The King's Curse Page 5

  Katherine goes to the circular chapel in the courtyard of the castle and prays on her knees for the health of her young husband. Late at night, I look down from the window in Arthur’s tower and I see her bobbing candle in the darkened courtyard and the train of women following her from the chapel to her bedroom. I hope that she can sleep as I turn back to the bed and the boy who is burning up with fever. I put some cleansing salts on the fire and watch the flames burn blue. I take his hand and feel the sweat in his hot palms and his pulse hammering under my fingertips. I don’t know what to do for him. I don’t know what there is to do for him. I fear that there is nothing that anyone can do for him. In the cold long darkness of the night I begin to believe that he will die.

  I eat my breakfast in his room but I have no appetite. He is wandering in his mind and will neither eat nor drink. I have the grooms of the bedchamber hold him while I force the cup against his mouth and pour small ale down his throat until he chokes and splutters and swallows, and then they lie him back on the pillow and he throws himself around in the bed, hot, and getting hotter.

  The princess comes to the door of his presence chamber and they send for me. “I shall see him! You will not prevent me!”

  I close the door behind me and confront her white-faced determination. Her eyes are shadowed like bruised violets; she has not slept all night. “It may be a grave illness,” I say, not naming the greatest fear. “I cannot allow you to go to him. I should be failing in my duty if I let you go to him.”

  “Your duty is to me!” shouts the daughter of Isabella of Spain, driven to rage by her fear.

  “My duty is to England,” I say to her quietly. “And if you are carrying a Tudor heir in your belly, then my duty is to that child as well as to you. I cannot allow you to go closer than to the foot of the bed.”

  At once she almost collapses. “Let me go in,” she pleads. “Please, Lady Margaret, just let me see him. I will stop where you say, I will do as you command, but for Our Lady’s sake, let me see him.”

  I take her in, past the waiting crowds who call out a blessing, past the trestle table where the doctor has set up a small cabinet with herbs and oils and leeches crawling in a jar, through the double doors to the bedroom where Arthur is lying, still and quiet, on the bed. He opens his dark eyes as she comes in, and the first words he whispers are, “I love you. Don’t come closer.”

  She takes hold of the carved post at the foot of the bed, as if to stop herself from climbing in beside him. “I love you too,” she says breathlessly. “You will be well?”

  He just shakes his head and, in that terrible moment, I know that I have failed in my promise to his mother. I said that I would keep him safe, and I have not. From a wintry sky, from an east wind—who knows how?—he has taken the curse of his father’s disease, and My Lady the King’s Mother will be punished by the curse of the two queens. She will pay for what she did to their boys, and see her grandson buried and, no doubt, her son also. I step forward and take hold of the princess by her slight waist and draw her to the door.

  “I shall come back,” she calls to him as she takes unwilling steps away from him. “Stay with me; I will not fail you.”

  All day we fight for him, as arduously if we were infantrymen bogged down in the mud of Bosworth Field. We put scalding plasters on his chest, we put leeches on his legs, we sponge his face with icy water, we put a warming pan under his back. As he lies there, white as a marble saint, we torment him with every cure that we can think of, and still he sweats as if he is on fire, and nothing breaks his fever.

  The princess comes back to him as she promised to do and this time we tell her that it is the Sweat and she may go no closer to him than the threshold of his room. She says that she has to speak with him privately, orders us all from the room and stands on tiptoe, holding the doorjamb, calling across the herb-strewn floor to him. I hear a quick exchange of vows. He asks for a promise from her, she agrees but begs him to get well. I take her arm.

  “For his own good,” I say. “You have to leave him.”

  He has raised himself up on one elbow and I catch a glimpse of his deathly determined face. “Promise,” he says to her. “Please. For my sake. Promise me now, beloved.”

  She cries out, “I promise!” as if the words are torn from her, as if she does not want to grant him his last wish, and I pull her from the room.

  The bell on the grand castle clock tolls six. Arthur’s confessor gives him extreme unction and he lies back on his pillow and closes his eyes. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t let go, don’t let go.” I am supposed to be praying at the foot of the bed, but instead I have my hands clenched in fists pressing into my wet eyes and all I can do is whisper no. I cannot remember when I last left the room, when I last ate or when I last slept, but I cannot bear that this prince, this supremely beautiful and gifted young prince, is going to die—and in my care. I cannot bear that he should give up his life, this beautiful life so full of promise and hope. I have failed to teach him the one thing I most truly believe: that nothing matters more than life itself, that he should cling on to life.

  “No,” I say. “Don’t.”

  Prayers cannot stop him slipping away, the leeches, the herbs, the oils, and the charred heart of a sparrow tied on his chest cannot hold him. He is dead by the time the clock strikes seven. I go to his bedside and straighten his collar, as I used to do when he was alive, and close his dark, unseeing eyes, pulling the embroidered coverlet straight across his chest as if I were tucking him up for the night, and I kiss his cold lips. I whisper: “God bless you. Good night, sweet prince,” and then I send for the midwives to lay him out and I leave the room.

