Montague bows his head. “And now nothing,” he observes. “And all our work this month does nothing for our estate.”
“It serves my grandson Henry; I’m working for Arthur’s boy. Thank God that he has been spared. He can come home to his own house, and in the end he’ll get everything.”
Montague shakes his head. “No, because it’s his mother’s house. His mother inherits, not him. She can leave the lands away from him if she wants.”
The thought of disinheriting a son is so foreign to me that I look aghast. “She’d never do such a thing!”
“If she marries again?” Montague points out. “The new husband takes everything.”
I go to the window and look out at the fields that I thought were Arthur’s fields, that would go unquestioningly to his son, another Henry Pole.
“And if she doesn’t remarry, she’ll be a drain on our estate,” Montague adds gloomily. “We’ll have to pay her dower for the rest of her life.”
I nod. I find I cannot think of her as the young woman that I welcomed to my house, that I thought of as another daughter. She failed in her wifely duty when she stood with her father against Arthur, when she took to her bed and let Arthur die alone. Now she sends her children away and lies in bed while her husband’s brother and mother save her harvest. For the rest of her life, for as long as she lives, she will be able to draw an income from the estates that I work so hard to sow and reap, to build. The spoiled heiress who took to her bed while her own husband was dying will have the right to live in my house and draw her dower from my rents, her whole life long. She will inherit her father’s fortune. I have even promised her lands in my will. Most likely, I will die before her and she will draw my black velvet gown with the black fur trim from my wardrobe and wear it to my funeral.
Jane is on the mend. Her lady-in-waiting comes to me and tells me, with a low curtsey, that Jane sends her compliments. She has fought the Sweat and won; she will come to dine with us tonight and she is most grateful to us for all we have done for the household.
“Have you told her that her husband is dead?” I ask the woman bluntly.
Her pale strained face tells me that she has not. “Your ladyship, we did not dare to tell her while she was ill,” she says. “And then it seemed too late to say it.”
“She hasn’t asked?” Montague demands incredulously.
“She’s been so very ill.” She excuses her mistress. “Not really in her right mind, with the fever so hot. I thought perhaps that you . . .”
“Tell her to come to my rooms before dinner this afternoon,” I rule. “I will tell her myself.”
We wait for Lady Arthur Pole in the guest room of this house that was once Arthur’s house, but is now hers.
The door is opened for her and she comes into the room leaning on the arm of her lady-in-waiting, apparently too weak to walk unaided.
“Ah, my dear,” I say as kindly as I can manage. “You do look pale. Sit down, please.”
She manages a curtsey to me and a bow of her head to Montague, who helps her to a chair as I nod to her lady-in-waiting to leave.
“This is my cousin, Elizabeth,” she says faintly, as if she would keep her.
“You shall sit with us at dinner,” I promise, and the woman takes the hint and goes from the room.
“I have very bad news for you, I am afraid,” I say gently.
“My father?” She blinks.
“Arthur, your husband.”
She gasps. Clearly, she had not even known that he was ill. But surely, when she came out of her chamber and he did not greet her, she must have guessed?
“I thought he had gone to your house with the children! Are they well?”
“Thank God Henry and Maggie were well and merry at Bisham when I left them, the baby, Mary, and my son Geoffrey and his wife too.”
She takes this in. “But Arthur . . .”
“My daughter, I am sorry to tell you that he has died of the Sweat.”
She crumples up, like a piece of dropped cloth. Her head sinks into her hands, her body folds up, even her little feet tuck back under her seat. With her hands over her face she wails out her sorrow.
Montague looks at me, as if to ask: “What shall I do?” I nod to him to take a seat and wait for this helpless sobbing to cease.
She does not stop. We leave her crying and go into dinner without her. The people of her estate, Arthur’s tenants, need to see that we are here, that life will go on, that they are required to do their duty, to work and pay their rents; the household staff need not think they can take a holiday because my son is dead. These lands become Jane’s again, but then, God willing, they will be inherited by Arthur’s son Henry, so they must be kept in good heart for him. When dinner is over, we go back to my rooms and find her red-eyed and pale; but, thank God, she has finally stopped crying.
“I can’t bear it,” she says piteously to me, as if a woman can choose what she can or cannot bear. “I can’t bear to be widowed again! I can’t bear to live without him. I can’t face life as a widow, and I won’t ever consider another marriage. I am wedded to him in death as in life.”
“These are early days, you’ve had a shock,” I say soothingly. But she is determined not to be comforted.
“My heart is broken,” she says. “I shall come and live at Bisham in my dower rooms. I shall live quite retired. I shall see no one and never go out.”
“Really?” I bite my tongue on the skepticism in my voice, and say again, more gently: “Really, my dear? Don’t you think you would prefer to live with your father? Don’t you want to go home to Bodiam Castle?”
She shakes her head. “Father would only arrange another marriage for me, I know he would. I will never marry again. I want to be in Arthur’s home, I want to always be close to him, nursing my grief. I will live with you and weep for him every day.”
I cannot feel the tenderness of heart that I should. “Of course, you are distressed now,” I say.
“I am determined,” she says.
