The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  “Very well,” I say dryly. I have no doubt that Arthur has considered that introducing me to the young lady whose parents demanded my brother was killed before they would send her to England is a task that should be handled carefully. Equally, I know that this idea will not have crossed the mind of my husband.

  I meet her as Arthur wishes, without ceremony, alone in the presence chamber of the Castle Warden of Ludlow, a great wood-paneled room immediately below her own apartment. There is a good fire in the grate and rich tapestries on the walls. It is not the glorious palace of the Alhambra; but equally it is nothing poor or shameful. I go to the hammered metal mirror and I adjust my headdress. My reflection looks dimly back at me, my dark eyes, pale clear skin, and pretty rosebud mouth—these are my best features. My long Plantagenet nose is my greatest disappointment. I straighten my headdress and feel the pins pull in my thickly coiled auburn hair, and then I turn from the mirror as a vanity that I should despise, and wait by the fireside.

  In a few moments I hear Arthur’s knock on the door and I nod to my lady-in-waiting who opens it and steps outside as Arthur comes in alone, bobs a swift bow to me as I curtsey to him, and then we kiss each other on both cheeks.

  “Are all three of them quite well?” he asks. “And the baby?”

  “Thanks be to God,” I say.

  He crosses himself quickly. “Amen. And you didn’t take it?”

  “It was surprising how few people took it this time,” I say. “We were very blessed. Just a couple of people in the village and only two deaths. The baby showed no signs at all. God is merciful indeed.”

  He nods. “May I bring the Princess of Wales to you?”

  I smile as he says her title with such care. “And how do you like being a married man, Your Grace?”

  The quick flush on his cheek tells me that he likes her a lot and is embarrassed to own it. “I like it well enough,” he says quietly.

  “You deal well together, Arthur?”

  The red in his cheek deepens and spreads to his forehead. “She is . . .” He breaks off. Clearly there are no words for what she is.

  “Beautiful?” I suggest.

  “Yes! And . . .”

  “Pleasing?”

  “Oh yes! And . . .”

  “Charming?”

  “She has such . . .” he starts and falls silent.

  “I had better see her. Clearly she is beyond describing.”

  “Ah, Lady Guardian, you are laughing at me but you will see . . .”

  He goes outside to fetch her. I had not realized we were keeping her waiting, and I wonder if she will be offended. After all, she is an Infanta of Spain and raised to be a very grand woman indeed.

  As the heavy wooden door opens I get to my feet and Arthur brings her into the room, bows, and steps out. He closes the door. The Princess of Wales and I are quite alone.

  My first thought is that she is so slight and so dainty that you would think her a portrait of a princess in stained glass, not a real girl at all. She has bronze-colored hair tucked modestly under a heavy hood, a tiny waist cinched in by a stomacher as big and heavy as a breastplate, and a high headdress draped in priceless lace, which falls to either side and shields her as if she might wear it down over her face like an infidel’s veil. She curtseys to me with her eyes and face downturned, and only when I take her hand and she glances up can I see that she has bright blue eyes and a shy pretty smile.

  She is pale with anxiety as I deliver my speech in Latin, welcoming her to the castle, and apologizing for my previous absence. I see her glance around for Arthur. I see her bite her lower lip as if to summon courage, and plunge into words. At once she speaks of the one thing that I would willingly never hear, especially from her.

  “I was sorry for the death of your brother, very sorry,” she says.

  I am quite astounded that she should dare to speak to me of this at all, let alone that she should do so with frankness and compassion.

  “It was a great loss,” I say coolly. “Alas, it is the way of the world.”

  “I am afraid that my coming . . .”

  I cannot bear for her to apologize to me for the murder that was done in her name. I cut her off with a few words. She looks at me, poor child, as if she would ask how she can comfort me. She looks at me as if she is ready to fall at my feet and confess it as her fault. It is unbearable for me that she should speak of my brother. I cannot hear his name on her lips, I cannot let this conversation continue or I will break down and weep for him in front of this young woman whose coming caused his death. He would be alive but for her. How can I speak calmly of this?

