The King's Curse Read online

  But my boy Reginald, the bright, happy, cheeky boy, has to be found a place. He is too young to go as a squire into a household, and I have no kinsmen with children who will take him into their nursery. The friends I used to know in the Marches or Wales are well aware that I am not invited to court nor paid a pension. They rightly take this to mean that the Tudors do not look kindly on me. I can think of only one man, too unworldly to calculate the danger of helping me, too kind to refuse. I write to My Lady’s confessor, Bishop Fisher:

  Dear Father,

  I hope you can help me, for I have nowhere else to turn. I cannot pay my bills, nor keep my children at home.

  I have been forced to send my two oldest boys to my cousin Neville; but I would like to find a place in a good religious house for my little son Reginald. If the Church insists, I will give him to God. He is a clever boy, quick-witted and lively, perhaps even a spiritual boy. I think he will serve God well. And anyway, I cannot keep him.

  For myself and my two younger children I hope to find refuge in a nunnery where we can live on the small income that I have.

  Your daughter in Christ,

  Margaret Pole

  He writes back at once. He has done more than I had asked of him—he has found a place for Reginald and a refuge for me. He says I may stay at Syon Abbey, one of my family’s favorite religious houses opposite the old Sheen Palace. The abbey is commanded by a Mother Abbess and attended by about fifty nuns, but they often take noble visitors and I can live there with my daughter and Baby Geoffrey. When Ursula is of age, she can become a novice and then a nun in the order and her future will be secure. At the very least there will be food on the table and a roof over our heads for the next few years.

  Bishop Fisher has found Reginald a place in the brother house to the abbey—Sheen Priory, a monastery of the Carthusian Order. He will be only a few miles from us, across the river. If I were to be allowed a candle to set in my window, he would see the glow of the light and know I was thinking of him. We may be allowed to hire a boatman to row across the river to see him on feast days. We will be separated by the discipline of the religious houses, and by the wide, wide river, but I will be able to see the chimneys of the priory that houses my son. There is every reason for me to be delighted with such a generous solution to my difficulties. My son will be provided for in one house, and the other children and I will have a roof over our heads almost within sight of him. I should be joyous with relief.

  Except, except, except . . . I slide to my knees on the floor and I pray to Our Lady to save us from this refuge. I know with complete conviction this is not the right place for Reginald, my clever, bright, chattering boy. The Carthusians are an order of silent hermits. Sheen Priory is a place of unbroken silence of the strictest of religious discipline. Reginald, my merry little boy who is so proud of learning to sing in a round, who loves to read aloud, who has learned some riddles and jokes and loves to tell them slowly, with intense concentration, to his brothers: this bright, talkative child will have to serve the monks who live like hermits in individual cells, each one praying and working alone. There is not one word spoken in the priory, except for Sundays and feast days. Once a week, the monks take a walk together and then they may talk in quiet tones, among themselves. The rest of the time they are in prayerful silence, each one alone with his thoughts with his own struggle with God, alone in his cell, enclosed by high walls, listening only to the sound of the wind.

  I cannot bear to think of my chattering, high-spirited son silenced in a place of such holy discipline. I try to reassure myself that God will speak to Reginald in the cold quietness, and call him to a vocation. Reginald will learn to be silent, just as he learned to talk. He will learn to value his own thoughts and not laugh or dance or sing or caper and play the fool for his big brothers. Again and again I assure myself that this is a great opportunity for my bright boy. But I know in my heart that if God fails to call this little boy to a lifetime of holy service, then I will have put my bright, loving boy in a wordless prison for life.

  I dream of him locked in a tiny cell, and I wake with a start and cry out his name. I rack my brains to think of something else that I can do with him. But I do not know anyone who would take him as a squire, and I have no money to swear him as an apprentice, and besides—what could he do? He is a Plantagenet—I cannot have him trained up to be a cobbler. Shall an heir to the House of York stir the mash for a brewer? Would I be a better mother if I sent him to learn oaths and blasphemy running errands in an inn, than prayer and silence with a devout order?

  Bishop Fisher has found him a place, a safe place and one where they will feed and educate him. I have to accept it. I can do nothing more for him. But when I think of my lighthearted son in a place where the only sound is the ticking of the clock, telling the hours to the next service of liturgy, I cannot stop my eyes blurring with tears.

  It is my duty to destroy my home and my family, which I created so proudly as the new Lady Pole. I order all the household servants and the grooms into the great hall and I tell them that we have fallen on hard times and that I release them from service. I pay them their wages up to that day; I can offer no more though I know that I am flinging them into poverty. I tell the children that we have to leave our home, and I try to smile and suggest that it is an adventure. I say it will be exciting to live elsewhere. I close down the castle at Stourton, where my husband brought me as a bride, and where my children were born, leaving only John Little to serve as a bailiff and collect the rents and fees. Two thirds he has to send to the king, one third he will send to me.

  We ride away from our home, Geoffrey in my arms as I ride pillion behind John Little, Ursula on the little pony, and Reginald tiny on his brother’s old hunter. He rides well; he has his father’s way with horses and people. He will miss the stables and the dogs and the cheerful noise of the farmyard. I cannot bring myself to tell him his destination. I keep thinking that when we are on the road, he will ask me where we are going and I will find the courage to tell him that we have to part: Ursula and Geoffrey and I to one religious house and he to another. I try to fool myself that he will understand that this is his destiny—not what we might have chosen, yet now inevitable. But trustingly, he does not ask me. He assumes we will stay together; it does not occur to him that he might be sent away.

  He is subdued at leaving his home, while little Geoffrey is excited by the journey and Ursula starts brightly and then starts to whimper. Reginald never asks me where we are going, and then I start to imagine that somehow he already knows, and that he wants to avoid the conversation as I do.

  Only on the very last morning, as we are riding on the towpath beside the river towards Sheen, do I say: “We’ll soon be there. This will be your new home.”

  He looks up at me from his little pony. “Our new home?”

  “No,” I say shortly. “I am going to stay nearby, just a little way across the river.”

  He says nothing, and I think perhaps he has not understood.

  “I have often lived apart from you,” I remind him. “When I had to go to Ludlow, and I left you at Stourton.”

  He turns his wide-eyed face towards me. He does not say, “But then I was with my brothers and sister and with all the people I had known all my life, my nurse in the nursery, my tutor who taught my brothers and me.” He just looks at me, uncomprehending. “You will not leave me alone?” he finally asks. “In a strange place? Mother? You will not just leave me?”

  I shake my head. I can hardly trust myself to speak. “I will visit you,” I whisper. “I promise.”

  The high towers of the priory come into sight, the gate opens, and the prior himself comes out to greet me, takes Reginald by the hand, and helps him down from the saddle.

  “I will come and see you,” I promise from high on my horse, looking down at the golden crown of his bowed head. “And you will be allowed to visit me.”

  He looks very small as he stands beside the prior. He does not pull away or show