It is Mary who explains:
You will have heard that the Boleyn girl Mary Carey has given birth to a boy. The king our brother is pleased, as any man is pleased, to have a healthy son to show to the world. His second healthy bastard boy. They are calling him Henry but he will take the husband’s surname of Carey. This spares the queen the humiliation of another bastard named Fitzroy, but that is all that she is spared. Everyone knows that the boy is of the king’s fathering and so everyone knows that it must be the queen’s fault that they only have one child, and that one a frail girl. Katherine is fasting more than ever, she hardly ever eats at dinner, and her hair shirt has scraped her skin raw on her shoulders and her hips. I really think that she will mortify her flesh to death and then Harry will be free. You would be heartbroken to see her, you who love her so well. I, her other sister, can do nothing but watch as she tortures herself. It is unbearable.
The Boleyn girl Mary seems to have lost the attention of our brother who is now publicly at the feet of her sister Anne Boleyn. She queens it around the court as if she were royal born. You would not believe how this girl from next to nowhere behaves at a royal court, at our court. Not even you and I, as princesses of the blood, were ever allowed these freedoms. She takes precedence wherever she can and also where she should not, and Harry leads her in to dinner and out to dance as if she were queen. It is quite extraordinary, she walks before duchesses as if she had a right. Katherine smiles with almost saintly dignity but anyone can see that she is near to despair. I am called upon to admire and accompany the Boleyn girl and I often say that I am unwell or too tired or that I have to go home. I pretend to be sick so that I do not appear to be in her service. Truly, this is how she makes it appear. She decides to do something, and she looks at Harry, and the next moment we are all running to her bidding. It is like a terrible masque of a court, like players trying to enact royalty. There is no grace or laughter or beauty here at all any more, there is just posturing and bitter laughter, the terrible cynicism of the young and the queen’s loneliness.
What makes it worse is that I still don’t think that she is his lover. She acts the part of a frantic tormentor who will not leave him alone and yet will not submit to him. She’s always touching him and touching her lips, caressing him and putting her hands on her own narrow waist, but she does not let him touch her. She seems to love him to damnation but she will not sin. And if she will not be his mistress—what is going to happen? Charles says that if Harry would just swive her it would all be over in a sennight, but Charles always does say things like that, and Mademoiselle Boleyn is not a girl to be simply taken for love.
You remember when we were children and Sir Thomas More brought Erasmus to visit and Harry couldn’t think of anything else until he had composed a poem, and read it aloud to the great philosopher? He’s like that now. He wants her to see him as exceptional. Or when he first saw our sister Katherine? He’s like that again. He can’t seem to be himself unless she is admiring him. He has ordered new jackets, he is writing poetry, he is striving for eminence like a boy in the grip of calf love. Katherine is fasting and praying for his soul. So am I.
So now I know why Harry is so tolerant of me. Now I know why Katherine’s rules no longer apply to us all. I taste triumph on my tongue, I dance a jig to the song in my head. At last Katherine’s power over Harry is waning. He has a boy that she could not give him and he is thinking of that boy as his heir. Now another woman has given him a second boy and it is blindingly obvious that it is Katherine’s fault that Harry has no legitimate son and heir to inherit our newly won Tudor crown. For years, Katherine’s disappointment and sorrow have been Harry’s disappointment and sorrow, her refusal to question the ways of God has been a model for him, her cleaving to the laws of unending marriage has been her only answer to their disappointment. But it is not his way any longer. Now he can see for himself that God does not intend him to die without a son and heir. Now he has a second boy in the cradle—as if God is saying to the world: Harry can get a boy, Harry shall have sons—it was Katherine all along who could not bear and birth one. This is not a sorrow from God mortifying the golden couple who seemed to have everything, this is a sorrow from God on Katherine, on her alone. Their marriage is not the spar that they must cling to in the wreckage of their hopes, it is their marriage itself that is the wreckage, Katherine’s wreckage. Without her, Harry can make a son.
So I doubt very much that Katherine will command me again to return to my husband, and I doubt that my brother will insist on marriage until death. Now I understand why he has told Archibald that if there is good evidence for a divorce, then even a royal Tudor divorce may go ahead. Now I know that Harry, nominated Defender of the Faith, who swore that marriage must continue until death, does not think like this any more.
And Katherine, the sister who threatened me that I would be no sister to her, may find instead that she is no wife. And I would have to be an angel in heaven not to think that her hard-heartedness to me is justly repaid.
I am to see my son in his privy chamber, with no one present but my former husband, Archibald, and James’s trusted guardian Davy Lyndsay. I am to have no companions; I am to come alone. There is no point objecting to the presence of Archibald since he has power as great as a king himself; he rules the council, he guards James. Everything is in his gift.
I dress carefully for this meeting in a gown of Tudor green with lighter green sleeves and a necklace of emeralds, and emeralds on my hood. I wonder if James will find me much changed. I am thirty-six years old, no longer a young woman, and I am finding a few silver hairs at my temples. I pluck them out and wonder if Mary has silver among the gold yet? Sometimes I think I look as if I have had a hard life, a life of continual struggle, and then at other times I catch a glimpse of myself in a looking glass laughing and I think that I am still a beautiful woman, and if I could only marry the man that I love and see my son on the throne of Scotland then I could be a happy woman and a good wife.
The double doors of the privy chamber—once my privy chamber—swing open, and I go in. As Archibald promised, the room is empty but for him, Davy, and my son, who is seated on the throne, his legs just reaching the floor. I forget the speech that I have prepared and I run towards him. “James! Oh, James!” I say. Abruptly, I stop and drop into a curtsey, but he is already off the throne and tumbling down the steps and into my arms.
He is my love, he is my boy, he is different and yet completely unchanged. I hold him tightly to me and feel his warm head under my chin; he has grown since I last saw him. He has filled out too, and his arms around my waist are strong. He says, “Lady Mother,” and I hear the adorable croak of a boy whose voice is breaking. He will lose his childish treble and I will never hear it again. The thought of that makes me sob and he looks up into my face and his honest hazel eyes gaze straight at me, and I know that I have him back, just as he was. He has forgiven me, he has missed me. I am so sorry to have failed him, but I am so flooded with delight to be holding him again. He is smiling and I brush the tears from my eyes and smile back at him.
“Lady Mother . . .” is all he can say.
“I am happy . . .” I cannot finish the sentence, I cannot catch my breath. “I am so happy, so happy.”