  I put out my hand to her to keep her at a distance, to silence her, but she grasps it, and makes a little curtsey. “It’s not your fault,” I manage to whisper. “And we must all be obedient to the king.”

  Her blue eyes are drowned in tears. “I am sorry,” she says. “So sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I say, to stop her saying another word. “And it was not his fault. Nor mine.”

  And then, strangely, we live together happily. The courage that she showed when she faced me and told me that she was sorry for my grief and that she would have wanted to prevent it, I see in her every day. She misses her home terribly; her mother writes only rarely, and then briefly. Katherine is little more than a motherless child in a strange land, with everything to learn: our language, our customs, even our foods are foreign to her, and sometimes, when we sit together in the afternoon, sewing, I divert her by asking her about her home.

  She describes their palace, the Alhambra, as if it were a jewel set in a lining of a green garden, placed in the treasure chest of the castle of Granada. She tells me of the icy water that flows in the fountains in the courtyards piped from the mountains of the high sierra, and of the burning sun that bakes the landscape to arid gold. She tells me of the silks that she wore every day, and of the languid mornings in the marble-tiled bathhouse, of her mother in the throne room dispensing justice and ruling the kingdom as an equal monarch with her father, and of their determination that their rule and the law of God should stretch throughout Spain.

  “This must all feel so strange to you,” I say wonderingly, looking out of the narrow window to where the light is draining from the dark wintry landscape, the sky going from ash gray through slate gray, to soot gray. There is snow on the hills and the clouds are rolling up the valley, as a scud of rain hammers against the little panes of glass in the window. “It must seem like another world.”

  “It is like a dream,” she says quietly. “You know? When everything is different, and you keep hoping and hoping to wake?”

  Silently, I assent. I know what it is like to find that everything has changed and you cannot get back to your earlier life.

  “If it were not for Arth . . . for His Grace,” she whispers and lowers her eyes to her sewing, “if it were not for him, I would be most unhappy.”

  I put my hand over hers. “Thank God that he loves you,” I say quietly. “And I hope that we can all make you happy.”

  At once she looks up, her blue eyes seeking mine. “He does love me, doesn’t he?”

  “Without any doubt,” I smile. “I have known him since he was a baby and he has a most loving and generous heart. It is a blessing that you two should come together. What a king and queen you will make, some day.”

  She has the dazzled look of a young woman very much in love.

  “And are there any signs?” I ask her quietly. “Any signs of a child? You do know how to tell if a baby is coming? Your mother or your duenna has talked to you?”

  “You need say nothing; my mother told me all about it,” she says with endearing dignity. “I know everything. And there are no signs yet. But I am sure that we will have a child. And I want to call her Mary.”

  “You should pray for a son,” I remind her. “A son and call him Henry.”

  “A son named Arthur, but first a girl called Mary,” she says, as if she is certain already. “Mary for
Our Lady, who brought me safely here and gave me a young husband who could love me. And then Arthur for his father and the England that we will make together.”

  “And how will your country be?” I ask her.

  She is serious, this is no childish game to her. “There will be no fines for small offenses,” she says. “Justice should not be used to force people into obedience.”

  I give the smallest nod of my head. The king’s rapacity in fining his noblemen, even his friends, and binding them over with tremendous debts is eating away at the loyalty of his court. But I cannot discuss it with the king’s heir.

  “And no unjust arrests,” she says very quietly. “I think your cousins are in the Tower of London.”

  “My cousin William de la Pole has been taken to the Tower, but there is no charge read against him,” I say. “I pray that he has nothing to do with his brother Edmund, a rebel who has run away. I don’t know where he is, nor what he is doing.”

  “Nobody doubts your loyalty!” she reassures me.

  “I make sure they don’t,” I say grimly. “And I rarely speak to my kinsmen.”

