But the loss of the cardinal and the dominance of the Howard faction at court means that the king has only one good advisor: Thomas More. He is at the king’s side through the day but tries to go home to the City to be with his family. “Tell your son that I am writing a long essay in reply to his,” he informs me one day as he walks to the stable yard, calling for his horse. “Tell him I am sorry to be late in my reply. I have been writing too many letters for the king to write my own.”

“Do you write everything as he bids, or do you tell him your own opinions?” I ask curiously.

He gives me a small, wary smile. “I choose my words carefully, Lady Margaret, both when I write as he commands, and when I tell him what I think.”

“And do you and Reginald still agree?” I ask him, thinking of Reginald traveling in France, consulting with churchmen, asking them for the advice that Thomas More avoids offering in England.

More smiles. “Reginald and I love to differ over detail,” he says. “But in general, we agree, my lady. And as long as he agrees with me, I am bound to think your son a very brilliant man.”

I am to take a new young woman into my care in the princess’s household. Lady Margaret Douglas, the commoner daughter of the king’s sister the Dowager Queen of Scotland. She was Cardinal Wolsey’s ward and now has to live somewhere. The king chooses to put her in our household, living with our princess, under my care.

I welcome her with pleasure. She is a pretty girl, sixteen this year, desperate to be at court, eager to grow up. I think she will make a charming companion for our princess, who is naturally serious and sometimes, in these hard days, troubled. But I hope that her wardship is not a sign to me that the importance of the princess is being diminished. I take my worries to the queen’s chapel, kneeling at her altar and looking at the golden crucifix gleaming with rubies, and I pray, wordlessly, that the king has not sent one girl who is half Tudor and half commoner into the house of a princess because he may one day argue she is the same: half Tudor, half Spanish, and no royal heir.


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1531


Geoffrey rides out to see me, in the twilight, as if he does not want to be observed. I see him from my window that faces over the London road and I go down to meet him. He is handing over his horse in the stable yard and he kneels for my blessing on the cobbles and then draws me into the cold gray garden, as if he dare not speak to me indoors.

“What’s the matter? What’s happened?” I ask him urgently.

His face is pale in the gloom. “I have to tell you something terrible.”

“The queen?”

“Safe, thank God. But someone has tried to kill Bishop Fisher, with poison.”

I grip his arm as I stagger in shock. “Who would do such a thing? He cannot have an enemy in the world.”

“The Lady,” Geoffrey says grimly. “He defends the queen from her, and he defends his faith from her, and he is the only man who dares to oppose the king. She, or her family, must be behind this.”

“It can’t be! How do you know?”

“Because two men died eating from the bishop’s bowl of porridge. God Himself saved John Fisher. He was fasting that day and didn’t touch it.”

“I can hardly believe it. I cannot believe it! Are we Italians now?”

“No one can believe it. But someone is prepared to kill a bishop to make the way easy for the Boleyn woman.”

“He is unharmed, God bless him?”

“Unhurt for now. But Lady Mother, if she would kill a bishop, would she dare attempt a queen? Or a princess?”

I feel myself grow cold in the cold garden; my hands begin to shake. “She would not. She would not attempt the life of the queen or the princess.”

“Someone poisoned the bishop’s porridge. Someone was prepared to do that.”

“You must warn the queen.”

“I have done so, and I told the Spanish ambassador, and Lord Darcy had the same idea and came to me.”

“We can’t be seen to plot with Spain. More so now than ever.”

“You mean, now that we know it is so dangerous to oppose Anne Boleyn? Now that we know that the king uses the axe and she uses poison?”

Numbly, I nod.


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531


Reginald comes home from Paris, in the furred robe of a scholar, with an entourage of clerks and learned advisors, bringing the opinions of the French churchmen and universities, after months of debate, research, and discussion. He sends me a brief note to tell me that he will see the king to make his report, and then come to visit me and the princess.

Montague brings him, traveling by our barge on an inflowing tide, with the sound of the drum keeping the rowers to their stroke echoing over the cool water at the gray time of the evening. I am waiting for them on the pier at Richmond, Princess Mary and her ladies with me, her hand in the crook of my elbow, both of us smiling a welcome.

As soon as the barge is close enough for me to see Montague’s white face and grimly set jaw I know that something is terribly wrong. “Go inside,” I say to the princess. I nod to Lady Margaret Douglas. “You go too.”

“I wanted to greet Lord Montague, and—”

“Not today. Go.”

She does as she is told, and the two of them make their way slowly and unwillingly towards the palace, so I can turn my attention to the barge, to Montague’s stiff figure and the crumpled heap of his brother, my son Reginald, in the seat at the rear. On the pier the sentries present arms and snap to attention. The drum rolls, the rowers ship their oars and hold them upward in salute as Montague hauls Reginald to his feet and helps him down the gangway.

My scholarly son staggers as if he is sick; he can hardly stand. The captain of the barge has to take his other arm and the two of them half lift him towards me as I stand on the pier.

Reginald’s legs give way, he collapses to his knees at my feet, his head bowed. “Forgive me,” he says.

I exchange one aghast look with Montague. “What’s happened?”

The face that Reginald turns up to me is as white as if he were dying of the Sweat. His hands that grip mine are damp and shaking. “Are you sick?” I demand in sudden fear. I turn on Montague. “How could you bring him here with a disease? The princess . . .”

Grimly, Montague shakes his head. “He’s not ill,” he says. “He’s been in a fight. He was knocked down.”

I clutch Reginald’s shaking hands. “Who dared to hurt him?”

“The king struck him,” Montague says shortly. “The king drew a dagger on him.”

I am wordless. I look from Montague to Reginald. “What did you say?” I whisper. “What have you done?”

He bows his head, his shoulders convulse, and he gives a sob like a dry choking heave. “I am sorry, Lady Mother. I offended him.”

“How?”

“I told him that there could be no reason in God’s law, in the Bible, or in common justice, for him to put the queen aside,” he said. “I told him that was the opinion of everyone. And he pounded his fist in my face, and snatched up a dagger from his table. If Thomas Howard had not caught him, he would have run me through.”

“But you were only to report what the French theologians believe!”

“That’s what they believe,” he says. He sits back on his heels and looks up at me, and now I see a great bruise slowly forming on the side of his pale handsome face. My son’s delicate cheek bears the mark of the Tudor fist. Anger curdles in my belly like vomit.

“He had a dagger? He drew on you?”

The only man allowed to bear arms at court is the king. He knows that if he ever draws a sword, he will be attacking a defenseless man. And so no king has ever drawn sword or dagger in court. It is against every tenet of chivalry that Henry learned as a boy. It is not in his nature to take up a blade against an unarmed opponent; it is not in his nature to bully with his fists. He is strong, he is big, but he has always managed his temper and controlled his strength. I can’t believe he would have been violent, not to a younger, slighter man, not to a scholar, not to one of his own. I can’t believe that he would have pulled out a blade on Reginald, of all people. This is not one of his wenching, fighting, drinking cronies; this is Reginald, his scholar.

“You taunted him,” I accuse Reginald.

He keeps his face down, he shakes his head.

“You must have driven him to anger.”

“I did nothing! He went in a moment,” he mutters.

“Was he drunk?” I ask Montague.

Montague is grim as if he took the blow himself. “No. The Duke of Norfolk practically threw Reginald into my arms. Dragged him out of the privy chamber and thrust him at me. I could hear the king roaring behind him like an animal. I really think the king would have killed him.”

I cannot imagine this, I cannot believe it.

Reginald looks up at me, the bruise darkening on his cheek, his eyes horrified. “I think he is gone mad,” he says. “He was like a man insane. I think our king has gone mad.”

We bundle Reginald into the Carthusian monastery at Sheen where he can pray in silence among his brothers and let his bruises fade. As soon as he is well enough to travel we send him back to Padua, without a word to the court. There was some thought that he might be made Archbishop of York; but this will not happen now. He will never be the princess’s tutor. I doubt that he will ever come to court or live in England.

“Better that he’s out of the country,” Montague says firmly. “I don’t dare speak of him to the king. He’s in a state of fury, all the time. He curses Norfolk for driving Wolsey to his death; he curses his own sister for her affection for the queen. He won’t even see the Duchess of Norfolk, who has declared her loyalty to the queen; he won’t ask Thomas More’s opinion for fear of what he would say. He says he can trust nobody, none of us. Better for our family and for Reginald himself that he should be out of sight and forgotten for a little while.”

“He said that the king has run mad,” I say very quietly.

Montague checks that the door behind us is tightly closed. “In truth, Lady Mother, I think the king has lost his wits. He loves the queen, he has relied on her judgment and he has always done so. She has been at his side without fail since he first came to the throne at seventeen. He cannot imagine being king without her. He’s never done it without her. But he is madly in love with the Lady, and she torments him night and day with desire and arguments. And he’s not a youth, he’s not a boy who can fall lightly into love and out again. He’s not a good age for greensickness. This isn’t poetry and singing songs under her window. She tortures him with her body and her brain. He’s beside himself with desire for her, there are times when I think he’s going to injure himself. Reginald caught him on the raw.”

“The more pity for us,” I say, thinking of Montague at court, Ursula struggling with the Stafford name, and Geoffrey, always at odds with his neighbors, trying to lead Parliament where they are more frightened and troubled than they have ever been. “It would have been better if we had gone unnoticed for a little while.”

“He had to report,” Montague says firmly. “And it took great courage to say the truth. But he’s better out of the country. Then at least we’ll know that he can’t upset the king again.”


WINDSOR CASTLE, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1531


Princess Mary and I, with our ladies, travel to Windsor to visit her mother while the king is on progress with his riding court. Once again the court is divided; once again the king and his mistress rattle around the great houses of England, hunting all day and dancing all night and assuring each other that they are wonderfully happy. I wonder how long Henry will tolerate this. I wonder when the emptiness of this life will drive him home to his wife.

The queen meets us at the castle gate, the great door behind her, the portcullis hanging above her, and even at a distance, as we ride up the hill to the great gray walls, I can see there is something about the straightness of her bearing and the turn of her head that tells me she has gripped tight onto her courage and that is all that is sustaining her.

We dismount from our horses and I drop into a curtsey, while the queen and her daughter cling to each other wordlessly, as if Katherine of Aragon, the doubly royal queen, does not care for formality anymore but wants to hold her daughter in her arms and never let her go.

She and I cannot talk privately until after dinner when Princess Mary has been sent to say her prayers and to bed; then Katherine calls me into her bedroom as if to pray together, and we draw up two stools to the fireside, close the door, and are quite alone.

“He sent the young Duke of Norfolk to reason with me,” she says. I see the humor in her face, and for a moment, forgetting the horror of her situation, we both smile, and then we laugh outright.

“And was he very very brilliant?” I ask.

She holds my hand and laughs aloud. “Lord, how I miss his father!” she says, heartfelt. “He was a man with no learning and much heart. But this duke, his son, has neither!” She breaks off. “He kept saying: ‘Highest theological authorities, highest theological authorities,’ and when I asked him what he meant, he said: ‘Levitiaticus, Levitiaticus.’ ”

I gasp with laughter.

“And when I said that I thought it was generally accepted that the passage from Deuteronomy indicated that a man should marry his deceased brother’s wife, he said: “What? Deuteronomous? What, Suffolk? Do you mean Deuteronomous? Don’t talk to me about scripture, I’ve never damn well read them. I have a priest to do that. I have a priest to do that for me.”

“The Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon, was here too?” I ask, sobering quickly.

“Of course. Charles would do anything for the king,” she says. “He always has done. He has no judgment at all. He’s torn, of course. His wife the dowager queen remains my friend, I know.”

“Half the country is your friend,” I say. “All the women.”

“But it makes no difference,” she says steadily. “Whether the country thinks I am right or wrong can make no difference. I have to live my life in the position that God appointed. I have no choice. My mother said I should be Queen of England when I was a little girl of no more than four, Prince Arthur himself chose this destiny for me from his deathbed, God placed me here at my coronation. Only the Holy Father can command me differently and he has yet to speak. But how d’you think Mary is taking this?”

“Badly,” I say truthfully. “She bleeds heavily with her courses, and they give her much pain. I have consulted with wise women and even spoken to a physician, but nothing they suggest seems to make any difference. And when she knows that there is trouble between you and her father, she can’t eat. She is sick with distress. If I force her to eat anything, she vomits it up again. She knows something of what is happening, Our Lady alone knows what she imagines. The king himself spoke of it to her as you failing in your duty. It’s terrible to see. She loves her father, she adores him, and she is loyal to him as the King of England. And she cannot live without you, she cannot be happy knowing that you are fighting for your name and your honor. This is destroying her health.” I pause, looking at her downturned face. “And it goes on and on and on, and I cannot tell her that there will be an end to it.”

“I can do nothing but serve God,” she says stubbornly. “Whatever it costs, I can do nothing but follow His laws. It blights my life too, and the king’s. Everyone says he is like a man possessed. This isn’t love, we’ve seen him in love. This is like a sickness. She does not call to his heart, to his true, loving heart. She calls to his vanity and she feeds it as if it were a monster. She calls to his scholarship and tricks him with words. I pray every day that the Holy Father writes simply and clearly to the king to tell him to put that woman aside. For Henry’s sake now, not even for mine. For his own dear sake, for she is destroying him.”

“Has he gone on progress with her?”

“Gone on progress leaving Thomas More to chase heretics through London and burn them for questioning the Church. The London tradesmen are persecuted, but she is allowed to read forbidden books.”

For a moment I don’t see the weariness in her face, the lines around her eyes, or the paleness of her cheeks. I see the princess who lost the young man she loved, her first love, and the girl who kept her promise to him. “Ah, Katherine,” I say tenderly. “How have we come to this? However did this come about?”

“D’you know, he left without saying good-bye?” she says wonderingly. “He has never done that before. Never in all his life. Not even these last few years. However angry he was, however troubled, he would never go to bed without saying good night to me, and he would never leave without saying good-bye. But this time he rode away, and when I sent after him to say that I wished him well, he replied . . .” She breaks off, her voice weakened. “He said that he did not want my good wishes.”

We are silent. I think that it is not like Henry to be rude. His mother taught him the perfect manners of royalty. He prizes himself on his courtesy, on his chivalry. That he should be discourteous—publicly and crudely discourteous to his wife, the queen—is another distinct line of paint in the portrait of this new king that is emerging: a king who will draw a blade on an unarmed younger man, who will allow his court to hound an old friend to his death, who watched his favorite and her brother and sister miming the act of dragging a cardinal of the Church down to hell.

I shake my head at the folly of men, at their cruelty, the pointless, bullying cruelty of a stupid man. “He’s showing off,” I say certainly. “In some ways he’s still the little prince I knew. He’s showing off to please her.”

“He was cold,” the queen says. She draws her shawl around her shoulders as if she feels his coldness in her chamber even now. “My messenger said that when the king turned away, his eyes were bright and cold.”

Only a few weeks later, just as we are about to go out riding, we get a message from the king. Katherine sees the royal seal and tears it open in the stable yard, her face alight with hope. For a moment I think that the king is commanding us to join him on progress, he has recovered from his ill temper and wants to see his wife and daughter.

Slowly, as she reads the letter, her face falls. “It’s not good news,” is all she says.

I see Mary put her hand to her belly as if she is suddenly queasy, and she turns from her horse as if she cannot bear the thought of sitting in a saddle. The queen hands me the letter and walks from the stable yard and into the palace without another word.

I read. It is a terse command from one of the king’s secretaries: the queen is to pack up and leave Greenwich Palace at once and go to the More, one of the houses of the late cardinal. But Mary and I are not to go with her. We are to return to Richmond Palace, where the king will visit us when he passes on his progress.

“What can I do?” Mary asks, looking after her mother. “What should I do?”

She is only fifteen years old; there is nothing that she can do. “We have to obey the king,” I say. “As your mother will do. She will obey him.”

“She will never agree to a divorce.” Mary rounds on me, her voice raised, her face anguished.

“She will obey him in everything that her conscience allows,” I correct myself.


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531


We get home and I have a sense of a storm about to break as soon as the door to Mary’s bedroom is closed behind us. All the way home, in the royal barge with people cheering her from the riverbank, she was dignified and steady. She took her seat at the rear of the barge on her gold throne, turning her head to right and left. When the wherrymen cheered her, she raised a hand; when the fishwives at the Lambeth quay shouted: “God bless you, Princess, and your mother, the queen,” she inclined her head a little, to show that she heard them, but no further to indicate disloyalty to her father. She held herself like a marionette on tight wires, but the moment that we are home and the door is shut behind us, she collapses as if all the strings are cut at once.

She drops to the floor in a storm of sobbing; there is no comforting her, there is no silencing her. Her eyes run, her nose, her deep sobs turn to retches and then she vomits out her grief. I fetch a bowl and pat her back, and still she does not stop. She heaves again but nothing comes except bile. “Stop,” I say. “Stop this, Mary, stop.”

She has never disobeyed me in her life before, but I see that she cannot stop; it is as if the separation of her parents has torn her apart. She chokes and coughs and sobs some more as if she would spit out her lungs, her heart. “Stop, Mary,” I say. “Stop crying.”

I don’t believe she can even hear me. She is eviscerating herself as if she were a traitor being disemboweled, choking on her tears, on bile, or phlegm, and her wailing goes on.

I pull her up from the floor and I wrap her in shawls, as tightly as if I were swaddling a baby. I want her to feel held, though her mother cannot hold her, though her father has let her fall. I tighten the scarves around her heaving belly, and she turns her head away from me and gasps for breath as I tighten the fabric around her body and wrap her close. I lie her on her back on the bed, holding her thin shoulders, and still her mouth gapes wide on her unstoppable sobs and still her grief racks her. I rock her, as if she were a swaddled baby, I wipe the tears that come from her red swollen eyes, I wipe her nose, I pat the saliva from her drooling mouth. “Hush,” I say gently. “Hush. Hush, little Mary, hush.”

It grows dark outside and her sobs become quieter; she breathes and then she gives a little hiccough of grief, and then she breathes again. I lay my hand on her forehead where she is burning hot, and I think between the two of them they have nearly killed their only child. All through this long night, while Mary sobs herself to sleep and then wakes and cries out again as if she cannot believe that her father has abandoned her mother and they have both left her, I forget that Katherine is in the right, that she is doing the will of God, that she swore to be Queen of England and that God called her to this place just as He calls those whom He loves. I forget that my darling Mary is a princess and must never deny her name, that God has called her, and it would be a sin to deny her throne as it would be a sin to deny her life. I just think that this child, this fifteen-year-old girl, is paying a terrible price for her parents’ battle; and it would be better for her, as it was better for me, to walk away from a royal name and a royal claim altogether.

The court splits and divides, like a country readying for war. Some are invited to the king’s progress around the hunting estates of England, riding all day and merrymaking all night. Some stay with the queen at the More, where she keeps a good household and a large court. Very many slip away to go to their own houses and lands and pray that they will not be forced to choose whether to serve the king or the queen.

