Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  My father nodded, a little consoled, but my uncle drummed the table with his long fingers. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Take her away.’ Anne spoke suddenly. She drew attention at once in the way that a late speaker always does, but the confidence in her voice was riveting.

  ‘Away?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Send her down to Hever. Tell him that she’s ill. Let him imagine her dying of grief.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he’ll want her back. She’ll be able to command what she likes. All she has to do –’ Anne gleamed her spiteful little smile ‘–All she has to do when she returns is to behave so well that she enchants the most educated, the most witty, the most handsome prince in Christendom. D’you think she can do it?’

  There was a cold silence while my mother and my father and my Uncle Howard and even George all inspected me in silence.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Anne said smugly. ‘But I can coach her well enough to get her into his bed, and whatever happens to her after that is in the hands of God.’

  Uncle Howard looked intently at Anne. ‘Can you coach her in how to keep him?’ he asked.

  She raised her head and smiled at him, the very picture of confidence. ‘Of course, for a while,’ she said. ‘He’s only a man after all.’

  Uncle Howard laughed shortly at the casual dismissal of his sex. ‘You have a care,’ he urged. ‘We men are not where we are today because of some sort of accident. We chose to get into the great places of power, despite the desires of women; and we chose to use those places to make laws which will hold us there forever.’

  ‘True enough,’ Anne granted. ‘But we’re not talking of high policy. We’re talking of catching the king’s desire. She just has to catch him and hold him for long enough for him to make a son on her, a royal Howard bastard. What more could we ask?’

  ‘And she can do that?’

  ‘She can learn,’ Anne said. ‘She’s halfway there. She is his choice, after all.’ The little shrug she gave indicated that she did not think much of the king’s choice.

  There was a silence. Uncle Howard’s attention had moved from me and my future as the brood mare for the family. Instead he was looking at Anne as if he had seen her for the first time. ‘Not many maids of your age think as clearly as you.’

  She smiled at him. ‘I’m a Howard like you.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t try for him yourself.’

  ‘I thought of it,’ she said honestly. ‘Any woman in England today would be bound to think of it.’

  ‘But?’ he prompted her.

  ‘I’m a Howard,’ she repeated. ‘What matters is that one of us catches the king. It hardly matters which one. If his taste is for Mary and she has his acknowledged son then my family becomes the first in the kingdom. Without rival. And we can do it. We can manage the king.’

  Uncle Howard nodded. He knew that the king’s conscience was a domesticated beast, given to easy herding but prone to sudden stubborn stops. ‘It seems we have to thank you,’ he said. ‘You have planned our strategy.’

  She acknowledged his thanks, not with a bow, which would have been graceful. Instead, she turned her head like a flower on the stem, a typically arrogant gesture. ‘Of course I long to see my sister as the king’s favourite. These things are my business quite as much as yours.’

  He shook his head as my mother made a shushing noise at her overly confident eldest daughter. ‘No, let her speak,’ he said. ‘She’s as sharp as any of us. And I think she’s right. Mary must go to Hever and wait for the king to send for her.’

  ‘He’ll send,’ Anne said knowledgably. ‘He’ll send.’

  I felt like a parcel, like the curtains for a bed, or the plates for the top table, or the pewter for the lower tables in the hall. I was to be packed up and sent to Hever as bait for the king. I was not to see him before I left, I was not to speak to anyone about my going. My mother told the queen that I was overtired and asked for me to be excused from her service for a few days so that I might go home and rest. The queen, poor lady, thought that she had triumphed. She thought that the Boleyns were in retreat.

  It was not a long ride, a little more than twenty miles. We stopped to dine at the roadside, eating nothing more than bread and cheese which we had carried with us. My father could have called on the hospitality of any great house along the way, he was well enough known as a courtier high in the favour of the king, and we would have been nobly entertained. But he did not want to break the journey.

