“My son,” she stressed.
I had to swallow back my rage, I had to hold back my desire to push her out of the damned window and let her break her selfish neck on the stone flags of the terrace below. I took a breath and then I had myself under control. “I know it,” I said steadily. “And now I am going to him.”
I went to say goodbye to the queen. She was alone in her silent rooms, stitching at the huge altar cloth. I hesitated in the doorway. “Your Majesty, I am come to bid you farewell, I am going to my children for the summer.”
She looked up. We were both aware that I no longer needed to ask for her permission to be absent from court.
“You are fortunate to see so much of them,” she said.
“Yes.” I knew she was thinking of the Princess Mary, who had been kept from her since last Christmas.
“But your sister has taken your son,” she remarked.
I nodded. I did not trust myself to speak.
“Mistress Anne plays a strong hand. She wants my husband and your son as well. She wants a full suit.”
I did not dare even look up, I feared that she would see the deep resentment in my eyes.
“I shall be glad to go away this summer,” I said quietly. “It is good of Your Majesty to spare me.”
Queen Katherine showed me a small flash of a smile. “I am so well served,” she said ironically. “I shall hardly miss you in the crowds that gather around me.”
I stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say in the silent rooms which I had once known so happy and so busy. “I hope to serve Your Majesty again when I come back to court in September,” I said carefully.
She put her needle to one side and looked at me. “Of course you will serve me. I shall be here. There is no doubt of that.”
“No,” I agreed, traitorous to my fingertips.
“You have never been anything other than courteous and a good servant to me,” she said. “Even when you were young and very foolish you were a good girl, Mary.”
I felt myself swallow my guilt. “I wish I had been able to do more,” I said, very low. “And there were times when I was sorry that I had to serve others, and not Your Majesty.”
“Oh, you mean Felipez,” she said easily. “Dear Mary, I knew you would tell your uncle or your father, or the king. I made sure that you saw the note and knew who was to be the messenger. I wanted them to watch the wrong port. I wanted them to think they had caught him. He got the message to my nephew. I chose you as my Judas. I knew you would betray me.”
I flushed a deep mortified scarlet. “I cannot ask you to forgive me,” I whispered.
The queen shrugged. “Half of the ladies in waiting report to the cardinal or to the king or to your sister every day,” she said. “I have learned to trust no one. For the rest of my life I will know that I can trust no one. I shall die a woman who has been disappointed in my friends. But I am not disappointed in my husband. He is ill advised at the moment, he is dazzled at the moment. But he will come to his senses. He knows that I am his wife. He knows that he can have no other wife but me. He will come back to me.”
I rose up. “Your Majesty, I am afraid that he never will. He has given his word to my sister.”
“It is not his to give away,” she said simply. “He is a married man. He cannot promise anything to another woman. His word is my word. He is married to me.”
There was nothing more I could say. “God bless Your Majesty.”
She smiled a little sadly, as if she knew as well as I did that this was goodbye. She would not be at court when I returned. She raised her hand in blessing over my head as I curtsied to her. “God grant you a long life and much joy of your children,” she said.
Hever was warm in the sunshine and Catherine had learned to write all of our names, to spell out her little book, and to sing a song in French. Henry, determinedly ignorant, would not even rid himself of the little lisp which made him say “w” for “r.” I should have corrected him more severely but I found him too enchanting. He called himself “Henwy” and he called me his “deawest” and it would have been a mother with a heart of stone who could have told him he was speaking wrongly. Nor did I tell him that I was his mother only by grace; in law he was Anne’s son. I could not bring myself to tell him that he had been stolen from me and I had been forced to let him go.
George stayed with us in the country for two weeks, as relieved as I was to be away from the court which was waiting, like the hounds in a ring around a wounded doe, for the moment that the queen could be dragged down. Neither of us wanted to be there the moment that the cardinals’ court ruled against the innocent queen and sent her in disgrace from the country that she had called her home. And then George received a letter from our father.
George,
It has gone awry. Campeggio announced today that he can take no decision without the Pope. The court is adjourned, Henry is black with rage and your sister beside herself.
We are all to leave on progress at once and the queen is to be left behind in disgrace.
You and Mary must come and be with Anne, no one but you can manage her temper.
Boleyn.
“I shan’t go,” I said simply.
We were sitting together in the great hall after dinner. Grandmother Boleyn had gone to bed, the children were fast asleep in their own little beds after a day of running and hiding and playing catch.
“I’ll have to,” George said.
“They said I could spend the summer with my children. They promised me that.”
“If Anne needs you—”
“Anne always needs me, she always needs you. She always needs all of us. She is trying to do something impossible—push a good woman out of marriage, push a queen off her throne. Of course she needs an army. You always need an army for a treasonous insurrection.”
George glanced to see that the doors to the hall were shut. “Careful.”
I shrugged. “This is Hever. This is why I come to Hever. So that I can speak. Tell them that I was sick. Tell them I might have the sweat. Tell them I said I would come as soon as I am well again.”