Montague travels with the king, his place is at his side, but his loyalty is always with the queen. Geoffrey goes home to Sussex, to his wife at Lordington, who gives birth to their first child. They call him Arthur, for the brother whom Geoffrey loved best. Geoffrey writes at once to me to ask for an allowance for his baby son. He is a young man who cannot hold money, and I laugh at the thought of his lordly extravagance. He is too generous to his friends and keeps too wealthy a household. I know that I should refuse him; but I cannot. Besides, he has given the family another boy, and that is a gift beyond price.

I stay with Princess Mary at Richmond Palace. She is still hoping to be allowed to join her mother, writing carefully loving letters to her father, receiving only occasional scrawled replies.

I think it is a message from him when I see, from the window of her presence chamber, half a dozen riders on the road below, coming towards the palace and turning in through the great gates. I wait at the door of the presence chamber for the letter to be brought up. I will take it to the princess herself when she comes from her private chapel. I find I am afraid now what news she will read.

Yet it is no royal messenger but old Tom Darcy who comes slowly up the stairs, clutching the small of his back until he sees me waiting, when he straightens up and makes his bow.

“Your lordship!” I say, surprised.

“Margaret Pole, Countess!” he replies, and holds out his arms to me so that I can kiss him on the cheek. “You look well.”

“I am well,” I say.

He glances towards the closed door of the presence chamber and cocks a grizzled eyebrow. “Not so well,” I say shortly.

“Anyway, it’s you I’ve come to see,” he says.

I lead the way to my own rooms. My ladies are with the princess in the chapel, so we are quite alone in the pretty, sunny room. “Can I offer you something to drink?” I ask. “Or to eat?”

He shakes his head. “I hope to come and go unobserved,” he says. “If anyone asks you why I was here, you can say that I called in as I was going to London, to pay my respects to the princess, but came away without seeing her because she was . . .”

“She’s unwell,” I say.

“Sick?”

“Melancholy.”

He nods. “No surprise. I came to see you about the queen her mother, and about her, poor young woman.”

I wait.

“Next Parliament, after Christmas, they are going to try to bring the cause of the king’s marriage into the judgment of England, away from the Pope. They’re going to ask Parliament to support that.”

Lord Darcy sees my small nod.

“They mean to annul the marriage and disinherit the princess,” Darcy says quietly. “I’ve told Norfolk that I can’t stand by and see it happen. He’s told me to keep my old mouth shut. I need others to join with me, if I speak out.” He looks at me. “Will Geoffrey speak with me? Will Montague?”

I find I am twisting the rings on my fingers, and he takes my hands in his firm grip and holds me still. “I need your support,” he says.

“I am sorry,” I say eventually. “You’re in the right, I know it, my sons know it. But I don’t dare have them speak out.”

“The king will usurp the rights of the Church,” Tom warns me. “He will usurp the rights of the Church just so that he can give himself permission to abandon a faultless wife and disinherit an innocent child.”

“I know!” I burst out. “I know! But we don’t dare defy him. Not yet!”

“When?” he asks shortly.

“When we have to,” I say. “When we absolutely have to. At the last moment. Not before. In case the king sees sense, in case something changes, in case the Pope makes a clear ruling, in case the emperor comes, in case we can get through this without standing up to be counted against the most powerful man in England, perhaps the most powerful man in the world.”

He has been listening very carefully, and now he nods and puts his arm around my shoulders as if I were still a girl and he were a handsome young Lord of the North. “Ah, Lady Margaret, my dear, you’re afraid,” he says gently.

I nod. “I am. I am sorry. I can’t help it. I am afraid for my boys. I can’t risk them going to the Tower. Not them. Not them as well.” I look into his old face for understanding. “My brother . . .” I whisper. “My cousin . . .”

“He can’t charge us all with treason,” Tom says stoutly. “If we stand together. He can’t charge us all.”

We stand in silence for a moment, and then he releases me and reaches into the inside of his jacket and produces a beautifully embroidered badge, such as a man might pin to his collar before going into battle. It is the five wounds of Christ. Two hands with bleeding palms, two feet, stabbed and bleeding, a bleeding heart with a trail of red embroidery, and then, like a halo over it all, a white rose. Gently, he puts it into my hands.

“This is beautiful!” I am dazzled by the quality of the work and struck by the imagery that links the sufferings of Christ with the rose of my house.

“I had them embroidered when I was planning an expedition against the Moors,” he said. “D’you remember? Years ago. Our crusade. The mission came to nothing, but I kept the badges. I had this one made with the rose of your house for your cousin who was riding with me.”

I tuck it into the pocket of my gown. “I am grateful to you. I shall put it with my rosary and pray on it.”

“And I shall pray that I never have to issue it in wartime,” he says grimly. “Last time I gave it out to my men we were sworn to die to defend the Church against the infidel. Pray God we never have to defend against heresy here.”

Lord Darcy is not our only visitor to Richmond Palace as the hot weather goes on and the king’s court stays away from his capital city. Elizabeth, my kinswoman, the Duchess of Norfolk, Thomas Howard’s wife, comes to visit us and brings a gift of game and much gossip.

She pays her compliments to the princess and then comes to my privy chamber. Her ladies sit with mine at a distance, and she requests two of them to sing. Shielded from observation and with our quiet voices drowned out by the music, she says to me: “The Boleyn whore has commanded the marriage of my own daughter.”

“No!” I exclaim.

She nods, keeping her face carefully impassive. “She commands the king, he commands my husband, and nobody consults me at all. In effect, she commands me, me: a Stafford by birth. Wait till you hear her choice.”

Obediently, I wait.

“My daughter Mary is to be married to the king’s bastard.”

“Henry Fitzroy?” I ask incredulously.

“Yes. My lord is delighted, of course. He has the highest of hopes. I would not have had my Mary mixed up in this for the world. When you next see the queen, tell her that I have never wavered in my love and loyalty to her. This betrothal is none of my doing. I think of it as my shame.”

“Mixed up?” I ask cautiously.

“I tell you what I think is going to happen,” she says in a quick, furious whisper. “I think the king is going to put the queen aside, whatever anyone says, send her to a nunnery, and declare himself a single man.”

I sit very still, as if someone was telling me of a new plague at my doorstep.

“I think he will deny the princess, say that she is illegitimate.”

“No,” I whisper.

“I do. I think that he will marry the Boleyn woman, and if she gives him a son, he will declare that boy his heir.”

“The marriage wouldn’t be valid,” I say quietly, holding on to the one thing that I know.

“Not at all. It will be made in hell against the will of God! But who in England is going to tell the king that? Are you?”

I swallow. No one is going to tell him. Everyone knows what happened to Reginald when he merely reported the opinion of the French universities.

“He will disinherit the princess,” she says. “God forgive him. But if the king cannot get a son on the Boleyn woman, he has Fitzroy in reserve and he will make him his heir.”

“Bessie Blount’s boy? In the place of our princess?” I try to sound scathing but I am finding it all too easy to believe her.

“He is the Duke of Richmond and Somerset,” she reminds me. “Commander of the North, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The king has given him every great title, so why not Prince of Wales among all the others?”

I know this was the cardinal’s old plan. I had hoped it had fallen with him. “No one would support such a thing,” I say. “No one would allow a legitimate heir to be replaced with a bastard.”

“Who would rise against it?” she demands. “No one would like it but who would have the courage to rise against it?”

I close my eyes for a moment and I shake my head. I know that it should be us. If anyone, it should be us.

“I’ll tell you who would rise if you would lead them,” she says in a quiet, passionate whisper. “The common people and everyone who would carry a sword at the Pope’s command, everyone who would follow the Spanish when they invade for their princess, everyone who loves the queen and supports the princess, and every Plantagenet that has ever been born. One way or another that’s nearly everyone in England.”

I put out a hand. “Your Grace, you know I cannot have this talk in the princess’s household. For her sake as well as mine I cannot hear it.”

She nods. “But it’s true.”

“But why would the Boleyn woman want such a match?” I ask her curiously. “Your daughter Mary brings a great dowry, and her father commands great acres of England—and all his tenants. Why would the Boleyn woman give such power to Henry Fitzroy?”

The duchess nods. “Better for her than his other choice,” she says. “She can’t bear his marriage to the Princess Mary. She can’t bear to see the princess as heir.”

“That would never have happened,” I say flatly.

“Who would stop it?” she challenges me.

My hand creeps to my pocket where I keep my rosary and Tom Darcy’s badge of the five wounds of Christ under the white rose of my house. Would Tom Darcy stop it? Would we join him? Would I sew this badge onto my son’s collar and send him out to fight for the princess?

“Anyway,” she concludes. “I came to tell you that I don’t forget my love and loyalty to the queen. If you see her tell her that I would do anything, I will do everything I can. I speak with the Spanish ambassador, I speak to my kinsmen.”

“I can be no part of it. I am not gathering her supporters.”

“Well, you should be,” the duchess says bluntly.


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531


Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, daughter of the Scottish queen, his sister, is ordered to leave us, though she and the princess have become the firmest of friends. She is not to be sent to her mother, but going into service at court, to wait upon the Boleyn woman, as if she were a queen.

She is excited at the thought of being at court, hopeful that her dark prettiness will turn heads; brunettes are in fashion, with the Boleyn woman’s black hair and olive skin being much praised. But she hates the thought of serving a commoner, clinging to Princess Mary and holding me tightly before she steps into the royal barge that has come for her.

“I don’t know why I can’t stay with you!” she exclaims.

I raise my hand in farewell. I don’t know why either.

I have a summer wedding to prepare, and I turn from my fears for the princess to write the contracts and agree the terms with the same joy that I pick the flowers to make a garland for the bride, my granddaughter, Katherine, Montague’s oldest. She is only ten, but I am glad to get Francis Hastings for her. Her sister Winifred is betrothed to his brother Thomas Hastings, so our fortunes are safely linked to a rising family; the boys’ father, my kinsman, has just been made an earl. We have a pretty betrothal ceremony and a wedding feast for the two little girls, and Princess Mary smiles when the two couples come handfasted down the aisle, as if she were their older sister and as proud of them as I am.


ENGLAND, CHRISTMAS 1531


This Christmas season has little joy in it, not for the princess, nor for her mother the queen. Not even her father the king seems to be happy; he keeps the feast at Greenwich in the most lavish style, but people say that it was a merry court when the queen was on the throne and now he is hagridden by a woman who cannot be satisfied and will give him no pleasure.

The queen is at the More, well served and honored; but alone. Princess Mary and I are ordered to go to Beaulieu in Essex, and we keep the Christmas feast there. I make the twelve days of Christmas as happy as I can for her; but through all the wassailing, and dancing, disguising and feasting, the bringing in of the Yule log and the raising of the Christmas crown, I know that Mary is missing her mother, and praying for her father, and that there is very little joy anywhere in England these days.


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, MAY 1532


It is a beautiful early summer, as lovely as if the countryside itself wanted to make everyone remember this time. Every morning there is a pearly mist on the river that hides the quietly lapping water, and the duck and geese rise out of it with slowly beating wings.

At sunrise the heat burns the mist away and leaves the grass sparkling with dew, every cobweb a work of lace and diamonds. Now I can smell the river, damp and wet and green, and sometimes, if I sit very still on the pier, looking down through the floating weed and the clumps of sweet-smelling water mint, I see schools of little fish and the movement of trout.

In the water meadows running down from the palace to the river the cows wallow hock-deep in thick, lush grass bright with buttercups, and flick their tails against the flies that buzz around them. Amorously, they walk shoulder to shoulder with the bull, and the little calves wobble on unsteady legs after their dams.

First the swifts arrive, and then the swallows and then the martins, and soon on every wall of the palace there is a frenzy of building and rebuilding the little mud cups of nests. All day long the birds are flying from river to eaves, stopping only to preen on the roofs of the stables, pretty as little nuns in their black and white. When the parents fly past the nests, the newly hatched chicks bob up their little heads and cry out, each yellow beak wide open.

We are filled with the joy of the season, and we bring in the May, and have dances in the woods, rowing races and swimming contests. The courtiers take a fancy to fishing and every young man brings a rod and a line and we have a bonfire by the river, where the cooks seethe the catch in butter in cauldrons set in the ashes, and serve it sizzling hot. As the sun lies low and the little silver moon rises, we go out in the barges and the musicians play for us and the music drifts across the water as the sky turns to peach, and the river becomes a pathway of rose gold that might lead us anywhere, and the tide feels as if it will draw us far away.

We are coming home at dusk, singing softly with the lute player, without torches so the gray of twilight lies on the water and the bats dipping in and out of the silvery river are undisturbed, when I hear a drum for rowers echoing across the water like distant cannon fire, and I see Montague’s barge carrying torches fore and aft coming swiftly towards us.

Our barges land at the pier, and I order Princess Mary into the palace, thinking that I will meet Montague alone, but for once, for the very first time, she does not make the face of a sulky child and slowly go where she is bidden. She stops to face me, and says: “My dear, my dearest Lady Governess, I think I should meet your son. I think he should tell us both what he has come to tell you. It is time. I am sixteen. I am old enough.”

Montague’s barge is at the pier; I can hear the rattle of the gangplank behind me and the footsteps of the rowers as they make a guard of honor, their oars held high.

“I am brave enough,” she promises. “Whatever he has to say.”

“Let me find out what is happening, and I will come at once and tell you,” I temporize. “You are old enough. It is time. But . . .” I break off, I make a little gesture as if to say, you are so slight, you are so fragile, how are you going to bear bad news?

She raises her head, she puts back her shoulders. She is her mother’s daughter in the way that she prepares herself for the very worst. “I can bear anything,” she says. “I can bear any trial that God sends to me. I was raised for this; you yourself educated me for this. Tell your son to come and report to me, his future sovereign.”

Montague stands before us, bows to us both, and waits, looking from one to the other: the mother whose judgment he trusts, and the young royal in my keeping.

She nods her head to him as if she were a queen already. She turns and seats herself in a little bower that we have made, a seat for lovers to enjoy the river in the shade of a rosebush and honeysuckle. She sits as if it is a throne, and the flowers breathing their scent into the night air are her canopy of state. “You can tell me, Lord Montague. What grave news do you have, that you come from London with your oars pulling so fast and the drum beating so loud?” And when she sees him glance at me, she says again: “You can tell me.”

“It is bad news. I came to tell my Lady Mother.” Almost without thinking he pulls off his cap and drops to one knee before her as if she were queen.

“Of course,” she says steadily. “I knew it as soon as I saw your barge. But you can tell us both. I am no child, and I am no fool. I know my father is moving against the Holy Church, and I need to know what has happened, Lord Montague, help me. Be a good advisor to me, and tell me what has happened.”

He looks up at her as if he would spare her this. But he tells her simply and quietly. “Today the Church surrendered to the king. Only God knows what will happen. But from today the king will rule the Church himself. The Pope is to be disregarded in England. He is no more than a bishop, the Bishop of Rome.” He shakes his head in disbelief as he says it. “The Pope is overthrown by the king, and the king sits below God with the Church below him. Thomas More has returned the seal of Lord Chancellor and resigned his post and gone home.”

She knows that her mother has lost a true friend and her father the last man who would tell him the truth. She is silent as she takes in the news. “The king has made the Church his own?” she asks. “All its wealth? And its laws and its courts? This is to take England entirely into his own possession.”

Neither I nor my son can contradict her.

“They are calling it the submission of the clergy,” he says quietly. “The Church cannot make law, the Church cannot convict heresy, the Church may not pay its wealth to Rome, and it may not take commands from Rome.”

“So that the king can rule on his own marriage,” the princess says. I realize that she has thought deeply on this, and that her mother will have told her the many clever measures that the king and his new advisor Thomas Cromwell have undertaken.

We are silent.

“Jesus Himself appointed his servant Peter to rule the Church,” she observes. “I know this. Everyone knows this. Is England to disobey Jesus Christ?”

“This is not our battle,” I interrupt. “This is a matter for churchmen. Not for us.”

Her blue York gaze turns to me as if she hopes that I will tell the truth, but knows that I will not.

“I mean it,” I insist. “This is a great matter. It is for the king and the Church to decide. It is for the Holy Father to remonstrate, if he thinks best. It is for the king to take advice and make his claim, as he thinks best. It is for the churchmen in Parliament to respond to the king. Thomas More must speak out, John Fisher will speak out, your own tutor Richard Fetherston has spoken out, it is for the men, the bishops, and archbishops. Not us.”

“Oh, they have spoken,” Montague says bitterly. “The churchmen spoke at once. Most of them agreed without an argument, and when it came to a vote, they stayed away. That is why Thomas More has gone home to Chelsea.”

The little princess rises from the garden seat and Montague gets to his feet. She does not take his offered arm but turns to me. “I shall go to my chapel and pray,” she says. “I shall pray for wisdom to guide me in these difficult days. I wish that I knew what I should do.”

She is silent for a moment, looking at us both. “I shall pray for my tutors and for Bishop Fisher. And I shall pray for Thomas More,” she says. “I think that he is a man who does know what he should do.”


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1532


That was the end of our carefree summer, and the end of the good weather too, for as the princess prayed in the private chapel, turning over her rosary beads naming her mother, Bishop Fisher, and Thomas More, to St. Jude, the saint for the hopeless and the despairing, the clouds rolled up the valley, making the river dark, and then it started to rain with the thick, heavy drops of a summer storm.

The bad weather lasted for weeks, heavy clouds lay over the city, and people grew bad-tempered and exhausted in the heat. When the clouds cleared at night, instead of the familiar stars there was a succession of constant burning comets crossing the sky. People watching the troubled stars saw standards and banners and unmistakable signs of war. One of Reginald’s former friends, one of the Carthusian monks, told my confessor that he had clearly seen a burning red globe hanging above their church, and from this he knew that the king’s anger would fall on them for keeping their prophecy safe, and hiding the manuscript.

The fishermen who came to the pier with fresh trout for the household said that they were catching dead bodies in their nets, so many men were throwing themselves into the flood waters of the unusually high tides. “Heretics,” one said, “for the Church will burn them if they don’t drown themselves. Thomas More will see to that.”

“Not anymore,” said the other. “For More will be burned himself, and the heretics are safe in England now that the king’s whore is a Lutheran. It is those who love the old ways and who pray to the Virgin and honor the queen who are drowning themselves in the new tide.”

“That’s enough from both of you,” I say, pausing at the kitchen door while the cook picks out her baskets of fish. “We don’t want any talk like that in this household. Take your money and go, and don’t come here again or I will report you.”

I can silence the men at the door, but every man, woman, and child on the road to or from London who passes our door and calls in for the free food given out at the end of every meal has one story or another, and they all have the same ominous theme.

They are talking of miracles, of prophecies. They believe that the queen is receiving daily messages from her nephew the emperor, promising that he will defend her, and there will be a Spanish fleet sailing up the Thames any dawn. They don’t know for sure, but they heard from someone that the Pope is consulting with his advisors, hammering out a compromise because he is afraid that the Christian kings will turn on each other over this matter, while the Turk is at the door of Christendom. They don’t know, but everyone seems to be sure that the king is advised only by the Boleyns and by their lawyers and churchmen, and they are telling him wicked lies: that the only way ahead to his desires is to steal the Church, to set aside his coronation oath, to tear up Magna Carta itself and act the tyrant and defy anyone who says that he cannot do such a thing.

