They take him away to be christened Edmund, which I take to be the morbid choice of My Lady, as he was a martyred king; but when it is time for me to be churched I find that I am unwilling to leave the confinement chamber. The heaviness and the weariness that came with the baby do not leave me, not even when they take him with his wet nurse to the palace at Eltham and Lady Margaret’s confessor, John Morton, puts aside his great cope and mitre as Archbishop of Canterbury and comes like a parish priest to the grille in my chamber and invites me to confess my sins, be blessed, and return to the world. I go slowly to the ironwork grille and rest my hands on the twisted Tudor roses, and I feel imprisoned like the boy, and unlikely to be freed.
“I have a sin of fear,” I say to him, my voice very low so that he can only just hear me in the empty chamber.
“What do you fear, my daughter?”
“Years ago, a long, long time ago, I cursed a man,” I whisper.
He nods. He will have heard worse things than this, I have to remember that he will have heard far worse things than this. I also have to remember that everything I say will almost certainly be reported to My Lady the King’s Mother. There is hardly a priest in England who does not come under her influence, and this is John Morton, whose life has intertwined with hers and who thinks her half a saint already.
“Who was it you cursed, my child?”
“I don’t know who it was,” I say. “My mother and I swore a curse against the man who killed the princes. We were so heartbroken when we heard they were missing. My mother especially . . .” I break off, not wanting to remember that night when she sank to her knees and put her head to the stone floor.
“What curse was it?”
“We swore that whoever had taken our boys would lose his own,” I say, the words barely audible, I am so ashamed now of what we did then. I am so fearful now of the consequences of the curse. “We swore that the murderer would be left with only a girl as his heir, and his line would die out. We said he would lose a son in one generation and a son in the next—he would lose a young son and then a young grandson in their boyhood.”
The priest sighs at the magnitude of the curse, even as the politician in him calculates what this means. We kneel together in silence. He puts a hand on his ivory crucifix.
“You regret this now?”
I nod. “Father, I deeply regret it.”
“You wish to lift this curse?”
“I do.”
He is silent, praying for a moment. “Who is it?” he asks. “Who killed the princes, your brothers? Who d’you think? Where will your curse fall?”
I sigh and lean my forehead against the iron Tudor rose of the grille, feeling the forged petals bite into my skin. “Truly,” I say. “Before God, I don’t know for sure. I have suspected more than one; but still I don’t know. If it was Richard, the King of England, then he died without an heir, and he saw his son die before him.”
He nods. “Does that not prove his guilt? Do you think it was him? You knew him well. Did you ask him?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I say fretfully. “He said it was not him, and I believed him then. That’s what I always tell everyone. I don’t know.”
He pauses as a thought strikes him. “If the princes, or even one of them, had survived, then whoever kills him now will receive the curse.”
I can feel him flinch as I glare at him through the screen, as he arrives so slowly at understanding. “Exactly,” I say. “That’s the very thing. I have to lift the curse. Before anything else happens. I have to do it now.”
He is aghast at the prospect that is opening before him. “The curse would light on the man who ordered your brother’s death,” he says, as rapidly as prayer. “Even if it were a just death. Even if it were a legal execution. The curse would fall on he who ordered it?”
“Exactly,” I say again. “It would take his son and his grandson when they were still children. It would mean that such an executioner would find his line ends after two generations, with a girl. If it were the man who killed my brother Edward he would be doubly cursed.”
The archbishop is white. “You must pray,” he says fervently. “I will pray for you. We must give alms, set a priest to pray daily. I will give you spiritual exercises, prayers for every day. You must go on pilgrimage and I will tell you alms that you must give to the poor.”
“And will that lift the curse?”
He meets my eyes and I see my own terror reflected back at me, the Queen of England, mother to three precious beloved sons. “No one has power to curse,” he says staunchly, repeating the official belief of the Church. “No mortal woman. What you and your mother said was meaningless, the ravings of distressed women.”
“So nothing will happen?” I ask.
He hesitates and he is honest. “I don’t know,” he says. “I will pray on it. God may be merciful. But it may be that your curse is an arrow into the dark and you cannot stop its flight.”
THE ISLE OF WIGHT, SUMMER 1499
I come out of confinement to find a court intent on merrymaking. We are to make a long progress along the south coast, passing through Kent and Sussex and Hampshire as if they had never lifted a blade against the king, as if they had never mustered for the boy. At Portsmouth we are to take ship and go to the Isle of Wight, that dim blue mass on the horizon. We are going to be happy. Most important, we are going to be seen to be happy.
Henry wears a smile like a mask. Lady Katherine is on his arm, everywhere he walks, her beautiful new horse, a black mare, goes shoulder to shoulder with his warhorse. He has taken to riding his warhorse again as if to remind everyone that he is a commander as well as a king. She inclines her head when he talks to her, she smiles as she listens. When he is merry we can hear her laugh, and when he asks her she sings for him, Scots songs, songs from the highlands, filled with melancholy for a land that is lost, until he says: “Lady Katherine, sing us something merry!” and she laughs and starts a round and the whole court joins in.
