The King's Curse Read online

  I stand with one hand raised in farewell until a bend in the road hides them from me and then I go inside, gathering my fine woolen shawl around me. I will go to the nursery and see my children, before dinner is served to the whole household, and after dinner I will raise a glass to the stewards of my house and lands, command them to keep everything in good order during my absence, and retire to my chamber with my ladies-in-waiting, my midwives, and the nurses. There I have to wait, for the four long weeks of my confinement, for our new baby.

  I am not afraid of pain, so I don’t dread the birth. This is my fourth childbed and at least I know what to expect. But I don’t look forward to it either. None of my children brings me the joy that I see in other mothers. My boys do not fill me with fierce ambition, I cannot pray for them to rise in the world—I would be mad to want them to catch the eye of the king, for what would he see but another Plantagenet boy? A rival heir to the throne? A threat? My daughter does not give me the satisfaction of seeing a little woman in the making: another me, another Plantagenet princess. How can I think of her as anything but doomed if she shines at court? I have got myself safely through these years by being almost invisible, how can I dress a girl, and put her forward, and hope that people admire her? All I want for her is a comfortable obscurity. To be a loving mother, a woman has to be optimistic, filled with hope for the babies, planning their future in safety, dreaming of grand plans. But I am of the House of York; I know better than anyone that it is an uncertain, dangerous world, and the best plan I can make for my children is that they survive in the shadows—by birth they will be the greatest of all the actors, but I must hope they are always either offstage, or anonymous in the crowd.

  The baby comes early, a week before I had thought, and he is handsome and strong, with a funny little tuft of brown hair in the middle of his head like the crest on a cock. He takes to the wet nurse’s milk and she suckles him constantly. I send the good news to his father and receive his congratulations and a bracelet of Welsh gold in reply. He says he will come home for the christening and that we must call the boy Reginald—Reginald the counselor—as a gentle hint to the king and his mother that this boy will be raised to be an advisor and humble servant to their line. It is no surprise to me that my husband wants the baby’s very name to indicate our servitude to them. When they won the country, they won us too. Our future depends on their favor. The Tudors own everything in England now; perhaps they always will.

  Sometimes the wet nurse gives him to me and I rock him and admire the curve of his closed eyelids and the sweep of the eyelashes against his cheek. He reminds me of my brother when he was a baby. I can remember his plump toddler face very well, and his anxious dark eyes when he was a boy. I hardly saw him as a young man. I cannot picture the prisoner walking through the rain to the scaffold on Tower Hill. I hold my new baby close to my heart and think that life is fragile; perhaps it is safer not to love anyone at all.

  My husband comes home as he promised—he always does what he promises—in time for the christening, and as soon as I am out of confinement and churched, we return to Ludlow. It is a long hard journey for me, and I go partly by litter and partly by horseback, riding in the morning and resting in the afternoon, but even so it takes us two days on the road and I am glad to see the high walls of the town, the striped black and cream of the lathes and plaster of the houses under their thick thatch roofs, and behind them, tall and dark, the greater walls of the castle.

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SPRING 1500

  They throw the gates wide open in compliment to me, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain of the Prince of Wales, and Arthur himself comes bounding like a colt out of the main gate, all long legs and excitement, to help me down from my horse and ask me how I am doing, and why have I not brought the new baby?

  “It’s too cold for him, he’s better off with his wet nurse at home.” I hug him and he drops to kneel for my blessing as the wife of his guardian, and royal cousin to his mother, and as he rises up I bob a curtsey to him as the heir to the throne. We go easily through these steps of protocol without thinking of them. He has been raised to be a king, and I was brought up as one of the most important people in a ceremonial court, where almost everyone curtseyed to me, walked behind me, rose when I entered a room, or departed bowing from my presence. Until the Tudors came, until I was married, until I became unimportant Lady Pole.

  Arthur steps back to scrutinize my face, the funny boy, fourteen this year, but sweet-natured and thoughtful as the tenderhearted woman, his mother. “Are you all right?” he asks carefully. “Was it all, all right?”

  “Quite all right,” I say to him firmly. “I’m quite unchanged.”

  He beams at that. This boy has his mother’s loving heart; he is going to be a king with compassion and God knows this is what England needs to heal the wounds of thirty long years of battles.

  My husband comes bustling from the stables, and he and Arthur sweep me into the great hall where the court bows to me and I walk through the hundreds of men of our household to my place of honor between my husband and the Prince of Wales, at the high table.

  Later that night I go to Arthur’s bedchamber to hear him say his prayers. His chaplain is there, kneeling at the prie-dieu beside him, listening to the careful recitation in Latin of the collect for the day and the prayer for the night. He reads a passage from one of the psalms and Arthur bows his head to pray for the safety of his father and mother, the King and Queen of England. “And for My Lady the King’s Mother, the Countess of Richmond,” he adds, reciting her title so that God will not forget how high she has risen, and how worthy her claim to His attention. I bow my head when he says “Amen,” and then the chaplain gathers up his things and Arthur takes a leap into his big bed.

  “Lady Margaret, d’you know if I am to be married this year?”

  “Nobody has told me a date,” I say. I sit on the side of his bed and look at his bright face, the soft down on his upper lip that he loves to stroke as if it will encourage it to grow. “But there can be no objection to the wedding now.”

  At once, he puts his hand out to touch mine. He knows that the monarchs of Spain swore they would send their daughter to be his bride only when they were assured that there were no rival heirs to the throne of England. They meant not only my brother Edward, but also the pretender who went by the name of the queen’s brother, Richard of York. Determined that the betrothal should go ahead, the king entrapped both young men together, as if they were equally heirs, as if they were equally guilty, and ordered them both killed. The pretender claimed a most dangerous name, took arms against Henry, and died for it. My brother denied his own name, never raised his voice, let alone an army, and still died. I have to try not to sour my own life with bitterness. I have to put away resentment as if it were a forgotten badge. I have to forget I am a sister, I have to forget the only boy that I have ever truly loved: my brother, the White Rose.

  “You know I would never have asked for it,” Arthur says, his voice very low. “His death. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “I know you didn’t,” I say. “It’s nothing to do with you or me. It was out of our hands. There was nothing that either of us could have done.”

  “But I did do one thing,” he says, with a shy sideways glance at me. “It wasn’t any good; but I did ask my father for mercy.”

  “That was good of you,” I say. I don’t tell him that I was on my knees before the king, my headdress off, my hair let down, my tears falling on the floor, my cupped hands under the heel of his boot, until they lifted me up and carried me away, and my husband begged me not to speak again for fear of reminding the king that I once had the name Plantagenet and that now I have sons with dangerous royal blood. “Nothing could be done. I am sure His Grace, your father, did only what he thought was right.”

  “Can you . . .” He hesitates. “Can you forgive him?”

  He cannot even look at me with this question, and his gaze is on our clasped hands. Gently, he turns th