The Last Boleyn (22 page)

She breathed hard in great quivering gasps drifting between outrage and desolation. Perhaps she was beyond crying ever again. She felt the urge to run away and hide, to flee like a child playing hide-and-seek in the gardens. They would wonder where she was, they would search, but they would have to return to the palace without her.

She craned her neck and looked at last. Staff and Maud had disappeared. Or maybe they were sprawled on the grass. She heaved a deep sigh. The garden was so unutterably beautiful, and she was so wretched. If anyone noticed her here alone, the gossip would be all over the court. The blonde Bullen sits alone and her husband and the king desert her. She thought to laugh at what father would say to that, but she heard a few huge raindrops plop on the gravel path and watched them bounce the green rose leaves. She tilted her head up to the pearl gray sky and blinked as a drop drenched her thick lashes. She moved to stand under the enclosed arched trellis and saw Mary Tudor and her Duke of Suffolk run laughing along the path to the watergate. She must go back. They would all be coming now, but she stepped back hidden in her tiny shelter in the rose garden.

She saw him then and instinctively took another step back into the thorns. He was so tall and the peacock blue of his garments stood out clearly in the riot of pinks and whites and greens at his back. But he was going the wrong way, not toward the barges. What had he done with his little paramour, Maud?

Mary watched him silently as he walked farther away from her. When he spun back, he caught sight of her and strode in huge steps through the rain to her. She thought to run, to lead him a chase through the gardens, but she was frozen in anguish and fascination. He put a hand on each side of the little enclosed bower blocking her in.

“It is going to pour, Mary. Why did you not come back with Will? He says His Grace chooses to take the little Bullen for a walk.”

“Yes. Will and I had an argument and he preferred not to enjoy my company either. Did he tell you that? I am returning to the barge now. Please do not concern yourself. I know you have more important people to look after. Let me pass.”

“Stop this nonsense. Everyone will be coming back soon and we have not much time.” He took a step closer to her in the cool protection of the sweet-scented bower. “They will not notice us here, and we will return separately in a moment. I should take the few minutes we have to give you one of my educational messages about being careful not to scold the king about his attentions to your sister, or doing something foolish like pleading with the king to restore little Harry to you, but I need this time for something far more important.”

He dropped his hands to her waist, and she took a step back, pressing closer into the leaves, blooms and prickers. He reached again and pulled her gently to him.

“Do not dare to ever touch me again!” she spat at him. “Go caress your Maud, go kiss her in the roses!” A little sob tore from her throat, and the stubborn tears sprang to her eyes again.

He loosed her waist and took one of her hands firmly in both of his warm ones. “I am in your bad graces, sweetheart, and rightly so. I did not know you and Will stood so close in the garden.”

“I am certain it would not have made one tiny difference to you if the cardinal himself would have stood there watching!”

His teeth shone white in the dim bower as he smiled and the rain splattered down around their protective arch of leaves. “I am elated that my attention to other ladies displeases you.”

“I could not care less what you do, William Stafford!”

“Really? Fine, because I am going to kiss you and if we had the time, I would carry you to one of those three hundred silken beds in that great pile of Wolsey's bricks and make hot love to you whether you were willing or not. I told you I do not love the little Jennings, Mary, and I told you true. You know whom I
do
love, do you not, sweetheart?”

His voice was so low and caressing, his dark eyes so mesmerizing in the regular patter of raindrops that she almost relaxed against him. His strong hands went to her waist again, he gave a little pull and she leaned full on him as his lips descended. She went limp; her thoughts and fear subsided as she returned kiss for searing kiss. Her arms stole up his back, and she pressed her open palms against his iron muscles through the velvet doublet. He shifted his weight and tipped her back a bit in his encircling arms. His lips traced fire down her throat, down to where her breasts swelled above the tiny lace rim of her decolletage. Her head dropped back on his shoulder, and she savored the touch of his tongue. His breath scalded her there.

She closed her eyes desperately against the rampant assault on her senses. Her breath came in strange little gasps over which she had no control. Her legs were like jelly. A low flame burned in the pit of her stomach, yet a chill raced along her spine.

“Sweetheart, my sweetheart,” he repeated as he kissed the bare flesh where her breasts swelled. He raised his head and pulled her up straight against him, almost brutally, and kissed her again hard on the mouth. She could feel everywhere he touched or looked, distinctly, intimately. He kept her hard against him, and his voice shook when he spoke.

“We have to go back or we will have them beating the bushes for us. And if we stay any longer, what they will find is you flat on the ground with your skirts up in the rain.”

He released her and, under his hot gaze, she brushed back her tumbled hair and smoothed her dress with little shaky tugs at the cloth.

