Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (134 page)

William lifted me down from the saddle and at the touch of his hands on my waist, his body against mine, I was filled with a sudden fierce yearning for him, so acute that I gave a little cry of pain.

‘Are you all right?' he asked, setting me on my feet.

‘No!' I said fiercely. ‘I am not all right. You know that I am not.'

For a moment he too was shaken out of calmness. He caught my hand and roughly pulled me back to him. ‘How you are feeling now is how I have been feeling for months,' he swore in a passionate undertone. ‘How you are feeling now is how I have been feeling night and day since I first saw you, and I expect to go on feeling like this for the rest of my life. Think about it, Mary. And you send for me. Send for me when you know that you cannot live without me.'

I twisted my hand out of his grip and I pulled myself away. I half-expected him to come after me but he did not. I walked so slowly that
if he had as much as whispered my name I would have heard him, and turned. I walked away from him though my feet dragged at every step. I went through the archway to the castle door though every inch of my body was crying out to stay with him.

I wanted to go to my room and weep but as I went through the great hall George rose up out of a chair and said: ‘I've been waiting for you, where've you been?'

‘Riding,' I said shortly.

‘With William Stafford,' he accused me.

I let him see my red eyes and the quiver of my mouth. ‘Yes. So?'

‘Oh God,' George said, brother-like. ‘Dear God no, you silly whore. Go and wash and get that look off your face, anyone can guess what you've been doing.'

‘I've done nothing!' I exclaimed in sudden passion. ‘Nothing! And much good it has done me!'

He hesitated. ‘Just as well. Hurry up.'

I went to my room and splashed water on my eyes and rubbed my face on a drying sheet. When I came into Anne's presence chamber there were half a dozen ladies playing cards, and George waiting, very sombre, in the window embrasure.

He gave a quick cautious look around the room and then tucked my hand under his arm and led me away to the picture gallery which ran the length of the great hall but was empty at this time of the day.

‘You've been seen,' he said. ‘You can't have thought you'd get away with it.'

‘With what?'

He stopped short, and looked at me with a seriousness I had never seen before. ‘Don't be pert,' he urged me. ‘You were seen coming out of the sand dunes with your head on his shoulder and his arm around your waist and your hair all blowing loose in the wind. Don't you know that Uncle Howard has spies everywhere? Didn't you think that you would be bound to be caught?'

‘What's going to happen?' I asked fearfully.

‘Nothing, if it stops here. That's why it's me telling you, and not Uncle or Father. They don't want to know. As far as you're concerned, they don't know. It's just between you and me and it need go no further.'

‘I love him, George,' I said very quietly.

He put his head down and ploughed on down the gallery, dragging
me with him by my hand in his arm. ‘Doesn't make any difference to people like us. You know that.'

‘I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.'

‘And he?' George asked, drawn into this despite himself.

I turned my head away so he should not see the sudden pain in my face. ‘I thought he felt the same. But today, when the wind changed, he said we would sail for England and we would not be able to see each other as we had done in France.'

‘Well, he's right,' George said brutally. ‘And if Anne had been doing her business then neither you nor half a dozen other of the ladies would have been dawdling around France flirting with men in your train.'

‘It's not like that,' I flared up. ‘He's not a man in my train. He's the man I love.'

‘D'you remember Henry Percy?' George suddenly demanded.

‘Of course.'

‘He was in love. More than that, he was betrothed, more than that: he was married. Did it save him? No. He's stuck in Northumberland, married to a woman who loathes him, still in love, still heartbroken, still hopeless. You can choose. You can be in love and heartbroken, or you can make the best you can of it.'

‘Like you?' I said.

‘Like me,' he said grimly. Despite himself he looked down the gallery to where Sir Francis Weston was leaning over Anne's shoulder, following a music score. Sir Francis felt our gaze on him and looked up. For once he forgot to smile at me, he looked past me at my brother and there was a deep intimacy in the gaze.

‘I never follow my desire, I never consult it,' George said grimly. ‘I have put my family first and it costs me a heartbeat, every day of my life. I do nothing which might cause Anne embarrassment. Love does not come into it for us Howards. We are courtiers first and foremost. Our life is at court. And true love has no place at court.'

Sir Francis gave a distant little smile when George did not acknowledge him, and turned his attention back to the music.

George pinched my cold fingers as they rested on his arm. ‘You have to stop seeing him,' he said. ‘You have to promise on your honour.'

‘I can't promise on my honour, for I have no honour,' I said bleakly. ‘I was married to one man and I cuckolded him with the king. I went back to him and he died, before I had a chance to tell him that I might love him. And now when I find a man that I could love heart and soul,
you ask me to promise on my honour not to see him – and I do so promise. On my honour. There is no honour left in us three Boleyns at all.'

‘Bravo,' George said. He took me in his arms and kissed me on the mouth. ‘And heartbreak becomes you. You look delicious.'

We sailed the next day. I looked for William on the deck and when I saw him, carefully not looking at me, I went below with the other ladies and curled up in a nest of cushions and went to sleep. More than anything else I wanted to sleep the next half year away until I could go to Hever and see my children again.

