The King's Curse

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1518

I wait until the queen is ready to return to court, her grief forced down, churched, bathed, and dressed. I think I will try to speak to her in the morning after Matins, as we walk back from her chapel.

“Margaret, do you not think that I can see that you are waiting to speak to me? Don’t you think after all these years I can read you? Are you going to ask to go home and get your handsome boy Arthur married?”

“I will ask you that,” I agree. “And soon. But I don’t need to talk to you about it now.”

“What then?”

I can hardly bring myself to wipe the smile from her face when she is trying so hard to be merry and carefree. But she does not know quite how carefree and merry the court has become.

“Your Grace, I am afraid I have to tell you something which will trouble you.” Maria de Salinas, now Countess Willoughby, steps to her side and looks at me as if I am a traitor to bring distress to a queen who has already suffered so much.

“What now?” is all she says.

I take a breath. “Your Grace, it is Elizabeth Blount. While you were in confinement she was with the king.”

“This is old news, Margaret.” She manages a careless laugh. “You’re a very poor gossip to bring me such an ancient scandal. Bessie is always with the king when I am with child. It’s a sort of fidelity.”

Maria says a word under her breath and turns her face away.

“Yes, but—what you don’t know is that now she is with child.”

“It is my husband’s child?”

“I suppose so. He hasn’t owned it. She’s not drawing any attention to herself except that her gowns are growing tight across her belly. She didn’t tell me. She is making no claims.”

“Little Bessie Blount, my own lady-in-waiting?”

Grimly, I nod.

She does not cry out, but turns from the gallery into an oriel window, and puts Maria’s supporting hand aside with one little gesture. She looks out of the small panes of glass at the water meadows that are gray with sheets of ice and driven snow. She looks towards the cold river, seeing nothing but a memory of her mother, sobbing, facedown on her pillows, breaking her heart over the infidelity of her husband, the King of Spain.

“That girl has been with me since she was twelve years old,” she says wonderingly. She finds a hard little laugh. “Clearly, I cannot have taught her very well.”

“Your Grace, it was impossible for her to refuse the king,” I say quietly. “I don’t doubt her affection for you.”

“It’s no surprise,” she says levelly, as if she were as cold as the flowers of frost on the windowpanes.

“No, I suppose not.”

“Does the king seem very pleased?”

“He has said nothing about it. And she’s not here now. She—Bessie –withdrew from court as soon as she . . . as soon as it . . .”

“As soon as everyone could see?”

I nod.

“And where has she gone?” the queen asks without much interest.

“To a house, the Priory of St. Lawrence, in the county of Essex.”

“She won’t be able to give him a child!” Maria suddenly bursts out passionately. “The child will die, for sure!”

I gasp at her words that sound like a curse. “It cannot be any fault of the king that we have only Princess Mary!” I correct her instantly. To say anything else is to speak against the king’s potency and health. I turn to my friend, the queen. “And no fault of yours either,” I say very low. “It must be God’s will, God’s will.”

The queen turns her head to look at Maria. “Why would Bessie, so young and so healthy, not give him a child?”

“Hush, hush,” I whisper.

But Maria answers: “Because God could not be so cruel to you!”

Katherine crosses herself and kisses the crucifix that hangs from coral rosary beads at her waist. “I think that I have suffered greater sorrows than the birth of a bastard to little Bessie,” she says. “And anyway, don’t you know that the king will lose all interest in her now?”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1519

My cousins and the other lords of the kingdom, Thomas Howard, the old Duke of Norfolk, and his son-in-law, my steward, Sir Thomas Boleyn, meet in private with the king and papal legate Wolsey and explain that the behavior of the wilder young men of the court reflects badly on us all. Henry, who loves the excitement and the laughter of his comrades, will hear nothing against his friends, until the older men tell him that the young courtiers on a diplomatic visit made fools of themselves in France, in front of King Francis himself.

This strikes home. Henry is still the boy who looked up to his brother Arthur, who longed to be his equal, who toddled after him on chubby legs and shouted for a horse as big as his brother’s. Now he sees a new version of a glorious prince in Francis of France. He sees in him a model of elegance and style, and he wants to be like him. King Francis has a small inner circle of friends and advisors who are sophisticated and witty and highly cultured. They don’t play pranks and jokes on each other; they don’t cheat at cards and drink themselves sick. Henry is fired with the ambition to have a court as cosmopolitan and elegant as the French.

For once, the cardinal and the councillors are united, and they persuade Henry that the minions must go. Half a dozen of them are sent from court and told not to return. Bessie Blount has retired for her confinement and nobody even mentions her. Some of the better-behaved young courtiers, including my son Arthur and my heir Montague, are retained. The court is purged of its wilder element, but my family, with our good breeding and good training, stay in place. The cardinal even remarks to me that he is glad that I visit the Princess Mary with such regularity, that she must learn from me as a model of decorum.

“It’s no hardship to spend time with her,” I say, smiling. “She is a beautiful child; it is a real pleasure to play with her. And I am teaching her letters, and how to read.”

“She could have no better Lady Governess,” he says. “They tell me that she runs to greet you as if you were a second mother.”

“I could not love her more if she were my own,” I say. I have to stop myself repeating how bright she is, and how clever, how prettily she dances, and what a good voice she has.

“Well, God bless you both,” the cardinal says airily, waving his fat fingers in a cross over my head.

WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, JUNE 1519

I leave the newly sober and composed court to go to my favorite house and plan Arthur’s marriage. It is a very good one. I would not throw my popular son Arthur away on anyone but a well-born heiress. His wife will be Jane Lewknor, the only daughter—and so the sole heiress—of a Sussex knight, a good old family and one that has amassed a fortune. She was married before and brings a good fortune from that marriage too. She has a daughter, living with her guardian, so I know she is fertile. Best of all, for Arthur, at court among the king’s friends who are ready, at the drop of a glove, to write a poem about Beauty and Unattainable Virtue, she is fair-haired, gray-eyed, and lovely but no fool; she will not write love poems in reply. And she is educated and well mannered enough to serve the queen. Altogether, she is an expensive asset for the family to buy, but I think she will serve us well.

PENSHURST PLACE, KENT, JUNE 1519

The king is honoring my cousin Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, with another visit to Penshurst Place, and Cousin Edward begs me to come, bring the newlyweds, and help entertain the king. It is a great moment for my cousin, but an even greater event for my daughter, Ursula, who finds, as I promised her, that being married to little Henry Stafford brings rewards. She stands beside her mother-in-law, Duchess Eleanor, to greet the King of England and his court, and everyone tells me that she will be the most delightful duchess one day.

I expect a magnificent show, but even so, I am amazed at my cousin’s lavish hospitality. Every day there is a hunt and an entertainment and a picnic in the woods. There are masques and one day a bullbaiting, a fight with dogs, and a bearbaiting with a magnificent beast that goes on for three hours. The duke has prepared the costumed dances and disguisings that the king loves, and commissioned music and performances. There are satirical plays that mock the ambition of Charles of Castile, who has just squandered a fortune buying the position of Holy Roman Emperor. Our king Henry, who hoped for the title for himself, laughs so hard that he nearly weeps when the play accuses Charles of greed and hubris. The queen listens to the abuse of her nephew with a tolerant smile, as if it were nothing at all to do with her.

We are awakened some mornings by a choir singing under our windows, another day boatmen call us from the lake and we row for pleasure with musicians on the boats and then gather for a tremendous regatta. The king wins the race, battling his way through the water, his face red with effort, his shoulder and chest muscles standing out under his fine linen shirt, just as he wins at cards, at tennis, at horse racing, at wrestling, and of course at the great joust which my cousin the duke stages for the entertainment of the court and to show the skill and courage of the king and his friends. Everything is designed for the king’s entertainment and amusement, not a moment of the day passes without some fresh extravagance, and Henry revels in it all, the winner of every game, a head taller than any man, as undeniably handsome as a carved statue of a prince, his hair curled, his smile wide, his body like a young god’s.

“You’ve spent a fortune on giving the king the best visit of the year,” I observe to my cousin. “This has been your kingdom.”

“As it happens, I have a fortune,” he replies nonchalantly. “And this is my kingdom.”

“You have succeeded in persuading the king that this is the most beautiful and well-ordered house in England.”

He smiles. “You speak as if that were not a triumph. For me, for my house, for my name. For your daughter too, who will inherit it all.”

“It’s just that from boyhood, the king has never admired something without wanting it for himself. He’s not given to disinterested joy.”

My cousin tucks my hand in the crook of his elbow and walks me past the warm sandstone walls of his lower garden towards the archery butts where we can hear the court exclaiming at the contest, and their ripple of applause at a good shot. “You are kind to caution me, Cousin Margaret; but I don’t need a warning. I never forget that this is a king whose father had nothing, who came into England with little more than the clothes on his poor back. Every time his son sees a landowner like you or me whose rights go back to Duke William of Normandy, or even earlier, he feels a little gnaw of envy, a little shiver of fear that he has not enough, that he is not enough. He wasn’t raised like us, in a family who knew that their place was the greatest in England. Not like you and me, born noble, raised as princes, safe in the greatest buildings in England, looking out at the widest fields. Henry was born the son of a pretender. I think he will always feel unsteady on such a new throne.”

I press his arm. “Take care, Cousin,” I advise. “It’s not wise for anyone, especially for those of us who once owned that throne, to speak of the Tudors as newcomers. Neither of us was raised by our father.”

The duke’s father was executed for treason against King Richard, mine for treason against King Edward. Perhaps treason runs in our veins with the royal blood and it would be wise to make sure that no one remembers it.

“Oh, it’s not polite,” he concedes. “It’s true, of course. But not polite in me, as a host. But I think I have shown him what I wanted him to see. He has seen how a great lord of England lives. Not riding his horse up the stairs like a child, not throwing eggs at his tenants, not fooling like an idiot and playing all day, not promising love to alehouse maids, and sending a well-born mistress into hiding to bear a child as if one was ashamed of dirty doings.”

I can’t argue with that. “He is contradictory. He always was.”

“Vulgar,” the duke says under his breath.

We come to the outskirts of the courtiers and people turn and bow low to us, standing back so that we can see the king, who is just about to draw the bow. Henry is like a beautifully wrought statue of an archer, poised, his weight a little back, his body a long, lean line from curly russet head to outstretched leg. We stand in attentive silence as His Grace bends the heavy longbow, pulls back the string, takes careful aim, and gently releases the arrow.

It flies through the air with a hiss and clips the central bull in the target, not midcenter, but just on the edge, close—not perfect, but very close. Everyone bursts into enthusiastic applause; the queen smiles and takes up a little gold chain, ready to award it to her husband.

Henry turns to my cousin. “Could you do better?” he shouts triumphantly. “Could anyone do better?”

I grip the duke’s hand before he can step forward and take up a bow and arrow. “I am very sure he cannot,” I say, and the duke smiles and says: “I doubt that anyone could outshoot Your Grace.”

Henry gives a little crow of delight and then kneels before the queen, looking up at her and beaming as she bends down to put the gold chain of victory around his neck. She kisses him on the mouth, and he puts up his hands and gently holds her face for a moment, as if he were in love with her, or at any rate, in love with the picture that they make: the young handsome man on his knee to his wife, his thick copper hair curling under her caress.

That night there is a masque, performed in the new way, with the actors coming in disguised, playing a scene and then inviting members of the court to dance with them. The king is wearing a mask over his face and a great hat, but everyone knows him at once by his height, and by the deference of the players around him. He is delighted when we all pretend that we think he is a stranger and are amazed at the grace of his dancing, and his charm. When the players break from their circle and mingle with the court, all the ladies-in-waiting flutter as he comes near to them. He chooses Elizabeth Carew to dance. Now that Bessie is away, there is an opportunity for another pretty girl who cares more for gifts than her good name.

I am standing behind the queen’s chair when I see a small disturbance at the end of the great hall, through the heat haze of the central fire, which the duke has proudly retained here at Penshurst, keeping the old ways in his grand hall. Someone is talking urgently to one of Cardinal Wolsey’s men, and then the message is passed from one to another down the hall, until it reaches the lawyer Thomas More, who leans over the fat red shoulder and whispers in the attentive ear.

“Something has happened,” I say quietly to the queen.

“Find out,” she replies. I step back from her chair into the shadows of the hall and go—not to the cardinal, who has kept his seat and his bland smile, beating time to the dance as if he has heard nothing—but out of the great hall and across the courtyard, where the stable boy is holding the messenger’s steaming horse, and another is taking off the sweaty saddle.

“He looks hot,” I remark, walking past as if on my way to somewhere else.

They both bow low to me. “Nearly foundered,” complains one lad. “I wouldn’t ride a beauty like this so hard.”

I hesitate and pat the horse’s damp neck. “Poor boy. Did he have to come far?”

“From London,” the lad says. “But the messenger is in a worse state—he rode all the way from Essex.”

“That is a long way,” I agree. “It’ll be for the king, then.”

“It is. But worth the effort. He said he would get a gold noble at the very least.”

I laugh. “Well, you will have to reward the poor horse,” I say, and stroll past.

I turn as soon as I am out of sight and walk through the little courtyard at the side of the great hall, entering through the side door with a nod to the guards. I find Thomas More at the back of the hall, watching the dancing. He smiles and bows to me.

“So Bessie Blount has a boy,” I assert.

He has not been long enough at court to learn to veil his honest brown eyes. “Your ladyship . . . I cannot say,” he stammers.

I smile at him. “You don’t need to say,” I tell him. “Indeed, you didn’t say,” and I return to my place beside the queen before anyone notices that I have gone.

“It’s news from Bessie Blount,” I say to her. “Compose yourself, Your Grace.”

She smiles and leans forward to clap her hands in time with the music as the king steps into the center of the circle, puts his hands on his hips, and dances a rapid jig, his feet pounding the ground.

“Tell me,” she says over the shouts of applause.

“She must have had a boy,” I say. “The messenger was counting on a reward. The king would only pay for news of a boy. And Wolsey’s man Thomas More did not deny it. He’ll never make a courtier, that man, he can’t lie at all.”

Her fixed smile never wavers. Henry twirls around at the burst of applause that greets the end of his dance and sees his wife jumping to her feet in her pleasure at his performance. He bows to her and leads another girl into the ring.

She sits down again. “A boy,” she says flatly. “Henry has a live son.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1520

Bessie’s boy survives the first few months, though none of us ladies in the queen’s rooms who have buried the half-formed bodies of Tudor princes would give thruppence for his survival. Of course nobody can say anything, but there has grown at court a wordless sense that the king cannot get boys, or, if he gets them, a woman cannot raise them. They call the poor little bastard Henry, as if we had not already buried two babies with that name. They give him the surname Fitzroy, as the king acknowledges his by-blow. Bessie is granted an allowance to raise her boy, and he is generally known, widely known, as the king’s own son. There’s no doubt in my mind that the man who publicly stands as his godfather, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, encourages the gossip that spreads across the kingdom, naming the boy as the king’s own in order that everyone shall hear that the king can sire a sturdy little son, and that he has done so.

Bessie comes out of confinement and finds herself promptly churched and married off to Cardinal Wolsey’s ward, young Gilbert Tailboys, whose father is so weak in the head that he cannot protect his son from a wife who is used goods. Just as the queen foresaw, the king does not return to his former lover, as if birth has given him a distaste for her. As he matures the king seems to be developing a taste for either notorious beauties or unspoiled girls.

Queen Katherine says nothing: nothing about Bessie, nothing about Henry Fitzroy, nothing about Mary Boleyn, the daughter of my steward Sir Thomas, who now comes to court from France, and attracts attention for her fair prettiness. She is an inconsequential little thing, newly married to William Carey, who seems to enjoy the court’s admiration of his charming wife. The king singles her out, asks her to dance, promises her a good horse of her very own. She laughs at his pleasantries, admires his music, and clasps her hands in delight like a pretty child when she sees the horse. She plays the part of an innocent, and the king likes to spoil her.

“Better for me that he amuses himself with a wife rather than a maid,” the queen remarks quietly. “It feels less . . .” She chooses her word “. . . injurious.”

“Better for us all,” I reply. “If he has her, and gives her a son, then the bastard will be put in the Carey cradle, named Henry Carey, and we won’t have another Henry Fitzroy.”

“D’you think she will have a boy as well?” she asks me with a sad little smile. “You think Mary Boleyn can carry a Tudor boy? Birth him live? Raise him? You think that it is only I who cannot give the king a son?”

I take her hand, but I cannot look her in the eyes and see her pain. “I didn’t mean to say that, because I don’t know, Your Grace. No one can know.”

What I do know as the Lenten lilies come out along the riverbank and the blackbirds start to sing at dawn, which comes earlier every day, is that the king is certain to bed Mary Boleyn, for the affair has gone beyond little gifts—he is writing poetry. He hires a choir to sing under her window on May Day morning and the court crowns her Queen of the May. Her family—my steward Sir Thomas and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of the old Duke of Norfolk—see their pretty daughter in a new light, as a step to wealth and position, and like a pair of cheerful bawds wash her and dress her and bejewel her and present her to the king as if she were a fat little pigeon ready for the pie.

THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, FRANCE, SUMMER 1520

The pinnacle of Thomas Wolsey’s strategy is to be a meeting with Francis of France, a campaign of peace with tents, horses, and an invading army of courtiers bright in their new clothes, thousands upon thousands of guardsmen and groomsmen and equerries, the ladies of both courts dressed like queens, and the two queens themselves constantly changing into fresh gowns with jewel-encrusted headdresses. Wolsey plans, commissions, and builds an extraordinary temporary town, set in a valley outside Calais, with a castle of fairy-tale beauty thrown up like a dream, overnight, and at the heart of it is our prince, on show like some beautiful rarity, in a setting of his advisor’s making.

They call it the Field of the Cloth of Gold, for the canopies and the standards and even the tents gleam with real gold thread, and the damp fields around Calais become the dazzling center of Christendom. Here the two greatest kings come together in a competition of beauty and strength, swearing peace, a peace that will last forever.

Henry is our golden king, as dashing and handsome and stylish as the King of France, extravagant as his father could never have been, generous in his politics, sincere in his quest for peace: everyone in his train is proud of him. And at his side, rejuvenated, beautiful, taking her place on the greatest stage in Christendom, is my friend the queen, and I am glowing with pride for her, and for them both, for the long struggle they have had to get to peace with France, prosperity in England, and a settled loving accord with each other.

It does not matter to me or to the queen that all of her ladies fold into a curtsey, almost a swoon, when the king—either king—comes by. It does not matter to me that Francis of France kisses every one of the queen’s ladies except old Lady Eleanor, the Duchess of Buckingham, Ursula’s fierce mother-in-law. Katherine and Queen Claude of France strike up an immediate friendship and understanding of each other. They are both married to handsome young kings; I imagine they share more difficulties than they discuss.

