I hunched my shoulders against the coldness of her tone but I was too tired to retort. Dimly, I heard George put down his cup and rise from his chair. I heard his soft kiss on Anne’s forehead.
“Weary work but everything to play for,” he said quietly. “Goodnight, Annamaria—I leave you to your duties and go to mine.”
I heard her seductive chuckle. “The whores of Greenwich are a noble calling, my brother. I shall see you tomorrow.”
Anne’s cape looked wonderful over my red riding habit and she lent me her smart little French riding hat as well. Henry, Anne, I, George, my husband William, and half a dozen others rode alongside the river to the shipyard where they were building the king’s new ship. It was a bright wintry day, the sun sparkled on the water, the fields either side of the river were noisy with the sound of water birds, the geese from Russia overwintering at our milder watermeadows. Against their continual gabble, the quacking of ducks and the call of snipe and curlew were very loud. We cantered beside the river in a little group, my horse shouldering against the king’s big hunter, Anne and George on either side of us. Henry pulled up to a trot and then a walk as we came near to the dock.
The foreman came out as he saw our party approaching and pulled off his hat and bowed low to the king.
“I thought to ride out and see how you do,” the king said, smiling down on him.
“We are honored, Your Majesty.”
“And how goes the work?” The king swung himself down from the saddle and tossed the reins of his horse to a waiting groom. He turned and lifted me down and tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow and led me to the dry dock.
“So what d’you think of her?” Henry asked me, squinting up at the smooth oak side of the half-built ship as she rested on the great wooden rollers. “Don’t you think she is going to be most lovely?”
“Lovely and dangerous,” I said, looking at the gun doors. “Surely the French have nothing as good as this.”
“Nothing,” Henry said proudly. “If I’d had three beauties like this one at sea last year I would have destroyed the French navy as they skulked in port, and I should have been King of England and France in deed as well as word today.”
I hesitated. “The French army is said to be very strong,” I ventured. “And Francis very resolute.”
“He’s a peacock,” Henry said crossly. “All show. And Charles of Spain will take him in the south as I come at him from Calais. The two of us will divide France between us.” Henry turned to the shipwright. “When will she be ready?”
“In spring,” the man answered.
“Is the draughtsman here today?”
The man bowed. “He is.”
“I have a fancy to have a sketch made of you, Mistress Carey. Will you sit for a moment and let the man take your likeness?”
I flushed with pleasure. “Of course, if you wish it.”
Henry nodded to the shipwright who shouted from the platform to the quay below us and a man came running. Henry helped me down the ladder and I sat on a pile of newly sawn planks while a young man in rough homespun cloth sketched a quick likeness of my face.
“What will you do with the picture?” I asked curiously, trying to keep still and hold a smile on my lips.
“Wait and see.”
The artist put his paper to one side. “I have enough.”
Henry put out his hand to me and raised me to my feet. “Then, sweeting, let’s ride home to our dinner. I’ll take you home around the watermeadows, there’s a good gallop to the castle.”
The grooms were walking the horses around so that they did not catch cold. Henry threw me up into my saddle and then mounted his own horse. He glanced over his shoulder to see that everyone was ready. Lord Percy was tightening Anne’s girth. She looked down and gave him her slow provocative smile. Then we all turned and rode back to Greenwich as the sun set primrose and cream in the cold winter sky.
Christmas dinner lasted for nearly all the day and I was sure that Henry would send for me that night. Instead he announced that he would visit the queen and I had to be among the ladies who sat with her, waiting for him to finish drinking with his friends and come to bed in the queen’s apartments.
Anne pushed a half-sewn shirt into my hands and sat beside me, firmly planting herself on the skirts of my outspread gown so I could not rise without her letting me up. “Oh leave me alone,” I said under my breath.
“Take that miserable look off your face,” she hissed. “Do your sewing and smile as if you were enjoying it. No man is going to desire you when you look as sulky as a baited bear.”
“But to spend Christmas night with her…”
Anne nodded. “D’you want to know why?”
“Yes.”
“Some beggarly soothsayer told him that he would get a son tonight. He’s hoping the queen might give him an autumn child. Lord, what fools men are.”
“A soothsayer?”
“Yes. Foretold a son, if he forsook all other women. No need to ask who paid her.”
“What d’you mean?”
“My guess is that we’d find Seymour gold in her pocket if we turned her upside down and shook her very hard. But it’s too late for that now. The damage is done. He’ll be in the queen’s bed tonight and every night till twelfth night. So you had better make sure that when he walks past you to do his duty he remembers what he’s missing.”
I bent my head lower over my sewing. Anne, watching me, saw a tear fall on the hem of the shirt and saw me blot it with my finger.
“Little fool,” she said roughly. “You’ll get him back.”
“I hate the thought of him lying with her,” I whispered. “I wonder if he calls her sweeting, too?”
“Probably,” Anne said bluntly. “Not many men have the wit to vary the tune. But he’ll do his duty by her and then look around again, and if you catch his eye and smile then it will be you again.”
“How can I smile when my heart is breaking?”
