“Should have known what?”
“Should have known that Edward would murder him. It makes perfect sense, now that our son is dead. So. How did he do it? Strangulation? Suffocation? A stab? A blow to his head while he knelt at his prayers? Poison? Did someone at least see to it that he made his confession first?”
“My lady! I told you! The late king died of sheer melancholy.”
“My husband has known nothing but sorrow for the last ten years. Am I to think that he could not bear this latest ill news? No. He has his faith; it has sustained him and would have yet.” I began to laugh. “Is it not ironic? The one person of all of us who could not bear violence dies a violent death.”
“I tell you, it was not a violent death!”
“You lie.”
“My lady, this will not do. I was going to offer to let you see him before he was taken from here, but if you persist in these wild accusations, I cannot allow you to do so.”
There was no point in arguing further, no point in much of anything anymore. “You will let me see him?”
“Only if you behave yourself and hold your tongue.”
“Then I will.” I took a breath. “I promise.”
“Then make yourself seemly and get your words under control. I will be back in an hour.”
***
“Where are they to bury him?” I asked Sir John as he led me to the Chapel of St. Peter of Vincula. “Here?”
“The king plans to bury him at Chertsey.”
I frowned. “Why Chertsey? He had no ties there. He wished to be buried at Westminster by his mother and by other kings. Or why not Eton?” My eyes glistened as I thought of Henry poring over his plans for that school. “That would please him.”
“I don’t know, my lady. The king specified Chertsey.”
“It matters not,” I said, crossing myself. “He will be with the Lord soon.”
Sir John pushed open the chapel door and led me inside. There, my husband, clad in a shroud, but with his face visible, lay on a bier as a priest read psalms over his body. The priest started when he recognized me, but went on chanting as if he had not been interrupted.
The murderers had been tidy; there was no sign of violence visible. Though the years and illness had aged Henry, time had been kinder to him than I would have thought. Only two things had changed greatly: his neatly trimmed hair, which had had a few strands of gray when I last saw him, had turned completely that color, and he had grown a beard. No one had ever told me. “I was his wife for six and twenty years. Might I have a lock of his hair as a remembrance?”
Sir John said nothing, but took out his dagger and lifted a strand of Henry’s hair, then cut it. He pulled out a handkerchief and carefully wrapped the hair inside it before giving it to me.
I thanked him. Then, expecting to be stopped, I knelt and kissed my husband’s cheek, but no one interfered. “Rest in peace, my dear Henry,” I said softly, putting my hand on the cheek where my lips had rested. “You will soon meet our son in Paradise, and there you will have the peace you have always longed for.” My tears began falling hard. “I meant well, my love,” I said. “I truly did. All I wanted was what was right for you and our son. All I did was for your sake.”
I turned away, unable to hold back my sobs anymore, and Sir John supported me out of the chapel. His own eyes were wet when he said, “He knows it, my lady.”
Henry died more than eleven years ago. He now sleeps at Chertsey; my son sleeps at Tewkesbury. I grow weaker every day and shall soon join them in death. The thought makes me smile.
I spent over four more years in England after Henry and Edward died. My time in the Tower was short: I was moved first to Windsor and then to Wallingford, where the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who had mothered me when I came as a seasick fifteen-year-old to England, could visit me from time to time and mother me once more.
Then in 1475, Edward mounted a great invasion of France. With Burgundy’s aid (the quarrel of 1471 having been mended for now), he would win back all that my Henry had lost; the fall of Normandy, of Gascony, would soon be nothing more than a bad memory. But Burgundy proved an unenthusiastic ally, and in the end my cousin Louis did not have to raise a finger against Edward: only to give him and his leading nobles handsome pensions. There was yet another part to the bargain: for fifty thousand crowns, I was ransomed. So in January 1476, I sailed from England for the very last time, as “Margaret, lately called queen.”
At least, I thought as I gazed back at the land I’d first entered while borne in my dear Suffolk’s arms, I’d left England standing upright.
