Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (139 page)

‘He wanted to be a soldier,' I said sadly. ‘A great crusader, a knight with a white shield riding out against the infidel.'

William shook his head. ‘We'll save the boy Henry from this if we can,' he said.

‘My son?'

He nodded. ‘Our son. We'll try to give him a life of some purpose, not idleness and pleasure-seeking. And you had better warn your brother and your sister that their circle of friends are the subject of whispers, and he the worst.'

Anne entered the City the following day, I helped her to dress in her white gown with a white surcoat and a mantle of white ermine. She wore her dark hair loose about her shoulders with a golden veil and circlet of gold. She rode into London on a litter pulled by two white ponies with the Barons of the Cinque Ports holding a canopy of cloth of gold over her head, and the whole court, dressed in their finest, following on foot behind her. There were triumphal arches, there were fountains pouring wine, there were loyal poems at every stopping point, but the whole procession wound through a city of terrible silence.

Madge Shelton was beside me as we walked behind Anne's litter in the silence which grew increasingly ominous as we went down the narrow streets to the cathedral. ‘Good God, this is dreadful,' she muttered.

London was sulking, the people were out in their thousands but they did not wave flags or call blessings or shout Anne's name. They stared at her with a dreadful hungry curiosity as if they would see the woman who had wrought such a change in England, such a change in the king, and who had finally cut the very mantle of queenship into her own gown.

If her entrance to the City was bleak, her coronation on the second day of silent celebrations was no better. This time she wore crimson velvet trimmed with the softest whitest fur of ermine with a mantle of purple, and a face like thunder.

‘Aren't you happy now, Anne?' I asked as I twitched her train straight.

She showed a smile which was more a grimace. ‘The most happy,' she said bitterly, quoting her own motto. ‘The most happy. I should be, shouldn't I? I have everything I ever wanted, and it was only me, first and last, who believed that I could get it. I am queen, I am the wife of the King of England. I have thrown down Katherine and taken her place. I should be the happiest woman in the world.'

‘And he loves you,' I said, thinking of how my life was transformed by being loved by a good man.

Anne shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh yes,' she said indifferently. She touched her belly. ‘If only I could know it was a boy. If only I could have been crowned with a prince already in the nursery.'

Gently I patted her shoulder, awkward at the intimacy. Since we had stopped sharing a bed we seldom touched. Since she had a household of maids I no longer brushed her hair or laced her gown. She was intimate still with George but she had grown apart from me; and the theft of my son had left an unspoken resentment between us. I felt odd that she should confide a weakness to me. The polished veneer of queenship had spread over Anne like a glaze over a figurine.

‘Not long to wait,' I said gently.

‘Three months.'

There was a knock at the door and Jane Parker came in, her face bright with excitement. ‘They're waiting for you!' she said breathlessly. ‘It's time. Are you ready?'

‘I beg your pardon?' Anne said glacially. At once my sister disappeared behind the mask of queenship. Jane dropped into a curtsey. ‘Your Majesty! I beg your pardon! I should have said that they are waiting for Your Majesty.'

‘I'm ready,' Anne said and rose to her feet. The rest of her court came into the room and the ladies in waiting arranged the long train of her cape, I straightened her headdress, and spread her long dark hair over her shoulders.

Then my sister, the Boleyn girl, went out to be crowned Queen of England.

I spent the night of Anne's coronation with William in my bedroom in the Tower. I should have had Madge Shelton to share my bed but she whispered to me that she would be gone all night so while the feasting of the court went on, William and I crept away to my room, locked the door, threw another log on the fire, and slowly, sensually, undressed and made love.

We woke through the night made love and dozed again in a sleepy cycle of arousal and satisfaction, and by five o'clock in the morning, when it was starting to get light, we were both deliciously exhausted and ravenous with hunger.

‘Come on,' he said to me. ‘Let's go out and find something to eat.'

We pulled on our clothes and I put on a cape with a hood to hide my face and we crept from the sleeping Tower into the streets of the City. Half the men of London seemed to be drunk in the gutters from the free wine that had poured from the fountains to celebrate the triumph of Anne. We stepped over limp bodies all the way up the hill to the Minories.

We walked hand in hand, careless of being seen in this city which was sick with drink. William led the way to a baker's shop and stepped back to see if smoke was coming from the crooked chimney.

‘I can smell bread,' I said, snuffing at the air and laughing at my own hunger.

‘I'll knock him up,' William said and hammered on the side door.

A muffled shout from inside answered him and the door was thrown open by a man with a red face smeared with white flour.

‘Can I buy a loaf of bread?' William asked. ‘And some breakfast?'

The man blinked at the brightness of the light in the street. ‘If you have the money,' he said sulkily. ‘For God knows I have squandered all of mine.'

