Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (150 page)

‘What about your Uncle Buckingham?'

‘That was different,' I said. ‘He was guilty.'

My husband let me go and turned back to the river. ‘We'll see,' was all he said. ‘Pray God you're right and I am wrong.'

Our prayers were not answered. Henry did the thing that I thought he would never dream of doing. He sent Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More to trial for claiming that Queen Katherine had been truly married to him. He let them lay their lives down to declare that he was not the head of the Church, an English Pope. And those two, men without a stain on their conscience, two of the finest men in England, walked out to the scaffold and laid their heads on the blocks as though they had been the lowest of traitors.

They were very quiet days at court, the days in June when Fisher died, when More died. Everyone felt that the world had grown a little more dangerous. If Bishop Fisher could be beheaded, if Thomas More could walk to the scaffold, then who could call themselves safe?

George and I waited with increasing impatience for Anne's baby to quicken in the womb so that she could tell the king that she was with child; but mid-June came and still nothing had happened.

‘Could you have mistaken your time?' I asked her.

‘Is that likely?' she retorted. ‘Do I think of anything else?'

‘Could it move so slightly that you cannot feel it?' I asked.

‘You tell me,' she said. ‘You're the sow that's always in farrow. Could it?'

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘Yes, you do know,' she said. Her little pursed mouth was shut in a thin bitter line. ‘We both know. We both know what's happened. It's died in there. It's five months now and I'm no bigger than when I was three months gone. It's dead inside me.'

I looked at her in horror. ‘You must see a physician.'

She snapped her fingers in my face. ‘I'd as soon see the devil himself. If Henry knows that there is a dead baby inside me he'll never come near me again.'

‘It will make you sick,' I warned her.

She laughed, a shrill bitter laugh. ‘It will be the death of me, one way or another. For if I let out one word that this is the second baby I've failed to carry, then I am thrown aside and ruined. What am I to do?'

‘I'll go to a midwife myself and ask her if there is something you could take to get rid of it.'

‘You'd better make sure she doesn't know it's for me,' Anne said flatly. ‘If one whisper of this gets out, then I am lost, Mary.'

‘I know,' I said grimly. ‘I'll get George to help me.'

That evening, before dinner, the two of us made our way down the river. A private ferryboatman took us, we didn't want the great family barge. George knew a bath house for whores. There was a woman who lived nearby who was reputed to be able to cast spells, or stop a baby, put a curse on a field of cows, or make river trout come to the line. The bath house overlooked the river, with bay windows leaning out over the water. There was a shielded candle in every window, and women seated half-naked by the light, so that they could be seen from the river. George pulled his hat down over his eyes and I drew the hood of my cape forward. We put the boat in at the landing stage, and I ignored the girls leaning out of the windows above our heads and cooing at George.

‘Wait here,' George ordered the boatman, as we went up the slippery wet steps. He took my elbow and guided me across the filth of the cobbled street to the house on the corner. He knocked at the door, and as it silently opened, he stood back and let me go in alone. I hesitated on the doorway, peering into the darkness.

‘Go on,' George said. An abrupt shove in the small of my back warned
me that he was in no mood for delays. ‘Go on. We've got to get this for her.'

I nodded and went inside. It was a small room, smoky from the sluggish fire of driftwood burning in the fireplace, furnished with nothing more than a little wooden table and a pair of stools. The woman was seated at the table: an old woman, stoop-backed and grey-haired, a face lined with knowledge, bright blue eyes which saw everything. A little smile revealed a mouthful of blackened teeth.

‘A lady of the court,' she remarked, taking in my cloak and the hint of my rich gown at the front opening.

I laid a silver coin on the table. ‘That's for your silence,' I said flatly.

She laughed. ‘I'll be not much use to you, if I'm silent.'

‘I need help.'

‘Want someone to love you? Want someone dead?' Her bright gaze scanned me as if she would take me all in. Her grin beamed out again.

‘Neither,' I said.

‘Baby trouble then.'

I pulled up a stool and sat down, thinking of the world divided so simply into love, death and childbirth. ‘It's not for me, it's for my friend.'

