I am to leave England in the summer; the plans are unchanged and I am glad of it, as there is nothing to keep me here. King James of Scotland is as good as his word on the marriage treaty and I will have a fortune in rents—six thousand pounds a year from the lands he has given me, as well as one thousand Scots pounds a year for my allowance. He will pay the wages of my twenty-four English servants and the expenses of my court. If he should be so unfortunate as to die—and this is possible as he is so very old—then I will be a wealthy widow: I will have Newark Castle and Ettrick Forest, and much, much more. This is something I can count on: this fortune and my crown. Everything else, even my mother’s love, can vanish overnight. I know this now.
But I am surprised to feel that I don’t want to leave home without making friends with my brother Harry, and I go to look for him. He is in my lady grandmother’s rooms, reading to her from a Latin psalter. I can hear his clear boy’s voice and his beautiful pronunciation through her door, and he does not stop as the doors are swung open by the guard, though he glances up and sees me. The two of them are framed by the carved stone arch of the window, as if posing for a painting about Youth and Age. They are both beautifully dressed in black velvet; a shaft of sunlight illuminates Harry’s golden head like a halo. My grandmother is wearing a severe white headdress, a wimple like a nun’s. They should both stop and bow, but my lady grandmother gives a nod of her head and gestures that Harry shall go on, as if his words are more important than my precedence. I look at them with exhausted resentment. They are both so lean and tall and beautiful and I am so dumpy and ruffled and hot. They look completely royal, enormously spiritual, and I look overdressed.
I curtsey to my grandmother in silence and sit on a cushion on the window seat that raises me slightly higher than her, while Harry finishes reading. It takes forever before she says: “That was beautiful, Your Grace, my dear boy, thank you.” And he bows and closes the book and hands it back to her and says: “It is I that should thank you for putting such words of wisdom, so beautifully illustrated, into my hands.”
Then they look at each other with mutual admiration and she goes to her small privy chapel to pray, her ladies follow her to kneel at the back, and Harry and I are alone.
“Harry, I am sorry that I said that, when Arthur died,” I stumble bluntly.
Graciously, he raises his head. Harry loves an apology.
“I was so unhappy,” I add. “I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“And then it got worse.” His moment of pride is gone. I can almost smell his misery—the misery of a boy, not yet a man, who has lost his mother, the only person who truly loved him.
Awkwardly, I get to my feet and stretch my arms out to him, and hold him. It is almost like holding Arthur, he is so tall and strong. “My brother,” I say, trying out the words; I have never felt tenderly towards Harry before. “My brother,” I repeat.
“My sister,” he says.
We hold each other in silence for a moment and I think: this is comforting. This is my brother—strong as a colt and lonely, as I am. I can, perhaps, trust him. He can trust me.
“You know, I am going to be King of England one day,” he says, his face pressed against my shoulder.
“Not for years yet,” I say consolingly. “Father will come back to court and it will be like it was.”
“And I am to marry Katherine,” he says shyly. He releases me. “She was never truly married to Arthur—she is to marry me.”
I am so stunned that I just gape silently, breathless with surprise. Harry sees the blankness of my face and gives a little embarrassed laugh. “Not at once, of course. We will wait until I am fourteen. But we will be betrothed at once.”
“Not again!” bursts out of me, as I think of the gold laces and the extravagant wedding.
“It’s agreed.”
“But she’s Arthur’s widow,” I say.
“Not really,” he says awkwardly.
“What do you mean?” Then, in an instant, all at once I know. I think of Katherine of Arrogant saying, “Alas, it never happened for us,” and my wondering what she meant by that, and why she should say such a thing.
“Alas,” I say, watching him narrowly. “It never happened for them.”
“No,” he says, relieved. I could bet that he even recognizes the words. “No, alas, it didn’t.”
“Is this her plan?” I demand furiously. “Is this how she gets to stay here, forever? Is this how she gets to be Princess of Wales and then become Queen of England even though her husband died? Because she has set her heart on this? She was never in love with Arthur, it was always for the throne.”
“It’s father’s plan,” Harry says innocently. “It was agreed before Lady Mother’s . . . Lady Mother’s death.”
“No, it will be her plan,” I am certain. “She promised Arthur something before he died. I think it was this.”
Harry smiles like a glowing angel. “Then I have my brother’s blessing,” he says. He raises his head, like when he was reading the Latin psalm, and he repeats from memory. “ ‘If brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another: but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother.’ ”
“Is that the Bible?” I ask, feeling my ignorance, but thinking it remarkable that God should plan this convenient arrangement for the expensive widow. This way we get her dowry, and don’t pay her widow’s jointure. How mysterious are the ways of the Lord! How nice for her and how cheap for my father!
“Deuteronomy,” says my brother the scholar. “It is God’s will that I marry Katherine.”