  To Her Grace the Queen of England

  Dear Cousin Elizabeth,

  They will have told you already, so this is a letter between us: from the woman who loved him as a mother, to the mother who could not have loved him more. He faced his death with courage, as the men of our family do. His sufferings were short and he died in faith.

  I do not ask you to forgive me for failing to save him because I will never forgive myself. There was no sign of any cause but the Sweat and there is no cure for that. You need not reproach yourself, there was no sign of any curse on him. He died like the beloved brave boy he was from the disease that his father’s armies unknowingly brought into this poor country.

  I will bring his widow, the princess, to you in London. She is a young woman with a broken heart. They had come to love one another and her loss is very great.

  As is yours, my dear.

  And mine.

  Margaret Pole

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1502

  The queen, my cousin, sends her private litter for the widow to make the long journey to London. Katherine travels shocked and mute, and every night on the road goes to bed in silence. I know she prays that she will not wake in the morning. I ask her, as I am bound to do, whether she thinks she might be with child and she shakes with rage at the question as if I am intruding on the privacy of her love.

  “If you are with child, and that child is a boy, then he will be the Prince of Wales and much later King of England,” I say to her gently, ignoring her tremulous fury. “You would become a woman as great as Lady Margaret Beaufort, who created her own title: My Lady the King’s Mother.”

  She can hardly bring herself to speak. “And if I am not?”

  “Then you are the dowager princess, and Prince Harry becomes the Prince of Wales,” I explain. “If you have no son to take the title, then it goes to Prince Harry.”

  “And when the king dies?”

  “Please God, that day is long coming.”

  “Amen. But when it does?”

  “Then Prince Harry is king and his wife—whoever she is—will be queen.”

  She turns away from me and goes to the fireplace but not before I see the swift expression of scorn that crosses her face at the mention of Prince Arthur’s little brother. “Prince Harry!” she exclaims.

  “You
have to accept the position in life that God gives you,” I remind her quietly.

  “I do not.”

  “Your Grace, you have suffered a great loss, but you have to accept your fate. God requires us all to accept our fate. Perhaps God commands that you are resigned?” I suggest.

  “He does not,” she says firmly.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1502

  I leave the Dowager Princess of Wales, as she is now to be called, at Durham House on the Strand and I go to Westminster where the court is in deep mourning. I walk through the familiar halls to the queen’s rooms. The doors stand open to her presence chamber, which is crowded with the usual courtiers and petitioners, but everyone is subdued and talking quietly, and many are wearing black trim on their jackets.

  I pass through, nodding to one or two people whom I know; but I don’t stop. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to have to say, yet again: “Yes. It is a very sudden disease. Yes, we did try that remedy. Yes, it was a terrible shock. Yes, the princess is heartbroken. Yes, it is a tragedy that there is no child.”

  I tap on the inner door and Lady Katherine Huntly opens it and looks at me. She is the widow of the pretender who was executed with my brother and there is no great love lost between us. She steps back and I go by her without a word.

  The queen is kneeling before her prie-dieu, her face turned up to the golden crucifix, her eyes closed. I kneel beside her and I bow my head and pray for the strength to talk to our prince’s mother about the loss of him.

  She sighs and glances at me. “I have been waiting for you,” she says quietly.

  I take her hands. “I am sorrier than I can say.”

  “I know.”

  We kneel, hand-clasped in silence, as if there is nothing more that needs saying. “The princess?”

  “Very quiet. Very sad.”

  “There’s no chance that she could be with child?”

  “She says not.”

  My cousin nods as if she were not hoping for a grandchild to replace the son she has lost.

  “Nothing was left undone . . .” I begin.

  She puts her hand gently on my shoulder. “I know you will have cared for him as you would have cared for your own,” she says. “I know you loved him from babyhood. He was a true York prince, he was our white rose.”

  “We still have Harry,” I say.

  “Yes.” She leans on my shoulder as she rises to her feet. “But Harry wasn’t raised to be Prince of Wales, or king. I’ve spoiled him, I’m afraid. He’s flighty and vain.”

  I am so surprised to hear her say so much as one word against her beloved son that for a moment I cannot answer her. “He can learn . . .” I stumble. “He will grow.”

  “He’ll never be another Prince Arthur,” she says, as if measuring the depth of her loss. “Arthur was the son that I made for England. Anyway,” she continues. “God be praised, I think I am with child again.”

  “You are?”

  “It’s early days yet, but I pray so. It would be such a comfort, wouldn’t it? Another boy?”

  She is thirty-six, she is old for another childbirth. “It would be wonderful,” I say, trying to smile. “God’s favor to the Tudors, mercy after sacrifice.”

  I go with her to the window and we look out at the bright gardens and the people playing at bowls on the green below us. “He was such a precious boy, coming as he did, so early in our marriage, like a blessing. And he was such a happy baby, d’you remember, Margaret?”

  “I remember,” I say shortly. I won’t tell her that my sorrow is that I feel I have forgotten so much, that his years with me have just slipped through my fingers as if they were nothing more than uneventful sunny days. He was such a happy boy, and happiness is not memorable.

