I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in the shadowy room, looking out over the grey slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realised that George was wrong, and my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong – for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love. I didn’t want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn’t want the arid glamour of George’s life. I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.
Hardly knowing what I was doing, I rose up from the bed and kicked the clothes aside. ‘William,’ I said to the empty room. ‘William.’
I went down to the stable yard and I ordered my horse to be brought from her stall and said that I was going to Hever to see my children. It was a certainty that my uncle would have a pair of eyes and ears listening and watching in the stable yard but I hoped to be gone before a message could be got to him. The court had gone from the bowling green to dinner, and I thought that if I was lucky, I might be away before any spy found my uncle at liberty to deliver the report which told him that his niece had left for her home without an escort.
It was dark within a couple of hours, that cold spring dark that comes on first very grey and then quickly as black as winter. I was hardly clear of the city, coming into a little village that called itself Canning where I could see the high walls and porter’s door of a monastery. I hammered on the door and when they saw the quality of my horse, they took me in and showed me to a small white-washed cell and gave me a slice of meat, a slice of bread, a piece of cheese and a cup of small ale for my dinner.
In the morning they offered me exactly the same fare to break my fast and I took Mass on a rumbling belly, thinking that Henry’s fulminations against the corruption and wealth of the church should make allowances for little communities like this.
I had to ask for directions to Rochford. The house and the estate had been in the Howard family for years but we seldom visited it. I had been there only once, and that by river. I had no idea of the road. But there was a lad in the stable who said that he knew his way to Tilbury, and the monk who served as master of the horse for the couple of riding mules and the draft horses for ploughing said that the boy could ride with me on an old cob to show me the way.
He was a nice lad, called Jimmy, and he rode bareback, kicking his bare heels against the dusty sides of his old horse, singing at the top of his voice. We made an odd couple: the urchin and the lady, as we rode along the track beside the river. It was hard riding, the track was dust and pebbles in some places, mud in others. Where it crossed the streams which flowed to the Thames there were fords and sometimes deceptive quagmires where my horse shied and fretted at the shifting sand and sucking mud beneath her feet and only the steadiness of Jimmy’s old hack kept her going on. We ate our dinner at a farm in a village called Rainham. The goodwife offered me a boiled egg and some black bread as being all that the house could afford. Jimmy ate bread with nothing else, and seemed well pleased. There were a couple of dried apples for our dessert and I nearly laughed as I thought of the dinner I was missing at the palace at Westminster, with the half-dozen side dishes and the dozens of meat dishes served on gold platters.
I was not nervous. For the first time ever I felt as if I had taken my life into my own hands and I could command my own destiny. For once I was obedient neither to uncle nor father nor king, but following my own desires. And I knew that my desire led me, inexorably, to the man I loved.
I did not doubt him. I did not think for one moment that he might have forgotten me, or taken up with some drab from the village, or married an heiress picked out for him. No, I sat on the tailboard of a wheel-less wagon and watched Jimmy spitting apple pips up into the air, and for once I had the sense to trust.
We rode for a couple more hours after dinner and came into the little market town of Grays as it started to get dark. Tilbury was further down the road, Jimmy assured me, but if I wanted Rochford, beyond Southend, he had a notion that I could cut away from the river and ride due east.
Grays boasted a little ale house, no farmhouse of any size, but a good manor house, drawn back from the road. I toyed with the idea of riding up to the manor house and claiming my right, as a benighted traveller, to their hospitality. But I was afraid of my uncle’s influence, which stretched all over the kingdom. And I was starting to become uneasy about the dust in my hair and the dirt on my face and clothes. Jimmy was as filthy as a street urchin, no house of any quality would have put him anywhere but in the stable.
‘We’ll go to the ale house,’ I decided.
It was a better place than it at first appeared. It profited from the traffic to and from Tilbury where travellers from the capital frequently chose to embark, rather than wait for the tide or the barges to take their ships up to the pool of London. They could offer me a bed with curtains in a shared room, and Jimmy a straw mattress in the kitchen. They killed and cooked a chicken for my dinner and served it with wheaten bread and a glass of wine. I even managed to wash in a basin of cold water so my face was clean, even if my hair was filthy. I slept in my clothes, and kept my riding boots under my pillow for fear of thieves. In the morning I had the uneasy sense that I smelled, and a string of fleabites across my belly under my stomacher which itched more and more infuriatingly as the day went on.
I had to let Jimmy go in the morning. He had promised only to show me the way to Tilbury, and it was a long ride back for a little lad on his own. He was not in the least daunted by it. He hopped from the mounting block onto the bowed back of his hack and accepted a coin from me, and a hunk of bread and cheese for his dinner on the road. We rode out together till our paths diverged and he pointed me on the track towards Southend, and then went westwards himself, back towards London.
