Henry sat with me, or with Anne. He called himself a thorn between two roses, a poppy between two ripe ears of wheat. He rested his hand on the small of my back as he watched her dance. He followed the score where I held it in my broadening lap as she sang a new song for him. He staked me when I played cards against her. He watched her take the choicest cuts of meat from her plate and put them on mine. She was sisterly, she was tender, she could not have been sweeter or more attentive to me.
“You are the lowest of things,” I said to her one night as she combed her hair before the mirror and then plaited it into one thick dark rope.
“I know,” she said complacently, looking at her reflection.
There was a tap outside and George put his head around the door. “Can I come in?”
“Come,” Anne said. “And shut the door, there’s a gale blowing down that corridor.”
Obediently, George closed the door for her, and waved a pitcher of wine at the two of us. “Anyone share a glass of wine with me? Not Milady Fruitfulness? Not Milady Spring?”
“I thought you’d have gone down to the stews with Sir Thomas,” Anne remarked. “He said he was roistering tonight.”
“The king kept me back,” George said. “Wanted to ask me about you.”
“Me?” Anne said, suddenly alert.
“Wanted to know how you might respond to an invitation.”
Without realizing it I had spread my fingers like claws on the red silk sheet of the bed. “What sort of invitation?”
“To his bed.”
“And you said?” Anne prompted him.
“As I’ve been bid. That you’re a maid and the flower of the family. There’ll be no bedding before you’re wed. Whoever asks.”
“And he said?”
“Oh.”
“That was all?” I pressed George. “He just said ‘Oh?’”
“Yes,” George said simply. “And followed Sir Thomas’s boat down the river to visit whores. I think you have him on the run, Anne.”
She lifted her nightdress high and got into bed. George watched her naked feet with a connoisseur’s gaze. “Very nice.”
“I think so,” she said complacently.
I went into the birthing chamber in the middle of January. What went on while I was enclosed in darkness and silence I did not need to know. I heard there was a joust and Henry carried a favor under his surcoat that was not given to him by me. On his shield he wore the motto “Declare, I dare not!” which puzzled half the court, thinking it was meant as a compliment to me, but an odd misfiring compliment since I saw neither joust nor motto, locked in the shadowy silence of the birthing chamber with no court and no musicians but just a gaggle of old ladies drinking ale and biding their time: my time actually.
And there were those who thought my star was very high on the rise: “Declare, I dare not!” was a signal to the court a son and heir might be declared. Only a very few people thought to look from the king, jousting with the ambiguous promise on his shield, to my sister as she sat at the queen’s shoulder, her dark eyes on the horsemen, the smallest of smiles on her lips, the tiniest consciousness in the turn of her head.
She visited me that evening, and complained of the stuffiness of the chamber and the darkness of the room.
“I know,” I said shortly. “They say it has to be like this.”
“I don’t see why you bear it,” she said.
“Think a moment,” I counseled her. “If I insist on having the curtains drawn and the windows open and then I lost the baby or it is born dead, what d’you think our lady mother would say to me? The king’s anger would be sweet in comparison.”
Anne nodded. “You can’t afford to do one thing wrong.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not all pleasure being the king’s sweetheart.”
“He wants me. He is on the brink of telling me so.”
“You’ll have to step back if I have a boy,” I warned her.
She nodded. “I know. But if it is a girl they may tell me to step onward.”
I leaned back on the pillows, too weary to argue. “Step onward or back, for all I care.”
She looked at my hugely rounded belly with unsympathetic curiosity. “You are gross. He should have named a barge after you, not a warship.”
I looked at her bright animated face and the exquisite hood which drew her hair back from her smooth complexion. “When they launch snakes you shall have your namesake,” I promised her. “Go away, Anne. I’m too tired to quarrel with you.”
She rose at once and went to the door. “If he desires me instead of you, then you will have to help me as I have helped you,” she warned me.
I closed my eyes. “If he desires you then I shall take my new baby, God willing, and go to Hever and you can have the king, and the court, and day after day of envy and spite and gossip with my blessing. But I don’t think he is a man who will bring his woman much joy.”
“Oh I shan’t be his woman,” she said disdainfully. “You don’t think I’d be a whore like you, do you?”
“He’ll never marry you,” I predicted. “And even if he would, you should think twice. You look at the queen before you aim for her chair. You look at the suffering in that woman’s face and ask yourself if marriage to her husband is likely to bring you joy.”
Anne paused before opening the door. “You don’t marry a king for joy.”
I had one more visitor in February. My husband William Carey came to see me early one morning, while I was breaking my fast on bread and ham and ale.
“I did not mean to interrupt you as you ate,” he said politely, hovering in the doorway.
I waved my hand at my maid. “Take it away.” I felt at a disadvantage, so fat and heavy against his sleek handsomeness.
“I came to bring you the king’s good wishes. He asked me to tell you that he has kindly given me some stewardships. I am in your debt, once again, madam.”
