The Forbidden Queen

by Anne O'Brien

  ‘My offer would circumvent it,’ FitzHugh completed the thought. ‘I suggest that you smother yourselves—and the child—in righteous legality.’

  ‘I don’t understand why…’ I didn’t want to be here, to be involved in plots and counterplots. I was weary beyond measure. All I wanted was to settle into my own property, away from prying eyes, but a hand suddenly enclosing mine stilled my tongue.

  ‘My lord Bishop is right, my love.’ Owen’s voice was harsh with the acknowledgement of how the world might see our union. ‘Do you want our children to be called bastards?’

  ‘But they never will.’

  ‘It is best to be sure,’ Bishop FitzHugh advised, patient with my concerns. ‘One of my properties—Much Hadham Palace, not too far from your castle in Hertfordshire—is at your disposal. You may travel there as you please.’ He beamed. ‘Your child will be born in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, hedged about with ecclesiastical favour. It may be that you—and your child—will need friends. I am privileged to count myself as one of them.’ His eyes positively twinkled.

  ‘And I,’ added Bishop Morgan. ‘We were both close to the policies of your husband—King Henry, that is. We feel it our duty to support you at this time.’

  Owen’s brows rose. ‘Gloucester will be beyond rage.’

  ‘Yes, he will, won’t he?’ FitzHugh smiled. ‘Will you accept my offer?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said Owen promptly, before I could open my mouth. ‘We’ll accept your offer. And with thanks.’

  ‘Excellent. A man of sense.’

  The three men shook hands on the agreement without even asking me, Bishop Morgan making one final observation.

  ‘Are you aware, my lady, that the law, in fact, makes provision for you taking a new husband, with or without permission?’

  No, I was not. My face must have registered shock, followed by bright anger.

  ‘Any children born of your union…’ he inclined his head to me and to Owen ‘… will be recognised as halfbrothers to the King.’

  ‘And Gloucester knew of this.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I despised Gloucester even more, and as if my hatred called up his presence, Gloucester himself appeared, striding down the steps and halfway across the courtyard in the wake of the bishops. I saw him lift a peremptory hand to Owen, and I watched, narrow-eyed, as Owen, now mounted, nudged his horse in Gloucester’s direction, bending his head to hear the royal duke’s clipped delivery.

  What passed between them I could not hear, but it was no friendly well-wishing. Gloucester had his hand on his sword hilt. Owen shook his head, raising a hand as if in denial, before hauling on his reins to leave Gloucester standing, frowning after him.

  As Owen’s silence registered cold outrage I made no comment but, ‘What did Gloucester have to say?’ I asked at the first opportunity on the road to Much Hadham.

  ‘Nothing to disturb you, fy nghariad.’

  I did not believe him. There was still fire in Owen’s eye and an obstinate set to his mouth but I had to admit defeat. His reticence was sometimes most infuriating.

  Our son was born at Much Hadham without fuss, with only Guille and Alice in attendance. No withdrawal from society for me, no enforced isolation until I was churched. I was Owen’s wife, not Queen of England, and I was sipping ale in our chamber with Owen, idly discussing whether we should eventually move our household to my castle at Hertford or whether we would perhaps prefer the beautiful but damp environs of Leeds, on the morning that our son entered the world with lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows and a shock of dark hair.

  Owen held him within the first hour of his life.

  ‘What do we call him?’ I asked, expecting a Welsh name.

  ‘Something indisputably English,’ Owen replied, much taken up with the tiny hands that waved and clutched. ‘Will he always bawl like this?’ ‘Yes. Why English?’ I asked.

  ‘As the wily bishop said, we want no question of his legitimacy or his Englishness.’ He slid a glance in my direction as Alice relieved him of our firstborn. ‘We’ll call him Edmund.’

  ‘We will?’ I blinked my astonishment. Why choose a name so uncomfortably reminiscent of my Beaufort indiscretion?

  Owen’s expression remained beautifully bland. ‘Do you object? I think it a thoroughly suitable name for a royal half-brother. No one can possibly take exception to it.’

