“Have you ever spoken privately with the Dowager Princess of Wales?” she asks me.
“Not much,” I say. I don’t know what answer she wants to hear. But I can tell by the grim lines grooved around her mouth that she is very displeased with somebody. I only hope it’s not me.
“Did she tell you anything of our beloved son Arthur?”
I note that my grandmother now refers to Arthur as our beloved son, as if my mother had never been at all. “She once said that he asked her to comfort us in our loss,” I reply.
“Not that,” the old lady snaps. “Not that. Did she say anything about her marriage, before he was ill?”
“Alas, it never happened for us,” I think to myself. Aloud, I say: “No. She hardly speaks to me.”
I see my grandmother’s face fold up into an expression of deep displeasure. Something has occurred that she dislikes—someone will be sorry for that. She puts a bony hand over mine, a deep, rich ruby glowing on her finger, the band clipping my knuckle. “You ask her,” she orders. “Ask her for advice. You are a young woman, about to be married. Ask her for the advice of a mother. What takes place in the marriage bed. Whether she was afraid, or in pain on her wedding night.”
I am quite shocked. I am a royal bride. I am not supposed to know anything. I am not supposed to ask.
She makes a little impatient noise in the back of her throat. “Ask her,” she says. “And then come and tell me exactly what she says.”
“But why?” I say, bemused. “Why am I to ask her? It was more than a year ago.”
The face she turns to me is bleached with fury. I have never seen her like this before. “She is saying they never bedded,” she hisses. “Age sixteen and near six months married, and now she says they never bedded? Put to bed before the whole court and rising up smiling in the morning with not a word against it? And now she says that she is a virgin untouched.”
“But why should she say such a thing?”
“Her mother!” my lady grandmother exclaims as if the words are an insult. “Her clever, wicked mother, Isabella of Castile, will have told her to deny Arthur so that she can marry without a dispensation, so she can be a virgin bride.”
Now she can’t sit still, she is so enraged. She gets up from her prie-dieu and strides about the small space, her black skirts swishing the rushes on the floor back and forth so they release the perfume of bedstraw, meadowsweet, and lavender in dusty clouds. “Virgin bride? A viper bride! I know what they are thinking, I know what they are planning. But I will see her dead before she takes my son’s throne.”
I am frightened. I crouch down on my footstool like a fat duckling in the nest when a sleek raptor flies over. My grandmother suddenly stops, puts her hands on my shoulder like a stooping peregrine. Her grip is as hard as a claw. I look up waveringly.
“You don’t want her to marry Harry?” I whisper. “I don’t either.” I try a sycophantic smile. “I don’t like her. I don’t want her to marry my brother.”
“Your father,” she says, and it is as if she shatters into a thousand sharp pieces of jealousy and grief. “I am certain that she wants to seduce and marry your father! She has set her sights on my son! My boy, my precious boy! But she will never do it. I will never allow it.”
DURHAM HOUSE, LONDON, ENGLAND, MARCH 1503
Unwilling and uncertain, I obey my grandmother and go to visit my sister-in-law, Katherine. I find her seated in her privy chamber hunched over a small fire. She is wrapped in a dark shawl and wearing a black gown, in double mourning, as we all are, but she looks up and springs to her feet when she sees me and her smile is bright.
“How lovely to see you. Did you bring Mary?”
“No,” I say, irritated. “Why should I bring her?”
She laughs at my bad temper. “No, no, I am so pleased you came alone, now we can be cozy.” She nods at the servant who has shown me into the room. “You can put on another log,” she says, as if firewood should be used carefully. She turns to me: “Will you have a glass of small ale?”
I accept a glass and then I have to laugh when I see her sip hers and put it aside. “You still don’t like it?”
She shakes her head and laughs. “I don’t think I ever will.”
“What did you drink in Spain?”
“Oh, we had clean water,” she says. “We had fruit juices, and sherbets, light wines and ice from the ice houses.”
“Ice? Water?”
She shrugs, with that little gesture, as if she wants to forget the luxuries of her home at the Alhambra Palace. “All sorts of things,” she says. “They don’t matter now.”
“I would think you would want to go home,” I say, raising the subject in obedience to my grandmother.
“Would you?” she asks, as if she is interested in my opinion. “Would you want to go home and leave your husband’s country if you were widowed?”
I have not thought of it. “I suppose so.”
“I don’t. England is my home now. And I am Dowager Princess of Wales.”
“You won’t ever be queen,” I say bluntly.
“I will, if I marry your brother,” she says.
“You won’t marry my father?”
“No. What an idea!”
We are both silent. “My lady grandmother thought that was your intention,” I say awkwardly.
She looks sideways at me as if she is about to laugh. “Did she send you here to stop me?”
I can’t help but giggle. “Not exactly, but, you know . . .”
“To spy on me,” she says agreeably.
“She can’t bear the thought of him remarrying,” I say. “Actually, neither can I.”
She puts her arm around my shoulders. Her hair smells of roses. “Of course not,” she says. “I have no intention, and my mother would never allow it.”
“But they don’t insist you go home?”
She looks into the fire, and I am able to study her exquisite profile. I would think she could marry anyone she chose.
“I expect them to work out the dowry payments and betroth me to Harry,” she says.
“But if they don’t?” I press her. “If my lady grandmother wants Harry for another princess?”
She turns and looks me directly in the eye, her beautiful face open to my scrutiny. “Margaret, I pray that this never happens to you. To love and to lose a husband is a terrible grief. But the only comfort I have is that I will do what my parents require, what Arthur wanted, and what God Himself has set as my destiny. I will be Queen of England. I have been called Princess of Wales since I was a baby in the nursery, I learned it as I learned my name. I won’t change my name now.”
I am stunned by her certainty. “I hope it never happens to me too. But if it did—I wouldn’t stay in Scotland. I’d come home to England.”
“You can’t do what you want when you are a princess,” she says simply. “You have to obey God and the king and queen, your mother and father. You’re not free, Margaret. You’re not like a plowman’s daughter. You are doing the work of God, you are going to be mother to a king, you are one below the angels, you have a destiny.”
I look around the bare room, and I notice for the first time that one or two of the tapestries are missing from the walls, and that there are gaps in the collection of silver plate on the sideboard. “Do you have enough money?” I ask her diffidently. “Enough for your household.”
She shakes her head without shame. “No,” she says. “My father will not send me an allowance, he says I am the responsibility of the king, and your father will not pay me my widow’s dower until all my bridal money has been paid to him. I am between two millstones and they are grinding me down.”
“But what will you do?”