Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (97 page)

‘You're as white as a boggart,' she said cheerfully. ‘You look old enough to be my mother.'

‘I am in pain,' I said steadily.

‘D'you want some hot ale?'

‘Yes please.'

‘And another pillow?'

‘Yes please.'

‘And a piss as usual?'

‘Yes please. Anne, if you had ever carried a child you would know what this feels like. I swear to you it's no small matter.'

‘I can see that it is not,' she said. ‘I only have to look at you to know that you feel like a woman of ninety years old. God knows how we will keep the king if this goes on.'

‘I don't have to do anything,' I said irritably. ‘All he ever looks at these days is my belly.'

Anne thrust the poker in the fire and set the ale at the hearthside with a couple of mugs. ‘Does he play with you?' she asked interestedly. ‘When you go to his room after dinner?'

‘Not once in the past month,' I said. ‘The midwife said that I should not.'

‘Sound advice to the mistress of a king,' Anne muttered irritably, bending over the fire. ‘I wonder who paid her to tell you that? You're such a fool to listen.' She drew the hot poker from the embers and thrust it into the jar of ale where it hissed and seethed. ‘What did you tell the king?'

‘The baby matters more than anything.'

Anne shook her head and poured the ale. ‘We matter more than anything else,' she reminded me. ‘And no woman has ever kept a man by giving him children. You have to do both, Mary. You can't stop pleasing him just because he's got a child on you.'

‘I can't do everything,' I said plaintively. She passed my cup and I took a sip. ‘Anne, all I really want to do is to rest and let this baby grow strong inside me. I have been at one court or another since I was four years old. I am tired of dancing, I am tired of feasting, I am tired of watching jousting and dancing in the masque and being amazed to see that the man who looks exactly like the king in disguise is indeed the king in disguise. If I could, I would go back to Hever tomorrow.'

Anne piled back into bed beside me, mug in hand. ‘Well you can't,' she said flatly. ‘You've got everything to play for now. If the queen is set aside, then there's no knowing how far you might rise. You've come this far. You have to go on.'

I paused for a moment, looking at her over the top of my mug. ‘Hear me,' I said softly. ‘My heart's not in it.'

She met my gaze. ‘That's as may be,' she said frankly. ‘But you're not free to choose.'

It was a cold winter, and that made it worse for me. Cooped up indoors with nothing to think of but each new strange pain every day, I started to fear the birth. I had carried my first baby in such happy ignorance;
but now I knew that before me was the month of darkness and enclosure, and after that the interminable pain with the midwives threatening to pull the baby out of me, while I clung to the sheets tied to the bedposts and screamed with terror and pain.

‘Smile,' Anne would snap at me when the king came to my rooms, and the ladies around me would flutter and take up a lute or a tabor. And I would try to smile but the ache in my back and the constant need to use the piss pot made my smile fade and I drooped on my stool.

‘Smile,' Anne would say under her breath. ‘And sit up straight, you lazy slut.'

Henry looked across at the two of us. ‘Lady Carey, you look weary,' he said.

Anne gleamed at him. ‘She is carrying a heavy burden,' she said with a smile. ‘And who should know it better than Your Majesty?'

He looked a little surprised. ‘Maybe,' he said. ‘You are forward, madam.'

Anne did not blink. ‘I should think any woman would move forward to Your Majesty,' she said with a little sparkle. ‘Unless she had good cause to make haste away.'

He was intrigued. ‘And would you haste away, Mistress Anne?'

‘Never too fast,' she said quickly.

He laughed out loud at that and the ladies, Jane Parker among them, looked over to see what I had said to amuse him. He patted my knee. ‘I am glad we brought your sister back to court,' he said. ‘She will keep us merry.'

‘Very merry,' I said as sweetly as I could.

I said nothing to Anne until we were on our own and she was undressing me at bedtime. She unlaced the tight ties on my bodice and I sighed with relief as my swollen belly was released. I scratched at the skin and saw the red weals left by my nails, and I straightened my back trying to ease the ache that I had with me always.

‘And what d'you think you're doing with the king?' I asked acidly. ‘Hasting away, are you?'

‘Open your eyes,' she said tersely. She helped me out of my skirt and into my nightgown. My new maid poured water into an ewer and under Anne's critical scrutiny I washed myself as thoroughly as I could be bothered in the cool water.

‘And your feet,' Anne ordered.

‘I can't even see my feet, much less wash them.'

Anne gestured for the bowl to be lifted down to the floor so that I could sit on the stool while the maid washed my feet.

‘I'm doing as I'm told,' Anne said coldly. ‘I thought you would see it at once.'

