The King's Curse Read online

  “Tell me one thing,” she spits. “You know for a fact, don’t you, that Prince Arthur and the dowager princess were lovers? You saw the unmistakable signs of their bedding. Under your roof he was conducted to her room once a week, was he not? I had ordered it, and it was done? Or are you telling me that you disobeyed me and they were not put together every week?”

  I can hardly speak. “You were obeyed,” I whisper. “Of course, I obeyed you. He was taken to her room every week.”

  “So,” she says, a little pacified. “So. You admit this much. He went to her room. We know this. You don’t deny this.”

  “But whether they were lovers or not, I cannot tell,” I say. My voice is so small that I fear she will not hear me and from somewhere I shall have to find the courage to speak again.

  But her hearing is acute, her understanding like a trap. “So. You are supporting her,” she says. “Supporting her ridiculous claim that her husband was incapable over four months of marriage. Though he was young and healthy and she was his wife. Though she never said anything to anyone at the time. Though she never complained. She never even mentioned it.”

  I have promised Princess Katherine my help, and I am bound to her. I loved Arthur and I heard him whisper to her: “Promise!” I stay on my knees and I keep my head down and I pray for this ordeal to pass.

  “I cannot tell,” I repeat. “She told me that there was no chance that she was with child. I understood her to be saying that they were not lovers. That they had never been lovers.”

  Her rage has passed; the color drains from her face, she is white as if she might faint. A lady steps forward to support her and then falls back before her fierce glare.

  “Do you know what you are doing, Margaret Pole?” My Lady demands of me, her voice like ice. “Do you really know what you are saying?”

  I sit back on my heels, finding that I am holding my hands together under my chin, as if I am praying for mercy. I shake my head. “Forgive me, Your Grace, I don’t know what you mean.”

  My Lady leans forward and hisses in my ear so that no one else can hear. She is so close that I can feel her malmsey breath on my cheek. “You are not getting your little friend married to Prince Harry, if that was your plan. You are putting that little Spanish whore in the bed of her father-in-law!”

  The word whore from the mouth of My Lady is as shocking as the idea. “What? Her father-in-law?”

  “Yes.”

  “The king?”

  “My son, the king.” Her voice quavers with frustrated passion. “My son, the king.”

  “He wants to marry the dowager princess now?”

  “Of course he does!” Her voice is grindingly low and I can feel the heat of her rage against my hair, against my ear. “Because that way he doesn’t have to pay her widow’s jointure, that way he keeps the dowry she brought and he can demand the rest, that way he keeps an alliance with Spain against our enemy, France. That way he gets himself a cheap wedding with a princess who is here in London already, and from her he gets a new baby, another son and heir. And that way”—she breaks off to pant like a hunted dog—“that way he takes the girl in sinful lust. In a sinful, incestuous lust. She has tempted him with her bold, wicked eyes. She has inflamed him with her dancing, she walks with him, she whispers with him, she smiles at him and curtseys when she sees him, she tempts him, she will take him down to hell.”

  “But she is betrothed to Prince Harry.”

  “You tell her that, while she hangs on his father’s arm and rubs herself against him!”

  “He can’t marry his daughter-in-law,” I say, utterly bemused.

  “Fool!” she snaps. “He needs only a dispensation from the Pope. And he will get that if she continues to say, as she constantly says, that the marriage was never consummated. If her friends support her, as you are doing. And her lie—for I know it is a lie—plunges my son into sin and my house into ruin. This lie will destroy us. And you are telling it for her. You are as bad as she. I will never forget this. I will never forgive this. I will never forgive you!”

  I can say nothing but gape at her.

  “Speak!” she commands me. “Say that she was wedded and bedded.”

  Dumbly, I shake my head.

  “If you do not speak, it will be the worse for you,” she warns me.

  I bow my head. I say nothing.

  STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1504

  I am with child again and I choose to stay at Stourton Castle while my husband rules Wales from Ludlow. He comes home to see me and is pleased with my care of our lands and our home and the education of my children.

  “But we have to be careful with money,” he reminds me. We are seated together in the steward’s room at Stourton, the rent books spread around us. “We have to take every care, Margaret. With four children and another on the way we have to guard our little fortune. They’re all going to need a place in the world, and Ursula will need a good dowry.”

  “If the king would only grant you some more lands,” I say. “God knows you serve him well. Every time you make a judgment in court you send the fine to him. You must earn him thousands of pounds and you never keep back a penny. Not like the others.”

  He shrugs. He is no courtier, my husband. He has never gone to the king for money, he has only ever been paid the smallest sum that the Tudors thought he would accept. And besides, there is more and more going into the royal coffers and less and less coming out. Henry Tudor paid off everyone who served him at Bosworth in the early years of his reign, and ever since he has been clawing back the lands he so generously granted in those first heady days. Every traitor finds his family home is forfeit, every minor criminal finds himself laden with demands to pay a fine. Even the smallest of offenses come with a great demand for payment, and everything—from the salt on the table to the ale in the inn—is taxed.

  “Perhaps you can speak to My Lady when we next go to court,” I suggest. “Everyone else is better rewarded than you.”

  “Can’t you ask her?”

  I shake my head. I have never told my husband of the terrible scene in My Lady’s rooms. I think that she got her way—I have heard no more talk of the king marrying the dowager princess—but she will never forget or forgive that I did not write a witness account to her dictation.

  “I’m no great favorite,” I say shortly. “Not with my cousin Edmund going round Europe, raising an army against them. Not with two other cousins, William de la Pole still in the Tower and William Courtenay just arrested.”

  “They’re not charged with anything,” he points out.

  “They’re not freed either.”

  “Then can’t you cut the costs here?” Sir Richard asks me irritably. “I don’t like to go to her. She is not an easy woman to ask.”

  “I try. But as you say, we have four children and another on the way. They all have to have horses and tutors. They all have to be fed.”

  We look at each other in mutual impatience. I think: this is so unfair! He can have no criticism of me. He married me, a young woman of royal birth, and I have given him children—three of them sons—and I have never boasted of my name or my lineage. I have never reproached him for bringing me down to be the wife of a small knight when I was born all but a princess and an heiress to the Warwick fortune. I have never complained that he made no attempt to get my title or my fortune restored; I have played the part of Lady Pole and managed his two little manors and a castle, and not the thousands on thousands of acres that were mine by right.

  “We’ll raise the rents for all the tenants,” he says shortly. “And we’ll tell them they have to increase what they send to the house from their own farms.”

  “They can barely pay at the moment,” I observe. “Not with the king’s new fines and the new royal service.”

  He shrugs. “They’ll have to,” he says simply. “The king requires it. These are hard times for everyone.”

  I go into my confinement thinking how hard the times are, and wondering w