The King's Curse Read online

  “There isn’t.”

  “But how do you know you have everything safely?”

  “Because I myself take out her jewels when she wants them, and then afterwards I put her things away. She’s not a goldsmith’s shop that has to keep a note of stock. She is a princess. She has jewels as she has gloves. Or lace. I don’t have a glove inventory either. I have no register of lace.”

  He looks quite baffled. “I’ll tell him,” he says.

  “Do.”

  But I don’t expect that to be the last of it, and it is not.

  “Thomas Cromwell says that you are to make an inventory of the princess’s jewels,” poor John Hussey says to me a few days later.

  His wife, passing us on the stairs, shakes her head with something like disdain and says something under her breath.

  “Why?” I ask.

  He looks baffled. “He didn’t tell me why. He just said it must be done. And so it must be done.”

  “Very well,” I say. “A thorough inventory? Of everything? Or just the best pieces?”

  “I don’t know!” he exclaims miserably, but then he gets himself in check. “A thorough inventory. An inventory of everything.”

  “If it is to be done thoroughly, as Master Cromwell wishes, then you had better do it with me, and bring a couple of your clerks.”

  “Very well,” he says. “Tomorrow morning.”

  We go through the princess’s wardrobe and open up all the little leather purses with the ropes of pearls and the pretty brooches.

  And all the time Thomas Cromwell is making another inventory. His agents travel up and down the land inquiring into the wealth and practices of the monasteries, discovering what they are worth and where their treasures are kept. Neither here among the princess’s boxes nor in the monasteries does anyone explain the purpose of this. Mr. Cromwell seems to be a man very interested in the exact value of other people’s goods.

  I cannot say I am any more helpful than the monasteries who claim their holiness and hide their treasures. Indeed, I spin out the inventory for day after day. We bring out all the little boxes, valueless things that she has kept from childhood, a collection of shells from the beach at Dover, some dried berries threaded on silk. Carefully, we list pressed flowers. The diamond brooch from the Emperor Charles turns up as a little ghost from the time when she was the king’s heiress and two of the greatest princes of Europe were proposed for her. Out of little boxes at the back of cupboards I bring the hasp of a belt, and one buckle missing its fellow. She has beautiful rosaries, her piety is well known, she has dozens of golden crucifixes. I bring them all, and the little toy crowns made of gold wire and glass, and the pins with silver heads, and the hair combs of ivory and a couple of rusting lucky horseshoes. We annotate her hairpins, a set of ivory toothpicks, and a silver lice comb. Everything I find, I list in exact detail and make Lord John see that his clerk copies it down in his inventory that runs to page after page, each initialed by us both. It takes days before we are done and the princess’s treasures, great and small, are spread across all the tables in the treasure room, and every last little pin is recorded.

  “Now we have to pack these up and give them to Frances Elmer in the privy chamber,” Lord John says. He sounds exhausted. I’m not surprised. It has been tedious and pointless and long, long drawn out by me.

  “Oh no, I can’t do that,” I say simply.

  “But that is why we made the inventory!”

  “It’s not why I made the inventory. I made the inventory to obey the instruction of the king from Master Cromwell.”

  “Well, now, he tells me to tell you to give the jewels to Mistress Elmer.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why!” It comes out as a bellow like a wounded bull.

  I look at him steadily. We both know why. The woman who calls herself queen has decided to take the princess’s jewels and give them to her bastard. As if a little coronal of diamonds, small enough to be tied on a baby’s head, will transform a child conceived out of wedlock into a Princess of England.

  “I can’t do it without a command from the king,” I say. “He told me to guard his daughter and keep her estate. I can’t hand over her goods just on someone’s say-so.”

  “It’s Thomas Cromwell’s say-so!”

  “He may seem like a great man to you,” I say condescendingly. “But I have not sworn to obey him. I could not give up the jewels, against the king’s own command, unless I have a command from the king to me, directly. When you give me that, I shall give the jewels to whomever His Grace appoints as worthy of them. But let me ask you, who would that be? Who do you think is worthy of the jewels that were given to our princess?”

  Lord John lets rip an oath and flings himself out of the room. The door bangs behind him and we hear his boots stamping down the stairs. We hear the front door bang and his snarl at the sentries as they present arms. Then there is silence.

  One of the clerks looks up at me. “All you can do is delay it,” he says with sudden clarity, speaking for the first time in days of silent work, and impertinently speaking directly to me. “You have delayed magnificently, your ladyship. But if a man runs mad and wants to dishonor his wife and rob his daughter, it’s very hard to stop him.”

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, AUTUMN 1533

  I travel to my home with a heavy heart, for Arthur’s boy Henry has died of a feverish throat, and we are to bury him in the family vault. It seems that he was thirsty, out hunting, and that some fool allowed him to drink water from a village well. Almost as soon as he got home he complained of a swelling and a heat in his throat. The loss of a Plantagenet boy, Arthur’s boy, is the result of a moment’s carelessness, and I find that I grieve for Arthur all over again and I blame myself that I failed to keep his boy safe.

  If his mother, Jane, had not taken herself into the priory but done her duty by her dead husband and her children, then perhaps little Henry would be alive today. As it is, she flings herself down the stone steps to the family vault and clings to the iron grille and cries that she wants to be there with her son, and her husband.

  She is beside herself with grief, and they have to take her back to the priory and put her to bed to cry herself to sleep. She never speaks one coherent word to me for the whole length of my visit, so I don’t have to hear that she wishes she had not joined the nunnery and that she wants to break her vows and come out. Perhaps now she wants to stay inside.

  We give a family dinner for those who have come to the funeral, and when it is cleared away, Geoffrey and Montague leave their wives in the presence chamber and come to my private room.

  “I met with the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, last month,” Montague says without preamble. “Since the Pope has ruled against the king and Henry has ignored him, Chapuys has a suggestion for us.”

  Geoffrey brings a chair close to the fireside for me and I sit down and put my feet on the warm fender. Geoffrey rests his hand tenderly on my shoulder, knowing I am feeling the death of Henry like a physical pain.

  “Chapuys suggests that Reginald shall come to England in secret, and marry the princess.”

  “Reginald?” Geoffrey says blankly. “Why him?”

  “He’s unmarried,” Montague says impatiently. “If it’s to be one of our line, it has to be him.”

  “Is this the emperor’s idea?” I ask. I am quite stunned at the prospect opening before my scholarly son.

  Montague nods. “To make an alliance. You can see his thinking; it’s an unbeatable alliance. Tudors and Plantagenets. It’s the old solution. It’s exactly what the Tudors did when they first came in and married Henry Tudor to Elizabeth of York. Now we do it to exclude the Boleyns.”

  “It is!” Geoffrey recovers from his jealousy that Reginald would be king consort to think what we would gain from it. “The emperor would land to support an uprising?”

  “He has promised to do so. The ambassador thinks the time is now. The Boleyn woman has only produced a girl, and I he