“I truly meant to only find you and bring you back to the landing, sweet, but when I saw you here alone, I could not help myself. It has been so many years I have longed for the forbidden fruit, Mary, and I am not really a very patient man. You were angered with me today for kissing Maud, but years of smiling and laughing with you and breathing in your sweet scent and seeing that luscious face and body near me and then bidding you a curt goodnight as you go to Will's or Henry's bed is pure hell.” He reached over to smooth her hair. “I tell you, Mary, whomever I have slept with these past five years, I have dreamed it was you or, if not, your face came back to tease me—to haunt me—soon after. Do you understand?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. It was like a dream and she wanted to be hidden away with him forever. Then she heard her own voice say in a rush, “I rely on you above all others, my Staff, even though I try not to admit it to myself sometimes.”

He put his head out of the bower and looked both ways, then came back toward her and kissed her swiftly on the lips. “I want more, much more than your reliance, Mary Bullen, and I will have it. But we must be careful, very careful. I will not have your safety or our chances to be together at all ruined by one passionate mistake.”

He pulled her gently from under the arched trellis after him, and she was amazed to feel the rain had almost stopped. He held her arm so tightly it almost hurt.

“Perhaps there will be some day soon, some place where we will have time to finish what we only started today, sweet. I see no one on the path. Go back along that way. I shall come from another direction in a few moments. Go on. Now!”

She turned on wooden legs and hurried down the crunchy wet path toward the line of trees that hid the boat gate. Her heart pounded, and she forgot to lift her sodden skirt hems in her excitement. Let the king cast her out, let Will hate her, and her father storm. There was one who loved her and whom she could trust. She glanced back quickly but he was gone as though he had never been there at all.

She darted from the overhanging yews toward the barge landing as the rains began lightly again. Her seat by the king awaited her, although he had put Anne on his other side. Will gazed off at the far Thames bank while pretty Maud Jennings had her lap full of roses.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

October 17, 1525

Eltham

A
ll during that summer, while the dreaded sweat stalked the narrow streets of Tudor London, the great herds of roe and fallow deer fed and grew among the leafy boughs of Eltham forest. At morning and evening some became bold and walked the orchards and green swards on their spindly, graceful legs. Unknowing, they awaited the bow and the packs of the king's hounds and his nobles who would hunt them bloodily, lustily in the months the court hid from the sweating sickness in the Kentish countryside.

King Henry had been at Eltham for nearly a week on this trip, stalking deer, riding merrily to the horn, and feasting off the groaning tables under the massive hammerbeam roof of his rebuilt hunt lodge. The queen was absent, sequestered as she had been throughout the long, dangerous summer at Beaulieu, but the gentle slopes of elm, ash and beech rang with shouts of His Grace's favorites.

Mary rode to the hunt in the king's private party as did the ever-present and laughing Anne. But each time His Majesty dispatched a huge roebuck or cornered a brown-red doe for the kill, Mary recoiled more into herself and the lusty scenes of blood no longer excited her. At first she had believed her queasiness meant she was with child again, but she knew it was not true. Her revulsion at their lusty killing of the gentle deer was somehow tied to the fact that Will Carey grew increasingly cold to her and that the king no longer sought her bed. Mary and the whole court knew full well that Anne kept tantalizingly out of the king's reach and bedded with no one. Mary told herself she was glad to have Henry Tudor gone, but her feelings of oppression grew.

The day was brisk, very brisk for a mid-October sunlit day. Mary was content to ride sidesaddle far back in the hunt party where she could see Staff's green cap and broad shoulders several riders ahead. His powerful body rose and fell rhythmically as he rode his huge stallion, Sanctuary. “A strange name for a horse, but a wonderful hunter,” Mary said aloud to comfort herself. Thinking of the hunt two days past when Staff's catch had been far greater than the king's, she added. “Only he would dare.”

“Dare to flaunt Anne that way with you here too, Mary?” Jane Rochford asked, and Mary was instantly annoyed that the ever-present girl had heard her and thought she was speaking of the king.

Why are you not tagging along behind Anne? Mary wanted to taunt, for even the wife of her brother could see the way the royal wind blew toward the younger sister. But she said only, “Why do you not ride with George today or with Mark Gostwick, Jane?”

The slender woman seemed to tense at the mention of the man she now favored openly. “I thought, perhaps, you needed my comfort and solace since none of your men have paid you the slightest attention lately. Do not tell me you do not fear for your position, dear Mary, or fear your father's wrath at the trends of the times.”