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, APRIL 1502

  Arthur tries his best—we all try to keep her spirits up—but it is a long cold winter for her in the hills on the borders of Wales. He promises her everything but the moon itself: a garden to grow vegetables, deliveries of oranges for her to make a sort of preserve that they love to eat in Spain, oil of roses for her hair, fresh lilies—he swears that they will bloom even here. We constantly assure her that the warm weather will come soon, and that it will be hot—not as hot as Spain, we say cautiously, but hot enough to walk outside without being wrapped in layer after layer of shawls and furs, and for certain, one day there will be an end to the unceasing rain, and the sun will rise earlier into a bright sky, and the night will come later, and she will hear nightingales.

  We swear to her that May will be sunny, and we tell her the silly plays and games of May Day: she will open her window at dawn and be greeted with a carol, all the handsome young men will leave peeled wands at her door, and we will crown her Queen of the May and we will teach her how to dance around a maypole.

  But, despite our plans and our promises, it is not like that. May is not like that at all. Perhaps it never could have been what we promised; but it was not the weather that failed us, nor the easily invoked joy of a court cooped up for months. It was not the blossoms, nor the fish spawning in the river; the nightingales came and sang, but nobody listened—it was a disaster which none of us could have imagined.

  “It’s Arthur,” my husband says to me, forgetting the prince’s many titles, forgetting to knock on my bedroom door, bursting in, scowling with worry. “Come at once, he’s sick.”

  I am seated before my mirror, my maid-in-waiting behind me plaiting my hair, with my headdress ready on the stand and my gown for the day hung on the carved wood cupboard door behind her. I jump to my feet, tweaking the plait from her hand, throw my cape over my nightgown, and hastily tie the cords. “What’s the matter?”

  “Says he’s tired, says he aches as if he had an ague.”

  Arthur never complains of illness, never sends for the physician. The two of us stride from my room down the stairs and across the hall to the prince’s tower and up to his bedroom at the top. My husband pants up the winding stair behind me as I run up the stone steps, round and round, my hand on the cool stone pillar at the center of the spiral.

  “Have you called the physician to him?” I throw over my shoulder.

  “Of course. But he’s out somewhere. His servant has gone into town to look for him.” My husband steadies himself, one hand against the central stone pillar, one hand on his heaving chest. “They won’t be long.”

  We reach Arthur’s bedroom door and I tap on it and go in without waiting for a response. The boy is in bed; his face has a sheen of sweat over it. He is as white as his linen, the ruffled collar of his nightshirt lying against his young face without contrast.

  I am shocked but I try not to show it. “My boy,” I say gently, my voice as warm and as confident as I can make it. “Are you not feeling well?”

  He rolls his head towards me. “Just hot,” he says through cracked lips. “Very hot.” He gestures to his menservants. “Help me. I’ll get up and sit by the fire.”

  I step back and watch them. They turn back the covers and throw his robe around his shoulders. They help him from the bed. I see him grimace as he moves, as if it hurts him to take the two steps to the chair, and when he gets to the fireside he sits down heavily, as if he is exhausted.

  “Would you fetch Her Grace the princess for me?” he asks. “I must tell her I cannot ride out with her today.”

  “I can tell her myself . . .”

  “I want to see her.”

  I don’t argue with him, but go down the stairs of his tower, across the hall, and up the stairs of her tower to her rooms and ask her to come to her husband. She is at her morning studies, reading English, frowning over her book. She comes at once, smiling and expectant; her duenna, Doña Elvira, follows with one fierce look at me, as if to ask: What is wrong. What has gone wrong in this cold, wet country now? How have you English failed again?

  The princess follows me through Arthur’s great presence chamber, where there are half a dozen men waiting to see the prince. They bow as she goes by and she walks through with a little smile to right and left, a gracious princess. Then she enters into Prince Arthur’s bedroom and the brightness drains from her face.

  “Are you ill, my love?” she asks him at once.

