The King's Curse Read online

  I am about to argue but suddenly I see her as the queen she may become. She will be formidable. This girl was raised to be Queen of England from the age of three. It seems she will be Queen of England however the luck runs against her.

  “I don’t know what’s the right thing to do,” I say uncertainly. “If I were you . . .”

  She shakes her head, smiling. “Lady Margaret, if you were me, you would go home to Spain and hope to live your life in quiet safety, because you have learned to keep your distance from the throne; you were raised in fear of the king, any king. But I was raised to be Princess of Wales and then Queen of England. I have no choice. They called me the Princess of Wales from the cradle! I can’t just change my name now and hide from my destiny. I have to do what I promised to Arthur. You have to help me.”

  “Half the court saw you put to bed together on your wedding night.”

  “I’ll say that he was incapable if I have to.”

  I gasp at her determination. “Katherine! You would never shame him?”

  “It’s no shame to him,” she says fiercely. “It is a shame on anyone who asks me. I know what he was to me and what I was to him. I know how he loved me and what we were to each other. But nobody else need know. Nobody else will ever know.”

  I see her passion for him still. “But your duenna . . .”

  “She’ll say nothing. She doesn’t want to go back to Spain with spoiled goods and a half-spent dowry.”

  She turns to me and smiles her fearless smile, as if it will be easy. “And I’ll have a son with Harry,” she promises. “Just as Arthur and I hoped. And a girl called Mary. Will you look after my children for me, Lady Margaret? Don’t you want to care for the children that Arthur wanted me to have?”

  I would have been wiser to say nothing, though I should have told her that women have to change their names and silence their own wills, though I could have told her that destinies are for men. “Yes,” I say reluctantly. “Yes. I do want to care for the children you promised him. I do want to be Mary’s governess. And I’ll never say anything about you and Arthur. I knew nothing for sure, I was not even there at your wedding night, and if you are truly determined, then I will not betray you. I will have no opinion.”

  She bows her head, and I realize that she is deeply relieved at my decision. “I am doing this for him,” she reminds me. “For love of him. Not for my own ambition, not even for my parents. He asked it of me, and I am going to do it.”

  “I’ll help you,” I promise her. “For him.”

  STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1502

  But there is little I can do for her. I am no longer the wife of the guardian of the Prince of Wales, because there is no longer a court for the Prince of Wales or a Welsh household. The new prince—Harry—is declared to be too precious to be sent away. While my cousin the queen grows big with a child which everyone says must be a boy, their only living heir, Harry, is raised at Eltham Palace near Greenwich with his sisters Margaret and Mary, and though he is a sturdy, strong eleven-year-old, old enough to take up his duties as a royal heir, old enough to have his own council and learn from them to make careful judgments, My Lady the King’s Mother demands that he be kept at home like his sisters, the adored and indulged lord of the nursery kingdom.

  He has the best of tutors, the finest musicians, and the best horsemen to teach him all the arts and skills of a young prince. My cousin his mother ensures that he is a scholar and tries to teach him that a king cannot have everything his own way; but My Lady insists that he must never be exposed to any danger.

  He must never go near a sick person, his rooms must be constantly cleaned, he must be attended always by a physician. He must ride wonderful horses, but they must be broken by his horsemaster and guaranteed safe for their most precious rider. He can ride at the quintain, but he may never face an opponent in the joust. He can row on the river but never if it looks like rain. He can play tennis, though nobody ever beats him, and sing songs and make music, but he must never be overexcited or flushed too hot, or strain himself. He is not taught to rule, he is not even taught to rule himself. The boy, already indulged and spoiled, is now the only Tudor stepping-stone to the future. If they were to lose him, they would lose everything they have fought and plotted and worked for. Without a son and heir to follow the Tudor king there is no Tudor dynasty, no House of Tudor. With the death of his brother, Harry is now the only son and heir. No wonder they wrap him in ermine and serve him off gold.

  They cannot see him take a step without being dizzily aware that he is their only boy. The Tudor family is so few: our queen facing the ordeal of childbirth, a king who is plagued with quinsy and cannot draw a breath without pain, his old mother, two girls, and only one boy. They are few and they are fragile.

  And nobody remarks it, but we Plantagenets in the House of York are so many. They call us the demon’s brood and indeed we breed like the devil. We are rich in heirs, headed by my cousin Edmund, gaining followers and power all the time at the court of the Emperor Maximilian, his brother Richard, and scores of kinsmen and cousins. Plantagenet blood is fertile; they named the family for the Planta genista, the broom shrub, which is never out of flower, which grows everywhere, in the most unlikely soil, which can never be uprooted and even when it is burned out will thrive and grow again the very next spring, yellow as gold though it is rooted in the blackest charcoal.

  They say that when you behead one of the Plantagenets, there is another that springs up, fresh in the green. We trace our line back to Fulk of Anjou, husband to a water goddess. We always bear a dozen heirs. But if the Tudors lose Harry, they have nothing to replace him with but the baby my cousin carries low and heavy in her belly that drains her face of color and makes her sick every morning.

  Since Prince Harry is so rare, since he is their singular precious heir, he has to be married, and they succumb to the temptation of Spanish wealth, Spanish power, and the convenience of Katherine, obedient and helpful, waiting for the word in her London palace. They promise Harry in marriage to her, and so she has her way. I laugh out loud when my husband comes back from London and tells me the news, and he looks at me curiously and asks me what is so amusing.

  “Just say it again!” I demand.

  “Prince Harry has been betrothed to the Dowager Princess of Wales,” he repeats. “But I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”

  “Because she had set her heart on it, and I never thought that they would consent,” I explain.

  “Well, I’m surprised that they did. They’ve got to get a dispensation and negotiate a settlement, and then they can’t marry for years. I’d have thought that nothing but the best would have been good enough for Prince Harry. Not his brother’s widow.”

  “Why not, if the marriage was never consummated?” I venture.

  He looks at me. “That’s what the Spanish are saying, it’s all around court. I didn’t contradict it, though I had eyes in my head at Ludlow. I don’t know the truth of it and I didn’t know what to say.” He looks sheepish. “I didn’t know what My Lady the King’s Mother would want to hear. Until she tells me, I’ll say nothing.”

  STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, FEBRUARY 1503

  Elizabeth my cousin the queen prayed that she was carrying another boy, prayed that the curse she had recited as a young woman of seventeen was nothing but words on the cold wind, prayed that the Tudor line would not die out. But she was brought to bed and she had a girl, a worthless girl, and it cost her her life, and the baby died too.

  “I am sorry,” my husband says gently to me, the letter sealed with black wax trailing black satin ribbons in his hand. “I am sorry. I know how much you loved her.”

  I shake my head. He does not know how much I loved her, and I cannot tell him. When I was a little girl and my world was all but destroyed by the Tudor victory, she was there, pale and afraid like me but determined that we Plantagenets would survive, determined that we would share in the Tudor spoils, determined that we would lea