The King's Curse

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For Anthony

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 29 NOVEMBER 1499

In the moment of waking I am innocent, my conscience clear of any wrongdoing. In that first dazed moment, as my eyes open, I have no thoughts; I am only a smooth-skinned, tightly muscled young body, a woman of twenty-six, slowly waking with joy to life. I have no sense of my immortal soul, I have no sense of sin or guilt. I am so deliciously, lazily sleepy that I hardly know who I am.

Slowly, I open my eyes and realize that the light coming through the shutters means that it is late in the morning. As I stretch out, luxuriously, like a waking cat, I remember that I was exhausted when I fell asleep and now I feel rested and well. And then, all in a moment, as if reality had suddenly tumbled down on my head like glossy-sealed denouncements from a high shelf, I remember that I am not well, that nothing is well, that this is the morning I hoped would never come; for this morning I cannot deny my deadly name: I am the heir of royal blood, and my brother—guilty as I am guilty—is dead.

My husband, sitting on the side of my bed, is fully dressed in his red velvet waistcoat, his jacket making him bulky and wide, his gold chain of office as chamberlain to the Prince of Wales splayed over his broad chest. Slowly, I realize he has been waiting for me to wake, his face crumpled with worry. “Margaret?”

“Don’t say anything,” I snap like a child, as if stopping the words will delay the facts, and I turn away from him into the pillow.

“You must be brave,” he says hopelessly. He pats my shoulder as if I were a sick hound puppy. “You must be brave.”

I don’t dare to shrug him off. He is my husband, I dare not offend him. He is my only refuge. I am buried in him, my name hidden in his. I am cut off from my title as sharply as if my name had been beheaded and rolled away into a basket.

Mine is the most dangerous name in England: Plantagenet, and once I carried it proudly, like a crown. Once I was Margaret Plantagenet of York, niece of two kings, the brothers Edward IV and Richard III, and the third brother was my father, George, Duke of Clarence. My mother was the wealthiest woman in England and the daughter of a man so great that they called him “Kingmaker.” My brother, Teddy, was named by our uncle, King Richard, as heir to the throne of England, and between us—Teddy and me—we commanded the love and the loyalty of half the kingdom. We were the noble Warwick orphans, saved from fate, snatched from the witchy grip of the white queen, raised in the royal nursery at Middleham Castle by Queen Anne herself, and nothing, nothing in the world was too good or too rich or too rare for us.

But when King Richard was killed, we went overnight from being the heirs to the throne to becoming pretenders, survivors of the old royal family, while a usurper took the throne. What should be done with the York princesses? What should be done with the Warwick heirs? The Tudors, mother and son, had the answer prepared. We would all be married into obscurity, wedded to shadows, hidden in wedlock. So now I am safe, cut down by degrees, until I am small enough to conceal under a poor knight’s name in a little manor in the middle of England where land is cheap and there is nobody who would ride into battle for the promise of my smile at the cry of “À Warwick!”.

I am Lady Pole. Not a princess, not a duchess, not even a countess, just the wife of a humble knight, stuffed into obscurity like an embroidered emblem into a forgotten clothes chest. Margaret Pole, young pregnant wife to Sir Richard Pole, and I have already given him three children, two of them boys. One is Henry, named sycophantically for the new king, Henry VII, and one is Arthur, named ingratiatingly for his son Prince Arthur, and I have a daughter, Ursula. I was allowed to call a mere girl whatever I wanted, so I named her for a saint who chose death rather than be married to a stranger and forced to take his name. I doubt that anyone has observed this small rebellion of mine; I certainly hope not.

But my brother could not be rechristened by marriage. Whoever he married, however lowly she was, she could not change his name as my husband has changed mine. He would still hold the title Earl of Warwick, he would still answer to Edward Plantagenet, he would still be the true heir to the throne of England. When they raised his standard (and someone, sooner or later, was bound to raise his standard) half of England would turn out just for that haunting flicker of white embroidery, the white rose. That is what they call him: “the White Rose.”

So since they could not take his name from him, they took his fortune and his lands. Then they took his liberty, packing him away like a forgotten banner, among other worthless things, into the Tower of London, among traitors and debtors and fools. But though he had no servants, no lands, no castle, no education, still my brother had his name, my name. Still Teddy had his title, my grandfather’s title. Still he was Earl of Warwick, the White Rose, heir to the Plantagenet throne, a living constant reproach to the Tudors, who captured that throne and now call it their own. They took him into the darkness when he was a little boy of eleven and they did not bring him out until he was a man of twenty-four. He had not felt meadow grass under his feet for thirteen years. Then he walked out of the Tower, perhaps enjoying the smell of the rain on the wet earth, perhaps listening to the seagulls crying over the river, perhaps hearing beyond the high walls of the Tower the shouts and laughter of free men, free Englishmen, his subjects. With a guard on either side of him, he walked across the drawbridge and up to Tower Hill, knelt before the block, and put his head down as if he deserved to die, as if he were willing to die; and they beheaded him.

That happened yesterday. Just yesterday. It rained all day. There was a tremendous storm, as if the sky was raging against cruelty, rain pouring down like grief, so that when they told me, as I stood beside my cousin the queen in her beautifully appointed rooms, we closed the shutters against the darkness as if we did not want to see the rain that on Tower Hill was washing blood into the gutter, my brother’s blood, my blood, royal blood.

“Try to be brave,” my husband murmurs again. “Think of the baby. Try not to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.” I twist my head to speak over my shoulder. “I don’t have to try to be brave. I have nothing to fear. I know that I am safe with you.”

He hesitates. He does not want to remind me that perhaps I do still have something to fear. Perhaps even his lowly estate is not humble enough to keep me safe. “I meant, try not to show your grief . . .”

“Why not?” It comes out as a childish wail. “Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I grieve? My brother, my only brother, is dead! Beheaded like a traitor when he was innocent as a child. Why should I not grieve?”

“Because they won’t like it,” he says simply.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER–SPRING 1500

The queen herself comes down the great stair from her rooms in the palace to say good-bye as we leave Westminster after the Christmas feast, though the king still keeps to his chamber. His mother tells everyone that he is well, he just has a touch of fever, he is strong and healthy and resting out the cold winter days beside a warm fire; but no one believes her. Everyone knows that he is sick with guilt at the murder of my brother and the death of the pretender who was named as a traitor, accused of joining in the same imaginary plot. I note, with wry amusement, that the queen and I, who have both lost a brother, go white-faced and tight-lipped about our business, while the man who ordered their deaths takes to his bed, dizzy with guilt. But Elizabeth and I are accustomed to loss, we are Plantagenets—we dine on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak. Henry Tudor is newly royal and has always had his battles fought for him.

“Good luck,” Elizabeth says shortly. She makes a little gesture towards the swell of my belly. “Are you sure you won’t stay? You could go into confinement here. You would be well served and I would visit you. Do change your mind and stay, Margaret.”

I shake my head. I cannot tell her that I am sick of London, and sick of the court, and sick of the rule of her husband and his overbearing mother.

“Very well,” she says, understanding all of this. “And will you go to Ludlow as soon as you are up and about again? And join them there?”

She prefers me to be at Ludlow with her boy Arthur. My husband is his guardian in that distant castle, and it comforts her to know that I am there too.

“I’ll go as soon as I can,” I promise her. “But you know Sir Richard will keep your boy safe and well whether I am there or not. He cares for him as if he were a prince of pure gold.”

My husband is a good man, I never deny it. My Lady the King’s Mother chose well for me when she made my marriage. She only wanted a man who would keep me from public view, but she happened upon one who cherishes me at home. And she got a bargain. She paid my husband the smallest possible fee on our wedding day; I could almost laugh even now, to think what they gave him to marry me: two manors, two paltry manors, and a little tumbling-down castle! He could have demanded far more; but he has always served the Tudors for nothing more than their thanks, trotted behind them only to remind them that he was on their side, followed their standard wherever it might lead without counting the cost or asking questions.

Early in his life he put his trust in Lady Margaret Beaufort, his kinswoman. She convinced him, as she convinced so many, that she would be a victorious ally but a dangerous enemy. As a young man he called on her intense family feeling and put himself into her keeping. She swore him to the cause of her son and he, and all her allies, risked their lives to bring her son to the throne and call her by the title she invented for herself: My Lady the King’s Mother. Still, even now, even in unassailable triumph she clutches at cousins, terrified of unreliable friends and fearsome strangers.

I look at my cousin the queen. We are so unlike the Tudors. They married her to My Lady’s son, the king, Henry, and only after they had tested her fertility and her loyalty for nearly two years, as if she were a breeding bitch that they had on approval, did they crown her as his queen—though she was a princess at birth and he was born very far from the throne. They married me to My Lady’s half cousin Sir Richard. They required us both to deny our breeding, our childhoods, our pasts, to take their name and swear fealty, and we have done so. But even so, I doubt they will ever trust us.

Elizabeth, my cousin, looks over to where the young Prince Arthur, her son, is waiting for his horse to be led from the stables. “I wish all three of you would stay.”

“He has to be in his principality,” I remind her. “He is Prince of Wales, he has to be near Wales.”

“I just . . .”

“The country is at peace. The King and Queen of Spain will send their daughter to us now. We will come back in no time, ready for Arthur’s wedding.” I do not add that they will only send the young Infanta now that my brother is dead. He died so that there was no rival heir; the Infanta’s carpet to the altar will be as red as his blood. And I shall have to walk on it, in the Tudor procession, and smile.

“There was a curse,” she says suddenly, drawing close to me and putting her mouth to my ear so that I can feel the warmth of her breath against my cheek. “Margaret, I have to tell you. There was a curse.” She puts her hand in mine and I can feel her tremble.

“What curse?”

“It was that whoever took my brothers from the Tower, whoever put my brothers to death, should die for it.”

Horrified, I pull back so that I can see her white face. “Whose curse? Who said such a thing?”

The shadow of guilt that crosses her face tells me at once. It will have been her mother, the witch Elizabeth. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a murderous curse from that murderous woman. “What did she say exactly?”

She slips her hand through my arm and draws me to the stable gardens, through the arched doorway, so that we are alone in the enclosed space, the leafless tree spreading its boughs over our heads.

“I said it too,” she admits. “It was my curse as much as hers. I said it with my mother. I was only a girl, but I should have known better . . . but I said it with her. We spoke to the river, to the goddess . . . you know! . . . the goddess who founded our family. We said: “Our boy was taken when he was not yet a man, not yet king—though he was born to be both. So take his murderer’s son while he is yet a boy, before he is a man, before he comes to his estate. And then take his grandson too and when you take him, we will know by his death that this is the working of our curse and this is payment for the loss of our son.’ ”

I shiver and gather my riding cape around me as if the sunlit garden were suddenly damp and cold with an assenting sigh from the river. “You said that?”

She nods, her eyes dark and fearful.

“Well, King Richard died, and his son died before him,” I assert boldly. “A man and his son. Your brothers disappeared while in his keeping. If he was guilty and the curse did its work, then perhaps it is all done, and his line is finished.”

She shrugs. No one who knew Richard would ever think for a moment that he had killed his nephews. It is a ridiculous suggestion. He devoted his life to his brother, he would have laid down his life for his nephews. He hated their mother and he took the throne, but he would never have hurt the boys. Not even the Tudors daresay more than to suggest such a crime; not even they are bare-faced enough to accuse a dead man of a crime he would never have committed.

“If it was this king . . .” My voice is no more than a whisper, and I hold her so close that we could be embracing, my cloak around her shoulders, her hand in mine. I hardly dare to speak in this court of spies. “If it was his order that killed your brothers . . .”

“Or his mother,” she adds very low. “Her husband had the keys of the Tower, my brothers stood between her son and the throne . . .”

We shudder, hands clasped as tight as if My Lady might be stealing up behind us to listen. We are both terrified of the power of Margaret Beaufort, mother to Henry Tudor.

“All right, it’s all right,” I say, trying to hold back my fear, trying to deny the tremble of our hands. “But Elizabeth, if it was they who killed your brother, then your curse will fall on her son, your own husband, and on his son also.”

“I know, I know,” she moans softly. “It’s what I have been afraid of since I first thought it. What if the murderer’s grandson is my son: Prince Arthur? My boy? What if I have cursed my own boy?”

“What if the curse ends the line?” I whisper. “What if there are no Tudor boys, and in the end nothing but barren girls?”

We stand very still as if we have been frozen in the wintry garden. In the tree above our heads a robin sings a trill of song, his warning call, and then he flies away.

“Keep him safe!” she says with sudden passion. “Keep Arthur safe in Ludlow, Margaret!”

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, SPRING 1500

I enter my monthlong confinement at Stourton and my husband leaves me to escort the prince to Wales, to his castle at Ludlow. I stand at the great door of our ramshackle old house to wave them good-bye. Prince Arthur kneels for my blessing, and I put my hand on his head and then kiss him on both cheeks when he stands up. He is thirteen years old, taller than me already, a boy with all the York good looks and the York charm. There’s almost no Tudor about him at all, except in the copper of his hair and his occasional unpredictable swoop into anxiety; all the Tudors are a fearful family. I put my arms around his slim boy’s shoulders and hug him closely. “Be good,” I command him. “And take care jousting and riding. I promised your mother that no harm will come to you. Make sure it does not.”

He rolls his eyes as any boy will do when a woman fusses over him, but he ducks his head in obedience and then turns and vaults onto his horse, gathering the reins and making it curvet and dance.

“And don’t show off,” I order. “And if it rains, get into shelter.”

“We will, we will,” my husband says. He smiles down at me kindly. “I’ll guard him, you know that. You take care of yourself, it’s you who has work to do this month. And send me the news the moment that the child is born.”

I put one hand over my big belly, feeling the baby stir, and I wave to them. I watch them as they go south down the red clay road to Kidderminster. The ground is frozen hard; they will make good time on the narrow tracks that wind between the patchwork of frosty rust-colored fields. The prince’s standards go before him, his men-at-arms in their bright livery. He rides beside my husband, the men of his household around them in tight protective formation. Behind them come the pack animals carrying the prince’s personal treasures, his silver plate, his gold ware, his precious saddles, his enameled and engraved armor, even his carpets and linen. He carries a fortune in treasure wherever he goes; he is the Tudor prince of England and served like an emperor. The Tudors shore up their royalty with the trappings of wealth as if they hope that playing the part will make it real.

Around the boy, around the mules carrying his treasure, ride the Tudor guard, the new guard that his father has mustered, the yeomen in their green and white livery. When we Plantagenets were the royal family, we rode through the highways and byways of England with friends and companions, unarmed, bare-headed; we never needed a guard, we never feared the people. The Tudors are always on alert for a hidden attack. They came in with an invading army, followed by disease, and even now, nearly fifteen years after their victory, they are still like invaders, uncertain of their safety, doubtful of their welcome.

I stand with one hand raised in farewell until a bend in the road hides them from me and then I go inside, gathering my fine woolen shawl around me. I will go to the nursery and see my children, before dinner is served to the whole household, and after dinner I will raise a glass to the stewards of my house and lands, command them to keep everything in good order during my absence, and retire to my chamber with my ladies-in-waiting, my midwives, and the nurses. There I have to wait, for the four long weeks of my confinement, for our new baby.

I am not afraid of pain, so I don’t dread the birth. This is my fourth childbed and at least I know what to expect. But I don’t look forward to it either. None of my children brings me the joy that I see in other mothers. My boys do not fill me with fierce ambition, I cannot pray for them to rise in the world—I would be mad to want them to catch the eye of the king, for what would he see but another Plantagenet boy? A rival heir to the throne? A threat? My daughter does not give me the satisfaction of seeing a little woman in the making: another me, another Plantagenet princess. How can I think of her as anything but doomed if she shines at court? I have got myself safely through these years by being almost invisible, how can I dress a girl, and put her forward, and hope that people admire her? All I want for her is a comfortable obscurity. To be a loving mother, a woman has to be optimistic, filled with hope for the babies, planning their future in safety, dreaming of grand plans. But I am of the House of York; I know better than anyone that it is an uncertain, dangerous world, and the best plan I can make for my children is that they survive in the shadows—by birth they will be the greatest of all the actors, but I must hope they are always either offstage, or anonymous in the crowd.

The baby comes early, a week before I had thought, and he is handsome and strong, with a funny little tuft of brown hair in the middle of his head like the crest on a cock. He takes to the wet nurse’s milk and she suckles him constantly. I send the good news to his father and receive his congratulations and a bracelet of Welsh gold in reply. He says he will come home for the christening and that we must call the boy Reginald—Reginald the counselor—as a gentle hint to the king and his mother that this boy will be raised to be an advisor and humble servant to their line. It is no surprise to me that my husband wants the baby’s very name to indicate our servitude to them. When they won the country, they won us too. Our future depends on their favor. The Tudors own everything in England now; perhaps they always will.

Sometimes the wet nurse gives him to me and I rock him and admire the curve of his closed eyelids and the sweep of the eyelashes against his cheek. He reminds me of my brother when he was a baby. I can remember his plump toddler face very well, and his anxious dark eyes when he was a boy. I hardly saw him as a young man. I cannot picture the prisoner walking through the rain to the scaffold on Tower Hill. I hold my new baby close to my heart and think that life is fragile; perhaps it is safer not to love anyone at all.

My husband comes home as he promised—he always does what he promises—in time for the christening, and as soon as I am out of confinement and churched, we return to Ludlow. It is a long hard journey for me, and I go partly by litter and partly by horseback, riding in the morning and resting in the afternoon, but even so it takes us two days on the road and I am glad to see the high walls of the town, the striped black and cream of the lathes and plaster of the houses under their thick thatch roofs, and behind them, tall and dark, the greater walls of the castle.

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SPRING 1500

They throw the gates wide open in compliment to me, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain of the Prince of Wales, and Arthur himself comes bounding like a colt out of the main gate, all long legs and excitement, to help me down from my horse and ask me how I am doing, and why have I not brought the new baby?

“It’s too cold for him, he’s better off with his wet nurse at home.” I hug him and he drops to kneel for my blessing as the wife of his guardian, and royal cousin to his mother, and as he rises up I bob a curtsey to him as the heir to the throne. We go easily through these steps of protocol without thinking of them. He has been raised to be a king, and I was brought up as one of the most important people in a ceremonial court, where almost everyone curtseyed to me, walked behind me, rose when I entered a room, or departed bowing from my presence. Until the Tudors came, until I was married, until I became unimportant Lady Pole.

Arthur steps back to scrutinize my face, the funny boy, fourteen this year, but sweet-natured and thoughtful as the tenderhearted woman, his mother. “Are you all right?” he asks carefully. “Was it all, all right?”

“Quite all right,” I say to him firmly. “I’m quite unchanged.”