Harry goes for his riding lesson and I remain seated in my lady grandmother’s rooms till she comes out of her private chapel followed by her ladies-in-waiting, and I see that behind her, Princess Katherine is holding Mary’s hand. Apparently, Katherine often prays with my sister in the privy chapel. I quickly take in her hood, her gown, her shoes, and I note that she has nothing new. The skirts of her gown look new, but actually they have been turned inside out; her shoes are worn. Katherine of Arrogant is having to pinch pennies, her parents are sending her no funds until the betrothal is confirmed, and my father is not paying her jointure since she will no longer be a widow. I cannot help but be pleased to see that the cost of her ambition is falling on her.
My lady grandmother sees me and beckons me into her chapel as the others leave, and we are alone in the shadowy room that always smells lingeringly of incense and books.
“Have you ever spoken privately with the Dowager Princess of Wales?” she asks me.
“Not much,” I say. I don’t know what answer she wants to hear. But I can tell by the grim lines grooved around her mouth that she is very displeased with somebody. I only hope it’s not me.
“Did she tell you anything of our beloved son Arthur?”
I note that my grandmother now refers to Arthur as our beloved son, as if my mother had never been at all. “She once said that he asked her to comfort us in our loss,” I reply.
“Not that,” the old lady snaps. “Not that. Did she say anything about her marriage, before he was ill?”
“Alas, it never happened for us,” I think to myself. Aloud, I say: “No. She hardly speaks to me.”
I see my grandmother’s face fold up into an expression of deep displeasure. Something has occurred that she dislikes—someone will be sorry for that. She puts a bony hand over mine, a deep, rich ruby glowing on her finger, the band clipping my knuckle. “You ask her,” she orders. “Ask her for advice. You are a young woman, about to be married. Ask her for the advice of a mother. What takes place in the marriage bed. Whether she was afraid, or in pain on her wedding night.”
I am quite shocked. I am a royal bride. I am not supposed to know anything. I am not supposed to ask.
She makes a little impatient noise in the back of her throat. “Ask her,” she says. “And then come and tell me exactly what she says.”
“But why
?” I say, bemused. “Why am I to ask her? It was more than a year ago.”
The face she turns to me is bleached with fury. I have never seen her like this before. “She is saying they never bedded,” she hisses. “Age sixteen and near six months married, and now she says they never bedded? Put to bed before the whole court and rising up smiling in the morning with not a word against it? And now she says that she is a virgin untouched.”
“But why should she say such a thing?”
“Her mother!” my lady grandmother exclaims as if the words are an insult. “Her clever, wicked mother, Isabella of Castile, will have told her to deny Arthur so that she can marry without a dispensation, so she can be a virgin bride.”
Now she can’t sit still, she is so enraged. She gets up from her prie-dieu and strides about the small space, her black skirts swishing the rushes on the floor back and forth so they release the perfume of bedstraw, meadowsweet, and lavender in dusty clouds. “Virgin bride? A viper bride! I know what they are thinking, I know what they are planning. But I will see her dead before she takes my son’s throne.”
I am frightened. I crouch down on my footstool like a fat duckling in the nest when a sleek raptor flies over. My grandmother suddenly stops, puts her hands on my shoulder like a stooping peregrine. Her grip is as hard as a claw. I look up waveringly.
“You don’t want her to marry Harry?” I whisper. “I don’t either.” I try a sycophantic smile. “I don’t like her. I don’t want her to marry my brother.”
“Your father,” she says, and it is as if she shatters into a thousand sharp pieces of jealousy and grief. “I am certain that she wants to seduce and marry your father! She has set her sights on my son! My boy, my precious boy! But she will never do it. I will never allow it.”
DURHAM HOUSE, LONDON, ENGLAND, MARCH 1503
Unwilling and uncertain, I obey my grandmother and go to visit my sister-in-law, Katherine. I find her seated in her privy chamber hunched over a small fire. She is wrapped in a dark shawl and wearing a black gown, in double mourning, as we all are, but she looks up and springs to her feet when she sees me and her smile is bright.
“How lovely to see you. Did you bring Mary?”
“No,” I say, irritated. “Why should I bring her?”
She laughs at my bad temper. “No, no, I am so pleased you came alone, now we can be cozy.” She nods at the servant who has shown me into the room. “You can put on another log,” she says, as if firewood should be used carefully. She turns to me: “Will you have a glass of small ale?”
I accept a glass and then I have to laugh when I see her sip hers and put it aside. “You still don’t like it?”
She shakes her head and laughs. “I don’t think I ever will.”
“What did you drink in Spain?”
“Oh, we had clean water,” she says. “We had fruit juices, and sherbets, light wines and ice from the ice houses.”
“Ice? Water?”
She shrugs, with that little gesture, as if she wants to forget the luxuries of her home at the Alhambra Palace. “All sorts of things,” she says. “They don’t matter now.”
“I would think you would want to go home,” I say, raising the subject in obedience to my grandmother.
“Would you?” she asks, as if she is interested in my opinion. “Would you want to go home and leave your husband’s country if you were widowed?”
I have not thought of it. “I suppose so.”
“I don’t. England is my home now. And I am Dowager Princess of Wales.”
“You won’t ever be queen,” I say bluntly.
