I wait.
“It is my husband who is my danger,” she says wearily, her face a hard mask of beauty. “A young fool, a spoiled fool. He should be old enough now to take a lover without falling in love. He should never allow anyone to question our marriage. He should never think for a moment that it might be set aside. To do that is to destroy his own authority as well as mine. I am Queen of England. There can be only one queen. There can be only one king. I am his wife. We were both crowned. That should never be questioned.”
“We can make sure that this never goes further,” I suggest.
She shakes her head. “The worst damage has already been done,” she says. “A king who speaks of love to anyone but his wife, a king who questions his marriage is a king who rocks the foundations of his own throne. We can stop this nonsense going further, but the damage was done when it entered his stupid head.”
We sit in silence for long moments, thinking about Henry’s handsome golden head. “He married me for love,” she observes wearily, as if it were a long time ago. “It was not an arranged marriage, it was one of love.”
“It’s a bad precedent,” I say, the daughter of an arranged marriage, the widow of an arranged marriage. “If a man marries for love, does he think he can get the marriage annulled when he loves no more?”
“Does he not love me anymore?”
I cannot answer her. It is such a painful question from a woman who was so deeply loved by her first, dead husband, who would never have bedded another woman and spoken of love to her.
I shake my head because I don’t know. I doubt that Henry himself knows. “He’s young,” I say. “And impulsive. And powerful. It’s a dangerous combination.”
Anne Hastings never comes back to court; her husband packs her off to a nunnery. My cousin Edward Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, her brother, recovers his good temper and rejoins us. Katherine wins Henry back to her side and they conceive another child, the boy that is to prove that God smiles on their marriage. The queen and I behave as if her realization that her husband is a fool had never happened. We don’t conspire in this. We don’t have to discuss it. We just do it.
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, JANUARY 1511
We are blessed, we are redeemed, and Katherine in particular is saved. She gives the king a Tudor son and heir and overturns in one act the rumors that were growing about the curse that sits on the Tudor family, the questioning of the marriage.
I have the honor to go to the young king and tell him that he is father to a boy, and I find him exultant among the young men of his court who drink to his great triumph. Katherine, confined in her rooms, leaning on the pillows in the great bed of state, is exhausted and smiling when I return.
“I did it,” she says quietly to me as I lean to kiss her cheek.
“You did it,” I confirm.
The next day, Henry sends for me. I find his rooms still crowded with men shouting congratulations and drinking the health of his son. Above the noise and the cheering he asks me if I will be the prince’s Lady Governess, and set up his household and appoint his staff and raise him as heir to the throne.
I put my hand on my heart and I curtsey. When I come up, Henry the boy pitches into my arms and I hug him in our shared joy. “Thank you,” he says. “I know you will guard him and raise him and govern him as if you were my mother.”
“I will,” I say to him. “I know just how she would have wanted it done, and I will make everything right.”
The baby is christened at the chapel of the Observant Friars at Richmond; he is to be Henry, of course. He will be Henry IX one day, God willing, and he will rule over a country which will have forgotten that once the rose of England was pure white. His Lady Mistress is appointed and his wet nurse, he sleeps in a cradle of gold, he is swaddled in the finest of linen, he goes everywhere carried breast-high, with two yeomen of the guard preceding his nurse and two behind. Katherine has him brought to her rooms every day, and while she rests in bed she has him laid beside her, and when she sleeps she has his little cradle put at the head of her bed.
Henry goes on a pilgrimage to give thanks. Katherine is churched and rises up from her bed, takes one of her hot Spanish baths, and returns to her court, glowing with pride in her youth and fertility. Not a girl in her train, not a lady in her rooms hesitates for one moment before bowing low to this triumphant queen. I don’t believe there is a woman in the country who does not share her joy.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1511
The king, returned from pilgrimage to Walsingham where he gave thanks to Our Lady, or perhaps, in truth, told Her of his achievement, sends for me to come to the jousting arena. My son Arthur comes with a smile and says I am not to tell anyone that I am going to watch a practice for the joust to celebrate the birth of the prince, but to slip quietly away from the queen’s rooms.
Indulgently, I go to the arena and, to my surprise, I find that Henry is alone, riding a great gray war charger round and round in careful circles, first one way then the other. Henry waves me to sit in the royal box, and I take the seat that his mother would have taken, and know, for I know him so well, that he wants me there, watching over him, as she and I once watched him practice on his pony.
He brings the horse right up to the balcony and shows me that it can bow, one foreleg extended, one foreleg tucked back. “Hold up a glove or something,” he says.
I take a kerchief from my neck and hold it up. Henry goes to the other side of the arena and shouts: “Drop!” As it falls he spurs forward and catches it in his hand, riding around the arena holding it high above his head like a flag.
He pulls up before me, his bright blue eyes fixed on my face.
“Very good,” I say approvingly.
“And there’s this,” he says. “Don’t be frightened. I know what I’m doing.”
I nod. He turns the horse sideways to my view and makes it rear and then buck, forelegs up then back legs kicking, in a fantastic display. He changes his seat slightly and the horse leaps above the ground, as the Moorish horses do, all legs in the air at once as if it were flying, and then it trots on the spot, raising one leg proudly high and then another. He really is a remarkable rider; he sits completely and beautifully still, holding the reins tightly, his whole body molded to the horse, alert, relaxed, at one with the great muscled animal.
“Get ready,” he warns me, and then he swings the horse round and it rears up, terribly high, its head as high as me in the royal box built over the arena, and it crashes its front hooves onto the wall of the box, springs back again, and drops down.
I nearly scream with fright, and then I jump to my feet and applaud. Henry beams at me, loosens the reins, pats the horse’s neck. “Nobody else can do that,” he remarks breathlessly, bringing the horse closer, watching me for my reaction. “Nobody in England can do that but me.”
“I should think not.”
“You don’t think it’s too loud? Will she be frightened?”
Katherine once stood with her mother to face a charge of enemy Arab cavalry, the fiercest horsemen in the world. I smile. “No, she’ll be very impressed, she knows good horsemanship.”
“She’ll never have seen anything like this,” he claims.
“She will,” I contradict him. “The Moors in Andalusia have Arab horses, and they ride wonderfully.”