Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Why would the mad Spanish dog betray us so? Why would he release Francis? Is he mad?’ He turned on the queen. ‘Is he insane, your nephew? Is he playing some costly double game? Is he double-crossing me, as your father would have double-crossed mine? Is there some vile traitorous blood in these Spanish kings? What’s your answer, madam? He writes to you, doesn’t he? What did he write last? That he wants to release our worst enemy? That he is a madman or just a fool?’

  She glanced at the cardinal to see if he would intercede; but Wolsey was no friend of the queen after this turn of events. He stayed dumb and met her sharp look of appeal with diplomatic serenity.

  Isolated, the queen had to face her husband without support. ‘My nephew does not write to me of all his plans. I did not know he was thinking of releasing King Francis.’

  ‘I should hope not!’ Henry yelled, bringing his face very close to hers. ‘For you would be guilty of treason at the very least if you knew that the worst enemy this country has ever seen was to be set free by your nephew.’

  ‘But I did not know,’ she said steadily.

  ‘And Wolsey tells me that he is thinking of jilting Princess Mary? Your own daughter! What d’you say to that?’

  ‘I did not know,’ she said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Wolsey remarked softly. ‘But I think Her Majesty has forgotten the meeting she had with the Spanish ambassador yesterday. Surely he warned you that the Princess Mary would be rejected.’

  ‘Rejected!’ Henry bounded from his chair, too inflamed to sit still. ‘And you knew, madam?’

  The queen rose, as she must, when her husband was on his feet. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The cardinal is correct. The ambassador did mention that there were doubts over the betrothal of the Princess Mary. I did not speak of it because I would not believe it until I had heard it from my nephew himself. And I have not.’

  ‘I am afraid there is no doubt at all,’ Cardinal Wolsey interpolated.

  The queen turned a steady gaze on him, noting that the cardinal had exposed her to her husband’s rage, and had done it twice, and wilfully. ‘I am sorry that you should think so,’ she said.

  Henry flung himself into his chair, too enraged to speak. The queen remained standing and he did not invite her to sit. The lace at the top of her gown stirred with her steady breath, she merely touched the rosary that hung from her waist with her forefinger. She could not be faulted for dignity or presence.

  Henry turned to her, icily angry. ‘Do you know what we will have to do, if we want to seize this opportunity which God has given to us and which your nephew is about to throw away?’

  She shook her head in silence.

  ‘We will have to raise a huge tax. We will have to muster another army. We will have to mount another expedition to France, and we will have to fight another war. And we will have to do this alone, alone and without support because your nephew, your nephew, madam, fights and wins one of the most lucky victories that could ever come to a king, and then plays ducks and drakes with it, skims it away off the waves as if victory was a pebble on the beach.’

  Even at that, she did not move. But her patience only inflamed him more. He leaped down from his chair again and there was a little gasp as he flung himself towards her. For a moment I even thought he might strike her but it was a pointing finger, not a fist, which she got in the face. ‘And you do not order him to be faithful to me?’

  ‘I do,’ she said through half-closed lips. ‘I commend him to remember our alliance.’

  Behind her, Cardinal Wolsey shook his head in denial.

  ‘You lie!’ Henry yelled at the queen. ‘You are a Spanish princess more than an English queen!’

  ‘God knows that I am a faithful wife and Englishwoman,’ she replied.

  Henry flung himself away and there was a sudden flurry as the court threw themselves out of his path and dropped into curtseys and bows. His gentlemen bowed briskly to the queen and followed his impetuous progress; but he checked at the door. ‘I shall not forget this,’ he shouted back at the queen. ‘I shall neither forgive nor forget your nephew’s insult to me, nor shall I forgive or forget your behaviour, your damned treasonous behaviour.’

  She sank slowly and beautifully into her deep regal curtsey and held it like a dancer until Henry swore and banged out of the door. Only then did she rise up and look thoughtfully around her, at all of us who had witnessed her humiliation and who now looked away from her that she might not claim our service.

