She turned and smiled at me. ‘Ah, the Queen of the Day,’ she said mockingly.
I made a little grimace. ‘Don’t tease me, Anne. I have had enough from George.’
Henry Percy stepped forward and took my hand and kissed it. As I looked down at the back of his blond head I realised how high my star was rising. This was Henry Percy, son and heir to the Duke of Northumberland. There was no other man in the kingdom who had fairer prospects or a greater fortune. He was the son of the richest man in England, second only to the king, and he was bowing his head to me and kissing my hand.
‘She shall not tease you,’ he promised me, coming up smiling. ‘For I shall take you in to dine. I’m told that the cooks from Greenwich were out here at dawn to get everything ready. The king is going in, shall we follow?’
I hesitated but the queen, who always created a sense of formality, was left behind at Greenwich, lying in a darkened room with a pain in her belly and fear in her heart. There was no-one at the dockside but the feckless idle men and women of the court. No-one cared about precedence, except in the sense that winners must come first. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
Lord Henry Percy offered his other arm to Anne. ‘Shall I have two sisters?’
‘I think you would find the Bible forbids it,’ Anne said provocatively. ‘The Bible orders a man to choose between sisters and to stay with his first choice. Anything else is a cardinal sin.’
Lord Henry Percy laughed. ‘I’m sure I could get an indulgence,’ he said. ‘The Pope would surely grant me a dispensation. With two sisters like this, what man could be made to choose?’
We did not ride home until it was twilight and the stars were starting to come out in the pale grey sky of spring. I rode beside the king, my hand in his, and we let the horses amble along the riverside tow track. We rode under the archway of the palace and up to the opening front door. Then he pulled up his horse and he lifted me down from the saddle and whispered in my ear: ‘I wish you were queen for all the days, and not just for one day in a pavilion by the river, my love.’
‘He said what?’ my uncle asked.
I stood before him, like a prisoner under question before the court. Behind the table in the Howard rooms were seated Uncle Howard, Duke of Surrey, and my father and George. At the back of the room, behind me, Anne was sitting beside my mother. I, alone before the table, stood like a disgraced child before my elders.
‘He said that he wished I was queen for all the days,’ I said in a small voice, hating Anne for betraying my confidence, hating my father and my uncle for their cold-hearted dissection of lovers’ whispers.
‘What d’you think he meant?’
‘Nothing,’ I said sulkily. ‘It’s just love talk.’
‘We need to see some repayment for all these loans,’ my uncle said irritably. ‘Has he said anything about giving you land? Or something for George? Or us?’
‘Can’t you hint him into it?’ my father suggested. ‘Remind him that George is to be married.’
I looked to George in mute appeal.
‘The thing is that he’s very alert for that sort of thing,’ George pointed out. ‘Everyone does it to him all the time. When he walks from his privy chamber to Mass every morning, his way is lined with people just waiting to ask him for a favour. I should think what he likes about Mary here is that she’s not like that. I don’t think she’s ever asked for anything.’
‘She has diamonds worth a fortune in her ears,’ my mother put in sharply from behind me. Anne nodded.
‘But she didn’t ask for them. He gave them freely. He likes to be generous when it’s unexpected. I think we have to let Mary play this her own way. She has a talent for loving him.’
I bit my lip on that, to stop myself saying a word. I did have a talent for loving him. It was perhaps the only talent I had. And this family, this powerful network of men, were using my talent to love the king as they used George’s talents at swordplay, or my father’s talent for languages, to further the interests of our family.
‘Court moves to London next week,’ my father remarked. ‘The king will see the Spanish ambassador. There’s little chance of him making any greater move towards Mary while he needs the Spanish alliance to fight the French.’
‘Better work for peace then,’ my uncle recommended wolfishly.
‘I do. I am a peacemaker,’ my father replied. ‘Blessed, aren’t I?’
The court in progress was always a mighty sight, part-way between a country fair, a market day, and a joust. It was all arranged by Cardinal Wolsey, everything in the court or the country was done by his command. He had been at the king’s side at the Battle of the Spurs in France, he had been almoner then to the English army and the men had never lain so dry at night nor eaten so well. He had a grasp of detail that made him attentive to how the court would get from one place to another, a grasp of politics that prompted him as to where we should stop and which lord should be honoured with a visit when the king was on his summer progress, and he was wily enough to trouble Henry with none of these things so the young king went from pleasure to pleasure as if the sky itself rained down supplies and servants and organisation.
It was the cardinal who ruled the precedence of the court on the move. Ahead of us went the pages carrying the standards with the pennants of all the lords in the train fluttering above their heads. Next there was a gap to let the dust settle and then came the king, riding his best hunter with his embossed saddle of red leather and all the trappings of kingship. Above his head flew his own personal standard, and at his side were his friends chosen to ride with him that day: my husband William Carey, Cardinal Wolsey, my father, and then trailing along behind them came the rest of the king’s companions, changing their places in the train as they desired, lagging back or spurring forward. Around them, in a loose formation, came the king’s personal guards mounted on horses and holding their lances at the salute. They hardly served to protect him – who would dream of hurting such a king? – but they kept back the press of people who gathered to cheer and gawp whenever we rode through a little town or a village.