“I will, if I marry your brother,” she says.
“You won’t marry my father?”
“No. What an idea!”
We are both silent. “My lady grandmother thought that was your intention,” I say awkwardly.
She looks sideways at me as if she is about to laugh. “Did she send you here to stop me?”
I can’t help but giggle. “Not exactly, but, you know . . .”
“To spy on me,” she says agreeably.
“She can’t bear the thought of him remarrying,” I say. “Actually, neither can I.”
She puts her arm around my shoulders. Her hair smells of roses. “Of course not,” she says. “I have no intention, and my mother would never allow it.”
“But they don’t insist you go home?”
She looks into the fire, and I am able to study her exquisite profile. I would think she could marry anyone she chose.
“I expect them to work out the dowry payments and betroth me to Harry,” she says.
“But if they don’t?” I press her. “If my lady grandmother wants Harry for another princess?”
She turns and looks me directly in the eye, her beautiful face open to my scrutiny. “Margaret, I pray that this never happens to you. To love and to lose a husband is a terrible grief. But the only comfort I have is that I will do what my parents require, what Arthur wanted, and what God Himself has set as my destiny. I will be Queen of England. I have been called Princess of Wales since I was a baby in the nursery, I learned it as I learned my name. I won’t change my name now.”
I am stunned by her certainty. “I hope it never happens to me too. But if it did—I wouldn’t stay in Scotland. I’d come home to England.”
“You can’t do what you want when you are a princess,” she says simply. “You have to obey God and the king and queen, your mother and father. You’re not free, Margaret. You’re not like a plowman’s daughter. You are doing the work of God, you are going to be mother to a king, you are one below the angels, you have a destiny.”
I look around the bare room, and I notice for the first time that one or two of the tapestries are missing from the walls, and that there are gaps in the collection of silver plate on the sideboard. “Do you have enough money?” I ask her diffidently. “Enough for your household.”
She shakes her head without shame. “No,” she says. “My father will not send me an allowance, he says I am the responsibility of the king, and your father will not pay me my widow’s dower until all my bridal money has been paid to him. I am between two millstones and they are grinding me down.”
“But what will you do?”
She smiles at me as if she is quite unafraid. “I’ll endure. I will outlast them both. Because I know my destiny is to be Queen of England.”
“I wish I were like you,” I say honestly. “I am certain of nothing.”
“You will be. When you are tested, you will be certain too. We are princesses, we were born to be queens, we are sisters.”
I ride away from the house on my expensive palfrey with my fur cape buttoned up to my nose, and I think I will report to my grandmother that Katherine of Arrogant is as proud and as beautiful as ever, but that she does not intend to marry my father. I will not tell her that the princess reminded me, in her stubborn determination, of my lady grandmother herself. If it comes to a battle of wills they will be well matched—but, actually, I would put my money on Katherine.
I will not tell my grandmother either that, for the first time, I like Katherine. I cannot help but think she will make a wonderful Queen of England.
THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY’S HOUSE, LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1503
I don’t know what my grandmother says to her son my father; but he comes out of his mourning, there is an exchange of letters with Spain, and never another word about his courting Katherine. Instead, he pursues the marriage contract that is going to save him so much money with as much enthusiasm as Katherine’s mother in faraway Spain. Together they instruct the Pope to send a dispensation so that a brother- and sister-in-law can marry, and Katherine of Arrogant dresses in virginal white and spreads her bronze hair over her shoulders for yet another grand wedding occasion.
At least this is not in the abbey, and we don’t spend a fortune on it. This is a betrothal, not a wedding—a promise to marry when Harry is fourteen. She walks into the bishop’s chapel as smiling and as queenly as s
he was just nineteen months ago, and she takes Harry’s hand as if she is glad to promise herself to a boy five years her junior. It is as if Arthur, their wedding, and their bedding never happened. Now she is Harry’s bride and she will be known as the Princess of Wales once again. Her serene dismissal, “Alas, it never happened for us,” seems to be the last word that anyone will ever say about it.
My lady grandmother is there too. She does not smile on the match, but she does not oppose it. For me, it is just another event in this world that means nothing. A mother can die, a brother can die, and a woman can deny her husband and retain her title. The only person who makes any sense to me is Katherine herself. She knows who she was born to be; I wish I had her certainty. When she follows me out of the chapel I know that I am trying to hold my head as she does—as if I were wearing a crown already.
RICHMOND PALACE, ENGLAND, JUNE 1503
I go to the nursery to say good-bye to my sister Mary, and who should I find but Katherine, teaching her to play the lute as if we don’t employ a music master, as if Katherine has nothing better to do. I don’t trouble to conceal my irritation. “I have come to say good-bye to my sister,” I say as a broad hint to Katherine that she might leave us alone.
“And here are both your sisters!”
“I have to say good-bye to Mary.” I ignore Katherine and guide Mary to the seat in the oriel window and pull her down to sit beside me. Katherine stands before us and listens. Good, I think, now you can see that I too have a sense of my destiny.