  At dinner the next night I saw the king’s eyes on me as I walked demurely into the great hall behind the queen. After dinner, when they cleared a space for dancing, he came over to me, walking past the queen, all but turning his back on her as he stood before me and claimed me for a dance.

  There was a little rustle of attention as he took me out on the dance floor. ‘The volte,’ Henry said over his shoulder and the other dancers, who had been readying to form into a set and dance with us, fell back and formed a circle to watch instead.

  It was a dance like no other, a dance of seduction. Henry did not take his blue eyes off my face, he danced towards me, stamped his foot and clapped his hands as if he would strip me naked then and there before the whole court. I banished the thought of the watching queen from my mind. I kept my head up and my eyes fixed on the king, and I danced towards him, the sly tripping steps, with a sway of my hips and a turn of my head. We faced one another and he snatched me up in the air and held me, there was a ripple of applause, he lowered me gently to my feet and I felt my cheeks burning with a potent combination of self-consciousness, triumph, and desire. We parted to the beat of the tabor and then came back as the dance turned our steps towards each other again. Once again he threw me up in the air and this time slid me down, so that my body was pressed against his. I felt him down every inch of my body: his chest, his hose, his legs. We paused, our faces so close that if he had leaned forward he could have kissed me. I felt his breath on my face and then he said very quietly: ‘My chamber. Come at once.’

  He took me to bed that night, and most of the nights that followed, with a steady desire. I should have been happy. Certainly my mother and my father and my uncle and even George were delighted that I was the king’s first choice once more, and that everyone in the court was once again gravitating towards me. The ladies of the queen’s chamber were as deferential to me as they were to her. Foreign ambassadors bowed to me as deeply as if I were a princess, the gentlemen of the king’s bedchamber wrote sonnets to the gold of my hair and the curl of my lips, Francis Weston wrote a song for me and everywhere I went there were people ready to do me a service, to assist me, to pay court to me, and always, always to whisper to me that if I could mention a little thing to the king they would be greatly obliged to me.

  I followed George’s advice and I always refused to ask the king for anything, even for myself, and so he was comfortable with me in a way that he could never be with anyone else. We made an odd little domestic haven behind the closed door of the privy chamber. We dined alone, after the dinner had been served in the great hall. We had the company only of the musicians and perhaps one or two chosen friends. Thomas More would take Henry up on to the leads and look at the stars and I would go too, looking up at the dark night sky and thinking that the same stars were shining down on Hever, gleaming through the arrow-slit windows to light my baby’s sleeping face.

  I missed my course in May, and in June I missed again. I told George who put his arm around me and pressed me close to him. ‘I’ll tell Father,’ he said. ‘And Uncle Howard. Pray God that it’s a boy this time.’

  I wanted to tell Henry myself but they decided that news so momentous and so rich with the possibility of profit should come from my father to the king, that the Boleyns could garner the full credit for my fertility. My father asked for a private audience; and the king, thinking it was something to do with Wolsey’s long negotiations with France, drew him into a window embrasure, out of the court’s hearing, and invited him to speak. My father s
poke a short, smiling sentence, and I saw Henry look from my father to me, where I sat with the ladies, and then heard his loud whoop of delight. He rushed across the room and was about to snatch me up when he suddenly checked himself for fear of hurting me, and caught my hands instead, and kissed them.

  ‘Sweetheart!’ he exclaimed. ‘The best news! The best I could hear!’

  I glanced around at the agog faces, and then back to the king’s joy.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I said carefully. ‘I am so glad to make you happy.’

  ‘You could do nothing to make me more joyful,’ he assured me. He urged me to my feet and drew me to one side. To one woman the ladies craned forward and simultaneously looked away, desperate to know what was going on and equally desperate not to appear to be eavesdropping. My father and George stepped before the king and started talking loudly about the weather and how soon the court would leave on its summer progress, blocking out the whispered conversation between the king and me.

  Henry pressed me into the windowseat and laid his hand gently on my stomacher. ‘Not laced too tight?’