No one knows anything for sure; but they know very well that there are dangerous times ahead, and that the smell of danger is in the air, and that every time the thunder rumbles someone, somewhere in England, says: “Listen. Was that guns? Is the war starting again?”

Those who are not afraid of war are afraid of the rising of the dead from their graves. The shallow graves at Bosworth Field, at Towton, at St. Albans, at Towcester throw up trophies of silver and gold, badges and keepsakes, tokens and livery buttons. Now they say that the quiet earth itself is disturbed in these old battlefields, as if they are being secretly harrowed in darkness, and the men who died for the Yorks have been released from the damp earth and are standing up, brushing off the clinging soil, mustering in their old troops, and coming back to fight again for their princess and for their Church.

Some fool comes to the stable door and tells the grooms that he has seen my brother, his head back on his shoulders, handsome as a boy, knocking at the door of the Tower of London and asking to come back in. Edward is supposed to have cried out that the Moldwarp, a wicked, dark animal King of England, has crawled onto his throne; and these are his years. A dragon and a lion and a wolf will have to rise up to defeat him, and the dragon will be the Emperor of Rome, the wolf will be the Scots, and the lion will be our own true princess who, like a girl in a story, will have to kill her wicked father to set her mother and her country free.

“Get that treasonous, foul-mouthed old gossip out of the yard and throw him in the river,” I say shortly. “And then lock him up in the guardhouse and ask the Duke of Norfolk what he wants done with him. And make sure that everyone knows I never want to hear a word of lions or moles or flaming stars again.”

I speak with such cold fury that everyone obeys me; but that night, as I close the shutters on my bedroom window, I see above our own palace roof a flaming star, like a blue crucifix, above the princess’s bedroom, as if St. Jude, the saint of the impossible, is shining down on her a sign of hope.


L’ERBER, LONDON, SUMMER 1532


Montague and Geoffrey ask me to meet them at our London house, L’Erber, and I make an excuse to the princess that I need to see a physician, buy some warmer tapestries for the walls of the palace, and get her a winter cloak.

“Will you see anyone in London?” she asks.

“I may see my sons,” I say.

She glances around to be sure that we cannot be overheard. “Can I give you a letter for my mother?” she whispers.

I hesitate for only a moment. Nobody has told me if the princess and her mother may exchange letters; but equally no one has forbidden it.

“I want to write to her and know no one else reads it,” she says.

“Yes,” I promise. “I’ll try to get it to her.”

She nods and goes to her private chamber. A little while later she comes out with a letter with no name on the front and no seal on the back and gives it to me.

“How will you get it into her hands?” she asks.

“Better that you don’t know,” I say, kiss her, and walk through the gardens and down to the pier.

I take our barge downriver to the water stairs above London Bridge and walk though the City, surrounded by my personal guards, to my London home.

It seems like a long time since I was pruning back the vine and hoping for English wine. It was a sunny day when Thomas Boleyn warned me of the danger that my cousin the Duke of Buckingham was running into headlong. I could almost laugh now at the thought of Boleyn’s fearful caution, when I think how high he has risen, and how much more danger we are all in as a result of his own ambition—though back then, he was warning me of mine. Who would have thought that a Boleyn could advise the king? Who would have thought that the daughter of my steward should threaten the Queen of England? Who would ever have dreamed that a King of England would overthrow the laws of the land and the Church itself to get such a girl into his bed?

Geoffrey and Montague are waiting for me in my privy chamber, where there is a good fire in the grate and mulled ale in the jug. My house is run as it should be, even though I am here only rarely. I see that everything is just so with a little nod of approval, and then I take the great chair and survey my two sons.

Montague looks far older than his forty years. The task of serving this king, as he goes determinedly down the wrong road against the wishes of his people, against the truth of his Church, against the advice of his councillors, is draining my oldest son. It is exhausting him.

Geoffrey is thriving on the challenge. He is where he loves to be, at the center of things, pursuing something he believes in, arguing the tiniest detail, clamoring for the greatest of principles. He appears to serve the king in Parliament, bringing information to the king’s clever servant, Thomas Cromwell, chatting to men who have come up from the country, puzzled and anxious with no idea of what is happening at court, and he meets with our friends and kinsmen of the Privy Council and speaks for the queen whenever he can. Geoffrey loves an argument; I should have sent him to be a lawyer and then perhaps he would have risen as high as Thomas Cromwell, whose plan it is to set the Parliament against the priests and so divide them to their ruin.

They both kneel and I put my hand on Montague’s head and bless him, and then rest my hand on Geoffrey’s head. His hair is still springy under my palm. When he was a baby, I used to run my fingers through his hair to see the curls lift up. He always was the prettiest of all my children.

“I have promised the princess to get this into her mother’s hands,” I say, showing them the folded paper. “How can we do this?”

Montague puts out his hand for it. “I’ll give it to Chapuys,” he says, naming the Spanish ambassador. “He writes to her in secret, and he delivers her letters to the emperor and the Pope.”

“Nobody must know that it has come by us,” I caution him.

“I know,” he says. “Nobody will.” He tucks the single page inside his doublet.

“So,” I say, gesturing that they can sit. “We will have been observed, meeting like this. What are we to say we have been discussing, should anyone ask?”

Geoffrey is ready with a lie. “We can say that we are troubled by Jane, Arthur’s widow,” he says. “She has written me a letter, asking to be released from her vows. She wants to come out of Bisham Priory.”

I raise an eyebrow at Montague. Grimly, he nods. “She wrote to me too. It’s not the first time.”

“Why didn’t she write to me?”

Geoffrey giggles. “It’s you she blames for putting her inside,” he says. “She has taken it into her head that you want to secure the fortune of your grandson Henry by keeping her locked up and out of sight forever, her dower lands in your keeping, his inheritance safe from her. She wants to come out and get her fortune back.”

“Well, she can’t,” I say flatly. “She took a vow of poverty for life of her own free will; I won’t restore her dower and have her in my house, and Henry’s lands and fortune are in my safe-keeping until he is a man.”

“Agreed,” Montague says. “But we can say that is why we met and talked here.”

I nod. “And so why did you want to see me?” I speak with determination. My boys must not know that I am weary and frightened by the world that we live in now. I did not think that I would ever see the day when a Queen of England did not sit on her throne at her court. I never dreamed that I would see the day when a king’s bastard took titles and wealth and paraded himself as an heir to the throne. And nobody, surely nobody in the long history of this country, ever thought that a King of England could set himself up as an English Pope.

“The king is to go to France again, another meeting,” Montague says briefly. “He hopes to persuade King Francis to support his divorce with the Pope. The hearing is set for Rome this autumn. Henry wants King Francis to represent him. In return, Henry will promise to go on crusade for the Pope against the Turk.”

“Will the King of France support him?”

Geoffrey shakes his head. “How can he? There is neither logic nor morality to it.”

Montague gives a weary smile. “That might not discourage him. Or he might promise it, just to get the crusade started. The point is that the king is taking Richmond.”

“Henry Fitzroy? What for?”

“He is to stay at the French court, as a visiting prince, and the French king’s son Henri duc d’Orléans is to come home with us.”

I am horrified. “The French are accepting Fitzroy, Bessie Blount’s bastard, in exchange for their prince?”

Montague nods. “It must be certain that the king plans to name him as his heir, and disinherit the princess.”

I cannot help it. I drop my head into my hands so that my sons cannot see the anguish on my face, then I feel Geoffrey’s gentle hand on my shoulder. “We’re not powerless,” he says. “We can fight this.”

“The king is taking the Lady to France also,” Montague goes on. “He is going to give her a title and a fortune; she is to be the Marquess of Pembroke.”

“What?” I ask. It is a strange title; this is to make her a lord in her own right. “And how can he take her to France? She can’t be a lady-in-waiting to the queen, since the queen is not attending. How can she go? What is she to do? What is she to be?”

“What she is—a whore,” Geoffrey sneers.

“A new sort of lady,” Montague says quietly, almost regretfully. “But the new Queen of France won’t meet her, and the King of France’s sister won’t meet her, so she’ll have to stay in Calais when the two kings meet. She’ll never meet the King of France at all.”

For a moment I think of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and the Queens of England and France going to take Mass together, chattering like girls, kissing each other and promising lifelong friendship. “It will be such a shadow of what went before,” I say. “Can the king not see that? Who will attend her?”

Montague allows himself a smile. “The dowager queen Mary is no friend to the Lady, and says that she’s too ill to travel. Even her husband has quarreled with the king about the Boleyn woman. The Duchess of Norfolk won’t go, the duke doesn’t even dare to ask her. None of the great ladies will go, they’ll all find an excuse. The Lady has only her immediate family: her sister and her sister-in-law. Other than Howards and Boleyns she has no friends.”

Geoffrey and I look blankly at Montague’s description of this scratch court. Every great person is always surrounded by a crowd of family, affinity, loyalists, friends, supporters: it is how we parade greatness. A lady without companions signals to the world that she is of no importance. The Boleyn woman is there only at the whim of the king, a very lonely favorite. The king’s whore has no queen’s court around her. She has no setting. “Does he not see her for what she is?” I ask helplessly. “When she has neither friends nor family?”

“He thinks that she prefers him before all company,” Montague says. “And he likes that. He thinks she is a rare thing, untouchable, a prize that only he can approach, only he might win. He likes it that she is not encircled by noblewomen. It’s her strangeness, her Frenchness, her isolation, that he likes.”

“Do you have to go?” I ask Montague.

“Yes,” he says. “God forgive me, I am commanded to go. And that’s why we wanted to see you. Lady Mother, I think the time has come for us to act.”

“Act?” I say blankly.

“We have to defend the queen and the princess against this madness. The time is now. Clearly, if he is parading Henry Fitzroy as his heir, he is going to put the princess aside. So I thought that I would take Geoffrey with me, in my household, and when we get to Calais, he can slip away and meet with Reginald. He can give him a report of our friends and kinsmen in England, take a message to the Pope, carry a letter for the queen to her nephew the King of Spain. We can tell Reginald that one strong ruling from the Pope against Henry will put a stop to this whole thing. If the Pope were to decide against Henry, then he would have to take the queen back. The Pope has to speak out. He can delay no longer. The king is pushing on, but he is blind as a mole in a tunnel. He is taking nobody with him.”

“Yet nobody defies him,” I observe.

“That’s what we must tell Reginald, that we will defy him.” Montague takes the challenge without flinching. “It has to be us. If not us, then who will stand against him? It should have been the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest duke in the land, but he is already dead on the scaffold and his son is a broken man. Ursula can do nothing with him—I’ve already asked her. The Duke of Norfolk should advise the king, but Anne Boleyn is his niece, and his daughter is married to the king’s bastard. He’s not going to argue against the promotion of the unworthy. Charles Brandon should advise the king, but Henry banished him from court for one word against her.

“As to the Church, it should be defended by the Archbishop of York, or of Canterbury; but Wolsey is dead and Archbishop Warham is dead and the king is going to put the Boleyn’s own chaplain in his place. John Fisher is unfailingly brave, but the king ignores him and he is old and his health is broken. The Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, handed back his seal of office rather than speak out, our own brother was silenced with a fist, and now the king listens only to men without principle. His greatest advisor, Thomas Cromwell, is neither of the Church nor of the nobility. He’s a man from nowhere without education, like an animal. He seeks to serve only the king, like a dog. The king has been seduced and entrapped by bad advisors. We have to win him back from them.”

“It has to be us, there is no one but us,” Geoffrey exclaims.

“Henry Courtenay?” I suggest, trying to escape the burden of destiny, naming our Plantagenet kinsman, the Marquess of Exeter.

“He’s with us,” Montague says shortly. “Heart and soul.”

“Can’t he do it?” I ask cravenly.

“On his own?” Geoffrey mocks me. “No.”

“He’ll do it with us. Together we are the white rose,” Montague says gently. “We are the Plantagenets, the natural rulers of England. The king is our cousin. We have to bring him back to his own.”

I look at their two eager faces and think that their father kept me in obscurity and short of money so that I would never have to take a decision like this, so that I would never have to take up my duty as a natural leader of the country, so that I would never have to steer the destiny of the kingdom. He hid me from power so that I should not have to make this sort of choice. But I cannot be hidden any longer. I have to defend the princess in my charge, I cannot deny my loyalty to the queen, my friend, and my boys are right—this is the destiny of our family.

Besides—the king was once a little boy and I taught him to walk. I loved his mother and promised I would keep her sons safe. I can’t abandon him to the terrible mistakes he is making. I can’t let him destroy his inheritance and his honor for the Boleyn bagatelle, I cannot let him put a bastard boy in the place of our true-born princess. I cannot let him enact his own curse by disinheriting a Tudor.

“Very well,” I say at last, and with deep reluctance. “But you must be very, very careful. Nothing written down, nothing told to anyone except those we can trust, not even a word in confession. This must be absolutely a secret. Not a whisper to your wives, especially I don’t want the children to know anything of this.”

“The king doesn’t pursue the families of suspects,” Geoffrey reassures me. “Ursula was unhurt by the sentence against her father-in-law. Her boy is safe.”

I shake my head. I can’t bear to remind him that I saw my eleven-year-old brother taken to the Tower and he never came out again. “Even so. It’s secret,” I repeat. “The children are to know nothing.”

I take out the emblem that Tom Darcy gave me, the embroidered badge of the five wounds of Christ with the white rose of York above it. I spread it flat on the table so that they can see it. “Swear on this badge, that this remains secret,” I say.

“I so swear.” Montague puts his hand on the badge, and I put my hand on his, and Geoffrey puts his hand on top.

“I swear,” he says.

“I swear,” I say.

We are handclasped for a moment and then Montague releases me with a little smile, and examines the badge.

“What is this?” he asks.

“Tom Darcy gave it to me; he had it made when he went on crusade. It’s the badge of the defender of the Church against heresy. He had one made for our family.”

“Darcy is with us,” Montague confirms. “He spoke against the divorce at the last Parliament.”

“He was there long before us.”

“And we have brought someone to see you,” Geoffrey says eagerly.

“If you wish,” Montague says more cautiously. “She’s a very holy woman, and she says some extraordinary things.”

“Who?” I ask. “Who have you brought?”

“Elizabeth Barton,” Geoffrey says quietly. “The nun that they call the Holy Maid of Kent.”

“Lady Mother, I think you should meet her,” Montague says, forestalling my refusal. “The king himself has met her, William Warham the archbishop, may he rest in peace, brought her to him. The king listened to her, spoke with her. There is no reason that you should not see her.”

“She preaches that Princess Mary will take the throne,” Geoffrey says. “And other predictions that she has made have come true, just as she said they would. She has a gift.”

“Our cousin Henry Courtenay has met her, and his wife, Gertrude, prayed with her,” Montague tells me.

“Where is she now?” I ask.

“She’s staying at Syon Abbey,” Geoffrey says. “She preaches to the Carthusian Brothers, she has visions and understands more than a simple country girl could possible know. But right now, she’s in your chapel. She wants to speak with you.”

I glance at Montague. He nods reassuringly. “She’s not under suspicion,” he says. “She’s spoken to everyone at court.”

I rise from my chair and lead the way through the hall and out to my private chapel at the side of the building. The candles are lit on the altar, as always. One candle burns brightly in a glass of red Venice crystal before the memorial stone for my husband. The scent of the church, a hint of incense, a dry smell like leaves, the wisp of smoke from the candles, comforts me. The triptych above the altar gleams with gold leaf, and the Christ child smiles down on me as I quietly enter the warm darkness, drop a curtsey, and touch my forehead with holy water in the sign of the cross. A slim figure rises up from her seat at the side of the room, nods her head to the altar as if acknowledging a friend, and then turns and curtseys to me.

“I am glad to meet, your ladyship, for you are doing God’s work, guarding the heir to England who will be queen,” she says simply with a soft country accent.

“I am guardian to the Princess Mary,” I say carefully.

She steps towards me into the candlelight. She is dressed in the robes of the Benedictine Order, an undyed wool gown of soft cream tied at the waist with a soft leather belt. A scapular of plain gray wool over the robe falls to the ground at front and back, and her hair is completely covered by a wimple and veil that shade her tanned face and her brown, honest eyes. She looks like an ordinary country girl, not like a prophetess.

“I am commanded by the Mother of Heaven to tell you that Princess Mary will come to her throne. No matter what happens, you must assure her that this will come to pass.”

“How do you know this?”

She smiles as if she knows that I have dozens of young women who look just like her working for me on the land, in the dairies or in the laundries of my many houses.

“I was an ordinary girl,” she says. “Just as I appear to you. An ordinary girl like Martha in the sacred story. But God in His wisdom called on me. I fell into a deep sleep and spoke of things that I couldn’t remember when I woke. One time I was speaking in tongues for nine days, without food or drink, like one asleep but awake in heaven.”

“Then I could hear my voice and understand what I was saying, and knew it to be true. My master took me to the priest and he called great men to see me. They examined me, my master and my priest, and the Archbishop Warham, and they proved that I was speaking the word of God. God commands me to speak with many great men and women, and nobody has disproved me, and everything that I have said has always come true.”

“Tell her ladyship about your predictions,” Geoffrey urges.

She smiles at him, and I see why people are following her in their thousands, why people listen to her. She has a smile of sweetness, but immense confidence. To see that smile is to believe her.

“I told Cardinal Wolsey to his face that if he helped the king to leave his wife, if he supported the king’s proposal to marry Mistress Anne Boleyn, then he would be completely destroyed and die ill and alone.”

Geoffrey nods. “And it happened.”

“Alas for the cardinal, it did come to pass. He should have told the king he must cleave to his wife. I warned Archbishop Warham that if he did not speak out for the queen and her daughter the princess he would die ill and alone, and poor man, poor sinner, he too has gone from us, just as I foresaw. I warned Lord Thomas More that he must take his courage and speak to the king, tell him that he must live with his wife the queen and put his daughter the princess on the throne. I warned Thomas More what would happen if he did not speak out, and that has yet to come.” She looks quite stricken.

“Why, what will happen to Thomas More?” I ask very quietly.

She looks at me and her brown eyes are dark with sorrow as if sentence has been passed. “God save his soul,” she says. “I will pray for him too. Poor man, poor sinner. And I spoke to your son Reginald, and told him that if he was brave, braver than anyone else has been, his courage would be rewarded and he would come to be where he was born to be.”

I take her arm and lead her away from my two sons. “And where is that?” I whisper.

“He will rise through the Church and they will call him Pope. He will be the next Holy Father and he will see Princess Mary on the throne of England and the true religion as the only religion of England once again.”

I can’t deny it, this is what I have thought and prayed for. “Do you know this for a certainty?”

She meets my eyes with such a steady confidence that I have to believe her. “I’ve been honored with visions. God has honored me with sight of the future. I swear to you that I have seen all this come to pass.”

