Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (128 page)

We rode down the lane and William dismounted to open the gate. A small boy emerged from nowhere and looked doubtfully at the two of us. “You can’t come in,” he said firmly. “This belongs to Sir William Stafford. A great man at court.”

“Thank you,” William said. “I am Sir William Stafford and you can tell your mother that you are a fine gatekeeper. Tell her that I am come home, and brought my wife, and that we need bread and milk and some bacon and cheese.”

“You are Sir William Stafford, for sure?” the boy confirmed.

“Yes.”

“Then she’ll probably kill a chicken as well,” he said, and legged it across the fields to the little cottage set half a mile away on the lane.

I rode Jesmond through the gate and pulled up in the stable yard. William helped me from the saddle and threw the reins over a hitching post while he took me into the house. The door to the kitchen was open, and we stepped over the threshold together.

“Sit down,” William said, pressing me into a chair by the fireside. “I’ll soon get this lit.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m going to be a farmer’s wife, remember. I’ll light the fire and you can see to the horses.”

He hesitated. “D’you know how to light a fire, my little love?”

“Go away!” I said in mock indignation. “Out of my kitchen. I need to set things to rights here.”

♦   ♦   ♦

It was like playing at house, like my children might do in a den made of bracken, and at the same time it was a real house, and a real challenge. There was kindling laid in the grate and a tinder
box so it did not take me more than about fifteen minutes of patient, painstaking work to get the fire lit and the little flames licking around the wood. The chimney was cold but the wind was in the right quarter so it soon started to draw. William came in from the horses just as the lad returned from the cottage bringing a parcel of food wrapped up in a muslin cloth. We spread the whole thing out on the wooden table and made a little feast of it. William opened a bottle of wine from his cellar under the stairs, and we drank to each other’s healths and to the future.

♦   ♦   ♦

The family who had been farming the fields for William while he had been at court had served him well. The hedges were in good trim, the ditches clear, the meadow fields had been cut for hay and the hay was safely in the barn. The older animals of the herd of cows and sheep would be slaughtered through the autumn, and their meat would be salted or smoked. We had chickens in the yard, we had doves in the cote, and a limitless supply of fish from the stream. For a few pence we could go down to the river and buy sea fish from the fishermen. It was a prosperous farm and an easy place to live.

The urchin’s mother, Megan, came over to the farmhouse every day to help me with the work and to teach me the skills I needed to know. She taught me how to churn butter and how to make cheese. She taught me how to bake bread and to pluck a chicken, a dove, or a game bird. It should have been easy and delightful to learn such important skills. I was absolutely exhausted by it.

I felt the skin on my hands grow dry and hard and saw, in the small sliver of looking glass, my face slowly color with the sun and the wind. I fell into my bed at the end of every day and I slept without dreaming: the sleep of a woman on the edge of
exhaustion. But though I was tired at the end of each day I felt I had achieved something, however small. I liked the work since it put food on our table or pence in our savings jar. I liked the feeling that we were building a place together, claiming the land as our own. I liked learning the skills that a poor woman was taught from childhood and when Megan asked me did I not miss my fine clothes and fancy gowns at court, I remembered the endless drudgery of dancing with men I did not like, and flirting with men I did not desire, playing cards and losing a small fortune, and forever trying to please everyone around me. Here there was just William and I, and we lived as easily and as joyfully as two birds in a hedge—just as he had promised.

My only sorrow was the loss of my children. I wrote to them every week and once a month I wrote to George or to Anne, wishing them well. I wrote to Secretary Thomas Cromwell asking him to intervene with my sister and ask her if we might come back to court. But I would not in any way apologize for the choice I had made. I would not sweeten my request with an apology. The words froze on my pen, I could not say that I regretted loving William, for every day I loved him more. In a world where women were bought and sold as horses I had found a man I loved; and married for love. I would never suggest that this was a mistake.

