Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  We were silent for a moment, a dark little group under a midsummer blue sky. George shook his head. ‘It’s nothing,’ he reiterated. ‘And it’s my own business. I’m sickened by women, by the constant desire and talk of women. You know all the sonnets and all the flirting and all the empty promises. And a boy is so clean and so clear …’ He turned away. ‘It’s a whim. I won’t regard it.’

  Anne looked at him, her eyes narrowed with calculation. ‘It’s a cardinal sin. You’d better let this whim go by.’

  He met her gaze. ‘I know it, Mistress Clever,’ he said.

  ‘What about Francis Weston?’ I asked.

  ‘What about him?’ George rejoined.

  ‘You’re always together.’

  George shook his head impatiently. ‘We’re always in service to the king,’ he corrected me. ‘We’re forever waiting for the king. And all there is to do is to flirt with the girls at court and talk scandal with them. It’s no wonder I am sick of it. The life I live makes me weary to the soul of the vanity of women.’

  Autumn 1525

  When I returned to court in the autumn a family conference was convened. I noted wrily that this time I had one of the big carved chairs with arms, and a velvet cushion in the seat. This year I was a young woman who might be carrying the king’s son in her belly.

  They decided that Anne might come back to court in the spring.

  ‘She’s learned her lesson,’ my father said judicially. ‘And with Mary’s star rising so high we should have Anne at court. She should be married.’

  My uncle nodded, and they moved on to the more important topic of what might be in the king’s mind since the same settlement which had ennobled my father had also made Bessie Blount’s boy a duke. Henry Fitzroy, a little lad of only six, was the Duke of Richmond and Surrey, the Earl of Nottingham and Lord High Admiral of England.

  ‘It’s absurd,’ my uncle said flatly. ‘But it shows how his mind is working. He’s going to make Fitzroy the next heir.’

  He paused. He looked round the table at the four of us: my mother and father, George and me. ‘It tells us that he’s getting truly desperate. He must be thinking of a new marriage. It’s still the safest, fastest way to an heir.’

  ‘But if Wolsey brokers a new marriage he’ll never favour us,’ my father observed. ‘Why should he? He’s no friend of ours. He’ll look for a French princess, or Portuguese.’

  ‘But what if she has a son?’ my uncle asked, nodding towards me. ‘When the queen is out of the way? Here’s a girl of good birth, as good as Henry’s mother’s. Pregnant for the second time by him. Every chance in the world that she might be carrying his son. If he marries her he has an heir. At once. A complete solution.’

  There was a silence. I looked around the table and saw that they were all nodding. ‘But the queen will never leave,’ I said simply. It was always me that reminded them of that one fact.

  ‘If the king has no need of her nephew, then the king has no need of her,’ my uncle said brutally. ‘The Treaty of the More which has taken Wolsey so much trouble has opened the door for us. Peace with France is the end of the alliance with Spain, is the end of the queen. Whether she wills it or no, she is no more than any unwanted wife.’

  He let the silence hang in the room. It was outright treason that we were talking now and my uncle feared nothing. He looked me in the face and I felt the weight of his will like a thumb pressed on my forehead. ‘The end of the alliance with Spain is the end of the queen,’ he said. ‘The queen is going whether she likes it or not. And you are going into her place, whether you like it or not.’

  I searched my soul for courage and I rose to my feet and went behind my chair so that I could hold onto the thick carved wooden back.

  ‘No,’ I said, and my voice came out steadily and strong. ‘No, Uncle, I am sorry but I can’t do it.’ I looked down the long dark wood table and met his gaze, as sharp as a falcon with black eyes that missed nothing. ‘I love the queen. She’s a great lady and I can’t betray her. I cannot take her place. I cannot push her out and take the place of the Queen of England. It’s to overthrow the order of things. I daren’t do it. I can’t do it.’

  He smiled at me, his wolfish smile. ‘We are making a new order,’ he said. ‘A new world. There is talk of the end of the authority of the Pope, the map of France and Spain is being redrawn. Everything is changing, and here we are, at the very front of the change.’

