The King's Curse

“I know.” He is almost laughing. “I even saw the princess. She is allowed to walk in the garden, by the order of Anne. Apparently, the Lady has ordered that the princess is given more freedom and treated more kindly. She can receive visitors and the Spanish ambassador can bring her letters.”

“But why? Why would Anne change like this?”

“Because while Queen Katherine was alive, the king had no choice but to stay with the Lady, he was bound to push through the destruction of the Church. You know what he’s like, with everyone saying that it couldn’t be done and shouldn’t be done he grew more and more obstinate. But now that the queen is dead he is free. His quarrel with the emperor is over, he’s safe from invasion, he has no need to quarrel with the Holy Father. He is a widower now; he can legally marry Anne if he wants to, and there is no reason that he should not reconcile with the princess. She is the daughter of his first wife; a son from his second will inherit before her.”

“So that woman is trying to befriend the princess?”

“Says she will intercede with her father, says she will be her friend, says she can come to court and not even be a lady-in-waiting, but have her own rooms.”

“Precedence over the Boleyn bastards?” I ask, sharp as ever.

“She didn’t say that. But why not? If he marries Anne a second time, this time with the blessing of the Church, then both girls will take second place to a legitimate boy.”

I nod slowly. Then as the realization comes to me, I say quietly, and with such satisfaction: “Ah. I see it. She will be afraid.”

“Afraid?” Geoffrey turns from the sideboard with a pastry left from last night in his hand. “Afraid?”

“The king is not married to her. They went through two services, but the Holy Father ruled both of them to be invalid. She is just his concubine. Now the queen is dead and he can marry again. But perhaps he won’t marry her.”

Geoffrey looks at me with his mouth open, as the pastry sheds crumbs on the floor. I don’t even tell him to use a plate. “Not marry her?”

I count on my fingers the triumphant list. “She hasn’t given him a son, she has only managed to carry a girl, he has fallen out of love with her and started his amours with other women. She has brought him no wisdom of her own and no good friends. She has no powerful foreign relations to protect her, her English family are not reliable. Her uncle has turned against her, her sister is banished from court, her sister-in-law has offended the king, and the moment that she is unsteady then Thomas Cromwell will turn on her, as he will only ever serve a favorite. What if she is favorite no more?”

ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, JANUARY 1536

It snows, and the road is very cold out of London, heading north up the great road to Peterborough. The weather is so bad, the snow so blinding and roads so impassable that we are two full days on the journey, rising at dawn and riding all day. In the early dark of the afternoons we stop once at a great house and request hospitality, and once at a good inn. We can no longer count on the monasteries along the way for hospitality and dinner. Some of them are closed altogether, some of the monks are transferred to other houses, some have been turned out of doors. I think that perhaps Thomas Cromwell did not foresee this when he started his great inquiry into religious houses and rifled their fortunes for the king’s profit. He claims that he is stamping out ill doing, but he is destroying a great institution in the country. The abbeys feed the poor, they nurse the sick, they help travelers, and they own more land than anyone else but the king, and farm it well. Now nothing is certain on the road anymore. No one is safe on the road anymore. Even the pilgrim hostels have put up their shutters as the shrines are being stripped of their wealth and their powers denied.

PETERBOROUGH, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, JANUARY 1536

On the afternoon of the third day I can see the spire of Peterborough Abbey ahead of me, pointing up to an iron gray sky, as my horse dips his head against the cold wind and trudges steadily onward, his big hooves scuffing the snow. I have a dozen men at arms around me and as we enter the gates of the city, the bell tolling for curfew, they close up against the people of the streets who watch resentfully, until they see my banner and start to shout.

For a moment I am afraid that they will shout out against me, seeing me as one of the court, one of the many new lords who have grown rich on the goodwill of the Tudors, even if I have that goodwill no more. But a woman leaning out of an overhanging window shrieks down at me: “God bless the white rose! God bless the white rose!”

Startled, I glance up and see her beam at me. “God bless Queen Katherine! God bless the princess! God bless the white rose!”

The urchin children and beggars clearing out of the way ahead of the soldiers turn and cheer, though they know nothing of who I am. But out of the little roadside shops, stepping out of workhouses and tumbling out of church and alehouse alike come men pulling off their hats and one or two even kneeling down in the freezing mud as I go by, and they call out blessings on the late queen, on her daughter, and on me and my house.

Someone even sets up the old cry “À Warwick!” and I know that they have not forgotten, any more than I have, that there was once an England with a York king on the throne who was content to be king and did not pretend to be Pope, who had a mistress who did not pretend to be queen, who had bastards who did not pretend to be heirs.

I understand, as we ride through the little city, why the king commanded that the queen should not be buried, as befits her dignity, in the abbey at Westminster. It is because the City would have risen up to mourn her. Henry was right to be afraid; I think all of London would have rioted against him. The people of England have turned against the Tudors. They loved this young king when he came to the throne to make everything right again, but now he has taken their Church, and taken their monasteries, and taken their best men, put aside his queen, and death has taken her. They cheer for her still, they mutter and call her martyred, a saint, and they cheer for me as one of the old royal family who would never have led them so badly astray.

We arrive at the guesthouse of the abbey, and find it overcrowded with the retinues of other great ladies from London. Maria de Salinas, Countess Willoughby, the queen’s faithful friend, is here already, and she comes running down the stairs as if she were still a lady-in-waiting to a Spanish princess and I were mere Lady Pole of Stourton. We hold each other tightly, and I can feel her shake with her sobs. When we pull back to look at each other, I know that there are tears in my eyes too.

“She was at peace,” is the first thing she says. “She was at peace at the end.”

“I knew it.”

“She sent you her love.”

“I tried . . .”

“She knew that you would be thinking of her, and she knew that you would continue to guard her daughter. She wanted to give you . . .” She breaks off, unable to speak, her Spanish accent still strong after years in England and her marriage to an English nobleman. “I am sorry. She wanted to give you one of her rosaries, but the king has ordered that everything be taken into his keeping.”

“Her bequests?”

“He has taken everything,” she says with a little sigh. “As is his right, I suppose.”

“It’s not his right!” I say at once. “If she was a widow as he insists, and they were unmarried, then everything she owned at her death was hers to give as she wished!”

There is a little twinkle in Maria’s dark eyes as she hears me. I cannot help myself, I always have to defend a woman’s estate. I bow my head. “It’s not the things,” I say quietly, knowing well enough that her greatest jewels and treasures had already been taken from her and hung around Anne Boleyn’s scrawny neck. “And it’s not that I wanted anything from her, I will remember her without a keepsake. But those things were hers by right.”

“I know,” Maria says, and looks up the stairs as Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, daughter of Mary the Dowager Queen of France, comes down the stairs and makes the smallest of bows to me in return to my curtsey. As the daughter of a Tudor princess married to a commoner Frances is cursed with anxiety about her precedence and her position, the more so as her father is now remarried, and to Maria’s daughter who is here too.

“You are welcome here,” she says, as if it were her own house. “The funeral is tomorrow morning. I shall go in first and you behind me and Maria and her daughter Catherine, my stepmother, behind you.”

“Of course,” I say. “All I want to do is to say good-bye to my friend. Precedence does not matter to me. She was my very dearest friend.”

“And the Countess of Worcester is here, and the Countess of Surrey,” Frances goes on.

I nod. Frances Howard, Countess of Surrey, is a Tudor supporter by birth and by marriage. Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, is one of the Boleyn ladies-in-waiting in constant attendance upon Anne Boleyn. I imagine that they have been sent to report back to their mistress, who will not be pleased to hear that the people in the street called blessings on the queen as her coffin was drawn to the abbey by six black horses with her household and half the county walking, heads bared to the cold wind, behind.

It is a beautiful day. The wind blows from the east, biting and cold, but the sky is clear with a hard wintry light as we walk to the abbey church and inside the hundreds of candles glow like dull gold. It is a simple funeral, not grand enough for a great queen and the victor of Flodden, not enough to honor an Infanta of Spain who came to England with such high hopes. But there is a quiet beauty in the abbey church where four bishops greet the coffin draped in black velvet with a frieze of cloth of gold. Two heralds walk before the coffin, two behind, carrying banners with her arms: her own crest, the royal arms of Spain, the royal arms of England, and her own insignia, the two royal arms together. Her motto “Humble and Loyal” is in gold letters beside the stand for the coffin, and when the requiem Mass is sung and the last pure notes are slowly dying away on the smoky incense-filled air, they lower the coffin into the vault before the high altar, and I know that my friend has gone.

I put my fist against my mouth to stifle a deep sob that tears from my belly. I never thought that I would see her to the grave. She came into my house when I was the lady of Ludlow and she was a girl, twelve years my junior. I could never have dreamed that I would see her buried so quietly, so peacefully in an abbey far from the city that was proud to be her capital and home.

Nor was it the funeral that she had requested in her will. But I do believe that though she wished to be buried in a church of the Observant Friars and have their devout congregation say memorial Masses for her, she has a place in heaven even without their prayers. The king denied her title, and closed the houses of the friars, but even if they are vagrants on the empty roads tonight, they will still pray for her; and all those of us who loved her will never think of her as anything other than Katherine, Queen of England.

We dine late and are quiet at dinner. Maria and Frances and I talk about her mother, and the old days when Queen Katherine ruled the court and the dowager queen Mary came home from France, so pretty and determined, and disobedient.

“It can’t always have been summer, can it?” Maria asks longingly. “I seem to remember those years as always summer. Can it really have been sunny every day?”

Frances raises her head. “Someone at the door.”

I can hear too the clatter of a small group of riders, and the door opening, and Frances’s steward in the doorway saying apologetically: “Message from the court.”

“Let him in,” Frances says.

I glance at Maria and wonder if she had permission to be here, or if the king has sent someone to arrest her. I fear for myself. I wonder if information has been laid against me, against my boys, against any one of our family. I wonder if Thomas Cromwell, who pays so many informants, who knows so much, has found out about the ship’s master at Grays who is available to hire, who was approached some nights ago and asked if he would sail a lady to France.

“Do you know who this is?” I ask Frances, my voice very low. “Were you expecting a message?”

“No, I don’t know.”

The man walks into the room, brushing the snow from his cape, puts back his hood, and bows to us. I recognize the livery of the Marquess of Dorset, Henry Grey, Frances’s husband.

“Your Grace, Lady Dorset, Lady Salisbury, Lady Surrey, Lady Somerset, Lady Worcester.” He bows to each of us. “I have grave news from Greenwich. I am sorry that it took me so long to get here. We had an accident on the road and had to take a man back to Enfield.” He turns his attention to Frances. “I am commanded by your lord and husband to bring you to court. Your uncle the king has been gravely wounded. When I left five days ago, he was unconscious.”

She stands as if to greet tremendous news. I see her lean on the table as if to steady herself.

“Unconscious?” I repeat.

The man nods. “The king took a terrible blow and fell from his horse. The horse stumbled and fell on him as he lay. He was running a course in the joust, the blow threw him back, he went down, and his horse on top of him. They were both fully armored, so the weight . . .” He breaks off and shakes his head. “When we got the horse off His Grace, he did not speak or move, he was like a dead man. We didn’t even know that he was breathing until we carried him into the palace, and sent for physicians. My lord sent me at once to fetch her ladyship.” He thumps his fist into his palm. “And then we couldn’t get through the drifts of snow.”

I look at Frances, who is trembling, a blush rising up into her cheeks. “A terrible accident,” she observes breathlessly.

The man nods. “We should leave at first light.” He looks at us. “The king’s condition is a secret.”

“He held a joust after the queen’s death, before she was even laid to rest?” Maria remarks coldly.

The messenger bows slightly, as if he does not want to comment on the king and the woman who calls herself queen celebrating the death of her rival. But I don’t attend to this, I am looking at Frances. She has been keenly ambitious all her life and hungry for position at court. Now I can almost read what she is thinking as her dark eyes flick, unseeing, from the table to the messenger and back again. If the king dies from this fall, then he leaves a baby girl who no one thinks is legitimate, a baby in the belly of a woman whose chance of ever being accepted as queen dies with him, a bastard boy acknowledged and honored, and a princess under house arrest. Who would dare to predict which of these claimants will take the throne?

The Boleyn party including Elizabeth Somerset, here at this table, will support the woman who calls herself queen and her baby Elizabeth, but the Howards, with Frances, Countess of Surrey, will split apart from their junior branch and press for the male heir, even if he is Bessie Blount’s bastard, for he is married into their family. Maria, and all my family, all my affinity, all the old nobility of England, would lay down our lives to put Princess Mary on the throne. Here at this dinner table, at the funeral of the queen, are gathered the parties who will make war against each other if the king is dead tonight. And I, who have seen a country at war, know very well that during the battles, other heirs will emerge. My cousin Henry Courtenay, cousin to the king? My son Montague, cousin to the king? My son Reginald, if he married the princess and brought with him the blessing of the Holy Father and the armies of Spain? Or even Frances herself, who will certainly be thinking of this, as she stands here wide-eyed and glazed with ambition, the daughter of the Dowager Queen of France, the king’s niece?

In a moment she recovers. “At first light,” she agrees.

“I have this for you.” He hands her a letter on which I can see her husband’s seal, a standing unicorn. I would give a lot to know what he writes to her privately. She holds the letter in her hand and turns to me. “Please excuse me,” she says. Carefully, we trade measured bobs, and then she hurries from her room to tell her attendants to pack up, and to read her letter.

Maria and I watch her go. “If His Grace does not recover . . .” Maria says very quietly.

“I think we had better travel with Lady Frances,” I say. “I think we all need to get back to London. We can travel with her escort.”

“She’ll want to hurry.”

“So will I.”

ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, JANUARY 1536

We spend one night on the road, riding as fast as we can to London, asking along the way for news but strictly forbidding our servants to say why we are in such haste to get back to court.

“If the people know that the king is gravely injured, I fear that they will rise up,” Frances says quietly to me.

“There’s no doubt of it,” I reply grimly.

“And your affinity would be . . .”

“Loyal,” I say shortly, without explaining what that might mean.

“There will have to be a regency,” she says. “A terribly long regency for the Princess Elizabeth. Unless . . .”

I wait to see if she has the courage to finish the sentence.

“Unless,” she says with finality.

“Pray God that His Grace is recovered,” I say simply.

“It is impossible to imagine the country without him,” Frances concurs.

I nod in agreement as I glance around at my companions, and think that clearly it is not impossible; for it is what each and every one of them are thinking.

We halt for the night at an inn which can house the ladies and women servants of our big party but the men will have to go to outlying farms and the guards will have to sleep in barns. So we know we are not fully guarded when we hear the noise of approaching horsemen and then see them cantering down the road at dusk, half a dozen horses ridden hard.

The ladies step back behind the big taproom table but I go out to face whatever is coming. I would rather greet fear than have it come stamping into my hall. Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, usually so anxious to be first, lets me take the precedence for danger, and I stand alone, waiting for the horses to halt before the doorway. In the light spilling out from the door and then in the sudden flicker from a torch held by one of the stable boys running forward I see the royal livery of green and white and my heart skips a beat for fear.

“A message for the Countess of Worcester,” he says.

Elizabeth Somerset hurries forward, and takes the letter sealed with the falcon crest. I let the other women crowd around her as she breaks the Boleyn woman’s seal, and leans towards the torches so that she can read in their flickering light; but no one else can see her message.

I step out into the road and smile at the messenger.

“You’ve had a long, cold ride,” I observe.

He tosses the reins of his horse to a stable boy. “We have.”

“And I am afraid there is not a bed to be had in the inn, but I can send your men to a farm nearby where my guard is sleeping. They will see that you get food and somewhere to rest. Are you to return to London with us?”

“I am to take the countess to the court at dawn tomorrow, ahead of you all,” he grumbles. “And I knew that there would be nowhere to sleep here. And I suppose nothing to eat either.”

“You can send your men to the farm, and I can get you a place at a table here in the hall tonight,” I say. “I’m the Countess of Salisbury.”

He bows low. “I know who you are, your ladyship. I’m Thomas Forest.”

“You can be my guest at dinner tonight, Mr. Forest.”

“I’d be very grateful for dinner,” he says. He turns and shouts to his men to follow the stable boy with the torch who will show them the way to the farm.

“Yes,” I say, leading the way inside where the trestle tables are being laid out for dinner and the benches drawn up. He can smell meat roasting in the kitchen. “But what’s the hurry? Does the queen need her lady so urgently that she sends you riding cross-country in winter? Or is it just a pregnant woman’s whim that you have to serve?”

He leans towards me. “They don’t tell me anything,” he says. “But I’m a married man. I know the signs. The queen has taken to her bed and they are hurrying in and out with hot water and towels and everyone from the greatest of them to the youngest kitchen maid speaks to every single man as if we are fools or criminals. The midwives are there. But nobody is carrying a cradle in.”

“She is losing her child?” I ask.

“Without a doubt,” he says with brutal honesty. “Another dead Tudor baby.”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1536

I leave the ladies to scurry back to court where the king is recovering from his fall and coming to terms with the news of the death of yet another child, and I ride at my leisure to my home. The question now, the only question, is how the king will take the loss of his son—for the baby was a boy. Will he see it as a sign of the disapproval of God and turn against the second wife, as he turned and blamed the first?

I spend some hours on my knees in the priory chapel thinking on this. My household, God bless them, give me the credit to believe that I am praying. Alas, I am not really at prayer. In the quietness and peace of the priory I am turning over and over in my own mind what the boy whom I once knew so well will do, now that he is a man and faced with a crushing disappointment.

The boy I knew would recoil in pain from such a blow, but then he would turn to the people he loved and those that loved him and in comforting them, cheer himself.

“But he’s not a boy anymore,” Geoffrey says quietly to me as he joins my vigil one day and kneels beside me, and I whisper these thoughts to him. “He’s not even a young man. The blow to his head has shaken him deeply. He was going bad, no doubt that he was spoiling like milk souring in the sun; but suddenly, everything is even worse. Montague says it is as if he has realized that he will die just like his wife the queen.”

“Do you think he grieves for her at all?”

“Even though he didn’t want to go back to her, he knew she was there, loving him, praying for him, hoping that they would be reconciled. And then suddenly, he is near death, and then the baby dies. Montague says that he thinks God has forsaken him. He’ll have to find some explanation.”

“He’ll blame Anne,” I predict.

Geoffrey is about to reply when Prior Richard comes in quietly and kneels beside me, prays for a moment, crosses himself, and says: “Your Grace, may I interrupt you?”

We turn to him. “What’s the matter?”

“We have a visitation,” he says. He speaks with such disdain that for a moment I think that frogs have come up from the moat and are all over the kitchen garden. “A visitation?”

“That’s what they call it. An inspection. My Lord Cromwell’s men have come to see that our priory is well run according to the precepts of its founders and our order.”

I rise to my feet. “There can be no question of that.”

He leads the way out of the church towards his private room. “My lady, they do question it.”

He opens the door and two men turn and look at me impertinently, as if I am interrupting them, though they are in my prior’s room, in my priory, on my lands. I wait for a moment, without moving or speaking.

