The Red Queen Read online

  Arthur goes at once to the old mounting block, and I dismount without help and let his reins go. He heads at once for his old stall, as if he were still Owen Tudor’s battle horse. The stable lad exclaims to see him, and I go quickly to the front door and the groom of the household flings it open before me, recognizes me though I have grown taller, bows to me, and says: “My lady.”

  “Where is my son?” I ask. “In his nursery?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I will have them bring him to you.”

  “I’ll go up,” I say, and without waiting I run up the stairs and burst into his nursery.

  He is eating his dinner. They have laid a table for him with a spoon and a knife, and he is seated at the head of the table and they are waiting on him as they should, as an earl should be served. He turns his little head as I come in, and he looks at me without recognition. His curly hair is brown, like a bright bay horse as Jasper said; his eyes are hazel. His face is baby-round still; but he is not a baby anymore, he is a boy, a little boy of four years old.

  He climbs down from his chair—he has to use the rungs of the chair as steps—and comes towards me. He bows; he has been well taught. “Welcome, madam, to Pembroke Castle,” he says. He has the slightest lilt of a Welsh accent in his clear, high voice. “I am the Earl of Richmond.”

  I drop to my knees so my face is level with his. I so long to snatch him into my arms, but I have to remember that to him I am a stranger.

  “Your uncle Jasper will have told you about me,” I say.

  His face lights up with joy. “Is he here? Is he safe?”

  I shake my head. “No, I am sorry. I believe he is safe, but he is not here.”

  His little mouth trembles. I am so afraid that he will cry, I put my hand out to him, but at once he straightens up and I see his little jaw square as he holds back tears. He nips his lower lip. “Will he come back?”

  “I am sure of it. Soon.”

  He nods, he blinks. One tear rolls down his cheek.

  “I am your mother, Lady Margaret,” I say to him. “I have come to take you to my home.”

  “You are my mother?”

  I try to smile, but I give a little choke. “I am. I have ridden for nearly two weeks to come to you to make sure you are safe.”

  “I am safe,” he says solemnly. “I am just waiting for my uncle Jasper to come home. I can’t come with you. He told me to stay here.”

  The door behind me opens, and Henry enters quietly. “And this is my husband, Sir Henry Stafford,” I say to my little son.

  The boy steps away from the table and bows. Jasper has taught him well. My husband, hiding his smile, bows solemnly in return.

  “Welcome to Pembroke Castle, sir.”

  “I thank you,” my husband says. He glances at me, taking in the tears in my eyes and my flushed face. “Is everything all right?”

  I make a helpless gesture with my hand as if to say—yes, everything is all right, except my son treats me as a polite stranger, and the only person he wants to see is Jasper, who is an attainted traitor and in exile for life. My husband nods as if he can understand all of this, and then turns to my son. “My men have ridden all the way from England, and they have extremely fine horses. I wonder if you would like to see them in their harness before the horses are put into the fields?”

  Henry brightens at once. “How many men?”

  “Fifty men-at-arms, a few servants and scouts.”

  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 pu