Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (108 page)

“You have nothing to stake,” I reminded him. “You swore to me you lost it when you saw me in my blue gown.”

“I got it back when you danced with the king,” he said. “Broken but returned.”

“It’s not a heart but a battered old arrow,” Henry remarked. “You’re always loosing it off and then going to get it back again.”

“It never finds its target,” Sir Francis said. “I am a poor marksman beside Your Majesty.”

“You’re a poor card player as well,” Henry said hopefully. “Let’s play for a shilling a point.”

♦   ♦   ♦

A few nights later, Bishop Fisher was sick, and nearly died of his sickness. Three men at his dinner table died of poison, others in his household were sick too. Someone had bribed his cook to put poison in his soup. It was only his good luck that Bishop Fisher had not wanted the soup that evening.

♦   ♦   ♦

I did not ask Anne what she had said to Father in the doorway, nor what he had replied. I did not ask her if she had any hand in the bishop’s sickness and the deaths of three innocent men at his table. It was not a little thing, to think that one’s sister and one’s father were murderers. But I remembered the darkness of her face as she swore that she hated Fisher as much as she had hated the cardinal. And now the cardinal was dead of shame, and Fisher’s dinner had been salted with poison. I felt as if this whole matter, which had started as a summer flirtation, had grown too dark and too great for me to want to know any secrets. Anne’s darktempered motto, “Thus it will be: grudge who grudge,”
seemed like a curse that Anne was laying on the Boleyns, on the Howards, and on the country itself.

♦   ♦   ♦

The queen was in the center of the court for the Easter feast, as she had predicted. The king dined with her every night, all smiles so that the people who had come out from the City to see the king and queen dine would go to their homes and say it was a shame that a man in the very prime of his life should be entrapped by a woman so much older and so grave-looking. Sometimes she would withdraw early from dinner and her ladies had to choose whether to go with her or to stay in the hall. I always left with her when she withdrew. I was weary of the endless gossip and scandal of the court, of the spite of the women and of the brittle charm of my sister. And I feared what I might see if I stayed. It was a more unreliable place than the court I had joined with such high hopes when I had been the only Boleyn girl in England, and a newly wed wife with great hopes of my husband and my life with him.

The queen accepted my service without comment; she never mentioned my earlier betrayal. Only once she asked me if I would not rather be in the hall, watching the entertainment or dancing.

“No,” I said. I had picked up a book and was about to offer to read to her as she sat and sewed the altar cloth. Almost all the blue sky was completed, it was remarkable how fast and accurately she had worked. The cloth was spread like a gown over her lap, tumbling down in a swirl of rich blue to the floor, she had only the last corner of sky to stitch.

“You have no interest in dancing?” she asked me. “You, a young widow? Have you no suitors?”

I shook my head. “No, Your Majesty.”

“Your father will be looking for another match for you,” she said, stating the obvious. “Has he spoken to you?”

“No. And matters are . . .” There was no way that I could complete the sentence as a proper courtier. “Matters are very unsettled for us.”

Queen Katherine gave a little snort of genuine laughter. “I had not thought of that,” she admitted. “What a great gamble for a young man! Who knows how far he might rise with you? Who knows how far he might fall?”

I smiled rather wanly and showed her the spine of the book. “Did you want me to read, Your Majesty?”

“D’you think I am safe?” she asked me abruptly. “You would warn me if my life was in danger, would you not?”

“Safe from what?”

“From poison.”

I shivered as if the spring evening had suddenly turned damp and chilly. “These are dark times,” I said. “Very dark times.”

“I know it,” she said. “And they started so very well.”

She spoke of her fear of poison to no one but me, but her ladies observed that she fed a little of her breakfast to her grayhound Flo, before eating it herself. One of them, a Seymour girl—Jane—remarked that it would get fat and that it was bad training for a dog to be fed at the table. Someone else laughed that the love of little Flo was all that the queen had left. I said nothing. I would willingly have had the queen test her food on any of them. We could have lost Jane Seymour and she would not have been much missed.

