Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (116 page)

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It was an enormous expedition, the greatest ever undertaken by Henry’s court since the journey to the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and it was in every way as extravagant and ostentatious as that fabled event had been. It had to be—Anne was determined that anything that Katherine had seen and done must be bettered by her; so we rode through England from Hanbury to Dover like emperors. A troop of horse went ahead of us to clear any malcontents out of the road, but the sheer weight of the expedition and the number of horses, carriages, wagons, soldiers, men at arms, serving men, camp followers and the beauty of the ladies on horseback and their gentlemen companions stunned most of the country into amazed silence.

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We had a clear sailing across the Channel. The ladies went below, Anne retired to her cabin and slept for much of the voyage. The gentlemen were up on deck, wrapped in their riding coats, watching the horizon for other ships and sharing jugs of hot wine. I came up on deck and leaned over the ship’s rail, and watched the movement of the waves rolling beneath the prow of the boat and listened to the creaking of the timbers.

A warm hand covered my cold one. “Are you feeling well?” William Stafford whispered in my ear. “Not sick?”

I turned toward him and smiled. “Not at all, praise God. But all the sailors say that this is a very calm crossing.”

“Please God it stays that way,” he said fervently.

“Oh! My knight errant! Don’t tell me that you are ill?”

“Not very,” he said defensively.

I wanted to take him in my arms. I thought for a moment what a test of love it is, when the beloved is less than perfect. I would never have thought that I could be drawn to a man suffering from seasickness and yet here I was, longing to fetch spiced wine for him and wrap him up warm.

“Come and sit down.” I glanced around. We were as unobserved as one might ever be in this court which was a very mine of gossip and scandal. I led him to a rolled pile of sails and settled him against the mast so that he might lean back. I tucked his cloak around him as carefully as if he had been my boy Henry.

“Don’t leave me,” he said in a tone so plaintive that for a moment I thought that he was teasing me, but I met a look of such limpid innocence that I touched his cheek with my cold fingers.

“I’m just going to get us some hot spiced wine.” I went to the galley where the cooks were heating wine and ale and serving chunks of bread, and when I came back William moved up on the roll of sail so that I could sit beside him. I held the cup while he ate the bread and then we shared the wine, sip for sip.

“Are you better?”

“Of course, is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, no,” I said hastily. “I was just pleased that you look better. Can I get you some more mulled wine?”

“No,” he said. “Thank you. I think I should like to sleep.”

“Could you sleep if you leaned back against the mast?”

“No, I don’t think I could.”

“Or if you lay down on the sail?”

“I think I’d roll off.”

I glanced around. Most people had gone over to the leeward side of the boat and were dozing or gambling. We were all but alone. “Shall I hold you?”

“I should like that,” he said softly, as if he were almost too ill to speak.

We exchanged seats, I went with my back to the mast and then he put his dear curly-haired head into my lap and put his arms around my waist and closed his eyes.

I sat stroking his hair and admiring the softness of his brown beard and the flutter of his eyelashes on his cheek. His head was warm and heavy on my lap, his arms tight around my waist. I felt the total contentment that I always knew when we were close together. It was as if my body had yearned for him all of my life, whatever my mind might have been thinking; and that at last, I had him.

I tipped my head back and felt the cold sea air on my cheeks. The rocking of the boat was soporific, the muted creak and hush of the wind in the sheets and the sails. The noise grew fainter and fainter as I fell asleep.

I woke to the warmth of his touch, his head nuzzling my crotch, rubbing against my thighs, his hands exploring inside my cape, stroking my arms, my waist, my neck, my breasts. As I sleepily opened my eyes to this flood of sensation, he lifted his head and kissed my bare neck, my cheek, my eyelids, and then finally, passionately, my mouth. His mouth was warm and sweet and lingering, his tongue slid between my lips and stirred me. I wanted to eat him, I wanted to drink him, I wanted him to kiss me and then bear me down onto
the holystoned boards of the deck and to have me, then and there, and never let me go.

