Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  Anne gave her small secretive smile. ‘He’s not necessarily a heretic,’ she said. ‘It’s a matter of opinion. I have been reading his books and others who think like he does.’

  ‘You’d better keep it quiet,’ I said. ‘If Father and Mother find you’ve been reading banned books they’ll send you to France again, anywhere to get you out of the way.’

  She shrugged. ‘No-one pays any attention to me, I’m quite eclipsed by your glory. There is only one way to come to the attention of this family and that is to climb into the king’s bed. You have to be a whore to be beloved by this family.’

  I folded my hands over my swollen belly and smiled at her, quite unmoved by her malice. ‘There’s no need to pinch me because my stars have led me here. There was no need for you to set yourself at Henry Percy and onwards to disgrace.’

  For a moment the mask of her beautiful face dropped and I saw the longing in her eyes. ‘Have you heard from him?’

  I shook my head. ‘If he wrote to me they’d not let me have the letter,’ I said. ‘I think he’s still fighting against the Scots.’

  She pressed her lips together to keep back a little moan. ‘Oh God, what if he is hurt or killed?’

  I felt my baby stir and I put my warm hands on my loose stomacher. ‘Anne, he should be nothing to you.’

  Her eyelashes flickered down over the heat in her gaze. ‘He is nothing to me,’ she replied.

  ‘He’s a married man now,’ I said firmly. ‘You will have to forget him if you ever want to get back to court.’

  She pointed at my belly. ‘That is the problem for me,’ she said baldly. ‘All anyone can think of in this family is that you might be carrying the king’s son. I have written to Father half a dozen times and he has had his clerk reply to me once. He doesn’t think about me. He doesn’t care about me. All anyone cares about is you and your fat belly.’

  ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ I said. I was trying to sound serene but I was afraid. If Henry had got a girl on me and she was strong and lovely then he should be happy enough to show the world that he was potent. But this was no ordinary man. He wanted to show the world that he could make a healthy baby. He wanted to show the world that he could make a boy.

  She was a girl. Despite all those months of hoping and whispered prayers and even special Masses said in Hever and Rochford church, she was a girl.

  But she was my little girl. She was an exquisite little bundle with hands so tiny that they were like the palms of a little frog, with eyes so dark a blue that they were like the sky above Hever at midnight. She had a dusting of black hair on the crown of her head, as unlike Henry’s ruddy gold as anything one could imagine. But she had his kissable rosebud mouth. When she yawned she looked like a very king, bored with insufficient praise. When she cried, she squeezed real tears onto her outraged pink cheeks, like a monarch denied his rights. When I fed her, holding her in my arms and marvelling at the insistent powerful sucking on my breast, she swelled like a lamb and slept as if she were a drunkard lolling beside a tankard of mead.

  I held her in my arms constantly. There was a wet nurse to attend her, but I argued that my breasts hurt so much that I must let her suckle, and I cunningly kept her to myself. I fell in love with her. I fell completely and utterly in love with her and I could not for a moment imagine that anything would have been any better if she had been a boy.

  Even Henry melted at the sight of her when he visited me in the shadowy peace of the birthing room. He picked her up from her cradle and marvelled at the tiny perfection of her face, her hands, her little feet under the heavy embroidered gown. ‘We’ll call her Elizabeth,’ he said, rocking her gently.

  ‘May I choose her name?’ I asked, greatly daring.

  ‘You don’t like Elizabeth?’

  ‘I had another name in mind.’

  He shrugged. It was a girl’s name. It did not matter much. ‘As you wish. Call her what you like. She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?’

  He brought me a purse of gold and a necklace with diamonds. And he brought me some books, a critique of his own work of theology, some heavy works that Cardinal Wolsey had recommended. I thanked him for them and put them to one side, and thought that I would send them to Anne and ask her to write me a synopsis so that I might bluff my way through a conversation.