My sons Montague and Arthur shine in these two hotly competitive courts; Geoffrey is at my side, learning courtly manners at this, the greatest event that the world will ever see; Ursula is in attendance on the queen, though she will have to go into confinement in the autumn; and one afternoon, without warning, my son Reginald comes into my private room on the queen’s side of the castle, and kneels at my feet for my blessing.

I am breathless with surprise. “My boy! Oh! My boy, Reginald.”

I raise him up and kiss him on both cheeks. He is taller than me and he has filled out; he is a handsome young man now, strong and serious, twenty years old. He has thick brown hair and dark brown eyes. Only I can see in his face the little boy that he was. Only I remember leaving him at Sheen Priory, when his lip trembled but they told him he could not speak to ask me to stay.

“Are you allowed to be here?” I ask.

He laughs. “I am not sworn to an order,” he reminds me. “I am not a child at school. Of course I can be here.”

“But the king—”

“The king expects me to study throughout Christendom. I often travel from Padua to visit a library or a scholar. He expects that. He pays for it. He encourages it. I wrote to him to tell him I would come here. I am to meet with Thomas More. We have written so much to each other and we have promised ourselves an evening of debate.”

I have to remember that my boy is now a respected theologian, a thinker, who talks with the greatest philosophers of the age. “What will you discuss with him?” I ask. “He’s become an important man at court. He’s now the king’s own secretary, he writes the important letters and he leads many of the discussions about peace.”

He smiles. “We’re going to talk about the nature of the Church,” he says. “That’s what we’re all talking about these days. About whether a man’s conscience can teach him, or whether he is bound to rely on the teachings of the Church.”

“And what do you think?”

“I believe that Christ formed the Church to teach us, the liturgy our lesson, and the priests and the clergy translate God to us, just as we scholars translate the teaching of Christ from Greek. There is no better guide than the Church that Christ Himself gave to us. A single man’s imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.”

“And what does Thomas More think?”

“Mostly the same,” he says negligently, as if the subtle shades of theology are not worth discussing with his mother. “And we cite authorities, and counter each other’s arguments. You wouldn’t be interested, it’s quite detailed.”

“And will you be ordained?” I ask eagerly. Reginald cannot rise unless he takes holy orders, and he has been trained to lead the Church.

He shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. “I don’t feel that I have been called.”

“But surely, your own conscience cannot be your guide! You just said, a man must be guided by the Church.”

He laughs and nods his approval. “Lady Mother, you are a rhetorician, I should take you with me to meet Erasmus and More. You’re right. A man’s conscience cannot be his guide if it is opposed to the teaching of the Church. A man cannot set himself up against his master, the Church. But the teaching of the Church itself tells me that I must wait and study until the time is right for me to be called. Then, if I am called, I will answer. If the Church requires my obedience I must serve it, as must every man, even a king.”

“And be ordained,” I press.

“Haven’t I always done what you order?”

I nod. I don’t want to hear that impatient tone.

“But if I am ordained, I will have to serve wherever the Church sends me,” he points out. “What if I am sent to the East? Or to the Russias? What if they send me so far away that I can never come home?”

I cannot say to this young man that the service of one’s family often means that one cannot live at the heart of the family. I left him when he was a baby, to care for Arthur Tudor, and I won’t attend Ursula’s lying-in if the queen needs me at her side. “Well, I hope that you will come home,” I say inadequately.

“I would want to,” is all he replies. “I feel that I hardly know my family at all, and I have been away a long time.”

“When you have finished your studies—”

“Do you think the king will invite me to court and have me work for him there? Or perhaps teach at the universities?”

“I do. It’s what I hope for. Whenever I can, I mention you. And Arthur keeps you in his mind. Montague too.”

“You mention me?” he asks with a slight skeptical smile. “You find time to mention me to the king, among all the favors you request for your other boys, for Geoffrey?”

“This is a king who commands all the places and all the favors,” I say shortly. “Of course I mention you. I mention all of you. I can hardly do more.”

Reginald stays the night and dines with the lords and his brothers. Arthur comes to see me after dinner and says that Reginald was good company, very knowledgeable and able to explain the new learning that is sweeping Christendom clearly and critically. “He would make a wonderful tutor for the Princess Mary,” he says. “Then he could come home.”

“Princess Mary’s tutor? Oh, what a good idea! I’ll suggest it to the queen.”

“You will live with the princess as her governess next year,” he considers. “When would she be old enough for a tutor?”

“Perhaps six or seven?”

“Two years’ time. Then Reginald could join you.”

“And the two of us could guide her and teach her,” I say. “And if the queen were to give birth to a prince”—neither of us remark how unlikely that seems to be—“then Reginald could teach him too. Your father would have been so proud to see his son as the tutor of the next King of England.”

“He would have been.” Arthur smiles at the memory of his father. “He was proud of anything we did well.”

“And how are you, my son? You must have ridden miles with the kings. Every day they go out for sport or riding or races.”

“I’m well enough,” Arthur says, though he looks weary. “Of course, keeping up with the king is sometimes more like work than play. But I’m a little troubled, Lady Mother. I am quarreling with Jane’s father, and so she is displeased with me.”

“What’s happened?”

Arthur tells me that he has tried to persuade Jane’s father to hand over his lands so that my son can be responsible for the military service that goes with ownership. Arthur is going to inherit them anyway; there is no reason for the old man to hold them now and be responsible for raising the tenants if there should be a call to war. “He really cannot serve the king,” he says, aggrieved. “He’s too old and too frail. It was a fair offer to help him. And I offered to pay rent as well.”

“You were quite right,” I say. Nothing that adds to Arthur’s landholdings could be wrong for me.

“Well, he has complained to Jane, and she thinks I am trying to steal her inheritance before his death, borrowing dead man’s shoes, and she has broken a storm over my poor head. And now he has complained to our cousin Arthur Plantagenet, and to our kinsman the old Earl of Arundel, and now they are threatening to complain of me to the king. They’re suggesting that I am trying to cheat the old fool out of his lands! Robbing my own father-in-law!”

“Ridiculous,” I say loyally. “And anyway, you have nothing to fear. Henry won’t listen to a word against you. Not from your own cousins. Not now. Not while he wants England to win at the jousting.”

L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING 1521

The king’s favor to my son Arthur continues. Arthur is at the center of the sporting, gambling, drinking, whoring court. All the young men, noisy and disrespectful, who had been banned from court, have come back, one at a time, forgetting that they were prohibited and that the king was supposedly reformed. Henry does not check or reprimand them; he likes to be among them, as wild as them, as free as them. Arthur tells me that the king will let a word or a jest go by that challenges his very majesty, while my cousin the Duke of Buckingham rages that the court is more like a taproom than a place of grandeur and complains that Wolsey has brought the manners of Ipswich to Westminster.

Since they have come back from the Field of the Cloth of Gold they are worse than ever, filled with joy at their triumph, conscious of their youth and beauty like never before. It is a court of young people, raging with desire and zest for life, with no one to halt or control them.

The queen’s ladies, delighted to return to England away from the hotly competitive French court, flaunt their French fashions and practice their French dances. Some of them have even assumed French accents that I find ridiculous, but are generally regarded as very sophisticated—or as they would say themselves: très chic. The most exotic and certainly the vainest of them all is Anne Boleyn, sister to Mary and George, who, thanks to her father’s charm, has spent her childhood at the French royal courts and quite forgotten any English modesty that she might have had. With her return from France we now have Sir Thomas’s full family at court: George Boleyn, his son who has served the king for almost all of his life; Elizabeth, his wife; and his newly married daughter Mary, who both serve with me in the queen’s rooms.

My cousin the Duke of Buckingham is increasingly excluded from this French-mad, fashion-mad court, and he is more protective of his family dignity, for my daughter Ursula has given him a grandson, and there is a new little Henry Stafford whose cradle linen is all embroidered with ducal strawberry leaves, and the duke is proud of another generation bearing royal blood.

There is one truly terrible moment when the king, washing his hands in a golden bowl before his dinner, steps to his throne under his cloth of estate and sits as the cardinal summons the server to his side, and dips his own fingers into the same gold bowl, into the king’s water. My cousin the duke bellows and knocks the bowl down, splashing water over the long red robes, raging like a madman. Henry turns at the noise, looks over his shoulder, and laughs as if it does not matter.

My cousin says something furious about how the dignity of the throne should not be usurped by upstarts, and Henry’s laugh stops short as he looks at my cousin. He looks at him with a long, level look as if he is thinking about something other than the spinning golden bowl which throws flashes of reflected light on the king’s riding boots, the cardinal’s splashed robe, my cousin’s stamping feet. For a moment, we all see it: at the word upstart Henry has the guarded, suspicious expression of his father.

I take leave from court for many of the days of this spring. I divide my time between supervising work on my London house, L’Erber, and staying with the Princess Mary. My duties as her Lady Governess should not really start until she enters the schoolroom, but she is such a clever little girl that I want her to begin lessons early and I love to read her bedtime story, to listen to her sing, to teach her prayers, and to dance with her in her rooms as my musicians play.

I am excused from court as the queen does not need me. She is happy in her rooms with her music and her reading, dining every night with the king and watching her ladies dance. She likes to know I am with her daughter, and often visits. The king is absorbed in a new flirtation but it is such a discreet affair that we only guess at it because he is writing love poetry, and every afternoon finds him bending over a blank page, nibbling at the end of his quill. Nobody knows who has caught his fancy this time. Neither the queen nor I can be troubled over the whimsical shifting of Henry’s attachments; there are so many girls, and they all smile and blush when the king looks at them, and he makes such a performance of his courtship, almost as if he wanted them to be reluctant. Perhaps one goes to his rooms for a private supper; perhaps she does not come back to the queen’s apartment till the early hours. Perhaps the king writes a poem or a new love song. The queen may not like it; but it hardly matters. It makes no real difference to the balance of power at court that is a deathly unstated struggle between the cardinal and the lords, between the cardinal and the queen, for the attention of the king. The girls are a diversion; they make no difference to this.

Besides, the king speaks strongly in favor of the sanctity of the holy sacrament of marriage. His sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, now sees the husband that she chose for love has turned into her enemy, and she wants to replace him in the country, and some say in her bed, with the Duke of Albany, her rival regent. Then we hear even worse. One of the northern lords writes to Thomas Wolsey to warn him bluntly that the king’s sister is asking her lover Albany to help her to get a divorce. The old commander predicts that there will be a murder, not an annulment.

Henry is greatly offended at the suggestion of loose behavior from his sister, and writes to her and her unwanted husband to remind them very grandly that the marriage bond is an indissoluble tie and marriage is a sacrament that no man can put asunder.

“However many laundry maids there may be,” I observe to Montague.

“Marriage is sacred,” Montague agrees with a little smile. “It cannot be set aside. And someone has to do the washing.”

I have much to do with my London house. The great vine that sprawls across the front is pulling down the masonry and threatening the roof. I have to put up a forest of wooden scaffolding to allow the workmen to get as high as the chimneys to trim the monster, and they take up saws and hatchets to hack through the thick boughs. Of course my neighbors complain that the road is blocked, and next thing I have a letter from the Lord Mayor bidding me keep the roadways clear. I ignore it completely. I am a countess, I can block all the roads in London if I want to.

The gardeners swear to me that this hard pruning will make the vine flower and fruit and I will be bathing in my own wine come the autumn. I laugh and shake my head. We have had such cold, wet weather in the last few years that I fear we will never make wine again in England. I don’t think we’ve had a good summer since my childhood. I seem to remember day after day of riding in glorious weather behind a great king, people coming out to wave and cheer for King Richard. We never seem to have summers like that anymore. Henry never makes a long progress through sunshine and acclaim. The golden summers of my childhood have gone; no one ever sees three suns in the sky anymore.

When we take the scaffolding down, I pave the road before my house so that the foul water the scullions throw into the street can run away. I make a great central ditch in the road and tell the lads in the stables that the dung is to be swept out of our courtyard and into the stream and from thence to the river. The stink of the town house is eased, and I am certain that we have fewer rats in the kitchen and the stores. It is obvious to anyone who walks down Dowgate Street that this is one of the greatest houses in London, as grand as a royal palace.

My steward comes to me as I am admiring my new paving stones and says quietly: “I would have a word with you, your ladyship.”

“Sir Thomas?” I turn to see Boleyn looking anxious at my elbow. “Is something the matter?”

“I’m afraid so,” he says shortly. He glances round. “I can’t speak here.”

I am reminded, with a sudden pang of fear, of the years where no one could speak in the street, where they checked the doors of their own houses before they would say a word. “Nonsense!” I say roundly. “But we may as well go inside, away from this noise.”

I lead the way into the shadowy hall and turn to the little door on the right. It is the downstairs records room for the steward of the household, so he can observe guests coming and going, receive messengers, and pay bills. There are two chairs, a table, and a double door so that no one can eavesdrop when he is giving instructions or reprimands. “There,” I say. “It’s quiet enough here. What’s the matter?”

“It’s the duke,” he says baldly. “Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham.”

I seat myself in the chair behind the table, gesturing that he can sit opposite. “You want to speak to me about my cousin?” I ask.

He nods.

I have a sort of dread of what will come next. This is Ursula’s father-in-law; my grandson is in the Stafford cradle. “Go on.”

“He’s been arrested. In the Tower.”

Everything is suddenly very still, and quiet. I hear a rapid thudding noise and realize it is the sound of my heart beating, echoing in my ears. “For what?”

“Treason.”

The one word is like the whistle of an axe in the quiet room. Boleyn looks at me, his pale face filled with dread. I know that I am absolutely impassive, my jaw clamped shut to stop my teeth chattering with fear.

“He was summoned to London, to the king at Greenwich. He was getting into his own barge, going to His Grace, when the captain of the king’s yeomen stepped on board with his men and said that they were to go to the Tower. Just like that.”

“What do they say he has done?”

“I don’t know,” Sir Thomas begins.

“You do know,” I insist. “You said ‘treason.’ So tell me.”

He moistens his dry lips, swallows. “Prophesying,” he says. “He met with the Carthusians.”

This is no crime. I have met with the Carthusians, I worship in their chapels, we all do. They took Reginald into Sheen Priory and educated him, they raised him; they are a good order of religious men. “Nothing wrong with that,” I say stoutly. “Nothing wrong with them.”

“They said that they had a prophecy in their library at Sheen which says that people will acclaim the duke as king,” he goes on. “Parliament will offer him the crown as they did to Henry Tudor.”

I bite my lip and say nothing.

“The duke is supposed to have said that the king was accursed, and that there will be no legitimate son and heir,” Sir Thomas says very quietly. “He said that one of the queen’s ladies spoke of a curse on the Tudors. One of the queen’s ladies said that there would be no son.”

“Which lady? Do they have a name? For this indiscreet lady?” I can feel my hands start to tremble, and I hold them together in my lap before he sees. I remember that Sir Thomas is the Duke of Norfolk’s son-in-law, and it is the Duke of Norfolk as Lord High Steward who will try my cousin for treason. I wonder if Boleyn is here as my steward to warn me, or as the duke’s spy to report on me. “Who would say such a thing? Did your daughters speak of it?”

“Neither would say such a thing,” he says quickly. “It is the duke’s confessor, who has given evidence against him. And his steward, and his servants. Did your daughter ever speak of it?”

I shake my head at the riposte. The duke’s steward has stayed at my house; I have prayed with his confessor. My daughter lives with the duke and discusses everything with him. “My daughter would never hear or repeat such a thing,” I say. “And the duke’s confessor cannot speak against him. He is bound by the oath of the confessional. He cannot repeat what a man says in his prayers.”

“The cardinal now says that he can. It is a new ruling. The cardinal says that a priest’s duty to the king is greater than his oath to the Church.”

I am silenced. This cannot be. The cardinal cannot change the rules that protect the confessional, that make a priest as silent as God. “It is the cardinal gathering evidence against the duke?”

He nods. Exactly. Wolsey is destroying his rival for the king’s affection and attention. This has been a long campaign. The splash of water on the robe of cardinal red left a stain that will be blotted out, blood red. Wolsey wants revenge.

“What will happen to the duke?” I don’t need to ask because I know. I know the punishment for treason. Who would know better than I?

“If they find him guilty, he will be beheaded,” Boleyn says quietly.

He waits while I absorb the information that I know already. Then he says something even worse. “And, my lady, they are questioning others. They are suspicious that there is a plot. A faction.”

“Who? What others?”

“His family, his friends, his affinity.”

This is my family, these are my friends, this is my affinity. The accused is my cousin and friend, my daughter Ursula is married to his son.

“Who are they questioning, exactly?”

“His cousin and yours, George Neville.”

I take a little breath. “Is that all?”

“His son, your son-in-law, Henry Stafford.”

Geoffrey’s friend, Ursula’s husband. I take a little breath. “Anyone else?”

“Your son Montague.”

I choke. I can hardly breathe. The air in this tiny room is thick; I feel as if the walls are closing in. “Montague is innocent,” I say stoutly. “Has anyone named Arthur?”

“Not yet.”

We are intertwined like a plant: the Planta genista that we are named for. My daughter, Ursula, is married to the duke’s own son. He and I are cousins. My boys were raised in the house of my other cousin, George Neville, who is married to the duke’s daughter. My son Montague is married to Cousin George’s daughter. We could not be more closely related. It is the way of great families, marriage and intermarriage, working together as one force. This way we keep our wealth inside the families, concentrate our power, join our lands. But looked at with a critical eye, looked at with a suspicious, fearful eye, it gives the impression that we are a faction, a conspiracy.

At once I think of Geoffrey, serving as a page in the queen’s rooms. At least his loyalty must be unquestioned. He must be safe. If Geoffrey is safe, then I can face anything.

“No word against Geoffrey?” I say flatly.

He shakes his head.

“Will they question me?” I ask.

He turns just slightly away from me, a cold shoulder. “Yes. They are bound to. If there is anything in the house—”

“What do you mean?” I am furious with fear.

“I don’t know!” he bursts out. “I don’t know! How would I know? I don’t hold with prophecies and predictions and long-lost kings. I don’t have giants in my family tree, like you Nevilles. I don’t have three suns in the sky like you Yorks. I am not descended from a water goddess who comes out of a river to mate with mortals! When your family was founded, no one had ever heard of us. When your uncles were on the throne, mine were quiet City men. I don’t know what you might have, what you might have kept from those times—a banner or a standard, a bead-roll or letter. Anything that shows your descent, anything that shows your royal blood, any prophecy that you once had the throne and will have it again. But whatever you have, your ladyship, clear it out and burn it. Nothing is worth the risk of keeping.”

The first thing I do is send a message to Geoffrey and tell him to go at once to Bisham and stay there till he hears from me, to speak to no one and to receive no one. He is to tell the servants that he is sick, he is to give out that it might be the Sweat. If I know that he is safe, then I can fight for my other sons. I send my Master of Horse to the Tower of London to discover who is behind those high gray walls, and what is being said about them.

