Prologue
Kimbolton Castle, January 1536 — the first time
She had done everything right, and it was killing her.
That was the thought Catherine could not get past, lying in the cold bad room at Kimbolton that was the last in a long descent of cold bad rooms, each meaner than the last, the slow geography of a wronged queen’s punishment. She had been moved and moved again, further from London, further from her daughter, into damp and draughts and the company of jailers who called themselves servants — and through all of it she had done everything right. She had honored God. She had defended her marriage as the sacrament it was. She had refused every bribe and threat to call herself Princess Dowager, refused to lie, refused to bend, because the truth was the truth and God saw it even when no one else would say it. She had been patient. She had submitted to everything but the one lie, and waited for God to set it right, exactly as she had been taught a faithful woman must.
And here was where it had brought her. A freezing room, a failing body, a daughter she had not been allowed to see in years, a Church torn out of England by the roots, a usurping girl crowned in her place — and now this, this fire in her belly that no physician could name, this thing that had come on so suddenly after the dish of Welsh ale, this agony that doubled her over and would not stop.
María was there. Dear María, who had defied the King’s own order and ridden through the winter and forced her way past the guards to be at her side, weeping, holding her hands. That was a mercy. Catherine fixed on it, on the warm grip of the one friend who had crossed a sea and a lifetime for her, because it was easier than fixing on the other knowledge, the cold certain knowledge that had been growing in her these last days alongside the fire.
This was not God’s doing. This was Henry’s.
She knew it the way she had always known things, by reading what others wished her not to read. The suddenness. The dish, sent up special. The way the man who brought it would not meet her eyes. Somewhere in London her husband — her gentle, grieving, golden husband, who had once worn her favor and won and laid the prize in her lap, breathless — had decided that a living Catherine was an inconvenience he was done tolerating, and had reached out one anointed hand across all those miles and stopped her heart with poison, and would weep when he heard, and would mean the weeping, and would call it God’s mercy that her suffering was ended.
I did everything right, she thought, as the fire climbed, as María’s face blurred. I honored You with my whole life. I was patient. I submitted. I waited for You to set it right.
And You let him kill me, and the realm is lost, and my Mary is alone among wolves.
It was the closest she had ever come to despair, and she was ashamed of it even dying, and she could not push it away. She had played the only game she knew how to play, the game of righteousness and endurance, and she had lost everything on the board, and she was going out of the world in a cold room with the truth in her mouth and no one left who could afford to hear it.
The priest had been. She had made her confession. She had dictated, with the last of her strength, a letter to Henry — mine eyes desire you above all things, she had written, forgiving him, because she would go to God with no hatred in her, even for the hand that held the cup. She believed in mercy. She believed it still, even now, even knowing.
But oh, she thought, as the room went dark at its edges and María’s weeping came from very far away — oh, if she had it to do again. If God in His mercy would give her even one of these years back, even one, knowing what she knew now, what she had paid to learn —
She would not be patient.
She would not wait.
She would do the thing she had been too faithful to do. She would fight him with everything — not as a wronged wife begging the law, but as Isabella’s daughter, who had taken a kingdom in the saddle and feared nothing under heaven. She would find the cracks in him. And there were cracks; she had seen them this last year, the glaze coming over his eyes, the grief curdling behind the king. She would put her whole soul into the breach. She would not die in a cold room having lost. She would —
The fire reached her heart.
There was a sound like a great door, and a cold beyond cold, and then nothing. Catherine of Aragon, who had done everything right, died among her enemies on the seventh of January, certain in her last breath of the thing the world would spend centuries arguing. That it had been no fever. That a hand she had once loved had reached across all those miles to still her heart. And that she went to her God murdered — and forgave it. She would carry no hatred where she was going.
And then —
— there was a sound like a great door, again, the same door, opening the other way.
And Catherine came up out of the dark gasping, her hand flying to her breast, to her heart, which beat — which beat, whole and strong and beating, under her palm — and she was not cold, and she was not dying, and the room around her was not the mean cell at Kimbolton but a fine warm chamber she knew, she knew, a chamber at Greenwich she had not seen in nine years because nine years from now it would be taken from her —
She sat up. Her hands were not an old dying woman’s hands. They were smooth, strong, the hands of a woman of forty in her power. Through the window came the grey light of a spring she had already lived, of a year — she knew the year, she knew it in her bones before her mind would say the number — a year before the worst of it, before the cold rooms, before the descent. Before she had lost.
