Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (121 page)

‘Go away,' the queen repeated. ‘Soon the Christmas feast will be over and we will not meet again till Easter. Soon the Pope will come to his decision and when he tells the king that he has to honour his marriage to me then your sister will make her next move. What have I to expect, d'you think? A charge of treason? Or poison in my dinner?'

‘She wouldn't,' I whispered.

‘She would,' the queen said flatly. ‘And you would help her. Go away, Lady Carey, I don't want to see you again till Easter.'

I rose to my feet and backed away, at the doorway I swept her a deep curtsey, as low as one would offer to an emperor. I did not show her my face, which was wet with tears. I bowed in shame. I went from her room and shut her door and left her alone, looking out over the frozen garden at the laughing court setting off down river to honour her enemy.

The gardens were quiet with most of the court absent. I thrust my cold hands deep into the fur of my sleeves and walked down to the river, my head lowered, my cheeks icy with my tears. Suddenly, a pair of down-at-heel boots stopped before me.

I looked up slowly. A good pair of legs if a woman cared to observe, warm doublet, brown fustian cape, smiling face: William Stafford.

‘Not gone with the court to visit your sister?' he asked without a word of greeting.

‘No,' I said shortly.

He took a closer look at my downturned face.

‘Are your children all right?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘What is it then?'

‘I've done a bad thing,' I said, narrowing my eyes against the glare of the winter sunshine on the water, looking upriver to where the merry court was rowing away.

He waited.

‘I discovered something about the queen and I told my uncle.'

‘Did he think it was a bad thing?'

I laughed shortly. ‘Oh no. So far as he is concerned I am a credit to him.'

‘The duchess's secret note,' he guessed at once. ‘It's all over the palace. She's been banished from court. But nobody knows how she was detected.'

‘I …' I started awkwardly.

‘No-one will learn it from me.' Familiarly he took my cold hand and tucked it in the crook of his elbow and led me to walk beside the river. The sun was bright on our faces, my hand, trapped between his arm and his body, grew warmer.

‘What would you have done?' I asked. ‘Since you keep your own counsel and pride yourself so much on being your own man.'

Stafford gave me the most delighted sideways gleam. ‘I did not dare to hope that you remembered our talks.'

‘It's nothing,' I said, slightly flustered. ‘It means nothing.'

‘Of course not.'

He thought for a moment. ‘I think I would have done as you did. If it had been her nephew planning an invasion then it would have been essential to read it.'

We paused at the boundary of the palace gardens. ‘Won't we open the gate and go on?' he asked temptingly. ‘We could go to the village and have a mug of ale and a pocketful of roasted chestnuts.'

‘No. I have to go to dinner tonight, even though the queen has dismissed me till Easter.'

He turned and walked beside me, saying nothing, but with my hand pressed warmly to his side. At the garden door he stopped. ‘I'll leave you here,' he said. ‘I was on my way to the stable yard when I saw you. My horse has gone lame and I want to see that they are fomenting her hoof properly.'

‘Indeed, I don't know why you delayed for me at all,' I said, a hint of provocation in my voice.

He looked at me directly and I felt my breath come a little short. ‘Oh I think you do,' he said slowly. ‘I think you know very well why I stopped to see you.'

‘Mr Stafford …' I said.

‘I so hate the smell of the liniment they put on the hoof,' he said quickly. He bowed to me and was gone before I could laugh or protest or even acknowledge that he had trapped me into flirting with him when it had been my hope to entrap him.

With the death of the cardinal the church quickly learned that it had lost not only one of its greatest profiteers, but also its great protector. Henry fined the church with an enormous tax that emptied the treasuries and made the clergy realise that the Pope might still be their spiritual leader, but their leader on earth was a good deal closer to home and a good deal more powerful.

Not even the king could have done it on his own. Supporting Henry's attack on the church were the brightest thinkers of the age, the men in whose books Anne believed, who demanded that the church return to early purity. The very people of England, ignorant of theology, were not prepared to support their priests or their monasteries against Henry when he spoke of the right of English people to a church of England. The church at Rome seemed very much the church of Rome: a foreign institution, dominated at the moment by a foreign emperor. Better by far that the church should answer firstly to God, and be ruled, as everything else in the country was ruled, by the King of England. How else could he be king?