A
T
C
HRISTMAS
I
HAD A LETTER FROM MY
brother, George.

Dear Sister,

I send you greetings of the season and hope that it finds you as well in your farmhouse as I am at court. Perhaps better.

Matters here are gone a little sour for our sister. The king has been riding and dancing with a Seymour girl—you remember Jane? The one who always looks down: so sweetly; and upward: so surprised? The king has been seeking her right under the nose of our sister and she is not best pleased. She has rung a few storms over his head but she does not move him to tears as she once did. He can tolerate her displeasure, he just goes away from her. You can imagine what this does to her temper.

Our uncle, taking warning from the king’s straying, has been putting Madge Shelton in his way, and His Majesty is torn between the two of them. Since they are both ladies in waiting the queen’s rooms are in continual uproar and the king finds it safer to go hunting a good deal and leave the ladies to cry and scream and scratch each other’s faces undisturbed.

Anne is sick with fear and I cannot tell what will be the outcome. She never thought when she overthrew a queen that thereafter all queens would be unsteady. She has no friend at court but me. Father, Mother and Uncle are all in favor of putting Madge forward, to keep the king’s eye from the Seymour girl. This leaves a very sour taste with Anne, who accuses the family of seeking to supplant her with a new Howard girl. She misses you, but she will not say it.

I speak of you but there is nothing I can tell her which would reconcile her to your marriage. If you had married a prince and been unhappy she would have stood your dearest friend. What breaks her heart is thinking of you finding love, while she is in the greatest court of Europe, frightened and unhappy.

I get richer every day and my wife is a curse to me and my friend is my delight and my torment. This court would corrupt a saint and neither Anne nor I were saints to begin with. She is desperately lonely and frightened and I long for what I cannot have and am forced to keep my desires hidden. I am weary and angry and this Christmas season seems to offer little to us Boleyns unless Anne can get herself with child again. Write to me to tell me of your news. I hope you are as happy as I imagine you to be.

Your brother,
George.

William and I celebrated the Christmas feast with a great haunch of venison. I took care not to ask where the beast had been killed. My family’s parkland at Rochford Hall was well-stocked and ill-guarded, and there was little doubt in my mind that I had just bought my own deer. But since neither Father nor Mother sent me greetings I thought that I might award myself
a gift from their wealth, and I bought the deer at a knockdown price, and a brace of pheasants too. The work of the farm did not stop for the twelve days but we found time to go to Christmas Mass, to see the mummers at Rochford, to drink a wassail cup with our neighbors, and to walk alone beside the river while the seagulls cried over our heads and a cold wind blew up the estuary.

In the iron days of February I prepared for my lying in. This time I would not be a grand lady at court, I would not have to take to my room for a month. I might do as I pleased. William was more apprehensive than I, he insisted that we send for a midwife to stay at the house with us from the last days of the month, to make sure that there was no danger of the baby coming while we were cut off by snow. I laughed at his anxiety but I did as he wished and an old woman, more like a witch than a midwife, came and stayed with us from the first days of March, and watched over me.

I was glad that William had been so careful when I woke one morning and found the room filled with a brilliant white light. It had snowed in the night and it was still snowing, thick white flakes which blew soundlessly out of a gray sky, and swirled around the yard. The world was transformed into a place of utter silence and magic. The hens hid inside their coop, only their three-toed tracks in the yard showed that they had ventured out looking for food. The sheep huddled at the gate, brown and dirty against the whiter field. The cows crowded into the barn and their field was bleached lawn. I sat at the window, feeling my belly churn as the baby moved inside me, and watched the drifts swell and curve along the hedge. It looked as if not a flake was landing, as if they were just swirling and blowing around the house, but every hour the peaks and troughs of the snowdrifts grew higher and more exotically sculpted. When I
looked down from the window, the flakes were white as duck feathers, but when I craned my neck and looked up, they were like scraps of gray lace, dirty against a dull sky.

