The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  SUMMER 1455

  It is my wedding day-come at last. I stand at the door of the church in my best gown, the belt high and tight around my rib cage and the absurdly wide sleeves drowning my thin arms and little hands. My headdress is so heavy on my head that I droop beneath the wire support and the tall, conical height. The sweep of the scarf from the apex veils my pale resentment. My mother is beside me to escort me to my guardian Edmund Tudor, who has decided-as any wise guardian would, no doubt-that my best interests will be served by marriage to him: he is his own best choice as caretaker of my interests.

  I whisper to my mother, “I am afraid,” and she looks down at me. My head is only up to her shoulder. I am twelve years old but still a little girl, my chest as flat as a board, my body hairless beneath my thick layers of rich clothes. They had to pack my bodice with linen to give the impression of breasts. I am a child sent out to do a woman’s duty.

  “Nothing to be afraid about,” she says bluntly.

  I try again. “I thought I would be a virgin like Joan of Arc,” I say to her. I put my hand on her sleeve to tug at her attention. “You know I did. I always did. I wanted to go to a convent. I still want to go. I may have a calling. It might be God’s will. We should take advice. We could ask the priest. We could ask him now, before it is too late. What if God wants me for His own? Then it would be blasphemy if I married.”

  She turns to me and takes my cold hand in hers. “Margaret,” she says seriously, “you must know that you could never choose your own life. You are a girl: girls have no choice. You could never even choose your own husband: you are of the royal family. A husband would always have been chosen for you. It is forbidden for one of royal blood to marry their own choice. You know this too. And finally, you are of the House of Lancaster. You cannot choose your allegiance. You have to serve your house, your family, and your husband. I have allowed you to dream, and I have allowed you to read; but the time has come to put aside silly stories and silly dreams and do your duty. Don’t think you can be like your father and run away from your duty. He took a coward’s way out; you cannot.”

  This sudden reference to my father shocks me. She never speaks of her second husband, my father, except in the vaguest and most general terms. I am about to ask, How did he run away? What was his coward’s way out? when the doors of the church open, and I have to walk forwards and take the hand of my new husband, and stand before a priest and swear to be a wife. I feel his big hand take mine and I hear his deep voice answer the questions, where I just whisper. He pushes a heavy ring of Welsh gold on my finger, and I have to hold my fingers together like a little paw to keep it on. It is far too big for me. I look up at him, amazed that he thinks such a marriage can go ahead, when his ring is too big for my hand and I am only twelve and he is more than twice my age: a man, tempered by fighting and filled with ambition. He is a hard man from a power-seeking family. But I am still a child longing for a spiritual life, praying that people will see that I am special. This is yet another of the many things that nobody seems to care about but me.

  I am to start married life in the palace of Lamphey, Pembrokeshire, which is in the heart of horrible Wales. I have no time to miss my mother and my family in the first months, for everything is so different that I have to learn completely new ways. Most of my time is spent with the servants and the women attendants in the castle. My husband and his brother storm in and out like rain. My lady governess has come with me, and my own maidservant, but everyone else is a stranger. They all speak Welsh and stare at me when I try to ask them for a glass of small ale or a jug of water for washing. I so long for a friendly face from home that I would even be glad to see Wat, the groom.

  The castle stands in desolate countryside. Around me is nothing but high mountains and sky. I can see the rain clouds coming like a wet curtain, half an hour before they pour down on the gray slate roofs and rain-streaked walls. The chapel is a cold and neglected building, and the priest is very poor in his attendance; he does not even notice my exceptional piety. I often go there to pray, and the light streams through the western window onto my bowed head, but nobody even notices. London is a nine-day arduous journey away; my old home is as far. It can take ten days for a letter to come from my mother, but she hardly ever writes. Sometimes I feel that I have been stolen from a battlefield and held to ransom in an enemy land, like my father. Certainly, I could not feel more foreign and lonely.

  Worst of all, I have not had a vision since my wedding night. I spend every afternoon on my knees, when I close my privy chamber door and pretend to be sewing. I spend every evening in the damp chapel. But nothing comes to me. Not a vision of the stake, not the battles, not even the flicker of a banner of angels and lilies. I beg Our Lady for a vision of Joan the Maid; but She grants me nothing, and in the end, sitting back on my heels, I begin to fear that I was holy only when I was a virgin; I am nothing special as a wife.

  Nothing in the world could compensate me for this loss. I was raised to know myself as the daughter of a great man and an heir of the royal family, but my own private glory was that I knew that God spoke to me, directly to me, and that He sent me the vision of Joan the Maid. He sent me an angel in the guise of a beggar to tell me all about her. He appointed William de la Pole as my guardian so that he-having seen Joan-would recognize the same holiness in me. But then God, for some reason, forgot all about this sensible plan and let me fall into the keeping of a husband who takes no interest in my holiness and who, by roughly consummating the marriage vows, takes my virginity and visions in one awful night. Why I should be chosen by God and then neglected by Him, I cannot understand. It is not for me to question the will of God, but I have to wonder: Why did He choose me in the first place if it was just to leave me here, abandoned in Wales? If He were not God, then one would think it very badly planned. It is not as if there is anything I can do here, and for sure, nobody sees me as a living light. It is even worse than Bletsoe, where at least people complained that I was excessively holy. Here they don’t even notice, and I am afraid that I am hidden under a bushel and there is nothing I can do to reveal myself as a beacon for the world.

  My husband is handsome and brave, I suppose. I hardly see him or his brother during the day, as they are constantly riding out to keep the king’s peace against dozens of local uprisings. Edmund is always in the lead; Jasper, his brother, at his shoulder like a shadow. They even walk at the same pace-Edmund striding forwards, Jasper just behind, in step. They are only a year apart in age. I thought them twins when I first saw them together. They have the same unfortunate ginger hair and long thin noses; they both stand tall and lean now, but I think they will run to fat in later life, which must be quite soon. When they talk, they can finish each other’s sentences and they laugh all the time at private jokes. They hardly ever speak to me, and they never tell me what is supposed to be so funny. They are utterly fascinated by weapons and can spend the entire evening talking about the stringing of a bow. I cannot see the use of either of them in God’s will.

  The castle is in a constant state of alert because warring parties and bands of armed and disaffected soldiers come by all the time and raid the nearby villages. Just as my mother feared when the king first fell into his trance, there is unrest everywhere. Worse here than anywhere else, of course, since it is half savage already. And it made no real difference when the king recovered, though the common people were told to rejoice, for now he has fallen ill again, and some people are saying that this is how it will always be: we will live with a king who cannot be relied on to stay awake. This is obviously a disadvantage. Even I can see that.

  Men are taking arms against the king’s rule, first complaining of the taxes raised to fight the unending French wars, and now complaining that the wars are over but we have lost everything we won under the king’s braver father and grandfather. Everyone hates the queen, who is French herself, of course, and everyone whispers that the king is under the cat’s-paw in this marriage, and that a French woman rules