Виктория Холт - The King’s Secret Matter

She sat on a stool near the virginals, and Mary came to stand beside her while the Queen put her arm about her daughter.

“You have heard no rumors about Wales?” asked the Queen.

“Wales, Mother? What sort of rumors?”

The Queen was relieved. “Well, you know you are Princess of Wales and it is the custom for the Prince or Princess to visit the Principality at some time.”

“We are going to Wales then, Mother?’

“You are going, my darling.”

Mary drew away from her mother and looked at her in startled dismay.

“Oh, it will not be for long,” said the Queen.

“But why do you not come with me?”

“It is the wish of your father that you go alone. You see, you are the Princess of Wales. You are the one the people want to see.”

“You must come too, Mother.”

“My darling, if only I could!”

“I will not go without you.” For a moment Mary looked like her father.

“My darling, your father has commanded you to go.”

Mary threw herself against her mother and clung to her. “But it is so far away.”

“Not so very far, and you will come back soon. We shall write to each other and there will be the letters to look forward to.”

“I don’t want to go away from you, Mother…ever.”

The Queen felt the tears, which she had so far managed to keep in check, rising to her eyes.

“My love, these partings are the fate of royal people.”

“I wish I were not royal then.”

“Hush, my darling. You must never say that. We have a duty to our people which is something we must never forget.”

Mary pulled at the rings on her mother’s fingers but Katharine knew she was not thinking of them. “Mother,” she said, “if I were to plead with my father…”

The Queen shook her head. “He has decided. You must go. But do not let us spoil what time is left to us in grieving. Time will pass, my darling, more quickly than you realize. I shall hear of you from your governess and tutors, and you will write to me yourself. You see I shall have all that to live for.”

Mary nodded slowly. Poor child! thought the Queen. She has learned to keep her feelings in check. She has learned that the fate of Princesses can often be cruel and that one thing is certain, they must be accepted.

“You will go to Ludlow Castle,” said the Queen trying to speak brightly. “It is a beautiful place.”

“Tell me about when you were there, Mother.”

“It was long…long ago. I went there with my first husband.”

“My father’s brother,” murmured Mary.

“It was so long ago,” said the Queen, and she thought of those days when she had been married to the gentle Arthur who was so different from Henry; Arthur who had been her husband for scarcely six months.

“Tell me about the castle,” said Mary.

“It rises from the point of a headland,” the Queen told her, “and is guarded by a wide, deep fosse. It is grand and imposing with its battlemented towers; and the surrounding country is superb…indeed some of the best I have ever seen.”

The Princess nodded sadly.

“You will be happy there,” murmured Katharine, putting her lips to Mary’s forehead. “We shall not be very far away from each other, and soon you will come back to me.”

“How soon?” asked Mary.

“You will be surprised how soon.”

“I would rather know. It is always so much easier to bear if you know how long. Then I could count the days.”

“My darling, you will be happy there. When I left my mother, the ocean separated us. This is not the same at all.”

“No,” said Mary slowly. “It is not the same at all.”

“And now, my love, go to the virginals. Play the piece which you wished me to hear.”

Mary hesitated and for a moment Katharine feared that the child would lose her hold on that rigid control. But obediently she rose, went to the virginals, sat down and began to play; and as she did so, the tears, which would no longer be kept back, rolled silently down her cheeks.

THE PRINCESS MARY WAS MELANCHOLY IN THE CASTLE OF Ludlow and the Countess of Salisbury was alarmed on her account. The only thing which could bring the child out of that languid indifference as to what went on around her was a letter from her mother.

Each day she told the Countess how long they had been at Ludlow; and she would ask wistfully if there were any news of their returning to her father’s Court.

“All in good time,” the Countess would say. “With the passing of each day we are a little nearer to our return.”

The Princess rode often in the beautiful woods close to the castle; she had to admit that the country was some of the fairest she had ever seen; but it was clear that when she was separated from her mother she could not be happy, and the Countess feared that her health would be affected by her melancholy.

Great plans were afoot for the celebrations of Christmas, The New Year and Twelfth Night.

“There will be plays, masques and a banquet…just as at your father’s Court,” the Countess told her.

“I wonder whether my mother will come,” was all the Princess could say.

It was true that she had a certain interest in her lessons; she worked hard at her Latin and her music and sometimes she would chuckle and say: “My mother will be surprised that I have come so far. I shall write to her in Latin, and when she comes I shall play all my new pieces.”

The Countess was grateful that she had this interest in her Latin and music, and made the most of it. There had been rumors which had come to the Countess’s notice before she left Court and, although she could not believe there was much truth in them, they made her very uneasy. The fact that the Queen had married the King’s brother could have no effect on the present marriage. The Pope had given the necessary dispensation, and during all the years the King and Queen had been married there had never before been any suggestion that the marriage might not be legal.

She was a wise woman, and in her fifty-two years she had seen much tragedy. None understood, more than she did, the Tudors’s fierce determination to fight off all those who threatened to take the crown from them. It was natural that the King wanted to make sure of the Tudor succession. Desperately he needed a son, and Katharine had failed to give it to him.

There were times when Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, wished that she were not a Plantagenet and so near to the throne. She had lived through troublous times. Her maternal grandfather had been that Earl of Warwick who had been known as the Kingmaker; her father had been the Duke of Clarence, brother of Richard III, who had been imprisoned in the Tower and there, it was believed, had been drowned in a butt of malmsey. She had been a young child when that had happened and it had made a deep and terrible impression on her; ever after she had been aware of the insecurity of life and the favor of Kings; and it seemed to her that those who lived nearest the throne had the most to fear. That was why she often thought with deep compassion of the Queen, and now as she sat with her royal charge she could grow quite melancholy wondering what the future held for her. Only recently tragedy had struck at her family through her youngest child, Ursula, wife of Henry Stafford, son of the Duke of Buckingham whose life had recently come to an end on the block.

Henry VIII had occasionally been kind to her family; she had fancied that he wanted to make amends to them for his father’s murder of her brother Edward who, as the Earl of Warwick, had been a menace to the throne. But how long would that favor last? She believed now that she was regarded with suspicion by Wolsey because of her close friendship with the Queen.

If Katharine could have been with her in Ludlow she would have been almost happy. It was peaceful here and seemed so far from the world of ambition. And how happy little Mary would have been if the Queen were here! But as the weeks stretched into months the love between the governess and her charge grew deeper and did—so the Countess fervently hoped—compensate in some measure for the child’s loss of her mother.

Margaret tried to replace that mother, and it was a great joy to her to know that the times of the day to which Mary looked forward more than any other were those when she and the Countess were alone together; and the little girl, released from her lessons which Margaret often felt were too much for her would sit at the Countess’s feet and demand to hear stories of her life.

And when Mary said: “My mother used to tell me stories of the days when she was a girl in Spain…” Margaret knew that the substitution had taken place in the child’s mind; and she wrote to the Queen telling her of these pleasant hours which seemed to give consolation to Mary for her exile.

Through Margaret’s description of her family Mary began to know the Pole children so well that they seemed to be her intimate friends. There was Henry, Lord Montague, who had followed the King to France to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Margaret did not tell the child of the anxiety she had suffered when Henry had been arrested at the time of the trial of the Duke of Buckingham because his father-in-law was a connection of the Duke’s; in any case he had been speedily released, and very soon afterwards had been restored to favor, being among those noblemen who had greeted the Emperor Charles on his arrival in England. The Countess would talk of her sons, Arthur, Reginald, Geoffrey and her daughter Ursula, with such loving detail that the Princess knew that these quiet hours were as enjoyable to the Countess as they were to her.