Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (86 page)

‘What d'you think he meant?'

‘Nothing,' I said sulkily. ‘It's just love talk.'

‘We need to see some repayment for all these loans,' my uncle said irritably. ‘Has he said anything about giving you land? Or something for George? Or us?'

‘Can't you hint him into it?' my father suggested. ‘Remind him that George is to be married.'

I looked to George in mute appeal.

‘The thing is that he's very alert for that sort of thing,' George pointed out. ‘Everyone does it to him all the time. When he walks from his privy chamber to Mass every morning, his way is lined with people just waiting
to ask him for a favour. I should think what he likes about Mary here is that she's not like that. I don't think she's ever asked for anything.'

‘She has diamonds worth a fortune in her ears,' my mother put in sharply from behind me. Anne nodded.

‘But she didn't ask for them. He gave them freely. He likes to be generous when it's unexpected. I think we have to let Mary play this her own way. She has a talent for loving him.'

I bit my lip on that, to stop myself saying a word. I did have a talent for loving him. It was perhaps the only talent I had. And this family, this powerful network of men, were using my talent to love the king as they used George's talents at swordplay, or my father's talent for languages, to further the interests of our family.

‘Court moves to London next week,' my father remarked. ‘The king will see the Spanish ambassador. There's little chance of him making any greater move towards Mary while he needs the Spanish alliance to fight the French.'

‘Better work for peace then,' my uncle recommended wolfishly.

‘I do. I am a peacemaker,' my father replied. ‘Blessed, aren't I?'

The court in progress was always a mighty sight, part-way between a country fair, a market day, and a joust. It was all arranged by Cardinal Wolsey, everything in the court or the country was done by his command. He had been at the king's side at the Battle of the Spurs in France, he had been almoner then to the English army and the men had never lain so dry at night nor eaten so well. He had a grasp of detail that made him attentive to how the court would get from one place to another, a grasp of politics that prompted him as to where we should stop and which lord should be honoured with a visit when the king was on his summer progress, and he was wily enough to trouble Henry with none of these things so the young king went from pleasure to pleasure as if the sky itself rained down supplies and servants and organisation.

It was the cardinal who ruled the precedence of the court on the move. Ahead of us went the pages carrying the standards with the pennants of all the lords in the train fluttering above their heads. Next there was a gap to let the dust settle and then came the king, riding his best hunter with his embossed saddle of red leather and all the trappings of kingship. Above his head flew his own personal standard, and at his side were his friends chosen to ride with him that day: my husband William Carey, Cardinal Wolsey, my father, and then trailing along behind them came the rest of the king's companions, changing their places in the train as
they desired, lagging back or spurring forward. Around them, in a loose formation, came the king's personal guards mounted on horses and holding their lances at the salute. They hardly served to protect him – who would dream of hurting such a king? – but they kept back the press of people who gathered to cheer and gawp whenever we rode through a little town or a village.

Then there was another break before the queen's train. She was riding the steady old palfrey which she always used. She sat straight in the saddle, her gown awkwardly disposed in great folds of thick fabric, her hat skewered on her head, her eyes squinting against the bright sunshine. She was feeling ill. I knew because I had been at her side when she had mounted her horse in the morning and I had heard the tiny repressed grunt of pain as she settled into the saddle.

Behind the queen's court came the other members of the household, some of them riding, some of them seated in carts, some of them singing or drinking ale to keep the dust from the road out of their throats. All of us shared a careless sense of a high day and a holiday as the court left Greenwich and headed for London with a new season of parties and entertainments ahead of us, and who knew what might happen in this year?

The queen's rooms at York Place were small and neat and we took only a few days to get unpacked and have everything to rights. The king visited every morning, as usual, and his court came with him, Lord Henry Percy among them. His lordship and Anne took to sitting in the windowseat together, their heads very close, as they worked on one of Lord Henry's poems. He swore that he would become a great poet under Anne's tuition and she swore that he would never learn anything, but that it was all a ruse to waste her time and her learning on such a dolt.

I thought that it was something for a Boleyn girl from a little castle in Kent and a handful of fields in Essex to call the Duke of Northumberland's son a dolt, but Henry Percy laughed and claimed that she was too stern a teacher and talent, great talent, would out, whatever she might say.

‘The cardinal is asking for you,' I said to Lord Henry. He rose up, in no particular hurry, kissed Anne's hand in farewell, and went to find Cardinal Wolsey. Anne gathered up the papers they had been working on and locked them in her writing box.

‘Does he really have no talent as a poet?' I asked.

She shrugged with a smile. ‘He's no Wyatt.'

