“Is it the measles?” I ask her shortly.
“That, or the pox,” she says.
Dozing beside Henry, Arthur cries a little when he sees me and I lift him from the hot sheets and sit him on my knee. I can feel his small body is burning hot. “I’m thirsty,” he says. “Thirsty.” The nurse gives me a cup of small ale and he drinks three gulps and then pushes it away. “My eyes hurt.”
“We kept the shutters closed,” the nursemaid says quietly to me. “Henry complained that the light hurt his eyes, so we closed them. I hope we did right.”
“I think so,” I say. I feel such dread at my own ignorance. I don’t know what should be done for these children, nor even what is wrong with them. “What does the doctor say?”
Arthur leans back against me, even the nape of his neck is hot under my kiss.
“The doctor says that it is probably the measles and that, God willing, they will all three recover. He says to keep them warm.”
We are certainly keeping them warm. The room is stifling, a fire in the grate and a glowing brazier under the window, the beds heaped with covers and all three children sweating, flushed with heat. I put Arthur back in his hot sheets and go to the little bed where Ursula is lying limp and silent. She is only three, she is tiny. When she sees me, she raises her small hand and waves, but she does not speak or say my name.
I round with horror on the nursemaid.
“Her mind hasn’t gone!” she exclaims defensively. “She’s just wandering because of the heat. The doctor said that if the fever breaks she will be well. She sings a little and she whimpers a little in her sleep, but she hasn’t lost her mind. At any rate, not yet.”
I nod, trying to be patient in this overheated room with my children lying around like drowned corpses on a strand. “When does the doctor come again?”
“He’ll be on his way now, your ladyship. I promised I’d send for him as soon as you arrived, so that he could talk with you. But he swears that they will recover.” She looks at my face. “Probably,” she adds.
“And the rest of the household?”
“A couple of page boys have it. One of them was sick before Henry. And the kitchen maid who looks after the hens has died. But no one else has taken it yet.”
“And the village?”
“I don’t know about the village.”
I nod. I will have to ask the doctor about that, all sickness on our lands is my responsibility. I will have to order our kitchen to send out food to cottages where there is illness, I will have to make sure that the priest visits them, and that when they die they have enough money for the gravediggers. If not, I will have to pay for a grave and a wooden cross. If it gets worse I will have to order that they dig plague pits to bury the bodies. These are my obligations as the lady of Stourton. I have to care for everyone in my domain, not just my children. And as usual—as is always the case—we have no idea what causes the illness, no idea what will cure it, no idea when it will pass on to some other poor blighted village and kill people there.
“Have you written to my lord?” I ask.
My steward, waiting on the threshold of the open door, replies for her. “No, my lady, we knew he was traveling with the Prince of Wales but we didn’t know where they were on the road. We didn’t know where to write to him.”
“Write in my name, and send it to Ludlow,” I say. “Bring it to me before you seal and send it. He will be at Ludlow within a few days. He might even be there now. But I will have to stay here until everyone is well again. I can’t risk taking this illness to the Prince of Wales and his bride, whether it is the measles or the pox.”
“God forbid,” the steward says devoutly.
“Amen,” the nursemaid replies, praying for the prince even while her hand is on my son’s hot red face, as if no one ever matters more than a Tudor.
STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, SPRING 1502
I spend more than two months with my children at Stourton while they slowly, one after another, lose the heat from their blood, the spots from their skin, and the pain from their eyes. Ursula is the last to improve, and even when she is no longer ill she is quick to tire and moody, and she shades her eyes from the light with her hand. There are a few people sick in the village and one child dies. There is no Christmas feasting and I ban the village from coming to the castle for their Twelfth Night gifts. There is much complaining that I have refused to give out food and wine and little fairings, but I am afraid of the sickness in the village and terrified that if I let the tenants and their families come to the castle they will bring disease with them.
Nobody knows what caused the illness, nobody knows if it has gone for good or will return with the hot weather. We are as helpless before it as the cattle herd before a murrain; all we can do is suffer like lowing cows and hope that the worst of it passes us by. When finally the last man is up and about and the village children back to work I am so deeply relieved that I pay for a Mass in the village church, to give thanks that the illness seems to have passed us by for now, that we have been spared in this hard winter season, even if this summer the warm winds bring us the plague.
Only when I have stood at the front of the church and seen it filled with a congregation no thinner, no dirtier, no more desperate-looking than usual, only when I have ridden through the village and asked at each ramshackle door if they are all well, only when I have confirmed the health of everyone in our household from the boys who scare the birds from the crops to my head steward, only then do I know it is safe to leave my children, and go back to Ludlow.
The children stand at the front door to wave good-bye, the nursemaid holds my baby Reginald in her arms. He smiles at me and waves his fat little hands. He calls: “Ma! Ma!” Ursula holds her hands cupped over her eyes to shield them against the morning sunlight. “Stand properly,” I say to her, as I swing up into the saddle. “Put your hands down at your sides, and stop scowling. Be good children, all four of you, and I will come home to see you soon.”
“When will you come?” Henry asks.
“In the summer,” I say to pacify him; in truth, I don’t know. If Prince Arthur and his new bride make a summer progress with the royal court, then I can come back to Stourton for all of the summer. But while they stay at Ludlow, under the protection of my husband, I have to be there too. I am not only a mother to these children; I have other duties. I am the lady of Ludlow and the guardian of the Prince of Wales. And I must play these parts perfectly, so that I can hide what I was born to be: a girl of the House of York, a White Rose.
I blow them a kiss, but already my mind is away from them and on the road ahead. I nod to the Master of Horse and our little cavalcade—half a dozen men at arms, a couple of mules with my goods, three ladies-in-waiting on horseback, and a gaggle of servants—starts the long ride to Ludlow where I shall meet, for the first time, the girl who will be the next Queen of England: Katherine of Aragon.
LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, MARCH 1502
I am greeted by my husband in his rooms. He is working with two clerks and papers are spread all over the great table. As I come in, he waves them away, pushes back his chair, and greets me with a kiss on both cheeks. “You’re early.”
“The roads were good.”
“All well at Stourton?”
“Yes, the children are better at last,” I say.
“Good, good. I had your letter.” He looks relieved; he wants sons and healthy heirs like any man, and he is counting on our three boys to serve the Tudors and advance the family fortunes. “Have you dined, my dear?”
“Not yet, I’ll dine with you. Shall I meet the princess now?”
“As soon as you are ready. He wants to bring her to you himself,” he says, going back to sit down behind the table. He smiles at the thought of Arthur as a bridegroom. “He’s very keen that he should make the introduction. He asked me if he could bring her to you alone.”