It was empty countryside that I rode through alone. Empty and flat and desolate. I thought that farming this land would be very different from being enfolded in the fertile weald of Kent. I rode briskly, and kept a good look about me, apprehensive that the desolate road through the marshes could be haunted by thieves. In fact, the sheer emptiness of the countryside was my friend. There were no highwaymen since there were no travellers to steal from. In the hours from dawn till noon I saw only a little lad scaring crows from a newly sown vegetable patch, and in the distance a ploughman churning the mud on the edge of the marsh, a plume of seagulls rising up like smoke behind him.
The going was slow as the track went through the marshes and became waterlogged and muddy. The wind blew in from the river bringing the smell of brine. I passed a couple of villages which were little more than mud, shaped into houses, with mud walls and mud roofs. A couple of children stared and then ran after me, crying with excitement as I went past, and they were the colour of mud, too. It was getting to be dusk as I rode into Southend and I looked around for somewhere that I could spend the night.
There were a few houses, and a small church, and the priest’s house beside it. I tapped on the door and the housekeeper answered me with a discouraging scowl. I told her that I was travelling and asked her for hospitality and she showed me, with the most unwilling air, into a small room which adjoined the kitchen. I thought that if I had been a Boleyn and a Howard I would have cursed her for her rudeness, but instead I was a poor woman, with nothing in the world but a handful of coins and an absolute determination.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as if it were an adequate lodging. ‘And can I have some water to wash in? And something to eat?’
The chink of the coins in my purse changed her refusal to an assent and she went to fetch me water and then a bowl of meat pottage, which looked and tasted very much as if it had been in the pot for a couple of days. I was too hungry to care, and too tire
d to argue. I ate it up and wiped the wooden trencher clean with a piece of bread, and then I fell into the little pallet bed and slept till dawn.
She was up in the morning in the kitchen, sweeping the floor and riddling the fire to cook her master’s breakfast. I borrowed a drying sheet from her and went out into the yard to wash my face and hands. I washed my feet too, under the pump, scolded all the time by a flock of chickens. I very much wanted to strip off my clothes and wash all over, and then wear clean clothes, but I might as well have wished for a litter and bearers to take me the last few miles. If he loved me, he would not mind a little dirt. If he did not love me, then the dirt would be nothing to me – compared with that catastrophe.
The housekeeper was curious at breakfast as to what I was doing travelling alone. She had seen the horse and my gown and knew what both would be worth. I said nothing, slipped a slice of bread into the pocket of my gown, and went out to saddle my horse. When I was mounted and ready to go I called her out to the yard. ‘Can you tell me the way to Rochford?’
‘Out of the gate and turn left down the track,’ she said. ‘Just keep heading eastwards. You should be there in about an hour. Who was it you wanted to see? The Boleyn family are always at court.’
I mumbled a reply. I did not want her to know that I, a Boleyn, had ridden out such a long way for a man who had not even invited me. As I grew nearer to his home I was more and more fearful and I did not need any witnesses to my boldness. I clicked to my horse, and rode out of the yard, turned left, as she had told me, and then straight into the rising sun.
Rochford was a little hamlet of half a dozen houses gathered around an ale house at a crossroads. My family’s great house was set back behind high brick walls with a good-sized park around it. I could not even see it from the road. I had no fear that any of the house servants would see me, and no-one would recognise me if they did.
An idle youth of about twenty lounged against a cottage wall and watched the empty lane. It was very flat and windy. It was very cold. If this had been a test of knight errantry it could not have been more discouraging. I put up my chin and called to the man: ‘William Stafford’s farm?’
He took the straw from his mouth and strolled over towards my horse. I turned the horse a little, so that he could not put his hand on the reins. He stepped back when the powerful hindquarters moved around, and pulled his forelock.
‘William Stafford?’ he repeated in complete bewilderment.
I brought out a penny from my pocket and held it between my gloved finger and thumb. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘The new gentleman?’ he asked. ‘From London? Appletree Farm,’ he said, pointing up the road. ‘Turn right, towards the river. Thatched house with a stable yard. Apple tree by the road.’
I flipped the coin towards him and he caught it with one hand. ‘You from London too?’ he asked curiously.
‘No,’ I said. ‘From Kent.’
Then I turned and rode up the road looking out for the river, an apple tree, and a thatched house with a stable yard.
The ground fell away from the road towards the river. At the river’s edge there were reed beds and a flight of ducks suddenly quacked in alarm and up sprang a heron, all long legs and bow-shaped breast, flapping his huge wings and then settling a little further downstream. The fields were hedged with low quickset and hawthorn, at the water’s edge the ragged meadows showed yellow, probably spoiled with salt, I thought. Nearer the road they were dull and green with the fatigue of winter, but in spring I thought William might get a good grass crop off them.
On the far side of the road the land was higher and ploughed. Water was glinting in every furrow, this would always be wet land. Further north I could see some fields planted with apple trees. There was a big old solitary apple tree leaning over the road and the branches brushed low. The bark was silvery grey, the twigs chunky with age. A bush of green mistletoe was thick in one fork in a branch and, on an impulse, I rode my horse up to it and picked a sprig, so I was holding that most pagan plant in my hand as I turned off the road and went down the little track to his farmhouse.