  I could not argue against so shrewd a thought, and so Edmund he was. And the church remained our steadfast ally, for within the year our second child—another blackheaded son—was born at Hatfield, one of the Bishop of Ely’s estates. The church continued to smile on us, while Gloucester glowered ineffectually at Westminster.

  ‘And this one will have a Welsh name,’ I insisted, with all the rights of a new and exhausted mother. ‘A family name—but a name I can pronounce.’

  ‘We will call him Jasper,’ Owen pronounced.

  ‘I can say that. Is that Welsh?’

  ‘No,’ he said as cupped the baby’s head in his hand. ‘But it means bringer of treasure. Does he not bring untold blessings to us?’

  The boys brought us joy and delight, and, unlike my firstborn, their father knew and loved them. I adored them, for their own sakes as well as for Owen’s blood that ran strong and true. My sons would never say that they were not loved.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Danger! Danger ripe with blood and terror. Bright as sunlight on a frozen pond, sharp as the taste of too-early pippins. I had not expected it. How would I, taken up as I was with my own concerns?

  We were travelling back from France, in the depths of a frozen February, after the momentous occasion when the crown of France, my father’s crown, had been lowered onto Young Henry’s brow. The culmination of all Henry of Agincourt’s ambitions. What power did the old prophecy have now on the life of my son?

  Henry born at Windsor shall long reign and all lose.

  None, I decided, even though Lord John was ill with the strain of war, and my brother Charles had claimed the French Crown for himself in Rheims Cathedral the previous year. My son’s inheritance was secure. I knew I would never return to France, and Young Henry’s future had passed into stronger hands than mine. My future was with Owen. I knew I carried another child for Owen.

  And so I drowsed as we pushed on with a small escort to Hertford—for this was now where Owen and I had established our home—where Edmund and Jasper waited in Alice’s care. It was cold enough to turn our breath to clouds of white and the ground was rock hard with frost. I travelled in a litter against the icy wind, the leather curtains drawn, with every frozen rut and puddle jarring my body. I longed to be home, and as if reading my mind, the curtain was twitched back, and Owen leaned down from his mount to peer in.

  ‘Are you surviving?’ His words were snatched away by the wind.

  ‘Just about.’ I grimaced, weary to my bones. ‘The bits of me that are not frozen are battered into submission. How long?’

  ‘Not long now.’

  He reached out to grip my hand and was about to drop the curtain back into place when his head whipped round. And I too heard it. Approaching hooves from ahead and behind, shouts that seemed to come from the undergrowth beside the road to our right and a cry of warning from one of our escort.

  ‘Footpads, by God!’ Owen snarled. ‘Sit tight!’

  As my litter came to a juddering halt, he hauled on his reins, shouting orders to our escort—a little band of half a dozen men well armed with sword and bow. I pushed the curtain aside again to see a motley collection of riff-raff leap from their hiding places in the undergrowth, daggers and swords to hand, at the same time as armed assailants descended from front and rear. And then all was full-scale battle.

  In the midst of it, I was aware of Owen. For a moment he sat motionless on his horse then spurred it forward towards a thief who, dagger drawn, was grappling with one of our men. And I realised. Owen had no weapon, neither sword nor dagger. He was helpless. Insanely, recklessly, h
e spurred his horse back into the fray.

  ‘Owen!’ My voice croaked soundlessly in my throat as Owen swung round, ducking to avoid a blow, yet still he caught a glance of a sword on his arm that made his breath hiss between his teeth. And I heard him call out above the mêlée…

  ‘A sword. Give me a sword, man!’

  Immediately one of our escort hefted his weapon in Owen’s direction. Owen caught it and wielded it as if he had been born with a sword in his hand, so that his attacker was beaten back. And I forced myself to watch as, cutting to left and right, managing his horse with skill, he lunged and parried even as his sleeve darkened with blood. With every clash and scrape of metal, every grunt and groan, I held my breath and dug my fingers into the litter supports until my nails cracked and splintered.