I send one of my ladies-in-waiting to Ursula and tell her to take her little son and go to L’Erber and stay there until we know what we should do. I send my page boy to Arthur and say that I am coming to court at once, that I will see him there.

I send for my barge and have them take me downriver. The court is at Greenwich and I sit quietly in my seat at the back of the barge with a couple of my ladies at my side and compose myself to be patient as the high towers come into sight over the tops of the fresh green trees.

The barge ties up at the pier and the rowers make a guard of honor with their oars as I step onshore. I have to wait until they are assembled and ready, and then I walk through them with a smile, controlling my desire to run to the queen’s rooms. I walk slowly up the graveled path and hear the noise from the stables as half a dozen riders come in and shout for their grooms. A guard swings open the private garden door to the queen’s stair. I nod my thanks and go up, but I don’t hurry, and my breath is steady and my heartbeat regular when I get to the top.

The guards outside her door salute me and stand aside as I go in to see the queen settled in the window seat, looking out at the garden, a beautifully embroidered linen shirt in her hands, one of her ladies reading from manuscript pages, the others sitting around and sewing. I see the Boleyn girls and their mother, I see Lord Morley’s daughter Jane Parker, the Spanish ladies, Lady Hussey, half a dozen others. They rise to curtsey to me as I curtsey to the queen, and then she waves them away and I kiss her on both cheeks and sit beside her.

“That’s pretty,” I say, my voice light and indifferent.

She raises it up, as if to show me the detail of the black on white embroidery, so no one can see her lips as she whispers: “Have they taken your son?”

“Yes, Montague.”

“What’s the charge?”

I grit my teeth and manage a false smile, as if we were speaking of the weather. “Treason.”

Her blue eyes widen, but her face does not change. Anyone looking at us would think she was mildly interested in my news. “What does this mean?”

“I think it is the cardinal, moving against the duke: Wolsey against Buckingham.”

“I will speak with the king,” she says. “He must know this is baseless.” She hesitates as she sees my face. “It is baseless,” she says less certainly. “Isn’t it?”

“They say that he spoke of a curse on the Tudor line,” I tell her, my voice a thread of sound. “They say that a lady from your rooms spoke of a curse.”

She takes a little breath. “Not you?”

“No. Never.”

“Is your son accused of repeating this curse?”

“And my cousin,” I confess. “But, Your Grace, neither my sons nor my cousin George Neville have ever said or heard a word against the king. The Duke of Buckingham might be intemperate but he is not disloyal. If a great nobleman of this kingdom is going to be charged at the whim of an advisor, a man who is nothing more than one of the king’s servants, a man without birth or breeding, then none of us will be safe. There is always rivalry around the throne. But a loss of favor cannot lead to death. My cousin Edward Stafford is tactless; is he to die for it?”

She nods. “Of course. I will speak with the king.”

Ten years ago, she would have walked at once to his rooms and taken him to one side; a touch on his arm, a quick smile and he would have done what she told him. Five years ago she would have gone to his rooms, given him advice, and he would have been influenced by her opinion. Even two years ago she would have waited for him to come to her rooms before dinner and then told him the right thing to do and he would have listened. But now she knows that the king may be talking with the cardinal, he may be gambling with his favorites, he may be walking in the gardens with a pretty girl on his arm, whispering in her ear, telling her he has never, never desired a woman more, that her voice is like music, that her smile is like sunlight, and he has little interest in the opinions of his wife.

“I’ll wait till dinner,” she decides.

I sit with the queen until the king comes with his friends to escort her and her ladies to dinner. I plan to greet Arthur with a smile, whisper a warning, and meet with him later. But when the double doors are thrown open and Henry strides into the room, handsome, laughing, and makes his bow to the queen, Arthur does not stroll in behind him.

I curtsey, a smile pinned on my face like a mask, a cold sweat starting to trickle on my spine. They are all there: Charles Brandon, William Compton, Francis Bryan, Thomas Wyatt. Everyone whom I can think of is there, none of them missing, all laughing at some private joke that they swear they will tell when it is composed into a sonnet; but no Arthur Pole. My son is missing, and no one remarks on it.

One of the maids-in-waiting drops a book that she has been reading, and bends to pick it up. She makes a low curtsey to the king, the book clasped to her bodice, emphasizing her love of study and drawing the eye to the warm, inviting skin of her neck and breasts. I see dark hair shining under the French hood and the flash of a gold initial B with three creamy pearl drops tied low at her neck; but the king bows over his wife’s hand and does not notice her at all.

The ladies flutter into their order of precedence behind the queen. I see Mary Boleyn jostling, elbows to ribs with Jane Parker, but as I smile at them, though I look everywhere, I do not see my son Arthur, and I do not know where he is tonight.

Thomas More is waiting at the entrance to the dining room as the ladies and gentlemen of the court take their places, his fleshy face downturned, deep in thought. He will be waiting for his master the cardinal; he may be working on the case against my sons.

“Councillor More,” I say politely.

He turns with a start and sees me.

“I am sorry to interrupt your meditations. One of my sons is a scholar and I have seen him deep in thought, just like you. He scolds me if I interrupt him.”

He smiles. “I would hesitate before I interrupted Reginald’s thinking, but you are safe with me. I was daydreaming. But still, he should not scold his mother. A child’s obedience is a holy duty.” He smiles, as if he is amused at himself. “I keep telling my children this. It is true, of course, but my daughter accuses me of special pleading.”

“Do you have any news of my other sons, Montague and Arthur?” I ask quietly. “I don’t see Arthur here tonight.”

And then the worst thing happens. He does not look at me with contempt for raising traitors, he does not look at me with anger for trying to plead their case to him. He looks at me with great sympathy, as you would look at a woman who is bereaved. The steady gaze of his dark eyes tells me that he thinks of me as a woman who has lost her sons, whose children are already dead.

“I was sorry to learn that Lord Montague is under arrest,” he says quietly.

“And Arthur? You don’t speak of Arthur?”

“Banished from court.”

“Where is he?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know where he has gone. I would tell you if I knew, your ladyship.”

“Sir Thomas, my son Montague is innocent of anything. Can you speak for him? Can you tell the cardinal that he has done nothing?”

“No, I cannot.”

“Sir Thomas, the king must not be advised that the law is his for the taking. Your master is a great thinker, a wise man, he must know that kings should live under the law, like all their people.”

He nods as if he agrees with me. “All kings should live under the law; but this king is learning his power. He is learning that he can make the law. And you cannot tell a grown man to show childlike obedience. Once he is a man, can he be a child again? Who will order a king when he is no longer a prince? Who will command a lion when he has learned he is no longer a cub?”

The cardinal sits at the king’s left hand at dinner, the queen on the other side. Nobody watching the king’s intent conversation with the cardinal and his occasional pleasantry to the queen could doubt who is his principal advisor now. The men talk head to head as if they are alone.

I am seated with the ladies of the queen’s household. They chatter among themselves, their gaze always flicking over the king’s friends, their voices high and affected, their heads turning this way and that, always trying to exchange a glance with the king, to catch his eye. I want to grab hold of any one of them, shake her for her stupidity, say to her: “This is not an ordinary night. If you have influence with the king, you must use it for my boys. If you dance with him, you must tell him that my boys are innocent of anything. If you have been such a foolish slut as to sleep with him, then you must whisper to him in bed to spare my boys.”

I grit my teeth and swallow my anxiety. I look up at the king and when he glances towards me, I nod my head slightly, like a princess, and I smile at him warmly, full of confidence. His gaze rests on me, indifferently, for a moment, and then he looks away.

After dinner there is dancing, and a play. Someone has composed a masque and then there is a joust of poetry, with people turning lines one after another. It is a cultured, amusing evening, and usually I would frame a line or a rhyme to play my part in the court; but this evening I cannot muster my wits. I sit among it all as if I am mute. I am deafened by my fear. It feels like a lifetime before the queen smiles at the king, rises from her chair, curtseys formally to him, kisses him good night, and leaves the room, her ladies trailing behind her, one or two of them clearly leaving as a matter of form, but planning to sneak back later.

In her rooms, the queen sends everyone away but Mary Boleyn and Maud Parr, who take off her headdress and her rings. A maid unlaces her gown and sleeves and stomacher, another helps her into her embroidered linen night shift, and she pulls a warm robe around her shoulders and waves them away. She looks tired. I remember that she is no longer the girl who came to England to marry a prince. She is thirty-five years old, and the fairy-tale prince who rescued her from poverty and hardship is now a hardened man. She motions me to sit on a chair beside her at the fireside. We put up our feet on the fender like we used to do at Ludlow, and I wait for her to speak.

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” she says slowly. “You know, I’ve never seen him like this before.”

“Do you know where my son Arthur is?”

“Sent from court.”

“Not under arrest?”

“No.”

I nod. Please God he has gone to his home at Broadhurst, or to mine at Bisham. “And Montague?”

“It was as if Henry’s father was speaking all over again,” she says wonderingly. “It was as if his father was speaking through him, as if this Henry has not had years of love and honor and safety. I think he is becoming afraid, Margaret. He is afraid just like his father was always afraid.”

I keep my gaze on the red embers in the grate. I have lived under the rule of a fearful king and I know that fear is a contagion, just like the Sweat. A frightened king first fears his enemies and then his friends and then he cannot tell one from the other until every man and woman in the kingdom fears that they can trust no one. If the Tudors are returning to terror, then the years of happiness for me and for my family are over.

“He cannot fear Arthur,” I say flatly. “He cannot doubt Montague.”

She shakes her head. “It’s the duke,” she says. “Wolsey has convinced him that the Duke of Buckingham has foreseen our death, the end of our line. The duke’s confessor has broken his vow of silence and told of terrible things, predictions and manuscripts, prophesying and stars in the sky. He says that your cousin the duke spoke of the death of the Tudors and a curse laid on the line.”

“Not to me,” I say. “Never. And not to my sons.”

Gently, she puts her hand over mine. “The duke spoke with the Carthusians at Sheen. Everyone knows how close your family is to them. Reginald was brought up by them! And the duke is close to Montague, and he is your daughter’s father-in-law. I know that neither you nor yours would speak treason. I know. I told Henry so. And I will talk to him again. He will recover his courage, I know that he will. He will come to his senses. But the cardinal has told him of an old curse on the Tudors which said that the Prince of Wales would die—as Arthur died—and the prince who came after him would die, and the line would end with a girl, a virgin girl, and there would be no more Tudors and it would, after all this, all have been for nothing.”

I hear a version of the curse that my cousin Elizabeth the queen once made. I wonder if this is indeed the punishment laid on the murderers of the boys in the Tower. The Tudors killed my brother for sure, killed the pretender for sure, perhaps killed the princes of York. Shall they lose their sons and heirs as we did?

“Do you know of this curse?” my friend the queen asks me.

“No,” I lie.

I send a warning to Arthur by four of my most trusted guardsmen, to each of my three houses, and to Arthur’s wife, Jane, at Broadhurst. I tell him, wherever he is now, to go to Bisham and wait there with his brother Geoffrey. If he thinks there is any danger at all, if any Tudor soldiers arrive in the neighborhood, he is to send Geoffrey to Reginald in Padua and then escape himself. I say that I am doing everything I can for Montague. I say that Ursula is safe with me in London.

I write to my son Reginald. I tell him that suspicion has fallen on our family and that it is vital he tell everyone that we have never questioned the rule of the king and never doubted that he and the queen will have a son and heir who will in time become Prince of Wales. I add that he must not come home, even if he is invited by the king and offered safe conduct. Whatever is going to happen, it is safer for him to stay in Padua. He can be a refuge for my boy Geoffrey if nothing else.

I go to my bedroom and I pray before the little crucifix. The five wounds of the crucified Lord show brightly on His pale painted skin. I try to think of His sufferings, but all I can think is that Montague is in the Tower, Ursula’s husband and father-in-law imprisoned with him, my cousin George Neville in another cell, Arthur exiled from court, and my boy Geoffrey at Bisham. He will be frightened, not knowing what he should do.

There is a tap on my bedroom door in the cool grayness of a spring dawn. It is the queen, returning to her room after Lauds. She is terribly pale. “You are dismissed as Mary’s governess,” she says shortly. “The king told me as we prayed together. He would listen to no argument. He’s gone hunting with the Boleyns.”

“Dismissed?” I repeat, as if I don’t understand the word. “Dismissed from Princess Mary?”

I cannot possibly leave her; she is only five years old. I love her. I guided her first steps, I trimmed her curls. I am teaching her to read Latin, English, Spanish, and French. I kept her steady on her first pony and taught her to hold the reins, I sing with her and I sit beside her when her music master comes to teach her to play the virginal. She loves me, she expects me to be with her. She will be lost without me. Her father cannot, surely cannot, say that I am not to be with her?

The queen nods. “He would not listen to me,” she says wonderingly. “It was as if he could not hear me.”

I should have thought of this, but I did not. I never thought that he would take me from the care of his daughter. Katherine looks blankly at me.

“She is accustomed to me,” I say weakly. “Who will take my place?”

The queen shakes her head. She looks frozen with distress.

“I’d better go then,” I say uncertainly. “Am I to leave court?”

“Yes,” she says.

“I’ll go to Bisham, I’ll live quietly in the country.”

She nods, her lips trembling. Without another word we move into each other’s arms and we cling to each other. “You will come back,” she promises in a whisper. “I will see you soon. I will not allow us to be parted. I will get you back.”

“God bless and keep you,” I say, my voice choked up with tears. “And give my love to Princess Mary. Tell her I will pray for her and see her again. Tell her to practice her music every day. I will be her governess again, I know it. Tell her I will come back. This will all come right. It has to come right. It will be all right.”

It does not come right. The king executes my kinsman Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, for treason, and my friend and kinsman old Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, pronounces the sentence of death with the tears pouring down his face. Right up to the last moment we all expect Henry to grant a pardon, since the duke is his kinsman and was his constant companion; but he does not. He sends Edward Stafford to his death on the scaffold as if he were an enemy and not the greatest duke in the realm, the king’s grandmother’s favorite, and his own greatest courtier and supporter.

I say nothing in his defense, I say nothing at all. So I too perhaps should be blamed for what we all see this year—the strange shadow that falls over our king. As he turns thirty he becomes harder in the eyes, harder of heart, as if the Tudor curse were not about heirs, but about a darkness that slowly creeps over him. When I pray for the soul of my cousin the Duke of Buckingham, I think that perhaps he was an accidental victim of this coldness where there once was warmth. Our golden prince Henry has always had a weakness: a hidden fear that he is not good enough. My kinsman, with his pride and his untouchable confidence, caught the king on the raw, and this is the terrible outcome.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, 1521

Our king is not angry for long. He is not like his father the tyrant. The duke is the only one of our family who pays the great price of his life. His son is attainted, he loses his fortune and his dukedom, but he is released. My son Montague is released, without charge. Henry does not pursue suspicion through the generations, he will not commute a death sentence into a fatal debt. He arrested my son, he banished us all from court in a moment of fear, fear of what we might be saying, or fear of who we are. But he does not pursue us, and once we are out of sight he returns to calmness, he is himself again. I have no doubt that the boy I loved in his childhood will summon me back to his side again. He will let me go back to his daughter.

Once he was a golden prince that we thought could do no wrong. This was folly, too high a standard for any young man to reach. But still he is our Henry, he will come right. He is his mother’s son and she was the bravest, steadiest, most loving woman I have ever known. It is not possible that my cousin Queen Elizabeth could have borne and raised a boy who was anything less than loving and trustworthy. I don’t forget her. I believe that he will recover.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, 1522

Thinking this, I live quietly, almost invisibly, at my manor at Bisham, secure on my lands, contented with my fortune. I write to no one and I see only my sons. My cousin George Neville is back at his home at Birling Manor in Kent and he writes nothing to me but the occasional letter with the most anodyne of family news, not even sealing it in case a spy traces its passage and wants to see the contents. I reply that we have grieved at the loss of Ursula’s little boy, who died of a fever at less than a year, but that Montague’s wife has had a girl and we have named her Katherine for the queen.

My older boys live quietly with their wives in their grand houses. Arthur is nearby with his wife, Jane, at his house at Broadhurst; Montague is only four miles away at Bockmer and we visit each other every month or so. My son Geoffrey I keep at home for these last precious years of his boyhood. I find I am treasuring him even more as he grows stronger and more handsome and reaches manhood. When we sit together in the evening, we never lower our voices; even when we are alone and the servants have left, we never say anything about the king, about the court, about the princess that I am not allowed to serve. If anyone is listening at the chimney, under the eaves, at the door, they hear nothing but the ordinary talk of a family. We never even agree upon this pact of silence. It is like an enchantment, like a fairy story, we have become mute as if by magic. A silence has fallen on us; we are so quiet that no one would bother to listen.

Reginald is safe in Padua. Not only has he completely escaped the king’s ill will but he is in high favor for the help he gave the king and Thomas More as they write a defense of the true faith against the Lutheran heresy. My son helps them with research into scholarly documents held at the library at Padua. I advise Reginald that he keep away from London, however much he, the king, and Thomas More agree on Bible texts. He can study just as well in Padua as in London, and the king likes having an English scholar working abroad. Reginald may want to come home, but I am not putting him at risk while there is any shadow over the reputation of our family. Reginald assures me that he has no interest in anything but his studies; yet the duke had no interest in anything but his fortune and his lands and now his wife is a widow and his son disinherited.

Ursula writes to me from a new, modest home in Staffordshire. When I made her marriage, I predicted that she would be the wealthiest duchess in England. Never did I think that the great family of the Staffords could be all but ruined. Their title is taken from them, their wealth and their lands quietly absorbed by the royal treasury on the judicious advice of the cardinal. Her great marriage, her wonderful prospects were cut off on Tower Hill with the head of her father-in-law. Her husband does not become Duke of Buckingham, and she will never be a duchess. He is mere Lord Stafford with only half a dozen manors to his name and a yearly income in only hundreds of pounds. She is Lady Stafford and has to turn the panels of her gowns. His name is disgraced and all his fortune is forfeited to the king. She has to manage a small estate and try to make a profit from dry lands when she thought she would never see a plowshare again, and she has lost her little boy so there is no son to inherit the little that there is left.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1523

We may be exiled from court but the king still calls on us when he wants outstanding military leaders. Both my boys, Montague and Arthur, are summoned to serve as the king invades France. Montague is appointed captain and Arthur fights so bravely at the forefront on the field of battle that he is knighted and is now Sir Arthur Pole. I think how proud his father would have been, I think how pleased the king’s mother would have been, and I am glad that my son has served hers.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1524

Nobody from court writes to me; I am in exile, I am in silent disgrace, though everyone knows that I am innocent of anything but bearing my name. Thomas Howard, the old Duke of Norfolk, dies comfortably in his bed and I order a Mass for his soul at the priory, the loyal good friend that he was; but I do not attend his lavish funeral. Katherine the queen sends me a short letter from time to time, a prayer book from her own library, New Year’s gifts. She rises and falls in the favor of the king as he enters alliances firstly with and then against Spain. My former pupil, my darling little Princess Mary, is betrothed to marry her kinsman Charles, the emperor, in an alliance against France, then she is to marry her cousin James, the young King of Scotland, then they even say that she will go to France and marry there. I hope that someone stands in my place and tells her not to attach herself to these alliances, not to dream of these young men as lovers. I hope that there is someone teaching her to look at all these ambitions with a steady skepticism. Nothing could be worse for her than to fall in love with the idea of one of these mercenary suitors; they may all come to nothing.

