nothing but curtsey for her blessing and go. I glance at my future husband as I leave. He is looking at the girl singer with his eyes narrowed, a little smile on his mouth. I don’t mind walking out after I see that look. I am more sick of men, all men, than I dare to acknowledge to myself.
Next day, the horses are in the stable yard, and I am to be sent back to Pembroke Castle until my year of mourning is finished and I can be married again to the smiling stranger. My mother comes to bid me farewell and watches the manservant lift me onto the pillion saddle behind Jasper’s master of horse. Jasper himself is riding ahead with this troop of guards. The rear file are waiting for me.
“You will leave your son in the care of Jasper Tudor when you marry Sir Henry,” my mother remarks, as if this arrangement has just occurred to her this minute, as I am leaving.
“No, he will come with me. Surely, he will come with me,” I blurt out. “He must come with me. He is my son. Where should he be, but with me?”
“It’s not possible,” she says decidedly. “It is all agreed. He is to stay with Jasper. Jasper will care for him and keep him safe.”
“But he is my son!”
My mother smiles. “You are little more than a child yourself. You cannot look after an heir to our name, and keep him safe. These are dangerous times, Margaret. You should understand that by now. He is a valuable boy. He will be safer if he is at some distance from London, while the Yorks are in power. He will be safer in Pembroke than anywhere else in the country. Wales loves the Tudors. Jasper will guard him as his own.”
“But he is
My mother comes closer and puts her hand on my knee. “You own nothing, Margaret. You yourself are the property of your husband. Once again I have chosen a good husband for you, one near to the crown, kinsman to the Nevilles, son of the greatest duke in England. Be grateful, child. Your son will be well cared for, and then you will have more, Stafford boys this time.”
“I nearly died last time,” I burst out, careless of the man seated before me on the horse, his shoulders squared, pretending not to listen.
“I know,” my mother says. “And this is the price of being a woman. Your husband did his duty and died. You did yours and survived. You were lucky this time; he was not. Let’s hope you take your luck onwards.”
“What if I am not so lucky next time? What if I have the Beaufort luck, and next time the midwives do as you ordered them and let me die? What if they do as you command and drag a grandson out of your daughter’s dead body?”
She does not even blink. “The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding the women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.”
“I think it is my tragedy, if you are telling my midwives to let me die!”
She all but shrugs as she steps back. “These are the chances that a woman faces. Men die in battle; women die in childbirth. Battle is more dangerous. The odds are with you.”
“But what if the odds are against me, if I am unlucky? What if I die?”
“Then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you made at least one son for the House of Lancaster.”
“Mother, before God,” I say, my voice shaking with tears, “I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!”
She shakes her head, smiling at me as if my sense of outrage is like a little girl shouting over her toys. “No, truly, my dear, there is nothing more for you,” she says. “So do your duty with an obedient heart. I will see you in January, at your wedding.”
I ride back to Pembroke Castle in a surly silence, and none of the signs of the coming spring down the greening lanes give me any pleasure at all. I turn my head away from the wild daffodils that make the high meadows a blaze of silver and gold, and I am deaf to the insistent, joyous singing of the birds. The lapwing soaring blunt-winged over a plowed field and calling out his sharp whistle means nothing to me, for everything means nothing to me. The snipe diving downwards making a sound like a roll of drums does not call to me. My life will not be dedicated to God, will not be special in any way. I shall sign myself Margaret Stafford-I won’t even be duchess. I shall live like a hedge sparrow on a twig until the sparrowhawk kills me, and my death will be unnoticed and unmourned by any. My mother herself has told me that there is nothing in my life that is worth doing, and the best I can hope is to avoid an early death in childbirth.
Jasper spurs on ahead as soon as he sees the high towers of Pembroke, and so greets me at the castle gates with my baby in his arms, beaming with joy. “He can smile!” he exclaims before the horses even come to a standstill. “He can smile. I saw it. I leaned over his cradle to pick him up, and he saw me, and he smiled. I am sure it was a smile. I did not think he would smile so early. But it was a smile for sure. Perhaps he will smile at you.”
We both wait expectantly, looking into the dark blue eyes of the little baby. He is still strapped up as if ready for the coffin; only his eyes can move, he cannot even turn his head. He is swaddled into immobility.
“Perhaps he will smile later,” Jasper says consolingly. “There! Did he then? No.”
“It doesn’t matter, since I am to leave him within a year anyway, since I have to go and marry Sir Henry Stafford. Since I now have to give birth to Stafford boys, even if I die in the trying. Perhaps he has nothing to smile about; perhaps he knows he is to be an orphan.”
Jasper turns with me towards the front door of the castle, walking beside me, my baby resting comfortably in his arms. “They will let you visit him,” he says consolingly.
“But you are to keep him. I suppose you knew. I suppose you all planned this together. You, and my mother, and my father-in-law, and my old husband-to-be.”
He glances down at my tearful face. “He is a Tudor,” he says carefully. “My brother’s son. The only heir to our name. You could choose no one better to care for him than me.”
“You are not even his father,” I say irritably. “Why should he stay with you and not with me?”
“Lady Sister, you are little more than a child yourself, and these are dangerous times.”
I round on him and stamp my foot. “I am old enough to be married twice. I am old enough to be bedded without tenderness or consideration. I am old enough to face death in the confinement room and be told that my own mother-my own mother-has commanded them to save the child and not me! I think I am a woman now. I have a babe in arms, and I have been married and widowed and now betrothed again. I am like a draper’s parcel to be sent about like cloth and cut to the pattern that people wish. My mother told me that my father died by his own hand and that we are an unlucky family. I think I am a woman now! I am treated as a woman grown when it suits you all, you can hardly make me a child again!”
He nods as if he is listening to me and considering what I have to say. “You have cause for complaint,” he says steadily. “But this is the way of the world, Lady Margaret; we cannot make an exception for you.”
“But you should!” I exclaim. “This is what I have been saying since my childhood. You should make an exception for me. Our Lady speaks to me, the holy Joan appears to me, I am sent to be a light to you. I cannot be married to an ordinary man and sent away to God knows where again. I should be given a nunnery of my own and be an abbess! You should do this, Brother Jasper; you command Wales. You should give me a nunnery, I want to found an order!”
He holds the baby close and turns away from me a little. I think he is moved to tears by my righteous anger, but then I see his face is flushed and his shoulders are shaking because he is laughing. “Oh, my lord,” he says. “Forgive me, Margaret, but oh, my lord. You are a child, a child. You are a baby like our Henry here, and I shall care for both of you.”
“Nobody shall care for me,” I shout. “For you are all mistaken about me, and you are a fool to laugh at me. I am in the care of God, and I am not going to marry anyone! I am going to be an abbess.”
He catches his breath, his face still bright with laughter. “An abbess. Certainly. And will you be dining with us tonight, Reverend Mother?”
I scowl at him. “I shall be served in my rooms,” I say crossly. “I shall not dine with you. Possibly I shall never dine with you again. But you can tell Father William to come to me. I will have to confess trespassing against those who have trespassed against me.”
“I will send him,” Jasper says kindly. “And I will send the best of the dishes to your room. And tomorrow I