I cannot help but believe her. “And how shall the princess come to her own?”

“With your help,” she says quietly. “You were appointed by the king himself to guard and support her. You must do that. Never leave her. You must prepare her to take the throne, for, believe me, if the king does not return to his wife, he will not reign for long.”

“I can’t hear such things,” I say flatly.

“I am not telling them to you,” she says. “I am speaking the words of my vision, and you can listen or not as you wish. God has told me to speak, aloud; that is enough for me.”

She pauses. “I say nothing to you that I have not said to the king himself,” she reminds me. “They took me to him so that he might know what my visions were. He argued with me, he told me that I was wrong; but he did not order me to be silent. I shall speak, and whoever wants to learn may listen. Those who want to stay in the darkness, worming through the earth like the Moldwarp, can do so. God told me, and I told the king that if he leaves his wife, the queen, and pretends to marry any woman, then he will not live not one day, no, not one hour after his false wedding.”

She nods at my aghast face. “I said those words to the king himself, and he thanked me for my advice and sent me home. I am allowed to speak such things, for they are the words of God.”

“But the king is not turned from his path,” I point out. “He may have listened, but he did not come back to us.”

She shrugs. “He must do as he thinks fit. But I have warned him of the consequences. The day will come, and when that day comes, you must be ready, the princess must be ready, and if her throne is not offered to her, then she will have to take it.” Her eyelids flutter, and for a moment I can see only the whites of her eyes as if she is about to faint. “She will have to ride her horse at the head of her men, she will have to fortify her house. She will come into London on a white horse and the people will cheer her.” She blinks, and her face loses its entranced dreamy look. “And your son”—she nods her head to Montague, waiting at the back of the chapel—“he will be at her side.”

“As her commander?”

She smiles at me. “As king consort.” Her words drop into the hushed silence of the chapel. “He is the white rose, he carries royal blood, he is the kinsman of every duke in the kingdom, he is the first among equals, he will marry her and they will be crowned together.”

I am stunned. I turn from her, and Montague is at my side at once. “Take her away,” I say. “She says too much. She speaks dangerous truths.”

She smiles, quite unperturbed. “Don’t speak of my sons,” I order her. “Don’t speak of us.”

She bows her head; but she does not promise.

“I’ll take her back to Syon,” Geoffrey volunteers. “They think much of her at the abbey. They are studying with her, old documents, legends. And hundreds of people come to the abbey doors to ask her advice. She tells them what is true. They speak of prophecies and curses.”

“Well, we don’t,” I say flatly. “We don’t ever speak of such things. Ever.”


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1532


It is a hard morning when I come back from London and tell the princess that her father is going to a great council in France in October and taking his court; but not her.

“I am to follow later?” she asks hopefully.

“No,” I say. “No, you are not. And your mother, the queen, is not attending either.”

“My father is taking only his court?”

“Mostly noblemen,” I temporize.

“Is the Lady going?”

I nod.

“But who will meet her? Not the French queen?”

“No,” I say awkwardly. “The queen won’t, because she’s kinswoman to your mother. And the king’s sister will not either. So our king will have to meet with the French king alone, and Mistress Boleyn will stay in our fort of Calais and not even enter into France.”

She looks puzzled by this complicated arrangement, as indeed anyone would be. “And my father’s companions?”

“The usual court,” I say uncomfortably. Then I have to tell the truth to her pale, hurt face. “He’s taking Richmond.”

“He is taking Bessie Blount’s boy to France but not me?”

Grimly, I nod. “And the Duke of Richmond is to stay in France for a visit.”

“Who will he visit?”

It is the key question. He should visit the French king’s mistress. He should be put in a household with noble bastards. He should be paired, like to like, just as we all send our boys to serve as squires to our cousins and friends, so that they can learn their place in a household the match of their own. By all the rules of courtesy Richmond should go to a household that is the match of his own, a noble bastard’s house.

“He is going into the king’s household,” I say through gritted teeth. “And the King of France’s son will come and stay at our court.”

I would not have thought it possible for her face to go any whiter, and her hand creeps to her belly, as if there is a sudden twist in her gut. “He goes as a prince then,” she says quietly. “He travels with my father as a prince of England, he stays with the French king as an acknowledged heir; but I am left at home.”

There is nothing to say. She looks at me as if she hopes I will contradict her. “My own father wants to make me into a nobody, as if I had never been born to him. Or never lived.”

We are silent after this conversation. We are silent when the furrier from London brings Mary her winter cloak and tells us that the king sent to the queen demanding her jewels for Lady Anne to wear in Calais. The queen first refused to give them up, then explained that they were Spanish jewels, then claimed that they were her own jewels given to her by her loving husband, and not part of the royal treasury; and then, finally defeated, she sent them to the king to show her obedience to his will.

“Does he want mine?” Mary asks me bitterly. “I have a rosary which was a christening gift; I have the gold chain he gave me last Christmas.”

“If he asks, we will send them,” I say levelly, conscious of the listening servants. “He is the King of England. Everything is his.”

As the furrier leaves, discouraged by the bleak response to the story of the jewels, he tells me that the Lady did not sweep the board, for she sent her chamberlain to get the queen’s barge, and he stole it away from its moorings, and had the beautiful carved pomegranates burned off it, and Anne’s crest of the falcon imposed in its place. But apparently that was a step too far for the king. He complained that her chamberlain should never have done such a thing, that Katherine’s barge was her own possession, that it should not have been taken from her, and the Boleyn woman was forced to apologize.

“So what does he want?” the furrier demands of me, as if I have an answer. “What does he want, in God’s name? How is it well and good to take the old lady’s jewels but not her barge?”

“You don’t call her the old lady in my house,” I snap at him. “She’s the Queen of England, and she always will be.”


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, AUTUMN 1532


Neither Montague nor Geoffrey writes me so much as one private note from France. I get a cheerful unsealed letter from Montague talking about the magnificent clothes and the hospitality and the success of the talks. They all swear to one another that they will mount a joint crusade against the Turk, they are the best of friends, they are on their way home.

It is not until Montague comes to Richmond Palace to pay his respects to the princess that he can tell me on their way back from France they stopped for the night at Canterbury, and Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, walked through crowds of thousands of people and through the guards to the garden where the king was strolling with Anne Boleyn.

“She warned him,” Montague says to me gleefully. We are standing in an oriel window in the princess’s rooms. The room is unusually quiet; the princess’s ladies are getting ready for dinner, the princess is in her dressing room with her maids choosing her jewels. “She stood in front of him and then went down on her knees, very respectful, and warned him for his own good.”

“What did she say?”

The little windowpanes reflect our faces. I turn away in case someone outside in the darkness is looking in.

“She told him that if he put the queen to one side and married the Boleyn woman there would be plagues and the Sweat would destroy us all. She said that he would not live for more than seven months after the wedding and it would be the destruction of the country.”

“My God, what did he say?”

“He was afraid.” Montague’s voice is so quiet that I can hardly hear him. “He was very afraid. I have never seen him like that before. He said: ‘Seven months? Why would you say seven months?’ and he looked at Anne Boleyn as if he would ask her something. She stopped him with one glance, and then the Maid was taken away. But it meant something terrible to the king. He said ‘Seven months’ as they took her away.”

I feel sick. I see the panes of glass before me sway and then recede as if I am about to faint.

“Lady Mother, are you all right?” Montague demands. I feel him get hold of me and seat me in a chair, while someone opens the window and the cold air blows into the room and into my face and I gasp as if I cannot breathe.

“I swear that she’s told him she’s with child,” I whisper to Montague. I could weep at the thought of it. “The Boleyn whore. She must have lain with him when he made her a marquess and promised him a boy—seven months from now. That’s what the date means to the king. That’s why he was so shocked by the words seven months. He’s heard them from her. He thinks his child will be born in seven months, and now the Maid has told him he will die at the birth. That’s why he’s afraid. He thinks he’s cursed and that he and his heir will die.”

“The Maid speaks of a curse,” Montague says, rubbing my icy hands in his big palms. “She says that you know of a curse.”

I turn my head away from his anxious face.

“Do you, Mother?”

“No.”

We don’t speak privately again until after dinner, when the princess complains of weariness and a pain in her belly. I send her to bed early and take a glass of warm spiced ale to her bedside. She is praying before her crucifix, but she gets up and slides between the sheets that I hold open for her. “Go and gossip with Montague,” she says, smiling. “I know he is waiting for you.”

“I’ll tell you everything that is entertaining in the morning,” I promise her, and she smiles as if she too can pretend that news of her father and his mistress triumphant in France could possibly be amusing.

He is waiting for me in my privy chamber, and I order wine and sweetmeats before sending everyone away. He gets up and listens at the door and then he goes down the little stair to the stable yard. I hear the outer door click and then he comes into the room with Geoffrey and I lock the door behind them.

Geoffrey comes to me and kneels at my feet, his face bright with excitement. “I do hope you’re not enjoying this too much,” I say dryly. “It’s not a game.”

“It’s the greatest game in the world,” he says. “For the highest stakes there are. I have just been with the queen. I went to her the moment we landed, to tell her the news.” He draws a letter from his shirt. “I have this from her to the princess.”

I take it and slip it down the top of my gown. “Is she well?”

He shakes his head, his excitement draining away. “Very sorrowful. And I had no joy to bring her. The king has forged an alliance with the French king, and we think they’ll propose an agreement to the Holy Father: Thomas Cranmer to be made archbishop, and given the power to hear the divorce in England. So the king gets his divorce. In return, he calls off the ruin of the Church, and the monasteries can keep their fortunes and send their fees to Rome. Henry must forgot his claim to be head of the Church, that will be all forgotten.”

“A massive bribe,” Montague says with distaste. “The Church wins its safety by abandoning the queen.”

“Would the Pope allow Cranmer to put the king’s marriage on trial?”

“Unless Reginald can change his mind before the King of France gets there,” Geoffrey says. “Our brother is working with Spain, he is working with the queen’s lawyers. He completely persuaded the scholars at the Sorbonne. He says he thinks he can do it. He has the law of the Church on his side, and the Spanish and God.”

“Henry will insist on a divorce whatever the scholars say, if the Lady is with child,” Montague points out. “And everyone thinks he’s married her already, without waiting for the Pope’s license. Why else would she give herself now, after holding out so long?”

“A haystack wedding,” Geoffrey says scornfully. “A secret wedding. The queen says that she will never regard such a marriage and none of us is to recognize it either.”

I take this terrible news in silence. Then I ask: “What else does Reginald say? And how does he look?”

“He’s well,” Geoffrey says. “Nothing wrong with him, don’t worry about him, going between Rome and Paris and Padua, dining with the best, everyone agreeing with him. He’s at the very heart of all of this, and everyone wants his opinion. He’s very influential, very powerful. He’s the one that the Holy Father listens to.”

“And what does he advise us?” I ask. “When you told him that we are ready to rise?”

Geoffrey nods, suddenly sobering. “He says that Emperor Charles will invade to defend his aunt and we must rise and march with him. The emperor has sworn that if Henry publicly marries the Boleyn woman and sets the princess aside, then he will invade to defend the rights of his aunt and his cousin.”

“Reginald says it is certain to come to war,” Montague says quietly.

“Who is with us?” I ask. I have a sense of everything rushing towards us too quickly, as if, like the prophetess Elizabeth Barton, I can see a future and it is suddenly here and now.

“All our kinsmen, of course,” Montague says. “Courtenay and the West of England, Arthur Plantagenet in Calais, the Staffords, the Nevilles. Charles Brandon, probably, if we make it clear we are against the advisors and not against the king, all the Church lands and their tenants—that’s nearly a third of England alone. Wales of course, because of the princess and you living there, the North and Kent with my uncle Lord Bergavenny. The Percys would rise to defend the Church, and there would be many who would rise up for the princess, more than have ever ridden out before. Lord Tom Darcy, Lord John Hussey, and the old Warwick affinity for you.”

“You have spoken to our kinsmen?”

“I have taken great care,” Montague assures me. “But I spoke to Arthur Viscount Lisle. He and Courtenay have met with the Maid of Kent and been convinced by her that the king will fall. Everyone else has come to me, to ask what we will do, or spoken to the Spanish ambassador. I am certain that the only lords who would stand with the king are the people he has newly made: the Boleyns and the Howards.”

“How will we know when the emperor is coming?”

Geoffrey beams. “Reginald will send to me,” he says. “He knows he has to give us time enough for everyone to arm their tenants. He understands.”

“We wait?” I confirm.

“We wait for now.” Montague looks warningly at Geoffrey. “And we only speak of it among ourselves. No one outside the family, only those who we know are already sworn to the queen or the princess.”


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1532–SUMMER 1533


Like the slow tolling of a funeral bell that rings out sorrowfully again and again as a prisoner is brought from the darkness of the Tower, to walk up to the hill where the headsman waits by the ladder to the scaffold, bad news comes beat by slow beat from the court in London.

In December the king and Anne inspect the works to repair the Tower of London and are reported as saying that the work must be hurried. The City is agog, thinking that the queen is to be taken from the More and imprisoned in the Tower.

She says that she is ready for a trial for treason, and instructs that Princess Mary is never to deny her name or her birth. She knows this means they may both be arrested and taken to the Tower. It is her command. Burn this.

Geoffrey comes to tell me that Anne holds great state at court, wearing the queen’s jewels, preceding everyone into dinner. She has come back from Calais holding her head stiffly erect, as if she is bearing the weight of a crown, invisible to everyone but herself. The true ladies of the realm are disregarded, the French dowager queen Mary avoids her own brother’s court altogether and gives out that she is ill. The other ladies of the kingdom—Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk; Gertrude, the Marchioness of Exeter; even I, especially I—are not invited. Anne is guarded by her tight little circle: Norfolk’s daughter Mary Howard, her own sister Mary, and her sister-in-law Jane. She spends all her time with the young men of Henry’s court and her brother George, a wild circle headed by the one-eyed Sir Francis Bryan, whom they call the vicar of hell. It is a feverishly witty, worldly court that the king has allowed to come about that is driven by sexual desire and ambition. There are fearless and bold young men, and women of doubtful virtue, all celebrating their daring in a new world with the new learning. It is a court that is perpetually on tenterhooks for the new fashion, for the new heresy, waiting for the Pope’s ruling, and for the king to decide what he will do. A court that has staked everything on the king being able to force the Pope into consent, knowing that this is the greatest sin in the world and the destruction of the kingdom, believing that this is a leap into freedom and into a new way of thinking.

In January, the king’s envoy to the Pope returns home wreathed in smiles and with the news that the Holy Father has approved the king’s choice for the Archbishop of Canterbury. In place of William Warham, a holy, thoughtful, gentle man, tortured by what the king was doing to his Church, we are to have the Boleyn family chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, whose reading of the Bible so conveniently agrees with the king’s and who is nothing less than a heretic Lutheran, like his mistress.

“It’s the very agreement that Reginald predicted,” Montague says gloomily. “The Pope accepts the Boleyn chaplain but he saves the English Church.”

Thomas Cranmer does not look like much of a savior. With the sacred cope of Archbishop of Canterbury around his shoulders he uses his first ever sermon to tell the court that the king’s marriage to the queen is sinful, and that he must make a new and better union.

I cannot keep this from the princess, and anyway, she has to be prepared for bad news from London. It is as if the slow ringing of the bell in my mind has become so loud that I think she must hear it too.

“What does it mean?” she asks me. Her blue eyes have violet shadows under them. She cannot sleep for the pain in her belly, and nothing I can do seems to cure it. When she has her monthly courses, she has to go to bed, and she bleeds heavily, as if from a deep wound. Other times she does not bleed at all, and I fear for her future. If grief has made her sterile, then the king has enacted his own curse. “What does it mean?”

“I think your father the king must have secretly obtained the permission of the Holy Father to leave your mother, and Thomas Cranmer is announcing this. Perhaps he will make the marquess his wife but not crown her as queen. But it makes no difference to your estate, Your Grace. You were conceived in good faith, you are still his only legitimate child.”

I do not say, your mother requires you to swear this, whatever the cost. I cannot bring myself to repeat the order. I know that I should, but I fail in my duty. I cannot tell a young woman of seventeen years that to say her name may cost her life; but she must take that risk.

“I know,” she says, in a very small voice. “I know who I am, and my mother knows that she never did a dishonorable act in her life. Everyone knows that. The only unknown thing is the marquess.”

We learn a little more in spring, when I get a series of notes from Montague in London. They are unsigned, unsealed. They appear at my plate, or pinned to my saddle, or tucked in my jewel box.

The new archbishop has ruled that the marriage of the king to the queen is, and always has been, invalid. Bishop John Fisher argued all day against it, and at the end of the day they arrested him. Burn this.

The king is to send the Duke of Norfolk to the queen to tell her that she is now to be known as the Dowager Princess, and that the king is married to Lady Anne, now called Queen Anne. Burn this.

I know what must happen next. I wait for the arrival of the king’s herald, and when he arrives I take him to the princess’s rooms. She is seated at a table with the bright spring sunshine pouring over her bent head, transcribing some music for the lute. She looks up as I come in, and then I see her smile die as she sees the liveried messenger behind me. At once she ages, from a happy young woman to a bitterly suspicious diplomat. She rises to her feet and observes his bow. He bows as low as a herald should bow to a princess. Cautiously, she inspects the name on the front of the sealed letter. She is correctly addressed as Princess Mary. Only then, when she is sure that he is not attempting some trickery of disrespect, does she break the royal seal and impassively read the king’s brief scrawl.

From my place at the door I can see it is a few words, signed with a swirling H. She turns and smiles broadly at me, and hands me the letter. “How very good His Grace is to tell me of his happiness,” she says, and her voice is perfectly steady. “After dinner I shall write to congratulate him.”

“He is married?” I ask, copying her tone of pleased surprise for the benefit of the herald and the ladies-in-waiting.

“Indeed, yes. To Her Grace the Marquess of Pembroke.” She recites the newly invented title without a quaver.

June—I saw her crowned, it’s done. Geoffrey was her servitor, I followed the king. I carved at her coronation dinner. The meat choked me. There was not one cheer along the whole procession route. The women cried out for the true queen. Burn this.

Geoffrey comes upriver in a hired boat, wearing a dark cape of worsted and a hat pulled down over his face. He sends my granddaughter Katherine to bring me to him and waits for me by the little pier that the townspeople use.

“I’ve seen the queen,” he says shortly. “She gave me this for the princess.”

Silently, I take the letter, sealed with wax, but the beloved insignia of the pomegranate is missing. “She’s forbidden to write,” he says. “She’s not allowed to visit. She’s almost kept as a prisoner. He’s going to reduce her household. The Boleyn woman won’t tolerate a rival court and a rival queen.”

“Is Anne with child?”

“She carries herself leaning backwards, as if she had twins in there. Yes.”

“Then Charles of Spain must invade before the birth. If it is a son . . .”