So when they brought news that Princess Mary was sick, my first thought, like the queen’s, was that her pretty, clever daughter had been poisoned. Probably by my sister.

“He says she is very ill,” the queen said, reading the physician’s
letter. “My God, he says that she has been sick for eight days, she can keep nothing down.”

I forgot royal protocol and took her hand which was shaking so hard that the paper crackled in her hand. “It can’t be poison,” I whispered urgently. “It would benefit no one to poison her.”

“She’s my heir,” the queen said, her face as white as the letter. “Would Anne have her poisoned to frighten me into a nunnery?”

I shook my head. I could not say for sure what Anne might do now.

“Either way I must go to her.” She strode to the door and flung it open. “Where will the king be?”

“I’ll find out,” I said. “Let me go. You can’t go running round the palace.”

“No,” she said with a moan of pain. “I cannot even go to him and ask him to let me see our daughter. What shall I do if that woman says no?”

For a moment I had no reply. The thought of the Queen of England desperately asking if my upstart sister would let her see her own child, and that child a Princess Royal, was too much, even for this topsy-turvy world. “It is not her word, Majesty. The king loves the Princess Mary, he would not want her to be sick without her mother to care for her.”

♦   ♦   ♦

Anne already knew that the princess was ill. Anne knew everything now. My uncle’s spy system, always a superb network, had recruited a servant in every household in England, and its findings were dedicated to the service of my sister. Anne knew that the Princess Mary was sick with distress. The little girl lived alone with no company but servants and her confessor, she spent hours on her knees praying God to turn her father’s love back to her mother, his wife. She was sick with grief.

That night, when the king came to the queen’s apartments he was primed with his answer. “You can go and see the princess if you like, and stop there,” he said. “With my blessing. With my thanks. And so farewell.”

The queen’s high color drained from her cheeks, leaving her looking sick and haggard. “I would never leave you, my husband,” she whispered. “I was thinking of our child. I was thinking that you would want to know that she was well cared for.”

“She’s only a girl,” he said, a world of spite in his voice. “You were not so quick to care for our son. You were not so effective a nurse for our son, as I remember?”

She gave a little gasp of pain but he went on. “So. Are you coming to dinner, madam? Or are you going to your daughter?”

She recovered herself with an effort. She drew herself up to her little height, took the arm that he offered and he led her into dinner as a queen. But she could not play-act as he did. She looked down the body of the hall and saw my sister at her table, her little court about her. Anne felt the queen’s dark gaze upon her and looked up. She gave her a radiant confident smile, and the queen, seeing Anne’s unconcealed pleasure, knew who she should thank for the king’s cruelty. She dropped her head and crumbled a slice of bread without eating any.

That night there were many people who said that a young handsome king should not be matched with a woman who looked old enough to be his mother and was miserable as sin into the bargain.

♦   ♦   ♦

Queen Katherine did not leave the tiltyard that was now the court until she was thoroughly beaten. It would have made any woman but my sister feel ashamed to watch the queen find the courage to confront her husband. Only days after she first heard
the news that the Princess Mary was sick, she was dining with the king in private, with the ladies of her chamber and the gentlemen of his, a couple of ambassadors and Thomas Cromwell, who was everywhere at the moment. Thomas More was there too, looking very much as if he wished he was not.

They had taken away the meats, and set the voiding course of fruit and dessert wine. The queen turned to the king and asked him—as if it were a simple request—to send Anne away from court. She called her “a shameless creature.”

I saw the face of Thomas More and knew I had the same stunned expression. I could not believe that the queen should challenge His Majesty in public. That she, whose case even now was before the Pope in Rome, should have the courage to face her husband in his own chamber and politely ask that he set aside his mistress. I could not think why she was doing it, and then I knew. It was for Princess Mary. It was to shame him into letting her go to the princess. She was risking everything to see her daughter.

Henry’s face flushed scarlet with anger. I dropped my gaze to the table and I prayed to God that the rage did not turn on me. With my head low I stole a sideways glance and I saw Ambassador Chapuys in the same pose. Only the queen, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair so that they should not tremble, kept her head up, kept her eyes on his suffused face, kept her face schooled to a look of polite inquiry.