I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensation of having my dirty feet soaped. Then I heard the warning note in her voice. ‘Told by whom?'

‘By our uncle. By our father.'

‘To do what?'

‘To keep the king's mind on you, to keep him engaged with you. To keep you before him.'

I nodded. ‘Well, of course.'

‘And failing that, to flirt with him myself.'

I sat up straighter and paid a little more attention. ‘Uncle told you to flirt with the king?'

Anne nodded.

‘When did he tell you this? Where?'

‘He came down to Hever.'

‘He went all the way to Hever in midwinter to tell you to flirt with the king?'

She nodded, unsmiling.

‘Good God, did he not know that you would do it anyway? That you flirt as naturally as you breathe?'

Anne gave an unwilling laugh. ‘Clearly not. He came to tell me that our first task, yours and mine, is to make sure that wherever the king goes for diversion during your confinement and after the birth, it is not into the petticoats of a Seymour girl.'

‘And how am I to prevent this?' I demanded. ‘I will be in the birthing chamber for half the time.'

‘Exactly. I am to prevent it for you.'

I thought for a moment and went straight to the anxiety of my childhood. ‘But what if he comes to like you best?'

Anne's smile was as sweet as poison. ‘What matter? So long as it is a Boleyn girl?'

‘Uncle Howard thinks this? Does he think nothing of me, in childbed, while my sister is set on to flirt with the father of my child?'

Anne nodded. ‘Yes. Exactly. He thinks nothing of you at all.'

‘I didn't want you to come back to court to be my rival,' I said sulkily.

‘I was born to be your rival,' she said simply. ‘And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?'

She did it beautifully, with such light charm that no-one even knew it was being done. She played cards with the king and she played so well
that she only ever lost by a couple of points. She sang his songs and preferred them to any written by any other man. She encouraged Sir Thomas Wyatt and half a dozen others to hang around her so that the king learned to think of her as the most alluring young woman in the court. Wherever Anne went there was a continual ripple of laughter and chatter and music – and she moved in a court which was hungry for entertainment. In the long winter days all the courtiers had an absolute duty to keep the king entertained; but Anne was the courtier without match. Only Anne could get through the day being fascinating and charming and challenging and always look as if she was being nothing but herself.

Henry sat with me, or with Anne. He called himself a thorn between two roses, a poppy between two ripe ears of wheat. He rested his hand on the small of my back as he watched her dance. He followed the score where I held it in my broadening lap as she sang a new song for him. He staked me when I played cards against her. He watched her take the choicest cuts of meat from her plate and put them on mine. She was sisterly, she was tender, she could not have been sweeter or more attentive to me.

‘You are the lowest of things,' I said to her one night as she combed her hair before the mirror and then plaited it into one thick dark rope.

‘I know,' she said complacently, looking at her reflection.

There was a tap outside and George put his head around the door. ‘Can I come in?'

‘Come,' Anne said. ‘And shut the door, there's a gale blowing down that corridor.'

Obediently, George closed the door for her, and waved a pitcher of wine at the two of us. ‘Anyone share a glass of wine with me? Not Milady Fruitfulness? Not Milady Spring?'

‘I thought you'd have gone down to the stews with Sir Thomas,' Anne remarked. ‘He said he was roistering tonight.'

‘The king kept me back,' George said. ‘Wanted to ask me about you.'

‘Me?' Anne said, suddenly alert.

‘Wanted to know how you might respond to an invitation.'

Without realising it I had spread my fingers like claws on the red silk sheet of the bed. ‘What sort of invitation?'

‘To his bed.'

‘And you said?' Anne prompted him.

‘As I've been bid. That you're a maid and the flower of the family. There'll be no bedding before you're wed. Whoever asks.'

‘And he said?'

‘Oh.'

‘That was all?' I pressed George. ‘He just said “Oh”?'

‘Yes,' George said simply. ‘And followed Sir Thomas's boat down the river to visit whores. I think you have him on the run, Anne.'

She lifted her nightdress high and got into bed. George watched her naked feet with a connoisseur's gaze. ‘Very nice.'

‘I think so,' she said complacently.

I went into the birthing chamber in the middle of January. What went on while I was enclosed in darkness and silence I did not need to know. I heard there was a joust and Henry carried a favour under his surcoat that was not given to him by me. On his shield he wore the motto ‘Declare, I dare not!' which puzzled half the court, thinking it was meant as a compliment to me, but an odd misfiring compliment since I saw neither joust nor motto, locked in the shadowy silence of the birthing chamber with no court and no musicians but just a gaggle of old ladies drinking ale and biding their time: my time actually.