Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (146 page)

‘Does George know?' she demanded.

‘No. I told you he does not. I only came to you. Only you can help me.'

‘Never,' she swore. ‘You have married a poor man for love, you can eat love, you can drink it. You can live off it. Go to his little farm in Rochford and rot there, and when Father or George or I come down to Rochford Hall make very sure that you are nowhere in our sight. You are banished from court, Mary. You have ruined yourself and I will set a seal on it. You are gone. I have no sister.'

‘Anne!' I cried, utterly aghast.

She turned a furious face to me. ‘Shall I call the guards and have you thrown out of the gates?' she demanded. ‘For I swear I will do so.'

I fell to my knees. ‘My son,' was all I could say.

‘
My
son,' she said vindictively. ‘I will tell him that his mother is dead and that he is to call me mother. You have lost everything for love, Mary. I hope it brings you joy.'

There was nothing I could say. I rose awkwardly to my feet, my heavy belly making it hard for me to rise. She watched me struggle as if she would sooner push me down than help me. I turned to the door and hesitated with my hand on the handle in case she should change her mind. ‘My son …'

‘Go,' she said. ‘You are dead to me. And don't approach the king or I shall tell him what a whore you have been.'

I slipped out of the door and went to my bedroom.

Madge Shelton was changing her dress before the looking glass. She turned when she heard me come in, a bright smile on her young face. She took one look at my grim expression and I saw her eyes widen. That one look said everything that was different between our ages, between our positions, between our places in the Howard family. She was a young girl with everything to sell and I was a woman twice married who would have three children at twenty-seven, cast out by my family and nothing to turn to but one man on a little farm. I was a woman who had her chance and botched it.

‘Are you sick?' she asked.

‘Ruined,' I said shortly.

‘Oh,' she said with all the doltishness of vain youth. ‘Sorry.'

I found a grim little laugh. ‘That's all right,' I said dourly. ‘It's a bed of my own making.'

I threw my riding cloak on the bed and she saw the broad lacing of my stomacher. She gave a little gasp of horror.

‘Aye,' I said. ‘I'm carrying a baby, and I am married, if you want to know.'

‘The queen?' she asked in a half-whisper, knowing, as we all knew, that the one thing this queen hated was fertile women.

‘Not best pleased,' I said.

‘Your husband?'

‘William Stafford.'

A gleam in her dark eyes told me that she had noticed more than she had said. ‘I'm so pleased for you,' she said. ‘He's a handsome man and a good man. I thought you liked him. So all these nights …?'

‘Yes,' I said shortly.

‘What happens now?'

‘We'll have to make our own way in the world,' I said. ‘We'll go to Rochford. He has a little farm there. We might do nicely.'

‘On a little farm?' Madge asked incredulously.

‘Yes,' I said with sudden energy. ‘Why not? There are other places to live than in palaces and castles. There are other tunes to dance to other than the court's music. We don't always have to wait on a king and queen. I have spent all my life at court, wasted my girlhood and womanhood here. I am sorry that I shall be poor but I am damned if I will miss the life here.'

‘And your children?' she asked.

The question knocked the wind out of me like a blow to the belly. My knees buckled and I sank to the floor, holding myself tight, as if my heart would break out of me. ‘Oh, my children,' I said in a whisper.

‘Does the queen keep them?' she asked.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes. She keeps my son.' I could have said more, and that very bitter. I could have said that she kept my son because she could have none of her own. That she had taken from me everything that she ever could take, she would always take everything from me. That she and I were sisters and deadly rivals and nothing would ever stop us from endlessly eyeing the other's plate and fearing that the other had the biggest portion. Anne wanted to punish me for refusing to dance in her shadow. And she knew that she had chosen the one forfeit in the world that I could not bear to pay.

‘At least I will escape her,' I said. ‘And escape this family's ambition.'

Madge looked at me wide-eyed, as worldly as a fawn. ‘But escaped to what?'

Anne was quick to announce my departure. My father and mother would not even see me before I left court. Only George came down to the stable yard to watch my trunks being loaded onto a cart, and William help me up into the saddle and then mount his own hunter.

‘Write to me,' George said. He was scowling with worry. ‘Are you well enough to travel all that way?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘I'll take care of her,' William assured him.

‘You've not done a wonderful job so far,' George said unpleasantly. ‘She's ruined, she's stripped of her pension, and she's banned from court.'

I saw William's hand tighten on the reins and his horse sidled. ‘Not my doing,' William said levelly. ‘That's the spite and ambition of the
queen and the Boleyn family. In any other family in the land Mary would be allowed to marry a gentleman of her choice.'

