Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (75 page)

‘Suffolk acknowledged you,' she whispered.

‘I thought so.'

‘He did. He bowed his head. That means the king has spoken to him of you, or spoken to his sister Queen Mary, and she has told Suffolk. He's serious. He must be serious.'

I glanced sideways. The queen was looking down the list where the king had halted his horse. The big charger was tossing his head and sidling while he waited for the trumpet blast. The king sat easily in the saddle, a little golden circlet round his helmet, his visor down, his lance held before him. The queen leaned forward to see. There was a trumpet blast and the two horses leaped forward as the spurs were driven into their sides. The two armoured men thundered towards each other, divots of earth flying out from the horses' hooves. The lances were down like arrows flying to a target, the pennants on the end of each lance fluttering as the gap closed between them, then the king took a glancing blow which he caught on his shield, but his thrust at Suffolk slid under the shield and thudded into the breastplate. The shock of the blow threw Suffolk back off his horse and the weight of his armour did the rest, dragging him over the haunches, and he fell with an awful thud to the ground.

His wife leaped to her feet. ‘Charles!' She whirled out of the queen's pavilion, lifting her skirts, running like a common woman towards her husband as he lay unmoving on the grass.

‘I'd better go too.' Anne hurried after her mistress.

I looked down the lists to the king. His squire was stripping him of his heavy armour. As the breastplate came off my white kerchief fluttered to the ground, he did not see it fall. They unstrapped the greaves from his legs and the guards from his arms and he pulled on a coat as he
walked briskly up the lists to the ominously still body of his friend. Queen Mary was kneeling beside Suffolk, his head cradled in her arms. His squire was stripping off the heavy armour from his master as he lay there. Mary looked up as her brother came closer and she was smiling.

‘He's all right,' she said. ‘He just swore an awful oath at Peter for pinching him with a buckle.'

Henry laughed. ‘God be praised!'

Two men carrying a stretcher ran forward. Suffolk sat up. ‘I can walk,' he said. ‘Be damned if I'm carried from the field before I'm dead.'

‘Here,' Henry said and heaved him to his feet. Another man came running to the other side and the two of them started to walk him away, his feet dragging and then stumbling to keep pace.

‘Don't come,' Henry called to Queen Mary over his shoulder. ‘Let us make him comfortable and then we'll get a cart or something and he can ride home.'

She stopped where she was bid. The king's page came running up with my kerchief in his hands, taking it to his master. Queen Mary put out her hand. ‘Don't bother him now,' she said sharply.

The lad skidded to a halt, still holding my kerchief. ‘He dropped this, Your Majesty,' he said. ‘Had it in his breastplate.'

She put out an indifferent hand for it and he gave it to her. She was looking after her husband being helped into the house by her brother and Sir John Lovick hurrying ahead of them, opening doors and shouting for servants. Absently she walked back to the queen's pavilion with my kerchief balled up in her hand. I went forward to take it from her and then I hesitated, not knowing what to say.

‘Is he all right?' Queen Katherine asked.

Queen Mary found a smile. ‘Yes. His head is clear; and no bones broken. His breastplate is hardly dented.'

‘Shall I have that?' Queen Katherine asked.

Queen Mary glanced down at my crumpled kerchief. ‘This! The king's page gave it me. It was in his breastplate.' She handed it over. She was quite blind and deaf to anything but her husband. ‘I'll go to him,' she decided. ‘Anne, you and the rest can go home with the queen after dinner.'

The queen nodded her permission and Queen Mary went quickly from the pavilion towards the house. Queen Katherine watched her go, my kerchief in her hands. Slowly, as I knew she would, she turned it over. The fine silk slipped easily through her fingers. At the fringed hem she saw the bright green of the embroidered silk monogram: MB. Slowly, accusingly, she turned towards me.

‘I think this must be yours,' she said, her voice low and disdainful. She held it at arm's length, between finger and thumb, as if it were a dead mouse that she had found at the back of a cupboard.

‘Go on,' Anne whispered. ‘You've got to get it.' She pushed me in the small of my back and I stepped forward.

The queen dropped it as I reached her, I caught it as it fell. It looked a sorry bit of cloth, something you might wash a floor with.

‘Thank you,' I said humbly.

At dinner the king hardly looked at me. The accident had thrown him into the melancholy that was such a characteristic of his father, which his courtiers too were learning to fear.

The queen could not have been more pleasant and more entertaining. But no conversation, no charming smiles, no music could lift his spirits. He watched the antics of his Fool without laughing, he listened to the musicians and drank deep. The queen could do nothing to cheer him, because she was partly the cause of his ill-humour. He was looking at her as a woman near her change of life, he saw Death at her shoulder. She might live for a dozen years more, she might live for a score. Death was even now drying up her courses and putting the lines on her face. The queen was heading towards old age and she had made no heirs to follow them. They might joust and sing and dance and play all the day but if the king did not put a boy into Wales as prince then he had failed in his greatest, most fundamental duty to the kingdom. And a bastard on Bessie Blount would not do.

