He was watching me, he was always watching me for the moment when we could slip away together. One discreet tilt of his head, one secret smile and we were gone into the shadows for a kiss and a hidden touch and sometimes, when it was dark and when we could not resist each other, we would take our pleasure, hidden in the darkness by the river with the sound of faraway music to disguise my moan of pleasure.
I was a clandestine lover and it was that which made me alert for George. He too would take part in the first half-dozen dances and establish his presence at the center of things. Then he too would step back, back, back from the circle of light into the obscurity of the garden. Then I would see that Sir Francis was missing too and know that he had taken my brother off somewhere, perhaps to his room, perhaps to the stews of the City for some wild doings, perhaps gambling, or riding in the moonlight, or for some rough embracing. George might reappear in five minutes, or he might be gone all night. Anne, who thought he was roistering as he always had done, accused him of flirting with the maids around the court and George laughed and disclaimed as he always had done. Only I knew that a more powerful and more dangerous desire had my brother in its grasp.
In August Anne announced that she would retire for her confinement and when Henry came to visit her in the morning, after hearing Mass, he found that the rooms were in chaos with furniture being moved in and out, and all the ladies in a great toil of activity.
Anne sat on a chair among all the confusion and ordered what she wanted. When she saw Henry come in she inclined her head but did not rise to curtsy to him. He did not care, he was besotted with his pregnant queen, he dropped like a boy to kneel beside her, to put his hands on her great round belly and look up into her face.
“We need a christening gown for our son,” she said without preamble. “Does she have it?”
“She” meant only one thing in the royal vocabulary. “She” was always the queen that had disappeared, the queen that no one ever mentioned, the queen that everyone tried not to remember, sitting in that chair, preparing for her own confinement in that room, and forever turning to Henry with her sweet deferential smile.
“It’s her own,” he said. “Brought from Spain.”
“Was Mary christened in it?” Anne demanded, already knowing the answer.
Henry frowned at the effort of recovering a memory. “Oh yes, a great long white gown, richly embroidered. But it was Katherine’s own.”
“Does she have it still?”
“We can order a new gown,” Henry said pacifically. “You could draw it yourself, and the nuns could sew it for you.”
A toss of Anne’s head indicated that this would not do. “My baby is to have the royal gown,” she said. “I want him christened in the gown that all the princes have worn.”
“We don’t have a royal gown…” he said hesitantly.
“I’ll warrant!” she snapped. “Because she has it.”
Henry knew when he was beaten. He bent his head and kissed her hand, clenched on the arm of the chair. “Don’t distress yourself,” he urged her. “Not so near your time. I’ll send to her for it. I swear I will. Our little Edward Henry shall have everything you might want.”
She nodded, she found her sweet smile, she touched the nape of his neck with her fingertips as he bowed to her.
The midwife came to them and swept a curtsy. “Your room is ready now,” she said.
Anne turned to Henry. “You’ll visit me every day,” she said. It sounded more like an order than a request.
“Twice a day,” he promised. “The time will pass, sweetheart, and you must rest for the coming of our son.”
He kissed her hand again and left her, and I drew close as the two of us went to the threshold of her bedchamber. Her great bed had been moved in, and the walls hung with thick tapestries to exclude any noise or sunshine or fresh air. They had put rushes down on the floor with rosemary for scent, and lavender for relief. They had moved all the other furniture out of the room except for one chair and table for the midwife. Anne was expected to stay in bed for one whole month. They had lit a fire although it was midsummer and the room was stifling. They had lit candles so that she could read or sew, and they had put the cradle ready at the foot of the bed.
Anne recoiled on the threshold of the darkened stuffy room. “I can’t go in there, it’s like a prison.”
“It’s only for a month,” I said. “Perhaps less.”
“I’ll suffocate.”
“You’ll be fine. I had to do it.”
“But I’m the queen.”
“All the more reason.”
