The King's Curse Read online

  A widow for four years, with no prospect of help, barely enough money to eat, no roof to put over my children’s heads, no dowry for my daughter, no brides for my sons, no lover, no friends, no chance of remarriage since I never even see a man who is not a priest, I go on my knees eight hours a day every day alongside the nuns to observe the liturgy of the hours, and I watch my prayers change.

  In the first year I prayed for help, in the second year for release. By the end of the third year I am praying for the death of King Henry and the damnation of his mother and the return of my House of York. In the silence I have grown into a bitter rebel. I damn the Tudors to hell and I come to hope that the curse that my cousin Elizabeth and her mother laid on them rings true, down through the long years to the end of the Tudors and the destruction of their line.

  SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, APRIL 1509

  I have the news first from the old porteress at the abbey who comes to the door of my cell and throws it open without knocking. Ursula is in her truckle bed and does not stir but Geoffrey sleeps in my narrow bed, held in my arms, and he pops up his little head as Joan bangs into the room and says: “The king is dead. Wake up, my lady. We are free. God is merciful. He has blessed us. God has saved us. The curse of the Red Dragon has passed over us. The king is dead.”

  I was dreaming that I was in the court of my uncle Richard at Sheriff Hutton and my cousin Elizabeth was dancing with him in a swirl of gold and silver brocade. I sit up at once and say to her: “Hush. I won’t hear it.”

  Her old wizened face is cracked open with a smile. I have never seen her beam before. “You’ll hear this!” she says. “And anyone can say it, and anyone can hear it. For the spymaster is dead and the spies are thrown out of employment. The king is dead and the bonny, bonny prince has come to his throne just in time to save us all.”

  Just then the bell of the abbey starts to toll, a steady, deep, sonorous note, and Geoffrey scrambles to his knees and says: “Hurrah! Hurrah! Is Henry to be king?”

  “Of course,” the old woman says, catching at his little hands and dancing him on the bed. “God bless him and the day he comes to the throne.”

  “My brother Henry!” Geoffrey squeaks. “King of England!”

  I am so horrified by this innocent speaking of treason that I snatch him to me, put my hand over his mouth, and turn to her in an agonized appeal for her silence. But she just shakes her head at him and laughs at his pride. “By rights—yes,” she says boldly. “It should be your brother Henry. But we have a bonny Tudor boy to come after the old sweat master, and Prince Harry Tudor will take the throne and the spies and the taxmen will be gone.”

  I jump out of bed and start to pull on my clothes.

  “Will she send for you?” Joan the porteress asks me, swinging Geoffrey from the bed and letting him dance around her. Ursula rises up and rubs her eyes and says: “What’s happening?”

  “Who?” I am thinking of My Lady the King’s Mother, who has buried her grandson and will now bury her son, just as Elizabeth’s curse foretold. She will be a broken woman. She will believe, as I do, that the Tudors signed their own death warrant when they killed our princes in the Tower. She will think, as I do, that they are accursed murderers.

  “Katherine, Dowager Princess of Wales,” Joan says simply. “Won’t he marry her and make her Queen of England as he promised to do? Won’t she send for you, her dearest friend? Won’t you be able to have your children with you at court and live as you were born to? Won’t it be like a miracle for you, like the stone rolling from the tomb and letting you all out?”

  I stop short. I am so unaccustomed to hope that I hardly know what to say. I had not even thought of this.

  “He might,” I say wonderingly. “He might marry her. And she might send for me. You know, if he does—she will.”

  It is like a miracle, a release as powerful as spring after a cold, gray winter. It comes in springtime and ever after when I see the hawthorn blossom making the hedges as white as snow, or the daffodils leaning over in the wind, I think of that spring when the old Tudor king was dead and the Tudor boy took the throne and made everything right.

  He had told me in his nursery that to be a king was a holy duty. I thought of him then as a lovable little braggart: a boy spoiled by doting women, a loving boy of good intentions. Yet who would have thought that he would have leaped up to defy the mean old man, to take Katherine as his betrothed wife, to declare himself king and ready to marry her in one breath? It was the first thing he did, this boy of seventeen, the very first thing that he did. Just like my uncle King Edward, he took the throne and he took the woman he loved. Who would have thought that Harry Tudor had the courage of a Plantagenet? Who would have thought he had the imagination? Who would have thought he had the passion?

  He is his mother’s son; that can be the only explanation. He has her love and her courage and her bright optimism, which is the nature of our family. He is a Tudor king but he is a boy of the House of York. In his joy and his optimism, he is one of ours. In his willing grasping of power, in his quick execution: he is one of ours.

  Katherine the princess sends for me with a short note that bids me come to the house of Lady Williams, where I will find rooms waiting for me suitable for a noblewoman of my station. Then I am to come at once to the Palace of Westminster, go straight to the wardrobe rooms, pick out half a dozen gowns, and attend her, richly dressed, as her first lady-in-waiting. It is my release. I am free. It is my restoration.

  I leave the children at Syon while I go downriver to London. I dare not take them with me yet; I feel as if I have to make sure that we are safe, to see that we are truly free before I dare summon them to be with me.

  London does not look like a city which has lost a king. It is not a capital in mourning; it is a city mad with joy. They are roasting meat at the street corners; they are sharing ale out of the windows of the brewhouses. The king has not been buried long, the prince is not yet crowned, but the place is elated. They are opening the debtors’ prisons and men are coming out who had thought they would never see daylight again. It is as if a monster has died and we are freed from the grip of a bad spell. It is like waking from a nightmare. It is like spring after a long, long winter.

  Dressed in my new gown of pale Tudor green, wearing a gable hood as heavy as that of the princess, I walk into the presence chamber of the King of England and see the prince, not on his throne, not standing in a stiff pose under the cloth of estate as if he were the portrait of majesty, but laughing with his friends strolling around the room, with Katherine at his side, as if they were a pair of lovers, enchanted with each other. And at the end of the room, seated on her chair with a circle of silent ladies all around her, a priest on either side for support, is My Lady, wearing deepest black, torn between grief and fury. She is no longer My Lady the King’s Mother—the title that gave her so much pride is buried with her son. Now, if she chooses it, she can be called My Lady the King’s Grandmother, and by the thunderous look on her face she does not choose it.

  ENGLAND, 1509

  For the commons of England it is a merciful release from hardship. For the lords it is an escape from tyranny. For the people of my family and my house it is the miraculous lifting of a death sentence. Anyone with Plantagenet blood or affinity to York has been living on license, achingly aware that at any moment the king might revoke permission and there would be a knock on the door from the green-and-white-liveried yeomen of the guard and a swift trip in their unmarked barge to the water gate of the Tower. The great portcullis would slide up, the barge would enter—and the prisoner would never come out again.

  But now we do come out. William Courtenay emerges from the Tower with a royal pardon, and we pray that William de la Pole will be out soon. My cousin Thomas Gray is released from Calais castle and comes home. Disbelievingly, like householders slowly opening their painted doors after plague has passed through a village, we all start to emerge. Cousins come to London from their distant castle