The Red Queen (32 page)

Stanley takes to the king’s rooms, where men gather in corners to mutter their fears that Edward, who has been invincible for all his life, may finally have run out of luck. I spend my time in the queen’s rooms, waiting for her to come in, to change her headdress and comb her hair. I watch her blank face in the mirror as she lets the maid pin up her hair any way she chooses. I see her white lips moving constantly in prayer. If she were the wife of any other man, I would pray for her too from pity. Elizabeth is in agony of fear at losing the man she loves and the one who has stood above us all, unquestionably the greatest man in England.

“What does she say?” my husband asks me as we meet at dinner in the great hall, as subdued as if a funeral pall were laid over us already.

“Nothing,” I reply. “She says nothing. She is dumbstruck at the thought of losing him. I am certain he is sinking.”

That afternoon the Privy Council is called to the king’s bedside. We women wait in the great presence chamber, outside the privy chambers, desperate for news. My husband comes out after an hour, grim-faced.

“He swore us to an alliance over his bed,” he says. “Hastings and the queen: the best friend and the wife. Begged us to work together for the safety of his son. Named his son Edward as the next king, joined the hands of William Hastings and the queen over his bed. Said we should serve under his brother Richard as regent till the
boy is of age. Then the priest came in to give him the last rites. He will be dead by nightfall.”

“Did you swear fealty?”

His crooked smile tells me that it meant nothing. “God, yes. We all swore. We all swore to work peaceably together, swore to friendship unending, so I should think the queen is arming now and sending for her son to come at once from his castle in Wales with as many men as he can muster, armed for war. I should think Hastings is sending for Richard, warning him against the Riverses, calling on him to bring in the men of York. The court will fall apart. Nobody can stand the ascendancy of the Riverses. They are certain to rule England through their boy. It will be Margaret of Anjou all over again, a court run by the distaff. Everyone will be calling on Richard to stop her. You and I must divide and work. I shall write to Richard and pledge fealty to him, while you assure the queen of our loyalty to her and to her family, the Riverses.”

“A foot in each camp at once,” I whisper. It is Stanley’s way. This is why I married him; this is the very moment that I married him for.

“My guess is that Richard will hope to rule England till Prince Edward is of age,” he says. “And then rule England through the boy if he can dominate him. He will be another Warwick. A Kingmaker.”

“Or will he be a rival king?” I breathe, thinking as always of my own boy.

“A rival king,” he agrees. “Duke Richard is a Plantagenet of York, already of age, whose claim to the throne is unquestionable, who does not need a regency nor an alliance of the lords to rule for him. Most people would think him a safer choice for king than an untried boy. Some will see him as the next heir. You must send a messenger to Jasper at once and tell him to keep Henry in safety till we know what will happen next. They cannot come to England till we know who will claim the throne.”

He is about to go, but I put a hand on his arm. “And what do you think will happen next?”

His eyes do not meet mine; he looks away. “I think the queen and Duke Richard will fight like dogs over the bone that is the little prince,” he says. “I think they will tear him apart.”

Only four weeks after that hurried conversation I write to Jasper with extraordinary news.

My husband Lord Stanley is now Duke Richard’s trusted advisor, as he was once King Edward’s. This is as it should be; he serves the king, and Richard is now the lord protector of the king for these short weeks before the boy Edward is crowned. Then Richard must give up everything, throne and power, and the boy will rule as King of England. We will see then who can survive the reign of a child of the Rivers family with the greatest crown in the world on his head, utterly commanded by his mother: a faithless witch in hiding. There are few men who will trust the boy, and nobody will trust his mother.

But anyway, what son of the House of York could ever give up power? What child of the House of York could ever bring himself to hand over the throne? Richard surely will not hand the crown and scepter to the son of a woman who hates him? But whatever doubts we feel, we are all measured for our coronation robes, and they are building the walkway at Westminster Abbey for the royal procession—the widowed Queen Elizabeth must hear the hammering and sawing above her, as she skulks in her sanctuary in the low chambers beside the abbey. The Privy Council went to her in form and demanded that she send her nine-year-old son Richard to join his twelve-year-old brother in the Tower. She could not refuse, and there was no reason for her to refuse, except her own hatred
of Duke Richard, and so she had to give way. Now the two royal boys wait in the royal apartments for the coronation day.