***
There was a rub to Louis’s generosity, of course; I’d never thought it would be otherwise. In repayment for his ransoming me, and in repayment for the costs he had incurred in helping me to recover my husband’s throne—the small matter that helping me had furthered his own ambitions seemed to have slipped my cousin’s mind—I was required to renounce my rights of inheritance to my father’s dominions. It suited me; I had no heir of my body, only the memory of my beautiful boy. So I took the pension that Louis offered me—I found it amusing that both I and King Edward were his pensioners now—and settled in my father’s manor at Reculée. I seldom saw my aged father himself. Having himself suffered somewhat from Louis’s sharp dealing, he had elected to spend his declining years in comfort at Provence. Though I was welcome at his court, I, clad in the black I had worn since 1471, a moth in a house of butterflies, was ill suited to its gaiety.
I had been at Reculée for about four years when my father died, which thanks to the renunciation Louis had forced me to sign left me with no home. Father in a burst of practicality had arranged, however, for me to go to the home of François de la Vignole, a family friend, and so I live now as a guest at his chateau at Dampierre.
Who of us is left from those bloody days in England? My cousin Marie returned to France after Tewkesbury and remarried, but my dear Katherine Vaux stayed by my side; she remains with me today, and if there is a hand other than hers that I am holding as I die, I shall be sorely surprised.
The Duke of Exeter was not killed at Barnet, as we had thought: he lay on the field, stripped and left for dead, until a servant found him and carried him off to a surgeon, then to sanctuary at Westminster. But Edward removed him from sanctuary and imprisoned him in the Tower. He was no longer the wild young man of my own youth: during the short time he and I were both prisoners there, Sir John would allow him to visit me and play a game of chess or cards. He was freed to join the great invasion of 1475, but drowned on the anticlimactic voyage back. Some say he fell overboard after quarreling with some drunken soldiers; others say that King Edward, always eager to lose one of the House of Lancaster, had him pushed.
The Duke of Clarence, the sorry turncoat, never ceased to plot against Edward, who solved his Clarence problems in 1478 by locking him in the Tower, then having him privately executed. My daughter-in-law Anne married the Duke of Gloucester, by all accounts a loyal and dutiful brother, rewarded as such by King Edward. I wonder if Anne ever thinks of my own Edward. She has a son by that name; he was named for the king, of course, but I like to think that he might have been named for a Prince of Wales too.
I like to think a lot of things; it is my main occupation these days. Yet I do not think so much of the past but of the future: the day that I shall see my dear ones in Paradise.
***
I am poor, I suppose, but a queen with no court needs very, very little. Yet as little as I have to leave, Louis keeps himself very well informed about my state of health. Once this would have infuriated me; now, as I prepare to leave behind the folly of this world, it rather amuses me.
My last will is ready. It is short: I ask Louis to pay any debts that the sale of my few goods is insufficient to pay, and I ask to be buried at the cathedral at Angers where my mother and my father already lie. I make no provision for a tomb, as this would no doubt strain Louis’s already meager generosity to the breaking point.
There is no tomb for my husband either, no effigy of him in his royal robes. His grave is indicated only by a simple marker, but that does not stop the people from flocking to Chertsey Abbey to be healed of their afflictions, for many now regard my Henry as a saint. Edward does his best to discourage these visits, they say, but the visitors come nonetheless. It must give Henry great pleasure to have them all, more pleasure, probably, than he ever had from his crown. “You will visit Henry when you go back to England?” I ask Katherine as she straightens my pillow.
“You know I will.”
“I know; I ask you at least once a day. And you will visit my Edward when you visit your William at Tewkesbury.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“He would be nine-and-twenty come this October.” I finger the rosary I keep in my hand at nearly all times, then take Katherine’s hand. “And your William would be five and forty. Sometimes I forget your own loss when I dwell upon my own, Katherine. Forgive me for that.”
“I do, my dear. Come. I can tell from your face that you are in great pain today. Shall I give you some poppy juice?”
