Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (76 page)

‘I felt dreadful,' I said. ‘I should never have given it to you in the first place.'

‘Well now you have it back,' he said without sympathy. ‘If it was so precious.'

‘It's not that it was precious,' I pursued. ‘It's that she knew without a doubt that it was mine. She gave it back to me in front of all the ladies. She dropped it to the ground, it would have fallen to the floor if I had not caught it.'

‘So what has changed?' he demanded, his voice very hard, his face suddenly ugly and unsmiling. ‘So what is the difficulty? She has seen us dancing together and talking together. She has seen me seeking your company, you have been handclasped with me before her very eyes. You didn't come to me then with your complaints and your nagging.'

‘I'm not nagging!' I said, stung.

‘Yes you are,' he said flatly. ‘Without cause, and, may I say, without position. You are not my mistress, madam, nor my wife. I don't listen to complaints about my behaviour from anyone else. I am the King of England. If you don't like how I behave then there is always France. You could always go back to the French court.'

‘Your Majesty … I …'

He spurred his horse and it went into a trot and then into a canter. ‘I give you goodnight,' he said over his shoulder and he rode away from me with his cloak in a flurry and the plume in his hat streaming, and he left me with nothing to say to him, no way to call him back.

I would not speak to Anne that night though she marched me in silence from the queen's rooms to our own and expected a full account of everything that had been said and done.

‘I won't say,' I said stubbornly. ‘Leave me alone.'

Anne took off her hood and started to unplait her hair. I jumped onto the bed, threw off my gown, pulled on my night shift and slipped between the sheets without brushing my hair or even washing my face.

‘You're surely not going to bed like that,' Anne said, scandalised.

‘For God's sake,' I said into the pillow, ‘leave me alone.'

‘What did he …?' Anne started as she slid into bed beside me.

‘I won't say. So don't ask.'

She nodded, turned and blew out her candle.

The smell of the smoke from the snuffed wick blew towards me. It smelled like the scent of grief. In the darkness, shielded from Anne's scrutiny, I turned over, lay on my back staring up at the tester above my head and considered what would happen if the king were so angry that he never looked at me again.

My face felt cold. I put my hand to my cheeks and found that they were wet with tears. I rubbed my face on the sheet.

‘What is it now?' Anne asked sleepily.

‘Nothing.'

‘You lost him,' Uncle Howard said accusingly. He looked down the long wooden dining table in the great hall at Eltham Palace. Our retainers stood on guard at the doors behind us, there was no-one in the hall but a couple of wolfhounds and a boy asleep in the ashes of the fire. Our men in Howard livery stood at the doors at the far end. The palace, the king's own palace, had been made secure for the Howards so that we could plot in private.

‘You had him in your hand and you lost him. What did you do wrong?'

I shook my head. It was too secret to spill on the unyielding surface of the high table, to offer up to flint-faced Uncle Howard.

‘I want an answer,' he said. ‘You lost him. He hasn't looked at you for a week. What have you done wrong?'

‘Nothing,' I whispered.

‘You must have done something. At the jousting he had your kerchief under his breastplate. You must have done something to upset him after that.'

I shot a reproachful look at my brother George: the only person who could have told Uncle Howard about my scarf. He shrugged and made an apologetic face.

‘The king dropped it and his page gave my scarf to Queen Mary,' I said, my throat tight with nervousness and distress.

‘So?' my father said sharply.

‘She gave it to the queen. The queen returned it to me.' I looked from one stern face to another. ‘They all knew what it meant,' I said despairingly. ‘When we rode home I told him that I was unhappy at him letting my favour be found.'

Uncle Howard exhaled, my father slapped the table. My mother turned her head away as if she could hardly bear to look at me.

‘For God's sake.' Uncle Howard glared at my mother. ‘You assured me that she had been properly brought up. Half her life spent in the French court and she whines at him as if she were a shepherd girl behind a haystack?'

‘How could you?' my mother asked simply.

I flushed and dropped my head until I could see the reflection of my own unhappy face in the polished surface of the table. ‘I didn't mean to say the wrong thing,' I whispered. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘It's not that bad,' George interceded. ‘You're taking too dark a view. He won't stay angry for long.'

‘He sulks like a bear,' my uncle snapped. ‘Don't you think there are Seymour girls dancing for him at this very moment?'

‘None as pretty as Mary,' my brother maintained. ‘He'll forget that she ever said a word out of place. He might even like her for it. It shows she's not overly groomed. It shows there's a bit of passion there.'

