The Red Queen (5 page)

Nothing in the world could compensate me for this loss. I was raised to know myself as the daughter of a great man and an heir of the royal family, but my own private glory was that I knew that God spoke to me, directly to me, and that He sent me the vision of Joan the Maid. He sent me an angel in the guise of a beggar to tell me all about her. He appointed William de la Pole as my guardian so that he—having seen Joan—would recognize the same holiness in me. But then God, for some reason, forgot all about this sensible plan and let me fall into the keeping of a husband who takes no interest in my holiness and who, by roughly consummating the marriage vows, takes my virginity and visions in one awful night. Why I should be chosen by God and then neglected by Him, I cannot understand. It is not for me to question the will of God, but I have to wonder: Why did He choose me in the first place if it was just to leave me here, abandoned in Wales? If He were not God, then one would think it very badly planned. It is not as if there is anything I can do here, and for sure, nobody sees me as a living light. It is even worse than Bletsoe, where at least people complained that I was excessively holy. Here they don’t even notice, and I am afraid that I am hidden under a bushel and there is nothing I can do to reveal myself as a beacon for the world.

My husband is handsome and brave, I suppose. I hardly see him or his brother during the day, as they are constantly riding out to keep the king’s peace against dozens of local uprisings. Edmund is always in the lead; Jasper, his brother, at his shoulder like a shadow. They even walk at the same pace—Edmund striding forwards, Jasper just behind, in step. They are only a year apart in age. I thought them twins when I first saw them together. They have the same unfortunate ginger hair and long thin noses; they both stand tall and lean now, but I think they will run to fat in later life, which must be
quite soon. When they talk, they can finish each other’s sentences and they laugh all the time at private jokes. They hardly ever speak to me, and they never tell me what is supposed to be so funny. They are utterly fascinated by weapons and can spend the entire evening talking about the stringing of a bow. I cannot see the use of either of them in God’s will.

The castle is in a constant state of alert because warring parties and bands of armed and disaffected soldiers come by all the time and raid the nearby villages. Just as my mother feared when the king first fell into his trance, there is unrest everywhere. Worse here than anywhere else, of course, since it is half savage already. And it made no real difference when the king recovered, though the common people were told to rejoice, for now he has fallen ill again, and some people are saying that this is how it will always be: we will live with a king who cannot be relied on to stay awake. This is obviously a disadvantage. Even I can see that.

Men are taking arms against the king’s rule, first complaining of the taxes raised to fight the unending French wars, and now complaining that the wars are over but we have lost everything we won under the king’s braver father and grandfather. Everyone hates the queen, who is French herself, of course, and everyone whispers that the king is under the cat’s-paw in this marriage, and that a French woman rules the country and that it would be better if we were ruled by the Duke of York.

Everyone who has a grievance against his neighbor takes this chance to pull down his fences or poach his game, or steal his timber, and then there is a fight and Edmund has to go out and make rough-and-ready justice. The roads are dangerous to travel because of roaming companies of soldiers that were formed in France and are now in the habit of forage and kidnap. When I ride out behind a servant into the little village that clusters around the walls of the castle, I have to take an armed guard with me. I see the white faces and hollow eyes of hunger, and nobody smiles at me, though you
would think they would be glad that the new lady of the palace is taking an interest. For who will intercede for them on earth and in heaven if not I? But I can’t understand what they say to me as they all speak Welsh, and if they come too close, the servants lower their pikes and order them back. Clearly, I am not a light for the common people in the village, any more than I am in the palace. I am twelve—if people cannot see that I am a light in a dark world now, when are they going to see it? But how will anyone see anything here in miserable Wales, where they can see nothing for the mud?

Edmund’s brother Jasper is supposed to live a few miles away at Pembroke Castle, but he is rarely there. He is either at the royal court, trying to hold together the irritable accord between the York family and the king, in the interests of the peace of England, or he is with us. Whether he is riding out to visit the king, or coming home, his face grave with worry that the king has slipped into his trance again, he always manages to find a road that passes by Lamphey and to come for his dinner.

At dinner, my husband Edmund talks only to his brother Jasper. Neither of them say so much as one word to me, but I have to listen to the two of them worrying that Richard, Duke of York, will make a claim on the throne on his own account. He is advised by Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and these two, Warwick and York, are men of too vast an ambition to obey a sleeping king. There are many who say that the country cannot even be safe in the hands of a regent, and if the king does not wake, then England cannot survive the dozen years before his son is old enough to rule. Someone will have to take the throne; we cannot be governed by a sleeping king and a baby.

“We can’t endure another long regency; we have to have a king,” Jasper says. “I wish to God you had married and bedded her years ago. At least we would be ahead of the game now.”

I flush and look down at my plate, heaped with overcooked and unrecognizable bits of game. They hunt better than they farm in
Wales, and every meal brings some skinny bird or beast to the table in butchered portions. I long for fast days when we have only fish, and I impose extra fast days on myself to escape the sticky mess of dinner. Everyone stabs what they want with their dagger from a common plate, and sops up the gravy with a hunk of bread. They wipe their hands on their breeches, and their mouths on their coat cuffs. Even at the high table we are served our meat on trenchers of bread that are eaten up at the end of the meal. There are no plates laid on the table. Napkins are obviously too French; they count it a patriotic duty to wipe their mouths on their sleeves, and they all bring their own spoons as if they were heirlooms, tucked inside their boots.

I take a little piece of meat and nibble at it. The smell of grease turns my stomach. Now they are talking, in front of me as if I were deaf, of my fertility and the possibility that if the queen is driven from England, or her baby dies, then my son will be one of the king’s likely heirs.