  She does not sob, though she constantly brushes tears from both of her cheeks with the back of her hands.

  “Will the king send Harry to Ludlow?” I ask. If my husband has to be guardian to another prince, then I will have to care for him too, and I don’t believe I can bear to see another boy, not even Harry, in Prince Arthur’s place.

  She shakes her head. “My Lady forbids it,” she says. “She says he is to stay with us, at court. He will be educated here and trained for his new calling under her eye, under our constant supervision.”

  “And the dowager princess?”

  “She will go home to Spain, I suppose. There’s nothing for her here.”

  “Nothing, poor child,” I agree, thinking of the white-faced girl in the big palace.

  I visit Princess Katherine before I go home to Stourton Castle. She is very young to be left all alone with no one but paid companions—her strict duenna and her ladies-in-waiting, her confessor and her servants—in the beautiful palace with great terraced gardens leading down to the river. I wish they would take her into the queen’s rooms at court and not leave her here, to run her own household.

  She has grown more beautiful in the months of mourning, her pale skin luminous against the bronze of her hair. She is thinner and it makes her blue eyes seem larger in her heart-shaped face.

  “I have come to say good-bye,” I tell her with forced cheerfulness. “I am going to my home at Stourton and I expect you will soon be on your way back to Spain.”

  She looks around as if to make sure that we are not overheard; but her ladies are at a distance, and Doña Elvira does not speak English.

  “No, I’m not going home,” she says with quiet determination.

  I wait for an explanation. She gives me a swift, mischievous smile that brightens the gravity of her sad face. “I am not,” she repeats. “So there’s no need to look at me like that. I’m not going.”

  “There’s nothing for you here anymore,” I remind her.

  She takes my arm so that she can speak very low as we walk down the length of the gallery, away from the ladies, with the slap of our slippers on the wooden floor hiding the sound of our words.

  “No, you are wrong. There is something here for me. I made a promise to Arthur on his deathbed, that I would serve England as I had been born and raised to do,” she says quietly. “You yourself heard him say, ‘Promise me now, beloved’—they were his last words to me. I will keep that promise.”

  “You can’t stay.”

  “I can, and in the most simple way. If I marry the Prince of Wales, I become Princess of Wales once more.”

  I am stunned into silence, then I find my voice. “You can’t want to marry Prince Harry.” I state the obvious.

  “I have to.”

  “Was this your promise to Prince Arthur?”

  She nods.

  “He can’t have meant you to marry his little brother.”

  “He did. He knew it would be the only way that I would be Princess of Wales and Queen of England, and he and I had many plans, we had agreed many things. He knew that the Tudor rule of England is not as the Yorks had ruled. He wanted to be a king from both houses. He wanted to rule with justice and compassion. He wanted to win the respect of the people, not coerce them. We had plans. When he knew he was dying, he still wanted me to do as we had planned—even though he could not. I shall guide Harry and teach him. I will make him into a good king.”

  “Prince Harry has many strengths.” I try to choose my words. “But he is not, and he will never be, the prince we have lost. He is charming, and energetic; he is brave as a little lion cub and ready to serve his family and his country . . .” I hesitate. “But he is like enamel, my dear. He shines on the surface, he sparkles; but he’s not pure gold. He’s not like Arthur—who was true, through and through.”

  “Even so, I will marry him. I will make him better than he is.”

  “Your Grace, my dear, his father will be looking for a great match for him, another princess. And your parents will be looking for a second marriage for you.”

  “Then we solve two problems with one answer. And besides, this way the king avoids paying my widow’s allowance. He’ll like that. And he’ll get the rest of my dowry. He’ll
like that. And he keeps an alliance with Spain, which he wanted so much that he . . .” She breaks off.

  “He wanted it so much that he killed my brother for it.” I finish the sentence quietly. “Yes, I know. But you are not the Spanish Infanta anymore. You have been married. It’s not the same. You are not the same.”

  She flushes. “It will be the same. I shall make it be the same. I shall say that I am a virgin, and that the marriage was not consummated.”

  I gasp. “Your Grace, nobody would ever believe you . . .”

  “But nobody will ever ask!” she declares. “Who would dare to challenge me? If I say such a thing, it must be so. And you will stand as my friend, won’t you, Margaret? Because I am doing this for Arthur and you loved him as I did? If you don’t deny what I say, then no one will question it. Everyone will want to think that I can marry Harry, nobody is going to question servants and companions for gossip. None of my ladies would answer a question from an English spy. If you don’t say anything, nobody else is going to.”

  I am so astounded by this jump from heartbreak into conspiracy that I can only gasp and look at her. Her face is completely determined, her jaw set.

  “Believe me, you cannot do this.”

  “I am going to do this,” she says grimly. “I promised. I am going to do this.”

  “Your Grace, Harry is a child . . .”

  “Don’t you think I know that? It’s to the good. It’s why Arthur was so determined. Harry has to be trained. Harry will be guided by me. I will advise him. I know he’s a vain, spoiled little boy. But I am going to make him into the king that he has to be.”