“Her Ladyship the Countess of Salisbury,” the prior says. Only then do they bow, and at their grudging courtesy I realize that the priory is in danger.

“And you are?”

“Richard Layton and Thomas Legh,” the older one says smoothly. “We are working for my Lord Cromwell—”

“I know what you do,” I interrupt him. This is the man who interrogated Thomas More. This is the man who went into Sheen Abbey and interrogated the monks. This is the man who gave witness against the Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton. I don’t doubt that my name and the names of my sons and my chaplain have been written several times on papers in the little brown satchel that he carries.

He bows, quite without shame. “I am glad of it,” he says steadily. “There has been much corruption and wickedness in the Church, and Thomas Legh and I are proud to be instruments of purification, of reformation, of God.”

“There’s no corruption or wickedness here,” Geoffrey says hotly. “So you can be on your way.”

Layton makes a funny little nodding gesture with his head. “You know, Sir Geoffrey, that is what everyone always assures me. And so we will confirm it, and be on our way as fast as we can. We have much to do. We don’t want to be here any longer than is necessary.”

He turns to the prior. “I take it we may use your room for our inquiries? You will send the canons and the nuns in one at a time, the canons first and then the nuns. The oldest first.”

“Why would you speak with the nuns?” Geoffrey asks. None of us wants my daughter-in-law Jane complaining to strangers about her decision to join the priory, or demanding her release.

The quickly suppressed smile that crosses Layton’s face tells me that they know of Jane, and they know that we took her dower from her when we encouraged her to enter the nunnery, and they know she wants to be released from her vows and get her fortune back into her own keeping.

“We always speak with everybody,” Richard Layton says quietly. “That’s how we make sure that not a sparrow falls. We are doing God’s work, we do it thoroughly.”

“Prior Richard will sit with you, and hear all that is said,” I assert.

“Alas, no. Prior Richard will be our first interview.”

“Look,” I say, in sudden fury. “You can’t come in here to my priory, founded by my family, and ask questions as you like. This is my land, this is my priory. I won’t have it.”

“You did sign the oath, didn’t you?” Layton asks negligently, turning over the papers on the desk. “Surely you did? As I recall only Thomas More and John Fisher refused to sign. Thomas More and John Fisher, both dead.”

“Of course My Lady Mother signed.” Geoffrey speaks for me. “There is no question of our loyalty, there can be no question.”

Richard Layton shrugs. “Then you accepted the king as the supreme head of the Church. He orders that it be visited. We are here doing his bidding. You are not questioning his right, his divine right, to govern his Church?”

“No, of course not,” I say, driven.

“Then please, your ladyship, let us start,” Layton says with a most agreeable smile, pulls out the prior’s chair from behind the prior’s table, seats himself, and opens his satchel while Thomas Legh draws a stack of papers towards him and writes a heading on the first page. It says Visitation of Bisham Priory, April 1536.

“Oh,” Richard Layton says, as if it has just occurred to him. “We’ll speak to your chaplain too.”

He catches me quite unawares. “I don’t have one,” I say. “I confess to Prior Richard, as does my household.”

“Did you never have one?” Layton asks. “I was sure there was a payment, in the priory accounts . . .” He turns over pages as if looking for something he vaguely remembers, flicking through them like an actor playing the part of someone looking for a name in old papers.

“I did,” I say firmly. “But he left. He moved on. He gave me no explanation.” I glance at Geoffrey.

“Most unreliable,” he says firmly.

“Helyar, wasn’t it?” Layton asks. “John Helyar?”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

They stay in the guesthouse of the priory for a week. They dine with the canons in the priory dining hall and they are wakened through the night by the priory bell ringing for prayer. I hear with some pleasure that they complain of sleeplessness. The cells are small and stone-walled and there are no fires except in the prior’s study room and in the dining hall. I am sure that they are cold and uncomfortable but this is the monastic life that they are investigating; they should be glad that it is poor and rigorous. Thomas Legh is accustomed to grander standards, he travels with fourteen men in his livery and his brother is his constant companion. He says that they should be staying in the manor and I say that they would be welcome but I have an infestation of biting fleas and all the rooms are being smoked and aired. Clearly, he does not believe me, and I do not try to convince him.

On the third day of their visit Thomas Standish, the clerk of the kitchen, comes bursting into the dairy where I am watching the maids press the cheeses.

“My lady! The villagers are up at the priory! You’d better come at once!”

I drop the wooden cheese press with a clatter on the well-scrubbed board and strip off my apron.

“I’ll come!” says one of the dairymaids eagerly. “They’re going to throw that Crummer man from his horse.”

“No, they’re not, his name is Cromwell, and you will stay here,” I say firmly.

I stride out of the kitchen, and the clerk takes my arm to guide me over the cobbles of the yard. “There’s just a dozen of them,” he says. “Nate Ridley and his sons, and a man I don’t know, and Old White and his boy. But they’re full of it. They say they won’t let the visitation happen. They say they know all about it.”

I’m just about to answer when my words are drowned out by a sudden peal of bells. Someone is ringing the bells out of order, out of time, then I hear that they are ringing them backwards.

“It’s a sign.” Standish breaks into a run. “When they ring the bells backwards, they signal that the commons have taken command, that the village is up.”

“Stop them!” I order. Thomas Standish runs ahead as I follow him to the priory where the fat bell ropes dangle at the back of the church. There are three Bisham men and one man I don’t know, and the clangor of the ill-timed peal is deafening in the small space.

“Stop it!” I shout, but no one can hear me. I cuff one of my men around the head with a hard backward slap of my hand, and I poke the other with the blunt cheese knife that I still have in my hand. “Stop it!”

They stop pulling the ropes as soon as they see me and the bells jangle on more and more unevenly until they are stilled. Behind me the two visitors, Legh and Layton, come tumbling into the church, and the men turn on them with a growl of anger.

“You get out,” I say to them briskly. “Go and sit with the prior. I can’t answer for your safety.”

“We are on the king’s business,” Legh starts.

“You’re on the devil’s business!” one of the men exclaims.

“Now then,” I say quietly. “That’s enough.”

To the two visitors I say, “I warn you. Go to the prior. He’ll keep you safe.”

They drop their heads and scuttle from the chapel. “Now,” I say steadily, “where are the rest of you?”

“They’re in the priory, they’re taking the chalice and the vestments,” Standish reports.

“Saving them!” old Farmer White says to me. “Saving them from those heretical thieves. You should let us do our work. You should let us do God’s work.”

“It’s not just us,” the stranger tells me. “We’re not alone.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Goodman, from Somerset,” he says. “The men of Somerset are defending their monasteries too. We’re defending the Church, as the monks and the gentry should do. I came here to tell these good people. They must stand up and defend their own priory. Each one of us must save God’s things for better times.”

“No, we must not,” I say quickly. “And I’ll tell you why. Because after these two men have run away—and I am sure you can make them scuttle back to London—the king will send an army and they will hang each one of you.”

“He can’t hang us all. Not if the whole village rises,” Farmer White objects.

“Yes, he can,” I say. “Do you think that he does not have cannon, and handguns? Do you think he doesn’t have horses with lances and soldiers with pikes? Do you think he can’t build enough scaffolds for all of you?”

“But what are we to do?” The fight has quite gone out of them. A few villagers straggle in through the church door and look at me as if I will save the priory. “What are we to do?”

“The king has become the Moldwarp,” a woman cries out from the back of the crowd. Her dirty shawl is over her head and her face is turned away. I don’t recognize her and I don’t want to see her face. I don’t want to give evidence against her, as she goes on, shouting treason. “The king has become a false king, hairy as a goat. He’s run mad and eats up all the gold in the land. There will be no May. There will be no May.”

I glance anxiously at the door and see Standish nod reassuringly. The visitors have not heard this; they are cowering in the prior’s chamber.

“You are my people,” I say quietly into the unhappy silence. “And this is my priory. I cannot save the priory but I can save you. Go to your homes. Let the visitation finish. Perhaps they will find no wrongdoing and the canons will stay here and all will be well.”

There is a low groan as if they are all in pain. “And if they don’t?” someone says from the back.

“Then we must beg the king to dismiss his wrong-thinking advisors,” I say. “And put the country to rights again. As it was, in the old days.”

“Better put it back to the old days before the Tudors,” someone says very quietly.

I put my hand out to order them to be silent before someone shouts “À Warwick!”.

“Silence!” I say, and it sounds more like a plea than a command. “There can be no disloyalty to the king.” There is a mutter of agreement to that. “So we have to allow his servants to do their work.”

Some of the men nod as they follow the logic.

“But will you tell him?” someone asks me. “Tell the king that we cannot lose our monasteries and our nunneries. Tell him that we want our altars at the roadside and our places of pilgrimage. We need our feast days and the monasteries open and serving the poor. And we want the lords to advise him, not this Crummer, and the princess to be his heir?”

“I’ll tell him what I can,” I say.

Unwillingly, uncertainly, like cattle that have broken through a hedge into a strange field and then don’t know what to do with their freedom, they allow themselves to be chivvied out of the priory chapel and down the road to the village.

When all is quiet again, the door to the priory opens and the two visitors come out. I feel quite triumphant over their nervous sidle to the door of the church and the way they look around at the traces of unrest, the mud on the floor, the bell ropes hanging, and frown at the echo of the ringing.

“These are a very troubled people,” Legh says to me as if I have stirred them to rebellion. “Disloyal.”

“No, they’re not,” I say flatly. “They are completely loyal to the king. They misunderstood what you were doing, that is all. They thought that you had come to steal away the church’s gold and close down the priory. They thought that the Lord Chancellor was closing down the churches of England for his own benefit.”

Legh smiles at me thinly. “Of course not,” he says.

Next day, Prior Richard comes to me in my records room at the manor. I am seated at a great round rent table, with each drawer labeled with a letter. Every tenant’s deeds are in a drawer labeled with the right letter and the table can spin from A to Z so that I can draw out, in a moment, the document that I need. The prior’s arrival distracts me from my pleasure in the well-run business that is my home. “They are speaking with the nuns today.”

“You don’t think there will be a problem?”

“If your daughter-in-law complains . . .”

I close a drawer and push the table a little to the right. “She can say nothing that is critical of the priory. She might say that she has changed her mind about being a nun, she might say that she wants to come out and draw her dower from my rents, but that is not the sort of corruption they are charged to find.”

“It’s the only thing where we might be seen as at fault,” he says tentatively.

“You are not at fault,” I reassure him. “It was Montague and I who urged her to go in, and Montague and I who have kept here there.”

Still, he looks worried. “These are troubled times.”

“None worse,” I say, and mean it. “I’ve never known worse.”

Thomas Cromwell’s men, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, take their leave of me with perfect civility and mount up to go. I note their good horses and their fine saddlery; I note Legh’s men and their smart livery. The king’s Church is a profitable service, it appears. Judging poor sinners seems to pay extraordinarily good wages. I wave them off, knowing that they’ll be back with a prompt decision, but even so I am surprised that a mere four days later, the prior comes to the manor and tells me that they are returned.

“They want me to leave,” he says. “They have asked for my resignation.”

“No,” I say flatly. “They have no right.”

He bows his head. “Your ladyship, they have a command with the king’s seal, signed by Thomas Cromwell. They have the right.”

“Nobody said that the king should be head of the Church to destroy it!” I burst out in sudden anger. “Nobody swore an oath saying that the monasteries should be closed and good men and women thrown into the world. Nobody wanted the stained glass taken from the windows, nobody wanted the gold taken from the altars, nobody in this country swore an oath calling for the end of the Catholic communion! This is not right!”

“I pray you,” he says, white as his linen, “I pray you be silent.”

I whirl to the window and I glare out at the sweetness of the green leaves on the trees, at the bobbing white and pink of the apple blossom over the orchard wall. I think of the child that I knew, of the little boy Henry who wanted to serve, who shone with innocence and hope, who was, in his childish way, devout.

I turn back. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I say. “Send them to me.”

The visitors, Layton and Legh, come into my privy chamber quietly, but without any signs of apprehension. “Close the door,” I say, and Legh closes it and they stand before me. There are no chairs for them, and I don’t move from my seat in the big chair with the canopy of state over my head.

“Prior Richard will not resign,” I say. “There is nothing wrong with the priory, and he has done nothing wrong. He will stay in his post.”

Richard Layton unrolls a scroll, shows me the seal. “He is commanded to resign,” he says regretfully.

I let him hold it towards me so that I can read the lengthy sentences. Then I look at him. “No grounds,” I say. “And I know you have no evidence. He will appeal.”

He rolls it up again. “There is no form of appeal,” he says. “We need no grounds. The decision is final, I am afraid, your ladyship.”

I rise to my feet and I gesture to the door to tell them that they are to go. “No, my decision is final,” I say. “The prior will not resign unless you can show that he has done something wrong. And you cannot show that. So he is staying.”

They bow, as they have to. “We will return,” Richard Layton says.

This is a testing time. I know that some monasteries have become lax and their servants a byword for corruption. I know—everyone knows—of the pigeon bones and the duck’s blood relics, and the bits of string that are offered to the gullible as the Virgin’s girdle. The country is full of fearful fools and the worst of the monasteries and nunneries have battened off them, misled them, exploited them, and lived like lords while preaching poverty. Nobody objects to the king appointing honest men to discover these abuses and stop them. But I shall see now what happens when the king’s visitors come to a priory that serves God and the people, where the treasures are used for the glory of God, where the rents taken by the prior are used to feed the poor. My family founded this priory and I will protect it. It is my life: like my children, like my princess, like my house.

Montague writes to me from London, unsealed and unsigned:

He says that he sees that God will not give him a son with her.

I hold the letter in my hand for a moment before I push it deep into the heart of the fire. I know that Anne Boleyn will not call herself queen for long.

In the hour before dinner, when I am sitting with my ladies in my privy chamber and the musician is playing the lute, I hear a great knock on the outer door.

“Go on,” I say to the musician who lets the notes die away as we listen to the sound of feet walking through the hall and coming up the stairs. “Go on.”

He strikes a chord as the door opens and Cromwell’s men Layton and Legh come into the room and bow to me. With them, like a ghost risen from the grave, but a triumphant ghost in new clothes, is my daughter-in-law, the grieving widow of my son Arthur, Jane, last seen clawing at the door of the family crypt and crying for her husband and son.

“Jane? What are you doing here? And what are you wearing?” I ask her.

She gives a little defiant laugh, and tosses her head. “These gentlemen are escorting me to London,” she says. “I am betrothed in marriage.”

I feel my breath coming faster as my temper rises. “You are a novice in a priory,” I say quietly. “Have you quite lost your mind?” I look at Richard Layton. “Are you abducting a nun?”

“She has spoken with the prior, and he has released her,” he says smoothly. “No novice can be held if she changes her mind. Lady Pole is betrothed to marry Sir William Barrantyne and I am commanded to take her to her new husband.”

“I thought William Barrantyne just stole goods and lands from the Church?” I say viciously. “I am behind the times. I didn’t know he captured nuns also.”

“I am no nun, and I should never have been put in there and kept there!” Jane shouts at me.

My ladies jump to their feet, my granddaughter Katherine scuttles towards me as if she would stand between me and Jane, but I gently put her to one side. “You asked, you begged, you cried to be allowed to withdraw from the world because your heart was broken,” I say steadily. “Now I see your heart is mended and you beg to come out again. But be very sure to tell your new husband that he takes a poor novice, not an heiress. You will get nothing from me when you marry and your father may leave your inheritance away from a runaway nun. You have no son to bear your name or inherit. You can return to the world if you wish; but it will not return everything to you. You will not find matters as you left them.”

She is horrified. She had not thought of this. I imagine her betrothed will be horrified too, if he even goes ahead with marriage to a woman who is not an heiress. “You have robbed me of my estate?”

“Not at all, you chose a life of poverty. You took one decision in grief and now are taking another in temper. You cannot seem to take a decision and stay with it.”

“I will get my fortune back!” she rages.

Coolly, I look past her to Richard Layton, who has been observing this with growing uneasiness. “Do you still want her?” I ask indifferently. “I imagine that your lord Thomas Cromwell did not plan to reward his friend William Barrantyne with a penniless madwoman?”

He is at a loss. I press my advantage. “And the prior will not have released her,” I say. “Prior Richard would not do so.”

“Prior Richard has resigned,” Thomas Legh says smoothly, speaking over his stammering partner. “Prior William Barlow will take his place and surrender the priory to Lord Cromwell.”

I don’t know Barlow, except by reputation as a great supporter of reform, which means, as we now all see, stealing from the Church and expelling good men. His brother serves as a Boleyn spy, and he hears George Boleyn’s confession, which must be a pretty tale.

“Prior Richard will not go!” I say hastily. “Certainly not for a Boleyn chaplain!”

“He has gone. And you will not see him again.”

For a moment I think that they mean that they have taken him to the Tower. “Arrested?” I ask with sudden fear.

“Wisely, he chose that it should not come to that.” Richard recovers himself. “Now I will take your daughter-in-law to London.”

“Here,” I say with sudden spite. I reach into my purse and I take a silver sixpence. I toss it straight at him, and Richard catches it without thinking, so that he looks a fool for taking such a little coin from me like a beggar. “For her expenses on the road. Because she has nothing.”

I write to Reginald and I send it to John Helyar in Flanders for him to take to my son.

They have given our priory to a stranger who will dismiss the priests and close the doors. They have taken Jane away to marry a friend of Cromwell’s. The Church cannot survive this treatment. I cannot survive it. Tell the Holy Father that we cannot bear it.

I am still reeling from this attack at the very heart of my home, at the church I love, when I get a note from London:

Lady Mother, please come at once. M.

L’ERBER, LONDON, APRIL 1536

Montague greets me at the door of my house, the vine showing green leaves all around him as if he is a Planta genista in an illuminated manuscript, a plant that grows green, whatever the soil or weather.

He helps me from my horse and holds my arm as we go up the shallow steps to the doorway. He feels the stiffness in my stride. “I am sorry to have made you ride,” he says.

“I’d rather ride to London than hear about it too late in the country,” I say dryly. “Take me to my privy chamber and close the door on the others and tell me what’s going on.”

He does as I ask, and in moments I am seated in my chair by the fireside with a glass of mulled wine in my hand and Montague is standing before the fire, leaning against the stone chimney breast, looking into the flames.

“I need your advice,” he says. “I’ve been invited to dine with Thomas Cromwell.”

“Take a long spoon,” I reply, and earn a wry smile from my son.

“This might be the sign of everything changing.”

I nod.

“I know what it’s about,” he says. “Henry Courtenay is invited with me; he spoke with Thomas Seymour, who had been playing cards with Thomas Cromwell, Nicholas Carew, and Francis Bryan.”

“Carew and Bryan were Boleyn supporters.”

“Yes. But now, as a cousin to the Seymours, Bryan is advising Jane.”

I nod. “So Thomas Cromwell is now befriending those of us who support the princess or are kin to Jane Seymour?”