I watch them as if I were gazing down from far away. I can see them walking together but only dimly hear what they say. I watch them as I know Queen Anne, wife to my Richard, watched me from her high window when we walked in the garden below and he put my hand in his arm and I leaned towards him, longing for his touch. I cannot blame Lady Katherine for ensnaring the King of England, for I did exactly the same. I cannot blame her for being young—she is eight years younger than me—and this summer I am as tired as if I were ninety years old. I cannot blame her for being beautiful—all courts are mad for beauty and she is a delight to watch. But most of all I cannot blame her for turning the king’s head away from me, his true wife, for I think she is doing the only thing she can do to save her husband.
I don’t think she is taken with him as he—vividly—is taken with her. I think she is holding him just where she wants him to be: at arm’s length but within arm’s reach, just at the right proximity so that she can influence him, divert him, soothe him, and soften him, in order to keep her husband alive.
She must have heard—who has not?—the rumors that there is to be a rescue of the boy. The Duchess Margaret sent her embassy to see her beloved protégé and nephew and everyone thinks that she had them whisper to him to wait, that help would come. Everyone knows she will try to save him. She has great influence in Europe, and the greatest kings still call themselves friends of the boy even though they are told he was an imposter. Support is gathering for the boy; if his wife can keep him alive for another season, someone will get him out.
Still the king does not act against the boy but keeps him imprisoned, with constant visitors. Lady Katherine is always at Henry’s side, always there with a quick smile and a soft question to remind him to be merciful to the boy that she married in error. Quick to show him that she can forgive and perhaps—who knows?—one day she may go on to love another? The boy does not have to die to set her free for she is already considering an annulment. Henry, at her side every day, often suggests that she should write to
the Pope to ask to be freed from her marriage. It would be little more than a formality. She was tricked into marriage by a man bearing a false name. She was utterly dazzled by a silk shirt. It can be overturned by a single letter from Rome. She assures him that she is considering it, she takes it to God in her three daily prayers. Sometimes she slides a shy sideways smile at him and says that she is tempted by the thought of being a single woman again: free.
Henry, in love for the first time in his life, mooning like a calf, follows her with his eyes, smiles when she smiles, and believes her when she assures him that she thinks of him as a great prince, a puissant king, who can forgive a nonentity like her husband. She understands his greatness by the quality of his mercy. He invites her into his presence chamber when people come to him with requests, and he glances at her to make sure that she is listening when he is generous in forgiving a fine or overturning a judgment. He has her on his arm when he talks with the ambassador from Spain, who tactfully—when speaking before the woman he would make a widow—does not insist that the boy and Teddy be killed at once, though the monarchs of Spain continue to urge the betrothal between Arthur and their daughter and the death of the two young men.
We stay at Carisbrook Castle, behind the gray stone perimeter walls, and we ride out every day into the lush green meadows around the castle, where the larks rise up into a blue sky quite empty of clouds. Lady Katherine declares she has never known such a bonny summer, and the king says that every English summer is like this and that when she has been in England, when she has been happy in English summers for years, she will forget the cold rain of Scotland.
He comes to my room at least once a week and he sleeps in my bed, though often he falls asleep as soon as he lies back on the pillows, tired from riding all day and dancing in the evening. He knows that I am unhappy, but guiltily he dares not ask me what is the matter, for fear of what I might say. He thinks I might accuse him of infidelity, of preferring another woman, of betraying our marriage vows. He wants to avoid any conversation like that, so he smiles brightly at me, and walks briskly with me, and comes to my bed and says cheerfully, “God bless, my dear, good night!” and closes his eyes on my reply.
I am not such a fool as to complain of a disappointment in love. I am not such a fool as to weep that my husband is looking away from me, away and towards a younger, more beautiful woman. It is not for disappointed love that my feet are heavy, and I don’t want to dance or even walk, and my heart aches on waking. It is not for disappointed love for Henry nor the pain of a betrayed wife. It is for the boy in the Tower, and my fear, my increasing fear, that we are far away from London so that the guards Henry has set on him, and their friends in the alleyways and inns, can conspire together, can plot, can send messages, can weave a rope long enough to hang themselves, and hang the boy with them, and that all these tales of the boy in his room and people coming and going are not mistakes, not slackness of the guard, but a part of the story that Henry is weaving that the boy from Tournai, the watergate keeper’s son, faithless and craven to the last, plots with other furtive men of the dark alleys, and leads them like fools to their death.
Henry shows no sign of thinking of the boy or my cousin Teddy at all. He is as merry as a king sure of his throne, certain of his inheritance, and confident of his future. When the Spanish ambassador comes and speaks gravely of traitors yet living in confinement, Henry slaps him on the back and tells him to assure their majesties of Spain the kingdom is safe, our troubles are all over, the infanta must come at once, and she and Arthur will be married at once. There is no obstacle.
“There is the boy,” the ambassador remarks. “And Warwick.”
Henry snaps his fingers.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1499
We return to London and Henry retires into his private rooms with his mother to review all the reports that have gathered in his absence. Within a day there is a stream of men coming and going by the private stair, almost unobserved by the court. Only I watch them and wonder at so many yeomen of the guard coming from their duty at the Tower to speak privately with the king.
