Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (166 page)

William ordered the woman of the house to make a dinner for us and
went out to gather news. He came back in time to eat and when the woman had served dinner and got herself out of the room he told me what he knew. The inns around the Tower were all buzzing with the news that the queen had been taken up, and the word was that her charge was adultery and witchcraft and no-one knew what else.

I nodded. This sealed Anne's fate. Henry was using the power of gossip, the voice of the mob, to pave the way to an annulment of the marriage, and a new queen. Already in the taverns they were saying that the king was in love again and this time with a beautiful and innocent girl, an English girl from Wiltshire, God bless her, and as devout and sweet as Anne had been over-educated and French-influenced. From somewhere, someone had gathered the certainty that Jane Seymour was a friend to Princess Mary. She had served Queen Katherine well. She prayed in the old ways, she did not read disputatious books nor argue with men who knew better. Her family were not grasping lords but honest honourable men. And it was a fertile family. There could be no doubt but Jane Seymour would have sons where Katherine and Anne had both failed.

‘And my brother?'

William shook his head. ‘No news.'

I closed my eyes. I could not imagine a world where George was not free to come and go as he pleased. Who could accuse George? Who could blame him for anything, so sweet and so feckless?

‘And who is waiting on Anne?' I asked.

‘Your aunt, Madge Shelton's mother, and a pair of other ladies.'

I made a face. ‘No-one she likes or trusts. But at least she can release Catherine now. She's not alone.'

‘I thought you could write. She could have a letter if it was left open. I'll take it to William Kingston, the constable of the Tower and ask him to give it to her.'

I ran down the narrow stairs to the lodging-house keeper and asked her for a piece of paper and a pen. She let me use her writing desk and lit a candle for me as I sat by the window for the last of the light.

                
Dear Anne,

                
I know that you are served by other ladies now so please release Catherine from your service as I need her with me
.

                
I beg you to let her come away now
.

                
Mary
.

I dripped some candle wax and put my sealing ring into the puddle of wax to show the ‘B' for Boleyn. But I left the letter open and gave it to William.

‘Good,' he said, reading it quickly. ‘I'll take it straightaway. Nobody can think you mean anything other than you say. I'll wait for an answer. Perhaps I'll bring her back with me and we can leave for Rochford tomorrow.'

I nodded. ‘I'll wait up.'

Henry and I played cards in front of the little fire on a rickety table sitting on two wooden stools. We were playing for farthings and I was winning all of Henry's pocket money. Then I cheated to let him win a little back, misjudged it, and was bankrupted in earnest. Still William did not come.

At midnight he came in. ‘I am sorry to have been so long,' he said to my white face. ‘I don't have her.'

I gave a little moan and at once he reached out to me and pulled me close to him. ‘I saw her,' he said. ‘That was why I was so long. I thought you would want me to see her and know that she was well.'

‘Is she distressed?'

‘Very calm,' he said with a smile. ‘You can go and see her tomorrow yourself at this time, and every day until the queen is released.'

‘But she can't come away?'

‘The queen wants to keep her and the constable is under instructions to give her whatever she reasonably desires.'

‘Surely …'

‘I tried everything,' William said. ‘But it is the queen's right to have attendants, and Catherine is the only one that she actually requested. The others are more or less forced on her. One of them is the constable's own wife, who is there to spy on everything she says.'

‘And how is Catherine?'

‘You would be proud of her. She sent you her love and said that she would like to stay and serve the queen. She says that Anne is ill and faint and weeping and that she wants to stay with her while she can help.'

I gave a little gasp, half of love and pride, half of impatience. ‘She's a little girl, she shouldn't even be there!'

‘She is a young woman,' William said. ‘She is doing her duty as a young woman should. And she's in no danger. No-one is going to ask her anything. Everyone is clear that she is in the Tower as Anne's companion. No harm will come to her because of it.'

‘And is Anne to be charged?'

William glanced towards Henry and then decided that he was old enough to know. ‘It looks as if Anne is to be charged with adultery. D'you know what adultery is, Henry?'

The boy blushed a little. ‘Yes, sir. It's in the Bible.'

‘I believe it is a false charge against your aunt,' William said levelly. ‘But it is a charge that the Privy Council has chosen to bring against her.'

At last I was beginning to understand. ‘And the others arrested too? They're charged with her?'

William nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Yes. Henry Norris and Mark Smeaton are to be charged with her, for being her lovers.'

‘That's nonsense,' I said flatly.

William nodded.

‘And my brother is taken for questioning?'

‘Yes,' he said.

Something in his tone of voice alerted me. ‘They're not putting him on the rack?' I asked. ‘They're not hurting him?'

‘Oh no,' William assured me. ‘They won't forget he's gentry. They'll keep him in the Tower while they question her and the others.'

‘But what are they charging him with?'

William hesitated, a glance to my son. ‘He's charged with the other men.'

For a moment I did not understand him. Then I said the word: ‘Adultery?'

He nodded.

I was silent. My first thought was to cry out and deny it, but then I remembered Anne's absolute need for a son, and her certainty that the king could not give her a healthy baby. I remembered her leaning back against George and telling him that the church could not be relied upon to rule on what was and what was not sin. And him telling her that he could have been excommunicated ten times before breakfast – and she had laughed. I did not know what Anne might have done in her desperation. I did not know what George might have dared in his recklessness. I turned my thoughts away from the two of them, as I had done before. ‘What shall we do?' I asked.