  And then the attack was over after a short skirmish, our own escort eventually proving more than a match for the attackers, and they were driven off, leaving two of them dead in the road. As our sergeant-at-arms ordered removal of the bodies, Owen dismounted and walked slowly back to me. His face was livid, his hair matted with sweat, but he was alive. Vibrantly alive. There was blood on his blade that was not his.

  ‘You are wounded,’ I said, all senses as frozen as the landscape, watching the blood drip from the fingers of his left arm.

  ‘Yes.’ Tight-lipped, wincing a little, he pulled at the material of his sleeve. ‘A flesh wound. I was careless.’

  ‘Can I help you, bind it up?’

  ‘No.’ He was as curt as he had ever been with me.

  I said what was uppermost in my mind. ‘Was that a deliberate attack against us?’

  ‘No. A chance encounter by particularly enterprising robbers.’ He did not look at me.

  I did not believe him, but let it slide. ‘Why were you not armed?’ I demanded. Even I heard the accusatory note in my voice.

  Now he looked up at me, anger bright in his face, his lips pale and thin, his words ungoverned.

  ‘I was not armed because I have to live under the damnable restrictions that the English law puts on me.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s not a matter for discussion.’ Oh, he was brusque. ‘Close the curtains, Katherine, and we’ll be off again.’

  He left me, and I obeyed, but not before I saw him toss the sword back to its owner.

  Back at Hertford within the hour, his face still set in stark lines, I kept a still tongue as I dispatched him to have Alice inspect his wounds. Giving him time, I visited Edmund and Jasper in the nursery, listened to their achievements and woes, but my mind was busy elsewhere. I was certain that the only time I had ever seen Owen wear a sword had been on the morning he had stood with me in St George’s Chapel and taken me as his wife.

  So he had a sword. He could indubitably use one, had been taught to wield one, and taught well. But—what was it that he had said? English law forbade him to wear one. What a morass of difficulties the law of England gave us. And how little of it I understood.

  I kissed my sons and went in search of my husband.

  For I knew that the ambush had not been the work of some chance vermin, some motley collection of riff-raff, as I had first surmised, but a well-mounted, well-armed, well-organised force. Furthermore, wearing no identifying livery, they had been waiting specifically for us. Owen might deny it, but it seemed to me that their focus had been set on Owen, not on our baggage wagons. In my heart I knew it with a cold certainty. They had been there to harm my husband.

  I found Owen seated on a wooden settle in the kitchens, where Alice, muttering irritably about law and order in general and footpads in particular, was in the process of cutting away the ruined cloth of his tunic from arm and shoulder. His ill humour had been subsumed under the painful exigencies of the past half-hour. Taking a seat, I waited as Alice cleansed his forearm with white wine, ignoring his hiss of pain as she wound a length of linen around it and then applied herself to another sword slice through the flesh of his shoulder, the source of most of the blood.

  ‘They say you fought well,’ she observed, forming a tight knot. ‘Why is it that brave men make such a fuss about a little scratch?’

  Yet I saw her apply her ministrations more gently. It was an uncomfortable hour for all of us, but when Owen showed his teeth in a feral snarl, Alice patted his unharmed shoulder and pushed a cup of ale into his hand.

  ‘You’ll do,’ she said. ‘If you could manage not to put any strain on your shoulder for a day or two—but I expect you’ll be back on horseback by tomorrow.’

  As she left us, I slid along the bench I was occupying until I sat opposite him.

  ‘Owen.’ I held his gaze when it lifted to mine. His eyes were dulled with pain and whatever alleviating substance Alice had added to his ale. ‘Why?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to ask,’ he interrupted with a grimace as he tried to brace his shoulder. ‘And the answer is this—just as I said when in danger of being hewn down by some lawless villain—I don’t wear a sword because the law forbids it.’

  ‘But you have one. I know you have. You wore it the day we stood before the altar.’

  ‘And that was the damned foolish reaction of a man with too much pride for his own good.’

  Which did not make sense. ‘Why does the law forbid it?’

