CHAPTER TWELVE
Late 1530
Arthur was in the Tower.
The insurrection had been quashed relatively quickly, with few deaths. Although her mother was modest when describing her role, Mary knew that much of the credit for putting down the rebels belonged to her, and a part of her wished she could have seen Katherine of Aragon leading at the head of an army, as she had done at Flodden Field. A part of her also derived some petty satisfaction from knowing that her father and Anne now owed her mother their lives.
But the fact remained that there had been a rebellion, that someone had tried to dethrone her father, and that her uncle was imprisoned.
"But surely Father knows he had nothing to do with it?" Mary had burst out, when Mother relayed that bit of information.
Neither of them spoke. They both knew that consent had little to do with it.
Mother and daughter threw themselves into running the More, the better to distract themselves from their turmoil, until about a month after Arthur's arrest, when Father sent permission for Mother to visit him. She set off for London with her countenance smooth, but her body shaking with grief. Owen she left behind, as he was too young to make the journey to the city. He cried fitfully and at all hours of the day, and only calmed when Mary held him.
Sometimes, sitting in the nursery with Owen dozing in her arms, she would wonder if he remembered his father. Arthur had been arrested when he was barely a week old. Owen certainly missed his mother, as he'd at least had a month to bond with her.
News continued to come in from London. Barton and Bocking had both been arrested - Mary was not surprised to hear that - but the names of the other participants were not as easy to learn. Ursula Pole's treason was the strongest blow, so sharp that Mary's beloved Lady Salisbury stepped down from her position as governess out of shame and grief. Mary remembered how Ursula had been Arthur's mistress for a brief while, before he came to his senses, and how she had secured herself a position in the Exeters' household. It made her shiver to realize that treachery could strike so close to home.
Anne's miscarriage, too, had not been God's will, but pure murder. Jane Seymour, her mother's old friend, had been unknowingly responsible for serving Anne something that poisoned the child in her womb. And the Exeters were involved as well: the important people from court who had paid visits to the mad nun, with possible backing from the Pope and Reginald Pole serving as messenger between England and the continent.
It all made Mary's head spin, who to believe and who to forgive, the memory of old loyalty warring with the knowledge of betrayal, and she dealt with it by simply not thinking of it. She was now the Lady of the More in her mother's absence, and running the household even with the assistance of the Duchess of Norfolk, Lady Stafford, demanded all her sensibilities.
The question of how to manage the tenants living on the estate, for instance, was a thorny one. Lady Stafford strongly advocated keeping all of them out of the manor and in their homes. "Likely as not, it was gossips among them who spread the word of your lady mother's child, and ensured that it spread across England like wildfire and reached the mad nun in Kent. If we'd kept them outside where they belonged, this unrest would never have happened."
Mary knew that Lady Stafford was badly shaken by the treason, especially after what had happened to her own father, and she meant to protect all their interests. Still, she remembered the warmth and energy that had filled the More when the tenants were allowed inside. How it had felt to have the children look up to her, and to see Arthur at home among the commoners. "But they were my friends, and so good to us when Owen was about to be born."
"Begging Your Grace's pardon, but a soft heart will do you no good in this climate."
In the end, they invited the children, the most innocent, back up to the observatory, but kept the adults with sharper eyes and ears on their lands. Mary enjoyed watching them at play, but it sent a pang through her heart when she wondered if Owen would ever grow up as carefree and at ease as them.
How difficult running her own household was, and it was nothing compared to what her father was dealing with right now, what Arthur would have had to manage in another lifetime.
Time after time, the weight of Arthur's imprisonment would strike Mary like a mallet striking a gong, but she firmly turned her mind away from any and all such considerations. She had been an eager Princess of Wales. She knew her history. She knew the eventual fates of all rival claimants to the throne, be they as young as the Princes in the Tower or as old as Arthur, and she knew that her father knew as well.
Guide us all, Heavenly Father, Mary would pray, spooling first her mother's old rosary through her fingers, and then her stepfather's. Deliver us from this limbo, and help us solve this equation of trust and mistrust.