1527. The very lip of the Great Matter. The beginning of the long road that ended in poison and a cold cell.
She was back. God help her, God be thanked — she was back, at the start of it, the whole of it remembered: every grave, the poison, the long cold descent, the death. All of it carried whole, in a living body, at the beginning of the road.
Catherine of Aragon sat in the grey dawn of a morning she had lived once already, with her strong heart slamming under her hand and tears she did not understand running down her face, and made, before she had risen from the bed, before she had said a single prayer, the first and only vow of her second life.
Not this time.
This time I will not be patient. This time I will not wait. This time, Lord, if You have truly sent me back — and if it is the Devil who sent me, then God forgive me and judge me — this time I will fight him with everything You gave me, and I will not die in a cold room having lost.
This time I live.
Somewhere in the waking palace, a man who did not yet know he had ever killed her was rising to dress, and rehearsing, perhaps, the gentle almsgiving voice in which he meant, quite soon, to tell his wife that she had never been his wife at all.
Catherine wiped her face, and breathed, and began — for the second time, and forewarned — to think.
Chapter One
Greenwich, spring 1527
The King told her, in the voice he used for almsgiving, that she had never been his wife.
He said it gently. That was the part Catherine kept coming back to later, in the dark, the way your tongue keeps finding a broken tooth. Henry had always been able to do gentleness when he wanted something, and he did it now across the small table between them, both hands open like a man offering bread.
“It grieves me past saying, Katharine.” He had not called her that in years. “But the scholars are agreed, and my conscience won’t be quiet. We have lived twenty years in sin, you and I. And God has shown us what He thinks of it.”
He didn’t say how. He didn’t have to. God’s opinion was a row of small coffins, six of them, and she had stood at every grave. The word son sat in the room with them like a seventh person, and she watched her husband decide not to look at it.
She had heard these words before.
Not words like them — these words, in this grey light, in this chamber: the almsgiving voice, the open hands, the small coffins sitting unspoken between them. She had lived this morning once already, in a life that ran on nine years past it to a cold cell at Kimbolton, a cup of poisoned ale, and her own slow murder. She had woken at dawn with the whole of it inside her — the long defeat, the meaner and meaner rooms, Mary taken from her, the Church pulled up by the roots, and at the end of the patient, righteous, obedient road, her own slow murder. She did not understand how. No prayer had answered her. She had stopped asking and started, instead, to think — because two things were past all doubting. She had done it the right way once. And the right way had killed her.
Catherine held still, in the body of a woman of forty and the memory of a woman who had already died, and watched her husband, and thought: not this time.
She had learned stillness in her mother’s war-camps, before she learned English — learned that a woman who doesn’t move is a woman who can’t be read, and she had spent twenty years being unreadable to a court that never quite decided whether she was its queen or its hostage. So she folded her hands on the dark wood, and let him talk, and did the thing she had always done to survive these people. She watched him.
And something was wrong with him.
Not the words. The words were monstrous, but they weren’t mad, and they weren’t even a surprise — she knew this argument by heart, in two lifetimes now, ever since the cardinal’s clerks first began pulling Leviticus off the shelf like a blade out of a sheath. Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife. Arthur — dead twenty-five years, a sickly boy she had shared a name and a country and four cold months with and almost nothing else — was reaching up out of his grave to unmake her. She had her answer ready. She had given it to bishops: she had come to Henry’s bed a virgin, whatever anyone said of Arthur, and she would swear it on the Host with her hand in the fire. Let any man in Christendom call her a liar to her face, and see what her nephew the Emperor did about it.
No. It wasn’t the argument. She had armor for the argument.
It was his eyes.
She had known Henry’s eyes for half her life. She had watched them go bright as struck flint when he rode at the tilt as a boy. She had watched them over their daughter’s cradle, and across a hundred councils where he turned to her — to his Spanish queen — for the steadiness he couldn’t always find in himself. Henry lived at the front of his own face. Whatever he felt, you saw it arrive.
