But perhaps Mary is a better sister to the queen than I, for she writes very gaily that the new baby is the prettiest of children with skin like the petal of a pale rose and that they are all delighted with a daughter.
And something very dreadful has happened. Bessie Blount, who was such a dear little maid-in-waiting to our sister, left court without leave from the queen and simply disappeared. The young woman has had a baby and, oh Maggie, I am sorry to say—she has had a boy and it is, without doubt, Harry’s son.
I put down her letter and walk to the window and look out, not seeing the waves cresting white on the gray waters as the wind moves across the loch. I think firstly: I need not worry; this does not matter. This baby will have no place in the line of inheritance, he is a bastard and counts for nothing. But then I think more coolly that he is the first Tudor bastard that Harry has ever made, and that counts for something. That counts for a lot. Bessie has shown the world that Harry can get a boy, and if the child lives, he will show the world that Harry can get a healthy boy.
This is no small thing on its own. And—in turn—it proves that the fault with all these dead heirs lies with Katherine, and not with my handsome brother. Everyone thought this before, but nobody dared to say it. Now it is proven as the truth. She is older than he—only by a few years, to be sure; but she is thirty-three now, with a string of miscarriages and stillbirths behind her. She comes from a family that is riddled with death and sickness, and in all these years she has managed only one delicate little girl. But Harry’s mistress, the lively, healthy, young Bessie, has given him a bonny boy in the fifth year of their affair. This is a triumphant proof of my brother’s virility and denies, contradicts, and silences forever the belief that the Tudors are cursed for their invasion of England and for the disappearance of the princes in the Tower. Whoever it was that killed the princes and was left with a curse on their line, it is not us. For I have a strong boy, Mary has Henry Brandon, and now my brother has a fat little bastard. They are calling him Henry Fitzroy. Henry for the king and Fitzroy to indicate a royal bastard. They could not have chosen two names that would hurt Katherine more. I should think it will break her heart. Now she will know what grief is. Once she taught heartbreak to me; now Bessie Blount has taught her.
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1519
Not until the leaves are turning to bronze and gold in the woods that surround the loch do I receive a reply from my brother, wrapped and sealed by Lord Dacre, whose messengers have carried it, and whose spies will have read it. I don’t care. At last, here is my safe conduct, this is my escape. I knew that my brother would respond to me and that Thomas Wolsey would find a way to make it right. I have no doubt that this is my invitation to return to London, get my accursed marriage dissolved and—if I know Thomas Wolsey—find a brilliant match. Why should he not? It was just what he was begging me to do three years ago, with my brother promising me that it would be the best choice that I ever made.
I take the letter to the little stone-walled room at the very top of the tower where I will not be disturbed and in my haste to open it I actually tear the heavy seal from the page. I see at once that it is not in Harry’s scrawl. He has dictated to a clerk. I imagine him, seated behind a table, sprawled and smiling, a glass of wine in his hand, Thomas Wolsey dealing out papers for signature like a winning hand of cards, as the groom of the ewery serves him dainties to eat. Charles Brandon, my self-seeking brother-in-law, lounges nearby, other men—Thomas Howard, Thomas Boleyn—stand back against the walls, quick to laugh, swift with a word of advice, as Harry dashes off a quick letter to me, one of the many duties that he has left too long, but which really cannot be delayed longer. It is nothing to him—an invitation to me to come to London. To me it is a release from prison.
At first, I cannot understand the words on the page. I have to read and then reread them, they are so far from what I was expecting. Harry is not encouraging. Instead he chooses to be stern, as pompous as a little chorister. He speaks of the divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony, and he tells me that all disagreement between husband and wife is evil, and a sin. I turn the page to be sure that he has signed this farrago. This from a man whose bastard has broken his wife’s heart!
Then I return to reading. Incredibly, he orders me to return to Archibald in thought and word and deed. We must live together as husband and wife or he will regard me as a sinner bound for hell, never more to be his sister. Archibald, his brother-in-law, has written to him, and Harry has listened to my faithless husband rather than to me. Perhaps this is the worst of all the terrible things that he says: that he has listened to Archibald and not to me. He has taken the man’s word for it, and been deaf to his own sister. Helpfully, he tells me that Archibald will take me back without complaint, that only with Archibald at my side can I hope to regain my authority in Scotland. Only with Archibald at my side will he, the king, or his spymaster Lord Dacre, support me. Ignorant as ever, he explains that Archibald has authority over the lords of Scotland, only he can keep me on the throne. I drop my head in my hands: Dacre will have read this. And all his spies.
Then Harry writes more. As if it were not enough to break my heart, he writes more, turning my shock into rage. He tells me that Katherine agrees. Apparently Katherine’s opinion counts heavily in all of this and she has decided that if I intend to defy God and live as a miserable sinner then I can be no sister of hers. I am not to come to England, I am not to divorce my husband, I am not to be happy. Katherine has decreed this, and so it will be. Katherine will not invite me to England: a divorced woman can never be her guest; her court could not be shamed, an adulteress could not come near her.
For ye are yet carnal—Harry quotes Saint Paul at me, as if I did not know by heart every word that the old woman-hater said—for whereof is there among you envying and strife and divisions, are ye not carnal?
I am so shocked by Harry’s tone, by his intent, by his leap from younger brother to preacher, from king to Pope, that I read the letter through several times in silence and then I go in silence down the steep stone stairs. One of my ladies is sitting in the window seat at the bottom. I wave away her exclamation at my white face and red eyes. “I must pray on this,” I say quietly.
“There is an Observant Friar from London,” she warns me. “Sent by the Queen of England to assist you. He is waiting to see you.”
Again? I can hardly believe it. Once again Katherine has sent me a confessor to advise me, just as she did after the death of James, after her orders killed James. She knows then, she knows that she has sent me a deadly blow and she hopes to soften it. “Who is he?”
“Father Bonaventure.”
“Ask him to wait in the chapel,” I say. “I will come in a moment.”
More than anger at Harry’s refusal to allow me to come to England, more than frustration at his misunderstanding my situation here—and how desperate for me that he does not have the wit to see the danger that I, my son, and the whole country are in!—more than all of this is my despair that Katherine should conspire with him, safe in the haven of complacent matrimony, and agree that what matters most—more than I! more than their own sister!—is the will of God. That they should invoke God and His holy laws against my all-too-mortal troubles, that Katherine should not write to me as a sister to offer her help to a woman just like her, publicly humiliated, crushed by neglect, trying to hold up her head in a world that laughs behind its hand—this is the worst thing about these smug joint letters that send me a friar and not a friend, that counsel me to return to my husband and say that I cannot come to them.