Philippa Gregory - The Red Queen

“Perhaps the king will stay well this time,” my mother suggests hopefully.

I realize how gravely ill His Grace has become from the awkward silence that greets this remark. “Perhaps,” the duke says.

They waste no time on courtship between Henry Stafford and me. They waste no time on giving us even a moment to meet. Why should they? This is a matter for the lawyers and the officers of the household who manage the wealth. It would not matter if Henry Stafford and I hated each other on sight. It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if I still want to be a nun. Nobody cares what I think at all. They treat me like an ordinary young woman, bred for wedding and bedding, and since they do not ask me what I think, nor observe what I feel, there is nothing that gives them pause at all.

They draw up the contracts, and we sign them. We go to the chapel, and before witnesses and before the priest we swear to marry each other in January so that I have a year to mourn my first marriage, which brought me so little joy and ended so soon. I will be fourteen years old, and he will be not exactly forty, but still an old man to me: thirty-three years old.

After the betrothal we go back to the house, and my mother and I sit in the solar, where there is a fire burning, with our ladies around us, listening to the musicians play. I draw my stool a little closer to her so that we can speak privately for once.

“Do you remember what you said before I was married to Edmund Tudor?” I ask her.

She shakes her head and glances away as if she would avoid this conversation. I am very sure she does not want to be reproached for telling me there was nothing to fear, when she instructed my own lady governess to let me die. “No, I don’t remember,” she says quickly. “It feels like years ago.”

“You said that I could not take the coward’s way out, my father’s way out.”

She flinches from me even naming the man who has been buried in silence for so long. “Did I?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine what I was thinking of.”

“So what did he do?”

She turns away with a false laugh. “Have you waited all this time to ask me to explain a silly thing I said at the church door?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Margaret, you are so …” She breaks off, and I wait to hear what I am that makes her toss her head like this and frown. “You are so very serious.”

“Yes.” I nod. “That is true. I am very serious, Lady Mother. I would have thought you would have known that by now. I have always been a serious person, a studious person. And you said something about my father that I think I have a right to understand. I take it seriously.”

She gets up and walks to the window, looking out as if admiring the dark evening. She shrugs her shoulders at the awkwardness of this daughter, her only Beaufort child. Her lady-in-waiting looks up at her in case she needs anything and I see the glance that passes between them. It is as if I am known to be a difficult girl, and I flush with embarrassment.

“Oh,” sighs my mother. “It’s such a long time ago now,” she says. “How old are you now? Thirteen? For heaven’s sake, it is twelve years ago.”

“Then you can tell me. I am old enough to know. And if you don’t, then someone is bound to tell me something. You surely don’t want me to ask the servants?”

The flush that comes to her face tells me that she does not want me to ask the servants, that they have been warned never to discuss this matter with me. Something happened twelve years ago that she wanted to forget, that she wanted me never to know. Something shameful happened.

“How did he die?” I ask.

“By his own hand,” she says quickly and quietly. “If you must know. If you insist on knowing his shame. He left you and he left me, and he died by his own hand. I was with child, a baby that I lost. I lost a baby in my shock and my grief, a baby that might have been a son for the House of Lancaster; but he didn’t think about that. It was days before your first birthday; he didn’t care enough for either of us even to wait to see you into your second year. And that is why I have always told you that your future lies in your son. A husband can come and go; he can leave on his own account. He can go to war or get sick or kill himself; but if you make your son your own, your own creation, then you are safe. A boy is your guardian. If you had been a boy, I would have poured my life into you. You would have been my destiny.”

“But since I was a girl you did not love me, and he did not wait to see my birthday?”

She looks at me honestly and repeats the dreadful words. “Since you were a girl, of course not. Since you were a girl you could only be the bridge to the next generation; you could be nothing more than the means by which our family gets a boy.”

There is a short silence while I absorb my mother’s belief in my unimportance. “I see. I see. I am lucky to be valued by God, since I am not valued by you. I was not valued by my father.”

She nods as if it does not matter much. Still she does not understand me. She will never understand. She will never think that I am worth the effort of understanding. To her I am, as she so frankly tells me, a bridge.

“So why did my father kill himself?” I return to her first revelation. “Why would he do such a thing? His soul will have gone to hell. They must have told a string of lies to get him buried in holy ground.” I correct myself. “You must have told a string of lies.”

My mother comes back and sinks onto the bench by the warm fire. “I did what I could to protect our good name,” she says quietly. “As anyone of a great name would do. Your father came back from France with stories of victory, but then people started to whisper. They said he had done nothing of any value, indeed he had taken the troops and money that his commander Richard of York-the great hero-needed to hold France for England. Richard of York was making progress, but your father set it back. Your father set siege to a town, but it was the wrong town, owned by the Duke of Brittany, and he had to return it to them. We nearly lost the alliance with Brittany through his folly. That would have cost the country dear, but he did not think of it. He set a tax to raise money in the defeated areas of France, but it was illegal; and worse, he kept all the revenue for himself. He said he had a great campaign plan; but he led his men round in circles and then brought them home again without either victory or plunder, so they were bitter against him and said that he was a false lord to them. He was dearly loved by our king, but not even the king could pretend that he had done well.

“There would have been an inquiry in London about his conduct; he escaped that shame only by his death. There might even have been an excommunication from the pope. They would have come for your father and accused him of treason, and he would have paid with his life on the block, and you would have lost your fortune, and we would have been attainted and ruined; he spared us that, but only by running away into death.”

“An excommunication?” I am more horrified by this than anything else.

“People wrote ballads about him,” she says bitterly. “People laughed at his stupidity and marveled at our infamy. You cannot imagine the shame of it. I have shielded you from it, from the shame of him, and I get no thanks for it. You are such a child you don’t know that he is notorious as the great example of his age of the change of fortune, of the cruelty of the wheel of fortune. He could not have been born with better prospects and better opportunities; but he was unlucky, fatally unlucky. In his very first battle in France, when he rode out as a boy, he was captured, and he was left in captivity for seventeen years. It broke his heart. He thought that nobody cared enough to ransom him. Perhaps that is the lesson that I should have taught you-never mind your studies, never mind your nagging for books, for a tutor, for Latin lessons. I should have taught you never to be unlucky, never to be unlucky like your father.”