Philippa Gregory - The Red Queen

“She may be a liar, and indeed, in your terms, she may be a whore, but she will be the next Queen of England,” he says. “If your son comes in like a dragon from Wales-did you know there is a new ballad doing the rounds about the dragon from Wales? – then he will have to marry her to secure the York affinity, whatever her past has been. If Richard defeats your son, as seems most likely, then Richard will marry her for love. Either way, she will be Queen of England, and you would be wise not to make an enemy of her.”

“I shall treat her with perfect courtesy,” I say.

“Do that,” he recommends. “But listen to me, and do something more …”

I wait.

“Don’t take this opportunity to ride roughshod over her, in case, when the times change, she rides her horses over you. You have to appear to be on her side, Margaret. Don’t be a Beaufort filled with wounded pride-be a Stanley: get on the winning side.”

I disregard my husband’s advice, and I watch Lady Elizabeth and she watches me. We live together in a state of armed silence, like two armies drawn up, pausing before battle.

“Like two cats on a stable roof,” my husband says, much amused.

Sometimes she asks me for news of my son-as if I would trust her with the humiliation he has had to suffer at the French court to raise funds and support for his attack on England! Sometimes I ask her if she has heard from her sisters, still at court, and she tells me that the court is to move to Nottingham, the dark castle at the heart of England, where Richard has chosen to wait for the attack that he knows is coming. The younger York girls are to be sent to Sheriff Hutton for safekeeping, and I know Elizabeth longs to be with them. She obeys the rules of my household without demur, and she is as silent in prayer and as still as I am myself. I have kept her for hours in my chapel without her breakfast, and she has never breathed one word of complaint. She just grows paler, more and more weary in the devotional silence of my private rooms, and I imagine that she finds the days very long. The rose that she was when she rode in through my gate in her red riding dress has now faded to a white rose indeed. She is still beautiful, but now she is again the silent girl that her mother raised in the shadowy sanctuary. She had only a little time of glory, poor little thing: a very brief moment when she was the unofficial queen of a merry court. Now she is in shadow and silence again.

“But your mother must live as I do,” I remark one day to her. “She too lives alone in the country, and she has no lands to command and no people to supervise. She is robbed of her lands and alone as I am. She must be penitent and sad and quiet.”

To my surprise, she laughs aloud, and then puts her hand over her mouth and apologizes. But her eyes are still dancing with the joke. “Oh no, my mother is a very merry woman,” she says. “She has music and dancing every evening, and the mummers come, and the players, and the tenants have their festivals, and she celebrates the saints’ days. She rides out with a hunt most mornings, and they often picnic in the woods. There is always something happening at her house, and she has many guests.”

“It sounds like a little court,” I say. I can hear the jealousy in my own voice, and I try to smile to conceal it.

“It is a little court,” she says. “Many people who loved her still remember the old days and are glad to visit her and see her in a lovely house and in safety again.”

“But it’s not her house,” I insist. “And she once commanded palaces.”

Elizabeth shrugs. “She doesn’t mind that,” she says. “Her greatest loss was my father and my brothers.” She looks away as she mentions them and swallows down her grief. “As for the rest of it all-the palaces and the clothes and the jewels matter less to her.”

“Your mother was the most venal woman I have ever known,” I say rudely. “Whatever she pretends, this is her downfall, her poverty, her defeat. She is in exile from the royal court, and she is a nobody.”

She smiles but says nothing in disagreement. There is something so utterly defiant in her smiling silence that I have to grip my hands on the arms of my chair. I should so like to slap her pretty face.

“You don’t think so?” I say irritably. “Speak up, girl.”

“My mother could have come to court at any time she wished, as the most honored guest of her brother-in-law King Richard of England,” she says quietly. “He invited her and promised she would be the second lady in the kingdom after the queen. But she didn’t want to. I think she has put worldly vanity behind her.”

“No, it is I who have put worldly vanity behind me,” I correct her. “And this is a struggle of mastery over one’s greed and desire for fame, a goal only won by years of study and prayer. Your mother has never done such a thing. She isn’t capable of it. She has not surrendered worldly vanity; she just didn’t want to see Anne Neville in her place.”

The girl laughs again, this time smiling at me. “You are quite right!” she exclaims. “And almost exactly the very thing she said! She said she couldn’t stand to see her lovely gowns cut down to fit Anne Neville! I truly believe she wouldn’t want to go back to court anyway, but you are quite right about the gowns. Poor Queen Anne.”

“God rest her soul,” I say piously, and the girl has the face to say: “Amen.”

My son must come soon. Richard, from the castle at Nottingham, sends a commission to all the shires of England to remind them of their duty to him, and proclaiming the threat of Henry Tudor. He orders them to put aside all local disputes and be ready to muster in his cause.

He orders Elizabeth to leave me and to go to Sheriff Hutton with her sisters, to join the orphaned children of George, Duke of Clarence, in a safe place. He is putting all the York children in the safest place he can find, his castle in the north, while he fights for their inheritance, against my son. I try to keep her with me-the men of York will only support my son if they think he is betrothed to her-but she packs in a moment, she is in the red riding dress in a second, she is ready to leave me within the hour, and when the escort comes for her, she all but dances out into the yard.

“I daresay we will meet again when all this is over,” I remark, as she comes to make her farewell curtsey to me. I let her come to me in the great hall, and I stay seated in my chair and make her stand before me, like a servant being dismissed.

She says nothing, she just looks at me with her beautiful gray eyes as if she is waiting for me to finish my sermon and release her.

“If my son comes in like a dragon from Wales and defeats King Richard, then he will be King of England. He will take you as his wife, and you will be queen. It will be in his gift,” I say. “You have no name now; he will give you one if he chooses to do so. You have no title; he can make you Queen of England. He will be your savior; he will rescue you from shame and from being a nothing.”

She nods, as if shame is not a curse for a woman.

“But if Richard defeats my son Henry, then Richard will take you, his whore, and wash your reputation clean with a late marriage. You will be queen but wed to the man who killed your uncle and your brothers, who betrayed your father’s will, your enemy. A shameful fate. It would be better if you had died with your brothers.”

For a moment I think she has not heard me, for her eyes are on the floor and she does not flinch at this prospect. She is quite unmoved by the threat of being married to a young man who must hate her, or a man who is blamed for the murder of her family. Then slowly, she looks up at me, and I see that she is smiling, beautifully smiling, as if she were happy.