She smiles at me. “Ah, Lady Margaret. Can we can make our arrangements for you to come to court?”
I take a breath. “I should be very glad to come to court,” I say. “I should be very glad for my son to go to Prince Harry at Eltham Palace. I beg of you, My Lady, to favor him with that. For the sake of his father, your half cousin who loved you so well. Let Sir Richard’s son be raised as a nobleman. Let your little kinsman come to you, please.”
“I will, if you will serve me in this one thing,” she says steadily. “Tell me the truth, and you will be saving us, your family, from a dishonorable bride. Tell me something that I can take to my son, the king, and prevent him marrying the Spanish liar to our innocent boy. I have prayed over this and I am certain Katherine of Aragon will never marry Prince Harry. You must be loyal to me, the mother of the king, and not to her. I warn you, Lady Margaret, take care what you say. Fear the consequences! Think very carefully before you consult your own will.”
She glares at me, her dark eyes boggling, as if to ensure that I understand the threat she promises, and at once I have a contrary reaction. My fear dissolves when she bullies me. I could almost laugh at her words. Fool that she is! Wicked old cruel fool that she is! Has she forgotten who I am, when she threatens me like this? Before God, I am a Plantagenet. I am a daughter of the House of York. My own father broke sanctuary, murdered a king, and was killed by his own brother. My mother followed her father into rebellion and then changed sides and waged war with her husband against him. We are a house of men and women who always follow our own wills; we cannot be made to fear consequences. If you show us danger we will always, always go towards it. They call us the demon’s brood for our devilish willfulness.
“I cannot lie,” I say to her quietly. “I don’t know if the prince was able with his wife or not. I never saw any signs. She told me, and I believed her, that they were not lovers. I believe her to be a virgin as she was when she came to this country. I believe that she can marry any suitable prince that her father approves. Myself, I think she would make a very good wife to Prince Harry, and a very good Queen of England.”
Her face grows dark and I can see a vein pulse at her temple, but she says nothing. With a quick, angry gesture she beckons her ladies to line up behind her. She is going to lead them into dinner, and I will not be eating at the high table ever again.
“As you wish.” She spits out the words as if they were venom. “I do hope that you can manage on your widow’s jointure, Lady Margaret Pole.”
I drop into a deep curtsey. “I understand,” I say humbly. “But my son? He is a royal ward, he is the son of your half cousin, he is a fine boy, Your Grace . . .”
She sweeps past me without a word, and all her ladies follow. I stand up to watch them go. I have had my moment of pride, I have charged down my own Ambion Hill to Bosworth Field and found nothing but defeat. And now I don’t know what I am going to do.
STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1506
For another year I do everything I can to wring more money out of my lands. When the gleaners go into the field, I confiscate a cup of grain from every basket, breaking the usual rules and upsetting all the older people in the village. I pursue poachers of game into the manor courts, and shock them by demanding cash fines for the minor thieving that they had done since childhood. I forbid the tenants from taking any living thing from the land—even rabbits, even old eggs that the hens have laid away—and I hire a gamekeeper to prevent them taking trout from my rivers. If I catch a child taking eggs from the nests of wild ducks, I fine his parents. If I find a man in the woods with a faggot of kindling and a single twig that is too thick, I take the whole load off him and fine him too. I would fine the birds for flying in the air over my fields or the cocks for crowing if they could pay.
The people are so poor it goes against the grain to take from them. I find I am starting to count the eggs that I can expect from a woman who has only six hens. I demand our share of honey from a man who has only one hive and has been storing the honeycombs since summer. When Farmer Stride butchers a cow that has fallen in a ditch and broken her neck, I demand every ounce of my share of the meat; I demand tallow from her fat and some of her hide for shoe leather. I am no good lord to him, I am grasping during his disaster, making a bad time worse for him, as the royal treasury is grasping in mine.
I send the men of my household out after deer, after pheasant, after heron, moorhen, anything that we might eat. The rabbit catcher has to bring in more coneys from the warren, the boy who empties the dove nests learns to expect me at the foot of his ladder. I become terrified that people are stealing from me, and I start to steal from them as I insist on my dues and more.
I am becoming the sort of landlord I despise; we are becoming a family whose tenants hate them. My mother was the richest heiress in England; my father was brother to the king. They kept followers, retainers, and adherents by constant open-handed generosity. My grandfather fed everyone in London who chose to come to his door. Any man could come at dinnertime and go away with as much meat as he could spear on the blade of his dagger. I am their heir, but I betray their traditions. I think I have become half mad with worry about money, the ache of fear in my belly is sometimes anxiety and sometimes hunger, and I have become so tormented that I can no longer tell which is which.
I am leaving church one day when I hear one of the village elders complaining to the priest and begging him to intervene. “Father, you must speak to her. We can’t pay our dues. We don’t even know what’s owed. She’s looked at every tenancy going back years and found new fines. She’s worse than a Tudor, she’s worse than the king for looking through the laws and turning them to her advantage. She’s starving us.”
In any case, it is not enough. I cannot buy my boys new riding boots, I cannot feed their horses. I struggle on for a year trying to deny that I am borrowing from myself, robbing my own tenants, stealing from the poor, but then I realize that all of my shabby attempts have failed.
We are ruined.
Nobody will help me. My widowhood is against me, my poverty is against me, and my name is against me. Worst of all, the king’s mother is against me and no one will dare to help me. Two of my cousins are still imprisoned in the Tower; they cannot help me. Only my kinsman George Neville replies to the dozens of letters that I send out. He offers to raise my oldest boys at his home, and I will have to send Henry and Arthur away with the promise that I will fetch them as soon as I can, that they will not be in exile forever, that something will happen to bring us back together again, to restore us to our home.
Like a losing gambler I tell them that good times will come soon, but I doubt either of them believes me. My steward, John Little, takes them to Cousin Neville’s house, Birling Manor in Kent, on the last of the horses, John mounted on the big plow horse, Henry on his hunter, and Arthur on his outgrown pony. I try to smile and wave to them, but the tears are blinding me and I can hardly see them—just their white faces and their big frightened eyes, two boys in shabby clothes, riding away from their home, with no idea of their destination. I don’t know when I will see them again, I will not watch and guard their childhood as I hoped to do. I will not raise them as Plantagenets. I have failed them as their mother and they will have to grow up without me.
Ursula, at eight too little to be sent away to a great household, has to stay with me, and Geoffrey at nearly two is my baby. He has only just learned to walk, does not yet speak, and is clingy and anxious, quick to tears and fearful. I cannot let Geoffrey go. He has suffered already, born into a house of mourning, fatherless from the day of his birth. Geoffrey will stay with me, whatever it costs me; I cannot be parted from him, his only word is Mama.