Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  She gave an unwilling chuckle at that and George bent his dark head and brushed her cheek with his lips. ‘You are,’ he assured her. ‘You are indeed utterly perfect. We all of us adore you. Keep it up, for God’s sake. If anyone ever knows what you are truly like in private we’ll all be lost.’

  She drew back and would have slapped him but he jerked his head out of the way and laughed at her and snapped his fingers to me. ‘Come on, little queen in the making!’ he said. ‘All ready? All prepared?’ He turned to Anne. ‘He can get his cock up, yes? You’ve not packed her too tight, like a ship’s keel?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said crossly. ‘But I should think it’ll hurt like the devil.’

  ‘Well, we won’t worry about that, will we?’ George smiled at her. ‘After all, this is our meal ticket and our fortune that we are sending to his bed, hardly a girl at all. Come, child! You have work to do for us Boleyns, and we are counting on you!’

  He kept up a flow of chatter as we went through the great hall and up the shadowy stairs to the king’s chambers. When we entered Cardinal Wolsey was sitting with Henry and George drew me to a windowseat and brought me a glass of wine while we waited for the king and his most trusted counsellor to finish their low-voiced talk.

  ‘Probably counting the scraps from the kitchen,’ George whispered to me mischievously.

  I smiled. The cardinal’s attempts to make the king’s court run with less waste was a source of continual amusement to those courtiers, my family among them, whose comfort and profit came from exploiting its folly and extravagance.

  Behind us, the cardinal bowed and nodded to his page to gather up his papers. He nodded to George and to me as George led me forward to sit in his chair by the fireside.

  ‘I shall bid you goodnight, Your Majesty, madam, sir,’ he said and left the room.

  ‘Will you take a glass of wine with us, George?’ the king asked.

  I shot a swift glance of appeal to my brother.

  ‘I thank Your Majesty,’ George said and poured wine for the king, for me, and for himself. ‘You are working late, sire?’

  Henry waved a dismissive hand. ‘You know how the cardinal is,’ he said. ‘Unceasing in his labours.’

  ‘Deadly dull,’ George suggested impertinently.

  The king chuckled disloyally. ‘Deadly dull,’ he agreed.

  He sent George away by eleven o’clock and we were in bed by midnight. He caressed me gently and praised the plumpness of my breasts and the roundness of my belly, and I stored his words up so that when my mother next reproached me for being fat and dull I could claim that the king liked me this way. But it was no joy to me. Somehow, when they had taken my baby away they had stolen away a part of me too. I could not love this man, knowing that he would not listen to me, knowing that I was not allowed even to show him my sadness. He was the father of my children and yet he would have no interest in them until they were old enough for him to use as counters in the game of inheritance. He had been my lover for years and yet it had been my task to make sure that he never knew me. As he lay on me, and moved inside me, I felt as lonely as if I were the ship which bore my name, out all alone at sea.

  Henry fell asleep almost as soon as he had done, breathing heavily, half-sprawled across me with his beard hot against my neck, his sour breath in my face. I could have screamed at the weight and the smell of him but I lay very still. I was a Boleyn. I was not some slut of a kitchen maid who could not bear a little discomfort. I lay still and thought of the moon shining on the moat of Hever Castle and wished myself in my own little room in the comfort of my bed. I took care not to think of my children: little Catherine in her bed at Hever, or Henry in his crib at Windsor. I could not risk tears when I was in the king’s bed. I must be ready to turn to him with a smile whenever he might wake.

  To my surprise he stirred at about two in the morning. ‘Light a candle,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep.’

  I rose from the bed and felt myself ache in every bone of my body from the discomfort of lying unmoving under his weight. I stirred up the logs of the fire and then lit a candle from the flame. Henry sat up and pulled the covers around his naked shoulders. I put on my robe and sat by the fire and waited to know what his pleasure might be.

  I noted with dread that he did not look happy. ‘What is the matter, my lord?’

  ‘Why d’you think the queen could not give me a son?’

  I was so surprised at this turn of thought that I could not answer quickly and smoothly, like a courtier. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, sire. It’s too late for her now.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said impatiently. ‘But why didn’t it happen before? When I married her I was a young man of eighteen and she was twenty-three. She was beautiful, beautiful, I can’t tell you. And I was the handsomest prince in Europe.’

  ‘You still are,’ I said swiftly.

  He gave me a little complacent smile. ‘Not Francis?’

  I waved away the French king. ‘Nothing compared with you.’

  ‘I was virile,’ he said. ‘And potent. Everyone knows that. And she took with child straightaway. D’you know how soon after the wedding she felt her baby quicken?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Four months!’ he said. ‘Think of it. I had her in foal in the first month of marriage. How is that for potency?’

  I waited.

  ‘Stillborn,’ he said. ‘Only a girl. Stillborn in January.’

  I looked away from his discontented face to the flames of the fire.

  ‘She took again,’ he said. ‘This time a boy. Prince Henry. We had him christened, we had a tournament in his honour. I’ve never been happier in my life. Prince Henry, named for me and for my father. My son. My heir. Born the first of January. He was dead by March.’

  I waited, chilled at the thought of my Henry, taken away from me, who too might be dead in three months. The king was far away from me, back in the past when he had been a youth not much older than I was now.

  ‘Another baby on the way before I went to war against the French,’ he said. ‘Miscarried in October. An autumn loss. It took the shine off the victory against the French. It took the shine off her. Two years after that, in the spring: another baby born dead, another boy. Another baby who would have been Prince Henry if he had lived. But he didn’t live. None of them lived.’

  ‘You had the Princess Mary,’ I reminded him in a half-whisper.

  ‘She came next,’ he said. ‘And I was sure that we had broken the pattern. I thought – God knows what I hoped for – but I had a thought that there had been some ill luck, or some illness, or some such thing that had worked itself out. That once she could bear one baby who lived then others would follow. But it took two years for her even to conceive after Mary. And then it was a baby girl – and born dead.’

  I took a breath, I had been holding my breath listening to this familiar story. The terrible listing of the babies’ deaths by their father was as painful as watching his wife on her prie dieu naming the lost ones over her rosary.

  ‘But I knew,’ Henry said, heaving himself off his pillows and turning to me, his face no longer filled with sorrow but flushing with anger, ‘I knew that I was potent and fertile. Bessie Blount had my boy while the queen was labouring over the last dead baby. Bessie had a boy from me while all I had from the queen were little corpses. Why should that be? Why should that be?’

  I shook my head. ‘How should I know, sire? It’s the will of God.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Exactly so. You are right, Mary. That is what it is. It has to be.’

  ‘God could not wish such a thing on you,’ I said, choosing my words with care, studying his profile in the darkness, longing for Anne’s advice. ‘Of all the princes in Christendom you must be his favourite.’

  He turned to look at me, his blue eyes robbed of their colour in the darkness. ‘So what could be wrong?’ he prompted me.

  I found I was gaping at him, my mouth half-open like an idiot dawdlin