The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  He nods. This is a boy who was born into a country at war and was raised by one of the greatest commanders of our house. He would rather inspect a troop than eat his dinner.

  “I should like to see them. I will get my jacket.” He goes into his private chamber, and we can hear him calling for his nursemaid to fetch his best jacket as he is going to inspect his mother’s guard.

  Henry smiles at me. “Nice little fellow,” he says.

  “He didn’t recognize me.” I am holding back tears, but the quaver in my voice betrays me. “He has no idea who I am. I am a complete stranger to him.”

  “Of course, but he will learn,” Henry says soothingly. “He will come to know you. You can be a mother to him. He is only four; you have missed only three years, but you can start again with him now. And he has been well raised and well educated.”

  “He is Jasper’s boy through and through,” I say jealously.

  Henry draws my hand through his arm. “And now you will make him yours. After he has seen my men, you show him Arthur and tell him that he was Owen Tudor’s battle horse, but that you ride him now. You’ll see-he will want to know all about it, and you can tell him stories.”

  I take a seat in silence in the nursery as they prepare him for bed. The mistress of the nursery is still the woman that Jasper appointed when my son was born; she has cared for him all his life, and I find myself burning with envy at her easy way with him, at the companionable way she hauls him to her knee and strips off his little shirt, at the familiar way that she tickles him as she pulls on his nightshirt and scolds him for wriggling like a Severn eel. He is deliciously at ease with her; but now and then he remembers that I am there and shoots me a little shy smile, as a polite child at a stranger.

  “Would you like to hear him say his prayers?” she asks me, as he goes through to his bedroom.

  Resentfully, in second place, I follow her to see him kneel at the foot of his tester bed, fold his hands together, and recite the Lord’s Prayer and the prayers for the evening. She hands me a badly transcribed prayer book, and I read the collect for the day and the prayer for the evening and hear his soprano “Amen.” Then he crosses himself and rises up and goes to her for her blessing. She steps back and gestures to him that he should kneel to me. I see his little mouth turn down; but he kneels before me, obediently enough, and I put my hand on his head and say: “God bless you and keep you, my son.” Then he rises up and takes a great run and a leap into his bed and bounces until she folds back the sheet and tucks him up and bends and kisses him in one thoughtless gesture.

  Awkwardly, a stranger in his nursery, uncertain of my welcome, I go to his bedside and lean over him. I kiss him. His cheek is warm, the smell of his skin like a new-baked bread roll, firm as a warm peach.

  “Good night,” I say again.

  I step back from the bed. The woman moves the candle away from the curtains and pulls up her chair to the fire. She is going to sit with him till he sleeps, as she does every night, as she has done every night since his birth. He has gone to sleep with the creak of the treadles of her rocking chair and the reassuring sight of her beloved face in the firelight. There is nothing for me to do here; he has no need of me at all. “Good night,” I say again, and I go quietly from his room.

  I close the outer door of his presence chamber and pause at the head of the stone stairs. I am just about to go down in search of my husband when I hear a door above me, high up in the tower, quietly open. It is a door that goes out to the roof where Jasper used to sometimes go to gaze up at the stars or, during troubled times, look out across the country for an enemy army. My first thought is that Black Herbert has got someone into Pembroke Castle and he is coming down the stairs with his knife drawn, ready to let in his troop through the sally port. I press myself back against Henry’s bedroom door, ready to fling myself into his room and lock the door behind me. I must keep him safe. I can raise the alarm from his bedroom window. I would lay down my life for him.

  I hear a quiet footstep, and then the closing of the roof door, and then the turning of the key, and I hold my breath so that there shall be no sound but another quiet step, as whoever it is comes silently down the spiral stone stairs of the tower.

  And at once, as if I could recognize him by his footstep, I know it is Jasper, and I step out from the shadow and say quietly, “Jasper, oh Jasper!” and he takes the last three steps in a bound and has his arms around me and is holding me tightly to him, and my arms are around his broad back and we are gripping each other as if we cannot bear to let each other go. I pull myself back so I can look up at him, and at once his mouth comes down on mine and he kisses me, and I am shot through with such desire and such longing that it is like being at prayer when God answers in flame.

  That thought of prayer makes me pull away from him and gasp, and he releases me at once.

  “I am sorry.”

  “No!”

  “I thought you would be at dinner or in the solar. I meant to come to you and your husband quietly.”

  “I was with my boy.”

  “Was he pleased to see you?”

  I make a little gesture. “He is more concerned with you. He is missing you. How long have you been here?”

  “I have been in the area for nearly a week. I didn’t want to come to the castle for fear of Herbert’s spies. I didn’t want to bring him down on us. So I have been hiding out in the hills, waiting for you to come.”

  “I came as soon as I could. Oh, Jasper, do you have to go away?”

  His arm is around my waist again, and I cannot stop myself leaning against him. I have grown taller, my head rests against his shoulder. I feel as if I fit him, as if his body were a piece of fretwork, hammered to interlock with mine. I feel as if I will ache all my life if we are not fitted together.

  “Margaret, my own love, I have to go,” he says simply. “There is a price on my head and bad blood between Herbert and me. But I will be back. I will go to France or Scotland and recruit for the true king, and I will return with an army. You can be sure of it. I will come back, and this will be my castle once more, when Lancaster is on the throne again and we have won.”

  I find I am clinging to him, and I unclench my hands from where I am holding his jacket, step back, and force myself to let him go. The space that I make between us, no more than a foot or so, is an unbearable void.

  “And you, are you well?” His direct blue eyes scan my face, run frankly down my body. “No child?”

  “No,” I say shortly. “It doesn’t seem to happen. I don’t know why.”

  “He treats you well?”

  “He does. He lets me have the chapel as I wish it, and he lets me study. He gives me an allowance from my lands that is generous. He even gets me books and helps me with Latin.”

  “A treat indeed,” he says solemnly.

  “Well, it is for me,” I say defensively.

  “And how will he stand with King Edward?” he asks. “Are you in any danger?”

  “I think not. He rode out for King Henry at Towton …”

  “He went to war?”

  I nearly giggle. “He did, and I don’t think he liked it much. But he has been pardoned, and his pardon should cover me. We’ll take Henry home with us and live quietly. When the true king comes into his own again, we will be ready. I doubt that York will trouble himself with us. Surely, he has greater enemies? Sir Henry does not play a big part in the affairs of the world; he likes to stay at home, quietly. Surely, he has made himself so unimportant that nobody will bother with us?”

  Jasper grins, a young man born to play a part in the great affairs of the world and quite incapable of staying at home quietly. “Perhaps. At any rate, I am glad he will keep you and the boy safe while I am away.”

  I cannot resist stepping forwards and taking hold of the lapel of his jacket again so I can look up earnestly into his face. His arm comes around my waist and holds me closer. “Jasper, how long will you be gone?”

  “As soon as I can