The King's Curse

  “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
t. And I, who have seen a country at war, know very well that during the battles, other heirs will emerge. My cousin Henry Courtenay, cousin to the king? My son Montague, cousin to the king? My son Reginald, if he married the princess and brought with him the blessing of the Holy Father and the armies of Spain? Or even Frances herself, who will certainly be thinking of this, as she stands here wide-eyed and glazed with ambition, the daughter of the Dowager Queen of France, the king’s niece?

  In a moment she recovers. “At first light,” she agrees.

  “I have this for you.” He hands her a letter on which I can see her husband’s seal, a standing unicorn. I would give a lot to know what he writes to her privately. She holds the letter in her hand and turns to me. “Please excuse me,” she says. Carefully, we trade measured bobs, and then she hurries from her room to tell her attendants to pack up, and to read her letter.

  Maria and I watch her go. “If His Grace does not recover . . .” Maria says very quietly.

  “I think we had better travel with Lady Frances,” I say. “I think we all need to get back to London. We can travel with her escort.”

  “She’ll want to hurry.”

  “So will I.”

  ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, JANUARY 1536

  We spend one night on the road, riding as fast as we can to London, asking along the way for news but strictly forbidding our servants to say why we are in such haste to get back to court.

  “If the people know that the king is gravely injured, I fear that they will rise up,” Frances says quietly to me.

  “There’s no doubt of it,” I reply grimly.

  “And your affinity would be . . .”

  “Loyal,” I say shortly, without explaining what that might mean.

  “There will have to be a regency,” she says. “A terribly long regency for the Princess Elizabeth. Unless . . .”

  I wait to see if she has the courage to finish the sentence.

  “Unless,” she says with finality.

  “Pray God that His Grace is recovered,” I say simply.

  “It is impossible to imagine the country without him,” Frances concurs.

  I nod in agreement as I glance around at my companions, and think that clearly it is not impossible; for it is what each and every one of them are thinking.

  We halt for the night at an inn which can house the ladies and women servants of our big party but the men will have to go to outlying farms and the guards will have to sleep in barns. So we know we are not fully guarded when we hear the noise of approaching horsemen and then see them cantering down the road at dusk, half a dozen horses ridden hard.

  The ladies step back behind the big taproom table but I go out to face whatever is coming. I would rather greet fear than have it come stamping into my hall. Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, usually so anxious to be first, lets me take the precedence for danger, and I stand alone, waiting for the horses to halt before the doorway. In the light spilling out from the door and then in the sudden flicker from a torch held by one of the stable boys running forward I see the royal livery of green and white and my heart skips a beat for fear.

  “A message for the Countess of Worcester,” he says.

  Elizabeth Somerset hurries forward, and takes the letter sealed with the falcon crest. I let the other women crowd around her as she breaks the Boleyn woman’s seal, and leans towards the torches so that she can read in their flickering light; but no one else can see her message.

  I step out into the road and smile at the messenger.

  “You’ve had a long, cold ride,” I observe.

  He tosses the reins of his horse to a stable boy. “We have.”

  “And I am afraid there is not a bed to be had in the inn, but I can send your men to a farm nearby where my guard is sleeping. They will see that you get food and somewhere to rest. Are you to return to London with us?”

  “I am to take the countess to the court at dawn tomorrow, ahead of you all,” he grumbles. “And I knew that there would be nowhere to sleep here. And I suppose nothing to eat either.”

  “You can send your men to the farm, and I can get you a place at a table here in the hall tonight,” I say. “I’m the Countess of Salisbury.”

  He bows low. “I know who you are, your ladyship. I’m Thomas Forest.”

  “You can be my guest at dinner tonight, Mr. Forest.”

  “I’d be very grateful for dinner,” he says. He turns and shouts to his men to follow the stable boy with the torch who will show them the way to the farm.

  “Yes,” I say, leading the way inside where the trestle tables are being laid out for dinner and the benches drawn up. He can smell meat roasting in the kitchen. “But what’s the hurry? Does the queen need her lady so urgently that she sends you riding cross-country in winter? Or is it just a pregnant woman’s whim that you have to serve?”