He beams at that. This boy has his mother’s loving heart; he is going to be a king with compassion and God knows this is what England needs to heal the wounds of thirty long years of battles.

My husband comes bustling from the stables, and he and Arthur sweep me into the great hall where the court bows to me and I walk through the hundreds of men of our household to my place of honor between my husband and the Prince of Wales, at the high table.

Later that night I go to Arthur’s bedchamber to hear him say his prayers. His chaplain is there, kneeling at the prie-dieu beside him, listening to the careful recitation in Latin of the collect for the day and the prayer for the night. He reads a passage from one of the psalms and Arthur bows his head to pray for the safety of his father and mother, the King and Queen of England. “And for My Lady the King’s Mother, the Countess of Richmond,” he adds, reciting her title so that God will not forget how high she has risen, and how worthy her claim to His attention. I bow my head when he says “Amen,” and then the chaplain gathers up his things and Arthur takes a leap into his big bed.

“Lady Margaret, d’you know if I am to be married this year?”

“Nobody has told me a date,” I say. I sit on the side of his bed and look at his bright face, the soft down on his upper lip that he loves to stroke as if it will encourage it to grow. “But there can be no objection to the wedding now.”

At once, he puts his hand out to touch mine. He knows that the monarchs of Spain swore they would send their daughter to be his bride only when they were assured that there were no rival heirs to the throne of England. They meant not only my brother Edward, but also the pretender who went by the name of the queen’s brother, Richard of York. Determined that the betrothal should go ahead, the king entrapped both young men together, as if they were equally heirs, as if they were equally guilty, and ordered them both killed. The pretender claimed a most dangerous name, took arms against Henry, and died for it. My brother denied his own name, never raised his voice, let alone an army, and still died. I have to try not to sour my own life with bitterness. I have to put away resentment as if it were a forgotten badge. I have to forget I am a sister, I have to forget the only boy that I have ever truly loved: my brother, the White Rose.

“You know I would never have asked for it,” Arthur says, his voice very low. “His death. I didn’t ask for it.”

“I know you didn’t,” I say. “It’s nothing to do with you or me. It was out of our hands. There was nothing that either of us could have done.”

“But I did do one thing,” he says, with a shy sideways glance at me. “It wasn’t any good; but I did ask my father for mercy.”

“That was good of you,” I say. I don’t tell him that I was on my knees before the king, my headdress off, my hair let down, my tears falling on the floor, my cupped hands under the heel of his boot, until they lifted me up and carried me away, and my husband begged me not to speak again for fear of reminding the king that I once had the name Plantagenet and that now I have sons with dangerous royal blood. “Nothing could be done. I am sure His Grace, your father, did only what he thought was right.”

“Can you . . .” He hesitates. “Can you forgive him?”

He cannot even look at me with this question, and his gaze is on our clasped hands. Gently, he turns the new ring I am wearing on my finger, a mourning ring with a W for Warwick, my brother.

I cover his hand with my own. “I have nothing to forgive,” I say firmly. “It was not an angry act or a vengeful act by your father against my brother. It was something that he felt he had to do in order to secure his throne. He did not do it with passion. He could not be swayed by an appeal. He calculated that the monarchs of Spain would not send the Infanta if my brother were alive. He calculated that the commons of England would always rise for someone who was a Plantagenet. Your father is a thoughtful man, a careful man; he will have looked at the chances almost like a clerk drawing up an account in one of those new ledgers with the gains on one side and the losses on the other. That’s how your father thinks. That’s how kings have to think these days. It’s not about honor and loyalty anymore. It’s about calculation. It’s my loss that my brother counted as a danger, and your father had him crossed out of the book.”

“But he was no danger!” Arthur exclaims. “And in all honor . . .”

“He was never a danger; it was his name. His name was the danger.”

“But it’s your name?”

“Oh no. My name is Margaret Pole,” I say dryly. “You know that. And I try to forget I was born with any other.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1501

Arthur’s bride does not come to England till she is fifteen. At the end of summer we travel to London, and Arthur, his mother, and I have two months of ordering clothes, commanding tailors, jewelers, glove makers, hatmakers, and seamstresses to put together a wardrobe of clothes for the young prince and a handsome suit for his wedding day.

He is nervous. He has written to her regularly, stilted letters in Latin, the only language they share. My cousin the queen has urged that she be taught English and French. “It’s barbaric to marry a stranger, and not even be able to speak together,” she mutters to me, as we embroider Arthur’s new shirts in her chamber. “Are they to sit down to breakfast with an ambassador to translate between them?”

I smile in reply. It is a rare woman who can speak freely with a loving husband, and we both know this. “She’ll learn,” I say. “She’ll have to learn our ways.”

“The king is going to ride down to the south coast to meet her,” Elizabeth says. “I have asked him to wait and greet her here in London, but he says he will take Arthur with him and ride like a knight errant to surprise her.”

“You know, I don’t think that the Spanish like surprises,” I remark. Everyone knows they are a most formal people; the Infanta has been living almost in seclusion, in the former harem of the Alhambra Palace.

“She is promised, she has been promised for twelve years, and now she is delivered,” Elizabeth says dryly. “What she likes or does not like is of little matter. Not to the king, and perhaps not even to her mother and father now.”

“Poor child,” I say. “But she could have no more handsome or good-natured bridegroom than Arthur.”

“He is a good young man, isn’t he?” His mother’s face warms at his praise. “And he has grown again. What are you feeding him? He is taller than me now; I think he will be as tall as my father.” She nips off her words as if it is treason to name her father, King Edward.

“He will be as tall as King Henry,” I amend. “And God willing she will make as good a queen as you have been.”

Elizabeth gives me one of her fleeting smiles. “Perhaps she will. Perhaps we will become friends. I think she may be a little like me. She has been raised to be a queen, just as I was. And she has a mother of determination and courage just like mine was.”

We wait in the nursery for the bridegroom and his father to ride home from their mission of knight errantry. Little Prince Harry, ten years old, is excited by the adventure. “Will he ride up and capture her?”

“Oh no.” His mother draws her youngest child, five-year-old Mary, onto her lap. “That wouldn’t do at all. They will go to wherever she is staying, and ask to be admitted. Then they will pay their compliments, and perhaps dine with her, and then leave the following morning.”

“I would ride up and capture her!” Harry boasts, raising his hand as if holding a pair of reins, and cantering around the room on an imaginary horse. “I would ride up and marry her on the spot. She’s taken long enough to come to England. I would brook no delay.”

“Brook?” I ask. “What sort of word is brook? What on earth have you been reading?”

“He reads all the time,” his mother says fondly. “He is such a scholar. He reads romances and theology and prayers and the lives of the saints. In French and Latin and English. He’s starting Greek.”

“And I’m musical,” Harry reminds us.

“Very talented,” I commend him with a smile.

“And I ride, on big horses, not just little ponies, and I can handle a hawk too. I have my own hawk, a goshawk called Ruby.”

His mother and I exchange a rueful smile over the bobbing copper head.

“You are undoubtedly a true prince,” I say to him.

“I should come to Ludlow,” he tells me. “I should come to Ludlow with you and your husband and learn the business of running a country.”

“You would be most welcome.”

He pauses in his prancing around the room and comes to kneel up on the stool before me, and takes my face in both of his hands. “I mean to be a good prince,” he says earnestly. “I do, indeed. Whatever work my father gives me. Whether it is to rule Ireland or command the navy. Wherever he wants to send me. You wouldn’t know, Lady Margaret, because you’re not a Tudor, but it is a calling, a divine calling to be born into the royal family. It is a destiny to be born royal. And when my bride comes to England, I will ride to greet her, and I will be in disguise, and when she sees me she will say—Oh! Who is that handsome boy on that very big horse? And I will say—It’s me! And everyone will say—Hurrah!”

“It didn’t go very well at all,” Arthur tells his mother glumly. He comes into the queen’s bedroom where she is dressing for dinner. I am holding her coronal, watching the maid-in-waiting brush her hair.

“We got there, and she was already in bed, and she sent out word that she could not see us. Father would not take a refusal and consulted with the lords who were with us. They agreed with him . . .” He glances down, and both of us can see his resentment. “Of course they did, who would disagree? So we rode in the pouring rain to Dogmersfield Palace and insisted that she admit us. Father went into her privy chamber, I think there was a row, and then she came out looking furious, and we all had dinner.”

“What was she like?” I ask into the silence, when nobody else says anything.

“How would I know?” he demands miserably. “She hardly spoke to me. I just dripped all over the floor. Father commanded her to dance and she did a Spanish dance with three of her ladies. She wore a heavy veil over her headdress so I could hardly see her face. I expect she hates us, making her come out to dinner after she had refused. She spoke Latin, we said something about the weather and her voyage. She had been terribly seasick.”

I nearly laugh aloud at his glum face. “Ah, little prince, be of good heart!” I say, and I put my arm around his shoulders to give him a hug. “It’s early days. She will come to love and value you. She will recover from seasickness, and learn to speak English.”

I feel him lean towards me for comfort. “She will? Do you really think so? She truly did look very angry.”

“She has to. And you will be kind to her.”

“My lord father is very taken with her,” he says to his mother as if he is warning her.

She smiles wryly. “Your father loves a princess,” she says. “There’s nothing he likes more than a woman born royal in his power.”

I am in the royal nursery playing with Princess Mary when Harry comes in from his riding lesson. At once he comes to me, elbowing his little sister to one side.

“Be careful with Her Grace,” I remind him. She giggles; she is a robust little beauty.

“But where is the Spanish princess?” he demands. “Why is she not here?”

“Because she’s still on her way,” I say, offering Princess Mary a brightly colored ball. She takes it and carefully tosses it up and catches it. “Princess Katherine has to make a progress through the country so that people can see her, and then you will ride out to greet her and escort her into London. Your new suit is ready, and your new saddle.”

“I hope I do it right,” he says earnestly. “I hope that my horse behaves, and that I make my mother proud.”

I put my arm around him. “You will,” I assure him. “You ride beautifully, you will look princely, and your mother is always proud of you.”

I feel him square his little shoulders. He is imagining himself in a cloth-of-gold jacket, high up on his horse. “She is,” he says with the vanity of a well-loved little boy. “I’m not the Prince of Wales, I’m only a second son, but she is proud of me.”

“What about Princess Mary?” I tease him. “The prettiest princess in the world? Or your big sister, Princess Margaret?”

“They’re just girls,” he says with brotherly scorn. “Who cares about them?”

I am watching to make sure that the queen’s new gowns are properly powdered, brushed, and hung in the wardrobe rooms when Elizabeth comes in and closes the door behind her. “Leave us,” she says shortly to the mistress of the robes, and by this I know that something is very wrong, for the queen is never abrupt with the women who work for her.

“What is it?”

“It’s Edmund, Cousin Edmund.”

My knees go weak at the mention of his name. Elizabeth pushes me onto a stool, then goes to the window and throws it open so that cool air comes into the room and my head steadies. Edmund is a Plantagenet like us. He is my aunt’s son, Duke of Suffolk, and high in the king’s favor. His brother was a traitor, leading the rebels against the king at the battle of Stoke, killed on the battlefield; but in utter contrast Edmund de la Pole has always been fiercely loyal, the Tudor king’s right-hand man and friend. He is an ornament to the court, the leader of the jousters, a handsome, brave, brilliant Plantagenet duke, a joyous signal to everyone that York and Tudor live alongside each other as a loving royal family. He is a member of the innermost royal circle, a Plantagenet serving a Tudor, a collar that has been turned, a flag that billows the other way, a new rose of red and white, a signpost for all of us.

“Arrested?” I whisper my greatest fear.

“Run away,” she says shortly.

“Where?” I ask, horrified. “Oh God. Where has he gone?”

“To the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, to raise an army against the king.” She chokes as if the words are sticking in her throat, but she has to ask me. “Margaret, tell me—you knew nothing of this?”

I shake my head, I take her hand, I meet her eyes.

“Swear it,” she demands. “Swear it.”

“Nothing. Not a word. I swear it. He did not confide in me.”

We are both silent as we think of those that he usually does confide in: the queen’s brother-in-law, William Courtenay; our cousin Thomas Grey; our cousin William de la Pole; my second cousin George Neville; our kinsman Henry Bourchier. We are a well-recorded, well-known network of cousins and kinsmen tightly interwoven by marriage and blood. The Plantagenets spread across all England, a thrusting, courageous, seemingly endless family of ambitious boys, warrior men, and fertile women. And against us—only four Tudors: one old lady, her anxious son, and their heirs Arthur and Harry.

“What’s going to happen?” I ask. I get to my feet and walk across the room to close the window. “I’m all right now.”

She stretches out her arms to me and we hold each other close for a moment, as if we were still young women waiting for the news from Bosworth, filled with dread.

“He can never come home,” she says unhappily. “We’ll never see Cousin Edmund again. Never. And the king’s spies are certain to find him. He employs hundreds of watchers now, wherever Edmund is, they’ll find him . . .”

“And then they’ll find everyone whom he has ever spoken with,” I predict.

“Not you?” she confirms again. She drops her voice to a whisper. “Margaret, really—not you?”

“Not me. Not one word. You know I am deaf and dumb to treason.”

“And then either this year, or the next, or the year after, they will bring him home and kill him,” she says flatly. “Our cousin Edmund. We’ll have to watch him walk to the scaffold.”

I give a little moan of distress. We grip hands. But in the silence, as we think of our cousin and the scaffold on Tower Hill, we both know that we have already survived even worse than this.

I do not stay for the royal wedding but go ahead of the young couple to Ludlow to make sure that the place is warm and comfortable for their arrival. As the king smilingly greets all his Plantagenet kinsmen with excessive, cloying affection I am glad to be away from the court for fear that his charming conversation should delay me in the hall while his spies search my rooms. The king is at his most dangerous when he appears happy, seeking the company of his court, announcing amusing games, urging us to dance, laughing and strolling around the banquet while outside, in the darkened galleries and narrow streets, his spies do their work. I may have nothing to hide from Henry Tudor; but that does not mean that I want to be watched.

In any case, the king has ruled that the young couple shall come to Ludlow after their wedding, without delay, and I must get things ready for them. The poor girl will have to dismiss most of her Spanish companions and travel cross-country in the worst winter weather to a castle nearly two hundred miles from London and a lifetime away from the comfort and luxury of her home. The king wants Arthur to show his bride, to impress everyone along the road with the next generation of the Tudor line. He is thinking of ways to establish the power and glamour of the new throne: he is not thinking of a young woman, missing her mother, in a strange land.

LUDLOW CASTLE, SHROPSHIRE, WINTER 1501

I have the Ludlow servants turn the place upside down and scour the floors and brush the stone walls and then hang the rich, warm tapestries. I have carpenters rehang the doors to try to prevent drafts. I buy a huge new barrel sawn in half from the wine merchants to serve the princess as a bath; the queen my cousin writes to me that the Infanta expects to bathe daily, an outlandish habit that I hope she will give up when she feels the cold winds that buffet the towers of Ludlow Castle. I have new curtains made and lined for the bed that is to be hers—and we hope the prince will find his way to it every night. I order new linen sheets from the drapers in London and they send me the best, the very best that money can buy. I scour the floors and put down fresh strewing herbs so that all the rooms smell hauntingly of midsummer hay and meadow flowers. I sweep the chimneys so that her fires of apple wood can burn brightly, I demand from the countryside all around the little castle the finest of food: the sweetest honey, the best-brewed ale, the fruits and vegetables that have been stored since harvest, the barrels of salted fish, the smoked meats, the great rounds of cheese that this part of the world makes so well. I warn them I will need a constant supply of fresh game, and that they will have to kill their beasts and chickens to serve the castle. I have all of my hundreds of servants, all of my dozen heads of household ensure that their division is as ready as it can be; and then I wait, we all wait, for the arrival of the couple who are the hope and light of England, and who are to live under my care, learn to be Prince and Princess of Wales, and conceive a son as soon as possible.

I am looking across the muddled thatched roofs of the little town to the east, hoping to see the bobbing standards of the royal guard coming down the wet, slippery track towards the Gladford gate, when I see instead a single horseman, riding fast. I know at once that this is bad news: my first thought is for the safety of my Plantagenet kinsmen, as I throw on my cape and hurry down to the castle gateway so that I am ready, heart pounding, as he trots up the cobbled road from the broad main street and jumps off before me, kneels, and offers me a sealed letter. I take it and break the seal. My first fear is that my rebel kinsman Edmund de la Pole has been captured, and named me as a fellow conspirator. I am so frightened that I can’t read the scrawled letters on the page. “What is it?” I say shortly. “What news?”

“Lady Margaret, I am sorry to tell you the children were very ill when I left Stourton,” he says.

I blink at the crabbed writing and make myself read the short note from my steward. He writes that nine-year-old Henry has been taken ill with a red rash and fever. Arthur, who is seven years old, continues well, but they are afraid that Ursula is ill. She is crying and seems to have a headache and she certainly has a fever as he writes. She is only three years old, a dangerous time for a child emerging from babyhood. He does not even mention the baby, Reginald. I have to assume that he lives and is well in the nursery. Surely, my steward would have told me if my baby was already dead?

“Not the Sweat,” I say to the messenger, naming the new illness that we all fear, the disease that followed the Tudor army and nearly wiped out the City of London when they assembled to welcome him. “Tell me it’s not the Sweat.”

He crosses himself. “I pray not. I think not. No one had . . .” He breaks off. He means to say that no one had died—proof that it is not the Sweat, which kills a healthy man in a day, without warning. “They sent me on the third day of the oldest boy’s illness,” he says. “He had lasted three days as I left. Maybe he continues . . .”

“And the baby Reginald?”

“Kept with his wet nurse at her cottage, away from the house.”

I see my own fear in his pale face. “And you? How are you, sirrah? No signs?”

Nobody knows how sickness travels from one place to another. Some people believe that messengers carry it on their clothes, on the paper of the message, so that the very person who brings you a warning brings your death as well.

“I’m well, please God,” he says. “No rash. No fever. I would not have come near you otherwise, my lady.”

“I’d better go home,” I say. I am torn between my duty to the Tudors and my fear for my children. “Tell them in the stable I’ll leave within the hour, and that I’ll need an escort and a spare riding horse.”

He nods and leads his horse through the echoing archway and turns into the stable yard. I go to tell my ladies to pack my clothes and that one of them will have to ride with me in this wintry weather, for we have to get to Stourton; my children are ill and I must be with them. I grit my teeth as I rap out orders, the number of men in the guard, the food we will have to carry with us, the oiled cape I want strapped on my saddle in case of rain or snow, and the one that I will wear. I don’t let myself think about the destination. Above everything, I don’t let myself think about my children.

Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family the Plantagenets like a faithful black hound?