“Tom Seymour promises me that if Jane were to be queen she would recognize the princess, bring her to court, and see her restored as heir.”

I raise my eyebrows. “How could Jane be queen? How could Cromwell do this?”

Montague lowers his voice though we are behind a closed door in our own house. “Geoffrey spoke to John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, only yesterday. Cromwell had asked him if the king could legally abandon the Boleyn woman.”

“Legally abandon her?” I repeat. “What does that even mean? And what did the bishop reply?”

Montague gives a short laugh. “He’s no fool. He’d like to see the Boleyns thrown down, but he said he would only give his opinion to the king, and then only if he knew what it was he wanted to hear.”

“And do any of us know what he wants to hear?”

Montague shakes his head. “The signs are contradictory. On one hand he’s called Parliament, and a meeting of his council. And Cromwell is clearly plotting against the Boleyns. But the king got the Spanish ambassador to bow to her as queen, for the first time ever—so, no, we don’t know.”

“Then we must wait until we do.”

Thoughtfully I strip off my riding gloves and put them over the arm of my chair. I hold my hands to the warmth of the fire. “So what does Cromwell want from us? For he owes me a priory at the moment, and I am not feeling kindly towards him.”

“He wants us to promise that Reginald will not write against him, will cease urging the Pope to act against the king.”

I frown. “Why does he care so much for Reginald’s good opinion?’

“Because Reginald speaks for the Pope. And Cromwell is in living terror and the king is in living terror that the Pope will excommunicate them both, and then nobody will obey their commands. Cromwell needs our support for his own safety,” Montague goes on. “The king says one thing at breakfast and contradicts himself at dinner. Cromwell doesn’t want to go the way of Wolsey. If he pulls down Anne, as Wolsey pulled down Katherine, he wants to know that everyone will advise the king that it is a godly thing.”

“If he pulls down Anne and saves our princess, then we support him,” I say grudgingly. “But he must advise the king to return to obedience to Rome. He must restore the Church. We can’t live in England without our monasteries.”

“Once Anne is gone then the king will make an alliance with Spain and return the Church to the headship of Rome,” Montague predicts.

“And Cromwell will advise this?” I ask skeptically. “He has become a faithful papist all at once?”

“He doesn’t want the bull of excommunication published,” Montague says quietly. “He knows that would ruin the king. He wants us to keep it silent, and pave the way for the king to return to Rome.”

For a moment I have a sense of the joy that comes with having, at last, some stake in the game, some power. Ever since Thomas Cromwell started to advise the king to betray our queen, to destroy our princess, we have been shouting against the wind. Now it seems the weather is changing.

“He has to have our friendship against the Boleyns,” Montague says. “And the Seymours want us to support Jane.”

“Is she the king’s new sweetheart?” I ask. “Do they really think he will marry her?”

“She must be soothing, after Anne,” Montague points out.

“And is it love again?”

He nods. “He is besotted with her. He thinks she is a quiet country girl, shy, ignorant. He thinks she has no interest in matters that concern men. He looks at her family and thinks she will be fertile.”

The young woman has five brothers. “But he cannot think that she is the finest woman at court,” I object. “He has always wanted the very best. He cannot think that Jane outshines all the others.”

“No, he’s changed. She is not the best—not by a long way—but she admires him much more than anyone else,” Montague says. “That’s his new benchmark. He likes the way she looks at him.”

“How does she look at him?”

“She’s awestruck.”

I take this in. I can see that for the king, shaken by his own mortality after hours of unconsciousness, facing the prospect of his own death without a male heir, the adoration of a pure country girl might be a relief. “And so?”

“I dine with Cromwell and Henry Courtenay tonight. Shall I tell him that we will join with them against Anne?”

I remember the huge newly accreted power of the Boleyns and the vast wealth of the Howards and I think that, even so, we can face them down. “Yes,” I say. “But tell him that our price for this is the restoration of the princess and the abbeys. We will keep the excommunication secret, but the king must return to Rome.”

Montague comes back from his dinner with Cromwell with his feet weaving under him, so drunk that he can hardly stand. I have gone to bed as he raps on my door and asks may he come in, and when I open the door, he stands at the threshold and says that he won’t intrude.

“Son!” I say, smiling. “You’re drunk as a stable boy.”

“Thomas Cromwell has a head of iron,” he says regretfully.

“I hope you said nothing more than we agreed.”

Montague leans against the doorjamb and sighs heavily. A warm gust of ale, wine, and I think brandy, for Cromwell has exotic tastes, blows gently into my face. “Go to bed,” I say. “You will be sick as a dog in the morning.”

He shakes his head in wonderment. “He has a head of iron,” he repeats. “A head of iron and a heart like an anvil. You know what he is doing?”

“No.”

“He is setting her own uncle, her own uncle, Thomas Howard, to gather evidence against her. Thomas Howard is going to find evidence against the marriage. He is going to ask for witnesses against his niece.”

“Men of iron with hearts of stone. And the Princess Mary?”

Owlishly, Montague nods at me. “I don’t forget your love of her, I never forget, Lady Mother. I raised it at once. I reminded him at once.”

“And what did he say?” I ask, curbing my impatience to dunk my drunken son’s head in a bucket of icy water.

“He said that she will get a proper household, and be honored in her new house. She will be declared legitimate. She will be restored. She will come to court, Queen Jane will be her friend.”

I nearly choke at the new name. “Queen Jane?”

He nods. “ ’Mazing, isn’t it?”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Cromwell is certain.”

I reach up to him, ignoring the odor of wine and brandy and mulled ale. I pat his cheek, as he beams at me. “Well done. That’s good,” I say. “Perhaps this will end well. And this is not just Cromwell casting bread on the waters? This is the king’s will?”

“Cromwell only ever does the king’s will,” Montague says confidently. “You can be sure of that. And now the king wants the princess restored and the Boleyn woman gone.”

“Amen,” I say, and gently push Montague out of the door of my privy chamber, where his men are waiting for him. “Put him to bed,” I say. “And leave him to sleep in the morning.”

MANOR OF THE ROSE, ST. LAWRENCE POUNTNEY, LONDON, APRIL 1536

Hugging this secret, and suddenly filled with hope, I go to visit my cousin Gertrude Courtenay at her house in St. Lawrence Pountney, London. Her husband, Henry, is at court, preparing for the May Day joust, and Montague must stay with the court too. After the joust they are all going on to a great feast to be held in France, with King Francis as the host. Whatever Cromwell is planning against the Boleyn woman, he is taking his time, and this is no way to further the friendship with Spain or the return to Rome. Since I don’t trust Thomas Cromwell any more than I would trust any mercenary soldier from the stews of Putney, I think it very likely that he is playing both sides at once, Boleyn and France against my Princess Mary and Spain, until he can be sure which side will win.

Cousin Gertrude is bursting with gossip. She gets hold of me the moment I am off my horse and walking into the hall. “Come,” she says. “Come into the garden, I want to talk to you and we can’t be overheard.”

Laughing, I follow her. “What is it that’s so urgent?”

As soon as she turns to speak my laughter dies, she looks so serious. “Gertrude?”

“The king spoke in private to my husband,” she says. “I did not dare write it to you. He spoke to him after the concubine lost her child. He said that now he sees that God will not give him a son with her.”

“I know,” I say. “I heard it too. Even in the country I heard it. Everyone at court must know, and since everyone knows, it can only be that the king and Cromwell must want everyone to know.”

“You won’t have heard this: he says that she seduced him with witchcraft, and that this is why they will never have a son together.”

I am stunned. “Witchcraft?” I drop my voice to repeat the dangerous word. To accuse a woman of witchcraft is tantamount to sentencing her to death, for what woman can prove that a disaster was not of her making? If someone says that they have been overlooked or bewitched, how can one prove that it was not so? If a king says that he has been bewitched, who is going to tell him that he is mistaken?

“God save her! What did my cousin Henry say?”

“He said nothing. He was too amazed to speak. Besides, what could he say? We all thought she had driven him mad, we all thought that she was driving everyone mad, he was clearly besotted, he was beside himself, who’s to say that it wasn’t witchcraft?”

“Because we saw her play him like a fish,” I say irritably. “There was no mystery, there was no magic. Don’t you see Jane Seymour being advised on the same game? Coming forward, going back, half seduced and then withdrawing? Haven’t we seen the king madly in love with half a dozen women? It’s not magic, it’s what any slut does if she has her wits about her. The difference with Boleyn was that she was quicker-witted than all the others, she had a family who backed her—and the queen, God bless her, was getting old and could have no more children.”

“Yes.” Gertrude steadies herself. “Yes, you’re right. But there again, if the king thinks he was enchanted, and the king thinks she was a witch, and the king thinks that this explains her miscarriages—then that’s all that matters.”

“And what matters next is what he will do about it,” I say.

“He’ll put her aside,” Gertrude says triumphantly. “He will blame her for everything, and put her aside. And we and Cromwell and all our affinity will help him to do it.”

“How?” I say. “For this is the very thing that Montague is working on with Cromwell, and Carew and Seymour.”

She beams at me. “Not just them,” she points out. “Dozens of others. And we don’t even have to do it. That devil Cromwell will do it for us.”

I stay to dine with Gertrude and I would stay longer but one of Montague’s men comes for me in the afternoon and asks me will I return to L’Erber.

“What’s happened?” Gertrude comes with me to the stable yard, where my horse is saddled and ready.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“But we can be in no danger?” she confirms, thinking of our secret toast at dinner that Anne will fall and the king come to his senses and Princess Mary be named as his one true heir.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “Montague would have warned me. I think he has work for me to do. Perhaps we are on the winning side, at last.”

L’ERBER, LONDON, MAY 1536

Montague strides up and down our private chapel as if he wishes he were running to the coast to the helpful ship’s master at Grays and sailing off to his brother Reginald.

“He’s gone mad,” he says in a low whisper. “I really think he has gone mad now. No one is safe, nobody knows what he is going to do next.”

I am stunned by this sudden reverse. I put my cape to one side and I take my son’s hands in my own. “Be calm. Tell me.”

“Did you hear nothing in the streets?”

“Nothing. A few people cheered for me as I went by, but they were mostly quiet . . .”

“Because it is beyond belief!” He claps his hand over his mouth and looks around. There is no one in the chapel but us, the candle flames bob up and down, there is no quietly closing door to make them flicker. We are alone.

Montague turns on his heel and drops on his knees before me. I see that he is white and shaking, deeply distressed. “He has arrested Anne Boleyn for adultery,” he breathes. “And men of her court with her, for keeping her secrets. We still don’t know how many. We still don’t know who.”

“ ‘How many’?” I repeat incredulously. “What do you mean, ‘how many’?”

He throws out his hands. “I know! Why would he charge more than one man, even if she had bedded dozens? Why would he let such a thing be known? And what an extraordinary lie for him to tell when he can just put her aside without a word! They’ve arrested Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Norris, but also the lad who sings in her chamber, and her own brother.” He looks at me. “You know him! What is he thinking? Why would he do this?”

“Wait,” I say. “I don’t understand.”

I take the priest’s chair and I sink down, as my knees go weak underneath me. I think, I am getting too old for this, I am not quick enough to leap to suspicion or conclusions. Henry the king goes too fast for me in a way that Henry the prince never did. For Henry the prince was quick and clever, but Henry the king is as fast and as cunning as a madman: wildly decisive.

Slowly, Montague repeats the names to me, adds the names of a couple more men who seem to be missing from court.

“Cromwell is saying that she gave birth to a monster,” my son says. “As if that proves everything.”

“A monster?” I repeat stupidly.

“Not a stillborn child. Some sort of reptile.”

I look at my son in blank horror. “My God, how Thomas Cromwell does find sin and sodomy everywhere he looks! In my own priory, in the queen’s bedroom! What a mind that man has. What voice does he hear in his prayers?”

“It’s the king’s mind that matters.” Montague puts his hands on my knees and looks up at me as if I was still his all-powerful mother and could make this better. “Cromwell only does what the king says that he wants. He’s going to try her for adultery.”

“He’s going to try her for adultery? His own wife?”

“God help me, I’m going to be on the jury.”

“You’re on the jury?”

“We agreed!” he leaps to his feet and bellows. “All of us who met with Cromwell, who said that we would help him get the marriage annulled, are summoned to judge. We thought we were talking about releasing the king from his false marriage vows. We thought we would inquire into the validity of the marriage and find it wanting. Not this! Not this!”

“He’s trying the marriage? He will annul it?” I ask. “Like he tried to do with the queen?”

“No! No! No! Don’t you hear me? He’s not trying the marriage, he’s putting the woman on trial. He’s going to try her for adultery. And her brother, and some other men, God knows who, God knows how many. God knows if they are even our friends or our cousins. Surely only God knows why!”

“Any of us?” I demand urgently. “Not any of our family or those who are working with us? None of the princess’s supporters?”

“No. Not as far as I know. Not arrested yet. That’s what’s so strange. All those who are missing are those of the Boleyn party who are in and out of her rooms all day.” Montague makes a little face. “You know the ones. Norris, Brereton . . .”

“Men that Cromwell doesn’t like,” I remark. “But why the lute boy?”

“I don’t know!” Montague rubs his face with his hands. “They took him first. Perhaps because Cromwell can torture him till he confesses? Cromwell can torture him till he names others? Till he gives the names that Cromwell wants?”

“Torture?” I repeat. “Torture him? The king is using torture? Against a boy? The little musician?”

Montague looks at me as if the country we know and love, our heritage, is tumbling to hell under our feet. “And I have agreed to be on the jury,” he says.

Not just my son Montague but twenty-five other peers of the realm have to sit in judgment on the woman whom they called queen. The panel is chaired by her uncle, grim-faced at the fall of the woman whom he pushed onto the throne, who became the queen whom he hated. Near him is her former lover, Henry Percy, trembling with ague, muttering that he is too sick to attend, that he should not be forced to attend.

All the lords of my family are there. A good quarter of the jury are of our affinity or party, who support the Princess Mary and have hated the Boleyn woman ever since she usurped the throne. For us, though the accounts of kissing and seduction are shocking enough, the accusation that she poisoned the queen and was planning to poison the princess is a bitter confirmation of our worst fears. The rest of the panel are Henry’s men who can be relied on to hate or love as he commands. She made no friends while she was queen, no one says one word in her defense. There is no possibility of justice for her, as they study the evidence that Thomas Cromwell has so persuasively prepared.

Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, who attended the queen’s funeral with me at Peterborough, has turned against her friend Anne and provides a report of flirtations and worse in the queen’s bedchamber. Someone speaks of something that someone said on their deathbed. It is a mess of petty gossip and grotesque scandal.

Montague comes home, his face dark and angry. “The shame of it,” he says shortly. “The king says that he believes that up to a hundred men have had her. The disgrace.”

I hand him a glass of mulled ale, while I watch him. “Did you say ‘guilty’?” I ask him.

“I did,” he says. “The evidence was inarguable. Lord Cromwell had every detail that one might question. For some reason, which is beyond me, he allowed George Boleyn himself to tell the court out loud that the king was incapable of fathering a child. He announced the king’s impotency.”

“Did they prove that she murdered our queen?”

“They accused her of it. Seems that’s enough.”

“Will he imprison her? Or send her to a nunnery?”

Montague turns to me and his face is filled with a dark pity. “No. He’s going to kill her.”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1536

I leave London. I cannot bear to hear the speculation and the gossip, the constant retelling of the obscene details of the trial, the unending wondering what will happen next. Even the people who have hated the Boleyn woman cannot understand why the king does not call his marriage invalid, name his daughter Elizabeth a bastard, and put the mother away in some distant cold castle where she can die of neglect.

Some of this is done: the marriage is annulled, the child Elizabeth declared a bastard. And yet still the woman is kept in the Tower and the plans for an execution go on.

I am glad to be away from the city but I cannot put the woman in the Tower out of my mind. In the closed and derelict priory I go into the cold chapel and kneel on the stone floor facing east, though the beautiful cross and altar silverware have been taken away. I find myself praying to an empty altar for the woman whom I have hated, whose agent stole my holy things.

There is no precedent for the execution of a Queen of England. It is not possible for a queen to be beheaded. No woman has ever walked from the Tower to the little patch of grass before the chapel to her death. I cannot imagine it. I cannot bear to imagine it. And I cannot believe that Henry Tudor, the prince whom I knew, could turn against a woman he had loved like this. He is a king whose courtly lovemaking is a byword at his court. He cannot be brutal; it is always love, true love, for Henry. Surely, he cannot sentence his wife, and the mother of his child, to death. I know that he turned against his own good queen, that he sent her away and neglected her. But it is a different thing, a different thing altogether, to ride away from a disappointing woman and ignore her, than to change overnight and command a lover’s death.

I pray for Anne, but I find my thoughts turning again and again to the king. I think he must be in a fury of jealous rage, shamed at what men are saying about him, exposed by the spiteful wit of the Boleyns, feeling his age, feeling the good looks of his youth blurred by the fatness of his face. Every day he must look in his mirror and see the young, handsome prince disappearing behind the bloated face of an old, laughable king, the golden child becoming the Moldwarp. Everyone adored Henry when he was a young king; he cannot understand that his court, the wife whom he raised from nothing, could have turned against him and—worse—laughed at him as a fat old cuckold.

But I am mistaken in this. While I think of the sensitive man recoiling with shame, raging at the loss of the woman for whom he destroyed so much, Henry is repairing his pride, courting the Seymour girl. He is not looking in the mirror and mourning his youth. He is going upriver in his barge with lute players twanging away, to dine with her every night. He is sending her little gifts and planning their future as if they are a bride and groom betrothed in May. He is not mourning his youth, he is reclaiming it; and just a few days after the cannon shot from the Tower tells all of London that the king has committed one of the worst crimes a man can do—killed his wife—the king marries again and we have a new queen: Jane.

“The Spanish ambassador told me that Jane will bring the princess to court, and see her honored,” Geoffrey tells me. We are walking in the fields towards Home Farm, looking at the greening crop. Somewhere among the white hawthorn of the hedgerow there is a blackbird singing defiance to the world, lilting notes, filled with hope.

“Really?”

Geoffrey is beaming. “Our enemy is dead, and we have survived. The king himself called Henry Fitzroy to him, took him in his arms, and said that the Boleyn woman would have killed him and our princess, and that he was lucky to still have them.”

“He’ll send for the princess?”

“As soon as Jane is proclaimed queen, and sets up her household. Our princess will live with her new mother, the queen—within days.”

I tuck my hand in the crook of my favorite son’s arm and rest my head briefly on his shoulder. “You know, in a life of such reverses, I find I am almost surprised to still be here. I am very surprised to see it all coming right again.”

He pats my hand. “Who knows? You might yet see your beloved princess crowned.”

“Shh, shh,” I say, though the fields are empty but for a distant laborer digging out a blocked ditch. It is now treason even to speak of the death of the king. Every day Cromwell makes a new law to protect the king’s reputation.

