The Red Queen

Philippa Gregory. The Red Queen (The Cousins – 2)

For Anthony

SPRING 1453

The light of the open sky is brilliant after the darkness of the inner rooms. I blink and hear the roar of many voices. But this is not my army calling for me, this whisper growing to a rumble is not their roar of attack, the drumming of their swords on shields. The rippling noise of linen in the wind is not my embroidered angels and lilies against the sky, but cursed English standards in the triumphant May breeze. This is a different sort of roar from our bellowed hymns, this is a howl of people hungry for death: my death.

Ahead of me, and towering above me as I step over the threshold from my prison into the town square, is my destination: a wood stack, with a stepladder of rough staves leaning against it. I whisper: “A cross. May I have a cross?” And then, louder: “A cross! I must have a cross!” And some man, a stranger, an enemy, an Englishman, one of those whom we call “goddamns” for their unending blaspheming, holds out a crucifix of whittled wood, roughly made, and I snatch it without pride from his dirty hand. I clutch it as they push me towards the woodpile and thrust me up the ladder, my feet scraping on the rough rungs as I climb up, higher than my own height, until I reach the unsteady platform hammered into the top of the bonfire, and they turn me, roughly, and tie my hands around the stake at my back.

It all goes so slowly then that I could almost think that time itself has frozen and the angels are coming down for me. Stranger things have happened. Did not the angels come for me when I was herding sheep? Did they not call me by name? Did I not lead an army to the relief of Orleans? Did I not crown the Dauphin and drive out the English? Just me? A girl from Domremy, advised by angels?

They light the kindling all around the bottom, and the smoke eddies and billows in the breeze. Then the fire takes hold and a hot cloud shrouds me, and makes me cough, blinking, my eyes streaming. Already it is scalding my bare feet. I step from one foot to the other, foolishly, as if I hope to spare myself discomfort, and I peer through the smoke in case someone is running with buckets of water, to say that the king whom I crowned has forbidden this; or the English, who bought me from a soldier, now acknowledge that I am not theirs to kill, or that my church knows that I am a good girl, a good woman, innocent of everything but serving God with a passionate purpose.

There is no savior among the jostling crowd. The noise swells to a deafening shriek: a mixture of shouted blessings and curses, prayers and obscenities. I look upwards to the blue sky for my angels descending, and a log shifts in the pyre below me, and my stake rocks, and the first sparks fly up and scorch my jacket. I see them land and glow like fireflies on my sleeve, and I feel a dry scratching in my throat, and I cough from the smoke and whisper like a little girl: “Dear God, save me, Your daughter! Dear God, put down Your hand for me. Dear God, save me, Your maid …”

There is a crash of noise and a blow to my head and I am sitting, bewildered, on the floorboards of my bedroom, my hand to my bruised ear, looking around me like a fool and seeing nothing. My lady companion opens my door and, seeing me, dazed, my prayer stool tipped over, says irritably: “Lady Margaret, go to bed. It is long past your bedtime. Our Lady does not value the prayers of disobedient girls. There is no merit in exaggeration. Your mother wants you up early in the morning. You can’t stay up all night praying; it is folly.”

She slams the door shut, and I hear her telling the maids that one of them must go in now and put me to bed and sleep beside me to make sure I don’t rise up at midnight for another session of prayer. They don’t like me to follow the hours of the church; they stand between me and a life of holiness, because they say I am too young and need my sleep. They dare to suggest that I am showing off, playing at piety, when I know that God has called me and it is my duty, my higher duty, to obey Him.

But even if I were to pray all night, I wouldn’t be able to recapture the vision that was so bright, just a moment ago; it is gone. For a moment, for a sacred moment, I was there: I was the Maid of Orleans, the holy Joan of France. I understood what a girl could do, what a woman could be. Then they drag me back to earth, and scold me as if I were an ordinary girl, and spoil everything.

“Our Lady Mary, guide me, angels come back to me,” I whisper, trying to return to the square, to the watching crowds, to the thrilling moment. But it has all gone. I have to haul myself up the bedpost to stand. I am dizzy from fasting and praying, and I rub my knee where I knocked it. There is a wonderful roughness on the skin, and I put my hand down and pull up my nightgown to see both knees, and they are the same: roughened and red. Saints’ knees, praise God, I have saints’ knees. I have prayed so much, and on such hard floors, that the skin of my knees is becoming hard, like the callus on the finger of an English longbowman. I am not yet ten years old, but I have saints’ knees. This has got to count for something, whatever my old lady governess may say to my mother about excessive and theatrical devotion. I have saints’ knees. I have scuffed the skin of my knees by continual prayer; these are my stigmata: saints’ knees. Pray God I can meet their challenge and have a saint’s end too.

I get into bed, as I have been ordered to do; for obedience, even to foolish and vulgar women, is a virtue. I may be the daughter of a man who was one of the greatest of English commanders in France, one of the great Beaufort family, and so heir to the throne of Henry VI of England, but still I have to obey my lady governess and my mother as if I were any other ordinary girl. I am highly placed in the kingdom, cousin to the king himself-though dreadfully disregarded at home, where I have to do as I am told by a stupid old woman who sleeps through the priest’s homily, and sucks sugared plums through grace. I count her as a cross I have to bear, and I offer her up in my prayers.

These prayers will save her immortal soul-despite her true deserts-for, as it happens, my prayers are especially blessed. Ever since I was a little girl, ever since I was five years old, I have known myself to be a special child in the sight of God. For years I thought this was a unique gift-sometimes I would feel the presence of God near me; sometimes I would sense the blessing of Our Lady. Then, last year, one of the veteran soldiers from France, begging his way back to his parish, came to the kitchen door when I was skimming the cream, and I heard him ask the dairymaid for something to eat, for he was a soldier who had seen miracles: he had seen the girl they called the Maid of Orleans.

“Let him come in!” I commanded, scrambling down from my stool.

“He’s dirty,” she replied. “He’s coming no closer than the step.”

He shuffled into the doorway, swinging a pack to the floor. “If you could spare some milk, little lady,” he whined. “And perhaps a crust of bread for a poor man, a soldier for his lord and his country-”

“What did you say about the Maid of Orleans?” I interrupted. “And miracles?”

The maid behind me muttered under her breath and raised her eyes, cut him a crust of dark rye bread and poured a rough earthenware mug of milk. He almost snatched it from her hand and poured it down his throat. He looked for more.

“Tell me,” I commanded.

The maid nodded to him that he must obey me, and he turned and bowed. “I was serving with the Duke of Bedford in France when we heard of a girl who was riding with the French,” he said. “Some thought her a witch; some thought her in league with the devil. But my doxy …” The maid snapped her fingers at him, and he choked down the word. “A young woman I happened to know, a French young woman, told me that this girl Joan from Domremy had spoken to angels and promised to see the French prince crowned and on the throne of France. She was only a maid, a girl from the country, but she said that angels spoke to her and called her to save her country from us.”

I was entranced. “Angels spoke to her?”

He smiled ingratiatingly. “Yes, little lady. When she was a girl no older than you.”