The King's Curse Read online

  Lord Darcy is not our only visitor to Richmond Palace as the hot weather goes on and the king’s court stays away from his capital city. Elizabeth, my kinswoman, the Duchess of Norfolk, Thomas Howard’s wife, comes to visit us and brings a gift of game and much gossip.

  She pays her compliments to the princess and then comes to my privy chamber. Her ladies sit with mine at a distance, and she requests two of them to sing. Shielded from observation and with our quiet voices drowned out by the music, she says to me: “The Boleyn whore has commanded the marriage of my own daughter.”

  “No!” I exclaim.

  She nods, keeping her face carefully impassive. “She commands the king, he commands my husband, and nobody consults me at all. In effect, she commands me, me: a Stafford by birth. Wait till you hear her choice.”

  Obediently, I wait.

  “My daughter Mary is to be married to the king’s bastard.”

  “Henry Fitzroy?” I ask incredulously.

  “Yes. My lord is delighted, of course. He has the highest of hopes. I would not have had my Mary mixed up in this for the world. When you next see the queen, tell her that I have never wavered in my love and loyalty to her. This betrothal is none of my doing. I think of it as my shame.”

  “Mixed up?” I ask cautiously.

  “I tell you what I think is going to happen,” she says in a quick, furious whisper. “I think the king is going to put the queen aside, whatever anyone says, send her to a nunnery, and declare himself a single man.”

  I sit very still, as if someone was telling me of a new plague at my doorstep.

  “I think he will deny the princess, say that she is illegitimate.”

  “No,” I whisper.

  “I do. I think that he will marry the Boleyn woman, and if she gives him a son, he will declare that boy his heir.”

  “The marriage wouldn’t be valid,” I say quietly, holding on to the one thing that I know.

  “Not at all. It will be made in hell against the will of God! But who in England is going to tell the king that? Are you?”

  I swallow. No one is going to tell him. Everyone knows what happened to Reginald when he merely reported the opinion of the French universities.

  “He will disinherit the princess,” she says. “God forgive him. But if the king cannot get a son on the Boleyn woman, he has Fitzroy in reserve and he will make him his heir.”

  “Bessie Blount’s boy? In the place of our princess?” I try to sound scathing but I am finding it all too easy to believe her.

  “He is the Duke of Richmond and Somerset,” she reminds me. “Commander of the North, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The king has given him every great title, so why not Prince of Wales among all the others?”

  I know this was the cardinal’s old plan. I had hoped it had fallen with him. “No one would support such a thing,” I say. “No one would allow a legitimate heir to be replaced with a bastard.”

  “Who would rise against it?” she demands. “No one would like it but who would have the courage to rise against it?”

  I close my eyes for a moment and I shake my head. I know that it should be us. If anyone, it should be us.

  “I’ll tell you who would rise if you would lead them,” she says in a quiet, passionate whisper. “The common people and everyone who would carry a sword at the Pope’s command, everyone who would follow the Spanish when they invade for their princess, everyone who loves the queen and supports the princess, and every Plantagenet that has ever been born. One way or another that’s nearly everyone in England.”

  I put out a hand. “Your Grace, you know I cannot have this talk in the princess’s household. For her sake as well as mine I cannot hear it.”

  She nods. “But it’s true.”

  “But why would the Boleyn woman want such a match?” I ask her curiously. “Your daughter Mary brings a great dowry, and her father commands great acres of England—and all his tenants. Why would the Boleyn woman give such power to Henry Fitzroy?”

  The duchess nods. “Better for her than his other choice,” she says. “She can’t bear his marriage to the Princess Mary. She can’t bear to see the princess as heir.”

  “That would never have happened,” I say flatly.

  “Who would stop it?” she challenges me.

  My hand creeps to my pocket where I keep my rosary and Tom Darcy’s badge of the five wounds of Christ under the white rose of my house. Would Tom Darcy stop it? Would we join him? Would I sew this badge onto my son’s collar and send him out to fight for the princess?

  “Anyway,” she concludes. “I came to tell you that I don’t forget my love and loyalty to the queen. If you see her tell her that I would do anything, I will do everything I can. I speak with the Spanish ambassador, I speak to my kinsmen.”

  “I can be no part of it. I am not gathering her supporters.”

  “Well, you should be,” the duchess says bluntly.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531

  Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, daughter of the Scottish queen, his sister, is ordered to leave us, though she and the princess have become the firmest of friends. She is not to be sent to her mother, but going into service at court, to wait upon the Boleyn woman, as if she were a queen.

  She is excited at the thought of being at court, hopeful that her dark prettiness will turn heads; brunettes are in fashion, with the Boleyn woman’s black hair and olive skin being much praised. But she hates the thought of serving a commoner, clinging to Princess Mary and holding me tightly before she steps into the royal barge that has come for her.

  “I don’t know why I can’t stay with you!” she exclaims.

  I raise my hand in farewell. I don’t know why either.

  I have a summer wedding to prepare, and I turn from my fears for the princess to write the contracts and agree the terms with the same joy that I pick the flowers to make a garland for the bride, my granddaughter, Katherine, Montague’s oldest. She is only ten, but I am glad to get Francis Hastings for her. Her sister Winifred is betrothed to his brother Thomas Hastings, so our fortunes are safely linked to a rising family; the boys’ father, my kinsman, has just been made an earl. We have a pretty betrothal ceremony and a wedding feast for the two little girls, and Princess Mary smiles when the two couples come handfasted down the aisle, as if she were their older sister and as proud of them as I am.

  ENGLAND, CHRISTMAS 1531

  This Christmas season has little joy in it, not for the princess, nor for her mother the queen. Not even her father the king seems to be happy; he keeps the feast at Greenwich in the most lavish style, but people say that it was a merry court when the queen was on the throne and now he is hagridden by a woman who cannot be satisfied and will give him no pleasure.

  The queen is at the More, well served and honored; but alone. Princess Mary and I are ordered to go to Beaulieu in Essex, and we keep the Christmas feast there. I make the twelve days of Christmas as happy as I can for her; but through all the wassailing, and dancing, disguising and feasting, the bringing in of the Yule log and the raising of the Christmas crown, I know that Mary is missing her mother, and praying for her father, and that there is very little joy anywhere in England these days.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, MAY 1532

  It is a beautiful early summer, as lovely as if the countryside itself wanted to make everyone remember this time. Every morning there is a pearly mist on the river that hides the quietly lapping water, and the duck and geese rise out of it with slowly beating wings.

  At sunrise the heat burns the mist away and leaves the grass sparkling with dew, every cobweb a work of lace and diamonds. Now I can smell the river, damp and wet and green, and sometimes, if I sit very still on the pier, looking down through the floating weed and the clumps of sweet-smelling water mint, I see schools of little fish and the movement of trout.

  In the water meadows running down from the palace to the river the cows wallow hock-deep in thick, lush grass bright with