The Red Queen

MAY 1485

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.”