It was a little farmhouse, like a child might draw. A long low house, four windows long along the upper storey, two and a central doorway on the lower. The doorway was like a stable door, top and bottom. I imagined that in the not very distant past the farmer’s family and the animals would all have slept inside together. At the side of the house was a good stable yard, cobbled and clean, and a field with half a dozen cows beside it. A horse nodded over the gate and I recognised William Stafford’s hunter that had galloped beside me on the sandy beaches at Calais. The horse whinnied when he saw us, and mine cried back as if she too remembered those sunny days at the end of autumn.
At the noise the front door opened and a figure came out of the dark interior and stood, hands on hips, watching me ride down the road. He did not move or speak as I rode up to the garden gate. I slipped down from the saddle unaided, and opened his gate without a word of welcome from him. I hitched the reins to the side of the gate and, with the mistletoe still in my hand, I walked up to him.
After all this long journey, I found I had nothing to say. My whole sense of purpose and determination scattered the moment I saw him.
‘William,’ was all that I managed, and I held out the little twig of mistletoe with the white buds as if it was a tribute.
‘What?’ he asked unhelpfully. He still made no move towards me.
I pulled off my hood and shook out my hair. I was suddenly, over-whelmingly conscious that he had never seen me anything but washed and perfumed. And here I was, in the same gown I had worn for three days, flea-bitten, lousy, dusty and smelling of horse and sweat, and hopelessly, helplessly inarticulate.
‘What?’ he repeated.
‘I’ve come to marry you, if you still want me.’ There seemed to be no way to mitigate the baldness of the words.
His expression gave nothing away. He looked at the road behind me. ‘Who brought you?’
I shook my head. ‘I came alone.’
‘What’s gone wrong at court?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s never been better. They’re married and she’s with child. The Howards never had fairer prospects. I will be aunt to the King of England.’
William gave a short barking laugh at that, and I looked down at my filthy boots and the dust on my riding habit and laughed too. When I looked back up his eyes were very warm.
‘I have nothing,’ he warned me. ‘I am a nobody, as you rightly said.’
‘I have nothing but a hundred pounds a year,’ I said. ‘I’ll lose that when they know where I have gone. And I am nobody without you.’
He made a quick gesture with his hand as if he would draw me to him, but still he held back. ‘I won’t be the cause of your ruin,’ he said. ‘I won’t have you become the poorer for loving me.’
I felt myself tremble at his nearness, at my desire for him to hold me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said urgently. ‘I swear to you that it doesn’t matter to me any more.’
He opened his arms to me at that, and I stepped and half-fell forward. He snatched me up and crushed me against him, his mouth on mine, his demanding kisses all over my dirty face, on my eyelids and cheeks and lips and then finally plunging into my open longing mouth. Then he lifted me up into his arms and carried me across the threshold of his house, and up the stairs into the bedroom, into the clean linen sheets of his duckdown bed, and into joy.
Much later he laughed at the fleabites, and he brought me a great wooden bath which he filled with water and set before the big fire in the kitchen, and combed my hair for lice while I lolled my head back and soaked in the hot sweet-smelling water. He put my stomacher and skirt and linen to one side for washing and insisted that I dress in his shirt and a pair of his trousers which I kilted in around my waist and rolled up the legs like a sailor on deck. He turned out my horse into the meadow where she rolled with pleasure at being rid of the saddle, and cantered around with Willi
am’s hunter, bucking and kicking like a filly. Then he cooked me a big bowl of porridge with yellow honey, and cut me a slice of wheaten bread with creamy butter, and a slab of thick soft Essex cheese. He laughed at my travels with Jimmy and scolded me for setting off without an escort, and then he took me back to bed and we made love all the afternoon till the sky darkened and we were hungry again.
We ate dinner by candlelight in the kitchen. In my honour, William killed an old chicken and spit-roasted it. I was armed with a pair of his gauntlets and delegated to turn the spit while he sliced bread and drew the small ale, and went to the cool pantry for butter and cheese.
When we had eaten we drew up our stools to the fire and drank to each other, and then sat in a rather surprised silence.
‘I can’t believe this,’ I said after a little while. ‘I thought no further than getting to you. I didn’t think about your home. I didn’t think what we would do next.’
‘And what d’you think now?’
‘I still don’t know what to think,’ I confessed. ‘I suppose I will become accustomed. I shall be a farmer’s wife.’
He leaned forward and tossed a slab of peat on the fire. It settled with the others and started to glow red. ‘And your family?’ he asked.
I shrugged.
‘Did you leave a note?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’
He cracked a laugh. ‘Oh my love, what were you thinking of?’
‘I was thinking of you,’ I said simply. ‘I just suddenly realised how much I loved you. All I could think of was that I should come to you.’
Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Page 91