When he loosened his grip on me and would have released me it was me who put my hands behind his head and pulled his mouth toward me again, it was my desire which drove us onward, not his.

“Is there a cabin? A bunk? Anywhere we can go?” he asked me breathlessly.

“The ladies have all the accommodation, and I gave my bunk away.”

He gave a little groan of frustrated desire and then ran his hands through his hair and laughed at himself. “Good God, I am like a cunt-struck page!” he said. “I am shaking with desire.”

“Me too,” I said. “Oh God, me too.”

William got to his feet. “Wait here,” he ordered me, and disappeared down into the body of the ship. He came back with a cup of small ale which he offered to me first, and then took a long draught himself.

“Mary, we must marry,” he said. “Or you must take full responsibility for me going insane.”

I laughed weakly. “Oh my love.”

“Yes I am,” he said fervently.

“You are what?”

“I am your love. Say it again.”

For a moment I thought I might refuse and then I knew I was weary of denying the truth. “My love.”

He smiled at that, as if for the moment it was enough for him. “Come here,” he said, opening his cape like a wing and summoning me to the rail of the ship. Obediently, I went and stood beside him and he put his arm and his warm riding cape around my shoulders and held me close to him. Under the shelter of the cape I slid my hand around his waist, and unseen by any but seagulls,
I rested my head on his shoulder and we stood there, swaying hip to hip with the motion of the ship for a long peaceful time.

“And there’s France,” he said finally.

I looked ahead and could see the dark shape of the land and then gradually the quayside and the masts of the boats and the walls and the castle of the English fortress of Calais.

Reluctantly, he released me. “I shall come and find you as soon as we are settled.”

“I shall look for you.”

We stood apart, there were people coming up on deck, marveling at the smoothness of the crossing and looking over the narrowing strait of water to Calais.

“Do you feel all right now?” I asked, out of arm’s reach, feeling the habitual coldness of my life take the place of that passionate intimacy.

For one moment William had the grace to look confused. “Oh, my seasickness, I had forgotten it.”

I suddenly realized I had been tricked. “Were you ever ill at all? No! You never were! It was all a scheme to get me to sit beside you and to wrap you up and to hold you while you slept.”

He was delightfully shamefaced, he dropped his head like a scolded boy and then I saw the gleam of his smile. “But you tell me, my Lady Carey,” he challenged me. “Did you have the happiest six hours of your life, just now? Or did you not?”

I bit my tongue. I paused and thought. There must have been in my life a dozen happy moments. I had been the beloved of a king, I had been reclaimed by a loving husband, and I had been the more successful sister for many years. But the happiest six hours?

“Yes,” I said simply, conceding him everything. “Those were the happiest six hours of my life.”

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We docked the ship in a bustle of noise and activity and the harbormaster and the sailors and dockers all came down to the quayside to watch the king and Anne disembark and cheer them as they touched English soil in France. Then we all went up to hear Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas with the governor of Calais, who made a great fuss, treating Anne with the same courtesy as if she were a crowned queen. But whatever the governor might say and do to appease her in her anxious hunt for reassurance, the King of France was not so amenable and Henry had to leave Anne behind in Calais while he rode out to meet Francis.

“He’s such a fool,” Anne muttered to herself, looking out of the window of Calais Castle as Henry rode out at the head of his men at arms, his hat off his head to bow in acknowledgment to the crowd, and then turning in the saddle to wave up to the castle in the hope that she would be watching him.

“Why?”

“He must have known that the Queen of France wouldn’t meet with me, she’s a Spanish princess like Katherine. And then he let the Queen of Navarre refuse to meet me as well. She should never have been asked but it gave her the chance to say that she would not.”

“Did she say why not? She was always so kind to us when we were little.”

“She said my behavior was a scandal,” Anne said shortly. “Good God, how these women do put on airs when they are married and safe. You would think none of them ever struggled to catch a husband.”

“So will we not see King Francis at all?”

“We cannot meet him officially,” Anne said. “There’s no lady to meet me.” She drummed her fingers on the windowsill. “Katherine was greeted by the Queen of France herself and everyone says now how friendly they were.”

