“What have you heard?”
“I have seen it myself,” she says. “His favorite, Mary Carey. And I see his son, Bessie Blount’s boy, at court. They have made him a duke, he is Duke of Richmond and Duke of Somerset. Nobody else in England is honored like that. It is too great an honor for a boy born to someone like Bessie. It is too great an honor for a horrid little boy like him.”
“Men, even kings, perhaps especially kings, may love with a free heart, even after their marriage,” I say. I look into her honest, questioning face and I hate the truth that I am telling her. “Your father, as a king, can do as he pleases, it is his right. The wife of a king, even though she is a queen herself, does not complain to him, does not complain to others. It is not important, it makes no difference. She makes it clear to everyone that it is not important. However many girls there may be, she is still his wife. Your mother is still the queen, however many Bessies and Marys dance at the court or walk behind her into her rooms. They don’t trouble her at all. They need not trouble you.”
“And the little double duke?” she asks spitefully.
Since I do not know what the king means by creating such an honor, I dare not advise her. “You are still the princess,” I say. “Whatever happens, the queen is still the queen.”
She looks unconvinced, and I am unwilling to tell this young princess that a woman, even a princess, is servant to her father and slave to her husband. “You know, a husband, any husband, is set by God Himself to rule over his wife.”
She nods. “Of course.”
“He must do as he pleases. If he imperils his immortal soul, a good wife might warn him of this. But she cannot try to take command. She has to live as he wishes. It is her duty as a wife and a woman.”
“But she might mind . . .”
“She might,” I admit. “But he cannot leave her side, he cannot deny his marriage, he cannot forsake her bed, he cannot deny her title as queen. He may dance and play and write poetry to a pretty girl but that changes nothing. He might give honors and love a bastard son but that changes nothing for the legitimate child of his marriage. A queen is the queen until her death. A princess is born to her coronet and no one can take it from her. A wife is a wife until her death. Everything else is just pastime and vanity.”
She is a wise girl, this little princess; for we don’t talk of this again, and when the couriers from her mother in London also carry gossip into the kitchen that the Boleyn girl has given the king a child, this one a boy, this one named Henry, I order that no one repeat the story in the hearing of the princess and I tell my daughter-in-law Constance that I will personally beat her into convulsions if I hear that she has allowed anything to be said in Mary’s hearing.
My daughter-in-law knows better than to fear my anger, as she knows I love her too dearly to lift a hand to her. But she makes sure that the princess hears nothing of the baby who is called Henry Carey, or of the new flirtation that her father has taken up in place of the old.
Under my guardianship the princess learns nothing more, not even when we go to court at Westminster and Greenwich for Christmas each year, not even when the king commands that we set up a court for the princess in Richmond Palace. I command the ladies as if I were the strictest abbess in the kingdom and there is no gossip spoken around the princess though the main court is beside itself about the king’s new flirt, Anne Boleyn, who seems to have taken her sister’s place in his favor, though not yet in his bed.
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1527
I am commanded to bring the princess to court for the celebration of her betrothal into the House of Valois. She is to marry either the French king, or his second son, a little boy of seven years, the duc d’Orléans, so a completely disorganized and inadequate plan. We arrive at court and Mary flies to her mother’s rooms with me running behind her, begging her to walk with dignity, like a princess.
It hardly matters. The queen jumps down from her throne in the presence chamber to embrace her daughter and takes me by the hand to lead us both into her privy chamber so that we can chatter and exclaim, and delight in each other without a hundred people watching.
As soon as the door is closed behind us and mother and daughter have exchanged a ripple of inquiries and answers, slowly the brightness drains from the queen’s face, and I see that Katherine is weary. Her blue eyes still shine with pleasure at seeing her daughter; but the skin beneath them is brown and stained, and her face is tired and pale. At the neck of her gown I see a tell-tale rash and I guess that she is wearing a hair shirt beneath her rich clothes, as if her life was not hard enough in itself to mortify her.
I understand at once that she is grieved her precious daughter is to be bundled off to France as part of an alliance against her own nephew, Charles of Spain, and that she blames herself for this, as for everything else that will befall England without an heir. The burden of being a Spanish princess and an English queen is weighing heavily on her. The behavior of her nephew Charles has made her life in England far worse than it was. He has made promise after promise to the king, and then broken them, as if Henry were not a man dangerously quick to take offense at any threat to his dignity, as if he were not so selfish as to punish his wife for events far beyond her control.
“I have good news, good news: you are not to go to France,” she says, sitting in her chair and pulling Mary onto her lap. “The betrothal is celebrated but you will not go for years, perhaps two or three. And anything can happen in that time.”
“You don’t want me to marry into the House of Valois?” Mary asks anxiously.
Her mother forces a reassuring smile. “Of course your father will have chosen rightly for you, and we will obey him with a glad heart. But I am pleased that he has said that you are to stay in England for the next few years.”
“At Ludlow?”
“Even better than that! At Richmond. And dear Lady Margaret will live with you, and care for you when I have to go away.”
“Then I am glad too,” Mary says fervently. She looks up into the weary, smiling face. “Are you well, Lady Mother? Are you happy? Not ill at all?”
“I am well enough,” the queen says, though I hear the strain in her voice and I stretch out a hand to her so that we are linked, one to another. “I am well enough,” she repeats.
She does not speak to me of her disappointment that her daughter is to marry into the house of her enemy, France; nor of her humiliation that the bastard boy of her former lady-in-waiting is now Lord of the North, living in the great castle of Sheriff Hutton with a court as grand as that of our princess and commanding the northern marches. Indeed, now he is Lord High Admiral of England though a child of eight.
But she never complains, not of her weariness nor her ill health; she never speaks of the changes of her body, the night sweats, the nauseating headaches. I go to her room one morning and find her wrapped in sheets stepping out of a steaming bath, a princess of Spain once more.
She smiles at my disapproving face. “I know,” she says. “But bathing has never done me any harm and in the nights I am so hot! I dream I am back in Spain and I wake as if I had a fever.”
“I am sorry,” I say. I tuck the linen sheet around her shoulders, which are still smooth-skinned and pale as pearls. “Your skin is as lovely as ever.”
She shrugs as if it does not matter, and pulls up the sheet so I shall not remark on the red weals of fleabites and the painfully raw patches that come from the rubbing of the hair shirt on her breasts and belly.
“Your Grace, you have no sins that would require you to hurt yourself,” I say very quietly.