The King's Curse

Her old wizened face is cracked open with a smile. I have never seen her beam before. “You’ll hear this!” she says. “And anyone can say it, and anyone can hear it. For the spymaster is dead and the spies are thrown out of employment. The king is dead and the bonny, bonny prince has come to his throne just in time to save us all.”

Just then the bell of the abbey starts to toll, a steady, deep, sonorous note, and Geoffrey scrambles to his knees and says: “Hurrah! Hurrah! Is Henry to be king?”

“Of course,” the old woman says, catching at his little hands and dancing him on the bed. “God bless him and the day he comes to the throne.”

“My brother Henry!” Geoffrey squeaks. “King of England!”

I am so horrified by this innocent speaking of treason that I snatch him to me, put my hand over his mouth, and turn to her in an agonized appeal for her silence. But she just shakes her head at him and laughs at his pride. “By rights—yes,” she says boldly. “It should be your brother Henry. But we have a bonny Tudor boy to come after the old sweat master, and Prince Harry Tudor will take the throne and the spies and the taxmen will be gone.”

I jump out of bed and start to pull on my clothes.

“Will she send for you?” Joan the porteress asks me, swinging Geoffrey from the bed and letting him dance around her. Ursula rises up and rubs her eyes and says: “What’s happening?”

“Who?” I am thinking of My Lady the King’s Mother, who has buried her grandson and will now bury her son, just as Elizabeth’s curse foretold. She will be a broken woman. She will believe, as I do, that the Tudors signed their own death warrant when they killed our princes in the Tower. She will think, as I do, that they are accursed murderers.

“Katherine, Dowager Princess of Wales,” Joan says simply. “Won’t he marry her and make her Queen of England as he promised to do? Won’t she send for you, her dearest friend? Won’t you be able to have your children with you at court and live as you were born to? Won’t it be like a miracle for you, like the stone rolling from the tomb and letting you all out?”

I stop short. I am so unaccustomed to hope that I hardly know what to say. I had not even thought of this.

“He might,” I say wonderingly. “He might marry her. And she might send for me. You know, if he does—she will.”

It is like a miracle, a release as powerful as spring after a cold, gray winter. It comes in springtime and ever after when I see the hawthorn blossom making the hedges as white as snow, or the daffodils leaning over in the wind, I think of that spring when the old Tudor king was dead and the Tudor boy took the throne and made everything right.

He had told me in his nursery that to be a king was a holy duty. I thought of him then as a lovable little braggart: a boy spoiled by doting women, a loving boy of good intentions. Yet who would have thought that he would have leaped up to defy the mean old man, to take Katherine as his betrothed wife, to declare himself king and ready to marry her in one breath? It was the first thing he did, this boy of seventeen, the very first thing that he did. Just like my uncle King Edward, he took the throne and he took the woman he loved. Who would have thought that Harry Tudor had the courage of a Plantagenet? Who would have thought he had the imagination? Who would have thought he had the passion?

He is his mother’s son; that can be the only explanation. He has her love and her courage and her bright optimism, which is the nature of our family. He is a Tudor king but he is a boy of the House of York. In his joy and his optimism, he is one of ours. In his willing grasping of power, in his quick execution: he is one of ours.

Katherine the princess sends for me with a short note that bids me come to the house of Lady Williams, where I will find rooms waiting for me suitable for a noblewoman of my station. Then I am to come at once to the Palace of Westminster, go straight to the wardrobe rooms, pick out half a dozen gowns, and attend her, richly dressed, as her first lady-in-waiting. It is my release. I am free. It is my restoration.

I leave the children at Syon while I go downriver to London. I dare not take them with me yet; I feel as if I have to make sure that we are safe, to see that we are truly free before I dare summon them to be with me.

London does not look like a city which has lost a king. It is not a capital in mourning; it is a city mad with joy. They are roasting meat at the street corners; they are sharing ale out of the windows of the brewhouses. The king has not been buried long, the prince is not yet crowned, but the place is elated. They are opening the debtors’ prisons and men are coming out who had thought they would never see daylight again. It is as if a monster has died and we are freed from the grip of a bad spell. It is like waking from a nightmare. It is like spring after a long, long winter.

Dressed in my new gown of pale Tudor green, wearing a gable hood as heavy as that of the princess, I walk into the presence chamber of the King of England and see the prince, not on his throne, not standing in a stiff pose under the cloth of estate as if he were the portrait of majesty, but laughing with his friends strolling around the room, with Katherine at his side, as if they were a pair of lovers, enchanted with each other. And at the end of the room, seated on her chair with a circle of silent ladies all around her, a priest on either side for support, is My Lady, wearing deepest black, torn between grief and fury. She is no longer My Lady the King’s Mother—the title that gave her so much pride is buried with her son. Now, if she chooses it, she can be called My Lady the King’s Grandmother, and by the thunderous look on her face she does not choose it.

ENGLAND, 1509

For the commons of England it is a merciful release from hardship. For the lords it is an escape from tyranny. For the people of my family and my house it is the miraculous lifting of a death sentence. Anyone with Plantagenet blood or affinity to York has been living on license, achingly aware that at any moment the king might revoke permission and there would be a knock on the door from the green-and-white-liveried yeomen of the guard and a swift trip in their unmarked barge to the water gate of the Tower. The great portcullis would slide up, the barge would enter—and the prisoner would never come out again.

But now we do come out. William Courtenay emerges from the Tower with a royal pardon, and we pray that William de la Pole will be out soon. My cousin Thomas Gray is released from Calais castle and comes home. Disbelievingly, like householders slowly opening their painted doors after plague has passed through a village, we all start to emerge. Cousins come to London from their distant castles hoping it is safe to be seen at court again. Kinsfolk whom have not written for years now dare to send a message, sharing family news, telling of the birth of babies and the death of members of the family, asking, fearfully, how is everyone else? Has anyone seen such a man? Does anyone know if a distant cousin is safe abroad? The deathlike grip of the old king on every one of us is suddenly released. Harry the prince has not inherited his father’s fearful suspicions; he dismisses the spies, he cancels the debts, he pardons the prisoners. It feels as if we can all come out, blinking into the light.

Servants and tradesmen who have avoided me since the death of my husband and my fall from favor come to me in their dozens to offer their services now that my name is no longer written somewhere, on some list, with a question mark beside it.

Slowly, hardly able to believe my luck, like the rest of the country I find I am safe. I seem to have survived the dangerous twenty-four years of the first Tudor reign. My brother died on King Henry’s scaffold, my husband in his service, my cousin in childbed trying to give him another heir; but I have survived. I have been ruined, I have been heartbroken, I have been estranged from all but two of my children and lived in hiding with them, but now I can emerge, half blinded, into the sunlight of the young prince’s summer.

Katherine, once a widow as poor as me, soars upward into the sunshine of the Tudor favor like a kestrel spreading her russet wings in the morning light, her debts excused, her dowry forgotten. The prince marries her, in haste, in private, in the delight of passion finally expressed. Now he says he has loved her in silence and at a distance for all this time. He has been watching her, he has been desiring her. Only his father, only his grandmother, My Lady, enforced his silence. The ambiguous papal dispensation for this marriage that Katherine’s mother cunningly provided so long ago makes the marriage legal beyond question; nobody asks about her first husband, nobody cares, and they are wedded and bedded in days.

And I take my place at her side. Once again I have the right to draw the finest velvets from the royal wardrobe, I help myself to ropes of pearls and gold and jewels from the royal treasury. Once again, I am the senior lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England and I follow nobody but a Tudor into dinner. Katherine’s new husband, King Henry—Henry VIII as we all delightedly remind ourselves—pays me a grant of a hundred pounds a year the moment that I arrive at court, and I settle my debts: to my faithful steward John Little at Stourton, to my cousins, to the nuns at Syon, to Reginald’s priory. I send for Henry and Arthur, and the king offers them a place in his household. The king speaks highly of an education in the new learning, and orders that Reginald shall be well taught in his monastery; he will come to court as a philosopher and a scholar. I keep my boy Geoffrey and Ursula in the queen’s rooms for now, but soon I will send them home, and they can live again in the country and be raised as Plantagenet heirs should be.

I even receive a proposal of marriage. Sir William Compton, the young king’s dearest friend and companion in his revels and jousting, asks me, humbly on his knees, with his smiling eyes looking boldly up at me, if I would consider him as a husband. His bowed knee indicates that I could have the ruling of him, his warm hand holding mine suggests that this might be pleasurable. I have lived as a nun for nearly five years; the thought of a handsome man between good linen sheets cannot help but make me pause for a moment and look into William’s brown smiling eyes.

It takes me only one minute to decide, but to serve his urgent sense of his own dignity as a man come from next to nowhere, I spin it out for a couple of days. Thank God that I do not need his newly minted name, I don’t have to hide my name now. I don’t need the royal favor that he carries. My own popularity at court is high, and only grows as the young king turns to me for advice, for stories of the old days, for my memories of his mother. I tell him of the fairy-tale Plantagenet court and I see that he longs to re-create our reign. So I do not need Compton’s newly built house; I am so restored, I have such great prospects, that the king’s favorite thinks me an advantageous match. Gently, I tell him no. Graciously, courteously, he expresses his disappointment. We conclude the passage like two skilled performers performing the steps of an elegant dance. He knows that I am at the height of my triumph, I am his equal, I don’t need him.

A tide of wealth and prosperity flows out of the open doors of the treasury. Incredulously, they throw open cupboards, boxes, and chests in every royal house, and everywhere they find plate and gold, jewels and fabrics, carpets and spices. The old king took his taxes and fines in money and goods, indiscriminately sucking in household furnishings, tradesmen’s stores, even the tools of apprentices, impoverishing the poor. The new king, the young Henry, gives back to innocent people what his father stole from them, in a festival of redress. Unjust fines are repaid from the exchequer, noblemen are restored to their lands, my kinsman George Neville who guarded my sons is released from his crippling debts and given the post of Chief Larderer, a patron to thousands, the master of hundreds, a royal fortune at his disposal just waiting to be spent on good things. He is high in the king’s favor, Henry admires him, calls him a kinsman, and trusts him. Nobody mentions his ill-set leg; he is allowed to go to any, to all of his beautiful homes.

His brother, Edward Neville, is a favorite and serves in the king’s bedchamber. The king swears that Edward is the very match of him, calls him to stand beside him, to compare heights and the color of their hair, assures my cousin that they could be mistaken for brothers, that he loves us all as his brothers and sisters. He is warm to all my family—Henry Courtenay of Devon, my cousin Arthur Plantagenet, the de la Poles, the Staffords, the Nevilles, all of us—as if he were seeking his mother in our smiling, familiar faces. Slowly, we return to where we were all born to be, at the center of power and wealth. We are the king’s cousins, there is no one closer to him.

Even My Lady the old King’s Mother is rewarded with the return of her palace of Woking, though she does not live to enjoy it for long. She sees her grandson crowned and then she takes to her bed and dies. Her confessor, dear John Fisher, preaches the eulogy at her funeral and describes a saint who spent her life in the service of her country and her son, who laid down her work only when it was done. We listen in polite silence but, truth be told, she is little mourned; most of us experienced her family pride more than her cousinly love. And I am not the only one who secretly thinks that she died of fatal pique, in fear that her influence had run out, and so that she would not have to see our Queen Katherine looking beautiful and making merry in the rooms where the old woman had ruled so meanly for so long.

God is blessing the new generation, and we care nothing for those who have gone. Queen Katherine conceives a child almost at once, during the carefree days of the summer progress, and announces her happy state before Christmas, at Richmond Palace. For a moment, in that season of celebration, in a constant rush of entertainments, I start to think that my cousin’s curse is forgotten and that the Tudor line will inherit my family’s luck and be as sturdy and prolific as we have always been.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1510

It is a bad night for her when she loses the baby, and then worse days follow. The fool of a physician tells her and, even worse, assures the king that she was carrying twins, and there is another healthy baby in her belly. She may have had an agonizing miscarriage, but there is no cause for dismay: she is still carrying an heir, there is a Tudor boy, waiting to be born.

This is how we learn that the young king likes to hear good news, indeed he insists on hearing good news, and in the future it may take some courage to force the truth on him. An older man, a more thoughtful man, would have questioned such an optimistic doctor; but Henry is eager to believe that he is blessed, and joyfully continues to celebrate his wife’s pregnancy. At the Shrove Tuesday feast he walks all around the diners proposing toasts to the queen and the baby that he thinks she is carrying in her swollen womb. I watch him, incredulously. This is the first time that I see that his sickly father and his fearful grandmother have instilled in him an absurd devotion to physicians. He listens to anything they say. He has a deep, superstitious terror of illness, and he longs for cures.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1510

Obediently, Katherine goes into confinement at Greenwich Palace, and as her swollen belly slims down to nothing, she waits with grim determination, knowing that there is going to be no birth. When her time is over and she has nothing to show for it, she bathes like a Spanish princess, in jug after jug of boiling-hot water with rose oil and the finest of soap, dresses in her best gown, and summons her courage to come out and face the court, looking like a fool. I stand beside her like a fierce guardian, my eyes raking the room, daring anyone to comment on her long pointless absence and now her surprise reappearance.

Her bravery is poorly rewarded. She is greeted without sympathy, for nobody is much interested in the return to court of a childless bride. Something far more intriguing is going on; the court is agog with scandal.

It is William Compton, my former suitor, who seems to have comforted himself by flirting with my second cousin, Anne, one of the two beautiful sisters of the Duke of Buckingham, newly married to Sir George Hastings. I failed to see this foolish affair develop as I was absorbed in Katherine’s grief, and I am sorry to learn that matters have gone so far that my cousin Stafford has had high words with the king at the insult to his family, and taken her away from court.

This is madness from the duke, but typical of his prickly sense of pride. There is no doubt in my mind that his sister will have been guilty of almost any indiscretion; she is the daughter of Katherine Woodville, and like most Woodville girls she is outstandingly beautiful and willful. She is unhappy with her new husband, and he will apparently allow any misdemeanor. But then, as the court continues to whisper of nothing else, I begin to think that there must be more to this than a courtier’s escapade, an episode of courtly lovemaking, playacting desire which went beyond the rules. Henry, who is normally pompous about the rules of courtly love, seems to side with Compton, who declares himself insulted by the duke. The young king flies into a rage, orders Buckingham to stay away from court, and goes everywhere arm in arm with Compton who looks both sheepish and rakish all at once, like a young tup in a lush field full of ewes.

Whatever has been taking place here seems to be more troubling than William Compton playing fast and loose with the duke’s sister. There must be some reason that the king supports his friend and not the cuckolded husband; there must be some reason that the duke is disgraced but the seducer is in favor. Someone is lying, and someone is hiding something from the queen. The ladies of her household are no use, they are not going to tell tales. My cousin Elizabeth Stafford maintains an aristocratic discretion since it is her kinswoman who is the center of the scandal. Lady Maud Parr says she knows nothing more than common gossip.

Katherine sends for the books of the household and sees that while she was confined, waiting for a baby that she knew was long gone, the court was making merry and it was Anne Hastings who was Queen of the May.

“What is this?” she asks me, pointing at the payment for a choir to sing under Anne’s window on May Day morning. “What is this?”—the wardrobe accounts for Anne’s costume in a masque.

I say I don’t know; but I can read the accounts as well as she can. What I see, what I know she sees, what anyone would see, is a small fortune from the royal treasury being spent for the amusement of Anne Hastings.

“Why would the royal household pay for William Compton’s choir for Lady Anne?” she asks me. “Is this usual, in England?”

Katherine is the daughter of a king whose philandering was well known. She knows that a king can take lovers as he wishes, that there can be no complaint, least of all from his wife. Queen Isabella of Spain broke her heart over the love affairs of her husband, and she was as royal as he was, no mere wife crowned as a favor, but a monarch in her own right. Even so, he never mended his ways. Isabella suffered hell’s own torments of jealousy and her daughter Katherine saw it, and resolved that she would never feel such pain. She did not know that this young prince who told her that he loved her, that he had waited for her for years, would turn out like this. She did not imagine that while she was in the dark loneliness of confinement, knowing that she had lost her baby and that nobody would let her grieve, her young husband was starting a flirtation with her own lady-in-waiting, a young woman in her service, in her rooms, a kinswoman of mine, a friend.

“I’m afraid that it’s what you’re thinking,” I say bluntly to her, telling her the worst and getting it over with. “William Compton pretended to court Anne; everyone saw them together, everyone knew they were meeting. But he was a shield. All the time she was meeting with the king.”

It is a hard blow for her, but she takes it like a queen.

“And there’s worse than this,” I say. “I’m sorry to have to tell you of it.”

She takes a breath. “Tell me. Tell me, Margaret, what can be worse than this?”

“Anne Hastings told one of the other ladies-in-waiting that it was not a flirtation, not a May Day courting, over and forgotten in one day.” I look at her pale face, the folded resolute line of her mouth. “Anne Hastings said that the king had made promises.”

“What? What could he promise?”

I ignore protocol and sit beside her and put my arm around her shoulders as if she were still a homesick princess and we were back at Ludlow. “My dear . . .”

For a moment she lets her head droop and rests it on my shoulder and I tighten my grip. “You’d better tell me, Margaret. I had better know everything.”

“She says that he swore he was in love with her. She told him that her vows could be annulled and, more importantly, she said that his were invalid. They spoke of marriage.”

There is a long, long silence. I think, please God she does not become queenly and leap to her feet and rage at me for bringing her such bad news. But then I feel her soften, her whole body yields, and she turns her hot face with her cheeks wet with tears to my neck, and I hold her while she cries like a hurt girl.

We are silent for a long time, then she pulls back and rubs her eyes roughly with her hands. I give her a handkerchief and she wipes her face and blows her nose.

“I knew it,” she sighs as if she is weary to her very bones.

“You knew?”

“He told me some of this last night, and I guessed the rest. God forgive him: he told me he was confused. He told me that when he bedded her she cried out in pain and said that she could not bear it. He had to take her gently. She told him that a virgin bleeds when it is her first time.” She makes a little face of disgust, of derision. “Apparently, she bled. Copiously. She showed him all that, and convinced him that I was no virgin on our wedding night, that my marriage to Arthur had been consummated.”

She holds herself very still and then she gives a deep shudder. “She suggested to him that his marriage to me is invalid, because I was wedded and bedded by Arthur. That in the sight of God, I will always be Arthur’s wife, and not Henry’s. And God will never give us a child.”

I am aghast. I look at her blankly. I have no words to defend our secret, I can only marvel at this nonchalant unraveling of our old plot.

“She’s a married woman herself,” I say flatly. “She’s been married twice.”

Katherine finds a mournful smile at my incredulity.

“She’s put it into his head that our marriage is against the will of God and that is why we lost the baby. She told him that we will never have a child.”

I am so appalled that I can only reach for her again. She takes my hand, pats it, and puts it aside.

