The Red Queen tc-2 Read online

  I laugh at his impression of a two-year-old’s fluting voice. “And his hair?” I say. “Is it coming through red like Edmund’s?”

  “Ah no,” Jasper says with a disappointment that I don’t share. “We did not breed true in that, as it turns out. His hair is in ringlets and brown, like a bright bay horse. His nursemaid thinks he will go more fair in the summer when he is out in the sunshine, but he won’t be a brass head like us Tudors.”

  “And does he like to play? And does he know his prayers?”

  “He plays with his bat and his ball, he will play all day if someone will throw a ball for him. And he is learning the Lord’s Prayer and his catechism. Your friend Father William sees him every morning for prayers, and his nursemaid sets him at the foot of his bed every night and makes him stay there. He is ordered to pray for you by name.”

  “Do you have playmates for him?” my husband asks. “Children from the neighboring houses?”

  “We are very isolated in the castle,” Jasper replies. “There are no families of his breeding nearby. There are no suitable companions for a boy such as him. He is Earl of Richmond, and kinsman to the king. I cannot let him play with children from the village, and besides, I would be afraid of illness. He plays with his nursemaids. I play with him. He does not need any others.”

  I nod. I don’t want him playing with village children who might teach him rough ways.

  “Surely, he needs to be with children of his own age,” my husband demurs. “He will need to match himself against other lads, even if they are from the village and from cottages.”

  “I will see when the time comes,” Jasper says stiffly. “He needs no companions but those I give him, for now.”

  There is an awkward silence. “And does he eat well?” I ask.

  “Eats well, sleeps well, runs about all day,” Jasper says. “He is growing well too. He will be tall, I think. He has Edmund’s shape: long and lean.”

  “We will go and visit him as soon as it is safe to travel,” my husband promises me. “And Jasper, you are sure you can keep him safe there?”

  “There is not a Yorkist left in Wales who could raise enough troops to take Pembroke village, let alone my castle,” Jasper assures us. “William Herbert is the king’s man now; he has turned his coat completely since his pardon, he is a Lancaster man now. Wales is safer than England for a Lancaster boy. I hold all the key castles and patrol the roads. I will keep him safe, as I promised. I will always keep him safe.”

  Jasper stays with us only two nights, and in the days he rides out among our tenants and musters as many men as will go with him to march to London to defend it for the king. Few of them are willing to go. We may be of the House of Lancaster; but everyone who lives close enough to London to hear the gossip of the court knows better than to lay down his life for a king that they have heard is half-mad, and a queen who is a Frenchwoman and a virago as well.

  On the third day, Jasper is ready to ride away again, and I have to say good-bye to him. “You seem happy at any rate,” he says to me quietly in the stable yard as his men saddle up and mount onto their saddles.

  “I am well enough. He is kind to me.”

  “I wish you could persuade him to play his part,” Jasper says.

  “I do what I can, but I doubt he will listen to me. I know he should serve, Jasper, but he is older than me and thinks he knows better.”

  “Our king could be fighting for his very right to rule,” Jasper says. “A true man would be at his side. One of the House of Lancaster should not wait to be summoned, let alone ignore the call.”

  “I know, I know, I will tell him again. And you tell baby Henry that I will come and see him as soon as the roads are safe to travel.”

  “There will be no peace and safety for travel until York and Warwick submit to their rightful king!” Jasper says irritably.

  “I know that,” I say. “But for Sir Henry-”

  “What?”

  “He is old,” I say with all the wisdom of a sixteen-year-old. “He does not understand that God gives us a moment sometimes, and we have to seize it. Joan of Arc knew that, you know it. Sometimes God gives us a moment of destiny, and we have to hear the call and rise to it.”

  Jasper’s smile warms his face. “Yes,” he says. “You are right, Margaret. That is how it is. Sometimes there is a moment and you have to answer it. Even if some think you are nothing more than a foolish hound to the hunting horn.”

  He kisses me as a brother-in-law should do, gently on the mouth, and he holds my hands for a moment. I close my eyes and feel myself sway, dizzy at his touch, and then he lets me go, turns his back on me, and swings into the saddle.

  “Is our old horse Arthur still carrying you well?” he asks, as if he does not want either of us to notice he is leaving me again and riding into danger.

  “Yes,” I say. “I ride out on him most days. Go with God, Jasper.”

  He nods. “God will protect me. For we are in the right. And when I am in the very heat of battle I know that God will always protect the man who serves his king.”

  Then he wheels his horse and rides at the head of his men, south to London, to keep the palace of Westminster safe from our enemies.

  AUTUMN 1459

  I hear nothing of Jasper until one of our tenants who was persuaded to follow him comes back to his home in the middle of September, strapped on his own little pony, one arm a suppurating stump, his face white, and the smell of death on him. His wife, a girl only a little older than me, screams in terror and faints as they bring him to their door. She cannot nurse him; she does not know what to do with these rotting remains of the young man she married for love, so they bring him up to the manor for better care than they can manage in his dirty cottage. I turn a spare room in the dairy into a sickroom, and I wonder how many more will come home wounded from Jasper’s hastily recruited band. Jasper’s volunteer tells my husband that Warwick’s father, the Earl of Salisbury, was marching his army of men to meet with the Duke of York at Ludlow when two of our lords, Dudley and Audley, prepared an ambush for him at Market Drayton, on the road to Wales. Our force was double the size of Salisbury’s army, our man John said that the York soldiers went down on their knees and kissed the ground of the field, thinking it would be their deathbed.

  But the York army played a trick, a trick that Salisbury could play since his men would do anything for him-fall back, stand, attack-so he commanded them to withdraw, as if giving up the fight. Our cavalry rode them down, thinking they were chasing a runaway force, and found that they were the ones who were caught, just as they were wading through the brook. The enemy turned and stood, fast as a striking snake, and our men had to fight their way uphill through ground that became more and more churned as they tried to charge the horses through it and drag our guns upwards. The York archers could shoot downhill into our men, and their horses died under them, and they were lost in the mud and the mess and the hail of arrows and shot. John said that the river was red with blood of the wounded and the dying, and men who waded through to escape the battle were dyed red.

  Night fell on a battlefield where we had lost the cause, and our men were left in the fields to die. The York commander Salisbury slipped away before the main body of our army could come up, and deceitfully left his cannon in the field and paid some turncoat friar to shoot them off all night. When the royal army thundered up at dawn, ready for battle, expecting to find the Yorks standing on the defensive with their cannon, ready to massacre the traitors, there was no one there but one drunken hedge friar, hopping from firing pan to firing pan, who told them that their enemy had run off to Ludlow, laughing about their victory over the two Lancaster lords.

  “So, battle has been met,” my husband says grimly. “And lost.”

  “They didn’t engage the king himself,” I say. “The king would have won, without a doubt. They just met two of our lords, not the king in command.”

  “Actually, they faced nothing more than one threadbare friar,” m