“Setting in,” William said. He had wrapped sacking around his legs and boots and he stood in the little porch outside the door untying it and kicking off the snow. I came slowly down the stairs and smiled at him. He was arrested by the sight of me. “Are you well?”

“Dreamy,” I said. “I have been watching the snow all the morning.”

He exchanged one swift meaningful glance with the midwife who was making porridge at the fire, and then he hopped across the kitchen floor in his bare feet and drew me into a chair at the fireside. “Are your pains coming?” he asked.

I smiled. “Not yet. But I think it will be today.”

The midwife slopped porridge into a big bowl and passed it to me with a spoon. “Sup up then,” she said encouragingly. “We’ll all need our strength.”

♦   ♦   ♦

In the end it was an easy birth. My baby girl came in only four hours of labor and the midwife wrapped her in a warm white sheet and put her to my breast. William, who was at my side for every moment of the four hours, put his hand on her little bloodstained head and blessed her, his mouth trembling with emotion. Then he lay down on the bed beside me. The old woman threw a cover over the three of us and left us warm, wrapped in each other’s arms, fast asleep.

We did not wake until the baby stirred and cried two hours later and then I put her to my breast and felt the familiar, wonderful sensation of a beloved child feeding. William tucked a shawl around my shoulders and went
downstairs to fetch me a cup of mulled ale. It was still snowing, I could see the white flakes against the darker sky from the bed. I snuggled down into the warmth and leaned back against the goosefeather pillows and knew that I was a woman blessed indeed.

Dear Sister,

The queen our sister commands me to tell you that she is with child once more and that you are to come to court to help her but that your husband must stay at Rochford and the baby with him. She will not see either. Your pension will be restored to you and you may be allowed to see your children at Hever this summer.

That is the message I have been ordered to give you, and I tell you as well that we need you at Hampton Court. Anne expects her confinement in the autumn of this year. We will go on progress this summer but not very far. She is anxious to have you with her, because she is desperate to keep this child, as you can imagine, and she wants a friend at court as well as me. In truth, at the moment, she is the loneliest woman in the world. The king is quite taken up with Madge who goes everywhere in a new gown for every day of the week. There was a family conference held the other day by our uncle to which neither I nor Father nor Mother was bid. The Sheltons went. I leave you to imagine what Anne and I made of that. Anne is still queen, but she is no longer favorite either with the king or with her own family.

I warn you of one other thing before you arrive. The city
is in an uneasy mood. The oath of succession has driven five good men to the Tower of London and to their deaths and it may drive more. Henry has discovered that his power is without limits and now there is neither Wolsey nor Queen Katherine nor Thomas More to keep him steady. The court itself is a wilder place than when you knew it before. I have been in the forefront of it, and it sickens me. It is like a runaway cart and I cannot see how to leap clear. It is not a happy place that I am bidding you visit. No—that I am begging you to visit.

As inducement, I can promise you a summer with your children, if Anne is well enough to let you leave her.

George.

I took the letter with the heavy Boleyn seal to my husband where he was in the yard, milking a cow with his head pressed against her warm flank and the milk hissing into the bucket.

“Good news?” he asked, reading my bright face.

“I am allowed back to court. Anne is with child again and she wants me there.”

“And your children?”

“I can see them this summer if she will release me.”

“Thank God,” he said simply, and he turned his head to the cow’s belly and closed his eyes for a moment and I realized, as I had not fully known before, that he had been suffering for me in the loss of my children.

“Any forgiveness for me?” he asked after a little while.

I shook my head. “You’re forbidden. But I suppose you could just come with me.”

“I’d be sorry to leave the farm again for long.”

I chuckled. “Have you become a rustic, my love?”

“Arr,” he said. He rose from the milking stool and patted the cow on the rump. I held open the gate for her and she went out into the field where the spring grass was coming through rich and green. “I’ll come to court with you, whether they say so or not; and when the summer comes, we’ll come back here.”