trouble herself to explain to me.”
“Yes,” he says. “I am to take you with an armed escort, and your baby is to stay here. You are to meet with Humphrey, the Duke of Buckingham. It is his house.”
“Why am I to see him?” I ask. I have a distant memory of the duke, who heads one of the great wealthy families of the kingdom. We are cousins of some sort. “Is he to be my new guardian? Can’t you be my guardian now, Jasper?”
He looks away. “No. It’s not that.” He tries to smile at me, but his eyes are soft with pity. “You are to be married again, my sister. You are to be married to the Duke of Buckingham’s son, as soon as your year of mourning is finished. But the contract of marriage and the betrothal is to take place now. You are to marry the duke’s son: Sir Henry Stafford.”
I look at him, and I know my face is horrified. “I have to marry again?” I blurt out, thinking of the agony of childbirth and the likelihood that it will kill me another time. “Jasper, can I refuse to go? Can I stay here with you?”
He shakes his head. “I am afraid not.”
MARCH 1457
A parcel-taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will-is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who. Nobody sees me for what I am: a young woman of great family with royal connections, a young woman of exceptional piety who deserves-surely to God! – some recognition. But no, having been shipped to Lamphey Castle in a litter, I now ride to Newport on a fat cob, seated behind a manservant, unable to see anything of the road ahead of me and glimpsing muddy fields and pale pasturelands only through the jogging ranks of the men-at-arms. They are armed with lances and cudgels and are wearing the badge of the Tudor crest at their collars. Jasper is leading the way on his warhorse, and he has warned them to be prepared for ambush from Herbert’s men, or trouble on the road from bands of thieves. Once we get closer to the sea there is also the danger of a marauding party of pirates. This is how I am protected. This is the country I live in. This is what a good king, a strong king, should prevent.
We ride under the portcullis of Greenfield House, and the gate slams shut behind us. We dismount in the courtyard before the house, and my mother comes out to greet me. I have not seen her for almost two years, not since my wedding day, when she told me there was nothing to fear. Now as she comes towards me and I kneel for her blessing I realize that she will see from my face that I know she was lying to me that day, for I have faced the very fear of death itself, and learned that she was prepared to sacrifice me for a grandson. There was nothing to fear for her-so she was right about that. But there was much to fear for me.
“Margaret,” she says quietly. She puts her hand on my head for a blessing and then raises me up and kisses me on both cheeks. “You’ve grown! And you are looking well!”
I long for her to hold me and hug me and tell me that she has missed me, but that would be to wish for a different sort of mother, and then I would have been a different girl. Instead, she looks at me with cool approval and then turns as the door of the house opens and the duke comes out.
“Here is my daughter,” she says. “Lady Margaret Tudor. Margaret, this is your kinsman the Duke of Buckingham.”
I make a low curtsey. This is a duke most particular about his position; they say that he took his order of precedence to parliament to get a ruling on who should walk behind him. He raises me up and kisses me on both cheeks. “You are welcome,” he says. “But you must be cold and tired from your journey. Come inside.”
The house is furnished with a luxury that I had almost forgotten, having spent these years in exile at Lamphey and Pembroke. Thick tapestries warm the stone walls, and the wooden beams above are gilded and brightly painted. Everywhere the duke’s crest is picked out in new gold. The rushes on the floor are fresh and sweet so that every room is scented lightly with herbs and lavender, and in every great stone fireplace there are blazing logs and a lad going round with a basket to bring in more firewood. Even the firewood boy wears the duke’s livery; they say that he has a small army always dressed and armed at his command. The boy even has boots. I think of the barefoot slovenliness of my husband’s home, and I feel a little better about this betrothal if it is going to take me into a house that is kept clean, with servants who are properly dressed.
The duke offers me a glass of small ale, which is mulled hot and sweet, to warm me from the chill of traveling. As I am sipping it, Jasper comes into the room with another older man, graying hair at his temples, lines in his face; he must be forty if he is a day. I look to Jasper to introduce this stranger, and when I see his grave face I realize. With a little gasp of shock I understand that this old man is Henry Stafford, and that I am before my new husband. He is not a boy of my age like John de la Pole, my first betrothed. He is not a young man like Edmund-and God knows he was too old and too hard for me. No, this time they have picked out a man old enough to be my father, old enough to be my grandfather, my ancestor. He is forty years old, fifty years old, probably sixty. I realize I am staring, and I quite fail to curtsey until my mother says sharply, “Margaret!” and I mumble, “Excuse me,” and sink down in a gesture of humility, to yet another man, who will make me live with him wherever he chooses, and will make another heir to the Lancaster line on me, whether I like it or not.
I see that Jasper is scowling down at his boots, but he raises his head to greet my mother with his usual courtesy and bows to the duke.
“I see you have kept my daughter safe through these most troubled times,” my mother says to him.
“I will keep the whole principality safe if I can,” he replies. “At last we seem to be gaining ground. I have recaptured the castles that the York party took, and William Herbert is on the run, in hiding. If he stays within Wales, I will catch him. We Tudors are well loved here; someone will betray him to me.”
“And then?” the Duke of Buckingham asks him. “What then?”
Jasper shrugs. He knows it is not a question about the fate of William Herbert, nor even of Wales. It is the question that every Englishman asks himself these days: What then? How can we go on with a court so unpopular it dare not even live in London? How can we go on with a king who slips away into dreams without warning, and leaves a queen hated by so many? How can we face the future when their heir is just one little weak boy? How can we be safe when the kingdom slides into the keeping of our enemies: the House of York?
“I have tried to reason with Richard of York, and his advisor the Earl of Warwick,” Jasper says. “You know how hard I have tried to persuade them to work with the queen. I have talked and talked with the queen. But she is terrified of them and fearful that they will attack her and her son at the next illness of the king. And in their turn, they fear that she will destroy them when the king is well enough to do her bidding. I can’t see a resolution.”
“If they could be sent from the country?” Buckingham suggests. “One of them to Calais? Perhaps we could send York to Dublin?”
Jasper shrugs. “I wouldn’t sleep easy in my bed at night knowing that they were off our coasts with their own armies,” he says. “From Calais they command the narrow seas; no southern port would be safe. From Dublin, Richard of York could raise an army and come against us. And the Irish love York like a king already.”
“Perhaps the king will stay well this time,” my mother suggests hopefully.
I realize how gravely ill His Grace has become from the awkward silence that greets this remark. “Perhaps,” the duke says.
They waste no time on courtship between Henry Stafford and me. They waste no time on giving us even a moment to meet. Why should they? This is a matter for the lawyers and the officers of the household who manage the wealth. It would not matter if Henry Stafford and I hated each other on sight. It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if I still want to be a nun. Nobody cares what I think at all. They treat me like an ordinary young woman, bred for wedding and bedding, and since they do not ask me what I think, nor observe what I feel, there is nothing that gives them pause at all.
They draw up the contracts, and we sign them. We go to the chapel, and before witnesses and before the priest we swear to marry each other in January so that I have a year to mourn my first marriage, which brought me