Anne gave a little giggle. “Oh what a tragedy queen! You can smile when your heart is breaking because you are a woman, and a courtier, and a Howard. That’s three reasons for being the most deceitful creature on God’s earth. Now sshh—here he comes.”
George came in first with a quick smile for me and went to kneel at the queen’s feet. She gave him her hand with a pretty blush, she was glowing with pleasure that the king was coming to her. Henry came in next with my husband, William, and with his hand on Lord Percy’s shoulder. He walked past me with nothing more than a nod of his head though Anne and I stood as he entered the room and dipped low into a curtsy. He went straight to the queen, kissed her on the lips and then led the way into her privy chamber. Her maids went in with them and shortly came out and closed the door. The rest of us were left outside in silence.
William looked around and smiled at me. “Well met, good wife,” he said pleasantly. “Shall you be keeping your present quarters for much longer, d’you think? Or will you want me as a bedfellow again?”
“That must depend on the command of the queen and of our uncle,” George said evenly. His hand slid along his belt to where his sword would hang. “Marianne cannot choose for herself, as you know.”
William did not rise to the challenge. He gave me a rueful smile. “Peace, George,” he said. “I don’t need you to explain it all to me. I should know by now.”
I looked away. Lord Percy had drawn Anne into an alcove and I heard her seductive giggle at something that he said. She saw me watching and said more loudly: “Lord Percy is writing sonnets to me, Mary. Do tell him that his lines don’t scan.”
“It’s not even finished,” Percy protested. “I was just telling you the first line and already you are too critical.”
“‘Fair lady—thou dost treat me with disdain—’”
“I think that’s a very good start,” I said helpfully. “How would you go on, Lord Percy?”
“It’s clearly not a good start,” George said. “To start a courtship with di
sdain is the very worst start you could make. A kind start would be more promising.”
“A kind start would be certainly startling, from a Boleyn girl,” William said with a barb in his tone. “Depending on the suitor, of course. But now I think of it—a Percy of Northumberland might get a kind start.”
Anne flashed him a look which was something less than sisterly but Henry Percy was so absorbed in his poem that he hardly heard him. “It goes on with the next line, which I don’t have yet, and then it goes something something something something, my pain.”
“Oh! To rhyme with disdain!” George declared provokingly. “I think I’m beginning to get this.”
“But you must have an image that you pursue throughout the poem,” Anne said to Henry Percy. “If you are going to write a poem to your mistress you must compare her to something and then twist the comparison round to some witty conclusion.”
“How can I?” Percy asked her. “I cannot compare you to anything. You are yourself. What should I compare you to?”
“Oh very pretty!” George said approvingly. “I say, Percy, your conversation is better than your poetry, I should stay on one knee and whisper in her ear, if I was you. You’ll triumph if you stick to prose.”
Percy grinned and took Anne’s hand. “Stars in the night,” he said.
“Something something something something, some delight,” Anne rejoined promptly.
“Let’s have some wine,” William suggested. “I don’t think I can keep up with this dazzling wit. And who will play me at dice?”
“I’ll play,” George said before William could challenge me. “What will the stakes be?”
“Oh a couple of crowns,” William said. “I should hate to have you as my enemy for a gambling debt, Boleyn.”
“Or any other cause,” my brother said sweetly. “Especially since Lord Percy here might write us a martial poem about fighting.”
“I don’t think something something something is very threatening,” Anne remarked. “And that is all that his lines ever say.”
“I am an apprentice,” Percy said with dignity. “An apprentice lover and an apprentice poet and you are treating me unkindly. ‘Fair lady—thou dost treat me with disdain—’ is nothing but the truth.”
Anne laughed and held out her hand for him to kiss. William drew a couple of dice from his pocket and rolled them on the table. I poured him a glass of wine and put it by him. I felt oddly comforted to be serving him when the man that I loved was bedding his wife in the room next door. I felt that I had been put aside, and for all I knew I might have to stay to one side.
We played until midnight and still the king did not emerge.
“What d’you think?” William asked George. “If he means to spend the night with her we might as well go to our beds.”
“We’re going,” Anne said firmly. She held out a peremptory hand to me.
“So soon?” Percy pleaded. “But stars come out at night.”
“Then they fade at dawn,” Anne replied. “This star needs to veil herself in darkness.”
I rose to go with her. My husband looked at me for a moment. “Kiss me goodnight, wife,” he ordered.
I hesitated and then I went across the room. He expected me to put a cool kiss on his cheek but instead I bent over and kissed him on his lips. I felt him respond as I touched him. “Goodnight, husband. And I wish you a merry Christmas.”
“Goodnight, wife. My bed would have been warmer tonight with you in it.”
I nodded. There was nothing I could say. Without intending it, I glanced toward the closed door of the queen’s privy chamber where the man I adored slept in the arms of his wife.
“Maybe we’ll all end up with our wives in the end,” William said quietly.
“For sure,” George said cheerfully, shoveling his winnings from the table into his cap, and then pouring them into the pocket of his jacket. “For we will be buried alongside each other, whatever our preferences in life. Think of me, melting to dust with Jane Parker.”
Even William laughed.