“This is our future.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “We’ve lost. Everyone knows it but us. Katherine will keep the king, as in very justice she should. Anne will become his mistress. We’ll never make it to the throne of England. Not in this generation. You’ll have to hope that Jane Parker gives you a pretty girl. And you can throw her into that den of wolves and see who snaps her up.”
He laughed shortly at that. “I’ll leave tomorrow. We cannot all surrender.”
“We’ve lost,” I said flatly. “No shame in surrender when you are completely and utterly defeated.”
Dear Mary,
George tells me that you do not come to court because you think my cause is lost. Be very careful to whom you say this. Cardinal Wolsey will lose his house, his lands and his fortune, he will be displaced from the Lord Chancellorship, he will be a ruined man because he failed in my business. So do not you forget that you too are to work at my business, and I will not tolerate a servant with half a heart.
I have the king under my thumb and dancing to my bidding. I am not going to be defeated by two old men and their lack of courage. You speak too soon when you speak of my defeat. I have staked my life on becoming Queen of England. I have said that I shall do it, and I will do it.
Anne
Come to Greenwich in the autumn without fail.
Autumn 1529
EVERYTHING THAT ANNE HAD THREATENED AGAINST WOLSEY came true, and it was our Uncle Howard with the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s dear friend and brother-in-law, who had the pleasure of taking the Great Seal of England off the disgraced cardinal. They would have the pickings of his enormous fortune too.
“I said I would bring him down,” Anne remarked smugly to me. We were reading in the window seat of her presence chamber of her new London house: Durham House. By standing at the window and craning her head Anne could just see York Place where the
cardinal had once reigned supreme and where she had courted Henry Percy.
There was a tap at the door. Anne looked at me to answer for her. “Come in!” I called.
It was one of the king’s pages, a handsome young man of about twenty. I smiled at him, his eyes danced at the attention. “Sir Harold?” I asked politely.
“The king begs his sweet mistress to accept this gift,” the youth said and dropped to one knee before Anne, holding out a small box.
She took it from him and opened it. She gave a little satisfied purr at the contents.
“What?” I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity.
“Pearls,” she said shortly. She turned to the page. “Tell the king that I am honored by his gift,” she said. “And that I will wear them at dinner tonight to thank him myself. Tell him,” she smiled as if at some private joke, “that he will find he has a kind mistress and not a cruel one.”
The young man nodded solemnly, got to his feet, made a deep bow to Anne and a flirtatious bob to me, and took himself out of the room. Anne closed the box and tossed it across to me. I looked at the pearls, they were magnificent, set on a chain of gold.
“What did your message mean?” I asked. “That you will be kind and not cruel?”
“I can’t give myself to him,” she said, as prompt as any huckster who knows the value to a penny. “But we had words this morning because he wanted to take me into his privy chamber after Mass and I would not go.”
“What did you say?”
“I lost my temper,” she confessed. “I swore that he wanted to treat me as a whore and dishonor me and dishonor himself and destroy any chance we had of a proper decision from Rome. If anyone thinks that I am his whore then I will never supplant Katherine. I’d be no better than you.”
“You lost your temper?” I asked, going at once to the worst part of this. “What did he do?”
“Fell back,” Anne said ruefully. “Shot out of the room like a cat scalded by a falling pan. But see what comes of it? He cannot bear me to be displeased with him. I have him dancing like a boy for me.”
“At the moment,” I said warningly.
“Oh, tonight I shall be kind as I promised. I shall dress and sing and dance only for him.”
“And after dinner?”
“I let him touch me,” she said unwillingly. “I let him stroke my breasts and I let him put his hand up my skirt. But I never take off my gown for him. I really don’t dare.”
“D’you pleasure him?”
“Yes,” she said. “He insists on it and I can’t see how to avoid it. But sometimes—” She rose from the window seat and paced to the center of the room. “When he has stripped off his hose he pushes it into my hand and I hate him for it. It feels like an insult to me, to use me like this and then…” She broke off, speechless with temper. “Then he reaches his pleasure and he spouts like a stupid whale, such a mess and wetness and I think…” She slammed her fist into her palm. “I think God, oh God—I need a baby and there is all this going to waste! Going to waste in my hand when it should be in my belly! For God’s sake! Apart from it being a sin, it’s such madness!”
“There’s always more,” I said practically.
The look she turned on me was haunted. “There’s not always more of me,” she said. “He’s mad to touch me now but he’s been waiting three years. What if we have to wait another three years? How am I to keep my looks? How am I to stay fertile? He might well be lusty till he is sixty, but what about me?”
“Does he not think badly of you?” I asked. “These are whore’s tricks you are playing with him.”
Anne shook her head. “I have to do something to keep him hot for my touch. I have to keep him coming forward and hold him off, all at the same time.”
“There are other things you can do,” I volunteered.
“Tell me.”
“You can let him watch you.”