William put his arm around my son and smiled down at him. Henry was up to his step-father's shoulder now, he looked at him trustingly.

‘We'll wait,' William said. ‘As soon as this mess is sorted out we'll have Catherine away and we'll go home to Rochford. And then we'll keep our heads down for a bit. Because whether Anne is set aside and allowed to live in a nunnery, or exiled, I think the Boleyns have had their moment. It's time to go back to making cheese for you, my love.'

The next day there was nothing to do but wait. I let the wet nurse go away for the day and encouraged William and Henry to stroll about the
town and take their dinner in an ale house while I stayed home and played with the baby. In the afternoon I took her for a little walk down to the river's edge and felt the wind from the sea blowing against our faces. I unswaddled her when I got her home and gave her a cool bath, rumpling her sweet rosy body in a linen sheet and patting her dry, and then let her kick, free of her swaddling bands for a while. I bound her up in fresh bands in time for the others coming in for their dinner and then I left her with the nurse while William and Henry and I went down to the great gate of the Tower and asked if Catherine might come out to see us.

She looked very small as she walked along the inner wall from the Beauchamp Tower to the gateway. But she walked like a Boleyn girl, as if she owned the place, with her head up, looking around her, a pleasant smile to one of the passing guards and then a bright beam to me through the grille as they unlocked the door within the wooden gate and let her slip out.

I wrapped her in my arms. ‘My love.'

She hugged me back and then sprang towards Henry. ‘Hen!'

‘Cat!'

They looked at each other with mutual delight. ‘Grown,' she said.

‘Fatter,' he replied.

William smiled at me over their heads. ‘D'you think they ever use whole sentences?'

‘Catherine, I wrote to Anne to ask her to release you,' I said hastily. ‘I want you to come away.'

At once she was grave. ‘I can't. She is in such distress. You've never seen her like this. I can't just leave her. And the other ladies around her are useless, two of them don't know what they're doing and the other two are my Aunt Boleyn and Aunt Shelton and they sit in a corner all the time and mutter behind their hands. I can't leave her with them.'

‘What does she do all day?' Henry asked.

Catherine flushed. ‘She cries, and prays. That's why I can't leave her. I just couldn't go. It would be like leaving a baby. She can't care for herself.'

‘Are you well fed?' I asked hopelessly. ‘Where d'you sleep?'

‘I sleep with her,' Catherine said. ‘But she hardly sleeps at all. And we could eat as well as we did at court. It's all right, Mother. And it's not for long.'

‘How d'you know?'

The captain of the guard leaned forward and said quietly to William, ‘Have a care, Sir William.'

William looked at me. ‘We gave an undertaking that we would not discuss the matter with Catherine. This is just for us to see her and know that she is well.'

I took a breath. ‘Very well. But Catherine, if this goes on for more than a week you will have to come away.'

‘I'll do as you say,' she said sweetly.

‘Do you need anything? Shall I bring you anything tomorrow?'

‘Some clean linen,' she said. ‘And the queen needs another gown or two. Can you get them for her from Greenwich?'

‘Yes,' I said, resigned. It seemed that all my life I had been running errands for Anne and even now, at this great crisis in our affairs, I was still at her beck and call.

William looked at the captain of the guard. ‘Is that well with you, Captain? That my wife brings some linen and gowns for the ladies?'

‘Yes, sir,' the man said. He tipped his hat to me. ‘Of course.'

I smiled grimly. No-one had imprisoned a queen with no evidence and no charge before. It was difficult to know which was the safe side.

I held Catherine to me once more and felt her smooth hair at the front of her hood just under my chin. I pressed a kiss on her forehead and smelt the scent of her young warm skin. I could hardly bear to let her go but she slipped through the gate and went back down the stone-paved path under the great shadow of the tower and paused and waved, and was gone.

William raised his hand as she went and then turned back to me. ‘One thing the Boleyns have never lacked is absolute folly-driven courage,' he said. ‘If you were horses I'd have no other breed because you'd jump anything. But as women you are insanely difficult to live with.'

I took a boat downriver to Greenwich to fetch the queen's gowns and Catherine's extra linen, leaving William, Henry and the baby behind at the lodgings near the Tower. William was uneasy at my going without him and I was fearful too, it felt like going back into danger, returning to Greenwich Palace; but I preferred to go alone and to know that my son – that precious and rare commodity, a son of the king – was out of sight of the court. I promised to be no longer than a couple of hours and to stop for nothing.

It was an easy matter to get into my rooms but the queen's apartments were sealed on the word of the Privy Council. I thought of finding my uncle and asking him for Anne's gowns and linen and then I concluded that it was not worth drawing attention to another Boleyn girl when the first one was in the Tower for unnamed crimes. I bundled up some gowns of my own for her and was slipping from the room just as Madge Shelton came by. ‘Good God, I thought you were arrested,' she said.

‘Why?'

‘Why is anyone arrested? You were gone. Of course I thought you were in the Tower. Did they let you go after questioning?'

‘I've never been arrested at all,' I said patiently. ‘I went to London to be with Catherine. She went with Anne as her maid in waiting. She's in the Tower with her still. I just came back for some linen.'

Madge dropped into a windowseat and burst into tears.

I threw a swift glance down the gallery and shifted my bundle from one arm to another. ‘Madge, I have to go. What's the matter?'

‘Dear God, I thought you were arrested and they would come for me next.'