“When will it be?” Percy asked. “Your happy nuptial day?”
“Sometime after midsummer. If I can contain my impatience for that long.”
“She brings a handsome dowry,” William remarked.
“Oh who cares for that?” Percy exclaimed. “Love is all that matters.”
“Thus speaks one of the richest men in the kingdom,” my brother observed wryly.
Anne held out her hand to Percy. “Pay no attention, my lord. I agree with you. Love is all that matters. At any rate, that’s what I think.”
“No you don’t,” I said as soon as the door was shut behind us.
Anne gave me a tiny smile. “I wish you would take the trouble to see who I am talking to, and not what I am saying.”
“Percy of Northumberland? You are talking of marriage for love to Percy of Northumberland?”
“Exactly. So you can simper at your husband all you like, Mary. When I marry I shall do better than you by far.”
Spring 1523
IN THE EARLY WEEKS OF THE NEW YEAR THE QUEEN FOUND HER youth again, and blossomed like a rose in a warm room, her color high, her smiles ready. She put aside the hair shirt she usually wore under her gown, and the telltale rough skin at her neck and shoulders disappeared as if smoothed away by joy. She did not tell anyone the cause of these changes; but her maid told another that she had missed one of her courses, and that the soothsayer was right: the queen had taken with child.
Given her past history of not going full term, there was every reason for her to be on her knees, her face turned up to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the little prie dieu in the corner of her privy chamber, and every morning found her there, one hand upon her belly, one hand on her missal, her eyes closed, her expression rapt. Miracles could happen. Perhaps a miracle was happening for the queen.
The maids gossiped that her linen was clean again in February and we began to think that soon she would tell the king. Already he had the look of a man waiting for good news, and he walked past me as if I were invisible. I had to dance before him and attend his wife and endure the smirks of the ladies and know once again that I was nothing more than a Boleyn girl, and not the favorite any more.
“I can’t stand it,” I said to Anne. We were sitting by the fireplace in the queen’s apartments. The others were walking with the dogs, but Anne and I had refused to go out. The mist was coming off the river and it was a bitterly cold day. I was shivering inside a fur-lined gown. I had not felt well since Christmas night when Henry had gone past me into her room. He had not sent for me since then.
“You are taking it hard,” she observed contentedly. “That’s what comes of loving a king.”
“What else could I do?” I asked miserably. I moved to the window seat to get more light on my sewing. I was hemming the queen’s shirts for the poor, and just because they were for old laboring men did not mean that I was allowed sloppy work. She would look at the seams and if she thought they were clumsily executed she would ask me, very pleasantly, to do them again.
“If she has a child and it’s a son then you might as well have stayed with William Carey and started your own family,” Anne observed. “The king will be at her beck, and your days will be done. You’ll just be one of many.”
“He loves me,” I said uncertainly. “I’m not one of many.”
I turned my head away and looked out of the window. The mist was curling off the river in great coils, like dust under a bed.
Anne gave a hard little laugh. “You’ve always been one of many,” she said brutally. “There are dozens of us Howard girls, all with good breeding, all well taught, all pretty, all young, all fertile. They can throw one after another on the table and see if one is lucky. It’s no real loss to them if one after another is taken up and then thrown aside. There’s always another Howard girl conceived, there’s always another whore in the nursery. You were one of many before you were even born. If he does not cleave to you
then you go back to William, they find another Howard girl to tempt him, and the dance starts all over again. Nothing is lost for them.”
“Something is lost for me!” I cried out.
She put her head on one side and looked at me, as if she would sift the reality from the impatience of childish passion. “Yes. Perhaps. Something is lost for you. Your innocence, your first love, your trust. Perhaps your heart is broken. Perhaps it will never mend. Poor silly Marianne,” she said softly. “To do one man’s bidding to please another man and get nothing for yourself but heartbreak.”
“So who would come after me?” I asked her, turning my pain into taunting. “Who d’you think the next Howard girl will be that they push into his bed? Let me guess—the other Boleyn girl?”
She flashed me a quick black glance and then her dark eyelashes swept down on her cheeks. “Not me,” she said. “I make my own plans. I don’t risk being taken up and dropped again.”
“You told me to risk it,” I reminded her.
“That was for you,” she said. “I would not live my life as you live yours. You would always do as you were bid, marry where you were told, bed where you were ordered. I am not like you. I make my own way.”
“I could make my own way,” I said.
Anne smiled disbelievingly.
“I’d go back to Hever and live there,” I said. “I wouldn’t stay at court. If I am put aside I could go to Hever. At least I will always have that now.”
The door to the queen’s apartment opened and I glanced up as the maids came out, lugging the sheets from the queen’s bed.
“That’s the second time this week she’s ordered them to be changed,” one said irritably.
Anne and I exchanged a quick look. “Are they stained?” Anne demanded urgently.
The maid looked at her insolently. “The queen’s sheets?” she asked. “You ask me to show you the queen’s own bed linen?”
Anne’s long fingers went to her purse and a piece of silver changed hands. The maid’s smile was triumphant as she pocketed the coin. “Not stained at all,” she said.