Reginald is safe in Padua. Not only has he completely escaped the king’s ill will but he is in high favor for the help he gave the king and Thomas More as they write a defense of the true faith against the Lutheran heresy. My son helps them with research into scholarly documents held at the library at Padua. I advise Reginald that he keep away from London, however much he, the king, and Thomas More agree on Bible texts. He can study just as well in Padua as in London, and the king likes having an English scholar working abroad. Reginald may want to come home, but I am not putting him at risk while there is any shadow over the reputation of our family. Reginald assures me that he has no interest in anything but his studies; yet the duke had no interest in anything but his fortune and his lands and now his wife is a widow and his son disinherited.

Ursula writes to me from a new, modest home in Staffordshire. When I made her marriage, I predicted that she would be the wealthiest duchess in England. Never did I think that the great family of the Staffords could be all but ruined. Their title is taken from them, their wealth and their lands quietly absorbed by the royal treasury on the judicious advice of the cardinal. Her great marriage, her wonderful prospects were cut off on Tower Hill with the head of her father-in-law. Her husband does not become Duke of Buckingham, and she will never be a duchess. He is mere Lord Stafford with only half a dozen manors to his name and a yearly income in only hundreds of pounds. She is Lady Stafford and has to turn the panels of her gowns. His name is disgraced and all his fortune is forfeited to the king. She has to manage a small estate and try to make a profit from dry lands when she thought she would never see a plowshare again, and she has lost her little boy so there is no son to inherit the little that there is left.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1523

I learn from my Bisham steward, who heard from the drovers who walked our beef cattle to Smithfield, that people are saying the king has a new lover. Nobody is sure which one of the ladies at court has the king’s unreliable fancy, but then I hear that it is one of the Boleyn girls, Mary Carey, and that she is pregnant and everyone is saying that it is the king’s child.

I am glad to hear from a pedlar who comes into the kitchen to sell trinkets to the maids that she has given birth to a girl, and he winks and whispers that while she was in confinement the king took up with her sister Anne. After dinner that night, quietly in my room, Geoffrey suggests that perhaps all Howard girls smell like prey to the king, just as a Talbot hound will prefer the scent of a hare to all else. It makes me giggle, and think with affection of the old Duke of Norfolk, who loved a bawdy joke, but I frown at Geoffrey for disrespect. This family, this boy especially, is never going to say one word against this king.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, JULY 1525

“I didn’t know that you could be two dukes at once,” my steward remarks with a sly smile to me.

“I am sure the king judges rightly,” I say; but inwardly I think that this will have cost my friend the queen a lot of pain, to see a golden-headed Tudor boy kissed by his royal father and draped in ermine.

It is Arthur, Sir Arthur as I now always call him, who gives me my first living grandson, the heir to my name. He names him Henry, as he should, and I send our beautiful gilded cradle to Jane at Broadhurst for the next generation of Plantagenet boys. I am amazed at my own fierce pride at this baby, at my powerful delight at the next generation of our dynasty.

My son Geoffrey was not part of the muster for France, and I made sure that he did not volunteer to go. He is a young man now, nearly twenty-one, and this last son, this most precious child, must be found a wife. I spend more time in considering who would suit Geoffrey than anything else in these years of exile.

She has to be a girl who will run his house for him; Geoffrey has been raised as a nobleman, he has to have a good household around him. She has to be fertile, of course, and well bred and well educated, but I don’t want a scholar for a daughter-in-law—she should be just well-enough read to raise her children in the learning of the Church. God spare me from a girl running after the new learning and dabbling in heresy as is the fashion these days. She has to be aware that he is a sensitive boy—he’s not a sportsman like Arthur nor a courtier like Montague, he is a hand-reared boy, his mother’s favorite. Even as a child he knew what I was thinking from just looking into my face, and he still has a sensitivity that is rare in anyone, especially a young nobleman. She must be beautiful; as a young boy with his long blond curls Geoffrey was often mistaken for a pretty girl, and now he has grown to manhood he is as handsome as any man at court. His children will be beauties if I can find a good match for him. She has to be elegant and thoughtful and she has to be proud—she is joining the old royal family of England, there is no greater young man by birth in the country. We may be in half disgrace at the moment, but the king’s mood changed quickly—almost overnight—and is certain to change again. Then we will be restored to royal favor and then she will represent us, the Plantagenets, at the Tudor court, and that is no easy task.

If my youngest son were in his rightful position, present at court, in some good place, heir to the greatest fortune in England, it would be easy to find the right bride for him. But as we are, half exiled, half disgraced, half acknowledged, and with the old lawsuit for my lands that Compton would deny me still running, we are a less-attractive family and Geoffrey is not the most eligible bachelor in the land as Montague was. Yet we are fertile—Montague’s wife Jane gives birth to another girl, Winifred, so I have three grandchildren now—and fertility is prized in these anxious days.

In the end I choose the daughter of the queen’s gentlemen usher, Sir Edmund Pakenham. It’s not a great match, but it is a good one. He has no sons, only two well-brought-up daughters, and one of them, Constance, is the right age for Geoffrey. The two girls will jointly inherit their father’s fortune and lands in Sussex that run near to my own, so Geoffrey will never be far from home. Sir Edmund is close enough to the queen to know that our friendship remains unshaken, and she will have me back at court as soon as her husband allows. He is gambling on my son being as great a man at court as his brothers were. He thinks, as I do, that Henry was ill advised, that the cardinal played on his fears, his father’s fears, and that this will soon pass.

They marry quietly, and the young couple come to live with me at Bisham. It is understood that when I am returned to court I will take Constance with me, that she will serve the queen and no doubt rise in the world. Sir Edmund has faith that he will see me back at court again.

And he is right. As slowly as spring comes to England, I see the royal frost thawing. The queen sends me a gift, and then the king himself, hunting nearby, sends me some game. Then after four years of exile I get the letter I have been expecting.

I am appointed to go, once again, to Ludlow Castle and be companion and governess to the little nine-year-old princess who is to take up the seat and govern the principality. Perhaps soon she will be named Princess of Wales, where once there was a beloved prince. I knew it. I knew that Katherine’s loving, gentle advice to the king would bring him to a sense of his true self. I knew that as soon as he was in alliance with her homeland he would turn once again to her. I knew that the cardinal would not be in favor forever, and that the prince I had loved as a boy would become what he was born to be: a fair, just, honorable king.

I go at once to meet the princess at Thornbury Castle, and I take my new daughter-in-law Constance with me, to serve the Princess Mary as a lady-in-waiting. The return of Tudor favor puts us all in our rightful places, back at the heart of the royal court. I show her the beautiful castle at Ludlow with pride as a place where I was once mistress, and I tell her about Arthur and the princess who was his bride. I don’t tell them that the young couple were in love, that their passion for each other illuminated the plum-colored castle. But I do say that it was a happy home, and that we will make it happy again.

THORNBURY CASTLE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, AUGUST 1525

I stand in the shadow of the doorway, glad to be out of the heat, ready to welcome her into the castle that I once counted as my daughter Ursula’s inheritance. This was a Stafford house; it should have been Ursula’s home. The cardinal took it from the duke, and now it is to be used by the princess, and I shall run it as I will run all her houses.