The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  Jasper strolls beside me as if he is out to take the air. He does not look up at me, nor glance at the horse. He gives the impression of a man walking beside a perfectly competent horsewoman; he is just there for company. Only when we have gone some distance down the road does he say: “Would you like to turn him around now, and head for home?”

  “How does he turn?”

  “You turn his head by pulling it gently round. He will know what you mean. And you give him a little squeeze with your leg to tell him to go on walking.”

  I do no more than touch the rein and the big head turns and Arthur circles around and heads for home. It is easy to walk back up the hill, and then I steer him through the courtyard and to the stables, and without telling, he goes to stand beside the mounting block and waits for me to get off.

  Jasper helps me down and then slips me a heel of bread to give to the horse. He shows me how to keep my hand flat so Arthur can find his titbit with his gentle lips, and then he shouts for a stable boy to take the horse away.

  “Would you like to ride again tomorrow?” he asks. “I could come out with you on my horse; they could go side by side and we could go farther. Perhaps down to the river.”

  “I should like that,” I say. “Are you going to the nursery now?”

  He nods. “He is usually awake about now. They will let me undo the swaddling and he can kick for a bit. He likes it when he is free.”

  “You do like him very much, don’t you?”

  He nods shyly. “He is all I have left of Edmund,” he says. “He is the last of us Tudors. He is the most precious thing in the castle. And who knows? One day he might be the most precious thing in Wales, even in England itself.”

  In Henry’s nursery I see that Jasper is a welcome and regular visitor. He has his own chair where he sits and watches the baby being slowly unwrapped from the swaddling bands. He does not flinch from the smell of the dirty clout nor turn his head away. Instead, he leans forwards and inspects the baby’s bottom carefully for any signs of redness or soreness, and when they tell him they have greased the baby with the oil from the sheep fleeces as he ordered, he nods and is satisfied. Then when the baby is cleaned, they put a warm woolen blanket on Jasper’s knees, and he lays the baby on his back and tickles his little feet and blows on his bare tummy, and the baby kicks and squirms with joy at his freedom.

  I watch this like a stranger, feeling odd and out of place. This is my baby, but I don’t handle him easily like this. Awkwardly, I go to kneel beside Jasper so I can take one of the little hands and look at the tiny fingernails and the creases in the fat little palm, the exquisite little lines around his plump wrist. “He is beautiful,” I say wonderingly. “But are you not afraid of dropping him?”

  “Why would I drop him?” Jasper asks. “If anything, I am most likely to spoil him with too much attention. Your lady governess says a child should be left alone and not played with every day.”

  “She’d say anything that meant she could sit longer over her dinner or sleep in her chair,” I say acidly. “She persuaded my mother that I should not have a tutor for Latin because she knew it would make more work for her. I won’t have her tutoring him.”

  “Oh no,” Jasper says. “He’ll have a proper scholar. We’ll get someone from one of the universities, Cambridge probably. Someone who can give him a good grounding in everything he’ll need to know. The modern subjects as well as the classics: geography and mathematics as well as rhetoric.”

  He leans forwards and plants a smacking kiss on Henry’s warm little belly. The baby gurgles with pleasure and waves his little hands.

  “He’s not likely to inherit, you know,” I remind him, denying my own belief. “He doesn’t need the education of a prince. There is the king on the throne and Prince Edward to come after him; and the queen is young, she can easily have more children.”

  Jasper hides the baby’s face with a little napkin and then whisks it away. The baby gives a little shout of surprise and delight. Jasper does it again, and again, and again. Clearly, the two of them could play this game all day.

  “He may never be more than a royal cousin,” I repeat. “And then your care of him and his education will all have gone to waste.”

  Jasper holds the baby close to him, warmed in his blanket. “Ah no. He is precious on his own account,” he says to me. “He is precious as my brother’s child and the grandson of my father, Owen Tudor, and my mother, God bless her, who was Queen of England. He is precious to me as your child-I don’t forget your sufferings as you gave birth to him. And he is precious as a Tudor. As for the rest-we will learn the future as God wills. But if they ever call for Henry Tudor, then they will find that I have kept him safe and prepared him so that he is ready to rule.”

  “Whereas they will never call for me, and I won’t be fit for anything but to be a wife, if I am even alive,” I say irritably.

  Jasper looks at me and does not laugh. He looks at me and it is as if, for the first time in my life, someone has seen me and understood me. “You are the heir whose bloodline gives Henry his claim to the throne,” he says. “You, Margaret Beaufort. And you are precious to God. You know that, at least. I have never known a woman more devout. You are more like an angel than a girl.”

  I glow, the way a lesser woman would blush if someone praised her beauty. “I didn’t know you had even noticed.”

  “I have, and I think you have a real calling. I know that you can’t be an abbess, of course not. But I do think you have a calling to God.”

  “Yes, but Jasper, what good is it being devout, if I am not to be an example to the world? If all that they will allow for me is a marriage to someone who hardly cares for me at all, and then an early death in childbed?”

  “These are dangerous and difficult times,” he says thoughtfully, “and it is hard to know what one should do. I thought that my duty was to be a good second to my brother, and to hold Wales for King Henry. But now my brother is dead, it is a constant battle to hold Wales for the king, and when I go to court the queen herself tells me that I should be commanded by her and not by the king. She tells me that the only safety for England is to follow her and she will lead us to peace and alliance with France, our great enemy.”

  “So how do you know what to do?” I ask. “Does God tell you?” I think it most unlikely that God would speak to Jasper, whose skin is so very freckled, even now in March.

  He laughs. “No. God does not speak to me, so I try to keep the faith with my family, with my king, and with my country in that order. And I prepare for trouble and hope for the best.”

  I draw close to speak to him quietly. “Do you think that Richard of York would dare to take the king’s throne, if the king were to be ill for very long?” I ask. “If he does not get better?”

  He looks bleak. “I would think it a certainty.”

  “So what am I to do if I am far from you and a false king takes the throne?”

  Jasper looks consideringly at the baby. “Say that our King Henry dies and then the prince, his son.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Amen. Say that they die the one after the other. On that day this baby is the next in line to the throne.”

  “I know that well enough.”

  “Do you not think that this might be your calling? To keep this child safe, to teach him the ways of kingship, to prepare him for the highest task in the land-to see him ordained as king and take the holy oil on his breast and become more than a man, a king, a being almost divine?”

  “I dreamed of it,” I tell him very quietly. “When he was first conceived. I dreamed that to carry him and give birth to him was my vocation, as to bring the French king to Rheims was Joan’s. But I have never spoken of it to anyone but God.”

  “Say you were right,” Jasper goes on, his whisper binding a spell around us both. “Say that my brother did not die in vain, for his death made this boy the Earl of Richmond. His seed made this boy a Tudor and so half nephew to the King of England. Your carryi