I shake my head. I can hardly trust myself to speak. “I will visit you,” I whisper. “I promise.”
The high towers of the priory come into sight, the gate opens, and the prior himself comes out to greet me, takes Reginald by the hand, and helps him down from the saddle.
“I will come and see you,” I promise from high on my horse, looking down at the golden crown of his bowed head. “And you will be allowed to visit me.”
He looks very small as he stands beside the prior. He does not pull away or show any defiance, but he turns up his pale face and he looks at me with his dark eyes and he says clearly: “Lady Mother, let me come with you and my brother and sister. Don’t leave me here.”
“Now, now,” says the prior firmly. “Let’s have no words from children who should always be silent before their elders and betters. And in this house, you will only speak when you are ordered to do so. Silence, holy silence. You will learn to love it.”
Obediently, Reginald folds his lower lip under his teeth, and says not another word; but still he looks at me.
“I shall visit you,” I say helplessly. “You will be happy here. It is a good place. You will serve God and the Church. You will be happy here, I am sure.”
“Give you good day.” The prior hints me away. “Better done quickly, since it has to be done.”
I turn my horse’s head and I look back at my son. Reginald is only six; he looks very small beside the prior. He is pale with fear. Obediently, he says nothing, but his little mouth forms the silent word: Mother!
There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can say. I turn my horse’s head, and I ride away.
SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1506
My boy Reginald has to learn to live among shadows and silence and so do I. Syon Abbey, run by the Bridgettine Order, is not a silent one; the sisters even go into London to teach and to pray, but I live among them as if I were sworn dumb, like my little boy. I cannot speak of my resentment and my bitterness, and I have nothing to say which is not resentful and bitter.
I will never forgive the Tudors for this heartbreak. They have waded to the throne through the blood of my kinsmen. They pulled my uncle Richard from the mud of Bosworth Field, stripped him naked, slung him over his own saddle, and then threw him into an unmarked grave. My own brother was beheaded to reassure King Henry; my cousin Elizabeth died trying to give him another son. They married me to a poor knight to bring me low, and now he is dead and I am lower than I imagined a Plantagenet could sink. All this—all this!—to legitimize their claim to a throne which in any case they took by conquest.
And clearly, the Tudors take little joy in their triumph and our subjection. Since the death of his wife, our princess, the king is uncertain of his court, anxious about his subjects, and terrified by us Plantagenets of the House of York. For years he has poured money into the pockets of the Emperor Maximilian, paying him to betray my cousin, Edmund de la Pole, the York claimant to the throne of England, and send him home to his death. Now I learn that the deal has been done. The emperor takes the money and promises Edmund that he will be safe, showing him the letter of safe conduct from the king, signed in his own hand. It is a guarantee that Edmund can come home. Edmund believes the assurances of Henry Tudor, he trusts the word of an ordained king. He sees the signature, he checks the seal. Henry Tudor swears he will have safe passage and an honest welcome. Edmund is a Plantagenet; he loves his country, he wants to come home. But the moment he walks under the portcullis of Calais Castle he is arrested.
This starts a chain of accusations that tears through my kinsmen like scissors through silk, and now I am on my knees praying for their lives. My cousin William Courtenay, already under arrest, is now charged with treasonous plotting. My kinsman William de la Pole in the Tower is questioned harshly in his cell. My cousin Thomas Grey falls under suspicion, for nothing more than dining with Cousin Edmund, years ago, before he fled from the country. One after another the men of my family disappear into the Tower of London, forced to endure solitude and fear, persuaded to name other dinner guests, and held in that dark keep, or secretly sent overseas to Calais Castle.
SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1507
I write to my sons Henry and Arthur to ask them how they are, and if they are studying and learning. I dare not trespass on the generosity of the abbey by inviting them here; the sisters cannot welcome two energetic young men into their quiet cloisters, and anyway I cannot pay for their journey.
I see my little boy Reginald only once every three months, when they send him across the river to me by a hired rowing boat. He comes as he is commanded, cold and huddled in the prow of the little wherry. He can stay for only one night and then he has to go again. They have taught him to be silent, they have taught him very well; he keeps his eyes down and his hands at his side. When I run to greet him and hug him closely, he is stiff and unwilling, as if my lively, talkative son is dead and buried and all I have left to hold is this cold little headstone.
Ursula, nearly nine years old, seems to grow every day, and I let down the hems of her secondhand gowns again and again. Two-year-old Geoffrey’s toes are pressed up against the front of his little boots. When I put him to bed at night, I stroke his feet and pull his toes as if I can stop them growing twisted and cramped. The rents from Stourton are collected and faithfully sent to me, but I have to hand them to the abbey for our keep. I don’t know where Geoffrey will go when he is too old to stay here. Perhaps both he and Ursula will have to be sworn to the Church like their brother Reginald, and disappear into silence. I spend hours on my knees praying to God to send me a sign, or send me some hope, or simply send me some money; sometimes I think that when my last two children are safely locked up inside the Church, I will tie a great sack of stones to my belt and walk into the cold deeps of the River Thames.
SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1508
I kneel at the chancel steps and look up at the statue of the crucified Christ. I feel as if I have been walking the road of sorrows of the Plantagenets, a Via Dolorosa, just like He did, for two long years.
Then the danger comes a step closer to me: the king arrests my cousin Thomas Grey, and my cousin George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, who is keeping my two boys, Henry and Arthur. George leaves my boys at his home in Kent and enters the Tower, where people have started to whisper that the king himself visits nightly to oversee the torture of the men he suspects. The pedlar who comes to the door of the abbey with chapbooks and rosaries for sale tells Porteress Joan that in the City they are saying that the king has become a monster who likes to hear the cries of pain: “a Moldwarp.” He whispers the old word for a cursed mole who works in darkness among dead and buried things, who undermines his own pastures.
I am desperate to send for my boys, to take them away from the household of a man who has been arrested as a traitor. But I do not dare. I am afraid to draw attention to myself, almost in seclusion, almost in hiding, almost in sanctuary. I must not alert the Tudor spy system to Reginald, kept in silence at the Charterhouse at Sheen, Ursula and I hidden by our devotions at Syon, or Geoffrey, the most precious of them all, clinging to my side as the nuns know that there is nowhere that he can go, that even a child of three years cannot be allowed out into the world, since there is no doubt that Henry Tudor, scenting Plantagenet blood, will sniff him out.