They decided between the two of them that Anne should be returned to court. People were starting to wonder why she had gone away. My father wanted the French envoys to see her. My uncle stopped me on the stair on my way to the queen’s rooms to tell me that Anne would be returning.
“Why?” I asked, as close to rudeness as I dared. “Henry was speaking to me of his desire for a son only the other night. If she comes back she’ll spoil everything.”
“Did he speak of your son?” he asked me bluntly, and at my silence he shook his head. “No. You make no progress with the king, Mary. Anne was right. We move forward not at all.”
I turned my head and looked out of the window. I knew I looked sullen. “And where d’you think Anne will take you?” I burst out. “She won’t work for the good of the family, she won’t do as she is bid. She’ll go for her own profits and her own lands and her own titles.”
He nodded, stroking the side of his nose. “Aye, she’s a self-seeking woman. But he keeps asking for her, he’s hot for her in a way he never was for you.”
“He has two children by me!”
My uncle’s dark eyebrows shot up at my raised voice. At once I dropped my head again. “I am sorry. But what more can I do? What can Anne do that I have not done? I have loved him and bedded him and borne him two strong children. No woman could do more. Not even Anne, though she’s so precious to everyone.”
“Perhaps she can do more,” he said, ignoring my irrelevant spite. “If she were to conceive a child by him right now, he might marry her. He’s so desperate for her he might do that. He’s desperate for her, he’s desperate for a child, the two desires might come together.”
“And what about me?” I cried.
He shrugged. “You can go back to William,” he said as if it did not matter at all.
A few days later, Anne returned to court as discreetly as she had left and within the day was the center of everyone’s attention. I had my bedfellow and my companion again, and I found myself tying the laces of her dresses when we woke in the morning and combing her hair at night. She commanded my service just as once she had been forced to give me hers.
“Didn’t you fear I would have won him back?” I asked curiously as I was brushing her hair before we went to bed.
“You don’t matter,” she said confidently. “Not for a moment. This is my spring, this will be my summer. I will have him dancing at the end of my string. Nothing will set him free of my spell. It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what any woman does. He is besotted. He is mine for the taking.”
“Just for the spring and the summer?” I asked.
Anne looked thoughtful. “Oh, who can hold a man for long? He’s on the very crest of the wave of his desire, I can hold him there; but at the end of it, the wave has to break. No one stays in love forever.”
“If you want to marry him you’ll have to hold him for a lot longer than a couple of seasons. D’you think you can hold him for a year? For two?”
I could have laughed aloud to see the confidence drain from her face.
“By the time he gets free to wed, if he ever gets free to wed, he won’t be hot for you any more anyway. You’ll be on the wane, Anne. You’ll be half-forgotten. A woman who has had her best years, has reached her mid-twenties, and still unmarried.”
She thumped down in the bed and slapped the pillow. “Don’t you ill-wish me,” she said crossly. “My God, sometimes you sound like an Edenbridge crone. Anything could happen for me, I can make anything happen for me. It is you who’ll be on the wane, because it is you who is too lazy to make your own destiny. But I wake every day with an utter determination to have my own way. Anything could happen for me.”
By May the business with the French envoys was all but finished. Princess Mary was to marry either the French king or his second son as soon as she was a woman. They held a great tennis tournament to celebrate and Anne was made mistress of the order of the players and made great work of a chart listing all the men of the court with their names on little flags. The king found her poring over it with one little flag absentmindedly pressed to her heart.
“What have you there, Mistress Boleyn?”
“The order of the tennis tournament,” she said. “I have to match each gentleman fairly so that all can play and we are certain of a true winner.”
“I meant what have you there, in your hand?”
Anne started. “I forgot I was holding it,” she said quickly. “Just one of the names. I am placing the names in the order of play.”
“And who is the gentleman that you hold so close?”
She managed to blush. “I don’t know, I had not looked at the name.”
“May I?” He held out his hand.
She did not give him the little flag. “It means nothing. It was just the flag that was in my hand as I was puzzling. Let me put it where it should be on the board and we’ll consider the order of play together, Your Majesty.”
He was alert. “You seem ashamed, Mistress Boleyn.”
She flared up a little. “I am ashamed of nothing. I just don’t want to seem foolish.”
“Foolish?”
Anne turned her head. “Please let me put this name down and you can advise me on the order of play.”
He put out his hand. “I want to know the name on the flag.”
For an awful moment I thought that she was not play-acting with him. For an awful moment I thought he was about to discover that she was cheating so that our brother George had the best place in the draw. She was so completely confused and distressed by his pressing to know the name that even I thought that she had been caught out. The king was like one of his best pointer dogs on the scent. He knew that something was being hidden and he was racked by his curiosity and his desire.
“I command it,” he said quietly.
With tremendous reluctance Anne put the little flag into his outstretched hand, swept a curtsy and walked away from him. She did not look back; but once she was out of sight we all heard her heels patter and her dress swish as she ran away from the tennis court back up the stone-flagged path to the castle.
