The Red Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

husband, my father, except in the vaguest and most general terms. I am about to ask, How did he run away? What was his coward’s way out? when the doors of the church open, and I have to walk forwards and take the hand of my new husband, and stand before a priest and swear to be a wife. I feel his big hand take mine and I hear his deep voice answer the questions, where I just whisper. He pushes a heavy ring of Welsh gold on my finger, and I have to hold my fingers together like a little paw to keep it on. It is far too big for me. I look up at him, amazed that he thinks such a marriage can go ahead, when his ring is too big for my hand and I am only twelve and he is more than twice my age: a man, tempered by fighting and filled with ambition. He is a hard man from a power-seeking family. But I am still a child longing for a spiritual life, praying that people will see that I am special. This is yet another of the many things that nobody seems to care about but me.

    I am to start married life in the palace of Lamphey, Pembrokeshire, which is in the heart of horrible Wales. I have no time to miss my mother and my family in the first months, for everything is so different that I have to learn completely new ways. Most of my time is spent with the servants and the women attendants in the castle. My husband and his brother storm in and out like rain. My lady governess has come with me, and my own maidservant, but everyone else is a stranger. They all speak Welsh and stare at me when I try to ask them for a glass of small ale or a jug of water for washing. I so long for a friendly face from home that I would even be glad to see Wat, the groom.
    The castle stands in desolate countryside. Around me is nothing but high mountains and sky. I can see the rain clouds coming like a wet curtain, half an hour before they pour down on the gray slate roofs and rain-streaked walls. The chapel is a cold and neglected building, and the priest is very poor in his attendance; he does not even notice my exceptional piety. I often go there to pray, and the light streams through the western window onto my bowed head, but nobody even notices. London is a nine-day arduous journey away; my old home is as far. It can take ten days for a letter to come from my mother, but she hardly ever writes. Sometimes I feel that I have been stolen from a battlefield and held to ransom in an enemy land, like my father. Certainly, I could not feel more foreign and lonely.
    Worst of all, I have not had a vision since my wedding night. I spend every afternoon on my knees, when I close my privy chamber door and pretend to be sewing. I spend every evening in the damp chapel. But nothing comes to me. Not a vision of the stake, not the battles, not even the flicker of a banner of angels and lilies. I beg Our Lady for a vision of Joan the Maid; but She grants menothing, and in the end, sitting back on my heels, I begin to fear that I was holy only when I was a virgin; I am nothing special as a wife.
    Nothing in the world could compensate me for this loss. I was raised to know myself as the daughter of a great man and an heir of the royal family, but my own private glory was that I knew that God spoke to me, directly to me, and that He sent me the vision of Joan the Maid. He sent me an angel in the guise of a beggar to tell me all about her. He appointed William de la Pole as my guardian so that he—having seen Joan—would recognize the same holiness in me. But then God, for some reason, forgot all about this sensible plan and let me fall into the keeping of a husband who takes no interest in my holiness and who, by roughly consummating the marriage vows, takes my virginity and visions in one awful night. Why I should be chosen by God and then neglected by Him, I cannot understand. It is not for me to question the will of God, but I have to wonder: Why did He choose me in the first place if it was just to leave me here, abandoned in Wales? If He were not God, then one would