  We started his visit formally enough, seated on chairs either side of the fireplace, but he took me to the bed and lay beside me and kissed me gently and sweetly. After a little while he wanted to have me and I had to remind him that I was not yet churched. I was not clean. Timidly I touched at his waistcoat and with a sigh he took my hand and pressed it against his hardness. I wished that someone would tell me what he wanted of me. But then he himself guided my touch, and whispered in my ear what he wanted to do, and then after a little while of his movement and my blundering caresses he gave a sigh and lay still.

  ‘Is it enough for you?’ I asked timidly.

  He turned and gave me his sweet smile. ‘My love, it is a great pleasure for me to have you, even like this, after this long time. When you go to be churched don’t confess it – the sin is all mine. But you would tempt a saint.’

  ‘And you do love her?’ I pressed him.

  He gave an indulgent, lazy chuckle. ‘Why yes. She’s as lovely as her mother.’

  He rose up after a few moments and straightened his clothes. He gave me his delicious roguish grin that still delighted me, though half my mind was on the baby in her cradle, and the other half on the ache in my milk-heavy breasts.

  ‘You shall have rooms nearer to mine when you are churched,’ he promised me. ‘I want you by me all the time.’

  I smiled. It was a delicious moment. The King of England wanted me with him, constantly at his side.

  ‘I want a boy off you,’ he said bluntly.

  My father was angry with me that the baby was a girl – or so my mother said – reporting from an outside world which seemed very remote. My uncle was disappointed but determined not to show it. I nodded as if I cared but I felt only a total delight that she had opened her eyes this morning and looked at me with a sort of bright intensity that made me certain that she had seen me and known me for her mother. Neither my father nor my uncle could be admitted into the birthing room, and the king did not repeat his single visit. There was a sense of this place being a refuge for us, a secret room where men and their plans and their treacheries would not come.

  George came, breaking the conventions with his usual comfortable grace. ‘Nothing too awful going on in here, is there?’ he asked, putting his handsome head around the door.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, welcoming him with a smile and my cheek to kiss. He bent over me and kissed me deeply on the mouth. ‘Oh how delicious, my sister, a young mother, a dozen forbidden pleasures all at once. Kiss me again – kiss me like you kiss Henry.’

  ‘Go away,’ I said, pushing him off. ‘Look at the baby.’

  He peered at her as she lay sleeping in my arms. ‘Nice hair,’ he said. ‘What shall you call her?’

  I glanced at the shut door. I knew I could trust George. ‘I want to call her Catherine.’

  ‘Rather odd.’

  ‘I don’t see why. I am her lady in waiting.’

  ‘But it’s her husband’s baby.’

  I giggled, it was impossible for me not to revel in my sense of joy. ‘Oh George, I know. But I have admired her from the moment I entered her service. And I want to show her that I respect her – whatever else has happened.’

  Still he looked doubtful. ‘D’you think she’ll understand? Won’t she think it’s some kind of mockery?’

  I was so shocked that I gripped Catherine a little. ‘She cannot imagine that I would triumph over her.’

  ‘Here, why are you crying?’ George asked. ‘There’s no reason to cry, Mary. Don’t cry, you’ll curdle the milk or something.’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ I said, ignoring the tears on my cheeks. ‘I’m not meaning to cry.’

  �
��Well, stop,’ he urged me. ‘Stop it, Mary. Mother will come in and everyone will blame me for upsetting you. And they’ll say that I shouldn’t be here in the first place. Why don’t you wait till you come out and then you can see the queen and ask her yourself if she would like the compliment? That’s all I’d suggest.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling immediately more cheerful. ‘I could do that, and then I might explain.’

  ‘But don’t cry,’ he reminded me. ‘She’s a queen, she won’t like tears. I bet you’ve never seen her cry, for all you’ve been with her day and night for four years.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘D’you know, in these four years, I have never ever seen her cry.’

  ‘You never will,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘She’s not a woman who crumbles into distress. She’s a woman of most powerful will.’

  My only other visitor was my husband, William Carey. He arrived, gracefully enough, bearing a bowl of early strawberries which he had ordered to be brought up from Hever.

  ‘A taste of home,’ he said kindly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He glanced into the cradle. ‘They tell me it’s a girl and she is well and strong?’

