“Arrested?” I whisper my greatest fear.
“Run away,” she says shortly.
“Where?” I ask, horrified. “Oh God. Where has he gone?”
“To the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, to raise an army against the king.” She chokes as if the words are sticking in her throat, but she has to ask me. “Margaret, tell me—you knew nothing of this?”
I shake my head, I take her hand, I meet her eyes.
“Swear it,” she demands. “Swear it.”
“Nothing. Not a word. I swear it. He did not confide in me.”
We are both silent as we think of those that he usually does confide in: the queen’s brother-in-law, William Courtenay; our cousin Thomas Grey; our cousin William de la Pole; my second cousin George Neville; our kinsman Henry Bourchier. We are a well-recorded, well-known network of cousins and kinsmen tightly interwoven by marriage and blood. The Plantagenets spread across all England, a thrusting, courageous, seemingly endless family of ambitious boys, warrior men, and fertile women. And against us—only four Tudors: one old lady, her anxious son, and their heirs Arthur and Harry.
“What’s going to happen?” I ask. I get to my feet and walk across the room to close the window. “I’m all right now.”
She stretches out her arms to me and we hold each other close for a moment, as if we were still young women waiting for the news from Bosworth, filled with dread.
“He can never come home,” she says unhappily. “We’ll never see Cousin Edmund again. Never. And the king’s spies are certain to find him. He employs hundreds of watchers now, wherever Edmund is, they’ll find him . . .”
“And then they’ll find everyone whom he has ever spoken with,” I predict.
“Not you?” she confirms again. She drops her voice to a whisper. “Margaret, really—not you?”
“Not me. Not one word. You know I am deaf and dumb to treason.”
“And then either this year, or the next, or the year after, they will bring him home and kill him,” she says flatly. “Our cousin Edmund. We’ll have to watch him walk to the scaffold.”
I give a little moan of distress. We grip hands. But in the silence, as we think of our cousin and the scaffold on Tower Hill, we both know that we have already survived even worse than this.
I do not stay for the royal wedding but go ahead of the young couple to Ludlow to make sure that the place is warm and comfortable for their arrival. As the king smilingly greets all his Plantagenet kinsmen with excessive, cloying affection I am glad to be away from the court for fear that his charming conversation should delay me in the hall while his spies search my rooms. The king is at his most dangerous when he appears happy, seeking the company of his court, announcing amusing games, urging us to dance, laughing and strolling around the banquet while outside, in the darkened galleries and narrow streets, his spies do their work. I may have nothing to hide from Henry Tudor; but that does not mean that I want to be watched.
In any case, the king has ruled that the young couple shall come to Ludlow after their wedding, without delay, and I must get things ready for them. The poor girl will have to dismiss most of her Spanish companions and travel cross-country in the worst winter weather to a castle nearly two hundred miles from London and a lifetime away from the comfort and luxury of her home. The king wants Arthur to show his bride, to impress everyone along the road with the next generation of the Tudor line. He is thinking of ways to establish the power and glamour of the new throne: he is not thinking of a young woman, missing her mother, in a strange land.
LUDLOW CASTLE, SHROPSHIRE, WINTER 1501
I have the Ludlow servants turn the place upside down and scour the floors and brush the stone walls and then hang the rich, warm tapestries. I have carpenters rehang the doors to try to prevent drafts. I buy a huge new barrel sawn in half from the wine merchants to serve the princess as a bath; the queen my cousin writes to me that the Infanta expects to bathe daily, an outlandish habit that I hope she will give up when she feels the cold winds that buffet the towers of Ludlow Castle. I have new curtains made and lined for the bed that is to be hers—and we hope the prince will find his way to it every night. I order new linen sheets from the drapers in London and they send me the best, the very best that money can buy. I scour the floors and put down fresh strewing herbs so that all the rooms smell hauntingly of midsummer hay and meadow flowers. I sweep the chimneys so that her fires of apple wood can burn brightly, I demand from the countryside all around the little castle the finest of food: the sweetest honey, the best-brewed ale, the fruits and vegetables that have been stored since harvest, the barrels of salted fish, the smoked meats, the great rounds of cheese that this part of the world makes so well. I warn them I will need a constant supply of fresh game, and that they will have to kill their beasts and chickens to serve the castle. I have all of my hundreds of servants, all of my dozen heads of household ensure that their division is as ready as it can be; and then I wait, we all wait, for the arrival of the couple who are the hope and light of England, and who are to live under my care, learn to be Prince and Princess of Wales, and conceive a son as soon as possible.
I am looking across the muddled thatched roofs of the little town to the east, hoping to see the bobbing standards of the royal guard coming down the wet, slippery track towards the Gladford gate, when I see instead a single horseman, riding fast. I know at once that this is bad news: my first thought is for the safety of my Plantagenet kinsmen, as I throw on my cape and hurry down to the castle gateway so that I am ready, heart pounding, as he trots up the cobbled road from the broad main street and jumps off before me, kneels, and offers me a sealed letter. I take it and break the seal. My first fear is that my rebel kinsman Edmund de la Pole has been captured, and named me as a fellow conspirator. I am so frightened that I can’t read the scrawled letters on the page. “What is it?” I say shortly. “What news?”
