“She’d be honored.”
I smiled radiantly. “I could dance all night if Your Majesty was my partner.”
George bowed and stepped back. I saw him take a fold of Anne’s dress in his fingers and draw her away to the wall of the room.
The king and I touched hands, turned toward each other, and started the dance. The steps drew us close and then led us apart, his eyes never left me.
Beneath the tight lacing of my stomacher my belly ached as if I were filled with poison. I could feel the sweat trickling down between my tightly strapped breasts. I kept smiling my bright mirthless smile. I thought if I could get Henry alone I might persuade him to let me see my children at Hever when he went hunting this summer. The thought of my baby son made my breasts prickle with pain as the milk tried to flow under the tight strapping. I smiled as if I were filled with joy. I looked across the circle of dancers at the father of my children and I smiled at him as if I could not wait to lie with him for his own sake, and not for what he could do for me and mine.
Anne supervised my washing that evening with a spiteful efficiency which caused her to slap me with a cold washing sheet, and complain of the bloodstained water.
“Good God, you disgust me,” she said. “However will he bear it?”
I wrapped myself in a sheet and combed my own hair before she could fly at me with the lice comb and rip the hairs from my head under the pretext of making me clean.
“Perhaps he won’t send for me,” I said. I was so tired from the dancing and from patiently standing for half an hour while Henry took his formal leave of the queen that I wanted to do nothing more than to tumble into bed.
There was a tap at the door, George’s knock. He put his head around the door. “Good,” he said, seeing me washed and half-naked. “He wants you. You can just put on a robe and come.”
“He’s a brave man then,” Anne said spitefully. “Her breasts still leak milk, she’s still bleeding, and at the smallest thing she bursts into tears.”
George giggled like a boy. “Bless you, Annamaria, you are the sweetest sister. I should think she wakes every day and thanks God she has a bedfellow like you to comfort and cheer her.”
Anne had the grace to look discomfited.
“And I have something for the bleeding,” he said. He pulled a small piece of wadding from his pocket. I looked at it with suspicion.
“What is it?”
“One of the whores told me about it. You push it up your cunny and it stops the bleeding for a while.”
I made a face. “Doesn’t it get in the way?”
“She says not. Do it, Marianne. You have to get into his bed tonight.”
“Look away then,” I said. George turned to the window and I went to the bed and struggled with unskillful fingers to do as he told me.
“Let me,” Anne said crossly. “God knows I do everything else for you.”
She thrust the stuff up inside me and then pushed again. I let out a hoarse gasp of pain and George half-turned. “No need to murder the girl,” he said mildly.
“It’s got to go up, hasn’t it?” Anne demanded, flushed and cross. “She’s got to be plugged, hasn’t she?”
George offered me a hand. I tumbled off the bed, wincing with pain. “Good God, Anne, if you ever leave court you could set up as a witch,” he said pleasantly. “You have all the gentleness already.”
She scowled at him.
“Why are you so sour?” he asked as I tied the gown around me and stepped into my shoes with the high scarlet heels.
“Nothing,” Anne said.
“Oho!” he said with sudden understanding. “I see it all, little Mistress Anne. They’ve told you to step back and leave him to Mary. You are to be nothing more than lady in waiting to the old queen while your sister mounts up to the throne.”
She scowled at him, her beauty completely erased by jealousy. “I am nineteen years of age,” she said bitterly. “Half the court thinks I’m the most beautiful woman in the world. All of them know that I am the wittiest and the most stylish. The king cannot take his eyes off me. Sir Thomas Wyatt has gone to France to escape me. But my sister, a year younger than me, is married and has two children by the king himself. When is it going to be my turn? When am I to be wed? Who is going to be the match for me?”
There was a little silence. George put his hand to her flushed cheek. “Oh Annamaria,” he said tenderly. “There couldn’t be a match for you. Not the King of France himself or the Emperor of Spain. You are a perfect piece, finished in every way. Be patient. When you are sister to the Queen of England we could look anywhere. Better to secure Mary where she might be well-placed to serve you, than throw yourself away on some paltry duke.”