  ‘If I refuse?’ I asked, my voice very thin.

  He gave me his most cynical smile that left his eyes as cold as wet coals. ‘You don’t,’ he said simply. ‘The world’s not changed that much yet. Men still rule.’

  Spring 1526

  Anne was finally allowed back to court and took over my duties as lady in waiting to the queen as I grew weary. It was a hard pregnancy this time, the midwives swore that it was because I was carrying a big strong boy and he was sapping my strength. I certainly felt the weight of him when I walked around Greenwich, always longing for my bed.

  When I lay in bed the weight of the baby pressed on my back so that my feet and toes would seize with the cramps and I would suddenly cry out in the night, and Anne would groggily wake and burrow down to the end of the bed to massage my clenched toes.

  ‘For God’s sake go to sleep,’ she said angrily. ‘Why do you toss and turn the whole time?’

  ‘Because I cannot get comfortable,’ I snapped back. ‘And if you cared more for me and less for yourself you would get me an extra pillow for my back and a drink, instead of lying there like a fat bolster.’

  She giggled at that and sat up in the darkness and turned to see me. The embers of the fire lit the bedroom.

  ‘Are you really ill, or just making a fuss over nothing?’

  ‘Really ill,’ I said. ‘Truly, Anne, I ache in every bone in my body.’

  She sighed and got out of bed and took the candle to the glowing fire and lit it. She held it close to my face so that she could see me.

  ‘You’re as white as a boggart,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You look old enough to be my mother.’

  ‘I am in pain,’ I said steadily.

  ‘D’you want some hot ale?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘And another pillow?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘And a piss as usual?’

  ‘Yes please. Anne, if you had ever carried a child you would know what this feels like. I swear to you it’s no small matter.’

  ‘I can see that it is not,’ she said. ‘I only have to look at you to know that you feel like a woman of ninety years old. God knows how we will keep the king if this goes on.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything,’ I said irritably. ‘All he ever looks at these days is my belly.’

  Anne thrust the poker in the fire and set the ale at the hearthside with a couple of mugs. ‘Does he play with you?’ she asked interestedly. ‘When you go to his room after dinner?’

  ‘Not once in the past month,’ I said. ‘The midwife said that I should not.’

  ‘Sound advice to the mistress of a king,’ Anne muttered irritably, bending over the fire. ‘I wonder who paid her to tell you that? You’re such a fool to listen.’ She drew the hot poker from the embers and thrust it into the jar of ale where it hissed and seethed. ‘What did you tell the king?’

  ‘The baby matters more than anything.’

  Anne shook her head and poured the ale. ‘We matter more than anything else,’ she reminded me. ‘And no woman has ever kept a man by giving him children. You have to do both, Mary. You can’t stop pleasing him just because he’s got a child on you.’

  ‘I can’t do everything,’ I said plaintively. She passed my cup and I took a sip. ‘Anne, all I really want to do is to rest and let this baby grow strong inside me. I have been at one court or another since I was four years old. I am tired of dancing, I am tired of feasting, I am tired of watching jousting and dancing in the masque and being amazed to see that the man who looks exactly like the king
in disguise is indeed the king in disguise. If I could, I would go back to Hever tomorrow.’

  Anne piled back into bed beside me, mug in hand. ‘Well you can’t,’ she said flatly. ‘You’ve got everything to play for now. If the queen is set aside, then there’s no knowing how far you might rise. You’ve come this far. You have to go on.’

  I paused for a moment, looking at her over the top of my mug. ‘Hear me,’ I said softly. ‘My heart’s not in it.’

  She met my gaze. ‘That’s as may be,’ she said frankly. ‘But you’re not free to choose.’

  It was a cold winter, and that made it worse for me. Cooped up indoors with nothing to think of but each new strange pain every day, I started to fear the birth. I had carried my first baby in such happy ignorance; but now I knew that before me was the month of darkness and enclosure, and after that the interminable pain with the midwives threatening to pull the baby out of me, while I clung to the sheets tied to the bedposts and screamed with terror and pain.