  ‘She is,’ I said, a little chilled by the indifference of his tone.

  ‘And what name are you calling her? Other than mine? I assume she is to carry my name, she isn’t to be Fitzroy or some other acknowledgement that she is a royal bastard?’

  I bit my tongue and bowed my head. ‘I am sorry if you are offended, husband,’ I said meekly.

  He nodded. ‘So what name?’

  ‘She is to be Carey. I thought Catherine Carey.’

  ‘As you wish, madam. I have been granted five good stewardships of land, and a knighthood. I am Sir William now, and you are Lady Carey. I have more than doubled my income. Did he tell you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I am in the highest of favour. If you had obliged us with a boy I might have looked for an estate in Ireland or France. I might have been Lord Carey. Who knows how high a boy bastard might have taken us?’

  I did not reply. William’s tone was mild; but the words had a cutting ring to them. I did not think he was truly asking me to celebrate his good fortune in being England’s most famous cuckold.

  ‘You know, I had thought to be a great man at the king’s court,’ he said bitterly. ‘When I knew he liked my company, when my star was rising. I hoped to be something like your father, a statesman who might see the whole picture of the scene, who might play his part in arguing at the great courts of Europe, dealing one with the other and always taking his own country’s interest as his byword. But no, here I am, rewarded ten times over for doing nothing but looking the other way while the king takes my wife to his bed.’

  I kept my silence, and my eyes down. When I looked up he was smiling at me, his ironical half-sad crooked smile. ‘Ah, little wife,’ he said gently. ‘We did not have much time together, did we? We did not bed very well nor very often. We did not learn tenderness or even desire. We only had a little time.’

  ‘I am sorry for that too,’ I said softly.

  ‘Sorry that we did not bed?’

  ‘My lord?’ I said, genuinely confused by the sudden sharpness in his tone.

  ‘It has been suggested, very politely by your kinsmen, that perhaps I had dreamed it all and we did not bed at all. Is that your wish? That I deny ever having had you?’

  I was startled. ‘No! You know it is not my wishes that are consulted in these matters.’

  ‘And they have not told you to tell the king that I was impotent on our wedding night and every night thereafter?’

  I shook my head. ‘Why would I say such a thing?’

  He smiled. ‘To get our marriage set aside,’ he suggested. ‘So that you are an unmarried woman. And the next baby is Fitzroy and perhaps Henry can be prevailed on to make him legitimate, the son and heir to the throne. Then you are the mother of the next King of England.’

  There was a silence. I found I was staring blankly at him. ‘They never want me to do that?’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh you Boleyns,’ he said gently. ‘What happens to you, Mary, if they have our marriage set aside and push you forward? It overthrows the state of marriage and it names you, without contradiction, as a whore, a pretty little whore.’

  I felt my cheeks blaze but I kept my mouth shut. He looked at me for a moment and I saw the anger drain from his face and be replaced with a sort of weary compassion. ‘Say what you have to say,’ he recommended me. ‘Whatever they order you. If they press you to say that on our bedding night I juggled with silver pomanders all night and never lay between your legs, you can say that, swear it if you have to – and you will have to. You are going to face the enmity of Queen Katherine herself, and the hatred of all of Spain. I shall spare you mine. Poor silly little girl. If it had been a boy in that cradle I think they would have pushed you into perjury the moment you were churched, to get rid of me, and to lure Henry on.’

  We looked at each other very steadily for a moment. ‘Then, you and I must be the only people in the whole world who are not sorry it is a girl,’ I whispered. ‘Because I don’t want more than I have now.’

  He smiled his bitter courtier smile. ‘But next time?’

