Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (57 page)

‘Nothing,’ said Henry, sulkily.

‘It is such a lovely afternoon, let us go for a walk,’ I say pleasantly to my ladies. ‘Lady Margaret will accompany me.’

We go outside, my cape is brought and put over my shoulders and my gloves. The path down to the river is wet and slippery and Lady Margaret takes my arm and we go down the steps together. The primroses are thick as churned butter in the hedgerows and the sun is out. There are white swans on the river but when the barges and wherries go by the birds drift out of the way as if by magic. I breathe deeply, it
is so good to be out of that small room and to feel the sun on my face again that I hardly want to open the subject of Lady Anne.

‘You must know what took place?’ I say to her shortly.

‘I know some gossip,’ she says levelly. ‘Nothing for certain.’

‘What has angered the king so much?’ I ask. ‘He is upset about my confinement, he is angry with me. What is troubling him? Surely not the Stafford girl’s flirtation with Compton?’

Lady Margaret’s face is grave. ‘The king is very attached to William Compton,’ she said. ‘He would not have him insulted.’

‘It sounds as if all the insult is the other way,’ I say. ‘It is Lady Anne and her husband who are dishonoured. I would have thought the king would have been angry with William. Lady Anne is not a girl to tumble behind a wall. There is her family to consider and her husband’s family. Surely the king should have told Compton to behave himself?’

Lady Margaret shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘None of the girls will even talk to me. They are as silent as if it were a grave matter.’

‘But why, if it was nothing more than a foolish affair? Youth calls to youth in springtime?’

She shakes her head. ‘Truly, I don’t know. You would think so. But if it is a flirtation, why would the duke be so very offended? Why quarrel with the king? Why would the girls not be laughing at Anne for getting caught?’

‘And another thing…’ I say.

She waits.

‘Why should the king pay for Compton’s courtship? The fee for the singers is in the court accounts.’

She frowned. ‘Why would he encourage it? The king must have known that the duke would be greatly offended.’

‘And Compton remains in high favour?’

‘They are inseparable.’

I speak the thought that is sitting cold in my heart. ‘So do you think that Compton is the shield and the love affair is between the king, my husband, and Lady Anne?’

Lady Margaret’s grave face tells me that my guess is her own fear. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, honest as ever. ‘As I say, the girls tell me nothing, and I have not asked anyone that question.’

‘Because you think you will not like the answer?’

She nods. Slowly, I turn, and we walk back along the river in silence.

Katherine and Henry led the company into dinner in the grand hall and sat side by side under the gold canopy of state as they always did. There was a band of special singers that had come to England from the French court and they sang without instruments, very true to the note with a dozen different parts. It was complicated and beautiful and Henry was entranced by the music. When the singers paused, he applauded and asked them to repeat the song. They smiled at his enthusiasm, and sang again. He asked for it once more, and then sang the tenor line back to them: note perfect.

It was their turn to applaud him and they invited him to sing with them the part that he had learned so rapidly. Katherine, on her throne, leaned forwards and smiled as her handsome young husband sang in his clear young voice, and the ladies of the court clapped in appreciation.

When the musicians struck up and the court danced, Katherine came down from the raised platform of the high table and danced with Henry, her face bright with happiness and her smile warm. Henry, encouraged by her, danced like an Italian, with fast, dainty footwork and high leaps. Katherine clapped her hands in delight and called for another dance as if she had never had a moment’s worry in her life. One of her ladies leaned towards the courtier who had taken the bet that Katherine would find out. ‘I think I shall keep my earrings,’ she said. ‘He has fooled her. He has played her for a fool, and now he is fair game to any one of us. She has lost her hold on him.’

I wait till we are alone, and then I wait until he beds me with his eager joy, and then I slip from the bed and bring him a cup of small ale.

‘So tell me the truth, Henry,’ I say to him simply. ‘What is the truth of the quarrel between you and the Duke of Buckingham, and what were your dealings with his sister?’

His swift sideways glance tells me more than any words. He is about to lie to me. I hear the words he says: a story about a disguising and all of them in masks and the ladies dancing with them and Compton and Anne dancing together, and I know that he is lying.

It is an experience more painful than I thought I could have with him. We have been married for nearly a year, a year next month, and always he has looked at me directly, with all his youth and honesty in his gaze. I have never heard anything but truth in his voice: boastful-ness, certainly, the arrogance of a young man, but never this uncertain deceitful quaver. He is lying to me, and I would almost rather have a bare-faced confession of infidelity than to see him look at me, blue-eyed and sweet as a boy, with a parcel of lies in his mouth.

I stop him, I truly cannot bear to hear it. ‘Enough,’ I say. ‘I know enough at least to realise that this is not true. She was your lover, wasn’t she? And Compton was your friend and shield?’

