The King's Curse Read online

  “Tell me one thing,” she spits. “You know for a fact, don’t you, that Prince Arthur and the dowager princess were lovers? You saw the unmistakable signs of their bedding. Under your roof he was conducted to her room once a week, was he not? I had ordered it, and it was done? Or are you telling me that you disobeyed me and they were not put together every week?”

  I can hardly speak. “You were obeyed,” I whisper. “Of course, I obeyed you. He was taken to her room every week.”

  “So,” she says, a little pacified. “So. You admit this much. He went to her room. We know this. You don’t deny this.”

  “But whether they were lovers or not, I cannot tell,” I say. My voice is so small that I fear she will not hear me and from somewhere I shall have to find the courage to speak again.

  But her hearing is acute, her understanding like a trap. “So. You are supporting her,” she says. “Supporting her ridiculous claim that her husband was incapable over four months of marriage. Though he was young and healthy and she was his wife. Though she never said anything to anyone at the time. Though she never complained. She never even mentioned it.”

  I have promised Princess Katherine my help, and I am bound to her. I loved Arthur and I heard him whisper to her: “Promise!” I stay on my knees and I keep my head down and I pray for this ordeal to pass.

  “I cannot tell,” I repeat. “She told me that there was no chance that she was with child. I understood her to be saying that they were not lovers. That they had never been lovers.”

  Her rage has passed; the color drains from her face, she is white as if she might faint. A lady steps forward to support her and then falls back before her fierce glare.

  “Do you know what you are doing, Margaret Pole?” My Lady demands of me, her voice like ice. “Do you really know what you are saying?”

  I sit back on my heels, finding that I am holding my hands together under my chin, as if I am praying for mercy. I shake my head. “Forgive me, Your Grace, I don’t know what you mean.”

  My Lady leans forward and hisses in my ear so that no one else can hear. She is so close that I can feel her malmsey breath on my cheek. “You are not getting your little friend married to Prince Harry, if that was your plan. You are putting that little Spanish whore in the bed of her father-in-law!”

  The word whore from the mouth of My Lady is as shocking as the idea. “What? Her father-in-law?”

  “Yes.”

  “The king?”

  “My son, the king.” Her voice quavers with frustrated passion. “My son, the king.”

  “He wants to marry the dowager princess now?”

  “Of course he does!” Her voice is grindingly low and I can feel the heat of her rage against my hair, against my ear. “Because that way he doesn’t have to pay her widow’s jointure, that way he keeps the dowry she brought and he can demand the rest, that way he keeps an alliance with Spain against our enemy, France. That way he gets himself a cheap wedding with a princess who is here in London already, and from her he gets a new baby, another son and heir. And that way”—she breaks off to pant like a hunted dog—“that way he takes the girl in sinful lust. In a sinful, incestuous lust. She has tempted him with her bold, wicked eyes. She has inflamed him with her dancing, she walks with him, she whispers with him, she smiles at him and curtseys when she sees him, she tempts him, she will take him down to hell.”

  “But she is betrothed to Prince Harry.”

  “You tell her that, while she hangs on his father’s arm and rubs herself against him!”

  “He can’t marry his daughter-in-law,” I say, utterly bemused.

  “Fool!” she snaps. “He needs only a dispensation from the Pope. And he will get that if she continues to say, as she constantly says, that the marriage was never consummated. If her friends support her, as you are doing. And her lie—for I know it is a lie—plunges my son into sin and my house into ruin. This lie will destroy us. And you are telling it for her. You are as bad as she. I will never forget this. I will never forgive this. I will never forgive you!”

  I can say nothing but gape at her.

  “Speak!” she commands me. “Say that she was wedded and bedded.”

  Dumbly, I shake my head.

  “If you do not speak, it will be the worse for you,” she warns me.

  I bow my head. I say nothing.

  STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1504

  I am with child again and I choose to stay at Stourton Castle while my husband rules Wales from Ludlow. He comes home to see me and is pleased with my care of our lands and our home and the education of my children.

