I am horrified. “The French are accepting Fitzroy, Bessie Blount’s bastard, in exchange for their prince?”
Montague nods. “It must be certain that the king plans to name him as his heir, and disinherit the princess.”
I cannot help it. I drop my head into my hands so that my sons cannot see the anguish on my face, then I feel Geoffrey’s gentle hand on my shoulder. “We’re not powerless,” he says. “We can fight this.”
“The king is taking the Lady to France also,” Montague goes on. “He is going to give her a title and a fortune; she is to be the Marquess of Pembroke.”
“What?” I ask. It is a strange title; this is to make her a lord in her own right. “And how can he take her to France? She can’t be a lady-in-waiting to the queen, since the queen is not attending. How can she go? What is she to do? What is she to be?”
“What she is—a whore,” Geoffrey sneers.
“A new sort of lady,” Montague says quietly, almost regretfully. “But the new Queen of France won’t meet her, and the King of France’s sister won’t meet her, so she’ll have to stay in Calais when the two kings meet. She’ll never meet the King of France at all.”
For a moment I think of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and the Queens of England and France going to take Mass together, chattering like girls, kissing each other and promising lifelong friendship. “It will be such a shadow of what went before,” I say. “Can the king not see that? Who will attend her?”
Montague allows himself a smile. “The dowager queen Mary is no friend to the Lady, and says that she’s too ill to travel. Even her husband has quarreled with the king about the Boleyn woman. The Duchess of Norfolk won’t go, the duke doesn’t even dare to ask her. None of the great ladies will go, they’ll all find an excuse. The Lady has only her immediate family: her sister and her sister-in-law. Other than Howards and Boleyns she has no friends.”
Geoffrey and I look blankly at Montague’s description of this scratch court. Every great person is always surrounded by a crowd of family, affinity, loyalists, friends, supporters: it is how we parade greatness. A lady without companions signals to the world that she is of no importance. The Boleyn woman is there only at the whim of the king, a very lonely favorite. The king’s whore has no queen’s court around her. She has no setting. “Does he not see her for what she is?” I ask helplessly. “When she has neither friends nor family?”
“He thinks that she prefers him before all company,” Montague says. “And he likes that. He thinks she is a rare thing, untouchable, a prize that only he can approach, only he might win. He likes it that she is not encircled by noblewomen. It’s her strangeness, her Frenchness, her isolation, that he likes.”
“Do you have to go?” I ask Montague.
“Yes,” he says. “God forgive me, I am commanded to go. And that’s why we wanted to see you. Lady Mother, I think the time has come for us to act.”
“Act?” I say blankly.
“We have to defend the queen and the princess against this madness. The time is now. Clearly, if he is parading Henry Fitzroy as his heir, he is going to put the princess aside. So I thought that I would take Geoffrey with me, in my household, and when we get to Calais, he can slip away and meet with Reginald. He can give him a report of our friends and kinsmen in England, take a message to the Pope, carry a letter for the queen to her nephew the King of Spain. We can tell Reginald that one strong ruling from the Pope against Henry will put a stop to this whole thing. If the Pope were to decide against Henry, then he would have to take the queen back. The Pope has to speak out. He can delay no longer. The king is pushing on, but he is blind as a mole in a tunnel. He is taking nobody with him.”
“Yet nobody defies him,” I observe.
“That’s what we must tell Reginald, that we will defy him.” Montague takes the challenge without flinching. “It has to be us. If not us, then who will stand against him? It should have been the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest duke in the land, but he is already dead on the scaffold and his son is a broken man. Ursula can do nothing with him—I’ve already asked her. The Duke of Norfolk should advise the king, but Anne Boleyn is his niece, and his daughter is married to the king’s bastard. He’s not going to argue against the promotion of the unworthy. Charles Brandon should advise the king, but Henry banished him from court for one word against her.
“As to the Church, it should be defended by the Archbishop of York, or of Canterbury; but Wolsey is dead and Archbishop Warham is dead and the king is going to put the Boleyn’s own chaplain in his place. John Fisher is unfailingly brave, but the king ignores him and he is old and his health is broken. The Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, handed back his seal of office rather than speak out, our own brother was silenced with a fist, and now the king listens only to men without principle. His greatest advisor, Thomas Cromwell, is neither of the Church nor of the nobility. He’s a man from nowhere without education, like an animal. He seeks to serve only the king, like a dog. The king has been seduced and entrapped by bad advisors. We have to win him back from them.”
“It has to be us, there is no one but us,” Geoffrey exclaims.
“Henry Courtenay?” I suggest, trying to escape the burden of destiny, naming our Plantagenet kinsman, the Marquess of Exeter.
“He’s with us,” Montague says shortly. “Heart and soul.”
“Can’t he do it?” I ask cravenly.
“On his own?” Geoffrey mocks me. “No.”
“He’ll do it with us. Together we are the white rose,” Montague says gently. “We are the Plantagenets, the natural rulers of England. The king is our cousin. We have to bring him back to his own.”
I look at their two eager faces and think that their father kept me in obscurity and short of money so that I would never have to take a decision like this, so that I would never have to take up my duty as a natural leader of the country, so that I would never have to steer the destiny of the kingdom. He hid me from power so that I should not have to make this sort of choice. But I cannot be hidden any longer. I have to defend the princess in my charge, I cannot deny my loyalty to the queen, my friend, and my boys are right—this is the destiny of our family.
Besides—the king was once a little boy and I taught him to walk. I loved his mother and promised I would keep her sons safe. I can’t abandon him to the terrible mistakes he is making. I can’t let him destroy his inheritance and his honor for the Boleyn bagatelle, I cannot let him put a bastard boy in the place of our true-born princess. I cannot let him enact his own curse by disinheriting a Tudor.
“Very well,” I say at last, and with deep reluctance. “But you must be very, very careful. Nothing written down, nothing told to anyone except those we can trust, not even a word in confession. This must be absolutely a secret. Not a whisper to your wives, especially I don’t want the children to know anything of this.”
“The king doesn’t pursue the families of suspects,” Geoffrey reassures me. “Ursula was unhurt by the sentence against her father-in-law. Her boy is safe.”
I shake my head. I can’t bear to remind him that I saw my eleven-year-old brother taken to the Tower and he never came out again. “Even so. It’s secret,” I repeat. “The children are to know nothing.”
I take out the emblem that Tom Darcy gave me, the embroidered badge of the five wounds of Christ with the white rose of York above it. I spread it flat on the table so that they can see it. “Swear on this badge, that this remains secret,” I say.
“I so swear.” Montague puts his hand on the badge, and I put my hand on his, and Geoffrey puts his hand on top.
“I swear,” he says.
“I swear,” I say.
We are handclasped for a moment and then Montague releases me with a little smile, and examines the badge.