“You think the queen will let that happen? You think Margaret of Anjou won’t fight for England? She knows her duty better than that,” Edmund says with a laugh. “There are even those who say that she was too determined to be stopped by a sleeping husband. They say she got the baby without the king. Some say she got a stable boy to mount her rather than leave the royal cradle empty and her husband dreaming.”

I put my hands to my hot cheeks. This is unbearable, but nobody notices my discomfort.

“Not another word,” Jasper says flatly. “She is a great lady, and I fear for her and her child. You get an heir for yourself, and don’t repeat gossip to me. The confidence of York with his quiver of four boys grows every day. We need to show them there is a true Lancaster heir-in-waiting; we need to keep their ambitions down. The Staffords and the Hollands have heirs already. Where’s the Tudor-Beaufort boy?”

Edmund laughs shortly and reaches for more wine. “I try every night,” he says. “Trust me. I don’t skimp my duty. She may be little more than a child herself, with no liking for the act, but I do what I have to.”

For the first time, Jasper glances over to me, as if he is wondering what I make of this bleak description of married life. I meet his gaze blankly with my teeth gritted. I don’t want his sympathy. This is my martyrdom. Marriage to his brother in this peasant palace in horrible Wales is my martyrdom; I offer it up, and I know that God will reward me.

Edmund tells his brother nothing more than the truth. Every single night of our life, he comes to my room, slightly unsteady from the wine at dinner that he throws down his throat like a sot. Every night, he gets into bed beside me, and takes a handful of my nightgown as if it were not the finest Valenciennes lace hemmed by my little-girl stitches, and holds it aside so he can push himself against me. Every night I grit my teeth and say not one word of protest, not even a whimper of pain, as he takes me without kindness or courtesy; and every night, moments later, he gets up from my bed and throws on his gown and goes without a word of thanks or farewell. I say nothing, not one word, from beginning to end, and neither does he. If it were lawful for a woman to hate her husband, I would hate him as a rapist. But hatred would make the baby malformed, so I make sure I do not hate him, not even in secret. Instead, I slide from the bed the minute he has gone and kneel at the foot of it, still smelling his rancid sweat, still feeling the burning pain between my legs, and I pray to Our Lady who had the good fortune to be spared all this by the kindly visit of the bodiless Holy Ghost. I pray to Her to forgive Edmund Tudor for being such a torturer to me, her child, especially favored by
God. I, who am without sin, and certainly without lust. Months into marriage I am as far away from desire as I was when I was a little girl; and it seems to me that there is nothing more likely to cure a woman of lust than marriage. Now I understand what the saint meant when he said that it was better to marry than to burn. In my experience, if you marry, you certainly won’t burn.

One long year of loneliness and disgust and pain, and now I have another burden to bear. Edmund’s old nursemaid becomes so impatient for another Tudor boy that she comes to me every month to ask if I am bleeding, as if I were a favorite mare at stud. She is longing for me to say no, for then she can count on her fat old fingers and see that her precious boy has done his duty. For months I can disappoint her and see her wizened old face fall, but at the end of June I can tell her that I have not bled, and she kneels down in my own privy chamber and thanks God and the Virgin Mary that the House of Tudor will have an heir and that England is saved for the House of Lancaster.

At first I think she is a fool, but after she has run to tell my husband Edmund and his brother Jasper, and they have both come to me like a pair of excited twins, and shouted their well wishes, and asked me if I would like anything special to eat, or if they should send for my mother, or whether I should like to gently walk in the courtyard, or to rest, I see that, to them, this conception is indeed a first step towards greatness, and could be the saving of our house.

That night, as I kneel to pray, at last I have a vision again. I have a vision as clear as if I were in my waking life, but the sun is as bright as in France, not Welsh gray. It is not a vision of Joan going to the scaffold, but a miraculous vision of Joan as she was called to
greatness. I am with her in the fields near her home; I can feel the softness of the grass under my feet, and I am dazzled by the brightness of the sky. I hear the bells tolling the Angelus, and they ring in my head like voices. I hear the celestial singing, and then I see the shimmering light. I drop my head to the rich cloth of my bed, and still the blazing light burns the inside of my eyelids. I am filled with conviction that I am seeing her calling and I am being called myself. God wanted Joan to serve Him and now He wants me. My hour has come and my heroine, Joan, has shown me the way. I tremble with desire for holiness, and the burning behind my eyes spreads through my whole body and burns, I am sure, in my womb, where the baby is growing into the light of life and his spirit is forming.

I don’t know how long I kneel in prayer. Nobody interrupts me, and I feel as if I have been in the sacred light for a whole year when I finally open my eyes in wonder, and blink at the dancing candle flames. Slowly I rise to my feet, hauling myself up the bedpost, weak at the knees with my sense of the divine. I sit on the side of my bed in a state of wonder and puzzle at the nature of my calling. Joan was called to save France from war and to put the true King of France on his throne. There must be a reason that I saw myself in her fields, that all my life I have dreamed of her life. Our lives must march in step. Her story must speak to me. I too must be called to save my country, as she was summoned to rescue hers. I have been called to save England from danger, from uncertainty, from war itself, and put the true King of England on his throne. When Henry the king dies, even if his son survives, I know it will be the baby now growing in my womb who will inherit. I know it. This baby must be a son—this is what my vision is telling me. My son will inherit the throne of England. The horror of war with France will be ended by the rule of my son. The unrest in our country will be turned into peace by my son. I shall bring him into the world, and I shall put him on the throne, and I shall guide him in the ways of God that I shall teach him. This is my destiny: to put my son on the throne of England,
and those who laughed at my visions and doubted my vocation will call me My Lady, the King’s Mother. I shall sign myself Margaret Regina: Margaret the queen.