Mary wished she could strike Jane's smug face as they cantered close together, to shove the ingrate, Rochford, from her horse, for her continual gossiping and mock concern drove both Bullen sisters to distraction. But Jane spurred her palfrey ahead and wedged into an opening near Mark Gostwick in complete defiance of what the Bullens thought. At least George did not care. He rode far ahead with His Grace and his beloved Anne.

Mary cantered beside Thomas Wyndham of Norfolk now and his new and starry-eyed bride Alice from the vast Darcy family. Another rare love match—fortune had blessed them since their parents had long ago arranged their marriage, yet they truly loved each other. “I do not belong next to them or anywhere here,” she said half aloud to her chestnut mare Eden, a gift from His Grace last year whom Mary had named for the gentle river near her home. Only Eden heard, and flicked her alert ears sharply in understanding. Then she heard it too, the horns, the baying of the pack, and their canter accelerated to a gallop through the halfbare trees. The clatter of forty horses' hoofbeats seemed to echo thunder off the huge trunks of the deep woods.

As the pursuing party spread out in the heat of the chase, Staff turned his head swiftly for a glimpse of her. She caught the movement and smiled broadly though he was too far ahead to tell she had noticed. He did care. Always she saw signs of it in his calm or teasing words if they had a fleeting moment alone. How she wished they could be really alone with no servants to stare, Will far away and the king himself gone, gone forever. But he was right to be safe and secure, though she herself would throw caution to the winds whatever wrath befell them. She shifted her weight forward on her horse. Like all women, she rode sidesaddle, though unlike most of them, she had ridden astride unseen by others at Hever and she liked it far better. That would shock them all. That and her knowledge that the great Henry really intended to bed the younger sister of his five-year acknowledged mistress.

The yelping and baying of the hounds was much louder now. Perhaps they even now surrounded their terrified prey cornered or disabled. The king would be first to the deer, and his steaming bloody knife would drip with the blood of the kill.

She reined in and dismounted in a cluster of stamping, snorting horses since those ahead of her had done so. It was good to stand on firm earth, to feel solidity and not the rhythmic constant swaying in the saddle. She dropped Eden's reins and stepped forward around Weston's huge stallion. Staff came from nowhere to take her arm firmly at the elbow. She smiled tremulously at him at the impact of his sudden proximity.

“I have not seen Will, Staff, not for a long time. And do you know why we got such a late start this morning?”

“No and yes, lass,” he said in her ear over the shouts of the crowd nearest the action. “One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how your sweet female minds dart about with at least two or three concerns at once. It quite tires me to attempt to keep up with you.”

“Please do not tease, Staff. I am not in the mood. And I have never noticed that I tire you.”

He leaned even closer. “If I ever get my way with you, my love, I promise you I will not tire—ever. And I meant not to upset you. I know times with Will, your father and even your dear little Annie are tense. For some strange reason, Will has attached himself to your brother this morning. And as to why we got a late beginning, I cannot say except that His Grace had some kind of personal business. I am afraid it may have had something to do with the little ice woman with the looks of fire—your sister—but I may be wrong. He can hardly attempt to bed her with you and Will about, and evidently still in favor.”

She did not answer, though months ago such advice and words about her sister, brother, Will or father would have drawn her anger. They stepped high over the crushed thicket as they approached the cluster of people. The smell and sounds of death permeated the chill air.

Staff loosed her arm, and they moved separately around the groups of standing courtiers. The king with his boon companions, Norris and Weston, behind him had slain three deer and their slender bloodied limbs still convulsed in sporadic shudders. The great Tudor stood astride a massive twelve-point buck, his crimsoned hunt dagger raised aloft while the crowd applauded and cheered and murmured. The other two were does, much smaller, both turned away from the slaughter of their master-buck as though they could not stand to see his sleek brown body on the leafy turf.

And then Mary's eyes took in the import of the whole scene—Anne standing stiff between George and Will Carey and His Grace offering her his victorious dagger the way he had offered it to Mary Bullen these past five years. But Anne shook her head, took a step back, and the king turned to stone. Then he half-motioned, half-shoved Will aside with quick words and turned his back on the obviously dismayed man while the circle of observers waited and studied their sovereign's every move. The huge reddish head bent to Anne again in earnest conversation. He ignored George, poor discomfitted George, as though he were not there.

It was like some play on a trestle stage with a dark forest setting, or some terrible nightmare come to life. Anne's slender cloaked form was blocked out by Henry's massive back, but Mary instinctively feared for her. Something was very, very wrong. Anne had evidently refused the offer of the dagger, a foolish affront before the court, no matter what private disagreement she had with her king.

Will Carey suddenly grabbed Mary from behind and pulled her several steps behind a gnarled tree trunk. His face was deathly pale and he could not speak at first. Mary turned her head to stare at the king, disbelieving that Will could have come away so quickly. His fingers bit into the flesh of her arm.