My father nodded, a little consoled, but my uncle drummed the table with his long fingers. ‘What should we do?'

‘Take her away.' Anne spoke suddenly. She drew attention at once in the way that a late speaker always does, but the confidence in her voice was riveting.

‘Away?' he asked.

‘Yes. Send her down to Hever. Tell him that she's ill. Let him imagine her dying of grief.'

‘And then?'

‘And then he'll want her back. She'll be able to command what she likes. All she has to do –' Anne gleamed her spiteful little smile ‘–
All
she has to do when she returns is to behave so well that she enchants the most educated, the most witty, the most handsome prince in Christendom. D'you think she can do it?'

There was a cold silence while my mother and my father and my Uncle Howard and even George all inspected me in silence.

‘Neither do I,' Anne said smugly. ‘But I can coach her well enough to get her into his bed, and whatever happens to her after that is in the hands of God.'

Uncle Howard looked intently at Anne. ‘Can you coach her in how to keep him?' he asked.

She raised her head and smiled at him, the very picture of confidence. ‘Of course, for a while,' she said. ‘He's only a man after all.'

Uncle Howard laughed shortly at the casual dismissal of his sex. ‘You have a care,' he urged. ‘We men are not where we are today because of
some sort of accident. We chose to get into the great places of power, despite the desires of women; and we chose to use those places to make laws which will hold us there forever.'

‘True enough,' Anne granted. ‘But we're not talking of high policy. We're talking of catching the king's desire. She just has to catch him and hold him for long enough for him to make a son on her, a royal Howard bastard. What more could we ask?'

‘And she can do that?'

‘She can learn,' Anne said. ‘She's halfway there. She is his choice, after all.' The little shrug she gave indicated that she did not think much of the king's choice.

There was a silence. Uncle Howard's attention had moved from me and my future as the brood mare for the family. Instead he was looking at Anne as if he had seen her for the first time. ‘Not many maids of your age think as clearly as you.'

She smiled at him. ‘I'm a Howard like you.'

‘I'm surprised you don't try for him yourself.'

‘I thought of it,' she said honestly. ‘Any woman in England today would be bound to think of it.'

‘But?' he prompted her.

‘I'm a Howard,' she repeated. ‘What matters is that one of us catches the king. It hardly matters which one. If his taste is for Mary and she has his acknowledged son then my family becomes the first in the kingdom. Without rival. And we can do it. We can manage the king.'

Uncle Howard nodded. He knew that the king's conscience was a domesticated beast, given to easy herding but prone to sudden stubborn stops. ‘It seems we have to thank you,' he said. ‘You have planned our strategy.'

She acknowledged his thanks, not with a bow, which would have been graceful. Instead, she turned her head like a flower on the stem, a typically arrogant gesture. ‘Of course I long to see my sister as the king's favourite. These things are my business quite as much as yours.'

He shook his head as my mother made a shushing noise at her overly confident eldest daughter. ‘No, let her speak,' he said. ‘She's as sharp as any of us. And I think she's right. Mary must go to Hever and wait for the king to send for her.'

‘He'll send,' Anne said knowledgably. ‘He'll send.'

I felt like a parcel, like the curtains for a bed, or the plates for the top table, or the pewter for the lower tables in the hall. I was to be packed
up and sent to Hever as bait for the king. I was not to see him before I left, I was not to speak to anyone about my going. My mother told the queen that I was overtired and asked for me to be excused from her service for a few days so that I might go home and rest. The queen, poor lady, thought that she had triumphed. She thought that the Boleyns were in retreat.

It was not a long ride, a little more than twenty miles. We stopped to dine at the roadside, eating nothing more than bread and cheese which we had carried with us. My father could have called on the hospitality of any great house along the way, he was well enough known as a courtier high in the favour of the king, and we would have been nobly entertained. But he did not want to break the journey.

The high road was rutted and pitted with potholes, every now and then we saw a broken cart wheel where a traveller had been overturned. But the horses stepped out well enough on the dry ground and every now and then the going was so good that we broke into a canter. The verges on the side of the road were thick with the white of gypsy lace and big-faced white daisies, and lush with the early summer greenness of grass. In the hedges the honeysuckle twisted around the bursting growth of hawthorn and may, at the roots were pools of purple-blue self-heal and the gangly growth of ladies' smock with dainty flowers of white, veined with purple. Behind the hedges in the thick lush pastures were fat cows with their heads down, munching, and in the higher fields there were flocks of sheep with the occasional idle boy watching over them from the shade of a tree.