I realize that when Katherine marries Prince Harry, she will precede My Lady in every procession, every time they go to Mass or to dinner. She will have these very rooms, she will command the best gowns from the royal wardrobes, she will outrank the king’s mother, and if the court follows the tastes of the king—and courts always do—then they will empty out from My Lady’s rooms and flock to the pretty young princess. Princess Katherine will not step back and yield to My Lady as my cousin the queen yielded to her. Katherine has grit. If she ever becomes Princess of Wales, then she will make My Lady give her precedence, everywhere, in everything. She will wrest her dues from this possessive old woman and repay her enmity.
“I have told you everything I know,” I say quietly. “I am yours to command, My Lady.”
She turns her back on me, as if she does not care to see my white face and my pleading eyes. “You have a choice,” she says shortly. “You can be my lady-in-waiting and your son can be a companion to Prince Harry. You will be generously paid and there will be gifts and grants of land. Or you can support the dowager princess in her monstrous lie and her disgusting ambition. It is your choice. But if you collude in tempting the Prince of Wales, our prince, our only prince, into marriage with that young woman, then you will never come to court for as long as I live.”
I wait until dusk before I go to visit Princess Katherine. I go on foot with one lady companion and a manservant, and my steward leads the way with a cudgel in his hand. The beggars are everywhere in London nowadays, desperate men driven from their farms by higher rents, made homeless when they could not pay fines, made paupers by the king’s taxes. Some of my own tenants may be sleeping in the doorways of the London churches and begging for food.
I walk with my hood pulled over the betraying bronze of my hair, and I look all around me in case we are being followed. There are more spies in England than there have ever been before, as everyone is paid to report on their neighbor, and I would rather that My Lady did not know that I am visiting the home of the princess that she calls “that young woman.”
There is no light burning at her doorway, and it takes a long time for anyone to respond to the quiet tap that my steward makes on the double wooden doors. There is no guard to open them but only a page boy who leads us across the cold great hall and knocks on the door of what used to be the grand presence chamber.
One of Katherine’s remaining Spanish ladies peeps around the door and, seeing me, straightens up, brushes down her gown, sweeps a curtsey, and leads me through the echoing presence chamber and into the privy chamber where a small group of ladies huddle around a mean fire.
Katherine recognizes me as soon as I put back my hood, jumps up with a cry, and runs towards me. I am about to curtsey but she flings herself into my arms and hugs me, kisses me on one cheek and then the other, leans back to study my face, and then hugs me again.
“I have been thinking and thinking of you. I was so sorry when I heard of your loss. You will have had my letters? I was so sorry for you, and for the children. And for the new baby! A boy, God bless him! Is he thriving? And you? Could you get the price of horseshoes down?”
She draws me towards the light of the single sconce of wax candles, so that she can look into my face.
“Santa Maria! But you are so thin, and my dear, you look so weary.”
She turns and shoos away her ladies from the fireside seats. “Go. All of you. Go to your bedrooms. Go to bed. Lady Margaret and I will talk alone.”
“To their bedrooms?” I query.
“There’s not enough firewood for a fire anywhere but here and the kitchen,” she says simply. “And they’re all too grand to sit in the kitchen. So if they don’t sit here, they have to go to bed to keep warm.”
I look at her in disbelief. “They are keeping you so short of money that you cannot have a fire in the bedrooms?”
“As you see,” she says grimly.
“I have come from Westminster,” I say, taking a stool beside her chair. “I had a terrible conversation with My Lady.”
She nods, as if this does not surprise her.
“She questioned me as to your marriage with . . .” Even now, three years on, I cannot easily say his name. “With our prince,” I amend.
“She would do. She is very much against me.”
“Why, do you think?” I ask curiously.
She slides her mischievous girl’s smile towards me. “Oh, was she such a loving mother-in-law to your cousin the queen?” she asks.
“She was not. We were both terrified of her,” I admit.
“She’s not a woman who enjoys the company of women,” she remarks. “With her son a widower and her grandson unmarried, she’s mistress of the court. She doesn’t want a young woman coming in and being merry and loving and happy, making it a true court of learning and elegance and pleasure. She’s not even very kind to her granddaughter Princess Mary because she’s so very pretty. She’s always telling her that looks mean nothing and that she should strive for humility! She doesn’t like pretty girls, she doesn’t like rivals. If she lets Prince Harry marry at all, it will be to a young woman that she can command. She’ll marry him off to a child, someone who can’t even speak English. She doesn’t want someone like me who knows how things should be done, and will see they are done and the kingdom put to rights. She doesn’t want anyone at court who will try to persuade the king to rule as he should.”
I nod. It is exactly what I have been thinking.
“She tries to keep you from the court?”
“Oh, she succeeds, she is triumphant.” She gestures at the threadbare hangings of the room and the gaps on the walls where the frames for rich tapestries are bare. “The king doesn’t pay my allowance; he makes me live off the things that I brought with me from Spain. I have no new gowns, so when they invite me to court I look ridiculous in Spanish fashions that are darned all over. My Lady hopes to break my will and force me to ask my father to take me home. But even if I were to ask him, he would not have me back. I am trapped here.”
I am horrified. The two of us have fallen from such prosperity to such poverty in such a short time. “Katherine, what will you do?”
“I’ll wait,” she says with quiet determination. She leans close to me and puts her mouth to my ear. “He is forty-eight, he’s in poor health, he can hardly breathe for the quinsy. I’ll wait.”
“Don’t say another word,” I say nervously. I glance towards the closed door and at the shadows on the walls.
“Did My Lady ask you to swear that Arthur and I had been lovers?” she asks me bluntly.
“Yes.”
“What did you answer?”
“At first I told her that I had seen no signs of it, and that I couldn’t say.”
“What did she say?”
“She promised me a place at court and a place for my son and the money that I need if I would tell her what she wants to hear.”
She hears the anguish in my voice, takes my hand, and looks at me steadily with her level blue gaze. “Oh Margaret, I can’t ask you to be poor for me. Your sons should be at court, I know that. You don’t have to defend me. I release you from your promise, Margaret. You can say what you wish.”
I am due to ride home, but I go in my riding dress once more to the queen’s rooms, where My Lady is listening to a psalm being read before going to dinner in the great hall at Westminster.
She sees me the moment I come quietly into the room, and when the psalm is finished, she beckons me to her side. Her ladies fall back and pretend to be looking at each other’s neat headdresses. Clearly, after yesterday’s meeting, they know that she has quarreled with me and they think I have come to surrender.