The court held Christmas at Westminster and Anne was the hub of every activity. The master of the revels staged masque after masque when she was hailed as Queen of Peace, Queen of Winter, Queen of Christmas. She was called everything but Queen of England, and everyone knew that title would follow very soon. Henry took her to the Tower of London and she had her pick of the treasury of England, as if she were a princess born.

She and Henry now had adjoining apartments. Brazenly, they retired to his room or hers together at night and they emerged together in the morning. He bought her a fur-lined black satin robe to greet the visitors who came into his bedchamber. I was released from my post as chaperone and bedfellow and found myself alone at night for the first time since girlhood. It was a pleasure of sorts to be able to sit by my little fire and know that Anne would not be storming into the room in a temper. But I found I was lonely. I spent long nights daydreaming in front of the fire, and many cold afternoons, looking out of the window at the grey winter rain. The sunshine and the sand dunes of Calais seemed like a million years away. I felt that I was turning to ice, just like the sleet on the tiled roofs.

I looked for William Stafford among my uncle's men and someone told me that he had gone to his farm to see to the lifting of the turnips and the killing of the old beasts. I thought of him, going about his little farmstead, setting things to rights, dealing with real things while I lingered at court, enmeshed in gossip and scandal and thinking of nothing but the pleasure of two idle selfish people and how to entertain them.

In the middle of the twelve-day Christmas feast Anne came to me and asked what signs would tell a woman that she had conceived. We counted
the days of her courses and she was due within the week; she was already determined to be sick in the mornings and unable to eat the fat off the meat, but I told her it was too early to know.

She counted the days. Sometimes I could see her holding herself very still and I knew that she was willing herself to be with child.

The day came when she might have bled, and that night she put her head around the door of my room and said triumphantly: ‘I am clean. Does that mean I have a baby?'

‘One day proves nothing,' I said ungraciously. ‘You have to wait a month at least.'

The next day passed, and the next. She did not tell Henry of her hopes but I imagined that he could count like any other man. They both started to have the look of a couple balancing on air like rope dancers at a fair. He did not dare to ask her, but he came to me and asked me if Anne had missed her course.

‘Only by a week or two, Your Majesty,' I said respectfully.

‘Shall I send for a midwife?' he asked.

‘Not yet,' I advised. ‘Better to wait for the second month.'

He looked anxious. ‘I should not lie with her.'

‘Perhaps just be very gentle,' I advised.

He frowned in his anxiety, and I thought that their desire for this baby would rob all the joy from their mating before they were even wed.

In January it was clear that Anne had missed a month for certain, and she told the king that she thought that she might be with his child.

It was touching to see him. He had been so long married to a barren woman, the thought of a fertile wife was damp ploughland in a dry August to him. They were very quiet together, very strange to each other. They had been passionate quarrellers, passionate lovers, and now they wanted to be friends. Anne wanted to rest quietly, she had a terror of doing anything that might disturb the process which was going on in secret in her body. Henry wanted to sit beside her, as if his presence might continue what he had started. He wanted to hold her and walk beside her, and save her from any exertion at all.

He had seen too many pregnancies end in a mess of crying women and disappointment. He had celebrated some live births and had the joy stolen from him by inexplicable deaths. Now he thought that Anne's ready fertility vindicated him completely. God had cursed him for marrying his brother's wife and now God was lifting the curse by making his wife-to-be (his first wife, in Henry's adaptable conscience) so fertile that she conceived within months of lying with him. He treated her with immense tenderness and respect, and he rushed through a new law, so that they
might be legally married, under the new English law, in the new English church.

It took place in almost complete secrecy in Whitehall, Anne's London house, the home of her dead adversary, the cardinal. The king's two witnesses were his friends, Henry Norris and Thomas Heneage, and William Brereton attended him. George and I were commanded to make it seem as though Anne and the king were dining in his privy chamber. We thought the most agreeable way to do this was to order the very best dinner for four and have it served to us sitting in the king's own chamber. The court, watching great dishes going in and out, came to the conclusion that it was a private dinner for the Boleyns and the king. It was a petty revenge for me, to sit in Anne's chair and eat off her plate while she was marrying the King of England, but it amused me. To tell the truth, I tried on her black satin bedgown too, while she was safely out of the way, and George swore that it suited me very well.

A few months later and the business was done. Anne, forever holding her swelling belly, was publicly announced as the official wife of the king by no less an authority than Archbishop Cranmer, who held the briefest of inquiries into the marriage of Queen Katherine and Henry and discovered that it had always been null and void. The queen did not even attend the court which traduced her name and dishonoured her. She was clinging to her appeal to Rome, and ignoring the English decision. For a moment, foolishly enough, I had looked for her when the announcement was made, thinking that she might be there, defiant in her red gown as she had been defiant before. But she was far away writing to the Pope, to her nephew, to her allies, begging them to insist that her case be tried fairly, before honourable judges in Rome.