Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I told you. I don’t like boys. They are all too silly.’

  ‘You don’t like boys?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So what do you like?’ he asks. His voice is lilting with admiration of himself. He knows the reply in this song.

  ‘I daren’t say.’ His hand is creeping up from my waist again, in a moment he will be fondling my breast. Oh, Thomas Culpepper, I wish to God this was you.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Oh, tell me, pretty Katherine, and I will give you a present for being an honest girl.’

  I snatch a quick breath of clean air. ‘I like you,’ I say simply, and one hand clamps – smack – on my breast and the other pulls me towards him and his mouth comes down on mine, all wet and sucking, and it is really very horrible; but on the other hand I have to wonder what present I get for being an honest girl.

  He gives me the estates of two convicted murderers: that is, a couple of houses and some goods, and some money. I can’t believe it. That I should have houses, two houses, and land, and money of my own!

  I have never had such wealth in my life, and never any gift so easily earned. I have to acknowledge: it was easily earned. It is not nice to lead on a man who is old enough to be my father, almost old enough to be my grandfather. It is not very nice to have his fat hand rubbing at my breasts and his stinking mouth all over my face. But I must remember that he is the king, and he is a kind old man and a sweet, doting old man, and I can close my eyes most of the time and pretend that it is someone else. Also, it is not very nice to have dead men’s goods, but when I say this to Lady Rochford she points out that we all have dead men’s goods one way or another, everything is either stolen or inherited, and a woman who hopes to rise in the world can’t afford to be particular.

  Anne, Westminster Palace, April 1540

  I thought that I would be crowned as part of the May Day celebrations but we are already less than a month away and no-one has ordered any gowns or planned the order of the coronation, so I begin to think it won’t be this May Day, it can’t be. In the absence of any better advisor I wait until the Princess Mary and I are walking back from the Lady Chapel to the palace, and I ask her what she thinks. I have grown to like her more and more and trust her opinion. Also, because she has been the child and then the exile of this court, she knows better than most what it is to live here and yet know yourself to be an outsider.

  At the very word ‘coronation’ she gives me a quick look of such concern that I cannot take another step. I freeze to the spot and cry: ‘Oh, what have you heard?’

  ‘Dear Anne, don’t cry,’ she says quickly. ‘I beg your pardon. Queen Anne.’

  ‘I’m not crying.’ I show her my shocked face. ‘I am not.’

  At once we both look round to see if anyone is watching us. This is how it is at court, always the glance over your shoulder for the spy; truth told only in whispers. She steps closer to me and I take her hand and put it through my arm and we walk together.

  ‘It can’t be this May Day because we would have had everything planned and ready by now if he was going to crown you,’ she says. ‘I thought that in Lent, myself. But it’s not so bad. It means nothing. Queen Jane wasn’t crowned either. He would have crowned her if she had lived, once she had given him an heir. He will be waiting for you to tell him that you are with child. He will be waiting for you to have a child and then there will be the christening and then your coronation after that.’

  I flush deeply at this and say nothing. She takes a glance at my face and waits until we have gone up the stairs, through my presence chamber, through my privy chamber and to my little withdrawing chamber where nobody comes without invitation. I close the door on the curious faces of my ladies and we are alone.

  ‘There is a difficulty?’ she says with careful tact.

  ‘Not of my making.’

  She nods but neither of us wants to say more. We are both virgins in our mid-twenties, old for spinsters, afraid of the mystery of male desire, afraid of the power of the king, both living on the edge of his acceptance.

  ‘You know, I hate May Day,’ she says suddenly.

  ‘I thought it was one of the greatest days of celebration of the year?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but it is a savage celebration, pagan: not a Christian one.’

  This is part of her Papist superstition and I am going to laugh for a moment but the gravity of her face stops me.

  ‘It’s just to welcome the coming of spring,’ I say. ‘There is no harm in it.’

  ‘It is the time for putting off the old and taking on the new,’ she says. ‘That’s the tradition and the king lives it to the full, like a savage. He rode in a May Day tournament with a love message to Anne Boleyn on his standard, and then he put my mother aside for the Lady Anne on a May Day. Less than five years later, it was her turn: the Lady Anne was the new Queen of the Joust, with her champions fighting for her honour before her royal box. But the knights were arrested that afternoon and the king rode away from her without even saying goodbye, and that was the end of the Lady Anne, and the last time she saw him.’

  ‘He didn’t say goodbye?’ For some reason, this seems to me the worst thing of all. No-one had told me this before.

  She shakes her head. ‘He never says goodbye. When his favour has gone then he goes swiftly too. He never said goodbye to my mother either, he rode away from her and she had to send her servants after him to wish him Godspeed. He never told her that he would not return. He just rode out one day, and never came back. He never said goodbye to the Lady Anne. He rode away from the May Day tournament and sent his men to arrest her. Actually, he never even said goodbye to Queen Jane, who died in giving him his son. He knew she was fighting for her life but he did not go to her. He let her die alone. He is hard-hearted but he is not hard-faced; he cannot stand women crying, he cannot stand goodbyes. He finds it easier to turn his heart, and turn his face, and then he just leaves.’

  I give a little shudder, and I go to the windows and check that they are tight shut, I have to stop myself from closing the shutters against the hard light. There is a cold wind coming off the river, I can almost feel it chilling me as I stand here. I want to go out to the presence chamber and surround myself with my silly girls, with a pageboy playing the lute, and the women laughing. I want the comfort of the queen’s rooms around me, even though I know that three other women have needed their comfort before, and they are all dead.

  ‘If he turn against me, as he turn against the Lady Anne, I would have no warning,’ I say quietly. ‘Nobody at this court is my friend, no-one even tell me that danger is coming.’

  Princess Mary does not attempt to reassure me.

  ‘It could be, like for the Lady Anne, a sunny day, a tournament, and then the men at arms come and there is no escape?’

  Her face is pale. She nods. ‘He sent the Duke of Norfolk against me to order my obedience. The good duke, who had known me from childhood and served my mother loyally, with love, said to my face that if he were my father he would swing me by the heels and split my head open against the wall,’ she says. ‘A man I had known from childhood, a man who knew me to be a Princess of the Blood, who had loved my mother as her most loyal servant. He came with my father’s goodwill, under his orders, and he was ready to take me to the Tower. The king sent his executioner against me and let him do what he would.’

  I take a handful of priceless tapestry, as if the touch of it can comfort me. ‘But I am innocent of offence,’ I say. ‘I have done nothing,’

  ‘Neither had I,’ she replies. ‘Neither had my mother. Neither had Queen Jane. Perhaps even the Lady Anne was innocent too. We all saw the king’s love turn to spite.’

  ‘And I have never had it,’ I say quietly to myself in my own language. ‘If he could abandon his wife of sixteen years, a woman he had loved, how readily, how easily can he dispose of me, a woman he has never even liked?’

  She looks at me. ‘What will become of you?’

  I