Her retinue is headed by my kinsman Walter Devereux, Baron Ferrers of Chartley. He greets me with a warm kiss on both cheeks and then helps the little princess down from her saddle.

I am shocked at my first sight of her. It has been so long since I have seen her I was imagining her taller, a sturdy Tudor girl like her aunt Margaret, stocky as a pony; but she is tiny, dainty as a flower. I see her pale heart-shaped face in the shadow of the big hood of her cape and think her swamped in adult clothes, too frail for such a costume, for such a force of guards, too slight to be carrying her titles and all our expectations, too young to be taking up her duties and lands. I feel myself swallow with anxiety. She is fragile, like a princess made out of snow, a princess wished into being and only lightly embodied.

But then she surprises me by taking Walter’s hand and jumping off her horse like an agile boy, bounding up the steps towards me, and flinging herself into my arms. “Lady Margaret! My Lady Margaret!” she whispers, her face pressed against me, her head at my breast, her body slight and thin. I hold her close and feel her tremble with relief that she is with me again. I hold her tight and think I should take her by the hand and present her to her household, show her to her people. But I can’t bear to turn her away from me. I wrap my arms around her and I don’t let go for a long time. This is a child as beloved as any one of my own, a little girl still, and I have missed four years of her childhood and I am glad to have her back into my keeping.

“I thought I would never see you again,” she breathes.

“I knew I would come back to you,” I say. “And I won’t ever leave you again.”

LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, 1525–1526

In the meantime, her tutor is Dr. Richard Fetherston, the choice of her mother and a man that I like on sight. He is tall and brown haired, and he has a quick wit. He teaches Mary Latin with the classic authors, and translations of the Bible, but he also composes silly rhymes for her and nonsense poems. His loyalty to her mother—which we never mention—is, I think, quite unshakable.

Princess Mary is a passionately loving girl. She counts herself betrothed to her cousin King Charles of Spain, and she pins a brooch which says “The Emperor” on every gown. Her mother has encouraged this attachment, and spoken of him to her; but this summer we learn that her engagement is to be released and that instead she will marry into the French royal family.

I tell her the news myself and she runs away and locks herself in her room. She is a princess—she knows better than to complain. But she puts the diamond brooch in the bottom of her jewelry box and we have a sulky few days.

Of course, I feel for her. She is nine and she thinks her heart is broken. I brush her beautiful long russet hair as she looks pale-faced into her mirror and tells me that she thinks she will never be happy again. I am not surprised that her betrothal has been broken, but I am genuinely shocked when we receive a letter from the cardinal and learn that the king has decided to marry her to a man old enough to be her father, the notoriously loose-living, widowed King of France. She dislikes him for these three good reasons and it is my duty to tell her that as a princess of England she has to make up her mind to serve her country with her marriage, and that in this, as in everything else, her father has to be obeyed and that he has the absolute right to place her where he thinks best.

“But what if my mother thinks differently?” she asks me, her dark eyes bright with anger.

I don’t allow myself to smile. She draws herself up to her full height, a magisterial four feet, as proud as a Spanish queen. “Then your mother and your father must agree,” I say steadily. “And you would not be a good daughter if you presumed to judge them, or to take sides.”

“Well, I shan’t like him,” she says stubbornly.

“You will love and respect him as a good and dutiful wife,” I tell her. “Nobody requires you to like him.”

Her quick wit grasps the humor of this and she rewards me with a peal of ready laughter. “Oh, Lady Governess! What a thing to say!”

“And anyway you will probably come to like him,” I say comfortingly, pulling her to sit beside me so that she can rest her head on my shoulder. “Once you marry a man and you have children together and you rule your lands together, you will find in him all sorts of qualities that you admire. And if he is kind to you and a good father to your children, then you will come to love and like him.”

“Not always,” she points out. “My aunt Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, turned the cannons of her castle on her own husband and is trying to persuade the Pope to give her a divorce.”

“She’s very wrong to do so,” I maintain. “It is God’s will that a woman obey her husband and that their marriage can only be ended by death. And your father has told her so himself.”

“So can it be better to marry for love?” she demands. “My father the king married my mother for love.”

“He did indeed,” I agree. “And it was as lovely as a fairy story. But not all of us can have a life like a fairy story. Most of us will not. Your mother was very blessed that the king chose her, and he was honored with her love.”