I really think she is.
“I will live my life in remembrance of Arthur. I will come to Bisham and never leave. I shall haunt his grave like a sorrowful ghost.”
“Oh,” I say.
I give her a few days to think and pray on this resolution but she doesn’t waver. She’s determined never to marry again, and she has set her heart on the rooms in my house promised to her in her marriage contract. She will have her own little household under my roof, she will no doubt employ her own servants, she will order her meals from my kitchens, and she will receive, four times a year, the rents from her dower lands, which I signed away, but never thought that I should pay. I don’t see how this is to be borne.
It is Montague, my quiet and thoughtful heir, who comes up with the brilliant solution to prevent the young widow from living with us forever. “Are you quite sure that you want to be withdrawn from the world?” he asks his sister-in-law one evening, in the small space of time that is available to see her, as she comes out of dinner in the great hall before heading to chapel to pray all night.
“Completely,” she says. She is draped in dark blue, as I am, the color of royal mourning. Arthur was a boy of the House of Plantagenet; he is mourned like a prince.
“Then I fear that Bisham Manor will be too noisy for you, too busy,” he says. “The king visits when he is on progress, the whole court comes for weeks during the summer, my mother entertains her family during the winter, the Staffords, the Courtenays, the Lisles, the Nevilles. You know how many cousins we have! The Princess Mary is certain to honor us with a long stay in the summer and she brings her entire court with her. It is not like a private house, not like your lovely house here; it is a palace, a working palace.”
“I don’t want to see any of those people,” she says crossly. “I wish to live completely retired. Perhaps my Lady Mother will give me another property of my own on her lands, where I can live in complete peace. I don’t want much, just a manor house with a privat
e park would be all I would need.”
Even Montague flinches at this request. “My Lady Mother has worked hard to put the lands together,” he says quietly. “I don’t think she would parcel them out now.”
“I can’t live in a noisy, busy house.” She turns to me. “I don’t want to live in a palace. I want to be as quiet and still as a nun.”
Montague says nothing.
He waits.
I say nothing, I wait too. Slowly, we can see a new idea dawning on her.
“What if I were to live at a nunnery?” she asks. “Or even—what if I were to take my vows?”
“Do you feel you have a calling?” I have to ask her. I think, guiltily, of the queen who has sworn that she could not consider a nunnery unless she knew that God had called her to a religious life, that no man or woman should take their vows unless they know for sure that they have a calling. Anything else is a blasphemy. My son Reginald still refuses to take vows without a calling. He says it is an insult to God Himself.
“I do,” she says with sudden enthusiasm. “I think I do.”
“And I am sure you do,” Montague, the courtier, says smoothly. “From the very beginning you said that you wanted to withdraw from the world, that you would never marry again.”
“Exactly,” she says. “I want to be completely quiet and alone with my grief.”
“Then this is the very best solution,” I say, succumbing without much reluctance to temptation. “And I shall find you a place in a good house, and I shall pay for your keep.”
She clearly does not realize that when she agrees to be a nun she will return her dower to me, just as if she were remarrying. I will pay out only what it costs to keep her in a nunnery sworn to poverty.
“I think it would be the very best thing,” she says. “But what about this house and lands? My inheritance? And the fortune that will come to me from my father?”
“You could assign them to Henry, as your heir,” I suggest. “And I could make him my ward and keep them for him. They need not trouble you at all.”
Carefully, Montague makes sure that he does not exchange a single triumphant glance with me. “Whatever you wish, sister,” he says respectfully.
I wait to be commanded to open up Richmond Palace for the princess to return to London, but there is no sign of the king coming to the city, and a rumor spreads that he has barricaded himself into a tower so that no unhealthy person can breathe on him. When the citizens hear this, they break off from burying their thousands of dead and laugh with the bitter cackle of a hangman, that their king so brave and showy in the jousting ring should be such a coward before disease.
It is not just Londoners who suffer. My former suitor and lately enemy Sir William Compton dies, and with him I hope dies the dispute over my lands. Anne Boleyn takes the disease and then bounces up from her bed at Hever Castle none the worse for it; but her sister’s husband Sir William Carey dies, leaving a luscious and fertile Boleyn girl with two copper-headed fatherless children. Here is another healthy bastard boy, here is another redheaded Henry. I cannot help but wonder if the king will look at Mary—the prettier and the warmer of the two, with a Tudor boy and a girl in her nursery—and think to put his wife aside and take Mary Boleyn and her little family and declare them as his own.
Jane takes her vows and becomes a novice at Bisham Priory, and I write at once to the newly recovered cardinal to apply for the wardship of my grandson Henry. Wolsey has triumphed over an illness that killed better men than him, and is now well enough to dispose of their heirs. However greedy he is for Henry’s inheritance for himself, he surely cannot deny my claim. Who could be more suitable than I to manage my grandson’s estates until he reaches his majority?
But I leave nothing to chance. A wealthy ward is a treasure that others will want. I have to promise the cardinal a handsome fee, and this is in addition to the one hundred marks that I pay him anyway every year just for his goodwill. It will be worth it, if he will only favor my claim. I have lost my beloved son Arthur; I cannot bear it that I should lose his fortune too, and that his son should fail to benefit from the marriage contract I composed.