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, WINTER 1501

I find my home in a state of feverish anxiety. All three of the children are ill; only the baby, Reginald, is not sweating nor showing a red rash. I go to the nursery at once. The oldest, nine-year-old Henry, is sleeping heavily in the big four-poster bed; his brother Arthur curled up beside him, and a few paces away my little girl, Ursula, tosses and turns in her truckle bed. I look at them and I feel my teeth grit.

At my nod, the nursemaid turns Henry onto his back and lifts his nightgown. His chest and belly are covered with red spots, some of them merging into one another, his face is swollen with the rash and behind his ears, and on his neck there is no normal skin at all. He is flushed and sore all over.

“Is it the measles?” I ask her shortly.

“That, or the pox,” she says.

Dozing beside Henry, Arthur cries a little when he sees me and I lift him from the hot sheets and sit him on my knee. I can feel his small body is burning hot. “I’m thirsty,” he says. “Thirsty.” The nurse gives me a cup of small ale and he drinks three gulps and then pushes it away. “My eyes hurt.”

“We kept the shutters closed,” the nursemaid says quietly to me. “Henry complained that the light hurt his eyes, so we closed them. I hope we did right.”

“I think so,” I say. I feel such dread at my own ignorance. I don’t know what should be done for these children, nor even what is wrong with them. “What does the doctor say?”

Arthur leans back against me, even the nape of his neck is hot under my kiss.

“The doctor says that it is probably the measles and that, God willing, they will all three recover. He says to keep them warm.”

We are certainly keeping them warm. The room is stifling, a fire in the grate and a glowing brazier under the window, the beds heaped with covers and all three children sweating, flushed with heat. I put Arthur back in his hot sheets and go to the little bed where Ursula is lying limp and silent. She is only three, she is tiny. When she sees me, she raises her small hand and waves, but she does not speak or say my name.

I round with horror on the nursemaid.

“Her mind hasn’t gone!” she exclaims defensively. “She’s just wandering because of the heat. The doctor said that if the fever breaks she will be well. She sings a little and she whimpers a little in her sleep, but she hasn’t lost her mind. At any rate, not yet.”

I nod, trying to be patient in this overheated room with my children lying around like drowned corpses on a strand. “When does the doctor come again?”

“He’ll be on his way now, your ladyship. I promised I’d send for him as soon as you arrived, so that he could talk with you. But he swears that they will recover.” She looks at my face. “Probably,” she adds.

“And the rest of the household?”

“A couple of page boys have it. One of them was sick before Henry. And the kitchen maid who looks after the hens has died. But no one else has taken it yet.”

“And the village?”

“I don’t know about the village.”

I nod. I will have to ask the doctor about that, all sickness on our lands is my responsibility. I will have to order our kitchen to send out food to cottages where there is illness, I will have to make sure that the priest visits them, and that when they die they have enough money for the gravediggers. If not, I will have to pay for a grave and a wooden cross. If it gets worse I will have to order that they dig plague pits to bury the bodies. These are my obligations as the lady of Stourton. I have to care for everyone in my domain, not just my children. And as usual—as is always the case—we have no idea what causes the illness, no idea what will cure it, no idea when it will pass on to some other poor blighted village and kill people there.

“Have you written to my lord?” I ask.

My steward, waiting on the threshold of the open door, replies for her. “No, my lady, we knew he was traveling with the Prince of Wales but we didn’t know where they were on the road. We didn’t know where to write to him.”

“Write in my name, and send it to Ludlow,” I say. “Bring it to me before you seal and send it. He will be at Ludlow within a few days. He might even be there now. But I will have to stay here until everyone is well again. I can’t risk taking this illness to the Prince of Wales and his bride, whether it is the measles or the pox.”

“God forbid,” the steward says devoutly.

“Amen,” the nursemaid replies, praying for the prince even while her hand is on my son’s hot red face, as if no one ever matters more than a Tudor.

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, SPRING 1502

I spend more than two months with my children at Stourton while they slowly, one after another, lose the heat from their blood, the spots from their skin, and the pain from their eyes. Ursula is the last to improve, and even when she is no longer ill she is quick to tire and moody, and she shades her eyes from the light with her hand. There are a few people sick in the village and one child dies. There is no Christmas feasting and I ban the village from coming to the castle for their Twelfth Night gifts. There is much complaining that I have refused to give out food and wine and little fairings, but I am afraid of the sickness in the village and terrified that if I let the tenants and their families come to the castle they will bring disease with them.

Nobody knows what caused the illness, nobody knows if it has gone for good or will return with the hot weather. We are as helpless before it as the cattle herd before a murrain; all we can do is suffer like lowing cows and hope that the worst of it passes us by. When finally the last man is up and about and the village children back to work I am so deeply relieved that I pay for a Mass in the village church, to give thanks that the illness seems to have passed us by for now, that we have been spared in this hard winter season, even if this summer the warm winds bring us the plague.

Only when I have stood at the front of the church and seen it filled with a congregation no thinner, no dirtier, no more desperate-looking than usual, only when I have ridden through the village and asked at each ramshackle door if they are all well, only when I have confirmed the health of everyone in our household from the boys who scare the birds from the crops to my head steward, only then do I know it is safe to leave my children, and go back to Ludlow.

The children stand at the front door to wave good-bye, the nursemaid holds my baby Reginald in her arms. He smiles at me and waves his fat little hands. He calls: “Ma! Ma!” Ursula holds her hands cupped over her eyes to shield them against the morning sunlight. “Stand properly,” I say to her, as I swing up into the saddle. “Put your hands down at your sides, and stop scowling. Be good children, all four of you, and I will come home to see you soon.”

“When will you come?” Henry asks.

“In the summer,” I say to pacify him; in truth, I don’t know. If Prince Arthur and his new bride make a summer progress with the royal court, then I can come back to Stourton for all of the summer. But while they stay at Ludlow, under the protection of my husband, I have to be there too. I am not only a mother to these children; I have other duties. I am the lady of Ludlow and the guardian of the Prince of Wales. And I must play these parts perfectly, so that I can hide what I was born to be: a girl of the House of York, a White Rose.

I blow them a kiss, but already my mind is away from them and on the road ahead. I nod to the Master of Horse and our little cavalcade—half a dozen men at arms, a couple of mules with my goods, three ladies-in-waiting on horseback, and a gaggle of servants—starts the long ride to Ludlow where I shall meet, for the first time, the girl who will be the next Queen of England: Katherine of Aragon.

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, MARCH 1502

I am greeted by my husband in his rooms. He is working with two clerks and papers are spread all over the great table. As I come in, he waves them away, pushes back his chair, and greets me with a kiss on both cheeks. “You’re early.”

“The roads were good.”

“All well at Stourton?”

“Yes, the children are better at last,” I say.

“Good, good. I had your letter.” He looks relieved; he wants sons and healthy heirs like any man, and he is counting on our three boys to serve the Tudors and advance the family fortunes. “Have you dined, my dear?”

“Not yet, I’ll dine with you. Shall I meet the princess now?”

“As soon as you are ready. He wants to bring her to you himself,” he says, going back to sit down behind the table. He smiles at the thought of Arthur as a bridegroom. “He’s very keen that he should make the introduction. He asked me if he could bring her to you alone.”

“Very well,” I say dryly. I have no doubt that Arthur has considered that introducing me to the young lady whose parents demanded my brother was killed before they would send her to England is a task that should be handled carefully. Equally, I know that this idea will not have crossed the mind of my husband.

I meet her as Arthur wishes, without ceremony, alone in the presence chamber of the Castle Warden of Ludlow, a great wood-paneled room immediately below her own apartment. There is a good fire in the grate and rich tapestries on the walls. It is not the glorious palace of the Alhambra; but equally it is nothing poor or shameful. I go to the hammered metal mirror and I adjust my headdress. My reflection looks dimly back at me, my dark eyes, pale clear skin, and pretty rosebud mouth—these are my best features. My long Plantagenet nose is my greatest disappointment. I straighten my headdress and feel the pins pull in my thickly coiled auburn hair, and then I turn from the mirror as a vanity that I should despise, and wait by the fireside.

In a few moments I hear Arthur’s knock on the door and I nod to my lady-in-waiting who opens it and steps outside as Arthur comes in alone, bobs a swift bow to me as I curtsey to him, and then we kiss each other on both cheeks.

“Are all three of them quite well?” he asks. “And the baby?”

“Thanks be to God,” I say.

He crosses himself quickly. “Amen. And you didn’t take it?”

“It was surprising how few people took it this time,” I say. “We were very blessed. Just a couple of people in the village and only two deaths. The baby showed no signs at all. God is merciful indeed.”

He nods. “May I bring the Princess of Wales to you?”

I smile as he says her title with such care. “And how do you like being a married man, Your Grace?”

The quick flush on his cheek tells me that he likes her a lot and is embarrassed to own it. “I like it well enough,” he says quietly.

“You deal well together, Arthur?”

The red in his cheek deepens and spreads to his forehead. “She is . . .” He breaks off. Clearly there are no words for what she is.

“Beautiful?” I suggest.

“Yes! And . . .”

“Pleasing?”

“Oh yes! And . . .”

“Charming?”

“She has such . . .” he starts and falls silent.

“I had better see her. Clearly she is beyond describing.”

“Ah, Lady Guardian, you are laughing at me but you will see . . .”

He goes outside to fetch her. I had not realized we were keeping her waiting, and I wonder if she will be offended. After all, she is an Infanta of Spain and raised to be a very grand woman indeed.

As the heavy wooden door opens I get to my feet and Arthur brings her into the room, bows, and steps out. He closes the door. The Princess of Wales and I are quite alone.

My first thought is that she is so slight and so dainty that you would think her a portrait of a princess in stained glass, not a real girl at all. She has bronze-colored hair tucked modestly under a heavy hood, a tiny waist cinched in by a stomacher as big and heavy as a breastplate, and a high headdress draped in priceless lace, which falls to either side and shields her as if she might wear it down over her face like an infidel’s veil. She curtseys to me with her eyes and face downturned, and only when I take her hand and she glances up can I see that she has bright blue eyes and a shy pretty smile.

She is pale with anxiety as I deliver my speech in Latin, welcoming her to the castle, and apologizing for my previous absence. I see her glance around for Arthur. I see her bite her lower lip as if to summon courage, and plunge into words. At once she speaks of the one thing that I would willingly never hear, especially from her.

“I was sorry for the death of your brother, very sorry,” she says.

I am quite astounded that she should dare to speak to me of this at all, let alone that she should do so with frankness and compassion.

“It was a great loss,” I say coolly. “Alas, it is the way of the world.”

“I am afraid that my coming . . .”

I cannot bear for her to apologize to me for the murder that was done in her name. I cut her off with a few words. She looks at me, poor child, as if she would ask how she can comfort me. She looks at me as if she is ready to fall at my feet and confess it as her fault. It is unbearable for me that she should speak of my brother. I cannot hear his name on her lips, I cannot let this conversation continue or I will break down and weep for him in front of this young woman whose coming caused his death. He would be alive but for her. How can I speak calmly of this?

I put out my hand to her to keep her at a distance, to silence her, but she grasps it, and makes a little curtsey. “It’s not your fault,” I manage to whisper. “And we must all be obedient to the king.”

Her blue eyes are drowned in tears. “I am sorry,” she says. “So sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, to stop her saying another word. “And it was not his fault. Nor mine.”

And then, strangely, we live together happily. The courage that she showed when she faced me and told me that she was sorry for my grief and that she would have wanted to prevent it, I see in her every day. She misses her home terribly; her mother writes only rarely, and then briefly. Katherine is little more than a motherless child in a strange land, with everything to learn: our language, our customs, even our foods are foreign to her, and sometimes, when we sit together in the afternoon, sewing, I divert her by asking her about her home.

She describes their palace, the Alhambra, as if it were a jewel set in a lining of a green garden, placed in the treasure chest of the castle of Granada. She tells me of the icy water that flows in the fountains in the courtyards piped from the mountains of the high sierra, and of the burning sun that bakes the landscape to arid gold. She tells me of the silks that she wore every day, and of the languid mornings in the marble-tiled bathhouse, of her mother in the throne room dispensing justice and ruling the kingdom as an equal monarch with her father, and of their determination that their rule and the law of God should stretch throughout Spain.

“This must all feel so strange to you,” I say wonderingly, looking out of the narrow window to where the light is draining from the dark wintry landscape, the sky going from ash gray through slate gray, to soot gray. There is snow on the hills and the clouds are rolling up the valley, as a scud of rain hammers against the little panes of glass in the window. “It must seem like another world.”

“It is like a dream,” she says quietly. “You know? When everything is different, and you keep hoping and hoping to wake?”

Silently, I assent. I know what it is like to find that everything has changed and you cannot get back to your earlier life.

“If it were not for Arth . . . for His Grace,” she whispers and lowers her eyes to her sewing, “if it were not for him, I would be most unhappy.”

I put my hand over hers. “Thank God that he loves you,” I say quietly. “And I hope that we can all make you happy.”

At once she looks up, her blue eyes seeking mine. “He does love me, doesn’t he?”

“Without any doubt,” I smile. “I have known him since he was a baby and he has a most loving and generous heart. It is a blessing that you two should come together. What a king and queen you will make, some day.”

She has the dazzled look of a young woman very much in love.

“And are there any signs?” I ask her quietly. “Any signs of a child? You do know how to tell if a baby is coming? Your mother or your duenna has talked to you?”

“You need say nothing; my mother told me all about it,” she says with endearing dignity. “I know everything. And there are no signs yet. But I am sure that we will have a child. And I want to call her Mary.”

“You should pray for a son,” I remind her. “A son and call him Henry.”

“A son named Arthur, but first a girl called Mary,” she says, as if she is certain already. “Mary for Our Lady, who brought me safely here and gave me a young husband who could love me. And then Arthur for his father and the England that we will make together.”

“And how will your country be?” I ask her.

She is serious, this is no childish game to her. “There will be no fines for small offenses,” she says. “Justice should not be used to force people into obedience.”

I give the smallest nod of my head. The king’s rapacity in fining his noblemen, even his friends, and binding them over with tremendous debts is eating away at the loyalty of his court. But I cannot discuss it with the king’s heir.

“And no unjust arrests,” she says very quietly. “I think your cousins are in the Tower of London.”

“My cousin William de la Pole has been taken to the Tower, but there is no charge read against him,” I say. “I pray that he has nothing to do with his brother Edmund, a rebel who has run away. I don’t know where he is, nor what he is doing.”

“Nobody doubts your loyalty!” she reassures me.

“I make sure they don’t,” I say grimly. “And I rarely speak to my kinsmen.”

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, APRIL 1502

Arthur tries his best—we all try to keep her spirits up—but it is a long cold winter for her in the hills on the borders of Wales. He promises her everything but the moon itself: a garden to grow vegetables, deliveries of oranges for her to make a sort of preserve that they love to eat in Spain, oil of roses for her hair, fresh lilies—he swears that they will bloom even here. We constantly assure her that the warm weather will come soon, and that it will be hot—not as hot as Spain, we say cautiously, but hot enough to walk outside without being wrapped in layer after layer of shawls and furs, and for certain, one day there will be an end to the unceasing rain, and the sun will rise earlier into a bright sky, and the night will come later, and she will hear nightingales.

We swear to her that May will be sunny, and we tell her the silly plays and games of May Day: she will open her window at dawn and be greeted with a carol, all the handsome young men will leave peeled wands at her door, and we will crown her Queen of the May and we will teach her how to dance around a maypole.

But, despite our plans and our promises, it is not like that. May is not like that at all. Perhaps it never could have been what we promised; but it was not the weather that failed us, nor the easily invoked joy of a court cooped up for months. It was not the blossoms, nor the fish spawning in the river; the nightingales came and sang, but nobody listened—it was a disaster which none of us could have imagined.

“It’s Arthur,” my husband says to me, forgetting the prince’s many titles, forgetting to knock on my bedroom door, bursting in, scowling with worry. “Come at once, he’s sick.”

I am seated before my mirror, my maid-in-waiting behind me plaiting my hair, with my headdress ready on the stand and my gown for the day hung on the carved wood cupboard door behind her. I jump to my feet, tweaking the plait from her hand, throw my cape over my nightgown, and hastily tie the cords. “What’s the matter?”

“Says he’s tired, says he aches as if he had an ague.”

Arthur never complains of illness, never sends for the physician. The two of us stride from my room down the stairs and across the hall to the prince’s tower and up to his bedroom at the top. My husband pants up the winding stair behind me as I run up the stone steps, round and round, my hand on the cool stone pillar at the center of the spiral.

“Have you called the physician to him?” I throw over my shoulder.

“Of course. But he’s out somewhere. His servant has gone into town to look for him.” My husband steadies himself, one hand against the central stone pillar, one hand on his heaving chest. “They won’t be long.”

We reach Arthur’s bedroom door and I tap on it and go in without waiting for a response. The boy is in bed; his face has a sheen of sweat over it. He is as white as his linen, the ruffled collar of his nightshirt lying against his young face without contrast.

I am shocked but I try not to show it. “My boy,” I say gently, my voice as warm and as confident as I can make it. “Are you not feeling well?”

He rolls his head towards me. “Just hot,” he says through cracked lips. “Very hot.” He gestures to his menservants. “Help me. I’ll get up and sit by the fire.”

I step back and watch them. They turn back the covers and throw his robe around his shoulders. They help him from the bed. I see him grimace as he moves, as if it hurts him to take the two steps to the chair, and when he gets to the fireside he sits down heavily, as if he is exhausted.

“Would you fetch Her Grace the princess for me?” he asks. “I must tell her I cannot ride out with her today.”

“I can tell her myself . . .”

“I want to see her.”

I don’t argue with him, but go down the stairs of his tower, across the hall, and up the stairs of her tower to her rooms and ask her to come to her husband. She is at her morning studies, reading English, frowning over her book. She comes at once, smiling and expectant; her duenna, Doña Elvira, follows with one fierce look at me, as if to ask: What is wrong. What has gone wrong in this cold, wet country now? How have you English failed again?

The princess follows me through Arthur’s great presence chamber, where there are half a dozen men waiting to see the prince. They bow as she goes by and she walks through with a little smile to right and left, a gracious princess. Then she enters into Prince Arthur’s bedroom and the brightness drains from her face.

“Are you ill, my love?” she asks him at once.

He is hunched in his chair at the fireside; my husband, agonized as an anxious hound, stands behind him. Arthur puts out his hand to stop her coming any closer, murmuring so low that I cannot hear what he says. She turns at once to me and her face is shocked.

“Lady Margaret, we must call the prince’s physician.”

“I have sent my servants to find him already.”

“I don’t want a fuss,” Arthur says immediately. From childhood he has hated being ill and being nursed. His brother Harry revels in attention, and loves to be ill and cosseted; but Arthur always swears there is nothing wrong.

There is a tap on the door and a voice calls out: “Dr. Bereworth is here, Your Grace.”