I learn from my Bisham steward, who heard from the drovers who walked our beef cattle to Smithfield, that people are saying the king has a new lover. Nobody is sure which one of the ladies at court has the king’s unreliable fancy, but then I hear that it is one of the Boleyn girls, Mary Carey, and that she is pregnant and everyone is saying that it is the king’s child.

I am glad to hear from a pedlar who comes into the kitchen to sell trinkets to the maids that she has given birth to a girl, and he winks and whispers that while she was in confinement the king took up with her sister Anne. After dinner that night, quietly in my room, Geoffrey suggests that perhaps all Howard girls smell like prey to the king, just as a Talbot hound will prefer the scent of a hare to all else. It makes me giggle, and think with affection of the old Duke of Norfolk, who loved a bawdy joke, but I frown at Geoffrey for disrespect. This family, this boy especially, is never going to say one word against this king.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, JULY 1525

The king creates a duke to replace my cousin whom he killed. Bessie’s boy, the bastard Henry Fitzroy, is honored beyond belief. My steward comes back from London and says there was a great procession to the old royal palace of Bridewell and the six-year-old boy was made a duke twice over: Duke of Richmond and Duke of Somerset. Thomas More, the king’s new favorite, read out the letters patent.

“I didn’t know that you could be two dukes at once,” my steward remarks with a sly smile to me.

“I am sure the king judges rightly,” I say; but inwardly I think that this will have cost my friend the queen a lot of pain, to see a golden-headed Tudor boy kissed by his royal father and draped in ermine.

It is Arthur, Sir Arthur as I now always call him, who gives me my first living grandson, the heir to my name. He names him Henry, as he should, and I send our beautiful gilded cradle to Jane at Broadhurst for the next generation of Plantagenet boys. I am amazed at my own fierce pride at this baby, at my powerful delight at the next generation of our dynasty.

My son Geoffrey was not part of the muster for France, and I made sure that he did not volunteer to go. He is a young man now, nearly twenty-one, and this last son, this most precious child, must be found a wife. I spend more time in considering who would suit Geoffrey than anything else in these years of exile.

She has to be a girl who will run his house for him; Geoffrey has been raised as a nobleman, he has to have a good household around him. She has to be fertile, of course, and well bred and well educated, but I don’t want a scholar for a daughter-in-law—she should be just well-enough read to raise her children in the learning of the Church. God spare me from a girl running after the new learning and dabbling in heresy as is the fashion these days. She has to be aware that he is a sensitive boy—he’s not a sportsman like Arthur nor a courtier like Montague, he is a hand-reared boy, his mother’s favorite. Even as a child he knew what I was thinking from just looking into my face, and he still has a sensitivity that is rare in anyone, especially a young nobleman. She must be beautiful; as a young boy with his long blond curls Geoffrey was often mistaken for a pretty girl, and now he has grown to manhood he is as handsome as any man at court. His children will be beauties if I can find a good match for him. She has to be elegant and thoughtful and she has to be proud—she is joining the old royal family of England, there is no greater young man by birth in the country. We may be in half disgrace at the moment, but the king’s mood changed quickly—almost overnight—and is certain to change again. Then we will be restored to royal favor and then she will represent us, the Plantagenets, at the Tudor court, and that is no easy task.

If my youngest son were in his rightful position, present at court, in some good place, heir to the greatest fortune in England, it would be easy to find the right bride for him. But as we are, half exiled, half disgraced, half acknowledged, and with the old lawsuit for my lands that Compton would deny me still running, we are a less-attractive family and Geoffrey is not the most eligible bachelor in the land as Montague was. Yet we are fertile—Montague’s wife Jane gives birth to another girl, Winifred, so I have three grandchildren now—and fertility is prized in these anxious days.

In the end I choose the daughter of the queen’s gentlemen usher, Sir Edmund Pakenham. It’s not a great match, but it is a good one. He has no sons, only two well-brought-up daughters, and one of them, Constance, is the right age for Geoffrey. The two girls will jointly inherit their father’s fortune and lands in Sussex that run near to my own, so Geoffrey will never be far from home. Sir Edmund is close enough to the queen to know that our friendship remains unshaken, and she will have me back at court as soon as her husband allows. He is gambling on my son being as great a man at court as his brothers were. He thinks, as I do, that Henry was ill advised, that the cardinal played on his fears, his father’s fears, and that this will soon pass.

They marry quietly, and the young couple come to live with me at Bisham. It is understood that when I am returned to court I will take Constance with me, that she will serve the queen and no doubt rise in the world. Sir Edmund has faith that he will see me back at court again.

And he is right. As slowly as spring comes to England, I see the royal frost thawing. The queen sends me a gift, and then the king himself, hunting nearby, sends me some game. Then after four years of exile I get the letter I have been expecting.

I am appointed to go, once again, to Ludlow Castle and be companion and governess to the little nine-year-old princess who is to take up the seat and govern the principality. Perhaps soon she will be named Princess of Wales, where once there was a beloved prince. I knew it. I knew that Katherine’s loving, gentle advice to the king would bring him to a sense of his true self. I knew that as soon as he was in alliance with her homeland he would turn once again to her. I knew that the cardinal would not be in favor forever, and that the prince I had loved as a boy would become what he was born to be: a fair, just, honorable king.

I go at once to meet the princess at Thornbury Castle, and I take my new daughter-in-law Constance with me, to serve the Princess Mary as a lady-in-waiting. The return of Tudor favor puts us all in our rightful places, back at the heart of the royal court. I show her the beautiful castle at Ludlow with pride as a place where I was once mistress, and I tell her about Arthur and the princess who was his bride. I don’t tell them that the young couple were in love, that their passion for each other illuminated the plum-colored castle. But I do say that it was a happy home, and that we will make it happy again.

THORNBURY CASTLE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, AUGUST 1525

Nine-year-old Princess Mary arrives on a blazing hot summer’s day, riding her own small horse, flanked by two hundred outriders, in her livery of blue and green, and smiling to the people who are massed around the castle gate to see this new princess coming into her own.

I stand in the shadow of the doorway, glad to be out of the heat, ready to welcome her into the castle that I once counted as my daughter Ursula’s inheritance. This was a Stafford house; it should have been Ursula’s home. The cardinal took it from the duke, and now it is to be used by the princess, and I shall run it as I will run all her houses.

Her retinue is headed by my kinsman Walter Devereux, Baron Ferrers of Chartley. He greets me with a warm kiss on both cheeks and then helps the little princess down from her saddle.

I am shocked at my first sight of her. It has been so long since I have seen her I was imagining her taller, a sturdy Tudor girl like her aunt Margaret, stocky as a pony; but she is tiny, dainty as a flower. I see her pale heart-shaped face in the shadow of the big hood of her cape and think her swamped in adult clothes, too frail for such a costume, for such a force of guards, too slight to be carrying her titles and all our expectations, too young to be taking up her duties and lands. I feel myself swallow with anxiety. She is fragile, like a princess made out of snow, a princess wished into being and only lightly embodied.

But then she surprises me by taking Walter’s hand and jumping off her horse like an agile boy, bounding up the steps towards me, and flinging herself into my arms. “Lady Margaret! My Lady Margaret!” she whispers, her face pressed against me, her head at my breast, her body slight and thin. I hold her close and feel her tremble with relief that she is with me again. I hold her tight and think I should take her by the hand and present her to her household, show her to her people. But I can’t bear to turn her away from me. I wrap my arms around her and I don’t let go for a long time. This is a child as beloved as any one of my own, a little girl still, and I have missed four years of her childhood and I am glad to have her back into my keeping.

“I thought I would never see you again,” she breathes.

“I knew I would come back to you,” I say. “And I won’t ever leave you again.”

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, 1525–1526

She is not a difficult child to raise. She has her mother’s sweet temper and all of the Spanish stubbornness, so I introduce her tutors to her, and persuade her to practice music and take exercise. I never command her; this is a daughter of England and Princess of Wales—nobody can command her but her father and mother—but I tell her that her beloved parents have put her in my keeping and will blame me if she does not live well, study like a scholar, and hunt like a Tudor. At once she applies herself for love of me. By making her lessons pleasant and interesting and encouraging her to question and consider things, by ensuring that her Master of Horse chooses hunters for her who are eager but obedient, and by having music and dancing in the castle every night, it is easy to encourage her to gain the skills that a princess must have. She is an intelligent, thoughtful girl, if anything a little too grave. I cannot help but think that she would be an apt pupil for Reginald, and that it would benefit all our family if he were to become an influence in her life.

In the meantime, her tutor is Dr. Richard Fetherston, the choice of her mother and a man that I like on sight. He is tall and brown haired, and he has a quick wit. He teaches Mary Latin with the classic authors, and translations of the Bible, but he also composes silly rhymes for her and nonsense poems. His loyalty to her mother—which we never mention—is, I think, quite unshakable.

Princess Mary is a passionately loving girl. She counts herself betrothed to her cousin King Charles of Spain, and she pins a brooch which says “The Emperor” on every gown. Her mother has encouraged this attachment, and spoken of him to her; but this summer we learn that her engagement is to be released and that instead she will marry into the French royal family.

I tell her the news myself and she runs away and locks herself in her room. She is a princess—she knows better than to complain. But she puts the diamond brooch in the bottom of her jewelry box and we have a sulky few days.

Of course, I feel for her. She is nine and she thinks her heart is broken. I brush her beautiful long russet hair as she looks pale-faced into her mirror and tells me that she thinks she will never be happy again. I am not surprised that her betrothal has been broken, but I am genuinely shocked when we receive a letter from the cardinal and learn that the king has decided to marry her to a man old enough to be her father, the notoriously loose-living, widowed King of France. She dislikes him for these three good reasons and it is my duty to tell her that as a princess of England she has to make up her mind to serve her country with her marriage, and that in this, as in everything else, her father has to be obeyed and that he has the absolute right to place her where he thinks best.

“But what if my mother thinks differently?” she asks me, her dark eyes bright with anger.

I don’t allow myself to smile. She draws herself up to her full height, a magisterial four feet, as proud as a Spanish queen. “Then your mother and your father must agree,” I say steadily. “And you would not be a good daughter if you presumed to judge them, or to take sides.”

“Well, I shan’t like him,” she says stubbornly.

“You will love and respect him as a good and dutiful wife,” I tell her. “Nobody requires you to like him.”

Her quick wit grasps the humor of this and she rewards me with a peal of ready laughter. “Oh, Lady Governess! What a thing to say!”

“And anyway you will probably come to like him,” I say comfortingly, pulling her to sit beside me so that she can rest her head on my shoulder. “Once you marry a man and you have children together and you rule your lands together, you will find in him all sorts of qualities that you admire. And if he is kind to you and a good father to your children, then you will come to love and like him.”

“Not always,” she points out. “My aunt Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, turned the cannons of her castle on her own husband and is trying to persuade the Pope to give her a divorce.”

“She’s very wrong to do so,” I maintain. “It is God’s will that a woman obey her husband and that their marriage can only be ended by death. And your father has told her so himself.”

“So can it be better to marry for love?” she demands. “My father the king married my mother for love.”

“He did indeed,” I agree. “And it was as lovely as a fairy story. But not all of us can have a life like a fairy story. Most of us will not. Your mother was very blessed that the king chose her, and he was honored with her love.”

“So why does he befriend other ladies?” Mary asks me, her voice lowered to a whisper, though we are quite alone in my private chamber. “Why does that happen, Lady Margaret?”

“What have you heard?”

“I have seen it myself,” she says. “His favorite, Mary Carey. And I see his son, Bessie Blount’s boy, at court. They have made him a duke, he is Duke of Richmond and Duke of Somerset. Nobody else in England is honored like that. It is too great an honor for a boy born to someone like Bessie. It is too great an honor for a horrid little boy like him.”

“Men, even kings, perhaps especially kings, may love with a free heart, even after their marriage,” I say. I look into her honest, questioning face and I hate the truth that I am telling her. “Your father, as a king, can do as he pleases, it is his right. The wife of a king, even though she is a queen herself, does not complain to him, does not complain to others. It is not important, it makes no difference. She makes it clear to everyone that it is not important. However many girls there may be, she is still his wife. Your mother is still the queen, however many Bessies and Marys dance at the court or walk behind her into her rooms. They don’t trouble her at all. They need not trouble you.”

“And the little double duke?” she asks spitefully.

Since I do not know what the king means by creating such an honor, I dare not advise her. “You are still the princess,” I say. “Whatever happens, the queen is still the queen.”

She looks unconvinced, and I am unwilling to tell this young princess that a woman, even a princess, is servant to her father and slave to her husband. “You know, a husband, any husband, is set by God Himself to rule over his wife.”

She nods. “Of course.”

“He must do as he pleases. If he imperils his immortal soul, a good wife might warn him of this. But she cannot try to take command. She has to live as he wishes. It is her duty as a wife and a woman.”

“But she might mind . . .”

“She might,” I admit. “But he cannot leave her side, he cannot deny his marriage, he cannot forsake her bed, he cannot deny her title as queen. He may dance and play and write poetry to a pretty girl but that changes nothing. He might give honors and love a bastard son but that changes nothing for the legitimate child of his marriage. A queen is the queen until her death. A princess is born to her coronet and no one can take it from her. A wife is a wife until her death. Everything else is just pastime and vanity.”

She is a wise girl, this little princess; for we don’t talk of this again, and when the couriers from her mother in London also carry gossip into the kitchen that the Boleyn girl has given the king a child, this one a boy, this one named Henry, I order that no one repeat the story in the hearing of the princess and I tell my daughter-in-law Constance that I will personally beat her into convulsions if I hear that she has allowed anything to be said in Mary’s hearing.

My daughter-in-law knows better than to fear my anger, as she knows I love her too dearly to lift a hand to her. But she makes sure that the princess hears nothing of the baby who is called Henry Carey, or of the new flirtation that her father has taken up in place of the old.

Under my guardianship the princess learns nothing more, not even when we go to court at Westminster and Greenwich for Christmas each year, not even when the king commands that we set up a court for the princess in Richmond Palace. I command the ladies as if I were the strictest abbess in the kingdom and there is no gossip spoken around the princess though the main court is beside itself about the king’s new flirt, Anne Boleyn, who seems to have taken her sister’s place in his favor, though not yet in his bed.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1527

I am commanded to bring the princess to court for the celebration of her betrothal into the House of Valois. She is to marry either the French king, or his second son, a little boy of seven years, the duc d’Orléans, so a completely disorganized and inadequate plan. We arrive at court and Mary flies to her mother’s rooms with me running behind her, begging her to walk with dignity, like a princess.

It hardly matters. The queen jumps down from her throne in the presence chamber to embrace her daughter and takes me by the hand to lead us both into her privy chamber so that we can chatter and exclaim, and delight in each other without a hundred people watching.

As soon as the door is closed behind us and mother and daughter have exchanged a ripple of inquiries and answers, slowly the brightness drains from the queen’s face, and I see that Katherine is weary. Her blue eyes still shine with pleasure at seeing her daughter; but the skin beneath them is brown and stained, and her face is tired and pale. At the neck of her gown I see a tell-tale rash and I guess that she is wearing a hair shirt beneath her rich clothes, as if her life was not hard enough in itself to mortify her.

I understand at once that she is grieved her precious daughter is to be bundled off to France as part of an alliance against her own nephew, Charles of Spain, and that she blames herself for this, as for everything else that will befall England without an heir. The burden of being a Spanish princess and an English queen is weighing heavily on her. The behavior of her nephew Charles has made her life in England far worse than it was. He has made promise after promise to the king, and then broken them, as if Henry were not a man dangerously quick to take offense at any threat to his dignity, as if he were not so selfish as to punish his wife for events far beyond her control.

“I have good news, good news: you are not to go to France,” she says, sitting in her chair and pulling Mary onto her lap. “The betrothal is celebrated but you will not go for years, perhaps two or three. And anything can happen in that time.”

“You don’t want me to marry into the House of Valois?” Mary asks anxiously.

Her mother forces a reassuring smile. “Of course your father will have chosen rightly for you, and we will obey him with a glad heart. But I am pleased that he has said that you are to stay in England for the next few years.”

“At Ludlow?”

“Even better than that! At Richmond. And dear Lady Margaret will live with you, and care for you when I have to go away.”

“Then I am glad too,” Mary says fervently. She looks up into the weary, smiling face. “Are you well, Lady Mother? Are you happy? Not ill at all?”

“I am well enough,” the queen says, though I hear the strain in her voice and I stretch out a hand to her so that we are linked, one to another. “I am well enough,” she repeats.

She does not speak to me of her disappointment that her daughter is to marry into the house of her enemy, France; nor of her humiliation that the bastard boy of her former lady-in-waiting is now Lord of the North, living in the great castle of Sheriff Hutton with a court as grand as that of our princess and commanding the northern marches. Indeed, now he is Lord High Admiral of England though a child of eight.

But she never complains, not of her weariness nor her ill health; she never speaks of the changes of her body, the night sweats, the nauseating headaches. I go to her room one morning and find her wrapped in sheets stepping out of a steaming bath, a princess of Spain once more.

She smiles at my disapproving face. “I know,” she says. “But bathing has never done me any harm and in the nights I am so hot! I dream I am back in Spain and I wake as if I had a fever.”

“I am sorry,” I say. I tuck the linen sheet around her shoulders, which are still smooth-skinned and pale as pearls. “Your skin is as lovely as ever.”

She shrugs as if it does not matter, and pulls up the sheet so I shall not remark on the red weals of fleabites and the painfully raw patches that come from the rubbing of the hair shirt on her breasts and belly.

“Your Grace, you have no sins that would require you to hurt yourself,” I say very quietly.

“It’s not for me, it is for the kingdom,” she says. “I take pain to turn aside the wrath of God from the king and his people.”

I hesitate. “This can’t be right,” I say. “Your confessor . . .”

“Dear Bishop Fisher wears a hair shirt himself for the sins of the world, and Thomas More does too,” she says. “Nothing but prayer, passionate prayer, is going to move God to speak to the king. I would do anything.”

That silences me for a moment.