“Yes,” she says thoughtfully. “Cruel, isn’t she? Wicked, isn’t she?”

And when I don’t reply, she says: “This is serious. She told him that my belly was swollen but since there was no child, it was a message from God that there will never be one. Because the marriage is against the word of God. That a man should not marry his brother’s widow, and if he does, their marriage will be without issue. It’s written in the Bible.” She smiles without humor. “She quoted Leviticus to him. ‘And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness: they shall be childless.’ ”

I am quite stunned at Anne Hastings’s sudden interest in theology. Someone has prepared her to whisper this poison into Henry’s ear. “The Pope himself gave a dispensation,” I insist. “Your mother arranged it! Your mother made sure that the dispensation provided, whether you had been bedded by Arthur or not. She made sure of it.”

She nods. “She did. But Henry has been filled with fears by that old grandmother of his. She quoted Leviticus to him before we were married. His father lived in terror that his luck would not hold. And now this Stafford girl turns his head with lust, and tells him it is God’s will that I should lose a baby and that another should disappear from my womb. She says our marriage is cursed.”

“It doesn’t matter what she says.” I am furious with the wicked girl. “Her brother has taken her from court, you need never have her back in your service. For God’s sake—she has a husband of her own! She is married and cannot get free! She can’t marry the king! Why cause all this trouble? And Henry cannot really believe that she is a virgin! She’s been married twice! Are they mad to talk like this?”

She nods. She is thinking, not railing against her circumstances, and I suddenly realize this must be the woman that her mother was, a woman who in the middle of a disaster could assess her chances, look at the odds, and plan. A woman who, when her camp of tents burned down, built a besieging camp of stone.

“Yes, I think we can get rid of her,” she says thoughtfully. “And we’ll have to make peace with her brother the duke and get him back to court; he’s too powerful to be an enemy. The old Lady Mother is dead, she can’t frighten Henry anymore. And we have to silence this talk.”

“We can,” I say. “We will.”

“Will you write to the duke?” she asks. “He’s your cousin, isn’t he?”

“Edward is my second cousin,” I specify. “Our grandmothers were half sisters.”

She smiles. “Margaret, I swear you’re related to everyone.”

I nod. “I am. And he’ll come back. He’s loyal to the king and he’s fond of you.”

She nods. “He’s not my danger.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father was famous for his philandering; everyone knew, my mother knew. But everyone knew that the women were his pleasure; nobody ever spoke of love.” She makes a little face of disgust, as if love between a king and a woman is always disreputable. “My father would never have spoken of love to anyone but his wife. Nobody ever doubted his marriage, nobody ever challenged my mother, Queen Isabella. They were married in secret without a papal dispensation at all—their marriage was the most uncertain one in the world, but nobody ever thought that it would not last until death. My father bedded dozens of other women, probably hundreds. But he never said one word of love to any one of them. He never let anyone think for even a moment that there was any other possible wife for him, any other possible Queen of Spain but my mother.”

I wait.

“It is my husband who is my danger,” she says wearily, her face a hard mask of beauty. “A young fool, a spoiled fool. He should be old enough now to take a lover without falling in love. He should never allow anyone to question our marriage. He should never think for a moment that it might be set aside. To do that is to destroy his own authority as well as mine. I am Queen of England. There can be only one queen. There can be only one king. I am his wife. We were both crowned. That should never be questioned.”

“We can make sure that this never goes further,” I suggest.

She shakes her head. “The worst damage has already been done,” she says. “A king who speaks of love to anyone but his wife, a king who questions his marriage is a king who rocks the foundations of his own throne. We can stop this nonsense going further, but the damage was done when it entered his stupid head.”

We sit in silence for long moments, thinking about Henry’s handsome golden head. “He married me for love,” she observes wearily, as if it were a long time ago. “It was not an arranged marriage, it was one of love.”

“It’s a bad precedent,” I say, the daughter of an arranged marriage, the widow of an arranged marriage. “If a man marries for love, does he think he can get the marriage annulled when he loves no more?”

“Does he not love me anymore?”

I cannot answer her. It is such a painful question from a woman who was so deeply loved by her first, dead husband, who would never have bedded another woman and spoken of love to her.

I shake my head because I don’t know. I doubt that Henry himself knows. “He’s young,” I say. “And impulsive. And powerful. It’s a dangerous combination.”

Anne Hastings never comes back to court; her husband packs her off to a nunnery. My cousin Edward Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, her brother, recovers his good temper and rejoins us. Katherine wins Henry back to her side and they conceive another child, the boy that is to prove that God smiles on their marriage. The queen and I behave as if her realization that her husband is a fool had never happened. We don’t conspire in this. We don’t have to discuss it. We just do it.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, JANUARY 1511

We are blessed, we are redeemed, and Katherine in particular is saved. She gives the king a Tudor son and heir and overturns in one act the rumors that were growing about the curse that sits on the Tudor family, the questioning of the marriage.

I have the honor to go to the young king and tell him that he is father to a boy, and I find him exultant among the young men of his court who drink to his great triumph. Katherine, confined in her rooms, leaning on the pillows in the great bed of state, is exhausted and smiling when I return.

“I did it,” she says quietly to me as I lean to kiss her cheek.

“You did it,” I confirm.

The next day, Henry sends for me. I find his rooms still crowded with men shouting congratulations and drinking the health of his son. Above the noise and the cheering he asks me if I will be the prince’s Lady Governess, and set up his household and appoint his staff and raise him as heir to the throne.

I put my hand on my heart and I curtsey. When I come up, Henry the boy pitches into my arms and I hug him in our shared joy. “Thank you,” he says. “I know you will guard him and raise him and govern him as if you were my mother.”

“I will,” I say to him. “I know just how she would have wanted it done, and I will make everything right.”

The baby is christened at the chapel of the Observant Friars at Richmond; he is to be Henry, of course. He will be Henry IX one day, God willing, and he will rule over a country which will have forgotten that once the rose of England was pure white. His Lady Mistress is appointed and his wet nurse, he sleeps in a cradle of gold, he is swaddled in the finest of linen, he goes everywhere carried breast-high, with two yeomen of the guard preceding his nurse and two behind. Katherine has him brought to her rooms every day, and while she rests in bed she has him laid beside her, and when she sleeps she has his little cradle put at the head of her bed.

Henry goes on a pilgrimage to give thanks. Katherine is churched and rises up from her bed, takes one of her hot Spanish baths, and returns to her court, glowing with pride in her youth and fertility. Not a girl in her train, not a lady in her rooms hesitates for one moment before bowing low to this triumphant queen. I don’t believe there is a woman in the country who does not share her joy.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1511

The king, returned from pilgrimage to Walsingham where he gave thanks to Our Lady, or perhaps, in truth, told Her of his achievement, sends for me to come to the jousting arena. My son Arthur comes with a smile and says I am not to tell anyone that I am going to watch a practice for the joust to celebrate the birth of the prince, but to slip quietly away from the queen’s rooms.

Indulgently, I go to the arena and, to my surprise, I find that Henry is alone, riding a great gray war charger round and round in careful circles, first one way then the other. Henry waves me to sit in the royal box, and I take the seat that his mother would have taken, and know, for I know him so well, that he wants me there, watching over him, as she and I once watched him practice on his pony.

He brings the horse right up to the balcony and shows me that it can bow, one foreleg extended, one foreleg tucked back. “Hold up a glove or something,” he says.

I take a kerchief from my neck and hold it up. Henry goes to the other side of the arena and shouts: “Drop!” As it falls he spurs forward and catches it in his hand, riding around the arena holding it high above his head like a flag.

He pulls up before me, his bright blue eyes fixed on my face.

“Very good,” I say approvingly.

“And there’s this,” he says. “Don’t be frightened. I know what I’m doing.”

I nod. He turns the horse sideways to my view and makes it rear and then buck, forelegs up then back legs kicking, in a fantastic display. He changes his seat slightly and the horse leaps above the ground, as the Moorish horses do, all legs in the air at once as if it were flying, and then it trots on the spot, raising one leg proudly high and then another. He really is a remarkable rider; he sits completely and beautifully still, holding the reins tightly, his whole body molded to the horse, alert, relaxed, at one with the great muscled animal.

“Get ready,” he warns me, and then he swings the horse round and it rears up, terribly high, its head as high as me in the royal box built over the arena, and it crashes its front hooves onto the wall of the box, springs back again, and drops down.

I nearly scream with fright, and then I jump to my feet and applaud. Henry beams at me, loosens the reins, pats the horse’s neck. “Nobody else can do that,” he remarks breathlessly, bringing the horse closer, watching me for my reaction. “Nobody in England can do that but me.”

“I should think not.”

“You don’t think it’s too loud? Will she be frightened?”

Katherine once stood with her mother to face a charge of enemy Arab cavalry, the fiercest horsemen in the world. I smile. “No, she’ll be very impressed, she knows good horsemanship.”

“She’ll never have seen anything like this,” he claims.

“She will,” I contradict him. “The Moors in Andalusia have Arab horses, and they ride wonderfully.”

At once the smile is wiped from his face. He turns a furious look on me. “What?” he demands icily. “What do you say?”

“She will understand how great is your achievement,” I say, the words tumbling out in my haste to redress the offense. “For she knows good horsemanship from her home in Spain, but she will never have seen anything like this. And no man in England can do this. I have never seen a better horse and rider.”

He is uncertain, and pulls on the rein; the horse, sensing the change of his mood, flicks his ear, listening.

“You are like a knight of Camelot,” I say hastily. “Nobody will have seen anything like it since the golden age.”

He smiles at that, and it is almost as if the sun comes out and birds start to sing. “I am a new Arthur,” he agrees.

I ignore the pang I feel at the casual use of the name of the prince we loved, whose little brother is still striving to better him. “You are the new Arthur of the new Camelot,” I repeat. “But where is your other horse, Your Grace? Your lovely black mare?”

“She was disobedient,” he throws over his shoulder as he rides out of the ring. “She defied me. She would not learn from me.”

He turns and gives me his most charming smile, all sunshine once again. I think that he is the most adorable young man as he says lightly: “I sent her for baiting. The hounds killed her. I can’t bear disloyalty.”

It is the greatest joust that I have ever seen, that England has ever seen. The king is everywhere, no scene is complete without him in a new costume. He leads the procession of the Master of the Armory, the trumpeters, the courtiers, the heralds, the court assistants, the poets, the singers, and at last, the long line of jousters. Henry has announced a tournament in which he will take on all comers.

He rides his great gray warhorse and he wears cloth of gold, interleaved with the richest blue velvet, gleaming in the bright spring sunshine as if he were a king newly minted. All over his jacket, his hat, his riding breeches, his trappings are sewn little gold K ’s as if he wants to show the world that he is hers, that she has set her initial all over him. Above his head is the standard he has chosen for this day: Loyall. His tournament name is Coeur Loyall, Henry is Sir Loyal Heart and as Katherine glows with pride he rides his horse around the ring and shows the tricks that he practiced before me, a perfect prince.

We all share her joy, even the girls who would welcome the attentions of the perfect prince themselves. Katherine sits in a throne with the sunlight shining through the cloth of gold canopy making her skin rosy and golden, smiling on the young man whom she loves, knowing that their first child, their son, is safe in his golden cradle.

But only ten days later, they go to pick him up and he is cold, and his little face is blue, and he is dead.

It is as if the world has ended. Henry withdraws to his rooms; the queen’s rooms are stunned and silent. All of the words of comfort that can be given to a young woman who has lost her first child dissolve on the tongue in the face of Katherine’s bleak horror. For day after day no one says anything to her. There is nothing to say. Henry falls into silence, and won’t speak of his lost child; he does not attend the funeral or the Mass. They cannot comfort each other, they cannot bear to be together. This loss in their new marriage is so terrible that Henry cannot comprehend it, cannot try to comprehend it. A darkness spreads over the court.

But even in grief, Katherine and I know that we have to be watchful, all the time. We have to wait for the next girl whom Henry takes to his bed, who will wind her arms around his neck and whisper in his ear that look! see! God does not bless his marriage. It has been only twenty months and yet there have been three tragedies: one miscarriage, one child vanished clear away from the womb, one baby dead in its cradle. Is this not proof, building, growing proof, that the marriage is against the will of God, but she—a virgin of healthy English stock—might give him a son?

“And which of my ladies-in-waiting should I suspect?” Katherine asks me bitterly. “Who? Who should I watch? Lady Maud Parr? She’s a pretty woman. Mary Kingston? Lady Jane Guildford? Lady Elizabeth Boleyn? She’s married of course but why should that prevent her seducing the king? You?”

I am not even offended by her outburst. “The queen has to be served by the most beautiful and wealthiest ladies of the kingdom,” I say simply. “It’s how a court works. You have to be surrounded by beautiful girls, they are here to find a husband, they are determined to shine, they are bound to catch the eye of the courtiers and the king.”

“What can I do?” she asks me. “How can I make my marriage unassailable?”

I shake my head. We both know that the only way she can prove that God has blessed her marriage is to give birth to a live son. Without him, without that little savior, we are all waiting for the moment that the king starts to interrogate God.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1512

The king, as he emerges from his grief for his baby, is good to me, and I am advised that I should apply for the return of my brother’s fortune and lands. I should even ask for the return of my family title. Having spent my life pretending that my name was nothing and my fortune was lost, I am bidden to claim them both.

It is a heady experience, like coming out of the cold nunnery to the springtime court once again, like coming out of darkness, blinking into light. I list the great fortune that my brother lost when this king’s father tore him from the schoolroom and bundled him into the Tower. I name the titles that I commanded when I walked away from them down the aisle to marry a lowly Tudor knight. Tentatively, at first, as if I am taking a great risk, I state my great name, estimate my great fortune, and say that it was my own, all my own, that the Tudors wrongly took it from me, and that I want it back.

I think of my angry prayers in Syon Abbey, and I put my temper to one side and write a careful petition to the king, framing my request in such a way that it is no criticism of that grasping tyrant, his father, but a measured claim for what is my own. A claim for my sons that they should have what is ours. I want to be restored to my greatness, I want to be a Plantagenet again. Apparently, the time has come that I can be a Plantagenet. Apparently, at last, I can be myself.

Amazingly, the king grants it. Freely, generously, sweetly, he grants me everything that I ask, and tells me that since I am by birth and by disposition one of the greatest ladies of the kingdom I should enjoy the greatest fortune. I am to be what I was born to be: Margaret Plantagenet, as wealthy as a princess of York.

I ask the queen for permission to be away from court for the night. “You want to tell your children,” she smiles.

“This changes everything for us,” I say.

“Go,” she says. “Go to your new house and meet them there. I am glad that you have justice, at last. I am glad that you are Margaret Plantagenet once more.”

“Countess of Salisbury,” I say, sweeping her a deep curtsey. “He has given me my family title, in my own right. I am Countess of Salisbury.”

She laughs with pleasure and says: “Very grand. Very royal. My dear, I am glad for you.”

I take Ursula, who is now a tall girl of thirteen years, and her younger brother, Geoffrey, in the royal barge down the river to L’Erber, the beautiful Plantagenet palace on the riverside, near to the Tower, that the king has returned to me. I make sure that the fire is lit in the grand hall and the flames are burning in the sconces so that when my boys come in, the place is warm and welcoming, and my new household can see, lit as brightly as players in a pageant, these York boys coming into their own.

I wait for them, standing before the huge fire of wood in the great hall, Ursula at my side, seven-year-old Geoffrey’s hand in mine. Henry comes in first, as he should, kneels for my blessing, and kisses me on both cheeks then steps aside for his brother Arthur. Side by side they kneel before me, their height and their strength obscured by their deference. These are boys no longer, they are young men. I have missed five, nearly six years of their lives, and no one, not even a Tudor king, can restore that to me. This is a loss that can never be made up.

I raise Henry to his feet and I smile at my pride as he goes up and up. He is a tall, well-built young man of nearly twenty. He overtops me by a head, and I can feel the strength in his arms. “My son,” I say, and I clear my throat so that my voice does not tremble. “My son, I have missed you, but we are returned to one another now, and to our place in the world.”

I raise Arthur and kiss him too. At seventeen he is nearly as tall as his older brother, and broader, stronger. He is an athlete, a great rider. I remember that my cousin George Neville—Lord Bergavenny—promised me that he would make this boy into a great sportsman: “Put him at the king’s court and they will fall in love with him for his courage at the joust,” he told me.

Next in line, Reginald rises to his feet as I step towards him but though I hold him close he does not put his arms around me, he does not cling to me. I kiss him and I step back to look at him. He is tall and lean, with a narrow face as sensitive and mobile as a girl’s, his brown eyes very wary for an eleven-year-old, his mouth firm as if closed by enforced silence. I think he will never forgive me for leaving him at the monastery. “I am sorry,” I say to him. “I didn’t know how to keep you safe, I didn’t even know how to feed you. I thank God that you are restored to me now.”

“You kept the others safe enough,” he says shortly, his voice unreliable, sometimes a boyish treble and sometimes cracking and going low. He glances at Geoffrey at my side, who tightens his grip on my hand when he hears the hostility in his brother’s voice. “They didn’t have to live like silent hermits, alone among strangers.”

“Come now!” Henry surprisingly interrupts his brother. “We are together again now! Our Lady Mother has won back our fortune and our title. She has rescued us from a lifetime of hardship. What’s done is done.”

Ursula comes close to me, as if to defend me from Reginald’s resentment, and I hold her to my side. “You’re right,” I say to Henry. “And you’re right to command your brother. You are the man of the family, you will be Lord Montague.”

He flushes with pleasure. “I am to have the title? They give me your title too? I am to carry your family name?”

“Not yet,” I say. “But you will have it. I shall call you Son Montague from now on.”

“Are we all to call him Montague and not Henry?” Geoffrey pipes up. “And do I have a new name too?”

“Surely you’ll be an earl at the very least,” Reginald remarks unpleasantly. “If they don’t find a princess for you to marry.”

“And will we live here now?” Ursula asks, looking round the great hall with the high painted beams and the old-fashioned fireplace in the center of the room. She has learned a taste for good things and the life of the court.

“This will be our London house but we’ll stay at court,” I tell her. “You and I in the queen’s chambers, your brother Geoffrey as the queen’s page. Your brothers will continue to serve the king.”

Montague beams, Arthur clenches a fist. “Just what I was hoping for!”

Reginald’s face lights up. “And me? Am I to come to court too?”

“You’re lucky,” I tell him. “Reginald is to go to the university!” I announce to the others, as his smile dies.

“The king himself has offered to pay your fees,” I tell him. “You are fortunate in his favor. He is a great scholar himself, he admires the new learning. It is a great privilege. I have told him you were studying with the Carthusian brothers, and so he is giving you a place at Magdalen College, Oxford. This is a great favor.”

