Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘She is a gentle pure young woman and –’

  ‘Pure? What was she doing in your lap? Saying her prayers?’

  ‘That’s enough!’ he said with a rumble of anger. ‘She stays among your ladies. Her family stays at court. You overreach yourself, madam.’

  ‘I do not!’ Anne swore. ‘I have the say of who attends me. I am queen and these are my rooms. I won’t have a woman here I don’t like.’

  ‘You will have the attendants I choose for you,’ he insisted. ‘I am the king.’

  ‘You will not order me,’ she said breathlessly, her hand to her heart.

  ‘Anne,’ I said. ‘Be calm.’ She did not even hear me.

  ‘I order everyone,’ he said. ‘You will do as I bid you for I am your husband and your king.’

  ‘I’ll be damned if I do!’ she screamed, and turned on her heel and fled to her privy chamber. She opened the door and shouted at him from the threshold. ‘You don’t master me, Henry!’

  But he could not run after her. That was her fatal mistake. If he had been able to run after her then he could have caught her and they could have tumbled into bed together as they had done so many times before. But his leg hurt him and she was young and taunting and instead of being aroused he was baited. He resented her youth and her beauty, he no longer revelled in it.

  ‘It is you who are the whore, not her!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t think I have forgotten what you will do to get into a king’s lap. Jane Seymour will never know half the tricks you used on me, madam! French tricks! Whore’s tricks! They no longer enchant me; but I don’t forget them.’

  There was a shocked gasp from the court and George and I exchanged one look of total horror. Anne’s door slammed shut and the king turned to his court and George and I met his fulminating glare with the blankness of absolute terror.

  He pulled himself to his feet. He said: ‘Arm.’ Sir John Seymour thrust George aside, and the king leaned on him and went slowly to his own rooms, his gentlemen following him. I watched him go and found that I was swallowing painfully with a dry throat.

  George’s wife Jane Parker was at my side. ‘What tricks did she used to do?’

  I had a sudden vivid recollection of coaching her to use her hair, her mouth, her hands on him. George and I had taught her everything that we knew, drawn from George’s time in the bath houses of Europe with French whores, Spanish madams, and English sluts, and everything that I knew from wedding and bedding one man and seducing another. We had taken Anne and trained her to do the things that Henry liked, the things all men like, things expressly forbidden by the church. We had taught her to strip naked before him, to raise her shift an inch at a time to show him her privates, we had taught her to lick his cock from the base to the tip with long languorous touches. We had taught her the words he liked and the pictures he wanted in his head. We had given her the skills of a whore and now she was reproached for it. I met George’s eyes and I knew he had the same memory.

  ‘Oh Lord save us, Jane,’ he said wearily. ‘Don’t you know that when the king is angry he’ll say anything? Nothing, is what she did. Nothing more than a kiss and a caress. The sort of thing that any husband and wife do in their balmy days.’ He paused, and corrected himself. ‘We didn’t, of course; not you and me. But then you’re not really a very kissable woman, are you?’

  She turned away for a moment as if he had pinched her. ‘But of course,’ she said, as quiet as a snake going through bracken, ‘you don’t really like to kiss women at all unless they are your sisters.’

  I left Anne alone for half an hour and then I tapped on her door and slipped into the room. I closed the door on the curious faces of the ladies in waiting and looked around for her. The room was in the darkness of an early winter afternoon, she had not lit the candles and only the firelight flickered on the walls and the ceiling. She was lying face down on her bed and for a moment I thought she was asleep. Then she reared up and I saw her pale face and her dark eyes.

  ‘My God, he was angry.’ Her voice was husky from crying.

  ‘You angered him. You ran towards it, Anne.’

  ‘What was I to do? When he insults me before the whole of the court?’

  ‘Be blind,’ I counselled her. ‘Look the other way. Queen Katherine did.’

  ‘Queen Katherine lost. She looked the other way and I took him. What am I to do to hold him?’

  We both said nothing. There was only one answer. There was always only one answer and it was always the same answer.

  ‘I was sick with anger,’ she remarked. ‘I felt as if I might vomit up my very guts.’

  ‘You must be calm.’

  ‘How can I be calm when Jane Seymour is everywhere I turn?’

  I went to the bed and took her hood from her head. ‘Let’s get you ready for dinner,’ I said. ‘Go down to dinner looking beautiful and it will all blow over and be forgotten.’

  ‘Not by me,’ she said bitterly. ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘Then act as if you do,’ I advised her. ‘Or everyone will remember that he abused you. You had better act as if it was never said and never heard.’

  ‘He called me a whore,’ she said resentfully. ‘No-one will forget that.’

  ‘We’re all whores compared with Jane,’ I said cheerfully. ‘So what of it? You’re his wife now, aren’t you? With a legitimate baby in your belly? He can call you what he likes in temper, you can win him back when he is calm. Win him back tonight, Anne.’

  I called for her maid and Anne picked out her gown. She chose a gown of silver and white, as if she would assert her purity even when the court had heard her accused of whoreish tricks. Her stomacher was embroidered with pearls and diamonds, the hem of the silvery cloth of the skirt was stitched with silver thread. When she put her hood on her black hair she looked every inch a queen, a snow queen, a queen of speckless beauty.

  ‘Very good,’ I said.

  Anne gave me a weary smile. ‘I have to do it and go on doing it forever,’ she said. ‘This dance to keep Henry interested. What will happen when I am old and I can dance no more? The girls in my chambers will still be young and beautiful. What happens then?’

  I had no comfort to offer her. ‘Let’s get through this evening. Never mind about years to come. And when you have a son and then more sons you won’t mind about getting old.’

  She rested her hand on the encrusted stomacher. ‘My son,’ she said softly.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  She nodded and went to the closed door. In the new gesture her shoulders went back and her chin went up, she smiled, her dazzling assured smile, and nodded to the maid to open the door and she went out to face the gossip mill of her own rooms, shining like an angel.

  I saw that the family had turned out in support, and knew that my uncle must have heard enough to be fearful. My mother was there, and my father. My uncle was at the rear of the room in amicable conversation with Jane Seymour which gave me pause for a moment. George was on the threshold, I caught his smile and then he went forward to Anne and took her hand. There was a little murmur of interest at her fine gown, at her defiant smile, and then the room eddied as the groups of talkers moved away and re-formed. Sir William Brereton came up and kissed her hand and whispered something about an angel fallen to earth, and Anne laughed and said that she had not fallen but merely arrived on a visit, so the suggestive imagery was neatly turned. Then there was a rustle at the door and Henry stamped into the room with the rest of the court, his lame leg giving him an awkward gait, his round face scored with new lines of pain. He gave Anne a sulky nod.

  ‘Good day, madam,’ he said. ‘Are you ready to go to dinner?’

  ‘Of course, husband,’ she said, as sweet as honey. ‘I am glad to see Your Majesty looking so well.’

  Her ability to flick from one mood to another was always baffling to him. He checked at her good humour and looked around at the avid faces of the court. ‘Have you greeted Sir John Seymour?’ he asked her, picking on the one man she would n