The King's Curse Read online

  “Arrested?” I whisper my greatest fear.

  “Run away,” she says shortly.

  “Where?” I ask, horrified. “Oh God. Where has he gone?”

  “To the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, to raise an army against the king.” She chokes as if the words are sticking in her throat, but she has to ask me. “Margaret, tell me—you knew nothing of this?”

  I shake my head, I take her hand, I meet her eyes.

  “Swear it,” she demands. “Swear it.”

  “Nothing. Not a word. I swear it. He did not confide in me.”

  We are both silent as we think of those that he usually does confide in: the queen’s brother-in-law, William Courtenay; our cousin Thomas Grey; our cousin William de la Pole; my second cousin George Neville; our kinsman Henry Bourchier. We are a well-recorded, well-known network of cousins and kinsmen tightly interwoven by marriage and blood. The Plantagenets spread across all England, a thrusting, courageous, seemingly endless family of ambitious boys, warrior men, and fertile women. And against us—only four Tudors: one old lady, her anxious son, and their heirs Arthur and Harry.

  “What’s going to happen?” I ask. I get to my feet and walk across the room to close the window. “I’m all right now.”

  She stretches out her arms to me and we hold each other close for a moment, as if we were still young women waiting for the news from Bosworth, filled with dread.

  “He can never come home,” she says unhappily. “We’ll never see Cousin Edmund again. Never. And the king’s spies are certain to find him. He employs hundreds of watchers now, wherever Edmund is, they’ll find him . . .”

  “And then they’ll find everyone whom he has ever spoken with,” I predict.

  “Not you?” she confirms again. She drops her voice to a whisper. “Margaret, really—not you?”

  “Not me. Not one word. You know I am deaf and dumb to treason.”

  “And then either this year, or the next, or the year after, they will bring him home and kill him,” she says flatly. “Our cousin Edmund. We’ll have to watch him walk to the scaffold.”

  I give a little moan of distress. We grip hands. But in the silence, as we think of our cousin and the scaffold on Tower Hill, we both know that we have already survived even worse than this.

  I do not stay for the royal wedding but go ahead of the young couple to Ludlow to make sure that the place is warm and comfortable for their arrival. As the king smilingly greets all his Plantagenet kinsmen with excessive, cloying affection I am glad to be away from the court for fear that his charming conversation should delay me in the hall while his spies search my rooms. The king is at his most dangerous when he appears happy, seeking the company of his court, announcing amusing games, urging us to dance, laughing and strolling around the banquet while outside, in the darkened galleries and narrow streets, his spies do their work. I may have nothing to hide from Henry Tudor; but that does not mean that I want to be watched.

  In any case, the king has ruled that the young couple shall come to Ludlow after their wedding, without delay, and I must get things ready for them. The poor girl will have to dismiss most of her Spanish companions and travel cross-country in the worst winter weather to a castle nearly two hundred miles from London and a lifetime away from the comfort and luxury of her home. The king wants Arthur to show his bride, to impress everyone along the road with the next generation of the Tudor line. He is thinking of ways to establish the power and glamour of the new throne: he is not thinking of a young woman, missing her mother, in a strange land.

  LUDLOW CASTLE, SHROPSHIRE, WINTER 1501

  I have the Ludlow servants turn the place upside down and scour the floors and brush the stone walls and then hang the rich, warm tapestries. I have carpenters rehang the doors to try to prevent drafts. I buy a huge new barrel sawn in half from the wine merchants to serve the princess as a bath; the queen my cousin writes to me that the Infanta expects to bathe daily, an outlandish habit that I hope she will give up when she feels the cold winds that buffet the towers of Ludlow Castle. I have new curtains made and lined for the bed that is to be hers—and we hope the prince will find his way to it every night. I order new linen sheets from the drapers in London and they send me the best, the very best that money can buy. I scour the floors and put down fresh strewing herbs so that all the rooms smell hauntingly of midsummer hay and meadow flowers. I sweep the chimneys so that her fires of apple wood can burn brightly, I demand from the countryside all around the little castle the finest of food: the sweetest honey, the best-brewed ale, the fruits and vegetables that have been stored since harvest, the barrels of salted fish, the smoked meats, the great rounds of cheese that this part of the world makes so well. I warn them I will need a constant supply of fresh game, and that they will have to kill their beasts and chickens to serve the castle. I have all of my hundreds of servants, all of my dozen heads of household ensure that their division is as ready as it can be; and then I wait, we all wait, for the arrival of the couple who are the hope and light of England, and who are to live under my care, learn to be Prince and Princess of Wales, and conceive a son as soon as possible.

  I am looking across the muddled thatched roofs of the little town to the east, hoping to see the bobbing standards of the royal guard coming down the wet, slippery track towards the Gladford gate, when I see instead a single horseman, riding fast. I know at once that this is bad news: my first thought is for the safety of my Plantagenet kinsmen, as I throw on my cape and hurry down to the castle gateway so that I am ready, heart pounding, as he trots up the cobbled road from the broad main street and jumps off before me, kneels, and offers me a sealed letter. I take it and break the seal. My first fear is that my rebel kinsman Edmund de la Pole has been captured, and named me as a fellow conspirator. I am so frightened that I can’t read the scrawled letters on the page. “What is it?” I say shortly. “What news?”

  “Lady Margaret, I am sorry to tell you the children were very ill when I left Stourton,” he says.

  I blink at the crabbed writing and make myself read the short note from my steward. He writes that nine-year-old Henry has been taken ill with a red rash and fever. Arthur, who is seven years old, continues well, but they are afraid that Ursula is ill. She is crying and seems to have a headache and she certainly has a fever as he writes. She is only three years old, a dangerous time for a child emerging from babyhood. He does not even mention the baby, Reginald. I have to assume that he lives and is well in the nursery. Surely, my steward would have told me if my baby was already dead?

  “Not the Sweat,” I say to the messenger, naming the new illness that we all fear, the disease that followed the Tudor army and nearly wiped out the City of London when they assembled to welcome him. “Tell me it’s not the Sweat.”

  He crosses himself. “I pray not. I think not. No one had . . .” He breaks off. He means to say that no one had died—proof that it is not the Sweat, which kills a healthy man in a day, without warning. “They sent me on the third day of the oldest boy’s illness,” he says. “He had lasted three days as I left. Maybe he continues . . .”

  “And the baby Reginald?”

  “Kept with his wet nurse at her cottage, away from the house.”

  I see my own fear in his pale face. “And you? How are you, sirrah? No signs?”

  Nobody knows how sickness travels from one place to another. Some people believe that messengers carry it on their clothes, on the paper of the message, so that the very person who brings you a warning brings your death as well.

  “I’m well, please God,” he says. “No rash. No fever. I would not have come near you otherwise, my lady.”

  “I’d better go home,” I say. I am torn between my duty to the Tudors and my fear for my children. “Tell them in the stable I’ll leave within the hour, and that I’ll need an escort and a spare riding horse.”

  He nods and leads his horse through the echoing archway and turns into the stable yard. I go to tell my ladies to pack my cloth