Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  My mother is still in bed, her bedroom fire just flickering into life. Her lady is bringing gowns for her to choose for the day, the heavy headdresses are laid out on the table. She looks up as I dawdle into her bedroom. I think I should say something, but I don’t know what.

  “You’re up early, Margaret,” she remarks.

  “I went to Prime with my lady grandmother.”

  “Is she joining us for breakfast?”

  “Yes.” And I think: my lady grandmother will know what to do when the confessor comes in with his face the color of a manuscript and grief written all over it.

  “Is everything all right, little queen?” she asks me tenderly.

  I can’t bear to answer her. I take a seat at the window and look out at the garden, and listen for the footsteps that soon come heavily along the corridor. Then, at last, after what seems like a long long time, I hear the outer doors to her presence chamber open, the sound of footsteps, the inner doors to the privy chamber open and then finally, unstoppably, the door to her bedroom is opened, and my father’s confessor comes into my mother’s rooms, his head bowed as low as the poorest drudge pulling a plow. I jump to my feet when he comes in, and I put out my hand as if I can stop him from speaking. I say suddenly: “No! No!” but he says quietly, “Your Grace, the king bids you come to his rooms at once.”

  Terribly, my mother turns to me. “What is it? You know, don’t you?”

  Terribly, I reply: “It’s Arthur. He’s dead.”

  They say that he died of the Sweat—and this only makes it worse for us Tudors. The disease came in from the jails of France with my father’s convict army. Wherever he marched, from Wales, through Bosworth to London, people died in an instant. England had never known such a disease. My father won the battle against Richard III with his sickly force, but he had to delay his coronation because of the horror that they brought with them. They called it the Tudor curse and said that the reign that had begun in sweat would end in tears. And now here we are, not anywhere near the end of our reign, but deep in sweat and tears, and the curse of the invading army has fallen on my innocent brother.

  My father and my mother take the loss of their elder son very hard. They don’t just lose their boy—and he was not yet sixteen—they lose their heir, the boy they trained to be the next king, the Tudor who was to come to the throne with acclaim, a Tudor that the people wanted, not one that was forced on them. My father had to fight for his throne and then defend it. He has to defend it still, even now, against the older royal family who would take it if they could, the Plantagenet cousins who are in open enmity in Europe, or those who stay uncertainly at court. Arthur was going to be the first Tudor that all of England welcomed to the throne, the son of both the old royal family and the new. They called him the sweet briar, the Tudor rose, the bush that was the union of two roses, the Lancaster red and the York white.

  This is the end of my childhood. Arthur was my brother, my darling, my friend. I looked up to him as my senior, I acknowledged him as my prince, I thought I would see him come to the throne as king. I imagined him ruling in England and I as Queen of Scotland with a Treaty of Perpetual Peace and a regular exchange of visits and letters, loving each other as brother and sister and neighboring monarchs. And now that he is dead I realize how bitterly I resent the days that we did not spend together, the months when he was with Katherine in the Welsh Marches and I did not see him, nor write often enough. I think of the days of our childhood when we were taught by different tutors, when they kept us apart so that I might learn needlework and he Greek, and how few days I had with him, my brother. I don’t know how I can bear it without him. We were four Tudor children, and now we are only three, and the firstborn and the finest has gone.

  I am walking down the gallery away from my mother’s rooms when I see Harry, his face all puffed and his eyes red from crying, coming the opposite way. When he sees me his little mouth goes downturned as if he is about to wail, and all my anger and my grief turns on him, this worthless boy, this brat, who presumes to cry as if he were the only person in the world to lose a brother.

  “Shut up,” I say fiercely. “What have you got to cry about?”

  “My brother!” he gulps. “Our brother, Margaret.”

  “You weren’t fit to polish his boots.” I am choking with resentment. “You weren’t fit to groom his horse. There will never be another like him. There will never be another prince like him.”

  Amazingly, this stops his tears. He goes white and almost stern. His head rears up, his shoulders go back, he sticks out his thin little-boy chest, he plants his fists on his hips, he almost manages to swagger. “There will be another prince like him,” he swears. “Better than him. Me. I am the new Prince of Wales and I shall be King of England in his place, and you can get used to it.”

  WINDSOR CASTLE, ENGLAND, SUMMER 1502

  We do get used to it. That’s the difference between being royal and being a commoner of no importance. We can grieve and pray and break our hearts on the inside, but on the outside we still have to make the court the center of beauty and fashion and art, my father still has to pass laws and meet with the Privy Council and guard against rebels and the constant threat of the French, and we still have to have a Prince of Wales, even though the true prince, the beloved Prince Arthur, will never take his seat next to the throne again. Harry is the Prince of Wales now and, as he predicted, I get used to it.

  But they won’t send him to Ludlow. This makes me angrier than anything; but since we are royal I can say nothing. Darling Arthur had to go to Ludlow to rule his principality, to learn the business of being king, to prepare him for the greatness that was to be his; but now that they have lost him they won’t let Harry out of their sight. My mother wants her last surviving son at home. My father is fearful that he might lose his only heir. And my grandmother advises my father that between the two of them they can teach Harry everything he needs to know to be a king, and that they had better keep him at court. Precious Harry does not have to go far away, nor marry a strange princess. No veiled beauty is going to be brought in to lord it over all of us. Harry can be under his grandmother’s eye, under her wing, under her thumb as if they would keep him a spoiled baby forever.

  Katherine of Arrogant—not arrogant at all now, but white-faced and thin and pale—comes back from Ludlow in a closed litter. My lady mother is absurdly indulgent to her, though she has done nothing for our family at all but steal Arthur away from us for the last months of his life. Mother weeps over her, and holds her hand, walks with her and they pray together. She invites her to visit, so we have her black silks and velvets, her incredibly rich black mantilla, her stupid silent Spanish presence, sweeping up and down the galleries all the time, and my lady mother orders that we all say nothing that might upset her.

  But really, whatever would upset her? She pretends to understand neither English nor French as I speak it; and I am not going to attempt a conversation in Latin. Even if I wanted to pour out my grief and jealousy, I would not be able to find words that she would understand. When I speak to her in French, she looks completely blank; and when I am sitting next to her at dinner I turn my shoulder to show that I have nothing to say to her. She went to Ludlow with the most beautiful, kind, loving prince the world has ever known and she failed to keep him, so now he is dead and she is marooned in England—and I am supposed not to upset her? Should not my lady mother consider that perhaps she upsets me?

  She is living, at enormous expense, at Durham House in the Strand. I suppose they will send her home to Spain, but my father is unwilling to pay her jointure as a widow when he still has not received her full dowry as a bride. The wasted wedding alone cost thousands: the castle with the dancers, the peach silk sails of the masquing boat! The treasure house of England is always empty. We live very grandly, as a royal family should do, but my father pays out a fortune on spies and couriers to watch the courts of Europe for fear of our Plantagenet cousins in exile plotting to return and seize our thr