The king is playing at cards. Bessie Blount is his partner; there is another girl on the other side of the table, but I can’t even be troubled to look. I can see from the pile of gold coins before Bessie that she is winning. This new inner court of friends and intimates, dressed in French fashions, drinking the best wine in the early morning, boisterous, noisy, childish, looks up when I come into the room, reads with perfect accuracy the defeat in my face and the droop of my shoulders. I see, I cannot miss, the avid gleam of some who scent heartbreak and know that trouble brings opportunity. I can hear, as the hubbub of the room drops to silence, someone tut with impatience as they see I have brought bad news again.
The king throws down his cards and comes quickly towards me as if he would silence me, as if he would keep this as a guilty, shameful secret. “Is it no good?” he asks shortly.
“I am sorry, Your Grace,” I say. “A girl, stillborn.”
For a moment his mouth turns down as if he has had to swallow something very bitter. I see his throat clench as if he would retch. “A girl?”
“Yes. But she never breathed.”
He does not ask me if his wife is well.
“A dead baby,” is all he says, almost wonderingly. “It is a cruel world for me, don’t you think, Lady Salisbury?”
“It is a deep sorrow for you both,” I say. I can hardly make my lips frame the words. “The queen is very grieved.”
He nods, as if it goes without saying, almost as if she deserves sorrow; but he does not.
Behind him, Bessie rises up from the table where they were playing cards while his wife was laboring to give birth to a dead child. Something about the way she turns attracts my attention. She averts her face and then she steps backwards, almost as if she were trying to slip away and avoid my notice, as if she were hiding something.
Unseen, she curtseys to the king’s back and steps away, leaving her winnings as if she has quite forgotten them, and then, as she turns to sidle through the opening door, I see the curve of her belly against the ripple of the rich fabric of her gown. I see that Bessie Blount is with child, and I suppose that it is the king’s.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1518
I wait until the queen is ready to return to court, her grief forced down, churched, bathed, and dressed. I think I will try to speak to her in the morning after Matins, as we walk back from her chapel.
“Margaret, do you not think that I can see that you are waiting to speak to me? Don’t you think after all these years I can read you? Are you going to ask to go home and get your handsome boy Arthur married?”
“I will ask you that,” I agree. “And soon. But I don’t need to talk to you about it now.”
“What then?”
I can hardly bring myself to wipe the smile from her face when she is trying so hard to be merry and carefree. But she does not know quite how carefree and merry the court has become.
“Your Grace, I am afraid I have to tell you something which will trouble you.” Maria de Salinas, now Countess Willoughby, steps to her side and looks at me as if I am a traitor to bring distress to a queen who has already suffered so much.
“What now?” is all she says.
I take a breath. “Your Grace, it is Elizabeth Blount. While you were in confinement she was with the king.”
“This is old news, Margaret.” She manages a careless laugh. “You’re a very poor gossip to bring me such an ancient scandal. Bessie is always with the king when I am with child. It’s a sort of fidelity.”
Maria says a word under her breath and turns her face away.
“Yes, but—what you don’t know is that now she is with child.”
“It is my husband’s child?”
“I suppose so. He hasn’t owned it. She’s not drawing any attention to herself except that her gowns are growing tight across her belly. She didn’t tell me. She is making no claims.”
“Little Bessie Blount, my own lady-in-waiting?”
Grimly, I nod.
She does not cry out, but turns from the gallery into an oriel window, and puts Maria’s supporting hand aside with one little gesture. She looks out of the small panes of glass at the water meadows that are gray with sheets of ice and driven snow. She looks towards the cold river, seeing nothing but a memory of her mother, sobbing, facedown on her pillows, breaking her heart over the infidelity of her husband, the King of Spain.
“That girl has been with me since she was twelve years old,” she says wonderingly. She finds a hard little laugh. “Clearly, I cannot have taught her very well.”
“Your Grace, it was impossible for her to refuse the king,” I say quietly. “I don’t doubt her affection for you.”
“It’s no surprise,” she says levelly, as if she were as cold as the flowers of frost on the windowpanes.
“No, I suppose not.”
“Does the king seem very pleased?”
“He has said nothing about it. And she’s not here now. She—Bessie –withdrew from court as soon as she . . . as soon as it . . .”
“As soon as everyone could see?”
I nod.
“And where has she gone?” the queen asks without much interest.
“To a house, the Priory of St. Lawrence, in the county of Essex.”
“She won’t be able to give him a child!” Maria suddenly bursts out passionately. “The child will die, for sure!”
I gasp at her words that sound like a curse. “It cannot be any fault of the king that we have only Princess Mary!” I correct her instantly. To say anything else is to speak against the king’s potency and health. I turn to my friend, the queen. “And no fault of yours either,” I say very low. “It must be God’s will, God’s will.”
The queen turns her head to look at Maria. “Why would Bessie, so young and so healthy, not give him a child?”
“Hush, hush,” I whisper.
But Maria answers: “Because God could not be so cruel to you!”
Katherine crosses herself and kisses the crucifix that hangs from coral rosary beads at her waist. “I think that I have suffered greater sorrows than the birth of a bastard to little Bessie,” she says. “And anyway, don’t you know that the king will lose all interest in her now?”
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1519
My cousins and the other lords of the kingdom, Thomas Howard, the old Duke of Norfolk, and his son-in-law, my steward, Sir Thomas Boleyn, meet in private with the king and papal legate Wolsey and explain that the behavior of the wilder young men of the court reflects badly on us all. Henry, who loves the excitement and the laughter of his comrades, will hear nothing against his friends, until the older men tell him that the young courtiers on a diplomatic visit made fools of themselves in France, in front of King Francis himself.
This strikes home. Henry is still the boy who looked up to his brother Arthur, who longed to be his equal, who toddled after him on chubby legs and shouted for a horse as big as his brother’s. Now he sees a new version of a glorious prince in Francis of France. He sees in him a model of elegance and style, and he wants to be like him. King Francis has a small inner circle of friends and advisors who are sophisticated and witty and highly cultured. They don’t play pranks and jokes on each other; they don’t cheat at cards and drink themselves sick. Henry is fired with the ambition to have a court as cosmopolitan and elegant as the French.
For once, the cardinal and the councillors are united, and they persuade Henry that the minions must go. Half a dozen of them are sent from court and told not to return. Bessie Blount has retired for her confinement and nobody even mentions her. Some of the better-behaved young courtiers, including my son Arthur and my heir Montague, are retained. The court is purged of its wilder element, but my family, with our good breeding and good training, stay in place. The cardinal even remarks to me that he is glad that I visit the Princess Mary with such regularity, that she must learn from me as a model of decorum.