Doña Elvira takes it upon herself to open the door and as the doctor comes in, the princess goes towards him with a ripple of Latin questions too quick for him to understand. He looks to me for help.

“His Grace is unwell,” I say simply. I step back and he sees the prince rise from his chair, staggering with the effort, all color drained from his face. I see the doctor recoil when he sees Arthur, and from his aghast look I instantly know what he is thinking.

The princess speaks urgently to her duenna, who replies in rapid muttered Spanish. Arthur looks from his young bride to his doctor, his eyes hollow, his skin yellowing from one hour to another.

“Come,” I say to the princess, taking her by her arm and leading her out of the bedchamber. “Be patient. Dr. Bereworth is a very good doctor and he has known the prince from childhood. It’s probably nothing to worry about at all. If Dr. Bereworth is concerned, we’ll send for the king’s own physician from London. We’ll soon have him well again.”

Her little face is downcast, but she lets me press her into a window seat in the presence chamber and she turns her head and looks out at the rain. I wave the crowd of petitioners out of the presence chamber and they leave, reluctantly bowing, glancing at the still figure in the window seat.

We wait in silence until the doctor reappears. I can just see as he closes the door that Arthur has returned to his bed and is lying back against the pillows.

“I think he should be left to sleep,” the doctor says.

I go to him. “It’s not the Sweat,” I mutter to him urgently, daring him to contradict me, glancing back at the frozen young woman in the window seat. I realize that I am not asking him for his opinion, I am forbidding him to name our greatest fear. “It’s not the Sweat. It can’t be.”

“Your ladyship, I can’t say.”

He is terrified to say. The Sweat kills within a night and a day, taking the old and the young, the healthy and the frail without distinction. It is the curse that the king trailed behind him when he marched into his kingdom with his army of mercenaries who brought it from the gutters and prisons of Europe. It is Henry Tudor’s blight on the English people, and in the first months after the battle people said that it proved that his line would not prosper; they said that the reign which had begun in labor would end in Sweat. I wonder if this was a prediction laid on our young prince, I wonder if his fragile life is doubly cursed.

“Please God, it’s not the Sweat,” the doctor says.

The princess comes across to him and speaks slowly in Latin, desperate to have his opinion. He assures her that it is nothing more than a fever, that he can administer a draft and the prince’s temperature will come down. He speaks soothingly to her, and goes, leaving me to persuade the princess that she cannot watch over her husband as he sleeps.

“If I leave him now, do you swear to me that you will stay with him, all the time?” she pleads.

“I’ll go back in now, if you will walk outside and then go to your room and read or study or sew.”

“I’ll go!” she says, instantly obedient. “I’ll go to my rooms if you will stay with him.”

The duenna, Doña Elvira, exchanges a level look with me and then follows her charge from the room. I go to the prince’s bedside, conscious that I have now sworn to both his wife and his mother that I will watch over him, but that my watching may be of little use if the young man who is so white and restless in the great curtained bed is the victim of his father’s disease and his mother’s curse.

The day goes by with painful slowness. The princess is obedient to her word and walks in the garden and studies in her rooms and sends every hour to ask how her husband does. I reply that he is resting, that his fever is still high. I don’t tell her that he is getting worse and worse, he is rolling around in feverish dreams, we have sent for the king’s own doctor from London and that I am sponging his forehead, his face, and his chest with wine vinegar and icy water but nothing makes him cool.

Katherine goes to the circular chapel in the courtyard of the castle and prays on her knees for the health of her young husband. Late at night, I look down from the window in Arthur’s tower and I see her bobbing candle in the darkened courtyard and the train of women following her from the chapel to her bedroom. I hope that she can sleep as I turn back to the bed and the boy who is burning up with fever. I put some cleansing salts on the fire and watch the flames burn blue. I take his hand and feel the sweat in his hot palms and his pulse hammering under my fingertips. I don’t know what to do for him. I don’t know what there is to do for him. I fear that there is nothing that anyone can do for him. In the cold long darkness of the night I begin to believe that he will die.

I eat my breakfast in his room but I have no appetite. He is wandering in his mind and will neither eat nor drink. I have the grooms of the bedchamber hold him while I force the cup against his mouth and pour small ale down his throat until he chokes and splutters and swallows, and then they lie him back on the pillow and he throws himself around in the bed, hot, and getting hotter.

The princess comes to the door of his presence chamber and they send for me. “I shall see him! You will not prevent me!”

I close the door behind me and confront her white-faced determination. Her eyes are shadowed like bruised violets; she has not slept all night. “It may be a grave illness,” I say, not naming the greatest fear. “I cannot allow you to go to him. I should be failing in my duty if I let you go to him.”

“Your duty is to me!” shouts the daughter of Isabella of Spain, driven to rage by her fear.

“My duty is to England,” I say to her quietly. “And if you are carrying a Tudor heir in your belly, then my duty is to that child as well as to you. I cannot allow you to go closer than to the foot of the bed.”

At once she almost collapses. “Let me go in,” she pleads. “Please, Lady Margaret, just let me see him. I will stop where you say, I will do as you command, but for Our Lady’s sake, let me see him.”

I take her in, past the waiting crowds who call out a blessing, past the trestle table where the doctor has set up a small cabinet with herbs and oils and leeches crawling in a jar, through the double doors to the bedroom where Arthur is lying, still and quiet, on the bed. He opens his dark eyes as she comes in, and the first words he whispers are, “I love you. Don’t come closer.”

She takes hold of the carved post at the foot of the bed, as if to stop herself from climbing in beside him. “I love you too,” she says breathlessly. “You will be well?”

He just shakes his head and, in that terrible moment, I know that I have failed in my promise to his mother. I said that I would keep him safe, and I have not. From a wintry sky, from an east wind—who knows how?—he has taken the curse of his father’s disease, and My Lady the King’s Mother will be punished by the curse of the two queens. She will pay for what she did to their boys, and see her grandson buried and, no doubt, her son also. I step forward and take hold of the princess by her slight waist and draw her to the door.

“I shall come back,” she calls to him as she takes unwilling steps away from him. “Stay with me; I will not fail you.”

All day we fight for him, as arduously if we were infantrymen bogged down in the mud of Bosworth Field. We put scalding plasters on his chest, we put leeches on his legs, we sponge his face with icy water, we put a warming pan under his back. As he lies there, white as a marble saint, we torment him with every cure that we can think of, and still he sweats as if he is on fire, and nothing breaks his fever.

The princess comes back to him as she promised to do and this time we tell her that it is the Sweat and she may go no closer to him than the threshold of his room. She says that she has to speak with him privately, orders us all from the room and stands on tiptoe, holding the doorjamb, calling across the herb-strewn floor to him. I hear a quick exchange of vows. He asks for a promise from her, she agrees but begs him to get well. I take her arm.

“For his own good,” I say. “You have to leave him.”

He has raised himself up on one elbow and I catch a glimpse of his deathly determined face. “Promise,” he says to her. “Please. For my sake. Promise me now, beloved.”

She cries out, “I promise!” as if the words are torn from her, as if she does not want to grant him his last wish, and I pull her from the room.

The bell on the grand castle clock tolls six. Arthur’s confessor gives him extreme unction and he lies back on his pillow and closes his eyes. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t let go, don’t let go.” I am supposed to be praying at the foot of the bed, but instead I have my hands clenched in fists pressing into my wet eyes and all I can do is whisper no. I cannot remember when I last left the room, when I last ate or when I last slept, but I cannot bear that this prince, this supremely beautiful and gifted young prince, is going to die—and in my care. I cannot bear that he should give up his life, this beautiful life so full of promise and hope. I have failed to teach him the one thing I most truly believe: that nothing matters more than life itself, that he should cling on to life.

“No,” I say. “Don’t.”

Prayers cannot stop him slipping away, the leeches, the herbs, the oils, and the charred heart of a sparrow tied on his chest cannot hold him. He is dead by the time the clock strikes seven. I go to his bedside and straighten his collar, as I used to do when he was alive, and close his dark, unseeing eyes, pulling the embroidered coverlet straight across his chest as if I were tucking him up for the night, and I kiss his cold lips. I whisper: “God bless you. Good night, sweet prince,” and then I send for the midwives to lay him out and I leave the room.

To Her Grace the Queen of England

Dear Cousin Elizabeth,

They will have told you already, so this is a letter between us: from the woman who loved him as a mother, to the mother who could not have loved him more. He faced his death with courage, as the men of our family do. His sufferings were short and he died in faith.

I do not ask you to forgive me for failing to save him because I will never forgive myself. There was no sign of any cause but the Sweat and there is no cure for that. You need not reproach yourself, there was no sign of any curse on him. He died like the beloved brave boy he was from the disease that his father’s armies unknowingly brought into this poor country.

I will bring his widow, the princess, to you in London. She is a young woman with a broken heart. They had come to love one another and her loss is very great.

As is yours, my dear.

And mine.

Margaret Pole

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1502

The queen, my cousin, sends her private litter for the widow to make the long journey to London. Katherine travels shocked and mute, and every night on the road goes to bed in silence. I know she prays that she will not wake in the morning. I ask her, as I am bound to do, whether she thinks she might be with child and she shakes with rage at the question as if I am intruding on the privacy of her love.

“If you are with child, and that child is a boy, then he will be the Prince of Wales and much later King of England,” I say to her gently, ignoring her tremulous fury. “You would become a woman as great as Lady Margaret Beaufort, who created her own title: My Lady the King’s Mother.”

She can hardly bring herself to speak. “And if I am not?”

“Then you are the dowager princess, and Prince Harry becomes the Prince of Wales,” I explain. “If you have no son to take the title, then it goes to Prince Harry.”

“And when the king dies?”

“Please God, that day is long coming.”

“Amen. But when it does?”

“Then Prince Harry is king and his wife—whoever she is—will be queen.”

She turns away from me and goes to the fireplace but not before I see the swift expression of scorn that crosses her face at the mention of Prince Arthur’s little brother. “Prince Harry!” she exclaims.

“You have to accept the position in life that God gives you,” I remind her quietly.

“I do not.”

“Your Grace, you have suffered a great loss, but you have to accept your fate. God requires us all to accept our fate. Perhaps God commands that you are resigned?” I suggest.

“He does not,” she says firmly.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1502

I leave the Dowager Princess of Wales, as she is now to be called, at Durham House on the Strand and I go to Westminster where the court is in deep mourning. I walk through the familiar halls to the queen’s rooms. The doors stand open to her presence chamber, which is crowded with the usual courtiers and petitioners, but everyone is subdued and talking quietly, and many are wearing black trim on their jackets.

I pass through, nodding to one or two people whom I know; but I don’t stop. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to have to say, yet again: “Yes. It is a very sudden disease. Yes, we did try that remedy. Yes, it was a terrible shock. Yes, the princess is heartbroken. Yes, it is a tragedy that there is no child.”

I tap on the inner door and Lady Katherine Huntly opens it and looks at me. She is the widow of the pretender who was executed with my brother and there is no great love lost between us. She steps back and I go by her without a word.

The queen is kneeling before her prie-dieu, her face turned up to the golden crucifix, her eyes closed. I kneel beside her and I bow my head and pray for the strength to talk to our prince’s mother about the loss of him.

She sighs and glances at me. “I have been waiting for you,” she says quietly.

I take her hands. “I am sorrier than I can say.”

“I know.”

We kneel, hand-clasped in silence, as if there is nothing more that needs saying. “The princess?”

“Very quiet. Very sad.”

“There’s no chance that she could be with child?”

“She says not.”

My cousin nods as if she were not hoping for a grandchild to replace the son she has lost.

“Nothing was left undone . . .” I begin.

She puts her hand gently on my shoulder. “I know you will have cared for him as you would have cared for your own,” she says. “I know you loved him from babyhood. He was a true York prince, he was our white rose.”

“We still have Harry,” I say.

“Yes.” She leans on my shoulder as she rises to her feet. “But Harry wasn’t raised to be Prince of Wales, or king. I’ve spoiled him, I’m afraid. He’s flighty and vain.”

I am so surprised to hear her say so much as one word against her beloved son that for a moment I cannot answer her. “He can learn . . .” I stumble. “He will grow.”

“He’ll never be another Prince Arthur,” she says, as if measuring the depth of her loss. “Arthur was the son that I made for England. Anyway,” she continues. “God be praised, I think I am with child again.”

“You are?”

“It’s early days yet, but I pray so. It would be such a comfort, wouldn’t it? Another boy?”

She is thirty-six, she is old for another childbirth. “It would be wonderful,” I say, trying to smile. “God’s favor to the Tudors, mercy after sacrifice.”

I go with her to the window and we look out at the bright gardens and the people playing at bowls on the green below us. “He was such a precious boy, coming as he did, so early in our marriage, like a blessing. And he was such a happy baby, d’you remember, Margaret?”

“I remember,” I say shortly. I won’t tell her that my sorrow is that I feel I have forgotten so much, that his years with me have just slipped through my fingers as if they were nothing more than uneventful sunny days. He was such a happy boy, and happiness is not memorable.

She does not sob, though she constantly brushes tears from both of her cheeks with the back of her hands.

“Will the king send Harry to Ludlow?” I ask. If my husband has to be guardian to another prince, then I will have to care for him too, and I don’t believe I can bear to see another boy, not even Harry, in Prince Arthur’s place.

She shakes her head. “My Lady forbids it,” she says. “She says he is to stay with us, at court. He will be educated here and trained for his new calling under her eye, under our constant supervision.”

“And the dowager princess?”

“She will go home to Spain, I suppose. There’s nothing for her here.”

“Nothing, poor child,” I agree, thinking of the white-faced girl in the big palace.

I visit Princess Katherine before I go home to Stourton Castle. She is very young to be left all alone with no one but paid companions—her strict duenna and her ladies-in-waiting, her confessor and her servants—in the beautiful palace with great terraced gardens leading down to the river. I wish they would take her into the queen’s rooms at court and not leave her here, to run her own household.

She has grown more beautiful in the months of mourning, her pale skin luminous against the bronze of her hair. She is thinner and it makes her blue eyes seem larger in her heart-shaped face.

“I have come to say good-bye,” I tell her with forced cheerfulness. “I am going to my home at Stourton and I expect you will soon be on your way back to Spain.”

She looks around as if to make sure that we are not overheard; but her ladies are at a distance, and Doña Elvira does not speak English.

“No, I’m not going home,” she says with quiet determination.

I wait for an explanation. She gives me a swift, mischievous smile that brightens the gravity of her sad face. “I am not,” she repeats. “So there’s no need to look at me like that. I’m not going.”

“There’s nothing for you here anymore,” I remind her.

She takes my arm so that she can speak very low as we walk down the length of the gallery, away from the ladies, with the slap of our slippers on the wooden floor hiding the sound of our words.

“No, you are wrong. There is something here for me. I made a promise to Arthur on his deathbed, that I would serve England as I had been born and raised to do,” she says quietly. “You yourself heard him say, ‘Promise me now, beloved’—they were his last words to me. I will keep that promise.”

“You can’t stay.”

“I can, and in the most simple way. If I marry the Prince of Wales, I become Princess of Wales once more.”

I am stunned into silence, then I find my voice. “You can’t want to marry Prince Harry.” I state the obvious.

“I have to.”

“Was this your promise to Prince Arthur?”

She nods.

“He can’t have meant you to marry his little brother.”

“He did. He knew it would be the only way that I would be Princess of Wales and Queen of England, and he and I had many plans, we had agreed many things. He knew that the Tudor rule of England is not as the Yorks had ruled. He wanted to be a king from both houses. He wanted to rule with justice and compassion. He wanted to win the respect of the people, not coerce them. We had plans. When he knew he was dying, he still wanted me to do as we had planned—even though he could not. I shall guide Harry and teach him. I will make him into a good king.”

“Prince Harry has many strengths.” I try to choose my words. “But he is not, and he will never be, the prince we have lost. He is charming, and energetic; he is brave as a little lion cub and ready to serve his family and his country . . .” I hesitate. “But he is like enamel, my dear. He shines on the surface, he sparkles; but he’s not pure gold. He’s not like Arthur—who was true, through and through.”

“Even so, I will marry him. I will make him better than he is.”

“Your Grace, my dear, his father will be looking for a great match for him, another princess. And your parents will be looking for a second marriage for you.”

“Then we solve two problems with one answer. And besides, this way the king avoids paying my widow’s allowance. He’ll like that. And he’ll get the rest of my dowry. He’ll like that. And he keeps an alliance with Spain, which he wanted so much that he . . .” She breaks off.

“He wanted it so much that he killed my brother for it.” I finish the sentence quietly. “Yes, I know. But you are not the Spanish Infanta anymore. You have been married. It’s not the same. You are not the same.”

She flushes. “It will be the same. I shall make it be the same. I shall say that I am a virgin, and that the marriage was not consummated.”

I gasp. “Your Grace, nobody would ever believe you . . .”

“But nobody will ever ask!” she declares. “Who would dare to challenge me? If I say such a thing, it must be so. And you will stand as my friend, won’t you, Margaret? Because I am doing this for Arthur and you loved him as I did? If you don’t deny what I say, then no one will question it. Everyone will want to think that I can marry Harry, nobody is going to question servants and companions for gossip. None of my ladies would answer a question from an English spy. If you don’t say anything, nobody else is going to.”

I am so astounded by this jump from heartbreak into conspiracy that I can only gasp and look at her. Her face is completely determined, her jaw set.

“Believe me, you cannot do this.”

“I am going to do this,” she says grimly. “I promised. I am going to do this.”

“Your Grace, Harry is a child . . .”

“Don’t you think I know that? It’s to the good. It’s why Arthur was so determined. Harry has to be trained. Harry will be guided by me. I will advise him. I know he’s a vain, spoiled little boy. But I am going to make him into the king that he has to be.”

I am about to argue but suddenly I see her as the queen she may become. She will be formidable. This girl was raised to be Queen of England from the age of three. It seems she will be Queen of England however the luck runs against her.

“I don’t know what’s the right thing to do,” I say uncertainly. “If I were you . . .”

She shakes her head, smiling. “Lady Margaret, if you were me, you would go home to Spain and hope to live your life in quiet safety, because you have learned to keep your distance from the throne; you were raised in fear of the king, any king. But I was raised to be Princess of Wales and then Queen of England. I have no choice. They called me the Princess of Wales from the cradle! I can’t just change my name now and hide from my destiny. I have to do what I promised to Arthur. You have to help me.”

“Half the court saw you put to bed together on your wedding night.”

“I’ll say that he was incapable if I have to.”

I gasp at her determination. “Katherine! You would never shame him?”

“It’s no shame to him,” she says fiercely. “It is a shame on anyone who asks me. I know what he was to me and what I was to him. I know how he loved me and what we were to each other. But nobody else need know. Nobody else will ever know.”

