“I am so glad you have come to me, for I have much for you to do, work and play,” I promise them. “And as soon as everyone is well at Broadhurst your mother and father will come here to fetch you and you can show them how much you have grown and what good children you have been this summer.”
I make sure that the house is run with the usual plague-season care. Anything that comes to us from the outside world is washed in vinegar and water. We buy as little food from the market at Bisham as possible, but live off our own lands. Strangers are not welcome, and anyone traveling through the town from London is invited to stay the night at the priory guesthouse, not in my home. I prepare gallons and gallons of tincture from rosemary and sage and sweet wine, and every servant in the household, every man, woman, and child who dines in the hall or sleeps in the straw, takes a spoonful of it every morning; but I never know if it does any good.
I don’t attend the priory church and I forbid my household from going into the warm, dark, stinking place where the incense floats over the stench of the midden and unwashed bodies. Instead, I observe the daily liturgy with my own confessor in my own private chapel next to my bedroom and I pray on my knees for hours that this sickness will pass us by. Arthur’s two children say their evening and morning prayers in my chapel; I keep them at a distance from the priest, and when he blesses the baby he signs the cross in the air over her precious head.
Especially I pray for Geoffrey, whose slight frame and clear skin make him seem so delicate to my worried inspection. I know that in reality he is strong and healthy, nobody could fail to see the color in his cheeks or his energy or his joy in life. But I watch him all the time for any signs of a fever, or a headache, or a shrinking from sunlight. His wife, Constance, is as enduring as her name, stocky as a pony, working hard for me, and I am grateful for her care of her husband. If she did not idolize him, I would hate her.
I begin to think that we will get through this summer with nothing worse than a few deaths in the village and a kitchen boy who was probably sick but ran away to his own home and died there, when Geoffrey taps on the door of my private chapel as I am praying on my knees for the health of all those that I love, Princess Mary, the queen, and my children. He puts his golden head into the room.
“Forgive me, Lady Mother,” he says.
I know it must be important if he disturbs me at my prayers. I sit back on my heels and motion him to come in. He crosses himself and kneels beside me. I see his mouth is trembling almost as if he were a little boy again and fighting to hold back tears. Something terrible must have happened. Then I see his hands are clasped tight together and he closes his eyes for a moment as if summoning the help of God to deliver his message, then he turns and looks at me. His dark blue eyes are filled with tears as he takes my cold hand.
“Lady Mother,” he says quietly. “I have very bad news for you.”
“At once,” I say through cold numb lips. “Tell me quickly, Geoffrey.” I think, Is it the Princess Mary, the girl I love as if she were my own daughter? Is it Montague, my heir and the heir of my royal name? Is it one of the little children, could God be so cruel as to take another Plantagenet boy?
“It’s Arthur,” he says, and his eyes fill with tears. “It’s my brother. He is dead, Lady Mother.”
For a moment, I cannot hear him. I look at him as if I am deaf and don’t know what he is saying. He has to repeat himself. He says again: “It’s Arthur, my brother. He is dead, Lady Mother.”
Arthur’s wife, Jane, is sick also, near to death. She has only one woman at her side, caring for her in her private rooms, so nobody tells her that her husband is dead. The steward of their household is so terrified of the sickness that he has abandoned his duty to his lord and his house and barricaded himself into his own rooms. In his absence the place is falling into complete disorder. There is no one to arrange things as they should be done, and so my son Montague commands that Arthur’s body is to be taken from his unlucky house and brought to our priory and laid in our chapel.
We lay him to rest where the other Plantagenet kings are laid, in our priory at Bisham, and when the church is swept and cleaned and censed, I go with Geoffrey and Constance and we start the prayers for his soul and hear the monks take up the chant.
We walk back to the house, and I look at the great house that I have renewed, with my family crest above the door, and I think, as bitterly as any sinner, that all the wealth and all the power that I won back for myself and my children could not save my beloved son Arthur from the Tudor sickness.
BROADHURST MANOR, WEST SUSSEX, SUMMER 1528
Montague and I ride over to Arthur’s house at Broadhurst and find the house in chaos and the hay uncut in the fields. The crops are ripening well, but the boys who should be scaring the birds are sick or dead, and the village is a silent place with shuttered windows and a bundle of hay at every other door. In the great house it seems everyone has run away. Only one woman is seeing to Jane, and no one is managing the house, or farming the lands.
“There is no reason why you should do this,” Montague says to me as I stride into the hall and start to give orders to servants who have clearly been sleeping in the unchanged straw and dining out of the larder since the family took to their beds.
“These are Arthur’s lands,” I say tersely. “This is what I made his marriage for. This is the inheritance of his son, Henry. I can’t see it go to waste. If Arthur cannot leave a fortune to his children, it’s as if he never won it by marrying her at all. If he doesn’t leave a legacy, then what’s the point of his life?”
Montague nods. He goes outside to the stables and sees that our horses are turned out into the fields and then tells the bailiff of the estate that, Sweat or no Sweat, he had better get a hay-making gang together tomorrow and start work, or they will die in the winter for lack of forage for the beasts, rather than dying now in the summer of the Sweat.
Between the two of us, we set the house and the land to rights over weeks of work, and then the news comes from London that the illness seems to have burned out. The cardinal himself took the Sweat and yet survived it. God smiles on Thomas Wolsey for a second time. His ways are mysterious, indeed.
“There’s no plague in the world that could touch him,” I say grimly. “No disease is poisonous enough to check that massive frame. What news from Hever?”
“She’s survived as well,” Montague says to me, disdaining to name Anne Boleyn as I do. We exchange a look of baffled sorrow, that the Sweat should spare a troublesome slut and yet take Arthur.
“Sir Arthur,” I say out loud.
“God bless him,” Montague says. “Why him and not the others?”
“God knows best in His wisdom,” I say; but my heart isn’t in it.
Jane knows that we are in the house, but we don’t go to her rooms for fear of infection, and she doesn’t send any message to us, nor ask after her husband.
“I’d think better of her if she asked,” I say irritably to Montague. “Has it not occurred to her?”
“She may be fighting for her own life,” he says.
He hesitates and then continues. “You do remember, Lady Mother, that there was provision in the marriage contract for Arthur’s early death? The lands that she brought to Arthur as her dowry will revert to her, her future inheritance from her father will go to her, for her to use as she wishes. Her father’s fortune will be hers alone, at his death. We get nothing.”
I had not remembered this. The very lands that I have been working this month, the house that I have been repairing will bring me nothing. The contract that I wrote to make my son wealthy gave him nothing but worry, and now there is nothing for our family at all. “He never stopped his work for these lands,” I say angrily. “He was prepared to take over their military service and spare her father, he was prepared to command their tenants. He was ready to do everything for them. It was her own father who stood in Arthur’s way—old fool. And she supported her father against Arthur.”