I can hear the sound of hooves on the road and we turn back to the house. I see Montague’s standard rippling above the hedgerows and when we walk into the stable yard he is dismounting from his horse. He comes quickly towards the two of us, smiling, drops to his knee for my blessing, and then rises. “I have news from Greenwich,” he says. “Good news.”

“The princess is to return to court?” Geoffrey guesses. “Didn’t I say so?”

“Even better than that,” Montague says. He turns to me. “It is you who are invited to return to court,” he says. “Lady Mother, I am here with the king’s own invitation. The exile is over, you are to return.”

I don’t know what to say. I look at his smiling face, and I struggle for words. “A restoration?”

“A complete restoration. It will be as it was before. The princess in her palace, you at her side.”

“God be praised,” Geoffrey exclaims. “You will command Princess Mary’s household again, just as you used to do. You will be where you should be, where we all should be, at court, and places and fees will come your way again, will come to all of us.”

“In debt, Geoffrey?” Montague asks with a slight mocking smile.

“I doubt you could manage on a small estate, constantly going to law with the neighbors,” Geoffrey says irritably. “All I want is for us to have our own again. Our Lady Mother should be at the head of the court, and we should all be there too. We are Plantagenets; we were born to rule, the least we can do is advise.”

“And I will care for the princess,” I say—the only thing that matters to me.

“Lady Governess to the princess again.” Montague takes my hand and smiles at me. “Congratulations.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1536

I return to London with Montague, his standard going before us, the white rose over my head, his guards beautifully mounted and dressed around me, and almost as soon as we are in the city, heading for our barge at the river, I see that people are pointing and running ahead of us, and starting to cheer. By the time we get close to the river there are thousands of people in the streets, shouting my name, shouting blessings, asking for the princess, and finally calling out “À Warwick! À Warwick!”.

“That’s enough.” Montague nods to one of the guards who rides into the crowd, crushing people with his big horse, and takes the flat of his sword and delivers a thudding blow to the young loyalist.

“Montague!” I say, shocked. “He was just cheering for us.”

“He can’t,” Montague says grimly. “You’re back at court, Lady Mother, and we are restored, but it’s not all just as it was. The king is not as he was. I think he will never be the same again.”

“I thought he was so happy with Jane Seymour?” I ask. “I thought she was the only woman he has ever loved?”

Montague hides a grim smile at my sarcasm. “He’s happy with her,” he says cautiously. “But he’s not so much in love that he can bear even one word of criticism, one word of doubt. And someone shouting for you, or for the princess, or for the Church, is the sort of criticism that he cannot bear to hear.”

My rooms at court are the ones I had before, so long ago, when I was here as lady-in-waiting to Katherine and she was a queen of only twenty-three years old, pulled out of poverty and despair by a seventeen-year-old king, and we thought that nothing would ever go wrong again.

I go to pay my respects to the new queen in her rooms, and make my curtsey to Jane Seymour, a girl I first met as a shy, rather incompetent maid-in-waiting to Katherine. From her blanched hauteur, I assume that she remembers being scolded by me for clumsiness, and I make sure I curtsey low, and stay down until she invites me to rise.

I show not the slightest hint of my amusement as I survey her room and her ladies. Every wooden boss that used to bear a falcon or a bold A has been lathed clean and sanded down, and now there is a J or a rising phoenix. Her unctuous motto, “Bound to Obey and Serve,” is being embroidered by her ladies on a banner of Tudor green. They greet me pleasantly. Some of them are old friends. Elizabeth Darrell served Katherine with me, Frances Grey’s half sister Mary Brandon is here and, most surprisingly of all, Jane Boleyn, the widow of George Boleyn, who provided fatal evidence against her own husband and her sister-in-law Anne. She seems to have recovered with remarkable swiftness from her grief and the disaster in her family, and she curtseys to me very politely.

Queen Jane’s court amazes me. To appoint Jane Boleyn as your lady-in-waiting is to knowingly welcome a spy who will stoop to anything. Surely, she must know that since Jane Boleyn sent her own husband and sister-in-law to the gallows she will hardly flinch from entrapping a stranger. But then I understand. These are not ladies of Jane’s choosing, these are women placed here by their kinsmen to scoop up patronage and fees and to catch the king’s eye; these are vile place servers inserted here for their reward. This is not an English queen’s court in any sense that I would understand it. This is a rat pit.

I am allowed to write to the princess, though I may not visit her yet. I am patient under this ban, certain that the king will bring her to court. Queen Jane speaks kindly of her, and asks my advice about sending her new clothes and a riding cape. Together we choose a new gown and some sleeves of deep red velvet that I know will suit her, and send them by royal messenger north, only thirty miles to Hunsdon, where she is preparing to come to court.

I write to ask of her health, of her happiness. I write telling her that I will see her soon, that we will be happy together again, that I hope the king will let me run her household and it will be as it was before. I say that the court is calm and merry again, and that she will find in Jane a queen and a friend. I don’t remark that they have much in common, being only eight years apart in age, except of course that Mary was born and bred a princess and Jane the uninteresting daughter of a country knight, and I wait for a reply.

Dearest Lady Margaret,

I am so sorry, and so sad, that I cannot come to court and be with you again. I have had the misfortune to offend my father the king, and though I would do anything to obey and honor him, I cannot disobey and dishonor my sainted mother or my God. Pray for me.

Mary

I don’t understand this at all, so I go at once to the king’s rooms to find Montague. He is playing cards with one of the Seymour brothers, who are now great men, and I wait for the game to finish and laugh at Montague’s carefully judged losses. Henry Seymour scoops up his winnings, bows to me, and strolls away down the gallery.

“What has happened with the princess?” I ask tersely, my hands gripping her letter, hidden deep in my pocket.

“The king won’t bring her to court until she takes the oath,” he says shortly. “He sent Norfolk to her, who cursed her to her face and called her a traitor.”

I shake my head in bewilderment. “Why? Why would the king insist that she take the oath now? Queen Katherine is dead, Anne is dead, Elizabeth declared a bastard, he has a new queen and—please God—she will give him a son and heir. Why would he insist that she take the oath now? What’s the point of it?”

Montague turns away from my anxious face and takes a few steps. “I don’t know,” he says simply. “It makes no sense. I thought that when the Boleyn woman was dead all our troubles would be over. I thought that the king would reconcile with Rome. I don’t see why he would persist. Especially, I don’t see why he would persist against his daughter. You wouldn’t speak to a dog the way that Norfolk spoke to her.”

I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a cry. “He threatened her?”

“He said that if she were his daughter he would knock her head against the wall till it was as soft as a baked apple.”

“No!” I cannot believe that even Thomas Howard would dare to speak to a princess like this. I cannot believe that any father would allow such a man to threaten his daughter with violence. “My God, Montague, what are we going to do?”

My son looks like a man being driven gradually, and inexorably, towards danger, a warhorse going reluctantly towards the sound of the cannons. “I thought that our troubles were over, but they have begun anew,” he says slowly. “I think we have to get her away. Queen Jane speaks for her, even Cromwell advises that she should come to court, but the king shouted at Jane that the princess should be tried for treason, and that Jane was a fool to be her advocate. I think that the king has turned against her, I think he has decided that she is his enemy. Her very presence, even at a distance, is a reproach to him. He can’t see her and forget how he treated her mother. He can’t think of her and pretend there was no Anne. He can’t pretend that he is not old enough to have fathered her. He can’t bear the thought of her defiance. We have to get her away. I don’t think she’s safe in his kingdom.”

Geoffrey rides once again to the secretive riverside village of Grays and reports back that the boatman is ready to leave at our bidding, and he remains loyal to the princess. Our kinsman in Calais, Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, writes to me and says that he can receive the consignment of goods that I am preparing to send him, and that a message to his steward in London will warn him when it is due to be delivered. Montague brings half a dozen strong riding horses to court, saying that he is training them for the hunting season. Our cousin Henry Courtenay pays a stable boy at Hunsdon for news, and understands that the princess is now allowed to walk in the garden every morning, for her health.

I am following Queen Jane to chapel before breakfast when I see Montague in the king’s train. He comes over to me, kneels for my blessing, and when my hand is on his head he whispers: “Norfolk has denounced his half brother to the king and Tom is arrested for treason.”

I keep the shock from my face as Montague rises and gives me his arm. “Come,” I say quickly.

“No.” He leads me towards the chapel and bows to the queen and steps back. “Do nothing out of the ordinary,” he reminds me.

While the priest serves Mass, his back to the congregation, the quiet mutter of Latin drifting over us, I find I am gripping my rosary beads and telling them over and over. It surely isn’t possible that a Howard has done anything against the king. Tom Howard has risen with his family by doing anything the king asked of them. There are no more loyal, bull-necked henchmen in the country. I can barely hear the Mass, I cannot say a prayer. I glance at the queen’s bowed head and I wonder if she knows.

It is not till the court goes to breakfast that I can walk beside Montague and appear to be talking quietly together, a mother and her son. “What’s Tommy Howard done?”

“He’s seduced the Scottish queen’s daughter, your former ward: Lady Margaret Douglas. They married in secret at Easter.”

“Lady Margaret!” I exclaim. I have rarely seen her since she left my charge to serve Anne Boleyn. For a moment all I can feel is relief that the princess is not threatened by fresh trouble, but then I think of the pretty girl who was in my keeping, but lost at court. “She would never have done anything which did not befit a princess,” I say fiercely. “She was our princess’s lady-in-waiting, and she is the daughter of Margaret Tudor. Don’t tell me that she has made a secret marriage to a commoner without permission!”

“I do tell you that,” Montague says flatly.

“Married to Tom Howard? In secret? How did the king find out?”

“Everyone is saying that the duke told him. Would Norfolk betray his own half brother?”

“Yes,” I say instantly. “Because he can’t risk having the king think that there was a plot to marry another royal heir into the Howard family. He’s got Henry Fitzroy in his family already; what does it look like if the family traps another Tudor heir?”

“To the king, it looks like they are readying to usurp the throne,” Montague says grimly.

“Better for us that he suspects the Howards than Plantagenets,” I remark. “But what’s going to happen to Lady Margaret? Is the king very angry?”

“He’s furious. Worse than I would have expected. And angry with Henry Fitzroy’s wife, Mary Howard, who helped them to meet.”

“How could they be so foolish?” I shake my head. “Lady Margaret knows that anyone courting her is putting himself close to the throne. These days, nobody knows how close. If Princess Elizabeth is declared a bastard and Princess Mary is not restored, then Lady Margaret is third in line for the throne, after her mother and brother.”

“She knows it now,” Montague says. “The king says that the Duke of Norfolk has put traitorous division into the realm.”

“He used the word traitor?”

“He did.”

“But wait,” I say. “Wait, Montague, let me think.” I take a few steps away from him, and then I come back. “Think for a moment. Why didn’t the Duke of Norfolk snap her up? As you say, if the king denies the princesses then Lady Margaret is in line for the throne. Why didn’t Norfolk take advantage of this secret marriage to get the heir to the throne into his family? Why didn’t he encourage it and keep it secret?”

Montague is about to answer as I lay out the plot for him. “Norfolk must be absolutely certain that the king is going to name Henry Fitzroy as his heir—and so make Mary Howard his daughter as Queen of England. Otherwise, he’d have supported the marriage and kept it secret as another useful royal connection.”

“Dangerous words,” Montague says so quietly that I can hardly hear him.

“Norfolk would never have betrayed his brother for anything less than a better chance at the throne—his daughter, married to the king’s heir,” I breathe. “Norfolk would be looking for the greatest opportunity for himself and his family. He knows that is not Lady Margaret. He must be absolutely sure that Henry Fitzroy will be named as heir.”

“And so?” Montague says. “What does this mean for us?”

I can feel myself grow cold as I realize. “It means that you are right and we must get the princess out of the country,” I say. “The king is never going to restore her. And she stands in his way. She is in danger if she stands in his way. Anyone who obstructs him is always in danger.”

I am with the young Queen Jane in her presence chamber, waiting demurely beside her throne as hundreds of people make their bow to her and ask for one favor or another. Jane looks rather blank at this sudden explosion of interest in her health and well-being. Everyone offers a small gift that she takes and then hands to one of her ladies, who puts it on a table behind her. Every now and then she glances at me, to see that I am watching and approving the conduct of her ladies and the decorum of her room. Gently, I nod. Despite the expenses of the princess’s household I am still the wealthiest woman at court in my own right, with the greatest title in my own right, and by far the oldest. I am sixty-two years old and Jane is the sixth queen whom I have seen on this throne. She is right to glance at me with her shy pale blue gaze and confirm that she is doing everything correctly.

She has started her reign with a terrible error. Lady Margaret Douglas should never have been allowed to meet in secret with Tom Howard. Mary Howard, the young duchess married to Henry Fitzroy, should never have been allowed to encourage them. Queen Jane, stepping up to a throne which was still warm from the frightened sweat of the last incumbent, dazzled by her own rise, did not watch the behavior of her new court, did not know what was happening. But now Tom is in the Tower charged with treason and Lady Margaret is confined to her rooms and the king is furious with everyone.

“No, she’s arrested, she’s in the Tower too,” Jane Boleyn tells me cheerfully.

I feel the familiar plummet of my heart at the thought of the Tower. “Lady Margaret? On what charge?”

“Treason.”

That word, from Jane Boleyn, is like a sentence of death.

“How can she be charged with treason when all she did was marry a young man for love?” I ask reasonably. “Folly, yes. Disobedience, yes. And of course the king is offended. Rightly so. But how is it treason?”

Jane Boleyn lowers her eyes. “It’s treason if the king says it is so,” she states. “And he says they are guilty. And the punishment is death.”

I am badly shaken. If the king can accuse his beloved niece of treason and put her in the Tower under a sentence of death, he can certainly charge his daughter too. Especially when he calls her his bastard daughter and sends his worst men to threaten her with violence. I am going to the king’s rooms to confer with Montague when I hear the tramp of soldiers’ feet behind me.

For a moment I think I will faint with fear, and I flinch back against the wall and feel the cold stone, cold as a cell in the Tower, against my back. I wait, my heart pounding as they go by, two dozen yeomen of the guard in the bright Tudor livery, marching in step through the corridors of Greenwich Palace heading to the king’s presence chamber.

As soon as they are past me, I am afraid for Montague. I breathe: “My son,” and I go quickly behind the soldiers as they tramp up the stairs to the king’s rooms where the great door to the presence chamber swings open and they go in, two abreast, menacingly strong.

The room is crowded but the king is not there. The throne is empty; he is inside, in his privy chamber, the door closed on his court. He will not witness the arrest. If there are cries and weeping, he will not be disturbed. As I look round the busy room, I see with relief that Montague is not here either; he is probably inside with the king.

The soldiers are not here for my son. Instead, the officer walks confidently to Sir Anthony Browne, the king’s favorite, his trusted Master of Horse, and asks him, politely enough, to come with them. Anthony gets to his feet from where he has been lounging at the window, smiles like the courtier he is, and asks negligently: “Why, whatever is the charge?”

“Treason,” comes the quiet reply, and everyone who is near to Anthony seems to melt away.

The officer looks around a court that is suddenly stunned into shocked silence. “Sir Francis Bryan!” he calls.

“Here,” Sir Francis says. He steps forward, and the men he was with slide back, as if they do not know him now, as if they have never known him. He smiles, his black eye patch looking blindly around the court and seeing no friends. “How may I be of service to you, Officer? Do you need my assistance?”

“You may come with me,” the officer says with a sort of grim humor. “For you are under arrest also.”

“I?” Francis Bryan says, cousin to this queen, cousin to the former queen, a man secure in royal favor after years of friendship. “For what? On what possible charge?”

“Treason,” the man says for the second time. “Treason.”

I watch the two men go out with the guard, and I find the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, at my elbow. “What can they possibly have done?” I ask. Bryan in particular has survived a thousand dangers, having been exiled from court at least twice and returned unscathed each time.

“I’m glad that you don’t know,” comes the threatening reply. “They have been conspiring with Lady Mary, the king’s bastard daughter. They have been plotting to get her out of Hunsdon and, by ship, away to Flanders. I would have them hanged for it. I would see her hanged for it.”

I go back to the queen’s rooms, fear snapping at my heels all the way. The ladies ask me what is happening and I tell them I have seen the arrest of two of the king’s firmest friends. I don’t tell them what the Duke of Norfolk said. I am too afraid to say the words. Lady Woods tells me that my kinsman Henry Courtenay has been dismissed from the Privy Council under suspicion of plotting for the princess. I give as good a performance as I can manage of a woman shocked by extraordinary news.

“Don’t you write to Lady Mary?” Lady Woods says. “Don’t you stay in touch with her? Your former charge? Though everyone knows that you love her and came back to court to serve her?”

“I write to her only through Lord Cromwell,” I say. “I have an affection for her, of course. I write with the queen.”

“But you don’t encourage her?”

I glance across the room. Jane Boleyn is holding herself very still over her sewing, quite as if she is not thinking about her sewing at all. “Of course not,” I say. “I took the oath like everyone else.”

“Not quite everyone,” Jane volunteers, looking up from her work. “Your son Reginald left England without swearing it.”

“My son Reginald is preparing a report for the king on the marriage of Queen Katherine and the governance of the Church of England,” I say firmly. “The king himself has commissioned it, and Reginald is going to reply. He is a scholar for the king, as he was raised to be. He is working for him. His loyalty cannot be questioned, and nor can mine.”

“Oh, of course,” Jane says with a little smile, bending her head to her work. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything other.”

I see Montague at dinner but I cannot easily speak with him until the tables are cleared away and the music starts for dancing. The king seems to be happy as he watches Jane dance with her ladies, and then, when they beg him, he rises to his feet and invites one of the pretty new girls to dance with him.

I find I am watching him almost as if he were a stranger. He is very unlike the prince whom we all loved so much, when his mother was alive and he was a second son, a long, long time ago, forty years ago. He has grown very broad; his legs which were so strong and supple are curved now, the calf muscles bulge under a straining blue garter. His belly is rounded under the jacket, but the jacket is so padded and thickly stitched that he looks grand rather than fat. His shoulders are wide as any great sportsman’s under the buckram wadding and the frame of this and the cloth overlaid makes him so big that he can only pass through a double door when it is fully opened. His rich mop of ginger curls is thinning and though he has it carefully combed and curled, still the scalp shines palely through. His beard, starting to be flecked with gray, is growing sparse and curly. Katherine would never let him wear a beard, she complained that it scratched her face. This queen can deny him nothing, and would not dare complain.

And his face—his face, flushed now with his awkward dancing, beaming at the young woman peeping up at him, as if she can think of no greater delight than a man old enough to be her father squeezing her hand and holding her close when the dance allows them to come together—it is his face that makes me hesitate.