  The high road was rutted and pitted with potholes, every now and then we saw a broken cart wheel where a traveller had been overturned. But the horses stepped out well enough on the dry ground and every now and then the going was so good that we broke into a canter. The verges on the side of the road were thick with the white of gypsy lace and big-faced white daisies, and lush with the early summer greenness of grass. In the hedges the honeysuckle twisted around the bursting growth of hawthorn and may, at the roots were pools of purple-blue self-heal and the gangly growth of ladies’ smock with dainty flowers of white, veined with purple. Behind the hedges in the thick lush pastures were fat cows with their heads down, munching, and in the higher fields there were flocks of sheep with the occasional idle boy watching over them from the shade of a tree.

  The common land outside of the villages was mostly farmed in strips and they made a pretty sight where they were gardened in rows with onions and carrots drawn up like a retinue on parade. In the villages themselves the cottage gardens were tumbling confusions of daffodils and herbs, vegetables and primroses, wild beans shooting and hawthorn hedgerows in flower with a corner set aside for a pig, and a rooster crowing on the dunghill outside the back door. My father rode in a quiet satisfied silence when the road took us onto our own land, downhill, through Edenbridge, and through the wet meadowlands towards Hever. The horses went slower as the going grew heavier on the damp road, but my father was patient now we were nearing our estate.

  It had been his father’s house before it was his; but it went no further back in our family than that. My grandfather had been a man of no more than moderate means who had risen by his own skills in Norfolk, apprenticed to a mercer, but eventually became Lord Mayor of London. For all that we clung to our Howard connection it was only a recent one, and only through my mother who had been Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, a great catch for my father. He had taken her to our grand house at Rochford in Essex and then brought her to Hever where she had been appalled at the smallness of the castle, and the cosy poky private rooms.

  At once he had set to rebuild it to please her. First he put a ceiling across the great hall, which had been open to the rafters in the old style. In the space he created above the hall he made a set of private rooms for us where we could dine and sit in greater comfort and privacy.

  My father and I turned in at the gates of the park, the gatekeeper and his wife tumbling out to make their bow as we went by. We rode past them with a wave, and up the dirt road to the first river, which was spanned by a little wooden bridge. My horse did not like the look of this, she jibbed at it as soon as she heard the echo of her hoofbeats on the hollow wood.

  ‘Fool,’ my father said briefly, leaving me to wonder whether he meant me or the horse, and put his own hunter before mine and led the way across. My horse followed behind, very docile when she could see that there was no danger, and so I rode up to the drawbridge of our castle behind my father and waited while the men came out of the guard room to take our horses and lead them away to the stables at the back. My legs felt weak after the long ride when they lifted me down from the saddle but I followed my father across the drawbridge and into the shadow of the gatehouse, under the forbidding thick teeth of the portcullis and into the welcoming little castle yard.

  The front door stood open, the yeoman of the ewry and the chief household men came out and bowed to my father, half a dozen servants behind them. My father ran his eyes over them: some were in full livery,
some were not, two of the servant girls were hastily untying the hessian aprons they wore over their best aprons underneath, and disclosing some very dirty linen as they did so; the spit boy, peeping out from the corner of the yard, was filthy with deeply engrained dirt and half-naked in his rags. My father took in the general sense of disorder and carelessness and nodded at his people.

  ‘Very well,’ he said guardedly. ‘This is my daughter Mary. Mistress Mary Carey. You have prepared rooms for us?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’ The groom of the bedchambers bowed. ‘Everything is ready. Mistress Carey’s room is ready.’

  ‘And dinner?’ my father demanded.

  ‘At once.’

  ‘We’ll eat in the private rooms. I’ll have dinner tomorrow in the great hall and people can come and see me. Tell them I will dine in public tomorrow. But this evening I won’t be disturbed.’

  One of the girls came forward and dipped a curtsey to me. ‘Shall I show you your room, Mistress Carey?’ she asked.

  I followed her at my father’s nod. We went through the broad front door and turned left along a narrow hall. At the end a tiny spiral stone staircase led us upwards to a pretty room with a small bed hung with curtains of pale blue silk. The windows looked out over the moat and the park beyond. A door out of the room would lead me into a small gallery with a stone fireplace which was my mother’s favourite sitting room.

