The Queen of Last Hopes (24 page)

“I will see you tomorrow at my departure. Good-bye, madam.”

Hal turned away, leaving me to lean against the abbey wall and weep with frustration.

***

That night, Henry joined me in bed. This time when he gave me his customary good-night peck on the lips, I pulled him close to me and kissed him hard, trying my best to replicate Hal’s expertise in this area. “Love me,” I whispered, and Henry did tentatively explore under my shift, almost as if we were both virgins again, as I caressed him and made encouraging noises.

He tried; I give him that. So did I. I employed all of the arts I knew of, which were not numerous given Henry’s very conservative nature in bed. But probably even an experienced courtesan would have met with defeat. After a while, Henry sighed and gently stopped my browsing hands. “I am sorry, my dear.”

“Perhaps some other time,” I said, trying to keep the misery out of my voice. Two-and-thirty, and I was a married woman living the life of a nun while being derided by my enemies as a strumpet. If the Duke of York had made it into Paradise, perhaps he was having a good laugh at my expense. I kissed Henry and rolled over before my tears began to fall. “There is always another night.”

***

The next day, we gathered at the harbor, where a brisk wind promised to send Hal and his party to France quickly. As his companions said their own farewells, Hal made a great show of double-checking to see that all of the letters he had been given were accounted for, then bantered with young Edward about the probability of getting seasick. Then he embraced Henry, and at last turned to me. Would he give me a warm good-bye, or a formal one? He could hardly leave without saying anything. “I wish you a safe voyage,” I said tremulously.

His voice was quiet, but not cold. “Is there anyone to whom you wish to send a message? Such as your father?”

“Yes.” I looked into Hal’s eyes. “Tell him that I love him very dearly.”

“I will, your grace.” Hal kissed my hand and smiled. “I look forward to seeing all of you shortly, and with good news.”

But the next news we heard was ill: my uncle Charles was dead. By the time Hal left his ship, a new king, Charles’s surly son Louis, sat on the throne of France.

My dear, how long the time has been!” My father stepped back to gaze at me. “And this is my fine grandson.” Father bent to address Edward confidentially. “
Parlez-vous français?
”

“
Oui
,” said Edward, and proceeded in fluent French to tell his grandfather the story of our journey from Brittany, where we had landed a couple of weeks before.

Louis XI, France’s new king, had been proving himself to be most unpredictable. Just days after becoming king, he had ordered the arrest of Pierre de Brézé, against whom he bore an old grudge. Louis and my uncle King Charles had long been on ill terms, and when Louis learned that Hal had arrived in France to see the late king, he had promptly ordered his arrest and held him in close confinement for several months. I had been terrified when I heard this news, convinced that Louis would send Hal to King Edward—as I suppose I should start calling him for clarity’s sake—in chains and that he would promptly be executed. Instead, in one of those abrupt volte-faces that was to typify my cousin Louis, he had suddenly decided it was time to discomfit King Edward and had ordered Somerset’s release. Unable to cross back to Scotland for fear of being intercepted by Edward’s agents, Hal had traveled to Flanders under the protection of his old friend Charles, the Count of Charolais, who had helped persuade Louis to spare his life in the first place. Supported by Charles, he was living in Bruges. From there, with the help of the count, he had plotted with John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and his son Aubrey to land at Essex, but poor Oxford’s side of the plot was discovered, and the earl and Aubrey had been beheaded on Tower Hill in February 1462 along with several others. Add to that the fact that the Earl of Pembroke and the Duke of Exeter had been defeated in Wales the autumn before by Edward’s men, and that Edward was making more overtures to the Scots, and it looked bleak for us that spring of 1462.

So I had decided to try my luck with Louis myself. First, however, I visited my father, whom I had not seen in seventeen years. As my father chatted with Edward, I gazed around Angers Castle, overlooking the River Maine. I had schooled myself upon coming to England not to feel homesick, and thanks to Suffolk, I had largely succeeded, but now that I was back in France at last, I felt an overwhelming urge to stay the rest of my life in this comfortable castle with my boy, safe from all that threatened me. I choked back a sob, and Father at once looked up at me. “My dear, what is it?”

“It has—it has been so hard lately, Father.”
And I have been so lonely
, I had to fight myself from adding. Henry still did no more than lie beside me.

Father put his arm around me. “Come, Marguerite. You have had a long journey. I have had your old chamber made ready for you. You must rest.” He smiled at Edward. “And you, my boy, shall see my lions!”