“No. Let us do some letters. That distracts me.”
For the past few days, Katherine and I have been busy sorting the papers I have kept over the years: I reading over them one last time, Katherine then feeding them into the fire that burns low even on this August day, for I chill easily. They are harmless mementoes—the poem dear Suffolk gave to me, an old lesson of my son’s, a prayer composed by my husband, an inquiry from my father about whether one of his dwarfs might cheer me up in my exile—but I do not want Louis’s agents putting their inquisitive hands upon them, the little treasures of a bereaved and dying woman. Katherine picks up one from the pile and smiles. “Ah. I have always wondered if you kept this.”
I unfold it and feel a pang as I stare at Hal’s letter to me. With his own hand, he had written this and sprinkled the sand on the ink when it was finished. I shall not stray again, but shall live and, if God wills it, die the king’s loyal subject. Though I have trained myself to think of Hal only in the most chaste and correct manner imaginable, I cannot forbear from giving the letter a kiss before I hand it to Katherine. I shake my head as the flames consume the letter. “My Beauforts were brave men.” I think of Hal abandoning the comforts of Chirk Castle to face almost certain death in service of our cause. “And he was the bravest of them all.”
We spend an hour or so reading and burning, a task which in my state of health exhausts me so that I soon drift off. When I awake, the sun is low in the sky. “A new letter arrived while you were asleep,” Katherine says, coming to my bedside.
“From whom? Louis? If so, tell him I am not quite dead yet.” Already he has written to my friend Jeanne Chabot, Madame de Montsoreau, demanding that she give him, my heir, the dogs I have sent to her in gratitude to the kindnesses she has shown me during my illness. She in turn has written to inform me that she had no choice but to comply, but she has secretly kept one bitch puppy, named Margaret, which Jeanne hopes will breed. At least one Margaret may have descendants.
I manage a snicker. “Perhaps we can put some paint on my face and parade me in my chariot around town as having made a recovery? That will no doubt cast Louis into great gloom for a day or so.”
“The letter is not from him. It is from the Earl of Pembroke.”
Having escaped from Edward just in time after the debacle of 1471, Henry’s half brother, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, is now in exile at the court of Brittany. He sends me his respects from time to time, though it has been a long time since I have received one of his missives. Pembroke was accompanied in his exile by his nephew, Henry Tudor, the son of that Margaret Beaufort who had given birth at such an early age. I still think of him as a boy, although he must now be well into his twenties. “Well, then, let me read it.”
Katherine hands me the letter. “It is addressed to the Queen of England.”
Madam, I have heard that you are very ill, perhaps even dying.
I hope the reports are wrong; I pray that they are. But if they are correct, I want your highness to know that the cause of the House of Lancaster, for which you fought so long and so hard, will remain alive in my heart, and in that of my nephew Henry and his mother, until the end of our days. You will never be forgotten, madam.
Your true subject and liege man,
Pembroke.
I smile at this masterpiece of wistful thinking. Its sentiments about me are kind, but what of the cause of the House of Lancaster? Jasper and his nephew are near-penniless exiles. The Earl of Oxford, having waged a nearly one-man war against the House of York since escaping from Barnet, has been captured at last and is now a prisoner, held fast in dreary Hammes Castle near Calais. It will take a miracle to restore Lancastrian rule to England—and a rule by whom?
Yet as I approach death, I am in a state of mind to remember that miracles do happen, and not only at my husband’s grave. My uncle Charles’s throne had been saved for him by a peasant girl, after all. Who knows what the Lord can do when so inclined? “Thank him for his good wishes. Now read to me a while, so I can sleep again.”
“From your Book of Hours?”
“No. My father’s Book of the Love-Smitten Heart. Let me look at it first.”
Katherine obeys. I leaf through the book, looking for the words that Jasper Tudor’s letter has so oddly brought to mind. “Read from here,” I command.
