“Who would rise against it?” she demands. “No one would like it but who would have the courage to rise against it?”
I close my eyes for a moment and I shake my head. I know that it should be us. If anyone, it should be us.
“I’ll tell you who would rise if you would lead them,” she says in a quiet, passionate whisper. “The common people and everyone who would carry a sword at the Pope’s command, everyone who would follow the Spanish when they invade for their princess, everyone who loves the queen and supports the princess, and every Plantagenet that has ever been born. One way or another that’s nearly everyone in England.”
I put out a hand. “Your Grace, you know I cannot have this talk in the princess’s household. For her sake as well as mine I cannot hear it.”
She nods. “But it’s true.”
“But why would the Boleyn woman want such a match?” I ask her curiously. “Your daughter Mary brings a great dowry, and her father commands great acres of England—and all his tenants. Why would the Boleyn woman give such power to Henry Fitzroy?”
The duchess nods. “Better for her than his other choice,” she says. “She can’t bear his marriage to the Princess Mary. She can’t bear to see the princess as heir.”
“That would never have happened,” I say flatly.
“Who would stop it?” she challenges me.
My hand creeps to my pocket where I keep my rosary and Tom Darcy’s badge of the five wounds of Christ under the white rose of my house. Would Tom Darcy stop it? Would we join him? Would I sew this badge onto my son’s collar and send him out to fight for the princess?
“Anyway,” she concludes. “I came to tell you that I don’t forget my love and loyalty to the queen. If you see her tell her that I would do anything, I will do everything I can. I speak with the Spanish ambassador, I speak to my kinsmen.”
“I can be no part of it. I am not gathering her supporters.”
“Well, you should be,” the duchess says bluntly.
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531
Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, daughter of the Scottish queen, his sister, is ordered to leave us, though she and the princess have become the firmest of friends. She is not to be sent to her mother, but going into service at court, to wait upon the Boleyn woman, as if she were a queen.
She is excited at the thought of being at court, hopeful that her dark prettiness will turn heads; brunettes are in fashion, with the Boleyn woman’s black hair and olive skin being much praised. But she hates the thought of serving a commoner, clinging to Princess Mary and holding me tightly before she steps into the royal barge that has come for her.
“I don’t know why I can’t stay with you!” she exclaims.
I raise my hand in farewell. I don’t know why either.
I have a summer wedding to prepare, and I turn from my fears for the princess to write the contracts and agree the terms with the same joy that I pick the flowers to make a garland for the bride, my granddaughter, Katherine, Montague’s oldest. She is only ten, but I am glad to get Francis Hastings for her. Her sister Winifred is betrothed to his brother Thomas Hastings, so our fortunes are safely linked to a rising family; the boys’ father, my kinsman, has just been made an earl. We have a pretty betrothal ceremony and a wedding feast for the two little girls, and Princess Mary smiles when the two couples come handfasted down the aisle, as if she were their older sister and as proud of them as I am.
ENGLAND, CHRISTMAS 1531
This Christmas season has little joy in it, not for the princess, nor for her mother the queen. Not even her father the king seems to be happy; he keeps the feast at Greenwich in the most lavish style, but people say that it was a merry court when the queen was on the throne and now he is hagridden by a woman who cannot be satisfied and will give him no pleasure.
The queen is at the More, well served and honored; but alone. Princess Mary and I are ordered to go to Beaulieu in Essex, and we keep the Christmas feast there. I make the twelve days of Christmas as happy as I can for her; but through all the wassailing, and dancing, disguising and feasting, the bringing in of the Yule log and the raising of the Christmas crown, I know that Mary is missing her mother, and praying for her father, and that there is very little joy anywhere in England these days.
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, MAY 1532
It is a beautiful early summer, as lovely as if the countryside itself wanted to make everyone remember this time. Every morning there is a pearly mist on the river that hides the quietly lapping water, and the duck and geese rise out of it with slowly beating wings.
At sunrise the heat burns the mist away and leaves the grass sparkling with dew, every cobweb a work of lace and diamonds. Now I can smell the river, damp and wet and green, and sometimes, if I sit very still on the pier, looking down through the floating weed and the clumps of sweet-smelling water mint, I see schools of little fish and the movement of trout.
In the water meadows running down from the palace to the river the cows wallow hock-deep in thick, lush grass bright with buttercups, and flick their tails against the flies that buzz around them. Amorously, they walk shoulder to shoulder with the bull, and the little calves wobble on unsteady legs after their dams.
First the swifts arrive, and then the swallows and then the martins, and soon on every wall of the palace there is a frenzy of building and rebuilding the little mud cups of nests. All day long the birds are flying from river to eaves, stopping only to preen on the roofs of the stables, pretty as little nuns in their black and white. When the parents fly past the nests, the newly hatched chicks bob up their little heads and cry out, each yellow beak wide open.
We are filled with the joy of the season, and we bring in the May, and have dances in the woods, rowing races and swimming contests. The courtiers take a fancy to fishing and every young man brings a rod and a line and we have a bonfire by the river, where the cooks seethe the catch in butter in cauldrons set in the ashes, and serve it sizzling hot. As the sun lies low and the little silver moon rises, we go out in the barges and the musicians play for us and the music drifts across the water as the sky turns to peach, and the river becomes a pathway of rose gold that might lead us anywhere, and the tide feels as if it will draw us far away.
We are coming home at dusk, singing softly with the lute player, without torches so the gray of twilight lies on the water and the bats dipping in and out of the silvery river are undisturbed, when I hear a drum for rowers echoing across the water like distant cannon fire, and I see Montague’s barge carrying torches fore and aft coming swiftly towards us.
Our barges land at the pier, and I order Princess Mary into the palace, thinking that I will meet Montague alone, but for once, for the very first time, she does not make the face of a sulky child and slowly go where she is bidden. She stops to face me, and says: “My dear, my dearest Lady Governess, I think I should meet your son. I think he should tell us both what he has come to tell you. It is time. I am sixteen. I am old enough.”
Montague’s barge is at the pier; I can hear the rattle of the gangplank behind me and the footsteps of the rowers as they make a guard of honor, their oars held high.
“I am brave enough,” she promises. “Whatever he has to say.”
“Let me find out what is happening, and I will come at once and tell you,” I temporize. “You are old enough. It is time. But . . .” I break off, I make a little gesture as if to say, you are so slight, you are so fragile, how are you going to bear bad news?
She raises her head, she puts back her shoulders. She is her mother’s daughter in the way that she prepares herself for the very worst. “I can bear anything,” she says. “I can bear any trial that God sends to me. I was raised for this; you yourself educated me for this. Tell your son to come and report to me, his future sovereign.”