Then there was another break before the queen’s train. She was riding the steady old palfrey which she always used. She sat straight in the saddle, her gown awkwardly disposed in great folds of thick fabric, her hat skewered on her head, her eyes squinting against the bright sunshine. She was feeling ill. I knew because I had been at her side when she had mounted her horse in the morning and I had heard the tiny repressed grunt of pain as she settled into the saddle.
Behind the queen’s court came the other members of the household, some of them riding, some of them seated in carts, some of them singing or drinking ale to keep the dust from the road out of their throats. All of us shared a careless sense of a high day and a holiday as the court left Greenwich and headed for London with a new season of parties and entertainments ahead of us, and who knew what might happen in this year?
The queen’s rooms at York Place were small and neat and we took only a few days to get unpacked and have everything to rights. The king visited every morning, as usual, and his court came with him, Lord Henry Percy among them. His lordship and Anne took to sitting in the windowseat together, their heads very close, as they worked on one of Lord Henry’s poems. He swore that he would become a great poet under Anne’s tuition and she swore that he would never learn anything, but that it was all a ruse to waste her time and her learning on such a dolt.
I thought that it was something for a Boleyn girl from a little castle in Kent and a handful of fields in Essex to call the Duke of Northumberland’s son a dolt, but Henry Percy laughed and claimed that she was too stern a teacher and talent, great talent, would out, whatever she might say.
‘The cardinal is asking for you,’ I said to Lord Henry. He rose up, in no particular hurry, kissed Anne’s hand in farewell, and went to find Cardinal Wolsey. Anne gathered up the papers they had been working on and locked them in her writing box.
‘Does
he really have no talent as a poet?’ I asked.
She shrugged with a smile. ‘He’s no Wyatt.’
‘Is he a Wyatt in courtship?’
‘He’s not married,’ she said. ‘And so more desirable to a sensible woman.’
‘Too high, even for you.’
‘I don’t see why. If I want him, and he wants me.’
‘You try asking Father to speak to the duke,’ I recommended sarcastically. ‘See what the duke says.’
She turned her head to look out of the window. The long beautiful lawns of York Place stretched down below us, almost hiding the sparkle of the river at the foot of the garden. ‘I won’t ask Father,’ she said. ‘I thought I might settle matters on my own account.’
I was going to laugh then I realised she was serious. ‘Anne, this is not something you can settle for yourself. He’s only a young man, you’re only seventeen, you can’t decide these things for yourselves. His father is certain to have someone in mind for him, and our father and uncle are certain to have plans for you. We’re not private people, we’re the Boleyn girls. We have to be guided, we have to do as we are told. Look at me!’
‘Yes, look at you!’ She rounded on me with a sudden flare of her dark energy. ‘Married when you were still a child and now the king’s mistress. Half as clever as me! Half as educated! But you are the centre of the court and I am nothing. I have to be your lady in waiting. I cannot serve you, Mary. It’s an insult to me.’
‘I never asked you to …’ I stammered.
‘Who insists that you bathe and wash your hair?’ she demanded fiercely.
‘You do. But I …’
‘Who helps you choose your clothes and prompts you with the king? Who has rescued you a thousand times when you’ve been too stupid and tongue-tied to know how to play him?’
‘You. But Anne …’
‘And what is there in this for me? I have no husband who can be given land to show the king’s favour. I have no husband to win high office because my sister is the king’s mistress. I get nothing from this. However high you rise I still get nothing. I have to have a place of my own.’
‘You should have a place of your own,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t deny it. All I was saying was that I don’t think you can be a duchess.’
‘And you should decide?’ she spat at me. ‘You who are nothing but the king’s diversion from the important business of making a son if he can and making war if he can raise an army?’
‘I don’t say I should decide,’ I whispered. ‘I just said that I don’t think they’ll let you do it.’
‘When it’s done, it’s done,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘And no-one will know until it’s done.’
Suddenly, like a striking snake, she reached out and grabbed my hand in a fierce grip. At once she twisted it behind my back and held me so that I could move neither forward nor backwards but only cry out in pain: ‘Anne! Don’t! You’re really hurting!’
‘Well, hear this,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Hear this, Mary. I am playing my own game and I don’t want you interrupting. Nobody will know anything until I am ready to tell them, and then they will know everything too late.’
‘You’re going to make him love you?’
Abruptly she released me and I gripped my elbow and my arm where the bones ached.
‘I’m going to make him marry me,’ she said flatly. ‘And if you so much as breathe a word to anyone, then I will kill you.’
After that I watched Anne with more care. I saw how she played him. Having advanced through all the cold months of the New Year at Greenwich, now, with the coming of the sun and our arrival in York Place, she suddenly retreated. And the more she withdrew from him the more he came on. When he came into a room she looked up and threw him a smile which went like an arrow to the centre of the target. She filled her look with invitation, with desire. But then she looked away and she would not look at him again for the whole of the visit.
