Three Sisters, Three Queens

LAMBETH PALACE, ENGLAND, AUTUMN 1516

I surprise myself by not collapsing into tears. I find I want to talk to someone who will understand how I feel—not someone whose softly-spoken advice only makes me feel worse. I call for my horse and for my grooms of the stable. I put on my best riding cape and my gown trimmed with marten, and I ride to Greenwich. I don’t go to the king’s presence chamber to see my brother, I take the stairs to the queen’s side, and the chief of my ladies asks the head of Katherine’s household if she will see me. He shows me in at once, and I find her ladies sitting quietly in her presence chamber, and the door to her privy chamber closed.

“You may go in,” he says quietly. “Her Grace is at prayer.”

I enter quietly, closing the door behind me on all of them, and I see her through the open door to the private chapel that she has made adjoining her privy chamber. I stand in the doorway and watch as the priest makes the sign of the cross over her bowed head and crosses himself, and she rises from the luxurious prie-dieu, speaks a few words to him, and comes out, her face smiling and serene.

She lights up with genuine pleasure when she sees me. “I was just praying for you, and here you are,” she exclaims. She puts her hand out to me. “I heard the news from Scotland. You must be glad at least that your husband is alive and restored to his own.”

“I can’t be,” I say, with sudden honesty. “I know that I should be. I know that I should be glad for him. And I am glad that he has not been killed. I have been in a constant terror that there would be an accident, or a raid, or a fight . . . But I can’t be happy that he has agreed with Albany and left me here.” I swallow a gulp of tears. “I know I should be glad for his safety. But I can’t.”

She draws me to the fireside and we sit together on stools of equal height. “It is hard,” she agrees. “You must feel quite abandoned by him.”

“I do!” I trust her with the painful truth. “I left him behind because he wanted to fight for me and would not come to England with our cause in so bad a state. It broke my heart to leave him, and he was so loving, he followed me to York and swore that he would fight for me to the death, and now I find that he has made an agreement with our enemy and is snug in his own little castle! Katherine—it must have been he who sent on my gowns!”

She looks down, she purses her lips. “I know. It is hard when you think someone is very good, very great, and they disappoint you. But perhaps it will be for the best. When you go back to Scotland you will have his castles to live in, he will have a fortune to support you. He will be on the council and can speak for you. You will be the wife of a great Scots lord and not an outlaw.”

“Have you been disappointed?” I ask so quietly that I wonder if she can hear me.

She turns her honest blue eyes on me. “Yes,” she says shortly. “You will have heard of some of my troubles. I think that everyone knows that Henry took a lover in the very first year of our marriage, when I was confined with our first child. Since then, there have been others, always another. There is one now.”

“One of your ladies?” I dare to ask.

She nods. “That makes it twice as bad,” she says. “It feels like a double betrayal. I thought of her as my friend, I thought of her tenderly.”

I can hardly breathe, I want to know so much which one it is. I don’t think I can ask. There is something about Katherine, something forbidding, even sitting on a stool before a fire, side by side with her sister.

“But it’s not serious,” I state. “It’s an amusement, for a young man, as all these young men do. Harry is gallant, he likes to play at chivalrous love.”

“It is not serious to him perhaps,” she says with quiet dignity. “But it is serious to me; and of course it is serious to her. I say nothing about it, and I treat her as kindly as I have always done. But it troubles me. On the nights that he does not come to my bed, I wonder if he is with her. And of course,” her voice quavers, just a little, “I am afraid.”

“Afraid?” I would not have thought she was ever afraid. She sits so straight, she looks out of the window to the sunlit river as if she would know all the secrets of the world and is afraid of nothing. “I never think of you as fearful, I think of you as indomitable.”

She laughs at that. “You left England before I was diminished. But you must have known I was defeated by your lady grandmother. She set out to bring me very low, and she was successful.”

“But you recovered your place. You married Harry.”

She gives a little shrug. “Yes, I thought I had won him and I would keep him forever. The girl—it is Bessie Blount, you know, the pretty girl, the fair one, very musical, very charming . . .”

“Oh,” I say, thinking of that blond head bent over a lute and that sweet clear voice.

“She is young and, I expect, fertile. If he were to get a child on her . . .” Katherine breaks off and I see that her eyes are filled with tears. She blinks them away as if they mean nothing. “If she were to give him a son before I do, then I think my heart would break.”

“But you’ll have a son next time!” I declare with false certainty. She has had four dead babies and one live little girl.

She looks at me; this is not a woman for an optimistic lie. “If God wills,” she says. “But I held a boy in my arms and named him Henry for his father, and then I had to bury him, and pray for his immortal soul. I don’t think I could bear for Bessie to have a son from my husband.”

“Oh, but surely he’d never let her call him Henry,” I remark, as if it matters.

Katherine smiles and shakes her head. “Ah, well. It’s not happened yet. Perhaps it will never happen.”

“So she must be married off to someone,” I say. “At least you can arrange her wedding and get her sent away from court.”

Katherine makes a little gesture with her hand. “I don’t know that it would be very fair to her, or to her husband,” she says. “She’s very young, I would not want to order her to marry a man who might resent it. He would know that she was the king’s leavings. He might be cruel to her.”

I simply cannot understand why she should care about Bessie’s happiness, and my bewilderment must show in my face, for Katherine laughs and pats my cheek. “Ah, my sister,” she says. “I was raised by a woman whose husband broke her heart over and over. I am always on the side of the woman. Even if the woman is my rival. And little Bessie is not really my rival. She is just a lover, not the first, and I doubt if she will be the last. But I am always the queen. Nobody can take that from me. He will always come back to me. I am his first, his true love. I am his wife, his only wife.”

“And I am Archibald’s,” I say, comforted by her certainty. “And you’re right that I should be pleased that my husband has gained a pardon from Albany and can live in his own castle again. Of course I am glad that he is safe. I can go home to him there and perhaps my son can come to us.”

“You must miss him so much,” she says.

“I do,” I agree. But I am thinking of Archibald, and she is thinking of my son James. “And at least he has been living on his wits in the borderlands,” I continue. “It’s hard to find somewhere safe for the night, hard to get enough to eat. There are no beautiful girls composing songs there.”

Katherine does not smile. “I hope that he never turns from you, wherever he lives,” she says. “It is an awful bereavement, when the man who has your love and your happiness in his keeping forgets about you.”

“Is that how it feels for you?” I ask, thinking of my wild fury with James and his open infidelities; of all the little bastards who came running towards him, and I knowing that their mothers lived conveniently nearby and that he rode out to see them on his way to holy pilgrimage.

“It makes me feel as if I am of no use,” she says quietly. “And I don’t know how to remind him that his honor and his heart are mine, sworn to me. I don’t know how to recall him to do his duty before God, as I do mine. Even if we never have another child—though I pray every day that we have a son—but even if we never have another child I am his partner and his helpmeet, at his side through war and through peace. I am his wife and his queen. He cannot forget me.”

I have a moment of shame that my little brother should treat his wife so badly. “He’s a fool,” I say abruptly.

She stops me with a small gesture of her heavily ringed hand. “I cannot allow a criticism of him,” she says. “Not even from you. He is the king. I have promised him my love and obedience forever.”