‘My lord? What is your wish?’
‘What d’you think would be right?’ he asks me.
‘I think that there is no need for a king as strong and as young as you to trouble himself at all,’ I flatter him.
He gestures to his leg. ‘I am half a man,’ he says bitterly.
‘You will get better. You will be riding again. You have the health and strength of a man half your age. You always recover. You have this terrible wound and you live with it, you defeat it. I see you conquer it like an enemy, day after day.’
He is pleased. ‘They don’t think that.’ He nods irritably towards the door. ‘They are thinking of my death.’
‘They think only of themselves,’ I say, condemning them generally in order to maintain my own position. ‘What do they want?’
‘They want their own kin to have preference,’ he says shortly. ‘Or their candidate. And they all hope to rule the kingdom by ruling Edward.’
Slowly I nod, as if the naked ambition of the courtiers is a sad revelation to me. ‘And what do you think, my lord? Nothing matters more than what you think is right.’
He shifts his seat and winces with the pain. He leans a little closer. ‘I have been watching you,’ he says.
His words ring in my head like a warning bell. He has been watching me. What has he seen? The rolled manuscript of psalms going to the copyist? The mornings of study with the two princesses? My recurring nightmare of closed doors at the top of a damp stair? My erotic daydreams of Thomas? Can I have spoken in my sleep? Can I have said his name? Have I been such a fool as to lie beside the king and breathe the name of another man?
I swallow on a dry throat. ‘Have you, my lord?’
He nods. ‘I have been watching how you spend time with Lady Elizabeth, how you are always a good friend to Lady Mary. I see how they enjoy each other’s company, how you have brought them both into your rooms and how they are blooming under your care.’
I nod, but I don’t dare to speak. I don’t yet know what he is thinking.
‘I have seen you with my son, Edward. I am told that you send each other notes in Latin in which he says he is your schoolmaster.’
‘It is a jest,’ I say, still smiling. ‘Nothing more.’ I cannot tell from his grim expression whether he is pleased with this intimacy or whether he suspects me of deploying his children to further my own ends, like the courtiers. I don’t know what to say.
‘You have made a family out of three children with three very different mothers,’ he says. Still, I cannot be sure if this is a good or a bad thing to have done. ‘You have taken the son of an angel and the daughter of a whore and the daughter of a Spanish princess and brought them together.’
‘They are all the children of one great father,’ I remind him faintly.
His hand shoots out as if he is slapping a fly and grabs my wrist too quickly for me to flinch. ‘You are certain?’ he asks. ‘You are certain of Elizabeth?’
I can almost smell my fear over the stink of the wound. I think of her mother, Anne Boleyn, sweating at the May Day joust, knowing her danger but not knowing what form it would take. ‘Certain?’
‘You don’t think I was cuckolded?’ he demands. ‘You don’t think she is another man’s child? Do you deny her mother’s guilt? I had her mother beheaded for that guilt.’
She is the spit of him. Her brassy hair, her white skin, her stubborn little pout of a mouth. But if I deny her mother’s guilt I accuse him of being a wife-killer, a jealous fool who put an innocent woman to death on the gossip of old midwives. ‘Whatever Anne Boleyn did in later years, I believe that Elizabeth is yours,’ I say carefully. ‘She is a little copy of you. She is Tudor through and through.’
He nods, greedy for reassurance.
‘Whatever her dam, nobody could deny her sire,’ I continue.
‘You see me in her?’
‘Her scholarship alone,’ I say, denying Anne Boleyn’s powerful intelligence and commitment to reform, in order to secure the safety of her daughter. ‘Her love of books and languages – that’s all you.’
‘And you say that, who see my children altogether, as no-one else has ever done?’
‘Lord husband, I brought them together as I thought it would be your wish.’
‘It is,’ he says finally. His stomach churns – I can hear it gurgle – and then he belches noisily. ‘It is.’
I can smell the sourness of his breath. ‘I am glad to have done the right thing for love of you and for love of your children,’ I say cautiously. ‘I wanted the whole country to see the beautiful royal family that you have made.’
He nods. ‘I am going to restore the girls to their place,’ he announces. ‘I am going to name them both as princesses. Mary will follow Prince Edward to the throne if she should survive him and he has no heir – God forbid it. After her: Elizabeth, and after her: my niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, and my Scots sister’s line.’
It is against the will of God and against tradition that the king shall name who comes after him. It is God who chooses kings, just as he chose this one – a second son – by taking all other heirs to Himself. God calls a king to his throne, God creates the order of birth and the survival of his chosen. But since the king rules the church in England and he holds the throne in England, who is going to stop him naming his heirs? Certainly not those men that he bundled from the room for arguing with him. Certainly not I.
‘Prince Edward will be king,’ I confirm. ‘And his children as yet unborn, who come after him.’
‘God bless them,’ he says mistily. He pauses. ‘I have always feared for him,’ he continues very quietly. ‘The child of a sainted mother, you know.’
‘I know,’ I say. Jane again. ‘God bless her.’
‘I think of her all the time. I think of her sweet nature and her early death. She died to give me an heir, she died in my service.’
I nod as if I am overwhelmed at the thought of her sacrifice.
‘When I am ill, when I fear I may never get well, I think that at least I will be with her.’
‘Don’t say it,’ I murmur, and I really mean it.
‘And people say terrible things. They say there is a curse, they speak of a curse, they say such things – a curse on Tudor boys, on our line.’
‘I’ve never heard it,’ I say stoutly. Of course I have. The rebels in the North were certain that the Tudor line would die out for its sins against the church and against the Plantagenets. They called him the Mouldwarp – a beast who was undermining his own kingdom.
‘You haven’t?’ he says hopefully.
I shake my head. Everyone said that the Tudors were cursed for killing the York princes in the Tower. How should a prince-killer be blessed? But if the king thought this, how could he dare to plan a future, he who killed the Plantagenet heirs: Lady Margaret Pole, and her innocent son and grandson? He, who beheaded two wives on suspicion?
‘I have heard nothing like that.’
‘Good. Good. But it’s why I keep him so safe. I guard him against murderers, against disease, against ill fortune. I guard him as my only treasure.’
‘I will guard him too,’ I promise.
‘So we will trust to God for Edward, pray that he gets strong sons, and in the meantime I shall put an act through parliament to name the girls as coming after him.’
England has never had a reigning queen, but I am not going to point this out either. I don’t know how to raise the question of who will be Lord Protector during Edward’s minority. That is to suggest the king might die within the next eleven years, and he won’t want to hear that.