Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘It’s dead then,’ someone said. ‘What is wrong with her that she cannot give him a son?’

  ‘Come on,’ William said to George. ‘Let’s get out of here. The more you say, the worse it will get.’

  With my husband and my brother on either side of me we pushed out through the court and down the stair to Uncle Howard’s chambers. His dark-liveried servant let us in without a word. My uncle was at the big table, some papers spread out before him, a candle throwing a yellow glow all around the room.

  When we entered he nodded to the servant to stir the fire and light another branch of candles.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘Anne went into labour and gave birth to a dead baby,’ I said flatly.

  He nodded, his grave face showing no emotion.

  ‘There were things wrong with it,’ I said.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Its back was flayed open, and its head was big,’ I said. I could feel my throat tightening in disgust and I gripped William’s hand a little tighter. ‘It was a monster.’

  Again he nodded as if I were telling him news of a most ordinary and distant nature. But it was George who gave a small strangled exclamation in his throat and felt for the back of a chair to support him. My uncle seemed to pay no attention, but he saw everything.

  ‘I tried to stop the midwife taking it out.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She said that she was already hired by the king.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And when I offered her money to stay or to leave the baby she said that it was her duty to the Virgin Mary to take the baby because she was a …’

  ‘A …?’

  ‘A witch-taker,’ I whispered.

  I felt the odd sensation of the floor floating underneath my feet and all the sounds of the room coming from far away. Then William pressed me into a chair and held a glass of wine to my lips. George did not touch me, he was clinging to the back of the chair and his face was as white as mine.

  My uncle was unmoved.

  ‘The king hired a witch-taker to spy on Anne?’

  I took another sip of wine and nodded.

  ‘Then she is in very great danger,’ he remarked.

  There was another long silence.

  ‘Danger?’ George whispered, pushing himself upright.

  My uncle nodded. ‘A suspicious husband is always a danger. A suspicious king even more so.’

  ‘She’s done nothing,’ George said stoutly. I stole a curious sideways glance at him, hearing him repeat the litany Anne had sworn when she had seen the monster that her body had made.

  ‘Perhaps,’ my uncle conceded. ‘But the king thinks she has done something, and that is enough to destroy her.’

  ‘And what will you do to protect her?’ George asked cautiously.

  ‘You know, George,’ my uncle said slowly, ‘the last time I had the pleasure of a private conversation with her she said that I might leave the court and be damned to me, she said that she had got where she was by her own efforts and that she owed me nothing, and she threatened me with imprisonment.’

  ‘She’s a Howard,’ I said, putting the wine aside.

  He bowed. ‘She was.’

  ‘This is Anne!’ I exclaimed. ‘We all spent our lives to get her here.’

  My uncle nodded. ‘And has she repaid us with great thanks? You were exiled from court, as I remember. You’d still be there if she had not needed your service. She has done nothing to recommend me to the king, on the contrary. And George, she favours you, but are you one shilling the richer than when she came to the throne? Did you not do as well when she was his mistress?’

  ‘This is not a matter of favour but a matter of life and death,’ George said hotly.

  ‘As soon as she bears a son her position is secure.’

  ‘But he can’t make a son!’ George shouted. ‘He couldn’t make a son on Katherine, he cannot make one on her. He is all but impotent! That’s why she has been going mad with fear …’

  There was a deadly silence. ‘God forgive you for putting all of us in such danger,’ my uncle said coldly. ‘It’s treason to say such a thing. I did not hear it. You did not say it. Now go.’

  William helped me to my feet and the three of us went slowly from the room. On the threshold George spun around, about to complain, but the door silently closed in his face before he could speak.

  Anne did not wake until the middle of the morning and then she had a raging temperature. I went to find the king. The court was packing to move to Greenwich Palace and he was away from the noise and the bustle, playing bowls in the garden, surrounded by his favourites, the Seymours very prominent among them. I was glad to see George at his side, looking confident and smiling, and my uncle among the watchers. My father offered the king a wager at good odds and the king took the bet. I waited till the last ball had been rolled and my father, laughing, handed over twenty gold pieces, before I stepped forward and made my curtsey.

  The king scowled to see me. I saw at once that neither Boleyn girl was in favour. ‘Lady Mary,’ he said coolly.

  ‘Your Majesty, I am come from my sister, the queen.’

  He nodded.

  ‘She asks that the court delay the move to Greenwich for a week until she has perfectly recovered her health.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘She can join us there when she is well.’

  ‘They have hardly started packing yet.’

  ‘It’s too late for her,’ he corrected me. There was an instantly suppressed little mutter around the bowling green. ‘It is too late for her to ask favours of me. I know what I know.’

  I hesitated. A very strong part of me wanted to take him by the collar of his jacket and shake the fat selfishness out of him. I had left my sister sick after a nightmarish childbirth and here was her husband, taking his ease, playing bowls in the sunshine and warning the court that she was far from his favour.

  ‘Then you must know that she, and I, and all we Howards have never swerved for a moment from our love and loyalty to you,’ I said. I saw my uncle’s scowl at the claim of kinship.