  ‘Smile,’ Anne would snap at me when the king came to my rooms, and the ladies around me would flutter and take up a lute or a tabor. And I would try to smile but the ache in my back and the constant need to use the piss pot made my smile fade and I drooped on my stool.

  ‘Smile,’ Anne would say under her breath. ‘And sit up straight, you lazy slut.’

  Henry looked across at the two of us. ‘Lady Carey, you look weary,’ he said.

  Anne gleamed at him. ‘She is carrying a heavy burden,’ she said with a smile. ‘And who should know it better than Your Majesty?’

  He looked a little surprised. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘You are forward, madam.’

  Anne did not blink. ‘I should think any woman would move forward to Your Majesty,’ she said with a little sparkle. ‘Unless she had good cause to make haste away.’

  He was intrigued. ‘And would you haste away, Mistress Anne?’

  ‘Never too fast,’ she said quickly.

  He laughed out loud at that and the ladies, Jane Parker among them, looked over to see what I had said to amuse him. He patted my knee. ‘I am glad we brought your sister back to court,’ he said. ‘She will keep us merry.’

  ‘Very merry,’ I said as sweetly as I could.

  I said nothing to Anne until we were on our own and she was undressing me at bedtime. She unlaced the tight ties on my bodice and I sighed with relief as my swollen belly was released. I scratched at the skin and saw the red weals left by my nails, and I straightened my back trying to ease the ache that I had with me always.

  ‘And what d’you think you’re doing with the king?’ I asked acidly. ‘Hasting away, are you?’

  ‘Open your eyes,’ she said tersely. She helped me out of my skirt and into my nightgown. My new maid poured water into an ewer and under Anne’s critical scrutiny I washed myself as thoroughly as I could be bothered in the cool water.

  ‘And your feet,’ Anne ordered.

  ‘I can’t even see my feet, much less wash them.’

  Anne gestured for the bowl to be lifted down to the floor so that I could sit on the stool while the maid washed my feet.

  ‘I’m doing as I’m told,’ Anne said coldly. ‘I thought you would see it at once.’

  I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensation of having my dirty feet soaped. Then I heard the warning note in her voice. ‘Told by whom?’

  ‘By our uncle. By our father.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To keep the king’s mind on you, to keep him engaged with you. To keep you before him.’

  I nodded. ‘Well, of course.’

  ‘And failing that, to flirt with him myself.’

  I sat up straighter and paid a little more attention. ‘Uncle told you to flirt with the king?’

  Anne nodded.

  ‘When did he tell you this? Where?’

  ‘He came down to Hever.’

  ‘He went all the way to Hever in midwinter to tell you to flirt with the king?’

  She nodded, unsmiling.

  ‘Good God, did he not know that you would do it anyway? That you flirt as naturally as you breathe?’

  Anne gave an unwilling laugh. ‘Clearly not. He came to tell me that our first task, yours and mine, is to make sure that wherever the king goes for diversion during your confinement and after the birth, it is not into the petticoats of a Seymour girl.’

  ‘And how am I to prevent this?’ I demanded. ‘I will be in the birthing chamber for half the time.’

  ‘Exactly. I am to prevent it for you.’

  I thought for a moment and went straight to the anxiety of my childhood. ‘But what if he comes to like you best?’

  Anne’s smile was as sweet as poison. ‘What matter? So long as it is a Boleyn girl?’

  ‘Uncle Howard thinks this? Does he think nothing of me, in childbed, while my sister is set on to flirt with the father of my child?’

  Anne nodded. ‘Yes. Exactly. He thinks nothing of you at all.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to come back to court to be my rival,’ I said sulkily.

  ‘I was born to be your rival,’ she said simply. ‘And you mine. We’re sisters, aren’t we?’