  The court went on its midsummer progress, down the dusty lanes to Sussex and on to Winchester and thence to the New Forest so that the king could hunt deer every day from dawn till twilight and then feast on venison every night. My husband went with his king, close at his side, boys together, no thought of jealousy when the court was on the move and the hounds were running ahead of the horses and yelping, and the hawks were coming behind in their special cart with their trainers riding alongside and singing to them to keep them calm. My brother went too, riding alongside Francis Weston, astride a new black hunter, a big strong beast which the king had given him from the royal stables, as a further token of his affection for me and mine. My father was in Europe, as part of the unending negotiations between England, France and Spain, trying to rein in the ambitions of three greedy bright young monarchs all jockeying for the title of the greatest king in Europe. My mother went with the court, with her own little train of servants. My uncle went, with his own men in Howard livery and with a wary eye always for the ambitions and pretensions of the Seymour family. The Percy family were there, Charles Brandon and Queen Mary, the London goldsmiths, the foreign diplomats: all the great men of England abandoned their fields, their farms, their ships, their mining, their trading, and their city houses to go hunting with the king, and not one dared to lag behind in case there was money being granted or land being dispensed, or favours to be had, or the king’s dancing eyes might turn on a pretty daughter or a wife and a position might be gained.

  I, thank God, was spared it this year, and I was glad to be away, riding slowly down the lanes to Kent. Anne met me in the neat courtyard of Hever Castle, her face as dark as a midsummer storm. ‘You must be mad,’ she said in greeting. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I want to be here with my baby this summer. I need to rest.’

  ‘You don’t look like you need a rest.’ She scrutinised my face. ‘You look beautiful,’ she conceded grudgingly.

  ‘But look at her.’ I pulled the white lace shawl back from Catherine’s little face. She had slept for most of the journey, rocked by the jolting of the litter.

  Anne politely glanced. ‘Sweet,’ she said, without much conviction. ‘But why didn’t you send her down with the wet nurse?’

  I sighed at the impossibility of convincing Anne that there was anywhere better to be than the court. I led the way into the hall and let the wet nurse take Catherine from my arms to change her swaddling clothes.

  ‘And then bring her back to me,’ I stipulated.

  I sat on one of the carved chairs at the great hall table and smiled at Anne as she stood before me, as impatient as an interrogator.

  ‘I’m not really interested in the court,’ I sa
id flatly. ‘It’s having a baby; you wouldn’t understand. It’s as if I suddenly know what the purpose of life is. It’s not to rise in the king’s favour nor to make one’s way at court. Nor even to raise one’s family a little higher. There are things that matter more. I want her to be happy. I don’t want her to be sent away as soon as she is old enough to walk. I want to be tender with her, I want her to be schooled under my eye. I want her to grow up here and know the river and the fields and the willows in the watermeadows. I don’t want her to be a stranger in her own country.’

  Anne looked rather blank. ‘It’s just a baby,’ she said flatly. ‘And chances are she’ll die. You’ll have dozens more. Are you going to be like this over all of them?’

  I flinched at the thought of it, but she didn’t even see. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know I’d feel like this over her. But I do, Anne. She’s the most precious thing in the world. Much more important to me than anything else. I can’t think about anything but caring for her and seeing that she is well and happy. When she cries it’s like a knife in my heart, I can’t bear the thought of her crying at all. And I want to see her grow. I won’t be parted from her.’

  ‘What does the king say?’ Anne demanded, going to the one central point for a Boleyn.

  ‘I haven’t told him this,’ I said. ‘He was happy enough that I should go away for the summer and rest. He wanted to get off hunting. He was in a fever to go this year. He didn’t mind too much.’

  ‘Didn’t mind too much?’ she repeated incredulously.

  ‘He didn’t mind at all,’ I corrected myself.

  Anne nodded, nibbling her fingers. I could almost see the calculations of her brain as she picked over what I was saying. ‘Very well then,’ she said. ‘If they don’t insist that you go to court I don’t see why I should worry. It’s more amusing for me to have you here, God knows. You can chatter to that merciless old woman at least and spare me her unending talk.’

  I smiled. ‘You really are very disrespectful, Anne.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, yes,’ she said impatiently, drawing up a stool. ‘But now tell me all the news. Tell me about the queen, and I want to know what Thomas More has said about the new tract from Germany. And what are the plans for the French? Is it to be war again?’