“And you?” she asks me. “You are well, my dear? Your children are all well? Ursula had a little girl, didn’t she? And Arthur’s wife is with child, is she not?”

“Yes, Ursula has a daughter named Dorothy, and is with child again, and Jane has had a girl,” I say. “They have called her Margaret.”

“Margaret for you?”

I smile. “Arthur will inherit his wife’s great fortune when her father dies but they would like to see some of my fortune going to my namesake.”

“And they have a boy already,” she says wistfully, and this is the only acknowledgment she makes that her barren marriage with only our little princess has broken her heart, and now it is an old, old sorrow.

But as I go around court and greet my friends and my many cousins, I find that her ladies, indeed everyone at court, seem to know that her courses have stopped and that there will never be any more Tudor babies, girls or boys. Perhaps it will be, in the end, that there are no sons and the line will end with a girl.

The king says nothing about this slow, painful crushing of his hopes, but the favor shown to Bessie Blount’s bastard, little Henry Fitzroy, and the honors heaped on him remind everyone that the queen is past the age of childbearing and that, although we have a handsome young Tudor boy visiting court, running down the galleries and calling for his horse in the stables, it is not one that she has carried, and now no one hopes for anything more from her.

It is Maria de Salinas, now Countess Willoughby, the queen’s most loyal friend, who says quietly to me: “Don’t think she is too distressed at this French marriage. She feared far worse.”

“Why, what could be worse for her?” I ask.

We are walking together by the river, as the king has demanded a rowing regatta and the watermen are competing against the noblemen of the court. Everyone is disguised as soldiers or mermen, and it is a pretty scene. I can only tell which team is of noblemen and which watermen by the harsh fact that the watermen win every race and Henry’s laughing court collapse over their oars and confess that it is harder work than it looks.

“She fears that the king might order Princess Mary to marry Henry Fitzroy,” she says, and watches as the smile drains from my face. I turn to face her and grip her hand as I feel I am about to faint.

“What?” I think I must have misunderstood her.

She nods. “It’s true. There is a plan that Princess Mary will marry the Duke of Richmond, the bastard.”

“This is an ugly joke,” I say.

Her steady gaze tells me that it is no joke.

“Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because it is true.”

I look around. There is no one in earshot, but still I draw her hand into my arm and we walk away from the riverbank, where the ladies are cheering their favorites, into the quietness of the lush garden.

“The king would never have thought of such a ridiculous thing.”

“Of course not. The cardinal put it into his head. But now the king thinks of it too.”

I look at her, and I am dumb with horror at what she is saying. “This is madness.”

“It is the only way he can get his son on the throne of England, without disinheriting his daughter. It’s the only way the people would accept Henry Fitzroy as his father’s heir. Princess Mary becomes Queen of England, with a Tudor husband at her side.”

“They are half brother and sister, it is quite horrible.”

“That is what we think. That is what a normal father would think. But this is the king, thinking about who is going to inherit his throne. He would do anything to keep the Tudors on the throne. A princess cannot hold the throne of England. And he could get a dispensation for such a marriage.”

“The Pope would never agree.”

“Actually, the Pope would agree. The cardinal would arrange it.”

“The cardinal has that much influence?”

“Some say he will be the next pope.”

“The queen would never consent.”

“Yes,” Maria says gently, as if finally I have come to an understanding of what she has been trying to say all along. “Exactly. That is the worst thing. That is the worst thing that might happen. The queen would never consent to it. She would rather die than see her daughter shamed. The queen would fight it. And what do you think will happen if she sets herself against the will of the king? What do you think will happen to her, if she defends her daughter against the command of her husband? What do you think he will do? What is he like, these days, if anyone contradicts him?”

I look at her pale face and I think of my cousin the Duke of Buckingham, who put his head on the block for nothing more than boastful words in the secrecy of the confessional. “If she opposed him, would he call it treason?” I wonder.

“Yes,” she says. “Which is why I am glad that the king plans to marry his daughter to our worst enemy, France. Because there was something even worse planned for her.”

My son Arthur, Sir Arthur as I delightedly remind myself to call him, rows in the regatta and beats four other boats before coming in second to a brawny waterman with arms like legs of ham. My son Montague takes bets on the riverbank and wins a purse of gold from the king himself. The happy, noisy court ends the day with a battle of boats with the king’s barge leading the charge against a small flotilla of wherries. Anne Boleyn gets herself the part of a figurehead, at the front of the king’s boat, gazing out over the water, directing the fire of the bargemen wielding buckets. Everyone gets drenched and the laughing king helps Anne out of the boat and keeps her by him as we all walk back to the palace.

Princess Mary practices her part in the great masque planned to celebrate her betrothal. I go with her to the wardrobe rooms where they are fitting her gown. It is an extraordinarily costly dress, the bodice encrusted with rubies and pearls, the red and white of the Tudor rose, their stems of emeralds, their hearts of yellow diamonds. She staggers at first under the weight of it, but when she stands up she is the most glamorous princess the world has ever seen. She is still slight and small, but her pale skin is flushed with health, her auburn hair is thick and rich, and in this gown she looks like an icon in a valuable shrine.

“We should really be in the treasury for this dress fitting,” I say to her and I see her face light up with pleasure.

“It is more treasure than velvet,” she agrees. “But see my sleeves!”

They hold out the golden surcoat and she puts it on. The hanging sleeves of the gown are in the new fashion, so long that they almost reach the ground, and she is draped in golden light. They gather her thick hair in a garland of flowers, and capture the mass of flowers and auburn locks in a silver net.

“How do I look?” she asks me, knowing that the answer is “beautiful.”

“You look like a princess of England and a queen of France,” I tell her. “You are as beautiful as your mother when she first came to England, but even more richly dressed. You’re dazzling, my dear. No one will look at anyone but you.”

She sweeps me a curtsey. “Ah, merci, ma bonne mère,” she says.

At first I am proved right; no one takes their eyes from our princess. The masque is a great success and the princess and seven ladies emerge from the painted scenery to dance with eight costumed knights, and she is the center of all attention, dripping in jewels and faultlessly trained. When the masque is over, the French ambassador begs her to honor him with a dance. She takes her place at the head of the set, and on the other side of the room her father lines up with his partner. My friend the queen watches smiling at this official, most important occasion, as her husband dances hand in hand with the commoner Anne Boleyn, his head turned towards her, his eyes on her animated face.

I wait for the signal that the ladies are to withdraw, but the dancing goes on long into the night. Only after midnight does the queen rise from her chair under the cloth of estate and curtsey to the king. He bows to her, with every sign of respect. He takes her hand and he kisses her on both her cheeks. Her ladies and I rise from our stools or reluctantly trail away from the dancing and prepare to leave.

The queen says: “Good night, God bless you,” and smiles at her husband. Princess Mary, her daughter, comes to stand behind her; Mary Brandon, the Dowager Queen of France, comes behind her. I follow them, all the ladies in order of their precedence, we are all ready leave—but Anne Boleyn has not moved.

I feel a moment’s horrible embarrassment: she has made a mistake and I, or someone else, had better smooth it over. She has not noticed that we are leaving and she will look a fool, scampering behind us when the queen withdraws. It doesn’t matter much, but it’s awkward and stupid of her to be inattentive to the time-honored rituals of the court. I step forward to take her by the arm and curtsey to the queen and sweep her into the train of ladies, to do this young woman the favor of skimming over her error before she is embarrassed by her mistake. But then I see something in the tilt of her head and the gleaming challenge of her smile, and I hesitate.

She stands surrounded by a circle of the most handsome men of the court, the center of attention in the beautiful arched hall, her dark head crowned by a French hood of deep crimson set with rubies and gold thread. She does not look out of place, she does not look shamed as she should, a lady-in-waiting who has forgotten her place. Instead, she looks utterly triumphant. She sweeps a shallow curtsey, her red velvet gown spread wide, and she does not hurry to join the queen’s train, as she should.

There is a momentary pause, almost an intake of breath, and then the queen looks from her husband to the Boleyn girl as if she realizes that something new and strange is happening here. The young woman is not going to withdraw from the hall following the queen, walking behind the superior ladies in order of strict precedence—and since she was born the daughter of a simple knight there are very many of us to precede her. She is not coming at all. In this one act she has changed everything. And the queen is not ordering her. And the king is allowing this.

Katherine gives a little shrug, as if it does not much matter, turns on her heel, and walks from the great hall with her head held high. Led by the king’s own daughter the princess, the king’s sister—a princess by birth and a queen by marriage—his cousins like me born royal, all the other ladies of the court, we all follow the queen in deafening silence. But as we proceed up the broad stairs, we hear Anne’s seductive giggle.

I command Montague and Arthur to my rooms at dawn, before breakfast, before Prime, before anyone else in the royal household is stirring.

“You should have told me matters had gone so far,” I say sharply.

Montague checks that the door is tightly closed, and that his sleepy groom is standing outside. “I couldn’t write anything, and besides, I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know?” I exclaim. “She serves as a lady-in-waiting but goes where she wants, dances with the king, and doesn’t leave when we do?”

“That’s the first time that has happened,” Arthur explains. “She’s never stayed behind before. Yes, she’s with him all the time; she goes alone to his rooms, they ride out just the two of them with the rest of us following behind, they sit together and talk or they gamble or they play and sing.” He makes an almost comical grimace. “Lady Mother, they read books of theology together! What sort of seduction is this? But she’s always been discreet before, she’s always been like all the others. She’s never stayed back like that.”

“So why now?” I demand. “In front of the French ambassador, and everyone?”

Montague nods at the question. He’s more of a politician than his brother. Arthur sees everything because he is all but inseparable from the king, one of the band of his close friends who go everywhere together; but Montague understands better what it means.

“Could it be for that very reason? Perhaps because this was the betrothal of Princess Mary to the French,” he suggests. “Anne favors the French, she spent years at the French court. She helped to bring this about and they know that. Henry doesn’t intend to befriend the Spanish again, they are to be our enemies. The queen—God bless her—is of the enemy. He feels free to offend her. Anne shows that it is her policy which will triumph.”

“What good does it do the king?” I ask crossly. “To insult the queen before the whole court does nothing but hurt her, and demean himself. And that young woman laughed as we left, I heard her.”

“If it wins him favor with the Lady, he’ll do it,” Arthur points out. “He’s beside himself. He’ll do anything.”

“What did you call her?”

“I called her the Lady. That’s what a lot of them are calling her.”

I could curse like a stable boy with rage. “For sure they can’t call her ‘Your Grace,’ ” I say sharply. “Or ‘Your Ladyship.’ She’s nothing more than a knight’s daughter. She wasn’t good enough for Henry Percy.”

“She likes anything that makes her stand out,” Arthur pursues. “She likes to be conspicuous. She likes the king to publicly acknowledge her. She’s terrified that everyone will think her nothing more than his whore, just like her sister, just like all the others. She makes him promise, all the time, that this will be different. She’s not to be another Bessie, she’s not to be another Mary. She’s not to be another laundry maid, or the French slut Jehanne. She’s got to be special, she’s got to be different. Everyone has to see that she is different.”

“The lead hackney,” I say vulgarly.

Montague looks at me. “No,” he says. “You have to see this, Lady Mother. It’s important. She’s more than his latest ride.”

“What more can she be?” I demand impatiently.

“If the queen should die . . .”

“God forbid,” I say instantly, crossing myself.

“Or say: if the queen should retire to live a religious life.”

“Oh, do you think she would?” Arthur asks, surprised.

“No, of course she wouldn’t!” I exclaim.

“She might,” Montague insists. “She might. And really—she should. She knows that Henry has to have a son. Fitzroy isn’t enough. Princess Mary isn’t enough. The king has to leave a legitimate male heir, not a bastard boy or a girl. The queen knows this, every princess knows this. If she could rise to greatness, if she could act with great generosity, she could retire from the marriage, take the veil, then Henry could be free to marry again. She should do that.”

“Oh, is this your opinion?” I ask bitingly. “The opinion of my son, who owes everything to the queen? Is this the opinion of the young men of the court who have sworn fealty to her?”

He looks awkward. “I’m not the only one saying it,” he says. “And many more think it.”

“Even so,” I say flatly. “Even if she were to choose to join a nunnery—and I swear she would not—that would make no difference to Anne Boleyn. If the queen stepped aside, it would only be for the king to marry a princess of Spain or France. The king’s whore would still be nothing but a whore.”

“A consort?” Montague suggests.

“A concubine?” Arthur smiles.

I shake my head. “Are we Mahometans now? In the eyes of God and by the law of the land, there is nothing that girl can be but an adulterous whore. We don’t have concubines in England. We don’t have consorts. She knows it, and we know it. The best she can get for herself is the right to dance at court after the queen has withdrawn, and a title like ‘the Lady,’ for those who are too mealymouthed to call a whore a whore. Anything else means nothing.”

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1527–1528

I dare not tell Montague to write to me secretly, so everything that I know this summer is learned from tactful pointers in his breezy unsealed letters, or from the gossip at the castle gate from the occasional London tinker or pedlar. Montague writes to me family news: Arthur’s new baby, Margaret, is thriving; Ursula is out of confinement and has given the Staffords another boy, another Henry; and then one day he writes with quiet pride to tell me that he too has a son. I take the letter and I kiss it, and hold it to my heart. There will be another Henry Pole, there will be another Lord Montague after my son and I are long gone. This little baby, this Henry, is another step on our family path to greatness from greatness.

He has to be silent about all other news. He can tell me nothing about the queen and the court, he cannot tell me that the king summoned Thomas More to walk in the garden with him at Hampton Court, and among the evening birdsong, and with the scent of the roses on the air, confided that he feared his marriage was invalid. He pronounced that his sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, could not get a divorce from the Pope, but that his marriage was a different case, that God had shown him, so painfully but so vividly in the deaths of his children, that his marriage is not blessed by God. And Thomas, good councillor he is, swallowed his own doubts at the divinity of this revelation, and promised the king that he will form an opinion, a thoughtful legal opinion, on the matter and advise his master.

But Montague’s discretion makes no difference, for by the end of the summer, the whole kingdom knows that the king is seeking to end the marriage with his queen. The whole kingdom knows, but there is not one word of it inside the state rooms at Ludlow. I surprise myself at the power of the rule I have established over my household. Nobody speaks ugly gossip to the young woman in my charge and so the princess’s world is collapsing around her; and she does not know.

Of course, in the end, I have to tell her. Many times I start; but each time the words simply die in my mouth. It is unreal to me, it is incredible to me, I cannot offer her an account of it, any more than I could seriously tell her the tale of the Lambton Worm as a fact rather than a ridiculous legend. It may be that everyone knows it, but still it is unreal.

And anyway, just as I hope, nothing happens. Or at any rate, we have no certain report that anything has happened. We are so far away from London, in the very distant west, that we get no reliable news. But even out here, we learn that the queen’s nephew Charles V of Spain has invaded Rome and captured the Pope and is holding him virtually as a prisoner. This changes everything. Not even our all-persuasive cardinal with his honeyed words is going to be able to convince a pope imprisoned by the Spanish king to rule against the Spanish Queen of England. Any of the king’s complicated theological arguments about it being a sin to marry his brother’s widow will simply go unheard by the captive Pope. While the Spanish emperor commands the Pope, his aunt, the Spanish Queen of England, is safe. All she has to do is to assert the simple truth: that God called her to marry the King of England, and that there is no reason that the marriage is invalid. And I know she will assert that truth until she dies.

In the very castle where Katherine and Arthur lived as passionate lovers, I say nothing to anyone about the love they shared, or about the promise he drew from her—that if he died, she must still be Queen of England and have a daughter called Mary. I say nothing about the lie that I swore to support. I put it from me as if it were a secret from so long ago that I cannot even remember it. My secret fear is that someone, sooner or later, perhaps the cardinal, perhaps Thomas More, or the cardinal’s new servant Thomas Cromwell, another man from nowhere, is going to ask me if Arthur and Katherine were lovers. I am praying that if I continue to study forgetfulness, then I can say in truth that I never knew, and now I cannot remember.

The summer heat comes and brings with it an outbreak of the Sweat, and the queen summons the princess to join her and the king to travel the country far from London. Once again they are going to live privately while the country suffers.

“You are to join them at St. Albans,” I say to Princess Mary. “I will take you there and go to my own house. I daresay you will spend the summer with them.”

“With who?” she asks anxiously. “Who else will be there?”

Poor child, I think. So she knows. Despite the shield I have put around her, she knows that Anne Boleyn goes everywhere with the king. Her silence about this has not been ignorance, but discretion. But I have good news for her, and I let her see my small, triumphant smile. “Alas,” I say, lingering over the word till her eyes shine and she gleams in return. “Alas, I hear that many of the court are ill. The cardinal has retreated to his home with his physician, and Anne Boleyn has gone to Hever. So it will just be a small court. Probably just your father and mother and perhaps one or two attendants, Thomas More who is such a good man attending your father, Maria de Salinas with your mother.”

Her face lights up. “Just my father and mother?”

“Just them,” I confirm, and I wonder if it would be a sin to pray that the damned whore dies of the disease in Kent.

“And you?” she asks.

I hug her to me. “I will go to my home at Bisham and make sure that my family and my people are well. It is a terrible illness, I will be needed. Arthur and Jane have had a new baby, I pray that they are well. And I will write to you that we are well, and I will think of you, my darling.”

“And I’ll come back to you,” she stipulates. “When the summer is over. We will be together again.”

“Of course.”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1528

It is a terrible illness, God forgive England for the sin that has brought it down on us. There are many who say that this was foretold when the first Tudor came. There are many who say that the king cannot get a son and the country cannot enjoy good health. There are many who fear the present and predict a terrible future and blame it on the Tudor line.

Everyone is talking of a young woman in Kent who has lain as if dead for weeks, and has now come back to life to say that princes should obey the Pope. Now they are calling her a visionary and flocking to hear what else she says. But I don’t need a prophetess to tell me that it will be a bad summer. When I had the message from London that men were dying in the streets, falling in the gutters as they were struggling to get to their homes, I knew that it would be a bad year for us all, even for my family, hiding behind the high walls of my great estate. Geoffrey and his wife, Constance, come to live with me, and Arthur sends me his children Henry and Margaret, my namesake, and the wet nurse with the baby, Mary, with a note to say that the Sweat has come to Broadhurst, he and Jane are both ill, they will pray that they survive it, and will I care for his children as if they were my own?

I pray to God that it passes us by,

he writes.

If we are unlucky, Lady Mother, please care for my children, and pray for me as I pray for you.—A

They are a pitiful pair, little Henry and Margaret, who goes by the name of Maggie. They stand, clutching each other’s hand, in my great hall and I kneel beside them and gather them into my arms and smile at them with a confidence I don’t feel.

“I am so glad you have come to me, for I have much for you to do, work and play,” I promise them. “And as soon as everyone is well at Broadhurst your mother and father will come here to fetch you and you can show them how much you have grown and what good children you have been this summer.”

