The Last Boleyn (52 page)

Mary's hands darted to her throat involuntarily and her thoughts jumped from Francois to Anne again. Anne's slender neck would be broken by a sharp headsman's sword, and on such a sunny day!

“Sweetheart.” Staff's hands were warm on her waist. “Come away from the window. I did not mean to speak such violence. There has been enough killing,” he said against her hair. He lifted her in his arms as sure and strong as he had that first time in the vast reaches of Greenwich when she had been Will Carey's wife and had thought that her life ahead would be all darkness. He laid her carefully on the sheets in the morning sunlight which streamed through the window. He lay beside her and pulled her against his body. She sighed and clung to him desperately, trembling, but no tears came as they had over the long weeks of Anne's trial, the long weeks of waiting for George's and Anne's deaths.

She pressed her face into his shoulder to stop the thoughts of Anne and George on the scaffold. But her eyes shot open as she pictured the poor girl, Meg Roper, receiving from the cruel pike her father's terrible head and cherishing it tenderly in her arms. Sir Thomas More had been beheaded at the king's cold command as Anne had today. And now, surely, Mary's own father was somewhere on the road to Hever.

They lay there, unspeaking, and the bird warbling from outside washed in with the sun and mingled with their quiet breathing. She stared at the white plaster ceiling that had watched her as a girl and it all came flooding back. Father was taking her to Brussels, but she was afraid and only eight years old. Then he took her away to France, and after she went, George and Anne still laughed together in the summer gardens and it was not fair. Had any of the Bullens loved each other enough along the way, knowing that they loved and cherished each other? But it was different with her and Staff. And for her children, it would be even better. She would spend the rest of her life making sure of that.

Rapid knocks rained on their door and they both shot upright as Nancy's voice came to them from the other side. “Your lord father has ridden in, my lady. He is in the solar. Little Andrew is with your mother. Shall I come in to help you dress?”

They were up and Staff had his breeks on and his shirt half tucked in when she finished talking. Mary dashed to retrieve her chemise and to brush her hair. “Yes, yes, Nance, and hurry.”

Nancy dressed her and would have set her hair had not Staff stood ready and had not her heart pounded so to see her father. He was here at last, come home to Hever, but he had come too early to have stayed for Anne's beheading. He had failed to save his world, but he had come home to them at Hever.

Nancy helplessly left her mistress's hair long and loose and gave it a last quick brush. Mary descended the stairs on Staff's arm. She began to tremble uncontrollably. She was terrified to hear the news he would bring and terrified she would see no understanding in his eyes even now. And the cold, hard stare from the king's portrait at the bottom of the steps.

“Do not fear, my love,” Staff said and pushed the door open.

Her father paced in broken lines before the unlit hearth and her mother sat slumped back in a chair near him. The morning sun made the room strangely bright and cheerful and stained patches of the carpet and walls red or blue through the windows.

Thomas Boleyn stopped, and his narrow eyes took them in. It seemed to Mary he had shrunk inward and his gaze seemed to come from deep inside some dark space. “You cry not, Mary. How often I have seen you cry, but not for Anne?”

“I have cried and prayed for my dear sister and brother for two long months, father, when you were not here to see. Now the only tears I have left are inside.”

His eyes focused hard on her and he began his rehearsed words. “The queen is dead by now—murdered by the king—as was your brother yesterday. George died bravely, they told me, and I know the queen must have too. I could not stay to hear of that. Anne was quite magnificent at her trial. Be that as it may, they both wished to be remembered to you, Mary, and Anne to your husband also. I had a note from Anne to you somewhere, but in my departure, I seem to have misplaced it. It will arrive packed in with my things somewhere. Anne bid me tell you to relate her love—and the truth of her unjust death—to the Princess Elizabeth when she is old enough to understand. She wanted both you and little Catherine to be sure to look to that.”

Mary left Staff standing behind her mother's chair with his hands on her shoulders and took two steps closer to her father. “I shall see to it as a solemn trust, father. Anne gave Henry Carey into my keeping also, though there are other monies for his education.”