He looks down at his feet, his dark eyelashes shielding his eyes, and I think he may be struggling not to cry. “So I have to live away from home again,” he observes, his voice very small. “While you are all at court. All of you together.”

“My son, it is a great privilege,” I say, a little impatiently. “If you have the king’s favor and rise through the Church, who knows where you might end?”

He looks as if he might argue, but his brother interrupts him. “Cardinal!” Montague exclaims, ruffling his hair. “Pope!”

Reginald cannot even find a smile for his brother. “And now you are laughing at me?”

“No! I mean it!” Montague replies. “Why not?”

“Why not?” I agree. “Everything is restored to us, everything is possible.”

“And what do we have?” Arthur asks. “Exactly? Because if I am to serve the king I shall need to buy a horse, and a saddle and armor.”

“Yes, what has he given us?” Montague asks. “God bless him for putting everything to right. What have we got?”

“Only what was our own, returned to us,” I say proudly. “I petitioned the king for what was rightfully mine, the title and the lands that were taken from me when my brother was wrongfully executed. He agreed that my brother was no traitor, so he is restoring our fortune. It’s justice, not charity.”

The boys wait, like children waiting for New Year’s gifts. All their lives they have known of the shadowy existence of an uncle whose name must not be mentioned, of a past so glorious that we had to conceal it, of wealth so great that we could not bear to discuss what had been lost. Now it is as if their mother’s dream is proven real.

I take a breath. “I have the earldom back,” I say. “My family name, my title is restored to me. I shall be Countess of Salisbury.”

Montague and Arthur, who understand the scale of this privilege, look astounded. “He gives you, a woman, an earldom?” Montague asks.

I nod. I know that I am beaming, I cannot hide my joy. “In my own right. And the lands. All my brother’s lands are returned to us.”

“We’re rich?” Reginald suggests.

I nod. “We are. We’re one of the richest families in the whole kingdom.”

Ursula gives a little gasp and clasps her hands together.

“This is ours?” Arthur confirms, looking round. “This house?”

“It was my mother’s house,” I say proudly. “I shall sleep in her great chamber, where she lay with her husband, the king’s brother. It’s as big a palace as any in London. I can just remember it, when I was a little girl. I can remember living here. Now it is mine again, and you shall call it home.”

“And what country houses?” Arthur asks eagerly.

I see the avidity in his face, and I recognize my own greed and excitement. “I’m going to build,” I promise him. “I’m going to build a great house of brick, a castle fitted out as richly as any palace, at Warblington in Hampshire. It’ll be our biggest house. And we’ll have Bisham, my family house, in Berkshire, and this house in London, and a manor at Clavering in Essex.”

“And home?” Reginald asks. “Stourton?”

I laugh. “It’s nothing compared with these,” I say dismissively. “A little place. One of our many other houses. We have dozens of houses like Stourton.” I turn to Montague. “I shall arrange a great marriage for you, and you shall have a house and lands of your own.”

“I’ll marry,” he promises. “Now that I have a name I can offer.”

“You’ll have a title to offer your bride,” I promise him. “Now I can look around and find someone suitable. You have something to bring to a marriage. The king himself calls me ‘cousin.’ Now we can look for an heiress whose fortune will match yours.”

He looks as if he might have a suggestion, but he smiles and keeps it to himself for the moment.

“I know who,” Arthur teases him.

At once, I am alert. “You can tell me,” I say to Montague. “And if she is wealthy and well bred I will be able to arrange it. You can take your pick. There’s not a family in the kingdom who would not think it an honor to be married into ours, now.”

“You’ve gone from pauper to princess,” Reginald says slowly. “You must feel as if God has answered your prayers.”

“God has sent me nothing more than justice,” I say carefully. “And we must, as a family, give thanks for that.”

Slowly, I become accustomed to being wealthy again, as I had to become accustomed to being poor. I order builders into my London home, and they start to transform L’Erber from the great palace that it is into an even more imposing house, paving the forecourt, carving beautiful wooden panels for the great hall. At Warblington I commission a castle, with a moat and a drawbridge and a chapel and a green, everything just as my parents would have had, just like Middleham Castle in my childhood, when I had known I was born for greatness and never dreamed that it could all disappear overnight. I build the equal of any castle in the land, and I create beautiful guest rooms for when the king and court come to stay with me, their great subject in her own great castle.

Everywhere I put my coat of arms, and I have to confess every day to the sin of pride. But I don’t care. I want to declare to the world: “My brother was no traitor, my father no traitor either. This is an honorable name, this is a royal standard. I am the only countess in England holding a title in my own right. Here is my stamp upon my many houses. Here am I. Alive—no traitor. Here am I!”

My boys enter court life like the princes they are. The king immediately takes to Arthur for his courage and skill at the joust. My kinsman George Neville served my sons well when he brought them up and taught them everything they needed to know to be popular courtiers. Montague is easy and elegant in the royal rooms; Arthur is one of the bravest jousters at a court that cares for nothing more than bravery. He is one of the few men who dare ride against the king, one of the very, very few who can beat him. When Arthur unseats the King of England, he flings himself off his own horse, brushing past pages to help Henry to his feet, and Henry bellows with laughter and holds Arthur in his arms. “Not yet, Cousin Plantagenet! Not yet!” he shouts and they roar together as if a fallen king is a great joke, and a Plantagenet standing over an unseated Tudor can only be a fine, comradely jest.

Reginald studies at the university, Ursula serves beside me in the queen’s rooms at court, Geoffrey stays at the nursery rooms in L’Erber with his tutors and companions and sometimes comes to court to serve the queen. I cannot bring myself to send him away to the country, not after the grief of losing my older boys, not after the lasting pain of Reginald’s exile. This boy, my youngest boy, my baby, I will keep at home. I swear I will have him by my side until he is married.

The king is desperate to go to war and determined to punish the French for their advances in Italy, determined to defend the Pope and his lands. In the summer my cousin Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, leads an expedition to take Aquitaine but can do nothing without the support of the queen’s father, who refuses to play his part in their joint battle plans. Thomas is blamed for this and for the misconduct of his troops, and a shadow falls, once again, over his reputation as a Tudor supporter and our family.

“The fault is not in your cousins, Your Grace, but in your father-in-law,” the blunt-spoken northern lord Tom Darcy tells the king. “He did not support me when I went on crusade. He has not supported Thomas Grey. It is your ally, not your generals, who is at fault.”

He sees me watching him, and he gives me a small wink. He knows that all my family fear the loss of Tudor favor.

“You might be right,” Henry says sulkily. “But the Spanish king is a great general and Thomas Grey is certainly not.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1513

Not even such a setback can permanently diminish the king’s enthusiasm for a war against France, driven on by his conscience which assures him that he is defending the Church and by the promise of the title “King of France.” The Pope is clever enough to know that Henry longs to win back the title that other English kings have lost, and show himself as a true king and a leader of men.

This summer the court and my boys can think of nothing but harnesses and armor, horses and provisions. The king’s new advisor Thomas Wolsey proves to be uniquely able to get an army on the move, ordering the goods where they are needed, controlling the mustering of troops, commanding the smiths to forge pikes and the saddlers to make jackets of leather. The detail, the constant orders about transport, supplies, and timing—which no nobleman can be bothered to follow—is all that Wolsey thinks about, and he thinks about nothing else.

The ladies of the queen’s chamber sew banners, keepsakes, and special shirts made from tough cloth to wear under chain mail; but Katherine, herself the daughter of a fighting queen, raised in a country at war, meets with Henry’s commanders and talks to them about provisions, discipline, and the health of the troops they will take to invade France. Only Wolsey understands her concerns, and she and the almoner are often closeted together, discussing routes for the march, provisions along the way, how to establish lines of messengers and how one commander can communicate with another and be persuaded to work together.

Thomas Wolsey treats her with respect, observing that she has seen more warfare than many of the noblemen at court, since she was raised at the siege of Granada. The whole court treats her with a secret smiling pride, for everyone knows that she is with child again, her belly starting to grow hard and curved. She walks everywhere, refusing to ride, resting in the afternoons, a plump, shining confidence about her.

CANTERBURY, KENT, JUNE 1513

We set off for the coast with the army, traveling slowly through Kent, and stop at the glorious shrine at Canterbury, dripping in gold and rubies of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, where we pray for victory for England.

The queen takes my hand as I kneel to pray beside her, and passes me her rosary, pressing it into my hand.

“What’s this?” I whisper.

“Hold it,” she says. “While I tell you something bad. I have to tell you something that will distress you.”

The sharp ivory crucifix digs into my palm like a nail. I think I know what she has to tell me.

“It’s your cousin Edmund de la Pole,” she says gently. “I am sorry, my dear. I am so sorry. The king has ordered that he be put to death.”

Even though I am expecting this, even though I have known it must come, even though I have waited for this news for years, I hear myself say: “But why? Why now?”

“The king could not go to war leaving a pretender in the Tower.” I can tell from the guilt in her face that she remembers the last pretender to the Tudor throne was my brother, killed so that she would come to England and marry Arthur. “I am so sorry, Margaret. I am so sorry, my dear.”

“He’s been imprisoned for seven years!” I protest. “Seven years and there has been no trouble!”

“I know. But the council advised it too.”

I bow my head as if in prayer, but I can find no words to pray for the soul of my cousin, dead under a Tudor axe, for the crime of being a Plantagenet.

“I hope you can forgive us?” she whispers.

Under the soaring chant of the Mass I can hardly hear her. I grip her hand. “It’s not you,” I say. “It’s not even the king. It’s what anyone would do to rid themselves of a rival.”

She nods, as if she is comforted; but I put my head in my hands and know that they have not rid themselves of Plantagenets. It is impossible to be rid of us. My cousin Edmund’s brother, Richard de la Pole, his heir, now the new pretender, has run away from England and is somewhere in Europe, trying to raise an army; and after him, there is another and another of us, unending.

DOVER CASTLE, KENT, JUNE 1513

The queen says good-bye to her husband at Dover Castle and he honors her with the title of Regent of England—she will rule this country with the authority of a crowned king. She is a monarch of England, a woman born to rule. He gently rests his hand on her belly and asks her to keep his country and his baby safe until he returns.

I can think of nothing but my boys, especially my son Montague, whose duty will keep him at the king’s side and whose honor will take him into the heart of any battle. I wait till his warhorse is loaded on the ships and he comes to me and bends his knee for my blessing. I am determined to say a smiling good-bye, and try to hide my fear for him.

“But take care,” I urge.

“Lady Mother, I am going to war. I am not supposed to take care. It would be a very poor war if we all rode out taking care!”

I am twisting my fingers together. “Take care with your food at least, and don’t lie on wet ground. Make sure that your squire always puts a leather cloak down first. And never take your helmet off if you are anywhere near—”

He laughs and takes my hands in his own. “Lady Mother, I will come home to you!” He is young and lighthearted and thinks that he will live forever, and so he promises the thing that in truth he cannot: that nothing will ever hurt him, not even on a battlefield.

I snatch at a breath. “My son!”

“I’ll make sure Arthur is safe,” he promises me. “And I’ll come home safe and sound. Perhaps I shall capture French prisoners for ransom, perhaps I shall come home rich. Perhaps I shall win French lands and you will be able to build castles in France as well as England.”

“Just come home,” I say. “Not even new castles matter more than the heir.”

He bends his head for my blessing and I have to let him go.

The war goes better than anyone dreams possible. The English army, under the king himself, take Therouanne, and the French cavalry flee before them. My son Arthur writes to me that his brother has ridden like a hero and has been knighted by the king, for his bravery in battle. My son Montague is now Sir Henry Pole—Sir Henry Pole!—and he is safe.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1513

It is encouraging news for us in London; but far graver things are happening at home than the easy progress of the king’s campaign. Almost as soon as Henry’s fleet sets sail, and despite the fact that the King of Scotland is sworn to a sacred permanent peace sealed by his marriage to an English princess, our own Princess Margaret, the king’s sister, James IV of Scotland invades, and we have to defend the kingdom with our army in France and our king playing at commander overseas.

The only man left in England able to command is Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, the old dog of war whom Henry left behind for his queen to deploy as she thinks best. The seventy-year-old warrior and the pregnant queen take over the presence chamber at Richmond, and instead of sheets of music and plans of dances spread on the table, there are maps of England and Scotland, lists of musters, and the names of landlords who will turn out their tenants for the queen’s war against Scotland. The queen’s ladies go through their household men and report on their border castles.

Katherine’s early years with her parents who fought for every inch of their kingdom shows in every decision she and Thomas Howard make together. Though everyone left in England complains that they are guarded by an old man and a pregnant woman, I believe that these two are better commanders than those in France. She understands the dangers of a battle ground and the deploying of a troop as if it were the natural business of a princess. When Thomas Howard musters his men to march north, they have a battle plan that he will attack the Scots in the north, and she will hold a second line in the Midlands, in case of his defeat. It is she who defies her condition to ride out to the army on a white horse, dressed in cloth of gold, and bawls out a speech to tell them that no nation in the world can fight like the English.

I watch her, and I can hardly recognize the homesick girl who cried in my arms at Ludlow. She is a woman indeed, she is a queen. Better than that, she is a queen militant, she has become a great Queen of England.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1513

Their battle plan is astoundingly successful. Thomas Howard sends her the bloodstained coat of James IV. The king’s own brother-in-law and fellow monarch is dead, we have widowed Princess Margaret and made her a dowager queen with a seventeen-month-old baby in her arms, and Scotland is ours for the taking.

Katherine is filled with bloodthirsty delight, and I laugh as she dances round the room, singing a battle song in Spanish. I take her hands and beg her to sit, be still and be calm; but she is completely her mother’s daughter, demanding that the head of James of Scotland be sent to her, until we persuade her that an English monarch cannot be so ferocious. Instead, she sends his bloodstained coat and torn banners to Henry in France, so that he shall know she has guarded the kingdom better than any regent has ever done before, that she has defeated the Scots as no one has ever done before, and London celebrates with the court that we have a heroine queen, a queen militant, who can hold the kingdom and carry a child in her womb.

She is taken ill in the night. I am sleeping in her bed and I hear her moan before the pain breaks through her sleep. I turn and raise myself up on one elbow to see her face, thinking that she is having a bad dream, and that I will wake her. Then I feel under my bare feet the wetness in the bed, and I flinch from the sensation, jump out of bed, pull back the sheets, and see my own nightgown is red, terribly stained with her waters.

I tear to the door and fling it open, screaming for her ladies and for someone to call the midwives and the physicians, and then come back to hold her hands as she groans as the pains start to come.

It is early, but it is not too early; perhaps the baby will survive this sudden urgent, fearful rush. I hold Katherine’s shoulders as she leans forward and then I sponge her face as she leans back and gasps with relief.

The midwives shout for her to push, and then suddenly they say, “Wait! Wait!” And we hear, we all can hear, a tiny gurgling cry.

“My baby?” the queen asks wonderingly, and then they lift him, his little legs writhing, the cord dangling, and rest him on her slack, quivering belly.

“A baby boy,” someone says in quiet wonderment. “My God, what a miracle,” and they cut the cord and wrap him tightly and then fold the warmed sheets across Katherine and put him into her arms. “A baby boy for England.”

“My baby,” she whispers, her face alight with joy and love. She looks, I think, like a portrait of the Virgin Mary as if she held the grace of God in her arms. “Margaret,” she says in a whisper. “Send a message to the king . . .”

Her face changes, the baby moves just slightly, his back arches, he seems to choke. “What’s the matter?” she demands. “What’s the matter with him?”

The wet nurse who was coming forward, undoing the front of her gown, rears back as if she is suddenly afraid to touch the child. The midwife looks up from the bowl of water and the cloth and lunges for him, saying, “Slap him on the back!” as if he has to be born and take his first breath all over again.

Katherine says: “Take him! Save him!” and bounds forward in the bed, thrusting him out to the midwife. “What’s wrong with him? What’s the matter?”

The midwife clamps her mouth over his nose and mouth, sucks and spits black bile on the floor. Something is wrong. Clearly, she does not know what to do, nobody knows what to do. The little body retches, a pool of something like oil spills from his mouth, from his nose, even from his closed eyes where little dark tears run down the tiny pale cheeks.

“My son!” Katherine cries.

They upend him like a drowned man from the moat, they slap him, they shake him, they put him over the nurse’s knees and pound his back. He is limp, he is white, his fingers and little toes are blue. Clearly he is dead and slapping will not return him to life.

She falls back on the bed, she pulls the covers over her face as if she wishes she were dead too. I kneel at the side of the bed and reach for her hand. Blindly, she grips me; “Margaret,” she says from under the covers as if she cannot bear that I should see her lips framing the words. “Margaret, write to the king and tell him that his baby is dead.”

As soon as the midwives have cleared up and gone, as soon as the physicians have given their opinion, which is nothing of any use, she herself writes to the king and sends the news by Thomas Wolsey’s messengers. She has to tell Henry, the homecoming conqueror in his moment of triumph, that although he has won proof of his valor; there is no proof of his potency. He has no child.

We wait for his return; she is bathed and churched and dressed in a new gown. She tries to smile, I see her practice before a mirror, as if she has forgotten how to do it. She tries to seem joyful for his victory, glad of his return, and hopeful for their future.

He does not look closely enough to observe that she is only pretending to joy. She plays a masque of delight for him and he barely glances her way, he is so full of stories of the battle and the capture of villages. Half of his court have been awarded their spurs, you would think he had taken Paris and been crowned in Rheims; but nobody mentions that the Pope has not given him the promised title of “Most Christian King of France.” He has ridden so far, and done so much, and won next to nothing.

To his queen he shows a sulky resentment. This is their third loss and this time he seems more puzzled than grieved. He cannot understand why he, so young, so handsome, so beloved, and this year so triumphant, should not have a child for every year of his marriage, like the Plantagenet king Edward. By this accounting he should have four children by now. So why is his nursery empty?

The boy who had everything that a prince might want, the young man who came to his throne and his bride in the same year, acclaimed by his people, cannot understand that something should go so wrong for him. I watch him and see him puzzling over disappointment, as a new and disagreeable experience. I see him seeking out the men who were with him in France to relive their triumphs, as it to assure himself that he is a man, the equal of any, superior to all; and then again and again, his glance goes to the queen as if he cannot understand how she, of the whole world, will not give him what he wants.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1514

The court can think of nothing but when they can go to war against France again. Thomas Howard’s triumph against the Scots is not forgotten—he is rewarded with the restoration of his dukedom of Norfolk. I see him coming towards us, with his dogged limp, as the queen and I and her ladies are walking beside the river one icy spring afternoon and he smiles at me and bows low to her.

“It seems I too am restored,” he says bluntly, falling in beside me. “I am myself again.” He is no courtier, the old soldier, but he is a good friend and the most loyal subject in the kingdom. He was a henchman of my uncle King Edward, and a faithful commander for my uncle King Richard. When he asked for pardon from Henry Tudor, he explained that he had done no wrong but served the king. Whoever sits on the throne has Howard’s loyalty; he is as uncomplicated as a mastiff.