I see her passion for him still. “But your duenna . . .”

“She’ll say nothing. She doesn’t want to go back to Spain with spoiled goods and a half-spent dowry.”

She turns to me and smiles her fearless smile, as if it will be easy. “And I’ll have a son with Harry,” she promises. “Just as Arthur and I hoped. And a girl called Mary. Will you look after my children for me, Lady Margaret? Don’t you want to care for the children that Arthur wanted me to have?”

I would have been wiser to say nothing, though I should have told her that women have to change their names and silence their own wills, though I could have told her that destinies are for men. “Yes,” I say reluctantly. “Yes. I do want to care for the children you promised him. I do want to be Mary’s governess. And I’ll never say anything about you and Arthur. I knew nothing for sure, I was not even there at your wedding night, and if you are truly determined, then I will not betray you. I will have no opinion.”

She bows her head, and I realize that she is deeply relieved at my decision. “I am doing this for him,” she reminds me. “For love of him. Not for my own ambition, not even for my parents. He asked it of me, and I am going to do it.”

“I’ll help you,” I promise her. “For him.”

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1502

But there is little I can do for her. I am no longer the wife of the guardian of the Prince of Wales, because there is no longer a court for the Prince of Wales or a Welsh household. The new prince—Harry—is declared to be too precious to be sent away. While my cousin the queen grows big with a child which everyone says must be a boy, their only living heir, Harry, is raised at Eltham Palace near Greenwich with his sisters Margaret and Mary, and though he is a sturdy, strong eleven-year-old, old enough to take up his duties as a royal heir, old enough to have his own council and learn from them to make careful judgments, My Lady the King’s Mother demands that he be kept at home like his sisters, the adored and indulged lord of the nursery kingdom.

He has the best of tutors, the finest musicians, and the best horsemen to teach him all the arts and skills of a young prince. My cousin his mother ensures that he is a scholar and tries to teach him that a king cannot have everything his own way; but My Lady insists that he must never be exposed to any danger.

He must never go near a sick person, his rooms must be constantly cleaned, he must be attended always by a physician. He must ride wonderful horses, but they must be broken by his horsemaster and guaranteed safe for their most precious rider. He can ride at the quintain, but he may never face an opponent in the joust. He can row on the river but never if it looks like rain. He can play tennis, though nobody ever beats him, and sing songs and make music, but he must never be overexcited or flushed too hot, or strain himself. He is not taught to rule, he is not even taught to rule himself. The boy, already indulged and spoiled, is now the only Tudor stepping-stone to the future. If they were to lose him, they would lose everything they have fought and plotted and worked for. Without a son and heir to follow the Tudor king there is no Tudor dynasty, no House of Tudor. With the death of his brother, Harry is now the only son and heir. No wonder they wrap him in ermine and serve him off gold.

They cannot see him take a step without being dizzily aware that he is their only boy. The Tudor family is so few: our queen facing the ordeal of childbirth, a king who is plagued with quinsy and cannot draw a breath without pain, his old mother, two girls, and only one boy. They are few and they are fragile.

And nobody remarks it, but we Plantagenets in the House of York are so many. They call us the demon’s brood and indeed we breed like the devil. We are rich in heirs, headed by my cousin Edmund, gaining followers and power all the time at the court of the Emperor Maximilian, his brother Richard, and scores of kinsmen and cousins. Plantagenet blood is fertile; they named the family for the Planta genista, the broom shrub, which is never out of flower, which grows everywhere, in the most unlikely soil, which can never be uprooted and even when it is burned out will thrive and grow again the very next spring, yellow as gold though it is rooted in the blackest charcoal.

They say that when you behead one of the Plantagenets, there is another that springs up, fresh in the green. We trace our line back to Fulk of Anjou, husband to a water goddess. We always bear a dozen heirs. But if the Tudors lose Harry, they have nothing to replace him with but the baby my cousin carries low and heavy in her belly that drains her face of color and makes her sick every morning.

Since Prince Harry is so rare, since he is their singular precious heir, he has to be married, and they succumb to the temptation of Spanish wealth, Spanish power, and the convenience of Katherine, obedient and helpful, waiting for the word in her London palace. They promise Harry in marriage to her, and so she has her way. I laugh out loud when my husband comes back from London and tells me the news, and he looks at me curiously and asks me what is so amusing.

“Just say it again!” I demand.

“Prince Harry has been betrothed to the Dowager Princess of Wales,” he repeats. “But I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”

“Because she had set her heart on it, and I never thought that they would consent,” I explain.

“Well, I’m surprised that they did. They’ve got to get a dispensation and negotiate a settlement, and then they can’t marry for years. I’d have thought that nothing but the best would have been good enough for Prince Harry. Not his brother’s widow.”

“Why not, if the marriage was never consummated?” I venture.

He looks at me. “That’s what the Spanish are saying, it’s all around court. I didn’t contradict it, though I had eyes in my head at Ludlow. I don’t know the truth of it and I didn’t know what to say.” He looks sheepish. “I didn’t know what My Lady the King’s Mother would want to hear. Until she tells me, I’ll say nothing.”

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, FEBRUARY 1503

Elizabeth my cousin the queen prayed that she was carrying another boy, prayed that the curse she had recited as a young woman of seventeen was nothing but words on the cold wind, prayed that the Tudor line would not die out. But she was brought to bed and she had a girl, a worthless girl, and it cost her her life, and the baby died too.

“I am sorry,” my husband says gently to me, the letter sealed with black wax trailing black satin ribbons in his hand. “I am sorry. I know how much you loved her.”

I shake my head. He does not know how much I loved her, and I cannot tell him. When I was a little girl and my world was all but destroyed by the Tudor victory, she was there, pale and afraid like me but determined that we Plantagenets would survive, determined that we would share in the Tudor spoils, determined that we would lead the Tudor court, determined that she would be queen and that the House of York would still rule England even if she had to marry the invader.

When I was sick with fear and utterly at a loss as to how I would keep my brother safe from the new king and his mother, it was Elizabeth who reassured me, who promised me that she and her mother would guard us. It was Elizabeth who barred the way of the yeomen of the guard when they came to arrest my little brother, Teddy, and Elizabeth who swore that they should not take him. It was Elizabeth who spoke to her husband time after time, begging him for Teddy’s release, and it was Elizabeth who held me and cried with me when, finally, the king brought himself to do that one terrible act and kill my brother, Teddy, for the crime of being Edward Plantagenet, for carrying his name, our name, the name that Elizabeth and I shared.

“Will you come with me to her funeral?” Richard asks.

I don’t know that I can bear it. I buried her son, and now I have to bury her. One died of the Tudor disease, the other of Tudor ambition. My family is paying a high price to keep the Tudors safe on their throne.

“They want you there,” he says shortly, as if that simply settles the matter.

“I’ll come,” I say; because it does.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1503

My Lady the King’s Mother rules how the funeral of a queen is to be done, as she rules all the great ceremonials of this great court. Elizabeth’s coffin is drawn through the streets of London by eight black horses, followed by two hundred paupers carrying lit candles. Dressed in black, I follow the coffin with her ladies, while the gentlemen of the court ride behind us, robed and hooded in black, through streets that are blazing with torches and filled with mourners, all the way to Westminster Abbey.

London turns out for the York princess. London has always loved the Yorks, and as I go by, following her coffin, there is a whisper that follows me down the cobbled street, “À Warwick,” like a blessing, like an offer. I keep my eyes and head down, as if I cannot hear my grandfather’s battle cry.

The king is not here; he has gone upriver to the beautiful palace that he built for her, Richmond; gone into the privy chamber at the heart of the palace, and closed the door, as if he cannot bear to live without her, as if he dare not look to see what friends he has left, now that the princess of the House of York has gone. He always swore that she did not bring him England, he took it on his own account. Now she is gone, he can see what his own account really is: what friends he has, what he holds without her; he can see how safe he feels among her people.

He does not come out from darkness and solitude till the middle of spring, and then he is still wearing black for her. My Lady, his mother, commands that he end his solitary mourning, nurses him back to health, and Sir Richard and I are at court at her bidding, seated among the knights and their ladies in the great dining hall. To my surprise the king walks down the length of the room, and when I rise to curtsey to him, he leads me away from the ladies’ table to an alcove at the back of the great hall.

He takes both my hands in his own. “You loved her as I did, I know. I can’t believe that she is gone,” he says simply.

He looks like a man injured beyond recovery. His face is engraved with new lines of suffering; his gray complexion shows that he is exhausted by grief. The sagging skin under his eyes shows a man who has wept for night after night instead of sleeping, and he stands a little bent, as if to ease the pain in his chest. “I can’t believe it,” he repeats.

I have no words of comfort because I share his loss, and I am still bewildered at the suddenness of her going. All my life my cousin Elizabeth has been with me, a constant loving presence. I cannot understand that she is here no longer. “God is . . .”

“Why would God take her? She was the best queen that England could have had! She was the best wife that I could have had.”

I say nothing. Of course she was the best queen that England could have had; she was from England’s own royal family that ruled long before he stumbled ashore at Milford Haven. She did not come in with a diseased army and take her crown from a thornbush; she was our own, born and bred an English princess. “And my children!” he exclaims, looking over to them.

Harry was placed at his father’s side for dinner, and he sits now beside the empty throne, his face turned down to his plate, eating nothing. For him it has been the worst blow a child can suffer; I wonder if he will ever recover. His mother loved him with a steady calmness that his grandmother’s passionate favoritism could not overthrow. Elizabeth saw him for what he was—a highly talented and charming little boy—and yet kept before him a picture of what he must be: the master of himself. Just by walking into his nursery she showed him that it is not enough to be the center of attention; every prince has that from birth. Instead, she required that he be true to himself, that he curb his boastful vanity, that he learn to put himself in others’ shoes, that he practice compassion.

His sisters, Margaret and Mary, terribly lost without her, are seated beside their grandmother, My Lady the King’s Mother, and Katherine the Spanish princess is beside them. She feels my gaze on her and she looks up and gives me a swift, inscrutable smile.

“At least they had their childhood with her,” I say. “A mother who truly loved them. At least Harry had his childhood safe in his mother’s love.”

He nods. “At least they had that,” he says. “At least I had my years with her.”

“It’s a grave loss for the dowager princess too,” I observe carefully. “The queen was very tender towards her.”

He follows my gaze. Katherine is seated in a place of honor, but the young princesses are not talking to her as sisters should. Thirteen-year-old Margaret has turned her shoulder and is whispering with her little sister, Mary, their heads close together. Katherine looks lonely at the high table, as if she is there on sufferance. As I look closely, I see that she is pale and anxious, occasionally glancing down the table to where Harry stares blindly at his plate, as if she would like to catch his eye.

“She’s more beautiful every time she comes to court,” he says quietly, his eyes on her, unaware that this grates on me as an insult on pain. “She’s growing into real beauty. She was always a pretty girl but now she is becoming a remarkable young woman.”

“Indeed,” I say stiffly. “And when is her marriage to Prince Harry to take place?”

The look that he slides sideways makes me shiver, as if a cold draft had suddenly blown into the room. He looks roguish, like Prince Harry does when he has been caught stealing pastries from the kitchen, excited and apologetic all at once, knowing that he is naughty, hoping that he can charm his way out of trouble, aware that no one can deny him anything.

“It’s too soon.” I see him decide not to tell me what has made him smile. “It’s too soon for me to say.”

My Lady the King’s Mother calls me to her private rooms before Sir Richard and I leave for Stourton. Her rooms are crowded with people seeking favors and help. The king has started to fine people heavily for small misdemeanors, and many people go to My Lady for mercy. Since she works with him on the royal account books and revels in the profit of fines, most petitioners come away unsatisfied, many of them poorer than before.

My Lady knows well enough that her son will hold England only if he can always put an army in the field, and that armies eat treasure. She and her son are at constant work on a war chest, saving funds against the rebellion that they fear will come.

She beckons me to her side with a quick gesture and her ladies tactfully rise up from their seats and move away, so that we can talk in private.

“You were at Ludlow Castle with the young couple, the prince and princess?” My Lady remarks without preamble.

“Yes.”

“You dined with them every day?”

“Almost every day. I was not there when they arrived, but after that, I lived there with them.”

“You saw them together, as husband and wife.”

I have a chilly realization that I do not know where this line of questioning is going, and that My Lady always talks for a purpose.

“Of course.”

“And you never saw anything that would suggest to you that they were not married in thought and word and deed.”

I hesitate. “I dined with them every night in the great hall. I saw them in public. They were a devoted young couple in public,” I say.

She pauses, her gaze as hard as a fist at my face. “They were wedded and bedded,” she states flatly. “There can be no doubt.”

I think of Arthur wresting the promise from the princess, his deathbed promise, that she would marry again and be Queen of England. I think that this was his plan and his wish. I remember that I would have done anything for Arthur; I think I would still do anything for him.

“Of course I cannot know what occurred in Her Grace’s bedchamber,” I say. “But she told me, and others, that the marriage had not been consummated.”

“Oh, you say that, do you?” My Lady remarks as if it is a matter of cold interest.

I take a breath. “I do.”

“Why?” she asks. “Why say such a thing?”

I try to shrug, although my shoulders are too stiff to move. “It’s just what I observed. Just what I heard.” I try to speak casually, but I am breathless.

She rounds on me so fiercely that I flinch from her furious face. “What you observed! What you heard! It is what you have made up, between the three of you—her duenna, the Spanish Infanta, and you—you three wicked women, for the downfall of my house and the destruction of my son! I know it! I know you! I wish she had never come to this country! She has brought us nothing but grief!”

A silence falls; everyone is staring at me in horrified speculation at what I have done to upset My Lady. I drop to my knees, my heart hammering in my ears. “Forgive me, Your Grace. I have done nothing, I would never do anything against you or your son. I don’t understand.”

“Tell me one thing,” she spits. “You know for a fact, don’t you, that Prince Arthur and the dowager princess were lovers? You saw the unmistakable signs of their bedding. Under your roof he was conducted to her room once a week, was he not? I had ordered it, and it was done? Or are you telling me that you disobeyed me and they were not put together every week?”

I can hardly speak. “You were obeyed,” I whisper. “Of course, I obeyed you. He was taken to her room every week.”

“So,” she says, a little pacified. “So. You admit this much. He went to her room. We know this. You don’t deny this.”

“But whether they were lovers or not, I cannot tell,” I say. My voice is so small that I fear she will not hear me and from somewhere I shall have to find the courage to speak again.

But her hearing is acute, her understanding like a trap. “So. You are supporting her,” she says. “Supporting her ridiculous claim that her husband was incapable over four months of marriage. Though he was young and healthy and she was his wife. Though she never said anything to anyone at the time. Though she never complained. She never even mentioned it.”

I have promised Princess Katherine my help, and I am bound to her. I loved Arthur and I heard him whisper to her: “Promise!” I stay on my knees and I keep my head down and I pray for this ordeal to pass.

“I cannot tell,” I repeat. “She told me that there was no chance that she was with child. I understood her to be saying that they were not lovers. That they had never been lovers.”

Her rage has passed; the color drains from her face, she is white as if she might faint. A lady steps forward to support her and then falls back before her fierce glare.

“Do you know what you are doing, Margaret Pole?” My Lady demands of me, her voice like ice. “Do you really know what you are saying?”

I sit back on my heels, finding that I am holding my hands together under my chin, as if I am praying for mercy. I shake my head. “Forgive me, Your Grace, I don’t know what you mean.”

My Lady leans forward and hisses in my ear so that no one else can hear. She is so close that I can feel her malmsey breath on my cheek. “You are not getting your little friend married to Prince Harry, if that was your plan. You are putting that little Spanish whore in the bed of her father-in-law!”

The word whore from the mouth of My Lady is as shocking as the idea. “What? Her father-in-law?”

“Yes.”

“The king?”

“My son, the king.” Her voice quavers with frustrated passion. “My son, the king.”

“He wants to marry the dowager princess now?”

“Of course he does!” Her voice is grindingly low and I can feel the heat of her rage against my hair, against my ear. “Because that way he doesn’t have to pay her widow’s jointure, that way he keeps the dowry she brought and he can demand the rest, that way he keeps an alliance with Spain against our enemy, France. That way he gets himself a cheap wedding with a princess who is here in London already, and from her he gets a new baby, another son and heir. And that way”—she breaks off to pant like a hunted dog—“that way he takes the girl in sinful lust. In a sinful, incestuous lust. She has tempted him with her bold, wicked eyes. She has inflamed him with her dancing, she walks with him, she whispers with him, she smiles at him and curtseys when she sees him, she tempts him, she will take him down to hell.”

“But she is betrothed to Prince Harry.”

“You tell her that, while she hangs on his father’s arm and rubs herself against him!”

“He can’t marry his daughter-in-law,” I say, utterly bemused.

“Fool!” she snaps. “He needs only a dispensation from the Pope. And he will get that if she continues to say, as she constantly says, that the marriage was never consummated. If her friends support her, as you are doing. And her lie—for I know it is a lie—plunges my son into sin and my house into ruin. This lie will destroy us. And you are telling it for her. You are as bad as she. I will never forget this. I will never forgive this. I will never forgive you!”

I can say nothing but gape at her.

“Speak!” she commands me. “Say that she was wedded and bedded.”

Dumbly, I shake my head.

“If you do not speak, it will be the worse for you,” she warns me.

I bow my head. I say nothing.

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1504

I am with child again and I choose to stay at Stourton Castle while my husband rules Wales from Ludlow. He comes home to see me and is pleased with my care of our lands and our home and the education of my children.

“But we have to be careful with money,” he reminds me. We are seated together in the steward’s room at Stourton, the rent books spread around us. “We have to take every care, Margaret. With four children and another on the way we have to guard our little fortune. They’re all going to need a place in the world, and Ursula will need a good dowry.”

“If the king would only grant you some more lands,” I say. “God knows you serve him well. Every time you make a judgment in court you send the fine to him. You must earn him thousands of pounds and you never keep back a penny. Not like the others.”

He shrugs. He is no courtier, my husband. He has never gone to the king for money, he has only ever been paid the smallest sum that the Tudors thought he would accept. And besides, there is more and more going into the royal coffers and less and less coming out. Henry Tudor paid off everyone who served him at Bosworth in the early years of his reign, and ever since he has been clawing back the lands he so generously granted in those first heady days. Every traitor finds his family home is forfeit, every minor criminal finds himself laden with demands to pay a fine. Even the smallest of offenses come with a great demand for payment, and everything—from the salt on the table to the ale in the inn—is taxed.

“Perhaps you can speak to My Lady when we next go to court,” I suggest. “Everyone else is better rewarded than you.”

“Can’t you ask her?”

