The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  ‘Beautiful?’ I whisper. I am not a pretty girl myself, which is a disappointment to my mother, but not to me, for I rise above vanity.

  He shakes his head and says exactly what I want to hear, ‘No, not pretty, not a pretty little thing, not girlish; but the light shone from her.’

  I nod. I feel that I understand–everything.

  ‘Well, that was the end of that campaign for me, but she went on. She took the French dauphin to Reims and crowned him and then went on to Paris. We threw her back from the walls of Paris but it was a close thing–think of it! She nearly took Paris! And then she led her army down the valley of the Loire.’

  I have no idea what is the valley of the Loire. It sounds like the valley of the shadow of death, and so it was for Joan. ‘A Burgundian soldier pulled her off her white horse in a battle,’ the earl says matter-of-factly. ‘Ransomed her to us; we passed her on to the Church for questioning, they found her guilty of heresy and witchcraft and Lord knows what, and released her to us and we executed her.’

  ‘Did you burn her yourself?’

  ‘Margaret!’ my mother reproves, but the earl lifts up his hand.

  ‘My commander, the Duke of Bedford did it. His wife Jacquetta the duchess examined her first. It was our duty as Englishmen to destroy her, she was the most formidable weapon they had, the equal to all our longbows. I don’t doubt she would have defeated us if she had not been stopped. And her death sentence was the choice of her countrymen and her church. But I will say she was the bravest woman I have ever known. I don’t expect to see such a woman again. She was little more than a girl but she was burning up long before we put her on the pyre. She was ablaze with the Holy Spirit.’

  He looked down at my rapt face and laughed. ‘Forget her,’ he said to me. ‘She is nothing to you. She had her day, and she was defeated. The king she crowned will never unite his country. The men she led are dead or lost without her. Her name will be forgotten and they scattered her ashes so no one could make her a shrine.’

  ‘But God spoke to her: a girl,’ I whisper. ‘He did not speak to the king, nor to a boy. He spoke to a girl.’

  He nodded. ‘I don’t doubt she was sure of it,’ he said. ‘I don’t doubt she heard the voices of angels. Otherwise she couldn’t have done what she did. But she was mistaken, for she was defeated, so God was on our side, not hers.’

  Obedient to a signal from my mother, I step down from the table, curtsey to the earl and go to my mother for her blessing. ‘Enough of this,’ she says. ‘I am tired of your harping on the Maid. You heard your guardian, he said: “Forget her”.’

  I curtsey to my mother but I disobey her in this. I never forget Joan, and every veteran that comes to the door of Bletsoe begging for food is told to wait, for little Lady Margaret will want to see him. I always ask them if they were at Les Augustins, at Les Tourelles, at Orléans, at Jageau, at Beaugency, at Patay, at Paris. I know her victories as well as I know the names of our neighbouring villages in Bedfordshire. Some of the begging soldiers were at these battles, some of them even saw her. They all speak of a slight girl on a big horse, a banner over her head, glimpsed where the fighting was the fiercest, a girl like a prince, sworn to bring peace and victory to her country, giving herself to the service of God, nothing more than a girl, nothing more than a girl like me: but a heroine.

  I am so far from a heroine that I haven’t even been taught how to ride, and I am not allowed even to be led on a horse of my own, not even when we come into London and hundreds of people in the streets and markets and shops gawp at the fifty of our household as we ride by. I have to jog behind Wat, my hand on his belt, like some village slut going to a goose fair, and not at all like the heir to the throne of England. We stay at an inn, not even at court, for the Earl of Suffolk my guardian, is disgraced in the Tower of London and 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 she must have thought that Herod had spare rooms in the palace, and 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 sempstresses 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 through a seven-foot doorway. The queen, Margaret of Anjou, loves beautiful clothes and is wearing a new colour of ruby red made from a new dye 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 only be 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 down river to declare my dissent against my betrothal, and to be presented at court.

  The dissent is a formality. I am hoping that they will question me and that I might stand before them shy, but clear-spoken, to say that I know from God Himself that John de la Pole is not to be my husband. I imagine myself before a tribunal of judges amazing them by my clarity and wit; I thought I might tell them that I had a dream which told me that I was not to marry him for I have a greater destiny: I am chosen by God Himself; but it is all written down before we arrive and all I am allowed to say is ‘I dissent’ and sign my name, and it is done. Nobody even asks me for my opinion on the matter. We go to wait outside the presence chamber and then one of the king’s men comes out and calls ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort!’ and everyone looks around and sees me, and I have a moment, a wonderful moment when I remember to despise worldly vanity, and then my mother leads the way into the king’s presence chamber.

  The king is on his great throne with his cloth of estate suspended over the chair and a throne almost the same size beside him for the queen. She is fair-haired and brown-eyed, a round little face with a straight nose. I think she looks beautiful and spoilt, and the king beside her looks fair and pale. She looks like ordinary day and he is like starlight. He smiles at me as I come in and curtsey, but the queen looks from the red roses at the hem of my gown to the little coronet on my head, and then looks away as if she does not think much of me. I suppose, being French, she does not understand who I am. Someone should have told her that if she does not have a child then it will be a son of mine who becomes the next King of England. Then I am sure she would have paid me more attention. But she is worldly; I am sure she would not even have seen the light in Joan. The French can be terribly worldly, I have observed it from my reading. I cannot be surprised that she does not admire me. I curtsey very low and I smile at the king.

  ‘I am giving your daughter in wardship to my dearly loved half-brother, Edmund Tudor,’ the king says to my mother. ‘She can live with you, until it is time for her to marry.’

  The queen looks away, and nods to someone in the crowd of people in the presence chamber as if she is not much pleased by this either. I wait for someone to ask me for my consent, but my mother merely curtseys and steps back and then someone else steps forward and it all seems to be over. The king has barely looked at me, he knows nothing about me, no more than he knew before I walked in the room, and yet he has given me to a new guardian, to another stranger. How can it be that he does not realise that I am a child of special holiness as he was? Am I not to have the chance to tell him about my saints’ knees?

  ‘Can I speak?’ I whisper to my mother.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Then how is he to know who I am, if God does not hurry up and tell him? ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We wait until the other petitioners have seen the king, and then go in to dine,’ she replies.

  ‘No, I mean, what happens to me?’

  She looks at me as if I am foolish not to understand. ‘You are to be betrothed again,’ she says. ‘Did you not hear? And this is an even greater match for you. You are to become the ward and then you will marry Edmund Tudor, the king’s half-brother by their mother, Queen Katheri