His face is aghast. ‘Katherine…’

‘Just tell me the truth.’

His mouth is trembling. He cannot bear to admit what he has done. ‘I didn’t mean to…’

‘I know that you did not,’ I say. ‘I am sure you were sorely tempted.’

‘You were away for so long…’

‘I know.’

A dreadful silence falls. I had thought that he would lie to me and I would track him down and then confront him with his lies and with
his adultery and I would be a warrior queen in my righteous anger. But this is sadness and a taste of defeat. If Henry cannot remain faithful when I am in confinement with our child, our dearly needed child, then how shall he be faithful till death? How shall he obey his vow to forsake all others when he can be distracted so easily? What am I to do, what can any woman do, when her husband is such a fool as to desire a woman for a moment, rather than the woman he is pledged to for eternity?

‘Dear husband, this is very wrong,’ I say sadly.

‘It was because I had such doubts. I thought for a moment that we were not married,’ he confesses.

‘You forgot we were married?’ I ask incredulously.

‘No!’ His head comes up, his blue eyes are filled with unshed tears. His face shines with contrition. ‘I thought that since our marriage was not valid, I need not abide by it.’

I am quite amazed by him. ‘Our marriage? Why would it not be valid?’

He shakes his head. He is too ashamed to speak. I press him. ‘Why not?’

He kneels beside my bed and hides his face in the sheets. ‘I liked her and I desired her and she said some things which made me feel…’

‘Feel what?’

‘Made me think…’

‘Think what?’

‘What if you were not a virgin when I married you?’

At once I am alert, like a villain near the scene of a crime, like a murderer when the corpse bleeds at the sight of him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She was a virgin…’

‘Anne?’

‘Yes. Sir George is impotent. Everyone knows that.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yes. So she was a virgin. And she was not…’ He rubs his face
against the sheet of our bed. ‘She was not like you. She…’ He stumbles for words. ‘She cried out in pain. She bled, I was afraid when I saw how much blood, really a lot…’ He breaks off again. ‘She could not go on, the first time. I had to stop. She cried, I held her. She was a virgin. That is what it is like to lie with a virgin, the first time. I was her first love. I could tell. Her first love.’

There is a long, cold silence.

‘She fooled you,’ I say cruelly, throwing away her reputation, and his tenderness for her, with one sweep, making her a whore and him a fool, for the greater good.

He looks up, shocked. ‘She did?’

‘She was not that badly hurt, she was pretending.’ I shake my head at the sinfulness of young women. ‘It is an old trick. She will have had a bladder of blood in her hand and broke it to give you a show of blood. She will have cried out. I expect she whimpered and said she could not bear the pain from the very beginning.’

Henry is amazed. ‘She did.’

‘She thought to make you feel sorry for her.’

‘But I was!’

‘Of course. She thought to make you feel that you had taken her virginity, her maidenhead, and that you owe her your protection.’

‘That is what she said!’

‘She tried to entrap you,’ I say. ‘She was not a virgin, she was acting the part of one. I was a virgin when I came to your bed and the first night that we were lovers was very simple and sweet. Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘There was no crying and wailing like players on a stage. It was quiet and loving. Take that as your benchmark,’ I say. ‘I was a true virgin. You and I were each other’s first love. We had no need for play-acting and exaggeration. Hold to that truth of our love, Henry. You have been fooled by a counterfeit.’

‘She said…’ he begins.

‘She said what?’ I am not afraid. I am filled with utter determination
that Anne Stafford will not put asunder what God and my mother have joined together.

‘She said that you must have been Arthur’s lover.’ He stumbles before the white fierceness of my face. ‘That you had lain with him, and that…’

‘Not true.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘It is not true.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘My marriage with Arthur was not consummated. I came to you a virgin. You were my first love. Does anyone dare say different to me?’

‘No,’ he says rapidly. ‘No. No-one shall say different to you.’

‘Nor to you.’

‘Nor to me.’

‘Would anyone dare to say to my face that I am not your first love, a virgin untouched, your true wedded wife, and Queen of England?’

‘No,’ he says again.

‘Not even you.’

‘No.’

‘It is to dishonour me,’ I say furiously. ‘And where will scandal stop? Shall they suggest that you have no claim to the throne because your mother was no virgin on her wedding day?’

He is stunned with shock. ‘My mother? What of my mother?’

‘They say that she lay with her uncle, Richard the usurper,’ I say flatly. ‘Think of that! And they say that she lay with your father before they were married, before they were even betrothed. They say that she was far from a virgin on her wedding day when she wore her hair loose and went in white. They say she was dishonoured twice over, little more than a harlot for the throne. Do we allow people to say such things of a queen? Are you to be disinherited by such gossip? Am I? Is our son?’