I think it is a message from him when I see, from the window of her presence chamber, half a dozen riders on the road below, coming towards the palace and turning in through the great gates. I wait at the door of the presence chamber for the letter to be brought up. I will take it to the princess herself when she comes from her private chapel. I find I am afraid now what news she will read.
Yet it is no royal messenger but old Tom Darcy who comes slowly up the stairs, clutching the small of his back until he sees me waiting, when he straightens up and makes his bow.
“Your lordship!” I say, surprised.
“Margaret Pole, Countess!” he replies, and holds out his arms to me so that I can kiss him on the cheek. “You look well.”
“I am well,” I say.
He glances towards the closed door of the presence chamber and cocks a grizzled eyebrow. “Not so well,” I say shortly.
“Anyway, it’s you I’ve come to see,” he says.
I lead the way to my own rooms. My ladies are with the princess in the chapel, so we are quite alone in the pretty, sunny room. “Can I offer you something to drink?” I ask. “Or to eat?”
He shakes his head. “I hope to come and go unobserved,” he says. “If anyone asks you why I was here, you can say that I called in as I was going to London, to pay my respects to the princess, but came away without seeing her because she was . . .”
“She’s unwell,” I say.
“Sick?”
“Melancholy.”
He nods. “No surprise. I came to see you about the queen her mother, and about her, poor young woman.”
I wait.
“Next Parliament, after Christmas, they are going to try to bring the cause of the king’s marriage into the judgment of England, away from the Pope. They’re going to ask Parliament to support that.”
Lord Darcy sees my small nod.
“They mean to annul the marriage and disinherit the princess,” Darcy says quietly. “I’ve told Norfolk that I can’t stand by and see it happen. He’s told me to keep my old mouth shut. I need others to join with me, if I speak out.” He looks at me. “Will Geoffrey speak with me? Will Montague?”
I find I am twisting the rings on my fingers, and he takes my hands in his firm grip and holds me still. “I need your support,” he says.
“I am sorry,” I say eventually. “You’re in the right, I know it, my sons know it. But I don’t dare have them speak out.”
“The king will usurp the rights of the Church,” Tom warns me. “He will usurp the rights of the Church just so that he can give himself permission to abandon a faultless wife and disinherit an innocent child.”
“I know!” I burst out. “I know! But we don’t dare defy him. Not yet!”
“When?” he asks shortly.
“When we have to,” I say. “When we absolutely have to. At the last moment. Not before. In case the king sees sense, in case something changes, in case the Pope makes a clear ruling, in case the emperor comes, in case we can get through this without standing up to be counted against the most powerful man in England, perhaps the most powerful man in the world.”
He has been listening very carefully, and now he nods and puts his arm around my shoulders as if I were still a girl and he were a handsome young Lord of the North. “Ah, Lady Margaret, my dear, you’re afraid,” he says gently.
I nod. “I am. I am sorry. I can’t help it. I am afraid for my boys. I can’t risk them going to the Tower. Not them. Not them as well.” I look into his old face for understanding. “My brother . . .” I whisper. “My cousin . . .”
“He can’t charge us all with treason,” Tom says stoutly. “If we stand together. He can’t charge us all.”
We stand in silence for a moment, and then he releases me and reaches into the inside of his jacket and produces a beautifully embroidered badge, such as a man might pin to his collar before going into battle. It is the five wounds of Christ. Two hands with bleeding palms, two feet, stabbed and bleeding, a bleeding heart with a trail of red embroidery, and then, like a halo over it all, a white rose. Gently, he puts it into my hands.
“This is beautiful!” I am dazzled by the quality of the work and struck by the imagery that links the sufferings of Christ with the rose of my house.
“I had them embroidered when I was planning an expedition against the Moors,” he said. “D’you remember? Years ago. Our crusade. The mission came to nothing, but I kept the badges. I had this one made with the rose of your house for your cousin who was riding with me.”
I tuck it into the pocket of my gown. “I am grateful to you. I shall put it with my rosary and pray on it.”
“And I shall pray that I never have to issue it in wartime,” he says grimly. “Last time I gave it out to my men we were sworn to die to defend the Church against the infidel. Pray God we never have to defend against heresy here.”
Lord Darcy is not our only visitor to Richmond Palace as the hot weather goes on and the king’s court stays away from his capital city. Elizabeth, my kinswoman, the Duchess of Norfolk, Thomas Howard’s wife, comes to visit us and brings a gift of game and much gossip.
She pays her compliments to the princess and then comes to my privy chamber. Her ladies sit with mine at a distance, and she requests two of them to sing. Shielded from observation and with our quiet voices drowned out by the music, she says to me: “The Boleyn whore has commanded the marriage of my own daughter.”
“No!” I exclaim.
She nods, keeping her face carefully impassive. “She commands the king, he commands my husband, and nobody consults me at all. In effect, she commands me, me: a Stafford by birth. Wait till you hear her choice.”
Obediently, I wait.
“My daughter Mary is to be married to the king’s bastard.”
“Henry Fitzroy?” I ask incredulously.
“Yes. My lord is delighted, of course. He has the highest of hopes. I would not have had my Mary mixed up in this for the world. When you next see the queen, tell her that I have never wavered in my love and loyalty to her. This betrothal is none of my doing. I think of it as my shame.”
“Mixed up?” I ask cautiously.
“I tell you what I think is going to happen,” she says in a quick, furious whisper. “I think the king is going to put the queen aside, whatever anyone says, send her to a nunnery, and declare himself a single man.”
I sit very still, as if someone was telling me of a new plague at my doorstep.
“I think he will deny the princess, say that she is illegitimate.”
“No,” I whisper.
“I do. I think that he will marry the Boleyn woman, and if she gives him a son, he will declare that boy his heir.”
“The marriage wouldn’t be valid,” I say quietly, holding on to the one thing that I know.
“Not at all. It will be made in hell against the will of God! But who in England is going to tell the king that? Are you?”
I swallow. No one is going to tell him. Everyone knows what happened to Reginald when he merely reported the opinion of the French universities.
“He will disinherit the princess,” she says. “God forgive him. But if the king cannot get a son on the Boleyn woman, he has Fitzroy in reserve and he will make him his heir.”
“Bessie Blount’s boy? In the place of our princess?” I try to sound scathing but I am finding it all too easy to believe her.
“He is the Duke of Richmond and Somerset,” she reminds me. “Commander of the North, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The king has given him every great title, so why not Prince of Wales among all the others?”
I know this was the cardinal’s old plan. I had hoped it had fallen with him. “No one would support such a thing,” I say. “No one would allow a legitimate heir to be replaced with a bastard.”