Henry opened his hand and looked at the name on the flag that she had been holding to her breast. It was his own name.
Anne’s tennis tournament took two days to complete and she was everywhere, laughing, ordering, umpiring and scoring. At the end there were four matches left to play: the king against our brother George, my husband William Carey against Francis Weston, Thomas Wyatt, newly returned from France, against William Brereton, and a match between a couple of nobodies which would take place while the rest of us were dining.
“You had best make sure that the king doesn’t play Thomas Wyatt,” I said to Anne in an undertone as our brother George and the king went onto the court together.
“Oh why?” she asked innocently.
“Because there’s too much riding on this. The king wants to win in front of the French envoys and Thomas Wyatt wants to win in front of you. The king won’t take kindly to being beaten in public by Thomas Wyatt.”
She shrugged. “He’s a courtier. He won’t forget the greater game.”
“The greater game?”
“Whether it is tennis or jousting or archery or flirtation the game is to keep the king happy,” she said. “That’s all we are here for, that’s all that matters. And we all know that.”
She leaned forward. Our brother George was in place, ready to serve, the king alert and ready. She raised her white handkerchief and dropped it. George served, it was a good one, it rattled on the roof of the court and dropped down just out of Henry’s reach. He lunged for it and got it back over the net. George, quick on his feet and twelve years younger than the king, smashed the ball past the older man and Henry raised his hand and conceded the point.
The next serve was an easy one for the king to reach and he did a smooth passing shot that George did not even attempt to chase. The play ebbed and flowed, both men running and hitting the ball as hard as
they could, apparently giving no quarter and allowing no favors. George was steadily and consistently losing but he did it so carefully that anyone watching would have thought the king the better player. Indeed, he probably was the better player in terms of skill and tactics. It was only that George could have outrun him twice over. It was only that George was lean and fit, a young man of twenty-four, while the king was a man with a thickening girth, a man heading toward the middle years of his life.
They were near the end of the first set when George sent up a high ball. Henry leaped to smash it past George and take the point but then he fell and crashed down on the court and let out a terrible cry.
All the ladies of the court screamed, Anne was on her feet at once, George jumped the net and was first at the king’s side.
“Oh God, what is it?” Anne called.
George’s face was white. “Get a physician,” he shouted. A page went flying up to the castle, Anne and I hurried to the gate of the court, tore it open and went in.
Henry was red-faced and cursing with the pain. He reached for my hand and clung to it. “Damnation. Mary, get rid of all these people.”
I turned to George. “Keep everyone out.”
I saw the quick embarrassed look Henry shot toward Anne and realized that the pain he was suffering was less than the injury to his pride at the thought of her seeing him on the ground with tears squeezing from under his eyelids.
“Go, Anne,” I said quietly.
She did not argue. She withdrew to the gate of the tennis court and waited, as the whole court waited, to hear what had struck the king down in the very moment of his triumphant shot.
“Where is the pain?” I asked him urgently. My terror was that he would point to his breast or to his belly and it would be something torn inside him, or his heart missing its beat. Something deep and irreparable.
“My foot,” he said, choking on the words. “Such a fool. I came down on the side of it. I think it’s broken.”
“Your foot?” The relief made me almost laugh out loud. “My God, Henry, I thought you were dead!”
He looked up at that and grinned through his scowl. “Dead of tennis? I have given up jousting to keep myself safe and you think that I might be dead of tennis?”
I was breathless with relief. “Dead of tennis! No! But I thought perhaps…it was so sudden, and you went down so fast…”
“And at the hand of your brother!” he finished, and then suddenly the three of us were howling with laughter, the king’s head cradled in my lap, George gripping his hands, and the king torn between the intense pain of his broken foot and the ludicrous thought that the Boleyns had attempted to assassinate him with tennis.
The French envoys were due to leave, their treaties signed, and we were to have a great masque and party to bid them farewell. It was to take place in the queen’s apartments, without her invitation, without even her desire. The master of the revels merely arrived and abruptly announced that the king had ordered that the masque should take place in her rooms. The queen smiled as if it was the very thing that she wanted and let him measure up for awnings and tapestries and scenery. The queen’s ladies were to wear gowns of gold or silver and to dance with the king and his companions who would enter disguised.
I thought how many times the queen had pretended not to recognize her husband when he came into her rooms disguised, how many times she had watched him dance with her ladies, how often he had led me out before her and that now she and I would watch him dance with Anne. Not a flicker of resentment crossed her face for even a moment. She thought that she would choose the dancers, as she had always done before, a little piece of patronage, one of the many ways to control the court. But the dancing master already had a list of the ladies who were to play the parts. They had been named by the king, and the queen was left with nothing to do, she was a cipher in her own rooms.
It took them all day to prepare for the masque, and the queen had nowhere to sit while they hammered the draperies into the wooden paneling. She retired to her privy chamber while the rest of us tried on our gowns and practiced our dance, too excited to care that we could hardly hear the beat of the music over the noise of the workmen. The queen went to bed early to get away from the noise and the disruption while the rest of us feasted late in the hall.