“He’ll never have a son,” Geoffrey says contemptuously. “The Tudors aren’t like us. There’s my sister Ursula with another boy in the cradle, me with another baby on the way. Any Tudor child will be stillborn for sure. The Maid of Kent has sworn it won’t happen, there’s a curse on the Tudors. Everyone knows it.”

“Do they?” I whisper.

“Yes.”


RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1533


The Duke of Norfolk himself writes to tell me that the princess’s household is to move to Beaulieu, and that we will not be returning to Richmond Palace.

“This is to diminish me,” she says bluntly. “A princess should live in a palace. I have always lived in a palace or a castle.”

“Beaulieu is a great house,” I remind her. “In beautiful countryside, it is one of your father’s favorite—”

“Hunting lodges,” she finishes for me. “Yes, exactly.”

“Your mother is to move as well,” I tell her.

She starts up, her face filled with hope. “Is she coming to Beaulieu?”

“No,” I say hurriedly. “No, I’m very sorry. No, my dear, she isn’t.”

“He’s not sending her back to Spain?”

I had not known that she had feared this.

“No, he’s not. He’s sending her to Buckden.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near Cambridge. I am sorry to say it’s not an adequate house for her, and he has dismissed her court.”

“Not all of them!” she exclaims. “Who will serve her?”

“Only a few,” I say. “And her friends, like Maria de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, are not allowed to visit. Even Ambassador Chapuys is not allowed to see her. And she can only walk in the gardens.”

“She is imprisoned?”

I answer her honestly, but it is a terrible thing to say to a girl who loves her mother and honors her father. “I am afraid so. I am afraid so.”

She turns her head away. “We had better pack our things then,” she says quietly. “For if I don’t obey him, perhaps he will imprison me too.”


BEAULIEU, ESSEX, AUGUST 1533


Geoffrey and Montague come openly together to visit me, apparently for a day’s hunting in the great park around Beaulieu. As soon as they are announced, the princess comes down to greet them in the walled garden.

It is a beautiful day. The brick walls hold the heat and not a leaf stirs in the windless air. Montague goes down on one knee as the princess comes towards him and smiles up at her. “I have great news for you,” he says. “Praise God that I can bring you good news at last. The Pope has ruled in favor of your mother. He has commanded the king to put aside all others and take her back to court.”

She gives a little gasp and the color comes to her cheeks. “I am so glad,” she replies. “God be praised for His mercy, and for speaking to the Pope. God bless the Pope for having the courage to say what he should.” She crosses herself and turns away from my sons, as I put my arms around her thin shoulders and hold her for a moment. Her eyes are filled with tears. “I’m all right,” she says. “I am so relieved. I am so glad. At last. At last the Holy Father has spoken, and my father will hear him.”

“If only . . .” I start, and then I trail into silence. It is pointless to wish: if only the Pope had ruled earlier. But at least he has ruled now. The Boleyn woman is with child and has gone through a form of marriage with the king, but this need not prevent the king’s return to his wife. We have had pregnant whores at court before; for years the queen lived alongside a favorite mistress and a bastard son.

“My father will return to his obedience to the Holy Father, won’t he?” She turns back to Montague, her voice carefully steady.

“I think that he will negotiate,” Montague says shrewdly. “He will have to come to terms with Rome, and your mother’s freedom and position as queen must be restored. The Pope’s ruling makes this the business of all Christian kings. Your father is not going to risk France and Spain allying against him.”

She looks as if a great burden has been lifted from her little shoulders. “This is very good news you bring me, Lord Montague,” she says. “And you, Sir Geoffrey.” She turns to me. “You must be glad to see your sons when they bring us such happiness.”

“I am,” I say.


BEAULIEU, ESSEX, SEPTEMBER 1533


It’s a girl. All this trouble for a bastard Boleyn girl. They all say it proves that God has turned his face from the king. They’re calling her Elizabeth.

After the months of waiting it is an intense relief that the Boleyn woman could not give birth to a boy. A son and heir would have proved to the king that he was right all along, that God had smiled on him whatever the Holy Father said. Now there is nothing to prevent him reconciling with the queen and confirming Princess Mary as his heir. Why should he not do so? He has no legitimate son to put in her place. The Boleyns’ great gamble has failed. Their Anne proved to be of no more use than their Mary. The king can return to his wife, she can return to court.

Finally, I think, the wheel of fortune has turned for the princess, and for the queen, her mother. The Pope has declared that the Aragon marriage is lawful, that the Boleyn marriage is a charade. The Boleyn child is a bastard and a girl. The shine is taken off the Boleyn woman and the crown will be taken off her too.

I am confident. We are all waiting for Henry to obey the Pope and restore his wife to her throne, but nothing happens. The bastard Elizabeth is to be christened; the whore, her mother, keeps her place at court.

The princess’s chamberlain, Lord John Hussey, returns to Beaulieu, riding up the great road from London. “He’s been at the christening,” his wife Anne sourly remarks. “He carried the canopy because he was commanded to do so. Don’t think his heart was in it. Don’t think he doesn’t love our princess.”

“My cousin’s wife Gertrude stood as godmother,” I reply. “And nobody loves the queen more than her. We all have to take our places and play our parts.”

She glances at me, as if uncertain how much she should say. “He’s met with a northern lord,” she says. “Better that I don’t say who. He says that the North is ready to rise to defend the queen, if the king does not obey the Pope. Shall I tell him that he can come to you?”

I grit my teeth on my fear. In my pocket wrapped around my rosary is Lord Tom Darcy’s badge of the five wounds of Christ embroidered with the white rose of my house. “With great care,” I say, “tell him that he can come to me with care.”

The boy who brings in the wood for the fire goes past us carrying his basket and we are immediately silent for a moment.

“Anyway, it’s a blessing that the king’s sister was not there to see it, poor princess,” Lady Anne remarks. “She’d never have curtseyed to a Boleyn baby!”

The dowager queen Mary Brandon died at her home in the summer; some people said it was heartbreak that her brother had married his mistress in secret. Both the queen and the princess have lost a good friend, and the king has lost one of the very few people who would tell him the truth about the England he is making.

“The king loved his sister and would have forgiven her almost anything,” I say. “The rest of us have to take the greatest care not to offend him.”

We watch John Hussey from the upper window as the troop of horses ride up the long avenue of trees and halts at the front of the house. He dismounts and throws his reins to a groom and then walks slowly and heavily to the front door like a man on a wearisome errand.

“He can’t be bringing orders that we have to move again, or to take anything from us,” I say uneasily, watching his heavy stride. “He won’t ask for anything. The queen refused to give them the princess’s christening gown for Elizabeth; there’s nothing they can want from us.”

“I’m very sure he’d better not ask anything from me,” she says shortly, and turns away from the window to go to the princess’s rooms.

I wait on the gallery as I hear Lord John come slowly up the stairs. He almost flinches when he sees me, waiting for him. “Your ladyship.” He bows.

“Lord John.”

“I have just come from London. From the christening of the Princess Elizabeth.”

I nod, neither confirming nor denying the name, and I think that he cannot have wined and dined very well at the christening feast, for he looks sluggish and unhappy.

“The king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, Cromwell himself, instructs me to get the inventory of the princess’s jewels.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Why would Thomas Cromwell want an inventory of the princess’s jewels?”

He stops for a moment. “He’s the Master of the Jewel House, and it is the king’s command. He asked me himself. And you can’t question that.”

“I can’t,” I agree. “I would not. And so I am sorry to tell you that there is no inventory.”

He takes in the fact that I am going to be difficult. “There must be.”

“There isn’t.”

“But how do you know you have everything safely?”

“Because I myself take out her jewels when she wants them, and then afterwards I put her things away. She’s not a goldsmith’s shop that has to keep a note of stock. She is a princess. She has jewels as she has gloves. Or lace. I don’t have a glove inventory either. I have no register of lace.”

He looks quite baffled. “I’ll tell him,” he says.

“Do.”

But I don’t expect that to be the last of it, and it is not.

“Thomas Cromwell says that you are to make an inventory of the princess’s jewels,” poor John Hussey says to me a few days later.

His wife, passing us on the stairs, shakes her head with something like disdain and says something under her breath.

“Why?” I ask.

He looks baffled. “He didn’t tell me why. He just said it must be done. And so it must be done.”

“Very well,” I say. “A thorough inventory? Of everything? Or just the best pieces?”

“I don’t know!” he exclaims miserably, but then he gets himself in check. “A thorough inventory. An inventory of everything.”

“If it is to be done thoroughly, as Master Cromwell wishes, then you had better do it with me, and bring a couple of your clerks.”

“Very well,” he says. “Tomorrow morning.”

We go through the princess’s wardrobe and open up all the little leather purses with the ropes of pearls and the pretty brooches.

And all the time Thomas Cromwell is making another inventory. His agents travel up and down the land inquiring into the wealth and practices of the monasteries, discovering what they are worth and where their treasures are kept. Neither here among the princess’s boxes nor in the monasteries does anyone explain the purpose of this. Mr. Cromwell seems to be a man very interested in the exact value of other people’s goods.

I cannot say I am any more helpful than the monasteries who claim their holiness and hide their treasures. Indeed, I spin out the inventory for day after day. We bring out all the little boxes, valueless things that she has kept from childhood, a collection of shells from the beach at Dover, some dried berries threaded on silk. Carefully, we list pressed flowers. The diamond brooch from the Emperor Charles turns up as a little ghost from the time when she was the king’s heiress and two of the greatest princes of Europe were proposed for her. Out of little boxes at the back of cupboards I bring the hasp of a belt, and one buckle missing its fellow. She has beautiful rosaries, her piety is well known, she has dozens of golden crucifixes. I bring them all, and the little toy crowns made of gold wire and glass, and the pins with silver heads, and the hair combs of ivory and a couple of rusting lucky horseshoes. We annotate her hairpins, a set of ivory toothpicks, and a silver lice comb. Everything I find, I list in exact detail and make Lord John see that his clerk copies it down in his inventory that runs to page after page, each initialed by us both. It takes days before we are done and the princess’s treasures, great and small, are spread across all the tables in the treasure room, and every last little pin is recorded.

“Now we have to pack these up and give them to Frances Elmer in the privy chamber,” Lord John says. He sounds exhausted. I’m not surprised. It has been tedious and pointless and long, long drawn out by me.

“Oh no, I can’t do that,” I say simply.

“But that is why we made the inventory!”

“It’s not why I made the inventory. I made the inventory to obey the instruction of the king from Master Cromwell.”

“Well, now, he tells me to tell you to give the jewels to Mistress Elmer.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why!” It comes out as a bellow like a wounded bull.

I look at him steadily. We both know why. The woman who calls herself queen has decided to take the princess’s jewels and give them to her bastard. As if a little coronal of diamonds, small enough to be tied on a baby’s head, will transform a child conceived out of wedlock into a Princess of England.

“I can’t do it without a command from the king,” I say. “He told me to guard his daughter and keep her estate. I can’t hand over her goods just on someone’s say-so.”

“It’s Thomas Cromwell’s say-so!”

“He may seem like a great man to you,” I say condescendingly. “But I have not sworn to obey him. I could not give up the jewels, against the king’s own command, unless I have a command from the king to me, directly. When you give me that, I shall give the jewels to whomever His Grace appoints as worthy of them. But let me ask you, who would that be? Who do you think is worthy of the jewels that were given to our princess?”

Lord John lets rip an oath and flings himself out of the room. The door bangs behind him and we hear his boots stamping down the stairs. We hear the front door bang and his snarl at the sentries as they present arms. Then there is silence.

One of the clerks looks up at me. “All you can do is delay it,” he says with sudden clarity, speaking for the first time in days of silent work, and impertinently speaking directly to me. “You have delayed magnificently, your ladyship. But if a man runs mad and wants to dishonor his wife and rob his daughter, it’s very hard to stop him.”


BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, AUTUMN 1533


I travel to my home with a heavy heart, for Arthur’s boy Henry has died of a feverish throat, and we are to bury him in the family vault. It seems that he was thirsty, out hunting, and that some fool allowed him to drink water from a village well. Almost as soon as he got home he complained of a swelling and a heat in his throat. The loss of a Plantagenet boy, Arthur’s boy, is the result of a moment’s carelessness, and I find that I grieve for Arthur all over again and I blame myself that I failed to keep his boy safe.

If his mother, Jane, had not taken herself into the priory but done her duty by her dead husband and her children, then perhaps little Henry would be alive today. As it is, she flings herself down the stone steps to the family vault and clings to the iron grille and cries that she wants to be there with her son, and her husband.

She is beside herself with grief, and they have to take her back to the priory and put her to bed to cry herself to sleep. She never speaks one coherent word to me for the whole length of my visit, so I don’t have to hear that she wishes she had not joined the nunnery and that she wants to break her vows and come out. Perhaps now she wants to stay inside.

We give a family dinner for those who have come to the funeral, and when it is cleared away, Geoffrey and Montague leave their wives in the presence chamber and come to my private room.

“I met with the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, last month,” Montague says without preamble. “Since the Pope has ruled against the king and Henry has ignored him, Chapuys has a suggestion for us.”

Geoffrey brings a chair close to the fireside for me and I sit down and put my feet on the warm fender. Geoffrey rests his hand tenderly on my shoulder, knowing I am feeling the death of Henry like a physical pain.

“Chapuys suggests that Reginald shall come to England in secret, and marry the princess.”

“Reginald?” Geoffrey says blankly. “Why him?”

“He’s unmarried,” Montague says impatiently. “If it’s to be one of our line, it has to be him.”

“Is this the emperor’s idea?” I ask. I am quite stunned at the prospect opening before my scholarly son.

Montague nods. “To make an alliance. You can see his thinking; it’s an unbeatable alliance. Tudors and Plantagenets. It’s the old solution. It’s exactly what the Tudors did when they first came in and married Henry Tudor to Elizabeth of York. Now we do it to exclude the Boleyns.”

“It is!” Geoffrey recovers from his jealousy that Reginald would be king consort to think what we would gain from it. “The emperor would land to support an uprising?”

“He has promised to do so. The ambassador thinks the time is now. The Boleyn woman has only produced a girl, and I hear that she is sickly. The king has no legitimate heir. And the Boleyn woman has spoken out, threatening the life of the queen and the princess. She may have tried to poison Bishop Fisher again; she may make an attempt on the queen. The ambassador thinks they are both in danger. The emperor would come to a country ready and waiting for him, and he’d bring Reginald.”

“They land, they marry. We raise her standard, and our own. All of our affinity turn out for us, all the Plantagenets. Three suns in the sky again, three sons of York on the battlefield. And the emperor lands for the princess, and every honest Englishman fights for the Church,” Geoffrey says excitedly. “It wouldn’t even come to a battle. Howard would turn his coat the moment that he saw the odds against him, and no one else would fight for the king.”

“Would she agree to marry him?” Montague asks me.

Slowly, I shake my head, knowing that this destroys the plan. “She won’t defy her father. It’s too much to ask of her. She’s only seventeen. She loves her father, I taught her myself that his word is law. Even though she knows he has betrayed and imprisoned her mother, it makes no difference to a daughter’s obedience to her father. He is still king. She would never commit an act of treason against a rightful king, she would never disobey her father.”

“So shall I tell Chapuys no?” Montague asks me. “Is she trapped by her duty?”

“Don’t say no,” Geoffrey says quickly. “Think what we might be, think if we might return to the throne. Their son would be a Plantagenet, the white rose on the throne of England once again. And we would be the royal family once more.”

“Tell him it’s not possible yet,” I temporize. “I won’t even speak to her of it yet.” For a moment only, I think of my son coming home at last, coming home in triumph, a hero of the Church, ready to defend the Church in England, the princess, and the queen. “I agree, it is a good proposal. It is a great opportunity for the country and, quite unbelievably, a great restoration for us. But the time is not now, not yet. Not until we are released from our obedience to the king. We have to wait for the Pope to enforce his word. Not until Henry is excommunicatedthen we are free to act. Then the princess is freed from her duty as a subject and a daughter.”

“That day must come,” Geoffrey declares. “I’ll write to Reginald and tell him to press the Pope. The Pope has to declare that no one shall obey the king.”

Montague nods. “He has to be excommunicated. It’s our only way ahead.”


BEAULIEU, ESSEX, AUTUMN 1533


John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Henry’s man through and through, a despised Lancastrian loyalist for generations, rides down the long avenue of trees, through the beautiful great gateway, and into the inner courtyard of Beaulieu with two hundred horsemen in light armor trotting behind his standard.

Princess Mary, beside me at the window that overlooks the courtyard, sees the armed men halting and dismounting. “Does he fear trouble on the road, that he rides with so many?”

“Generally, a de Vere brings trouble rather than meets it,” I say sourly, but I know that the roads are dangerous for the king’s officers. The people are sulky and suspicious, they fear the tax collectors, they fear the new officials who come to inspect the churches and the monasteries, they don’t cheer when they see the Tudor rose anymore, and if they see Anne’s badgeshe is now showing a falcon pecking at a pomegranate to flaunt her victory over Queen Katherinethey spit on the road before her horses.

“I’ll go down to greet him,” I say. “You wait in your rooms.” I close the door and go slowly down the great stone stairs to the entrance hall, where John is tossing his hat on a table and pulling off his leather gloves.

“Lord John.”

“Countess,” he says, pleasantly enough. “Can I turn my horses out in your fields for the day? We won’t stay long.”

“Of course,” I say. “You’ll dine with us?”

“That would be excellent,” he says. The de Veres have always been great trenchermen. The family was in exile with Henry Tudor and came back at Bosworth to devour England. “I’ve come to see Lady Mary,” he says flatly.

I find that I am quite chilled to hear him call her that. As if by denying her name, he is announcing the death of the princess. I pause for a moment and give him a long, slow stare. “I will take you to Her Grace the Princess Mary,” I say steadily.

He puts a hand on my arm. I don’t shake it off, I just look at him in silence. He moves his hand awkwardly. “A word of advice,” he says. “To a very well-regarded, well-respected, beloved kinswoman of the King of England. One word of advice . . .”

I wait in icy silence.

“The king’s will is that she is known as Lady Mary. That is going to happen. It will be the worse for her if she defies him. I am here to tell her that she must obey. She is a bastard. He will guide her and care for her as his bastard daughter, and she will take the name Lady Mary Tudor.”

I feel the blood rush to my face. “She is no bastard and Queen Katherine was no whore. And any man who says so is a liar.”

He cannot face me with the lie on his lips and my face burning with anger. He turns away from me as if he is ashamed of himself, and he goes up to the presence chamber. I run after him; I have some mad thought of throwing myself in front of the door and barring him from saying the terrible words to our princess.

He enters without announcement. He gives her the smallest bow, and I rush in behind him too late to prevent him delivering his shameful message.

She hears him out. She does not respond when he addresses her as Lady Mary. She looks at him steadily, she looks through him with a dark blue gaze that in the end reduces him to repeating himself, to losing his thread, and then to silence.

“I shall write to my father, His Grace,” she says shortly. “You can carry the letter.”

She rises from her chair and sweeps past him, not waiting to see whether or not he bows. John de Vere, caught between the old habit of respect and the new rules, bobs down, bobs up, and finally stands awkwardly, like a fool.

