The Red Queen Read online

  “The princess. She said that she was cursed to be the next Queen of England and take her brother’s throne.”

  We look at each other in stunned incomprehension. “You are sure?”

  “She was terrifying. She complained of her mother’s ambition and said that it was a curse laid on the family and that she would have to take her brother’s throne—and that that, at least, would please her mother, though it would disinherit her brother.”

  “What could she mean?”

  The doctor shrugs. “She didn’t say. She has grown to be a beautiful girl, but she is terrifying. I believed her. I have to say, I believed every word she said. It was like a prophet speaking true. I believe that somehow she will be Queen of England.”

  I take a little breath. This is so aligned to my own prayers that it has to be the word of God, though speaking through a most sinful vessel. If Henry were to take the throne and she were to marry him, she would indeed be queen. How else could it come about?

  “And there was one other thing,” Lewis says cautiously. “When I asked the queen what were her plans for the princes in the Tower, Edward and Richard, she said: ‘It’s not Richard.’”

  “She said what?”

  “She said: ‘It’s not Richard.’”

  “What did she mean?”

  “It was then that the princess came in, with her gown all wet from the river, and she knew everything: the acclamation for the duke, the disinheriting of the family. Then she said that she would be queen.”

  “But did you ask the queen what she meant by ‘It’s not Richard’?”

  He shakes his head, this man who has seen everything, but did not have the sense to ask the one key thing. “Did you not think it might be rather important?” I snap at him.

  “I am sorry. The princess coming in was so … she was unearthly. And then her mother said that now they were in a dry spell but they would be in flood again. They were terrifying. You know what they say about their ancestry—that they come from a water goddess. If you had been there, you would have thought the water goddess about to rise from the Thames itself.”

  “Yes, yes,” I say without sympathy. “I see they were frightening, but did she say anything else? Did the queen speak of her brothers who have got away? Did she say where they are or what they are doing? The two of them have the power to raise half the kingdom.”

  He shakes his head. “She said nothing. But she heard it well enough when I told her that you would help the young princes to escape. She is planning something, I am sure. She was planning it before she realized that Richard is going to take the throne. She will be desperate now.”

  I nod and I gesture to him to leave me. I make my way at once to our little chapel to get to my knees. I need the peace of God to clear my mind of this whirl of thoughts. That Elizabeth the princess should know her destiny only confirms my belief that she will be Henry’s wife, and he will take the throne. That her mother should say, “It’s not Richard” fills me with deep unease.

  What can she mean: “It’s not Richard”? Is it not Richard her son, in the Tower? Or does she merely mean that it is not Richard, Duke of Gloucester, whom she fears? I can’t tell, and that fool should have asked her. But I suspected something like this. I have been fretting about something like this. I never thought that she would be such a fool as to give up a second son to an enemy who had kidnapped the first. I have known her for ten years; she is not a woman who does not foresee the worst. The Privy Council trooped down to meet her and lined themselves up to tell her that she had no choice, and then marched away with the little Prince Richard holding the archbishop’s hand. But I always thought that she would have prepared for them. I always knew she would do something to get her last free son away to safety. Any woman would do it, and she is determined and clever, and she dotes on her boys. She would never send them into danger. She would never let her youngest son go where her oldest was in danger.

  But what has she done? If the second prince in the Tower is not Richard, then who is it? Has she sent some pauper in disguise? Some minor ward who would do anything for her? And worse, if Prince Richard, the legitimate heir to the throne of England, is not in the Tower of London under lock and key, then where is he? If she has hidden him somewhere, then he is heir to the York throne, another obstacle to my son’s succession. Is she telling me this? Or pretending? Is she tormenting me? Triumphing over me still by telling my thick-witted messenger a riddle to pass on to me? Did she speak her son’s name on purpose to laugh at me with her foresight? Or did she just slip up? Is she telling me of Richard, to warn me that whatever happens to Edward, she still has an heir?

  I wait for hours on my knees for Our Lady the Queen of Heaven to tell me what this most earthly queen is doing: playing her games, weaving her spells, once again, as ever, before me, triumphing over me even in this moment of her great terror and defeat. But Our Lady does not come to me. Joan does not advise me. God is silent to me, his handmaiden. None of them tell me what Elizabeth Woodville is doing in the hidden sanctuary beneath the abbey, and without their help I know she will come out again to triumph.

  No more than a day after this, my lady-in-waiting comes in with red eyes and says that Anthony, Earl Rivers, the dazzling, chivalrous brother of the queen, is dead, executed on Richard’s order in Pontefract Castle. She brings the news to me the moment it reaches London. Nobody could have heard more quickly; the official report reaches the Privy Council only an hour after I hear it. It seems that the queen and her daughter told Dr. Lewis on the very night that it happened, perhaps at the very moment of his death. And how can that be?

  In the morning, my husband meets me at breakfast. “I am summoned to attend a Privy Council meeting,” he says, showing me a warrant with the seal of the boar. Neither of us looks directly at it; the letter sits on the table between us like a dagger. “And you are to go to the royal wardrobe and prepare the coronation robes for Anne Neville. The robes for a queen. You are to be lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne. We are released from house arrest without a word. And we are in royal service again, without a word spoken.”

  I nod. I will undertake the work for King Richard that I was doing for King Edward. We will wear the same gowns, but the gown of gold and ermine that was ready for the Dowager Queen Elizabeth will be cut down for her sister-in-law, the new Queen Anne.

  My ladies-in-waiting and the Stanley men-at-arms are seated all around us, so my husband and I exchange no more than a small glance of triumph at our own survival. This will be the third royal house that I have served, and each time I have bowed low and thought of my own son as heir. “I shall be honored to serve Queen Anne,” I say smoothly.

  It is my destiny to smile at the changes of the world and await my reward in heaven, but even I balk for a moment at the doorway of the queen’s chambers when I see little Anne Neville—daughter of the Kingmaker Warwick, born well enough, royally married, widowed to nothing, and now risen again to the throne of England itself—standing by the great fireplace in her traveling cloak surrounded by her ladies from the north, like a gypsy encampment from the moors. They see me in the doorway; the steward of her chamber bellows, “Lady Margaret Stanley!” in an accent no one living south of Hull could understand, the women shuffle aside, so that I can walk towards her, and I step in and go down to my knees, abase myself to yet another usurper, and hold up my hands in the gesture of fealty.

  “Your Grace,” I say to the woman who was picked up from disgrace and poverty by the young Duke Richard because he knew he could claim the Warwick fortune with this most unlucky bride. Now she is to be Queen of England, and I have to kneel to her. “I am so glad to offer you my service.”

  She smiles at me. She is pale as marble, her lips pale, her eyelids the palest pink. Certainly, she cannot be well; she puts her hand on the stone of the fireplace and leans against it as if she is weary.

  “I thank you for your service, and I would have you serve as my senior lady-in-waiting,” she says quietly, a little catch in he