She gave an unwilling chuckle at that and George bent his dark head and brushed her cheek with his lips. “You are,” he assured her. “You are indeed utterly perfect. We all of us adore you. Keep it up, for God’s sake. If anyone ever knows what you are truly like in private we’ll all be lost.”
She drew back and would have slapped him but he jerked his head out of the way and laughed at her and snapped his fingers to me. “Come on, little queen in the making!” he said. “All ready? All prepared?” He turned to Anne. “He can get his cock up, yes? You’ve not packed her too tight, like a ship’s keel?”
“Of course,” she said crossly. “But I should think it’ll hurt like the devil.”
“Well, we won’t worry about that, will we?” George smiled at her. “After all, this is our meal ticket and our fortune that we are sending to his bed, hardly a girl at all. Come, child! You have work to do for us Boleyns, and we are counting on you!”
He kept up a flow of chatter as we went through the great hall and up the shadowy stairs to the king’s chambers. When we entered Cardinal Wolsey was sitting with Henry and George drew me to a window seat and brought me a glass of wine while we waited for the king and his most trusted counselor to finish their low-voiced talk.
“Probably counting the scraps from the kitchen,” George whispered to me mischievously.
I smiled. The cardinal’s attempts to make the king’s court run with less waste was a source of continual amusement to those courtiers, my family among them, whose comfort and profit came from exploiting its folly and extravagance.
Behind us, the cardinal bowed and nodded to his page to gather up his papers. He nodded to George and to me as George led me forward to sit in his chair by the fireside.
“I shall bid you goodnight, Your Majesty, madam, sir,” he said and left the room.
“Will you take a glass of wine with us, George?” the king asked.
I shot a swift glance of appeal to my brother.
“I thank Your Majesty,” George said and poured wine for the king, for me, and for himself. “You are working late, sire?”
Henry waved a dismissive hand. “You know how the cardinal is,” he said. “Unceasing in his labors.”
“Deadly dull,” George suggested impertinently.
The king chuckled disloyally. “Deadly dull,” he agreed.
He sent George away by eleven o’clock and we were in bed by midnight. He caressed me gently and praised the plumpness of my breasts and the roundness of my belly, and I stored his words up so that when my mother next reproached me for being fat and dull I could claim that the king liked me this way. But it was no joy to me. Somehow, when they had taken my baby away they had stolen away a part of me too. I could not love this man, knowing that he would not listen to me, knowing that I was not allowed even to show him my sadness. He was the father of my children and yet he would have no interest in them until they were old enough for him to use as counters in the game of inheritance. He had been my lover for years and yet it had been my task to make sure that he never knew me. As he lay on me, and moved inside me, I felt as lonely as if I were the ship which bore my name, out all alone at sea.
Henry fell asleep almost as soon as he had done, breathing heavily, half-sprawled across me with his beard hot ag
ainst my neck, his sour breath in my face. I could have screamed at the weight and the smell of him but I lay very still. I was a Boleyn. I was not some slut of a kitchen maid who could not bear a little discomfort. I lay still and thought of the moon shining on the moat of Hever Castle and wished myself in my own little room in the comfort of my bed. I took care not to think of my children: little Catherine in her bed at Hever, or Henry in his crib at Windsor. I could not risk tears when I was in the king’s bed. I must be ready to turn to him with a smile whenever he might wake.
To my surprise he stirred at about two in the morning. “Light a candle,” he said. “I can’t sleep.”
I rose from the bed and felt myself ache in every bone of my body from the discomfort of lying unmoving under his weight. I stirred up the logs of the fire and then lit a candle from the flame. Henry sat up and pulled the covers around his naked shoulders. I put on my robe and sat by the fire and waited to know what his pleasure might be.