“Lady Margaret, I am sorry to tell you the children were very ill when I left Stourton,” he says.
I blink at the crabbed writing and make myself read the short note from my steward. He writes that nine-year-old Henry has been taken ill with a red rash and fever. Arthur, who is seven years old, continues well, but they are afraid that Ursula is ill. She is crying and seems to have a headache and she certainly has a fever as he writes. She is only three years old, a dangerous time for a child emerging from babyhood. He does not even mention the baby, Reginald. I have to assume that he lives and is well in the nursery. Surely, my steward would have told me if my baby was already dead?
“Not the Sweat,” I say to the messenger, naming the new illness that we all fear, the disease that followed the Tudor army and nearly wiped out the City of London when they assembled to welcome him. “Tell me it’s not the Sweat.”
He crosses himself. “I pray not. I think not. No one had . . .” He breaks off. He means to say that no one had died—proof that it is not the Sweat, which kills a healthy man in a day, without warning. “They sent me on the third day of the oldest boy’s illness,” he says. “He had lasted three days as I left. Maybe he continues . . .”
“And the baby Reginald?”
“Kept with his wet nurse at her cottage, away from the house.”
I see my own fear in his pale face. “And you? How are you, sirrah? No signs?”
Nobody knows how sickness travels from one place to another. Some people believe that messengers carry it on their clothes, on the paper of the message, so that the very person who brings you a warning brings your death as well.
“I’m well, please God,” he says. “No rash. No fever. I would not have come near you otherwise, my lady.”
“I’d better go home,” I say. I am torn between my duty to the Tudors and my fear for my children. “Tell them in the stable I’ll leave within the hour, and that I’ll need an escort and a spare riding horse.”
He nods and leads his horse through the echoing archway and turns into the stable yard. I go to tell my ladies to pack my cloth
es and that one of them will have to ride with me in this wintry weather, for we have to get to Stourton; my children are ill and I must be with them. I grit my teeth as I rap out orders, the number of men in the guard, the food we will have to carry with us, the oiled cape I want strapped on my saddle in case of rain or snow, and the one that I will wear. I don’t let myself think about the destination. Above everything, I don’t let myself think about my children.
Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family the Plantagenets like a faithful black hound?
STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, WINTER 1501
I find my home in a state of feverish anxiety. All three of the children are ill; only the baby, Reginald, is not sweating nor showing a red rash. I go to the nursery at once. The oldest, nine-year-old Henry, is sleeping heavily in the big four-poster bed; his brother Arthur curled up beside him, and a few paces away my little girl, Ursula, tosses and turns in her truckle bed. I look at them and I feel my teeth grit.
At my nod, the nursemaid turns Henry onto his back and lifts his nightgown. His chest and belly are covered with red spots, some of them merging into one another, his face is swollen with the rash and behind his ears, and on his neck there is no normal skin at all. He is flushed and sore all over.
“Is it the measles?” I ask her shortly.
“That, or the pox,” she says.
Dozing beside Henry, Arthur cries a little when he sees me and I lift him from the hot sheets and sit him on my knee. I can feel his small body is burning hot. “I’m thirsty,” he says. “Thirsty.” The nurse gives me a cup of small ale and he drinks three gulps and then pushes it away. “My eyes hurt.”
“We kept the shutters closed,” the nursemaid says quietly to me. “Henry complained that the light hurt his eyes, so we closed them. I hope we did right.”
“I think so,” I say. I feel such dread at my own ignorance. I don’t know what should be done for these children, nor even what is wrong with them. “What does the doctor say?”
Arthur leans back against me, even the nape of his neck is hot under my kiss.
“The doctor says that it is probably the measles and that, God willing, they will all three recover. He says to keep them warm.”
We are certainly keeping them warm. The room is stifling, a fire in the grate and a glowing brazier under the window, the beds heaped with covers and all three children sweating, flushed with heat. I put Arthur back in his hot sheets and go to the little bed where Ursula is lying limp and silent. She is only three, she is tiny. When she sees me, she raises her small hand and waves, but she does not speak or say my name.
I round with horror on the nursemaid.
“Her mind hasn’t gone!” she exclaims defensively. “She’s just wandering because of the heat. The doctor said that if the fever breaks she will be well. She sings a little and she whimpers a little in her sleep, but she hasn’t lost her mind. At any rate, not yet.”
I nod, trying to be patient in this overheated room with my children lying around like drowned corpses on a strand. “When does the doctor come again?”
“He’ll be on his way now, your ladyship. I promised I’d send for him as soon as you arrived, so that he could talk with you. But he swears that they will recover.” She looks at my face. “Probably,” she adds.
“And the rest of the household?”
