“I don’t want to go abroad,” Reginald says very quietly. “If you will allow me, Lady Mother, I would like to stay in England.”

I am so shocked, that for a moment I say nothing, and Arthur speaks into the silence. “He has never lived with us since he was a child, Lady Mother. Let him study at Oxford and live at L’Erber, and spend his summers with us. He can join us when we are on progress, and when we go to Warblington or Bisham, he can come with us. I am sure the king would allow it. Montague and I could ask it for Reginald. Now that he has completed his degree surely he can come home?”

Reginald, the boy I could not afford to feed or house, looks directly at me. “I want to come home,” he says. “I want to live with my family. It’s time. It’s my turn. Let me come home. I have been away from all of you for so long.”

I hesitate. To gather my family together again would be the greatest triumph of my return to wealth and favor. To have all my sons under my roof and see them working for the power and strength of our family is my dream. “It’s what I want,” I tell him. “I have never told you, I never will tell you how much I missed you. Of course. But I shall have to ask the king,” I say. “None of you will ask him. I shall ask the king, and if he agrees, then that would be my dearest wish.”

Reginald flushes like a girl and I see his eyes grow suddenly dark with tears. I realize that though he may be a scholar of brilliance and promise he is still only fifteen—a boy who never had a childhood. Of course he wants to live with us all. He wants to be my beloved son once more. We have found our home again, he wants to be with us. It is right that he should be with us.

RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, JUNE 1515

It brings the king back into his wife’s company, and he discovers again the charm and wit that are naturally hers. He realizes once more that he is married to a beautiful, educated, amusing woman, and he is reminded that Katherine is a true princess: beautiful, admired, the finest woman at the court. Compared to the girls who throw themselves at his attention, Katherine simply shines. As the summer becomes warmer and the court starts to go boating on the river and eating dinner in the lush fields around the city of London, the king comes often to Katherine’s bed, and though he dances with Bessie Blount, he sleeps with his wife.

In these sunny days I take the chance to ask the king if Reginald may stay in England.

“Ah, Lady Margaret, you have to say good-bye to your boy, but not for long,” he says pleasantly enough. I am walking beside him on the way back from the bowling green. Ahead of us are some of the queen’s ladies dawdling along with much affected laughter and playfulness, hoping that the king notices them.

“Every kingdom in Europe is taken up with the new learning,” Henry explains. “Everyone is writing papers, drawing plans, inventing machines, building great monuments. Every king, every duke, the lowliest lord wants scholars in his house, wants to be a patron. England needs scholars just as much as Rome does. And your son, they tell me, will be one of the greatest.”

“He is pleased to study,” I say. “Truly, I think he has a gift. And he is grateful to you for sending him to Oxford. We all are. But surely, he can be a scholar for you at Westminster as well as anywhere else, and he can live at home.”

“Padua,” the king rules. “Padua is where he must go. That’s where everything is happening, that’s where all the greatest scholars are. He needs to go there and learn all that he can, and then he can come home to us and bring the new learning to our universities, and publish his thoughts in English. He can translate the great texts that they are writing into English so that English scholars can study them. He can bring their scholarship to our universities. I expect great things of him.”

“Padua?”

“In Italy. And he can find and buy books for us and manuscripts, and translate them. He can dedicate them to me. He can found a library for me. He can direct Italian scholars to our court. He will be my scholar and servant in Padua. He will be a shining light. He will show Christendom that here in England we too are reading and studying and understanding. You know I have always loved scholarship, Lady Margaret. You know how impressed Erasmus was with me when I was just a boy! And all my tutors remarked that when I entered the Church I would be a great theologian. And a linguist too. I still write poetry, you know. If I had the chances that Reginald has before him, I don’t know what I might have been. If I had been raised as he has been, as a scholar, I would want to do nothing but study.”

“You’ve been very good to him.” I cannot shift the king from the flattering picture of his court as a center of the new learning and Reginald as his ambassador to an admiring world. “But surely he need not go at once?”

“Oh, as soon as possible, I would think,” Henry says grandly. “I will pay him an allowance and he has his fees from . . .” He turns, and Thomas Wolsey, who has been walking behind us and clearly listening, says: “Wimborne Minster.”

“Yes, that’s it. And there will be other livings he can have, Wolsey will see to it. Wolsey is so clever at giving men places and matching them to their needs. I want Reginald to be our representative; he must look like a well-regarded scholar in Padua and live like one. I am his patron, Lady Margaret, his position reflects my own scholarship. I want the world to know that I am a thoughtful man at the forefront of the new learning, a scholar-king.”

“I thank you,” I say. “It is just that we, his family, wanted to have him home with us for a while.”

Henry takes my hand and tucks it in the crook of his arm. “I know,” he says warmly. “I miss my mother too, you know. I lost her when I was younger than Reginald is now. But I had to bear it. A man has to go where his destiny calls him.”

The king strolls with my hand tucked under his arm. A pretty girl goes by and flashes a radiant smile at him. I can almost feel the burn of Henry’s interest as she curtseys, her fair head lowered.

“All the ladies seem to have changed their hoods,” Henry remarks. “What is this fashion that my sister has brought in? What are they wearing these days?”

“It’s the French hood,” I say. “The Dowager Queen of France brought it back with her. I think I shall change too. It’s a lot lighter and easier to wear.”

“Then Her Grace must wear them,” he says. He draws me a little closer. “She is well, do you think? We might be lucky this time? She tells me she has missed her course.”

“It’s very early days, but I hope so,” I say steadily. “I pray so. And she prays every day for the blessing of a child, I know.”

“So why does God not hear us?” he asks me. “Since she prays every day, and I pray every day, and you do too? And half of England as well? Why would God turn his face away from my wife and not give me a son?”

I am so horrified at him speaking this thought aloud to me, with Thomas Wolsey within earshot, that my feet stumble as if I am wading in mud. Henry slowly turns me to face him and we stand still. “It’s not wrong to ask such a question,” he insists, defensive as a child. “It’s not disloyal to Her Grace whom I love and always will. It’s not to challenge God’s will, so it’s not heretical. All I am saying is: why can any fat fool in a village get a son and the King of England cannot?”

“You might have one now,” I say weakly. “She might be carrying your son right now.”

“Or she might have one that dies.”

“Don’t say that!”

He shoots a suspicious glance at me. “Why not? D’you fear ill-wishing now? Do you think she is unlucky?”

I choke on my words. This young man asks me do I believe in ill-wishing when I know for a fact that his own mother cursed his father’s line, and I remember very clearly going down on my knees and praying God to punish the Tudors for the harm they have done to me and mine. “I believe in God’s will,” I say, avoiding the question. “And no woman as good and as dear and as holy as the queen could be anything but blessed.”

He is not comforted; he looks unhappy, as if I have not said enough for him. I cannot think what more he could want to hear. “I should be blessed,” he reminds me as if he were still a spoiled boy in a nursery that revolved around his childish will. “It is me that should be blessed. It can’t be right that I cannot have a son.”