I follow her to her privy chamber and see her take her seat at the table and draw a piece of paper towards her. She inspects the nib of a quill, dips it in the ink, wipes it carefully, and starts to write in her confident, elegant hand.

“Your Grace, think carefully before you write. What will you say?”

She glances up at me, chillingly calm, as if she had prepared herself for this, the worst thing that could happen. “I will tell him that I will never disobey his commands but that I cannot renounce the rights which God, Nature, and my own parents have given me.” She gives a little shrug. “Even if I wanted to step aside from my duty, I cannot do so. I was born a Tudor princess. I will die a Tudor princess. Nobody can say differently.”


BEAULIEU, ESSEX, NOVEMBER 1533


Montague comes to Beaulieu, riding through a dark day of mist and freezing rain, with half a dozen men around him and no standard showing.

I greet him in the stable yard when they clatter in. “You come disguised?”

“Not exactly disguised, but I don’t mind being obscure,” he says. “I don’t think I’m spied on, or followed, and I’d like it to stay that way. But I had to see you, Lady Mother. It’s urgent.”

“Come in,” I say. I leave the grooms to take the horses and Montague’s men to find their own way into the hall, where they can get mulled ale against the cold weather. I lead my son up the small stairs to my privy chamber. Katherine and Winifred, my granddaughters, and two other ladies are seated in the window, trying to catch the last of the light on their sewing, and I tell them they can leave it aside and go and practice their dance in the presence chamber. They curtsey and leave, very pleased to be sent to dance, and I turn to my son.

“What is it?”

“Elizabeth Barton, the Maid of Kent, has disappeared from Syon Abbey. I’m afraid she may have been taken by Cromwell. He’s certain to ask her to name those friends of the queen that she has met. He’s certain to try to make it look like a plot. Have you seen her at all since the time that I brought her to you?”

“Once,” I say. “She came with Cousin Henry’s wife, Gertrude Courtenay, and we prayed together.”

“Did anyone see you together?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“We were in the chapel at Richmond. The priest was there. But he would never give evidence against me.”

“He would now. Cromwell is using torture to get the confessions that he wants. Did she speak of the king?”

“Torture? He is torturing priests?”

“Yes. Did the Maid speak of the king?”

“She spoke as she always does. That if he tried to set the queen aside, his days would be numbered. But she said nothing more than she has said to the king himself.”

“Did she ever say that we would take the throne? Did she ever say that?”

I am not going to tell my son that she foresaw his marrying the princess and becoming king consort. I’m not going to tell him that she predicted that the Plantagenet line would be the royal family of England once again. “I won’t say. Not even to you, my dear.”

“Lady Mother, Thomas More himself warned her against predicting greatness for a family like ours. He reminded her of what happened to the Buckingham chaplain who knew a prophecy and whispered it to Buckingham. He warned her that the false prophet led our cousin on to dream of greatness, and then the king was led on to cut him down. The king cut down both prophet and the hero of his prophecy, and now the duke’s confessor and the duke are dead.”

“So I don’t ever speak of prophecies.” Silently, I add: “Or curses.”

Montague nods, as if he is reassured. “Half of the court have met with her to have their fortunes told or to pray with her,” he says. “We’ve done no more than this. You’re sure, aren’t you? That we have done no more than this?”

“I don’t know what she might have said to Cousin Gertrude. And are you sure of Geoffrey?”

Montague smiles ruefully. “Well, at any rate, I’m sure that Geoffrey would never betray us,” he says. “I think he’s been to Syon and traveled with her to Canterbury. But so have many others. Fisher and More among them.”

“Thousands have heard her preach,” I point out. “Thousands have met with her privately. If Thomas Cromwell wants to arrest everyone who has prayed with the Maid of Kent, then he will have to arrest most of the kingdom. If he wants to arrest those who think the queen is wrongly put aside, he will have to arrest everyone in the kingdom but the Duke of Norfolk, the Boleyns, and the king himself. Surely we would be safe, my son? We’d be lost in the crowd.”

But Thomas Cromwell is a bolder man than I realized. A more ambitious man than I realized. He arrests the Maid of Kent, he arrests seven holy men with her, and once again, he arrests John Fisher, the bishop, and Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor, as if they were nobodies whom he could pick up from the street and fling in the Tower for nothing more than disagreeing with him.

“He can’t arrest a bishop for speaking with a nun!” Princess Mary says. “He simply cannot.”

“They say that he has,” I reply.


BEAULIEU, ESSEX, WINTER 1533


I don’t expect us to be invited to court for Christmas, though I hear that they are keeping very great estate and celebrating another pregnancy. They say that the woman who calls herself queen is walking with her head stiffly high, and her hand forever clasped to her belly, where they are letting out the laces on her stomacher. They say that she is confident it will be a boy this time. I imagine she is on her knees every night, praying for him.

Under these circumstances I doubt that they will want my assistance. I have attended so many royal lyings-in that disappointment hangs around me like a dark cloak. I doubt that they will want the princess at court either, so I order the household to prepare for the feast at Beaulieu. I don’t expect the princess to be very merryshe is not even allowed to send her mother a gift or the good wishes of the season. I suspect that the woman who calls herself queen has warned people not to visit or send gifts; but the princess is a princess to us, and her state demands that we hold a Christmas feast.

Although they are forbidden to pay their respects it’s touching to see how the country people send her their love and support. There is a constant stream of apples and cheeses and even smoked hams coming to the door with the good wishes of the local farmers’ wives. All my family, even the most distant cousins, send her a little Christmas gift. The churches for miles around pray for her by name and for her mother, and every servant in the house and every visitor refers to her as “Her Grace the Princess” and serves her on bended knee.

I don’t order them to honor her state and defy the king; but in our house at Beaulieu it is as if he never spoke. Many of the people in her service have been with her since she was a little girl. She has always been “Her Grace” to us; even if we wanted to rename her, we would not be able to remember it. Lady Anne Hussey boldly calls her by her true title and when anyone remarks on it says that she’s forty-three and too old to change her ways.

The princess and I are mounting up to go hunting on a bright winter morning. We are in the central courtyard with her little court on their horses and ready to trot out, passing around the stirrup cup with some hot wine to keep out the cold, the hounds running everywhere, sniffing everything, sometimes bursting into excited yelping. The princess’s Master of Horse helps her into the saddle as I stand at the horse’s head, patting his neck. Without thinking, I ease my finger under the girth of her horse to check that it is as tight as it can be. The Master of Horse smiles at me and ducks his head in a little bow. “I wouldn’t leave Her Grace’s girth loose,” he said. “Never.”

I have a shamefaced blush. “I know you wouldn’t,” I say. “But I can’t let her mount without checking it.”

Princess Mary laughs. “She’d have me on a pillion saddle behind you, if she could,” she says naughtily. “She’d have me ride a donkey.”

“I’m supposed to keep you safe,” I say. “In the saddle or out of it.”

“She’ll be safe enough on Blackie,” he says, and then something at the gate catches his eye and he turns and says quietly to me, “Soldiers!”

I scramble up onto the mounting block so I can see over the tossing heads of the horses that there are soldiers running into the yard, and behind them a man on a great horse with a standard unfurling.

“Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.”

Princess Mary moves, as if she would dismount, but I nod to her to stay in the saddle and I stand tall, like a statue on a pedestal, waiting for the Duke of Norfolk to ride up to me.

“Your Grace,” I say coldly. I loved his father, the old duke, who was a loyal adherent to the queen. I am fond of his wife, my cousin, and he makes her quite miserable. There is nothing I like about him, this man who has stepped into the shoes of a greater father, and inherited all of the ambition and none of the wisdom.

“My Lady Countess,” he says. He looks past me at the princess. “Lady Mary,” he says very loudly.

There is a stirring as everyone hears him, and everyone wants to contradict him. I see the head of his guard look quickly around, as if to count our numbers and assess his danger. I see him note that we are going hunting and that many of the men have a dagger at their side or a knife in a scabbard. But Howard is safe enough, he has commanded his guard to come fully armed, ready for a fight.

Coolly I count their number, and their weapons, and I look at the hard-faced duke and wonder what he hopes to achieve. The Princess Mary’s face is turned slightly away, as if she cannot hear him, as if she does not know that he is there.

“I have brought you news of changes to the household,” he says, loudly enough for her to hear. Still, she does not deign to look at him. “His Grace the King commands that you are to come to court.”

That catches her; she turns, her face alight, smiling. “To court?” she asks.

Grimly, he goes on. I realize that this is no pleasure to him. This is dirty work that he will have to do, and probably worse than this, if he is going to serve the king and the woman who now calls herself queen.

“You are to go to court to serve the Princess Elizabeth,” he says, his voice clear above the noise of the horses and the hounds, and the swelling discontented murmur from the princess’s household.

The joy dies from her face at once. She shakes her head. “I cannot serve a princess, I am the princess,” she says.

“It’s not possible,” I start to say.

Howard turns on me and thrusts into my hands an open sheet of paper with the king’s scrawled H at the foot and his seal. “Read it,” he says rudely.

He dismounts and throws the reins to one of his men and walks without invitation through the open double doors into the great hall beyond.

“I’ll see him,” I say quickly to the princess. “You go riding. I’ll see what we have to do.”

She is shaking with rage. I glance at her Master of Horse. “Take care of her,” I say warningly.

“I am a princess,” she spits. “I serve no one but the queen, my mother, and the king, my father. Tell him that.”

“I’ll see what we can do,” I promise her, and I jump down from the mounting block, wave my hunter away, and follow Thomas Howard into the darkness of the hall.

“I’ve not come to dispute the rights and wrongs, I’ve come to accomplish the king’s will,” he says the moment I step into the great room.

I doubt that the duke could dispute the rights and wrongs of anything. He’s no great philosopher. He’s certainly no Reginald.

I bow my head. “What is the king’s will?”

“There’s a new law.”

“Another new law?”

“A new law that determines the heirs of the king.”

“It’s not enough that we all know the firstborn son takes the throne?”

“God has told the king that his marriage to Queen Anne is his only valid marriage, and that her children will be his heirs.”

“But Princess Mary can still be a princess,” I point out. “Just one of two. The senior of two, the oldest of two.”

“No,” the duke says flatly. I can see this puzzles him and immediately he is irritated that I have raised it. “That’s not how it’s going to be. I am not here to argue with you, but to do the king’s will. I’m to take her to Hatfield Palace. She’s to live there, under the supervision of Sir John and Lady Anne Shelton. She’s to take a lady’s maid, a lady-in-waiting, a groom for her horses. That’s all.”

The Sheltons are kin to the Boleyns. He is taking my girl and putting her in a house run by her enemies.

“But her ladies-in-waiting? Her chamberlain? Her Master of Horse? Her tutor?”

“She’s to take none of them. Her household is to be dismissed.”

“But I’ll have to go with her,” I say, startled.

“You won’t,” he says flatly.

“The king himself put her in my keeping when she was a baby!”

“That’s over. The king says that she’s to go and serve Princess Elizabeth. There’s not to be anyone to serve her. You’re dismissed. Her household is dismissed.”

I look at his hard face, and think of his armed men in our Christmas courtyard. I think of Princess Mary coming back from her ride, for me to tell her that she has to go and live in the old palace at Hatfield, with none of the entourage or household of a princess, with none of the companions of her childhood. She has to go into service to the Boleyn bastard in a household supervised by Boleyn cousins. “My God, Thomas Howard, how can you bring yourself to do this?”

“I’m not going to say no to the king,” he says gratingly. “And neither are you. Any of you.”

She is sick with pain and white-faced. She is too ill to ride, and I have to help her into a litter. I put a hot brick under her feet and one wrapped in silk in her lap. She puts out her little hands through the curtains, and I cling to her as if I cannot bear to let her go.

“I will send for you as soon as I can,” she says quietly. “He cannot keep you from me. Everyone knows that we have always been together.”

“I asked them if I could come with you, I said I would come at my own expense, that I will serve you for nothing. I will pay for your household to serve you.” I am gabbling in my anxiety as from the corner of my eye I see Thomas Howard mount up. The litter rocks as the mules move restlessly, and I grab her hands even more tightly.

“I know. But they want to get me alone, like my mother, without a friend in the house.”

“I’ll come,” I swear. “I’ll write to you.”

“They won’t let me have letters. And I won’t read anything that is not addressed to me as princess.”

“I’ll write in secret.” I am desperate that she does not see me crying, that I help her to keep her own dignity, as we are dragged apart, in this awful moment.

“Tell my mother I’m well, and that I am not at all frightened,” she says, white as the curtains of the litter and trembling with fear. “Tell her I never forget that I am her daughter and that she is Queen of England. Tell her that I love her and I will never betray her.”

“Come on!” Thomas Howard shouts from the head of the troop, and at once they move off, the litter jerking and rolling as her grip tightens on my hand.

“You may have to obey the king, I can’t tell what he will ask of you,” I say quickly, walking alongside, breaking into a run. “Don’t stand against him. Don’t anger him.”

“I love you, Margaret!” she calls. “Give me your blessing!”

My lips form the words but I am choking and cannot speak. “God bless,” I whisper. “God bless you, little princess, I love you.”

I step back and I all but fall into a curtsey, my head down so she can’t see my face contorted with grief. Behind me, I feel the whole household sink down into the lowest of bows, and the country people lining the avenue, come to see the princess kidnapped from her own house, disobey every shouted order they have heard all day and pull off their caps and drop to their knees to honor the only princess in England as she goes by.


WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, SPRING 1534



I should be glad to be at my own home and pleased to rest. I should be glad to wake with the sun shining through my window panes of clear Venetian glass making the lime-washed room bright and light. I should be glad of the fire in the grate and my clean linen airing before it. I am a wealthy woman, I have a great name and a great title, and now that I am released from my service at court I can stay at home and visit my grandchildren, run my lands, pray in my priory, and know that I am safe.

I am not a young woman, my brother dead, my husband dead, my cousin the queen dead. I look in the mirror and see the deep lines in my face and the weariness in my dark eyes. Under my gable hood my hair has gone silver and gray and white like an old dappled mare. I think it is time that I was put out to grass, it is time for me to rest, and I smile at the thought of it and know that I will never prepare myself for death: I am a survivor, I doubt I will ever be ready to quietly turn my face to the wall.

I am glad of my hard-won safety. They charged Thomas More with talking treason to Elizabeth Barton, and he had to find a letter he had written warning her not to speak to prove his innocence so that he could stay at his quiet home. My friend John Fisher could not defend himself against the charge and now sleeps in a stone cell in the Tower in these damp spring days. Elizabeth Barton, and those who were her friends, are in the Tower too, and certain to die.

I should be glad to be safe and free, but I have little joy, for John Fisher has neither safety nor liberty and somewhere out in the flat, cold lands of Huntingdonshire is the Queen of England, ill served by people who are set about only to guard her. Even worse, at Hatfield Palace Princess Mary is cooking her breakfast over her bedroom fire, afraid to eat at the high table because there are Boleyn cooks in the kitchen poisoning the soup.

She is confined to the house, not even allowed to walk in the grounds, kept from any visitor for fear that they pass her a message or one word of comfort, separated from her mother, exiled from her father. They won’t let me go to her, though I have bombarded Thomas Cromwell with begging letters, and asked the Earl of Surrey and the Earl of Essex to intervene with the king. Nobody can do anything. I am to be parted from the princess whom I love as a daughter.

I suffer something like an illness, though the physicians can find nothing wrong with me. I take to my bed and find that I cannot easily get up again. I feel as if I have some mysterious illness, a greensickness, a falling sickness. I am so anxious for the princess and for the queen and so powerless to help either of them that my sense of weakness spreads through me till I can barely stand.

Geoffrey comes to visit from his home at nearby Lordington and tells me that he has a message from Reginald, who is in Rome, begging the Pope to excommunicate Henry, as he said he would, so that the people can rise against him, readying the emperor for the moment that he should invade.

Geoffrey tells me that my cousin Henry Courtenay’s wife, Gertrude, has spoken out so strongly in favor of the queen and justice for the princess that the king took Courtenay to one side and warned him that one more word from her would cost him his head. Courtenay told Geoffrey that he assumed at first the king was speaking in jest—for whoever beheads a man for his wife’s words?—but it is no laughing matter; now he has ordered his wife to keep silent. Geoffrey is warned by this and does his work in secrecy, going quietly, unseen, along the cold mud tracks to visit the queen and deliver her letter to the princess.

“It didn’t cheer her,” he says unhappily to me. “I fear that it made things worse.”

“How?” I ask. I am lying on a daybed near the window for the last light of the setting sun. I feel sick at the thought of Geoffrey taking a letter to Mary that made her feel worse. “How?”

“Because it was a farewell.”

I raise myself up on one elbow. “A farewell? The queen is leaving?” My head spins at the thought of it. Can it be that her nephew is going to offer her a safe haven abroad? Would she leave Mary alone in England to face her father?

Geoffrey’s face is pale with horror. “No. Worse, far worse. The queen wrote that the princess should not dispute with the king and should obey him in all things except those matters which concerned God and the safety of her soul.”

“Yes,” I say uneasily.

“And she said that for herself, she didn’t mind what they did to her, for she was sure that they would meet in heaven.”

I am sitting up now. “And what do you understand from this?”

“I didn’t see the whole letter. This is just what I got from the princess as she read it. She held it to her heart, kissed the signature, and she said that her mother could lead and she would follow, and she would not fail her.”

“Can the queen mean that she will be executed, and is telling the princess to prepare herself too?”

Geoffrey nods. “She says she won’t fail.”

I get to my feet, but the room swims around me, and I cling to the headboard of the bed. I will have to go to Mary. I have to tell her that she must take any oath, make any agreement; she must not risk her life. The one thing that she has, this precious Tudor girl, is her life. I didn’t wrap her in swaddling bands as a newborn baby, or carry her in ermine from her christening, or raise her as my own daughter, for her to give up her life. Nothing matters more than life. She must not offer her life against her father’s error. She must not die for this.

“There’s talk of an oath which everyone is going to have to take. Every one of us is going to have to swear on the Bible that the king’s first marriage was invalid, that his second one is good, and that the Princess Elizabeth is the king’s only heir and Princess Mary is his bastard.”

“She can’t swear to that,” I say flatly. “Neither can I. Nor can anyone. It’s just a lie. She can’t put her hand on a Holy Bible and insult her mother.”

“I think she’ll have to,” Geoffrey says. “I think we all will. Because I think they will call it treason to refuse to swear.”

“They can’t put a man to death for speaking the truth.” I cannot imagine a country where the hangman would kick out a stool from under a man who was telling a truth that the hangman knows as well as his victim. “The king is determined, I see that. But he wouldn’t do this.”

“I think it will happen,” Geoffrey warns.

“How can she swear that she’s not the princess, when everyone knows that she is?” I repeat. “I can’t swear that, nobody can.”


WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1534


I am summoned with the other peers of the realm to the Privy Council at the Palace of Westminster where the Lord Chancellor, the newly great Thomas Cromwell, stepping into the shoes of Thomas More like a Fool dancing in his master’s boots, is to administer the oath of succession to the nobility of England, who stand before him like puzzled children waiting to recite their catechism.

We know the truth of the matter, for the Pope has publicly ruled. He has announced that the marriage of Queen Katherine and King Henry is valid, and that the king must set aside all others and live in peace with his true wife. But he has not excommunicated the king, so though we know that the king is in the wrong, we are not authorized to defy him. We each must do what we think best.

And the Pope is far away, and the king claims that he has no authority in England. The king has ruled that his wife is not his wife, that his mistress is queen, and that her bastard is a princess. The king says that by his declaring this, it is so. He is the new pope. He can declare that something is so; and now it is. And we, if we had any courage or even a sure grasp on the material world, would say that the king is mistaken.

Instead, one by one we walk up to a great table and there is the oath written out, and the great seal above it. I take up the pen and dip it in the ink and feel my hand tremble. I am a Judas, a Judas even to take the pen into my hand. The beautifully transcribed words dance before me; I can hardly see them, the paper is a blur, the table seems to sway as I lean over. I think: God save me, I am sixty years old, I am too old for this, I am too frail for this, perhaps I can faint and be carried from the room and spared this.

I glance up, and Montague’s steady gaze is on me. He will sign, and Geoffrey will sign after him. We have agreed that we must sign so that no one can doubt our loyalty; we will sign hoping for better days. Quickly, before I can find the courage to change my mind, I scrawl my name, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, and so I renew my allegiance to the king, I pledge my loyalty to the children of his marriage with the woman who calls herself queen, and I acknowledge him as head of the Church in England.

These are lies. Every single one of these is a lie. And I am a liar to set my hand to it. I step back from the table and I am no longer wishing I had pretended to faint, I am wishing that I had the courage to step forward and die as the queen told the princess that she must be ready to do.

Later they tell me that the saintly old man, confessor to two Queens of England, and God knows a good friend to me, John Fisher, would not sign the oath when they pulled him out of his prison in the Tower and put it before him. They did not respect his age, nor his long loyalty to the Tudors; they forced the oath on him and when he read and reread it and finally said that he did not think he could deny the authority of the Pope, they took him back to the Tower. Some people say that he will be executed. Most people say that no one can execute a bishop of the Church. I say nothing at all.

Thomas More refused the oath also, and I think of the warm brown eyes and his joke about filial obedience and his pity for me when Arthur went missing. I wish that I had stood beside him when he told them, like the scholar he is, that he would sign a rewritten version of the oath, that he did not disagree with much of it, but that he could not sign it exactly as it stands.

I think of the sweetness of his spirit that led him on to say that he did not blame those who had drawn up the oath, nor did he have one word of criticism for those who had signed it; but for the sake of his own soul—just his—he could not sign.

The king had faithfully promised his friend Thomas that he would never put him to the test on this. But the king does not keep his word to the man that he loved, that we all love.


BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1534


I go back to Bisham, Geoffrey to Lordington. I have a bad taste in my mouth every day on waking and I think it is the odor of cowardice. I am glad to get away from London, where my friend John Fisher and Thomas More are held in the Tower, and where Elizabeth Barton’s honest eyes stare from a spike on London Bridge until the ravens and the buzzards peck them away.

They create a new law, one that we never needed before. It is called the Treason Act, and it rules that anyone who wishes for the king’s death, or wills it, or desires it in either speech or writing or craft, or who promises any bodily harm to the king or his heirs, or who names him as a tyrant, is guilty of treason and will be done to death. When my cousin Henry Courtenay writes to me that this act has been passed and we must take great care in everything we commit to paper, I think that he need not warn me to burn his letter; burning writing is nothing, now we have to learn to forget our thoughts. I must never think that the king is a tyrant, I must forget the words his own mother said when she and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth wished for the end of his line.

Montague travels with the king as he goes on a long progress with his riding court of friends, and Thomas Cromwell sends out his own progress: a handful of his trusted men to discover the value of every religious house in England, of every size and order. Nobody knows exactly why the Lord Chancellor would want to know this; but nobody thinks that it bodes well for the rich, peaceful monasteries.

My poor princess hides in her bedroom at the palace of Hatfield, trying to avoid the bullying of Princess Elizabeth’s household. The queen has been moved again. Now she is imprisoned in a castle, Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, a newly built tower with only one way in and out. Her governors, they might as well call them jailers, live on one side of the courtyard, the queen and her women and small household on the other side. They tell me she is ill.

The woman who calls herself queen stays at Greenwich Palace for the birth of her child, in the same royal apartments where Katherine and I endured her labors, hoping for a boy.

Apparently, they are certain that this one will be a son and heir. They have had physicians and astrologers and prophecies and they all say that a strong little boy baby is waiting to be born. They are so confident that the queen’s apartments at Eltham Palace have been converted into a grand nursery for the expected prince. A cradle of solid silver has been forged for him, and the maids-in-waiting are embroidering his linen with gold thread. He is to be called Henry, after his all-conquering father; he is to be born in the autumn and his christening will prove that the king is blessed by God and the woman who calls herself queen is right to do so.

My chaplain and confessor, John Helyar, comes to me as they are getting the harvest in. The great stacks are being built in the fields so that we will have hay for the winter; the corn is being brought by the wagonload to the granaries. I am standing at the granary door, my heart lifting with every load that pours down from the cart like golden rain. This will feed my people through the winter, this will make a profit for my estate. This material comfort is so great to me that it feels like the sin of gluttony.

John Helyar does not share my joy; his face is troubled as he begs me for a private word. “I can’t take the oath,” he says. “They’ve come to Bisham church, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“Geoffrey did,” I say. “And Montague. And me. We were the first to be called in. We did it. Now it is your turn.”

“Do you believe, in your hearts, that the king is the true head of the Church?” he asks me very quietly.

They are singing as the wagons come up the lane, the big oxen pulling in harness now as in spring they pulled the plow.

“I confessed to you the lie that I told,” I say quietly. “You know the sin that I undertook when I signed the oath. You know that I betrayed God and my queen and my beloved goddaughter the princess. And I failed my friends John Fisher and Thomas More. I repent of it every day of my life. Every day.”

“I know,” he says earnestly. “And I believe that God knows too, and that He forgives you.”

“But I had to do it. I can’t walk towards my death as John Fisher is doing,” I say piteously. “I can’t go willingly to the Tower. I have spent my life trying to keep out of the Tower. I can’t do it.”

“Neither can I,” he agrees. “So, with your permission, I’m going to leave England.”

I am so shocked that I turn and catch his hands. Some bawdy fool of a laborer whistles and someone else cuffs him. “We can’t talk here,” I say impatiently. “Come into the garden.”

We walk away from the noise of the granary yard, through the gate to the garden. There is a stone bench set into the wall, late roses still growing fat around it and dropping their scented petals. I sweep them off with my hand and sit down. He stands before me as if he thinks I am going to scold him. “Oh, sit down!”

He does as he is ordered and then is silent for a moment as if he is praying. “Truly, I cannot take the oath and I am too afraid of death. I am going to go abroad and I am asking you if there is any way that I can serve you.”

“In what way?”

He chooses his words carefully. “I can carry messages, for your sons. I can go to your kinsmen in Calais. I can travel to Rome to see the papal court and speak to them of the princess. I can go to the emperor and speak to him of his aunt the queen. I can discover what the English ambassadors are saying about us, and send you reports.”

“You are offering to be my spy,” I say flatly. “You are presuming that I want or need a spy and a courier. When you, of all people, know that I took the oath to be a loyal subject to the king and Queen Anne, and their heirs.”

He does not say anything. If he had protested that he was only making an offer to keep me in touch with my son, I would have known him as a spy from Cromwell, sent to lead us into danger. But he says nothing. He just bows his head and says: “As you wish, my lady.”

“Will you go anyway, without a commission from me?”

“If you cannot use me in this work, then I will try to find someone who can. Lord Thomas Darcy, Lord John Hussey, your kinsmen? I know there are many who have taken the oath against their wills. I will go to the Spanish ambassador and ask him if there is anything I can do. I believe that there are many lords who would want to know what Reginald is thinking and doing, what the Pope plans, what the emperor plans. I will serve the interests of the queen and the princess, whoever is my master.”

I pick a soft-petaled rose, a white rose, and I give it to him. “There’s your answer,” I say. “That’s your badge. Go to Geoffrey’s friend, his old steward, Hugh Holland, he will get you safely across the narrow seas. Then go to Reginald, tell him how things are with us, and then serve him and the princess as one. Tell him that the oath is too much for us all, that England is ready to rise, and he must tell us when.”

John Helyar goes the next day, and when people ask after him, I say that he left without notice and without warning. I shall have to find another chaplain for the household and a confessor for myself and it is a great nuisance and trouble.

When Prior Richard summons all the household after church on Sunday to administer the king’s oath in the priory chapel, I report John Helyar as missing and say that I think he has family in Bristol, so perhaps he has gone there.

I know that we have put another link in the chain that stretches from the queen at Kimbolton Castle to Rome, where the Pope must order her rescue.

In September, as the court turns back to London as the weather turns colder, Montague comes to Bisham for a brief visit.

“I thought I would come and tell you myself.” He jumps from his horse and kneels for my blessing. “I didn’t want to write.”

“What’s happened?” I am smiling. I can tell from the way he springs to his feet that it is not bad news for us.

“She lost the child,” he says.

Like any woman in the world I feel a pang of sorrow at the news. Anne Boleyn is my worst enemy and the child would have been her triumph but, even so, I have dawdled to the king’s rooms too many times with bad news of a dead baby not to remember that sense of terrible loss, of promise unfulfilled, of a future so confidently imagined which will now never happen.

“Oh, God bless him,” I say, and cross myself. “God bless him, the poor innocent.”

There is to be no Tudor boy this time; the terrible curse that the Plantagenet queen and her witch of a mother put on the Tudor line goes on and on working. I wonder if it will reach its very end as my cousin predicted, and there will be no Tudor boys at all, but only a girl, a barren girl.

“And the king?” I ask after a moment.

“I had thought you would be pleased,” Montague remarks, surprised. “I had thought you would triumph.”

I make a little gesture with my hand. “I don’t have so hard a heart as to wish for the death of an unborn child,” I say. “Whatever his begetting. Was it a boy? How did the king take it?”

“He went quite mad,” Montague says steadily. “He locked himself in his rooms and roared like an injured lion, banging his head against the wooden paneling, we heard him, but we couldn’t get in. He raged for a day and a night, weeping and shouting, then he fell asleep like a drunkard with his head in the fireplace.”

I listen to Montague in silence. This is like the rage of a disappointed child, not the grief of a man, a father.

“And then?”

“Then the servers of the body went in to him in the morning, and he comes out, washed and shaved, his hair curled, and says nothing of it,” Montague tells me incredulously.

“He can’t bear to have it spoken?”

Montague shakes his head. “No, he acts as if it never happened. Not the night of tears, not the loss of the baby, not the wife in childbed. It never was. It beggars belief. After the making of the cradle and the painting of the rooms, knocking the queen’s apartments at Eltham into a dining room and a privy chamber for a prince, he now says nothing about it, and denies that there was ever a child at all. And we all behave as if it never was. We are merry, we are hoping that she conceives soon. We have everything to hope for and we have never known despair.”

This is more strange than Henry blaming God for forgetting the Tudors. I had thought he would rail against his luck, or even turn on Anne as he turned on the queen. I thought he might claim that she had some terrible fault that she could not give him a son. But this is the strangest of all. He has had a loss that he cannot bear, and so he is simply denying it. Like a madman facing something that he does not want to see—he denies it is even there.

“And does no one speak to him? Since you all know that it has happened? Does no one even express their sympathy for his loss?”

“No,” Montague says heavily. “There is not a man at court who would dare. Not his old friend Charles Brandon, not even Thomas Cromwell, who is with him every day and speaks to him every minute. There is not a man at court who would have the courage to tell the king something that he denies. Because we have allowed him to say what is, and what is not, Lady Mother. We have allowed him to say what the world is like. He’s doing it right now.”

“He says that there was no child at all?”

“None at all. And so she has to pretend to be happy and pretend to be well.”

I take a moment to think of a young woman who has lost her child having to behave as if it had never been. “She acts as if she is happy?”

“Happy is not the half of it. She laughs and dances and flirts with every man at the court. She is in a whirl of excitement, gambling and drinking and dancing and disguising. She has to appear the most desirable, the most beautiful, the wittiest, cleverest, most interesting woman.”

I shake my head at this portrait of a nightmare court, dancing on the very edge of madness. “She does this?”

“She is frantic. But if she did not, he would see her as flawed,” Montague says quietly. “Ill. Incapable of bearing a child. She has to deny her loss, because he won’t be married to a woman who is not perfect. She has buried a dead baby in secret and she has to look as if she is endlessly beautiful, clever, and fertile.”

The process of taking the oath to deny the queen and the princess goes on, from church to courtroom throughout the country. I hear that they arrest Lady Anne Hussey, my kinswoman, who served the princess with me. They charge her with sending letters and little gifts to the princess at Hatfield, and she confesses that she had also called her “Princess Mary” from habit, not from intent. She has to beg forgiveness and spends long months in the Tower before they let her go.

Then I receive a note from Geoffrey, unsigned and without a seal to identify him.

The queen will not swear the oath; she has refused to deny herself or her daughter and has said that she is ready for any penalty. She thinks they will execute her privately behind the castle walls of Kimbolton and nobody will know. We have to prepare to rescue her and the princess at once.

I think that this is the moment I have longed to avoid. I think that I was born a coward. I think that I am a liar. I think that my husband begged me never to claim my own, never to do my duty, to keep myself and our children safe. But now, I think those days have gone, and though I am sick with fear I write to Geoffrey and to Montague.

Hire men and horses, hire a boat to take them to Flanders. Take every care of yourselves. But get them out of the country.


BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, CHRISTMAS 1534


I keep the Christmas feast at Bisham as if I were not in a state of frozen anticipation waiting for news from Hatfield and Kimbolton. It takes time to find a way into a royal palace, to bribe a servant in a royal prison. My sons will need to take the greatest care when they talk with the boatmen along the Thames and find who sails to Flanders, and who is loyal to the true queen. I have to behave as if I am thinking of nothing but the Christmas feast and the baking of the great pudding.

My household pretend to a carelessness that they don’t feel. We pretend we are not fearful for our priory, we are not afraid of a visit from Thomas Cromwell’s inspectors. We know that every monastery in the country has been inspected and that the money counters are always followed by an inquiry into morals—especially if a priory is rich. They have come to our priory and looked at our treasures and the richness of the lands and gone away again, saying nothing. We try not to fear their return.

The mummers come and play before the fire in the great hall, the wassailers come and sing. We dress up with great hats and capes and prance about pretending to enact stories from long ago. This year nobody enacts a story about the king, or the queen, or the Pope. This year there is no comedy in the Lord of Misrule; nobody knows what is true and what is treason, everything is Misrule. The Pope who threatened the king with excommunication is dead, and now there is a new Pope in Rome. Nobody knows if God will speak clearly to him, or how he will rule on the king with two wives. He is of the Farnese family: what the world says about him is not fit to be repeated. I pray that he can find holy wisdom. Nobody thinks anymore that God speaks to our king, and there are many who say that he is advised by the Moldwarp in dark and forbidden deeds. Our queen is far away, preparing for her execution, and the woman who calls herself queen can neither bear nor carry a son, proving to everyone that the blessing of God is not on her. Enough here for a hundred masques, but nobody dares even mention these events.

Instead, people put on tableaux that tell stories from a time that is safely long ago. The pages plan and perform a masque about a great sea voyage that takes the adventurers past a sea witch, a monster, and a fearsome waterspout. The cooks come up from the kitchen and play a throwing game with knives, very fast and dangerous, with no words at all—as if thoughts are more dangerous than blades. When the priest comes in from the priory, he reads in Latin from the Bible, incomprehensible to all of the servants, and will not tell us the story of the baby in the manger and the oxen kneeling to him, as if nothing is certain anymore, not even the Word that shone in the darkness.

Since truth has become only what the king tells us, and since we have sworn to believe whatever he says—however ridiculous—we are uncertain about everything. His wife is not the queen, his daughter is not a princess, his mistress has a crown on her head, and her bastard is served by his true heir. In a world like this, how can we know anything for sure?

“She’s losing her friends,” Geoffrey tells me. “She has quarreled with her uncle Thomas Howard. Her sister has been sent away from court in disgrace for marrying some passing soldier, her sister-in-law Jane Boleyn has been exiled by the king himself for starting a quarrel with his new fancy.”

“He’s fallen in love again?” I demand eagerly.

“A flirtation; but the Boleyn queen tried to get her sent away and lost her sister-in-law in the attempt.”

“And the girl?”

“I don’t even know her name. And now he’s courting Madge Shelton,” Geoffrey says. “Sending her love songs.”

I am suddenly filled with hope. “This is the best New Year’s gift you could have given me,” I say. “Another Howard girl. This will divide the family. They’ll want to push her forward.”

“It leaves the Boleyn woman very alone,” Geoffrey says, sounding almost sympathetic. “The only people she can count on are her parents and her brother. Everyone else is a rival or a threat.”


BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1535


I receive an unsigned note from Montague.

We can do nothing. The princess is ill and they fear for her life.

I burn the note at once and I go to the chapel to pray for her. I press the heels of my hands into my hot eyes and I beg God to watch over the princess that is the hope and light of England. She is ill, seriously ill, the princess who I love is said to be so weak that she might die, and nobody knows what is wrong with her.

My cousin Gertrude writes to me that there is a plan to murder the queen by suffocating her in her bed and leave her without a bruise on her body, and that the princess is even now being poisoned by agents of the Boleyns. I can’t be sure whether to believe her or not. I know that Queen Anne is insisting that the true queen be accused of treason by an Act of Attainder and executed behind closed doors. Is she so evil, this woman who was once the daughter of my steward, that she would kill her former mistress in secret?

Not for a moment do I think that Henry has planned any of this. He has sent his own doctor to the princess and said that she can be moved nearer to her mother to Hunsdon so that the queen’s physician can attend her, but he will not let her live with her mother, where the queen could guard her and nurse her back to health. I write again to Thomas Cromwell and I beg to be allowed to go to her and nurse her, just while she is ill. He says that it is not possible. But he assures me that the moment she signs the oath I can join her, she can come to court, she can be a beloved child of her father—like Henry Fitzroy, he adds, as if that would make me feel anything but horror.

I reply to him saying that I will take my own household, my own physician, at my own cost. That I will set up house for her, that I will advise her to take the oath as I have done. I remind him that I was among the first to do so. I am not like Bishop Fisher, or Lord Thomas More. I am not guided by my conscience. I am one who bends before the storm like a flexible willow. You can call for a heretic, a turncoat, a Judas, and I will answer willingly, consulting my own safety before anything else. I was raised to be fainthearted, false-hearted; it was the powerful, painful lesson of my childhood. If Thomas Cromwell wants a liar, I am here, ready to believe that the king is head of the Church. I will believe that the queen is a dowager princess, that the princess is Lady Mary. I assure him that I am ready to believe anything, anything that the king commands, if he will only let me go to her and taste the food before she eats it.