She gave a delighted little giggle. ‘As ever.'

‘She was with child, but she's now in her fifth month and the baby isn't growing and isn't moving.'

At once the old woman was more interested. ‘What does she say?'

‘She thinks it's dead.'

‘Is she still growing stouter?'

‘No. She's no bigger than two months ago.'

‘Sick in the mornings, her breasts tender?'

‘Not now.'

She nodded her head. ‘Has she bled?'

‘No.'

‘Sounds like the baby is dead. You'd better take me to her, so that I can be sure.'

‘That's not possible,' I said. ‘She's very closely guarded.'

She gave a short laugh. ‘You won't believe the houses that I have got in and out.'

‘You can't see her.'

‘Then we can take a chance. I can give you a drink, it'll make her sick as a dog and the baby will come away.'

I nodded eagerly but she held up a hand. ‘But what if she's mistaken? If it's a live baby in there? Just resting awhile? Just gone quiet?'

I looked at her, quite baffled. ‘What then?'

‘You've killed it,' she said simply. ‘And that makes you a murderer, and her, and me too. D'you have the stomach for that?'

I shook my head slowly. ‘My God, no,' I said, thinking of what would happen to me and mine if anyone knew that I had given the queen a potion to make her miscarry a prince.

I rose to my feet and turned away from the table to look out of the window at the cold grey river. I summoned my memory of Anne as I had seen her at the start of this pregnancy, her higher colour, her swelling breasts; and as she was now, pale, drained, dry-looking.

‘Give me the drink. She can be the one to choose whether to take it or no.'

The woman rose from her stool and waddled towards the back of the room. ‘That'll be three shillings.'

I said nothing to the absurdly high fee but put the silver coins down on the greasy table in silence. She snatched them up with one quick movement. ‘It's not this you need fear,' she said suddenly.

I was halfway to the door but I turned back. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘It's not the drink but the blade you should fear.'

I felt a cold shiver, as if the grey mist from the river had just crept all over the skin of my back. ‘What d'you mean?'

She shook her head, as if she had been asleep for a moment. ‘I? Nothing. If it means something to you, then take it to heart. If it means nothing, it means nothing. Let it go.'

I paused for a moment in case she would say anything more, and when she was silent I opened the door and slipped out.

George was waiting, arms folded. When I came out he tucked his hand under my elbow in silence and we hurried down the slippery green steps to the gently rocking boat. In silence we made the longer journey home, the boatman rowing against the current. When he put us off at the palace landing stage I said urgently to George, ‘Two things you should know: one is that if the baby is not dead then this drink will kill it, and we'll have that on our consciences.'

‘Is there any way we can tell if it's a boy, before she drinks?'

I could have cursed him for the single track of his mind. ‘Nobody ever knows that.'

He nodded. ‘The other thing?'

‘The other thing the old woman said is that we should not fear the drink but fear the blade.'

‘What sort of blade?'

‘She didn't say.'

‘Sword blade? Razor blade? Executioner's axe?'

I shrugged.

‘We're Boleyns,' he said simply. ‘When you spend your life in the shadow of the throne you're always afraid of blades. Let's get through tonight. Let's get that drink down her and see what happens.'

Anne went down to dinner like a queen, pale-faced, drawn, but with her head high and a smile on her lips. She sat next to Henry, her throne only a little less grand than his, and she chattered to him, and flattered him and enchanted him as she still could do. Whenever the stream of wit paused for even a moment his eyes strayed across the room and rested on the ladies in waiting at their table, perhaps looking towards Madge Shelton, perhaps to Jane Seymour, once even a thoughtful warm smile at me. Anne affected to see nothing, she plied him with questions about his hunting, she praised his health. She picked the nicest morsels from the dishes on the high table and put them on his already loaded plate. She was very much Anne, Anne in every turn of her head and her flickering flirtatious glance from under her eyelashes, but there was something about her determined charm that reminded me of the woman who had sat in that chair before and tried not to see that her husband's attention was drifting elsewhere.