The midwife came up behind me and said: “Is it all to your liking, Your Majesty?”
Anne’s face was white. “It’s like a prison.”
The midwife laughed and ushered her into the room. “They all say that. But you’ll be glad of the rest.”
“Tell George I’ll want to see him later,” Anne said over her shoulder to me. “And tell him to bring someone entertaining. I’m not going to be all alone in here. I might as well be imprisoned in the Tower.”
“We’ll dine with you,” I promised. “If you rest now.”
With Anne withdrawn from court the king returned to his normal pattern of hunting every morning from six till ten and then coming in for his dinner. In the afternoon he would visit Anne and then there would be entertainments laid on for him in the evening.
“Who does he dance with?” Anne demanded, as sharp as ever though she lay hot and tired and heavy in the darkened room.
“No one in particular,” I said. Madge Shelton had taken his eye and the Seymour girl, Jane. Lady Margaret Steyne was peacocking about in half a dozen new gowns. But none of this would matter if Anne had a boy.
“And who hunts with him?”
“Just his gentlemen,” I lied. Sir John Seymour had bought his daughter a most handsome gray hunter. She had a dark blue gown to ride in and she looked well in the saddle.
Anne looked suspiciously at me. “You’re not chasing after him yourself, are you?” she asked nastily.
I shook my head. “I’ve no desire to alter my station in life,” I said honestly enough. Carefully, I kept my thoughts from William. If I let myself think of the set of his shoulders or the way he stretched when he was naked in the morning light, then I knew that my desire would show in my face. Anyone could read it. I was too much his woman.
“And you watch the king for me?” Anne insisted. “You do watch him, Mary?”
“He’s waiting for the birth of his son, like the rest of the court,” I said. “If you have a boy then nothing can touch you. You know that.”
She nodded and closed her eyes and leaned back on the pillows. “God, I wish it was over,” she said pettishly.
“Amen,” I said.
Without my sister’s keen eyes on me I was free to spend time with William. Madge Shelton was frequently missing from my bedroom and she and I had developed an informal arrangement of always knocking at the door, and turning away from it immediately if it was locked from the inside. Madge was only a young girl but she had grown up quickly at court. She knew that her chances of a good marriage depended on the careful balance of catching a man’s desire without letting a shadow fall on her own reputation. And it was a wilder harder-living court than the one I had come to as a girl.
George’s deceits worked as well. He and Sir Francis with William Brereton and Henry Norris were at a loose end without the queen in her court. They went hunting with Henry in the morning and sometimes they would be summoned to his council in the afternoon but mostly they were idle. They flirted with the queen’s ladies, they slipped up the river to the City, and they disappeared for unexplained nights. I caught him once in the early morning. I had been watching the sunshine on the river when a rowboat tied up to the palace landing stage and George paid off the boatman and came quietly up the garden path.
“George,” I said, stepping out from my seat in the roses.
He gave a start. “Mary!” At on
ce his thoughts went to Anne. “Is she all right?”
“She’s well. Where have you been?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “We went for a little entertainment,” he said. “Some friends of Henry Norris. We went dancing and dining, a little gambling.”
“Was Sir Francis there?”
He nodded.
“George—”
“Don’t reproach me!” he said quickly. “No one else knows. We keep it quiet enough.”
“If the king found out you would be banished,” I said flatly.
“He won’t find out,” he said. “I know you heard of it but that was a groom who was gossiping. He’s silenced. Dismissed. That’s the end of it.”
I took his hand and looked in his dark Boleyn eyes. “George, I fear for you.”
He laughed, his courtier’s brittle laugh. “Don’t,” he said. “I have nothing to fear. Nothing to fear, nothing to look for, and nowhere to go.”