“Yes, she told me so.” He said nothing else and continued to regard her awkwardly as though she were a person he did not know.

“And you, father?” She reached out carefully and rested her fingers on his tense arm.

“I, Mary?” He pulled away and began to pace again. “I have failed, failed completely.”

“But mother and I still love you, father,” she ventured shakily. “You have Hever.”

“Hever? Love? I spoke of all our plans. That black reptile Cromwell has been elevated to my vacant office of Lord Privy Seal. Traitors, traitors all! Norfolk her judge, the whining bitch Rochford their condemner—no wonder George could never love her or get her with child! And your dear cousin Francis Bryan was only too happy to ride to Jane Seymour and tell her that the queen had been condemned! Damn them all! Rats always leave a sinking ship no matter how grand or important the ship or the fact it might have yet been saved.”

“My lord was telling me that we are not to have their bodies to bury,” came Elizabeth Boleyn's rasping voice as she looked vacantly at Mary. “The guards were to bury them under the floor of the little church within The Tower where the jailers worship. At least it is a consecrated church though no place for a Howard and a queen. What did you call that church, my lord?”

“Saint Peters-in-Chains, Elizabeth.”

“Yes. At least it sounds somehow appropriate. I pray they will bury their heads with their bodies, so that on resurrection day they will be raised guiltless in His eyes.”

“Guiltless, maybe not, my dear, but innocent of the dreadful crimes of which the king sought to brand them. Kingston promised he would see to that as you asked, madam.”

“Thank you, Thomas. That mattered greatly to me. And the king will not harm Elizabeth?”

“I told you, no. Elizabeth is declared bastard now, but she is his and he knows it. Tudor is written all over her face.”

“But she has her mother's skin and eyes and slender hands, father,” Mary put in, and he turned to her again.

Thomas Boleyn refused to sit, but he leaned heavily on the carved mantel and put one still-booted foot on the andiron. “The sandy-haired boy by the gate is your new son,” he said suddenly.

“Not so new, father. He will be three this autumn.”

“Yes. Well, he looks to be quite a Howard.”

“He is a Stafford, father. Not a Boleyn, not a Howard, a Stafford.”

He turned his head to one side and looked at her over his arms folded along the mantelpiece. He pivoted his head farther and stared at her husband. “My wife has told me repeatedly over the years, I assure you, Stafford, of your loyalty and kindnesses to her and your care of her these last two months. For that I am grateful.”

“I do not covet your gratitude in any way, my lord. I did it for the love I bear my wife and her mother.”

They faced each other staring over Mary, who stood between them. “I regret, Stafford, that Hever must revert to the crown upon our deaths, now that George is gone. In proper times it would have gone to Mary as the surviving heir or her Uncle James. It is a wonder to me that His Royal Majesty left me Hever even until I die. Sometimes I think he did it for Mary. Do you understand me, Stafford? Hever goes to the crown.”

“Mary values Hever, not I, my lord. Wivenhoe will always be enough for me.”

“I see. Then would you ever choose to do me any service for myself?”

“For the love I bear your daughter who loves you all too well, my lord, yes.”

Thomas Boleyn was the first to break the grip lock of their eyes as he looked toward the door. “Mary has often been foolish, but then so have you, Stafford. No, Elizabeth, I will say this. You had the chance to have much of wealth and lands from the king.”

“I wanted nothing from him but my freedom, Lord Boleyn, even as Mary and I want that from you.”

“Well, maybe you were right not to trust him. Trust no one. Cromwell did one last favor for Anne when he fetched Mary to her and then he turned on us all. I would ask you for one favor before you go to Wivenhoe.”

“My lord, they can well stay in my house as long as they should like to,” Elizabeth Boleyn said, rising from her chair.

“Their home is Wivenhoe, wife. They prefer it. He has said it.”

“We shall go today then, but we may be back to see Lady Elizabeth. And I assume that your grandchildren are welcome here to see their grandmother. If not, she will be asked to come to Wivenhoe in the summers or whenever she would wish.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Lord Boleyn pointed toward the solar, and Mary feared he would order them from his home instantly. His hand shook as he pointed. “I would like you, Lord Stafford, to take the king's portrait down from the wall in my entryway and bury it somewhere in the gardens and do not tell me where. Bury it and slice it to ribbons if you would, for us both, for all of us! I should like to put my fist through it again and again, but, 'sbones, I have not the strength!”