“I’m glad.”
“I understand from this generosity that I am to give your child my name?”
I shifted a little awkwardly in the bed. “He has not told me what he wants. But I would have thought…”
“Another Carey. What a family we are making!”
“Yes.”
He took my hand and kissed it as if he suddenly repented of teasing me. “You are pale and you look weary. Is it not so easy, this time?”
I felt tears prickling under my eyelids at his unexpected kindness. “No. It is not so easy this time.”
“Not afraid?”
I put my hand on my swelling belly. “A little.”
“You’ll have the best midwives in the kingdom,” he reminded me.
I nodded. There was no point in saying that I had been attended by the best midwives before and they had spent three nights standing around the bed telling the most evil tales any woman ever had to hear about the deaths of babies.
William turned to the door. “I will tell His Majesty that you are looking bonny and blithe.”
I smiled a shallow smile. “Please do, and give him my obedient duty.”
“He’s much engaged with your sister,” William remarked.
“She’s a very engaging woman.”
“You’re not afraid she might take your place?”
I gestured at the dark chamber and the heavy hangings on the bed, the hot fire and my own lumpish body. “My God, husband, any woman in the world could take my place with my blessing if she would do it this morning.”
He laughed out loud at that, swung his hat to me in his bow, and went out through the door. I lay for a while in silence, watching the hangings of the bed move slowly in the still air. It was February, my baby was not due until the middle of the month. It felt like a lifetime.
Thank God he came early. And thank God he was a boy. My little baby boy was born on the fourth day of February. A boy: the king’s acknowledged healthy boy; and the Boleyns had everything to play for.
Summer 1526
BUT THEY COULD NOT PLAY M
E.
“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” my mother demanded. “It has been three months since the birth, and you are as white as if you were sickening for the plague. Are you ill?”
“I cannot stop bleeding.” I looked into her face for some sympathy. She was blank and impatient. “I am afraid I will bleed to death.”
“What do the midwives say?”
“They say that it will stop in time.”
She tutted at that. “You’re so fat,” she complained. “And you’re so…you’re so dull, Mary.”
I looked up at her and felt my eyes fill with tears. “I know,” I said humbly. “I feel dull.”
“You have given the king a son.” My mother was trying to be encouraging but I could hear her impatience. “Any woman in the world would give her right hand to do what you have done. Any woman in the world would be up and out of her bed and at his side, laughing at his jests and singing his songs, and riding out with him.”
“Where is my son?” I asked flatly.
She hesitated for a moment, confused. “You know where. At Windsor.”
“D’you know when I last saw him?”
“No.”
“Two months ago. I came back from churching and he was gone.”
She was completely blank. “But of course he was taken away,” she said. “Of course we made arrangements that he should be cared for.”
“By other women.”
“Why should that matter?” My mother was genuinely uncomprehending. “He is well cared for, and named Henry for the king.” She could not keep the exultation from her voice. “With everything before him!”
“But I miss him.”
For a moment it was as if I were speaking another language altogether, something incomprehensible: Russian or Arabic.
“Why?”
“I miss him and I miss Catherine.”
“And this is why you are so dull?”
“I am not dull,” I said flatly. “I am sad. I am so sad that I want to do nothing but lie on my bed and put my face into my pillows and weep and weep.”
“Because you miss your child?” My mother had to have confirmation, the thought was so strange to her.
“Did you never miss me?” I cried out. “Or if not me, then Anne? We were taken away from you when we were little more than babies and sent to France. Did you not miss us then? Someone else taught us to read and write, someone else picked us up when we fell, someone else taught us to ride on our ponies. Did you never think that you would have liked to have seen your children?”
“No,” she said simply. “I could not have found you a better place than the royal court of France. I would have been a poor mother if I had kept you at home.”
I turned away. I could feel my tears very wet on my cheeks.
“If you could see your baby would you be happy again?” my mother asked.
“Yes,” I breathed. “Oh yes, Mother, yes. I would be happy if I could see him again. And Catherine.”
“Well, I will tell your uncle,” she said grudgingly. “But you must be really happy: smiling, laughing, dancing blithe, pleasing to the eye. You must win the king back to your side.”
“Oh, has he strayed so very far?” I asked acidly.
She did not look ashamed, not for a moment. “Thank God Anne has him in her toils,” she said. “She plays with him like you might tease the queen’s dog. She has him on a thread.”
“Why not use her then?” I demanded spitefully. “Why bother with me at all?”
The swiftness of her answer warned me that this had already been decided at a family council.
“Because you have the king’s son,” she said simply. “Bessie Blount’s bastard is made Duke of Richmond, our Baby Henry has as good a claim. It is nothing to annul your marriage to Carey, and next to nothing to annul the marriage to the queen. We are looking to have him marry you. Anne was our decoy while you were in childbed. But we are placing our fortunes with you.”