I shake my head. I have never told my husband of the terrible scene in My Lady’s rooms. I think that she got her way—I have heard no more talk of the king marrying the dowager princess—but she will never forget or forgive that I did not write a witness account to her dictation.

“I’m no great favorite,” I say shortly. “Not with my cousin Edmund going round Europe, raising an army against them. Not with two other cousins, William de la Pole still in the Tower and William Courtenay just arrested.”

“They’re not charged with anything,” he points out.

“They’re not freed either.”

“Then can’t you cut the costs here?” Sir Richard asks me irritably. “I don’t like to go to her. She is not an easy woman to ask.”

“I try. But as you say, we have four children and another on the way. They all have to have horses and tutors. They all have to be fed.”

We look at each other in mutual impatience. I think: this is so unfair! He can have no criticism of me. He married me, a young woman of royal birth, and I have given him children—three of them sons—and I have never boasted of my name or my lineage. I have never reproached him for bringing me down to be the wife of a small knight when I was born all but a princess and an heiress to the Warwick fortune. I have never complained that he made no attempt to get my title or my fortune restored; I have played the part of Lady Pole and managed his two little manors and a castle, and not the thousands on thousands of acres that were mine by right.

“We’ll raise the rents for all the tenants,” he says shortly. “And we’ll tell them they have to increase what they send to the house from their own farms.”

“They can barely pay at the moment,” I observe. “Not with the king’s new fines and the new royal service.”

He shrugs. “They’ll have to,” he says simply. “The king requires it. These are hard times for everyone.”

I go into my confinement thinking how hard the times are, and wondering why this should be. Our York court was notoriously rich and wasteful, with an unending annual round of entertainments and parties, hunts, jousts, and celebrations. I had ten royal cousins and they were all magnificently dressed and equipped, and married well. How can it be that the same country that poured gold into the lap of Edward IV and dispersed it to an enormous family cannot find enough money to pay the fines and taxes of one man: Henry Tudor? How can it be that a royal family of only five people can need so much money when all the Plantagenets and the Rivers affinity made merry on so much less?

My husband says he will stay at Stourton Castle during my confinement to greet me when I come out. I cannot see him when I am confined, of course, but he sends me cheering messages telling me that we have sold some of the hay crop, and that he has had a pig killed and salted down for the christening party for our baby.

One evening he sends me a short handwritten note.

I have taken a fever and am resting in my bed. I have ordered the children not to see me. Be of good cheer, wife.

I feel nothing but irritation. There will be no one to watch the steward check the Michaelmas rents, nor to take the apprenticeship fees from the young people who start work this quarter. The horses will start eating the stored hay, and there will be no one to make sure they are not overfed. We cannot afford to buy in hay, we have to parcel it out throughout the winter. There is nothing I can do about this but curse our bad luck that has me confined and my husband sick at such a time. I know our steward, John Little, is an honest man, but the feast of Michaelmas is one of the key times for the profitable running of our lands, and if neither Sir Richard nor I am leaning over his shoulder and watching every number he writes, he is bound to be more careless or, worse, more generous to the tenants, forgiving them bad debts or letting unpaid rents run on.

Two nights later I get another note from Sir Richard.

Much worse, and sending for the doctor. But the children are in good health, God willing.

It is unusual for Sir Richard to be ill. He has been on one campaign after another for the Tudors, ridden out for them in all weather over three kingdoms and a principality. I write back:

Are you very ill? What does the doctor say?

I get no reply from him, and the next morning I send my lady-in-waiting Jane Mallett to my husband’s groom of the bed-chamber to ask if he is well.

As soon as she comes into my confinement chamber I can tell from her shocked face that it is bad news. I put my hand over the swell of my belly where my baby is packed as tight as herring in a barrel. I can feel its every move inside my straining belly and suddenly it goes still too, as if it is listening, like me, for bad news.

“What’s the matter?” I ask, my voice hard with worry. “What’s the matter that you look so pale? Speak up, Jane, you are frightening me.”

“It’s the master,” she says simply. “Sir Richard.”

“I know that, fool! I guessed that! Is he very ill?”

She drops a curtsey, as if deference can soften the blow. “He’s dead, my lady. He died in the night. I am so sorry to be the one to tell you . . . he’s gone. The master’s gone.”

It makes it so much worse being in confinement. The priest comes to the door and whispers words of consolation through the crack, as if his vows of celibacy will be all overthrown if he sees my tearstained face. The physician tells me it was a fever that overcame Sir Richard’s great strength. He was a man of forty-six, a good age, but he was powerful and active. It was not the Sweat and not the pox and not the measles and not the ague and not St. Anthony’s fire. The doctor gives me such a long list of things that the disease was not that I lose patience and tell him he can go and send me the steward; and I command him, in a whisper through the door, to make sure everything is done that should be done, that Sir Richard is laid in his coffin on the chancel steps of Stourton church and proper watch is kept. The bell must be tolled and all the tenants given a grant of money, mourners must have black cloth, and Sir Richard must be buried with all the dignity that he should have—but as cheaply as possible.

Then I write to the king and to his mother, My Lady, and tell them that their honorable servant, my husband, has died in their service. I do not point out to them that he leaves me all but penniless with four children of royal blood to raise on nothing, and an unborn child on the way. My Lady the King’s Mother will understand that well enough. She will know that they have to help me with an immediate grant of money, and then the gift of some more land for me to keep myself, and my children, now that we do not have the fees from his work in Wales or from his other posts. I am their kinswoman, I am of the old royal house, they have no choice but to make sure I can live with dignity and feed and clothe my children and my household.

I send for my two oldest children, my boys, the boys whom I will have to raise alone. I will let the Lady Governess tell Ursula and Reginald that their father has gone to heaven. But Henry is twelve and Arthur ten, and they should know from their mother that their father is dead and from now on there is no one but ourselves; we will have to help one another.

They come in very quiet and anxious, looking around at the shadowy confinement chamber with the superstitious anxiety of growing boys. It is only my bedroom where they have been a hundred times, but now there are tapestries over the windows to shut out the light and the damp, there are small fires in the grates at either end of the room, and there is the haunting smell from the herbs that are said to be helpful in childbirth. Against the wall a candle burns before a silver-framed icon of the Virgin Mary and the communion wafer is on display in a monstrance. There is a small bed for birthing set at the foot of my big canopied bed, and the ominous ropes tied to the two bottom posts for me to haul against when my time comes, a lathe of wood for me to bite, a holy girdle to tie around my waist. They take all this in with round, frightened eyes.

“I have some bad news for you both,” I say steadily. There is no point trying to break such a thing to them gently. We are all born to suffer, we are all born to loss. My boys are the sons of a house that has always dealt liberally in death, both in giving and receiving.

Henry looks at me anxiously. “Are you ill?” he asks. “Is the baby all right?”

“Yes. It’s not bad news about me.”

Arthur knows at once. He is always quick to understand, and quick to speak. “Then it’s Father,” he says simply. “Lady Mother, is my father dead?”

“Yes. I am very sorry to tell you,” I say. I take Henry’s cold hand in my own. “You are now the head of this family. Make sure that you guide your brothers and sister well, protect our fortune, serve the king, and avoid malice.”

His dark eyes well up with tears. “I can’t,” he says, his voice quavering. “I don’t know how to.”

“I can do it,” Arthur volunteers. “I can do it.”

I shake my head. “You can’t. You’re the second son,” I remind him. “It’s Henry who’s the heir. Your task is to help and support him, defend him if you have to. And you can do everything, Henry. I will advise and guide you, and we will find a way to advance this family in wealth and greatness—but not too far.”

“Not too far?” Arthur repeats.

“Great under the great king,” Henry says, showing, just as I thought, that he is old enough to do his duty and wise enough already to know that we want to prosper—but not enviably so.

Only then, after my boys have wept a little and gone, do I have time to kneel before my prie-dieu and grieve for the loss of my husband and pray for his immortal soul. I cannot doubt that he will go to heaven, though we will have to find the money from somewhere to have Masses said. He was a good man, loyal as a dog to the Tudors, faithful as a dog to me. Kind, as a strong man of few words is often kind to his children and servants and tenants. I never could have fallen in love with him; but I was always grateful to him and glad of his name. Now that he is dead and I will never see him again, I know that I will miss him. He was a comfort and a shield and a kind husband—and these qualities are rare.

He gave me his name, and death does not take it away from me. Now I am Lady Margaret Pole the widow, as I once was Lady Margaret Pole the wife. But the important thing is that his name is not buried with him. I can keep it. I can hide my true self behind it; even in death he will keep me safe.

I give birth to a baby boy—a son who will never know his father. In the weak moments after they put him in my arms I find I am crying over his little downy head. This is the last gift my husband will ever give me, this is the last child I will ever have. This is my last chance to love an innocent who depends on me, as I loved my brother who depended on me. I kiss his damp little head and I feel his pulse flutter. This is my last, my most precious child. Pray God I can keep him safe.

I come out of confinement to pray at the new memorial that bears the name Sir Richard Pole set under a window at our little church. The king sends me a gift of one hundred fifty-seven nobles for funeral clothes for me and for all the tenants, which—managed carefully—also pays for the feast after the funeral and goes a long way to paying for the memorial stone too. I call our steward John Little to me, to tell him that I am pleased with what he has done.

“And His Grace the king has sent permission for you to borrow one hundred twenty nobles from your son’s estate,” he says. “So we will get through Christmastide, at least.”

“One hundred twenty nobles?” I repeat. It is a help; but it is hardly a princely gift. It is not generous. The Tudors will have to do more than this if they are to keep us warm.

In the meantime, all the money goes the wrong way: from us to them. My boys must become royal wards since their father died while they are still children. This is a disaster for me and for the family. All of the earnings of the estate will go to the king, poured into the royal treasury until my son is a man and can inherit his own—or whatever is left of it after it has been bled by the king’s treasury. If the king wants to cut down every standing tree for timber, he can do so. If he wants to butcher every cow in the field, no one can prevent him. All that I can take is my widow’s dower, a third of the rents and profits—only one hundred twenty nobles, for a whole year! King Henry is offering me a loan from what was once all mine; I can’t feel grateful.

“One hundred twenty nobles only takes us to Christmastide. And what happens after that?” I ask my steward.

He just looks at me. He knows that he is not expected to have an answer to this. He knows that I have no answer. He knows there is none.

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, SPRING 1505

Christmas comes and goes with no feast for the tenants, and Twelfth Night goes by with only the smallest of gifts for the children. I announce that we are still mourning the loss of my husband, but they mutter in the village that it is not how things should be done, and it was better in the old days when the gentle knight Sir Richard ordered a good feast for the household and all the tenants, and remembered that these are the cold and hungry months and that a good dinner is helpful for people with many mouths to feed, and free firewood should be sent out too.

Geoffrey the baby thrives with his wet nurse but I find I am wondering when he can be weaned from her, as she is such an extra expense in the nursery. I cannot let the boys’ tutor go—these are my father’s grandsons, the grandsons of George, Duke of Clarence, the best-read nobleman of an exceptional court; these are Warwick children, they have to be able to read and write in three languages at least. I cannot let this family slide down into ignorance and dirt; but teaching and cleanliness are terribly expensive.

We have always lived off the produce from the home farm and we sell some of our surplus at the local markets. We make cheeses and butter, we harvest fruit, and we salt down meat. Our spare food we send to the local market for sale, any extra grain I sell to the miller, and hay and straw I sell to a local merchant. The mills on the river pay me a fee every time they grind, the local potters pay me for firing their wares in my kiln, and I sell wood from the forest.

But the tail end of winter is the worst time of year; our horses are eating our summer crop of hay and there is no extra to sell, the beasts are eating the straw and if they finish it before the spring grass comes, they will have to be killed for meat and then I will have no livestock. Once the household has been fed there is no surplus food left to sell for cash; indeed, we rely on the tenants giving us our share of their crops, as we cannot grow enough on our own fields.

Princess Katherine writes to condole with me on the loss of my husband. She too has suffered a terrible loss. Her mother wrote to her rarely, and seldom with any warmth, but Katherine never stopped looking for her letters, and missed her every day. Now Isabella of Spain is dead, and Katherine will never see her mother again. Even worse than this, the death of her mother means that her father no longer jointly rules all of Spain, but only his own kingdom of Aragon. His wealth and position in the world have been halved, worse than halved, and his oldest daughter Juana has inherited the throne of Castile from her mother. Katherine is no longer the daughter of the monarchs of Spain, she is the daughter of mere Ferdinand of Aragon—a very different prospect. I am not surprised to read that Prince Harry and his father no longer visit her as they used to do. She survives on little gifts of money from the king and sometimes they are less than she expected, and sometimes the royal exchequer forgets to pay altogether. The king is insisting that her full dowry must be paid by Spain to him before the marriage to Prince Harry can go ahead, and in riposte Katherine’s father Ferdinand is demanding that her widow’s jointure be paid by the king to her, in full and at once.

Will you write for me to My Lady and ask her if I can come to court? Will you tell her that I am sorry but I cannot seem to manage my household bills and that I am lonely and unhappy here? I want to live in her rooms as her granddaughter, as I should.

I reply and tell her that I am a widow, as she is, and that I too am struggling to pay my way in the world. I say that I am sorry, but I have no influence over My Lady. I will write to her, but I doubt she will be kind to Katherine at my bidding. I don’t say that My Lady said she would never forgive me for refusing to bear witness against Katherine, and that I doubt any word from me, any word from anyone, would make her act kindly to the princess.

Katherine replies quite cheerfully that her duenna, Doña Elvira, is so bad-tempered that she sends her out to the market to haggle with traders and her angry broken English wins them bargains. She writes this as if it is funny, and I laugh aloud when I read her letter and tell her about the quarrel I have with the farrier about the cost of horseshoes.

It is not grief that will deprive me of my wits but hunger. I go round the kitchen under the pretense that there must be no waste; but really I am getting so low that I shall start licking the spoons and scraping the pots.

I turn away as many as I can of the household staff as soon as we get to the end of the quarter at Lady Day. Some of them cry as they leave and I have no quit money to give them. Those who are left have to work harder and some of them don’t know how the work is done. The kitchen maid now has to lay the fire and sweep the grate in my room and she constantly forgets to bring the wood or spills the ash. It’s heavy work for her and I see her struggle with the log basket and I look away. I put myself in charge of the dairy and learn to make cheese and skim milk and send the dairymaid back to her family. I keep the boy in the malthouse but I learn to make ale. My son Henry has to ride out in the fields with the steward and watch them sowing the seed. He comes home afraid that they are scattering it too thickly, that the carefully measured scoops of grain are not covering the ground.

“Then we’ll have to buy more somehow,” I say grimly. “We have to have a good crop or there will be no bread next winter.”

As the evenings get lighter I give up using wax candles altogether, and tell the children they must do all their studying before dusk. We live in the guttering shadows and stink of the rush lights and the tallow drips on the floors. I think that I will have to marry again, but no man of any wealth or position would consider me, and My Lady will not order one of her relations to the task this time. I am a widow of thirty-one years with five young children and growing debts. When I remarry, I will lose all rights over the estates, as they will all go to the king as Henry’s guardian, so I would come to a new husband as a pauper. Very few men would see me as a desirable wife. No man who wants to prosper at the Tudor court would marry a widow with five children of Plantagenet blood. If My Lady the King’s Mother will not make a marriage for me with someone whom she can command, then I cannot see how to raise my children and feed myself.

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1505

It all comes back to her. It all comes back to her favor and her influence. In the summer I realize that however good the harvest, however high the price of wheat, we will not make enough to get through another winter. I am going to have to raise the money to go to London and ask her for help.

“We could sell Sir Richard’s warhorse?” my steward John Little suggests.

“He’s so old!” I exclaim. “Who would want him? And he served Sir Richard so well for so long!”

“He’s no use to us,” he says. “We can’t use him on the plow, he won’t go between the shafts. I might get a good price for him in Stourbridge. He’s well known as Sir Richard’s horse; people know he’s a good horse.”

“Then everyone will know that I can’t afford to keep him,” I protest. “That I can’t afford to keep him for Henry to ride.”

The steward nods, his eyes on his boots, not looking at me. “Everyone knows that already, my lady.”

I bow my head at this new humiliation. “Take him then,” I say.

I watch the big horse being saddled up. He lowers his proud head for the bridle and stands still while they tighten the girth. He may be old, but his ears come forward when the steward steps off the mounting block to swing a leg over his back and sit in the saddle. The old warhorse thinks he is riding out to battle once more. His neck arches, and he paws the ground as if he is eager to go to work. For a moment I nearly cry out: “No! Keep him! He’s our horse, he’s served my husband well. Keep him for Henry.”

But then I remember that there is nothing to feed him unless I can get help from My Lady the King’s Mother in London, and that the price of the horse will pay for my journey.

We take our own horses and we stay in the guesthouses of the nunneries or abbeys along the way. They are positioned along the road to help pilgrims and wayfarers, and I am comforted every time I see a bell tower on the horizon and know there is a place of refuge, every time I step into a clean lime-washed room and feel the sense of holy peace. One night there is nowhere to go but an inn, and I have to pay for myself, for my lady companion, and for the four men-at-arms. I have spent nearly all my money by the time we see the spires of London coming out of the afternoon mist and hear the dozens of bells tolling for None.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1505

The court is at Westminster, which is a blessing for me because there are always extra rooms in the huge rambling palace. Once I used to sleep in the best room, in the bed of the queen to keep her company through the night; now I am allotted a small room, far away from the great hall. I note how quickly and accurately the steward of the household observes the fall in my fortunes.

This palace is like an enclosed village, set inside its own great walls inside the city of London. I know all the twisting alleyways and the little walled gardens, the backstairs and the hidden doorways. This has been my home since childhood. I wash my face and hands and pin on my hood. I brush the dust from my gown and hold my head high as I walk through the little cobbled streets to the great hall and the queen’s rooms.

I am just about to cross the queen’s gardens when I hear someone call my name, and I turn to see Bishop John Fisher, confessor to My Lady, and an old acquaintance of mine. When I was a little girl, he used to come to Middleham Castle to teach us our catechism and hear our confessions. He knew my brother, Teddy, as a small boy, as the heir to the throne; he taught me the psalms when the name in my psalter was Margaret Plantagenet, and I was niece to the King of England.

“My lord bishop!” I exclaim, and I drop a little curtsey, for he has become a great man under the pious rule of My Lady.

He makes the sign of the cross over my head, and bows as low to me as if I were still the heiress to the royal house. “Lady Pole! I am sorry for your loss. Your husband was a fine man.”

“He was indeed,” I say.

Bishop Fisher offers me his arm and we walk side by side on the little path. “It is rare that we see you at court, my daughter?”

I am about to say something lighthearted about wanting to buy new gloves when something in his friendly, smiling face makes me want to confide in him.