I make sure that the house is run with the usual plague-season care. Anything that comes to us from the outside world is washed in vinegar and water. We buy as little food from the market at Bisham as possible, but live off our own lands. Strangers are not welcome, and anyone traveling through the town from London is invited to stay the night at the priory guesthouse, not in my home. I prepare gallons and gallons of tincture from rosemary and sage and sweet wine, and every servant in the household, every man, woman, and child who dines in the hall or sleeps in the straw, takes a spoonful of it every morning; but I never know if it does any good.

I don’t attend the priory church and I forbid my household from going into the warm, dark, stinking place where the incense floats over the stench of the midden and unwashed bodies. Instead, I observe the daily liturgy with my own confessor in my own private chapel next to my bedroom and I pray on my knees for hours that this sickness will pass us by. Arthur’s two children say their evening and morning prayers in my chapel; I keep them at a distance from the priest, and when he blesses the baby he signs the cross in the air over her precious head.

Especially I pray for Geoffrey, whose slight frame and clear skin make him seem so delicate to my worried inspection. I know that in reality he is strong and healthy, nobody could fail to see the color in his cheeks or his energy or his joy in life. But I watch him all the time for any signs of a fever, or a headache, or a shrinking from sunlight. His wife, Constance, is as enduring as her name, stocky as a pony, working hard for me, and I am grateful for her care of her husband. If she did not idolize him, I would hate her.

I begin to think that we will get through this summer with nothing worse than a few deaths in the village and a kitchen boy who was probably sick but ran away to his own home and died there, when Geoffrey taps on the door of my private chapel as I am praying on my knees for the health of all those that I love, Princess Mary, the queen, and my children. He puts his golden head into the room.

“Forgive me, Lady Mother,” he says.

I know it must be important if he disturbs me at my prayers. I sit back on my heels and motion him to come in. He crosses himself and kneels beside me. I see his mouth is trembling almost as if he were a little boy again and fighting to hold back tears. Something terrible must have happened. Then I see his hands are clasped tight together and he closes his eyes for a moment as if summoning the help of God to deliver his message, then he turns and looks at me. His dark blue eyes are filled with tears as he takes my cold hand.

“Lady Mother,” he says quietly. “I have very bad news for you.”

“At once,” I say through cold numb lips. “Tell me quickly, Geoffrey.” I think, Is it the Princess Mary, the girl I love as if she were my own daughter? Is it Montague, my heir and the heir of my royal name? Is it one of the little children, could God be so cruel as to take another Plantagenet boy?

“It’s Arthur,” he says, and his eyes fill with tears. “It’s my brother. He is dead, Lady Mother.”

For a moment, I cannot hear him. I look at him as if I am deaf and don’t know what he is saying. He has to repeat himself. He says again: “It’s Arthur, my brother. He is dead, Lady Mother.”

Arthur’s wife, Jane, is sick also, near to death. She has only one woman at her side, caring for her in her private rooms, so nobody tells her that her husband is dead. The steward of their household is so terrified of the sickness that he has abandoned his duty to his lord and his house and barricaded himself into his own rooms. In his absence the place is falling into complete disorder. There is no one to arrange things as they should be done, and so my son Montague commands that Arthur’s body is to be taken from his unlucky house and brought to our priory and laid in our chapel.

We lay him to rest where the other Plantagenet kings are laid, in our priory at Bisham, and when the church is swept and cleaned and censed, I go with Geoffrey and Constance and we start the prayers for his soul and hear the monks take up the chant.

We walk back to the house, and I look at the great house that I have renewed, with my family crest above the door, and I think, as bitterly as any sinner, that all the wealth and all the power that I won back for myself and my children could not save my beloved son Arthur from the Tudor sickness.

BROADHURST MANOR, WEST SUSSEX, SUMMER 1528

Montague and I ride over to Arthur’s house at Broadhurst and find the house in chaos and the hay uncut in the fields. The crops are ripening well, but the boys who should be scaring the birds are sick or dead, and the village is a silent place with shuttered windows and a bundle of hay at every other door. In the great house it seems everyone has run away. Only one woman is seeing to Jane, and no one is managing the house, or farming the lands.

“There is no reason why you should do this,” Montague says to me as I stride into the hall and start to give orders to servants who have clearly been sleeping in the unchanged straw and dining out of the larder since the family took to their beds.

“These are Arthur’s lands,” I say tersely. “This is what I made his marriage for. This is the inheritance of his son, Henry. I can’t see it go to waste. If Arthur cannot leave a fortune to his children, it’s as if he never won it by marrying her at all. If he doesn’t leave a legacy, then what’s the point of his life?”

Montague nods. He goes outside to the stables and sees that our horses are turned out into the fields and then tells the bailiff of the estate that, Sweat or no Sweat, he had better get a hay-making gang together tomorrow and start work, or they will die in the winter for lack of forage for the beasts, rather than dying now in the summer of the Sweat.

Between the two of us, we set the house and the land to rights over weeks of work, and then the news comes from London that the illness seems to have burned out. The cardinal himself took the Sweat and yet survived it. God smiles on Thomas Wolsey for a second time. His ways are mysterious, indeed.

“There’s no plague in the world that could touch him,” I say grimly. “No disease is poisonous enough to check that massive frame. What news from Hever?”

“She’s survived as well,” Montague says to me, disdaining to name Anne Boleyn as I do. We exchange a look of baffled sorrow, that the Sweat should spare a troublesome slut and yet take Arthur.

“Sir Arthur,” I say out loud.

“God bless him,” Montague says. “Why him and not the others?”

“God knows best in His wisdom,” I say; but my heart isn’t in it.

Jane knows that we are in the house, but we don’t go to her rooms for fear of infection, and she doesn’t send any message to us, nor ask after her husband.

“I’d think better of her if she asked,” I say irritably to Montague. “Has it not occurred to her?”

“She may be fighting for her own life,” he says.

He hesitates and then continues. “You do remember, Lady Mother, that there was provision in the marriage contract for Arthur’s early death? The lands that she brought to Arthur as her dowry will revert to her, her future inheritance from her father will go to her, for her to use as she wishes. Her father’s fortune will be hers alone, at his death. We get nothing.”

I had not remembered this. The very lands that I have been working this month, the house that I have been repairing will bring me nothing. The contract that I wrote to make my son wealthy gave him nothing but worry, and now there is nothing for our family at all. “He never stopped his work for these lands,” I say angrily. “He was prepared to take over their military service and spare her father, he was prepared to command their tenants. He was ready to do everything for them. It was her own father who stood in Arthur’s way—old fool. And she supported her father against Arthur.”

Montague bows his head. “And now nothing,” he observes. “And all our work this month does nothing for our estate.”

“It serves my grandson Henry; I’m working for Arthur’s boy. Thank God that he has been spared. He can come home to his own house, and in the end he’ll get everything.”

Montague shakes his head. “No, because it’s his mother’s house. His mother inherits, not him. She can leave the lands away from him if she wants.”

The thought of disinheriting a son is so foreign to me that I look aghast. “She’d never do such a thing!”

“If she marries again?” Montague points out. “The new husband takes everything.”

I go to the window and look out at the fields that I thought were Arthur’s fields, that would go unquestioningly to his son, another Henry Pole.

“And if she doesn’t remarry, she’ll be a drain on our estate,” Montague adds gloomily. “We’ll have to pay her dower for the rest of her life.”

I nod. I find I cannot think of her as the young woman that I welcomed to my house, that I thought of as another daughter. She failed in her wifely duty when she stood with her father against Arthur, when she took to her bed and let Arthur die alone. Now she sends her children away and lies in bed while her husband’s brother and mother save her harvest. For the rest of her life, for as long as she lives, she will be able to draw an income from the estates that I work so hard to sow and reap, to build. The spoiled heiress who took to her bed while her own husband was dying will have the right to live in my house and draw her dower from my rents, her whole life long. She will inherit her father’s fortune. I have even promised her lands in my will. Most likely, I will die before her and she will draw my black velvet gown with the black fur trim from my wardrobe and wear it to my funeral.

Jane is on the mend. Her lady-in-waiting comes to me and tells me, with a low curtsey, that Jane sends her compliments. She has fought the Sweat and won; she will come to dine with us tonight and she is most grateful to us for all we have done for the household.

“Have you told her that her husband is dead?” I ask the woman bluntly.

Her pale strained face tells me that she has not. “Your ladyship, we did not dare to tell her while she was ill,” she says. “And then it seemed too late to say it.”

“She hasn’t asked?” Montague demands incredulously.

“She’s been so very ill.” She excuses her mistress. “Not really in her right mind, with the fever so hot. I thought perhaps that you . . .”

“Tell her to come to my rooms before dinner this afternoon,” I rule. “I will tell her myself.”

We wait for Lady Arthur Pole in the guest room of this house that was once Arthur’s house, but is now hers.

The door is opened for her and she comes into the room leaning on the arm of her lady-in-waiting, apparently too weak to walk unaided.

“Ah, my dear,” I say as kindly as I can manage. “You do look pale. Sit down, please.”

She manages a curtsey to me and a bow of her head to Montague, who helps her to a chair as I nod to her lady-in-waiting to leave.

“This is my cousin, Elizabeth,” she says faintly, as if she would keep her.

“You shall sit with us at dinner,” I promise, and the woman takes the hint and goes from the room.

“I have very bad news for you, I am afraid,” I say gently.

“My father?” She blinks.

“Arthur, your husband.”

She gasps. Clearly, she had not even known that he was ill. But surely, when she came out of her chamber and he did not greet her, she must have guessed?

“I thought he had gone to your house with the children! Are they well?”

“Thank God Henry and Maggie were well and merry at Bisham when I left them, the baby, Mary, and my son Geoffrey and his wife too.”

She takes this in. “But Arthur . . .”

“My daughter, I am sorry to tell you that he has died of the Sweat.”

She crumples up, like a piece of dropped cloth. Her head sinks into her hands, her body folds up, even her little feet tuck back under her seat. With her hands over her face she wails out her sorrow.

Montague looks at me, as if to ask: “What shall I do?” I nod to him to take a seat and wait for this helpless sobbing to cease.

She does not stop. We leave her crying and go into dinner without her. The people of her estate, Arthur’s tenants, need to see that we are here, that life will go on, that they are required to do their duty, to work and pay their rents; the household staff need not think they can take a holiday because my son is dead. These lands become Jane’s again, but then, God willing, they will be inherited by Arthur’s son Henry, so they must be kept in good heart for him. When dinner is over, we go back to my rooms and find her red-eyed and pale; but, thank God, she has finally stopped crying.

“I can’t bear it,” she says piteously to me, as if a woman can choose what she can or cannot bear. “I can’t bear to be widowed again! I can’t bear to live without him. I can’t face life as a widow, and I won’t ever consider another marriage. I am wedded to him in death as in life.”

“These are early days, you’ve had a shock,” I say soothingly. But she is determined not to be comforted.

“My heart is broken,” she says. “I shall come and live at Bisham in my dower rooms. I shall live quite retired. I shall see no one and never go out.”

“Really?” I bite my tongue on the skepticism in my voice, and say again, more gently: “Really, my dear? Don’t you think you would prefer to live with your father? Don’t you want to go home to Bodiam Castle?”

She shakes her head. “Father would only arrange another marriage for me, I know he would. I will never marry again. I want to be in Arthur’s home, I want to always be close to him, nursing my grief. I will live with you and weep for him every day.”

I cannot feel the tenderness of heart that I should. “Of course, you are distressed now,” I say.

“I am determined,” she says.

I really think she is.

“I will live my life in remembrance of Arthur. I will come to Bisham and never leave. I shall haunt his grave like a sorrowful ghost.”

“Oh,” I say.

I give her a few days to think and pray on this resolution but she doesn’t waver. She’s determined never to marry again, and she has set her heart on the rooms in my house promised to her in her marriage contract. She will have her own little household under my roof, she will no doubt employ her own servants, she will order her meals from my kitchens, and she will receive, four times a year, the rents from her dower lands, which I signed away, but never thought that I should pay. I don’t see how this is to be borne.

It is Montague, my quiet and thoughtful heir, who comes up with the brilliant solution to prevent the young widow from living with us forever. “Are you quite sure that you want to be withdrawn from the world?” he asks his sister-in-law one evening, in the small space of time that is available to see her, as she comes out of dinner in the great hall before heading to chapel to pray all night.

“Completely,” she says. She is draped in dark blue, as I am, the color of royal mourning. Arthur was a boy of the House of Plantagenet; he is mourned like a prince.

“Then I fear that Bisham Manor will be too noisy for you, too busy,” he says. “The king visits when he is on progress, the whole court comes for weeks during the summer, my mother entertains her family during the winter, the Staffords, the Courtenays, the Lisles, the Nevilles. You know how many cousins we have! The Princess Mary is certain to honor us with a long stay in the summer and she brings her entire court with her. It is not like a private house, not like your lovely house here; it is a palace, a working palace.”

“I don’t want to see any of those people,” she says crossly. “I wish to live completely retired. Perhaps my Lady Mother will give me another property of my own on her lands, where I can live in complete peace. I don’t want much, just a manor house with a private park would be all I would need.”

Even Montague flinches at this request. “My Lady Mother has worked hard to put the lands together,” he says quietly. “I don’t think she would parcel them out now.”

“I can’t live in a noisy, busy house.” She turns to me. “I don’t want to live in a palace. I want to be as quiet and still as a nun.”

Montague says nothing.

He waits.

I say nothing, I wait too. Slowly, we can see a new idea dawning on her.

“What if I were to live at a nunnery?” she asks. “Or even—what if I were to take my vows?”

“Do you feel you have a calling?” I have to ask her. I think, guiltily, of the queen who has sworn that she could not consider a nunnery unless she knew that God had called her to a religious life, that no man or woman should take their vows unless they know for sure that they have a calling. Anything else is a blasphemy. My son Reginald still refuses to take vows without a calling. He says it is an insult to God Himself.

“I do,” she says with sudden enthusiasm. “I think I do.”

“And I am sure you do,” Montague, the courtier, says smoothly. “From the very beginning you said that you wanted to withdraw from the world, that you would never marry again.”

“Exactly,” she says. “I want to be completely quiet and alone with my grief.”

“Then this is the very best solution,” I say, succumbing without much reluctance to temptation. “And I shall find you a place in a good house, and I shall pay for your keep.”

She clearly does not realize that when she agrees to be a nun she will return her dower to me, just as if she were remarrying. I will pay out only what it costs to keep her in a nunnery sworn to poverty.

“I think it would be the very best thing,” she says. “But what about this house and lands? My inheritance? And the fortune that will come to me from my father?”

“You could assign them to Henry, as your heir,” I suggest. “And I could make him my ward and keep them for him. They need not trouble you at all.”

Carefully, Montague makes sure that he does not exchange a single triumphant glance with me. “Whatever you wish, sister,” he says respectfully.

I wait to be commanded to open up Richmond Palace for the princess to return to London, but there is no sign of the king coming to the city, and a rumor spreads that he has barricaded himself into a tower so that no unhealthy person can breathe on him. When the citizens hear this, they break off from burying their thousands of dead and laugh with the bitter cackle of a hangman, that their king so brave and showy in the jousting ring should be such a coward before disease.

It is not just Londoners who suffer. My former suitor and lately enemy Sir William Compton dies, and with him I hope dies the dispute over my lands. Anne Boleyn takes the disease and then bounces up from her bed at Hever Castle none the worse for it; but her sister’s husband Sir William Carey dies, leaving a luscious and fertile Boleyn girl with two copper-headed fatherless children. Here is another healthy bastard boy, here is another redheaded Henry. I cannot help but wonder if the king will look at Mary—the prettier and the warmer of the two, with a Tudor boy and a girl in her nursery—and think to put his wife aside and take Mary Boleyn and her little family and declare them as his own.

Jane takes her vows and becomes a novice at Bisham Priory, and I write at once to the newly recovered cardinal to apply for the wardship of my grandson Henry. Wolsey has triumphed over an illness that killed better men than him, and is now well enough to dispose of their heirs. However greedy he is for Henry’s inheritance for himself, he surely cannot deny my claim. Who could be more suitable than I to manage my grandson’s estates until he reaches his majority?

But I leave nothing to chance. A wealthy ward is a treasure that others will want. I have to promise the cardinal a handsome fee, and this is in addition to the one hundred marks that I pay him anyway every year just for his goodwill. It will be worth it, if he will only favor my claim. I have lost my beloved son Arthur; I cannot bear it that I should lose his fortune too, and that his son should fail to benefit from the marriage contract I composed.

This is not my only worry in these times. I had hoped that the king’s choice to hide from the Sweat with his wife and daughter would have its usual consequence of reminding him what a pleasant companion is his wife of nearly twenty years. But I hear from Montague who visits the small touring court that every day the king writes passionate letters to the absent Boleyn girl, and composes poetry to her dark eyes, and openly yearns for her. Extraordinary though it seems, the court will return to London headed by a king and queen who have clung together through danger, but once they are back in Westminster the king will resume his attempt to get the queen to step aside for a young commoner.

At least my son Geoffrey gives me no cause for concern. Neither he nor Constance take the Sweat, and when I go to London, they return to their house at Lordington in Sussex. Geoffrey manages the land so well and is so skilled with his tenants and neighbors that I have no hesitation in giving him the right to be a member of Parliament. The seat of Wilton is in my gift and I hand it to him.

“You can use this as a stepping-stone at court,” I tell him after dinner, on our last night together before he goes to his home and I go to court. Constance has tactfully withdrawn, as she knows I love to be with Geoffrey and free to talk to him about everything. Of all my boys he is the one who has always been closest to my heart. From babyhood, he is the one who has never been far from my side.

“Like Thomas More?” he suggests.

I nod. Geoffrey has all of my political skills. “Exactly so, and look how far he has risen.”

“But he used to speak against the king and in favor of the power of Parliament,” he reminds me.

“Yes, and there’s no need to follow him in that. Besides, once he became the speaker of Parliament he persuaded them to do the will of the king. You can follow his example in using your speeches in Parliament to draw the attention of people. Let them see you as thoughtful and loyal. Let the king know that in you he has a man who can put his case to the Parliament, and make friends so that when you propose something for the king, you will have influence, and it will be agreed.”

“Or you could just put me at court and I could befriend the king,” he suggests. “That’s what you did for Arthur and Montague. You didn’t send them to the Parliament to study and speak and persuade people. They just walked into royal favor, and all they had to do was to be good company for the king, to entertain him.”

“Those were different times,” I say ruefully. “Very different.” I think of my son Arthur and how the king loved him for his courage and quickness at every game that the court might play. “It is harder to befriend the king now. Those were more lighthearted times, when all Arthur had to do was joust and play games. The king was a happy young man and easy to please.”