Elizabeth Boleyn went to him and wrapped her thin arms protectively around him as his dry sobs wracked his shaking body. Staff went to the door and then came back to pull Mary after him. He closed the door to the solar gently.

“I have never seen them like that, Staff. She is comforting him,” she whispered in the hall as they stood under the big portrait.

“Maybe it will be a new start for them now in the years they have left, Mary.” He turned and pulled the portrait out from the wall to peer behind it. “Dirt and dust and wretched bugs,” he said. He grasped the heavy frame and lifted the painting high off its hooks. “I almost think,” he said low to her, “that he would have softened if we would have begged him to let us stay here and live with them.” He turned his alert face to hers.

“But he must know we could never do that, my love. Wivenhoe is our home.”

A beautiful smile lit his tired face and his eyes caressed her. “Then we shall do this last task and gather up Nancy, Stephen, and the lad and be on our way home, my wife.”

They went far out past the knot garden and the beds of tightbudded roses to the pond by the willows. “Will you fetch me a gardener with a shovel?” he said to her as he bent over the painting and drew his dagger. She stared down on the rough oil-painted surface at the face she had once known so well. Shadows of the willow boughs flitted across the strong, stern features. The narrow eyes seemed to shift and the huge hands were in shadow.

“When Anne was little, she used to be afraid of this portrait,” Mary thought aloud. “She said once the hands were too big and the eyes were like father's.” She turned away and hurried to find Michael, the gardener who had always lived about the grounds at Hever. Michael's face lit when he saw her and he came on the run with his shovel. She sat on the bench near the sundial which would soon be surrounded by the young shoots of mint and dill and watched Michael and then Staff dig. This is where she had been sitting before the labor pains for Harry began, she thought, and Michael was here to help her then. Suddenly reality stabbed at her again. Anne had just drifted off to leave her sitting here alone because she did not feel well enough to tell her how things were going at court. Tears of memory blinded her eyes, for Anne would never laugh and flit about the gardens of Hever again.

She went no nearer as the two men took turns digging a hole under the willow tree to bury the king's head, and her thoughts wandered again. Had sad Meg Roper finally buried her father's head? she mused. Staff always got on so democratically with servants that it amazed her. Why, it was as though Stephen was his best friend.

And then, as she watched them lift the huge frame into its grave and begin to shovel the soil back in, it came to her that her awful past was surely ready to be buried now too. It was as though, through the grief of losing George and Anne, it had gone with them off her shoulders and from her haunted thoughts. “Wait, Staff,” she called and dashed to them. “Wait, my lord, do not fill it all in yet. There is something I would add.”

She darted through the gardens and into the house past the still closed solar door. She ran up the steps which she had once descended to face the king only to find Staff's dark eyes awaiting her. She shoved the strands of pearls from dear Anne aside and dug under the garnet necklace Staff had given her so long ago at Whitehall. There it was. She had not dared to look on it since the sad death of its beloved giver two years before. It was just as the fair Tudor Rose had handed it to her over their chess game so long ago.

Staff and Michael awaited her return, and Michael looked on in surprise as Mary showed Staff the green and white gilded chess pawn in her open palm. “'Tis a little thing,” Michael observed.

“No, Michael, it is a big, big thing,” Staff told the puzzled man as Mary dumped the pawn into the freshly turned earth of the grave and Staff covered it.

“I have seen your fine gardens, Michael,” Staff complimented the man after the hole was filled. “I have seen them over the years and admired them. Are you wed, Michael?”

The gangly man smiled guiltily and the gap between his teeth showed as it always had. “No, milord. I never did yet find the lass to love and wed with, an' I couldna see weddin' only to raise a passel a young ones.”

“A wise man,” Staff said seriously and patted the glowing Michael on the shoulder. “I will tell you this, Michael, and I want you to remember my words.”