He doesn’t look like Elizabeth’s son anymore. The clean beauty of her family profile, our family profile, is smudged by the fat of his cheeks, of his chin. Her defined features are blurred in the collapsing face of her darling Prince Harry. His eyes look smaller in his puffed cheeks, his rosebud mouth is now pursed so often in disapproval that he looks mean. He is still a handsome man, this is still a handsome face, but the expression is not handsome. He looks petty, he looks self-indulgent. Not his mother, not any of our line were ever petty. They were kings and queens on a grand scale; this, their descendant, though he dresses so richly, though he presents himself as such a great power, is—under the padding, under the fat—a little man, with the spite and vindictiveness of a little man. Our trouble, the court’s trouble, the country’s trouble, is that we have given this small-minded bully the power of the Pope and the army of the king.

“You look very grave, Lady Pole,” Nicholas Carew remarks to me.

At once I move my gaze from the king and smile. “I was miles away,” I say.

“Indeed, I know of one that I wish was miles away tonight,” he says quietly.

“Oh, do you?”

“I can help you with saving her,” he says earnestly.

“We can’t talk of this now, not here,” I say. “Not after today.”

He nods. “I’ll come to your rooms after breakfast tomorrow, if I may.”

I wait but he doesn’t come. I can’t be seen to be looking for him, so I go out riding with the ladies of the queen’s court, and when we meet with the gentleman for a picnic by the river, I sit at the ladies’ table and barely glance towards the court. I can see at once that he’s not there.

At once I look for Montague. The king is at the top table, Queen Jane beside him. He is noisy, laughing, calling for more wine and praising the chef; a huge pastry dish is before him, and he is eating the meat from the inside with the long golden serving spoon, proffering it to Jane, dribbling gravy on her fine gown. I see in a moment that Montague is missing. He is not at the top table, nor with the other gentlemen of the privy chamber. I can feel the sweat prick under my arms and chill. I look at the dozen or so young men and I think that more than Montague and Carew are missing, but I cannot at once see who is absent. It reminds me of the time once before when I looked for Montague, and Thomas More told me that he was exiled from court. Now Thomas More has gone forever, and once again, I don’t know if my son is safe.

“You’re looking for your son.” Jane Boleyn, seated opposite me, spears a slice of roasted meat on her fork and nibbles the end of it, dainty as a French princess.

“Yes, I expected him to be here.”

“You need not worry. His horse went lame and he went back,” Jane volunteers. “I don’t think he has been taken with the others.”

I look at her slight, teasing smile. “What others?” I ask. “What are you saying?”

Her dark eyes are limpid. “Why, Thomas Cheyney and John Russell have been taken for questioning. Lord Cromwell believes that they have been plotting to encourage Lady Mary to defy her father.”

“That’s not possible,” I say coldly. “They are loyal servants to the king, and what you are describing would be treason.”

She looks directly at me, a mischievous twinkle in her beautiful dark eyes. “I suppose it would. And anyway, there is worse.”

“What can be worse than this, Lady Rochford?”

“Nicholas Carew has been arrested. Would you have thought him a traitor?”

“I don’t know,” I say stupidly.

“And, your friend who served Lady Mary in your household, the wife of the chamberlain, your friend Lady Anne Hussey! She has been arrested for plotting and been taken to the Tower. I fear that they are going to arrest everyone who prided themselves on being Lady Mary’s friend. I pray that no one suspects you.”

“I thank you for your prayers,” I say. “I hope I never need them.”

Montague comes to my rooms before dinner that evening, and I go towards him and lean my forehead against his shoulder. “Hold me,” I say.

He is always shy with me. Geoffrey will take me in a great hug, but Montague is always more reticent. “Hold me,” I say again. “I was very afraid today.”

“We’re safe so far. No one has betrayed us and no one doubts your loyalty to the king. Henry Courtenay is not arrested, just dismissed from the Privy Council under suspicion. William Fitzwilliam with him. Francis Bryan will be released.”

I take my seat.

“We can’t get the princess away now,” Montague says. “Courtenay’s man has been taken, disappeared from the stables. There’s no one with a key to her door, and no one can get her out of the house. Carew had a maid in his pay but we can’t reach her without him. He’s under arrest but I don’t know where. We’ll have to wait.”

“They’ve arrested Anne Hussey.”

“I heard. I don’t know how many of your old household at Richmond are being questioned.”

“God help them. Have you warned Geoffrey?”

“I sent him a message to get in the harvest and keep quiet,” Montague says grimly. “He mustn’t try to see the princess, she’s being watched night and day again. They have broken open the plot like a hatching egg. She has a guard on her door and a maid locked into her chamber with her every night. They don’t even let her walk in the garden.”

“And the Spanish ambassador?”

Montague’s face is grim. “He tells me that he is trying to get a dispensation from the Pope so that she can swear the oath to say that her parents’ marriage was invalid, that she is a bastard, and that the king is head of the Church. Chapuys says that she must swear. She will be arrested if she doesn’t.” He sees my horrified expression. “Arrested and beheaded,” he says. “That’s why Chapuys is telling her that she must swear, buy time, and then we’ll get her away.”

She is only twenty years old. Only twenty years old and her mother has not been buried a year. She is separated from her friends and held under arrest like a sinner, like a criminal. She has nothing but her belief in God to support her, and she is afraid that it is God’s will that she die a martyr for her faith.

A panel of judges, convened to inquire into her treasonous disobedience to the king, struggle briefly with their consciences, and agree to send one more time to Hunsdon where she is now held as a prisoner with no attempt at concealing her disgrace. They prepare a document called “The Lady Mary’s Submission,” and tell her that she must sign it or they will charge her with treason. The charge of treason carries a death sentence and she knows that half a dozen men are held in the Tower accused of trying to rescue her, and that their lives depend on what she does next. She believes that her mother was poisoned by her father’s wife, she believes that her father will have her beheaded if she does not obey him. No one can rescue her, no one can even reach her.

Poor child, poor darling child. She signs the three clauses. First she signs that she accepts her father as King of England and that she will obey all his laws. Then she signs that she recognizes him as supreme head on earth of the Church of England; then she signs the last clause:

I do freely and frankly recognize and acknowledge that the marriage between His Majesty and my mother was by God’s law and Man’s law incestuous and unlawful.

“She signed it?” Geoffrey asks me on a brief visit to London, come to borrow money from me, and horrified at the news.

I nod. “God only knows what it cost her to swear on His holy name that her mother was an incestuous whore. But she signed it, and she accepts that she is Lady Mary and no princess, and a bastard.”

“We should have taken her away long before this!” Geoffrey exclaims furiously. “We should have gone in before the lawyers got there and snatched her away!”

“We couldn’t,” I say. “You know that we couldn’t. We delayed when she was ill, then we delayed because we thought she was safe after the death of Anne, and then the plot was broken wide open. We’re lucky not to be in the Tower with the others as it is.”

Lord Cromwell now puts an act before the houses of Parliament that rules the king shall nominate his own heir. His heir shall be of his choosing, from Jane, or—as it cheerfully declares—any subsequent wife.

“He’s planning to marry again?” Geoffrey demands.

“He’s not ruling it out,” Montague says. “Our princess is denied, and the bastard Elizabeth loses her title. It clearly says that if he has no children with Queen Jane, then he can choose his heir. Now he has three children all declared bastards of his own begetting to choose from: the true princess, the bastard princess, and the bastard duke.”

“Everyone keeps asking who he means to name,” Geoffrey says. “In Parliament, as they were reading the bill, men kept asking me who the king intended as his heir. Someone even asked me if I thought the king would name our cousin Henry Courtenay as heir and restore our family.”

Montague laughs shortly. “Does he destroy his children so that he has to turn to cousins?”

“Does no one think he will get a child from Jane?” I ask. “Does this act show that he is doubting his own potency?”

Ever since Anne Boleyn went to the scaffold for laughing with her brother that the king could not do the act, we are all well aware that it is illegal to say such a thing. I see Montague glance at the closed door and the barred windows.

“No. He’s going to name Fitzroy,” Geoffrey says certainly. “Fitzroy walked before him at the opening of Parliament carrying the king’s cap in full sight of everyone. He could not have been more conspicuous. He’s been given half of poor Henry Norris’s lands and places, and the king is going to set him up at Baynard’s Castle with his wife, Mary Howard.”

“That’s where Henry Tudor stayed when he first came to London,” I point out. “Before his coronation as Henry VII, before he moved to Westminster.”

Geoffrey nods. “It’s a signal to everyone. Princess Mary and the bastard Elizabeth and the bastard Fitzroy are all equal bastards, but Princess Mary is only now released from prison and Elizabeth is a weak baby. Fitzroy is the only one with his own castle and his own lands, and now a palace in the heart of London.”

“The king could still get a son from Jane,” Montague points out. “That’s what he’ll be hoping for. If this marriage is good in the sight of God, why should he not have a son now? She’s a young woman of twenty-eight, from good, fertile stock.”

Geoffrey looks at me as if I know why not. “He’ll not get a live son. He never will. There’s a curse, isn’t there, Lady Mother?”

I say what I always say: “I don’t know.”

“If there ever was such a curse that the king should have no son and heir, then it means nothing because he has Fitzroy,” Montague says irritably. “This talk of curses is a waste of time, for there is the duke, on the brink of being named the king’s heir and displacing the princess, living proof that there is no curse.”

Geoffrey ignores his brother and turns to me. “Was there a curse?”

“I don’t know.”

KING’S PLACE, HACKNEY, LONDON, JUNE 1536

I am almost singing with hope as we ride out through the city walls into the fields and go north and east to the village of Hackney. It’s a summer day, promising good weather and gilded with sunshine, and Geoffrey rides on my right with Montague on my left, and for a moment, between my boys, riding away from London and the looming Tower, I have a moment of intense joy.

As soon as Princess Mary denied her mother and denied her faith the king sent for her and gave her his beautiful hunting lodge, only a few miles from Westminster, and promised her a return to court. She is allowed to see her friends, she is allowed to walk and ride as she wishes; she is free. She sends for me at once, and she is allowed to see me.

“You’ll be shocked when you see her,” Geoffrey warns me. “It’s been more than two years since you saw her last, and she has been ill and very unhappy.”

“We have both been ill and very unhappy,” I say. “She will be beautiful to me. My only regret is that I couldn’t spare her unhappiness.”

“Mine is that we couldn’t get her away,” Geoffrey says grimly.

“Enough of that.” Montague cuts him short. “Those days are over, thank God, and we have all survived them, one way or another. Never mention them again.”

“Any news of Carew?” Geoffrey asks Montague, keeping his voice low, though there is no one near us but half a dozen of our own guards, riding before and behind, too distant to eavesdrop.

Grimly, Montague shakes his head.

“Nothing to link us to him?” Geoffrey presses him.

“Everyone knows that our Lady Mother loves the princess like a daughter,” Montague says irritably. “Everyone knows that I talked with the plotters. We all dined with Cromwell and plotted the fall of Anne. You don’t have to be a Cromwell to make a case against us. We just have to hope that Cromwell doesn’t want to make a case against us.”

“Half the Privy Council opposed the king disinheriting the princess,” Geoffrey complains. “Most of them spoke against it to me.”

“And if Cromwell wants to bring half the Privy Council down, then you can be sure he’ll have evidence.” Montague looks across me to his younger brother. “And by the sound of it, you’ll be the first one he’ll come to.”

“Because I am the first to speak up for her!” Geoffrey bursts out. “I defend her!”

“Hush, boys,” I say. “Nobody doubts either of you. Montague, don’t tease your brother, you’re like children again.”

Montague ducks his head in a half apology and I look ahead, where the old hunting lodge sits on a little rise of ground, the turrets just visible above the trees.

“She is expecting us?” I ask. I find I am nervous.

“Of course,” Montague confirms. “As soon as she had greeted the king she asked if she could see you. And he agreed. He said that he knew that she loved you and that you had always been a good guardian to her.”

From the edge of the wood we can see the lane leading to the castle, and there are riders coming towards us at a leisurely canter. I think I can see, I shade my eyes against the bright morning sunshine, I can see that there are ladies riding among the men, I can see the flicker of their gowns. I think that they have come out to meet us, and I give a little laugh and press my horse forward into a trot and then into a canter.

“Halloo! Awaaay!” Geoffrey cries out the hunting call and follows me as I ride forward and then I am almost certain, and then I am completely certain, that at the center of the riders is the princess herself and that she is feeling, just as I am, that she cannot wait for another moment, and she has ridden out to meet me.

“Your Grace!” I call to her, forgetting all about her changed title. “Mary!”

The horses slow as the two parties come together and I pull up my hunter, who snorts excitedly. One of the guards runs to his head and helps me down from the saddle, and my darling princess tumbles from her horse as if she were a child again, jumping down to me, and she dives into my arms and I hold her tightly.

She cries, of course she cries, and I bend my head and put her wet cheek against mine and feel my own grief and sense of loss and fear for her rise up until I am ready to cry too.

“Come,” Montague says gently behind me. “Come, Lady Mother, come, Lady Mary.” He nods his head as he says this, as if to apologize for the false title. “Let’s all go back to the house and you can talk all day long.”

“You’re safe,” Mary says, looking up at me. Now I can see the dark shadows under her eyes and the weariness in her face. She’s never going to have the shining look of a lucky child again. The loss of her mother and the sudden cruelty from her father have scarred her, and her pale skin and pinched mouth show a woman who has learned to bear pain with a deep determination too young.

“I am safe, but I have been so afraid for you.”

She shakes her head as if to say that she will never be able to tell me what she has endured. “You went to my mother’s funeral,” she says, handing the reins of her horse to the groom and linking her arm through mine so we walk back to the house in step.

“It was very solemn, very beautifully done, and a number of those of us who loved her were allowed to attend.”

“They wouldn’t let me go. They wouldn’t even let me pay for her prayers. Besides, they took everything from me.”

“I know.”

“But it’s better now,” she says with a brave little smile. “My father has forgiven my obstinacy and nobody could be kinder than Queen Jane. She has given me a diamond ring and my father gave me a thousand crowns.”

“And you have a proper steward to take care of things for you?” I ask anxiously. “A chamberlain of your household?”

A shadow crosses her face. “Sir John Shelton is my chamberlain; Lady Anne, his wife, runs the household.”

I nod. So the jailers become the servants. I imagine they still report to Lord Cromwell.

“Lord John Hussey is not allowed to serve me, nor his wife,” Mary says.

“His wife is arrested,” I say very quietly. “In the Tower.”

“And my tutor Richard Fetherston?”

“In the tower.”

“But you are safe?”

“I am,” I say. “And so happy to be with you again.”

We talk together all day; we close the door on everyone and speak freely. She asks after my children. I tell her of my little ladies-in-waiting, my granddaughters Katherine and Winifred. I tell her of my pride and love for Montague’s son Henry, who is nine years old. “We call him Harry,” I tell her. “You should see him on a horse, he can ride anything. He terrifies me!” I tell her of the loss of Arthur’s boy, but his two girls are well. Ursula has given the Staffords a great brood of three boys and a girl, and Geoffrey, my baby, has babies of his own: Arthur who is five years old, Margaret who is four, Elizabeth who is three, and our new baby, little Thomas.

She volunteers little stories about her half sister Elizabeth, smiling at the things that the child says, and praising her quickness and her charm. She asks about the ladies who have come to serve Jane, and laughs when I tell her that they are all Seymour appointments, or Cromwell choices, however unsuitable for the work, and that Jane looks around them sometimes quite dazed that they should all find themselves in the queen’s rooms.

“And the Church?” she asks me quietly. “And the monasteries?”

“Going one by one. We have lost Bisham Priory,” I say. “Cromwell’s men inspected it and found it wanting, and handed it over to a prior who is never there, and whose intention is to declare it corrupt and surrender it to them.”

“It can’t be true that so many houses have failed in their faith,” she says. “Bisham was a good house of prayer, I know it was.”

“None of the inquiries is honest, only a way of persuading the abbess or the prior to resign their living and go. Cromwell’s visitors have gone to almost every small monastery. I believe they will go on to inquire at the great houses too. They accuse them of terrible crimes, and then find against them. There have been some places that were trading in relics—you know the sort of thing—and some places where they lived too comfortably for their souls, but this is not a reformation, though that is what they want to call it—it’s a destruction.”

“For profit?”

“Yes, only for profit,” I say. “God knows how much treasure has gone from the altars into the treasury, and the rich farmland, and the buildings have been bought by their neighbors. Cromwell had to create a whole new court to manage the wealth. If you ever inherit, my dear, you will not recognize your kingdom; it has been stripped bare.”

“If I ever inherit, I shall put it right,” she says very quietly. “I swear it. I will put it right again.”

SITTINGBOURNE, KENT, JULY 1536

The court is on progress to Dover to inspect the new fortifications, then the newlyweds will go hunting. The suspected courtiers have been released from the Tower, and my kinsman Henry Courtenay returns to court but not yet to the Privy Council.

“Did you prove your innocence?” I ask him very quietly as we mount up and prepare to ride out.

“Nothing was proved or disproved,” he says as he helps me into the saddle and looks up at me, scowling against the bright sunshine. “I think it was not to test our guilt but to frighten us and throw us into disarray. And,” he says with a wry smile, “it surely did that.”

This used to be the happiest time of the year for the king, but not this summer. He glances at Jane’s plate when she is eating her breakfast, as if he were wishing that she felt queasy, he watches her—his head tipped slightly to the side—as she dances with her ladies, as though he would be better pleased if she were tired. I am not the only person who thinks that he is looking for a fault, wondering why she is not with child, considering that there may be some flaw in her that makes her unworthy to bear a Tudor heir, or even to be crowned as queen. They have been married less than eight weeks, but the king is quick to identify failure in others. He demands perfection—and this is the woman he married because he was certain that she was the perfect contrast to Anne Boleyn.

Sittingbourne is a great town of inns, built on Watling Street, the road from Dover to London, the main pilgrimage route to the Becket shrine at Canterbury. We stay at the Lyon, and their banqueting hall is so large and their rooms so many that they can house most of the court on the premises and only the hangers-on and the lower servants have to stay in inns nearby.

For the first time in my life I see that although the pilgrims push back their hoods to uncover their heads for the royal standard, they turn their faces away from the king. They dare do no more, but they do not call out blessings on him, or smile as he rides by. They blame him for closing the smaller monasteries and nunneries, they fear he will go on to destroy the bigger ones. These are devout people, accustomed to praying in an abbey church in their little towns, who now find that the abbey is closed and some hard-faced new Tudor lord is taking the lead from the roof and the glass from the windows. These are people who believe in the saints of little roadside shrines, whose fathers and grandfathers were saved from purgatory by the family chantries that are now destroyed. Who is going to say a Mass for them? These are people who were brought up to revere the local churches, who rented lands from the monasteries, who went to the nunnery hospital when they were sick, who went to the abbey kitchen in hungry times. When the king ordered the visitation and then the closure of the small monasteries and nunneries, he tore the heart out of the small communities and handed their treasures over to strangers.

