Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (114 page)

George turned and lifted her up, tossed her in the air and handed her to me. She was heavy now, a firm-bodied little four-year-old smelling of sunshine and leaves.

‘Clever girl,' I said. ‘You are a great hunter.'

‘And what about her?' George asked. ‘Would you deny her a great place in the world? She will be the Queen of England's niece. Think of that.'

I hesitated. ‘If women could only have more,' I said longingly. ‘If we could have more in our own right. Being a woman at court is like forever watching a pastrycook at work in the kitchen. All those good things, and you can have nothing.'

‘What about Henry then?' he said, temptingly. ‘Your Henry is the nephew of the King of England, known well enough as his son. If (God forbid) Anne does not have a son, then Henry could claim the throne of England, Mary. Your son is the son of a king, and he could be his heir.'

I did not glow at the thought. I looked fearfully into the wood where my staunch little boy was struggling to keep up with us and muttering to himself hunting songs of his own composing.

‘Please God he is safe,' was all I said. ‘Please God he is safe.'

Anne survived her illness and grew stronger in the clean air of Hever. When she came from her chamber I still would not sit with her, I was so afraid of taking the sickness to my children. She tried to be witty about my fears but there was an edge to her voice. She had felt betrayed by the king when he had fled the court, and she was mortally offended that he had spent the summer with Queen Katherine and with the Princess Mary.

She was determined to find him as soon as the cooler weather came, and the sweating sickness passed away. I was hoping that I might be overlooked in the rush to get Anne on the throne.

‘You have to come back with me,' Anne said flatly.

We were at our favourite seat by the moat of the castle. Anne was seated on the stone bench, George sprawled on the grass before her. I was seated on the grass, leaning back against the bench, watching my children solemnly paddling their little feet in the water. It was shallow water at the bank, but I could not take my gaze off them.

‘Mary!' Anne's voice was sharp.

‘I heard you,' I said, not turning my head.

‘Look at me!'

I glanced up at her.

‘You have to come back with me, I can't manage without you.'

‘I don't see why –'

‘I do,' George said. ‘She has to have a bedfellow that she can trust. When she closes her bedroom door behind her she has to know that no-one is going to prattle to the queen that she's crying, or tell Henry that she's furious. She's acting a part every day of her life, she needs a band of travelling players to be with. She has to have some people around her that she can know, that can know her. It can't be all masquerade.'

‘Yes,' Anne said, surprised. ‘That's just how it is. How did you know?'

‘Because Francis Weston is a friend to me,' George said frankly. ‘I need someone to whom I am not brother or son or husband.'

‘Nor lover,' I prompted.

He shook his head. ‘Just friend. But I know how Anne needs you, because I need him.'

‘Well I need my children,' I said stubbornly. ‘And Anne manages well enough without me.'

‘I am asking you as my sister.' Something in her tone made me look at her a little more closely. This illness had knocked some of the arrogance out of her, she sounded for a moment like a woman who needed a sister's tenderness. Slowly, very slowly, in an unfamiliar gesture, Anne stretched out her hand to me.

‘Mary … I can't do this on my own,' she whispered. ‘It nearly killed me last time. I knew something would break inside me if I had to keep going. And now I have to go back to court and it will start all over again.'

‘Can't you keep the king without such effort?'

She leaned back and closed her eyes. For a moment she did not look like the most determined, the most brilliant young woman in a brilliant court. She looked like an exhausted girl who has seen the depths of her own fear. ‘No. The only way I know is always to be the best there is.'

I reached out and touched her hand and felt her fingers grip mine. ‘I'll come and help.'

‘Good,' she said quietly. ‘I do need you, you know. Stay beside me, Mary.'

Back at court, at Bridewell Palace, the game had changed again. The Pope, weary at last of the endless demands from England, was sending an Italian theologian, Cardinal Campeggio, to London to resolve finally and absolutely the matter of the king's marriage. Far from being threatened by this new development the queen seemed to welcome it. She was looking well. There was a glow on her skin from the summer sun and she had been happy in the company of her daughter. The king, shaken by his terror of infection, had been easy to entertain. Together they had discussed the cause of the illness which had swept the country, planned measures for prevention, and composed special prayers which they had ordered to be said in every church. Together they had worried about the health of the country which they had ruled for so long. Anne, though never far from the king's thoughts, lost some of her glamour when she was merely one of the many sick. Once again, the queen was his only constant and reliable friend in a dangerous world.

I could see the difference in her the moment we came into her apartment
in the palace. She wore a new gown of dark red velvet which suited the warm colour of her skin. She did not look like a young woman – she would never be a young woman again; but she had a confident poise which Anne could never learn.

She welcomed Anne and me with a faint ironic smile. She inquired after my children, she asked after Anne's health. If she thought for a moment that the country would have been a better place if the sweat had carried off my sister, as it had taken so many others, there was no sign of that in her face.

