The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  “You will forgive me if we win and I can bring your boy home to you,” he suggests hopefully.

  “You will be on opposing sides,” I say coldly. “You will be fighting on one side and my brother-in-law and my boy on the other. You ask me to hope that my brother-in-law Jasper is defeated or killed. For that is the only way that my boy will need a new guardian. I cannot do that.”

  He sighs. “I suppose not. Will you give me your blessing, anyway?”

  “How can I bless you when you are cursed in your choice?” I demand.

  He cannot maintain his smile. “Wife, will you pray for my safety at least while I am gone?”

  “I shall pray that you see sense and change sides in the very middle of the battle,” I say. “You could do that and make sure you were on the victorious side. I would pray for your victory then.”

  “That would be quite without principle,” he remarks mildly. He kneels to me and takes my hand and kisses it, and I stubbornly do not touch his head with my other hand in blessing. He rises up and goes to the mounting block. I hear him grunt with the effort of stepping onto it and swinging into the saddle, and for a moment I feel pity that a man, not young anymore, who so dislikes leaving his home, should be forced out on a hot spring day to battle.

  He turns his horse and raises his hand to me in salute. “Good-bye, Margaret,” he says. “And I say ‘God bless you’ to you, even if you won’t say it to me.”

  I think it is unkind of me to stand there with my hands by my sides and a frown on my face. But I let him go without a blown kiss, without a blessing, without a command to come back safely. I let him go without a word or a gesture of love, for he is going out to fight for my enemy and so he is my enemy now.

  I hear from him within a few days. His second squire comes back in a rush because he forgot the gussets for his coat of mail. He brings the will that my husband has scribbled in haste, thinking battle will be joined at once. “Why? Does he think he will die?” I ask cruelly when the man hands it to me for safekeeping.

  “He is very low in his spirits,” he answers me honestly. “Shall I take a message back to cheer him?”

  “No message,” I say, turning away. No man who fights under the banner of York against the interests of my son will have a message of hope from me. How can I? My prayer must be that York fails and is defeated. My prayer must be for my husband’s defeat. I will pray that he is not killed, but in all honesty, before my God, I can’t do more than that.

  I spend that night, all the night, on my knees praying for the victory of my House of Lancaster. The servant said that they were gathering outside London and would march to meet our forces that are mustering in thousands, somewhere near Oxford. Edward will march out his troops along the great west road, and the armies will meet somewhere on the way. I expect Warwick to win for our king, even with both York boys, George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester, fighting alongside their older brother. Warwick is the more experienced commander; he taught the York boys everything they know about warfare. And Warwick has the greatest force. And Warwick is in the right. Our king, an ordained monarch, a saintly man, is held a prisoner in the Tower of London by order of the York usurper. How can God allow his captor to have victory? My husband may be there, in the armies of York. But I have to pray for his defeat. I am for Lancaster, I am for my king, I am for Jasper, and I am for my son.

  I send to Guildford every day for news, expecting riders to come from London with word of a battle; but no one knows what is happening until one of our men comes back, riding a stolen horse, ahead of all the others to tell me that my husband Henry is wounded and near to death. I hear him out, standing alone in the stable yard until someone thinks to send for one of my ladies, and she clasps my arm to hold me up, while the man tells me of a battle of shifting fortunes and confusion. There was thick mist, the line of the army swung about, the Earl of Oxford changed his coat, or so someone said; there was a panic when he attacked our side, and Edward came out of the mist in a charge like the devil himself, and the Lancaster forces broke before him.

  “I will have to go to him and fetch him home,” I say. I turn to his steward. “Get a cart ready so we can bring him home, and put a featherbed in it and everything he will need. Bandages, I suppose, and physic.”

  “I will fetch the physician to go with you,” he says. I take it as a reproach that I have never been much of a nurse or herbalist. “And the priest,” I say. I see him flinch, and I know that he is thinking that his master may need the last rites, that he may be near death as we speak. “And we’ll go at once,” I say. “This day.”

  I ride ahead of the slow wagon, but it is a hard long ride, and I get to Barnet as the dusk of the spring evening closes down on the muddy road. All along the way there are men begging for help to get home, or lying down in the hedgerow and dying for lack of friends or family or someone to care for them. Sometimes we are crowded off the road by an armed troop hurrying after the main armies to join with them. I see hideous sights: a man with half his face cut away, a man tying his shirt over his belly to stop his lights from spilling out. A pair of men clinging to each other like drunkards, trying to help each other home with only three feet between the two of them. I ride along the road, cutting across the fields wherever I can to avoid the straggle of dying men, trying not to look at the men who stagger towards me, trying not to see the scatter of equipment and bodies all around me, as if the fields were growing strange and terrible crops.

  There are women here, like crows, bending over the dying men and rifling through their jackets, looking for money or jewels. Sometimes a loose horse comes trotting towards mine, whinnying for company and for reassurance. I see a few knights who have been pulled down and killed on the ground, and one whose suit of armor protected him so well that he died inside it, his face smashed to pulp against the helmet. When a looter pulls the helmet upwards, the head comes with it too, and the slop of brains spills out through the visor. I keep a grip on my rosary, and I say “Hail Mary” over and over again to keep myself in the saddle and the vomit at the back of my mouth. My horse walks warily, as if he too is repelled at the smell of blood and knows this is dangerous ground. I had no idea that it would be this bad. I had no idea that it would be like this.

  I cannot believe that it was like this for Joan of Arc. I thought of her always on a white horse with a banner of lilies and angels above her head, clean. I never thought of her riding through carnage, though she must have done so, as I am doing. If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this. It is like riding through the valley of the shadow of death, and we go like harbingers of death ourselves, for we give away no water, though men imploringly reach towards me, pointing to their bloodstained mouths, where their teeth are all knocked out. We dare not stop and give to one, for that would bring them all down on us, so the master of the horse goes ahead with a whip and shouts, “Clear the way for Lady Margaret Stafford,” and the wounded shuffle out of our way and shield their heads from the lash.

  An outrider comes back to us and says that they have found my husband lodged in an inn at Whetstone, and we follow him as he leads us down the muddy lanes to the little village. The inn is nothing more than a village alehouse with two rooms for passing travelers. I am reluctant to get down from my horse, fearful of being on the ground with the walking dead. But I dismount and go in. I am very afraid that my husband will be horribly maimed, like the men on the road, or hacked by a battle-axe; but I find him lying on a settle in the back room, with a scarf tied tight around his belly. The growing red on the scarf tells me he is still bleeding. He turns his head as I come in and manages to smile at the sight of me. “Margaret, you shouldn’t have come.”

  “I am safe enough, and I have the wagon following to bring you home.”

  His face lights up at the very mention of our home. “I should be glad to see my home. There were moments whe