  ‘No,’ I said, smiling up at him. ‘It is very early days yet, Your Majesty. I hardly show.’

  ‘Pray God it is a boy this time,’ he said.

  I smiled up at him, with all the Boleyn recklessness. ‘I am sure it is,’ I said. ‘Remember that I never said so with Catherine. But this time I am sure of it. I am sure that he will be a boy. Perhaps we will call him Henry.’

  The reward for my pregnancy came quickly to my family that summer. My father became Viscount Rochford and George became Sir George Boleyn. My mother became a viscountess and entitled to wear purple. My husband had another grant of land to add to his growing estate.

  ‘I am to thank you for this I think, madam,’ he said. He had chosen to sit beside me at dinner and serve me with the very best cuts of meat. Looking up the hall to the high table I saw that Henry’s eyes were on me and I smiled up at him.

  ‘I am glad to be of service to you,’ I said politely.

  He leaned back in his chair and smiled at me but his eyes were dull, drunkard’s eyes, filled with regret. ‘And so we spend another year with you at court and me in the king’s train and we never meet, and we rarely talk. You are a mistress and I a monk.’

  ‘I did not know that you had chosen a celibate life,’ I observed mildly.

  He had the grace to smile. ‘I am married and not married,’ he pointed out. ‘Where am I to get heirs for my new lands if not on my wife?’

  I nodded. There was a brief silence. ‘Yes, you’re right. I am sorry,’ I said shortly.

  ‘If you have a girl and his interest wanes they will send you home to me. You will be my wife again,’ William remarked conversationally. ‘How do you think we shall fare? Us and the two little bastards?’

  My eyes flew to his face. ‘I don’t like to hear you speak like that.’

  ‘Careful,’ he cautioned me. ‘We’re being watched.’

  At once my face glazed with an empty social smile. ‘Watched by the king?’ I asked, carefully not looking around.

  ‘And your father.’

  I took a piece of bread and nibbled it, turned my head as if we were talking of nothing important. ‘I don’t like to hear you talk of my Catherine like that,’ I said. ‘She bears your name.’

  ‘And that should make me love her?’

  ‘I think you would love her if you saw her,’ I said defensively. ‘She is a most beautiful child. I don’t see how you could fail to love her. I hope to be with her this summer at Hever. She will be learning to walk.’

  The hard look left his face. ‘And is that your greatest wish, Mary? You, the mistress of the King of England? And your greatest wish is that you could live in a little manor castle and teach your daughter to walk?’

  I gave a little laugh. ‘Absurd, aren’t I? But yes. I would like nothing more than to be with her.’

  He shook his head. ‘Mary, you correct me,’ he said gently. ‘When I think that I have been abused by you and I am angry with you and this wolfpack of your family I suddenly see that we are all of us doing very well off you. All of us are thriving very handsomely and in the middle of it all, like a piece of soft manchet bread nibbled by ducks, is you, being eaten alive by every one of us. Perhaps you should have married a man who would have loved and kept you and given you a baby that you could have suckled yourself, without interruption.’

  I smiled at the picture.

  ‘Don’t you wish you had married a man like that? Sometimes I wish you had. I wish that you had married a man who would have loved you and kept you, whatever the advantages to handing you over. And when I am drunk and sad I sometimes wish that I had had the courage to have been that man.’

  I let the silence extend until the attention of our neighbours had been distracted by something else.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ I said gently. ‘It was all decided for me before I was old enough to think for myself. I am sure, my lord, that you were right to do as the king desired.’

  ‘I will exert my power to do one thing,’ William said. ‘I will get him to consent to you going to Hever this summer. I can do that for you at least.’

  I looked up. ‘I would be so glad,’ I whispered. I felt my eyes filling with tears at the thought of seeing Catherine again. ‘Oh, my lord. I would be so glad of that.’

  William was as good as his word. He spoke to my father, he spoke to my uncle, and then finally he spoke to the king. And I was allowed to Hever for the whole of the summer so that I could be with Catherine and walk with her in the apple orchards of Kent.