“A couple of page boys have it. One of them was sick before Henry. And the kitchen maid who looks after the hens has died. But no one else has taken it yet.”
“And the village?”
“I don’t know about the village.”
I nod. I will have to ask the doctor about that, all sickness on our lands is my responsibility. I will have to order our kitchen to send out food to cottages where there is illness, I will have to make sure that the priest visits them, and that when they die they have enough money for the gravediggers. If not, I will have to pay for a grave and a wooden cross. If it gets worse I will have to order that they dig plague pits to bury the bodies. These are my obligations as the lady of Stourton. I have to care for everyone in my domain, not just my children. And as usual—as is always the case—we have no idea what causes the illness, no idea what will cure it, no idea when it will pass on to some other poor blighted village and kill people there.
“Have you written to my lord?” I ask.
My steward, waiting on the threshold of the open door, replies for her. “No, my lady, we knew he was traveling with the Prince of Wales but we didn’t know where they were on the road. We didn’t know where to write to him.”
“Write in my name, and send it to Ludlow,” I say. “Bring it to me before you seal and send it. He will be at Ludlow within a few days. He might even be there now. But I will have to stay here until everyone is well again. I can’t risk taking this illness to the Prince of Wales and his bride, whether it is the measles or the pox.”
“God forbid,” the steward says devoutly.
“Amen,” the nursemaid replies, praying for the prince even while her hand is on my son’s hot red face, as if no one ever matters more than a Tudor.
STOURTON CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE, SPRING 1502
I spend more than two months with my children at Stourton while they slowly, one after another, lose the heat from their blood, the spots from their skin, and the pain from their eyes. Ursula is the last to improve, and even when she is no longer ill she is quick to tire and moody, and she shades her eyes from the light with her hand. There are a few people sick in the village and one child dies. There is no Christmas feasting and I ban the village from coming to the castle for their Twelfth Night gifts. There is much complaining that I have refused to give out food and wine and little fairings, but I am afraid of the sickness in the village and terrified that if I let the tenants and their families come to the castle they will bring disease with them.
Nobody knows what caused the illness, nobody knows if it has gone for good or will return with the hot weather. We are as helpless before it as the cattle herd before a murrain; all we can do is suffer like lowing cows and hope that the worst of it passes us by. When finally the last man is up and about and the village children back to work I am so deeply relieved that I pay for a Mass in the village church, to give thanks that the illness seems to have passed us by for now, that we have been spared in this hard winter season, even if this summer the warm winds bring us the plague.
Only when I have stood at the front of the church and seen it filled with a congregation no thinner, no dirtier, no more desperate-looking than usual, only when I have ridden through the village and asked at each ramshackle door if they are all well, only when I have confirmed the health of everyone in our household from the boys who scare the birds from the crops to my head steward, only then do I know it is safe to leave my children, and go back to Ludlow.
The children stand at the front door to wave good-bye, the nursemaid holds my baby Reginald in her arms. He smiles at me and waves his fat little hands. He calls: “Ma! Ma!” Ursula holds her hands cupped over her eyes to shield them against the morning sunlight. “Stand properly,” I say to her, as I swing up into the saddle. “Put your hands down at your sides, and stop scowling. Be good children, all four of you, and I will come home to see you soon.”
“When will you come?” Henry asks.
“In the summer,” I say to pacify him; in truth, I don’t know. If Prince Arthur and his new bride make a summer progress with the royal court, then I can come back to Stourton for all of the summer. But while they stay at Ludlow, under the protection of my husband, I have to be there too. I am not only a mother to these children; I have other duties. I am the lady of Ludlow and the guardian of the Prince of Wales. And I must play these parts perfectly, so that I can hide what I was born to be: a girl of the House of York, a White Rose.
I blow them a kiss, but already my mind is away from them
and on the road ahead. I nod to the Master of Horse and our little cavalcade—half a dozen men at arms, a couple of mules with my goods, three ladies-in-waiting on horseback, and a gaggle of servants—starts the long ride to Ludlow where I shall meet, for the first time, the girl who will be the next Queen of England: Katherine of Aragon.
LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, MARCH 1502
I am greeted by my husband in his rooms. He is working with two clerks and papers are spread all over the great table. As I come in, he waves them away, pushes back his chair, and greets me with a kiss on both cheeks. “You’re early.”
“The roads were good.”
“All well at Stourton?”
“Yes, the children are better at last,” I say.
“Good, good. I had your letter.” He looks relieved; he wants sons and healthy heirs like any man, and he is counting on our three boys to serve the Tudors and advance the family fortunes. “Have you dined, my dear?”
“Not yet, I’ll dine with you. Shall I meet the princess now?”
“As soon as you are ready. He wants to bring her to you himself,” he says, going back to sit down behind the table. He smiles at the thought of Arthur as a bridegroom. “He’s very keen that he should make the introduction. He asked me if he could bring her to you alone.”
The King's Curse Page 3