  ‘Let us hope you are not all tested,’ the king said unpleasantly. Then he turned from me and beckoned to Jane Seymour. Modestly, eyes downcast, she tiptoed forward from the queen’s ladies.

  ‘Walk with me?’ he asked in a very different voice.

  She curtsied as if it were too much of an honour for her even to speak, and then laid her little hand on his bejewelled sleeve and they walked off together, the court falling into line at a discreet distance behind them.

  The court was buzzing with rumours which George and I, working alone, could not deny. Once it had been a hanging offence to say one word against Anne. Now there were songs and jokes about her flirtatious court circle, and scandalous insinuations about her inability to carry a child.

  ‘Why doesn’t Henry silence them?’ I asked of William. ‘God knows he has the power of the law to do so.’

  He shook his head. ‘He is allowing them to say anything,’ he said. ‘They say she has done everything but sell her soul to the devil.’

  ‘Fools!’ I stormed.

  Gently he took my hands and unfolded the clenched fingers. ‘But Mary. How else would she have made a monstrous child but from a monstrous union? She must have lain in sin.’

  ‘With whom, for God’s sake? Do you think she has made a contract with the devil?’

  ‘Don’t you think she would do so, if it got her a son?’ he demanded.

  That stopped me. Unhappily, I looked up into his brown eyes. ‘Hush,’ I said, afraid of the very words. ‘I don’t want to think it.’

  ‘What if she did perform some witchcraft, and it gave her a monster child?’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then he would be right to put her aside.’

  For a moment I tried to laugh. ‘This is a sorry jest at this sorry time, William.’

  ‘No jest, wife.’

  ‘I can’t see it!’ I cried in su
dden impatience at the way the world had so suddenly turned. ‘I can’t comprehend what’s happened to us!’

  Disregarding the fact that we were in the garden and that any of the court could come upon us at any moment, he slipped his arm around my waist and folded me in to him, as intimate as if we were in the stable yard of his farm. ‘Love, my love,’ he said tenderly. ‘She must have done something very bad to give birth to a monster. And you don’t even know what it was. Have you never run a secret errand for her? Fetched a midwife? Bought a potion?’

  ‘You yourself …’ I started.

  He nodded. ‘And I have buried a dead baby. Please God this matter can be settled quietly and they never ask too many questions.’

  The only previous time that the court had abandoned a queen in an empty palace was when the king and Anne had ridden out laughing, and left Queen Katherine alone. Now Henry did it again. Anne watched, unseen, from the window of her bedroom, kneeling up on a chair, still too weak to stand, while he, with Jane Seymour riding at his side, led the progress of the court to Greenwich, his favourite palace.

  In the train of merry courtiers behind the laughing king and the new pretty favourite was my family, father, mother, uncle and brother, jockeying for the king’s favour, while William and I rode with our children. Catherine was quiet and reserved, and she glanced back at the palace and then looked up at me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t seem right to be riding away without the queen,’ she said.

  ‘She’ll join us later, when she feels well again,’ I said comfortingly.

  ‘D’you know where Jane Seymour will have her rooms at Greenwich?’ she asked me.

  I shook my head. ‘Won’t she share with another Seymour girl?’

  ‘No,’ my young daughter said shortly. ‘She says that the king is to give her beautiful apartments of her own, and her own ladies in waiting. So that she can practise her music.’

  I did not want to believe Catherine but she was quite right. It was given out that Secretary Cromwell himself had given up his rooms at Greenwich so that Mistress Seymour could warble away to her lute without disturbing the other ladies. In fact, Secretary Cromwell’s rooms had a private passage connecting the apartment to the king’s privy chamber. Jane was ensconced in Greenwich as Anne had been before her, in rival rooms to the queen’s apartment, as a rival court.

  As soon as the court was settled, a little group of Seymours met and talked and danced and played in Jane’s new grand apartments, and the queen’s ladies, without the queen to wait on, found their way over to Jane’s rooms. The king was there all the time, talking, reading, listening to music or poetry. He dined with Jane informally, in his rooms or hers, with Seymours around the table to laugh at his jests or divert him with gambling, or he took her into dinner in the great hall and sat her near to him, with only the queen’s empty throne to remind anyone that there was a Queen of England left behind in an empty palace. Sometimes, as I looked at Jane leaning forward to say something to Henry over my sister’s empty seat, I felt as if Anne had never been and there was nothing to stop Jane moving from one chair to the other.

  She never wavered in her sweetness to Henry. They must have reared her on a diet of sugar beet in Wiltshire. She was utterly unendingly pleasant to Henry whether he was in a sour mood because of the pain in his leg, or whether he was exultant as a boy crowing in triumph because he had brought down a deer. She was always very calm, she was always very pious – he often found her on her knees before her little prie dieu with her hands clasped on her rosary, and her head uplifted – and she was always unendingly modest.

  She set aside the French hood, the stylish half-moon-shaped headdress which Anne had introduced when she first came back to England. Instead, Jane wore a gable hood, like Queen Katherine had done, which only a year ago marked the wearer as someone impossibly dowdy and dull. Henry himself had sworn that he hated Spanish dress, but its very sternness suited Jane’s cool beauty as a foil. She wore it like a nun might wear a coif – to demonstrate her disdain for worldly show. But she wore it in palest blue, in softest green, in butter yellow: all clean light colours as if her very palette was mild.