  She did it beautifully, with such light charm that no-one even knew it was being done. She played cards with the king and she played so well that she only ever lost by a couple of points. She sang his songs and preferred them to any written by any other man. She encouraged Sir Thomas Wyatt and half a dozen others to hang around her so that the king learned to think of her as the most alluring young woman in the court. Wherever Anne went there was a continual ripple of laughter and chatter and music – and she moved in a court which was hungry for entertainment. In the long winter days all the courtiers had an absolute duty to keep the king entertained; but Anne was the courtier without match. Only Anne could get through the day being fascinating and charming and challenging and always look as if she was being nothing but herself.

  Henry sat with me, or with Anne. He called himself a thorn between two roses, a poppy between two ripe ears of wheat. He rested his hand on the small of my back as he watched her dance. He followed the score where I held it in my broadening lap as she sang a new song for him. He staked me when I played cards against her. He watched her take the choicest cuts of meat from her plate and put them on mine. She was sisterly, she was tender, she could not have been sweeter or more attentive to me.

  ‘You are the lowest of things,’ I said to her one night as she combed her hair before the mirror and then plaited it into one thick dark rope.

  ‘I know,’ she said complacently, looking at her reflection.

  There was a tap outside and George put his head around the door. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Come,’ Anne said. ‘And shut the door, there’s a gale blowing down that corridor.’

  Obediently, George closed the door for her, and waved a pitcher of wine at the two of us. ‘Anyone share a glass of wine with me? Not Milady Fruitfulness? Not Milady Spring?’

  ‘I thought you’d have gone down to the stews with Sir Thomas,’ Anne remarked. ‘He said he was roistering tonight.’

  ‘The king kept me back,’ George said. ‘Wanted to ask me about you.’

  ‘Me?’ Anne said, suddenly alert.

  ‘Wanted to know how you might respond to an invitation.’

  Without realising it I had spread my fingers like claws on the red silk sheet of the bed. ‘What sort of invitation?’

  ‘To his bed.’

  ‘And you said?’ Anne prompted him.

  ‘As I’ve been bid. That you’re a maid and the flower of the family. There’ll be no bedding before you’re wed. Whoever asks.’

  ‘And he said?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That was all?’ I pressed George. ‘He just said “Oh”?’

  ‘Yes,’ George said simply. ‘And followed Sir Thomas’s boat down the river to visit whores. I think you have him on the run, Anne.’

  She lifted her nightdress high and got into bed. Georg
e watched her naked feet with a connoisseur’s gaze. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘I think so,’ she said complacently.

  I went into the birthing chamber in the middle of January. What went on while I was enclosed in darkness and silence I did not need to know. I heard there was a joust and Henry carried a favour under his surcoat that was not given to him by me. On his shield he wore the motto ‘Declare, I dare not!’ which puzzled half the court, thinking it was meant as a compliment to me, but an odd misfiring compliment since I saw neither joust nor motto, locked in the shadowy silence of the birthing chamber with no court and no musicians but just a gaggle of old ladies drinking ale and biding their time: my time actually.

  And there were those who thought my star was very high on the rise: ‘Declare, I dare not!’ was a signal to the court a son and heir might be declared. Only a very few people thought to look from the king, jousting with the ambiguous promise on his shield, to my sister as she sat at the queen’s shoulder, her dark eyes on the horsemen, the smallest of smiles on her lips, the tiniest consciousness in the turn of her head.

  She visited me that evening, and complained of the stuffiness of the chamber and the darkness of the room.

  ‘I know,’ I said shortly. ‘They say it has to be like this.’

  ‘I don’t see why you bear it,’ she said.

  ‘Think a moment,’ I counselled her. ‘If I insist on having the curtains drawn and the windows open and then I lost the baby or it is born dead, what d’you think our lady mother would say to me? The king’s anger would be sweet in comparison.’

  Anne nodded. ‘You can’t afford to do one thing wrong.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not all pleasure being the king’s sweetheart.’

  ‘He wants me. He is on the brink of telling me so.’

  ‘You’ll have to step back if I have a boy,’ I warned her.

  She nodded. ‘I know. But if it is a girl they may tell me to step onwards.’

  I leaned back on the pillows, too weary to argue. ‘Step onwards or back, for all I care.’