‘I am sure that Charles Brandon will soon be well again,' the queen volunteered. There were sugared plums on the table and a rich sweet wine. She took a sip but I thought that she had little relish for it while her husband sat beside her with a face so drawn and dark that he could have been his father who had never liked her. ‘You must not feel that you did wrong, Henry. It was a fair joust. And you've taken hits from him before, God knows.'

He turned in his chair and looked at her. She looked back at him and I saw the smile drain from her face at the coldness of his stare. She did not ask him what was the matter. She was too old and wise ever to ask an angry man what was troubling him. Instead, she smiled, a dauntless endearing smile, and she raised her glass to him.

‘Your health, Henry,' she said with her warm accent. ‘Your health and I must thank God that it was not you that was hurt today. Before now, I have been the one running from the pavilion to the lists with my heart
half broken with fear; and though I am sorry for your sister Queen Mary, I have to be glad that it was not you that was hurt today.'

‘Now that,' Anne said in my ear, ‘
that
is masterly.'

It worked. Henry, seduced by the thought of a woman sick with fear over his well-being, lost his dark sulky look. ‘I would never cause you a moment of uneasiness.'

‘My husband, you have caused me days and nights of them,' Queen Katherine said, smiling. ‘But as long as you are well and happy, and as long as you come home at the end of it all; why should I complain?'

‘Aha,' Anne said quietly. ‘And so she gives him permission and your sting is drawn.'

‘What d'you mean?' I asked.

‘Wake up,' Anne said brutally. ‘Don't you see? She's called him out of his bad temper and she has told him that he can have you, as long as he comes home afterwards.'

I watched him lift his glass in a return toast to her.

‘So what happens next?' I asked. ‘Since you know everything?'

‘Oh he has you for a while,' she said negligently. ‘But you won't come between them. You won't hold him. She's old, I grant you. But she can act as if she adores him and he needs that. And when he was little more than a boy she was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. It'll take a lot to overcome that. I doubt that you're the woman to do it. You're pretty enough and half in love with him, which is helpful, but I doubt that a woman such as you could command him.'

‘Who could do it?' I demanded, stung by her dismissal of me. ‘You, I suppose?'

She looked at the two of them as if she were a siege engineer measuring a wall. There was nothing in her face but curiosity and professional expertise. ‘I might,' she said. ‘But it would be a difficult project.'

‘It's me that he wants, not you,' I reminded her. ‘He asked for my favour. He wore my kerchief under his breastplate.'

‘He dropped it and forgot it,' Anne pointed out with her usual cruel accuracy. ‘And anyway, what he wants is not the issue. He's greedy and he's spoiled. He could be made to want almost anything. But you'll never be able to do that.'

‘Why should I not do that?' I demanded passionately. ‘What makes you think that you could hold him and I could not?'

Anne looked at me with her perfectly beautiful face as lovely as if it were carved from ice. ‘Because the woman who manages him will be one who never stops for a moment remembering that she is there for strategy. You are all ready for the pleasures of bed and board. But the woman who
manages Henry will know that her pleasure must be in managing his thoughts, every minute of the day. It would not be a marriage of sensual lust at all, though Henry would think that was what he was getting. It would be an affair of unending skill.'

The dinner ended at about five o'clock on the cool April evening and they brought the horses around to the front of the house so that we could say goodbye to our host and mount and ride back to Eltham Palace. As we left the banqueting tables I saw the servants tipping the leftover loaves and meats into great panniers which would be sold at a discount at the kitchen door. There was a trail of extravagance and dishonesty and waste that followed the king round the country like slime behind a snail. The poor people who had come to watch the jousting and stayed on to watch the court dine now gathered at the kitchen door to collect some food from the feast. They would be given the broken meats: the slicings from the loaves, the off-cuts from the meats, the puddings which had been half-eaten. Nothing would be wasted, the poor would take anything. They were as economical as keeping a pig.

It was these perks that made a place in the king's household such a joy for his servants. In every place, every servant could perform a little cheat, put a little by. The lowliest server in the kitchen had a little business in crusts of the pastry from the pies, in lard from the basting, in the juices of the gravy. My father was at the top of this heap of off-cuts, now that he was controller of the king's household: he would watch the slice that everyone took of their bit of business, and he would take a slice of his own. Even the trade of lady in waiting who looks as if she is there to provide company and little services for the queen is well-placed to seduce the king under her mistress's nose, and cause her the most grief that one woman can cause to another. She too has her price. She too has her secret work which takes place after the main dinner is over and when the company are looking the other way, and which trades in off-cuts of promises and forgotten sweetmeats of love-play.

We rode home as the light faded from the sky and it grew grey and cool. I was glad of my cloak which I tied round me, but I kept my hood pushed back so that I could see the way before me and the darkening skies above me, and the little pinpricks of stars showing in the pale grey sky. We had been riding for half the journey when the king's horse came alongside mine.

‘Did you enjoy your day?' he asked.

‘You dropped my kerchief,' I said sulkily. ‘Your page gave it to Queen
Mary and she gave it to Queen Katherine. She knew it at once. She gave it back to me.'

‘And so?'

I should have thought of the small humiliations which Queen Katherine managed, as part of the duty of queenship. She never complained to her husband. She took her troubles to God; and only then in a very low whispered prayer.