The King's Curse Read online

  My daughter-in-law knows better than to fear my anger, as she knows I love her too dearly to lift a hand to her. But she makes sure that the princess hears nothing of the baby who is called Henry Carey, or of the new flirtation that her father has taken up in place of the old.

  Under my guardianship the princess learns nothing more, not even when we go to court at Westminster and Greenwich for Christmas each year, not even when the king commands that we set up a court for the princess in Richmond Palace. I command the ladies as if I were the strictest abbess in the kingdom and there is no gossip spoken around the princess though the main court is beside itself about the king’s new flirt, Anne Boleyn, who seems to have taken her sister’s place in his favor, though not yet in his bed.

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1527

  I am commanded to bring the princess to court for the celebration of her betrothal into the House of Valois. She is to marry either the French king, or his second son, a little boy of seven years, the duc d’Orléans, so a completely disorganized and inadequate plan. We arrive at court and Mary flies to her mother’s rooms with me running behind her, begging her to walk with dignity, like a princess.

  It hardly matters. The queen jumps down from her throne in the presence chamber to embrace her daughter and takes me by the hand to lead us both into her privy chamber so that we can chatter and exclaim, and delight in each other without a hundred people watching.

  As soon as the door is closed behind us and mother and daughter have exchanged a ripple of inquiries and answers, slowly the brightness drains from the queen’s face, and I see that Katherine is weary. Her blue eyes still shine with pleasure at seeing her daughter; but the skin beneath them is brown and stained, and her face is tired and pale. At the neck of her gown I see a tell-tale rash and I guess that she is wearing a hair shirt beneath her rich clothes, as if her life was not hard enough in itself to mortify her.

  I understand at once that she is grieved her precious daughter is to be bundled off to France as part of an alliance against her own nephew, Charles of Spain, and that she blames herself for this, as for everything else that will befall England without an heir. The burden of being a Spanish princess and an English queen is weighing heavily on her. The behavior of her nephew Charles has made her life in England far worse than it was. He has made promise after promise to the king, and then broken them, as if Henry were not a man dangerously quick to take offense at any threat to his dignity, as if he were not so selfish as to punish his wife for events far beyond her control.

  “I have good news, good news: you are not to go to France,” she says, sitting in her chair and pulling Mary onto her lap. “The betrothal is celebrated but you will not go for years, perhaps two or three. And anything can happen in that time.”

  “You don’t want me to marry into the House of Valois?” Mary asks anxiously.

  Her mother forces a reassuring smile. “Of course your father will have chosen rightly for you, and we will obey him with a glad heart. But I am pleased that he has said that you are to stay in England for the next few years.”

  “At Ludlow?”

  “Even better than that! At Richmond. And dear Lady Margaret will live with you, and care for you when I have to go away.”

  “Then I am glad too,” Mary says fervently. She looks up into the weary, smiling face. “Are you well, Lady Mother? Are you happy? Not ill at all?”

  “I am well enough,” the queen says, though I hear the strain in her voice and I stretch out a hand to her so that we are linked, one to another. “I am well enough,” she repeats.

  She does not speak to me of her disappointment that her daughter is to marry into the house of her enemy, France; nor of her humiliation that the bastard boy of her former lady-in-waiting is now Lord of the North, living in the great castle of Sheriff Hutton with a court as grand as that of our princess and commanding the northern marches. Indeed, now he is Lord High Admiral of England though a child of eight.

  But she never complains, not of her weariness nor her ill health; she never speaks of the changes of her body, the night sweats, the nauseating headaches. I go to her room one morning and find her wrapped in sheets stepping out of a steaming bath, a princess of Spain once more.

  She smiles at my disapproving face. “I know,” she says. “But bathing has never done me any harm and in the nights I am so hot! I dream I am back in Spain and I wake as if I had a fever.”

  “I am sorry,” I say. I tuck the linen sheet around her shoulders, which are still smooth-skinned and pale as pearls. “Your skin is as lovely as ever.”

  She shrugs as if it does not matter, and pulls up the sheet so I shall not remark on the red weals of fleabites and the painfully raw patches that come from the rubbing of the hair shirt on her breasts and belly.

  “Your Grace, you have no sins that would require you to hurt yourself,” I say very quietly.

  “It’s not for me, it is for the kingdom,” she says. “I take pain to turn aside the wrath of God from the king and his people.”

  I hesitate. “This can’t be right,” I say. “Your confessor . . .”

  “Dear Bishop Fisher wears a hair shirt himself for the sins of the world, and Thomas More does too,” she says. “Nothing but prayer, passionate prayer, is going to move God to speak to the king. I would do anything.”

  That silences me for a moment.

  “And you?” she asks me. “You are well, my dear? Your children are all well? Ursula had a little girl, didn’t she? And Arthur’s wife is with child, is she not?”

  “Yes, Ursula has a daughter named Dorothy, and is with child again, and Jane has had a girl,” I say. “They have called her Margaret.”

  “Margaret for you?”

  I smile. “Arthur will inherit his wife’s great fortune when her father dies but they would like to see some of my fortune going to my namesake.”

  “And they have a boy already,” she says wistfully, and this is the only acknowledgment she makes that her barren marriage with only our little princess has broken her heart, and now it is an old, old sorrow.

  But as I go around court and greet my friends and my many cousins, I find that her ladies, indeed everyone at court, seem to know that her courses have stopped and that there will never be any more Tudor babies, girls or boys. Perhaps it will be, in the end, that there are no sons and the line will end with a girl.

  The king says nothing about this slow, painful crushing of his hopes, but the favor shown to Bessie Blount’s bastard, little Henry Fitzroy, and the honors heaped on him remind everyone that the queen is past the age of childbearing and that, although we have a handsome young Tudor boy visiting court, running down the galleries and calling for his horse in the stables, it is not one that she has carried, and now no one hopes for anything more from her.

  It is Maria de Salinas, now Countess Willoughby, the queen’s most loyal friend, who says quietly to me: “Don’t think she is too distressed at this French marriage. She feared far worse.”

  “Why, what could be worse for her?” I ask.

  We are walking together by the river, as the king has demanded a rowing regatta and the watermen are competing against the noblemen of the court. Everyone is disguised as soldiers or mermen, and it is a pretty scene. I can only tell which team is of noblemen and which watermen by the harsh fact that the watermen win every race and Henry’s laughing court collapse over their oars and confess that it is harder work than it looks.

  “She fears that the king might order Princess Mary to marry Henry Fitzroy,” she says, and watches as the smile drains from my face. I turn to face her and grip her hand as I feel I am about to faint.

  “What?” I think I must have misunderstood her.

  She nods. “It’s true. There is a plan that Princess Mary will marry the Duke of Richmond, the bastard.”

  “This is an ugly joke,” I say.

  Her steady gaze tells me that it is no joke.

  “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Be