The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  “Why do you still miss Jasper so much?” I ask him, as I tuck him up. I make sure my voice is light, almost indifferent.

  His little face brightens against the white linen pillow. He beams at the thought of his uncle. “He is my lord,” he says simply. “I am going to ride out with him when I am big enough. We are going to bring peace to England, and when that is done, we are going on crusade together. We will never be parted. I shall swear fealty to him and be the son that he does not have. He is my lord. I am his man.”

  “But I am your mother,” I remark. “I am here to take care of you now.”

  “Jasper and I love you,” he says cheerfully. “We say you are our guiding light. And we always pray for you, and for my father Edmund too.”

  “But I am here now,” I insist. “And Edmund never even saw you. He hardly counts, it is not the same at all. Jasper is in exile; I am the only one here now.”

  He turns his little head, his eyelids are drooping, dark eyelashes brushing his pink cheeks. “My uncle, Lord Pembroke, is glad to have you at his castle,” he says quietly. “We are both glad to welcome …”

  He is asleep. I turn and find my husband leaning silently against the stone doorway. “Did you hear that?” I ask him. “All he thinks about is Jasper. He prays for me as he does for his father, who was dead before he was born. I am as distant as the queen to him.”

  My husband puts out an arm to me, and I am glad for the comfort. I rest my head on his chest and feel him hold me.

  “He’s a bright boy,” he says soothingly. “You have to give him time to get to know you. He has lived with Jasper for so long that the man fills his world. He has to learn about you. It will come. Be patient. And besides, it is no disadvantage to be as the queen to him. You are his mother, not his nursemaid. Why not be his guiding light, the one who commands him? He has learned from Jasper to adore you from afar. He understands that. Why would you want to be anything else?

  AUTUMN 1461

  We are wakened by the clanging of the tocsin, and I jump out of bed, throw on a gown, and run to the nursery. My boy is pulling on his breeches and shouting for his boots. The mistress of the nursery looks up as I come in. “My lady? D’you know what it is?”

  I shake my head and look out of the window. The portcullis is coming down with a speedy clatter; the guards and the grooms of the stables are spilling out of their living quarters and shouting. Among the men I see my husband moving quietly and steadily towards the guard tower that overlooks the gate.

  “I’m going down,” I say.

  “I’ll come! I’ll come!” my son pipes. “I need my sword.”

  “You don’t need your sword,” I say. “But you can come if you promise to stay with me.”

  “May I come with the little earl, please, m’lady?” his nurse asks. I know she thinks that I won’t be able to make him stay beside me, and I flush with irritation; but I nod, and the three of us run down the stone stairs, across the yard, and up the narrow stairs to the tower, where my husband and the captain of the guard are looking over the battlements to where the flag of William Herbert is fluttering over a small army of his men, trotting along the road.

  “God be with us,” I whisper.

  Henry drags his nurse to the farthest corner of the tower, where he can look down on the drawbridge being hauled up.

  My husband smiles at me. “I doubt we are in danger,” he says gently. “I have no doubt that Herbert has been given this castle, and perhaps the earldom too. He has only come to claim his own. We are his unexpected guests.”

  “What will we do?”

  “Hand it over to him.”

  “Hand it over to him?” I am so shocked at my husband’s traitorous plan that I stare at him, my mouth agape. “Just give him the keys? Of Jasper’s castle? Just open the doors and invite him to dine?”

  “He might ask us to dine,” my husband corrects me. “If, as I think, that this is his castle now.”

  “You cannot intend to just let him in.”

  “Of course I do,” he says. “If King Edward has given him the castle and the command of Wales, then we are behaving as loyal citizens should by giving William Herbert his own, and rendering to Caesar his due.”

  “This castle belongs to us Tudors,” I spit at him. “To Jasper, and in his absence to me and Henry. This is Henry’s home; this is my castle.”

  My husband shakes his gray head. “No, my dear. You are forgetting that there is a new king on the throne and he will have made new grants and allowances. Lancaster no longer holds the throne, nor Wales, not even Pembroke Castle. For all that this was your home, it will have been given to one of proven loyalty to York. I had thought perhaps William Hastings or Warwick, but as we see, William Herbert is the lucky man.” He glances over the castle wall. They are nearly within hailing distance.

  “Jasper would have raised a siege,” I say bitterly. “Jasper would have defended his own. He would have died rather than hand over our castle to such as Herbert. He would not surrender like a woman. He would have fought. Herbert is a traitor, and I won’t admit him to Jasper’s castle.”

  My husband looks at me, and he is no longer smiling. “Margaret, you see for yourself what Jasper would have done. You see for yourself what choice he made. He saw that the battle was lost, and he left the castle, and he left your son, and he left you. He left you without a backward glance. He told you he didn’t like long good-byes, and he ran away to secure his own safety, far away. He told me himself that he expected Herbert to come and claim Pembroke, and that he expected us to yield. He told me that he would be glad if we stayed to hand over Pembroke to Herbert and make sure that the servants were safe. Anything like a siege would be to waste our lives for nothing. Anything else and we might as well have run away as he did. The battle is lost: it was lost at Towton, and Jasper knew it and ran away.”

  “He didn’t run away,” I say hotly.

  “He’s not here now, is he?” my husband observes. He leans out over the battlements and shouts: “Hi! Sir William!”

  The big man at the front of his men pulls up his horse and dips his standard. “I am William, Lord Herbert. Who calls me? Is that you, Sir Henry Stafford?”

  “The same. I am here with my wife Lady Margaret and her son, the Earl of Richmond.”

  “And Jasper Tudor, the traitor, the former Earl of Pembroke?”

  Henry pulls at my hand, and I bend down to listen to his whisper. “My uncle is still Earl of Pembroke, isn’t he? Why does that bad man say the former earl?”

  “We will never call him that,” I swear. “In our prayers he will always be the Earl of Pembroke to us. It is just the Yorks who think differently. They are all liars.”

  “Jasper Tudor is gone away,” Sir Henry shouts back. “You have my word of honor that he is not in the castle nor nearby.”

  “I have been granted the castle and the command of Wales by King Edward, God save him!” Herbert bellows up. “Will you open the gates and admit me to my own?”

  “I will,” Sir Henry says cheerfully, and nods to the captain of the guard. Two men go running, and I watch, disbelieving, as the portcullis is cranked up and the drawbridge dropped down, and the red dragon standard of the Tudors, smartly as a traitor, drops down the flagpole and disappears from sight as if it had not fluttered over the castle for all the time that I have known it.

  William Herbert tips a salute to the soldiers at the gate and rides into the castle that is now his own, with a merry flourish, and dismounts on my mounting block, as if it had been standing there, all these years, just waiting for him.

  I am speechless with rage at dinner that night; but my husband and Lord Herbert talk of the new king, of the likelihood of an invasion from France, of the danger of a Scots army marching down on England, as if these were our enemies and not our saviors. I find myself hating my husband for his easy good manners, and I keep my eyes on my plate, and I speak only in reply to a direct question. Indeed, Lord Herbert says almost nothing to me until I rise fro