The King's Curse Read online

  “Her bequests?”

  “He has taken everything,” she says with a little sigh. “As is his right, I suppose.”

  “It’s not his right!” I say at once. “If she was a widow as he insists, and they were unmarried, then everything she owned at her death was hers to give as she wished!”

  There is a little twinkle in Maria’s dark eyes as she hears me. I cannot help myself, I always have to defend a woman’s estate. I bow my head. “It’s not the things,” I say quietly, knowing well enough that her greatest jewels and treasures had already been taken from her and hung around Anne Boleyn’s scrawny neck. “And it’s not that I wanted anything from her, I will remember her without a keepsake. But those things were hers by right.”

  “I know,” Maria says, and looks up the stairs as Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, daughter of Mary the Dowager Queen of France, comes down the stairs and makes the smallest of bows to me in return to my curtsey. As the daughter of a Tudor princess married to a commoner Frances is cursed with anxiety about her precedence and her position, the more so as her father is now remarried, and to Maria’s daughter who is here too.

  “You are welcome here,” she says, as if it were her own house. “The funeral is tomorrow morning. I shall go in first and you behind me and Maria and her daughter Catherine, my stepmother, behind you.”

  “Of course,” I say. “All I want to do is to say good-bye to my friend. Precedence does not matter to me. She was my very dearest friend.”

  “And the Countess of Worcester is here, and the Countess of Surrey,” Frances goes on.

  I nod. Frances Howard, Countess of Surrey, is a Tudor supporter by birth and by marriage. Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, is one of the Boleyn ladies-in-waiting in constant attendance upon Anne Boleyn. I imagine that they have been sent to report back to their mistress, who will not be pleased to hear that the people in the street called blessings on the queen as her coffin was drawn to the abbey by six black horses with her household and half the county walking, heads bared to the cold wind, behind.

  It is a beautiful day. The wind blows from the east, biting and cold, but the sky is clear with a hard wintry light as we walk to the abbey church and inside the hundreds of candles glow like dull gold. It is a simple funeral, not grand enough for a great queen and the victor of Flodden, not enough to honor an Infanta of Spain who came to England with such high hopes. But there is a quiet beauty in the abbey church where four bishops greet the coffin draped in black velvet with a frieze of cloth of gold. Two heralds walk before the coffin, two behind, carrying banners with her arms: her own crest, the royal arms of Spain, the royal arms of England, and her own insignia, the two royal arms together. Her motto “Humble and Loyal” is in gold letters beside the stand for the coffin, and when the requiem Mass is sung and the last pure notes are slowly dying away on the smoky incense-filled air, they lower the coffin into the vault before the high altar, and I know that my friend has gone.

  I put my fist against my mouth to stifle a deep sob that tears from my belly. I never thought that I would see her to the grave. She came into my house when I was the lady of Ludlow and she was a girl, twelve years my junior. I could never have dreamed that I would see her buried so quietly, so peacefully in an abbey far from the city that was proud to be her capital and home.

  Nor was it the funeral that she had requested in her will. But I do believe that though she wished to be buried in a church of the Observant Friars and have their devout congregation say memorial Masses for her, she has a place in heaven even without their prayers. The king denied her title, and closed the houses of the friars, but even if they are vagrants on the empty roads tonight, they will still pray for her; and all those of us who loved her will never think of her as anything other than Katherine, Queen of England.

  We dine late and are quiet at dinner. Maria and Frances and I talk about her mother, and the old days when Queen Katherine ruled the court and the dowager queen Mary came home from France, so pretty and determined, and disobedient.

  “It can’t always have been summer, can it?” Maria asks longingly. “I seem to remember those years as always summer. Can it really have been sunny every day?”

  Frances raises her head. “Someone at the door.”

  I can hear too the clatter of a small group of riders, and the door opening, and Frances’s steward in the doorway saying apologetically: “Message from the court.”

  “Let him in,” Frances says.

  I glance at Maria and wonder if she had permission to be here, or if the king has sent someone to arrest her. I fear for myself. I wonder if information has been laid against me, against my boys, against any one of our family. I wonder if Thomas Cromwell, who pays so many informants, who knows so much, has found out about the ship’s master at Grays who is available to hire, who was approached some nights ago and asked if he would sail a lady to France.

  “Do you know who this is?” I ask Frances, my voice very low. “Were you expecting a message?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  The man walks into the room, brushing the snow from his cape, puts back his hood, and bows to us. I recognize the livery of the Marquess of Dorset, Henry Grey, Frances’s husband.

  “Your Grace, Lady Dorset, Lady Salisbury, Lady Surrey, Lady Somerset, Lady Worcester.” He bows to each of us. “I have grave news from Greenwich. I am sorry that it took me so long to get here. We had an accident on the road and had to take a man back to Enfield.” He turns his attention to Frances. “I am commanded by your lord and husband to bring you to court. Your uncle the king has been gravely wounded. When I left five days ago, he was unconscious.”

  She stands as if to greet tremendous news. I see her lean on the table as if to steady herself.

  “Unconscious?” I repeat.

  The man nods. “The king took a terrible blow and fell from his horse. The horse stumbled and fell on him as he lay. He was running a course in the joust, the blow threw him back, he went down, and his horse on top of him. They were both fully armored, so the weight . . .” He breaks off and shakes his head. “When we got the horse off His Grace, he did not speak or move, he was like a dead man. We didn’t even know that he was breathing until we carried him into the palace, and sent for physicians. My lord sent me at once to fetch her ladyship.” He thumps his fist into his palm. “And then we couldn’t get through the drifts of snow.”

  I look at Frances, who is trembling, a blush rising up into her cheeks. “A terrible accident,” she observes breathlessly.

  The man nods. “We should leave at first light.” He looks at us. “The king’s condition is a secret.”

  “He held a joust after the queen’s death, before she was even laid to rest?” Maria remarks coldly.

  The messenger bows slightly, as if he does not want to comment on the king and the woman who calls herself queen celebrating the death of her rival. But I don’t attend to this, I am looking at Frances. She has been keenly ambitious all her life and hungry for position at court. Now I can almost read what she is thinking as her dark eyes flick, unseeing, from the table to the messenger and back again. If the king dies from this fall, then he leaves a baby girl who no one thinks is legitimate, a baby in the belly of a woman whose chance of ever being accepted as queen dies with him, a bastard boy acknowledged and honored, and a princess under house arrest. Who would dare to predict which of these claimants will take the throne?

  The Boleyn party including Elizabeth Somerset, here at this table, will support the woman who calls herself queen and her baby Elizabeth, but the Howards, with Frances, Countess of Surrey, will split apart from their junior branch and press for the male heir, even if he is Bessie Blount’s bastard, for he is married into their family. Maria, and all my family, all my affinity, all the old nobility of England, would lay down our lives to put Princess Mary on the throne. Here at this dinner table, at the funeral of the queen, are gathered the parties who will make war against each other if the king is dead tonigh