I noted with dread that he did not look happy. “What is the matter, my lord?”
“Why d’you think the queen could not give me a son?”
I was so surprised at this turn of thought that I could not answer quickly and smoothly, like a courtier. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, sire. It’s too late for her now.”
“I know that,” he said impatiently. “But why didn’t it happen before? When I married her I was a young man of eighteen and she was twenty-three. She was beautiful, beautiful, I can’t tell you. And I was the handsomest prince in Europe.”
“You still are,” I said swiftly.
He gave me a little complacent smile. “Not Francis?”
I waved away the French king. “Nothing compared with you.”
“I was virile,” he said. “And potent. Everyone knows that. And she took with child straightaway. D’you know how soon after the wedding she felt her baby quicken?”
I shook my head.
“Four months!” he said. “Think of it. I had her in foal in the first month of marriage. How is that for potency?”
I waited.
“Stillborn,” he said. “Only a girl. Stillborn in January.”
I looked away from his discontented face to the flames of the fire.
“She took again,” he said. “This time a boy. Prince Henry. We had him christened, we had a tournament in his honor. I’ve never been happier in my life. Prince Henry, named for me and for my father. My son. My heir. Born the first of January. He was dead by March.”
I waited, chilled at the thought of my Henry, taken away from me, who too might be dead in three months. The king was far away from me, back in the past when he had been a youth not much older than I was now.
“Another baby on the way before I went to war against the French,” he said. “Miscarried in October. An autumn loss. It took the shine off the victory against the French. It took the shine off her. Two years after that, in the spring: another baby born dead, another boy. Another baby who would have been Prince Henry if he had lived. But he didn’t live. None of them lived.”
“You had the Princess Mary,” I reminded him in a half-whisper.
“She came next,” he said. “And I was sure that we had broken the pattern. I thought—God knows what I hoped for—but I had a thought that there had been some ill luck, or some illness, or some such thing that had worked itself out. That once she could bear one baby who lived then others would follow. But it took two years for her even to conceive after Mary. And then it was a baby girl—and born dead.”
I took a breath, I had been holding my breath listening to this familiar story. The terrible listing of the babies’ deaths by their father was as painful as watching his wife on her prie dieu naming the lost ones over her rosary.
“But I knew,” Henry said, heaving himself off his pillows and turning to me, his face no longer filled with sorrow but flushing with anger, “I knew that I was potent and fertile. Bessie Blount had my boy while the queen was laboring over the last dead baby. Bessie had a boy from me while all I had from the queen were little corpses. Why should that be? Why should that be?”
I shook my head. “How should I know, sire? It’s the will of God.”
“Yes,” he said with satisfaction. “Exactly so. You are right, Mary. That is what it is. It has to be.”
“God could not wish such a thing on you,” I said, choosing my words with care, studying his profile in the darkness, longing for Anne’s advice. “Of all the princes in Christendom you must be his favorite.”
He turned to look at me, his blue eyes robbed of their color in the darkness. “So what could be wrong?” he prompted me.
I found I was gaping at him, my mouth half-open like an idiot dawdling on a village stile, trying to think of what he might want me to say.
“The queen?”
He nodded. “My marriage to her was cursed,” he said simply. “It must have been so. Cursed from the beginning.”
I bit back my instant denial.
“She was my brother’s wife,” he said. “I should never have married her. I was advised against it, but I was young and headstrong and I believed her when she swore that he had never had her.”
I was on the brink of telling him that the queen was incapable of a lie. But I thought of us Boleyns and our ambitions, and I held my peace.
“I should never have married her,” he said. He repeated it once, twice, and then his face crumpled like a tearful boy and he put his arms out to me and I hurried to the bedside to hold him. “Oh God, Mary, see how I am punished? Our two children, and one of them a boy, and Bessie’s Henry born out of wedlock; but no son to follow behind me on the throne unless he has the courage and the skill to fight his way through. Or else the Princess Mary takes it and holds it and England has to bear whatever husband I can get for her. Oh God! See how I am punished for the Spanish woman’s sin! See how betrayed I am! And by her!”