  “But we have to be careful with money,” he reminds me. We are seated together in the steward’s room at Stourton, the rent books spread around us. “We have to take every care, Margaret. With four children and another on the way we have to guard our little fortune. They’re all going to need a place in the world, and Ursula will need a good dowry.”

  “If the king would only grant you some more lands,” I say. “God knows you serve him well. Every time you make a judgment in court you send the fine to him. You must earn him thousands of pounds and you never keep back a penny. Not like the others.”

  He shrugs. He is no courtier, my husband. He has never gone to the king for money, he has only ever been paid the smallest sum that the Tudors thought he would accept. And besides, there is more and more going into the royal coffers and less and less coming out. Henry Tudor paid off everyone who served him at Bosworth in the early years of his reign, and ever since he has been clawing back the lands he so generously granted in those first heady days. Every traitor finds his family home is forfeit, every minor criminal finds himself laden with demands to pay a fine. Even the smallest of offenses come with a great demand for payment, and everything—from the salt on the table to the ale in the inn—is taxed.

  “Perhaps you can speak to My Lady when we next go to court,” I suggest. “Everyone else is better rewarded than you.”

  “Can’t you ask her?”

  I shake my head. I have never told my husband of the terrible scene in My Lady’s rooms. I think that she got her way—I have heard no more talk of the king marrying the dowager princess—but she will never forget or forgive that I did not write a witness account to her dictation.

  “I’m no great favorite,” I say shortly. “Not with my cousin Edmund going round Europe, raising an army against them. Not with two other cousins, William de la Pole still in the Tower and William Courtenay just arrested.”

  “They’re not charged with anything,” he points out.

  “They’re not freed either.”

  “Then can’t you cut the costs here?” Sir Richard asks me irritably. “I don’t like to go to her. She is not an easy woman to ask.”

  “I try. But as you say, we have four children and another on the way. They all have to have horses and tutors. They all have to be fed.”

  We look at each other in mutual impatience. I think: this is so unfair! He can have no criticism of me. He married me, a young woman of royal birth, and I have given him children—three of them sons—and I have never boasted of my name or my lineage. I have never reproached him for bringing me down to be the wife of a small knight when I was born all but a princess and an heiress to the Warwick fortune. I have never complained that he made no attempt to get my title or my fortune restored; I have played the part of Lady Pole and managed his two little manors and a castle, and not the thousands on thousands of acres that were mine by right.

  “We’ll raise the rents for all the tenants,” he says shortly. “And we’ll tell them they have to increase what they send to the house from their own farms.”

  “They can barely pay at the moment,” I observe. “Not with the king’s new fines and the new royal service.”

  He shrugs. “They’ll have to,” he says simply. “The king requires it. These are hard times for everyone.”

  I go into my confinement thinking how hard the times are, and wondering w
hy this should be. Our York court was notoriously rich and wasteful, with an unending annual round of entertainments and parties, hunts, jousts, and celebrations. I had ten royal cousins and they were all magnificently dressed and equipped, and married well. How can it be that the same country that poured gold into the lap of Edward IV and dispersed it to an enormous family cannot find enough money to pay the fines and taxes of one man: Henry Tudor? How can it be that a royal family of only five people can need so much money when all the Plantagenets and the Rivers affinity made merry on so much less?

  My husband says he will stay at Stourton Castle during my confinement to greet me when I come out. I cannot see him when I am confined, of course, but he sends me cheering messages telling me that we have sold some of the hay crop, and that he has had a pig killed and salted down for the christening party for our baby.

  One evening he sends me a short handwritten note.

  I have taken a fever and am resting in my bed. I have ordered the children not to see me. Be of good cheer, wife.