Now there was a film over them. A glaze, like the skin that forms on cooling broth. He was looking at her and past her at the same time, at something only he could see, and whatever it was burned bright enough that she had become hard for him to make out. His voice caught on their twenty years with what she would once have sworn was real grief. The eyes didn’t change. The grief was in his throat and his hands but it hadn’t reached the place behind his eyes. That place was busy with something else.
Cold moved through her stomach — older and worse than fear.
You’re not well, she thought. Dios mío, there is something loose in you. Her heart ached for him suddenly. She knew she could not heal her husband, and it was the worst kind of pain, worse than death itself.
“You’re quiet,” Henry said.
“I’m listening to my husband tell me he isn’t my husband. It’s a lot to take in before supper.”
For just a second the glaze cracked. Something flinched up out of him — the boy who used to wear her favor on his sleeve and win and ride straight to her box to drop the prize in her lap, breathless, eleven years old and already too big. Did you see me. Did you see. For a second he was only a frightened man telling his wife a terrible thing.
Then it closed over again, smooth as oil on water, and he was the other one. The new one. The one who had started, this past year, saying we when he meant himself and God, as though the two of them had taken to sharing one skin.
“Don’t make it harder with your cleverness,” he said. “You were always proud.”
“My mother took Granada from the Moors in the saddle, eight months pregnant. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be less proud than she was, and failing.” She let that sit. “You used to love that in me.”
“I loved a great many things that turned out to be sins.” He stood.
He was enormous standing up. The room had been built to make a queen feel safe, and it shrank to fit him. He went to the window and put his back to her, and the grey spring light came in around his shape.
“I’ve been thinking about the priesthood of kings,” he said, to the glass.
Catherine said nothing. Her heart had started, very quietly, to run.
“The bishop of Rome is a man.” Henry’s voice had gone soft and reasonable and far away. “A man in a distant city who has never set foot in England, who knows nothing of my people or my soul — and yet he holds the keys to both. He rattles them, and a king kneels in his own kingdom. Is that God’s order? I’ve started to wonder if it’s God’s order at all, Katharine, or just an old habit the world mistook for one.”
He turned enough to give her his profile, the heavy handsome ruin of it.
“A king is anointed. The holy oil is poured on a king, and on no pope. What if the truth has been standing in front of us the whole time, and we were too afraid to read it? What if England doesn’t need Rome? What if the head of the Church in England is —” he smiled, and the smile was the worst thing yet, because it was happy “— meant to be here?”
He laid his open hand flat against his own chest.
The cold climbed up under her ribs and stayed there.
She understood, with a clarity that scared her more than rage could have, that he hadn’t said any of this to hurt her. He’d said it because it had been pressing on him, and she was the person he brought things to. Twenty years of habit. He had unmade their marriage in one breath, and in the next he was reaching for her like a child who’s done something and needs his mother to tell him it’s all right. He wanted her to say yes, my lord, you’ve seen clearly. You are the head of the Church, the dead babies were never your fault, your conscience is clean, you are the great king after all.
And he would tear a thousand years of the Church out of England’s ground to hear it.
To anyone else it would have sounded like ambition. Catherine had spent her life around ambitious men, and ambition had a smell — hot, leaning forward. This wasn’t that. This was a man building a cathedral over a wound so he’d never have to look at the wound again. The annulment wasn’t the sickness. Anne Boleyn — whose name the whole court whispered, whose dark eyes tracked the King across every hall — wasn’t the sickness either. They were the bright fevered surface of it. The sickness was right here, in this gentle, smiling, reasoning madness: a grieving king who had decided the easiest thing in the world — easier than mourning his sons, easier than being, just once, an ordinary man told no — was to become God.
They’ll call it a marriage quarrel, she thought. They’ll call it lust, and policy, a foreign wife who outstayed her welcome. They’ll write it down as the King’s Great Matter, a business about a bed. And the whole roaring engine of it, the thing that would crack the world in half, was that Henry couldn’t stand to be a man God had refused.
