Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,87
made it only to a corner before he retched up his meal, while poor Lord Clinton simply stuck his head under the table. His wife, who had been sharing his salad, went white and fell fainting to the floor.
Jane shrieked as I simultaneously tried to attend to the Clintons and to my sons. “Poison!”
“No,” said Robert, who along with Amy had been dining with us. “A cook who has no idea what he is about with a salad.” He picked up a leaf from Lord Clinton’s plate and flourished it in the air. “This has no business in a salad. A proper salad requires a French chef. We in England just don’t understand it.”
Lady Clinton gave a little moan and sat up. “I feel ill,” she announced, and promptly proved her point.
“Salad,” Robert confirmed as Guildford stumbled back into the room and looked at me piteously.
“Get them all to their chambers,” I ordered in relief. What ailed everyone would be unpleasant for a few days, I foresaw, but not dangerous. I turned to Jane, who still looked uneasy. It was her place more than mine to see that her husband was coddled during his illness, but a recuperating Guildford surely deserved more sympathetic company than hers. “Jane, wait a few hours to make sure you are not afflicted. If you are not, perhaps you can visit your mother for a few days while Guildford recovers.”
Jane smiled, for the first time since she had entered our family, in wholehearted approval.
***
Guildford, Hal, and the Clintons were still recovering when John, who had been with the king at Greenwich during this gastric mayhem, summoned me to his chamber and locked the door when I arrived. “It is time to tell you,” he said. “Some days ago, I called the king’s physicians together and asked for their opinion of whether the king would recover.”
I did not need to hear any more; the answer was in John’s face and voice. “And they said he would not?”
“Yes. They said he has three months. At best.”
I felt the tears come to my own eyes. King Henry might have justified his actions with other explanations, and might have even believed them, but anyone who had lived through his reign knew it was the desire for a living son that had caused him to thrust aside Catherine of Aragon so cruelly, then to send Anne Boleyn to the block. Many more had died as the result of the turmoil caused by these queens’ failure to provide the king a male heir. And now this son, this much-loved and much-protected son, for whose birth so much blood had been shed, was dying, with no one but women in line for his throne. You could say one thing for the Lord: he did love his irony. “There is no hope?”
“I told the physicians not to slacken their efforts and not to cease praying for the king’s life, and I have promised them a hundred crowns a month in fees. They have every incentive to hope. I have tried myself. But I do not think there is any.” John’s voice faltered. Then he said, in a voice so low as to be almost unintelligible, “The king wants to see us together tomorrow morning.”
“Why, what could he want with me?”
“He prefers to tell you in person,” John said. He rose. “The king’s condition is a secret, for now, at least in theory. In practice, every ambassador in London is aware of it and is convinced I am poisoning him. In addition, of course, to scheming to marry myself and Jack to either the lady Mary or the lady Elizabeth. One thing I can’t complain of is being accused of idleness.”
“John—”
“I don’t care, in truth. What does it matter what they say of me, with the king dying? He has become almost a son to me.”
“Maybe there is hope, John. You mustn’t lose faith.”
John shook his head. “You won’t say that when you see him.”
***
The king remained at Greenwich, which was both the healthiest place for him to be and the necessary place for him to be, as he was too ill to travel safely. Courtiers had once flirted in its halls and done more than that in some of its secluded places, but no one who stayed here now was idle or cheerful. Everyone went around his business quietly and diligently.
I was no stranger to death in all of its manifestations, having watched five of my children die young of various illnesses, but