Now these pilgrims are traveling to the shrine of a churchman who was killed by a king, another Henry. They believe that Thomas Becket stood for the Church against the king and the miracles that constantly occur at his celebrated shrine go to prove that the churchman was right and the king was wrong. As the royal guards trot into the village and jump off their big horses and line the village street, the pilgrims whisper of John Fisher, who died for his faith on the royal scaffold; of Thomas More, who could not bring himself to say that the king was the rightful head of the Church, and laid down his life rather than sign his name. As the royal party ride in, nodding to right and left with the usual Tudor charm, there are no beaming faces or excited shouts in reply. Instead, they turn their heads away, or they look down, and there is a discontented murmur like a deep embanked stream.

Henry hears it; his head goes up and he looks coldly around at the pilgrims who stand at the doorways of the inns or lean out of the windows to see the man who is destroying their Church. The yeomen of the guard hear it, looking round uneasily, sensing divided loyalties, even in their own ranks.

Many, many people, knowing that I am the princess’s governess and head of her household, call out to me: “God bless her! God bless her!,” afraid even to say her true name and her title as they have sworn to deny her, but still wanting to send their love and loyalty.

Henry, usually traveling between his rich palaces, mostly by barge, always heavily guarded, has not heard the rumble of a thousand critical whispers before. It’s like a distant thunder, low and yet ominous. He looks around, but he cannot see one person speaking against him. Abruptly, he laughs out loud at nothing, as if he is trying to demonstrate that he is not troubled by this sulky welcome, and he swings himself heavily down from his horse, throws the reins to a groom, and stands stock-still, his arms akimbo, a fat block of a man, as if daring anyone to speak against him. He can see no one to challenge. There is no scowling face in the crowd, no one is going to stand up to be martyred. If Henry saw an enemy, he would cut him down where he stood; he has never lacked courage. But there is no one opposing him. There is just a dull sourceless whisper of discontent. The people don’t like their king anymore, they don’t trust him with their Church, they don’t believe that his will is given to him by God, they miss Queen Katherine, they were horrified by the stories of the guilt and the death of Queen Anne. How can such a woman ever have been the choice of a godly king? He chose her to prove that he was the best, that he could marry the best. Since she is now shown to be the worst, what does that say about him?

They don’t know anything about Queen Jane, but they have heard that she danced on the night of the execution and married the king eleven days after he beheaded his former wife, her mistress. They think she must be a woman quite without pity. To them, the king is no longer the prince whose coming makes all things right, he is no longer the young man whose follies and sports were a byword for joyous excess. Their love for him has grown doubtful, their love for him has grown fearful; in truth, their love for him has gone.

Henry looks around and tosses his head as if he despises the little town and the lowered heads of the silent pilgrims. He reminds me, for one moment, of the way his father used to look, as if he thought we were all fools, that he had taken the throne and the kingdom by his own quick and cunning wits, and that he despised us all for having allowed it. Henry glances down at Jane who stands at his side, waiting to walk with him through the wide-open doors of the inn. His face does not soften at the sight of her blond bowed head. He looks at her as if she is another fool who is going to do exactly as he wants, even if it costs her life.

We are following slavishly behind, when there is a disturbance in the crowd outside, horsemen riding down the road and trying to push their way through. I see Montague, following the king, looking back at the noise. It is one of Henry Fitzroy’s servants, his horse nearly foundered, looking as if it has been ridden hard, perhaps all the way from St. James’s Palace, the young duke’s London home.

A small nod of Montague’s head as he goes into the darkness of the inner hall of the inn prompts me to wait outside and discover the news that has made Fitzroy’s servants ride so hard. The man pushes his way through the crowd, while his groom waits behind holding the horse.

At once people gather around him clamoring for news, and I stand back to listen. He shakes his head and speaks quietly. I clearly hear him say that nothing could be done, the poor young man, and nothing could be done.

I go into the inn, where the king’s presence chamber is filled with the court, talking and wondering what has happened. Jane is seated on the throne, trying to look unconcerned and talking with her ladies. The door to the king’s private room is closed, with Montague nearby.

“He went in there with the messenger,” Montague says to me quietly. “Shut everyone out. What’s happened?”

“I think Fitzroy may be dead,” I say.

Montague’s eyes widen and he gives a little exclamation, but he is such a trained conspirator now that he gives little away. “An accident?”

“I don’t know.”

There is a great bellow from behind the closed door, a terrible roar, like a bull will give when a mastiff has fastened on his throat and he drops to his knees. It is the noise of a man mortally wounded. “No! No! No!”

Jane whirls around at the cry, jumps to her feet, and sways indecisively. The court falls completely silent, and watches her, as she sits back down on her throne and then rises up again. Her brother speaks quickly to her and she obediently goes to the door to the privy chamber, but then she steps back and makes a little gesture with her hand, stopping the guards from opening it. “I can’t,” she says.

She looks across at me, and I go to her side. “What should I do?” she asks.

There is a single loud sob from inside the room. Jane looks quite terrified. “Should I go to him? Thomas says I must go to him. What’s happening?”

Before I can answer Thomas Seymour is at his sister’s side, his hand in the small of her back, literally thrusting her towards the closed door. “Go in,” he says through his teeth.

She digs in her heels, she rolls her eyes towards me. “Shouldn’t Lord Cromwell go in?” she whispers.

“Not even he can raise the dead!” Thomas snaps. “You’ve got to go in.”

“Come with me.” Jane reaches out and grabs my hand as the guard swings the door open. The messenger stumbles out and Thomas Seymour pushes us both in and slams the door behind us.

Henry is on his knees, on the floor, hunched over a richly padded footstool, his face buried in the thick embroidery. He is sobbing convulsively like a child, hoarse-voiced as if his grief is tearing out his heart. “No!” he says when he catches his breath, and then he gives a great groan.

Cautiously, like someone approaching a wounded beast, Jane goes towards him. She pauses and bends down, her hand hovering above his heaving shoulders. She looks at me, I nod, and she pats his back so lightly that he will not feel it through the wadding of his jacket.

He rubs his face one way and another against the knots of gold and sequins on the footstool; his clenched fist thumps the stool and then the wooden planks of the floor. “No! No! No!”

Jane jumps back at this violence, and looks at me. Henry gives a little scream of distress and pushes the footstool away and flings himself facedown on the floor, rolling from one side to the other in the strewing herbs and the straw. “My son! My son! My only son!”

Jane shrinks back from his flailing arms and kicking legs, but I go forward and kneel at his head. “God bless him and keep him, and take him into eternal life,” I say quietly.

“No!” Henry rears up, his hair stuck with herbs and straw, and screams into my face. “No! Not into eternal life. This is my boy! He is my heir! I need him here.”

He is terrifying in his red-faced frustrated rage, but then I see where the footstool cover has scratched his face, torn his eyelid, so blood and tears are running down his face, I see the desperate child that he was when his brother died, when his mother died only a year later. I see Henry the child who had been sheltered from life and now had it breaking into his nursery, into his world. A child who had rarely been refused and now suddenly had everything he loved snatched from him.

“Oh, Harry,” I say, and my voice is filled with pity.

He wails and pitches himself into my lap. He grips around my waist as if he would crush me. “I can’t . . .” he says. “I can’t . . .”

“I know,” I say, I think of all the times that I have had to come to this young man and tell him a son has died, and now he is as old as I was then, and once again I have to tell him that he has lost a son.

“My boy!”

I grip him as tightly as he is holding me, I rock him and we move together as if he were a great baby, crying in his mother’s lap with the heartbreak of childhood.

“He was my heir,” he wails. “He was my heir. He was the very spit of me. Everyone said it.”

“He was,” I say gently.

“He was handsome as I was!”

“He was.”

“It was as if I would never die . . .”

“I know.”

A new burst of sobbing follows, and I hold him as he weeps heartbrokenly. I look over his heaving shoulders to Jane. She is simply aghast. She stares at the king, hunched on the floor, crying like a child, as if he is some strange monster from a fairy story, nothing to do with her at all. Her eyes slide to the door; she is wishing herself far away from this.

“There is a curse,” Henry says suddenly, sitting up and scrutinizing my face. His eyelids are puffed and red, his face blotchy and scratched, his hair standing up, his cap in the ashes of the fire. “There must be a curse against me. Why else would I lose everyone I love? Why else am I wretched? How can I be king and the most miserable man in the world?”

Even now, with this bereaved father clinging to my hands, I will not say anything. “How did Bessie Blount offend God that He strikes at me?” Henry demands of me. “What did Richmond ever do wrong? Why would God take him away from me if there is not a curse on them?”

“Was he ill?” I ask quietly.

“So fast,” Henry whispers. “I knew he wasn’t well, but it wasn’t serious. I sent my physician, I did everything that a father should do . . .” He catches his breath on a little sob. “I have failed in nothing,” he says more strongly. “It cannot be anything I have done. It has to be the will of God that he was taken from me. It must be something Bessie has done. There must be some sin.”

He breaks off and takes my hand and puts it to his sore, burning cheek. “I can’t bear it,” he says simply. “I can’t believe it. Say it isn’t so.”

The tears are pouring down my own face. Silently, I shake my head.

“I won’t have it said,” Henry says. “Say it’s not so.”

“I can’t deny it,” I say steadily. “I am sorry. I am sorry, Henry. I am so sorry. But he has gone.”

His mouth gapes and he drools, his eyes raw and filled with tears. He can hardly make a sound. “I can’t bear it,” he whispers. “What about me?”

I pick myself up from the floor, sit on the footstool, and hold out my arms to him as if he were the little boy in the royal nursery once again. He crawls towards me and lays his head in my lap and gives himself up to his tears. I stroke his thinning hair, and I wipe his sore cheeks with the linen sleeve of my gown, and I let him cry and cry while the room goes golden with sunset and gray with dusk, and Jane Seymour sits like a little statue at the opposite end of the room, too horrified to move.

As the dusk turns darker and becomes night, the king’s sobs gradually turn to whimpers and then shudders until I think he has fallen asleep, but then he stirs again and his shoulders heave. When it is time for dinner, he does not move and Jane keeps her strange silent vigil with me, as we witness his heartbreak. Then when the bells in the town toll for Compline, the door opens a crack and Thomas Cromwell slips into the room, and takes in everything in one shrewd glance.

“Oh,” Jane exclaims with relief, rises to her feet and makes a little distracted flapping gesture with her hands as if to show the Lord Secretary that the king has collapsed with grief, and the Lord Secretary had better take charge.

“Would you like to go to dinner, Your Grace?” Cromwell asks her with a bow. “You can tell the court that the king is dining in his rooms, privately.”

Jane gives a little mew of assent and slips from the room, and Cromwell turns to me with the king in my arms, as if I pose a knottier problem.

“Countess,” he says to me, bowing.

I incline my head but I don’t speak. It is as if I am holding a sleeping child whom I don’t want to wake.

“Shall I get the grooms of the bedchamber to put him to bed?” he asks me.

“And his physician with a sleeping draft?” I suggest in a whisper.

The physician comes, and the king raises his head and obediently drinks the measure. He keeps his eyes closed, as if he cannot bear to see the looks, curious, sympathetic or, worst of all, amused, of the grooms of the bedchamber who turn down the bed, pierce it with a sword to prevent assassins, warm it with the hot coals in the pan, and then stand at his head and his feet, waiting for instruction.

“Put His Majesty to bed,” Cromwell says.

I start a little at the new title. Now that the king is the only ruler in England and the Pope is nothing but the vicar of Rome, he has taken to claiming that he is as good as an emperor. He is no longer to be called “Your Grace” like any duke, though this was good enough for his father, the first Tudor, and good enough for all of my family. Now he has an imperial title: he is “Majesty.” Now his newly made majesty is so felled by grief that his humble subjects have to lift him into bed, and they are too afraid to touch him.

The grooms hesitate, hardly knowing how to approach him. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Cromwell says irritably.

It takes six of them to lift him from the floor to the bed, and his head lolls and the tears spill from his closed eyes. I order the grooms to pull off his beautifully worked riding boots, and Cromwell tells them to take off the heavy jacket, so we leave him to sleep still half dressed, like a drunkard. One of the grooms will sleep on a pallet bed on the floor; we see them tossing coins for the unlucky one who has to stay. Nobody wants to be with him through the night as he snores and farts and weeps. There are two yeomen guards on the door.

“He’ll sleep,” Cromwell says. “But when he wakes, what do you think, Lady Margaret? Is his heart broken?”

“It is a terrible loss,” I concede. “To lose a child is always terrible, but to lose one when he was through the illnesses of childhood and had everything before him . . .”

“To lose an heir,” Cromwell remarks.

I say nothing. I am not going to share any opinion about the king’s heir.

Cromwell nods. “But from your point of view it is all to the good?”

The question is so heartless that I hesitate and look at him, as if I cannot be sure that I heard him correctly.

“It leaves Lady Mary as the only likely heir,” he points out. “Or do you say princess?”

“I don’t talk of her at all. And I say Lady Mary. I signed the oath, and I know that you passed an act of Parliament to say that the king will choose his own heir.”

I order food brought to my private rooms. I can’t bear to join the court which is noisy with excited chatter and speculation. Montague comes in with the fruit and sweetmeats, pours a glass of wine, and sits opposite me.

“Did he collapse?” he asks coolly.

“Yes,” I say.

“He was like that when he lost the Boleyn baby,” he says. “He cried and raged and then didn’t speak. Then, when he finished with his grief, he denied that it had ever happened. And we had a secret burial.”

“It’s a terrible loss for him,” I remark. “He said he was going to make Fitzroy his heir.”

“And now he has no male heir, just as the curse foretold.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

In the morning the king is flushed and sullen, his eyes red and puffy, his face downcast. He completely ignores me. It is as if I am not there at breakfast, and was not there last night. He eats hugely, calling again and again for more meat, more ale, some wine, some fresh baked bread, some pastries, as if he would gobble up the world, and then goes again to his chapel. I sit with the queen and her ladies in our bright rooms which overlook the high street and so we see the messengers in Norfolk livery come and go, but the death of the young duke is not announced to the court and nobody knows if they should wear mourning or not.

For three days we stay at Sittingbourne, and still the king says nothing about Fitzroy, though more and more people know that he has died. On the fourth day the court moves on, towards Dover, but still no one has announced that the duke is dead, and the court has not gone into mourning, and the funeral has not been planned.

It is as if everything is suspended in time, frozen like a winter waterfall with the cascade pouring down one moment and stopped in silence the next. The king says nothing; the court knows everything, but obediently acts as if it is completely ignorant. Fitzroy does not ride to join us from London, he will never ride again and yet we all have to pretend that we are waiting for him to come.

“This is madness,” Montague says to me.

“I don’t know what I am supposed to do,” the queen says plaintively to her brother. “It’s not really anything to do with me. I have ordered a mourning gown. But I don’t know if I have to put it on.”

“Howard has to speak,” Thomas Seymour rules. “Fitzroy was his son-in-law. There’s no reason for any of us to get the bastard a proper funeral. There’s no reason for us to call the king to account.”

Thomas Howard steps up to the throne as Henry sits in the presence chamber before dinner and asks, his voice so quiet that only the men closest to him can hear, if he has permission to leave court to go home and bury his son-in-law.

Carefully, he does not say Fitzroy’s name. The king beckons him closer and whispers in his ear, and then turns and waves him away. Thomas Howard leaves court without a word to anyone, and goes to his home in Norfolk. Later, we hear that he buried his son-in-law, and his own hopes, in Thetford Priory, with only two men attending the funeral, a plain wooden coffin and a secret service.

“Why?” Montague asks me. “Why is it kept so quiet?”

“Because Henry cannot bear to lose another son,” I say. “And because now he has the court so obedient and we are such fools, if he does not want to think of something, then none of us says it. If he loses his son and cannot bear the grief, then the boy is buried out of sight. And when he next wants to do something which is completely wrong, we will find that he has grown stronger still. He can deny the truth and nobody will argue with him.”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, JULY 1536

I stay at my home while the court is on progress and walk in my fields, and watch the wheat turn golden. I go out with the reaping gang on the first day of harvesting and watch them stride side by side across the field, their sickles slicing down the waving crop, the hares and the rabbits darting away before them so the boys race after them with yapping terriers.

Behind the men come the women, embracing great armfuls of stooks and tying them with one practiced movement, their gowns hitched up so that they can stride, their sleeves rolled up high over their brawny arms. Many of them have a baby strapped to their back, most of them have a couple of children trailing behind with the old people gleaning the fallen heads of wheat so that nothing is wasted.

I feel all the wild joy of a miser watching gold come into the treasury. I would rather have a good crop than all the plate I could steal from an abbey. I sit on my horse and watch the tenants work, and I smile when they call out to me and tell me that it is a good year, a good year for us all.

I ride back to the house and notice a strange horse in the stables and a man taking a drink of ale at the kitchen door. He looks up as I ride into the yard and pulls his hat from his head—it’s an odd cap, Italian-made I should guess. I dismount and wait for him to come towards me.

“I have a message from your son, Countess,” he says. “He is well, and sends you good wishes.”

“I am glad to hear from him,” I say, hiding my anxiety. We are all waiting, we have been waiting for months, for Reginald to complete his report on the king’s claim to be supreme head of the English Church. Reginald has promised that the work will be finished soon and that it will support the king’s views. How he will walk through the maze that lost Thomas More, how he will avoid the trap that snapped shut on John Fisher, I don’t know. But there is no one in Christendom better read than my son Reginald. If there is a precedent for a king like ours in the long history of the Church, he will find it, and perhaps he can find a way to restore Princess Mary too.

“I will read this, and write a reply,” I tell him.

He bows. “I will be ready to take it tomorrow,” he says.

“The steward will find you bed and board for tonight.”

I walk through the door to the inner garden and sit on the seat beneath the roses and break the seal of Reginald’s letter to me.

He is in Venice. I rest the letter on my knee, close my eyes, and try to imagine my son in a fabulous city of wealth and beauty, where the houses’ doors open on the lapping water, and he has to take a boat to go to the great library where he is an honored scholar.

He writes to me that he is ill and thinking about death. He does not feel sorrow but a sense of peace.

I have completed my report and sent it as a long letter to the king. It is not for publication. It is the opinion that he asked for. It is sharp and loving. The scholar in him will recognize the strength of the logic, the theologian will understand the history. The fool and the sensualist will be shocked that I call him both, but I do believe that the death of his concubine gives him a chance to return to the Church, which he must do to save his soul. I am his prophet, as God sent to David. If he can listen to me, he might yet be saved.

I have advised him to give it to his best scholars for them to make a précis for him. It’s a long letter and I know that he will not have the patience to read it all! But there are men in England who will read it and ignore the vehement words to hear the truth. They can reply to me and perhaps I will rewrite. This is not a statement for publication for all men to wonder at, this is a document for discussion among men of learning.

I have been ill but I will not rest. There are those who would be glad to see me dead and some days I would be glad to sleep in death. I remember, and I hope that you remember too, that when I was only a little boy you gave me entirely to God and rode away from me, and left me in the hands of God. Don’t worry about me now—I am still in His hands, where you left me.

