Three Sisters, Three Queens

RICHMOND PALACE, ENGLAND, JUNE 1503

I go to the nursery to say good-bye to my sister Mary, and who should I find but Katherine, teaching her to play the lute as if we don’t employ a music master, as if Katherine has nothing better to do. I don’t trouble to conceal my irritation. “I have come to say good-bye to my sister,” I say as a broad hint to Katherine that she might leave us alone.

“And here are both your sisters!”

“I have to say good-bye to Mary.” I ignore Katherine and guide Mary to the seat in the oriel window and pull her down to sit beside me. Katherine stands before us and listens. Good, I think, now you can see that I too have a sense of my destiny.

“I am going to Scotland to my husband; I am going to be a great queen,” I inform Mary. “I will own a fortune, a queen’s fortune. I will write to you and you must reply. You must write properly, not a silly scribble. And I will tell you how I get on as queen in my own court.”

She is seven years old, no longer a baby, but her face puckers up and she reaches out her arms to me. I receive the full sobbing weight of her on my lap. “Don’t cry,” I say. “Don’t cry, Mary. I will come back on visits. Perhaps you will come to visit me.”

She only sobs more passionately, and I meet Katherine’s concerned gaze over her heaving shoulder. “I thought she would be glad for me,” I say. “I thought I should tell her—you know—that a princess is not like a plowman’s daughter.”

“It is hard for her to lose a sister,” she says with ready sympathy. “And she has just lost a mother and a brother.”

“I have too!” I point out.

The older girl smiles and puts her hand gently on my shoulder. “It’s hard for us all.”

“It wasn’t very hard for you.”

I see the shadow pass over her face. “It is,” she says shortly. She kneels beside the two of us and puts her arm around my sister’s thin shaking shoulders. “Little Princess Mary,” she says sweetly. “One sister is leaving you, but one has arrived. I am here. And we will all write to each other, and we will always be friends. And one day, you will go to a beautiful country and be married, and we will always remember our royal sisters.”

Mary raises her tearstained face and reaches out for Katherine’s neck so she is holding us both. It is almost as if we are welded together by sisterly love. I can’t pull away, and I find that I don’t want to. I put my arms around Katherine and Mary and our three golden heads come together as if we were swearing an oath.

“Friends forever and ever,” Mary says solemnly.

“We are the Tudor sisters,” Katherine says, though obviously she’s not.

“Two princesses and one queen,” I say.

Katherine smiles at me, her face close to mine, her eyes shining. “I am sure we will all be queens one day,” she says.