***

In the chamber where I had spent much of my maidenhood, everything was largely as I had left it—my old tapestries, taken out of their chests and rehung, my old bed, my old coverlet and furnishings. I climbed into my bed and lay there, sipping the wine I’d been given, while Marie and my other ladies unpacked my belongings. Jeanne de Laval, my father’s second wife, who was three years younger than myself, superintended. I had known her when we were children and remembered her as being very good natured, but now she looked scandalized at the speed with which Marie and the others were accomplishing their duties. “My dear, this is all you brought with you?” I nodded. “Is this all you carry in England?”

“We are not all quite barbarians there, but I have been reduced to traveling light,” I said. “My husband and I are very poor now, and live on others’ charity.”

“Well, I daresay your dear father will replenish your wardrobe, poor darling.” She shook her head at the gown that Marie was unfolding, which was downright threadbare in spots. “After all, so many people are curious to see you, and you won’t want to appear in front of them looking less than your best.”

“Curious to see me?”

“Why, of course! You are thought to be quite the heroine here, fighting for your husband and your son.”

I snorted. “The people of England think quite differently of me, I can assure you that.”

“Oh, well, they are fools, are they not? And it helps matters here as well that the gallant Duke of Somerset is so plainly enamored of you.”

I almost dropped the cup I was holding. “Enamored of me?”

“Indeed, he is quite the knight-errant, and you the lady of his heart. It is all quite chivalrous. Of course, it helps that he is said to be so very handsome. We have never seen him here at Angers, of course, but those who have seen him say he is like a young King David. Is he?”

“He is good-looking,” I allowed.

“Oh, you seem rather underwhelmed.”

I shrugged. “I have known him since he was fourteen, which is a rather unimpressive age for most men in terms of looks. I suppose I am simply so used to seeing him now that I cannot see what other women see.”

“Dear me,” said Jeanne, shaking her head as she drew the bed curtains so that I could settle in for a nap. “You have become quite the cold Englishwoman, I fear. I quite agree with your father; you need to tarry a while in Angers.”

***

“I saw the lions!” Edward told me as we walked around the castle grounds a few hours later. “And look—there are ostriches! With feathers just like on my badge!” A pair of those birds sauntered by us. “And there are these strange dark people all about.”

“Moors.”

“And dwarfs! How come Father never kept Moors or dwarfs?”

“Your father is more concerned with spiritual pursuits.”

“And do you know there is a tennis court here? When I become king I shall have one at Windsor. Maybe Westminster too.” Edward considered. “And I think I’ll have some Moors there too.”

“No dwarfs?”

Edward scrunched his face up to ponder the matter. “Well, maybe,” he said finally. “And Grandfather said there will be a farce tonight in our honor. Have I ever seen a farce? Grandfather says it is a comic play.”

“No.” Having two kings in one tiny island was farce enough for my taste.

“Father’s court—when he had one—is not very amusing,” Edward commented.

“When it is yours, you can make it so.” I ran my hand through Edward’s hair. “I know it is hard to be wandering from place to place with so little money and so little amusement, but someday we will have your father’s throne back, and it will have been all worthwhile.”

“Oh, I understand.” Edward pulled at my hand. “Look, Mother! A monkey!”

***

While I enjoyed a semblance of my youth again (and indeed the face in the mirror that my father bought me looked less careworn with each passing day), King Louis tarried in the south of France, sending envoys to greet me but making it clear that I would have to bide my time before I met with him personally. In the meantime, there arrived some welcome additions to my party: Pierre de Brézé, whom Louis had freed from prison, and Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke.

And Doctor John Morton, my son’s former chancellor, also appeared one day at Angers—much to my shock, for he had been captured after Towton and sent to the Tower. “You were released?” I asked after I had greeted him joyously.

“No,” said Doctor Morton cheerfully. “I escaped.’

“
Escaped?
” Men like Roger Mortimer, Queen Isabella’s virile lover from the century before, could manage the feat of breaking out of the Tower, I supposed, but this plump little man? “How?”

“No great feat of strength, I fear. I simply picked the most amicable of my guards and reasoned with him. Was it not wrong, I asked, to take an anointed king from the throne that he and his father and his grandfather had held for sixty years, in favor of the grandson of a man who had been executed as a traitor? Even if King Henry was”—Morton coughed delicately—“not entirely himself at times, did he not have a fine young man, whose soundness I could attest to, to succeed to his throne, and who would be capable of acting as his regent in just a few years? Mind you, this seed took many weeks to plant, but it at last bore fruit, and when it did, my guard procured old clothes for me and allowed me to slip out in the dead of night, where he had friends waiting to convey me abroad. And so—here I am! As is my kind guard who helped me escape. So you see, madam, I have not only brought you myself, but a convert as well.”