  ‘A penalty of my being Welsh, and retaliation for the rebellion of Owain Glyn Dwr. A rebellion that threatened English sovereignty and thwarted the English king’s desire to rule Wales.’ He winced again as he lifted the cup of ale to his lips. ‘It was a pretty successful rebellion, all in all, until it was crushed with bloody and savage retribution. And so have we Welsh all been crushed ever since. The law discriminates against us.’

  I had not thought about this to any degree, but I did now.

  ‘Tell me what it means to be Welsh under English dominion,’ I demanded. ‘When I asked you before, you didn’t tell me. I want to know now. How does the law discriminate against you?’

  He leaned back on the settle, placing the cup beside him, weariness heavy in his eyes, resignation in his voice. ‘You know that I own nothing of my own. Have you never considered why?’

  ‘I think I presumed that your family had nothing for you to inherit.’

  His smile was grim. ‘My family had much to inherit. But after Glyn Dwr was overthrown, all who fought for him were stripped of their property. My father fought for Glyn Dwr.’ He scrubbed his hands over his face as if he would obliterate some unpleasant memory. His voice quiet and measured, without inflection, with Alice bustling in the background and the faint chatter of servants, the heat of the ovens and the appetising scents of roasting meat, Owen told me about the restrictions he knew by heart as if they meant nothing to him, whereas I knew they were a wound on his soul.

  ‘The law says that I can neither wear nor own weapons. I am forbidden to own land in England. I am forbidden to enter some towns. I am not allowed to assemble with other Welshmen, for fear we might hatch another vile plot against the English government. And many would, God help them. The law keeps us penurious and powerless. That is why I have worked for you all these years. That is why I had nothing to give you and nothing to forfeit.’

  And he had never told me any of it. He had kept the shameful dishonour of it bound and shackled in his heart and belly. It almost moved me to tears, but I would not. Here was no time for weak sentiment. I listened silently, and when he had finished, we simply sat. After a little while I took his hand as I pondered what I now knew.

  ‘No one has ever told me this.’

  ‘Why would they? It matters to no one who is not Welsh.’

  ‘It is unjust.’

  ‘Many would say we earned it by spilling English blood. Rebels are not well thought of.’ His brief smile was humourless. ‘And before you ask—there’s nothing that can be done about it. We have no rights before English law.’

  ‘I would have asked that,’ I replied. And then: ‘Not wearing a sword means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’ He turned his face f
rom me. ‘You wore it when we were wed. You stood in your own name with a sword at your side.’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘And what’s more,’ I observed as the memory of his part in the bloody fight surged back, ‘you used the sword as if it was second nature to you. Who taught you?’

  ‘My father,’ he replied. ‘When I was a boy at home.’

  ‘So you have worn a sword.’

  There was a flash of anger in his face, quickly masked. ‘All men of my family are warriors. It would have been a dishonour for me not to have the skill.’

  ‘Then if your father taught you, and you can use it well, why not wear—?’

  He silenced me with a glance. ‘I’ll not wear Llewellyn’s sword again until I can do so with honour. I will not speak of this, Katherine.’

  I lifted my hands in exasperation and gave up. He would not admit it, but I could read all that he did not say in the dark bleakness of his eyes, the proud flare of nostril and edge of cheekbone. So his family had once been landowners. Was not a sword the symbol of a man of birth? It was so in France, and I saw no reason why England should be any different. An English or Welsh gentleman would feel the need to wear a sword at his side just as much as his French cousin. But what exactly was his family? Were they men of rank and social standing? I remembered that when I had asked him he had become marvellously reticent for a man so clever with words. There was still so much I did not know about Owen Tudor.

  ‘What would happen if you were caught wearing a weapon?’ I asked, ignoring, in true wifely fashion, Owen’s decision.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He hitched a shoulder, resulting in a grunt of discomfort at Alice’s tight bandaging when he forgot. ‘I might be fined. Clapped in prison perhaps?’ Carefully he began to shrug himself back into what was left of his tunic, to cover the remnants of his shirt.

  ‘No one would know, of course,’ I suggested. ‘If you did happen to wear one.’

  He abandoned the attempt to dress. ‘By God, that woman’s ministrations are more incapacitating than the damned sword thrust!’