‘Is he a Wyatt in courtship?'

‘He's not married,' she said. ‘And so more desirable to a sensible woman.'

‘Too high, even for you.'

‘I don't see why. If I want him, and he wants me.'

‘You try asking Father to speak to the duke,' I recommended sarcastically. ‘See what the duke says.'

She turned her head to look out of the window. The long beautiful lawns of York Place stretched down below us, almost hiding the sparkle of the river at the foot of the garden. ‘I won't ask Father,' she said. ‘I thought I might settle matters on my own account.'

I was going to laugh then I realised she was serious. ‘Anne, this is not something you can settle for yourself. He's only a young man, you're only seventeen, you can't decide these things for yourselves. His father is certain to have someone in mind for him, and our father and uncle are certain to have plans for you. We're not private people, we're the Boleyn girls. We have to be guided, we have to do as we are told. Look at me!'

‘Yes, look at you!' She rounded on me with a sudden flare of her dark energy. ‘Married when you were still a child and now the king's mistress. Half as clever as me! Half as educated! But you are the centre of the court and I am nothing. I have to be your lady in waiting. I cannot serve you, Mary. It's an insult to me.'

‘I never asked you to …' I stammered.

‘Who insists that you bathe and wash your hair?' she demanded fiercely.

‘You do. But I …'

‘Who helps you choose your clothes and prompts you with the king? Who has rescued you a thousand times when you've been too stupid and tongue-tied to know how to play him?'

‘You. But Anne …'

‘And what is there in this for me? I have no husband who can be given land to show the king's favour. I have no husband to win high office because my sister is the king's mistress. I get nothing from this. However high you rise I still get nothing. I have to have a place of my own.'

‘You should have a place of your own,' I said weakly. ‘I don't deny it. All I was saying was that I don't think you can be a duchess.'

‘And you should decide?' she spat at me. ‘You who are nothing but the king's diversion from the important business of making a son if he can and making war if he can raise an army?'

‘I don't say I should decide,' I whispered. ‘I just said that I don't think they'll let you do it.'

‘When it's done, it's done,' she said with a toss of her head. ‘And no-one will know until it's done.'

Suddenly, like a striking snake, she reached out and grabbed my hand in a fierce grip. At once she twisted it behind my back and held me so that I could move neither forward nor backwards but only cry out in pain: ‘Anne! Don't! You're really hurting!'

‘Well, hear this,' she hissed in my ear. ‘Hear this, Mary. I am playing my own game and I don't want you interrupting. Nobody will know anything until I am ready to tell them, and then they will know everything too late.'

‘You're going to make him love you?'

Abruptly she released me and I gripped my elbow and my arm where the bones ached.

‘I'm going to make him marry me,' she said flatly. ‘And if you so much as breathe a word to anyone, then I will kill you.'

After that I watched Anne with more care. I saw how she played him. Having advanced through all the cold months of the New Year at Greenwich, now, with the coming of the sun and our arrival in York Place, she suddenly retreated. And the more she withdrew from him the more he came on. When he came into a room she looked up and threw him a smile which went like an arrow to the centre of the target. She filled her look with invitation, with desire. But then she looked away and she would not look at him again for the whole of the visit.

He was in the train of Cardinal Wolsey and was supposed to wait on His Grace while the cardinal visited the king or the queen. In practice there was nothing for the young lord to do but to lounge around the queen's apartments and flirt with anyone who would talk to him. It was clear that he only had eyes for Anne and she walked past him, danced with anyone who asked her but him, dropped her glove and let him return it to her, sat near him but did not speak to him, returned his poems and told him that she could help him no longer.

She went into the most unswerving of retreats, having been unswervingly in advance, and the young man did not begin to know what he could do to recapture her.

He came to me. ‘Mistress Carey, have I offended your sister in some way?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘She used to smile on me so charmingly and now she treats me very coldly.'

I thought for a moment, I was so slow at these things. On the one hand was the true answer: that she was playing him like a complete angler
with a fish on the line. But I knew Anne would not want me to say that. On the other hand was the answer Anne would want me to give. I looked into Henry Percy's anxious baby face for a moment of genuine compassion. Then I gave him the Boleyn smile and the Howard answer. ‘Indeed, my lord, I think she is afraid to be too kind.'

I saw the hope leap up in his trusting, boyish face. ‘Too kind?'

‘She was very kind to you, was she not, my lord?'

He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I'm her slave.'

‘I think she feared that she might come to like you too much.'

He leaned forward as if to snatch the words from my mouth. ‘Too much?'