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“Good God! Her men have taken Richard, Duke of York, and killed him.” He looks up at me, clenches the letter in his fist. “My God! Who would have thought it? The protector dead! She has won!”
I am ashamed at my own reluctance to hear this call to arms.
There is no point trying to argue with this mixture of terror and truth. The queen, a woman in armor, leading her own army, with a son conceived by a sleeping husband, a woman who uses alchemy and possibly the dark arts, a French princess in alliance with our enemies has become an object of utter horror to the people of her country.
We ride south with the queen’s army, the royal party at the head of the marching men, the pillaging, looting, and terror going on behind us in a broad swathe that we know about, but ignore.
but others are madmen, men from the North like Vikings going berserk, killing for the sake of it, stealing from churches, raping women. We bring terror to England; we are like a plague on our own people.
But some of the other lords, the queen herself, and even her little boy seem to revel in punishing the country that rejected them. Margaret is like a woman released from the bonds of honor; she is free to be anything she likes for the first time in her life, free of her husband, free of the constraints of the court, free of the careful manners of a French princess; she is free, at last, to be wicked.
I turn away as if she might see, reflected in my eyes, the three suns I saw, dazzling on the water of the Thames. These are three suns I know; these three suns I have seen. But I did not know then what they meant, and I still don’t know now.
The queen rides through it all, blind to the misery of it, and the prince rides beside her, beaming at our victory, his little sword held up before him.
“This is Sir Thomas, and Lord Bonville,” the king says to his wife. “They have been very good … very good.” “How?” she spits. “They kept me amused,” he says, smiling. “While it was all going on, you know. While the noise was going on. We played marbles. I won. I liked playing when the noise was going on.”
He guides the king into the queen’s vacated chair. “No, I am afraid he is not well,” he says gently, helping Henry to sit.
The queen whirls around to her son in a white-faced fury. “These lords have held your father the king prisoner,” she says flatly. “What death would you have them die?” “Death?” Bonville looks up, shocked.
“Your Grace! We have kept him safe. We were promised safe conduct. He gave us his own word!” “What death would you have these rebels die?” she repeats, staring at her son. “These men, who kept your father prisoner, and now dare tell me that he is ill?”
“Don’t go, Sir Thomas,” the king says. “Don’t leave me here with …” He glances at the queen, but he cannot find her name again in his addled brain. “We can play again,” he says, as if to tempt his friend to stay with him. “You like to play.” “Your Grace.” Sir Thomas holds his hand and gently closes his other one over it in a warm clasp. “I need you to tell Her Grace, the queen, that I have cared for you. You said that we should stay with you and we would be safe. You gave us your word! Do you remember? Don’t let the queen behead us.”
I should have warned him. I have the Sight sometimes, but I might as well be blind.” He leans forwards and takes my hand. “It’s just fortune,” he says. “A cruel goddess. Will you write to Elizabeth? I can send a man with a message.”
I am part of a victorious army on a winning campaign, but I have never before felt so defeated.
I step over the threshold into the warm shadows of Groby Hall and know that I will have to do the worst, the very worst thing that one woman can do to another: tell her that her son is dead.
When I get back to St. Albans, I find most of the town empty, the shops gutted, and the houses barred. The townspeople are terrified of the queen’s army, which has looted all the valuables and foraged all the food for an area of ten miles all around the town.
I lean against him for a moment. “I am sick of it,” I say quietly. “I am sick of the fighting, and I am sick of the death, and I don’t think she can be trusted with the throne of England. I don’t know what to do. I thought of it all the way to Groby and all the way back again, and I don’t know what I think or where my duty lies. I can’t foresee the future, and I can’t even say what we should do tomorrow.”
Someone laughs at the mention of the king, and shouts a bawdy joke that he has never been master in his own house and probably not master in his own bed.
“Has the poor king stopped weeping?” he asks. “When he was living here under the command of the Duke of York, he wept all the time. He went to Westminster Abbey and measured out the space for his own tomb. They say he never smiled but cried all the time like a sorrowful child.” “He is happy with the queen and with his son,” I say steadily, hiding my embarrassment at this report.
“Truth is,” he says finally, “the city doesn’t want the queen here, nor the king, nor the prince. They don’t want any of them. Sworn to peace or not.”
“She is the Queen of England,” I say flatly. “She is our ruin,” he replies bitterly. “And he is a holy fool. And the prince is none of his begetting. I am sorry, Lady Rivers, I am sorry indeed. But I cannot open the gates to the queen nor to any of her court.”
“She is faithless and a danger, and we want no more of her,” he says. “She used you to divert us and try to take us by force. She is faithless. Tell her to go away and take her soldiers with her. We will never admit her. Make her go away, Duchess, help us. Get rid of her. Save London. You take the queen from our door.”
“Duchess, we are counting on you to deliver us from that she-wolf,”
It seems that though we won the last battle, we are losing England.
“I don’t know how to do such things, and I never wanted to know. I’m not a witch, Margaret, I’m not even much of a wise woman. If I could do anything right now, I would make my son and husband invulnerable.”
I go to the window. I can hardly see the city walls, for the snow is blinding; it is a blizzard blowing round and round. I put my hand over my eyes, I have a memory of a vision of a battle uphill in snow, but I cannot see the standards, and I do not know, when the snow turns red, whose blood is staining the slush.
We go out into the yard. “Come with me?” she asks, like a girl again. “I don’t want to go alone.” Not for a moment do I think I will go with her. I will leave her now, even if I never see her again in all my life. “I have to look for Richard, and Anthony,” I say. I can hardly speak. “I will have to go out and find their bodies. I may have to see them buried. Then I will go to my children.”
“We’re finished,” Anthony volunteers. “I am sorry, Lady Mother. I have handed in my sword. I have sworn loyalty to York.” I am stunned. I turn to Richard. “I too,” he says. “I would not serve the queen again, not in such an army, not under such a command.
I cannot serve Henry or Margaret; they are outlaws now to me.” It is his use of their names that shakes me as much as anything, that tells me that everything is over, and everything is changed. “Henry,” I repeat, as if saying the name for the very first time. “You call the king Henry.”
“The king’s name is Edward,” my husband says, as if repeating a lesson. “King Edward.”
“That’s all that matters,” I say, grasping at a truth. “That must be all that matters, at the very end. You are alive, and your father. At any rate, that’s what matters most to me.”
“We’ll go to Grafton,” I whisper as I fall asleep. “And we will be squires again, and we will think of all of this as a romance, a story that someone might write one day.”
The new king turns out to be an astute commander of men, a king for all parties. He rules with the advice of the Earl of Warwick, who put him on the throne, but he calls as many of the lords into government as will come.
I think I will never see her again, the pretty French girl who would not marry until I had told her what her destiny would be. It has been the wheel of fortune indeed.
“I should ask King Edward to inquire into my dower,” Elizabeth remarks. “For sure my boys will have nothing unless I can find someone who will make
I leave the window and open the great hall door to them myself. I see Elizabeth’s flush and the young king’s bright smile, and I think to myself this is fortune’s wheel indeed—can it be? Can such a thing be?