He was in the train of Cardinal Wolsey and was supposed to wait on His Grace while the cardinal visited the king or the queen. In practice there was nothing for the young lord to do but to lounge around the queen’s apartments and flirt with anyone who would talk to him. It was clear that he only had eyes for Anne and she walked past him, danced with anyone who asked her but him, dropped her glove and let him return it to her, sat near him but did not speak to him, returned his poems and told him that she could help him no longer.
She went into the most unswerving of retreats, having been unswervingly in advance, and the young man did not begin to know what he could do to recapture her.
He came to me. ‘Mistress Carey, have I offended your sister in some way?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘She used to smile on me so charmingly and now she treats me very coldly.’
I thought for a moment, I was so slow at these things. On the one hand was the true answer: that she was playing him like a complete angler with a fish on the line. But I knew Anne would not want me to say that. On the other hand was the answer Anne would want me to give. I looked into Henry Percy’s anxious baby face for a moment of genuine compassion. Then I gave him the Boleyn smile and the Howard answer. ‘Indeed, my lord, I think she is afraid to be too kind.’
I saw the hope leap up in his trusting, boyish face. ‘Too kind?’
‘She was very kind to you, was she not, my lord?’
He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I’m her slave.’
‘I think she feared that she might come to like you too much.’
He leaned forward as if to snatch the words from my mouth. ‘Too much?’
‘Too much for her own peace of mind,’ I said very softly.
He leaped up and took two strides away from me and then came back again. ‘She might desire me?’
I smiled and turned my head a little so that he could not see my weariness at this deceit. He was not to be put off. He dropped to his knees before me and peered up into my face.
‘Tell me, Mistress Carey,’ he begged. ‘I have not slept for nights. I have not eaten for days. I am a soul in torment. Tell me if you think that she loves me, if you think that she might love me. Tell me, for pity’s sake.’
‘I cannot say.’ Indeed, I could not. The lies would have stuck in my throat. ‘You must ask her yourself.’
He sprang up, like a hare out of bracken with the beagle hounds behind it. ‘I will! I will! Where is she?’
‘Playing at bowls in the garden.’
He needed nothing more, he tore open the door and ran out of the room. I heard the heels of his boots ring down the stone stairs to the door to the garden. Jane Parker, who had been seated across the room from us, looked up.
‘Have you made another conquest?’ she asked, getting the wrong idea as usual.
I gave her a smile as poisonous as her own. ‘Some women attract desire. Others do not,’ I said simply.
He found her at the bowling green, losing daintily and deliberately to Sir Thomas Wyatt.
‘I shall write you a sonnet,’ Wyatt promised. ‘For handing me victory with such grace.’
‘No, no, it was a fair battle,’ Anne protested.
‘If there had been money on it I think I would be getting out my purse,’ he said. ‘You Boleyns only lose when there is nothing to gain by winning.’
Anne smiled. ‘Next time you shall put your fortune on it,’ she promised him. ‘See – I have lulled you into a sense of safety.’
‘I have no fortune to offer but my heart.’
‘Will you walk with me?’ Henry Percy interrupted, his voice coming out far louder than he intended.
Anne gave a little start as if she had not noticed him there. ‘Oh! Lord Henry.’
‘The lady is playing bowls,’ Sir Thomas said.
Anne smiled at them both. ‘I have been so roundly defeated that I will take a walk and plan my strategy,’ she said and put her hand on Lord Henry Percy’s arm.
He led her away from the bowling green, down the windin
g path that led to a seat beneath a yew tree.
‘Miss Anne,’ he began.
‘Is it too damp to sit?’
At once he swung his rich cloak from his shoulder and spread it out for her on a stone bench.
‘Miss Anne …’
‘No, I am too chilled,’ she decided and rose up from the seat.
‘Miss Anne!’ he exclaimed, a little more crossly.
Anne paused and turned her seductive smile on him.
‘Your lordship?’
‘I have to know why have you grown so cold to me?’
For a moment she hesitated, then she dropped the coquettish play and turned a face to him which was grave and lovely.
‘I did not mean to be cold,’ she said slowly. ‘I meant to be careful.’
‘Of what?’ he exclaimed. ‘I have been in torment!’
‘I did not mean to torment you. I meant to draw back a little. Nothing more than that.’
‘Why?’ he whispered.
She looked down the garden to the river. ‘I thought it better for me, perhaps better for us both,’ she said quietly. ‘We might become too close in friendship for my comfort.’
He took a swift step from her and then back to her side. ‘I would never cause you a moment’s uneasiness,’ he assured her. ‘If you wanted me to promise you that we would be friends and that no breath of scandal would ever come to you, I would have promised that.’
She turned her dark luminous eyes on him. ‘Could you promise that no-one would ever say that we were in love?’
Mutely, he shook his head. Of course he could not promise what a scandal-mad court might or might not say.
‘Could you promise that we would never fall in love?’
He hesitated. ‘Of course I love you, Mistress Anne,’ he said. ‘In the courtly way. In the polite way.’
She smiled as if she were pleased to hear it. ‘I know it is nothing more than a May game. For me, also. But it’s a dangerous game when played between a handsome man and a maid, when there are many people very quick to say that we are made for each other, that we are perfectly matched.’
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