I felt his tears wet upon my neck and I held him close to me and rocked him as if he had been my baby. “You still have time, Henry,” I whispered. “You’re a young man. And potent and virile. If the queen should release you then you can still have an heir.”
He was inconsolable. He sobbed like a child and I rocked him, no longer trying to assure him of anything but just to caress him and pet him and whisper, “There. There. There,” until his storm of tears blew out and he fell asleep, still in my arms, with his eyelashes dark with the wetness of his tears and his rosebud mouth downturned.
Again I did not sleep. His head rested heavily in my lap, my arms supported him around his shoulders, I spent the night willing myself not to move. This time my mind was busy. For the first time I had heard of a threat to the queen, from lips other than those of my family. This was the word of the king; and that was far more serious for the queen than anything that had gone before.
Henry stirred before dawn and pulled me down into the bed with him. He had me quickly, without even opening his eyes and dozed off to sleep again and then woke as the groom of the bedchamber came in with the ewers of hot water for him to wash, and the pageboy came to stir the fire. I drew the curtains of the bed around the two of us and put on my robe and stepped into my high-heeled shoes.
“Will you hunt with me today?” Henry asked.
I straightened my back which was stiff from holding his weight all night long, and smiled as if I were not weary through and through. “Oh yes!” I said delightedly.
He nodded. “After Mass,” he said, dismissing me.
I went out. George was waiting for me in the anteroom, faithful as ever, swinging a gilt pomander stuffed with herbs and sniffing at it. He took a second look at my face as I came from the king’s room.
“Trouble?” he asked.
“Not for us.”
“Oh good. Who for?” he asked cheerfully, drawing my arm through his and strolling by my side through the room and then down the stairs to the great hall.
“Will you keep it secret?”
He made an uncertain face. “Just tell me
and let me be the judge.”
“D’you think I am an utter fool?” I asked irritably.
He gave me his most engaging smile. “Sometimes,” he said. “Now tell me, what is the secret?”
“It’s Henry,” I said. “He wept last night for being accursed by God in not having sons.”
George stopped his stride. “Accursed? Did he say accursed?”
I nodded. “He thinks that God will not give him sons because he married his brother’s wife.”
A look of pure delight illuminated my brother’s face. “Come,” he said. “Come at once.”
He drew me down the second stairs to the old part of the palace.
“I’m not dressed.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re going to Uncle Howard.”
“Why?”
“Because the king has finally got to where we want him to be. At last. At last.”
“We want him to think that he’s accursed?”
“Good God, yes.”
I stopped and would have pulled my hand from the crook of his elbow but he held me tight and pulled me onward. “Why?”
“You are a fool as I thought,” he said simply, and hammered on my uncle’s door.
It swung open. “This had better be important,” my uncle said with threatening courtesy before the door revealed us. “Come in.”
George thrust me in and closed the door behind us.
My uncle was seated before the little fire in his privy chamber, a pot of ale beside him, a sheaf of papers before him, wearing his fur-lined robe. No one else was stirring in his household. George took a quick glance around the room. “Is it safe to speak?”
My uncle nodded and waited.
“I’ve just brought her from the king’s bed,” he said. “The king told her that he is childless because of the will of God. He’s calling himself accursed.”
My uncle’s sharp gaze switched to my face. “He said that? He said accursed?”
I hesitated. Henry had wept in my arms, had held me as if I were the only woman in the world who could pity his pain. Something of the sense of betrayal must have shown in my face because my uncle laughed shortly, kicked a log into a spurt of flame on the fire, and gestured to George to seat me on a stool at the fireside. “Tell me,” he said, with quiet menace. “If you want to see your babies at Hever this summer. Tell me, if you want to see your son before he is breeched.”