Bella Court, Greenwich, Spring 1438
Barking Abbey, Essex, Spring
THE ABBEY AT Barking – famously wealthy, beautifully built of cream coloured stone – stands on an island.
We have to ride on raised tracks through marshlands, where herons stand silent in pools and cormorants spread their black wings to dry in the cold air.
I can see the abbey from a long way off, raised above the waters, like a holy city on a hill.
Their gate is open, and though they will have seen me coming at a gallop at the head of my guard, they are serene when I rattle over the drawbridge.
The abbess Katherine de la Pole comes to greet me in the visitors’ room, as if I am welcome. When she sees that I am alone, she comes out from behind the parlour grille that divides the nuns from male guests.
‘Your Grace.’ She curtseys, and I nod my head.
She is the young sister of William de la Pole, who has wriggled his way out of my husband’s patronage and now sides with Cardinal Beaufort and has married into that sprawling family.
His sister will have no love of me. She is a tall plain woman in her late twenties carrying herself proudly – an abbess who rules great lands.
‘I understand you have the care of two bastard boys,’ I say coldly.
She raises her eyebrows. She has that irritating face of enclosed women: smooth as if they never frown, shiny as if they use only soap and water.
‘The Tudor boys,’ I say, so she knows that I know everything.
‘Jasper and Edmund are in my keeping, with other sons of noble houses,’ she says. ‘We are proud of our scholarship here.’
‘I’ve come to take them away.’
‘Do you have a letter from their father?’ she asks me coolly.
‘I don’t correspond with Owen Tudor, a convicted criminal. Do you?’
She bows in silence, as if she will not bandy words with me.
‘You have accepted them under a pretence. Their parents were not married. Their mother – I will not mention her name for shame – was forbidden from marrying without a licence. Her children are illegitimate, now motherless, and their father is in prison. Nobody is going to pay you for keeping them. And they should not be mixing with noble boys. I will take them.’
‘What for?’
‘What?’
‘If they are shamed bastards and half-orphans, what do you want them for?’ she asks reasonably. ‘What use are they to you?’
‘I would rather that my family’s shame was not known,’ I say. ‘They are my bastard nephews, illegitimate sons of the late queen, my husband’s sister-in-law. I will take them into my keeping and raise them at my family’s castle or our own abbey.’
She bows. ‘I’ll tell them to get ready to leave. Will you take them now?’
I didn’t think it would be that easy. ‘At once, if you please.’
She puts out her white hand. ‘You have the king’s warrant?’
I hesitate. ‘I don’t have a warrant; they are my nephews. I don’t need my royal nephew’s authorisation to take base-born nephews into my own keeping. My husband is head of the privy council – should he write me a letter?’
She does not smile at my sarcasm. ‘You need a warrant from the privy council to take a criminal’s sons from here. They are, in a way, his bail. I am, in a way, their gaoler. I cannot release them until he is released. Is he going to be released?’
‘Never!’ I exclaim. ‘He will never be released.’
She shrugs, as icy as I am. ‘Then they must be imprisoned also.’
‘I’ll see them,’ I say.
She gestures to the window. ‘They’re at play. They are usually sword fighting. All our noble boys play at knights all the time. We allow them wooden swords.’
We stand side by side and look out of the arched stone window.
Below, in a garden lined on either side by a palisade of trees, now winter-bare, there are half a dozen boys playfighting in a mêlée.
Two have the deep chestnut-red hair of Owen, my lover.
They could be twins, I think, with a pang so deep that I feel it in my womb; they could have been my twins.
They stand back to back to defend each other, their toy swords at the ready.
They take on one boy after another, who leap forward to fight them.
They are about six or seven years old, with swords of wood, but their stance is perfect, and they are laughing.
One of them gently taps a boy in the belly with his sword, and the lad pretends to fall.
The two little boys call out: ‘à Tudor!’ and the others cheer them.
I hold to the stone lintel of the window as I watch the sons of the man that I love, playing as if they have a great future before them, until their copper heads are blurred by the tears that are filling my eyes.
Now all the boys are pretending to be on horseback, holding imaginary reins in one hand, cantering to the tilt in another, the wooden swords pointed before them like lances.
‘They’re all born to be fighters,’ Katherine de la Pole says, watching them, smiling. ‘We give them all sorts of toys but they always play at being knights. I think those two will make the name of Tudor famous.’
‘It cannot be more shamed than it is now,’ I say sharply.
She does not reply to me but turns from the window. ‘D’you wish to see your sister, Your Grace?’
I had almost forgotten that Anne is here. ‘Is she allowed to see me?’
She bows her head. ‘I’ll send her in.’
I WAIT, WATCHING the boys in the playground.
It is easy to see that the Tudor boys are companions as well as brothers: they never lose sight of the other; they run side by side and veer when the other does, like birds in flight, without signalling.
All the boys play together in a scramble of swords and balls and singlesticks, but the Tudor boys are their leaders.
For one moment only, I smile as I watch them and think how handsome and strong they are, and how lovely it is to see boys running wild, and then I remember that they are Owen’s boys and their father will be dying now, on my orders, and that if I could have got them away from here, I would have imprisoned them for life.
This would be their last day of freedom.
The door opens softly, and my younger sister Anne comes into the room, eyes down, hands folded inside her sleeves, the plain black and white of her nun’s habit making her look sallow. She would never have been any use to me at court with these looks. I have nothing to say to her.
‘Anne,’ I say levelly.
She curtseys and comes closer; I plant one cold kiss on one cheek and then the other. ‘Are you well?’ I ask.
She blinks her pale eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘You like it here?’
She has a tiny frown as if my question puzzles her. ‘Yes.’
‘I will give our father your love and remembrance when I see him.’
Now she nods and says nothing.
‘I am well,’ I tell her. ‘And my husband the duke leads the privy council.’
‘Yes,’ she says again. ‘I know.’
None of my family are of any use to me. If she had one scrap of family feeling, I would ask her to watch the Tudor boys for me and tell me if any messenger comes for them.
If she looked capable of any act, I would ask her to prevent them writing to the king or visiting court.
But she is as much use to me as if she had been walled up in her cell, an anchorite.
In fact, she would be more use to me like that, for then I would know she was silenced – whereas here, when I am gone, she can speak ill of me.
‘I’m going now,’ I tell her. ‘Do you have everything you need?’
She glances into my face as if she is not sure that she heard me correctly. ‘I took a vow of poverty,’ she says, ‘and obedience. I am supposed to have nothing and to make no complaint. Those are my very vows.’
‘I would never have been a nun!’ I say with sudden temper, thinking of my mother’s desire to shut me away, quite forgetting this poor pale thing, my sister.
A tiny smile crosses her face and is gone in a moment. ‘The Holy Church’s loss is England’s gain,’ she says; and before I can demand whether she thinks she is being funny, she curtseys again and is gone.