In theory, we were still her ladies in waiting, though the presence chamber and the privy chamber which had been allocated to us were almost as large as the queen's own rooms. Her ladies flitted from her rooms to ours, to the king's presence chambers. The steady discipline of the court was breaking down, there was a sense now that almost anything could happen. The king and queen were on terms of quiet courtesy. The papal legate was on his way from Rome but taking an inordinate time over the journey. Anne was back at court indeed, but the king had spent a happy summer without her, it might be that his passion had cooled.

No-one dared to predict which way events might move and so there was a steady stream of people arriving to pay their respects to the queen and moving from her rooms to visit Anne. They crossed with another flow whose money was on the other horse. There was even talk that Henry would, in the end, come back to me and our growing nursery. I paid no attention until I heard my uncle had laughed with the king about his handsome boy at Hever.

I knew well enough, as did Anne, as did George, that my uncle never did anything by accident. Anne took George and me into her privy chamber and stood before us to accuse us.

‘What's going on?' she demanded.

I shook my head but George looked shifty.

‘George?'

‘It's always true that your stars rise and fall in opposition,' he said awkwardly.

‘What d'you mean?' she asked frostily.

‘They had a meeting of the family.'

‘Without me?'

George flung up his hands like a defeated fencer. ‘I was summoned. I didn't speak. I didn't say a thing.'

Anne and I were on him at once. ‘They met without us there? What are they saying? What do they want now?'

George put us both at arm's length. ‘All right! All right! They don't
know which way to jump. They don't know which way to go. They didn't want Anne to know for fear of offending her. But now that you are so luckily widowed, Mary, and he lost interest in Anne this summer, they are wondering if he might not be brought round to you again.'

‘He did not lose interest!' Anne swore. ‘I won't be supplanted.' She rounded on me. ‘You she-dog! This would be your plan!'

I shook my head. ‘I've done nothing.'

‘You came back to court!'

‘You insisted on it. I've hardly looked at the king, I've hardly said two words to him.'

She turned from me and pitched face down on the bed as if she could not bear to look at either of us. ‘But you've got his son,' she wailed.

‘That's it really,' George said gently. ‘Mary's got his son and now she's free to marry. The family think that the king might settle for her. And his dispensation applies to either of you. He can marry her if he wants.'

Anne rose up from the pillows, tearstained.

‘I don't want him,' I said, exasperated.

‘It doesn't matter, does it?' she said bitterly. ‘If they tell you to go forward then you will go forward and take my chair.'

‘As you took mine,' I reminded her.

She sat up. ‘One Boleyn girl or the other.' Her smile was as bitter as if she had been biting on a lemon. ‘We might either of us be Queen of England and yet we'll always be nothing to our family.'

Anne spent the next weeks entrancing the king all over again. She drew him away from the queen, away even from his daughter. Slowly the court came to realise that she had won him back. There was nobody but Anne.

I watched the seduction with the detachment of a widow. Henry gave Anne a London house of her own. Durham House on The Strand, her own apartments over the tiltyard at Greenwich Palace for the Christmas season. The king's council publicly ruled that the queen should not dress too finely nor go out to be seen by the people. It was apparent to everyone that it was only a matter of time before Cardinal Campeggio ruled for divorce, Henry could marry Anne, and I could go home to my children and make a new life.

I was still Anne's chief confidante and companion and one day in November she insisted that she and George and I walk by the flooded river at Greenwich Palace.

‘You must be wondering what will become of you, now that you have
no husband,' Anne started. She seated herself on a bench and looked up at me.

‘I thought I would live with you while you need me, and then go back to Hever,' I said cautiously.

‘I can ask the king to allow that,' she said. ‘It is in my gift.'

‘Thank you.'

‘And I can ask him to provide for you,' she said. ‘William left you almost nothing, you know.'

‘I know,' I said.

‘The king used to pay William a pension of one hundred pounds a year. I can have that pension transferred to you.'

‘Thank you,' I repeated.

‘The thing is,' Anne said lightly, turning her collar up against the cold wind, ‘I thought I would adopt Henry.'

‘You thought what?'

‘I thought I would adopt little Henry as my own son.'

I was so astounded, I could only look at her. ‘You don't even like him very much,' I said, the first foolish thought of a loving mother. ‘You never even play with him. George has spent more time with him than you.'

Anne glanced away, as if seeking patience from the river and the jumbled roof tops of the City beyond. ‘No. Of course. That's not why I would adopt him. I don't want him because I like him.'

Slowly, I started to think. ‘So that you have a son, Henry's son. You have a son who is a Tudor by birth. If he marries you then in the same ceremony he gets a son.'

She nodded.

I turned and took a couple of steps, my riding boots crunching on the frozen gravel. I was thinking furiously. ‘And of course, this way, you take my son away from me. So I am less desirable to Henry. In one move you make yourself the mother of the king's son and you take away my great claim to his attention.'

George cleared his throat, and leaned against the river wall, arms folded across his chest, his face a picture of detachment. I rounded on him. ‘You knew?'