Anne did not get her royal christening gown. They wrote to the queen with proposals for her separation from the king. They addressed her as Dowager Princess and she tore the parchment of the declaration with an angry pen-stroke when she crossed through the title. They threatened her that she would never see the Princess Mary her daughter again. They moved her to the most desolate of palaces: Buckden in Lincolnshire. Still she would not recant. Still she would not admit the possibility that she had not been the king’s lawful wife. In such an impasse, the christening gown seemed to matter very little and after she refused to part with it, saying that it was her own property brought from Spain, Henry did not insist.
I thought of her, in a cold house on the edge of the Fens. I thought of her, separated from her daughter as I was parted from my son by the ambition of the same woman. I thought of her unswerving determination to do right in the sight of God. And I missed her. She had been like a mother to me when I had first come to court and I had betrayed her as a daughter will betray her mother, and yet never stop loving her.
Autumn 1533
ANNE’S PAINS STARTED AT DAWN AND THE MIDWIFE CALLED ME straightaway into the birthing chamber. I had to half-fight my way through courtiers and lawyers and clerks and officers of the court in the presence chamber outside the room. Nearest the door were the ladies in waiting assembled to assist the queen in her confinement, in fact doing nothing but frightening each other with nightmare stories of difficult births. Princess Mary was among them, her pale face screwed up into her habitual scowl of determination. I thought Anne cruel to make Katherine’s daughter a witness of the birth of the child that would disinherit her. I gave her a little smile as I went past her and she gave me that curious, half-hearted curtsy which was now her trademark. She could trust nobody, she would trust nobody ever again.
Inside the room it was like a scene from hell. They had rigged up ropes on the bedposts and Anne was clinging onto them like a drowning woman. The sheets were already stained with her blood, and the midwives were brewing a caudle on the fire which was stoked high with logs. Anne was naked from the waist down. She was sweating and crying out with fear. Two other ladies in waiting were reciting their prayers in an irritating anxious drone and every now and again Anne would let out a shriek of renewed pain.
“She must rest,” one of the midwives said to me. “She’s fighting it.”
I stepped up to the bed and waited. “Anne, rest,” I said. “This is going to go on for hours.”
“It’s you, is it?” she said, throwing back her hair. “Thought you’d get up, did you?”
“I came as soon as I was called. Do you want me to do anything for you?”
“I want you to do this for me,” she said, her wit as sharp as ever.
I laughed. “Not I!”
She stretched a hand to me and when I held it, she clung on. “God help me, I am in terror,” she whispered.
“God will help you,” I said. “You’re having a Christian prince, aren’t you? You’re giving birth to a boy that is going to be the head of the church in England, aren’t you?”
“Don’t leave me,” she said. “I am ready to vomit with fear.”
“Oh you’ll vomit,” I said cheerfully. “It gets an awful lot worse than this before it is better.”
Anne was in labor for all of the day and then her pains grew faster and it was clear to us all that the baby was coming. She stopped fighting and went vague and dreamy, her body doing the work for her. I held her up and the midwife spread the cloth for the baby and then gave a shout of joy as the head broke out of Anne’s straining body, and then with a slither and a rush the whole baby was born. “God be praised,” the woman said.
She bent her head and sucked at the baby’s mouth and we heard a choking little cry. Both Anne and I strained to see.
“Is it the prince?” Anne gasped, her voice croaky with screaming. “He is to be Prince Edward Henry.”
“A girl,” the midwife said, determinedly cheerful.
I felt Anne’s full weight as she slumped with disappointment and I heard myself whisper: “Oh God, no.”
“A girl,” the midwife said again. “A strong healthy girl,” she repeated as if to reconcile us to our disappointment.
For a moment I thought Anne had fainted. She was as white as death itself. I lowered her back against the pillows and stroked the hair back from her sweating face. “A girl.”
“A live baby is the main thing,” I said, trying to fight my own sense of despair.
The midwife wrapped the baby in the cloth and patted her. Both Anne and I turned our heads at the wailing penetrating cry.
“A girl,” Anne said in horror. “A girl. What good is a girl to us?”