“Let him watch me do what?”
“Let him watch you while you touch yourself. He loves that. It makes him almost weep with lust.”
She looked intensely uncomfortable. “For shame.”
I laughed shortly. “You let him watch you undress, one thing then another, very slowly. Last of all you lift your shift and put your fingers to your cunny and open it up to show him.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it…”
“And you can take him in your mouth.” I hid my amusement at her shrinking.
“What?” She looked at me with unveiled disgust.
“You can kneel before him and take it in your mouth. He loves that too.”
“You’ve done that with him?” she demanded, her nose wrinkled.
I looked her straight in the eye. “I was his whore,” I said. “And our brother has his stewardships and our father is a wealthy man because of it. When he lay on his back I would lie on him and kiss him down from his mouth to his parts and then lick his parts like a cat lapping at milk. Then I would take him in my mouth and suck on it.”
Anne’s face was a picture of curiosity and revulsion. “And did he like that?”
“Yes,” I said, brutally frank. “He adored it; it gave him as great a pleasure as anything else. And you can look as if you cannot bear the thought of it, you can set yourself up as high as you like; but if you have to hold him with whore’s tricks then you had better learn some new whore’s tricks and do them well.”
For a moment I thought that she would flare up, but she went quiet and nodded her head.
“I’m sure that the queen never did such a thing,” she said with deep resentment.
“No,” I said, exercising my constant resentment for a brief moment. “But she was his beloved wife that he married for love; and you and I are just whores.”
The tricks Anne learned to play with the king soothed his temper, but made her more irritable than ever. I opened the door to her chamber one day and I heard her voice raised in a breaking storm.
Henry was facing the door as I came in, and the look that he shot me was almost pleading. I stared aghast as Anne railed at him. She had her back to me, she did not even hear the door click, she was in such a rage as to be blind and deaf except to her own loud words.
“And then to find that she, she! is still sewing your shirts, and she mocks me with this, she took them out in front of me and asked me to thread her needle. Asked me before all the ladies to thread the needle as if I were some serving woman.”
“I never asked her…”
“Oh? What happens? Does she go to your rooms and steal your shirts away in the night? Does the groom of the bedchamber filch them and pass them on to her? Do you sleepwalk and carry them to her by accident?”
“Anne, she is my wife. She has sewed my shirts for twenty years. I had no idea that you would object. But I will tell her that I don’t want her to do them any more.”
“You had no idea that I would object? Why don’t you go back to her bed and see if I object to that! I sew as well as she does, a good deal better actually, since I am not so old and shortsighted that someone else has to thread my needle for me. But you do not bring your shirts to me. You snub me…” Her voice quavered. “Before the whole court you snub me by taking your shirts to her.” She grew stronger with indignation. “You might as well say to the world: this is my wife and the woman I trust, and this is my mistress who is for the night and for play.”
“Before God…” the king started.
“Before God, you have hurt me with this, Henry!”
At the quaver in her voice he was quite unmanned. He opened his arms to her but she shook her head. “No, no, I won’t run to you and have you kiss my tears away and make me tell you that it doesn’t matter. It does matter, it matters more than anything.”
She put her hand to her eyes and walked past him, she opened the door to her privy chamber and went in without even glancing at him. In the silence that followed we heard her close the door and turn the key in the lock.
The king and I looked at each o
ther.
He looked stunned. “Before God, I never meant to hurt her.”
“About some shirts?”
“The queen still sews my shirts for me. Anne didn’t know. She has taken it badly.”
“Oh,” I said.
Henry shook his head. “I shall tell the queen she shall no longer sew them for me.”
“I think that would be wise,” I said gently.
“And when she comes out, will you tell her that I was much grieved to have caused her so much pain? And tell her that the offense will never be repeated?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell her.”
“I shall send for a goldsmith and have him make her something pretty,” he said, warming to the thought. “And when she is happy again she will forget that this quarrel ever took place.”
“She will be happy by the time she has rested,” I said hopefully. “Of course it’s hard for her, waiting to be married to you. She loves you so very much.”
For a moment he looked like the boy who had been in love with Katherine. “Yes, that’s why she calls up such a storm. Because she loves me so much.”
“Of course,” I reassured him. The last thing I wanted was for Henry to see how disproportionate Anne’s anger was to the facts.
He looked tender again. “I know. I have to be patient with her. And she’s very young, and she knows almost nothing of the world.”
I kept my mouth shut, thinking of the young girl I had been when my family had handed me over to him, and how I had never been allowed a whispered protest, let alone a temper tantrum.
“I’ll get her some rubies,” he said. “A virtuous woman, rubies, you know.”
“She’ll like that,” I said with certainty.
Henry gave her rubies, and she rewarded him with more than a smile. She came back to her room very late one night with her gown all disheveled and her hood in her hand. I had been asleep in bed, I never waited up for her as she used to do for me. She pulled the covers off me to make me wake up and unlace her.