The Red Queen Read online

  Next morning, at breakfast, I learn why I was banned from praying through the night. My mother tells me to prepare for a journey, a long journey. “We are going to London,” she says calmly. “To court.”

  I am thrilled at the thought of a trip to London, but I take care not to exult like a vain, proud girl. I bow my head and whisper: “As you wish, Lady Mother.” This is the best thing that could happen. My home at Bletsoe, in the heart of the county of Bedfordshire, is so quiet and dull that there is no chance for me to resist the perils of the world. There are no temptations to overcome, and no one sees me but servants and my older half brothers and half sisters, and they all think of me as a little girl, of no importance. I try to think of Joan, herding her father’s sheep at Domrémy, who was buried like me, among miles of muddy fields. She did not complain of being bored in the country; she waited and listened for the voices to summon her to greatness. I must do the same.

  I wonder if this command to go to London is the voice I have been waiting for, calling me to greatness now. We will be at the court of the good King Henry VI. He must welcome me as his nearest kin, I am all but his cousin, after all. His grandfather and my grandfather were half brothers, which is a very close connection when one of you is king and the other is not, and he himself passed a law to recognize my family, the Beauforts, as legitimate though not royal. Surely, he will see in me the light of holiness that everyone says is in him. He must claim me as both kin and kindred spirit. What if he decides I shall stay at court with him? Why not? What if he wants to take me as his advisor, as the Dauphin took Joan of Arc? I am his second cousin, and I can almost see visions of the saints. I am only nine years old, but I hear the voices of angels and I pray all night when they let me. If I had been born a boy, I would be all but the Prince of Wales now. Sometimes I wonder if they wish I had been born a boy and that is why they are blind to the light that shines within me. Could it be that they are so filled with the sin of pride in our place that they wish I was a boy, and ignore the greatness that is me, as a holy girl?

  “Yes, Lady Mother,” I say obediently.

  “You don’t sound very excited,” she says. “Don’t you want to know why we are going?”

  Desperately. “Yes, if you please.”

  “I am sorry to say that your betrothal to John de la Pole must be ended. It was a good match when it was made when you were six, but now you are to dissent from it. You will face a panel of judges who will ask you if you wish your betrothal to be ended, and you will say yes. Do you understand?”

  This sounds very alarming. “But I won’t know what to say.”

  “You will just consent to the end of your betrothal. You will just say yes.”

  “What if they ask me if I think it is the will of God? What if they ask me if this is the answer to my prayers?”

  She sighs as if I am tiresome. “They won’t ask you that.”

  “And then what will happen?”

  “His Grace, the king, will appoint a new guardian, and, in turn, he will give you in marriage to the man of his choice.”

  “Another betrothal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I not go to an abbey?” I ask very quietly, though I know what her answer will be. Nobody regards my spiritual gifts. “Now I am released from this betrothal can I not go?”

  “Of course you can’t go to an abbey, Margaret. Don’t be stupid. Your duty is to bear a son and heir, a boy for our family, the Beauforts, a young kinsman to the King of England, a boy for the House of Lancaster. God knows, the House of York has boys enough. We have to have one of our own. You will give us one of our own.”

  “But I think I have a calling—”

  “You are called to be mother of the next heir of Lancaster,” she says briskly. “That is an ambition great enough for any girl. Now go and get ready to leave. Your women will have packed your clothes; you just have to fetch your doll for the journey.”

  I fetch my doll and my own carefully copied book of prayers too. I can read French, of course, and also English, but I cannot understand Latin or Greek, and my mother will not allow me a tutor. A girl is not worth educating, she says. I wish that I could read the gospels and prayers in Latin, but I cannot, and the handwritten copies in English are rare and precious. Boys are taught Latin and Greek and other subjects too; but girls need only be able to read and write, to sew, to keep the household accounts, to make music and enjoy poetry. If I were an abbess, I would have access to a great library, and I could set clerks to copy all the texts that I wanted to read. I would make the novices read to me all day. I would be a woman of learning instead of an untaught girl, as stupid as any ordinary girl.

  If my father had lived, perhaps he would have taught me Latin. He was a great reader and writer; at least I know that much about him. He spent years in captivity in France when he studied every day. But he died just days before my first birthday. My birth was so unimportant to him that he was in France on campaign, trying to restore his fortune, when my mother was brought to bed, and he did not come home again until just before my first birthday, and then he died; so he never knew me and my gifts.

  It will take us three days to get to London. My mother will ride her own horse, but I am to ride pillion behind one of the grooms. He is called Wat, and he thinks himself a great charmer in the stables and kitchen. He winks at me, as if I would be friendly to a man such as him, and I frown to remind him that I am a Beaufort and he is a nobody. I sit behind him, and I have to take tight hold of his leather belt, and when he says to me, “Right and tight? Righty tighty?” I nod coldly, so as to warn him that I don’t want him talking to me all the way to Ampthill.

  He sings instead, which is just as bad. He sings love songs and haymaking songs in a bright tenor voice, and the men who ride with us, to protect us from the armed bands who are everywhere in England these days, join in with him and sing too. I wish my mother would order them to be silent, or at least command them to sing psalms; but she is happy, riding out in the warm spring sunshine, and when she comes alongside me, she smiles and says, “Not far now, Margaret. We will spend tonight at Abbots Langley and go on to London tomorrow. Are you not too tired?”

  I am so unprepared by those who should care for me that I haven’t even been taught how to ride, and I am not allowed even to sit on a horse of my own and be led, not even when we arrive in London and hundreds of people in the streets and markets and shops gawp at the fifty of our household as we ride by. How am I to appear as the heroine who will save England if I have to jog behind Wat, seated pillion, my hand on his belt, like some village slut going to a goose fair? I am not at all like an heir to the House of Lancaster. We stay at an inn, not even at court, for the Duke of Suffolk, my guardian, was terribly disgraced and is now dead, so we cannot stay in his palace. I offer up to Our Lady the fact that we don’t have a good London house of our own, and then I think that She too had to make do with a common inn at Bethlehem, when surely Herod must have had spare rooms in the palace. There must have been more suitable arrangements than a stable, surely. Considering who She was. And so I try to be resigned, like Her.

  At least I am to have London clothes before we go to court for me to renounce my betrothal. My Lady Mother summons the tailors and the seamstresses to our inn, and I am fitted for a wonderful gown. They say that the ladies of the court are wearing tall, conical headdresses, so high that a woman has to duck to get under a seven-foot doorway. The queen, Margaret of Anjou, loves beautiful clothes and is wearing a new color of ruby red made from a new dye; they say it is as red as blood. My mother orders me a gown of angelic white by way of contrast, and has it trimmed with Lancaster red roses to remind everyone that I may be only a girl of nine years old but I am the heiress of our house. Only when the clothes are ready can we take a barge downriver to declare my dissent against my betrothal, and to be presented at court.

  The dissent is a tremendous disappointment. I am hoping that they will question me and that I might stand before them, shy but clear-spo