The Queen of Last Hopes (39 page)

Authors: Susan Higginbotham

Henry died more than eleven years ago. He now sleeps at Chertsey; my son sleeps at Tewkesbury. I grow weaker every day and shall soon join them in death. The thought makes me smile.

I spent over four more years in England after Henry and Edward died. My time in the Tower was short: I was moved first to Windsor and then to Wallingford, where the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who had mothered me when I came as a seasick fifteen-year-old to England, could visit me from time to time and mother me once more.

Then in 1475, Edward mounted a great invasion of France. With Burgundy’s aid (the quarrel of 1471 having been mended for now), he would win back all that my Henry had lost; the fall of Normandy, of Gascony, would soon be nothing more than a bad memory. But Burgundy proved an unenthusiastic ally, and in the end my cousin Louis did not have to raise a finger against Edward: only to give him and his leading nobles handsome pensions. There was yet another part to the bargain: for fifty thousand crowns, I was ransomed. So in January 1476, I sailed from England for the very last time, as “Margaret, lately called queen.”

At least, I thought as I gazed back at the land I’d first entered while borne in my dear Suffolk’s arms, I’d left England standing upright.

***

There was a rub to Louis’s generosity, of course; I’d never thought it would be otherwise. In repayment for his ransoming me, and in repayment for the costs he had incurred in helping me to recover my husband’s throne—the small matter that helping me had furthered his own ambitions seemed to have slipped my cousin’s mind—I was required to renounce my rights of inheritance to my father’s dominions. It suited me; I had no heir of my body, only the memory of my beautiful boy. So I took the pension that Louis offered me—I found it amusing that both I and King Edward were his pensioners now—and settled in my father’s manor at Reculée. I seldom saw my aged father himself. Having himself suffered somewhat from Louis’s sharp dealing, he had elected to spend his declining years in comfort at Provence. Though I was welcome at his court, I, clad in the black I had worn since 1471, a moth in a house of butterflies, was ill suited to its gaiety.

I had been at Reculée for about four years when my father died, which thanks to the renunciation Louis had forced me to sign left me with no home. Father in a burst of practicality had arranged, however, for me to go to the home of François de la Vignole, a family friend, and so I live now as a guest at his chateau at Dampierre.

Who of us is left from those bloody days in England? My cousin Marie returned to France after Tewkesbury and remarried, but my dear Katherine Vaux stayed by my side; she remains with me today, and if there is a hand other than hers that I am holding as I die, I shall be sorely surprised.

The Duke of Exeter was not killed at Barnet, as we had thought: he lay on the field, stripped and left for dead, until a servant found him and carried him off to a surgeon, then to sanctuary at Westminster. But Edward removed him from sanctuary and imprisoned him in the Tower. He was no longer the wild young man of my own youth: during the short time he and I were both prisoners there, Sir John would allow him to visit me and play a game of chess or cards. He was freed to join the great invasion of 1475, but drowned on the anticlimactic voyage back. Some say he fell overboard after quarreling with some drunken soldiers; others say that King Edward, always eager to lose one of the House of Lancaster, had him pushed.

The Duke of Clarence, the sorry turncoat, never ceased to plot against Edward, who solved his Clarence problems in 1478 by locking him in the Tower, then having him privately executed. My daughter-in-law Anne married the Duke of Gloucester, by all accounts a loyal and dutiful brother, rewarded as such by King Edward. I wonder if Anne ever thinks of my own Edward. She has a son by that name; he was named for the king, of course, but I like to think that he might have been named for a Prince of Wales too.

I like to think a lot of things; it is my main occupation these days. Yet I do not think so much of the past but of the future: the day that I shall see my dear ones in Paradise.

***

I am poor, I suppose, but a queen with no court needs very, very little. Yet as little as I have to leave, Louis keeps himself very well informed about my state of health. Once this would have infuriated me; now, as I prepare to leave behind the folly of this world, it rather amuses me.

My last will is ready. It is short: I ask Louis to pay any debts that the sale of my few goods is insufficient to pay, and I ask to be buried at the cathedral at Angers where my mother and my father already lie. I make no provision for a tomb, as this would no doubt strain Louis’s already meager generosity to the breaking point.

There is no tomb for my husband either, no effigy of him in his royal robes. His grave is indicated only by a simple marker, but that does not stop the people from flocking to Chertsey Abbey to be healed of their afflictions, for many now regard my Henry as a saint. Edward does his best to discourage these visits, they say, but the visitors come nonetheless. It must give Henry great pleasure to have them all, more pleasure, probably, than he ever had from his crown. “You will visit Henry when you go back to England?” I ask Katherine as she straightens my pillow.

“You know I will.”

“I know; I ask you at least once a day. And you will visit my Edward when you visit your William at Tewkesbury.”

“Yes, my dear.”

“He would be nine-and-twenty come this October.” I finger the rosary I keep in my hand at nearly all times, then take Katherine’s hand. “And your William would be five and forty. Sometimes I forget your own loss when I dwell upon my own, Katherine. Forgive me for that.”

“I do, my dear. Come. I can tell from your face that you are in great pain today. Shall I give you some poppy juice?”

“No. Let us do some letters. That distracts me.”