“So why does he befriend other ladies?” Mary asks me, her voice lowered to a whisper, though we are quite alone in my private chamber. “Why does that happen, Lady Margaret?”

“What have you heard?”

“I have seen it myself,” she says. “His favorite, Mary Carey. And I see his son, Bessie Blount’s boy, at court. They have made him a duke, he is Duke of Richmond and Duke of Somerset. Nobody else in England is honored like that. It is too great an honor for a boy born to someone like Bessie. It is too great an honor for a horrid little boy like him.”

“Men, even kings, perhaps especially kings, may love with a free heart, even after their marriage,” I say. I look into her honest, questioning face and I hate the truth that I am telling her. “Your father, as a king, can do as he pleases, it is his right. The wife of a king, even though she is a queen herself, does not complain to him, does not complain to others. It is not important, it makes no difference. She makes it clear to everyone that it is not important. However many girls there may be, she is still his wife. Your mother is still the queen, however many Bessies and Marys dance at the court or walk behind her into her rooms. They don’t trouble her at all. They need not trouble you.”

“And the little double duke?” she asks spitefully.

Since I do not know what the king means by creating such an honor, I dare not advise her. “You are still the princess,” I say. “Whatever happens, the queen is still the queen.”

She looks unconvinced, and I am unwilling to tell this young princess that a woman, even a princess, is servant to her father and slave to her husband. “You know, a husband, any husband, is set by God Himself to rule over his wife.”

She nods. “Of course.”

“He must do as he pleases. If he imperils his immortal soul, a good wife might warn him of this. But she cannot try to take command. She has to live as he wishes. It is her duty as a wife and a woman.”

“But she might mind . . .”

“She might,” I admit. “But he cannot leave her side, he cannot deny his marriage, he cannot forsake her bed, he cannot deny her title as queen. He may dance and play and write poetry to a pretty girl but that changes nothing. He might give honors and love a bastard son but that changes nothing for the legitimate child of his marriage. A queen is the queen until her death. A princess is born to her coronet and no one can take it from her. A wife is a wife until her death. Everything else is just pastime and vanity.”

She is a wise girl, this little princess; for we don’t talk of this again, and when the couriers from her mother in London also carry gossip into the kitchen that the Boleyn girl has given the king a child, this one a boy, this one named Henry, I order that no one repeat the story in the hearing of the princess and I tell my daughter-in-law Constance that I will personally beat her into convulsions if I hear that she has allowed anything to be said in Mary’s hearing.

My daughter-in-law knows better than to fear my anger, as she knows I love her too dearly to lift a hand to her. But she makes sure that the princess hears nothing of the baby who is called Henry Carey, or of the new flirtation that her father has taken up in place of the old.

Under my guardianship the princess learns nothing more, not even when we go to court at Westminster and Greenwich for Christmas each year, not even when the king commands that we set up a court for the princess in Richmond Palace. I command the ladies as if I were the strictest abbess in the kingdom and there is no gossip spoken around the princess though the main court is beside itself about the king’s new flirt, Anne Boleyn, who seems to have taken her sister’s place in his favor, though not yet in his bed.

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1527

It hardly matters. The queen jumps down from her throne in the presence chamber to embrace her daughter and takes me by the hand to lead us both into her privy chamber so that we can chatter and exclaim, and delight in each other without a hundred people watching.

As soon as the door is closed behind us and mother and daughter have exchanged a ripple of inquiries and answers, slowly the brightness drains from the queen’s face, and I see that Katherine is weary. Her blue eyes still shine with pleasure at seeing her daughter; but the skin beneath them is brown and stained, and her face is tired and pale. At the neck of her gown I see a tell-tale rash and I guess that she is wearing a hair shirt beneath her rich clothes, as if her life was not hard enough in itself to mortify her.

I understand at once that she is grieved her precious daughter is to be bundled off to France as part of an alliance against her own nephew, Charles of Spain, and that she blames herself for this, as for everything else that will befall England without an heir. The burden of being a Spanish princess and an English queen is weighing heavily on her. The behavior of her nephew Charles has made her life in England far worse than it was. He has made promise after promise to the king, and then broken them, as if Henry were not a man dangerously quick to take offense at any threat to his dignity, as if he were not so selfish as to punish his wife for events far beyond her control.