Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  My father nodded, a little consoled, but my uncle drummed the table with his long fingers. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Take her away.’ Anne spoke suddenly. She drew attention at once in the way that a late speaker always does, but the confidence in her voice was riveting.

  ‘Away?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Send her down to Hever. Tell him that she’s ill. Let him imagine her dying of grief.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he’ll want her back. She’ll be able to command what she likes. All she has to do –’ Anne gleamed her spiteful little smile ‘–All she has to do when she returns is to behave so well that she enchants the most educated, the most witty, the most handsome prince in Christendom. D’you think she can do it?’

  There was a cold silence while my mother and my father and my Uncle Howard and even George all inspected me in silence.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Anne said smugly. ‘But I can coach her well enough to get her into his bed, and whatever happens to her after that is in the hands of God.’

  Uncle Howard looked intently at Anne. ‘Can you coach her in how to keep him?’ he asked.

  She raised her head and smiled at him, the very picture of confidence. ‘Of course, for a while,’ she said. ‘He’s only a man after all.’

  Uncle Howard laughed shortly at the casual dismissal of his sex. ‘You have a care,’ he urged. ‘We men are not where we are today because of some sort of accident. We chose to get into the great places of power, despite the desires of women; and we chose to use those places to make laws which will hold us there forever.’

  ‘True enough,’ Anne granted. ‘But we’re not talking of high policy. We’re talking of catching the king’s desire. She just has to catch him and hold him for long enough for him to make a son on her, a royal Howard bastard. What more could we ask?’

  ‘And she can do that?’

  ‘She can learn,’ Anne said. ‘She’s halfway there. She is his choice, after all.’ The little shrug she gave indicated that she did not think much of the king’s choice.

  There was a silence. Uncle Howard’s attention had moved from me and my future as the brood mare for the family. Instead he was looking at Anne as if he had seen her for the first time. ‘Not many maids of your age think as clearly as you.’

  She smiled at him. ‘I’m a Howard like you.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t try for him yourself.’

  ‘I thought of it,’ she said honestly. ‘Any woman in England today would be bound to think of it.’

  ‘But?’ he prompted her.

  ‘I’m a Howard,’ she repeated. ‘What matters is that one of us catches the king. It hardly matters which one. If his taste is for Mary and she has his acknowledged son then my family becomes the first in the kingdom. Without rival. And we can do it. We can manage the king.’

  Uncle Howard nodded. He knew that the king’s conscience was a domesticated beast, given to easy herding but prone to sudden stubborn stops. ‘It seems we have to thank you,’ he said. ‘You have planned our strategy.’

  She acknowledged his thanks, not with a bow, which would have been graceful. Instead, she turned her head like a flower on the stem, a typically arrogant gesture. ‘Of course I long to see my sister as the king’s favourite. These things are my business quite as much as yours.’

  He shook his head as my mother made a shushing noise at her overly confident eldest daughter. ‘No, let her speak,’ he said. ‘She’s as sharp as any of us. And I think she’s right. Mary must go to Hever and wait for the king to send for her.’

  ‘He’ll send,’ Anne said knowledgably. ‘He’ll send.’

  I felt like a parcel, like the curtains for a bed, or the plates for the top table, or the pewter for the lower tables in the hall. I was to be packed up and sent to Hever as bait for the king. I was not to see him before I left, I was not to speak to anyone about my going. My mother told the queen that I was overtired and asked for me to be excused from her service for a few days so that I might go home and rest. The queen, poor lady, thought that she had triumphed. She thought that the Boleyns were in retreat.

  It was not a long ride, a little more than twenty miles. We stopped to dine at the roadside, eating nothing more than bread and cheese which we had carried with us. My father could have called on the hospitality of any great house along the way, he was well enough known as a courtier high in the favour of the king, and we would have been nobly entertained. But he did not want to break the journey.

  The high road was rutted and pitted with potholes, every now and then we saw a broken cart wheel where a traveller had been overturned. But the horses stepped out well enough on the dry ground and every now and then the going was so good that we broke into a canter. The verges on the side of the road were thick with the white of gypsy lace and big-faced white daisies, and lush with the early summer greenness of grass. In the hedges the honeysuckle twisted around the bursting growth of hawthorn and may, at the roots were pools of purple-blue self-heal and the gangly growth of ladies’ smock with dainty flowers of white, veined with purple. Behind the hedges in the thick lush pastures were fat cows with their heads down, munching, and in the higher fields there were flocks of sheep with the occasional idle boy watching over them from the shade of a tree.

  The common land outside of the villages was mostly farmed in strips and they made a pretty sight where they were gardened in rows with onions and carrots drawn up like a retinue on parade. In the villages themselves the cottage gardens were tumbling confusions of daffodils and herbs, vegetables and primroses, wild beans shooting and hawthorn hedgerows in flower with a corner set aside for a pig, and a rooster crowing on the dunghill outside the back door. My father rode in a quiet satisfied silence when the road took us onto our own land, downhill, through Edenbridge, and through the wet meadowlands towards Hever. The horses went slower as the going grew heavier on the damp road, but my father was patient now we were nearing our estate.

  It had been his father’s house before it was his; but it went no further back in our family than that. My grandfather had been a man of no more than moderate means who had risen by his own skills in Norfolk, apprenticed to a mercer, but eventually became Lord Mayor of London. For all that we clung to our Howard connection it was only a recent one, and only through my mother who had been Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, a great catch for my father. He had taken her to our grand house at Rochford in Essex and then brought her to Hever where she had been appalled at the smallness of the castle, and the cosy poky private rooms.

  At once he had set to rebuild it to please her. First he put a ceiling across the great hall, which had been open to the rafters in the old style. In the space he created above the hall he made a set of private rooms for us where we could dine and sit in greater comfort and privacy.

  My father and I turned in at the gates of the park, the gatekeeper and his wife tumbling out to make their bow as we went by. We rode past them with a wave, and up the dirt road to the first river, which was spanned by a little wooden bridge. My horse did not like the look of this, she jibbed at it as soon as she heard the echo of her hoofbeats on the hollow wood.

  ‘Fool,’ my father said briefly, leaving me to wonder whether he meant me or the horse, and put his own hunter before mine and led the way across. My horse followed behind, very docile when she could see that there was no danger, and so I rode up to the drawbridge of our castle behind my father and waited while the men came out of the guard room to take our horses and lead them away to the stables at the back. My legs felt weak after the long ride when they lifted me down from the saddle but I followed my father across the drawbridge and into the shadow of the gatehouse, under the forbidding thick teeth of the portcullis and into the welcoming little castle yard.

  The front door stood open, the yeoman of the ewry and the chief household men came out and bowed to my father, half a dozen servants behind them. My father ran his eyes over them: some were in full livery,