The next day the French envoys came to dine at noon in the great hall. The queen sat at Henry’s right hand but his eyes were on Anne. The trumpets sounded and the servers marched in like soldiers, all in step in their bright liveries, bringing dish after dish to the top table and then to the other tables in the hall. It was a feast of quite ludicrous proportions, every sort of beast had been killed and gutted and cooked to demonstrate the wealth of the king and the richness of his kingdom. The pinnacle of the feast was the dish of fowls with a peacock cooked and presented all in its feathers, a great towering piece of fancy. It was stuffed with a swan which had been stuffed with chicken which had been stuffed with a lark. The carver’s task was to get a perfect slice from every bird without disturbing the beauty of the dish. Henry took a taste of everything but I saw Anne refuse all that she was offered.
Henry beckoned the server with one crook of his finger and whispered in his ear. He sent Anne the heart of the dish, the lark. She looked up as if she were surprised—as if she had not been following every move that he had made—and she smiled at him and bowed her head in thanks. Then she tasted the meat. As she put a small slice in her smiling mouth, I saw him shudder with desire.
After dinner the queen and her ladies, Anne and I among them, retired from the great hall and hurried to our rooms to change. Anne and I helped each other lace into the tight stomachers of our cloth of gold gowns, and Anne complained as I pulled her laces tight.
“Too much lark,” I said unsympathetically.
“Did you see how he watches me?”
“Everyone saw.”
She pushed her French hood far back on her head so that her dark hair showed, and straightened the gold “B” that she always wore round her neck.
“What d’you see when my hood is set back like this?”
“Your smug face.”
“A face without a line on it. Hair that is glossy and dark without one thread of gray.” She stepped back from the mirror and admired the golden gown. “Dressed like a queen,” she said.
There was a knock on the door and Jane Parker put her head into the room. “Talking secrets?” she asked hungrily.
“No,” I said unhelpfully. “Just getting ready.”
She opened the door and slipped inside. She was wearing a silver gown, cut low to show her breasts, and then tugged down a bit lower still; and a silver hood. When she saw how Anne was wearing her hood she at once went to the mirror and pushed her own back a little. Anne winked at me behind her back.
“He does favor you above all others,” she said confidentially to Anne. “Anyone can see that he desires you.”
“Indeed.”
Jane turned to me. “Doesn’t it make you feel jealous? Isn’t it odd bedding a man who desires your sister?”
“No,” I said shortly.
Nothing would halt the woman. Her speculation was like the slime trail after a snail. “I would find it very odd. And then, when you come from his bed, you get into bed with Anne and the two of you are side by side and all but naked. He must wish he could come to your room and have both of you at once!”
I was stunned. “That’s filthy talk. His Majesty would be much offended.”
She gave a smile which would have been better in a bawdy house than in a lady’s room. “Of course, there’s only one man who comes in here to the two beautiful sisters, after their bed time, and that’s my husband. I know he visits most nights. For sure he’s never in my bed.”
“Good God, who can blame him?” Anne exclaimed roundly. “For I’d rather sleep with a worm than have you whispering in my ear all the night. Go, Jane Parker, and take your foul mouth and your worse mind to the necessary room where it belongs.
Mary and I are going to dance.”
Almost as soon as the French envoys were gone, as if he had been waiting for quietness and secrecy, Cardinal Wolsey created a hidden court of law and summoned witnesses, prosecutors, and defendants. He was judge, of course. That way it seemed to be Wolsey, only Wolsey, acting on principle and not on instruction. That way a divorce could be ordered by the Pope, and not requested by the king. Amazingly, Wolsey’s court remained a secret. No one except those ferried quietly downriver to Westminster knew of it. Not Mother, always alert for the family’s benefit, not Uncle Howard, the spymaster. Not I, warm from the king’s bed, not Anne, enfolded in his confidence. Most important, not even the queen knew of her court. For three days they had an innocent woman’s marriage on trial and she did not even know it.
For Wolsey’s secret court at Westminster was to try Henry himself for cohabiting unlawfully with the wife of his dead brother Arthur: a charge so grave and a court so preposterous that they must have been pinching themselves as they swore themselves in and watched their king walk, head penitently bowed, into the dock, accused of sin by his own Lord Chancellor. Henry confessed that he had married his brother’s wife on the basis of a mistaken papal dispensation. He said that at the time, and after, he had “grave doubts.” Wolsey unblinkingly ordered that the matter should be put before a papal legate—his unbiased self—and the king agreed, named a lawyer and withdrew from the proceedings. The court sat for three days and then summoned theologians to give evidence that it was unlawful to marry the wife of a dead brother. My uncle’s spy network finally picked up news of the secret court when he heard of an inquiry made to the Bishop of Lincoln. At once Anne, George and I were summoned before him to his rooms at Windsor.