Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (52 page)

“But why, if it was nothing more than a foolish affair? Youth calls to youth in springtime?”

She shakes her head. “Truly, I don’t know. You would think so. But if it is a flirtation why would the duke be so very offended? Why quarrel with the king? Why would the girls not be laughing at Anne for getting caught?”

“And another thing . . .” I say.

She waits.

“Why should the king pay for Compton’s courtship? The fee for the singers is in the court accounts.”

She frowned. “Why would he encourage it? The king must have known that the duke would be greatly offended.”

“And Compton remains in high favor?”

“They are inseparable.”

I speak the thought that is sitting cold in my heart. “So do you think that Compton is the shield and the love affair is between the king, my husband, and Lady Anne?”

Lady Margaret’s grave face tells me that my guess is her own fear. “I don’t know,” she says, honest as ever. “As I say, the girls tell me nothing, and I have not asked anyone that question.”

“Because you think you will not like the answer?”

She nods. Slowly, I turn, and we walk back along the river in silence.

*     *     *

Katherine and Henry led the company into dinner in the grand hall and sat side by side under the gold canopy of state as they always did. There was a band of special singers that had come to England from the French court and they sang without instruments, very true to the note, with a dozen different parts. It was complicated and beautiful and Henry was entranced by the music. When the singers paused, he applauded and asked them to repeat the song. They smiled at his enthusiasm, and sang again. He asked for it once more, and then sang the tenor line back to them: note perfect.

It was their turn to applaud him and they invited him to sing with them the part that he had learned so rapidly. Katherine, on her throne,
leaned forwards and smiled as her handsome young husband sang in his clear young voice, and the ladies of the court clapped in appreciation.

When the musicians struck up and the court danced, Katherine came down from the raised platform of the high table and danced with Henry, her face bright with happiness and her smile warm. Henry, encouraged by her, danced like an Italian, with fast, dainty footwork and high leaps. Katherine clapped her hands in delight and called for another dance as if she had never had a moment’s worry in her life. One of her ladies leaned towards the courtier who had taken the bet that Katherine would find out. “I think I shall keep my earrings,” she said. “He has fooled her. He has played her for a fool, and now he is fair game to any one of us. She has lost her hold on him.”

*     *     *

I wait till we are alone, and then I wait until he beds me with his eager joy, and then I slip from the bed and bring him a cup of small ale.

“So tell me the truth, Henry,” I say to him simply. “What is the truth of the quarrel between you and the Duke of Buckingham, and what were your dealings with his sister?”

His swift sideways glance tells me more than any words. He is about to lie to me. I hear the words he says: a story about a disguising and all of them in masks and the ladies dancing with them and Compton and Anne dancing together, and I know that he is lying.

It is an experience more painful than I thought I could have with him. We have been married for nearly a year, a year next month and always he has looked at me directly, with all his youth and honesty in his gaze. I have never heard anything but truth in his voice: boastfulness, certainly, the arrogance of a young man, but never this uncertain deceitful quaver. He is lying to me, and I would almost rather have a barefaced confession of infidelity than to see him look at me, blue-eyed and sweet as a boy, with a parcel of lies in his mouth.

I stop him, I truly cannot bear to hear it. “Enough,” I say. “I know enough at least to realize that this is not true. She was your lover, wasn’t she? And Compton was your friend and shield?”

His face is aghast. “Katherine . . .”

“Just tell me the truth.”

His mouth is trembling. He cannot bear to admit what he has done. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

“I know that you did not,” I say. “I am sure you were sorely tempted.”

“You were away for so long . . .”

“I know.”

A dreadful silence falls. I had thought that he would lie to me and I would track him down and then confront him with his lies and with his adultery and I would be a warrior queen in my righteous anger. But this is sadness and a taste of defeat. If Henry cannot remain faithful when I am in confinement with our child, our dearly needed child, then how shall he be faithful till death? How shall he obey his vow to forsake all others when he can be distracted so easily? What am I to do, what can any woman do, when her husband is such a fool as to desire a woman for a moment, rather than the woman he is pledged to for eternity?

“Dear husband, this is very wrong,” I say sadly.

“It was because I had such doubts. I thought for a moment that we were not married,” he confesses.

“You forgot we were married?” I ask incredulously.

“No!” His head comes up, his blue eyes are filled with unshed tears. His face shines with contrition. “I thought that since our marriage was not valid, I need not abide by it.”

I am quite amazed by him. “Our marriage? Why would it not be valid?”

He shakes his head. He is too ashamed to speak. I press him. “Why not?”

He kneels beside my bed and hides his face in the sheets. “I liked her and I desired her and she said some things which made me feel . . .”

“Feel what?”

“Made me think . . .”

“Think what?”

“What if you were not a virgin when I married you?”

At once I am alert, like a villain near the scene of a crime, like a murderer when the corpse bleeds at the sight of him. “What do you mean?”

“She was a virgin . . .”

“Anne?”

“Yes. Sir George is impotent. Everyone knows that.”

“Do they?”

“Yes. So she was a virgin. And she was not . . .” He rubs his face against the sheet of our bed. “She was not like you. She . . .” He stumbles for words. “She cried out in pain. She bled, I was afraid when I saw how much blood, really a lot . . .” He breaks off again. “She could not go on, the first time. I had to stop. She cried, I held her. She was a virgin. That is what it is like
to lie with a virgin, the first time. I was her first love. I could tell. Her first love.”

There is a long, cold silence.