‘Stop it,' I said quickly, before George could reply.

George took a breath and bowed his head. ‘She's not been best treated,' he conceded. He looked up at William, seated high on the horse above him, and smiled his rueful, charming Boleyn smile. ‘We had our minds on targets other than her happiness.'

‘I know,' said William. ‘But I do not.'

George looked wistful. ‘I wish you would tell me the secret of true love,' he said. ‘Here's the two of you riding off the very edge of the world and yet you look as if someone has just given you an earldom.'

I put my hand out to William and he gripped it hard. ‘I just found the man I love,' I said simply. ‘I could never have had a man who loved me more, nor a more honest man.'

‘Go then!' George said. He pulled off his cap as the wagon lurched forward. ‘Go and be happy together. I'll do the best I can to get you your place and your pension.'

‘Just my children,' I said. ‘That's all I want.'

‘I'll speak to the king when I can, and you can write. Write to Cromwell perhaps, and I'll talk to Anne. It's not forever. You'll come back, won't you? You'll come back?'

There was an odd tone to his voice; not at all as if he were promising me my safe return to the centre of the kingdom, more as if he feared being without me. He did not sound like one of the greatest men at a great court, he sounded more like a boy abandoned in a dangerous place.

‘Keep yourself safe!' I said, suddenly shivering. ‘Keep out of bad company, and watch over Anne!'

I had not been mistaken. The expression on his face was one of fear. ‘I'll try.' His voice rang with hollow confidence. ‘I will try!'

The wagon went out under the archway and William and I rode side by side after it. I looked back at George and he seemed very young and far away. He waved at me and called something, but over the grinding of the wheels on the cobbles and the ringing of the horses' hooves I could not hear.

We came out onto the road and William let his horse lengthen his stride so that we overtook the slow-moving wagon and were clear of the dust from its wheels. My hunter would have trotted to keep up, but I steadied her into a walk. I rubbed my face with the back of my glove and William looked sideways at me. ‘No regrets?' he asked gently.

‘I just fear for him,' I said.

He nodded. He knew too much about George's life at court to offer me a glib reassurance. George's love affair with Sir Francis, their indiscreet
circle of friends, their drinking, their gambling, their whoring, was slowly coming to be an open secret. More and more men at court were taking their pleasures more and more wildly, George among them.

‘And for her,' I said, thinking of my sister who had banished me like a beggar and so left herself with only one friend in the world.

William leaned over and put his hand over mine. ‘Come on,' he said, and we turned our horses' heads to the river and rode down to meet the waiting boat.

We disembarked at Leigh early in the morning. The horses were cold and fretting after the long river journey and we walked them up the lane, north to Rochford. William took us down the little track which led cross-country to his farm. The early morning mist swirled damp and cold over the fields, it was the very worst time of year to come to the country. It would be a long waterlogged icy winter in the little farmhouse, a long way from anywhere. The dampness on my skirts now would hardly dry out for six months.

William glanced back at me. He smiled. ‘Sit up, sweetheart, and look about you. The sun's coming out, and we'll be all right.'

I managed a smile and I straightened my back and pressed my horse onwards. Ahead of me I could see the thatched roof of his farmhouse, and then, as we came over the rise of a hill, the whole pretty little fifty acres, laid out below us with the river lapping up to the bottom fields and the stable yard and barn as neat and as trim as I remembered it.

We rode down the lane and William dismounted to open the gate. A small boy emerged from nowhere and looked doubtfully at the two of us. ‘You can't come in,' he said firmly. ‘This belongs to Sir William Stafford. A great man at court.'

‘Thank you,' William said. ‘I am Sir William Stafford and you can tell your mother that you are a fine gatekeeper. Tell her that I am come home, and brought my wife, and that we need bread and milk and some bacon and cheese.'

‘You are Sir William Stafford, for sure?' the boy confirmed.

‘Yes.'

‘Then she'll probably kill a chicken as well,' he said, and legged it across the fields to the little cottage set half a mile away on the lane.

I rode Jesmond through the gate and pulled up in the stable yard. William helped me from the saddle and threw the reins over a hitching post while he took me into the house. The door to the kitchen was open, and we stepped over the threshold together.

‘Sit down,' William said, pressing me into a chair by the fireside. ‘I'll soon get this lit.'

‘Not at all,' I said. ‘I'm going to be a farmer's wife, remember. I'll light the fire and you can see to the horses.'

He hesitated. ‘D'you know how to light a fire, my little love?'

‘Go away!' I said in mock indignation. ‘Out of my kitchen. I need to set things to rights here.'