  ‘D’you want to wash?’ the girl asked awkwardly. She gestured towards a jug and ewer filled with cold water. ‘I could get you some hot water?’

  I stripped off my riding gloves and handed them to her. ‘Yes,’ I said. For a moment I thought of the palace at Eltham and the constant sycophantic service. ‘Get me some hot water and see that they bring my clothes up. I want to change out of this riding dress.’

  She bowed and left the room by the little stone staircase. As she went I could hear her muttering to herself: ‘Hot water. Clothes,’ so as not to forget. I went to the windowseat, kneeled up and looked out of the little window through the leaded panes.

  I had spent the day trying not to think of Henry and the court I was leaving behind me, but now at this comfortless homecoming I realised that I had not just lost the love of the king, I had lost the luxuries which had become essential to me. I did not want to be Miss Boleyn of Hever again. I did not want to be the daughter of a small castle in Kent. I had been the most favoured young woman in the whole of England. I had gone far beyond Hever and I did not want to come back.

  My father stayed no more than three days, long enough to see his land agent and those tenants who urgently wanted to speak to him, time enough to solve a dispute about a boundary post and to order his favourite mare put to the stallion, and then he was ready to leave again. I stood on the drawbridge to bid him farewell and I knew that I must look sorrowful indeed since even he noticed as he swung himself up into the saddle.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded, bracingly. ‘Not missing court, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said shortly. There was no point telling my father that indeed I missed the court, but that I missed most, unbearably, the sight of Henry.

  ‘No-one to blame but yourself,’ my father said robustly. ‘We have to trust to your brother and sister to set it right for you. If not, then God knows what will become of you. I’ll have to get Carey to take you back, and we’ll have to hope that he forgives you.’

  He laughed aloud at the shocked look on my face.

  I drew closer to my father’s horse and put my hand on his gauntlet where it rested on the reins. ‘If the king asks for me would you tell him that I am very sorry if I offended him?’

  He shook his head. ‘We play this Anne’s way,’ he said. ‘She seems to think she knows how to manage him. You have to do as you are bid, Mary. You bodged it once, you have to work under orders now.’

  ‘Why should Anne be the one who says how things are done?’ I demanded. ‘Why d’you always listen to Anne?’

  My father took his hand from under my grip. ‘Because she’s got a head on her shoulders and she knows her own value,’ he said bluntly. ‘Whereas you have behaved like a girl of fourteen in love for the first time.’

  ‘But I am a girl of fourteen in love for the first time!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said unforgivingly. ‘That’s why we listen to Anne.’

  He did not trouble to say goodbye to me, but turned his horse away, trotted over the drawbridge and then down the track towards the gates.

  I raised my hand to wave in case he looked back; but he did not. He rode straight-backed, looking forward. He rode like a Howard. We never look back. We have no time for regrets or second thoughts. If a plan goes awry we make another, if one weapon breaks in our hands we find a second. If the steps fall down before us we overleap them and go up. It is always onwards and upwards for the Howards; and my father was on his way back to court and to the company of the king without a backwards glance for me.

  By the end of the first week I had taken a turn around every walk that there was in the garden and explored the park in every direction from my starting point at the drawbridge. I had started a tapestry for the altar of St Peter’s church at Hever and completed a square foot of sky which was very boring indeed, being nothing but blue. I had written three letters to Anne and George and sent them off by messenger to the court at Eltham. Three times he had gone for me and come back with no reply except their good wishes.

  By the end of the second week I was ordering my horse out of the stables in the morning and going for long rides on my own, I was too irritable even for the company of a silent servant. I tried to keep my temper hidden. I thanked the maid for any little service she did for me, I sat to eat my dinner and bowed my head when the priest said grace as if I did not want to leap up and scream with frustration that I was trapped in Hever while the court was on the move from Eltham to Windsor and I not with them. I did everything I could to contain the fury that I was so far from court, and so terribly left out of everything.

