The King's Curse Read online

  Katherine goes to the circular chapel in the courtyard of the castle and prays on her knees for the health of her young husband. Late at night, I look down from the window in Arthur’s tower and I see her bobbing candle in the darkened courtyard and the train of women following her from the chapel to her bedroom. I hope that she can sleep as I turn back to the bed and the boy who is burning up with fever. I put some cleansing salts on the fire and watch the flames burn blue. I take his hand and feel the sweat in his hot palms and his pulse hammering under my fingertips. I don’t know what to do for him. I don’t know what there is to do for him. I fear that there is nothing that anyone can do for him. In the cold long darkness of the night I begin to believe that he will die.

  I eat my breakfast in his room but I have no appetite. He is wandering in his mind and will neither eat nor drink. I have the grooms of the bedchamber hold him while I force the cup against his mouth and pour small ale down his throat until he chokes and splutters and swallows, and then they lie him back on the pillow and he throws himself around in the bed, hot, and getting hotter.

  The princess comes to the door of his presence chamber and they send for me. “I shall see him! You will not prevent me!”

  I close the door behind me and confront her white-faced determination. Her eyes are shadowed like bruised violets; she has not slept all night. “It may be a grave illness,” I say, not naming the greatest fear. “I cannot allow you to go to him. I should be failing in my duty if I let you go to him.”

  “Your duty is to me!” shouts the daughter of Isabella of Spain, driven to rage by her fear.

  “My duty is to England,” I say to her quietly. “And if you are carrying a Tudor heir in your belly, then my duty is to that child as well as to you. I cannot allow you to go closer than to the foot of the bed.”

  At once she almost collapses. “Let me go in,” she pleads. “Please, Lady Margaret, just let me see him. I will stop where you say, I will do as you command, but for Our Lady’s sake, let me see him.”

  I take her in, past the waiting crowds who call out a blessing, past the trestle table where the doctor has set up a small cabinet with herbs and oils and leeches crawling in a jar, through the double doors to the bedroom where Arthur is lying, still and quiet, on the bed. He opens his dark eyes as she comes in, and the first words he whispers are, “I love you. Don’t come closer.”

  She takes hold of the carved post at the foot of the bed, as if to stop herself from climbing in beside him. “I love you too,” she says breathlessly. “You will be well?”

  He just shakes his head and, in that terrible moment, I know that I have failed in my promise to his mother. I said that I would keep him safe, and I have not. From a wintry sky, from an east wind—who knows how?—he has taken the curse of his father’s disease, and My Lady the King’s Mother will be punished by the curse of the two queens. She will pay for what she did to their boys, and see her grandson buried and, no doubt, her son also. I step forward and take hold of the princess by her slight waist and draw her to the door.

  “I shall come back,” she calls to him as she takes unwilling steps away from him. “Stay with me; I will not fail you.”

  All day we fight for him, as arduously if we were infantrymen bogged down in the mud of Bosworth Field. We put scalding plasters on his chest, we put leeches on his legs, we sponge his face with icy water, we put a warming pan under his back. As he lies there, white as a marble saint, we torment him with every cure that we can think of, and still he sweats as if he is on fire, and nothing breaks his fever.

  The princess comes back to him as she promised to do and this time we tell her that it is the Sweat and she may go no closer to him than the threshold of his room. She says that she has to speak with him privately, orders us all from the room and stands on tiptoe, holding the doorjamb, calling across the herb-strewn floor to him. I hear a quick exchange of vows. He asks for a promise from her, she agrees but begs him to get well. I take her arm.

  “For his own good,” I say. “You have to leave him.”

  He has raised himself up on one elbow and I catch a glimpse of his deathly determined face. “Promise,” he says to her. “Please. For my sake. Promise me now, beloved.”

  She cries out, “I promise!” as if the words are torn from her, as if she does not want to grant him his last wish, and I pull her from the room.

  The bell on the grand castle clock tolls six. Arthur’s confessor gives him extreme unction and he lies back on his pillow and closes his eyes. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t let go, don’t let go.” I am supposed to be praying at the foot of the bed, but instead I have my hands clenched in fists pressing into my wet eyes and all I can do is whisper no. I cannot remember when I last left the room, when I last ate or when I last slept, but I cannot bear that this prince, this supremely beautiful and gifted young prince, is going to die—and in my care. I cannot bear that he should give up his life, this beautiful life so full of promise and hope. I have failed to teach him the one thing I most truly believe: that nothing matters more than life itself, that he should cling on to life.

  “No,” I say. “Don’t.”

  Prayers cannot stop him slipping away, the leeches, the herbs, the oils, and the charred heart of a sparrow tied on his chest cannot hold him. He is dead by the time the clock strikes seven. I go to his bedside and straighten his collar, as I used to do when he was alive, and close his dark, unseeing eyes, pulling the embroidered coverlet straight across his chest as if I were tucking him up for the night, and I kiss his cold lips. I whisper: “God bless you. Good night, sweet prince,” and then I send for the midwives to lay him out and I leave the room.

  To Her Grace the Queen of England

  Dear Cousin Elizabeth,

  They will have told you already, so this is a letter between us: from the woman who loved him as a mother, to the mother who could not have loved him more. He faced his death with courage, as the men of our family do. His sufferings were short and he died in faith.

  I do not ask you to forgive me for failing to save him because I will never forgive myself. There was no sign of any cause but the Sweat and there is no cure for that. You need not reproach yourself, there was no sign of any curse on him. He died like the beloved brave boy he was from the disease that his father’s armies unknowingly brought into this poor country.

  I will bring his widow, the princess, to you in London. She is a young woman with a broken heart. They had come to love one another and her loss is very great.

  As is yours, my dear.

  And mine.

  Margaret Pole

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1502

  The queen, my cousin, sends her private litter for the widow to make the long journey to London. Katherine travels shocked and mute, and every night on the road goes to bed in silence. I know she prays that she will not wake in the morning. I ask her, as I am bound to do, whether she thinks she might be with child and she shakes with rage at the question as if I am intruding on the privacy of her love.

  “If you are with child, and that child is a boy, then he will be the Prince of Wales and much later King of England,” I say to her gently, ignoring her tremulous fury. “You would become a woman as great as Lady Margaret Beaufort, who created her own title: My Lady the King’s Mother.”

  She can hardly bring herself to speak. “And if I am not?”

  “Then you are the dowager princess, and Prince Harry becomes the Prince of Wales,” I explain. “If you have no son to take the title, then it goes to Prince Harry.”

  “And when the king dies?”

  “Please God, that day is long coming.”

  “Amen. But when it does?”

  “Then Prince Harry is king and his wife—whoever she is—will be queen.”

  She turns away from me and goes to the fireplace but not before I see the swift expression of scorn that crosses her face at the mention of Prince Arthur’s little brother. “Prince Harry!” she exclaims.

  “You