That evening, when the young men of the court visit my rooms to dance with my ladies and to flirt in the hour before dinner, Henry is grim and gray-faced.
“You have had some bad news,” I say as he glances back at the court lining up behind us.
He shoots a hard look at me. “Do you know what it is?” he demands. “Have you known all this time?”
I shake my head. “Truly, I know nothing. I have seen people reporting to you all the day and now I see you looking ill, you are so weary.”
He takes my hand in a painfully tight grip. “You are missing a cousin,” he says.
At once my thoughts go to Teddy in the Tower. “My cousin? He’s gone?”
“Edmund de la Pole,” he says, spitting out the words. “Another false York. Son of your aunt Elizabeth. The one that she swore to me I could trust.”
“Edmund?” I repeat.
“He’s run away,” Henry says shortly. “Did you know?”
“No, of course not.”
The court is ready. Henry glances over his shoulder as if he always fears who is behind him. “I am sick,” he says. “Sick to my belly.”
He sits at the head of the great table and they bring him the best that the kingdom can supply, but I can see as he takes a small portion from one dish and then another that he tastes nothing. The meat has lost its savor and the marchpane its sweetness. He glances down the table to Lady Katherine, seated at the head of my ladies, and she looks back at him and gives him her sweet, promising smile. He looks at her not as if she is a woman that he desires, but a puzzle that he cannot solve, and the smile dies on her lips as she swallows and turns her face down.
After dinner he goes to his privy rooms with his mother, and they send out for sweet wine and biscuits and cheese and talk into the night. It is long after midnight when he comes to my bedroom and sits heavily on the chair before the fire, and looks into the embers.
“What’s the matter?” I ask. I was half-asleep but I slide from the bed and take a stool to sit beside him. “What is the matter, husband?”
Slowly, his head drops till he is resting it on his hand and then even lower so that his hands are over his face. “It’s the boy,” he says, muffled. “It’s the damned boy.”
The flames flicker quietly in the little room. “The boy?” I repeat.
“I set people about him that were entrusted to lead him into danger,” he says, his head still down, his face hidden from me. “I thought I would entrap him into plotting his freedom.”
“To kill him,” I say steadily.
“To execute him for a crime,” he corrects me. “Breaking his word of surrender. I had some villains come to him and promise they would get him free, they would help him escape. He consented. Then I had them go to Warwick . . .”
I clap my hand over my mouth to stop myself crying out. “Not Teddy!”
“Warwick too. It has to be done. And it has to be done now. The two young fools have cut a hole in the vaulting between their rooms and they whisper to each other.”
“They talk to each other? Teddy and the boy?” There is something unbearably tender about the thought of those two, whispering hopes and cheer to each other. “He talks to Teddy?”
“I sent them a plan of escape. The boy agreed, Warwick too once they explained it to him. I sent them a plan that they should take England, raise an army, kill me.”
“They must have known it was hopeless . . .”
“The boy knows, but he is desperate to be free. And then—all of a sudden—it is not hopeless.” He pauses and chokes as if vomit is rising unstoppably in his throat. “Elizabeth, there was my little plot, half a dozen conspirators, a code book, a message to the duchess, plans for an uprising, enough to see a man hanged, all planned and controlled by me, and . . . and . . .” He stops as if he cannot bear to continue. “And then . . .”
I rise from my stool and p
ut my hand on his bowed shoulder. It is like touching the back of the chair, he is rigid with fear. “What then? What happened then, my dear?”
“They have been joined by others. Others that I had not instructed. Others that are supposed to be loyal to me. They are getting messages from all over the country. Men who will risk their lives and their fortunes to get Warwick out of the Tower, men who will put their families and their livelihoods and their property at risk to set the boy free. There is another rebellion brewing, another rebellion after all we have gone through! I have no idea how many men are ready to rise, I have no idea who is faithless and ready to betray me. But it is starting all over again. England wants the boy. They want the boy on the throne, and they are ready to throw me down.”
“No,” I say. I can’t believe what I am hearing as Henry leaps up, shrugging off my hand from his shoulder, gone from despair to sudden rage.
“It’s the Yorks!” he shouts at me. “Your family again! Edmund de la Pole missing! Your cousin at the heart of plots! The white rose painted on every street corner! Your family and your retainers and your servants and your damned charm and family loyalty and magic—God knows what it is that works for you. God knows why it works for him. He has lost his looks, he is beaten to ugliness, I saw to that. He has lost his charm—he can’t smile with no teeth. He has lost his fortune and his ruby brooch, and his wife is in my keeping, but still they flock to him. Still they would turn out for him, still I am threatened by him. There he is, imprisoned in the Tower, no friends but the ones I allow him, no companions but the scum that I send to him, and still he musters an army against me and I have to defend myself, and defend you and defend our sons.”
I sink down before his rage; almost, I could kneel before him. “My lord—”
“Don’t speak to me,” he says furiously. “This is his death warrant. I can do nothing now but have him killed. Wherever he is, whatever shape he takes, whatever name he goes by, they seek him out, they believe in him, they want him as King of England.”