The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  I know the answer to this. I know just what he is doing in one of the loyal houses of York. He is growing into a Yorkist. He loves the luxury and comfort of Raglan Castle; I swear he would prefer it to the holy plainness of my new home at Woking, if he had ever been allowed to see my home. He warms to the gentle piety of Anne Devereux; my demand that he know every collect of the day and honor every saint’s day is too much for him, I know it is. He admires the courage and dash of William Herbert, and while he loves Jasper still, and writes to tell him so, boyish letters filled with boasting and affection, he is learning to admire his uncle’s enemy and adopt him as a very model of a chivalrous, honorable knight and landlord.

  And worst of all for me, he thinks of me as a woman who cannot reconcile herself to defeat; I know he thinks this. He thinks I am a woman who saw my king driven from his throne, and my husband killed and my brother-in-law run away, and he thinks that it is disappointment and failure that has made me seek solace in religion. He thinks I am a woman seeking consolation in God for the failure of her life. Nothing I can do can convince him that my life in God is my power and glory. Nothing I can do can convince him that I do not see our cause as lost, I don’t see myself as defeated, I don’t believe, not even now, that York will hold the throne. I think we will return, I think we will win. I can say this to him, I can say it over and over again; but I have no evidence to support my conviction, and the embarrassed smile, and the way he bows his head to me and murmurs, “Lady Mother, I am sure you are right,” tells me, as clearly as if he loudly contradicted me, that he thinks I am wrong and mistaken and-worse than that-irrelevant.

  I am the woman who gave him birth, but I lived with him for only the first year of his life. Now he sees me once a year, and rarely more, and I spoil my time with him by trying to persuade him to be faithful to a cause that was lost nearly ten years ago. No wonder he does not cleave to me. Every year I must seem more of a fool.

  And I cannot help myself. God knows, if I could reconcile myself to living with a man who is the embodiment of mediocrity, in a country under a usurper-with a queen so much my inferior in every way! – observing my God only as a once-a-day deity in my evening prayers, I would do so. But I cannot. I want a husband with the courage and determination to play his part in the rule of the country. I want my country ruled by my true king, and I have to pray to God for this in the five services of the day. It is how I am, I cannot deny myself.

  William Herbert is King Edward’s man through and through, of course. In his house, my son, my own son, the flower of the House of Lancaster, learns to speak of the usurper with respect, to admire the so-called ravishing beauty of his hastily married wife, the commoner Elizabeth, and to pray for an heir for their accursed house. She is fertile as a stable cat, but every year she manages to give birth only to a girl. The joke is on her, for they say she married him by enchantment and comes from a long line of women who dabble in magic. Now all she can make are little witches for the burning; she cannot give him a prince, and her magical skills do not seem to help.

  Indeed, if they had conceived an heir early on, then perhaps our story would be a different one; but they do not, and slowly but surely the notorious York disloyalty begins to split the self-aggrandizing House of York against itself. Their great advisor and mentor, the Earl of Warwick, turns against the boy he helped to the throne, and the second son George, Duke of Clarence, turns against the brother he proclaimed as his king. Together they make an alliance as a pair of opportunists.

  Envy, the family poison of York, flows through George’s veins like their second-rate blood. As Warwick grows away from the first York boy that he made king, the second York boy creeps closer, dreaming of the same favor, and Warwick begins to think he might play the same trick again: this time replacing a pretender king with a new pretender. Warwick marries his daughter Isobel to George and easily, like the serpent in Eden, Warwick tempts George, Duke of Clarence, to abandon his brother’s cause and dream of usurping the usurper’s throne. They snatch the new king as if he were the crown at the top of the maypole and hold him prisoner-and I think that a way is open to me.

  I know all Yorkists are ambitious and disloyal in their very cradles. But the division in their house can only serve mine. I play my own hand in the middle of these plots. When the Yorks took everything, they stole my son’s title of Earl of Richmond, and George, Duke of Clarence, took it as his own. I send a message to George, through his confessor and mine, and promise my friendship and loyalty, if he will return the title of Earl of Richmond to my son. I indicate to him that the support of my house can be commanded by me; he knows, without my boasting of it, how many men I could muster. I indicate to him that if he will return the title to my son, he can name his price, and I will back him against his brother the king.

  I keep this from my husband, and I think it has been done cleverly in secret until it becomes clear, as Edward escapes from his false friend and his false brother and returns in triumph to London, that we have fallen from the favor of the York court. The title Earl of Wiltshire should have come to my husband, but King Edward passes over him and instead honors his younger brother John, who is made Earl of Wiltshire for his ostentatious loyalty to Edward. It seems we are not to rise under this new king. We are tolerated but not favored. It is an injustice, but it cannot be challenged. My husband will be nothing but “Sir” till the end of his days. He can give me no title but “Lady.” I shall never be a countess. He says nothing, and by his very silence I guess that he has heard of my meddling offer of friendship to George of Clarence, and blames me for disloyalty to him and to King Edward, and indeed, he is right.

  But then-and who could have predicted it? – everything changes again. Queen Margaret, our precious Queen Margaret, in desperate exile in France, running out of money and lost without soldiers, agrees to an alliance with the snake Warwick, her old enemy, formerly our greatest adversary. Amazingly, she lets her precious son Edward, Prince of Wales, marry Warwick’s younger daughter Anne, and the two parents agree to invade England together, to give the young people a bloodbath for a honeymoon and put the Lancaster son and the Warwick girl on the throne of England.

  The end for York comes as swift as sunset; Warwick and George land together and march north. William Herbert calls out his men to join with the king, but before they can meet with the main force of York, Herbert sights the enemy outside Banbury, at Edgecote Hill. He did nothing more than his duty when he took my son with him that day, but I will never forgive him. As a nobleman should, he took his ward into battle to give him a taste of violence and a lesson in real fighting, as he should, as he should; but this is my son, my precious son, my only son. Even worse-I cannot bear to think it, but it is true-my son first put on his armor, first took a lance in his hand and then rode out to fight for York, against a Lancaster army. He fought for our enemy, at the side of our enemy, against our own house.

  It was over quickly, as God’s will is sometimes done in battle. The York troops were overpowered, and Warwick took a feast of prisoners, including William Herbert himself. Warwick, already stained in blood, already a turncoat, did not add uncertainty to his crimes. He had Herbert beheaded on the spot, and my son’s guardian died that day, perhaps as my son watched.

  I am glad of it. I never had a moment of pity for him. He took my son from me and then he raised him so well that Henry loved him as a father. I never forgave him for either, and I was glad to hear he was dead.

  “We have to fetch Henry,” I say to my husband, Sir Henry, as the news comes to us in snippets of gossip and gales of rumor. “God knows where he is. If Warwick has him, he will surely keep him safe; but if Warwick had him, surely he would have sent us a message? Perhaps my boy is in hiding, or perhaps he is injured …” I break off. The rest of my sentence, “perhaps he is dead,” is as clear as if it were written on the air between us.

  “We’ll get news soon,” my husband says calmly. “And be sure that if he were dead or injured, we would have heard straighta