Servants and tradesmen who have avoided me since the death of my husband and my fall from favor come to me in their dozens to offer their services now that my name is no longer written somewhere, on some list, with a question mark beside it.

Slowly, hardly able to believe my luck, like the rest of the country I find I am safe. I seem to have survived the dangerous twenty-four years of the first Tudor reign. My brother died on King Henry’s scaffold, my husband in his service, my cousin in childbed trying to give him another heir; but I have survived. I have been ruined, I have been heartbroken, I have been estranged from all but two of my children and lived in hiding with them, but now I can emerge, half blinded, into the sunlight of the young prince’s summer.

Katherine, once a widow as poor as me, soars upward into the sunshine of the Tudor favor like a kestrel spreading her russet wings in the morning light, her debts excused, her dowry forgotten. The prince marries her, in haste, in private, in the delight of passion finally expressed. Now he says he has loved her in silence and at a distance for all this time. He has been watching her, he has been desiring her. Only his father, only his grandmother, My Lady, enforced his silence. The ambiguous papal dispensation for this marriage that Katherine’s mother cunningly provided so long ago makes the marriage legal beyond question; nobody asks about her first husband, nobody cares, and they are wedded and bedded in days.

And I take my place at her side. Once again I have the right to draw the finest velvets from the royal wardrobe, I help myself to ropes of pearls and gold and jewels from the royal treasury. Once again, I am the senior lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England and I follow nobody but a Tudor into dinner. Katherine’s new husband, King Henry—Henry VIII as we all delightedly remind ourselves—pays me a grant of a hundred pounds a year the moment that I arrive at court, and I settle my debts: to my faithful steward John Little at Stourton, to my cousins, to the nuns at Syon, to Reginald’s priory. I send for Henry and Arthur, and the king offers them a place in his household. The king speaks highly of an education in the new learning, and orders that Reginald shall be well taught in his monastery; he will come to court as a philosopher and a scholar. I keep my boy Geoffrey and Ursula in the queen’s rooms for now, but soon I will send them home, and they can live again in the country and be raised as Plantagenet heirs should be.

I even receive a proposal of marriage. Sir William Compton, the young king’s dearest friend and companion in his revels and jousting, asks me, humbly on his knees, with his smiling eyes looking boldly up at me, if I would consider him as a husband. His bowed knee indicates that I could have the ruling of him, his warm hand holding mine suggests that this might be pleasurable. I have lived as a nun for nearly five years; the thought of a handsome man between good linen sheets cannot help but make me pause for a moment and look into William’s brown smiling eyes.

It takes me only one minute to decide, but to serve his urgent sense of his own dignity as a man come from next to nowhere, I spin it out for a couple of days. Thank God that I do not need his newly minted name, I don’t have to hide my name now. I don’t need the royal favor that he carries. My own popularity at court is high, and only grows as the young king turns to me for advice, for stories of the old days, for my memories of his mother. I tell him of the fairy-tale Plantagenet court and I see that he longs to re-create our reign. So I do not need Compton’s newly built house; I am so restored, I have such great prospects, that the king’s favorite thinks me an advantageous match. Gently, I tell him no. Graciously, courteously, he expresses his disappointment. We conclude the passage like two skilled performers performing the steps of an elegant dance. He knows that I am at the height of my triumph, I am his equal, I don’t need him.

A tide of wealth and prosperity flows out of the open doors of the treasury. Incredulously, they throw open cupboards, boxes, and chests in every royal house, and everywhere they find plate and gold, jewels and fabrics, carpets and spices. The old king took his taxes and fines in money and goods, indiscriminately sucking in household furnishings, tradesmen’s stores, even the tools of apprentices, impoverishing the poor. The new king, the young Henry, gives back to innocent people what his father stole from them, in a festival of redress. Unjust fines are repaid from the exchequer, noblemen are restored to their lands, my kinsman George Neville who guarded my sons is released from his crippling debts and given the post of Chief Larderer, a patron to thousands, the master of hundreds, a royal fortune at his disposal just waiting to be spent on good things. He is high in the king’s favor, Henry admires him, calls him a kinsman, and trusts him. Nobody mentions his ill-set leg; he is allowed to go to any, to all of his beautiful homes.

His brother, Edward Neville, is a favorite and serves in the king’s bedchamber. The king swears that Edward is the very match of him, calls him to stand beside him, to compare heights and the color of their hair, assures my cousin that they could be mistaken for brothers, that he loves us all as his brothers and sisters. He is warm to all my family—Henry Courtenay of Devon, my cousin Arthur Plantagenet, the de la Poles, the Staffords, the Nevilles, all of us—as if he were seeking his mother in our smiling, familiar faces. Slowly, we return to where we were all born to be, at the center of power and wealth. We are the king’s cousins, there is no one closer to him.

Even My Lady the old King’s Mother is rewarded with the return of her palace of Woking, though she does not live to enjoy it for long. She sees her grandson crowned and then she takes to her bed and dies. Her confessor, dear John Fisher, preaches the eulogy at her funeral and describes a saint who spent her life in the service of her country and her son, who laid down her work only when it was done. We listen in polite silence but, truth be told, she is little mourned; most of us experienced her family pride more than her cousinly love. And I am not the only one who secretly thinks that she died of fatal pique, in fear that her influence had run out, and so that she would not have to see our Queen Katherine looking beautiful and making merry in the rooms where the old woman had ruled so meanly for so long.

God is blessing the new generation, and we care nothing for those who have gone. Queen Katherine conceives a child almost at once, during the carefree days of the summer progress, and announces her happy state before Christmas, at Richmond Palace. For a moment, in that season of celebration, in a constant rush of entertainments, I start to think that my cousin’s curse is forgotten and that the Tudor line will inherit my family’s luck and be as sturdy and prolific as we have always been.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1510

This is how we learn that the young king likes to hear good news, indeed he insists on hearing good news, and in the future it may take some courage to force the truth on him. An older man, a more thoughtful man, would have questioned such an optimistic doctor; but Henry is eager to believe that he is blessed, and joyfully continues to celebrate his wife’s pregnancy. At the Shrove Tuesday feast he walks all around the diners proposing toasts to the queen and the baby that he thinks she is carrying in her swollen womb. I watch him, incredulously. This is the first time that I see that his sickly father and his fearful grandmother have instilled in him an absurd devotion to physicians. He listens to anything they say. He has a deep, superstitious terror of illness, and he longs for cures.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1510

Her bravery is poorly rewarded. She is greeted without sympathy, for nobody is much interested in the return to court of a childless bride. Something far more intriguing is going on; the court is agog with scandal.