Your loving and obedient son,

Reginald

I hold the letter against my cheek as if I could smell the incense and the candle wax of the study where he wrote it. I kiss the signature in case he kissed it before he sealed it up and sent it away. I think that I have lost him indeed, if he has turned from life and yearns for death. The one thing I would have taught him, if I had kept him at my side, is to never weary of life, but to cling to it. Life: at almost any cost. I have never prepared myself for death, not even going into childbed, and I would never put my head down on the block. I think that I should never have left him with the Carthusian monks, good men though they were, poor though I was and without any other way to feed him. I should have begged on the roadside with my son in my arms before I let him be taken from me. I should never have left him to grow into a man who sees himself in the hands of God and prays to go to heaven.

I lost him when I left him at the priory, I lost him when I sent him to Oxford. I lost him when I sent him to Padua, and now I know the full extent and the finality of my loss. Once, I was married to a good man, I had four handsome boys, and now I am an old lady, a widow with only two sons in England, and Reginald, the brightest and the one who needed me the most, is far, far away from me dreaming of his own death.

I hold his letter to my heart and I mourn for the son who is tired of life, and then I start to think. I reread the letter and I wonder what he means by “vehement words,” I wonder what he means by being a prophet to the king. I hope very much that he has not written anything that will stir the king’s ever-ready suspicion or wake his restless rage.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, OCTOBER 1536

The court returns to London and as soon as the king is in his rooms I am summoned to his privy chamber. Of course, I hope that he is going to appoint me to the princess’s household, and I hurry from my rooms, across the courtyard, through a small door and up a stairway, through the great hall, until I come to the king’s rooms in the warren that is Westminster Palace.

I go through the crowded presence chamber with a little smile of anticipation on my face. They may have to wait but I have been summoned. Surely, he will appoint me to serve the princess and I can guide her back to her title and her true position.

There are more people than ever waiting to see the king, and most of them have a set of plans or a map in their hands. The monasteries and churches of England are being parceled out, one after another, and everyone wants their share.

But there are men who look uneasy. I recognize an old friend of my husband’s, one of the townsmen of Hull, and I nod to him as I go by.

“Will the king see you?” he asks urgently.

“I am going to him now,” I say.

“Please ask him if I can see him,” the man says. “We’re sick with fear in Hull.”

“I’ll tell him if I can,” I say. “What’s the matter?”

“The people can’t stand having their churches taken,” he says quickly, one eye on the door of the privy chamber. “They won’t tolerate it. When a monastery is pulled down, it robs the whole town. We can’t rule the towns, the citizens won’t bear it. They’re all up in the North, and they are talking of defending the monasteries and throwing out the inspectors who come to close them.”

“You must tell Lord Cromwell, it’s his work.”

“He knows. But he doesn’t warn the king. He doesn’t understand the danger that we are in. I tell you, we can’t hold the North against the people if they all join together.”

“Defending the Church?” I say slowly.

He nods. “Saying it has all been foretold. And speaking for the princess.”

One of the king’s grooms opens the privy chamber door and nods to me. I leave the townsman without another word, and go in.

It is cool and dark in the privy chamber, where the shutters are closed against the gray of an autumn afternoon, and the fire is laid in the grate but not yet lit. The king is seated behind a broad black-polished table in a big carved chair, scowling. The table before him is heaped with papers, and a secretary waits at the far end, his pen poised, as if the king had been dictating a letter and had broken off when he heard the sentries knock and swing open the door. Lord Cromwell stands to one side, and politely bows his head to me as I walk in.

I can smell danger, just like a horse can sense weak timbers underfoot on a rotten bridge. I look from Cromwell’s downturned gaze to the poised secretary, and it is as if we are all posing for a portrait from the court painter, Master Holbein. The title would be Judgment.

I raise my head and I walk towards the table and the dark gaze of the most powerful man in Christendom. I am not afraid. I will not be afraid. I am a Plantagenet. The scent of danger is one that I know as well as I know the rich smell of fresh blood, the sharp smell of rat poison. I smelled it in my nursery; this is the scent of my childhood, of all of my life.

“Your Majesty.” I rise up from my curtsey and I stand before him, my hands clasped before me, my face serene.

He meets my gaze and glares at me, his eyes blank, and I let him hold the silence while I feel salty bile slowly rising in my throat. I swallow it down. Then he speaks first. “You know what this is,” he says rudely, pushing a bound manuscript towards me.

I step forward and when Lord Cromwell nods, I pick it up. My hands don’t tremble.

I see that the title is in Latin. “Is this my son’s letter?” I ask. My voice does not quaver.

Lord Cromwell bows his head.

“Do you know what he has called it?” Henry snaps.

I shake my head.

“Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione,” Henry reads aloud. “Do you know what that means?”

I give him a long look. “Your Majesty, you know that I do. I used to teach you Latin.”

It is almost as if he loses his balance, as if I have recalled him to the boy that he was. For a moment only he wavers, then he swells into grandeur again. “For the defense of the unity of the Church,” he says. “But am I Defender of the Faith or not?”

I find that I can smile at him, my lips don’t tremble. “Of course you are.”

“And Supreme Head of the Church of England?”

“Of course you are.”

“Then is your son not guilty of insult, of treason, when he questions my right to rule my Church and defend it? The very title of his letter is treason, all on its own!”

“I have not seen his letter,” I say.

“He has written to her,” Lord Cromwell says quietly to the king.

“He is my son, of course he writes to me,” I reply to the king, ignoring Cromwell. “And he told me that he had written you a letter. Not a report, not a book, nothing to be published, nothing with a title. He told me that you had asked for his opinion on certain matters and he had obeyed you, studied, consulted, and written his opinion.”

“It’s a treasonous opinion,” the king says flatly. “He is worse than Thomas More, far worse. Thomas More should never have died for what he said, and he never said anything like this. More should be alive today, the best of my advisors, and your son beheaded in his place.”

I swallow. “Reginald should not have written anything that even approached treason,” I say quietly. “I must beg your pardon for him if he has done so. I had no idea what he was writing. I had no idea what he was studying. He has been your scholar for many years, working to your commands.”

“He says what you all think!” Henry rises to his feet and leans towards me. His little eyes are glaring. “Do you dare to deny it? To my face? To my face?”

“I don’t know what he says,” I repeat. “But none of my family in England speaks or thinks or even dreams a word of treason. We are loyal to you.” I turn to Cromwell. “We took the oath without delay,” I say. “You closed Bisham Priory, my own foundation, and I did not complain, not even when you appointed a prior of your choosing and turned out Prior Richard and all the canons and cleared the chapel. You took the Lady Mary’s jewels from the list that I made for you, and when you locked her up I obeyed you and never wrote to her. Montague is a loyal servant and friend, Geoffrey serves you in Parliament. We are kinsmen, loyal kinsmen, and we have never done anything against you.”

The king suddenly slaps the table with a heavy hand, which sounds like a pistol shot. “I can’t stand this!” he bellows.

I don’t jump, I hold myself very still. I turn towards him and face him full on, as the keeper at the Tower faces the wild beasts. Thomas More once told me: lion or king, never show fear or you are a dead man.

The king leans forward and shouts into my face. “Everywhere I turn there are people conspiring against me, whispering, writing . . .” He sweeps Reginald’s manuscript to the floor with another angry gesture. “Nobody thinks of what I do for the country, nobody thinks of how I suffer, leading the country onward, taking them out of darkness into light, serving God though everyone around me, everyone . . .” Suddenly, he rounds on Cromwell. “What are they doing in Lincoln? What are they doing in Yorkshire? What do they say against me? Why don’t you keep them silent? Why are they roaming the streets of Hull? And why did you allow Pole to write this?” he yells. “Why would you be such a fool?”

Cromwell shakes his head as if he is amazed at his own stupidity. And at once, since he is getting the blame for the bad news, he sets about diminishing it. A moment ago he was my prosecutor; now he is my codefendant, and the offense immediately becomes much less serious. I see him turn, like a dancer in a masque, to skip down the line in the opposite direction.

“The Duke of Norfolk will put down the uprising in the North,” he says soothingly. “A few peasants shouting for bread, it’s nothing. And this from your scholar Reginald Pole—this is nothing. It’s only a private letter,” he says. “It’s only the opinion of one man. If Your Majesty would deign to rebut it, how could it stand? Your understanding is naturally greater than his. Who would even read it if you denied it? Who cares what Reginald Pole thinks?”

Henry flings himself to the window and looks out into the soft twilight. The owls that live in the attics of this old building are hooting, and as he watches, a great white barn owl sweeps quietly by on silent snub wings. The bells are tolling all over the great city. I think for one moment what would happen to this king if the bells were to start to peal backwards and the people hear the signal to rise against him?

“You will write to your son,” Henry spits, without looking round. “And you will tell him to come to England and face me, like a man. You will disown him. You will tell him that he is no child of yours for he speaks against your king. I won’t have divided loyalties. Either you serve me, or you are his mother. You can choose.”

“You are my king,” I say simply. “You were born to be king, you always have been my king. I never deny that. You must judge what is the best for the whole kingdom and for me, as your most humble and loving servant.”

He turns and looks at me, and suddenly it is as if his temper is quite blown away. He is smiling, as if I have said something that makes complete sense to him. “I was born to be king,” he says quietly. “It is God’s will. To say anything else is to fly in the face of God. Tell your son that.”

I nod.

“God put Arthur aside to make me king,” he reminds me, almost shyly. “Didn’t he? You saw Him do it. You were a witness.”

I give no sign of what it costs me to speak of Arthur’s death to his younger brother. “God Himself put you on the throne,” I agree.

“The best choice,” he asserts.

I bow my head in assent.

The king sighs as if he has somehow got to a place where he can be at peace.

I glance at Cromwell; it seems that the audience is over. He nods, his face a little pale. I think that Cromwell must sometimes have to dig deep to find the courage to face this monster he has made.

I curtsey and I am about to turn to go to the door when a little warning gesture of the hand from the silent secretary at the end of the table reminds me that we are not allowed to turn our backs on the king anymore. His greatness is such that we have to leave his presence walking backwards.

I am of the old royal family in England. My father was brother to two kings. I think for a moment, for half a moment only, that I will look like a fool showing exaggerated respect for this fat tyrant, whose back is turned to me, who does not even see the homage that I am ordered to give him. Then I think that the only fool is the one who fails to survive in these dangerous times, and I give Thomas Cromwell a smile which says—if he could but read it—how low shall we stoop, you and I? To keep our heads on our shoulders? And I curtsey again and walk backwards six paces, curtsey, feel blindly behind my back for the handle, and slide out of the door.

Montague comes to my room after Compline, late at night. “What did he say to you?” he demands. His hair is sticking up as if he has run his hands through it in exasperation. I stroke it down and straighten his cap. He jerks his head away from my touch. “He tore into me, this letter of Reginald’s has all but ruined us. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive it. He can’t bear to hear criticism. He screamed at me.”

“He told me that I had to disown Reginald,” I admit. “He was angrier than I have ever seen him before.”

“He frightened Cromwell,” Montague says. “I saw his hands shake. I was kneeling, I swear that my legs would have given way if I had been standing. There was no pleasing him through dinner. The queen spoke to him about a favor for someone and he said that she didn’t have enough goodwill from him to squander it on others. In front of everyone! I thought she was going to cry before all the court. Then after dinner he took me to one side and was beside himself.”

“She’s terrified of him,” I remark. “Not like Queen Katherine, not even like Anne. She can’t begin to manage him.”

“What will we do?” Montague demands. “God knows that we can’t manage him. What could possess Reginald to expose us to this?”

“He had to!” I defend him. “It was either that or write page after page of lies. The king commanded that he give his opinion. He had to say what he thought.”

“He called the king a tyrant and a ravening beast!” Montague raises his voice and then remembers that these words alone are treason, and claps his hand over his mouth.

“We’ll have to deny him,” I say unhappily. “I know we will.”

Montague flings himself into a chair and runs his hands through his hair. “Doesn’t he realize what life is like in England today?”

“He knows very well,” I say. “Probably nobody knows better. He’s warning the king that if he goes on with the destruction of the monasteries, the people will rise against him and the emperor will invade. And already the North is up.”

“The commons turned on the bishop’s chancellor at Horncastle,” Montague tells me, his voice low. “They’re burning beacons as far as Yorkshire. But Reginald declares against the king too soon. His letter is treason.”

“I don’t see what else he could write,” I say. “The king asked for his opinion. He has given it. He says that the princess should have her title, and the Pope should have the headship of the Church. Would you say any different?”

“Yes! Dear God, I’d never tell the truth to this king.”

“But if you were far away, and ordered to write your honest opinion?”

Montague gets out of his chair and kneels beside mine so that he can whisper into my ear. “Lady Mother, he is far away; but we are not. I am afraid for you, and for me, and for my son Harry, all my children, and for all our kin. It doesn’t matter that Reginald is right—I know he is! It doesn’t matter that most of England would agree with him—almost every lord of the land would agree with him. It’s not just the commons who are marching in Lincolnshire, they’re taking the gentry with them and calling on the lords to turn out for them. Every day someone seeks me out or sends me a message or asks me what we are going to do. But telling this truth has put all of us into terrible danger. The king is no longer a thoughtful scholar, he is no longer a devout son of the Church. He has become a man quite out of the control of his teachers, of the priests, perhaps of himself. There is no point giving the king an honest opinion, he wants nothing but praise of himself. He cannot bear one word of criticism. He is merciless against those who speak against him. It is death to speak the truth in England now. Reginald is far away and enjoying the luxury of speaking out, but we are here; it is our lives he is risking.”

I am silent. “I know,” I say. “I don’t think that he could have done differently, he had to speak out. But I know that he has put us in danger.”

“Geoffrey too,” Montague says. “Think of your precious Geoffrey. Reginald’s letter has endangered us all.”

“What can we do to make ourselves safe?”

“There’s no safety for us. We are the royal family, whether we publicly proclaim it as Reginald does, or not. All we can do is draw a line between Reginald and ourselves. All we can say is that he does not speak for us, that we deny what he says, that we urge him to be silent. And we can beg him not to publish, and you can order him not to go to Rome.”

“But what if he publishes this letter, and what if he goes to Rome and persuades the Pope to publish the excommunication and order a crusade against England?”

Montague puts his head in his hands. “Then I am ready,” he says very quietly. “When the emperor invades, I will raise the tenants and we will march with the commons of England, defend the Church, overthrow the king, and put the princess on her throne.”

“We will do it?” I ask, as if I don’t know that the answer is yes.

“We have to,” Montague says grimly. Then he looks up at me, and I see my own fear in his face. “But I am afraid,” he admits honestly.

Both Montague and I write to Reginald. Geoffrey writes too and we send the letters by Thomas Cromwell’s messengers, so that he can see how loudly we condemn Reginald for his folly, for the abuse of his position as the king’s own scholar, and how clearly we call on him to withdraw everything he has said.

Take another way and serve our master as thy bounden duty is to do, unless thou wilt be the confusion of thy mother.

I leave the letter unsealed, but I kiss my signature and hope that he will know. He will not withdraw one word of what he has written, and I know that he has written nothing but the truth. He will know that I wouldn’t have him deny the truth. But he can never come to England while the king lives, and I cannot see him. Perhaps, given my great age, I will never see him again. The only way that my family can be together again will be if Reginald comes with an army from Spain to rouse the commons, restore the Church, and put the princess on the throne. “Come the day!” I whisper, and then I take my letter to Thomas Cromwell for his spies to study for a hidden code of treason.

The great man, Lord Secretary and Vicegerent of the Church, invites me into his privy chamber where three men are bowed over letters and accounts books. The work of the world revolves around Thomas Cromwell, just as it did around his old master, Thomas Wolsey. He takes care of everything.

“The king requests that your son come to court and explain his letter,” he says to me. Out of the corner of my eye I see one of the clerks pause with his pen raised, waiting to copy down my reply.

“I pray that he will come,” I say. “I will tell him, as his mother, that he should come. He should show every obedience to His Gracious Majesty, as we all do, as he was raised to do.”

“His Majesty is not angry now with his cousin Reginald,” Cromwell says gently. “He wants to understand the arguments, he wants Reginald to talk with other scholars so that they can agree.”

“What a very good idea.” I look directly into his smiling face. “I shall tell Reginald to come at once. I will add a note to my letter.”

Cromwell, the great liar, the great heretic, the great pander to his master, bows his head as if he is impressed with my loyalty. I, as bad as he is, bow back.

L’ERBER, LONDON, OCTOBER 1536

Montague comes to see me at my home early in the morning, while the court is at Mass. He comes into my chapel and kneels beside me on the stone flags while the priest, half hidden by the rood screen, his back turned towards us, performs the mysteries of the Mass and brings the blessing of God to me and my silently kneeling household.

At the back, untouched and unread, is the Bible that the king has ordered shall be placed in every church. Everyone of my household believes that God speaks in Latin to his Church. English is the language of everyday mortals, of the market, of the midden. How can anything that is of God be written down in the language of sheep farming and money? God is the Word, he is the Pope, the priest, the bread and the wine, the mysterious Latin of the litany, the unreadable Bible. But we do not defy the king on this, we don’t defy him on anything.

“Queen Jane went down on her knees to the king and begged him to restore the abbeys and not steal them from the people.” Montague bows his head as if in prayer and mutters the news to me over his rosary. “Lincolnshire is up to defend the abbeys, there’s not a village that is not marching.”

“Is it our time?”

Montague bows his head farther so that no one can see him smile. “Soon,” he says. “The king is sending Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to put down the commons. He thinks it will be readily done.”

“Do you?”

“I pray.” Cautiously, Montague does not even say what he prays for. “And the princess sent you her love. The king has brought her and little Lady Elizabeth to court. For a man who says that the commons will be easily put down, it’s telling that he should have his daughters brought to him for safety.”

Montague leaves as soon as the service is over, but I don’t need him to bring me news. Soon all of London is buzzing. The cook’s boy, sent to market to get some nutmeg, comes home with the claim that forty thousand men, armed and horsed, are marching in Boston.

My London steward comes to me to tell me that two lads from Lincolnshire have run away, gone home to join with the commons. “What did they think they were going to do?” I ask.

“They take an oath,” he says, his voice carefully bland. “Apparently, they swear that the church shall have its fees and funds, that the monasteries shall not be thrown down, but shall be restored, and that the false bishops and false advisors who recommended these wrongs shall be exiled from the king and from the kingdom.”

“Bold demands,” I say, keeping my face quite still.

“Bold demands in the face of danger,” he adds. “The king has sent his friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, to join with the Duke of Norfolk against the rebels.”

“Two dukes against a handful of fools?” I say. “God save the commons from folly and hurt.”

“The commons may save themselves. They’re not unarmed,” he says. “And there are more than a few of them. The gentry are with them and they have horse and weapons. Perhaps it is the dukes who had better look to their own safety. They say that Yorkshire is ready to rise, and Tom Darcy has sent to the king to ask what his answer must be.”

“Lord Thomas Darcy?” I think of the man who has my pansy badge in his pocket.

“The rebels have a banner,” my steward continues. “They are marching under the five wounds of Christ. They say it is like a holy war. The Church against the infidel, the commons against the king.”