William drew me into the bakehouse. It was warm inside and smelled sweet. Everywhere was covered with a fine dust of white flour, even the table and the stools. William swept a seat with his cape and set me down on it.

‘Some bread,' he said. ‘A couple of mugs of small ale. Some fruit if you have it, for the lady. A couple of eggs, boiled, a little ham perhaps? A cheese? Anything nice.'

‘This is my first batch of the day,' the man grumbled. ‘I have hardly broken my own fast. Never mind running around slicing ham for the gentry.'

A little chink and the gleam of a silver coin changed everything.

‘I have some excellent ham in my larder and a cheese just up from the country that my own cousin made,' the baker said persuasively. ‘And my
wife shall rise and pour you the small ale herself. She's a good brewer, there's not a better taste in all of London.'

‘Thank you,' William said gracefully as he sat down beside me and winked, and rested his arm comfortably around my waist.

‘Newly wed?' the man asked, shovelling loaves out of the oven and seeing William's gaze on my face.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Long may it last,' he said doubtfully, and turned the loaves onto the wooden counter.

‘Amen to that,' William said quietly, and drew me to him and kissed me on the lips and whispered privately in my ear: ‘I am going to love you like this forever.'

William saw me into the little wicket gate to the Tower before going down to the river, hiring a river boatman and entering through the watergate. Madge Shelton was in our room when I got in, but too absorbed in brushing her hair and changing her gown to wonder where I had been so early in the morning. Half the court seemed to be waking up in the wrong beds. The triumph of Anne, the mistress who had become a wife, was an inspiration to every loose girl in the country.

I washed my face and hands and dressed ready to go with Anne and the other ladies to matins. Anne, in her first day of queenship, was dressed very richly in a dark gown with a jewelled hood and a long string of pearls twisted twice around her neck. She still wore her golden ‘B' for Boleyn, and carried a prayerbook encased in gold leaf. She nodded when she saw me and I dropped into a deep curtsey and followed the hem of her gown as if I was honoured to do so.

After Mass and after breakfast with the king, Anne started to reorganise her household. Many of Queen Katherine's servants had transferred their loyalty without much inconvenience, like the rest of us they would rather be attached to a rising star than to the lost queen. My eye was caught by the name Seymour.

‘Are you having a Seymour girl as your lady in waiting?' I asked curiously.

‘Which one?' George asked idly, pulling the list towards him. ‘That Agnes is said to be a terrible whore.'

‘Jane,' Anne said. ‘But I shall have Aunt Elizabeth, and Cousin Mary. I should think we have enough Howards to outweigh the influence of one Seymour.'

‘Who asked for her place?' George inquired.

‘They're all asking for places,' Anne said wearily. ‘All of them, all of the time. I thought one or two women from other families would be a sop. The Howards can't have everything.'

George laughed. ‘Oh, why not?'

Anne pushed her chair back from the table and rested her hand on her belly and sighed. George was alert.

‘Tired?' he asked.

‘A little gripe.' She looked at me. ‘It doesn't matter, does it? Little nips of pain? They don't mean anything?'

‘I had quite bad pains with Catherine, and she went full term, and then an easy birth.'

‘They don't mean that it'll be a girl though, do they?' George said anxiously.

I looked at the two of them, the matching long Boleyn noses and long faces and those eager eyes. They were the same features that had looked back at me from my own mirror for all of my life, except that now I had lost that hungry expression.

‘Be at peace,' I said gently to George. ‘There's no reason in the world why she should not have the most beautiful son. And worrying is the worst thing she can do.'

‘As well tell me not to breathe,' Anne snapped. ‘It's like carrying the whole future of England in my belly. And the queen miscarried over and over again.'

‘Because she was not his proper wife,' George said soothingly. ‘Because their marriage was never valid. Of course God will give you a son.'

Silently, she stretched her hand across the table. George gripped it tight. I looked at both of them, at the absolute desperation of their ambition, still riding them as hard as when they were the children of a small lord on the rise. I looked at them and knew the relief of my escape.

I waited for a moment and then I said, ‘George, I have heard some gossip about you which is not to your credit.'

He looked up with his merry, wicked smile. ‘Surely not!'

‘It is serious,' I said.

‘Who have you been listening to?' he returned.

‘Court whispers,' I said. ‘They say that Sir Francis Weston is part of a wild circle, you among them.'

He glanced quickly at Anne, as if to see what she knew.

She looked inquiringly at me. She was clearly ignorant of what was being said. ‘Sir Francis is a loyal friend.'

‘The queen has spoken.' George tried to make a joke.

‘Because she doesn't know the half of it, and you do,' I snapped back.

Anne was alerted by that. ‘I have to be all but perfect,' she said. ‘I can't let them have anything that they could whisper to the king against me.'