The King's Curse Read online

  “I think he asks everyone. But he doesn’t listen to anyone, except perhaps the Bishop Wolsey. It’s natural that he should, my lord being so wise and knowing the will of God and everything.”

  “At any rate, don’t tell him that his marriage is invalid,” I say bluntly. “I would never forgive you, Bessie, if you said something like that. It would be wicked. It would be a lie. God would never forgive you for such a lie. And the queen would be hurt.”

  Fervently, she shakes her head and the pearls on her new headdress bob and shine in the candlelight. “I never would! I love the queen. But I can only tell the king what he wants to hear. You know that as well as I.”

  I go back into the confinement chamber and stay with Katherine through her labor until the pains come faster and faster and she hauls on a knotted cord and the midwives throw handfuls of pepper in her face to make her sneeze. She is gasping for breath, the tears pouring down her face, her eyes and nostrils burning with the harsh spice, as she screams in pain and with a rush of blood the baby is born. The midwife pounces on him, hauls him out like a wriggling fish, and cuts the cord. The rocker enfolds him in a pure linen cloth and then a blanket of wool, and holds him up for the queen to see. She is blinded with tears and choking with the pepper and with the pain. “Is it a boy?” she demands.

  “A boy!” they tell her, in a delighted chorus. “A boy! A live boy!”

  She reaches out to touch his little clenched fists, his kicking feet, though this time, she is afraid to hold him. But he is strong: red in the face, hollering, loud as his father, as self-important as a Tudor. She gives an amazed, delighted little laugh, and holds out her arms. “He is well?”

  “He is well,” they confirm. “Small, because he is early, but well.”

  She turns to me and gives me the great honor: “You shall tell the king,” she says.

  I find him in his rooms, playing cards with his friends Charles Brandon, William Compton, and my son Montague. I am announced just ahead of a scramble of courtiers who were hoping to gather the news from the maids at the doorway and get to him with the first tidings, and he knows at once why I have come to him. He leaps to his feet, his face bright with hope. I see once more the boy I knew, the boy who always hovered between boasting and fearfulness. I curtsey and my beam, as I rise up, tells him everything.

  “Your Grace, the queen has been brought to bed of a bonny boy,” I say simply. “You have a son, you have a prince.”

  He staggers, and puts his hand on Montague’s shoulder to steady himself. My own son supports his king and is the first to say: “God bless! Praise be!”

  Henry’s mouth is trembling, and I remember that despite his vanity he is only twenty-three, and his ostentation is a shield over his fear of failure. I see the tears in his eyes and realize he has been living under a terrible dread that his marriage was cursed, that he would never have a son, and that right now, as people outside the room cheer at the news and his comrades slap him on the back and call him a great man, a bull of a man, a stallion of a man, a man indeed, he is feeling the curse lifting from him.

  “I must pray, I must give thanks,” he stammers, as if he does not know what he is saying, he does not know what he should say. “Lady Margaret! I should give thanks, shouldn’t I? I should have a Mass sung at once? This is God’s blessing on me, isn’t it? Proof of His favor? I am blessed. I am blessed. Everyone can see that I am blessed. My house is blessed.”

  Courtiers crowd around him. I see Thomas Wolsey elbowing his way through the young men, and then sending a message for the cannons to fire and all the church bells in England to peal, and a thanksgiving Mass to be said in every church. They will light bonfires in the streets, they will serve free ale and roast meats, and the news will go out all around the kingdom that the king’s line is secure, that the queen has given him a son, that the Tudor dynasty will live forever.

  “She is well?” Henry asks me over the babble of comment and delighted congratulation. “The baby is strong?”

  “She is well,” I confirm. No need to tell him that she is torn, that she is bleeding terribly, that she is almost blinded by the spices they threw in her face and exhausted by the labor. Henry does not like to hear of illness; he has a horror of physical weakness. If he knew the queen was ripped and bleeding, he would never bring himself to her bed again.

  “The baby is lusty and strong.” I take a breath and I play my strongest card for the queen. “He looks just like you, sire. He has hair of Tudor red.”

  He gives a shout of joy and at once he is jumping round the room like a boy, pounding men on the back, embracing his friends, ebullient as a young tup in the meadow.

  “My son! My son!”

  “The Duke of Cornwall.” Thomas Wolsey reminds him of the title.

  Someone brings in a flask of wine and slops it into a dozen cups. “The Duke of Cornwall!” they bellow. “God bless him! God save the king and the Prince of Wales!”

  “And you will watch over the nursery?” Henry calls over his shoulder to me. “Dear Lady Margaret? You will care for and guard my son? You are the only woman in England I would trust to raise him.”

  I hesitate. I was to be Lady Governess to the first son, and I am afraid to undertake this again. But I have to consent. If I do not, it looks as if I doubt my abilities, it looks as if I doubt the health of the child whom they are putting into my keeping. All the time, every day of our lives, every minute of every day, we have to act as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing can go wrong, as if the Tudors are under the exceptional blessing of God.

  “You could not choose more tender care,” my son Montague says quickly as I hesitate. He gives me a look as if to remind me that I must respond, and promptly.

  “I am honored,” I say.

  The king himself presses a goblet of wine into my hand. “Dear Lady Margaret,” he says. “You will raise the next King of England.”

  And so it is me the nurse calls first, when she lifts the little baby from his golden enamelled crib and finds that he is blue and lifeless. They were in the room next door to the queen’s bedroom; the nursemaid was sitting beside the cradle, watching him, but she had thought that he was very quiet. She put her hand on his soft head and felt no pulse. She put her fingers down inside his lawn nightgown and found him still warm. But he was not breathing. He had just stopped breathing, as if some old curse had gently rested a cool hand over his little nose and mouth, and made an end to the line that killed the princes of York.

  I hold the lifeless body as the nurse weeps on her knees before me, crying over and over again that she never took her eyes off him, he made not a sound, there was no way of knowing that anything was wrong—and then I put him back into his ornate crib as if I hope that he will sleep well. Without knowing what to say, I walk through the adjoining door between the nursery and the confinement room where the queen has been washed and bandaged and dressed in her nightgown, ready for the night.

  The midwives are turning down the fresh sheets on the big bed, a couple of ladies-in-waiting are seated beside the fire, the queen herself is praying at the little altar at the corner of the room. I kneel beside her and she turns her face to me and sees my expression.

  “No,” she says simply.

  “I am so sorry.” For a terrible moment I think I am going to vomit, I am so sick to my belly and so filled with horror at what I have to say. “I am so sorry.”

  She is shaking her head, wordlessly, like an idiot at the fair. “No,” she says. “No.”

  “He is dead,” I say very quietly. “He died in his cradle while he was sleeping. Just a moment ago. I am so sorry.”

  She goes white and sways backwards. I give a shout of warning and one of her ladies, Bessie Blount, catches her as she faints. We pick her up and lie her on the bed and the midwife comes to pour a bitter oil onto a cloth and clamps it to her nose and mouth. She chokes and opens her eyes and sees my face. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that was a terrible dream.”

  “It’s true,”