Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘I won’t let it frighten me,’ she said staunchly. ‘I’ve seen saint’s blood made from the blood of pigs, and holy water scooped up from a stream. Half of this church’s teaching is to lead you on, half to frighten you into your place. I won’t be bribed onwards, and I won’t be frightened. Not by anything. I took a decision to build my own road and I will do it.’

  If George had been listening he would have heard the sharp nervous edge in her voice. But he was watching her bright determined face. ‘Onwards and upwards, Anna Regina!’ he said.

  She beamed at him. ‘Onwards and upwards. And the next will be a boy.’

  She turned in his arms and put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him, as if he were a trusted lover. ‘So what am I to do?’

  ‘You have to get him back,’ he said earnestly. ‘Don’t rail at him, don’t let him see your fear. Call him back to you with every trick you know. Enchant him again.’

  She hesitated and then she smiled and told him the truth behind the bright face. ‘George, I’m ten years older than when I courted him first. I am nearing thirty. He’s had only one live child off me, and now he knows that I gave birth to a monster. I will repel him.’

  George tightened his grip on her waist. ‘You can’t repel him,’ he said simply. ‘Or we all fall. You have to draw him back to you.’

  ‘But it was me who taught him to follow his desires. Worse than that, I filled his stupid head with the new learning. Now he thinks that his desires are God’s manifestations. He only has to want something to think that it is God’s will. He doesn’t have to confirm it with priest, bishop, or Pope. His whims are holy. How can anyone make such a man return to his wife?’

  George looked over her head to me for help. I came a little closer. ‘He likes comfort,’ I said. ‘A little soothing. Pet him, tell him he is wonderful, praise him, and be kind to him.’

  She looked as blankly at me as if I were speaking Hebrew. ‘I am his lover, not his mother,’ she said flatly.

  ‘He wants a mother now,’ George said. ‘He’s hurt and he feels old and battered. He fears old age, he fears death. The wound on his leg stinks. He is in terror of dying before he has made a prince for England. What he wants is a woman to be tender to him until he feels better again. Jane Seymour is all sweetness. You have to out-sweeten her.’

  She was silent. We all knew that it was not possible to be sweeter than Jane Seymour when she had the crown in her sights. Not even Anne, that most consummate seductress, could out-sweeten Jane Seymour. The brightness had died from her face and for a moment in her thin pallor I saw the hard face of our own mother.

  ‘By God I hope it kills her,’ she suddenly swore vindictively. ‘If she gets her hand on my crown and her arse on my throne I hope it is the death of her. I hope she dies young. I hope she dies in childbed in the very act of giving him a boy. And I hope the boy dies too.’

  George stiffened. He could see from the window the return of the hunting party to court.

  ‘Run downstairs, Mary, and tell the king I am come,’ Anne said, not moving from George’s embrace.

  I ran downstairs as the king was dismounting from his horse. I saw him wince as he stepped to the ground and his weight went onto his injured leg. Jane was riding beside him, a phalanx of Seymours around them. I looked around for my father, for my mother, for my uncle. They were thrust to the back, eclipsed.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I said, sweeping him a curtsey. ‘My sister the queen has arrived and bids me to give Your Majesty her compliments.’

  Henry looked at me, he was wearing his sulky face, his forehead grooved with pain, his mouth pursed. ‘Tell her I am wearied from my riding, I will see her at dinner,’ he said shortly.

  He went past me with a heavy tread, walking unevenly, favouring his hurt leg. Sir John Seymour helped his daughter from her horse. I noted the new riding gown, the new horse, the diamond winking on her gloved hand. I longed so much to spit some venom at her that I had to bite the tip of my tongue, to make myself smile sweetly at her, and step back as her father and her brother escorted her through the great doors to her apartments – the apartments of the king’s favourite.

  My father and my mother followed the Seymours, in their train. I waited for them to ask me how Anne was, but they passed me with no more than a nod. ‘Anne is well,’ I volunteered, as my mother went by.

  ‘Good,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Will you not come to wait on her?’

  Her face was as blank as a barren woman. It was as if none of us had ever been born to her. ‘I will visit her when the king goes to her rooms,’ she said.

  I knew then that Anne and George and I were on our own.

  The ladies returned to Anne’s room like a flock of buzzards, uncertain where the best pickings were to be had. I noted, with bitter amusement, the crisis in headgear which Anne’s confident return had caused. Some of them went back to French hoods which Anne continued to wear. Some of them stayed in the heavy gable hoods which Jane favoured. All of them were desperate to know whether they should be in the queen’s beautiful apartment or over the way with the Seymours. Where might the king come next? Where might he prefer? Madge Shelton wore a gable hood and was trying to wheedle her way into Jane Seymour’s circle. Madge for one thought that Anne was in decline.

  I entered the room and three women fell silent the moment I approached them. ‘What’s the news?’ I asked.

  No-one would tell me. Then Jane Parker, always the most reliable of all scandal mongers, came to my side. ‘The king has sent Jane Seymour a gift, a huge purse of gold, and she has refused it.’

  I waited.

  Jane’s eyes were bright with delight. ‘She said she could not take such gifts from the king until she was a married woman. It would compromise her.’

  I was silent for a moment, trying to decode this arcane statement. ‘Compromise her?’

  Jane nodded.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I made my way through the women to Anne’s privy chamber. George was in there with her, Sir Francis Weston with him. ‘I would speak with you alone,’ I said flatly.

  ‘You can speak in front of Sir Francis,’ Anne said.

  I took a breath. ‘Have you heard about Jane Seymour refusing the king’s gift?’

  They shook their heads. ‘She is supposed to have said that she could not take such gifts from him until she was a married woman, because it might compromise her.’

  ‘Oho,’ Sir Francis said.

  ‘I suppose it is nothing more than her flaunting her virtue; but the court’s abuzz with it,’ I said.

  ‘It reminds the king that she could marry another,’ George said. ‘He’ll hate the sound of that.’

  ‘It parades her virtue,’ Anne added.

  ‘And it’ll get out,’ Sir Francis said. ‘This is theatre. She didn’t turn down that horse, did she? Or the diamond ring? Or the locket with his picture inside? But the court now thinks, and the world will soon think, that the king is interested in a young woman who has no ambition for wealth. Touché! And all in one tableau.’

  Anne gritted her teeth. ‘She is insufferable.’

  ‘And there’s nothing you can do to pay her back,’ George said. ‘So don’t even think about it. Head up, smile on, and enchant him if you can.’

  ‘There may be mention at dinner of the alliance with Spain,’ Sir Francis cautioned her as she rose from her chair. ‘Better say nothing against it.’

  Anne looked back over her shoulder at him. ‘If I have to become Jane Seymour myself, I might as well be set aside,’ she said. ‘If everything that is me – my wit and my temper and my passion for the reform of the church – has to be denied, then I have set my own self aside. If what the king wants is a biddable wife then I should never have tried for the throne in the first place. If I cannot be me, I might as well not be here at all.’

  George went to her, raised her hand and kissed it. ‘No, for we all adore you,’ he said. ‘And this is just a passing whim of the king’s. He wants J