The Red Queen (8 page)

He shakes his head. “I am afraid not.”

A parcel—taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will—is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who. Nobody sees me for what I am: a young woman of great family with royal connections, a young woman of exceptional piety who deserves—surely to God!—some recognition. But no, having been shipped to Lamphey Castle in a litter, I now ride to Newport on a fat cob, seated behind a manservant, unable to see anything of the road ahead of me and glimpsing muddy fields and pale pasturelands only through the jogging ranks of the men-at-arms. They are armed with lances and cudgels and are wearing the badge of the Tudor crest at their collars. Jasper is leading the way on his warhorse, and he has warned them to be prepared for ambush from Herbert’s men, or trouble on the road from bands of thieves. Once we get closer to the sea there is also the danger of a marauding party of pirates. This is how I am protected. This is the country I live in. This is what a good king, a strong king, should prevent.

We ride under the portcullis of Greenfield House, and the gate slams shut behind us. We dismount in the courtyard before the house, and my mother comes out to greet me. I have not seen her
for almost two years, not since my wedding day, when she told me there was nothing to fear. Now as she comes towards me and I kneel for her blessing I realize that she will see from my face that I know she was lying to me that day, for I have faced the very fear of death itself, and learned that she was prepared to sacrifice me for a grandson. There was nothing to fear for her—so she was right about that. But there was much to fear for me.

“Margaret,” she says quietly. She puts her hand on my head for a blessing and then raises me up and kisses me on both cheeks. “You’ve grown! And you are looking well!”

I long for her to hold me and hug me and tell me that she has missed me, but that would be to wish for a different sort of mother, and then I would have been a different girl. Instead, she looks at me with cool approval and then turns as the door of the house opens and the duke comes out.

“Here is my daughter,” she says. “Lady Margaret Tudor. Margaret, this is your kinsman the Duke of Buckingham.”

I make a low curtsey. This is a duke most particular about his position; they say that he took his order of precedence to parliament to get a ruling on who should walk behind him. He raises me up and kisses me on both cheeks. “You are welcome,” he says. “But you must be cold and tired from your journey. Come inside.”

The house is furnished with a luxury that I had almost forgotten, having spent these years in exile at Lamphey and Pembroke. Thick tapestries warm the stone walls, and the wooden beams above are gilded and brightly painted. Everywhere the duke’s crest is picked out in new gold. The rushes on the floor are fresh and sweet so that every room is scented lightly with herbs and lavender, and in every great stone fireplace there are blazing logs and a lad going round with a basket to bring in more firewood. Even the firewood boy wears the duke’s livery; they say that he has a small army always dressed and armed at his command. The boy even
has boots. I think of the barefoot slovenliness of my husband’s home, and I feel a little better about this betrothal if it is going to take me into a house that is kept clean, with servants who are properly dressed.

The duke offers me a glass of small ale, which is mulled hot and sweet, to warm me from the chill of traveling. As I am sipping it, Jasper comes into the room with another older man, graying hair at his temples, lines in his face; he must be forty if he is a day. I look to Jasper to introduce this stranger, and when I see his grave face I realize. With a little gasp of shock I understand that this old man is Henry Stafford, and that I am before my new husband. He is not a boy of my age like John de la Pole, my first betrothed. He is not a young man like Edmund—and God knows he was too old and too hard for me. No, this time they have picked out a man old enough to be my father, old enough to be my grandfather, my ancestor. He is forty years old, fifty years old, probably sixty. I realize I am staring, and I quite fail to curtsey until my mother says sharply, “Margaret!” and I mumble, “Excuse me,” and sink down in a gesture of humility, to yet another man, who will make me live with him wherever he chooses, and will make another heir to the Lancaster line on me, whether I like it or not.

I see that Jasper is scowling down at his boots, but he raises his head to greet my mother with his usual courtesy and bows to the duke.

“I see you have kept my daughter safe through these most troubled times,” my mother says to him.

“I will keep the whole principality safe if I can,” he replies. “At last we seem to be gaining ground. I have recaptured the castles that the York party took, and William Herbert is on the run, in hiding. If he stays within Wales, I will catch him. We Tudors are well loved here; someone will betray him to me.”

“And then?” the Duke of Buckingham asks him. “What then?”

Jasper shrugs. He knows it is not a question about the fate of William Herbert, nor even of Wales. It is the question that every Englishman asks himself these days: What then? How can we go on with a court so unpopular it dare not even live in London? How can we go on with a king who slips away into dreams without warning, and leaves a queen hated by so many? How can we face the future when their heir is just one little weak boy? How can we be safe when the kingdom slides into the keeping of our enemies: the House of York?

“I have tried to reason with Richard of York, and his advisor the Earl of Warwick,” Jasper says. “You know how hard I have tried to persuade them to work with the queen. I have talked and talked with the queen. But she is terrified of them and fearful that they will attack her and her son at the next illness of the king. And in their turn, they fear that she will destroy them when the king is well enough to do her bidding. I can’t see a resolution.”

“If they could be sent from the country?” Buckingham suggests. “One of them to Calais? Perhaps we could send York to Dublin?”

Jasper shrugs. “I wouldn’t sleep easy in my bed at night knowing that they were off our coasts with their own armies,” he says. “From Calais they command the narrow seas; no southern port would be safe. From Dublin, Richard of York could raise an army and come against us. And the Irish love York like a king already.”

“Perhaps the king will stay well this time,” my mother suggests hopefully.

I realize how gravely ill His Grace has become from the awkward silence that greets this remark. “Perhaps,” the duke says.

They waste no time on courtship between Henry Stafford and me. They waste no time on giving us even a moment to meet. Why should they? This is a matter for the lawyers and the officers of the
household who manage the wealth. It would not matter if Henry Stafford and I hated each other on sight. It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if I still want to be a nun. Nobody cares what I think at all. They treat me like an ordinary young woman, bred for wedding and bedding, and since they do not ask me what I think, nor observe what I feel, there is nothing that gives them pause at all.

They draw up the contracts, and we sign them. We go to the chapel, and before witnesses and before the priest we swear to marry each other in January so that I have a year to mourn my first marriage, which brought me so little joy and ended so soon. I will be fourteen years old, and he will be not exactly forty, but still an old man to me: thirty-three years old.

After the betrothal we go back to the house, and my mother and I sit in the solar, where there is a fire burning, with our ladies around us, listening to the musicians play. I draw my stool a little closer to her so that we can speak privately for once.

“Do you remember what you said before I was married to Edmund Tudor?” I ask her.

She shakes her head and glances away as if she would avoid this conversation. I am very sure she does not want to be reproached for telling me there was nothing to fear, when she instructed my own lady governess to let me die. “No, I don’t remember,” she says quickly. “It feels like years ago.”

“You said that I could not take the coward’s way out, my father’s way out.”

She flinches from me even naming the man who has been buried in silence for so long. “Did I?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine what I was thinking of.”

“So what did he do?”

She turns away with a false laugh. “Have you waited all this time to ask me to explain a silly thing I said at the church door?”

“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.