Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘For me too. Is the baby all right? Settled in?’

  ‘I left her and the nurse sound asleep. And I have good lodgings for them and for us too as soon as you can get away from court.’

  ‘I’ve done better than that,’ I said delightedly. ‘The king was pleased to see me and he asked for you. You are to come to court tomorrow. We can be here together. He said that we could take Baby Anne to Hever for the summer.’

  ‘Did Anne ask it for you?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s Anne I have to thank for my exile,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t even have let me see my children if I had not asked it of the king.’

  He gave a low whistle. ‘You must have thanked her kindly for that.’

  I shook my head. ‘No point complaining of her very nature.’

  ‘And how is she?’

  ‘Sour,’ I whispered very low. ‘Sick. And sad.’

  Summer 1535

  That night George and I sat in Anne’s room as she prepared for bed. The king had said he would lie with her that night and she had bathed and asked me to brush her hair.

  ‘You do make sure he is careful, don’t you?’ I asked her anxiously. ‘It’s a sin that he should lie with you at all.’

  George gave a short laugh from where he was stretched out on her bed, his boots on her fine covers.

  She turned her head under the hairbrush. ‘I’m in little danger of rough wooing.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Some nights he cannot do it. Some nights he cannot get hard at all. It’s disgusting. I have to lie underneath him while he heaves around and sweats and grunts. And then he gets angry, and he is angry with me! As if I had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Is it drink?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘You know the king. He’s always half-drunk by night.’

  ‘If you tell him you’re with child …’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have to tell him in June, won’t I?’ she remarked. ‘As soon as it quickens, I’ll tell him then. He’ll cancel the court’s progress and we can all stay at Hampton Court. George will have to ride out and hunt with him and keep that moon-faced Jane off his neck.’

  ‘Archangel Gabriel couldn’t keep the women off him,’ George said negligently. ‘You’ve set a pattern, Anne, you’ll live to regret it. They all of them hold him at arm’s length and promise him the earth. It was easier when they were all like pretty Mary here – took a little romp and were paid a couple of manors for it.’

  ‘I think you got the manors,’ I said sharply. ‘And Father. And William Carey. As I recall, I got a pair of embroidered gloves and a pearl necklace.’

  ‘And a ship named for you, and a horse,’ Anne said with her accurate envious memory. ‘And gowns without number, and a new bed.’

  George laughed. ‘You have an inventory as if you were a groom of the household, Anne.’ He stretched out a hand for her and pulled her to the bed to lie back on the pillow beside him. I looked at the two of them, as intimate as twins, side by side in the big bed of England.

  ‘I’ll leave you,’ I said shortly.

  ‘Run off to Sir Nobody,’ Anne threw over her shoulder, and twitched the richly embroidered curtains of the bed so they were both shielded from my sight.

  William was waiting for me, in the garden, looking out over the river, his face dark.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘He’s arrested Fisher,’ he said. ‘I never thought he’d dare.’

  ‘Bishop Fisher?’

  ‘I thought he had a charmed life. Henry always loved him, and he seemed to be allowed to defend Queen Katherine and emerge unscathed. He’s been her man without swerving. She’ll grieve for him.’

  ‘But he’ll just be in the Tower for a week or so, won’t he? And then apologise, or whatever?’

  ‘It depends what they demand of him. He won’t take the oath of succession, I’m sure of that. He can’t say that Elizabeth is to succeed in the place of Mary, he’s written a dozen books and preached a million sermons in defence of the marriage, he can’t disinherit her daughter.’

  ‘Then he’ll just stay there,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ William repeated.

  I drew a little closer and put my hand on his arm. ‘Why are you so worried?’ I asked. ‘He’ll have his books and his things, his friends will visit him. He’ll be released at the end of the summer.’

  William turned from the river and took my hands in his. ‘I was there when Henry ordered him sent to the Tower,’ he said. ‘He was at Mass while he was doing his business. Think of that, Mary. He was at Mass when he ordered a bishop to the Tower.’

  ‘He’s always done his business while hearing Mass,’ I said. I was unwilling to recognise my husband’s earnestness. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘These are Henry’s laws,’ my husband said, holding my hands and not releasing me. ‘The Oath of Succession and then the Supremacy Act, and then the Treason Act. These aren’t the laws of the land. These are Henry’s laws that set a trap to catch his enemies, and Fisher and More have fallen into it.’

  ‘He’s hardly going to behead them …’ I said reasonably. ‘Oh William, really! One is the most revered churchman in the land, and the other was Lord Chancellor. He’d hardly dare behead them.’

  ‘If he dares to try them for treason then none of us is safe.’

  I found I had lowered my voice to match him. ‘Because?’

  ‘Because he will have found that the Pope does not protect his servants. That English men and women do not rise up against tyranny. That no-one is so well thought of, or so well connected, that they cannot be arrested under a new law of his devising. How long d’you think Queen Katherine will be free once her advisor is imprisoned?’

  I pulled my hands away. ‘I won’t listen to this,’ I said. ‘It’s to fear shadows. My Grandfather Howard was in the Tower for treason and came out smiling. Henry wouldn’t execute Thomas More, he loves him. They may be at loggerheads now but More was his greatest friend and joy.’

  ‘What about your Uncle Buckingham?’

  ‘That was different,’ I said. ‘He was guilty.’

  My husband let me go and turned back to the river. ‘We’ll see,’ was all he said. ‘Pray God you’re right and I am wrong.’

  Our prayers were not answered. Henry did the thing that I thought he would never dream of doing. He sent Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More to trial for claiming that Queen Katherine had been truly married to him. He let them lay their lives down to declare that he was not the head of the Church, an English Pope. And those two, men without a stain on their conscience, two of the finest men in England, walked out to the scaffold and laid their heads on the blocks as though they had been the lowest of traitors.

  They were very quiet days at court, the days in June when Fisher died, when More died. Everyone felt that the world had grown a little more dangerous. If Bishop Fisher could be beheaded, if Thomas More could walk to the scaffold, then who could call themselves safe?

  George and I waited with increasing impatience for Anne’s baby to quicken in the womb so that she could tell the king that she was with child; but mid-June came and still nothing had happened.

  ‘Could you have mistaken your time?’ I asked her.

  ‘Is that likely?’ she retorted. ‘Do I think of anything else?’

  ‘Could it move so slightly that you cannot feel it?’ I asked.

  ‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘You’re the sow that’s always in farrow. Could it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you do know,’ she said. Her little pursed mouth was shut in a thin bitter line. ‘We both know. We both know what’s happened. It’s died in there. It’s five months now and I’m no bigger than when I was three months gone. It’s dead inside me.’

  I looked at her in horror. ‘You must see a physician.’

  She snapped her fingers in my face. ‘I’d as soon see the devil himself. If Henry knows that there is a dead baby inside m