Philippa Gregory - The Red Queen

By the same author

The Cousins War

The White Queen

The Wideacre Trilogy

Wideacre

The Favored Child

Meridon

Historical Novels

The Wise Woman

Fallen Skies

A Respectable Trade

Earthly Joys

Virgin Earth

The Tudor Court Novels

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Queens Fool

The Virgins Lover

The Constant Princess

The Boleyn Inheritance

The Other Queen

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Philippa Gregory Limited

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First Touchstone hardcover edition August 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-4165-6372-3
ISBN 978-1-4165-6393-8 (ebook)

For Anthony

THE
RED
QUEEN

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 Orlans? Did I not crown the Dauphin and drive out the English? Just me? A girl from Domrmy, 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 cant 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 dont rise up at midnight for another session of prayer. They dont 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 wouldnt 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 Orlans, 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 saints end too.