The Red Queen Read online

  I lie back for a moment, and for a blessed moment the worst of it stops. In the sudden silence I hear my lady governess say, very clearly: “Your orders are to save the baby if you have to choose. Especially if it is a boy.”

  I am so enraged at the thought of Jasper ordering my own lady governess to tell my midwives that they should let me die if they have to choose between my life or that of his nephew that I spit on the floor and cry out: “Oh, who says so? I am Lady Margaret Beaufort of the House of Lancaster …” But they don’t even hear me; they don’t turn to listen to me.

  “That’s the right thing to do,” Nan agrees. “But seems hard on the little maid …”

  “It is her mother’s order,” my lady governess says, and at once I don’t want to shout at them anymore. My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby?

  “Poor little girl. Poor, poor little girl,” Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.

  It takes two days and nights for the baby to make his agonizing way out of me, and I do not die, though there are long hours when I would have done so willingly, just to escape the pain. They show him to me, as I am falling asleep, drowning in pain. He is brown-haired, I think, and he has tiny hands. I reach out to touch him, but the drink and the pain and the exhaustion flood over me like darkness and I faint away.

  When I wake, it is morning and one of the shutters is opened, the yellow winter sun is shining in the little panes of glass, and the room is warm with the banked-up fire glowing in the fireplace. The baby is in his cradle, swaddled tight on his board. When the nursemaid hands him to me, I cannot even feel his body, he is wrapped so tight in the swaddling bands that are like bandages from head to toe. She says he has to be strapped to his board so his arms and legs cannot move, so his head is kept still, to make sure that his young bones grow straight and true. I will be allowed to see his feet and his hands and his little body when they unwrap him to change his clout, which they will do at midday. Until then I can hold him while he sleeps, like a stiff little doll. The swaddling cloth is wrapped around his head and chin to keep his neck straight, and it finishes with a little loop on the top of his head. The poor women use the loop to hook their babies up on a roof beam when they are cooking, or doing their work, but this boy, who is the newest baby in the House of Lancaster, will be rocked and carried by a team of nursemaids.

  I lie him down on the bed beside me and gaze at his tiny face, his little nose, and the smiling curves of his rosy eyelids. He is not like a living thing, but more like a little stone carving of a baby as you find in a church, placed beside his stone-dead mother. It is a miracle to think that such a thing has been made, has grown, has come into the world; that I made him, almost entirely on my own (for I hardly count Edmund’s drunken labors). This tiny little object, this miniature being, is the bone of my bone and the flesh of my flesh, and he is of my making, all of my making.

  After a little while he wakes and starts to cry. For such a small object the cry is incredibly loud, and I am glad the nursemaid comes in at a run and takes him from the room to the wet nurse. My own small breasts ache to suckle him, but I am bound up as tight as my swaddled baby; the two of us are strapped tight to do our duty: a baby who must grow straight, and a young mother who may not feed her child. His wet nurse has left her own baby at home so that she can come and take up her position in the castle. She will eat better than she has ever eaten in her life before, and she is allowed a good ration of ale. She does not even have to care for my baby, she just has to make milk for him, as if she were a dairy cow. He is brought to her when he needs feeding, and the rest of the time he is cared for by the maids of the nursery. She does a little cleaning, washing his clouts and linen, and helps in his rooms. She does not hold him except at feeding time. He has other women to do that. He has his own rocker to sleep by his cradle, his own two nursemaids to wait on him, his own physician comes once a week, and the midwives will stay with us until I am churched and he is christened. He has a larger entourage than me, and I suddenly realize that this is because he is more important than me. I am Lady Margaret Tudor, born a Beaufort, of the House of Lancaster, cousin to the sleeping King of England. But he is both a Beaufort and a Tudor. He has royal blood on both sides. He is Earl of Richmond, of the House of Lancaster, and has a claim, after the king’s son, Prince Edward, to the throne of England.

  My lady governess comes into the room. “Your brother-in-law Jasper asks you to agree to his name for the baby,” she says. “He is writing to the king and to your mother to tell them he is going to call him Edmund Owen, for the baby’s father and his Tudor grandfather.”

  “No,” I say. I am not going to name my baby, who cost me so much pain, after a man who caused me nothing but pain. Or his stupid father. “No, I won’t call him Edmund.”

  “You can’t call him Edward,” she says. “The king’s son is Prince Edward.”

  “I am going to call him Henry,” I say, thinking of the sleeping king who might wake for a boy of the House of Lancaster called Henry, though he slept through the birth of the prince called Edward. “Henry is a royal name for England, some of our best and bravest kings have been called Henry. This boy will be Henry Tudor.” I repeat the name proudly: “Henry Tudor.” And I think to myself, when the sleeping King Henry VI is dead, then this baby will be Henry VII.

  “He said Edmund Owen,” she repeats, as if I might be deaf as well as stupid.

  “And I say Henry,” I say. “And I have called him this already. This is his name. It is decided. I have named him in my prayers. He is all but baptized Henry already.”

  She raises her eyebrows at my ringing emphasis. “They won’t like it,” she says, and she goes out of the room to tell my brother-in-law Jasper that the girl is being stubborn and will not name her son for her dead husband, but has chosen her own name for him and will not be dissuaded.

  I lie back against the pillows again and close my eyes. My boy will be Henry Tudor, whatever anyone says.

  SPRING 1457

  I have to stay in my rooms for another six weeks after the birth of my boy, before I can go to the chapel and be cleansed of the sin of childbirth. When I come back to my rooms, the shutters are down and the dark drapes have been taken away. There is wine in jugs and small cakes on plates, and Jasper has come to visit me and congratulate me on the birth of my child. The nursemaids tell me that Jasper visits the baby in his nursery every day, as if he were the doting father himself. He sits by the cradle if the baby is asleep, he touches his cheek with his finger, he cups the tightly wrapped head in his big hands. If the baby is awake, Jasper watches him feed, or he stands over them when they unwrap the swaddling and admires the straight legs and the strong arms. They tell me that Jasper begs them to leave the swaddling off for a moment more so he can see the little fists and the fat little feet. They think it unmanly for him to hang over the cradle, and I agree; but all the Tudors please only themselves.

  He smiles at me tentatively, and I smile back. “Are you well, sister?” he asks.

  “I am,” I say.

  “They tell me it was a difficult birth for you.”

  “It was.”

  He nods. “I have a letter from your mother for you, and she also wrote to me.”

  He hands me one sheet of paper, folded square and sealed with my mother’s Beaufort crest of the portcullis. I lift the seal carefully and read her letter. She has written in French, and she commands me to meet her at Greenfield House in Newport, Gwent. That is all. She sends me no words of affection or inquiry after my son, her own grandson. I remember that she told them if it was a choice between a boy and me, then they should let me die, and I ignore her coldness and turn to Jasper. “Does she tell you why I am to go to Newport? For she does not trouble herself to expla