“And where is Lord Hussey?” I ask, naming one of the lords of the country, the princess’s former chamberlain.

“He’s with the rebels,” my steward says, nodding at my blank-faced astonishment. “And his wife is out of the Tower and with him.”

The country is so disturbed with rumors of uprisings, even in the South, that I stay in London in early October. I take my barge downriver one cold day as the mist is lying on the water and the evening sun burning red, and the tide is up and the current strong.

“Best walk round the bridge, my lady,” says the master of my barge, and they set me down on the wet slimy stairs and row the barge out into the middle channel to shoot the stormy waters of the bridge and pick me up on the other side.

One of my granddaughters, Katherine, takes my arm and we have a liveryman before and behind us as we walk the short way around to the water stairs on the other side of the bridge. There are beggars, of course, but they clear from the path when they see us coming. I hide my flinch of dismay when I notice a nun’s habit, fouled by months of sitting and waiting, and see the strained, desperate face of a woman who had given herself to God and then found herself flung into the gutter. I nod to Katherine’s sister Winifred, who, unasked, tosses the woman a coin.

A man comes out of the darkness and stands before us. “Who’s this?” he asks one of my servants.

“I am Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury,” I say briskly, “and you had better let me pass.”

He smiles, as merry as an outlaw in the greenwood, and he bows low. “Pass, your ladyship, pass with our blessing,” he says. “For we know who our friends are. And God be with you, for you too are a pilgrim and have a pilgrimage gate to go.”

I stop short. “What did you say?”

“It’s not a rebellion,” he says very quietly. “You would know that as well as I, perhaps. It is a pilgrimage. We are calling it the Pilgrimage of Grace. And we tell each other that we have to pass through the pilgrimage gate.”

He hesitates and sees my face as I hear the words “Pilgrimage of Grace.” “We are marching under the five wounds of Christ,” he says. “And I know you, and all the good old lords of the white rose, are pilgrims just like us.”

The rebels who say they march on the Pilgrimage of Grace have captured Sir Thomas Percy, or else he has joined with them; nobody seems to know. They are under the leadership of a good man, an honest Yorkshireman, Robert Aske, and in the middle of October we learn that Aske rode into the great northern city of York without an arrow flying in its defense. They threw open the gates to him and to the force that everyone is now calling the pilgrims. They are twenty thousand strong. This is four times the force that took England at Bosworth, this is an army great enough to take all of England.

Their first act was to restore two Benedictine houses in the city, Holy Trinity and the nunnery of St. Clement. When they rang the bells at Holy Trinity, the people cried for joy as they went in to hear Mass.

My guess is that the king will do anything to avoid an open battle. The rebels in Lincolnshire have been offered a pardon if they will only go home, but why should they do so, now the massive county of Yorkshire is up in arms?

“I’m ordered to muster the tenants and to get ready to march,” Montague says to me. He has come to L’Erber as the servants are clearing away the tables after dinner. The musicians are tuning up and there is a masque to be performed. I beckon Montague to sit beside me, and I lean my head towards him so that he can speak softly against my hood.

“I am commanded to go north and put down the pilgrimage,” he says. “Geoffrey has to raise a force too.”

“What will you do?” In my pocket I touch the embroidered badge that Lord Darcy gave me, the five wounds of Christ and the white rose of York. “You can’t fire on the pilgrims.”

He shakes his head. “Never,” he says simply. “Besides, everyone says that when the king’s army sees the pilgrims, they’ll change sides and join them. It’s happening every day. Every letter that the king sends out with orders to his commanders he follows with one asking them if they are staying true to him. He trusts no one. He’s right. It turns out that no one can be trusted.”

“Who’s he got in the field?”

“Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and the king trusts him no farther than he can see him. Talbot, Lord Shrewsbury, is marching in support, but he is for the old religion and the old ways. Charles Brandon refused to go, saying that he wanted to be at home to keep his county down; he’s been ordered to Yorkshire against his will. Thomas Lord Darcy says he’s pinned down by the rebels in his castle, but since he’s been arguing against the pulling down of the monasteries since the first moment of the queen’s divorce, nobody knows if he’s just waiting for the right moment to join the pilgrims. John Hussey sent a letter to say he’s been kidnapped by them, but everyone knows he was the princess’s chamberlain and loves her dearly, and his wife is outright on her side. The king is chewing his nails to the quick; he’s in a frenzy of rage and self-pity.”

“And what . . .” I break off as a messenger in Montague’s livery comes into the hall and walks close to him and waits. Montague beckons him forward, listens intently, and then turns to me.

“Tom Darcy has surrendered his castle to the rebels,” he says. “The pilgrims have taken Pontefract and everyone under Tom Darcy’s command in the castle and in the town has sworn the pilgrim oath. The Archbishop of York is with them.”

He sees my face. “Old Tom is on his last crusade,” he says wryly. “He’ll be wearing his badge of the five wounds.”

“Tom is wearing his badge?” I ask.

“He had the crusader badges at his castle,” he says. “He issued it to the pilgrims. They are marching for God against heresy and wearing the five wounds of Christ. No Christian can fire on them under that sacred banner.”

“What should we do?” I ask him.

“You go to the country,” Montague decides. “If the South rises for the pilgrims, they’ll need leadership and money and supplies. You can lead them in Berkshire. I’ll send to you so you know what’s happening in the North. Geoffrey and I will go north with our force, and join the pilgrims when the time is right. I’ll send a message to Reginald to come right away.”

“He’ll come home?”

“At the head of a Spanish army, please God.”

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, OCTOBER 1536

I can get no news in the country, but I hear extraordinary stories of thousands of men marching on the destroyed abbeys and rebuilding them while singing the great psalms that were always sung there. People talk of a comet in the sky over Yorkshire, and say that the rising has gone underground in Lincolnshire and King Moldwarp will have to chase through the earth to find the pilgrims but they are already in the Yorkshire hills and dales and he will never impose his muddy will on them again.

I get a letter from Gertrude who tells me that her husband, my cousin Henry Courtenay, has been commanded by the king to muster an army and put himself under the command of Lord Talbot and march north as soon as possible. The king had said that he would lead his army, but the news from the North is so terrifying that he is sending my kinsmen instead.

It’s little and late. The king has not given the commanders money enough to pay the men, and they are so badly shod and there are so few on horses that they can’t get north fast enough. Anyway, they all know that when the king’s army sees the pilgrim badge they’ll desert, taking their weapons with them. And Thomas Howard is complaining that he is supposed to hold down Yorkshire with nothing, while all the money and troops go to George Talbot and the credit will go to Charles Brandon. The king does not know who his friends are, or how to keep them; how should he face his enemies?

Best of all, Norfolk has authority to treat with the rebels and he is bound to grant them the saving of the abbeys. If we can make the princess safe too in this moment, then this will be a great victory.

I’ll send you news as soon as I have it. The royal army and the pilgrims are bound to meet in battle and the pilgrims outnumber them by many thousands. And all the hosts of heaven are on our side too.

Burn this.

I am in the flesh kitchen at Bisham watching the hunt bring in the deer. They had two great buck and a hind and they dressed the meat in the field to stop it spoiling and now hang it in the cool stone-floored room to drip blood in the gutters.

“They hung our friend Legh just like that,” the Master of the Hounds remarks quietly to me.

Carefully, I don’t turn my head. It looks as if the two of us are inspecting the flayed carcass.

“Did they?” I ask. “Thomas Legh who came here, to close the priory?”

“Yes,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “On the gates of Lincoln. And the Bishop of Lincoln’s chancellor. He that gave evidence against the sainted queen. It’s like it’s all coming to rights, isn’t it, your ladyship?”

I smile, but I take care to say nothing.

“And is your son Reginald coming soon with a holy army?” he says in the lowest whisper. “It would make the commons glad to know it.”

“Soon,” I say, and he bows and leaves.

We have eaten the venison, and made pasties, and made soup from the bones, and given the bones to the hounds before we get news from Doncaster where the lords, gentry, and commons of the North drew up in battle order against the king’s army, my two sons on the wrong side, biding their time, ready to cross over. Montague sends a messenger to me.

The pilgrims brought their demands to Thomas Howard. He was lucky that they agreed to parlay; if they had fought he would have been destroyed. There must have been more than thirty thousand of them, and led by every gentleman and lord in Yorkshire. The king’s army is hungry and cold, the countryside around here being very poor and no man wishing us well. I have been given no money to pay my men, and the others are marching for even less than I have promised. The weather is bad too, and they say there is pestilence in the town.

The pilgrims have won this war and now present their demands. They want the faith of our fathers to be restored, that the law should be restored, that the noble advisors to the king should be restored, and that Cromwell, Richard Riche, and the heretic bishops be banished. There is not a man in the king’s army, including Thomas Howard, who does not agree. Charles Brandon encourages them also. It’s what we’ve all been thinking since the king first turned against the queen and took Cromwell as his advisor. So Thomas Howard is to ride to the king with the pilgrims’ request for general pardon, and an agreement to restore the old ways.

Lady Mother, I am so hopeful.

Burn this.

L’ERBER, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1536

I should be preparing Bisham Manor for Christmas, but I cannot settle to anything when I think of my two sons, the king’s army behind them and the pilgrims before them, waiting for the king’s agreement to the truce. In the end I take Montague’s children—Katherine, Winifred, and Harry—and go to London, hoping for news.

I do not promise them the treat of attending a full coronation, but they know that the king has promised to crown his wife, and the ceremony should take place on All Hallows’ Day. My own belief is that he will not be able to afford a great coronation while he is sending men and arms north, and he will be furious and frightened all at once. He will not be able to stride out in confidence before a crowd, and let everyone admire him and his beautiful new wife. This rebellion has shaken him, and while he is like this, thrown back into his childhood fears that he is not good enough, he simply will not be able to plan a great ceremony.

As soon as I have arrived and prayed in my chapel I go to my presence chamber, to meet with all the tenants and petitioners who want to see me, bid me a merry Christmas, make their requests, and pay their seasonal fines and rents. Among them is a man I recognize, a priest and friend of my exiled chaplain, John Helyar.

“You can leave me,” I say to my grandson Harry.

He looks up at me, his face bright and willing. “I can stay with you, Lady Grandmother, I can be your page. I’m not tired of standing.”

“No,” I say. “But I could be here all day. You can go down to the stables and you can go out into the streets; you can have a look around.”

He gives a little bow and shoots from the room like a loosed arrow, and only then do I nod to Helyar’s friend in greeting and indicate to my steward that he can step forward and speak with me.

“Father Richard Langgrische of Havant,” he reminds me.

“Of course,” I smile.

“I have greetings from your son, Geoffrey. I have been with him in the king’s army in the North,” he says.

“I am glad to hear of it,” I say clearly. “I am glad that my son is prospering in the king’s service. Is my son well?”

“Both your sons are well,” he says. “And confident that these troubles will soon be over.”

I nod. “You can dine in hall tonight, if you wish.”

He bows. “I thank you.”

Someone else steps forward with some complaint about the cost of ale in one of my tenant alehouses and the steward steps to my side and takes a note of the problem.

“Get that man to my chamber before dinner,” I say quietly. “Make sure no one sees him.”

He does not blink. He merely writes down the claim that the ale has been watered and that the jugs are not full measure and waves the next petitioner forward.

Langgrische is waiting for me by the little fire in my bedroom, concealed like a secret lover. I can’t restrain a smile. It’s been a long time since there was a man waiting for me in my bedroom; I have been a widow now for thirty-two years.

“What’s the news?” I sit in my chair at the fireside and he stands before me.

Silently, he shows me a small piece of cloth, a token like a man might sew to his collar. It is the match of the badge that Tom Darcy gave me, the five wounds of Christ and a white rose above it. Silently, I touch it as if it were a relic of faith, and return it to him.

“The pilgrims have dispersed most of their force, waiting for the king to agree to their terms. The king sent a dishonorable command to Tom Darcy, to meet with the pilgrim leader Robert Aske as if to talk in honor, kidnap him, and hand him over to Cromwell’s men.”

“What did Tom say?”

“He said that his coat should never have such a spot on it.”

I nod. “That’s Tom. And my sons?”

“Both well, both releasing men from their force to the pilgrim army every day, but both sworn to the king’s force and no one suspecting different. The king has asked for more details of the pilgrim demands and they have explained them.”

“Do Montague and Geoffrey think that the king will grant the demands?”

“He’ll have to,” the man said simply. “The pilgrims could overwhelm the royal army in a moment, they’re only waiting for an answer because they don’t want to make war on the king.”

“How can they call themselves loyal subjects? In battle array? When they hang his servants?”

“There have been remarkably few deaths,” he says. “Because hardly anyone disagrees with them.”

“Thomas Legh? Well worth hanging, I agree.”

He laughs. “They would have hanged him if they had caught him but he got away. He sent out his cook in his place like a coward, and they hanged him instead. The pilgrims don’t attack the lords or the king. They blame only his advisors. Cromwell must be banished, the destruction of monasteries reversed, and you and your family restored to the king’s council.”

He looks at me almost slyly and smiles. “I have news of your other son, Reginald, too.”

“Is he in Rome?” I ask eagerly.

He nods. “He is to be made a cardinal,” he says, awestruck. “He is to come to England as a cardinal and restore the Church to its glory, as soon as the king agrees to the pilgrims’ demands.”

“The Pope will send my son home to restore the Church?”

“To save us all,” Langgrische says devoutly.

L’ERBER, LONDON, DECEMBER 1536

This year we will keep the twelve days of Christmas in the old ways. The priory at Bisham may still be closed, but here in London I open up my chapel and set Advent lights in the window and keep the door open so that anyone can come in and see the altar dressed with cloth of gold, the chalice and the crucifix gleaming in the incense-scented darkness, the shine of the crystal monstrance holding the mystery of the Host, the chapel lined with the smiling, confident painted faces of saints and draped in the banners of the Church and my family. In the darkness of the corner of the chapel the banner of the white rose palely gleams; opposite is the rich pansy of the Pole family in papal imperial purple. And I kneel and bury my face in my hands and think that there is no reason that Reginald should not become Pope.

This Christmas is a great one, for our family and for England. Perhaps this will be the year that my son Reginald comes home to restore the Church to its rightful position, and my sons Montague and Geoffrey restore the king to his true royal place.

I know from a note from my cousin Gertrude, from a messenger from the Spanish ambassador, and from my own people in London that the king has been persuaded there will be no ruling any of England, let alone the North, unless he forges an agreement with the pilgrims. They have told him, simply and respectfully, that the Church has to return to Rome, and the old noble advisors to his chambers. The king may complain that nobody has the right to tell him who to consult, but he knows, as the lords know, as the gentlemen know, as the commons know, that nothing has gone well with his reign since he put lowly clerks in the highest office and pretended to marry the daughter of my steward.

Finally, blustering and angry, he consents—he can do nothing but consent—and Thomas Howard rides back north through flurries of snow in freezing weather, carrying the king’s pardon, and has to wait in the cold outside Doncaster while the Lancaster herald offers the king’s pardon to the thousands of patient northerners in their massed and silent ranks. Robert Aske, the leader who came from almost nowhere, kneels before his thousands of pilgrims and tells them that they have won a great victory. He asks them to release him from his post as captain. When they agree, he tears off the badge of the five wounds and promises that they all will wear no badge but that of the king.

When I hear that, I take the badge that Tom Darcy gave me from my pocket, and I kiss it, and put it at the back of an old chest in my wardrobe rooms. I don’t need it as a secret reminder of my loyalty anymore. The pilgrimage is over and the pilgrims have won; we can all put our badges away and my sons, all my sons, will be coming home.

London is filled with joy at the news. They ring the church bells for the Christmas service but everyone knows they are pealing out that we have saved the country, and saved the Church, and saved the king from himself. I take my household to watch the court progress from Westminster to Greenwich, and we laugh and walk on the frozen river. It is so cold that the children can slip and slide on the ice and my grandchildren Katherine, Winifred, and Harry cling to my arms and beg me to tow them along.

The court, in its golden Christmas glory, walks in the center of the river, the bishops in their copes with their miters on their heads and their jeweled crooks sparkling in the light of a thousand torches. The men-at-arms hold back the crowds so that the horses in their special ice shoes with sharp studs can take to the center of the river as if it were a great white road curving its way through an ice city, as if they could ride all the way to the Russias. All the roofs of London are crusted with snow; every thatch has a fringe of glistening icicles. The prosperous citizens and their children are brightly dressed in holly colors of red and green, throwing their rosy bonnets in the air and shouting: “God save the king! God save the queen!”

When the Princess Mary comes out, dressed in white on her white horse, she gets the greatest roar the crowd can raise. “God save the princess!” My grandson Harry is thrilled to see her, he jumps on the spot and cheers, his eyes bright with loyalty. The people of London don’t care that she is to be called Lady Mary, and is a princess no longer. They know that they have restored the Church, they have no doubt but that they will restore the princess too.

She smiles as I taught her to smile, and turns her head left and right so that no one is neglected. She raises her gloved hand, and I see that she has beautifully embroidered white leather gloves, sewn with pearls; at last she is being kept as a princess should be. Her horse has trappings of deep green, her saddle is green leather. Over her head her standard flaps in the icy wind, and I smile to see that she is flying the Tudor rose, with the red of the center so small that it looks like a white rose, and she flies her mother’s flag too, the pomegranate.

She has the prettiest bonnet on her head, silvery white with a sweeping feather; she has a rich jacket of white embroidered with silver thread and stitched with pearls. Her deep, full skirt is white too, falling either side of the saddle, and she rides well, her reins held firmly in her hand, her head up.

At her side, riding alongside on a little bay pony as if she had a right to be there, is the three-year-old Boleyn girl, her pretty face bright under a scarlet hat, waving her hand to everyone. Mary speaks to her from time to time. It is obvious that she loves her little half sister Elizabeth. The crowd applauds her for it. Mary has a tender heart, and she is always looking for someone to love.

“Can’t I make a bow? Can’t I bow to her?” Harry demands.

I shake my head. “Not today. I will take you to her another time.”

I step back so that she does not see me. I don’t want to be a reminder of harder days, and I don’t want her to think that I am seeking her attention on this, the day of her triumph. I want her to feel the joy that she should have had from childhood, I want her to be a princess with no regrets. She has had few happy days, none since the coming of the Boleyn whore, but this is one. I don’t want it overshadowed by her sorrow that she cannot have me by her side, that still we are parted.

I am content to watch her from the riverbank. I think that at last the king is coming to his senses and we have endured some strange years of mad cruelty, when he did not know what he was doing, when he did not know what he was thinking, and there was no one with the courage to stop him. But now the people themselves have stopped him. With the courage of the saints, the common people have stood up and warned Henry Tudor that his father conquered the country but cannot take their souls.

Wolsey would not do it, the Boleyn girl could not do it, Cromwell never thought to do it, but the people of England have said to their king that he has come to a line they have drawn. He does not have power over everything in the kingdom. He does not have power over the Church, he does not have power over them.