“He has made you duke again?” I guess. I glance towards his wife, Agnes. “And my lady will be a duchess?”

He bows. “Yes, Countess,” he says with a grin. “We all have our coronets back.”

Agnes Howard beams at me.

“I congratulate you both,” I say. “This is a great honor.” It is true. This raises Thomas Howard to be one of the greatest men in the kingdom. Dukes are inferior only to the king himself; only Buckingham—a duke with royal blood—is greater than Norfolk. But the new duke has gossip for me that takes the shine off his triumph. He catches my arm and takes a halting step beside me. “You’ll have heard that he’s going to ennoble Charles Brandon too?”

“No!” I am genuinely scandalized. The man has done nothing but seduce women and amuse the king. Half the girls of the court are in love with him, including the king’s youngest sister, Princess Mary, though he is nothing more than a handsome rogue. “Why? What has he ever done to earn it?”

The old man’s eyes narrow. “Thomas Wolsey,” he says shortly.

“Why would he favor Brandon?”

“It’s not that he loves Charles Brandon so much, but he wants a power to set against that of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. He wants a friend in power to help pull the great duke down.”

I take this in, glancing forward to see that the queen is out of earshot. “Thomas Wolsey is growing very great,” I observe disapprovingly. “And that from very small beginnings.”

“Since the king stopped taking the queen’s advice he is prey to any clever talker who can put an argument together,” the duke says scathingly. “And this Wolsey has nothing to boast of but a library of books, and the mind of a goldsmith. He can tell you the price of anything, he can tell you the names of every town in England. He knows the bribe for every member of Parliament and every secret that they hide. Anything that the king desires, he can get for him, and now he gets it for him before the king even knows that he wants it. When the king listened to the queen, we knew where we were: friends with Spain, enemies with France, and ruled by the nobility. Now that the king is advised by Wolsey we have no idea who is our friend or our enemy, and no idea where we’re going.”

I glance ahead, to where the queen is leaning on Margery Horsman’s arm. She looks a little weary already, though we have walked for only a mile.

“She used to keep him steady,” Howard grumbles in my ear. “But Wolsey gives him whatever he wants and urges him on to want more. She’s the only one that can say no to him. A young man needs guidance. She has to take back the reins, she has to guide him.”

It is true that the queen has lost her influence with Henry. She won the greatest battle that England has ever seen against the Scots but he cannot forgive her for losing the child. “She does all that she can,” I say.

“And d’you know what we are to call him?” Howard growls.

“Call Thomas Wolsey?”

“Bishop it is now. Bishop of Lincoln, no less.” He nods at my surprise. “God knows what that’s worth to him annually. If she could only give him a son, we would all be the richer for it. The king would attend to her if she gave him an heir. It’s because she fails in this one thing that he cannot trust her in anything else.”

“She tries,” I say shortly. “No woman in the world prays more for the blessing of a son. And perhaps . . .”

He raises a craggy eyebrow at my discreet hint.

“It’s very early days,” I say cautiously.

“Please God,” he says devoutly. “For this is a king without patience, and we cannot afford to wait long.”

ENGLAND, SUMMER 1514

The queen grows big with her child, riding in a litter drawn by two white mules when we go on progress. Nothing is too luxurious for this most important pregnancy.

Henry no longer comes to her bedroom at night. Of course, no good husband beds his wife during her pregnancy; but neither does he come to her for conversation or advice. Her father is refusing to go to war in France again, and Henry’s fury and disappointment with Ferdinand of Aragon overflows onto Ferdinand’s daughter. Even the marriage planned for Henry’s little sister Princess Mary with Archduke Charles is overthrown as England turns from Spain and all things Spanish. The king swears that he will take advice from no foreigner, that no one knows better than he what good English people desire. He scowls at the queen’s Spanish ladies and pretends he cannot understand them when they bid him a courteous good morning. Katherine herself, her father, her country, are publicly insulted by her husband as she sits very still and very quietly under the cloth of estate and waits for the storm to pass, her hands folded on her rounded belly.

Henry loudly declares that he will rule England without advice or help from anyone, but in fact he does nothing; everything is read, studied, and considered by Wolsey. The king barely glances at documents before scrawling his name. Sometimes he cannot even find the time to do that, and Wolsey sends out a royal command under his own seal.

Wolsey is an enthusiast for peace with the French. Even the king’s current mistress is a French woman, one of Princess Mary’s maids of honor, a young woman very ill-suited for a decent court, a notorious whore from the French court. The king is dazzled by her reputation for wickedness, and seeks her out, following her around court as if he were a young hound and she a bitch in season. Everything French is in fashion, whores and ribbons and alliances alike. It seems that the king has forgotten all about his crusade and is going to ally with England’s traditional enemy. I am not the only skeptical English subject who thinks that Wolsey is planning to seal the peace with a marriage—Henry’s sister Princess Mary, the daintiest princess who ever was, will be sacrificed like a virgin chained on a dragon’s rock to the old French king.

I suspect this; but I don’t tell Katherine. I will not have her worried while she is carrying a child, perhaps even carrying a son. Fortune-tellers and astrologists constantly promise the king that this time a son will be born who is certain to live. For sure, every woman in England prays that this time Katherine will be blessed and give the king his heir.

“I doubt that Bessie Blount prays for me,” she says bitterly, naming the new arrival at court whose childish blond prettiness is much admired by everyone, including the king.

“I am certain that she does,” I say firmly. “And I’d rather have her as the center of attention than the French woman. Bessie loves you, and she is a sweet girl. She can’t help it if the king favors her above all your other ladies. She can hardly refuse to dance with him.”

But Bessie does not refuse. The king writes her poems and he dances with her in the evenings; he teases her and she giggles like a child. The queen sits on her throne, her belly heavy, determined to rest and be calm, beating the time of the music with her heavily ringed hand, and smiling as if she is pleased to see Henry, flushed with excitement, dancing like a boy, while all the courtiers applaud his grace. When she makes the signal to leave, Bessie withdraws with the rest of us, but it is common knowledge that she sneaks back to the great hall with some of the other ladies-in-waiting and that they dance till dawn.

If I were her mother, Lady Blount, I should take her away from court, for what can a young woman possibly hope to gain from a love affair with the king but a season of self-importance and then a marriage to someone who will accept a royal cast-off? But Lady Blount is faraway in the west of England, and Bessie’s father, Sir John, is delighted that the king admires his girl, foreseeing a river of favors, places, and riches flowing in his direction.

“She is better behaved than some would be,” I remind Katherine quietly. “She asks for nothing, and she never says a word against you.”

“What word could she say?” she demands with sudden resentment. “Have I not done everything a wife could do, did I not defeat Scotland while he was not even in the country? Have I not worked at the ruling of the kingdom when he cannot be bothered? Do I not read the papers from the council so that he is free to go out hunting all day? Do I not constantly choose my words to try to keep the treaty with my father when Henry would break his oath every day? Do I not sit quietly and listen while he abuses my father and my own countrymen as liars and traitors? Do I not ignore the shameful French mistress and now the new flirtation with Mistress Blount? Do I not do everything, everything I can, to prevent Thomas Wolsey from forcing us into an alliance with the French, which will be the ruin of England, my home, and Spain, my motherland?”

We are both silent. Katherine has never spoken against her young husband before. But he has never before been so openly guided by his vanity and selfishness.

“And what does Bessie do that is so charming?” Katherine demands angrily. “Write poems, compose music, sing love songs? She is witty, she is talented, she is pretty. What does this matter?”

“You know what you have not done,” I say gently. “But you will put that right. And when he has a child, he will be loving and grateful and you can bring him back into alliance with Spain, out of Thomas Wolsey’s pocket and away from Mistress Blount’s smiles.”

She puts her hand on her belly. “I am doing that now,” she says. “This time I will give him a son. God Himself knows that everything depends on it, and He will never forsake me.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1514

But three months before the baby is due, we have bad news from Scotland where the king’s sister, the widowed Queen Margaret, has been fool enough to marry a fool at her court: the handsome Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus. In one stroke she loses her right to be regent and the care of her two-year-old son and heir, and his baby brother who is only six months old. The honeymooners hide in Stirling Castle with the babies, and the new regent of Scotland, John Stewart, the second Duke of Albany, takes power.

Henry and the whole of the north of England are anxious that Albany will make alliances with the French and turn on England. But, before the Scots can make an alliance with the French, we have beaten them to it. Henry has decided that his friendship with France will be sealed by the marriage of his little sister, Princess Mary, and the queen has to see her sister-in-law married to the king whom she regards as an enemy of herself, her father, and both her countries.

Princess Mary is bitterly opposed to this match—the French king is nearly old enough to be her grandfather—and she comes crying into the queen’s private rooms, whispering that she is in love with Charles Brandon and that she has begged the king to allow her to marry him. She asks the queen to take her part and persuade Henry that his sister can marry for love as he did.

Katherine and I share a glance over the bowed red-gold head, as the young princess cries with her face in the queen’s lap. “You are a princess,” Katherine says steadily. “Your destiny brings great riches and power; but you were not born to marry for love.”

Henry revels in this opportunity to be dominant and kingly. I can almost see him admiring his own statesmanlike determination as he rises above the complaints of his wife and his sister and proves to them that as a man and a king he knows best. He ignores both the furiously bargaining princess and the dignified protests of his wife. He sends Princess Mary to France with a noble entourage of ladies and gentlemen of the court; my son Arthur with his growing reputation for jousting and dangerous sports is among them.

Carefully, the queen suggests that Bessie Blount might go with Princess Mary to France, and the princess at once asks pretty Bessie would she not like the chance of seeing the French court? Princess Mary knows well enough that her sister-in-law the queen would go into her confinement with a lighter heart if Bessie were not dancing with the king while she is in labor. But instantly Bessie’s father refuses the honor offered to his daughter, and we know that he is obeying the king. Bessie is not to leave court.

I catch hold of her arm when I am on my way to Katherine’s darkened room one day and Bessie, dressed for hunting, is running in the opposite direction.

“Bessie!”

“I can’t stop, your ladyship!” she says hurriedly. “The king is waiting for me. He has bought me a new horse and I have to go and see it.”

“I won’t keep you,” I reply. Of course, I cannot keep her. No one can exert any authority over the king’s chosen favorite. “But I wanted to remind you to say nothing against the queen. She is anxious in her confinement, and everyone gossips so. You won’t forget, will you, Bessie? You wouldn’t want to hurt Queen Katherine?”

“I’d never hurt her!” she flares up. “All of us maids-in-waiting love her, I’d do anything to serve her. And my father told me especially to say nothing to worry the king.”

“Your father?” I repeat.

“He told me, if the king ever said anything to me, that I was to say nothing about the queen’s health, but only to remark that we come from fertile stock.”

“Fertile stock?”

“Yes,” she says, pleased at remembering her father’s instruction.

“Oh, did he?” I say furiously. “Well, if your father wants a nameless bastard in his house, then it’s his concern.”

Bessie flushes, the quick tears coming to her eyes as she turns away from me. “I am commanded by my father and the King of England,” she mutters. “There’s no point scolding me, your ladyship. It’s not as if I can choose.”

DOVER CASTLE, KENT, AUTUMN 1514

The court turns out to escort the princess to Dover and see her party set sail. After waiting for the storms to die down, finally the horses and carts with Mary’s enormous wardrobe, furniture, goods, carpets, and tapestries lumber on board and finally the young princess and her ladies walk up the gangplank and stand like fashionably dressed martyrs on the poop deck and wave to those of us who are lucky enough to stay in England.

“This is a great alliance I have made,” Henry declares to the queen, and all his friends and courtiers nod. “And your father, madam, will regret the day that he tried to play me for a fool. He will learn who is the greater man. He will learn who will be the maker and breaker of the kingdoms of Europe.”

Katherine lowers her eyes so that he cannot see the flash of her temper. I see her grip her hands together so tightly that the rings are biting into her swollen fingers.

“I do think, my lord . . .” she begins.

“There is no need for you to think,” he overrules her. “All you can do for England is give us a son. I have the command of my country, I do the thinking; you shall have the making of my heir.”

She sweeps him a curtsey, she manages a smile. She manages to avoid the avid gaze of the court who have just heard a princess of Spain reprimanded by a Tudor, and she turns to walk back towards Dover Castle. I go half a step behind her. When we are in the lee of the wall that overlooks the sea, she turns and takes my arm as if she needs the support.

“I am sorry,” I say inadequately, flushing for his rudeness.

She gives a little shrug. “When I have a son . . .” she says.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1514

The king is remodeling the palace of Greenwich on a grand scale. It was my cousin’s, his mother’s, favorite palace, and I am walking with this queen where I walked with her predecessor, on the graveled paths which run alongside the great expanse of the river, when the queen pauses and puts her hand to her belly as if she felt something deeply, powerfully move.

“Did he give you a great kick?” I ask, smiling.

She doubles up, folding like a paper queen, and blindly reaches out a hand for me. “I have a pain. I have a pain.”

“No!” I say, and take her hand as her legs give way and she goes down. I drop to my knees beside her as her ladies come running. She looks up at me, her eyes black with fear and her face as white as one of the sails of the ships on the river, and she says: “Say nothing! This will pass.”

At once I turn to Bessie, and to Elizabeth Bryan. “You heard Her Grace. You two say nothing, and let’s get her inside.”

We are about to lift her when she suddenly screams loudly, as if someone has run her through with a spear. At once, half a dozen yeomen of the guard dash to her, but skid to a halt when they see her on the ground. They dare not touch her, her body is sacred. They are at a loss as to what they should do.

“Fetch a chair!” I snap at them, and one runs back. They come from the palace with a wooden chair with arms and a back, and we ladies help her into it. They carry the chair carefully to the palace, the beautiful palace on the river where Henry was born, the lucky palace for the Tudors, and we take her into the darkened room.

It is only half prepared, since she is more than a month before her time, but she goes into labor despite the rules in the great book of the court. The midwives look grim; the housemaids rush in with clean linen, hot water, tapestries for the walls, carpets for the tables, all the things that were being made ready but are suddenly needed now. Her pains come long and slow, as they prepare the room around her. A day and a night later the room is perfect, but still the baby has not been born.

She leans back on the richly embroidered pillows and scans the bowed heads of her ladies as they kneel in prayer. I know that she is looking for me and I stand up and go towards her. “Pray for me,” she whispers. “Please, Margaret, go to the chapel and pray for me.”

I find myself kneeling beside Bessie, our hands gripped on the chancel rail. I glance sideways, and see her blue eyes are filled with tears. “Pray God that it is a boy and comes soon,” she whispers to me, trying to smile.

“Amen,” I say. “And healthy.”

“There is no reason, is there, Lady Salisbury, why the queen should not have a boy?”

Stoutly, I shake my head. “No reason at all. And if anyone ever asks you, if anyone at all ever asks you, Bessie, you owe it to Her Grace to say that you know of no reason why she should not have a healthy son.”

She sits back on her heels. “He asks,” she confides. “He does ask.”

I am appalled. “What does he ask?”

“He asks if the queen talks privately to her friends, to you and to her ladies. He asks if she is anxious about bearing a child. He asks if there is some secret difficulty.”

“And what do you tell him?” I ask. I am careful to keep the burn of anger out of my voice.

“I tell him I don’t know.”

“You tell him this,” I say firmly. “Tell him that the queen is a great lady—that’s true, isn’t it?”

Pale with concentration, she nods.

“Tell him that she is a true wife to him—that’s true, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes.”

“And that she serves the country as queen and serves him as a loving partner and helpmeet. He could have no better woman at his side, a princess by birth and a queen by marriage.”

“I know she is. I do know.”

“Then, if you know so much, tell him that there is no doubt that their marriage is good in the sight of God as it is before us all, and that a son will come to bless them. But he has to be patient.”

She gives a pretty little moue with her mouth and a shrug of her shoulders. “You know, I can’t tell him all that. He doesn’t listen to me.”

“But he asks you? You just said that he asks you!”

“I think he asks everyone. But he doesn’t listen to anyone, except perhaps the Bishop Wolsey. It’s natural that he should, my lord being so wise and knowing the will of God and everything.”

“At any rate, don’t tell him that his marriage is invalid,” I say bluntly. “I would never forgive you, Bessie, if you said something like that. It would be wicked. It would be a lie. God would never forgive you for such a lie. And the queen would be hurt.”

Fervently, she shakes her head and the pearls on her new headdress bob and shine in the candlelight. “I never would! I love the queen. But I can only tell the king what he wants to hear. You know that as well as I.”

I go back into the confinement chamber and stay with Katherine through her labor until the pains come faster and faster and she hauls on a knotted cord and the midwives throw handfuls of pepper in her face to make her sneeze. She is gasping for breath, the tears pouring down her face, her eyes and nostrils burning with the harsh spice, as she screams in pain and with a rush of blood the baby is born. The midwife pounces on him, hauls him out like a wriggling fish, and cuts the cord. The rocker enfolds him in a pure linen cloth and then a blanket of wool, and holds him up for the queen to see. She is blinded with tears and choking with the pepper and with the pain. “Is it a boy?” she demands.

“A boy!” they tell her, in a delighted chorus. “A boy! A live boy!”

She reaches out to touch his little clenched fists, his kicking feet, though this time, she is afraid to hold him. But he is strong: red in the face, hollering, loud as his father, as self-important as a Tudor. She gives an amazed, delighted little laugh, and holds out her arms. “He is well?”

“He is well,” they confirm. “Small, because he is early, but well.”

She turns to me and gives me the great honor: “You shall tell the king,” she says.

I find him in his rooms, playing cards with his friends Charles Brandon, William Compton, and my son Montague. I am announced just ahead of a scramble of courtiers who were hoping to gather the news from the maids at the doorway and get to him with the first tidings, and he knows at once why I have come to him. He leaps to his feet, his face bright with hope. I see once more the boy I knew, the boy who always hovered between boasting and fearfulness. I curtsey and my beam, as I rise up, tells him everything.

“Your Grace, the queen has been brought to bed of a bonny boy,” I say simply. “You have a son, you have a prince.”

He staggers, and puts his hand on Montague’s shoulder to steady himself. My own son supports his king and is the first to say: “God bless! Praise be!”

Henry’s mouth is trembling, and I remember that despite his vanity he is only twenty-three, and his ostentation is a shield over his fear of failure. I see the tears in his eyes and realize he has been living under a terrible dread that his marriage was cursed, that he would never have a son, and that right now, as people outside the room cheer at the news and his comrades slap him on the back and call him a great man, a bull of a man, a stallion of a man, a man indeed, he is feeling the curse lifting from him.

“I must pray, I must give thanks,” he stammers, as if he does not know what he is saying, he does not know what he should say. “Lady Margaret! I should give thanks, shouldn’t I? I should have a Mass sung at once? This is God’s blessing on me, isn’t it? Proof of His favor? I am blessed. I am blessed. Everyone can see that I am blessed. My house is blessed.”

