The King's Curse Read online

  Montague bows his head. “And now nothing,” he observes. “And all our work this month does nothing for our estate.”

  “It serves my grandson Henry; I’m working for Arthur’s boy. Thank God that he has been spared. He can come home to his own house, and in the end he’ll get everything.”

  Montague shakes his head. “No, because it’s his mother’s house. His mother inherits, not him. She can leave the lands away from him if she wants.”

  The thought of disinheriting a son is so foreign to me that I look aghast. “She’d never do such a thing!”

  “If she marries again?” Montague points out. “The new husband takes everything.”

  I go to the window and look out at the fields that I thought were Arthur’s fields, that would go unquestioningly to his son, another Henry Pole.

  “And if she doesn’t remarry, she’ll be a drain on our estate,” Montague adds gloomily. “We’ll have to pay her dower for the rest of her life.”

  I nod. I find I cannot think of her as the young woman that I welcomed to my house, that I thought of as another daughter. She failed in her wifely duty when she stood with her father against Arthur, when she took to her bed and let Arthur die alone. Now she sends her children away and lies in bed while her husband’s brother and mother save her harvest. For the rest of her life, for as long as she lives, she will be able to draw an income from the estates that I work so hard to sow and reap, to build. The spoiled heiress who took to her bed while her own husband was dying will have the right to live in my house and draw her dower from my rents, her whole life long. She will inherit her father’s fortune. I have even promised her lands in my will. Most likely, I will die before her and she will draw my black velvet gown with the black fur trim from my wardrobe and wear it to my funeral.

  Jane is on the mend. Her lady-in-waiting comes to me and tells me, with a low curtsey, that Jane sends her compliments. She has fought the Sweat and won; she will come to dine with us tonight and she is most grateful to us for all we have done for the household.

  “Have you told her that her husband is dead?” I ask the woman bluntly.

  Her pale strained face tells me that she has not. “Your ladyship, we did not dare to tell her while she was ill,” she says. “And then it seemed too late to say it.”

  “She hasn’t asked?” Montague demands incredulously.

  “She’s been so very ill.” She excuses her mistress. “Not really in her right mind, with the fever so hot. I thought perhaps that you . . .”

  “Tell her to come to my rooms before dinner this afternoon,” I rule. “I will tell her myself.”

  We wait for Lady Arthur Pole in the guest room of this house that was once Arthur’s house, but is now hers.

  The door is opened for her and she comes into the room leaning on the arm of her lady-in-waiting, apparently too weak to walk unaided.

  “Ah, my dear,” I say as kindly as I can manage. “You do look pale. Sit down, please.”

  She manages a curtsey to me and a bow of her head to Montague, who helps her to a chair as I nod to her lady-in-waiting to leave.

  “This is my cousin, Elizabeth,” she says faintly, as if she would keep her.

  “You shall sit with us at dinner,” I promise, and the woman takes the hint and goes from the room.

  “I have very bad news for you, I am afraid,” I say gently.

  “My father?” She blinks.

  “Arthur, your husband.”

  She gasps. Clearly, she had not even known that he was ill. But surely, when she came out of her chamber and he did not greet her, she must have guessed?

  “I thought he had gone to your house with the children! Are they well?”

  “Thank God Henry and Maggie were well and merry at Bisham when I left them, the baby, Mary, and my son Geoffrey and his wife too.”

  She takes this in. “But Arthur . . .”

  “My daughter, I am sorry to tell you that he has died of the Sweat.”

  She crumples up, like a piece of dropped cloth. Her head sinks into her hands, her body folds up, even her little feet tuck back under her seat. With her hands over her face she wails out her sorrow.

  Montague looks at me, as if to ask: “What shall I do?” I nod to him to take a seat and wait for this helpless sobbing to cease.

  She does not stop. We leave her crying and go into dinner without her. The people of her estate, Arthur’s tenants, need to see that we are here, that life will go on, that they are required to do their duty, to work and pay their rents; the household staff need not think they can take a holiday because my son is dead. These lands become Jane’s again, but then, God willing, they will be inherited by Arthur’s son Henry, so they must be kept in good heart for him. When dinner is over, we go back to my rooms and find her red-eyed and pale; but, thank God, she has finally stopped crying.

  “I can’t bear it,” she says piteously to me, as if a woman can choose what she can or cannot bear. “I can’t bear to be widowed again! I can’t bear to live without him. I can’t face life as a widow, and I won’t ever consider another marriage. I am wedded to him in death as in life.”

  “These are early days, you’ve had a shock,” I say soothingly. But she is determined not to be comforted.

  “My heart is broken,” she says. “I shall come and live at Bisham in my dower rooms. I shall live quite retired. I shall see no one and never go out.”

  “Really?” I bite my tongue on the skepticism in my voice, and say again, more gently: “Really, my dear? Don’t you think you would prefer to live with your father? Don’t you want to go home to Bodiam Castle?”

  She shakes her head. “Father would only arrange another marriage for me, I know he would. I will never marry again. I want to be in Arthur’s home, I want to always be close to him, nursing my grief. I will live with you and weep for him every day.”

  I cannot feel the tenderness of heart that I should. “Of course, you are distressed now,” I say.

  “I am determined,” she says.

  I really think she is.

  “I will live my life in remembrance of Arthur. I will come to Bisham and never leave. I shall haunt his grave like a sorrowful ghost.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  I give her a few days to think and pray on this resolution but she doesn’t waver. She’s determined never to marry again, and she has set her heart on the rooms in my house promised to her in her marriage contract. She will have her own little household under my roof, she will no doubt employ her own servants, she will order her meals from my kitchens, and she will receive, four times a year, the rents from her dower lands, which I signed away, but never thought that I should pay. I don’t see how this is to be borne.

  It is Montague, my quiet and thoughtful heir, who comes up with the brilliant solution to prevent the young widow from living with us forever. “Are you quite sure that you want to be withdrawn from the world?” he asks his sister-in-law one evening, in the small space of time that is available to see her, as she comes out of dinner in the great hall before heading to chapel to pray all night.

  “Completely,” she says. She is draped in dark blue, as I am, the color of royal mourning. Arthur was a boy of the House of Plantagenet; he is mourned like a prince.

  “Then I fear that Bisham Manor will be too noisy for you, too busy,” he says. “The king visits when he is on progress, the whole court comes for weeks during the summer, my mother entertains her family during the winter, the Staffords, the Courtenays, the Lisles, the Nevilles. You know how many cousins we have! The Princess Mary is certain to honor us with a long stay in the summer and she brings her entire court with her. It is not like a private house, not like your lovely house here; it is a palace, a working palace.”

  “I don’t want to see any of those people,” she says crossly. “I wish to live completely retired. Perhaps my Lady Mother will give me another property of my own on her lands, where I can live in complete peace. I don’t want much, just a manor house with a privat