“Damn your little bitch of a sister,” he groaned. He glared at the rough bark behind her head and pushed Mary against the tree. “She will ruin everything. She will be the end of us all.”

“Please, my lord, what is happening?”

“You fool. You cannot mean you do not know. Why did you not head her off? She has taunted and flirted and led him on these months for her own selfish ends. And now, when she reaps the obvious rewards of such sluttish behavior, she draws back, she refuses.” A strange, strangled sound came from deep in his throat and he raised his wide eyes to her shocked face at last.

“His Grace has asked Anne to bed with him?” she got out in a half-choked voice. “Here? At Eltham? With me along?” Her knees began to tremble and she felt as though she still rode the bouncing Eden careening along dark forest paths to some bloody destruction.

“He asked her first last night and told her to think about it until this morning. He just offered her the dagger of his kill, and she refused it thinking it would be as good as her compliance later in his bed. Her father will kill her! Or if he does not, perhaps I shall.”

Their conversation was no longer private as others of the hunt party streamed back to their grazing mounts whispering and shaking their heads. Over Will's shoulder Mary noted the smirk on Jane Rochford's face as Mark Gostwick helped her up astride her palfrey. Mary caught Jane's sharp eye and turned away as she nearly dry-heaved with the sudden impact of reality. Many hated the Bullens; she knew that. Even Jane and maybe Will, ashen-faced and grim-lipped before her.

Then the stunned Careys saw Anne and George ride by only a stone's throw from where they stood, as if transfixed. Anne had taken to wearing tiny bells on her saddle and bridle, and the gentle tinklings drifted foolishly in the chill air.

Will glanced around the tree and pulled his head back jerkily. “I knew it. Doomed, doomed. He stands there, livid with his fist clenched and Norris, Weston and Stafford stand around like great wooden dummies at the quintain. We had best flee. I will not face his narrow-eyed wrath again for the stupidity of a Bullen wench, any Bullen wench.” He strode off, and she wondered if he meant to leave her here alone.

She took a few steps in the direction in which she had left the untethered Eden. To her surprise, it was Staff who held her horse as she crunched through the crispy brown leaves, and Will was nowhere in sight.

“I thought you were with His Grace,” Mary said, as though nothing had happened.

“I was. Will has gone to fetch his horse. I think, Mary Bullen, the time is finally come for your graceful exit from the king's august presence. I only hope that somehow, through Will's tenuous position or your father's craftiness, you are both able to come back.” He seized her waist and hoisted her to her lofty perch above him before she realized the full impact of his words.

“Leave court? Leave Eltham, you mean. Is Anne to stay? Is she in disgrace?”

Staff's dark eyes swung swiftly in a wide arc around the clearing in which they stood, she astride, he leaning his chest against her knees as if to reassure her shaking limbs. “I am afraid I mean leave court, Mary. Has Will not told you? That foolish slip of a sister of yours has overstepped and badly. She led him a merry dance, and then hit him square in the face with a refusal. Twice. She is no innocent. She knows better than to tempt a rutting boar, and then try to ward it off with a child's stick. And, unfortunately, you and Will—and I—must suffer, Mary. I had not thought it would happen this way. By the blessed saints, he ought to just rape her and have done with it, but he has never had his pride stuck full of lances by a lady he desired before. He is hardly a mortal man in that respect and his wrath may fall on you all out of proportion.”

“And has some lady stuck your masculine pride full of lance points?” she heard herself ask foolishly, as though they were just passing a sunny afternoon and in no danger at all.

“Some lady used to, but I think she has come to see the error of her ways with me. If it ever comes to it that I can ask her to be mine after all these years and she tries to gainsay me, I shall force her to my will. She owes me too much and in such circumstances she would never escape me.”

Mary opened her mouth to reply but the words would not come. They stared deep into each other's eyes, unblinking, and her pulse began to beat a nervous patter which no danger from the king or even her father could ever bring on. “Staff, you must know that I...” She jerked her head up at the crashing approach of a single horse through the nearby brush.

Will emerged and walked his nervous steed close to them. “Where in the devil is your horse, Staff? You said you were coming with us.”

“Yes, Will, I ride clear to Richmond with you,” Staff said, never taking his eyes from Mary though he addressed her husband.

“Richmond? Clear to Richmond—today?” she asked in the sudden hush of the forest.

“We can hardly stay here where we will bump into His Grace, of course,” Will said while Staff turned away to get his horse. “Thanks to your sister's meddling, we may have to leave Richmond, too, and hide out for a time at my country house. Poor Eleanor will take this very hard.”

Damn Eleanor, Mary thought. “His Grace said we are to go?”