Courtiers crowd around him. I see Thomas Wolsey elbowing his way through the young men, and then sending a message for the cannons to fire and all the church bells in England to peal, and a thanksgiving Mass to be said in every church. They will light bonfires in the streets, they will serve free ale and roast meats, and the news will go out all around the kingdom that the king’s line is secure, that the queen has given him a son, that the Tudor dynasty will live forever.

“She is well?” Henry asks me over the babble of comment and delighted congratulation. “The baby is strong?”

“She is well,” I confirm. No need to tell him that she is torn, that she is bleeding terribly, that she is almost blinded by the spices they threw in her face and exhausted by the labor. Henry does not like to hear of illness; he has a horror of physical weakness. If he knew the queen was ripped and bleeding, he would never bring himself to her bed again.

“The baby is lusty and strong.” I take a breath and I play my strongest card for the queen. “He looks just like you, sire. He has hair of Tudor red.”

He gives a shout of joy and at once he is jumping round the room like a boy, pounding men on the back, embracing his friends, ebullient as a young tup in the meadow.

“My son! My son!”

“The Duke of Cornwall.” Thomas Wolsey reminds him of the title.

Someone brings in a flask of wine and slops it into a dozen cups. “The Duke of Cornwall!” they bellow. “God bless him! God save the king and the Prince of Wales!”

“And you will watch over the nursery?” Henry calls over his shoulder to me. “Dear Lady Margaret? You will care for and guard my son? You are the only woman in England I would trust to raise him.”

I hesitate. I was to be Lady Governess to the first son, and I am afraid to undertake this again. But I have to consent. If I do not, it looks as if I doubt my abilities, it looks as if I doubt the health of the child whom they are putting into my keeping. All the time, every day of our lives, every minute of every day, we have to act as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing can go wrong, as if the Tudors are under the exceptional blessing of God.

“You could not choose more tender care,” my son Montague says quickly as I hesitate. He gives me a look as if to remind me that I must respond, and promptly.

“I am honored,” I say.

The king himself presses a goblet of wine into my hand. “Dear Lady Margaret,” he says. “You will raise the next King of England.”

And so it is me the nurse calls first, when she lifts the little baby from his golden enamelled crib and finds that he is blue and lifeless. They were in the room next door to the queen’s bedroom; the nursemaid was sitting beside the cradle, watching him, but she had thought that he was very quiet. She put her hand on his soft head and felt no pulse. She put her fingers down inside his lawn nightgown and found him still warm. But he was not breathing. He had just stopped breathing, as if some old curse had gently rested a cool hand over his little nose and mouth, and made an end to the line that killed the princes of York.

I hold the lifeless body as the nurse weeps on her knees before me, crying over and over again that she never took her eyes off him, he made not a sound, there was no way of knowing that anything was wrong—and then I put him back into his ornate crib as if I hope that he will sleep well. Without knowing what to say, I walk through the adjoining door between the nursery and the confinement room where the queen has been washed and bandaged and dressed in her nightgown, ready for the night.

The midwives are turning down the fresh sheets on the big bed, a couple of ladies-in-waiting are seated beside the fire, the queen herself is praying at the little altar at the corner of the room. I kneel beside her and she turns her face to me and sees my expression.

“No,” she says simply.

“I am so sorry.” For a terrible moment I think I am going to vomit, I am so sick to my belly and so filled with horror at what I have to say. “I am so sorry.”

She is shaking her head, wordlessly, like an idiot at the fair. “No,” she says. “No.”

“He is dead,” I say very quietly. “He died in his cradle while he was sleeping. Just a moment ago. I am so sorry.”

She goes white and sways backwards. I give a shout of warning and one of her ladies, Bessie Blount, catches her as she faints. We pick her up and lie her on the bed and the midwife comes to pour a bitter oil onto a cloth and clamps it to her nose and mouth. She chokes and opens her eyes and sees my face. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that was a terrible dream.”

“It’s true,” I say, and I can feel my own face is wet with tears. “It’s true. I am so sorry. The baby is dead.”

On the other side of the bed I see Bessie’s aghast face as if her worst fears have been confirmed, as she slides to her knees and bows her head in prayer.

The queen lies in her glorious bed of state for days. She should be dressed in her best, reclining on golden pillows, receiving gifts from godparents and foreign ambassadors. But nobody comes, and in any case, she would not see them. She turns her face into her pillow and lies in silence.

I am the only one who can go to her and take her cold hand and say her name. “Katherine,” I whisper as if I am her friend and not her subject. “Katherine.”

For a moment I think she will stay mute, but she moves a little in the bed and looks at me over her hunched shoulder. Her face is etched with pain; she seems far older than her twenty-eight years, she is like a fallen statue of sorrow. “What?”

I pray for a word of encouragement to come to me, for a message of Christian patience, for a reminder that she has to be brave as her mother, that she is a queen and has a destiny laid on her. I think perhaps I might pray with her, or cry with her. But her face like white Carrara marble is forbidding, as she waits for me to find something to say as she lies there, curled up, clenched around her grief.

In the silence I understand that there are no words to comfort her. Nothing can be said that would bring her comfort. But still, there is something that I have to tell her. “You’ve got to get up,” is all I say. “You can’t stay here. You’ve got to get up.”

Everyone wonders, but no one speaks. Or perhaps: everyone wonders, but no one speaks just yet. Katherine is churched and returns to the court and Henry greets her with a sort of coolness that is new to him. He was raised to be a boisterous boy, but she is teaching him sorrow. He was a boy confident of his own good luck, demanding of good fortune, but Katherine is teaching him doubt. Man and boy he has striven to be the best at everything he does; he has delighted in his own strength, ability, and looks. He cannot bear failure in himself or in anyone near him. But now he has been disappointed by her, he has been disappointed by her dead sons, he has even been disappointed by God.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1514

Bessie Blount goes everywhere with the king, all but hand in hand as if they were a young husband and his pretty wife. The Christmas festivities take place with a silent queen presiding over it all like one of the statues that the court delightedly shapes out of the thick snow in the white gardens. She is a perfect version of the queen, in all her finery, but cold as ice. Henry talks to his friends seated on his left at his dinner, and often he steps down from the dais and strolls around the hall with his easy, cheerful manner, speaking to one man and another, spreading the royal favor and greeted at every table with laughter and jokes. He is like the most handsome actor in a masque, drawing admiration everywhere he goes, playing the part of a handsome man, beloved by everyone.

Katherine sits still on her throne, eating almost nothing, showing an empty smile that fails to illuminate her hollow eyes. After dinner they sit side by side on their thrones to watch the entertainments and Bessie stands beside the king and leans in to hear his whispered comments, and laughs at everything he says, every single thing that he says, in a ripple of girlish laughter as meaningless as birdsong.

The court puts on a Christmas pageant and Bessie is dressed as a lady of Savoy in a blue gown with her face masked. In the dance, she and her companions are rescued by four brave masked knights, and they all dance together, the tall redheaded masked man dancing with the exquisitely graceful young woman. The queen thanks them for a delightful entertainment, and smiles and gives out little gifts, as if there is nothing that can give her more pleasure than seeing her husband dance with his mistress to the acclaim of a drunken court.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1515

My son Arthur and the young Princess Mary do not stay long in France. Only two months after the wedding of the most beautiful princess in Christendom to the oldest king, Louis of France is dead and Princess Mary is now Dowager Queen. The English wedding party have to stay in France until they are certain that she is not with child—the scandalmongers say gleefully that she cannot be pregnant since the old king killed himself in the attempt—and then they all have to wait a few weeks longer; for the little madam has married Charles Brandon sent by the king to fetch her home, and they have to beg the king’s pardon before they can return.

She was always a self-willed child, as passionate and headstrong as her brother. When I hear that she has married for love, against the wishes of the king, I smile, thinking of her mother, my cousin Elizabeth, who also fell in love and swore she would marry her choice, and of her mother who married in secret for love, and of her mother before her who was a royal duchess and married her dead husband’s squire and caused a scandal. Princess Mary comes from three generations of women who believed in pleasing themselves.

Henry has been outwitted by the pair of them or perhaps, more truly, the two men were outwitted by the young woman. Henry knew that she was head over heels in love with Charles Brandon and made his friend promise that he would escort her safely home as a widow and not dream of speaking to her of love—but as soon as Charles arrived from England, she wept and swore that she would marry him or go into a convent. Between hot tears and temper she completely seduced him, and made him marry her.

She has wrong-footed her brother too, as he cannot blame her for holding him to his word. When he insisted on the French marriage, she agreed that she would marry his choice for her first husband if she might choose her second—and now she has done so. Henry is furious with her, and with his dear friend Charles, and there are many who say that Brandon is guilty of high treason for marrying a princess without permission.

“He should be beheaded,” old Thomas Howard says bluntly. “Better men than he, far better, have gone to the block for far less. It’s treason, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think this is a king for executions,” I say. “And thank God for it.”

It is true. Unlike his father, Henry is a king neither for the Tower nor the block, and he craves the love and admiration of his court. Quickly, he forgives both his beloved young sister and his oldest friend, as they return to court in triumph and plan a second, public wedding in May.

It is one of the few happy events this spring, when the king and the queen are united in their affection for his naughty pretty sister, and their joy in her return to court. Apart from this, they are cool with each other and Princess Mary, the Dowager Queen of France, finds the court much changed.

“Does he not take the queen’s advice at all?” she asks me. “He never comes to her rooms like he used to do.”

I shake my head and nip off a thread from my sewing.

“Does he listen to no one but Thomas Wolsey now?” she persists.

“No one but Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York,” I say. “And the archbishop, in his wisdom, favors the French.”

The archbishop has taken the place of the queen in Henry’s private councils; he has taken the place of all the other advisors in the council chambers. He works so hard that he can gobble up the places and fees of a dozen men, and while he goes between offices and treasure rooms Henry is free to play at falling in love and the queen can do nothing but smile and pretend that she does not mind.

The king still visits Katherine’s bed from the continuing need for an heir, but he takes his pleasure elsewhere. Katherine’s praise means less to him now that she is no longer the beautiful widow of his older brother, the woman he was forbidden to marry. He thinks less of her father since he failed against France; he thinks less of her for not giving him an heir. They are still side by side at every dinner, of course she is honored as Queen of England at every great event, but he is Sir Loyal Heart no longer, and everyone can see it now, not just the alert ladies of the queen’s rooms and their opportunistic families.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1515

I don’t like Charles Brandon; even on his official public wedding day to our Princess Mary I cannot warm to him, but that is the fault of my caution. When I see a man whom everyone adores, whose ascent to the highest places in the land has been like an upward flying spark, I always wonder what he will do with all this heat and light, and whose thatch will he burn down?

“But at least this is a marriage for love for our Princess Mary,” the queen says to me as I stand behind her, holding her coronet as the lady-in-waiting pins her hair. It is still the rich auburn that Prince Arthur loved with just a few threads of gray.

I smile at her. “On her side certainly there is love; but you are making the assumption that Charles Brandon has a heart.”

She shakes her head at me in smiling reproof, and the lady snatches at a falling pin. “Oh, sorry,” the queen says, and sits still. “I see that you are not in favor of love, Lady Margaret,” she smiles. “You have become a cold old widow.”

“I am indeed,” I say cheerfully. “But the princess—I mean the Dowager Queen of France—has enough heart for both of them.”

“Well, I for one am glad to have her back at court,” Katherine says. “And I’m glad that the king has forgiven his friend. They’re such a handsome couple.” She slides a sidewise smile at me. Katherine is never a fool. “The Archbishop of York, Thomas Wolsey, was in favor of the match?” she confirms.

“He was indeed,” I say. “And I am sure Charles Brandon is grateful for his support. And I am sure it will cost him.”

She nods in silence. The king is circled by favorites like wasps around a tray of jam tarts, set on a windowsill to cool. They have to outdo each other in buzzing compliments. Wolsey and Brandon are united against my cousin the Duke of Buckingham; but every lord in the land is jealous of Wolsey.

“The king is loyal to his friends,” she observes.

“Of course,” I agree. “He was always a most sweet-tempered boy. He never bears a grudge.”

The wedding feast is a joyous one. Mary is a favorite of everyone at court and we are glad to have her back with us, though we are all anxious as to the health and safety of her sister Margaret in Scotland. Since Margaret was widowed, and remarried a man whom the Scots lords cannot accept, we all wish that she too would come home to safety.

My son Arthur comes to find me during the dancing, kisses me on both cheeks, and kneels for my blessing.

“Not dancing?” I ask.

“No, for I have someone to meet you.”

I turn to him. “No trouble?” I say quickly.

“Merely a visitor to court who wants to see you.”

He winds his way through the dancers with a smile to one and the touch of an arm to another, through an arched door and into an inner room. I go through, and there is the last person I would have expected to see: my boy Reginald, lanky as a colt, his wrists showing at the cuffs of his jacket, his boots scuffed and his shy smile. “Lady Mother,” he says, and I put my hand on his warm head and then hold him as he springs up. “My boy!” I say in delight. “Ah, Reginald!”

I hold him in my arms but I feel the tension in his shoulders. He never embraces me as my two older boys do, he never clings to me like his younger brother, Geoffrey. He was taught to be a diffident child; now, at fifteen years old, he is a young man made by a monastery.

“Lady Mother,” he repeats, as if he is testing the words for meaning.

“Why are you not at Oxford?” I release him. “Does the king know you are here? Do you have permission to be away?”

“He’s graduated, Lady Mother!” Arthur reassures me. “He need not go back to Oxford ever again! He’s done very well. He’s completed his studies. He’s triumphant. He’s regarded as a very promising scholar.”

“Are you?” I ask him doubtfully.

Shyly, he ducks his head. “I am the best Latinist in my college,” he says quietly. “They say the best in the town.”

“That’s the best in England!” Arthur declares exuberantly.

The door behind us opens, and a gust of music comes in with Montague, Geoffrey at his side. Ten-year-old Geoffrey bounds towards his older brother like an excited child, and Reginald fends him off and embraces Montague.

“He debated for three days on the nature of God,” Arthur tells me. “He’s much admired. Turns out our brother is a great scholar.”

I laugh. “Well, I am glad of it,” I say. “And so what now, Reginald? Has the king commanded you? Are you to join the Church? What does he want you to do?”

Reginald looks at me anxiously. “I have no calling for the Church,” he says quietly. “So I hope you will allow me—Lady Mother . . .”

“No calling?” I repeat. “You have lived behind the walls of an abbey since you were six years old! You have spent almost all your life as a churchman. You have been educated as a churchman. Why would you not take orders?”

“I have no vocation,” he repeats.

I turn to Montague. “What does he mean?” I demand. “Since when did a churchman have to be called by God? Every bishop in the land is there for the convenience of his family. Obviously, he has been educated for the Church. Arthur tells me that he is well regarded. The king himself could not have done more for him. If he takes holy orders, he can be given the livings that come with our great estates and he will, no doubt, be made a bishop. And he could rise, perhaps even become an archbishop.”

“It’s a matter of conscience.” Arthur interrupts his brother’s answer. “Really, Lady Mother . . .”

I go to the chair at the head of the table, seat myself, and look down the long polished surface at my boys. Geoffrey follows me, and stands behind my chair looking gravely at his older brothers, as if he is my page boy, my little squire, and they are supplicants to the two of us. “Everyone in this family serves the king,” I say flatly. “That’s the only way to wealth and power. That is safety as well as success. Arthur, you are a courtier, one of the best jousters in the court, an ornament to the court. Montague, you have won your place as a server of the body, the best position at court, and you are rising in favor; you will be a senior advisor, I know. Geoffrey will go into the king’s rooms when he is a little older and will serve the king as well as any one of you. Ursula will marry a nobleman, link us to the greatest family we can obtain, and continue our line. Reginald here will be a churchman and serve the king and God. What else is possible? What else can he do?”

“I love and admire the king,” Reginald says quietly. “And I am grateful to him. He has offered me the deanship of Wimborne Minster, a valuable place. But I don’t have to take holy orders to get it, I can be a dean without being ordained. And he says he will pay for me to study abroad.”

“He does not insist you take your vows?”

“He does not.”

I am surprised. “This is a sign of great favor,” I say. “I would have thought he would have demanded it of you, after all he has done for you.”

“The king has read one of Reginald’s essays,” Arthur explains. “Reginald says that the Church should be served by no one but men who have heard the call of God, not men that hope to rise in the world by using the Church as their ladder. The king was very impressed. He admires Reginald’s logic, his judgment. He thinks he is both inspired and educated.”

I try to conceal my surprise at this son of mine who seems to have become a theologian rather than a priest. I cannot force him to take his vows at this stage in his life, especially if the king is willing to patronize him as a lay scholar. “Well, so be it,” I agree. “Very well for now. Later on, you will have to take holy orders to rise through the Church, Reginald. Don’t think that you can avoid that. But for the time being you can take the deanship and study as you wish, since His Grace approves.” I glance at Montague. “We’ll collect the fees for him,” I say. “We’ll pay him an allowance.”

“I don’t want to go abroad,” Reginald says very quietly. “If you will allow me, Lady Mother, I would like to stay in England.”

I am so shocked, that for a moment I say nothing, and Arthur speaks into the silence. “He has never lived with us since he was a child, Lady Mother. Let him study at Oxford and live at L’Erber, and spend his summers with us. He can join us when we are on progress, and when we go to Warblington or Bisham, he can come with us. I am sure the king would allow it. Montague and I could ask it for Reginald. Now that he has completed his degree surely he can come home?”

Reginald, the boy I could not afford to feed or house, looks directly at me. “I want to come home,” he says. “I want to live with my family. It’s time. It’s my turn. Let me come home. I have been away from all of you for so long.”

I hesitate. To gather my family together again would be the greatest triumph of my return to wealth and favor. To have all my sons under my roof and see them working for the power and strength of our family is my dream. “It’s what I want,” I tell him. “I have never told you, I never will tell you how much I missed you. Of course. But I shall have to ask the king,” I say. “None of you will ask him. I shall ask the king, and if he agrees, then that would be my dearest wish.”

Reginald flushes like a girl and I see his eyes grow suddenly dark with tears. I realize that though he may be a scholar of brilliance and promise he is still only fifteen—a boy who never had a childhood. Of course he wants to live with us all. He wants to be my beloved son once more. We have found our home again, he wants to be with us. It is right that he should be with us.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, JUNE 1515

The return of our Princess Mary as Dowager Queen of France brings an energy and beauty to a court where joy had been wearing thin. She runs in and out of the queen’s rooms to show her the swirl of a new gown, or to bring a book of the new scholarship. She teaches the queen’s ladies the dances that are fashionable in France, and the presence of her entourage brings all the king’s young men, and the king himself, into the queen’s rooms to sing and play and flirt and write poetry.

