“I know who,” Arthur teases him.
At once, I am alert. “You can tell me,” I say to Montague. “And if she is wealthy and well bred I will be able to arrange it. You can take your pick. There’s not a family in the kingdom who would not think it an honor to be married into ours, now.”
“You’ve gone from pauper to princess,” Reginald says slowly. “You must feel as if God has answered your prayers.”
“God has sent me nothing more than justice,” I say carefully. “And we must, as a family, give thanks for that.”
Slowly, I become accustomed to being wealthy again, as I had to become accustomed to being poor. I order builders into my London home, and they start to transform L’Erber from the great palace that it is into an even more imposing house, paving the forecourt, carving beautiful wooden panels for the great hall. At Warblington I commission a castle, with a moat and a drawbridge and a chapel and a green, everything just as my parents would have had, just like Middleham Castle in my childhood, when I had known I was born for greatness and never dreamed that it could all disappear overnight. I build the equal of any castle in the land, and I create beautiful guest rooms for when the king and court come to stay with me, their great subject in her own great castle.
Everywhere I put my coat of arms, and I have to confess every day to the sin of pride. But I don’t care. I want to declare to the world: “My brother was no traitor, my father no traitor either. This is an honorable name, this is a royal standard. I am the only countess in England holding a title in my own right. Here is my stamp upon my many houses. Here am I. Alive—no traitor. Here am I!”
My boys enter court life like the princes they are. The king immediately takes to Arthur for his courage and skill at the joust. My kinsman George Neville served my sons well when he brought them up and taught them everything they needed to know to be popular courtiers. Montague is easy and elegant in the royal rooms; Arthur is one of the bravest jousters at a court that cares for nothing more than bravery. He is one of the few men who dare ride against the king, one of the very, very few who can beat him. When Arthur unseats the King of England, he flings himself off his own horse, brushing past pages to help Henry to his feet, and Henry bellows with laughter and holds Arthur in his arms. “Not yet, Cousin Plantagenet! Not yet!” he shouts and they roar together as if a fallen king is a great joke, and a Plantagenet standing over an unseated Tudor can only be a fine, comradely jest.
Reginald studies at the university, Ursula serves beside me in the queen’s rooms at court, Geoffrey stays at the nursery rooms in L’Erber with his tutors and companions and sometimes comes to court to serve the queen. I cannot bring myself to send him away to the country, not after the grief of losing my older boys, not after the lasting pain of Reginald’s exile. This boy, my youngest boy, my baby, I will keep at home. I swear I will have him by my side until he is married.
The king is desperate to go to war and determined to punish the French for their advances in Italy, determined to defend the Pope and his lands. In the summer my cousin Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, leads an expedition to take Aquitaine but can do nothing without the support of the queen’s father, who refuses to play his part in their joint battle plans. Thomas is blamed for this and for the misconduct of his troops, and a shadow falls, once again, over his reputation as a Tudor supporter and our family.
“The fault is not in your cousins, Your Grace, but in your father-in-law,” the blunt-spoken northern lord Tom Darcy tells the king. “He did not support me when I went on crusade. He has not supported Thomas Grey. It is your ally, not your generals, who is at fault.”
He sees me watching him, and he gives me a small wink. He knows that all my family fear the loss of Tudor favor.
“You might be right,” Henry says sulkily. “But the Spanish king is a great general and Thomas Grey is certainly not.”
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1513
Not even such a setback can permanently diminish the king’s enthusiasm for a war against France, driven on by his conscience which assures him that he is defending the Church and by the promise of the title “King of France.” The Pope is clever enough to know that Henry longs to win back the title that other English kings have lost, and show himself as a true king and a leader of men.
This summer the court and my boys can think of nothing but harnesses and armor, horses and provisions. The king’s new advisor Thomas Wolsey proves to be uniquely able to get an army on the move, ordering the goods where they are needed, controlling the mustering of troops, commanding the smiths to forge pikes and the saddlers to make jackets of leather. The detail, the constant orders about transport, supplies, and timing—which no nobleman can be bothered to follow—is all that Wolsey thinks about, and he thinks about nothing else.
The ladies of the queen’s chamber sew banners, keepsakes, and special shirts made from tough cloth to wear under chain mail; but Katherine, herself the daughter of a fighting queen, raised in a country at war, meets with Henry’s commanders and talks to them about provisions, discipline, and the health of the troops they will take to invade France. Only Wolsey understands her concerns, and she and the almoner are often closeted together, discussing routes for the march, provisions along the way, how to establish lines of messengers and how one commander can communicate with another and be persuaded to work together.
Thomas Wolsey treats her with respect, observing that she has seen more warfare than many of the noblemen at court, since she was raised at the siege of Granada. The whole court treats her with a secret smiling pride, for everyone knows that she is with child again, her belly starting to grow hard and curved. She walks everywhere, refusing to ride, resting in the afternoons, a plump, shining confidence about her.
CANTERBURY, KENT, JUNE 1513
We set off for the coast with the army, traveling slowly through Kent, and stop at the glorious shrine at Canterbury, dripping in gold and rubies of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, where we pray for victory for England.
The queen takes my hand as I kneel to pray beside her, and passes me her rosary, pressing it into my hand.
“What’s this?” I whisper.
“Hold it,” she says. “While I tell you something bad. I have to tell you something that will distress you.”
The sharp ivory crucifix digs into my palm like a nail. I think I know what she has to tell me.
“It’s your cousin Edmund de la Pole,” she says gently. “I am sorry, my dear. I am so sorry. The king has ordered that he be put to death.”
Even though I am expecting this, even though I have known it must come, even though I have waited for this news for years, I hear myself say: “But why? Why now?”
“The king could not go to war leaving a pretender in the Tower.” I can tell from the guilt in her face that she remembers the last pretender to the Tudor throne was my brother, killed so that she would come to England and marry Arthur. “I am so sorry, Margaret. I am so sorry, my dear.”
“He’s been imprisoned for seven years!” I protest. “Seven years and there has been no trouble!”
“I know. But the council advised it too.”
I bow my head as if in prayer, but I can find no words to pray for the soul of my cousin, dead under a Tudor axe, for the crime of being a Plantagenet.
“I hope you can forgive us?” she whispers.
Under the soaring chant of the Mass I can hardly hear her. I grip her hand. “It’s not you,” I say. “It’s not even the king. It’s what anyone would do to rid themselves of a rival.”