I am responsible for the wardrobe for the coronation, and I meet with the wardrobe mistress and her maids to see what robes will be provided for the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, the princesses, and the other ladies of court. We must prepare the gowns assuming that the queen will come out of sanctuary for the coronation, and that she will want to be dressed exquisitely as usual. We are supervising the brushing of the queen’s ermine robe by the maid of the wardrobe and watching the seamstress sew on a mother-of-pearl button, when the wardrobe mistress remarks that the Duchess of Gloucester, Anne Neville, Richard’s wife, has not ordered her gown from the wardrobe.

“Her command must have gone astray,” I observe. “For she cannot have what she needs to wear for a coronation at her castle at Sheriff Hutton. And she cannot be ordering something to be made—it will never be ready in time.”

She shrugs as she pulls out a robe trimmed with velvet, shakes off the linen cover, and spreads it out for me to see. “I don’t know. But I have no order for a gown from her. What should I do?”

“Prepare one for her, in her size,” I say, as if I am not much interested, and I turn the talk to something else.

I hurry home and seek out my husband. He is writing out the warrants that will summon every sheriff in England to London to see the young king crowned. “I am busy. What is it?” he asks rudely as I open the door.

“Anne Neville has not ordered a gown for the coronation. What d’you think of that?”

He thinks as I did, as swiftly as I did. He puts down his pen and beckons me in. I close the door behind me, with a little thrill of joy at conspiring with him. “She never acts on her own account. Her husband must have ordered her not to come,” he says. “Why would he do that?”

I don’t answer. I know he will be thinking fast.

“She has no gown, so she cannot be coming to the coronation. He will have told her not to come for he must have decided that there will be no coronation,” he says quietly. “And all this”—he gestures at the piles of paper—“all this is just to keep us busy and to fool us into thinking that the coronation will happen.”

“Perhaps he has warned her not to come because he thinks London may riot. Perhaps he wants her safe at home.”

“Who would riot? Everyone wants the York prince crowned. There is only one person who would prevent him becoming king, just as there is only one person who would benefit.”

“Duke Richard of Gloucester himself?”

My husband nods. “What can we do with this precious information? How shall we use it?”

“I’ll tell the dowager queen,” I decide. “If she is going to muster her forces, she should do it now. She had better get her sons away from Richard’s keeping. And if I can persuade the York queen to fight the York regent, then there is a chance for Lancaster.”

“Tell her the Duke of Buckingham might be fit for turning,” he says quietly, as I am halfway out of the door. I stop at once. “Stafford?” I repeat incredulously. This is my second husband’s nephew—the little boy who inherited the title when his grandfather died, who was forced into marriage with the queen’s sister. He has hated the Rivers family ever since they forced him to marry into them. He cannot abide them. So he was first to back Richard; he was first to his side. He was there when Richard arrested Anthony Rivers. I know he will have loved the humiliation of the man he was forced to call brother-in-law. “But Henry Stafford cannot bear the queen. He hates her, and he hates her sister, his wife Katherine. I know it. I remember when they married him. He would never turn against Richard in their favor.”

“He has his own ambitions,” my husband remarks darkly. “He has royal blood in his line. He will be thinking that if the throne can
be taken from Prince Edward, then it can be taken from Richard too. He would join with the queen, pretending to defend her son, and then take the throne for himself when they have victory.”

I think quickly. The Stafford family, with the exception of my weakly modest husband Henry, has always been extreme in its pride. Stafford backed Richard from spite against the Riverses; now he might indeed stake his own claim. “I’ll tell the queen if you wish,” I say. “But I would think him utterly untrustworthy. She will be a fool to take him as an ally.”

My husband smiles, more like a wolf than the fox they call him. “She has not many friends to choose from,” he says. “I would think she will be glad of him.”

A week after this, at dawn, my husband thumps his fist on my bedroom door and comes in as my maid screams and jumps up from her bed. “Leave us,” he says brusquely to her, and she scuttles from the room as I sit up in bed and draw my robe around me.