It brings the king back into his wife’s company, and he discovers again the charm and wit that are naturally hers. He realizes once more that he is married to a beautiful, educated, amusing woman, and he is reminded that Katherine is a true princess: beautiful, admired, the finest woman at the court. Compared to the girls who throw themselves at his attention, Katherine simply shines. As the summer becomes warmer and the court starts to go boating on the river and eating dinner in the lush fields around the city of London, the king comes often to Katherine’s bed, and though he dances with Bessie Blount, he sleeps with his wife.

In these sunny days I take the chance to ask the king if Reginald may stay in England.

“Ah, Lady Margaret, you have to say good-bye to your boy, but not for long,” he says pleasantly enough. I am walking beside him on the way back from the bowling green. Ahead of us are some of the queen’s ladies dawdling along with much affected laughter and playfulness, hoping that the king notices them.

“Every kingdom in Europe is taken up with the new learning,” Henry explains. “Everyone is writing papers, drawing plans, inventing machines, building great monuments. Every king, every duke, the lowliest lord wants scholars in his house, wants to be a patron. England needs scholars just as much as Rome does. And your son, they tell me, will be one of the greatest.”

“He is pleased to study,” I say. “Truly, I think he has a gift. And he is grateful to you for sending him to Oxford. We all are. But surely, he can be a scholar for you at Westminster as well as anywhere else, and he can live at home.”

“Padua,” the king rules. “Padua is where he must go. That’s where everything is happening, that’s where all the greatest scholars are. He needs to go there and learn all that he can, and then he can come home to us and bring the new learning to our universities, and publish his thoughts in English. He can translate the great texts that they are writing into English so that English scholars can study them. He can bring their scholarship to our universities. I expect great things of him.”

“Padua?”

“In Italy. And he can find and buy books for us and manuscripts, and translate them. He can dedicate them to me. He can found a library for me. He can direct Italian scholars to our court. He will be my scholar and servant in Padua. He will be a shining light. He will show Christendom that here in England we too are reading and studying and understanding. You know I have always loved scholarship, Lady Margaret. You know how impressed Erasmus was with me when I was just a boy! And all my tutors remarked that when I entered the Church I would be a great theologian. And a linguist too. I still write poetry, you know. If I had the chances that Reginald has before him, I don’t know what I might have been. If I had been raised as he has been, as a scholar, I would want to do nothing but study.”

“You’ve been very good to him.” I cannot shift the king from the flattering picture of his court as a center of the new learning and Reginald as his ambassador to an admiring world. “But surely he need not go at once?”

“Oh, as soon as possible, I would think,” Henry says grandly. “I will pay him an allowance and he has his fees from . . .” He turns, and Thomas Wolsey, who has been walking behind us and clearly listening, says: “Wimborne Minster.”

“Yes, that’s it. And there will be other livings he can have, Wolsey will see to it. Wolsey is so clever at giving men places and matching them to their needs. I want Reginald to be our representative; he must look like a well-regarded scholar in Padua and live like one. I am his patron, Lady Margaret, his position reflects my own scholarship. I want the world to know that I am a thoughtful man at the forefront of the new learning, a scholar-king.”

“I thank you,” I say. “It is just that we, his family, wanted to have him home with us for a while.”

Henry takes my hand and tucks it in the crook of his arm. “I know,” he says warmly. “I miss my mother too, you know. I lost her when I was younger than Reginald is now. But I had to bear it. A man has to go where his destiny calls him.”

The king strolls with my hand tucked under his arm. A pretty girl goes by and flashes a radiant smile at him. I can almost feel the burn of Henry’s interest as she curtseys, her fair head lowered.

“All the ladies seem to have changed their hoods,” Henry remarks. “What is this fashion that my sister has brought in? What are they wearing these days?”

“It’s the French hood,” I say. “The Dowager Queen of France brought it back with her. I think I shall change too. It’s a lot lighter and easier to wear.”

“Then Her Grace must wear them,” he says. He draws me a little closer. “She is well, do you think? We might be lucky this time? She tells me she has missed her course.”

“It’s very early days, but I hope so,” I say steadily. “I pray so. And she prays every day for the blessing of a child, I know.”

“So why does God not hear us?” he asks me. “Since she prays every day, and I pray every day, and you do too? And half of England as well? Why would God turn his face away from my wife and not give me a son?”

I am so horrified at him speaking this thought aloud to me, with Thomas Wolsey within earshot, that my feet stumble as if I am wading in mud. Henry slowly turns me to face him and we stand still. “It’s not wrong to ask such a question,” he insists, defensive as a child. “It’s not disloyal to Her Grace whom I love and always will. It’s not to challenge God’s will, so it’s not heretical. All I am saying is: why can any fat fool in a village get a son and the King of England cannot?”

“You might have one now,” I say weakly. “She might be carrying your son right now.”

“Or she might have one that dies.”

“Don’t say that!”

He shoots a suspicious glance at me. “Why not? D’you fear ill-wishing now? Do you think she is unlucky?”

I choke on my words. This young man asks me do I believe in ill-wishing when I know for a fact that his own mother cursed his father’s line, and I remember very clearly going down on my knees and praying God to punish the Tudors for the harm they have done to me and mine. “I believe in God’s will,” I say, avoiding the question. “And no woman as good and as dear and as holy as the queen could be anything but blessed.”

He is not comforted; he looks unhappy, as if I have not said enough for him. I cannot think what more he could want to hear. “I should be blessed,” he reminds me as if he were still a spoiled boy in a nursery that revolved around his childish will. “It is me that should be blessed. It can’t be right that I cannot have a son.”

ENGLAND, SUMMER 1515

The court goes on progress to the west, the queen traveling with them in a litter so that she does not get too tired. The king, eager as a boy, gets up at dawn every morning to go hunting, and comes back to wherever we are staying, shouting that he is starving! Starving to death! The cooks serve a huge breakfast at midday, sometimes in the hunting field where they put up a village of tents as if we were on campaign.

Thomas Wolsey travels with us, always riding a white mule as did the Lord, but his modest mount is tacked up in the best leather of cardinal red which I don’t believe was the preference of Jesus. The clerk from humble beginnings has made the greatest jump that any churchman can make, and now has a cardinal’s hat and is preceded everywhere by a silver cross and a household in full livery.

“The greatest ascent possible, unless he can persuade them to make him Pope,” the queen whispers through the curtains of her litter as I ride alongside her.

I laugh, but I cannot help but wonder what answer the cardinal would make if the king asked him why God did not bless him with a son. A churchman—so near to Rome, so well read, so high in the Church—must surely have an answer for the master who raised him up just because he could answer any question. I am certain that Henry will ask him. I am certain that his answer will be what Henry wants to hear; and I do wonder what that is.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1515

At last we hear from Scotland. The king’s sister the dowager queen Margaret has escaped from the country that she so markedly failed to rule and collapsed in a northern castle to give birth to a little girl, to be called Lady Margaret Douglas. God help the child, for her mother is in exile and her father has run back to Scotland. The dowager queen will have to make her way south to safety with her brother, and Queen Katherine sends her everything she could want for the journey.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1516

We are preparing the queen’s rooms for her confinement. Her ladies watch while the servants hang the rich tapestries from wall to wall, blotting out all light from the windows, and supervise the arranging of the gold and silver cups and plates in the cupboards. They will not be used by the queen, who will eat off her usual gold plates, but every confinement chamber has to be richly stocked to honor the prince who will be born here.

One of the ladies, Elizabeth Bryan now Carew, oversees the making of the huge bed of state with creamy white linen sheets, and the overlaying of the rich velvet spreads. She shows these careful preparations to the girls who are newly come to court; they have to know the correct rituals for the confinement of a queen. But it is no novelty to Bessie Blount and the other ladies, and we go about our work quietly, without excitement.

Bessie is so subdued that I stop to ask her if she is well. She looks so troubled that I draw her into the queen’s private chamber, and the dipping flame of the candle on the little altar throws her face alternately into golden light and shadows.

“It just feels like a waste of time for us, and grief for her,” she says.

“Hush!” I say instantly. “Take care what you say, Bessie.”

“But it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s not just me saying it. Everyone knows.”

“Everyone knows what?”

“That she will never give him a child,” Bessie whispers.

“Nobody can know that!” I exclaim. “Nobody can know what will happen! Perhaps this time she will give birth to a strong, bonny boy and he will be Henry, Duke of Cornwall, and grow to be Prince of Wales, and we will all be happy.”

“Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” she replies obediently enough; but her eyes slide away from me, as if the words in her mouth mean nothing, and in a moment she slips through the arched doorway and is gone.

As soon as the rooms are prepared, the queen goes into confinement, her lips folded in a grim line of determination. I go into the familiar shadowy rooms with her and, cravenly, I confess to myself that I don’t think I can bear to go through another death. If she has another son, I don’t think that I can find the courage to take him into my care. My fears have become so great that they have quite drowned out any hopes. I have become convinced that she will give birth to a dead child, or that any baby she has will die within days.

I feel only more gloomy when the king calls me to his side after Prime one morning, and walks with me in the early morning darkness back to the shadowy confinement chamber. “The queen’s father, King Ferdinand, has died,” he says to me shortly. “I don’t think we should tell her while she’s in confinement. Do you?”

“No,” I say instantly. There is an absolute rule that a queen in confinement should be kept from bad news. Katherine adored her father, though nobody can deny that he was a hard master to his little daughter. “You can tell her after the birth. She must not be distressed now.”

“But my sister Margaret went into confinement in fear of her life from the rebels,” he complains. “She barely got over the border to take refuge. And yet she had a healthy girl.”

“I know,” I say. “Her Grace the Queen of Scotland is a brave woman. But nobody could doubt the courage of our queen.”

“And she is well?” he asks, as if I am a physician, as if my assurance counts for anything.

“She is well,” I say stoutly. “I am confident.”

“Are you?”

There is only one answer that he wants to hear. Of course I say it: “Yes.”

I try to act as if I am confident as I greet her brightly every morning and kneel beside her at the grille where the priest comes three times a day to pray. When he asks for God’s blessing on the fertility of the mother and the health of the baby, I say “Amen” with conviction, and sometimes I feel her hand creep into mine as if she seeks assurance from me. I always take her fingers in a firm grip. I never allow a shadow of doubt in my eyes, never a hesitant word from my mouth. Even when she whispers to me: “Sometimes, Margaret, I fear that there is something wrong.”

I never say: “And you are right. What you fear is a terrible curse.” Instead, always I look her in the eye and declare: “Every wife in the world, every woman that I know has lost at least one baby and gone on to have more. You come from a fertile family and you are young and strong, and the king is a man among men. Nobody can doubt his vigor and his strength, nobody can doubt that you are fertile as your emblem, the pomegranate. This time, Katherine, this time I am certain.”

She nods. I see her staunch little smile as she enforces confidence on herself. “Then I will be hopeful,” she says. “If you are. If you really are.”

“I am,” I lie.

It is an easier birth than the last one, and when the midwives cry out that they can see the little bloody crown of the head, and Katherine clutches at my arm, I have a moment when I think, perhaps this is a strong baby? Perhaps all will be well.

I grip her hand and tell her to wait, and then the midwives exclaim that the baby is coming, and that she must push. Katherine grits her teeth and holds back a groan of pain. She believes—some devout fool has told her—that a queen does not cry out in childbirth, and her neck is straining like the bough of a twisted tree in the effort to hold herself regally silent, as hushed as the Virgin Mary.

Then there is a cry, a loud complaining bawl, Katherine gives a hoarse sob, and everyone is exclaiming that the baby is here. Katherine turns a frightened face to me and says: “He lives?”

There is another flurry of activity, her face contorts with pain, and the midwife says: “A girl. A girl, a live girl, Your Grace.”

I am almost sick with disappointment for the queen, but then I hear the baby cry, a good loud shout, and I am overwhelmed at the thought that she lives, that there is a live child, a live child in this room that has seen so many deaths.

“Let me see her!” Katherine says.

They wrap her in scented linen and pass her to her mother, while the midwives busy themselves, and Katherine sniffs at the damp head as if she were a cat in a basket with a litter of kittens, and the baby stops crying and snuffles against her mother’s neck.

Katherine freezes and looks down. “Is she breathing?”

“Yes, yes, she’s just hungry,” one of the midwives pronounces, smiling. “Will you give her to the wet nurse, Your Grace?”

Reluctantly, Katherine hands her over to the plump woman. She does not take her eyes off the little bundle for one moment.

“Sit beside me,” she says. “Let me watch her feed.”

The woman does as she is ordered. This is a new wet nurse; I couldn’t bear to have the same woman who had fed the previous baby. I wanted everything new: new linen, new swaddling bands; new cradle, new nurse. I wanted nothing to be the same, so I am dreading what happens now, as the queen turns to me and says gravely: “Dear Margaret, will you tell His Grace?”

This is no honor anymore, I think, as I go slowly from the overheated room and step into the cold hall. Unbidden, my son Montague is waiting for me outside. I am so relieved to see him that I could weep. I take his arm.

“I thought you might want someone to walk with?” he asks.

“I do,” I say shortly.

“The baby?”

“Alive. A girl.”

He purses his lips at the thought that we may have to tell the king disagreeable news, and we walk swiftly in silence, down the hall together to the king’s private rooms. He is waiting, Cardinal Wolsey at his side, his companions quiet and anxious. They do not wait with excitement and confidence anymore, cups filled in their hands ready for a toast. I see Arthur among them and he nods to me, his face pale with anxiety.

“Your Grace, I am happy to tell you that you have a daughter,” I say to King Henry.

There is no mistaking the joy that leaps into his face. Anything, as long as he has got a live child on his queen. “She is well?” he demands hopefully.

“She is well and strong. I left her at the wet nurse’s breast and she is feeding.”

“And Her Grace?”

“She is well. Better than ever before.”

He comes towards me and takes my arm to speak quietly to me, so that no one, not even the cardinal following behind, can hear. “Lady Margaret, you’ve had many children . . .”

“Five,” I reply.

“All live births?”

“I lost one in the early months, once. It’s usual, Your Grace.”

“I know. I know. But does this baby look strong? Can you tell? Will she live?”

“She looks strong,” I say.

“Are you sure? Lady Margaret, you would tell me if you had doubts, wouldn’t you?”

I look at him with compassion. How will anyone ever find the courage to tell him anything that does not please him? How will this indulged boy ever learn wisdom in manhood if nobody ever dares to say no to him? How will he learn to judge a liar from a true man if everyone, even the truest, cannot speak a word to him that is not good news?

“Your Grace, I am telling you the truth: she looks well and strong now. What will become of her only God can say. But the queen has been safely delivered of a bonny girl, and they are both doing well this afternoon.”

“Thank God,” he says. “Amen.” He is deeply moved, I can see it. “Thank God,” he says again.

He turns to the waiting court. “We have a girl!” he announces. “Princess Mary.”

Everyone cheers; no one reveals the slightest anxiety. No one would dare to show the slightest doubt. “Hurrah! God save the princess! God save the queen! God save the king!” they all say.

King Henry turns back to me with the question that I am dreading. “And will you be her Lady Governess, my dear Lady Margaret?”

I cannot do it. I really cannot do it this time. I cannot once again lie sleepless, waiting for the gasp of shock from the nursery and the noise of running feet and the knock on my door, the white-faced girl crying that the baby has just stopped breathing, for no reason, for no reason at all, and will I come and see? And who will tell the queen?

My son Montague meets my eyes and nods. He need do nothing more to remind me that we all have to endure things we would prefer to avoid, if we are to keep our titles and our lands and our favored place at court. Reginald has to go far away from his home, Arthur has to smile and play tennis when his back is wrenched from jousting, he has to climb back on a horse which has thrown him and laugh as if he has no fear. Montague has to lose at cards when he would rather not bet, and I have to watch over a baby whose life is unbearably uncertain.

“I shall be honored,” I say, and I make my face smile.

The king turns to Lord John Hussey. “And will you be her guardian?” he asks him.

Lord John bows his head as if overwhelmed by the honor, but when he looks up, he meets my eye, and I see in his face my own silent dread.

We christen her quickly, as if we don’t dare to wait, in the chapel of the Observant Friars nearby, as if we don’t dare to take her farther afield in the cold wintry air. And she is confirmed in her faith in the same service, as if we can’t be sure she will live long enough to make her own vows. I stand sponsor for her confirmation, taking her vows for her as if they will make her safe when the plague winds blow, when the sickly mists rise from the river, when the cold gales rattle the shutters. When I take the holy oil on my forehead and the candle in my hand, I cannot help but wonder if she will live long enough for me to tell her that she was confirmed in the faith of the Church and that I stood proxy for her and prayed desperately for her little soul.

Her godmother, my cousin Catherine, carries her down the aisle, and hands her at the church door to the other godmother, Agnes Howard, Duchess of Norfolk. As the ladies file by, each one dipping a little curtsey to the royal baby, the duchess hands her back to me. She is not a sentimental woman, she does not love to hold a baby; I see her brisk nod at her stepdaughter Lady Elizabeth Boleyn. Gently, I put the little princess in the arms of her Lady Mistress, Margaret Bryan, and I walk alongside her, wrapped in ermine against the cold wind blowing down the Thames valley, yeomen of the guard around me, the cloth of estate carried over our regal heads, and all the ladies of the baby’s nursery following me.

It is a moment of greatness for me, even grandeur. I am Lady Governess of the royal baby and heir; I should be relishing this moment. But I can’t revel in it. All I can do, all I want to do, is to go on my knees and pray that this baby lives longer than her poor little brothers.

ENGLAND, SUMMER 1517

The sweating sickness comes to London. The Dowager Queen of Scotland, Margaret, hopes to avoid it by traveling north, returning to her own country to rejoin her husband and son. As soon as she leaves, the king orders that the court pack up and go to Richmond, farther away from the dirt and the smells and the low-lying mists of the city.

“He’s gone on ahead with just a riding court,” my son Montague tells me, leaning on the doorway of my room and watching my maids go one way and another, packing all of our goods into traveling chests. “He’s terrified.”

“Hush,” I say cautiously.

“It’s no secret that he’s sick with fear.” Montague steps inside and closes the door behind him. “He’d admit it himself. He has a holy terror of all diseases but the Sweat is his particular dread.”

“No wonder, since it was his father who brought it in, and it killed his brother Arthur,” I remark. “They called it the Tudor curse even then. They said that the reign had begun in sweat and would end in tears.”

“Well, please God they were wrong,” my son says cheerfully. “Will the queen come with us today?”

“As soon as she’s ready. But she’s making a pilgrimage to pray at Walsingham later in the month. You won’t see her change her plans for the Sweat.”

“No, she doesn’t imagine herself dying with every cough,” he says. “Poor lady. Is she going to pray for another child?”

“Of course.”

“She still hopes for a boy?”

“Of course.”