During his last years, my aged father had completed a manuscript he had been working on for two decades, a tale of a knight named Heart who goes in quest of Sweet Mercy. He never sent it to me during his lifetime, as I had let it be known that I had no patience with such tales, but after my father’s death in 1480, my stepmother had sent an illuminated copy to me. Slowly turning the pages out of curiosity, I had been startled to find a picture of a woman, past her youth but still pretty, with dark blond hair and a crown on her head. There was no better likeness of me, or at least of me when I had been twenty years younger.
Her name was Lady Hope. Tears streaming down my face, I had read the words she speaks to the hero:
You shall have sorrows in profusion
So often it will be unjust,
For Love by custom so apportions
His rewards and afflictions
Whether deserved or not:
He cares little who wins or loses.
Into the Forest of Long Awaiting
You shall enter, so I say, and
Shall drink from the Fountain of Fortune,
Which is not the same for all men.
Had Father had me in mind when he wrote those words? I will never know, but Jasper Tudor’s letter has brought them home to me. I settle back against my pillow, listening to Katherine read:
But guard you well, I pray you,
From the Path of Madness,
For by this way you would arrive
At the manor wherein dwells Despair.
If, by chance, you should enter within,
I shall tell you what you should do:
Keep me then in memory,
And this will grant victory to you,
And you can soon retrace your road
To the Path of Joyful Thought.
Through which you shall find Mercy.
But your heart shall then be overcast,
For before this conquest
You shall receive many blows upon your head
From Harsh Discord and Refusal,
Who will quite overcome you.
If Despair comes upon you,
Joy will no longer remain within you:
So be you ever mindful of me
Who bears Hope as name.
“I will be, Father,” I whisper. “Thank you. I can sleep now.”
It is pleasant being an old lady. Take this procession before the day of the royal coronation, for instance. I have been asked to ride in Queen Catherine’s train, but at my age I feel the heat as keenly as the cold, and I know that were I to take part, I wou
ld be prostrate for a week. “I would be honored to attend the queen, your grace,” I tell young King Henry. Not quite eighteen, he is tall, handsome, and genial like his grandfather, that fourth Edward. “But my health will not allow it. I must miss this occasion, I fear.”
“Well,” Henry rumbles. “We shall miss you. But why should you miss the procession? You may watch in comfort with my grandmother.”
So on the day of the procession, I do not sit in a litter with the sun beating down upon my poor old head, nor do I sit in my chambers waiting to hear a description of the day’s festivities from my son and daughter, who are in the procession themselves: Nicholas as one of King Henry’s knights, Jane as one of Queen Catherine’s ladies. Instead, I sit on the upper floor of a hired house in Cheapside alongside Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, and watch the procession from the comfort of a well-cushioned chair.
The king’s thirteen-year-old sister, the Lady Mary, is with us as well. My daughter, Jane Guildford, has virtually raised this beautiful girl, who has made it known that when her time comes to marry, she will not budge out of England without her Mother Guildford in her train. “Have you ever seen such a sight?” she breathes as she leans far out the window. She speaks merely of the banners that festoon the street: the procession itself has not even begun.
“It will be but more splendid when it starts, but you will not improve the occasion if you fall out the window,” I said. You see? A younger woman could never say that to a princess.
The Lady Mary obediently takes a somewhat less precarious stance. “You were at my mother’s coronation, weren’t you, Lady Vaux?”
“Indeed I was. And I was at the coronation of my lady Margaret of Anjou as well.”
Mary’s face lights up with curiosity, for Margaret of Anjou is little more than a name to her, the wars of the last century the abstract stuff of her tutors’ lectures. This girl has grown up in an England of peace and prosperity, an England where her father the king died quietly in his bed and where her brother Henry has no one trying to push him off his new throne. For her, Wakefield, St. Albans, Towton, Hexham, Barnet, and Tewkesbury are simply the names of English towns. “That’s right. You served her, didn’t you, Lady Vaux?”
The Queen of Last Hopes Page 37