  George came to visit without warning twice through the summer months, riding into the castle courtyard hatless and in his shirtsleeves, sending the housemaids into a frenzy of desire and anxiety. Anne would ply him with questions as to what was doing at court, and who was seeing whom, but he was quiet and weary and often during the heat of midday he would go up the stone stairs to the little chapel alongside his room where the watery reflections from the moat beneath danced on the white-washed ceiling, and he could kneel in silence and pray or daydream as he wished.

  He was most ill-suited in his wife. Jane Parker never came with him to Hever, he would not allow her. These days with us were to be unsullied by her bright curious gaze, her avaricious desire for scandal.

  ‘She really is a monster,’ he remarked idly to me. ‘She is quite as bad as I had feared.’

  We were seated in the heart of the ornamental garden before the main entrance of the castle. Around us the hedges and plants were sculpted like a painting, each bush in its place, each plant blowing just so. We three were sprawled on the stone seat before the fountain which pattered soothingly, like rain on a roof, as George rested his dark head in my lap and I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  Anne at the end of the stone bench looked at us. ‘How bad?’

  He opened his eyes, too lazy to sit up. He raised his hand and counted off her sins on his fingers. ‘One, she’s vilely jealous. I can’t step out of the door without her watching me go, and she shows her jealousy by mock battles.’

  ‘Mock?’ Anne queried.

  ‘You know,’ he said impatiently. He adopted a falsetto whine. ‘“If I see that lady look at you again, Sir George, I shall know what to think of you! If you dance with that girl one more time, Sir George, I shall have words with her and with you!”’

  ‘Oh,’ Anne said. ‘How vile.’

  ‘Two,’ he said, continuing the list. ‘She’s light-fingered. If there’s a shilling in my pocket that she thinks I won’t miss, it disappears. If there’s a bauble lying around she snaps it up like a magpie.’

  Anne was enchanted. ‘No, really? I missed some gold ribbon once. I always thought she took it.’

  ‘Three,’ he continued. ‘And worst of all. She chases me round the bed like a bitch on heat.’

  I snorted with surprised laughter. ‘George!’

  ‘She does,’ he confirmed. ‘Scares the life out of me.’<
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  ‘You?’ Anne asked scornfully. ‘I’d have thought you’d be glad.’

  He sat up and shook his head. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said earnestly. ‘If she was hot I wouldn’t mind, provided she kept her heat indoors and didn’t shame me. But it’s not like that. She likes …’ He broke off.

  ‘Oh do tell!’ I begged.

  Anne silenced me with a quick frown. ‘Ssh. This is important. What does she like, George?’

  ‘It’s not like lust,’ he said uneasily. ‘I can deal with lust. And it’s not variety – I like a little taste of the wild myself. But it’s as if she wanted some kind of power over me. The other night she asked me if I would like a maid brought in. She offered to bring me in a girl and worse: she wanted to watch.’

  ‘She likes to watch?’ Anne demanded.

  He shook his head. ‘No, I think she likes to arrange. I think she likes to listen at doors, to spy through keyholes. I think she likes to be the one that makes things happen and watches others at the business. And when I said “no”…’ He stopped abruptly.

  ‘What did she offer you then?’

  George flushed. ‘She offered to get me a boy.’

  I gave a little shriek of scandalised laughter, but Anne was not laughing at all.

  ‘Why would she offer you that, George?’ she asked quietly.

  He looked away. ‘There’s a singer at court,’ he said shortly. ‘A lad so sweet, pretty as a maid but with the wit of a man. I’ve said nothing and done nothing. But she saw me laugh with him once and clap him on the shoulder – and she thinks everything is lust.’

  ‘This is the second lad whose name has been linked with yours,’ Anne observed. ‘Was there not some pageboy? Sent back to his home last summer?’

  ‘That was nothing,’ George said.

  ‘And now this?’

  ‘Nothing again.’

  ‘A dangerous nothing,’ Anne said. ‘A dangerous brace of nothings. Wenching is one thing but you can be hanged for this.’