For the past few days, Katherine and I have been busy sorting the papers I have kept over the years: I reading over them one last time, Katherine then feeding them into the fire that burns low even on this August day, for I chill easily. They are harmless mementoes—the poem dear Suffolk gave to me, an old lesson of my son’s, a prayer composed by my husband, an inquiry from my father about whether one of his dwarfs might cheer me up in my exile—but I do not want Louis’s agents putting their inquisitive hands upon them, the little treasures of a bereaved and dying woman. Katherine picks up one from the pile and smiles. “Ah. I have always wondered if you kept this.”

I unfold it and feel a pang as I stare at Hal’s letter to me. With his own hand, he had written this and sprinkled the sand on the ink when it was finished.
I shall not stray again, but shall live and, if God wills it, die the king’s loyal subject.
Though I have trained myself to think of Hal only in the most chaste and correct manner imaginable, I cannot forbear from giving the letter a kiss before I hand it to Katherine. I shake my head as the flames consume the letter. “My Beauforts were brave men.” I think of Hal abandoning the comforts of Chirk Castle to face almost certain death in service of our cause. “And he was the bravest of them all.”

We spend an hour or so reading and burning, a task which in my state of health exhausts me so that I soon drift off. When I awake, the sun is low in the sky. “A new letter arrived while you were asleep,” Katherine says, coming to my bedside.

“From whom? Louis? If so, tell him I am not quite dead yet.” Already he has written to my friend Jeanne Chabot, Madame de Montsoreau, demanding that she give him, my heir, the dogs I have sent to her in gratitude to the kindnesses she has shown me during my illness. She in turn has written to inform me that she had no choice but to comply, but she has secretly kept one bitch puppy, named Margaret, which Jeanne hopes will breed. At least one Margaret may have descendants.

I manage a snicker. “Perhaps we can put some paint on my face and parade me in my chariot around town as having made a recovery? That will no doubt cast Louis into great gloom for a day or so.”

“The letter is not from him. It is from the Earl of Pembroke.”

Having escaped from Edward just in time after the debacle of 1471, Henry’s half brother, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, is now in exile at the court of Brittany. He sends me his respects from time to time, though it has been a long time since I have received one of his missives. Pembroke was accompanied in his exile by his nephew, Henry Tudor, the son of that Margaret Beaufort who had given birth at such an early age. I still think of him as a boy, although he must now be well into his twenties. “Well, then, let me read it.”

Katherine hands me the letter. “It is addressed to the Queen of England.”

Madam, I have heard that you are very ill, perhaps even dying.

I hope the reports are wrong; I pray that they are. But if they are correct, I want your highness to know that the cause of the House of Lancaster, for which you fought so long and so hard, will remain alive in my heart, and in that of my nephew Henry and his mother, until the end of our days. You will never be forgotten, madam.

Your true subject and liege man,

Pembroke.

I smile at this masterpiece of wistful thinking. Its sentiments about me are kind, but what of the cause of the House of Lancaster? Jasper and his nephew are near-penniless exiles. The Earl of Oxford, having waged a nearly one-man war against the House of York since escaping from Barnet, has been captured at last and is now a prisoner, held fast in dreary Hammes Castle near Calais. It will take a miracle to restore Lancastrian rule to England—and a rule by whom?

Yet as I approach death, I am in a state of mind to remember that miracles do happen, and not only at my husband’s grave. My uncle Charles’s throne had been saved for him by a peasant girl, after all. Who knows what the Lord can do when so inclined? “Thank him for his good wishes. Now read to me a while, so I can sleep again.”

“From your Book of Hours?”

“No. My father’s
Book of the Love-Smitten Heart
. Let me look at it first.”

Katherine obeys. I leaf through the book, looking for the words that Jasper Tudor’s letter has so oddly brought to mind. “Read from here,” I command.

During his last years, my aged father had completed a manuscript he had been working on for two decades, a tale of a knight named Heart who goes in quest of Sweet Mercy. He never sent it to me during his lifetime, as I had let it be known that I had no patience with such tales, but after my father’s death in 1480, my stepmother had sent an illuminated copy to me. Slowly turning the pages out of curiosity, I had been startled to find a picture of a woman, past her youth but still pretty, with dark blond hair and a crown on her head. There was no better likeness of me, or at least of me when I had been twenty years younger.

Her name was Lady Hope. Tears streaming down my face, I had read the words she speaks to the hero:

You shall have sorrows in profusion

So often it will be unjust,

For Love by custom so apportions

His rewards and afflictions

Whether deserved or not:

He cares little who wins or loses.

Into the Forest of Long Awaiting

You shall enter, so I say, and

Shall drink from the Fountain of Fortune,

Which is not the same for all men.

Had Father had me in mind when he wrote those words? I will never know, but Jasper Tudor’s letter has brought them home to me. I settle back against my pillow, listening to Katherine read:

But guard you well, I pray you,

From the Path of Madness,

For by this way you would arrive

At the manor wherein dwells Despair.

If, by chance, you should enter within,

I shall tell you what you should do:

Keep me then in memory,

And this will grant victory to you,

And you can soon retrace your road

To the Path of Joyful Thought.

Through which you shall find Mercy.

But your heart shall then be overcast,