She was silent for a moment as if she expected me to respond with joy. When I said nothing she spoke again, a little more sharply. “So get up now, and get the maid to brush your hair and lace you tightly.”
“I can come to dinner because I am not ill,” I said grimly. “They say the bleeding does not matter and perhaps it does not. I can sit near the king and I can laugh at his jokes and ask him to sing for us. But I cannot be merry in my heart, Mother. Do you understand me at all? I cannot make myself merry any more. I have lost my joy. I have lost my joy. And no one but me even knows what this feels like, and how dreadful it is.”
She looked at me with a hard determined stare. “Smile,” she ordered me.
I drew back my lips and felt my eyes fill with tears.
“That’s good enough,” she said. “Stay like that, and I will make arrangements for you to see your children.”
My uncle came to my new rooms after dinner. He looked around with some pleasure, he had not seen how richly I was housed since I came out of the birthing chamber. Now I had a privy chamber as large as the queen’s and four ladies of my household to sit with me. I had a pair of personal maids for my service and a pageboy. The king had promised me a musician of my own. Behind the privy chamber was my bedchamber which I shared with Anne, and a little retiring room where I could go to read and be alone. Most days I went in there, closed the door tightly behind me and wept without anyone seeing.
“He’s keeping you very fine.”
“Yes, Uncle Howard,” I said politely.
“Your mother says you are pining for your babies.”
I bit my lip to try to stop the tears coming to my eyes.
“What in God’s name are you looking like that for?”
“Nothing,” I whispered.
“Smile then.”
I showed him the same gargoyle face that had satisfied my mother and he stared at me rudely and then nodded. “Well enough. Don’t think you can be idle and spoiled just because you have his boy. The baby is no use to us unless you take the next step.”
“I can’t make him marry me,” I said quietly. “He’s still married to the queen.”
He snapped his finger. “Good God, woman, d’you know nothing? That never mattered less. He’s one step away from war with her nephew now. He’s all but in alliance with France and the Pope and Venice against the Spanish emperor. Are you so ignorant that you don’t know that?”
I shook my head.
“You should make it your business to know these things,” he said sharply. “Anne always does. The new alliance will fight against Charles of Spain and if they start to win then Henry will join them. The queen is the aunt of the enemy of all of Europe. She has no influence with him any more. She is the aunt of a pariah.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s not long since Pavia when she was the country’s savior.”
He snapped his fingers. “Forgotten. Now, as to you. Your mother says that you are not well?”
I hesitated. The impossibility of confiding in my uncle was very apparent to me. “No.”
“Well, you have to be back in the king’s bed by the end of this week, Mary. You do that or you’ll never see your children again. D’you understand?”
I gave a little gasp at the cruelty of the bargain and he turned his hawk-face toward me and looked at me with his dark eyes. “I’ll settle for nothing less.”
“You cannot forbid me the sight of my children,” I whispered.
“You’ll find that I can.”
“I have the king’s favor.”
His hand slammed the table with a sound like a pistol shot. “You do not! That is my very point! You do not have the king’s favor, and without it, you do not have mine. Get back into his bed and you can do whatever you like. You can ask him to set up a nursery for you, you can dandle your babies on the throne of England. You can banish me! But outside his bed you are nothing but a silly used whore that no one cares for.”
There was a dead silence in the room.
“I unders
tand,” I said stiffly.
“Good.” He moved away from the fireplace and pulled down his jerkin. “You’ll thank me for this on your coronation day.”
“Yes,” I said. I could feel my knees giving way. “May I sit?”
“No,” he said. “Learn to stand.”
That night there was dancing in the queen’s rooms. The king had brought his musicians to play for her. It was apparent to everyone that though he sat beside her, he was there to enjoy watching her ladies as they danced. Anne was among them. She was wearing a gown of dark blue, a new gown, and she had a matching hood. She was wearing her usual necklace of pearls with the “B” in gold as if she wanted to flaunt her status as a single woman.
“Dance,” George said to me very quietly, his mouth next to my ear. “They’re all waiting for you to dance.”
“George, I dare not. I’m bleeding. I might faint.”
“You have to get up and dance,” he said. He looked at me with a bright smile on his face. “I swear it, Mary. You have to do it or you’re lost.” He held out his hand.
“Hold me tight,” I said. “If I start to fall then catch me.”
“Into the breach. Come on. It has to be done.”
He led me to join the circle of dancers. I saw Anne’s quick gaze take in the strength of George’s grip under my elbow, and the whiteness of my face. For a moment she turned her back and I knew she would have been happy to see me drop to the floor. But then she saw the gaze of our uncle upon us, and our mother’s bright demanding stare, and she gave up her place to me in the set of dancers, summoning her partner Francis Weston away, and George led me down the line toward the king and I looked up and smiled at His Majesty.
I danced that set, and then the next, and then the king himself came toward us and said to George: “I’ll take your place and dance with your sister, if she’s not too tired.”