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, AUTUMN 1528

The worst thing about this autumn is that I cannot get news, and if I had any, I could not repeat one word of it to the princess. She knows, of course she knows, that her mother and father are all but estranged, and she probably knows that her father is madly, dangerously in love with another woman—he does nothing to conceal it—and she a woman of such ordinary birth that she was lucky to be a maid-in-waiting at court, never mind domineering over everyone as an acknowledged favorite. I remember Anne Boleyn, thrilled as a child to serve the Princess Mary in France, and her father’s pride when she managed to move into the queen’s service. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine her as a consort, giving orders to the court, complaining of the great cardinal himself, almost an unofficial queen.

Princess Mary is twelve now, and bright and intelligent as any clever girl, but with a grace and dignity which comes from her breeding and training. I am sure that I judge her rightly. I taught her myself and raised her to know all that a princess should know, to read the minds of subjects and enemies, to think ahead, to plan strategically, to be wise far beyond her years. But how can I prepare her to see the father she adores turn away from the mother she so deeply loves? How can anyone suggest to her that her father truly believes he was not married to her mother, that they have been living in a state of mortal sin for all these years? How can anyone tell her that there is a God in heaven who, observing this, decided to punish a young married couple with the deaths of four baby brothers and sisters? I could not say such a thing to a girl of twelve, not a girl whom I love as I love this one, and I make sure that no one else does either.

It’s not hard to keep her ignorant, for we rarely go to dine at court, and nobody now visits us. It takes me a little while to realize that this is another sign of the troubled times. The court of the heir to the throne, however young, is always a bustling, busy, popular place. Even a child like Mary attracts people to her service who know that one day she will be Queen of England, and that her favor should be won now.

But not this autumn. This autumn it grows colder and darker and it seems that every morning there is a dull gray light but no sunshine, there are no riders coming out from London, there are no barges coming quickly up the river, catching the inflowing tide. This autumn we are not popular, not with courtiers, nor advisors. We don’t even attract people with petitions and begging letters. I think to myself that we must have sunk very low in the public estimation if we are not even visited by people wanting to borrow money.

Princess Mary does not know why; but I do. There can be only one reason that we live so quietly at Richmond, as if we were in a private house and not a palace. The king must be giving people to understand that she is not the heir to his throne. He must be letting people know, in all the subtle, wordless ways that a king can deploy, that there is good reason that Princess Mary is no longer at her castle in Ludlow ruling Wales, that Princess Mary is no longer betrothed to marry the King of France, nor the King of Spain, that Princess Mary is living at Richmond like a daughter of the House of Tudor, served, supported, and respected but no more important than her bastard half brother, Bessie Blount’s boy.

The courtiers are fluttering around a new attraction like midges around a sweaty face. I learn that much from my dressmaker, who comes to Richmond Palace to fit me with a velvet gown in dark red for the winter feasts, telling me proudly that she can barely find the time to make it, as she is fully engaged by all the ladies at Suffolk House in Southwark. I stand on the stool and the dressmaker’s assistant is pinning the hem, as the dressmaker tightens the bodice.

“The ladies at Suffolk House?” I repeat. This is the home of the Dowager Queen of France, Mary, and her utterly worthless husband, Charles Brandon. While she has always been dearly loved by the court, I can’t imagine why they should be so busy and popular all of a sudden.

“Mademoiselle Boleyn is staying there!” she says delightedly. “Holding court, and everyone visits, the king daily, and they dance every night.”

“At Suffolk House?” This can only be Charles Brandon’s doing. The Dowager Queen Mary would never have allowed the Boleyn girl to hold court in her own house.

“Yes, she has quite taken it over.”

“And the queen?” I ask.

“She lives very quietly.”

“And the plans for the Christmas feast?”

The dressmaker notes in silence that I have not received an invitation. Her arched eyebrows rise a little higher and she tweaks a fold at my waist, as if it is hardly worth making an expensive gown that will never be worn before the king. “Well,” she remarks, preparing to share scandal, “I am told that the Lady will have her own set of rooms, right next door to the king, and she will hold court there, to her many, many well-wishers. It will be like two courts in the same palace. But the king and queen will celebrate Christmas together, as always.”

I nod. We exchange one long look and I know that the dressmaker’s expression—a sort of grim smile, the natural expression of a woman who knows that her own best years are past—is mirrored on my face.

“Perfect,” she says, and helps me down from the stool. “You know, there’s not a woman in England over thirty who does not feel the queen’s pain.”

“But the women over thirty will not be asked for their opinions,” I say. “Who cares what we think?”

I am sitting with my ladies listening to Princess Mary practice on the lute and singing. She has composed the song, which is a reworking of an old reapers’ ballad about a merry lad going sowing. I am glad to hear her sing with a lilt in her voice and a smile on her face, and she is looking well; the regular trial of her monthly pains has passed and she has color in her cheeks and an appetite for her dinner. I watch her, bent over the strings, looking up to sing, and I think what a blessedly pretty girl she is and that the king should go down on his knees and thank God for her, and raise her as a princess who will some day rule England, secure in her position, and confident of her future. He owes that to her, he owes that to England. How can it be that Henry, the boy who was the darling of the nursery, cannot see that here is another Tudor heir as precious and as valuable as he was?

The knock at the door startles all of us, and Princess Mary looks up, her fingers still pressed on the strings, as my steward bows, comes into the room, and says: “A gentleman at the gate, your ladyship. Says he is your son.”

“Geoffrey?” I get to my feet with a smile.

“No, I would know the master, of course. He says he is your son from Italy.”

“Reginald?” I ask.

Princess Mary rises and says quietly: “Oh, Lady Margaret!”

“Admit him,” I say.

The steward nods and steps aside and Reginald, tall, handsome, dark-eyed, and dark-haired, comes into the room, takes in everyone in one swift glance, and kneels at my feet for my blessing.

I put my hand on his thick dark hair and whisper the words, and then he stands taller than me and bends down to kiss me on both cheeks.

At once I present him to the princess and he sweeps her a deep bow. The color flushes into her cheeks as she puts out both hands to him. “I have heard so much about you, and your learning,” she says. “I have read much of what you have written with such admiration. Your mother will be so happy you are home.”

He throws me a smile over his shoulder, and I see at once the darling little boy whom I had to give to the Church, and the tall, composed, independent young man that he has become through years of study and exile.

“You will stay here?” I ask him. “We are about to go in to dinner.”

“I was counting on it!” he says easily. To the princess he says: “When I miss England I miss my childhood dinners. Does my mother still order a lamb pie with a thick pastry crust?”

She makes a little face. “I am glad you are here to eat it,” she confides. “For I disappoint her all the time by not being a hearty eater. And I observe all the fast days. She says I am too rigorous.”

“No, you are right,” he says quickly. “The fast days are for our observation, both for the good of man and the glory of God.”

“You mean for our good? That it is good to go hungry?”

“For those who go fishing,” he explains. “If everyone in Christendom ate nothing but fish on Friday, then the fishermen and their children would eat well the rest of the week. God’s will is always for the greater good of men. His laws are the glory both of heaven and earth. I am a great believer in deeds and faith working together.”

Princess Mary shoots a naughty little smile at me as if to score the point. “That’s what I think,” she says.

“And let us talk about filial obedience?” I suggest.

Reginald throws up his hands in joking protest. “Lady Mother, I shall obediently come to dinner and you shall command what I eat and what I say.”

It is a talkative and merry meal. Reginald says grace in Greek for the court and listens to the musicians who play as we eat. He talks with the princess’s tutor Richard Fetherston, and they share their enthusiasm for the new learning and their belief that Lutheranism is nothing but heresy. Reginald admires the dancing, and Princess Mary takes Constance’s hand and dances with her ladies before him, as if he were a great visitor. After dinner, I see Mary to her prayers and as she climbs into the big four-poster bed she beams at me.

“Your son is very handsome,” she says. “And very learned.”

“He is,” I say.

“Do you think my father will appoint him to be my tutor when Dr. Fetherston leaves us?”

“He might.”

“Don’t you wish that he would? Don’t you think he would be such a good tutor, so wise and thoughtful?”

“I think he would make you study very hard. He is teaching himself Hebrew right now.”

“I don’t mind study,” she assures me. “It would be an honor to work with a tutor like him.”

“Well, time to go to sleep, anyway,” I say. I am not going to encourage any girlish dreams about Reginald from a young woman who is going to have to marry whoever her father appoints, and who, at the moment, seems to have no prospects at all.

She raises her face for my kiss, and I am moved to deep tenderness by her dainty prettiness and her shy smile.

“God bless you, my little princess,” I say.

Reginald and I go alone to my privy chamber and I tell the servants to set the chairs before the fireside and leave us with a glass of wine, some nuts, and dried fruits to talk alone.

“She’s delightful,” he says.

“I love her as if she were my own.”

“Tell me the family news, my brothers and sister.”

I smile. “All well, thank God, though I miss Arthur more than I thought possible.”

“And how is Montague’s boy?” he asks with a smile, identifying at once the child who will be my favorite as he will carry our name forward.

“He’s well,” I say with a gleam. “Chattering, running around, strong as any Plantagenet prince. Willful, cheeky.” I stop myself from listing his latest sayings. “He’s funny,” I tell him. “He’s the image of Geoffrey at his age.”

Reginald nods. “Well, he has sent for me,” he says without preamble, knowing that I will understand at once that he means the king. “It is time for my expensive education and long learning to be of use.”

“It is of use,” I reply instantly. “He consults your thinking on what is and is not heretical, and I know that you advise Thomas More, and the king relies upon him.”

“You don’t need to encourage me,” he says with a small smile. “I am past the age when I need your approval. I’m not Montague’s heir, hopping up to win your favor. I know that I’ve served the king well at the universities, in my writing to the Pope, and in Padua. But he wants me to come home now. He needs advisors and councillors at court who know the world, who have friends at Rome, who can argue with any of them.”

I draw my shawl around me as if there is a draft in the room to make me shiver, though the logs are banked high and glowing red, and the tapestries are still and warm on the walls. “You won’t advise him to put the queen aside,” I say flatly.

“As far as I know, there are no possible grounds,” he says simply. “But he can command me to study the books that he has assembled to answer this question—you would be surprised at the size of the library he has collected on this. The Lady too brings him books, and it will be my duty to answer them. Some of them are quite heretical. He allows her to read books that More and I would have banned. Some that are banned. She even brings them to him. I shall explain their errors to him, and defend the Church against these dangerous new ideas. I hope to serve both Church and the king in England. He can request me to consult with other theologians, there can be no harm in that. I should read what authorities he has, and advise him if they make a case. He paid for me to be educated so that I can think for him. I will do that.”

“It harms the queen and the princess to have the marriage questioned at all!” I say angrily. “The books that question the queen or those that question the Church should be banned, without discussion.”

He bows his head. “Yes, Lady Mother, I know it is a great harm to a great lady who deserves nothing but respect.”

“She took us out of poverty,” I remind him.

“I know.”

“And I have known her and loved her since she was a girl of sixteen.”

He bows his head. “I shall study and tell the king my opinion, without fear or favor,” he says. “But I will do that. It is my duty to do that.”

“And will you live here?” It is a joy to me to see my son, but we have not lived under the same roof since he was a boy of six years old. I don’t know if I want the daily company of this independent young man who thinks as he pleases, and has no habit of obedience to his mother.

He smiles, as if he knows this very well. “I shall go to the Carthusian Brothers at Sheen,” he says. “I shall live in silence again. And I can visit you. Just as I used to do.”

I make a little gesture with my hand as if to push away the memories of those days. “It’s not like it was,” I say. “We have a good king on the throne now and we are prosperous. You can stay there by choice—not because you have nowhere else to go, not because I can’t afford to house you. These are different times.”

“I know,” he says mildly. “And I thank God that we live in such different times.”

“But don’t listen to gossip there,” I warn him. “It was said that they hold a document with an old prophecy about the family, about us. I suppose it’s been destroyed; but don’t listen to anything about it.”

He smiles and shakes his head at me as if I am an old foolish woman, fretting over shadows. “I need not listen, but the whole country is talking about the Holy Maid of Kent who prophesies the future and warns the king against leaving his wife.”

“It doesn’t matter what she says.” I deny the truth—there are thousands flocking to hear what she says. I am only determined that Reginald shall not be among them. “Don’t listen to gossip.”

“Lady Mother,” he reminds me, “they are a silent order. There are no gossips there. You are not allowed to say one word.”

I think of the duke, my cousin, beheaded for listening to talk of the end of the Tudors in this very monastery. “Something must have been said there, something dangerous.”

He shakes his head. “That must be a lie.”

“It cost your kinsman his life,” I remark.

“A wicked lie then,” he says.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1529

We receive few visitors from London this spring, but one day I look from my window to the view of the river, swollen with the rains, and see a barge approaching. At the bow and stern are the Darcy colors. Lord Thomas Darcy, the old Lord of the North, is coming to pay us the compliments of the season.

I call the princess, and we go out to meet him and watch as he stamps down the gangway of the barge, waves his three guests to follow him, and drops to his knee before her. We both watch with some anxiety the slow creaking down and then the painful rise, but I frown when one of the grooms of the household steps forward to help him. Tom Darcy may be more than sixty years old, but he does not like anyone to remark on it.

“I thought I’d bring you some plover eggs,” he says to the princess. “From my moors. In the north.”

He speaks as if he owns all the moorland in the north of England, and indeed he owns a good share of it. Thomas Lord Darcy is one of the great northern lords whose life is dedicated to keeping the Scots on their side of the border. I first met him when I lived in Middleham Castle with my uncle King Richard, and Tom Darcy was one of the Council of the North. Now I step forward and kiss him on both ruddy cheeks.

He smiles, pleased at the attention, and gives me a wink. “I have brought these gentlemen to see your court,” he says, as the French visitors line up and bow, profering little gifts. Mary’s lady-in-waiting takes them with a curtsey and we lead the way into the palace. The princess takes them into her presence chamber and then, after a brief conversation, leaves us. The Frenchmen stroll about and look at the tapestries and the silver plate, the precious objects on the sideboards, and chat to the ladies-in-waiting. Lord Darcy leans towards me.

“Troubled times,” he says shortly. “I never thought I would live to see them.”

I nod. I lead him to the window so that he can enjoy the view of the knot gardens and the river beyond.

“They asked me what I knew of the wedding night!” he complains. “A wedding night a quarter of a century ago! And I was in the north anyway.”

“Indeed,” I say. “But why are they asking?”

“They’re going to sit in judgment,” he says unhappily. “There’s some cardinal, trailing all the way from Rome, to tell our queen that she wasn’t truly married, telling the king that he’s been a bachelor for the last twenty years and can marry whomever he likes. Amazing what they think of, isn’t it?”

“Amazing,” I agree.

“I’ve got no time for it,” he says abruptly. “Nor for that fat churchman Wolsey.” He looks at me with his shrewd twinkling glare. “I’d have thought you’d have had something to say about it. You and yours.”

“No one has asked me for my opinion,” I say cautiously.

“Well, when they do, if you answer that the queen is his wife and his wife is the queen, you can call on Tom Darcy to support you,” he says. “And others. The king should be advised by his peers. Not by some fat fool in cherry red.”

“I hope that the king will be well advised.”

The old baron puts out his hand. “Give me your pretty brooch,” he says.

I unpin the insignia of my husband’s house, a deep purple enameled pansy, that I wear at my belt. I drop it into Darcy’s calloused hand.

“I’ll send it with a messenger, if I ever need to warn you,” he says. “So you know it’s truly from me.”

I am wary. “I should always be glad to hear from you, my lord. But I hope that we will never need such a sign.”

He nods towards the closed door to the princess’s privy chamber. “I hope so too. But for all that, we might as well be prepared. For her,” he says shortly. “Bonny little thing. England’s rose.”

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, JUNE 1529

Montague comes from Blackfriars to Richmond on our family barge to bring me the news from London, and I order the servants to bring him directly into my own private room and leave my ladies and their sewing and their gossip outside the closed door. Princess Mary is in her rooms and will not come to me unless I send for her; I have told her ladies to keep her busy today and to make sure that she speaks to no one coming from London. We are all trying to protect her from the nightmare that is being enacted just downriver. Her own tutor, Dr. Richard Fetherston, has gone to London to represent the queen but agreed with me that we should keep his mission from her daughter if we can. But, I know that bad news travels fast, and I am expecting bad news. Lord Darcy was not the only lord who was questioned, and now a cardinal has arrived from Rome and set up a court to rule on the royal marriage.

“What’s happened?” I ask the minute the door is closed tightly shut behind us.

“There was a court, a proper hearing, before Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio,” he begins. “The place was packed. It was like a fair, packed so tightly you could hardly breathe. Everyone wanted to be there; it was like a public beheading when everyone is crowding to see the scaffold. Awful.”

I see he is genuinely distressed. I pour him a glass of wine and press him into a chair at the fireside. “Sit. Sit, my son. Take a breath.”

“They called the queen into court and she was magnificent. She completely ignored the cardinals sitting in judgment and she walked past them and knelt before the king—”

“She did?”

“Knelt and asked him in what way she had displeased him. Said that she had greeted his friends as her own, done whatever he wanted, and if she had not given him a son it wasn’t her fault.”

“My God—she said that in public?”

“Clear as a tolling bell. She said that he had found her an untouched virgin, as she was when she came from Spain. He said nothing. She asked him in what way she had ever failed him as a wife. He said nothing. What could he say? She has been everything to him for twenty years.”

I find I am smiling at the thought of Katherine speaking the truth to a king who has become accustomed to a diet of flattering lies.

“She asked if she could appeal to Rome, and then she rose to her feet and walked out, and left him silenced.”

“She just walked out?”

“They shouted her name to call her back into court, but she walked out and went back to her rooms as if she thought nothing of them. It was the greatest moment. Lady Mother, she has been a great queen all her life but that was her finest moment. And everyone outside the court, all the common people, were cheering and blessing her name and cursing the Lady for a whore who has brought nothing but trouble. And all the people inside the court were just stunned, or longing to laugh, or wanting to cheer too—but not daring while the king sat there, looking like a fool.”

“Hush,” I say at once.

“I know,” he says, snapping his fingers as if irritated at his own indiscretion. “Sorry. This has shaken me more than I thought. I felt . . .”

“What?” I ask. Montague is not Geoffrey; he is not ready with his feelings, quick to tears, quick to anger. If Montague is distressed, then he has witnessed something very great indeed. If Montague is distressed, then the whole court will be rocked with emotion. The queen has let them see her sorrow, she has shown them her heartbreak, and now they will be as troubled as children who see their mother cry for the first time.

“I feel as if something terrible is happening,” he says wonderingly. “As if nothing will ever be the same again. For the king to try to end his marriage to a faultless wife is somehow . . . if the king loses her he will lose . . .” He breaks off. “How will he be without her? How will he behave without her advice? Even when he does not consult her, we all know what she thinks. Even when she doesn’t speak, there is still the sense of her at court, we know she is there. She is his conscience, she is his exemplar.” He pauses again. “She’s his soul.”