  He is hunched in his chair at the fireside; my husband, agonized as an anxious hound, stands behind him. Arthur puts out his hand to stop her coming any closer, murmuring so low that I cannot hear what he says. She turns at once to me and her face is shocked.

  “Lady Margaret, we must call the prince’s physician.”

  “I have sent my servants to find him already.”

  “I don’t want a fuss,” Arthur says immediately. From childhood he has hated being ill and being nursed. His brother Harry revels in attention, and loves to be ill and cosseted; but Arthur always swears there is nothing wrong.

  There is a tap on the door and a voice calls out: “Dr. Bereworth is here, Your Grace.”

  Doña Elvira takes it upon herself to open the door and as the doctor comes in, the princess goes towards him with a ripple of Latin questions too quick for him to understand. He looks to me for help.

  “His Grace is unwell,” I say simply. I step back and he sees the prince rise from his chair, staggering with the effort, all color drained from his face. I see the doctor recoil when he sees Arthur, and from his aghast look I instantly know what he is thinking.

  The princess speaks urgently to her duenna, who replies in rapid muttered Spanish. Arthur looks from his young bride to his doctor, his eyes hollow, his skin yellowing from one hour to another.

  “Come,” I say to the princess, taking her by her arm and leading her out of the bedchamber. “Be patient. Dr. Bereworth is a very good doctor and he has known the prince from childhood. It’s probably nothing to worry about at all. If Dr. Bereworth is concerned, we’ll send for the king’s own physician from London. We’ll soon have him well again.”

  Her little face is downcast, but she lets me press her into a window seat in the presence chamber and she turns her head and looks out at the rain. I wave the crowd of petitioners out of the presence chamber and they leave, reluctantly bowing, glancing at the still figure in the window seat.

  We wait in silence until the doctor reappears. I can just see as he closes the door that Arthur has returned to his bed and is lying back against the pillows.

  “I think he should be left to sleep,” the doctor says.

  I go to him. “It’s not the Sweat,” I mutter to him urgently, daring him to contradict me, glancing back at the frozen young woman in the window seat. I realize that I am not asking him for his opinion, I am forbidding him to name our grea
test fear. “It’s not the Sweat. It can’t be.”

  “Your ladyship, I can’t say.”

  He is terrified to say. The Sweat kills within a night and a day, taking the old and the young, the healthy and the frail without distinction. It is the curse that the king trailed behind him when he marched into his kingdom with his army of mercenaries who brought it from the gutters and prisons of Europe. It is Henry Tudor’s blight on the English people, and in the first months after the battle people said that it proved that his line would not prosper; they said that the reign which had begun in labor would end in Sweat. I wonder if this was a prediction laid on our young prince, I wonder if his fragile life is doubly cursed.

  “Please God, it’s not the Sweat,” the doctor says.

  The princess comes across to him and speaks slowly in Latin, desperate to have his opinion. He assures her that it is nothing more than a fever, that he can administer a draft and the prince’s temperature will come down. He speaks soothingly to her, and goes, leaving me to persuade the princess that she cannot watch over her husband as he sleeps.

  “If I leave him now, do you swear to me that you will stay with him, all the time?” she pleads.

  “I’ll go back in now, if you will walk outside and then go to your room and read or study or sew.”

  “I’ll go!” she says, instantly obedient. “I’ll go to my rooms if you will stay with him.”

  The duenna, Doña Elvira, exchanges a level look with me and then follows her charge from the room. I go to the prince’s bedside, conscious that I have now sworn to both his wife and his mother that I will watch over him, but that my watching may be of little use if the young man who is so white and restless in the great curtained bed is the victim of his father’s disease and his mother’s curse.

  The day goes by with painful slowness. The princess is obedient to her word and walks in the garden and studies in her rooms and sends every hour to ask how her husband does. I reply that he is resting, that his fever is still high. I don’t tell her that he is getting worse and worse, he is rolling around in feverish dreams, we have sent for the king’s own doctor from London and that I am sponging his forehead, his face, and his chest with wine vinegar and icy water but nothing makes him cool.