Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘I’ll sit beside you.’ George pulled up a chair for me and I sat down without drawing my hand away from the king.

  ‘Pray to God he wakes up,’ George said, looking down at Henry’s waxy face and his fluttering eyelids.

  ‘Amen,’ I said. ‘Amen.’

  We sat with him till the middle of the afternoon, the physicians at the foot of the bed, George and I at the head, my mother and father forever coming in and out, my uncle away somewhere, plotting.

  Henry was sweating and one of the physicians went to ease the covers back from him, but suddenly checked. On his fat calf where he had been injured jousting long ago was a dark ugly stain of blood and pus. His wound, which had never properly healed, had opened up again.

  ‘He should be leeched,’ the man said. ‘Get the leeches onto that and let them suck out the poison.’

  ‘I can’t look,’ I confessed shakily to George.

  ‘Go and sit in the window, and don’t you dare faint,’ he said roughly. ‘I’ll call you when they’ve got them on and you can come back to the bedside.’

  I stayed in the windowseat, resolutely not looking back, trying not to hear the clink of the jars as they put the black slugs on the king’s legs and left them to suck away at the torn flesh. Then George called, ‘Come back and sit beside him, you needn’t see anything.’ And I returned to my place at the head of the bed, only going away when the leeches had sucked themselves into little sated balls of black slime and could be taken off the wound.

  In the mid-afternoon, I was holding the king’s hand and stroking it, like one might gentle a sick dog, when he suddenly gripped me, his eyes opened and his gaze was clear. ‘God’s blood,’ he said. ‘I ache all over.’

  ‘You had a fall from your horse,’ I said, trying to judge if he knew where he was.

  ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember coming back to the palace.’

  ‘We carried you in.’ George came forward from the windowseat. ‘Brought you upstairs. You wanted Mary at your side.’

  Henry gave me a mildly surprised smile. ‘I did?’

  ‘You weren’t yourself,’ I said. ‘You were wandering. Praise God you’re well again.’

  ‘I’ll get a message to the queen.’ George ordered one of the guards to tell her that the king was awake and well again.

  Henry chuckled. ‘You must all have been sweating.’ He went to move in the bed but he suddenly grimaced with pain. ‘God’s death! My leg.’

  ‘Your old wound has opened up,’ I said. ‘They put leeches on it.’

  ‘Leeches. It needs a poultice. Katherine knows how to make it, ask her …’ He bit his lip. ‘Someone should know how to treat it,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake. Someone should know the recipe.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Give me wine.’

  A page came running with a cup and George held it to the king’s lips. Henry drained it. His colour came back and his attention returned to me. ‘So who moved first?’ he asked curiously. ‘Seymour or Howard or Percy? Who was going to keep my throne warm for my daughter and call himself Regent for the whole of her minority?’

  George knew Henry too well to be led into a laughing confession. ‘The whole court has been on its knees,’ he said. ‘No-one thought of anything but your health.’

  Henry nodded, believing nothing.

  ‘I’ll go and tell the court,’ George said. ‘They will hold a thanksgiving Mass. We were most afraid.’

  ‘Get me some more wine,’ Henry said sulkily. ‘I ache as if every bone in my body was broken.’

  ‘Shall I leave you?’ I asked.

  ‘Stay,’ he said carelessly. ‘But lift these pillows behind my back. I can feel my back seizing up as I lie here. What idiot laid me so flat?’

  I thought of the moment when we shunted him from the litter to the bed. ‘We were afraid to move you.’

  ‘Chickens in the farmyard,’ he said with mild satisfaction, ‘when the cock is taken away.’

  ‘Thank God you were not taken away.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with ungenerous relish. ‘It would go hard for the Howards and the Boleyns if I died today. You’ve made many enemies on your upward climb who would be happy to see you tumble down again.’

  ‘My thoughts were only for Your Highness,’ I said carefully.

  ‘And would they have followed my wishes and put Elizabeth on my throne?’ he asked with sudden sharpness. ‘I suppose you Howards would have got behind one of your own? But what about the others?’

  I met his gaze. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If I were not here with no prince to follow after me those oaths might not stick. D’you think they would have been true to the princess?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t say. I wasn’t even with the court, I spent all the time in here, watching over you.’

  ‘You would cleave to Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Regency to Anne with your uncle behind her, I suppose. A Howard ruling England in all but name. And then a woman to follow a woman, again ruled by a Howard.’ He shook his head, his face darkening. ‘She must give me a son.’ A vein throbbed at his temple and he put his hand to his head as if to press away the pain with his fingertips. ‘I’ll lie down again,’ he said. ‘Take these damned pillows away. I can hardly see with the pain behind my eyes. A Howard girl as Regent and a Howard girl to follow her. A promise of nothing but disaster. She must give me a son this time.’

  The door opened and Anne came in. She was still very white. She went slowly to Henry’s bed and took his hand. His eyes, screwed up with pain, scrutinised her pale face.

  ‘I thought you would die,’ she said flatly.

  ‘And what would you have done?’

  ‘I should have done my best as Queen of England,’ she returned. She had her hand on her belly as she spoke.

  He put his own bigger hand to cover hers. ‘You had better have a son in there, madam,’ he said coldly. ‘I think your best as Queen of England would not be enough. I need a boy to hold this country together, the Princess Elizabeth and your scheming uncle is not what I want to leave behind when I die.’

  ‘I want you to swear you’ll never ride in the joust again,’ she said passionately.

  He turned his head away from her. ‘Let me rest,’ he said. ‘You with your swearing and your promises. God help me, I thought when I put the queen aside that I was getting something better than this.’

  It was the bleakest of moments that I had ever seen between them. Anne did not even argue. Her face was as white as his. The two of them looked like ghosts, half-dead of their own fear. What might have been a loving reunion had served only to remind them both how slight was their hold on the country. Anne curtsied to the heavy body on the bed and went out of the room. She walked slowly as if she were carrying a weighty burden and she paused at the door for a moment.

  As I watched her, she transformed herself. Her head went back, her lips curved up in a smile. Her shoulders straightened and she rose up, just a little, like a dancer when the music starts. Then she nodded at the guard on the door and he flung it open, and she went out to the buzz of noise of the court, with a face filled with thanksgiving to tell them that the king was well, that he had jested with her about falling from his horse, that he would ride in the joust again as soon as ever he could, and that they were merry.

  Henry was quiet and thoughtful as he recovered from his fall. The aches in his body gave him a premonition of old age. The wound in his leg wept a mixture of blood and yellow pus, he had to have a thick bandage on it all the time, and when he sat, he propped it up on a footstool. He was humiliated by the sight of it, he who had always been so proud of his strong legs and his dogged stance. Now he limped when he walked and the line of his calf was destroyed by the bulky dressings. Worse than that, he smelled like a dirty hen coop. Henry, who had been the golden Prince of England, acknowledged as the most handsome man in Europe, could see old age coming towards him when he would be lame and in constant pain and stinking like a dirty monk.

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