This is not my only worry in these times. I had hoped that the king’s choice to hide from the Sweat with his wife and daughter would have its usual consequence of reminding him what a pleasant companion is his wife of nearly twenty years. But I hear from Montague who visits the small touring court that every day the king writes passionate letters to the absent Boleyn girl, and composes poetry to her dark eyes, and openly yearns for her. Extraordinary though it seems, the court will return to London headed by a king and queen who have clung together through danger, but once they are back in Westminster the king will resume his attempt to get the queen to step aside for a young commoner.
At least my son Geoffrey gives me no cause for concern. Neither he nor Constance take the Sweat, and when I go to London, they return to their house at Lordington in Sussex. Geoffrey manages the land so well and is so skilled with his tenants and neighbors that I have no hesitation in giving him the right to be a member of Parliament. The seat of Wilton is in my gift and I hand it to him.
“You can use this as a stepping-stone at court,” I tell him after dinner, on our last night together before he goes to his home and I go to court. Constance has tactfully withdrawn, as she knows I love to be with Geoffrey and free to talk to him about everything. Of all my boys he is the one who has always been closest to my heart. From babyhood, he is the one who has never been far from my side.
“Like Thomas More?” he suggests.
I nod. Geoffrey has all of my political skills. “Exactly so, and look how far he has risen.”
“But he used to speak against the king and in favor of the power of Parliament,” he reminds me.
“Yes, and there’s no need to follow him in that. Besides, once he became the speaker of Parliament he persuaded them to do the will of the king. You can follow his example in using your speeches in Parliament to draw the attention of people. Let them see you as thoughtful and loyal. Let the king know that in you he has a man who can put his case to the Parliament, and make friends so that when you propose something for the king, you will have influence, and it will be agreed.”
“Or you could just put me at court and I could befriend the king,” he suggests. “That’s what you did for Arthur and Montague. You didn’t send them to the Parliament to study and speak and persuade people. They just walked into royal favor, and all they had to do was to be good company for the king, to entertain him.”
“Those were different times,” I say ruefully. “Very different.” I think of my son Arthur and how the king loved him for his courage and quickness at every game that the court might play. “It is harder to befriend the king now. Those were more lighthearted times, when all Arthur had to do was joust and play games. The king was a happy young man and easy to please.”
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, AUTUMN 1528
The worst thing about this autumn is that I cannot get news, and if I had any, I could not repeat one word of it to the princess. She knows, of course she knows, that her mother and father are all but estranged, and she probably knows that her father is madly, dangerously in love with another woman—he does nothing to conceal it—and she a woman of such ordinary birth that she was lucky to be a maid-in-waiting at court, never mind domineering over everyone as an acknowledged favorite. I remember Anne Boleyn, thrilled as a child to serve the Princess Mary in France, and her father’s pride when she managed to move into the queen’s service. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine her as a consort, giving orders to the court, complaining of the great cardinal himself, almost an unofficial queen.
Princess Mary is twelve now, and bright and intelligent as any clever girl, but with a grace and dignity which comes from her breeding and training. I am sure that I judge her rightly. I taught her myself and raised her to know all that a princess should know, to read the minds of subjects and enemies, to think ahead, to plan strate
gically, to be wise far beyond her years. But how can I prepare her to see the father she adores turn away from the mother she so deeply loves? How can anyone suggest to her that her father truly believes he was not married to her mother, that they have been living in a state of mortal sin for all these years? How can anyone tell her that there is a God in heaven who, observing this, decided to punish a young married couple with the deaths of four baby brothers and sisters? I could not say such a thing to a girl of twelve, not a girl whom I love as I love this one, and I make sure that no one else does either.
It’s not hard to keep her ignorant, for we rarely go to dine at court, and nobody now visits us. It takes me a little while to realize that this is another sign of the troubled times. The court of the heir to the throne, however young, is always a bustling, busy, popular place. Even a child like Mary attracts people to her service who know that one day she will be Queen of England, and that her favor should be won now.
But not this autumn. This autumn it grows colder and darker and it seems that every morning there is a dull gray light but no sunshine, there are no riders coming out from London, there are no barges coming quickly up the river, catching the inflowing tide. This autumn we are not popular, not with courtiers, nor advisors. We don’t even attract people with petitions and begging letters. I think to myself that we must have sunk very low in the public estimation if we are not even visited by people wanting to borrow money.
Princess Mary does not know why; but I do. There can be only one reason that we live so quietly at Richmond, as if we were in a private house and not a palace. The king must be giving people to understand that she is not the heir to his throne. He must be letting people know, in all the subtle, wordless ways that a king can deploy, that there is good reason that Princess Mary is no longer at her castle in Ludlow ruling Wales, that Princess Mary is no longer betrothed to marry the King of France, nor the King of Spain, that Princess Mary is living at Richmond like a daughter of the House of Tudor, served, supported, and respected but no more important than her bastard half brother, Bessie Blount’s boy.