She goes white and sways backwards. I give a shout of warning and one of her ladies, Bessie Blount, catches her as she faints. We pick her up and lie her on the bed and the midwife comes to pour a bitter oil onto a cloth and clamps it to her nose and mouth. She chokes and opens her eyes and sees my face. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that was a terrible dream.”
“It’s true,” I say, and I can feel my own face is wet with tears. “It’s true. I am so sorry. The baby is dead.”
On the other side of the bed I see Bessie’s aghast face as if her worst fears have been confirmed, as she slides to her knees and bows her head in prayer.
The queen lies in her glorious bed of state for days. She should be dressed in her best, reclining on golden pillows, receiving gifts from godparents and foreign ambassadors. But nobody comes, and in any case, she would not see them. She turns her face into her pillow and lies in silence.
I am the only one who can go to her and take her cold hand and say her name. “Katherine,” I whisper as if I am her friend and not her subject. “Katherine.”
For a moment I think she will stay mute, but she moves a little in the bed and looks at me over her hunched shoulder. Her face is etched with pain; she seems far older than her twenty-eight years, she is like a fallen statue of sorrow. “What?”
I pray for a word of encouragement to come to me, for a message of Christian patience, for a reminder that she has to be brave as her mother, that she is a queen and has a destiny laid on her. I think perhaps I might pray with her, or cry with her. But her face like white Carrara marble is forbidding, as she waits for me to find something to say as she lies there, curled up, clenched around her grief.
In the silence I understand that there are no words to comfort her. Nothing can be said that would bring her comfort. But still, there is something that I have to tell her. “You’ve got to get up,” is all I say. “You can’t stay here. You’ve got to get up.”
Everyone wonders, but no one speaks. Or perhaps: everyone wonders, but no one speaks just yet. Katherine is churched and returns to the court and Henry greets her with a sort of coolness that is new to him. He was raised to be a boisterous boy, but she is teaching him sorrow. He was a boy confident of his own good luck, demanding of good fortune, but Katherine is teaching him doubt. Man and boy he has striven to be the best at everything he does; he has delighted in his own strength, ability, and looks. He cannot bear failure in himself or in anyone near him. But now he has been disappointed by her, he has been disappointed by her dead sons, he has even been disappointed by God.
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1514
Bessie Blount goes everywhere with the king, all but hand in hand as if they were a young husband and his pretty wife. The Christmas festivities take place with a silent queen presiding over it all like one of the statues that the court delightedly shapes out of the thick snow in the white gardens. She is a perfect version of the queen, in all her finery, but cold as ice. Henry talks to his friends seated on his left at his dinner, and often he steps down from the dais and strolls around the hall with his easy, cheerful manner, speaking to one man and another, spreading the royal favor and greeted at every table with laughter and jokes. He is like the most handsome actor in a masque, drawing admiration everywhere he goes, playing the part of a handsome man, beloved by everyone.
Katherine sits still on her throne, eating almost nothing, showing an empty smile that fails to illuminate her hollow eyes. After dinner they sit side by side on their thrones to watch the entertainments and Bessie stands beside the king and leans in to hear his whispered comments, and laughs at everything he says, every single thing that he says, in a ripple of girlish laughter as meaningless as birdsong.
The court puts on a Christmas pageant and Bessie is dressed as a lady of Savoy in a blue gown with her face masked. In the dance, she and her companions are rescued by four brave masked knights, and they all dance together, the tall redheaded masked man dancing with the exquisitely graceful young woman. The queen thanks them for a delightful entertainment, and smiles and gives out little gifts, as if there is nothing that can give her more pleasure than seeing her husband dance with his mistress to the acclaim of a drunken court.
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1515
My son Arthur and the young Princess Mary do not stay long in France. Only two months after the wedding of the most beautiful princess in Christendom to the oldest king, Louis of France is dead and Princess Mary is now Dowager Queen. The English wedding party have to stay in France until they are certain that she is not with child—the scandalmongers say gleefully that she cannot be pregnant since the old king killed himself in the attempt—and then they all have to wait a few weeks longer; for the little madam has married Charles Brandon sent by the king to fetch her home, and they have to beg the king’s pardon before they can return.
She was always a self-willed child, as passionate and headstrong as her brother. When I hear that she has married for love, against the wishes of the king, I smile, thinking of her mother, my cousin Elizabeth, who also fell in love and swore she would marry her choice, and of her mother who married in secret for love, and of her mother before her who was a royal duchess and married her dead husband’s squire and caused a scandal. Princess Mary comes from three generations of women who believed in pleasing themselves.
Henry has been outwitted by the pair of them or perhaps, more truly, the two men were outwitted by the young woman. Henry knew that she was head over heels in love with Charles Brandon and made his friend promise that he would escort her safely home as a widow and not dream of speaking to her of love—but as soon as Charles arrived from England, she wept and swore that she would marry him or go into a convent. Between hot tears and temper she completely seduced him, and made him marry her.
She has wrong-footed her brother too, as he cannot blame her for holding him to his word. When he insisted on the French marriage, she agreed that she would marry his choice for her first husband if she might choose her second—and now she has done so. Henry is furious with her, and with his dear friend Charles, and there are many who say that Brandon is guilty of high treason for marrying a princess without permission.
“He should be beheaded,” old Thomas Howard says bluntly. “Better men than he, far better, have gone to the block for far less. It’s treason, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think this is a king for executions,” I say. “And thank God for it.”
It is true. Unlike his father, Henry is a king neither for the Tower nor the block, and he craves the love and admiration of his court. Quickly, he forgives both his beloved young sister and his oldest friend, as they return to court in triumph and plan a second, public wedding in May.
It is one of the few happy events this spring, when the king and the queen are united in their affection for his naughty pretty sister, and their joy in her return to court. Apart from this, they are cool with each other and Princess Mary, the Dowager Queen of France, finds the court much changed.
“Does he not take the queen’s advice at all?” she asks me. “He never comes to her rooms like he used to do.”
I shake my head and nip off a thread from my sewing.
“Does he listen to no one but Thomas Wolsey now?” she persists.
“No one but Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York,” I say. “And the archbishop, in his wisdom, favors the French.”
The archbishop has taken the place of the queen in Henry’s private councils; he has taken the place of all the other advisors in the council chambers. He works so hard that he can gobble up the places and fees of a dozen men, and while he goes between offices and treasure rooms Henry is free to play at falling in love and the queen can do nothing but smile and pretend that she does not mind.