  I knew that she was halfway to my sister’s place when Madge Shelton, bawdy, flirtatious, loose-living little Madge Shelton, appeared at dinner in a gable hood in pale blue with a high-necked gown to match and her French sleeves remodelled to an English cut. Within days every woman in the court wore a gable hood and walked with her eyes downcast.

  Anne joined us in February, riding into court with the greatest show: the royal standard rippling over her head, the Boleyn standard coming along behind her, and a great train of liveried serving men and gentlemen on horseback. George and I were waiting for her on the steps with the great doors open wide behind us, and Henry noticeable by his absence.

  ‘Shall you tell her about Jane’s rooms?’ George asked me.

  ‘Not I,’ I said. ‘You can.’

  ‘Francis says to tell her in public. She’ll rule her temper in front of the court.’

  ‘You discuss the queen with Francis?’

  ‘You talk with William.’

  ‘He is my husband.’

  George nodded, looking towards the first men in Anne’s train as they approached the door.

  ‘You trust William?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I feel the same about Francis.’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘How would you know what his love is like to me?’

  ‘I know that it can’t be as a man loves a woman.’

  ‘No. I love him as a man loves a man.’

  ‘It’s against holy writ.’

  He took my hands and smiled his irresistible Boleyn smile. ‘Mary, have done. These are dangerous times and the only comfort to me is Francis’s love. Let me have that. Because as God is my witness I have few other joys, and I think we are in the greatest of danger.’

  Anne’s train of escorts rode past and she pulled up her horse beside us with a radiant smile. She was wearing a riding habit in darkest red and a dark red hat set back on her head with a long feather pinned on the brim with a great ruby brooch.

  ‘Vivat Anna!’ my brother called, responding to her emphatic style.

  She looked past us, into the shadows of the great hall, expecting to see the king waiting for her. Her expression did not change when she saw that he was missing.

  ‘Are you well?’ I asked, coming forward.

  ‘Of course,’ she said brightly. ‘Why should I not be?’

  I shook my head. ‘No reason,’ I said cautiously. Clearly, we were to say nothing about this dead baby as we had always said nothing about the others.

  ‘Where is the king?’

  ‘Hunting,’ George said.

  Anne strode into the palace, servants running before her to throw open the doors.

  ‘He knew I was coming?’ she threw over her shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ George replied.

  She nodded and waited until we were in her rooms with the doors shut. ‘And where are my ladies?’

  ‘Some of them are hunting with the king,’ I said. ‘Some of them are …’ I found I did not know how to end the sentence. ‘Some of them are not,’ I said hopelessly.

  She looked past me and raised a dark eyebrow at George. ‘Will you tell me what my sister means?’ she asked. ‘I knew her French and Latin were incomprehensible but now English seems to be beyond her too.’

  ‘Your ladies are flocking to Jane Seymour,’ he said flatly. ‘The king has given her Thomas Cromwell’s apartments, he dines with her every day. She has a little court over there.’

  She gasped for a moment and looked from our brother to me. ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘He has given her Thomas Cromwell’s rooms? He can go straight to her rooms without anyone even knowing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they lovers?’

  I looked at George.
<
br />   ‘No way of knowing,’ he said. ‘My wager is not.’

  ‘Not?’

  ‘She seems to be refusing to take the addresses of a married man,’ he said. ‘She is playing on her virtue.’

  Anne went to the window, walking slowly, as if she would puzzle out this change in her world. ‘What does she hope for?’ she asked. ‘If she is calling him on and holding him off at the same time?’

  Neither of us answered her. Who would know better than us?

  Anne turned, her eyes as sharp as a cat’s. ‘She thinks to put me aside? Is she mad?’

  We neither of us answered.

  ‘And Cromwell was ordered out for this shower of Seymours?’

  I shook my head. ‘Cromwell offered his rooms.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘So Cromwell is openly against me now.’

  She looked to George for comfort, an odd look, as if she were not sure of him. But George had never failed her. Tentatively, he went closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder, brother-like. Instead of turning to him for a hug, she stepped back until he was standing behind her and then she rested her head back against his chest. He gave a sigh and wrapped his arms around her and rocked her gently as they stood, looking out of the window where the Thames sparkled in the wintry sunshine.

  ‘I thought you might be afraid to touch me,’ she said softly.

  He shook his head. ‘Oh, Anne. According to the laws of the land and the church I am anathemetised ten times over before breakfast.’

  I shuddered at that; but she giggled like a girl.

  ‘And whatever we have done, it was done for love,’ he said gently.

  She turned in his arms and looked up at him, scrutinising his face. I realised that I had never in my life seen her look at anyone like that before. She looked at him as if she cared what he felt. He was not just a step on the stair of her ambition. He was her beloved. ‘Even when the outcome was monstrous?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t pretend to know the theology. But my mare has dropped a foal with one leg joined to the other and I didn’t dip her for a witch. These things happen in nature, they can’t always mean something. You were unlucky, nothing more.’