Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘I am sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘Someone was talking about it the other night but I wasn’t listening.’

  She made a little noise and leaped to her feet. ‘Oh very well then,’ she said irritably. ‘Talk to me about the baby. That’s all you’re interested in, isn’t it? You sit with your head half-cocked listening for her all the time, don’t you? You look ridiculous. For heaven’s sake sit up straight. The nurse won’t bring her back any quicker for you looking like a hound on point.’

  I laughed at the accuracy of her description. ‘It’s like being in love. I want to see her all the time.’

  ‘You’re always in love,’ Anne said crossly. ‘You’re like a big butter ball, always oozing love for someone or other. Once it was the king and we did very well out of that. Now it’s his baby, which will do us no good at all. But you don’t care. It’s always seep seep seep with you: passion and feeling and desire. It makes me furious.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Because you are all ambition,’ I said.

  Her eyes gleamed. ‘Of course. What else is there?’

  Henry Percy hovered between us, tangible as a ghost. ‘Don’t you want to know if I have seen him?’ I asked. It was a cruel question and I asked it hoping to see pain in her eyes, but I got nothing for my malice. Her face was cold and hard, she looked as if she had finished weeping for him and as if she would never weep for a man again.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘So you can tell them when they ask that I never mentioned his name. He gave up, didn’t he? He married another woman.’

  ‘He thought you’d abandoned him,’ I protested.

  She turned her head away. ‘If he’d been a proper man he’d have gone on loving me,’ she said, her voice harsh. ‘If it had been the other way round I’d never have married while my lover was free. He gave in, he let me go. I’ll never forgive him. He’s dead for me. I can be dead for him. All I want to do is to get out of this grave and get back to court. All that there is left for me is ambition.’

  Anne, Grandmother Boleyn, Baby Catherine and I settled down to spend the summer together in enforced companionship. As I grew stronger and the pain in my privates eased, I got back on my horse and started to ride out in the afternoons. I rode all around our valley and up to the hills of the Weald. I watched the hay meadows turn green again after their first cut, and the sheep grow white and fluffy with new wool. I wished the reapers joy at the harvest when they went into the wheatfields to sickle the first of the crop and saw them load the grain into great carts and take it to the granary and the mill. We ate hare one night after the reapers had sent in the dogs after the animals trapped in the last stand of wheat. I saw the cows separated from their calves for weaning and felt my own breasts ache with sympathy when I saw them crowding around the gate and trying to break through the thick-set hedges, barging and tossing their heads and bellowing for their babies.

  ‘They’ll forget, Lady Carey,’ the cowman said to me consolingly. ‘They won’t cry for more than a few days.’

  I smiled at him. ‘I wish we could leave them a little longer.’

  ‘It’s a hard world for man and beast,’ he said firmly. ‘They have to go, or how will you get your butter and your cheese?’

  The apples swelled round and rosy in the orchard. I went into the kitchen and asked the cook to make us great fat apple dumplings for our dinner. The plums grew rich and dark and split their skins, and the lazy late-summer wasps buzzed around the trees and grew drunk on the syrup. The air was sweet with honeysuckle and the heady perfume of fruit fattening on the bough. I wanted the summer never to end. I wanted my baby always to stay this small, this perfect, this adorable. Her eyes were changing colour from the dark blue of birth to a darker indigo, almost black. She would be a dark-eyed beauty like her sharp-tempered aunt.

  She smiled now when she saw me, I tested her over and over again, and I grew quite cross with my Grandmother Boleyn who claimed that a baby was blind until two or three years of age and that I was wasting my time hanging over her cradle, and singing to her, and spreading a carpet under the trees and lying on it with her and spreading her little fingers to tickle her palms, and taking up her tiny fat foot to nibble her toes.

  The king wrote to me once, describing the hunting and the kills he had made. It sounded as if there would not be a deer left in the New Forest by the time he was satisfied. At the end of the letter he said that the court would be back at Windsor in October, and Greenwich for Christmas, and that he expected me there, without my sister of course, and without our baby to whom he sent a kiss. Despite the tenderness of the kiss to our child, I knew that the joy of my summer with my baby was at an end, whatever my wishes might be; and that like a peasant woman who has to leave her child and go back to the field, it was time for me to go back to my work.

  Winter 1524

  I found the king at Windsor in merry mood. The hunting had gone well, the company had been excellent. There was a rumour about a flirtation with one of the queen’s new ladies, one Margaret Shelton, a Howard cousin of mine, newly come to court, and another story, more comical than true, about a lady who took every fence neck and neck with the king until, in sheer despair of outriding her, he had her behind a bush, and rode away before she had rearranged her dress. She was stuck on the ground until someone came by who would lift her back up into the saddle, and her hope of taking my place was over.

  There were bawdy tales of drinking bouts and my brother George had a bruise over one eye after a brawl in a tavern, and some running joke about a young page who had been besotted with George and had been sent home in disgrace after penning him a dozen lovesick sonnets all signed Ganymede. All in all the gentlemen of the court had been merry and the king himself was in high spirits.

  He snatched me up and held me tight and kissed me hard when he saw me, before all the court, though, thank God, the queen was not there. ‘Sweetheart, I have missed you,’ he said exuberantly. ‘Tell me that you have missed me too.’

  I could not help but smile into his bright eager face. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And I hear on all sides that Your Majesty has amused yourself.’

  There was a little guffaw from the king’s most intimate friends and he grinned a little sheepishly himself. ‘My heart ached for you night and day,’ he said with the exquisite mock courtesy of courtly love. ‘I pined in outer darkness. And you are well? And our baby?’

  ‘Catherine is very beautiful and grows well and strong,’ I said with a tiny stress on her name to prompt him. ‘She is most beautifully fashioned, a true Tudor rose.’

  My brother George stepped forward and the king released me so that George could kiss my cheek.

  ‘Welcome back to court, my sister,’ he said cheerily. ‘And how is the little princess?’

  There was a moment of stunned silence. The smile was wiped from Henry’s face. I gaped at George in blank horror at the terrible error he had made. He spun on his heel in a flash and turned to the king: ‘I call little Catherine a princess because she is fawned over as if she were a queen in the making. You should see the clothes that Mary has sewn for her, embroidered with her own hands. And the bed linen that the little empress reclines on! Even her swaddling clouts have her initials. You would laugh, Your Majesty. You would laugh to see her. She is a little tyrant at Hever, it must all be done to her direction. She is a veritable cardinal. She is a pope of the nursery.’

  It was a wonderful recovery. Henry relaxed and laughed at the thought of the little baby’s dictatorship, all the courtiers instantly echoed his laughter with their own smiles and titters at George’s description of the baby.

  ‘Is it really so? Do you indulge her so much?’ the king asked me.

  ‘She is my first,’ I excused myself. ‘And all her clothes will be used again for the next one.’

  It was a perfect note to hit. At once Henry thought of the next one and we had moved onwards. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘But what will the princess do with a rival in the nursery?’

  ‘I hope she will be too sma