“I have come for help,” I say honestly. “I am hoping that My Lady will advise me. My husband left me with next to nothing, and I cannot manage on my dower rents.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” he says simply. “But I am sure she will hear you kindly. She has many worries and much work, God bless her; but she would never neglect one of her family.”

“I hope so,” I say. I am wondering if there is any way in which I can ask him to plead my case with her, when he gestures towards the open doors of the gallery before her presence chamber. “Come on,” he urges me. “I’ll go in with you. There’s no time like the present, and there are always many people waiting to see her.”

We walk together. “You will have heard that your former charge, the Dowager Princess of Wales, is to go home to Spain?” he asks me quietly.

I am shocked at the news. “No! I thought she was betrothed to marry Prince Harry.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not widely known, but they cannot agree on the terms,” he says. “Poor child, I think she is very lonely in her big palace with no one but her confessor and her ladies. Better for her to go to her home than live alone here, and My Lady does not wish her to come to court. But this is between the two of us. I don’t know that they have even told her yet. Will you go to see her while you are in London? I know she loves you very much. You might advise her to accept her destiny gladly and with grace. I truly think that she would be happier at home than waiting and hoping here.”

“I will. I am so sorry!”

He nods. “It’s a hard life she has had. Widowed so young and now having to go home again a widow. But My Lady is guided by her prayers. She thinks it is God’s will that Prince Harry should marry another bride. The dowager princess is not for him.”

The guards stand aside for the bishop and open the doors to the presence chamber. It is crowded with petitioners; everyone wants to meet My Lady and ask her for one favor or another. All of the business of being the queen has fallen on her shoulders, and she has her own great lands to manage too. She is one of the kingdom’s wealthiest landowners, by far the wealthiest woman in England. She has endowed colleges, and chantries and built hospitals, churches, colleges, and schools, and all of them send representatives to report to her or to ask for her favor. I look around the room and calculate that there are about two hundred people waiting to see her. I am one of very, very many.

But she singles me out. She comes into the room from chapel, with her ladies walking two abreast behind her, carrying their missals as if they were a small exclusive convent of nuns, and she looks around with her sharp, observing gaze. She is more than sixty years old now, deeply lined and unsmiling, but her head is erect under her heavy gable hood, and though she leans on one of her ladies as she walks through the room, I suspect that she does this for show; she could walk equally well on her own.

Everyone curtseys or bows to her as low as if she were the queen whose rooms she occupies. I sink down but I keep my head up and smiling: I want her to see me. I catch her eye, and when she stops before me, I kiss the hand she holds out to me, and when she gestures that I may rise up and she leans forward, I kiss her soft old cheek.

“Dear Cousin Margaret,” she says coolly, as if we had parted as good friends only yesterday.

“Your Grace,” I reply.

She nods that I am to walk beside her. I take the place of her lady-in-waiting and she leans on my arm as we walk through the hundreds of people. I note that I am being publicly honored with her attention.

“You have come to see me, my dear?”

“I am hoping for your advice,” I say tactfully.

The beaklike nose turns to me, her hard eyes scan my face. She nods. She knows full well I do not need advice but that I am desperately short of money.

“You have come a long way for advice,” she observes dryly. “Is everything all right at your home?”

“My children are well and ask for your blessing,” I say. “But I cannot manage on my dower. I have only a small income now that my husband is dead, and I have five young children. I do the best I can, but there is only a little land at Stourton and the estates at Medmenham and Ellesborough only pay fifty pounds a year in rents, and of course I only get a third of that.” I am anxious not to sound as if I am complaining. “It is not enough to pay my bills,” I say simply. “Not to keep the household.”

“Then you will have to reduce your household,” she advises me. “You are not a Plantagenet now.”

To use my name to me in public, even so low that no one can hear, is to threaten me.

“I have not heard that name in years,” I say to her. “And I have never lived like that. I have reduced my household. I want only to live as the widow of a loyal Tudor knight. I don’t look for anything grander than that. My husband and I were proud to be your humble servants, and to serve you well.”

“Would you like your son to come to court? To be a companion to Prince Harry?” she asks. “Would you like to be a lady-in-waiting to me?”

I can hardly speak; this is a solution that I had not dreamed of. “I would be honored . . .” I stammer. I am amazed that she should suggest such a favor. This would resolve all my difficulties. If I could get Henry into Eltham Palace, he would have the best education in the world; he would live like a prince, with the prince himself. And a lady-in-waiting gets a fee for her services, is awarded posts when they fall vacant, is tipped for the smallest of tasks, is bribed by strangers coming to court. A lady-in-waiting gets gifts of jewels and gowns, a purse of gold at Christmas, her keep and that of her household, her horses stabled for free, her servants fed in the royal hall. The thought of dining out of the royal kitchens with my horses in the royal stables eating Tudor hay is like the promise of release from a prison of worry.

Lady Margaret sees that hope illuminates my face. “It is possible,” she concedes. “After all, it is suitable.”

“I would be honored,” I said. “I would be delighted.”

A smartly dressed man steps before us and bows. I scowl at him; this is my time with My Lady. She is the source of all wealth and patronage; she and her son, the king, own everything. This is my only time and my only chance; nobody is going to interrupt us if I can help it. To my surprise, Bishop Fisher puts a hand on the gentleman’s arm before he can present his petition and draws him away with a quiet word.

“I have to ask you a question that I asked you once before,” Lady Margaret says quietly. “It is about your time at Ludlow, with the Prince and Princess of Wales.”

I can feel myself growing cold. John Fisher has just told me that they are planning to send Katherine home to Spain. If that is the case, why would they care whether the marriage was consummated or not? “Yes?”

“We are troubled by a small matter, a legal question, for the dispensation of her first marriage. We have to ensure that we get the right wording of the dispensation so that our dear Katherine can marry Prince Harry. It is in the interest of the princess that you tell me what I need to know.”

I know that this is a lie. Lady Margaret wants to send her home.

“The marriage between Prince Arthur and the princess was consummated, was it not?” The grip on my arm tightens as if she would squeeze a confession from the marrow of my bones. We have reached the end of the room, but instead of turning to stroll back again through the crowd of petitioners, she nods to her liveried servants on the double doors to throw them open, and we pass through into her private rooms and the doors close behind us. We are alone; nobody can hear my answer but her.

“I cannot say,” I say steadily, though I find I am frightened of her, here in this empty room with guards on the doors. “Your ladyship, I told you, my husband took the prince to her bedchamber; but she told me that he was not able.”

“She said that. I know what she said.” There is a grating impatience in her voice, but she manages a smile. “But, my dear Margaret, what do you believe?”

More than anything else I believe that this is going to cost me my post as lady-in-waiting and my son his education. I rack my brains to think of something I can say to satisfy her that will not betray the princess. She is waiting, hard-faced. She will be satisfied with nothing but the words she wants to hear. She is the most powerful woman in England and she will insist that I agree with her. Miserably, I whisper: “I believe Her Grace the Dowager Princess.”

“She thinks that if she is a virgin untouched, we will marry her to Prince Harry,” My Lady says flatly. “Her parents asked for a dispensation from the Pope and told him the marriage was not consummated. He gave them a dispensation that leaves it deliberately unclear. It is typical of Isabella of Castile to get a document that can be read any way she wants. Even after death she tricks us. Apparently, her daughter is not to be challenged. She must not even be questioned. She thinks that she can walk into our family, walk into our house, walk into these very rooms—my rooms—and make them her own. She thinks to take the prince and everything away from me.”

“I am sure Prince Harry will be well suited—”

“Prince Harry will not choose his bride,” she declares. “I shall choose her. And I will not have that young woman as my daughter-in-law. Not after this lie. Not after her attempt to seduce the king in the very first days of his grief. She thinks that because she is a princess born and bred she can take everything that I have won, everything that God has given to me: my son, my grandson, my position, my whole life’s work. I spent the best years of my life bringing my son to England, keeping him safe. I married to give him allies, I befriended people that I despised for his sake. I stooped to . . .” She breaks off as if she does not want to remember what she stooped to do. “But she thinks she can walk in here with a lie in her mouth because she is a princess of royal blood. She thinks she is entitled. But I say that she is not.”

I realize that when Katherine marries Prince Harry, she will precede My Lady in every procession, every time they go to Mass or to dinner. She will have these very rooms, she will command the best gowns from the royal wardrobes, she will outrank the king’s mother, and if the court follows the tastes of the king—and courts always do—then they will empty out from My Lady’s rooms and flock to the pretty young princess. Princess Katherine will not step back and yield to My Lady as my cousin the queen yielded to her. Katherine has grit. If she ever becomes Princess of Wales, then she will make My Lady give her precedence, everywhere, in everything. She will wrest her dues from this possessive old woman and repay her enmity.

“I have told you everything I know,” I say quietly. “I am yours to command, My Lady.”

She turns her back on me, as if she does not care to see my white face and my pleading eyes. “You have a choice,” she says shortly. “You can be my lady-in-waiting and your son can be a companion to Prince Harry. You will be generously paid and there will be gifts and grants of land. Or you can support the dowager princess in her monstrous lie and her disgusting ambition. It is your choice. But if you collude in tempting the Prince of Wales, our prince, our only prince, into marriage with that young woman, then you will never come to court for as long as I live.”

I wait until dusk before I go to visit Princess Katherine. I go on foot with one lady companion and a manservant, and my steward leads the way with a cudgel in his hand. The beggars are everywhere in London nowadays, desperate men driven from their farms by higher rents, made homeless when they could not pay fines, made paupers by the king’s taxes. Some of my own tenants may be sleeping in the doorways of the London churches and begging for food.

I walk with my hood pulled over the betraying bronze of my hair, and I look all around me in case we are being followed. There are more spies in England than there have ever been before, as everyone is paid to report on their neighbor, and I would rather that My Lady did not know that I am visiting the home of the princess that she calls “that young woman.”

There is no light burning at her doorway, and it takes a long time for anyone to respond to the quiet tap that my steward makes on the double wooden doors. There is no guard to open them but only a page boy who leads us across the cold great hall and knocks on the door of what used to be the grand presence chamber.

One of Katherine’s remaining Spanish ladies peeps around the door and, seeing me, straightens up, brushes down her gown, sweeps a curtsey, and leads me through the echoing presence chamber and into the privy chamber where a small group of ladies huddle around a mean fire.

Katherine recognizes me as soon as I put back my hood, jumps up with a cry, and runs towards me. I am about to curtsey but she flings herself into my arms and hugs me, kisses me on one cheek and then the other, leans back to study my face, and then hugs me again.

“I have been thinking and thinking of you. I was so sorry when I heard of your loss. You will have had my letters? I was so sorry for you, and for the children. And for the new baby! A boy, God bless him! Is he thriving? And you? Could you get the price of horseshoes down?”

She draws me towards the light of the single sconce of wax candles, so that she can look into my face.

“Santa Maria! But you are so thin, and my dear, you look so weary.”

She turns and shoos away her ladies from the fireside seats. “Go. All of you. Go to your bedrooms. Go to bed. Lady Margaret and I will talk alone.”

“To their bedrooms?” I query.

“There’s not enough firewood for a fire anywhere but here and the kitchen,” she says simply. “And they’re all too grand to sit in the kitchen. So if they don’t sit here, they have to go to bed to keep warm.”

I look at her in disbelief. “They are keeping you so short of money that you cannot have a fire in the bedrooms?”

“As you see,” she says grimly.

“I have come from Westminster,” I say, taking a stool beside her chair. “I had a terrible conversation with My Lady.”

She nods, as if this does not surprise her.

“She questioned me as to your marriage with . . .” Even now, three years on, I cannot easily say his name. “With our prince,” I amend.

“She would do. She is very much against me.”

“Why, do you think?” I ask curiously.

She slides her mischievous girl’s smile towards me. “Oh, was she such a loving mother-in-law to your cousin the queen?” she asks.

“She was not. We were both terrified of her,” I admit.

“She’s not a woman who enjoys the company of women,” she remarks. “With her son a widower and her grandson unmarried, she’s mistress of the court. She doesn’t want a young woman coming in and being merry and loving and happy, making it a true court of learning and elegance and pleasure. She’s not even very kind to her granddaughter Princess Mary because she’s so very pretty. She’s always telling her that looks mean nothing and that she should strive for humility! She doesn’t like pretty girls, she doesn’t like rivals. If she lets Prince Harry marry at all, it will be to a young woman that she can command. She’ll marry him off to a child, someone who can’t even speak English. She doesn’t want someone like me who knows how things should be done, and will see they are done and the kingdom put to rights. She doesn’t want anyone at court who will try to persuade the king to rule as he should.”

I nod. It is exactly what I have been thinking.

“She tries to keep you from the court?”

“Oh, she succeeds, she is triumphant.” She gestures at the threadbare hangings of the room and the gaps on the walls where the frames for rich tapestries are bare. “The king doesn’t pay my allowance; he makes me live off the things that I brought with me from Spain. I have no new gowns, so when they invite me to court I look ridiculous in Spanish fashions that are darned all over. My Lady hopes to break my will and force me to ask my father to take me home. But even if I were to ask him, he would not have me back. I am trapped here.”

I am horrified. The two of us have fallen from such prosperity to such poverty in such a short time. “Katherine, what will you do?”

“I’ll wait,” she says with quiet determination. She leans close to me and puts her mouth to my ear. “He is forty-eight, he’s in poor health, he can hardly breathe for the quinsy. I’ll wait.”

“Don’t say another word,” I say nervously. I glance towards the closed door and at the shadows on the walls.

“Did My Lady ask you to swear that Arthur and I had been lovers?” she asks me bluntly.

“Yes.”

“What did you answer?”

“At first I told her that I had seen no signs of it, and that I couldn’t say.”

“What did she say?”

“She promised me a place at court and a place for my son and the money that I need if I would tell her what she wants to hear.”

She hears the anguish in my voice, takes my hand, and looks at me steadily with her level blue gaze. “Oh Margaret, I can’t ask you to be poor for me. Your sons should be at court, I know that. You don’t have to defend me. I release you from your promise, Margaret. You can say what you wish.”

I am due to ride home, but I go in my riding dress once more to the queen’s rooms, where My Lady is listening to a psalm being read before going to dinner in the great hall at Westminster.

She sees me the moment I come quietly into the room, and when the psalm is finished, she beckons me to her side. Her ladies fall back and pretend to be looking at each other’s neat headdresses. Clearly, after yesterday’s meeting, they know that she has quarreled with me and they think I have come to surrender.

She smiles at me. “Ah, Lady Margaret. Can we can make our arrangements for you to come to court?”

I take a breath. “I should be very glad to come to court,” I say. “I should be very glad for my son to go to Prince Harry at Eltham Palace. I beg of you, My Lady, to favor him with that. For the sake of his father, your half cousin who loved you so well. Let Sir Richard’s son be raised as a nobleman. Let your little kinsman come to you, please.”

“I will, if you will serve me in this one thing,” she says steadily. “Tell me the truth, and you will be saving us, your family, from a dishonorable bride. Tell me something that I can take to my son, the king, and prevent him marrying the Spanish liar to our innocent boy. I have prayed over this and I am certain Katherine of Aragon will never marry Prince Harry. You must be loyal to me, the mother of the king, and not to her. I warn you, Lady Margaret, take care what you say. Fear the consequences! Think very carefully before you consult your own will.”

She glares at me, her dark eyes boggling, as if to ensure that I understand the threat she promises, and at once I have a contrary reaction. My fear dissolves when she bullies me. I could almost laugh at her words. Fool that she is! Wicked old cruel fool that she is! Has she forgotten who I am, when she threatens me like this? Before God, I am a Plantagenet. I am a daughter of the House of York. My own father broke sanctuary, murdered a king, and was killed by his own brother. My mother followed her father into rebellion and then changed sides and waged war with her husband against him. We are a house of men and women who always follow our own wills; we cannot be made to fear consequences. If you show us danger we will always, always go towards it. They call us the demon’s brood for our devilish willfulness.

“I cannot lie,” I say to her quietly. “I don’t know if the prince was able with his wife or not. I never saw any signs. She told me, and I believed her, that they were not lovers. I believe her to be a virgin as she was when she came to this country. I believe that she can marry any suitable prince that her father approves. Myself, I think she would make a very good wife to Prince Harry, and a very good Queen of England.”

Her face grows dark and I can see a vein pulse at her temple, but she says nothing. With a quick, angry gesture she beckons her ladies to line up behind her. She is going to lead them into dinner, and I will not be eating at the high table ever again.

“As you wish.” She spits out the words as if they were venom. “I do hope that you can manage on your widow’s jointure, Lady Margaret Pole.”

I drop into a deep curtsey. “I understand,” I say humbly. “But my son? He is a royal ward, he is the son of your half cousin, he is a fine boy, Your Grace . . .”

She sweeps past me without a word, and all her ladies follow. I stand up to watch them go. I have had my moment of pride, I have charged down my own Ambion Hill to Bosworth Field and found nothing but defeat. And now I don’t know what I am going to do.

STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1506

For another year I do everything I can to wring more money out of my lands. When the gleaners go into the field, I confiscate a cup of grain from every basket, breaking the usual rules and upsetting all the older people in the village. I pursue poachers of game into the manor courts, and shock them by demanding cash fines for the minor thieving that they had done since childhood. I forbid the tenants from taking any living thing from the land—even rabbits, even old eggs that the hens have laid away—and I hire a gamekeeper to prevent them taking trout from my rivers. If I catch a child taking eggs from the nests of wild ducks, I fine his parents. If I find a man in the woods with a faggot of kindling and a single twig that is too thick, I take the whole load off him and fine him too. I would fine the birds for flying in the air over my fields or the cocks for crowing if they could pay.

The people are so poor it goes against the grain to take from them. I find I am starting to count the eggs that I can expect from a woman who has only six hens. I demand our share of honey from a man who has only one hive and has been storing the honeycombs since summer. When Farmer Stride butchers a cow that has fallen in a ditch and broken her neck, I demand every ounce of my share of the meat; I demand tallow from her fat and some of her hide for shoe leather. I am no good lord to him, I am grasping during his disaster, making a bad time worse for him, as the royal treasury is grasping in mine.

I send the men of my household out after deer, after pheasant, after heron, moorhen, anything that we might eat. The rabbit catcher has to bring in more coneys from the warren, the boy who empties the dove nests learns to expect me at the foot of his ladder. I become terrified that people are stealing from me, and I start to steal from them as I insist on my dues and more.

I am becoming the sort of landlord I despise; we are becoming a family whose tenants hate them. My mother was the richest heiress in England; my father was brother to the king. They kept followers, retainers, and adherents by constant open-handed generosity. My grandfather fed everyone in London who chose to come to his door. Any man could come at dinnertime and go away with as much meat as he could spear on the blade of his dagger. I am their heir, but I betray their traditions. I think I have become half mad with worry about money, the ache of fear in my belly is sometimes anxiety and sometimes hunger, and I have become so tormented that I can no longer tell which is which.