“Lancaster should have more such as you,” I said, smiling broadly. Not in months had I felt so optimistic. Let so-called King Edward treat with the Scots! We had other means of unseating him.

Lord Ros, Hal’s older half brother, also joined us. By this time I was able to ask about Hal without betraying anything more than the natural solicitude of a queen for a loyal supporter. “He’s doing what he can for us in Bruges, your grace, stirring up trouble for Edward from there.” Ros laughed. “And I suspect he’s not so unhappy to be there, as rumor has it that the ladies of Burgundy find him quite agreeable.” He touched his face, a good-humored one but not a particularly good-looking one. “Oh, to be blessed with that angelic Beaufort visage.”

I managed a smile.

Finally, in June, I was summoned to Chinon to meet Louis. I remembered him from my sister’s wedding celebrations at Nancy in 1445 as a long-nosed youth of twenty-one, who’d been feuding with his father, King Charles, and had made a great point of parading his unhappiness with being at court. Now I saw that although his nose had not improved with time, he had certainly become more urbane. “Dear lady and cousin,” he said, kissing my hand. “We are delighted to have you in France. I do wish my queen were here to greet you.”

I smiled sweetly, knowing full well from my men that Louis had been issuing orders that I not be allowed to see his queen, lest I put her in the position of begging Louis a favor for me, and him in the position of having to grant her petition. “I am sorry to have missed her.” I hesitated, then decided to get past these niceties and to the heart of the matter. “But you must know I am not here to visit. I am here because my king and I need your help.”

Louis’s impenetrable face betrayed a slight hint of approval at my straightforwardness. “So I hear. What are you prepared to offer?”

“A hundred years’ truce.”

“Truces are made to be broken. You might as well say twenty years, or two years, or two months, my dear lady. It’s all the same.”

“Safe conducts for our subjects in each other’s dominions.”

Louis yawned, not at all discreetly, behind his hand.

“Calais.”

Louis put down his hand, and my own men repressed gasps. Though I had told them beforehand that this was an offer I was willing to make, and Henry had empowered me to make it, they might well have thought I would lose my nerve. For Calais had been in the hands of the English since 1346, when it was won by the great Edward III, and Englishmen, even those who had never seen the coast of England, much less Calais, cherished it as they did their own acres of land. I could not have possibly made a concession more likely to earn me the hatred of the English people.

“My dear lady, you certainly do not pander to the people by courting popularity with them.”

“My popularity does not matter a whit to me now. I lost any love the people might have had when Normandy fell, and nothing will gain it back, save perhaps for me drowning myself in the Thames.”

“What of your husband’s popularity?”

“They will blame all on me, and his reputation will go unscathed. And when my son is old enough, he will gain the people’s love, with or without Calais. He has the makings of another Edward III or Henry V. I feel it in my very bones.”

“Mothers,” said Louis.

“And in any case, our bargain about Calais need not be made public for now.”

“True.”

“I do not, of course, expect that we would give up Calais without compensation. That will have to be determined.”

“Oh, yes.” Louis smiled. “I trust, by the way, that your husband has empowered you to make this very intriguing offer?”

“Yes. I have his full authority.”

“Such an interesting marriage you have. But the English are quite a unique people.”

“Well? Can we talk further?”

“Oh, yes.” Louis had the look of a man already remodeling Calais to his satisfaction. “We certainly can.”

***

The next day, on June 23 at Chinon, Louis and I signed our secret agreement, in return for a loan of twenty thousand francs. Once we won Calais back from Edward’s men, it would be delivered to Louis within a year, at which time Henry would receive forty thousand crowns. A few days later, we went to Tours, where we signed a public agreement, under which Louis agreed to proclaim that he favored our cause. Better yet, once the ink was dry, Louis permitted Pierre de Brézé to raise an army that he and I would bring to Scotland.

Twenty thousand francs to the better, thanks to Calais, I traveled to Rouen in July, Edward having remained at Angers with his grandfather. As part of what seemed to be our friendship, Louis had ordered the citizens there to give me a grand welcome as I rode in, richly dressed (thanks to my father) and riding a fine horse. “They’re even wearing marguerites,” I said to the Archbishop of Narbonne, who was escorting me. My eyes filled with tears as I stared at the crowds thronging the streets. “That is what the people wore at my coronation procession in London.”