George said the same when I told him. Uncle Howard swore out loud and called me a useless jade and my sister a stupid whore when I took the news to him. The whole fortunes of the family had depended on this small accident of birth. If Anne had given birth to a boy we would have been the most powerful family in England with a stake in the throne forever. But she had a girl.
Henry, always the king, always unpredictable, did not complain. He took the baby on his lap and praised her blue eyes and her strong sturdy little body. He admired the little details of her hands, the dimples of her knuckles, the tiny perfection of her fingernails. He told Anne that next time they should have a boy, that he was happy to have another princess, and such a perfect little princess, in his household. He ordered that the letters which were to have gone out announcing the birth of a prince should have a double “s” added to them, to tell the King of France and the Emperor of Spain that the King of England had a new daughter. He gritted his teeth and tried not to think what they would say in the courts of Europe. They would laugh at all of England, for going through such an upheaval in order for the king to get a girl on a commoner. But I admired him, that evening, when he took my sister in his arms and kissed her hair and called her sweetheart. I understood him: he was too proud to let anyone know that he had been disappointed. I thought that he was a man of intense vanity, of dangerous whims, and despite all of that—or perhaps because all of that—a great king.
I got to my bedroom after thirty-six hours without sleep, and with the anger and despair of my father, my uncle, and my brother ringing in my ears, and found William there with a little meat pie on the fireside table and a pitcher of small ale.
“I thought you’d be tired and hungry,” he said by way of greeting.
I fell into his arms and buried my face into the comforting smell of his linen. “Oh William!”
“Trouble?”
“They are all so angry, and Anne is in despair, and no one has looked at the baby but the king and he held her for a few moments only. And it all seems so dreadful. Oh God, if she had only been a boy!”
He patted my back. “Hush, my love. They’ll all come round. And they’ll make another child. A son next time, perhaps.”
“Another year,” I said. “Another year before Anne is free of fear and before I can be free of her.”
He dr
ew me to the table, sat me before it and pressed the spoon into my hand. “Eat,” he said. “Everything will seem much better when you have eaten and slept.”
“Where’s Madge?” I asked fearfully, looking at the door.
“Roistering in the hall like a drunkard,” he said. “The court prepared a feast to welcome the prince and was going to eat it whatever happened. Madge won’t be back for hours, if she comes at all.”
I nodded and ate my dinner as he bid me. When I had finished he drew me onto the bed and kissed my ear and my neck and my eyelids very gently and very tenderly until I forgot all about Anne and the unwanted baby girl and turned in his arms and let him hold me. I fell asleep like that, fully dressed, lying on the covers of the bed, torn between sleep and desire. I fell asleep and I dreamed of him making love to me, even as he held me and stroked my face, all the night long.
As soon as Anne recovered from the birth she was engrossed in arranging for the care of the little Princess Elizabeth at Hatfield Palace, where a royal nursery was to be established under the charge of our aunt, Lady Anne Shelton, Madge’s discreet mother. The Princess Mary, who had been seen to smile behind her hand at Anne’s discomfiture in having a girl was to go too, far away from her father and her proper place at court.
“She can wait on Elizabeth,” Anne said carelessly. “She can be her maid in waiting.”
“Anne,” I said. “She’s a princess in her own right. She can’t serve your daughter, it’s not right.”
Anne gleamed at me. “Fool,” she said simply. “It is all part of the same thing. She must be seen to go where I bid her, she must serve my daughter, that way I know that I am queen indeed and Katherine is forgotten.”
“Can’t you rest?” I asked. “Surely you don’t have to be always plotting?”
She gave me a bitter thin smile. “You don’t think that Cromwell rests, do you? You don’t think that the Seymours rest, do you? You don’t think that the Spanish ambassador and his network of spies and that accursed woman are all resting, saying to themselves: ‘Well, she has married him and given birth to a useless girl so although we have everything to play for we’ll rest.’ Do you?”