  I feel nothing but irritation. There will be no one to watch the steward check the Michaelmas rents, nor to take the apprenticeship fees from the young people who start work this quarter. The horses will start eating the stored hay, and there will be no one to make sure they are not overfed. We cannot afford to buy in hay, we have to parcel it out throughout the winter. There is nothing I can do about this but curse our bad luck that has me confined and my husband sick at such a time. I know our steward, John Little, is an honest man, but the feast of Michaelmas is one of the key times for the profitable running of our lands, and if neither Sir Richard nor I am leaning over his shoulder and watching every number he writes, he is bound to be more careless or, worse, more generous to the tenants, forgiving them bad debts or letting unpaid rents run on.

  Two nights later I get another note from Sir Richard.

  Much worse, and sending for the doctor. But the children are in good health, God willing.

  It is unusual for Sir Richard to be ill. He has been on one campaign after another for the Tudors, ridden out for them in all weather over three kingdoms and a principality. I write back:

  Are you very ill? What does the doctor say?

  I get no reply from him, and the next morning I send my lady-in-waiting Jane Mallett to my husband’s groom of the bed-chamber to ask if he is well.

  As soon as she comes into my confinement chamber I can tell from her shocked face that it is bad news. I put my hand over the swell of my belly where my baby is packed as tight as herring in a barrel. I can feel its every move inside my straining belly and suddenly it goes still too, as if it is listening, like me, for bad news.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask, my voice hard with worry. “What’s the matter that you look so pale? Speak up, Jane, you are frightening me.”

  “It’s the master,” she says simply. “Sir Richard.”

  “I know that, fool! I guessed that! Is he very ill?”

  She drops a curtsey, as if deference can soften the blow. “He’s dead, my lady. He died in the night. I am so sorry to be the one to tell you . . . he’s gone. The master’s gone.”

  It makes it so much worse being in confinement. The priest comes to the door and whispers words of consolation through the crack, as if his vows of celibacy will be all overthrown if he sees my tearstained face. The physician tells me it was a fever that overcame Sir Richard’s great strength. He was a man of forty-six, a good age, but he was powerful and active. It was not the Sweat and not the pox and not the measles and not the ague and not St. Anthony’s fire. The doctor gives me such a long list of things that the disease was not that I lose patience and tell him he can go and send me the steward; and I command him, in a whisper through the door, to make sure everything is done that should be done, that Sir Richard is laid in his coffin on the chancel steps of Stourton church and proper watch is kept. The bell must be tolled and all the tenants given a grant of money, mourners must have black cloth, and Sir Richard must be buried with all the dignity that he should have—but as cheaply as possible.

  Then I write to the king and to his mother, My Lady, and tell them that their honorable servant, my husband, has died in their service. I do not point out to them that he leaves me all but penniless with four children of royal blood to raise on nothing, and an unborn child on the way. My Lady the King’s Mother will understand that well enough. She will know that they have to help me with an immediate grant of money, and then the gift of some more land for me to keep myself, and my children, now that we do not have the fees from his work in Wales or from his other posts. I am their kinswoman, I am of the old royal house, they have no choice but to make sure I can live with dignity and feed and clothe my children and my household.

  I send for my two oldest children, my boys, the boys whom I will have to raise alone. I will let the Lady Governess tell Ursula and Reginald that their father has gone to heaven. But Henry is twelve and Arthur ten, and they should know from their mother that their father is dead and from now on there is no one but ourselves; we will have to help one another.

  They come in very quiet and anxious, looking around at the shadowy confinement chamber with the superstitious anxiety of growing boys. It is only my bedroom where they have been a hundred times, but now there are tapestries over the windows to shut out the light and the damp, there are small fires in the grates at either end of the room, and there is the haunting smell from the herbs that are said to be helpful in childbirth. Against the wall a candle burns before a silver-framed icon of the Virgin Mary and the communion wafer is on display in a monstrance. There is a small bed for birthing set at the foot of my big canopied bed, and the ominous ropes tied to the two bottom posts for me to haul against when my time comes, a lathe of wood for me to bite, a holy girdle to tie around my waist. They take all this in with round, frightened eyes.