“Well, you’re not queen yet, you know,” I said injudiciously.

The look she turned on me was like ice. “Yes,” she said. “I know that. I have observed that over the last six years. I have had a little while to become aware of that, thank you. But I will be. And when I next come to France as queen I shall make her sorry for this insult to me, and when Margaret of Navarre seeks to marry her children to my sons I will not forget that she called me a scandal.” She looked hard at me. “And I shall not forget that you are always very quick to point out that I am not yet queen.”

“Anne, I was only saying . . .”

“Then you should be silent and try thinking before you speak for once,” she snapped.

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Henry invited King Francis of France back to the English fort of Calais and for two days we ladies in waiting, with Anne at our head, had to content ourselves with peeping from the castle window at the French king, and seeing nothing more of his fabled good looks than the top of his head. I expected Anne to be in a state of absolute fury at being excluded but she was smiling and secretive, and when Henry came to her room every night after dinner he was welcomed with such pleasant humor that I was certain that she had something planned.

She set us to rehearsing a special dance which was to be led in by her and then to include the seated diners, who would be summoned to dance with us. It was obvious that she was planning to enter the king’s banquet with the King of France and dance with him.

Some of the younger ladies wondered how she dared run against the conventions, but I knew that she would have had her plan approved by Henry. His surprise when she entered would be as counterfeit as all the amazement that Queen Katherine had
learned to show when her husband had entered her rooms so many times in his disguises. It made me feel old and world-weary to think that we had pretended for years not to recognize the king, and now Anne would play the same games, and the court would still have to admire them.

Despite the demands of riding with Anne in the morning and dancing with her and the ladies in the afternoon I found time every noon to stroll in the streets of Calais where, at a little alehouse, I would always find William Stafford waiting for me. He would draw me inside, away from the prying eyes of the street, and set a mug of small ale before me.

“All well, my love?” he would ask me.

I would smile at him. “Yes. And with you?”

He nodded. “I am to ride out with your uncle tomorrow, I have news of some horses he might like. But the prices are absurd. Every French farmer is determined to fleece an English lord this season, for fear we never come again.”

“He said that he might make you master of his horse. That would be a good thing for us, wouldn’t it?” I said wistfully. “We could see each other more easily if you had charge of my horse, and we could ride together.”

“And marry of course,” he said, teasing me. “Your uncle would be delighted if the master of his horse married his niece. No, my love, I don’t think it would be a good thing for us at all. I don’t think there’s any way for us at court.” He touched my cheek. “I don’t want to see you every day by luck. I want to see you every night and day because we are married and living in the same house.”

I was silent.

“I will wait for you,” William said softly. “I know that you are not ready now.”

I looked up at him. “It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the
children, and my family, and Anne. More than anything else—it’s Anne. I don’t know how I can leave her.”

“Because she needs you?” he asked, surprised.

I gave a little gurgle of laughter. “Good God! No! Because she won’t let me go. She needs me in her sight, so that she knows that she is safe.” I broke off, unable to explain to him the long determined rivalry between the two of us. “Any triumph she has is halved if I am not there to see it. And anything that goes wrong for me, any slight or humiliation, she is quick to perceive and she would even be quick to revenge—oh!—but inside her heart is singing to know that I have taken a blow.”

“She sounds like a devil,” he said, loyal to me.

I giggled again. “I wish I could say yes,” I confessed. “But to tell you the truth, it is the same for me. I am as envious of her as she is of me. But I have seen her rise and rise. I will never do better than her now. I have come to accept it. I know that she caught and held the king when I could not. But I also know that I didn’t really want to. After I had my son, I wanted nothing but to be with my children and far from the court, and the king is so—”

“So?” he prompted.

“He’s so desirous. Not just of love; but of everything. He’s like a child himself and when I had a child of my own, a real child, I found I had no patience with a man who wanted to be diverted like a child. When once I saw King Henry was as selfish as his own little son, I couldn’t really love him any more. I couldn’t look at him but with impatience.”