“He hasn’t listened to her advice for years.”

“No, but even so, even so, she doesn’t have to speak, does she? He knows what she thinks. We know what she thinks. She’s like an anchor that he has forgotten, but still it keeps him steady. What is the Lady but just another of his fancies? He’s had half a dozen of them, but he always goes back to the queen, she always welcomes his return. She’s his haven. Nobody believes that this time is any different. And to distress her like this . . .”

There is a little silence as we think what Henry would be without Katherine’s loving, patient constancy.

“But you yourself said that she should consider stepping aside,” I accuse him. “When this all started.”

“I see that the king wants a son and heir. Nobody can blame him for that. But he can’t put a wife like this aside for a woman like that. For a princess from Spain or France or Portugal? Yes, then she should consider it. Then he might propose it to her, and she might consider it. But for a woman like that? Driven by nothing but sinful lust? And to try to trick the queen into saying that they were never married? Asking everyone of their opinion?”

“It’s wrong.”

“Very wrong.” Montague rests his face in his hands.

“So what happens now?”

“The hearing goes on. I should think it will take days, maybe weeks. They’re going to hear from all sorts of theologians, and the king has books and manuscripts coming in from all over Christendom to prove his case. He’s commissioned Reginald to find and buy books for him. Sent him to Paris to consult with scholars.”

“Reginald is going to Paris? Why, when will he leave?”

“He’s gone already. The king sent him the moment that the queen walked out of the court. She’s going to appeal to Rome, she won’t accept Wolsey’s judgment in an English court. So the king will need foreign advisors, admired writers from all over Christendom. England won’t be enough. That’s his only hope. Otherwise, the Pope will say that they were married in the sight of God, and nothing can put them apart.”

My son and I look at each other, as if the world we know is changing beyond recognition.

“How can he do this?” I ask simply. “It’s against everything he has ever believed in.”

Montague shakes his head. “He’s talked himself into it,” he says shrewdly. “Like his love poems. He strikes a pose and then he persuades himself it’s true. Now he wants to believe that God speaks to him directly, that his conscience is a greater guide than anything else; he’s talked himself into love with this woman, and he has talked himself out of marriage, and now he wants everyone to agree.”

“And who will disagree?” I ask.

“Archbishop Fisher might, Thomas More probably not, Reginald can’t,” Montague says, ticking off the great scholars on his fingers. “We should,” he says, surprisingly.

“We can’t,” I say. “We’re not experts. We’re just family.”

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1529

The king, bitterly disappointed by Wolsey and the cardinal he brought from Rome to try to find a compromise, goes on progress without the queen. He takes a riding court, Anne Boleyn among them. They are said to be very merry. He does not send for his daughter, and she asks me if I think she will be summoned to join him and her mother this summer.

“I don’t think so,” I say gently. “I don’t think that they are traveling together this year.”

“Then may I go and stay with my mother, the queen?”

She looks up from her sewing, where she is doing blackwork embroidery on a shirt for her father, just as her mother taught her to do.

“I will write to ask,” I say. “But it may be that your father prefers you to stay here.”

“And not see him or my mother?”

It is impossible to lie to her when she looks at me with that straight, honest York gaze.

“I think so, my dear,” is all I say. “These are difficult times. We have to be patient.”

She folds her lips together as if to stop any word of criticism escaping. She bends a little lower over her work. “Is my father to be divorced from my mother?” she asks.

That word in her mouth is like a blasphemous oath. She looks up at me as if she expects me to correct her speech, as if the very word is dirty.

“The case has been referred to Rome,” I say. “Did you know that?”

A little nod tells me that she heard this from somewhere.

“The Holy Father will make a judgment. We just have to wait and see what he thinks. God will guide him. We have to have faith. The Holy Father knows what is right in this; God will speak to him.”

She gives a little sigh, and shifts in her seat.

“Are you in pain?” I ask, seeing her bend forward a little, as if to ease a cramp in her belly.

At once she straightens up, her shoulders down, her head held like a princess. “Not at all,” she says.

My son Geoffrey is honored as the court leaves London. He is knighted for his services to the king in Parliament. Geoffrey becomes Sir Geoffrey, as he should be. I think how proud my husband would be, and I cannot stop myself smiling all day at the honor done to his son.

Montague travels with the court as they ride down the sunlit valley of the Thames, calling at the great houses, hunting every day, dancing every night. Anne Boleyn is the mistress of everything she sees. He writes me one scribbled note:

Stop paying Wolsey’s bribe, the Lady has turned against him and he’s certain to fall. Send another of your little notes to Thomas More, I bet you a noble that he’ll be the new Lord Chancellor.

The princess knows that a messenger has come from court, and sees the gladness in my face. “Good news?” she asks.

“It is good news,” I tell her. “This day a very honest man has come into your father’s service, and he, at least, will advise him well.”

“Your son Reginald?” she asks hopefully.

“His friend and fellow scholar,” I say. “Thomas More.”

“What has happened to Cardinal Wolsey?” she asks me.

“He has left court,” I say. I don’t tell her that the Holy Maid of Kent predicted he would die miserably alone if he encouraged the king to leave his wife; and now the cardinal is all alone, and his health is failing.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1529

Dressed in her best gown, wrapped in furs, I take Princess Mary by royal barge down the river to Greenwich for Christmas, and we go straight to her mother’s rooms.

The queen is waiting for us. Her ladies smile as Princess Mary runs through the presence chamber into the private rooms and mother and daughter hold each other tightly, as if they cannot bear to be parted ever again.

Katherine looks over her daughter’s bowed head to me, and her blue eyes are filled with tears. “Why, Margaret, you are raising a beauty for me,” she says. “Merry Christmas, my dear.”

I am so moved by the sight of the two of them, together after such a long time, that I can barely reply.

“Are you all right?” is all that the little princess asks her mother, pulling back to look at her weary face. “Mama? Are you all right?”

She smiles, and I know that she is going to lie to her daughter, as we all do these days. She is going to tell a brave lie in the hope that this little girl will grow to be a woman without the heartbreak of knowing that her father is wrong in his thoughts and wrong in his life and wrong in his faith.

“I am very well,” she says emphatically. “And more importantly, I am sure that I am doing the right thing in the sight of God. And that must make me happy.”

“Does it?” the little princess asks doubtfully.

“Of course,” her mother says.

It is a great feast, as if Henry is trying to show the world the unity of his family, his wealth and power, and the beauty of his court. He leads the queen to her throne with his usual grace, he talks most charmingly to her as they dine, and nobody seeing them seated side by side smiling would dream that this was an estranged couple.

His children, the bastard and the true heir, are honored equally in an insane subverting of the rules of precedence. I watch as Princess Mary enters the great hall with a nobody: the ten-year-old boy, Bessie Blount’s bastard. But they make a handsome pair. The princess is so dainty and slight and the boy so handsome and tall for his age that they walk at the same pace, their copper heads aligned. Little Henry Fitzroy is referred to everywhere as the Duke of Richmond; this brass-headed, smiling child is the greatest duke in the country.

Princess Mary holds his hand as they enter for the Christmas feast, and when he opens his New Year’s gift from his father the king—a magnificent set of gilt cups and pots—she smiles and applauds as if she is pleased to see him so highly rewarded. She glances across at me and sees my small nod of approval. If a princess of England is required to treat her father’s bastard as an honored half brother, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the head of the Council of the North, then my little princess—the true princess of England, Wales, Ireland, and France—can rise to this ordeal.

The Lady is not present, so we are spared her pushing in front of her betters; but there is no need for anyone to hope that the king is tired of her yet, for her father is everywhere, flaunting his new title.

Thomas Boleyn, the man who was once very glad to serve me as steward of my lands, is now the Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde, while his handsome but quite useless son George is Lord Rochford, appointed to the privy chamber with my cousin Henry Courtenay—where I doubt they will agree. The thankfully absent daughter becomes Lady Anne, and the previous Boleyn whore, Mary Carey, now serves in two contradictory posts: chief companion and sole confidante to her sister, and as a rather sheepish lady-in-waiting to the queen.

Montague tells me that at the banquet held before Christmas, to celebrate Thomas Boleyn’s remarkable rise, his daughter Anne walked before a princess born: the Dowager Queen of France, Mary. I cannot imagine the king’s mistress walking ahead of the king’s sister, the daughter of my steward preceding a dowager queen. My only comfort when Montague tells me of this is that I know Anne Boleyn has made herself a formidable enemy. The dowager queen is accustomed to being the first at court for rank, beauty, and wit, and no Norfolk-born slut is going to take that off her without a battle.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1530

The first sign of the royal visit is the arrival of the household: the grooms with the cantering horses, ridden four abreast, the man in the king’s livery at the center, holding four sets of reins, the horses going steadily forward. Behind them come the men-at-arms, first the mounted riders in light riding armor, then—after a long pause—the slower carts carrying the hawks for hunting, with the hounds running alongside, a cart for the little dogs and pets, and then the household goods. The king’s luxuries go before him, his linen, his furniture, his carpets, his tapestries, the great riches of the treasury. The Lady’s gowns, headdresses, and jewels take two carts of their own, and her serving women ride alongside, not daring to take their eyes off her wardrobe.

Behind them come the cooks with all the utensils for the kitchens, and the stores for today’s feast and tomorrow.

Princess Mary, standing beside me on the tower at Richmond Palace, looking down at this winding cavalcade as it heads towards us, says hopefully: “Is he staying for a long time?”

I tighten my arm around her waist. “No. He’s going on from here. He’s just coming for the day.”

“Where’s he going?” she asks, forlorn.

“He’ll travel this summer,” I guess. “There’s news of the Sweat in London. He’ll go from one place to another again.”

“Then will he send for my mother and for me and it will be like the year when it was just us?” She looks up at me, suddenly hopeful.

I shake my head. “Not this year, I don’t think,” I say.

The king is determined to be charming to his daughter, you would almost think he wanted to win her to his side. From the moment his barge draws up to the pier with a shout of trumpets, to the moment he leaves at dusk, he is beaming at her, her hand tucked into the crook of his arm, his head cocked to hear her speech. He looks as if he is sitting for a portrait entitled “A Loving Father,” he looks as if he is an actor performing in a masque, and his role is “The Righteous Parent.”

He has only a handful of companions with him: his usual friends, Charles Brandon and his wife, Mary, the Dowager Queen of France, my cousin Henry Courtenay and his wife, Gertrude, my son Montague and a few other gentlemen of the privy chamber. The Boleyn men are on the royal barge but there is no mention of either of the Boleyn whores, and the only ladies who dine with us are those in attendance on the king’s sister.

As soon as the king arrives, his breakfast is served, and he himself cuts the best meats and pours the sweetest watered wine for Princess Mary. He commands her to say grace for him and she does so quietly, in Greek, and he praises her learning and her composure. He nods his thanks to me. “You are polishing my jewel,” he says. “I thank you, Lady Margaret, you are a dear friend and kinswoman. I don’t forget that you have been watching over me and mine, like a loving mother, from my childhood.”

I bow. “It is a pleasure to serve the princess,” I say.

He smiles roguishly. “Not like me, when I was her age,” he twinkles, and I think, how urgently you move the conversation to you. How eagerly you prompt praise.

“Your Grace was the finest prince in the nursery,” I respond. “And so naughty! And so beloved!”

He chuckles and pats Mary’s hand. “I loved sport,” he says. “But I never neglected my studies. Everyone said that I excelled at everything I did. But,” he stages a shrug and a little laugh, “people always praise princes.”

They take the horses and go out hunting, and I command a picnic to be ready for them when they are tired. We meet in the woods to dine, and the musicians, hidden in the trees, play music that has been composed by the king himself. He asks the princess to sing for him and she makes a little curtsey to her aunt, the dowager queen, and sings a song in French, to please her.

The dowager queen, who was once a Princess Mary herself, rises from the table and kisses her niece, and gives her a gold and diamond bracelet. “She’s a delight,” she says quietly to me. “A princess through and through,” and I know we are both thinking of the little boy who is not and never can be a prince.

There is dancing after they have dined, and I find Montague at my side, as we watch the princess with her young ladies. “The queen stays at Windsor Castle,” he says. “But we have to go on. We are to meet up with the Lady and her court tonight.”

“But nothing changes?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing changes. This is how it is now: the queen at court and us trailing around with the Lady. There’s no joy in the summer anymore. It’s as if we are children who have run away from home. We’re tired of the adventure, but we have to endlessly pretend that we are having a wonderful time.”

“Is he not happy? Does she not make him happy?” I ask hopefully. If the king is not satisfied, then he will look.

“He’s still not had her,” Montague says bluntly. “She’s got him dancing on a thread. She’s a prize he has to win. He’s still, night and day, on the hunt, hoping that this day, this night, she will say yes. My God, but she knows how to entrap a man! She is always about to fall, but she keeps always a handbreadth, a moment out of his reach.”

The king seems to be delighted with the hunting, with the day, with the weather, with the music. The king is delighted with everything but especially with the company of his daughter.

“How I wish I could take you with me,” he says fondly. “But your mother will not allow it.”

“I am sure my Lady Mother would allow it,” she says. “I am sure that she would, Your Grace. And my Lady Governess could have my things packed and me ready to leave in a moment.” She laughs, a thin, hopeful, little nervous sound. “I could come at once. You have only to say the word.”

He shakes his head. “We have had some differences,” he says carefully. “Your Lady Mother does not understand the difficulty that I am in. I am guided by God, my daughter. I am commanded by Him to ask your mother to take up a holy life, a sacred life, a life filled with respect and comfort that would honor her.”

“Most people would say that she is lucky to be able to leave this troubled world and live at her ease in respect and holiness. I, for one, can’t just give up. I have to stay and struggle in this world. I have to guard the country and continue my line. But your mother could be freed of her duty, she can be happy, she can live a life that would please her. You could stay with her often. Not I. I cannot put down my burden.”

She folds her lower lip under her little white teeth as if she is afraid of saying the wrong thing. She is frowning with concentration on his words. Henry laughs and chucks her under the chin. “Don’t look so grave, little princess!” he exclaims. “These are worries for your parents, not for you. Time enough for you to understand the heavy burdens that I bear. But, believe this: your mother cannot travel with me while she writes to the Pope and tells him to command me, while she writes to her nephew the emperor and tells him to reprove me. She complains of me to others—that’s not loyal, now, is it? Complains of me when I am trying to do the right thing, God’s will! And so she cannot travel with me, though I would like her to be with me. And you cannot travel with me either. It is very cruel of her to separate us to prove her point. It is not a woman’s role to enter into discourse. It is very cruel of her to send me out on progress alone. And wrong of her, against the commandment of God, to set up her opinion against her husband.”

“It is hard,” the king continues, his voice deepening with pity for himself. “It is a hard road for me, with no wife at my side. Your mother does not think of this when she sets herself against me.”

“I am sure . . .” Princess Mary begins, but her father raises his hand for her silence.

“Be very sure of this: I am doing the right thing for you, for the kingdom, and for your mother,” he interrupts her. “And I am doing God’s will. God speaks directly to kings, you know. So anyone who speaks against me is speaking against the will of God Himself. They all say that—the men of the new learning. They all write it. It is indisputable. I am obeying the will of God and your mother, mistakenly, is following her own ambition. But at least I know I can count on your love and obedience. My little daughter. My princess. My only true love.”

Her eyes fill with tears, her lip trembles; she is torn between her loyalty to her mother and the intensely powerful charm of her father. She cannot argue against his authority; she curtseys to the father she loves. “Of course,” she says.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, AUTUMN 1530

The former cardinal, Wolsey, has died on the road to London, before he could face trial, just as the Holy Maid of Kent predicted. Thank God that we are spared the sight of a cardinal on trial. Cousin Henry Courtenay had been told he would have to present the charges of corruption and witchcraft; but God is merciful, and our family will not have his blood on our hands. We could not send a cardinal to the scaffold, though Tom Darcy says he could have done it.

The Boleyns, brother and sisters, danced in celebration before the court, in a masque of the damned. They looked as if they had come up from hell with sooty faces and hands like talons. God knows what we are coming to. Wolsey was bad enough but now the king’s councillors are a family of nobodies who dress themselves as devils to celebrate the death of an innocent man. Burn this.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, DECEMBER 1530

We spend Christmas at Greenwich as usual, the king his charming regal self, loving with the queen, doting on Mary, and proudly warm to his son the double duke, young Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond. He is now a boy of eleven years, of soaring importance, and nobody who sees him could mistake him for anyone but his father’s son; he is tall like a York, copper-headed like a Tudor, with the Plantagenet love of sport, music, and learning.

I cannot imagine what the king means to do with him, unless it is to hold him in reserve as an heir, in case he gets no other. The fortune that is spent on his household and on his goods, even on his New Year’s gifts, shows that he is to be regarded highly, even as royal as the Princess Mary. Worse, it shows that the king wants everyone to see this—and what this means for my princess and her future leaves me puzzled. Every ambassador at court, every foreign visitor knows the princess is the only legitimate child, the daughter of the queen, a little crown on her head, the king’s acknowledged daughter and heiress. But at the same time, walking beside her like an equal, is the king’s bastard, dressed in cloth of gold, served like a prince, seated beside his father. What is anyone to make of this but that the king is training up his bastard child for the throne? And what is to become of his daughter if she is not to be Princess of Wales? And, if Henry Fitzroy is the next king, what is she?

The queen is outwardly serene, hiding her anguish at the supplanting of her daughter with a nameless bastard. She takes her place on the throne beside her smiling husband and nods to her many friends. The ladies of the court, from the Dowager Queen of France down to Bessie Blount, show her every respect; most of them show her a special tenderness. Every woman knows that if a husband can set his wife aside and say it is the will of God, then not one of them will ever be safe, not even with a wedding ring on her finger.

The noblemen of the court are scrupulous in their respect. They dare not openly oppose her husband, but the way that they bow when she walks by, and lean towards her to listen when she speaks, shows everyone that they know this is a Princess of Spain and a Queen of England, and nothing can ever change that. Only the Boleyn family avoid her, the Boleyns and their kinsman Thomas Howard, the new young Duke of Norfolk—he has none of his father’s fidelity to the queen, but thinks only of his own family’s growing power. Everyone knows that the Howard interests are bound to the success of the young women whom they have planted in the king’s bed; their opinion of the queen is worthless.

They keep out of the queen’s rooms but they are everywhere else at court, as if it were their own house, as if the magnificent Greenwich Palace were poky little Hever Castle. I hear from one of the ladies that the Boleyn woman, Anne, has sworn that she wishes all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea, and that she will never serve the queen again. I think that if refusing to serve is the worst thing that Anne Boleyn can threaten, then we have nothing to fear.