The King's Curse Read online

  Behind the men come the women, embracing great armfuls of stooks and tying them with one practiced movement, their gowns hitched up so that they can stride, their sleeves rolled up high over their brawny arms. Many of them have a baby strapped to their back, most of them have a couple of children trailing behind with the old people gleaning the fallen heads of wheat so that nothing is wasted.

  I feel all the wild joy of a miser watching gold come into the treasury. I would rather have a good crop than all the plate I could steal from an abbey. I sit on my horse and watch the tenants work, and I smile when they call out to me and tell me that it is a good year, a good year for us all.

  I ride back to the house and notice a strange horse in the stables and a man taking a drink of ale at the kitchen door. He looks up as I ride into the yard and pulls his hat from his head—it’s an odd cap, Italian-made I should guess. I dismount and wait for him to come towards me.

  “I have a message from your son, Countess,” he says. “He is well, and sends you good wishes.”

  “I am glad to hear from him,” I say, hiding my anxiety. We are all waiting, we have been waiting for months, for Reginald to complete his report on the king’s claim to be supreme head of the English Church. Reginald has promised that the work will be finished soon and that it will support the king’s views. How he will walk through the maze that lost Thomas More, how he will avoid the trap that snapped shut on John Fisher, I don’t know. But there is no one in Christendom better read than my son Reginald. If there is a precedent for a king like ours in the long history of the Church, he will find it, and perhaps he can find a way to restore Princess Mary too.

  “I will read this, and write a reply,” I tell him.

  He bows. “I will be ready to take it tomorrow,” he says.

  “The steward will find you bed and board for tonight.”

  I walk through the door to the inner garden and sit on the seat beneath the roses and break the seal of Reginald’s letter to me.

  He is in Venice. I rest the letter on my knee, close my eyes, and try to imagine my son in a fabulous city of wealth and beauty, where the houses’ doors open on the lapping water, and he has to take a boat to go to the great library where he is an honored scholar.

  He writes to me that he is ill and thinking about death. He does not feel sorrow but a sense of peace.

  I have completed my report and sent it as a long letter to the king. It is not for publication. It is the opinion that he asked for. It is sharp and loving. The scholar in him will recognize the strength of the logic, the theologian will understand the history. The fool and the sensualist will be shocked that I call him both, but I do believe that the death of his concubine gives him a chance to return to the Church, which he must do to save his soul. I am his prophet, as God sent to David. If he can listen to me, he might yet be saved.

  I have advised him to give it to his best scholars for them to make a précis for him. It’s a long letter and I know that he will not have the patience to read it all! But there are men in England who will read it and ignore the vehement words to hear the truth. They can reply to me and perhaps I will rewrite. This is not a statement for publication for all men to wonder at, this is a document for discussion among men of learning.

  I have been ill but I will not rest. There are those who would be glad to see me dead and some days I would be glad to sleep in death. I remember, and I hope that you remember too, that when I was only a little boy you gave me entirely to God and rode away from me, and left me in the hands of God. Don’t worry about me now—I am still in His hands, where you left me.

  Your loving and obedient son,

  Reginald

  I hold the letter against my cheek as if I could smell the incense and the candle wax of the study where he wrote it. I kiss the signature in case he kissed it before he sealed it up and sent it away. I think that I have lost him indeed, if he has turned from life and yearns for death. The one thing I would have taught him, if I had kept him at my side, is to never weary of life, but to cling to it. Life: at almost any cost. I have never prepared myself for death, not even going into childbed, and I would never put my head down on the block. I think that I should never have left him with the Carthusian monks, good men though they were, poor though I was and without any other way to feed him. I should have begged on the roadside with my son in my arms before I let him be taken from me. I should never have left him to grow into a man who sees himself in the hands of God and prays to go to heaven.

  I lost him when I left him at the priory, I lost him when I sent him to Oxford. I lost him when I sent him to Padua, and now I know the full extent and the finality of my loss. Once, I was married to a good man, I had four handsome boys, and now I am an old lady, a widow with only two sons in England, and Reginald, the brightest and the one who needed me the most, is far, far away from me dreaming of his own death.

  I hold his letter to my heart and I mourn for the son who is tired of life, and then I start to think. I reread the letter and I wonder what he means by “vehement words,” I wonder what he means by being a prophet to the king. I hope very much that he has not written anything that will stir the king’s ever-ready suspicion or wake his restless rage.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, OCTOBER 1536

  The court returns to London and as soon as the king is in his rooms I am summoned to his privy chamber. Of course, I hope that he is going to appoint me to the princess’s household, and I hurry from my rooms, across the courtyard, through a small door and up a stairway, through the great hall, until I come to the king’s rooms in the warren that is Westminster Palace.

  I go through the crowded presence chamber with a little smile of anticipation on my face. They may have to wait but I have been summoned. Surely, he will appoint me to serve the princess and I can guide her back to her title and her true position.

  There are more people than ever waiting to see the king, and most of them have a set of plans or a map in their hands. The monasteries and churches of England are being parceled out, one after another, and everyone wants their share.

  But there are men who look uneasy. I recognize an old friend of my husband’s, one of the townsmen of Hull, and I nod to him as I go by.

  “Will the king see you?” he asks urgently.

  “I am going to him now,” I say.

  “Please ask him if I can see him,” the man says. “We’re sick with fear in Hull.”

  “I’ll tell him if I can,” I say. “What’s the matter?”

  “The people can’t stand having their churches taken,” he says quickly, one eye on the door of the privy chamber. “They won’t tolerate it. When a monastery is pulled down, it robs the whole town. We can’t rule the towns, the citizens won’t bear it. They’re all up in the North, and they are talking of defending the monasteries and throwing out the inspectors who come to close them.”

  “You must tell Lord Cromwell, it’s his work.”

  “He knows. But he doesn’t warn the king. He doesn’t understand the danger that we are in. I tell you, we can’t hold the North against the people if they all join together.”

  “Defending the Church?” I say slowly.

  He nods. “Saying it has all been foretold. And speaking for the princess.”

  One of the king’s grooms opens the privy chamber door and nods to me. I leave the townsman without another word, and go in.

  It is cool and dark in the privy chamber, where the shutters are closed against the gray of an autumn afternoon, and the fire is laid in the grate but not yet lit. The king is seated behind a broad black-polished table in a big carved chair, scowling. The table before him is heaped with papers, and a secretary waits at the far end, his pen poised, as if the king had been dictating a letter and had broken off when he heard the sentries knock and swing open the door. Lord Cromwell stands to one side, and politely bows his head to me as I walk in.

  I can smell danger, just like a horse can sense weak timbers underfoot on a rotten bridge. I look f