“She fooled you,” I say cruelly, throwing away her reputation, and his tenderness for her, with one sweep, making her a whore and him a fool, for the greater good.

He looks up, shocked. “She did?”

“She was not that badly hurt, she was pretending.” I shake my head at the sinfulness of young women. “It is an old trick. She will have had a bladder of blood in her hand and broke it to give you a show of blood. She will have cried out. I expect she whimpered and said she could not bear the pain from the very beginning.”

Henry is amazed. “She did.”

“She thought to make you feel sorry for her.”

“But I was!”

“Of course. She thought to make you feel that you had taken her virginity, her maidenhead, and that you owe her your protection.”

“That is what she said!”

“She tried to entrap you,” I say. “She was not a virgin, she was acting the part of one. I was a virgin when I came to your bed and the first night that we were lovers was very simple and sweet. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” he says.

“There was no crying and wailing like players on a stage. It was quiet and loving. Take that as your benchmark,” I say. “I was a true virgin. You and I were each other’s first love. We had no need for playacting and exaggeration. Hold to that truth of our love, Henry. You have been fooled by a counterfeit.”

“She said . . .” he begins.

“She said what?” I am not afraid. I am filled with utter determination that Anne Stafford will not put asunder what God and my mother have joined together.

“She said that you must have been Arthur’s lover.” He stumbles before the white fierceness of my face. “That you had lain with him, and that—”

“Not true.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It is not true.”

“Oh, yes.”

“My marriage with Arthur was not consummated. I came to you a virgin. You were my first love. Does anyone dare say different to me?”

“No,” he says rapidly. “No. No one shall say different to you.”

“Nor to you.”

“Nor to me.”

“Would anyone dare to say to my face that I am not your first love, a virgin untouched, your true wedded wife, and Queen of England?”

“No,” he says again.

“Not even you.”

“No.”

“It is to dishonor me,” I say furiously. “And where will scandal stop? Shall they suggest that you have no claim to the throne because your mother was no virgin on her wedding day?”

He is stunned with shock. “My mother? What of my mother?”

“They say that she lay with her uncle, Richard the usurper,” I say flatly. “Think of that! And they say that she lay with your father before they were married, before they were even betrothed. They say that she was far from a virgin on her wedding day when she wore her hair loose and went in white. They say she was dishonored twice over, little more than a harlot for the throne. Do we allow people to say such things of a queen? Are you to be disinherited by such gossip? Am I? Is our son?”

Henry is gasping with shock. He loved his mother and he had never thought of her as a sexual being before. “She would never have . . . she was a most . . . how can . . .”

“You see? This is what happens if we allow people to gossip about their betters.” I lay down the law which will protect me. “If you allow someone to dishonor me, there is no stopping the scandal. It insults me, but it threatens you. Who knows where scandal will stop once it takes hold? Scandal against the queen rocks the throne itself. Be warned, Henry.”

“She said it!” he exclaims. “Anne said that it was no sin for me to lie with her because I was not truly married!”

“She lied to you,” I say. “She pretended to her virgin state and she traduced me.”

His face flushes red with anger. It is a relief to him to turn to rage. “What a whore!” he exclaims crudely. “What a whore to trick me into thinking . . . what a jade’s trick!”

“You cannot trust young women,” I say quietly. “Now that you are King of England you will have to be on your guard, my love. They will run after
you and they will try to charm you and seduce you, but you have to be faithful to me. I was your virgin bride, I was your first love. I am your wife. Do not forsake me.”

He takes me into his arms. “Forgive me,” he whispers brokenly.

“We will never, ever speak of this again,” I say solemnly. “I will not have it, and I will not allow anyone to dishonor either me or your mother.”

“No,” he says fervently. “Before God. We will never speak of this nor allow any other to speak of it again.”

*     *     *

Next morning Henry and Katherine rose up together and went quietly to Mass in the king’s chapel. Katherine met with her confessor and kneeled to confess her sins. She did not take very long, Henry observed, she must have no great sins to confess. It made him feel even worse to see her go to her priest for a brief confession and come away with her face so serene. He knew that she was a woman of holy purity, just like his mother. Penitently, his face in his hands, he thought that not only had Katherine never been unfaithful to her given word, she had probably never even told a lie in her life.

*     *     *

I go out with the court to hunt dressed in a red velvet gown, determined to show that I am well, that I am returned to the court, that everything will be as it was before. We have a long, hard run after a fine stag who takes a looping route around the great park and the hounds bring him down in the stream and Henry himself goes into the water, laughing, to cut his throat. The stream blooms red around him and stains his clothes and his hands. I laugh with the court but the sight of the blood makes me feel sick to my very belly.

We ride home slowly. I keep my face locked in a smile to hide my weariness and the pain in my thighs, in my belly, in my back. Lady Margaret brings her horse beside mine and glances at me. “You had better rest this afternoon.”

“I cannot,” I say shortly.

She does not need to ask why. She has been a princess; she knows that a queen has to be on show, whatever her own feelings. “I have the story, if you want to trouble yourself to hear such a thing.”

“You are a good friend,” I say. “Tell me briefly. I think I know the worst that it can be already.”

“After we had gone in for your confinement the king and the young men started to go into the City in the evenings.”

“With guards?”

“No, alone and disguised.”

I stifle a sigh. “Did no one try to stop him?”

“The Earl of Surrey, God bless him. But his own sons were of the party and it was lighthearted fun, and you know that the king will not be denied his pastimes.”