I am leaving church one day when I hear one of the village elders complaining to the priest and begging him to intervene. “Father, you must speak to her. We can’t pay our dues. We don’t even know what’s owed. She’s looked at every tenancy going back years and found new fines. She’s worse than a Tudor, she’s worse than the king for looking through the laws and turning them to her advantage. She’s starving us.”

In any case, it is not enough. I cannot buy my boys new riding boots, I cannot feed their horses. I struggle on for a year trying to deny that I am borrowing from myself, robbing my own tenants, stealing from the poor, but then I realize that all of my shabby attempts have failed.

We are ruined.

Nobody will help me. My widowhood is against me, my poverty is against me, and my name is against me. Worst of all, the king’s mother is against me and no one will dare to help me. Two of my cousins are still imprisoned in the Tower; they cannot help me. Only my kinsman George Neville replies to the dozens of letters that I send out. He offers to raise my oldest boys at his home, and I will have to send Henry and Arthur away with the promise that I will fetch them as soon as I can, that they will not be in exile forever, that something will happen to bring us back together again, to restore us to our home.

Like a losing gambler I tell them that good times will come soon, but I doubt either of them believes me. My steward, John Little, takes them to Cousin Neville’s house, Birling Manor in Kent, on the last of the horses, John mounted on the big plow horse, Henry on his hunter, and Arthur on his outgrown pony. I try to smile and wave to them, but the tears are blinding me and I can hardly see them—just their white faces and their big frightened eyes, two boys in shabby clothes, riding away from their home, with no idea of their destination. I don’t know when I will see them again, I will not watch and guard their childhood as I hoped to do. I will not raise them as Plantagenets. I have failed them as their mother and they will have to grow up without me.

Ursula, at eight too little to be sent away to a great household, has to stay with me, and Geoffrey at nearly two is my baby. He has only just learned to walk, does not yet speak, and is clingy and anxious, quick to tears and fearful. I cannot let Geoffrey go. He has suffered already, born into a house of mourning, fatherless from the day of his birth. Geoffrey will stay with me, whatever it costs me; I cannot be parted from him, his only word is Mama.

But my boy Reginald, the bright, happy, cheeky boy, has to be found a place. He is too young to go as a squire into a household, and I have no kinsmen with children who will take him into their nursery. The friends I used to know in the Marches or Wales are well aware that I am not invited to court nor paid a pension. They rightly take this to mean that the Tudors do not look kindly on me. I can think of only one man, too unworldly to calculate the danger of helping me, too kind to refuse. I write to My Lady’s confessor, Bishop Fisher:

Dear Father,

I hope you can help me, for I have nowhere else to turn. I cannot pay my bills, nor keep my children at home.

I have been forced to send my two oldest boys to my cousin Neville; but I would like to find a place in a good religious house for my little son Reginald. If the Church insists, I will give him to God. He is a clever boy, quick-witted and lively, perhaps even a spiritual boy. I think he will serve God well. And anyway, I cannot keep him.

For myself and my two younger children I hope to find refuge in a nunnery where we can live on the small income that I have.

Your daughter in Christ,

Margaret Pole

He writes back at once. He has done more than I had asked of him—he has found a place for Reginald and a refuge for me. He says I may stay at Syon Abbey, one of my family’s favorite religious houses opposite the old Sheen Palace. The abbey is commanded by a Mother Abbess and attended by about fifty nuns, but they often take noble visitors and I can live there with my daughter and Baby Geoffrey. When Ursula is of age, she can become a novice and then a nun in the order and her future will be secure. At the very least there will be food on the table and a roof over our heads for the next few years.

Bishop Fisher has found Reginald a place in the brother house to the abbey—Sheen Priory, a monastery of the Carthusian Order. He will be only a few miles from us, across the river. If I were to be allowed a candle to set in my window, he would see the glow of the light and know I was thinking of him. We may be allowed to hire a boatman to row across the river to see him on feast days. We will be separated by the discipline of the religious houses, and by the wide, wide river, but I will be able to see the chimneys of the priory that houses my son. There is every reason for me to be delighted with such a generous solution to my difficulties. My son will be provided for in one house, and the other children and I will have a roof over our heads almost within sight of him. I should be joyous with relief.

Except, except, except . . . I slide to my knees on the floor and I pray to Our Lady to save us from this refuge. I know with complete conviction this is not the right place for Reginald, my clever, bright, chattering boy. The Carthusians are an order of silent hermits. Sheen Priory is a place of unbroken silence of the strictest of religious discipline. Reginald, my merry little boy who is so proud of learning to sing in a round, who loves to read aloud, who has learned some riddles and jokes and loves to tell them slowly, with intense concentration, to his brothers: this bright, talkative child will have to serve the monks who live like hermits in individual cells, each one praying and working alone. There is not one word spoken in the priory, except for Sundays and feast days. Once a week, the monks take a walk together and then they may talk in quiet tones, among themselves. The rest of the time they are in prayerful silence, each one alone with his thoughts with his own struggle with God, alone in his cell, enclosed by high walls, listening only to the sound of the wind.

I cannot bear to think of my chattering, high-spirited son silenced in a place of such holy discipline. I try to reassure myself that God will speak to Reginald in the cold quietness, and call him to a vocation. Reginald will learn to be silent, just as he learned to talk. He will learn to value his own thoughts and not laugh or dance or sing or caper and play the fool for his big brothers. Again and again I assure myself that this is a great opportunity for my bright boy. But I know in my heart that if God fails to call this little boy to a lifetime of holy service, then I will have put my bright, loving boy in a wordless prison for life.

I dream of him locked in a tiny cell, and I wake with a start and cry out his name. I rack my brains to think of something else that I can do with him. But I do not know anyone who would take him as a squire, and I have no money to swear him as an apprentice, and besides—what could he do? He is a Plantagenet—I cannot have him trained up to be a cobbler. Shall an heir to the House of York stir the mash for a brewer? Would I be a better mother if I sent him to learn oaths and blasphemy running errands in an inn, than prayer and silence with a devout order?

Bishop Fisher has found him a place, a safe place and one where they will feed and educate him. I have to accept it. I can do nothing more for him. But when I think of my lighthearted son in a place where the only sound is the ticking of the clock, telling the hours to the next service of liturgy, I cannot stop my eyes blurring with tears.

It is my duty to destroy my home and my family, which I created so proudly as the new Lady Pole. I order all the household servants and the grooms into the great hall and I tell them that we have fallen on hard times and that I release them from service. I pay them their wages up to that day; I can offer no more though I know that I am flinging them into poverty. I tell the children that we have to leave our home, and I try to smile and suggest that it is an adventure. I say it will be exciting to live elsewhere. I close down the castle at Stourton, where my husband brought me as a bride, and where my children were born, leaving only John Little to serve as a bailiff and collect the rents and fees. Two thirds he has to send to the king, one third he will send to me.

We ride away from our home, Geoffrey in my arms as I ride pillion behind John Little, Ursula on the little pony, and Reginald tiny on his brother’s old hunter. He rides well; he has his father’s way with horses and people. He will miss the stables and the dogs and the cheerful noise of the farmyard. I cannot bring myself to tell him his destination. I keep thinking that when we are on the road, he will ask me where we are going and I will find the courage to tell him that we have to part: Ursula and Geoffrey and I to one religious house and he to another. I try to fool myself that he will understand that this is his destiny—not what we might have chosen, yet now inevitable. But trustingly, he does not ask me. He assumes we will stay together; it does not occur to him that he might be sent away.

He is subdued at leaving his home, while little Geoffrey is excited by the journey and Ursula starts brightly and then starts to whimper. Reginald never asks me where we are going, and then I start to imagine that somehow he already knows, and that he wants to avoid the conversation as I do.

Only on the very last morning, as we are riding on the towpath beside the river towards Sheen, do I say: “We’ll soon be there. This will be your new home.”

He looks up at me from his little pony. “Our new home?”

“No,” I say shortly. “I am going to stay nearby, just a little way across the river.”

He says nothing, and I think perhaps he has not understood.

“I have often lived apart from you,” I remind him. “When I had to go to Ludlow, and I left you at Stourton.”

He turns his wide-eyed face towards me. He does not say, “But then I was with my brothers and sister and with all the people I had known all my life, my nurse in the nursery, my tutor who taught my brothers and me.” He just looks at me, uncomprehending. “You will not leave me alone?” he finally asks. “In a strange place? Mother? You will not just leave me?”

I shake my head. I can hardly trust myself to speak. “I will visit you,” I whisper. “I promise.”

The high towers of the priory come into sight, the gate opens, and the prior himself comes out to greet me, takes Reginald by the hand, and helps him down from the saddle.

“I will come and see you,” I promise from high on my horse, looking down at the golden crown of his bowed head. “And you will be allowed to visit me.”

He looks very small as he stands beside the prior. He does not pull away or show any defiance, but he turns up his pale face and he looks at me with his dark eyes and he says clearly: “Lady Mother, let me come with you and my brother and sister. Don’t leave me here.”

“Now, now,” says the prior firmly. “Let’s have no words from children who should always be silent before their elders and betters. And in this house, you will only speak when you are ordered to do so. Silence, holy silence. You will learn to love it.”

Obediently, Reginald folds his lower lip under his teeth, and says not another word; but still he looks at me.

“I shall visit you,” I say helplessly. “You will be happy here. It is a good place. You will serve God and the Church. You will be happy here, I am sure.”

“Give you good day.” The prior hints me away. “Better done quickly, since it has to be done.”

I turn my horse’s head and I look back at my son. Reginald is only six; he looks very small beside the prior. He is pale with fear. Obediently, he says nothing, but his little mouth forms the silent word: Mother!

There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can say. I turn my horse’s head, and I ride away.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1506

My boy Reginald has to learn to live among shadows and silence and so do I. Syon Abbey, run by the Bridgettine Order, is not a silent one; the sisters even go into London to teach and to pray, but I live among them as if I were sworn dumb, like my little boy. I cannot speak of my resentment and my bitterness, and I have nothing to say which is not resentful and bitter.

I will never forgive the Tudors for this heartbreak. They have waded to the throne through the blood of my kinsmen. They pulled my uncle Richard from the mud of Bosworth Field, stripped him naked, slung him over his own saddle, and then threw him into an unmarked grave. My own brother was beheaded to reassure King Henry; my cousin Elizabeth died trying to give him another son. They married me to a poor knight to bring me low, and now he is dead and I am lower than I imagined a Plantagenet could sink. All this—all this!—to legitimize their claim to a throne which in any case they took by conquest.

And clearly, the Tudors take little joy in their triumph and our subjection. Since the death of his wife, our princess, the king is uncertain of his court, anxious about his subjects, and terrified by us Plantagenets of the House of York. For years he has poured money into the pockets of the Emperor Maximilian, paying him to betray my cousin, Edmund de la Pole, the York claimant to the throne of England, and send him home to his death. Now I learn that the deal has been done. The emperor takes the money and promises Edmund that he will be safe, showing him the letter of safe conduct from the king, signed in his own hand. It is a guarantee that Edmund can come home. Edmund believes the assurances of Henry Tudor, he trusts the word of an ordained king. He sees the signature, he checks the seal. Henry Tudor swears he will have safe passage and an honest welcome. Edmund is a Plantagenet; he loves his country, he wants to come home. But the moment he walks under the portcullis of Calais Castle he is arrested.

This starts a chain of accusations that tears through my kinsmen like scissors through silk, and now I am on my knees praying for their lives. My cousin William Courtenay, already under arrest, is now charged with treasonous plotting. My kinsman William de la Pole in the Tower is questioned harshly in his cell. My cousin Thomas Grey falls under suspicion, for nothing more than dining with Cousin Edmund, years ago, before he fled from the country. One after another the men of my family disappear into the Tower of London, forced to endure solitude and fear, persuaded to name other dinner guests, and held in that dark keep, or secretly sent overseas to Calais Castle.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1507

I write to my sons Henry and Arthur to ask them how they are, and if they are studying and learning. I dare not trespass on the generosity of the abbey by inviting them here; the sisters cannot welcome two energetic young men into their quiet cloisters, and anyway I cannot pay for their journey.

I see my little boy Reginald only once every three months, when they send him across the river to me by a hired rowing boat. He comes as he is commanded, cold and huddled in the prow of the little wherry. He can stay for only one night and then he has to go again. They have taught him to be silent, they have taught him very well; he keeps his eyes down and his hands at his side. When I run to greet him and hug him closely, he is stiff and unwilling, as if my lively, talkative son is dead and buried and all I have left to hold is this cold little headstone.

Ursula, nearly nine years old, seems to grow every day, and I let down the hems of her secondhand gowns again and again. Two-year-old Geoffrey’s toes are pressed up against the front of his little boots. When I put him to bed at night, I stroke his feet and pull his toes as if I can stop them growing twisted and cramped. The rents from Stourton are collected and faithfully sent to me, but I have to hand them to the abbey for our keep. I don’t know where Geoffrey will go when he is too old to stay here. Perhaps both he and Ursula will have to be sworn to the Church like their brother Reginald, and disappear into silence. I spend hours on my knees praying to God to send me a sign, or send me some hope, or simply send me some money; sometimes I think that when my last two children are safely locked up inside the Church, I will tie a great sack of stones to my belt and walk into the cold deeps of the River Thames.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1508

I kneel at the chancel steps and look up at the statue of the crucified Christ. I feel as if I have been walking the road of sorrows of the Plantagenets, a Via Dolorosa, just like He did, for two long years.

Then the danger comes a step closer to me: the king arrests my cousin Thomas Grey, and my cousin George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, who is keeping my two boys, Henry and Arthur. George leaves my boys at his home in Kent and enters the Tower, where people have started to whisper that the king himself visits nightly to oversee the torture of the men he suspects. The pedlar who comes to the door of the abbey with chapbooks and rosaries for sale tells Porteress Joan that in the City they are saying that the king has become a monster who likes to hear the cries of pain: “a Moldwarp.” He whispers the old word for a cursed mole who works in darkness among dead and buried things, who undermines his own pastures.

I am desperate to send for my boys, to take them away from the household of a man who has been arrested as a traitor. But I do not dare. I am afraid to draw attention to myself, almost in seclusion, almost in hiding, almost in sanctuary. I must not alert the Tudor spy system to Reginald, kept in silence at the Charterhouse at Sheen, Ursula and I hidden by our devotions at Syon, or Geoffrey, the most precious of them all, clinging to my side as the nuns know that there is nowhere that he can go, that even a child of three years cannot be allowed out into the world, since there is no doubt that Henry Tudor, scenting Plantagenet blood, will sniff him out.

This is a king who has become a dark mystery to his people. He’s not like the kings of my house—open, joyful sensualists who ruled by agreement and made their way by charm. This king spies on his people, imprisons them on a word, tortures them so they accuse and counteraccuse each other and, when he has evidence of treason, amazingly he forgives them, releasing them with a pardon, but burdened by fines so terrible that they will never be free of service to him, not through half a dozen generations. This is a king driven by fear and ruled by greed.

My second cousin George Neville, my boys’ guardian, comes out of the Tower tight-lipped about a limp which looks as if his leg has been broken and left to set crooked, poorer by a fortune, but free. My other cousins are still imprisoned. George Neville tells no one what agreement he made inside those damp walls; silently he pays the king half of his income every quarter and never complains. He has fines so heavy that twenty-six of his friends have to serve as guarantors, and he is forbidden ever to go home to his beloved house in Kent, or to Surrey, Sussex, or Hampshire. He is an exile in his own country though he has been charged with nothing, and nothing has been proved against him.

None of the men who were arrested with him ever speaks of the contracts that each of them signed with the king in the darkened rooms underneath the Tower where the walls are thick and the doors are bolted and only the king stands in the corner of the chamber as his headsman turns a lever on the rack and the ropes bite tight. But people say that their agreements for huge debts are signed in their own blood.

My cousin George writes to me briefly.

You can safely leave your boys with me; they did not fall under any suspicion. I am a poorer man than I was, and banned from my home; but I can still house them. Better leave them with me until the fuss dies down. No point in having them lead people to you. You had better stay quietly there. Speak to no one and trust no one. These are hard times for the white rose.

I burn the letter and I do not reply.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1509

The king grows more mistrustful every year, retreating into the inner rooms of his palaces to sit with his mother, refusing to allow any strangers over the threshold, doubling the numbers of the yeomen of the guard who stand at his door, going endlessly, endlessly, through his book of accounts, binding men who were already loyalists to keep the peace with massive fines, taking their lands as sureties for good behavior, asking them for goodwill gifts, interfering with court cases and taking the fees. Justice itself can now be bought with a payment to the king. Safety can be bought with a fee to his treasury. Words can be written in the accounts for the price of a gift to the right servant, or erased for a bribe. Nothing is certain but that money offered to the royal treasury can buy anything. I believe that my cousin George Neville is all but ruined, paying for his freedom every quarter; but nobody dares to write and tell me so. I receive occasional letters from Arthur and Henry and they do not mention the arrest of their host and his return, a broken man, barred from the home that was his pride. They are only sixteen and fourteen years old but already they know that the men of our house should stay silent. They were born into the most talented, intellectual, questioning family in England, and they have been taught to hold their tongues for fear that they be cut out. They know that if you are of Plantagenet blood, you should have been born dumb and deaf too. I read their innocent letters and I burn them on reading. I do not dare to keep even these, my boys’ good wishes. None of us dares to own anything.

A widow for four years, with no prospect of help, barely enough money to eat, no roof to put over my children’s heads, no dowry for my daughter, no brides for my sons, no lover, no friends, no chance of remarriage since I never even see a man who is not a priest, I go on my knees eight hours a day every day alongside the nuns to observe the liturgy of the hours, and I watch my prayers change.

In the first year I prayed for help, in the second year for release. By the end of the third year I am praying for the death of King Henry and the damnation of his mother and the return of my House of York. In the silence I have grown into a bitter rebel. I damn the Tudors to hell and I come to hope that the curse that my cousin Elizabeth and her mother laid on them rings true, down through the long years to the end of the Tudors and the destruction of their line.

SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, APRIL 1509

I have the news first from the old porteress at the abbey who comes to the door of my cell and throws it open without knocking. Ursula is in her truckle bed and does not stir but Geoffrey sleeps in my narrow bed, held in my arms, and he pops up his little head as Joan bangs into the room and says: “The king is dead. Wake up, my lady. We are free. God is merciful. He has blessed us. God has saved us. The curse of the Red Dragon has passed over us. The king is dead.”

I was dreaming that I was in the court of my uncle Richard at Sheriff Hutton and my cousin Elizabeth was dancing with him in a swirl of gold and silver brocade. I sit up at once and say to her: “Hush. I won’t hear it.”