“But if I am ordained, I will have to serve wherever the Church sends me,” he points out. “What if I am sent to the East? Or to the Russias? What if they send me so far away that I can never come home?”

I cannot say to this young man that the service of one’s family often means that one cannot live at the heart of the family. I left him when he was a baby, to care for Arthur Tudor, and I won’t attend Ursula’s lying-in if the queen needs me at her side. “Well, I hope that you will come home,” I say inadequately.

“I would want to,” is all he replies. “I feel that I hardly know my family at all, and I have been away a long time.”

“When you have finished your studies—”

“Do you think the king will invite me to court and have me work for him there? Or perhaps teach at the universities?”

“I do. It’s what I hope for. Whenever I can, I mention you. And Arthur keeps you in his mind. Montague too.”

“You mention me?” he asks with a slight skeptical smile. “You find time to mention me to the king, among all the favors you request for your other boys, for Geoffrey?”

“This is a king who commands all the places and all the favors,” I say shortly. “Of course I mention you. I mention all of you. I can hardly do more.”

Reginald stays the night and dines with the lords and his brothers. Arthur comes to see me after dinner and says that Reginald was good company, very knowledgeable and able to explain the new learning that is sweeping Christendom clearly and critically. “He would make a wonderful tutor for the Princess Mary,” he says. “Then he could come home.”

“Princess Mary’s tutor? Oh, what a good idea! I’ll suggest it to the queen.”

“You will live with the princess as her governess next year,” he considers. “When would she be old enough for a tutor?”

“Perhaps six or seven?”

“Two years’ time. Then Reginald could join you.”

“And the two of us could guide her and teach her,” I say. “And if the queen were to give birth to a prince”—neither of us remark how unlikely that seems to be—“then Reginald could teach him too. Your father would have been so proud to see his son as the tutor of the next King of England.”

“He would have been.” Arthur smiles at the memory of his father. “He was proud of anything we did well.”

“And how are you, my son? You must have ridden miles with the kings. Every day they go out for sport or riding or races.”

“I’m well enough,” Arthur says, though he looks weary. “Of course, keeping up with the king is sometimes more like work than play. But I’m a little troubled, Lady Mother. I am quarreling with Jane’s father, and so she is displeased with me.”

“What’s happened?”

Arthur tells me that he has tried to persuade Jane’s father to hand over his lands so that my son can be responsible for the military service that goes with ownership. Arthur is going to inherit them anyway; there is no reason for the old man to hold them now and be responsible for raising the tenants if there should be a call to war. “He really cannot serve the king,” he says, aggrieved. “He’s too old and too frail. It was a fair offer to help him. And I offered to pay rent as well.”

“You were quite right,” I say. Nothing that adds to Arthur’s landholdings could be wrong for me.

“Well, he has complained to Jane, and she thinks I am trying to steal her inheritance before his death, borrowing dead man’s shoes, and she has broken a storm over my poor head. And now he has complained to our cousin Arthur Plantagenet, and to our kinsman the old Earl of Arundel, and now they are threatening to complain of me to the king. They’re suggesting that I am trying to cheat the old fool out of his lands! Robbing my own father-in-law!”

“Ridiculous,” I say loyally. “And anyway, you have nothing to fear. Henry won’t listen to a word against you. Not from your own cousins. Not now. Not while he wants England to win at the jousting.”

L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING 1521

Since they have come back from the Field of the Cloth of Gold they are worse than ever, filled with joy at their triumph, conscious of their youth and beauty like never before. It is a court of young people, raging with desire and zest for life, with no one to halt or control them.

The queen’s ladies, delighted to return to England away from the hotly competitive French court, flaunt their French fashions and practice their French dances. Some of them have even assumed French accents that I find ridiculous, but are generally regarded as very sophisticated—or as they would say themselves: très chic. The most exotic and certainly the vainest of them all is Anne Boleyn, sister to Mary and George, who, thanks to her father’s charm, has spent her childhood at the French royal courts and quite forgotten any English modesty that she might have had. With her return from France we now have Sir Thomas’s full family at court: George Boleyn, his son who has served the king for almost all of his life; Elizabeth, his wife; and his newly married daughter Mary, who both serve with me in the queen’s rooms.

My cousin the Duke of Buckingham is increasingly excluded from this French-mad, fashion-mad court, and he is more protective of his family dignity, for my daughter Ursula has given him a grandson, and there is a new little Henry Stafford whose cradle linen is all embroidered with ducal strawberry leaves, and the duke is proud of another generation bearing royal blood.

There is one truly terrible moment when the king, washing his hands in a golden bowl before his dinner, steps to his throne under his cloth of estate and sits as the cardinal summons the server to his side, and dips his own fingers into the same gold bowl, into the king’s water. My cousin the duke bellows and knocks the bowl down, splashing water over the long red robes, raging like a madman. Henry turns at the noise, looks over his shoulder, and laughs as if it does not matter.

My cousin says something furious about how the dignity of the throne should not be usurped by upstarts, and Henry’s laugh stops short as he looks at my cousin. He looks at him with a long, level look as if he is thinking about something other than the spinning golden bowl which throws flashes of reflected light on the king’s riding boots, the cardinal’s splashed robe, my cousin’s stamping feet. For a moment, we all see it: at the word upstart Henry has the guarded, suspicious expression of his father.

I take leave from court for many of the days of this spring. I divide my time between supervising work on my London house, L’Erber, and staying with the Princess Mary. My duties as her Lady Governess should not really start until she enters the schoolroom, but she is such a clever little girl that I want her to begin lessons early and I love to read her bedtime story, to listen to her sing, to teach her prayers, and to dance with her in her rooms as my musicians play.