Reports of the disease grow worse, and worse still in the telling. It is the most terrifying of sicknesses because of its speed. A man at dinnertime, reporting to his household that he is well and strong, and that they are lucky to have escaped, will complain of a headache and heat in the evening and will be dead by sunset. Nobody knows why the disease goes from one place to another, nor why it takes one healthy man but spares another. Cardinal Wolsey takes the disease and we are all prepared to hear of his death, but the cardinal survives it. Henry the king is not comforted by this; he is completely determined to escape even the breath of it.

We stay at Richmond and then one of the servers takes ill. Henry is at once plunged into terror at the thought that a boy under the wing of death handed him his meat; he thinks of the poor victim as an assassin. The whole court packs up to leave. Every head of each service is told to go through his staff and examine each one minutely, demand of every man if he has any symptoms, any heat, any pain, any faintness. Of course, everyone denies that he is ill—nobody wants to be left behind with the dying page boy at Richmond; and besides, the disease comes on so fast that by the time everyone has sworn to good health, the first of them could be taking to their beds.

We rush downriver to Greenwich, where the clean air smells of salt from the sea, and the king insists that the rooms are swept and washed daily and that no one comes too close to him. The king, who is supposed to be blessed with a healing touch, will let no one come near him at all.

He is distracted from his fears by the Spanish, who send an embassy hoping for an alliance against France, and under their urbane scrutiny we pretend for weeks that there is nothing wrong, that the kingdom is not dogged by sickness and that our king is not terrified. As ever with the king, when he is meeting with the Spanish he prizes his Spanish wife more highly, so he is kind and attentive to the queen, listening to her advice, admiring her elegant conversation with the emissaries in their language, coming to her bed at night, resting in her clean sheets. Her dear friend Maria de Salinas has married an English nobleman, William Willoughby, and there are compliments about the natural love between the two countries. There are feasts and celebrations and jousts, and for a brief while it is like the old days; but after the Spanish visitors ride away we hear of sickness in the village of Greenwich, and the king decides that he would be safer at Windsor Castle.

This time, he shuts down the court altogether. Only the queen, a small riding court of the king’s friends, and his personal doctor are allowed to travel with them. I go to my own house at Bisham and pray that the Sweat passes us by in Berkshire.

But death follows the Tudor king, just as it followed his father. The pages who serve in his bedchamber take the illness, and when one of them dies, the king is certain that death is tracking him like a dark hound. He goes into hiding, leaves all his servants behind, abandons his friends and, taking only the queen and his doctor, travels from one house to another like a guilty man seeking sanctuary.

He sends outriders ahead, wherever he plans to go, and the king’s doctor interrogates his hosts, asking if anyone is ill in the house, or if the Sweat has passed them by. Henry will only go to a house where he is assured that everyone is well, but even so, time and again, he has to order that the horses be saddled and they rush on, because a lady’s maid complained of the heat at noon, or a child was crying with toothache. The court loses its dignity and its elegance careering from one house to another, leaving furniture, linen, even silverware behind in the confusion. The king’s hosts cannot prepare for him, and when they have ordered in costly food and entertainment, he declares that it is not safe, and he cannot stay. While other people rest at home, try to avoid travel, discourage strangers, and quietly, trustingly, put their faith in God, the king roams the countryside demanding safety in a dangerous world, trying to get a guarantee in an uncertain realm, as if he fears that the very air and streams of England are poison to the man whose father claimed them against their will.

In London, a leaderless city plagued with illness, the apprentices take to the streets in running riots, demanding to know: Where is the king? Where is the Lord Chancellor? Where are the Lord Mayor and the City fathers? Is London to be abandoned? How far will the king run? Will he go to Wales? To Ireland? Beyond? Why does he not stand alongside his people and share their troubles?

The common people—fainting as they walk behind the plow, resting their burning heads on their workbenches, the brewers dropping down their malting spoons and saying they have to rest, the spinners lying down with a fever and not getting up—the common people take against the young king whom they had adored. They say that he is a coward, running away from the sickness that they cannot escape, fearful of the disease that carries his name. They curse him, saying that his Tudor father brought in death and now the son abandons them to its pains.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1517

Released from court by the king’s flight, I am not required to care for Princess Mary, who is safe and well in her nursery. I can take the summer to myself, working on my own buildings, my own lands, my own farms, my own profit and—at long last—the marriage of my son Montague.

Now that we have our fortune and our name restored he is the most eligible bachelor in England. I will match him only to a great heiress whose fortune will enhance ours, or to a girl with a great name. Of course, I don’t have to look very far. Montague spent his childhood in the nursery of my cousin George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, and was with his cousin Jane almost every day. The boys were educated together as young noblemen should be, they did not share lessons with the daughters of the house; but he saw her at dinner, at church, and at the great feast days and holidays. When the dancing master came, they were paired together; when the lute master played, they sang duets. When the household went hunting, she followed his lead over hedges and stiles. He was thoughtlessly fond of her, as young boys can be, and she set her heart on him, as silly young girls will.

When they grew older, living in the same household, traveling from one great palace to another, she emerged from the schoolroom and he saw her make that transformation, almost alchemical, from a little girl, a playmate, an uninteresting creature, rather like an inferior brother, into a young woman: a thing of mystery, a beauty.

It is Montague who asks me what I think of a match between him and Jane. He does not demand it like a fool, for he knows what is due to his name. He suggests it, cautiously, and tells me that he likes her better than any other young woman he has seen at court.

I ask: “Better than Bessie Blount?” who is popular with all the young men of the court for her sweetness and radiant beauty.

“Better than anyone,” he says. “But it is for you to judge, Lady Mother.”

I think it a happy ending to a hard story. Without the help of her father, my cousin, I could not have fed my children. Now, I am happy that he should profit from his loyalty and care for me and my family by making his daughter Lady Pole, with a jointure of two hundred pounds for now and the prospect of my fortune and title after my death. In marrying my son she nets herself a great title and vast lands. And she is an heiress in her own right, she will bring a fortune as her dowry, and on the death of my cousin George she will inherit half of his wealth. My cousin George Neville is growing old and he has only two girls; it happens that Montague’s fancy has lit on a great heiress and hers on him.

Their children will be Plantagenets from both sides, doubly royal, and will be ornaments to the Tudor court and supporters of their Tudor cousins. Without a doubt they will have handsome children. My son is a tall, good-looking young man of twenty-five, and his bride matches him, her fair head coming up to his shoulder. I hope she is fertile, but as my cousin George says as he signs the detailed marriage contract: “I think we can be confident—eh, Cousin? No Plantagenets ever failed to make a son.”

“Hush,” I say without thinking as I put sealing wax into the candle flame and impress it with the insignia on my ring, the white rose.

“Actually, the king remarks on it himself. He asks everyone why a man as lusty and strong and handsome as himself should not have a son in the nursery by now. Three or four sons in the nursery by now. What do you think? Is it some weakness in the queen? She comes from good breeding stock, after all. What can be wrong? Can it be that the marriage is not blessed?”

“I won’t hear of it.” I make a gesture with my hand as if to halt an army of whispers. “I won’t hear of it, and I won’t speak of it. And I tell all her ladies that they are not to discuss it. Because if it were to be true: what would happen? She’s still his wife, baby or no baby, she’s still Queen of England. She bears all the pain and sorrow of their losses, must she bear the blame as well? To gossip about it and to slander her can only make it worse for her.”

“Would she ever step aside?” he asks very softly.

“She can’t,” I say simply. “She believes that God called her to be Queen of England and made great and terrible changes so that she took the crown beside the king. She has given him a princess, and God willing they will have a son. Otherwise, what are we saying? That a marriage should end because a man does not have a son in eight years? In five years? Is a wife to be a leasehold that he can cancel on quarter day? It is ‘in sickness and in health, till death us do part,’ it is not ‘until I have doubts.’ ”

My cousin smiles. “She has a staunch defender in you,” he says.

“You should be glad of it.” I gesture at the contract. “Your daughter will marry my son and they will swear to be parted only by death. Only if marriage lasts without doubt till death can your daughter, or any woman, be sure of her future. The queen would not overthrow the safety of every woman in England by agreeing that a husband can put a wife aside at will. She would be no good queen to the women of England if she did that.”

“He has to have an heir,” he points out.

“He can name his heir,” I point out. I allow myself the smallest of smiles. “After all, there are heirs,” I say. My cousin’s daughter is marrying one of them, my son Montague. “There are many heirs.”

My cousin is silent for a moment as he thinks of how close we are to the throne. “The return of the Plantagenets,” he says very quietly. “Ironic, if after all this, it should come back to one of us.”

WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, SPRING 1518

Christmas comes and goes; but the king does not return to his capital city, nor does he summon the court to his feast. I visit the baby princess in her nursery at Greenwich and find the palace free from any disease and the little girl chattering and playing and learning to dance.

I spend a happy week with Mary, hand-clasped, obeying her imperious demands to dance up and down the long galleries, while it grows colder and colder and finally snows outside the windows that overlook the river. She is an adorable child, and I leave her with a pile of gifts and the promise to return soon.

The queen writes that they have moved to Southampton, so they can buy provisions that come in from the Flanders merchants; the king does not want English goods, fearing that they are contaminated. He will not let his hosts’ servants go to the town market.

We see no one but the king’s closest friends that he cannot do without. The king will not even receive letters from the City for fear of the disease. Cardinal Wolsey writes to him on special paper from Richmond Palace and is living there, ruling like a king himself. He hears pleas from all over the country and decides on them in the royal presence chamber, seated on a throne. I have urged the king to return home to Westminster and open the court for Easter but the cardinal is firmly against me, and the king listens to no one else. The cardinal fills his letters with warnings of disease and the king thinks it safer to stay away.

I burn the queen’s letter to me, from the old habit of caution, but her words stay with me. The thought of the court of England, my family’s court, hiding like outlaws from the natural lords and advisors, living near a port so they can buy food from foreigners rather than honest fare in the English markets, taking advice only from one man, and he not a Plantagenet, not even a duke, nor a lord, but a man dedicated to his own rise, troubles me very deeply as I celebrate the turn of the year at the heart of my newly built home, and ride around the fields where my people are walking behind the plow, and the plowshare is turning over the rich earth.

I would not choose to live anywhere but on my own lands, I would not eat anything that we have not grown. I would not be served by anyone but my own people. I am a Plantagenet born and bred in the heart of my country. I would never willingly leave. So why does the king, whose father spent his life trying to get to England and risked his life to win it, not feel this deep, loving connection to his kingdom?

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, EASTER 1518

We celebrate the feast of Easter at Bisham, with just our family. The royal court, still closed to everyone but Henry’s inner circle and the cardinal, is now traveling near Oxford. I begin to wonder if they will ever come home to their capital city.

The cardinal is trusted with all the business of the realm, as no one can see the king; he will not even receive documents. Everything goes to Wolsey and his ever-expanding household. His clerks write the royal letters, his surveyors know the price of everything, his advisors judge how things should be, and his favorite, Thomas More, who has risen to be the trusted go-between for king and cardinal, is now given the huge responsibility of the health of the court. He commands that any household in the kingdom with a sick member has to show a bundle of hay at the door so that anyone can see the sign and keep away.

People complain that the lawyer More is persecuting the poor by marking them out, but I write to the young lawyer to thank him for his care of the king, and when I hear that he is ill himself, I send him a bottle of oils of my own distilling which are said to reduce fever.

“You’re very generous,” my son Montague observes as he sees the carrier take a basket of precious medicines directed to Thomas More at Abingdon, near Oxford. “I didn’t know that More was a friend of ours.”

“If he’s the favorite of the cardinal, then he’ll be close to the king,” I say simply. “And if he’s close to the king, then I would want him to think kindly of us.”

My son laughs. “We’re safe now, you know,” he points out to me. “Perhaps everyone had to buy the friendship of the court in the old days, when the old king was on the throne, but Henry’s advisors are no threat to us. No one would turn him against us now.”

“It’s a habit,” I admit. “All my life I have lived on the favor of the court. I know no other way to survive.”

Since none of us is invited to the tiny court that is allowed to live with the king, my kinsmen the Nevilles and the Staffords come to stay for a sennight to celebrate the end of Lent and the festival of Easter. The Duke of Buckingham, Edward Stafford, my second cousin, brings with him his son, Henry, sixteen years old and a bright, charming boy. My boy Geoffrey is only three years his junior, and the two cousins take a liking to each other and disappear for a whole day at a time, riding at the ring in the jousting arena, hawking, even fishing in the cold water of the Thames and bringing home a fat salmon which they insist on cooking themselves in the kitchen, to the outrage of the cook.

We indulge their pride, and have trumpeters announce the arrival of the dish in the dining room, where it is carried shoulder-high in triumph, and the three hundred people of our combined households who sit down to dinner in my great hall rise to their feet and applaud the noble salmon and the grinning young fishermen.

“Have you heard when the court will return?” George Neville asks Edward Stafford when dinner is over and we cousins and our boys are seated in my private chamber and at ease with wine and sweetmeats before the fire.

His face darkens. “If the cardinal has his way, he will keep the king apart from his court forever,” he says shortly. “I am ordered not to come to him. Banned from court? Why would such a thing be? I am well, my household is well. It’s nothing to do with illness; it is that the cardinal fears the king will listen to me—that’s why I am barred from attending on him.”

“My lords,” I say carefully. “Cousins. We must watch our words.”

George smiles at me and puts his hand over mine. “You’re always cautious,” he says. To the duke he nods. “Can’t you just go to the king, even without permission, and tell him that the cardinal is not serving his interests? Surely, he’d listen to you. We’re a great family of the realm, we have nothing to gain by causing trouble, he can trust our advice.”

“He doesn’t listen to me,” Edward Stafford says irritably. “He doesn’t listen to anyone. Not to the queen, not to me, not to any of the great men of the realm who carry blood as good or better than his, and who know as well as he does, or better, how the kingdom should be ruled. And I cannot just go to him. He won’t admit anyone to his court unless he is assured that they are not carrying disease. And who do you think is judge of that? Not even a doctor—the cardinal’s new assistant, Thomas More!”

I nod to my sons, Montague and Arthur, to leave the room. It may be safe to speak against the cardinal; there are very few lords of the land who do not speak against him. But I would rather my sons didn’t hear it. If anyone ever asks them, they can truthfully say that they heard nothing.

They both hesitate to go. “Nobody could doubt our loyalty to the king,” Montague says for both of them.

The Duke of Buckingham gives a reluctant laugh, more like a growl. “Nobody had better doubt mine,” he says. “I have breeding as good as the king himself, better in fact. Who believes in loyalty to the throne more than a royal? I don’t challenge the king. I never would. But I do question the motives and the advancement of that damned butcher’s son.”

“I think, Lord Uncle, that the cardinal’s father was a merchant?” Montague queries.

“What difference does that make to me?” Buckingham demands. “Tinker or tailor or beggar? Since my father was a duke and his grandfather was a duke, and my great-great-great-great-grandfather was King of England?”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1518

The king’s Knight Harbinger rides up to my front door, with half a dozen yeomen of the guard riding with him, glances at the new stonework that shows my proud crest over the door of my old family home, and dismounts. His eyes travel over the newly renovated towers, the handsome retiled roofs, the meadows that run down to the wide river, the well-tilled fields, the haystacks, the gold of the wheat and the rich greenish shimmer of the barley in the fields. He counts—I know without even seeing the greed in his eyes—the wealth of my fields, the fatness of my cattle, the prosperity of this rolling vast expanse of lush countryside that I own.

“Good day,” I say, stepping out of the great door in my riding gown, a plain hood on my head, the very picture of a working landlord with great lands in her stewardship.

He bows very low, as he should. “Your ladyship, I am sent from the king to say that he will come to stay with you for eight nights, if there is no illness in the village.”

“We are all well, thanks be to God,” I reply. “And the king and court will be welcome here.”

“I see that you can house them,” he says, conceding the grandeur of my house. “We’ve been in much more modest quarters recently. May I speak to the steward of your household?”

I turn and nod, and James Upsall steps forward. “Sir?”

“I have a list of rooms required.” The Knight Harbinger pulls a rolled scroll of paper from an inner pocket in his jacket. “And I shall have to see every one of your stable lads and household servants. I have to see for myself that they are well.”

“Please assist the Knight Harbinger,” I say calmly to Upsall, who is bristling at this high-handed treatment. “When will His Grace the King arrive?”

“Within the week,” the harbinger replies, and I nod as if this is an everyday matter to me, and go quietly into my house, where I pick up my gown and run to tell Montague and Jane, Arthur and Ursula, and especially Geoffrey, that the king himself is coming to Bisham and everything must be absolutely perfect.

Montague himself rides out with the waymarkers and sets up the signs on the road to make sure that the scurriers who go ahead of the court cannot possibly get lost. Behind them will come yeomen of the guard, making sure that the countryside is safe and that there is no point where the king might be ambushed, or attacked. They come into the stables and dismount from their sweating horses, and Geoffrey, who has been on faithful lookout all the morning, comes running to tell me that the guards are here so the court cannot be far behind.

We are ready. My son Arthur, who knows the king’s tastes better than any of us, has ordered musicians and rehearsed them; they will play after dinner for dancing. He has arranged the loan of good horses for hunting from all our neighbors, to supplement the full stable of hunters that will come with the court. Arthur has warned our tenants that the king will ride all over their fields and woodland and any damage to crops will be settled up when the visit is over. They are strictly forbidden to complain before then. The tenants have been primed to cheer the king and shout blessings whenever they see him; they may not present complaints or requests. I have sent my steward to every local market to buy up delicacies and cheeses, while Montague sends his own man to London to raid the cellar at L’Erber for the best wines.

Ursula and I set the groom of the ewery to bring out the very best of linen for the two best bedrooms, the king’s room on the west side of the building and the queen’s at the east. Geoffrey runs errands from one room to another, from one tower to another, but even he, in his boyish glee, is not more excited than I that the King of England will sleep under my roof, that everyone will see that I am restored to my place, in the home of my forefathers, and that the King of England is a visiting friend.

It is odd that the best part of it, the best moment—after all the work of preparation and the boastful joy—is when Geoffrey stands by my side as I help Katherine out of her litter and see her face radiant, and she clings to me as if she were my little sister and not my queen, and whispers in my ear: “Margaret! Guess why I am in a litter and not riding?”

And when I hesitate, afraid to say what I am suddenly, wildly hoping, she laughs aloud and hugs me again. “Yes! Yes! It’s true. I am with child.”

It is clear they have been happy together, away from the court, the place servers and flatterers banned from the king’s presence. She has been attended by only a few of her ladies—no flirtatious girls. For a full year they have lived like a private couple with only a handful of friends and companions. Henry has been starved of the constant flood of attention and praise, and it has done him good. In the absence of others they have enjoyed each other’s company. Whenever Henry pays attention to Katherine, she blooms under the warmth of his affection, and he discovers again the steady wisdom and the genuine learning of the charming woman whom he married for love.