  “I have some bad news for you both,” I say steadily. There is no point trying to break such a thing to them gently. We are all born to suffer, we are all born to loss. My boys are the sons of a house that has always dealt liberally in death, both in giving and receiving.

  Henry looks at me anxiously. “Are you ill?” he asks. “Is the baby all right?”

  “Yes. It’s not bad news about me.”

  Arthur knows at once. He is always quick to understand, and quick to speak. “Then it’s Father,” he says simply. “Lady Mother, is my father dead?”

  “Yes. I am very sorry to tell you,” I say. I take Henry’s cold hand in my own. “You are now the head of this family. Make sure that you guide your brothers and sister well, protect our fortune, serve the king, and avoid malice.”

  His dark eyes well up with tears. “I can’t,” he says, his voice quavering. “I don’t know how to.”

  “I can do it,” Arthur volunteers. “I can do it.”

  I shake my head. “You can’t. You’re the second son,” I remind him. “It’s Henry who’s the heir. Your task is to help and support him, defend him if you have to. And you can do everything, Henry. I will advise and guide you, and we will find a way to advance this family in wealth and greatness—but not too far.”

  “Not too far?” Arthur repeats.

  “Great under the great king,” Henry says, showing, just as I thought, that he is old enough to do his duty and wise enough already to know that we want to prosper—but not enviably so.

  Only then, after my boys have wept a little and gone, do I have time to kneel before my prie-dieu and grieve for the loss of my husband and pray for his immortal soul. I cannot doubt that he will go to heaven, though we will have to find the money from somewhere to have Masses said. He was a good man, loyal as a dog to the Tudors, faithful as a dog to me. Kind, as a strong man of few words is often kind to his children and servants and tenants. I never could have fallen in love with him; but I was always grateful to him and glad of his name. Now that he is dead and I will never see him again, I know that I will miss him. He was a comfort and a shield and a kind husband—and
these qualities are rare.

  He gave me his name, and death does not take it away from me. Now I am Lady Margaret Pole the widow, as I once was Lady Margaret Pole the wife. But the important thing is that his name is not buried with him. I can keep it. I can hide my true self behind it; even in death he will keep me safe.

  I give birth to a baby boy—a son who will never know his father. In the weak moments after they put him in my arms I find I am crying over his little downy head. This is the last gift my husband will ever give me, this is the last child I will ever have. This is my last chance to love an innocent who depends on me, as I loved my brother who depended on me. I kiss his damp little head and I feel his pulse flutter. This is my last, my most precious child. Pray God I can keep him safe.

  I come out of confinement to pray at the new memorial that bears the name Sir Richard Pole set under a window at our little church. The king sends me a gift of one hundred fifty-seven nobles for funeral clothes for me and for all the tenants, which—managed carefully—also pays for the feast after the funeral and goes a long way to paying for the memorial stone too. I call our steward John Little to me, to tell him that I am pleased with what he has done.

  “And His Grace the king has sent permission for you to borrow one hundred twenty nobles from your son’s estate,” he says. “So we will get through Christmastide, at least.”

  “One hundred twenty nobles?” I repeat. It is a help; but it is hardly a princely gift. It is not generous. The Tudors will have to do more than this if they are to keep us warm.

  In the meantime, all the money goes the wrong way: from us to them. My boys must become royal wards since their father died while they are still children. This is a disaster for me and for the family. All of the earnings of the estate will go to the king, poured into the royal treasury until my son is a man and can inherit his own—or whatever is left of it after it has been bled by the king’s treasury. If the king wants to cut down every standing tree for timber, he can do so. If he wants to butcher every cow in the field, no one can prevent him. All that I can take is my widow’s dower, a third of the rents and profits—only one hundred twenty nobles, for a whole year! King Henry is offering me a loan from what was once all mine; I can’t feel grateful.