No-one outside the church would argue with this logic. Inside the church only Bishop Fisher, the queen's old stubborn faithful confessor made any protest when Henry named himself the supreme head of the church of England.

‘You should refuse to allow him to court,' Anne said to Henry. They were seated in a window embrasure in the audience chamber of the palace of Greenwich. She lowered her voice only a little out of deference to the petitioners waiting to see him and the court all around them. ‘He's always creeping into the queen's rooms to whisper for hours. Who's to say she's confessing and he's praying? Who knows what advice he is giving her? Who knows what secrets they are plotting?'

‘I cannot deny her the rites of the church,' the king said reasonably. ‘She would hardly plot in the confessional.'

‘He's her spy,' Anne said flatly.

The king patted her hand. ‘Peace, sweetheart,' he said. ‘I am head of the church of England, I can rule on my own marriage. It is all but done.'

‘Fisher will speak against us,' she fretted. ‘And everyone will listen to him.'

‘Fisher is not supreme head of the church,' Henry repeated, savouring the words. ‘I am.' He looked over to one of the petitioners. ‘What d'you want? You can approach me.'

The man came forward holding out a piece of paper, some quarrel about a will that the court of wards had been unable to resolve. Father, who had brought the man to court, stood back and let him make his petition. Anne slipped from Henry's side to Father, touched his sleeve and whispered. They broke apart and she came back to the king, smiling.

I was laying out the cards for us to play a game. I looked around for a gentleman to take the fourth hand. Sir Francis Weston stepped forward and bowed to me. ‘Can I stake my heart?' he asked.

George was watching the two of us, smiling at Sir Francis's flirtatiousness, his eyes very warm.

‘You have nothing to stake,' I reminded him. ‘You swore to me you lost it when you saw me in my blue gown.'

‘I got it back when you danced with the king,' he said. ‘Broken but returned.'

‘It's not a heart but a battered old arrow,' Henry remarked. ‘You're always loosing it off and then going to get it back again.'

‘It never finds its target,' Sir Francis said. ‘I am a poor marksman beside Your Majesty.'

‘You're a poor card player as well,' Henry said hopefully. ‘Let's play for a shilling a point.'

A few nights later, Bishop Fisher was sick, and nearly died of his sickness. Three men at his dinner table died of poison, others in his household were sick too. Someone had bribed his cook to put poison in his soup. It was only his good luck that Bishop Fisher had not wanted the soup that evening.

I did not ask Anne what she had said to Father in the doorway, nor what he had replied. I did not ask her if she had any hand in the bishop's
sickness and the deaths of three innocent men at his table. It was not a little thing, to think that one's sister and one's father were murderers. But I remembered the darkness of her face as she swore that she hated Fisher as much as she had hated the cardinal. And now the cardinal was dead of shame, and Fisher's dinner had been salted with poison. I felt as if this whole matter, which had started as a summer flirtation, had grown too dark and too great for me to want to know any secrets. Anne's dark-tempered motto, ‘Thus it will be: grudge who grudge', seemed like a curse that Anne was laying on the Boleyns, on the Howards, and on the country itself.

The queen was in the centre of the court for the Easter feast, as she had predicted. The king dined with her every night, all smiles so that the people who had come out from the City to see the king and queen dine would go to their homes and say it was a shame that a man in the very prime of his life should be entrapped by a woman so much older and so grave-looking. Sometimes she would withdraw early from dinner and her ladies had to choose whether to go with her or to stay in the hall. I always left with her when she withdrew. I was weary of the endless gossip and scandal of the court, of the spite of the women and of the brittle charm of my sister. And I feared what I might see if I stayed. It was a more unreliable place than the court I had joined with such high hopes when I had been the only Boleyn girl in England, and a newly wed wife with great hopes of my husband and my life with him.

The queen accepted my service without comment; she never mentioned my earlier betrayal. Only once she asked me if I would not rather be in the hall, watching the entertainment or dancing.

‘No,' I said. I had picked up a book and was about to offer to read to her as she sat and sewed the altar cloth. Almost all the blue sky was completed, it was remarkable how fast and accurately she had worked. The cloth was spread like a gown over her lap, tumbling down in a swirl of rich blue to the floor, she had only the last corner of sky to stitch.

‘You have no interest in dancing?' she asked me. ‘You, a young widow? Have you no suitors?'