“Except I am afraid the king is neglecting his rule,” she says.

“Neglecting?”

Nobody could be a better judge of monarchy than Katherine of Aragon; she was raised to believe that ruling a kingdom is a holy duty to pray for last thing at night, and think of as you wake. When Henry was a little boy, he felt the same, but he has grown to be casual with the work of kingship. When the queen was regent for England, she met with her councillors every day, consulted the experts, took advice from the great lords, and read and signed every single document that was released from the court. When Henry came home, he devoted himself to hunting.

“He leaves all the work to the cardinal,” she says. “And I am afraid that some of the lords may feel that they have been ignored.”

“They have been ignored,” I say bluntly.

She lowers her eyes. “Yes, I know,” she concedes. “And the cardinal is well rewarded for his work.”

“What is he getting now?” I demand. I can hear the irritation in my own voice. I smile, and touch her sleeve. “Forgive me, I too think that the cardinal rules too widely and is paid too much.”

“Favorites are always expensive,” she smiles. “But this new honor will cost the king little. It is from the Holy Father. The cardinal is to be made a papal legate.”

I gasp. “A papal legate? Thomas Wolsey is to rule the Church?”

She raises her eyebrows and nods.

“No one above him but the Pope?”

“No one,” she observes. “At least he is a peacemaker. I suppose we should be glad of that. He is proposing a peace between us and France and the marriage of my daughter to the dauphin.”

With quick sympathy I put my hand on hers. “She’s only two,” I say. “That’s a long way off. It might never happen; there is certain to be a quarrel with France before she has to go.”

“Yes,” she concedes. “But the cardinal—forgive me, His Lordship the Papal Legate—always seems to get what he wants.”

Everything goes smoothly on the royal visit. The king admires the house, enjoys the hunting, gambles with Montague, rides with Arthur. The queen walks around the grounds with me, smilingly praises my presence chamber, my privy chamber, my bedroom. She recognizes the joy that I take in my house, and in the knowledge that I have all my other houses returned to me. She admires my treasure room and my records room and understands that the running of this, my kingdom, is my pride and my joy.

“You were born for a great place,” she says. “You must have had a wonderful year, organizing a wedding and getting everything just as you want it here.”

When the court moves on, they will take Arthur with them. The king swears that no one can keep up with him in the hunting field like Arthur.

“He is to make me a gentleman of the privy chamber.” Arthur comes to my room on the last night.

“A what?”

“It’s a new order of the household that the king is making. All his best friends, just as we are now, but we are to be attached to the privy chamber—just like the King of France has his gentlemen. Henry wants to do whatever the King of France does. He wants to rival him. So we are to have a privy chamber and I am to be one of the very, very few gentlemen.”

“And what will your duties be?”

He laughs. “As now, I think. To be merry.”

“And drink too much,” I supplement.

“To be merry and drink too much, and flirt with ladies.”

“And lead the king into bad ways?”

“Alas, Lady Mother, the king is a young man, and every day he seems younger. He can lead himself into bad ways, he doesn’t need me as his waymarker.”

“Arthur, my boy, I know you can’t stop him, but there are some young ladies who would be happy to break the heart of his wife. If you could steer him away from them . . .”

He nods. “I know. And I know how dear she is to you, and God knows that England could not have a better queen. He would never do anything disrespectful; he loves her truly, it is just . . .”

“If you can keep the king to light pleasures, with women who remember that courtly love is a game, and that it should be played lightly, you would be doing the queen and the country a service.”

“I would always want to serve the queen. But not even William Compton, not even Charles Brandon can lead the king.” Arthur’s face lightens with laughter. “And, Mother, nothing can stop him from falling in love. It is quite ridiculous! He is the oddest mixture of lust and primness. He will see a pretty girl, a laundress in a dye shop, and he could have her for a penny. But instead he has to write a poem to her and speak words of love before he can do an act that most of us would finish and be done with in minutes on the drying green, hidden by the wet sheets.”

“Yes, and it’s this that troubles the queen,” I say. “The words of love, not the penny, not the business of minutes.”

“That’s the king for you.” Arthur shrugs. “He doesn’t want the momentary pleasure, he wants words of love.”

“From a laundress in a dye shop?”

“From anyone.” Arthur says. “He is chivalric.”

He says it as if it were an affliction, and I have to laugh.

I bid the court farewell and I don’t travel with them. Instead, I go to London and visit the Princess Mary for a few weeks and then on to the silk merchants, for I have much to buy. My daughter Ursula is to be married from home this autumn. I have won for her a truly great marriage, and I will celebrate it as my own triumph as well as her happiness. She is to marry Henry Stafford, the son and heir of my cousin Edward, the Duke of Buckingham. She will be a duchess and one of the greatest landowners in England. We will make a new link to our cousins, the greatest ducal family in the land.

“He’s a child,” she says shortly when I tell her the news. “When he was here at Easter, he was Geoffrey’s little playmate.”

“He’s seventeen, he’s a man,” I say.

“I’m twenty years old!” she exclaims. “I don’t want to marry one of Geoffrey’s little friends. Mother, how can I? How can I marry my younger brother’s playmate? I will look like a fool.”

“You’ll look like an heiress,” I say. “And later on, in good time, you’ll look like a duchess. You will find that a great compensation for anything you feel now.”

She shakes her head; but she knows that she has no choice, and we both know that I am right. “And where will we live?” she asks sulkily. “Because I can’t live here with Geoffrey, and see the two of them running out to play every morning.”

“He’s a young man. He will grow out of play,” I say patiently. “But in any case you will live with the duke, his father, who will bring you to court to live in the Buckingham rooms there. I will see you there and you will continue to serve the queen when you are at court. But you’ll go into dinner practically on her heels. You will outrank almost every other woman but the royal princesses.”

I see her face warm to the thought of that, and I hide a smile. “Yes, think of it! You’ll have a greater title than mine. You’ll go ahead of me, Ursula.”

“Oh, will I?”

“Yes. And when you’re not at court, you will live at one of His Grace’s houses.”

“Where?” she asks.

I laugh. “I don’t know which one. At any one of his twelve castles, I suppose. I have provided well for you, Ursula, I have provided for you outstandingly well. You will be a wealthy young woman on your wedding day, even before your father-in-law dies, and when he does, your husband will inherit everything.”

She hesitates. “But will the duke wait on the king anymore? I thought Arthur said that it is always the papal legate who advises the king now, not the lords.”

“The Duke of Buckingham will attend court,” I assure her. “No king can rule without the support of the great lords, not even with Thomas Wolsey doing all the work. The king knows that, his father knew that. The king will never quarrel with his great lords, that is the way to divide the country. The duke has such great lands, and so many men under his command, so many faithful tenants, that no one can rule England without him. Of course he will go to court as one of the greatest lords of the land, and you will be respected everywhere as his daughter and the next Duchess of Buckingham.”

Ursula is no fool. She will disregard the childishness of her new husband for the riches and position that he can bring to her. And she understands something more: “The Stafford family are directly descended from Edward III,” she observes. “They are of royal blood.”

“No less than us,” I agree.

“If I were to have a son, he would be Plantagenet on both sides,” she points out. “Royal on both sides.”

I shrug. “You are of the old royal family of England,” I say. “Nothing can change that. Your son will inherit royal blood. Nothing can change that. But it is the Tudors who are on the throne, the queen is with child, if she has a boy, then he is a Tudor prince—and nothing can change that either.”

I don’t object to improving myself through the rise of a daughter who will be a duchess one day, because, for the first time, I have a moment’s doubt about my own position at court. From the very first moment that he came to the throne, the king has done nothing but single me out for favor: raising me, restoring me to my family lands, giving me the greatest of titles, seeing that I have the best rooms at court, encouraging the queen to appoint me as a principal lady and, of course, trusting me with the future guidance and education of the princess. He could do nothing more to show to the world that I am a favored royal kinswoman. I am one of the wealthiest lords of the country; I am by far the wealthiest woman, and the only one with a title and lands in my own right.

But some sort of shadow has fallen, though I cannot tell why. The king is less free with his smiles, less pleased to see us—me and all my wider family. Arthur remains his favorite, Montague is still in the inner circle, but all the older cousins—the Duke of Buckingham, George Neville, Edward Neville—are slowly being edged out of the king’s privy chamber to join the less-favored guests in the presence chamber outside.

The riding court that the king lived with for his year of exile during the Sweat has become his inner circle, a private ring of friends all his age and younger. They even have a name for themselves: they call themselves the “minions”—the king’s boon companions.

My cousins, especially Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and George Neville, are too old and too dignified to act like fools to amuse the king. There is an incident when the young men ride their horses up the stairs of the palace and canter round the presence chamber; this is supposed to be the best sport. Someone balances a jug of water over a door, and an ambassador coming on a state visit is drenched. They ambush the kitchen in a miniature military raid and capture dinner and ransom it back to the court, who have to eat it cold after the roasted meats have been speared and thrown hand to hand; nobody thinks this is funny but the young men themselves. They go into London and charge through a market and overturn the stalls, breaking the goods and spoiling the wares, they drink themselves to a standstill and vomit in the fireplaces and they pester the women servants of the court till there is not one honest woman left in the dairy.

Of course, my older kinsmen are excluded from such sports, but they say that it is more serious than high spirits and young men at play. While Henry roisters with the minions, all the work of the kingdom is done by his smiling helper, Cardinal Wolsey. All the gifts and privileges and high-paying places pass through the cardinal’s soft, warm hands, and many of them slide up his capacious red sleeves. Henry is in no hurry to invite grave older councillors back into his presence to question his increasing enthusiasm for another handsome young king, Francis of France, and will not hear anything about the increasing folly and extravagance of his friends.

So I am anxious he is thinking of me as one of the dull old people, and I am worried when he tells me one day that he thinks his grant to me of some of my manors in Somerset was a mistake—for they should really belong to the Crown.

“I don’t think so, Your Grace,” I say at once. I glance around the young men and see my son Montague’s head come up to listen, as I contradict the king.

“Sir William seems to think so,” Henry drawls.

Sir William Compton, my former suitor, gives me one of his most seductive smiles. “Actually, they are crown lands,” he rules. Apparently, he has become an expert. “And three of them belong to the duchy of Somerset. Not to you.”

I ignore him and turn to the king. “I have the documents which show that they are, and always have been, in my family. Your Grace was good enough to return my own to me. I have only what is rightfully mine.”

“Oh, the family!” Sir William yawns. “My God, that family!”

I am stunned for a moment, I don’t know what to say or think. What does he mean by such a remark? Does he mean that my family, the Plantagenet family of England, are not deserving of the greatest respect? My young cousin Henry Courtenay raises his eyebrows at the insult and stares at William Compton, his hand drifting to where his sword would be, on his empty belt.

“Your Grace?” I turn to the king.

To my relief he makes a little gesture with his hand, and Sir William bows, smiles, and withdraws.

“I’ll have my steward look into it,” Henry says simply. “But Sir William is quite sure that they are my lands and you have them in error.”

I am about to say, as I would be wise to say: Oh! let me return them to you at once, now, without delay, whether they are mine by right or not—that would be the work of a good courtier. Everything belongs to the king, we hold our fortunes at his pleasure, and if I give them to him at the first moment of asking, he might return something else to me later.

I am just about to dispossess myself when I see a quick, sly smile on Sir William’s face as he turns away from my son Montague. It’s a gleam of triumph between the man who knows that he is the absolute favorite, allowed all sorts of liberties, guilty of all sorts of indiscretions, to another who is younger, steadier, and a better man by far. And I feel a stubbornness rise up in me as I think I will not give my son’s inheritance away because this popinjay thinks that it is not mine. It is mine. These are my family lands. I had to endure poverty without them and it was hard for me to win them back; I am damned if I am going to give them away at the bidding of such as William Compton, to a king like Henry whom I watched dance around the nursery snatching his sister’s moppets and refusing to share.

“I shall ask my steward Sir Thomas Boleyn to look into it and inform Sir William,” I say coolly. “But I am certain that there is no mistake.”

I am walking away from the king’s privy chamber, with a couple of my ladies-in-waiting, going towards the queen’s rooms, when Arthur catches me up and takes my arm so that he can speak quietly, and no one else can hear.

“Lady Mother—just give him the lands,” he says shortly.

“They are mine!”

“Everyone knows it. Doesn’t matter. Just give them to him. He doesn’t like to be crossed and he doesn’t like to have work to do. He won’t want to read a report, he doesn’t want to make a judgment. Most of all he doesn’t want to have to write anything and sign it.”

I stop and turn to him. “Why would you advise me to give away your brother’s inheritance? Where would we be if I had not dedicated my life to winning back what is ours?”

“He is the king, he’s accustomed to having his own way,” Arthur says briefly. “He gives Wolsey an order, sometimes he gives him nothing more than a nod, and it’s done. But you and my uncle Stafford, and my uncle Neville—you all argue with him. You expect him to act within a set of rules, of traditions. You expect him to explain any change. You hold him to account. He doesn’t like it. He wants to be a power that is not disputed. He really can’t bear being challenged.”

“They are my lands!” I have raised my voice, and I glance around and then speak more quietly. “These are my family lands that I own by right.”

“My cousin the duke would say that we own the throne by right,” Arthur hisses. “But he would never say it out loud before the king. We own these lands, we own the whole of England by right. But we never say such a thing, or even suggest it. Give him back the lands. Let him see that we think we have no rights, that we claim no rights, that we are nothing but his humblest subjects. That we are glad to receive only what he freely gives us.”

“He’s the King of England,” I say impatiently. “I grant you that. But his father got the throne by conquest and, some would say, treachery on the battlefield. He only held it by the skin of his teeth. He did not inherit it, he’s not of the old royal blood of England. And young Henry is first among equals, he is not above us, he’s not above the law, he’s not above challenge. We call him ‘Your Grace,’ as we would call any duke, as we call your cousin Stafford. He is one of us, honored; but not above us. He is not beyond challenge. His word is not that of God. He’s not the Pope.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1518

In November the court moves to Westminster and together the queen and I plan her confinement, ordering her favorite bed to be moved into the great chamber and choosing the tapestries which will hang over the windows, blocking out the disturbing daylight.

We are going to use the birthing bed where she had Princess Mary. I even have the same linen ready. Without saying anything, we both hope that it will bring us luck. She is busy and happy and confident, her belly curved like a fat cauldron, nearing her eighth month. We are standing side by side, considering a space in the room where we plan to place a great dresser to show her golden plates, when she suddenly stops and pauses, as if she has heard something, a whisper of unease.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing.” She is uncertain. “I just felt . . .”

“Should you sit down?”

I help her to her chair and she sits gingerly.

“What did you feel?”

“I felt . . .” she begins, and then she suddenly scoops the skirts of her gown towards her, as if she would hold the baby inside her womb by sheer force. “Get the midwives,” she says very low and quiet, as if she is afraid that someone might hear. “Get the midwives, and close the door. I’m bleeding.”

We rush hot water and towels and the cradle into the room, while I send a message to the king that the queen has gone into labor, weeks early of course, but that she is well and we are caring for her.

I dare to hope; little Mary is flourishing in her nursery, a clever two-year-old, and she came early. Perhaps this will be another frighteningly small baby who will surprise us all by strength and tenacity. And if it were to be a tough little boy . . .

It is all that we think about, and nobody says it aloud. If the queen were to have a boy, even at this late stage of her life, even though she has lost so many, she would be triumphant. Everyone who has whispered that she is weak or infertile or cursed would look a fool. The grand newly made papal legate Wolsey himself would take second place to such a wife who had given her husband the one thing that he lacks. The girls who accompany the queen when she dines with the king, or walks with him or plays cards with him, always with their eyes modestly downturned, always with their hoods pushed back to show their smooth hair, always with their gowns pulled down in front to show the inviting curve of their breasts, those girls will find that the king has eyes only for the queen—if she can give him a son.

At midnight she goes into full labor, her gaze fixed on the holy icon, the communion wafer in the monstrance on the altar in the corner of the room, the midwives pulling on her arms and shouting at her to push, but it is all over too quickly, and there is no little cry, just a small creature, hardly visible in a mess of blood and a rush of water. The midwife picks up the tiny body, shrouds it from the queen’s sight in the linen cloth that was supposed to be used to swaddle a lusty son, and says: “I am sorry, Your Grace, it was a girl, but she was already dead inside you. There’s nothing here.”

I don’t even wait for her to ask me. Wearily she turns to me and silently gives me a nod to send me on my errand, her face twisted with grief. Wearily, I get to my feet and go from the confinement chamber, down the stairs, across the great hall, and up the stairs to the king’s side of the palace. I dawdle past the guards who raise their pikes in a salute to let me through, past a couple of courtiers who drop into a bow and stand aside to let me by, through the outer doors of the presence chamber, through the whispering, staring crowds who are waiting and hoping to see the king. A silence falls all around as I enter the room. Everyone knows what my errand is, everyone guesses that it is bad news from my stony face, as I walk through the doors of the privy chamber, and there he is.

The king is playing at cards. Bessie Blount is his partner; there is another girl on the other side of the table, but I can’t even be troubled to look. I can see from the pile of gold coins before Bessie that she is winning. This new inner court of friends and intimates, dressed in French fashions, drinking the best wine in the early morning, boisterous, noisy, childish, looks up when I come into the room, reads with perfect accuracy the defeat in my face and the droop of my shoulders. I see, I cannot miss, the avid gleam of some who scent heartbreak and know that trouble brings opportunity. I can hear, as the hubbub of the room drops to silence, someone tut with impatience as they see I have brought bad news again.

The king throws down his cards and comes quickly towards me as if he would silence me, as if he would keep this as a guilty, shameful secret. “Is it no good?” he asks shortly.

“I am sorry, Your Grace,” I say. “A girl, stillborn.”

For a moment his mouth turns down as if he has had to swallow something very bitter. I see his throat clench as if he would retch. “A girl?”

“Yes. But she never breathed.”

He does not ask me if his wife is well.

“A dead baby,” is all he says, almost wonderingly. “It is a cruel world for me, don’t you think, Lady Salisbury?”

“It is a deep sorrow for you both,” I say. I can hardly make my lips frame the words. “The queen is very grieved.”

He nods, as if it goes without saying, almost as if she deserves sorrow; but he does not.

Behind him, Bessie rises up from the table where they were playing cards while his wife was laboring to give birth to a dead child. Something about the way she turns attracts my attention. She averts her face and then she steps backwards, almost as if she were trying to slip away and avoid my notice, as if she were hiding something.

Unseen, she curtseys to the king’s back and steps away, leaving her winnings as if she has quite forgotten them, and then, as she turns to sidle through the opening door, I see the curve of her belly against the ripple of the rich fabric of her gown. I see that Bessie Blount is with child, and I suppose that it is the king’s.