarks that earn him no reply, after asking me if I would like to take a trip to London with him—as if I would go to the city which has celebrated shame!—turns his attention to running our great estates and to his trade in London. The new king’s determination to keep the peace means more work for local gentry, and my husband finds that he is commanded to root out self-serving and corrupt local officers who have thrived under the lackadaisical rule of King Henry. The law courts now have to be open to give justice to all, and not just to those who can bribe the court officers. The new King Edward summons a Parliament and tells them that it is his determination to live of his own and not burden the country with heavy taxation. He commands that the roads be made safe and that private armies be reduced. He orders that brigands and criminals be brought to justice and that the casual
violence of the alehouse and the highway be controlled. Everyone welcomes these changes and foresees a time of greater prosperity and peace for England, with this glorious son of York guiding it into the ways of peace. Everyone is delighted with the reforms and the improvements. Everyone seems to be in love with the handsome son of York. Everyone but me.

This King Edward is a young man of nineteen, just a year older than me, surviving the death of his father as I have done, dreaming of greatness as I do—and yet he has put himself at the head of his house’s army and led them to the throne of England, while I have done nothing. It is he who has been a Joan of Arc for England, not me. I cannot even hold my son in my own keeping. This boy, this Edward that they call the sweet rose of England, the fair herb of England, the white flower, is fabled to be handsome and brave and strong—and I am nothing. He is adored by women; they sing his praises, his looks, and his charms. I cannot even be seen at his court. I am known to nobody. I am a flower that wastes its sweetness on the desert air, indeed. He has never even seen me. No one has written a single, solitary ballad about me; no one has drawn my likeness. I am wife to a man of no ambition, who will not ride out to war until he is forced to go. I am mother to a son in my enemy’s keeping, and I am the distant love of a defeated man in exile. I spend my days—which get shorter all the time as the evenings draw in on this most miserable year—on my knees, and I pray to God to let this dark night pass, to let this cold winter pass, and to throw down the House of York and let the House of Lancaster come home.

It is not one dark winter, it is nearly ten winters before God releases me and my house from the misery of defeat in our days and exile in our own country. For nine long years I live with a husband with whom I share nothing but our new house at Woking in the country. House, land, and interest we share, and yet I am lonely, longing for my son, raised by my enemy whom I have to pretend is my friend. Together, Stafford and I conceive no child, which I think is the fault of the midwives at the birth of my son Henry, and I have to endure my husband’s generous acceptance that I will not give him an heir. He does not reproach me, and I have to bear his kindness as best I can. We both have to endure the power of the Yorks, who wear the ermine collar of monarchy as if they were born to it. Edward, the young king, marries a nobody in the first years of his reign, and most people think she enchanted him by witchcraft with the help of her witch mother Jacquetta, the great friend of our queen, who has turned her coat and now rules the York court. My husband’s nephew, the little duke Henry Stafford, is snatched up by the greedy siren Elizabeth, who calls herself queen. She takes him from us, his family, and betrothes him to her own sister, Katherine Woodville, a girl born and bred only to raise hens in Northampton, and so the Woodville girl becomes the new duchess and head of our house.
My husband does not protest against this kidnap of our boy; he says it is part of the new world, and we have to become accustomed. But I do not. I cannot. I will never become accustomed.

Once a year I visit my boy in the ostentatious luxury of the Herbert household and see him grow taller and stronger; see him at ease in among the Yorks, beloved of Anne Devereux, the wife of Black Herbert; see him affectionate and comfortable with their son William, his dearest friend, his playmate, and his companion in his studies; and gentle with their daughter Maud, who clearly they have picked out for him as a wife, without a word to me.

Every year I visit faithfully and speak to him of his uncle Jasper in exile, and of his cousin the king imprisoned in the Tower of London, and he listens, his brown head inclined to me, his brown eyes smiling and obedient. He listens for as long as I speak, politely attentive, never disagreeing, never questioning. But I cannot tell if he truly understands even one word of my earnest sermon: that he must hold himself in waiting, that he is to know that he is a boy chosen for greatness, that I, his mother, heiress to the Beauforts and to the House of Lancaster, nearly died in giving birth to him, that the two of us were saved by God for a great purpose, that he was not born to be a boy glad of the affection of such as William Herbert. I do not want a girl like Maud Herbert as my daughter-in-law.

I tell him he must live with them like a spy; he must live with them like an enemy in their camp. He must speak politely but wait for his revenge. He must bend the knee to them but dream of the sword. But he will not. He cannot. He lives with them like an openhearted boy of five, then six, then seven; he lives with them until he is thirteen; he grows into a young man under their care, not mine. He is a boy of their making, not mine. He is like a beloved son to them. He is not a son to me, and I will never forgive them for this.

For nearly nine years I whisper poison in his little ear against the guardian that he trusts, and against his guardian’s wife that he
loves. I can see him flourishing in their care, I can see him growing under their tuition. They hire masters of swordsmanship, of French, of mathematics, of rhetoric for him. They spare no fee that would teach him skills or encourage him to learn. They give him the education of their own son; the two boys study side by side as equals. I have no cause to complain. But I stifle a silent howl of resentment and anger that I can never release: that this is my boy, that this is an heir to the throne of England, that this is a boy of Lancaster—what in the name of God is he doing, flourishing and happy, in a House of York?

I know the answer to this. I know just what he is doing in one of the loyal houses of York. He is growing into a Yorkist. He loves the luxury and comfort of Raglan Castle; I swear he would prefer it to the holy plainness of my new home at Woking, if he had ever been allowed to see my home. He warms to the gentle piety of Anne Devereux; my demand that he know every collect of the day and honor every saint’s day is too much for him, I know it is. He admires the courage and dash of William Herbert, and while he loves Jasper still, and writes to tell him so, boyish letters filled with boasting and affection, he is learning to admire his uncle’s enemy and adopt him as a very model of a chivalrous, honorable knight and landlord.

And worst of all for me, he thinks of me as a woman who cannot reconcile herself to defeat; I know he thinks this. He thinks I am a woman who saw my king driven from his throne, and my husband killed and my brother-in-law run away, and he thinks that it is disappointment and failure that has made me seek solace in religion. He thinks I am a woman seeking consolation in God for the failure of her life. Nothing I can do can convince him that my life in God is my power and glory. Nothing I can do can convince him that I do not see our cause as lost, I don’t see myself as defeated, I don’t believe, not even now, that York will hold the throne. I think we will return, I think we will win. I can say this to him, I can say it over and
over again; but I have no evidence to support my conviction, and the embarrassed smile, and the way he bows his head to me and murmurs, “Lady Mother, I am sure you are right,” tells me, as clearly as if he loudly contradicted me, that he thinks I am wrong and mistaken and—worse than that—irrelevant.

I am the woman who gave him birth, but I lived with him for only the first year of his life. Now he sees me once a year, and rarely more, and I spoil my time with him by trying to persuade him to be faithful to a cause that was lost nearly ten years ago. No wonder he does not cleave to me. Every year I must seem more of a fool.