  By the third week I had slid into a resigned despair. I heard nothing from anyone and I concluded that Henry did not want to send for me to return, that my husband was proving intractable and did not want a wife carrying the disgrace of being the king’s flirtation – but not his mistress. Such a woman could not add to a man’s prestige. Such a woman was best left in the country. I wrote to Anne and to George twice in the second week but still they did not reply. But then, on Tuesday of the third week, I received a scrawled note from George.

  Don’t despair – I wager you are thinking yourself quite abandoned by us all. He speaks of you constantly and I remind him of your many charms. I should think he will send for you within the month. Make sure that you are looking well!

  Geo.

  Anne bids me tell you that she will write in a little while.

  George’s letter was the only moment of relief during my long wait. As I entered my second month of waiting, the month of May, always the happiest month at court as the season for picnics and journeyings started again, it seemed to me that my days were very long.

  I had no-one to talk to, I had no company to speak of at all. My maid chattered to me while she dressed me. At breakfast I dined alone at the top table and spoke only to claimants who came to the house with business for my father to transact. I walked in the garden for a little while. I read some books.

  In the long afternoons I had my hunter brought round and I rode in wider and wider sweeps of the countryside. I began to learn the lanes and byways that stretched around my home and even started to recognise some of our tenants on their little farms. I learned their names and started to rein in my horse when I saw a man working in the fields and ask him what he was growing, and how he was doing. This was the best time for the farmers. The hay was cut and drying in windrows, waiting to be pitchforked into great stacks and thatched to keep dry for winter feed. The wheat and barley and rye were standing tall in the fields and growing in height and plumpness. The calves were growing fat on
their mothers’ milk and the profits from this year’s wool sales were being counted in every farmhouse and cottage in the county.

  It was a time for leisure, a brief respite in the hard work of the year, and the farmers held little dances on the village green, and races and sports before the main work of harvesting.

  I, who had first ridden into the Boleyn estate looking around me and recognising nothing, now knew the country all around the estate wall, the farmers and the crops they were growing. When they came to me at dinner time and complained that such a man was not properly farming his strip which he held by agreement with his village, I knew straightaway what they were speaking of because I had ridden that way the day before and seen the land left to grow weeds and nettles, the only wasted lot among the well-tended common fields. It was easy for me, as I ate my dinner, to warn the tenant that his land would be taken from him if he did not use it for growing a crop. I knew the farmers who were growing hops and the ones who were growing vines. I made an agreement with one farmer that if he should get a good crop of grapes then I would ask my father to send to London for a Frenchman to come on a visit to Hever Castle and teach the art of winemaking.

  It was no hardship to ride around every day. I loved being outside, hearing the birds singing as I rode through the woods, smelling the flowering honeysuckle as it cascaded through the hedges on either side of the track. I loved my mare Jesmond, which the king had given me: her eagerness to canter, the alert flicker of her ears, her whinny when she saw me come into the stable yard, a carrot in my hand. I loved the lushness of the meadows by the river, the way they shimmered white and yellow with flowers, and the blaze of red poppies in the wheatfields. I loved the weald and the buzzards circling in the sky in great lazy loops, even higher than larks, before turning on their broad wings and wheeling away.

  It was all makeweight, it was all a way of filling the time since I could not be with Henry and could not be at court. But I had a growing sense that if I were never to go to court again, then I could at least be a good and fair landlord. The more enterprising young farmers outside Edenbridge could see that there was a market for lucerne. But they knew no-one who grew it, nor where they could get the seeds. I wrote for them to a farmer on my father’s estate in Essex, and got them both seeds and advice. They planted a field while I was there, and promised to plant another when they saw how the crop liked the soil. And I thought, even though I was no more than a young woman, I had done a wonderful thing. Without me they would not have gone further than slapping their hands on the table at the Hollybush and swearing that a man could make some money from the new crops. With my help they were able to try it out, and if they made a fortune then there would be two more men rising up in the world, and if my grandfather’s story were anything to go by, then no-one could tell how high they might aspire.