“Well, you shouldn’t tell me!” I burst out.
“No,” he concedes. “Except, I have to know. Richard said that there was a curse placed on the head of whoever killed his brother, the young king. The witch put it on—your mother’s mother, the white-witch queen, Elizabeth Woodville. She swore that whoever had taken the young king to his death would lose his son, and his son’s son, over and over till the line ended with a barren girl.”
I put my hand over my proud belly. I am not a barren girl. “I am with child,” I say defiantly.
“We have just lost our son,” he says, his voice curt and quiet. “And so I am forced to ask you. Do you think we have lost our son because there is a curse on you Tudors?”
“No,” I say furiously. “I think we lost him because your stinking country is dirty and cold, and half the children born will die of cold because they cannot breathe in smoky rooms and they cannot go outside in the killing cold air. It is your filthy country, it is your stupid midwives, it is your sickly wet nurses with their thin milk. It is not my curse.”
He nods as if this is interesting information. “But my other children live,” he observes. “In this filthy country with stupid midwives and sickly wet nurses and thin milk.”
“Not all of them. And anyway, I am carrying one. I am not a barren girl.”
He nods again, as if this is a true observation that he might jot in his notebook and discuss with his alchemist. “You are. I wish you good health. Try not to grieve too much for this one that is lost. You will endanger the one that you carry. And our boy is in heaven. We must know that he is innocent. He was baptized, he was christened. He may have been half yours, from the line of a usurper who killed children, and half mine, son of a regicide and patricide; we are a sinful pair of parents. But he was baptized against sin so we must pray that he is in heaven now.”
“I wish that I was in heaven with him!” I shout at him.
“With the sins of your family, how could you be?” he asks, and he leaves me. Just like that. Without even bowing.
Dear Katherine, I have lost my boy and my husband is most unkind to me. He has said the most dreadful things. The only thing that comforts me is that I am with child and hope that we will have another boy. Mary tells me that you are living very poorly and that there are no plans for your wedding to my brother. I am sorry for you. Now I have been brought very low myself, I understand better. I understand how unhappy you must be, and I think of you all the time. Who ever thought that anything could go so wrong for us who must be the favorites of God? Do you think there is any reason? There could not be a curse, of course? I will pray for you, Margaret the Queen.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1508
James rides with me from Stirling Castle to Holyroodhouse while the hilltops are white with snow and the road along the side of the gray river is hard with frost. I have a new steady horse that carries me and my neat round belly safely. We say nothing more about the child we have lost, hoping for the one that is coming this summer.
As soon as we get to Edinburgh, James goes off to the port of Leith where he is building ships and testing cannon. He wants to build another great port, away from the sandbanks. I say that I don’t know why he would want so many ships; my father also rules a country surrounded by seas and he does not have a fleet at his command. James smiles and chucks me under the chin as if I were an ignorant little sailmaker in one of his lofts, and says that perhaps he has a fancy to rule the seas and how shall I like to be queen of all the oceans?
So he is not at court when an emissary comes from my father, a watchful clerk by the name of Thomas Wolsey, who wants to see James about keeping the peace. This makes it particularly awkward for me to say that the king is not at court but testing the firing of new, bigger guns, and overseeing the building of warships.
But this Wolsey will not be denied, for Scotland has breached the alliance and he has a commission to make sure that James intends to keep the peace. It is all the fault of the bastard boys—causing trouble for me yet again. James Hamilton, the new-made Earl of Arran, who was ennobled on my wedding day, escorted the two of them to Erasmus in Italy and came home through England without a safe conduct and got himself arrested. Once again, we see the evil consequences of my husband’s ridiculous attention to his bastards; now it has caused real trouble.
I may not understand everything, though everyone is always trying to explain to me the endless terms and clauses of the treaty, but even I can see what Thomas Wolsey is talking about as we wait for James to return from Leith. Wolsey says that France is trying to get my husband to renew their traditional alliance, and my father is trying to get him to keep to the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. Since our marriage was part of the treaty, my husband should respect it as he does our marriage. He married a princess of England, so he should be at peace forever: that is what perpetual means. He should not make an alliance with France, and he does not need guns and a fleet of ships and the biggest cannon in the world.
Thomas Wolsey must explain this to my husband, so I send for him at once and tell him he must come home. Wolsey talks and talks and talks to me in the hope that I will persuade my husband to brush off the French, and confirm the alliance with England. But my husband is elusive and when he finally returns to court and I manage to speak to him alone he pats me on the cheek and says: “What’s my motto? What will be our son’s motto?”
“?‘In My Defense,’?” I say sullenly.
“Exactly,” he says. “I live my life, I make my alliances, I do everything every day in defense of my kingdom; and not even you, peerless princess that you are, will persuade me to endanger my country by insulting the French.”
“The French are no use to us,” I tell him. “The only alliance we need is with England.”
“I am sure you are right, my royal wife,” he says. “And if England becomes a more helpful neighbor than it is at the moment, then our alliance will long continue.”
“I hope you don’t forget that I was born an English princess before I was a Scots queen,” I say to him.
He slaps my bottom gently as if I were one of his sluts. “I never forget your importance,” he says, smiling. “I would never dare.”
“So what will you say to Thomas Wolsey?” I persist.
“I will meet with him, I will talk to him for hours,” he promises. “And at the end I will tell him what I intend to do, what I have always intended to do: to keep the peace with England and keep my friendship with France. Why would I befriend one and not the other? When each is as bad as the other? When all they both want is to swallow me up? And the only reason they care about us at all is to endanger the other.”
Wolsey has brought me a letter from Katherine and while he and James are locked in argument, I read it on my own, in my rooms. She is sympathetic, speaking kindly of the many women who lose a child, especially a first child, and urges me to rest and stay hopeful that God will give me a son and heir. I know of no reason that you should not be fertile and happy, she writes emphatically. I know of nothing against the Tudors. I take it in the spirit that it is meant—kindly sisterhood—and, anyway, I don’t want to think about curses and deaths in childbirth.