“Well?” he said. The reasonable, far-off voice. The shining eyes. “You’re clever, Katharine. Cleverer than my whole council put together. Tell me. Tell me I’ve read it true.”
This was the hinge of her life, and she felt it turn.
She could fight him on Leviticus. She could send to Rome, to Madrid, set the lawyers of two nations chewing on Arthur and the marriage bed. She knew exactly where that road went, because she had walked every step of it once: to Rome’s endless delay, and the Emperor’s stern useless letters, and seven slow years of being lawfully, righteously destroyed, and a cold cell at the end. Law was a fence, and you couldn’t fence a flood. That was the road that had killed her. She could be Catherine the wronged wife, correct and doomed, and go to her grave discarded while he burned England to keep his conscience warm — again.
Or.
She looked at her husband, lit up, waiting for her to bless his madness, and she made the calculation her mother’s daughter had been born to make — the one that had nothing to do with what was right and everything to do with what would work. No one would believe a cast-off queen who said the King was sick in his soul. A wife fighting her own dismissal — what was her word worth? Spite, they’d call it. Spanish spite. They wouldn’t see what she saw, because they hadn’t spent twenty years learning to read the front of this man’s face. And because the most dangerous madmen in the world are the gentle, reasoning, well-spoken ones, who can lay out every step to perdition in a voice you’d trust with your children.
So she would have to make them see it. Or she would have to find people the world couldn’t wave away so easily — and God help her, she had no idea yet who, in this whole nest of his creatures, that could possibly be.
She unfolded her hands.
“You’ve read it,” Catherine said slowly, watching his face the way her mother used to watch a wall for the place to set the cannon, “more clearly than I’ve ever heard any man read anything.”
It wasn’t even a lie. She had never heard the road to hell laid out with such conviction.
“Give me a little time, husband. To read it as clearly as you do. It’s a great thought. It shouldn’t be answered like a small one.”
It was enough. More than enough. He came back to the table and took both her hands, and his eyes filled, and the boy was there again — grateful, certain he’d been understood. He kissed her knuckles and called her his wise queen, his good Katharine. He did not seem to notice, or to care, that a quarter of an hour ago he had told his wise good queen she had never been his wife at all.
When he was gone she sat a long time without moving, because there was no one left to read her, and nothing yet to do. The light went grey, then gold, then nothing. A servant came to ask about candles and she sent the girl away.
She thought about the small coffins. She thought about her daughter — Mary, eleven years old, asleep two floors up, whose legitimacy a mad king could erase with one stroke of his anointed pen; Mary, whom she had lost the first time, and not been permitted to hold even at the end. She thought about her nephew the Emperor, the most powerful prince in the world, and how very far away Spain was tonight, and how little, when it came to it, he would do. She thought about the Church, and about God, in whom she believed with a whole and simple and unshakable faith — and about the impossible thing that faith was going to ask of her. She did not have to wonder, this time, where it all had to go. She had been shown the whole road and its ending, and the part of her that was her mother’s daughter had already stopped being afraid and started, coldly, to plan a different one.
A faithful woman submits and waits, the nuns had taught her, and God will set it right.
She had submitted. She had waited. She had done it with her whole faithful heart — and God had let her husband poison her in a cold room with the realm in ruins around her. So either the nuns had been wrong, or God, in sending her back to the start of it, was telling her the thing they had never dared: that there is a time to submit, and a time to take up your mother’s sword, and the only sin is mistaking the one for the other.
For the first time in either of her lives, Catherine of Aragon sat in her husband’s house and was certain the nuns had been wrong.
Somewhere below in the palace a lute was playing, and a woman she had not yet decided how to hate — a woman she remembered crowned in her own place, and then, in the last she had lived to see, beginning to watch the King’s eyes go cold the way they had once gone cold on her — was laughing at something, low and bright, and the spring night came on.
What had become of the girl after that, Catherine did not know. Her memory ended where her life had ended, in a cold room with the realm in ruins; whatever followed, she had not lived to see it. She knew only the road, and where it had been heading when the dark came down — and that it was the same road, the very same, that she had walked to her own grave.