He replies that he would be glad to oblige me; but it is not possible. He writes that he is sorry to also tell me that Princess Mary’s former tutor Richard Fetherston is in the Tower for refusing the oath. “You had a traitor for a tutor,” he observes like a casual threat. And he remarks, as if an aside, that he is very glad to hear that I will swear to anything; for John Fisher and Thomas More are to go before judges for treason, and that no one can doubt the outcome.

And, he says at the very end, that the king is going to consult Reginald as to these changes! I almost drop the letter in disbelief. The king has written to Reginald for the benefit of his learned opinion on the marriage with Anne Boleyn, and his thoughts on the ownership of the English Church. They trust that Reginald will confirm the king’s view, that the King of England must be head of the Church, since—surely—only a king can rule his kingdom?

At once I fear that it is an entrapment, that they hope to trick Reginald into such words that he will condemn himself. But Lord Cromwell writes smoothly that Reginald has replied to the king and is studying the matter with much interest, and has agreed to reply to the king as soon as he has reached his conclusions. He will read and study and discuss. Lord Cromwell thinks that there can be no doubt what he will recommend, such a loyal and loving churchman has he promised to be.

I call for my horse and for a guard to accompany me. I ride to my London house and I send for Montague.


L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING–SUMMER 1535


“They put Bishop Fisher and then Thomas More on trial,” Montague tells me wearily. “It was not hard to see what their verdict would be. The judges were Thomas Howard, the Boleyn uncle, and Boleyn father and Boleyn brother.” He looks tired, as if he is exhausted by these times and by my outrage.

“Why could they not swear it?” I grieve. “Swear the oath and know that God would forgive them?”

“Fisher could not pretend.” Montague puts his head in his hands. “The king asks us all to pretend. Sometimes we have to pretend that he is a handsome stranger come to court. Sometimes we have to pretend that his bastard is a duke. Sometimes we have to pretend that there is no dead baby; and now we have to pretend that he is supreme head of the Church. He is calling himself Emperor of England, and no one may raise their voice to disagree.”

“But he’ll never hurt Thomas More,” I argue. “The king loves Thomas, he allowed him to stay silent when others had to advise about the marriage. He made Reginald speak out, but he allowed Thomas to stay quiet. He allowed him to give up his seal of office and go home. He said that if Thomas was silent, then he could live quietly, privately. And Thomas has done this. He lived with his family and told everyone he was glad to be a private scholar. It’s not possible that the king should condemn his friend, such a beloved friend, to death.”

“I bet you he will,” Montague says. “They’re just trying to find a day which won’t disturb the apprentice boys. They don’t dare to execute John Fisher on a saint’s day. They fear they are making another saint.”

“For God’s sake, why don’t they both beg for pardon, submit to the king’s will, and come out?”

Montague looks at me as if I am a fool. “You imagine that John Fisher, confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, one of the holiest men who ever guided the Church, is going to publicly declare that the Pope is not head of the Church? Swear to a heresy in the sight of God? How could he ever do that?”

I shake my head, blinded by the rush of tears to my eyes. “So that he might live,” I say despairingly. “Nothing matters more than that. So that he doesn’t have to die! For words!”

Montague shrugs. “He won’t do it. He can’t bring himself to it. Nor Thomas More. Don’t you think that it will have occurred to him? Thomas? The cleverest man in England? I imagine that he thinks of it every day. I imagine, given Thomas’s passion for life and for his children, especially his daughter, that it is his great temptation. I imagine that he puts it aside from him every day of his life, every minute.”

I sink into a chair, and I cover my face with my hands. “Son, are those good men going to die rather than sign their name on a piece of paper delivered to them by a scoundrel?”

“Yes,” Montague says. “And if I were more of a man, I would have done the same and I would be in the Tower with them and not let them go as if I were Judas, worse than Judas.”

I raise my face at once. “Don’t wish it,” I say quietly. “Don’t wish yourself in there. Don’t ever wish such a thing.”

He pauses. “Lady Mother, the time is coming when we will have to make a stand, either against the king’s advisors or against him himself. John Fisher and Thomas More are making that stand now. We should stand with them.”

“And who will stand with us?” I demand. “When you tell me that the emperor is setting sail to invade, then we can stand. Alone, I don’t dare it.”

I look at his determined pale face, and I have to get a grip on myself so that I don’t break down. “Son, you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know the Tower, you don’t know what it’s like to look out of the little window. You don’t know what it’s like to hear them building the scaffold. My father was executed there, my own brother walked across the drawbridge to Tower Hill and laid down his head on the block. I can’t risk you, I can’t risk Geoffrey. I can’t see another Plantagenet walk into the place. We can’t stand without the certainty of support, we can’t stand without the certainty of victory. We can’t go towards death like trusting beasts to slaughter. Promise me that we will not throw ourselves on the scaffold. Promise me that we will only stand against the Tudors if we are certain that we can win.”

The new Holy Father sends the king a message that cannot be mistaken. He makes John Fisher a cardinal of the Church, a sign to everyone that this great man, in failing health in the Tower, must be treated with respect. The Pope is head of the universal Church, and the man held as a traitor, praying for strength, is his cardinal, under his explicit protection.

The king swears aloud, before all the court, that if the Pope sends a cardinal’s hat, then the bishop will be unable to wear it for he will have no head.

It is a brutal, brutish joke. But the gentlemen of the court hear Henry and they do not silence him. Nobody says “Hush” or “God forgive you.” The court, my sons shamefully among them, allow the king to say anything, and then in June, beyond belief, they let him do it. They let him execute the saintly man who was his grandmother’s greatest friend and chosen confessor. They let him execute the friend who was his wife’s spiritual advisor. John Fisher was a good, kind, loving man, he found me a refuge when I was a young woman and desperate for a friend; and I don’t stand up and say one word in his defense.

His long vigil in the Tower did not frighten the old man; they say that he never tried to escape the fate that Thomas Cromwell prepared for him. On the morning of his execution he sent for his best clothes as if he were a bridegroom, and went to his death gladly as if to his wedding. I shudder when I hear this and go to my chapel to pray. I couldn’t do that. I would never do that. I lack the faith and, besides, I have spent all my life clinging onto life.

In July, Thomas More, after writing and praying and thinking, and finally realizing that there is no way to satisfy God and the king, walks out of his cell, looks up at the blue sky and the crying seagulls, and strolls up to Tower Hill quietly, as if taking the air on a summer’s day, and lays his head down on the block as he too chooses death rather than deny his Church.

And no one in England objects. Certainly, we don’t say a word. Nothing happens. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I read in a terse note from Reginald that the Holy Father, the King of France, and the emperor agree that the King of England must be stopped; not another death can be permitted. It is a horror breaking out in England, and the whole world is shamed by it. The whole of Christendom is stunned that a king should dare to execute a cardinal, should martyr the greatest theologian in his country, his dearest friend. Everyone is horrified and soon they start to ask: If the king can do this, what else will he do? Then they start to ask: What about the queen? What might this tyrant do to his queen?

At the end of August, Reginald writes to us and says that he has achieved the goal he has been working for—the king is to be excommunicated. This could not be more important; it is the declaration of war by the Pope on the king. It is the Pope telling the English, telling all of Christendom, that the king is not blessed by God, is not authorized by the Church; he is outside, he is certain to go to hell. No one need obey him, no Christian can defend him, no one should take up arms for him, indeed anyone fighting against him is blessed by the Church as a crusader riding against a heretic.

He is excommunicated but the sentence is suspended. He is to be allowed two months to return to his marriage with the queen. If he persists in his sins, the Pope will call on the Christian kings of Spain and France to invade England, and I shall come in with their army and raise the English with you.

Montague has been so sick since the death of Thomas More that his wife writes to me and asks me to come to his bedside. She fears that he might die.

What’s the matter with him?

I reply heartlessly.

He has turned his face to the wall and will not eat.

He is heartsick. I cannot help him. This is heartbreak, like the Sweat—a disease that came in with the Tudors. Tell him to get up and meet me in London; there is no time for anyone to ill-wish themselves. Burn this.

Montague arises from his sick bed and comes to see me, pale and grave. I call all of us together, as if for a family party to celebrate the birth of two new boys. My daughter, Ursula, has another boy whom she has named Edward, and Geoffrey has a fourth child, Thomas. My cousin Henry Courtenay and his wife, Gertrude, come with two silver christening cups, and my son-in-law Henry Stafford takes one for his son, with thanks. We look like a family party celebrating the birth of new children.

The court is away from the city, riding with the king and the woman who calls herself queen in a great round of the principal houses going west. Years ago, they would have come to stay with me, and the beautiful royal chamber at Bisham would have housed the handsome young king and my dearest friend, the queen. Now they stay with the men who have built new homes on the wealth that the king has given them, with men who think that the new learning and the new religion are the way to heaven. These are men who do not believe in purgatory, ready to make a hell on earth to prove it, and sleep under stolen slates.

The court on progress is flirtatious. In its desperation to appear triumphantly happy, it is becoming lax. The king has moved on from his infatuation with Madge Shelton and apparently is now favoring one of the Seymour girls, visiting her home at Wulf Hall. I know her, Jane, too shy to take advantage of a lovesick man nearly old enough to be her father, but dutiful enough to receive his poems with a wan smile.

The woman who calls herself queen has to experience the humiliation of watching his eyes go past her, to a younger, prettier woman, just as she once was. Who would know better how dangerous it is when Henry’s attention wanders? Who would know better that a lady-in-waiting can so easily wait in the wrong place, waiting for the king rather than her mistress the queen?

“This means nothing,” I say irritably to Geoffrey, who reports to me that the Seymours say they have a girl who draws the king’s gaze as she walks across his wife’s rooms. “If he does not return to the queen, he should be excommunicated. Is the Pope going to fulfill his threat?”

Montague, trying to be cheerful, orders the servants to bring the food and invites us to table as a merry family party, and then Geoffrey sets the musicians to play loudly in the hall while we step into the private room behind the great table and close the door.

“I have a letter from our Lisle cousins,” Henry Courtenay says. He shows us the seal and then carefully tucks it into the fire, where it blazes and the wax sputters and then it is nothing but ash. “Arthur Plantagenet says that we have to protect the princess. He will hold Calais for her against the king. If we can get her out of England, she will be safe there.”

“Protect her against what?” I ask flatly, as if daring them to say. “The Lisles are safe in Calais. What do they want us to do?”

“Lady Mother, the next Parliament is going to be offered a Bill of Attainder against the queen and the princess,” my son Montague says quietly. “Then they’ll be taken to the Tower. Like More and Fisher. Then they’ll be executed.”

There is a shocked silence, but everyone can see the truth in Montague’s bleak misery.

“You’re sure?” is all I say. I know that he is sure. I don’t need his agonized face to tell me that.

He nods.

“Do we have enough support to deny the bill in Parliament?” Henry Courtenay asks.

Geoffrey knows. “There should be enough men for the queen to vote it down. If they dare to speak their minds, there are enough votes. But they have to stand up and speak.”

“How can we make sure that they speak out?” I ask.

“Someone has to take the risk and speak first,” Gertrude says eagerly. “One of you.”

“You didn’t stand up for so very long,” her husband remarks resentfully.

“I know,” she admits. “I thought I would die in the Tower. I thought that I would die of cold and disease before I was tried and hanged. It’s terrible. I was there for weeks. I would be there still if I had not denied everything and begged forgiveness. I said I was a foolish woman.”

“I am afraid that the king is ready to make war on women now, foolish or otherwise,” Montague says grimly. “Nobody will be allowed that excuse again. But my cousin Gertrude is right. Someone has to speak up. I think it has to be us. I’ll approach every friend that I have and tell him that there can be no attainder against the queen or the princess.”

“Tom Darcy will help you,” I say. “John Hussey too.”

“Yes, but Cromwell will be ahead of us,” Geoffrey warns. “Nobody manages Parliament better than Cromwell. He’ll have been before us, and he has deep pockets, and people are terrified of him. He knows some secret about everybody. He has a hold on everyone.”

“Can’t Reginald persuade the emperor to come?” Henry Courtenay asks me. “The princess is begging to be rescued. Can the emperor at least send a ship and take her away?”

“He says that he will,” Geoffrey replies. “He promised Reginald.”

“But there are guards on both houses. Kimbolton is almost impossible to even get near without being observed,” Montague cautions him. “Would the princess go without the queen? And from the start of this month all the ports will be guarded. The king knows well enough that the Spanish ambassador is plotting with the princess to try to get her away. She’s closely watched, and there’s not a port in England that doesn’t have a Cromwell spy on duty. I really don’t think we can get her out of the country; it will be hard enough to get her out of Hunsdon.”

“Can we take her into hiding in England?” Geoffrey asks. “Or send her to Scotland?”

“I don’t want her sent to Scotland,” I interrupt. “What if they keep her?”

“We may have to,” Montague says and Courtenay and Stafford nod in agreement. “One thing is for certain: we can’t let her be taken to the Tower, and we have to stop Cromwell’s Parliament passing a Bill of Attainder and sending her to her death.”

“Reginald is working for the king’s excommunication to be publicly declared,” I remind them.

“We need it now,” Montague says.


WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, WINTER 1535


Geoffrey goes visiting all the substantial landlords who live around Warblington or around his own house at Lordington, and speaks to them of the Bill of Attainder against the queen and princess and how it must not come to Parliament. In London Montague speaks discreetly to selected friends at court, mentioning that the princess should be allowed to live with her mother, that she should not be so closely guarded. The king’s great friend and companion Sir Francis Bryan agrees with him, suggesting that he speak with Nicholas Carew. These are men at the very heart of Henry’s court, and they are starting to rebel against the king’s malice to his wife and daughter. I begin to think that Cromwell will not dare to propose the arrest of the queen to the Parliament. He will know that there is a growing opposition; he will not want an open challenge.

The autumn progress has done its work and she is with child again. No word from Rome, and the king feels safe. He is in and out of her rooms flirting with her ladies; but she does not care. If she has a boy, she will be untouchable.


WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, JANUARY 1536


Dearest Lady Mother,

I am sorry to tell you that the Dowager Princess is gravely ill. I have asked Lord Cromwell if you may go to her and he says that he is not authorized to allow any visitors. The Spanish ambassador went just after the Christmas feast, and Maria de Salinas is on her way. I don’t think we can do any more?

Your obedient and loving son,

Montague.


L’ERBER, LONDON, JANUARY 1536


I ride up the cold roads to London with my cape over my head and dozens of scarves wound round my face in an effort to keep warm. I fall from the saddle at the doorway of my London house, and Geoffrey catches me in his arms and says kindly: “Here, you’re home now, don’t even think of going on to Kimbolton.”

“I have to go,” I say. “I have to say good-bye to her. I have to beg her forgiveness.”

“How have you failed her?” he demands, guiding me into the great hall. The fire is lit in the grate; I can feel the flickering heat on my face. My ladies gently lift the heavy cloak from my shoulders and unwind the scarves, take the gloves from my chilled hands, and pull off my riding boots. I am aching from cold and weariness. I feel every one of my sixty-two years.

“She left me in charge of the princess, and I didn’t stay at her side,” I say shortly.

“She knew you did everything that you could.”

“Oh, damn everything to hell!” I suddenly break out in blasphemy. “I have done nothing for her as I meant to do, and we were young women together and it seems just yesterday, and now she is lying near death and her daughter is in danger and we cannot reach her and I . . . I . . . am just a foolish old woman and I am helpless in this world. Helpless!”

Geoffrey kneels at my feet and his sweet face is torn between laughter and sorrowful pity. “No woman I know is less helpless in the world,” he says. “Not one more determined or powerful. And the queen knows that you are thinking of her and praying for her even now.”

“Yes, I can pray,” I say. “I can pray that at least she is in a state of grace and without pain. I can pray for her.”

I heave myself to my feet, leave the temptation of the fire and the glass of mulled ale, and go to my chapel, where I kneel on the stone floor, which is how she always prayed, and I put the soul of my dearest friend Katherine of Aragon into the hands of God in the hopes that He will care for her better in heaven than we have cared for her here on earth.

And that is where Montague finds me when he comes to tell me that she is gone.

She went like a woman of great dignity; this has to be a comfort for me and for her. She prepared for her death, she had a long talk with her ambassador, and she had the company of dearest Maria, who rode through the winter weather to get to her. She wrote to her nephew and to the king. They tell me that she wrote to Henry that she loved him as she had always done and signed herself as his wife. She prayed with her confessor and he anointed her with holy oil, and administered extreme unction, so that she was, according to her unshakable faith, ready for her death. In the early afternoon she slipped away from this life that had been such a hard and thankless task for her, and—I am as certain as if I had seen it—joined her husband Arthur in the next.

I think of her as I first met her, a young woman tremulous with anxiety about being Princess of Wales and illuminated with love, her first love, and I think of her going to heaven like that, with her five little angels following her, one of the finest queens that England has ever had.

“Of course, it changes everything for Princess Mary for the worse,” Geoffrey says tempestuously, bursting into my private chamber, throwing off his winter jacket.

“How for the worse?” I feel calm in my grief. I am wearing a gown of dark blue, the royal color of mourning for my house, though they tell me that the king is in yellow and gold—the mourning color of Spain, and a bright buttercup shade that suits his mood, freed as he is at last from a faithful wife, and safe from invasion by her nephew.

“She has lost a protector and a witness,” Montague agrees. “The king would never have moved against her while her mother was alive, he would have had to order that the queen was attainted before his daughter. Now Princess Mary is the only person left in England who refuses to swear to his oath.”

I take the decision that has been waiting for me. “I know. I know this. We have to get her out of England. Son Montague, the time is now. We have to take the risk. We have to act now. Her life is in danger.”

I stay in London while Montague and Geoffrey handpick a guard who will ride to Hunsdon and seize the princess, plan a route skirting London, and hire a ship that will wait for her and take her out of one of the little Thameside villages like Grays. We decide against telling the Spanish ambassador; he loves the princess and he is in deep grief for her mother, but he is a dainty, fearful man, and if Thomas Cromwell were to arrest him, I think he would squeeze him like a Spanish orange and the man would tell everything within days, perhaps within hours.

Geoffrey goes to Hunsdon and, after waiting patiently, bribing everyone he can, gets the boy who lights the fires in the bedchambers into his service. He comes home beaming with relief.

“She’s safe for the moment,” he says. “Thank God! Because getting her away would have been near to impossible. But her luck has changed—who would have thought it? She has letters from the Boleyn queen saying that they must be friends, that the princess can turn to her in her grief.”

“What?” I ask incredulously. It is so early in the morning that I am not yet dressed, but am still in my nightgown and furred robe. Geoffrey has come to my bedchamber and we are alone as he stirs up the fire.

Загрузка...