  He leans towards me. “They don’t tell me anything,” he says. “But I’m a married man. I know the signs. The queen has taken to her bed and they are hurrying in and out with hot water and towels and everyone from the greatest of them to the youngest kitchen maid speaks to every single man as if we are fools or criminals. The midwives are there. But nobody is carrying a cradle in.”

  “She is losing her child?” I ask.

  “Without a doubt,” he says with brutal honesty. “Another dead Tudor baby.”

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1536

  I leave the ladies to scurry back to court where the king is recovering from his fall and coming to terms with the news of the death of yet another child, and I ride at my leisure to my home. The question now, the only question, is how the king will take the loss of his son—for the baby was a boy. Will he see it as a sign of the disapproval of God and turn against the second wife, as he turned and blamed the first?

  I spend some hours on my knees in the priory chapel thinking on this. My household, God bless them, give me the credit to believe that I am praying. Alas, I am not really at prayer. In the quietness and peace of the priory I am turning over and over in my own mind what the boy whom I once knew so well will do, now that he is a man and faced with a crushing disappointment.

  The boy I knew would recoil in pain from such a blow, but then he would turn to the people he loved and those that loved him and in comforting them, cheer himself.

  “But he’s not a boy anymore,” Geoffrey says quietly to me as he joins my vigil one day and kneels beside me, and I whisper these thoughts to him. “He’s not even a young man. The blow to his head has shaken him deeply. He was going bad, no doubt that he was spoiling like milk souring in the sun; but suddenly, everything is even worse. Montague says it is as if he has realized that he will die just like his wife the queen.”

  “Do you think he grieves for her at all?”

  “Even though he didn’t want to go back to her, he knew she was there, loving him, praying for him, hoping that they would be reconciled. And then suddenly, he is near death, and then the baby dies. Montague says that he thinks God has forsaken him. He’ll have to find some explanation.”

  “He’ll blame Anne,” I predict.

  Geoffrey is about to reply when Prior Richard comes in quietly and kneels beside me, prays for a moment, crosses himself, and says: “Your Grace, may I interrupt you?”

  We turn to him. “What’s the matter?”

  “We have a visitation,” he says. He speaks with such disdain that for a moment I think that frogs have come up from the moat and are all over the kitchen garden. “A visitation?”

  “That’s what they call it. An inspection. My Lord Cromwell’s men have come to see that our priory is well run according to the precepts of its founders and our order.”

  I rise to my feet. “There can be no question of that.”

  He leads the way out of the church towards his private room. “My lady, they do question it.”

  He opens the door and two men turn and look at me impertinently, as if I am interrupting them, though they are in my prior’s room, in my priory, on
my lands. I wait for a moment, without moving or speaking.

  “Her Ladyship the Countess of Salisbury,” the prior says. Only then do they bow, and at their grudging courtesy I realize that the priory is in danger.

  “And you are?”

  “Richard Layton and Thomas Legh,” the older one says smoothly. “We are working for my Lord Cromwell—”

  “I know what you do,” I interrupt him. This is the man who interrogated Thomas More. This is the man who went into Sheen Abbey and interrogated the monks. This is the man who gave witness against the Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton. I don’t doubt that my name and the names of my sons and my chaplain have been written several times on papers in the little brown satchel that he carries.

  He bows, quite without shame. “I am glad of it,” he says steadily. “There has been much corruption and wickedness in the Church, and Thomas Legh and I are proud to be instruments of purification, of reformation, of God.”

  “There’s no corruption or wickedness here,” Geoffrey says hotly. “So you can be on your way.”

  Layton makes a funny little nodding gesture with his head. “You know, Sir Geoffrey, that is what everyone always assures me. And so we will confirm it, and be on our way as fast as we can. We have much to do. We don’t want to be here any longer than is necessary.”

  He turns to the prior. “I take it we may use your room for our inquiries? You will send the canons and the nuns in one at a time, the canons first and then the nuns. The oldest first.”

  “Why would you speak with the nuns?” Geoffrey asks. None of us wants my daughter-in-law Jane complaining to strangers about her decision to join the priory, or demanding her release.

  The quickly suppressed smile that crosses Layton’s face tells me that they know of Jane, and they know that we took her dower from her when we encouraged her to enter the nunnery, and they know she wants to be released from her vows and get her fortune back into her own keeping.