“Before God!” Henry raged at her. “I will never send Lady Anne away from court. She has done nothing to offend any right-thinking man.”

“She is your mistress,” the queen observed quietly. “And that is a scandal to a God-fearing household.”

“Never!” Henry’s shout became a roar. I flinched, he was as terrifying as a baited bear. “Never! She is a woman of absolute virtue!”

“No,” the queen said calmly. “In thought and in word, if not in deed, she is shameless and brazen, and no company for a good woman or a Christian prince.”

He leaped to his feet, and still she did not shrink back.

“What the devil do you want of me?” he yelled into her face. His spittle showered her cheeks. She did not blink or turn away. She sat in her chair as if she were made of rock while he was a terrifying spring tide, raging into shore.

“I want to see the Princess Mary,” she said quietly. “That is all.”

“Go!” he bellowed. “Go! For God’s sake! Go! And leave us all in peace. Go and stay there!”

Slowly, Queen Katherine shook her head. “I would not leave you, not even for my daughter, though you will break my heart,” she said quietly.

There was a long painful silence. I looked up. There were tears on her face but her expression was completely calm. She knew that she had just surrendered the chance to see her child, even if her child was dying.

Henry glared at her with absolute hatred for a moment and the queen turned her head and nodded to a server behind her. “More wine for His Majesty,” she said coolly.

Angrily, the king leaped to his feet and pushed back his chair. It scraped like a scream on the wooden floor. The ambassador and the lord chancellor and the rest of us rose uncertainly with him. Henry dropped back into his chair as if he were exhausted. We dipped up and down, lost. Queen Katherine looked at him, she seemed as drained as he did by their quarrel, but she was not beaten.

“Please,” she said very quietly.

“No,” he replied.

♦   ♦   ♦

A week later and she asked him again. I was not with her when that scene was played out but Jane Seymour told me, very wide-eyed with horror, that the queen had stood her ground when the king had raged. “How could she dare?” she asked.

“For her child,” I said bitterly. I looked at Jane’s young face and thought that before I had my son I had been as great a fool as this ninny. “She wants to be with her daughter,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Not until the princess was said by her doctors to be near to death, and asking every day when her mother was coming, did Henry release the queen. He ordered that Princess Mary should be taken by litter to Richmond Palace and the queen could meet her there. I went down to the stable yard to see her off.

“God bless Your Majesty and the princess.”

“At least I can be with her,” was all she said.

I nodded and stepped back and the cavalcade went past me, the queen’s standard in front, half a dozen horsemen following the flag, and next came the queen and a couple of her ladies, then the outriders, and then she was gone.

William Stafford was on the other side of the stable yard, watching me waving farewell.

“So, at last, she can see her daughter.” He strolled across to where I stood, holding my dress away from the mud. “They say that your sister swears that the queen will never return to court. She says that the queen so foolishly loves her daughter that she has gone to her and lost the crown of kingdom in one ride.”

“I don’t know that, or anything else,” I said stubbornly.

He laughed, his brown eyes gleaming at me. “You seem very ignorant today. Do you not rejoice in your sister’s rise to greatness?”

“Not at this price,” I said shortly, and I turned and walked away from him.

I had barely gone half a dozen steps before he was beside me. “And what of you, Lady Carey? I have not seen you for days. D’you ever look for me?”

I hesitated. “Of course I don’t look for you.”

He fell into step beside me. “I don’t expect it,” he said with sudden earnestness. “I might joke with you, madam. But I know very well that you’re far above me.”

“I am,” I said ungraciously.

“Oh I know it,” he assured me again. “But I thought that we quite liked each other.”

“I cannot play these games with you,” I said gently. “Of course I don’t look for you. You are in service to my uncle and I am the daughter of the Earl of Wiltshire—”

“A rather recent honor,” he supplemented quietly.

I frowned, a little distracted by the interruption. “Whether it is today’s honor or goes back a hundred years makes no difference,” I said. “I am the daughter of an earl and you are a nobody.”