Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  For a moment she hesitated.

  ‘The hazelnuts came too,’ I said temptingly. ‘And the chestnuts. It was a great woodland ball. I think the berries were there.’

  It was enough. She rose from her stool and came towards me and I lifted her onto my lap. She was heavier than I remembered: a child of solid flesh and bone, not the dream child that I thought of night after night. I put her on my knee and felt the warmth and strength of her. I rested my cheek against the warm cap and felt her curls tickle my neck. I inhaled the sweet scent of her skin, that wonderful baby-child scent.

  ‘Tell,’ she commanded and sat back to listen, as I started the story of the Woodland Revel.

  We had a wonderful week together: George, the babies and me. We walked in the sunshine and took picnics out into the hay meadows where the soft grass was starting to grow through the stubble again. When we were out of sight of the castle I would strip the swaddling off Baby Henry and let him kick his legs in the warm air and move freely. I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen. And George and Catherine ran races in which he was more and more outrageously handicapped so at first he had to hop, and then he had to crawl, and at the end of the week he could only be trundled along on his hands with me holding his feet in order to make it fair, so that she could win on her unsteady little feet.

  The night we were due to go back to court I could not eat my dinner, I was so sick with grief, I could not bring myself to tell her that I was leaving. I stole away in the dawn like a thief and told her nursemaid to tell her when she woke that her mother would come back again as soon as she could, and to be a good girl and look after Oakey. I rode until midday in a haze of misery and did not notice that it had been raining since we set out until George remarked at noon: ‘For pity’s sake let’s get out of this rain and find something to eat.’

  He had halted before a monastery where the bell was starting to toll for Nones and he dropped to the ground and lifted me down from the saddle. ‘Have you cried all the way?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I can’t bear to think of …’

  ‘Don’t think of it then,’ he said briskly. He stood back while one of our men rang the big bell and announced us to the gatekeeper. When the big gate swung open George marched me into the courtyard and up the steps to the refectory. We were early, there were only a couple of monks laying out pewter plates on the table and pewter mugs for ale or wine.

  George snapped his fingers at one of them and sent him scurrying for wine for the two of us, and then pressed the cold metal goblet into my hand. ‘Drink up,’ he said firmly. ‘And stop crying. You have to be at court tonight and you can’t arrive with a white face and red eyes. They’ll never let you go again if it makes you ugly. You’re not a woman who can please herself.’

  ‘You show me a woman in the world who can please herself,’ I said, passionately resentful, and made him laugh.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know one. How glad I am that Baby Henry and me are men.’

  We did not get to Windsor until evening and then we found the court on the brink of departure. Not even Anne could spare time from her packing to inspect me. She was in a flurry of preparation and I saw two new gowns disappearing into her box.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Gift from the king,’ she said shortly.

  I nodded, saying nothing. She shot me a sideways smile and then put in the matching hoods. I saw, as she undoubtedly meant that I should, that at least one was thickly sewn with seed pearls. I went to the windowseat and watched her put her cape over the top of them all and then call for her maid to come and strap up the box. When the girl had come and the porter followed her to lug the box away, Anne turned to me challengingly: ‘So?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Gowns?’

  She turned, her clasped hands behind her back, demure as a schoolgirl. ‘He’s courting me,’ she said. ‘Openly.’

  ‘Anne, he is my lover.’

  Lazily, she shrugged. ‘You weren’t here, were you? You’d strolled off to Hever, you wanted your children more than him. You weren’t exactly …’ She paused. ‘Hot.’

  ‘And you are?’

  She smiled, as if at some inner jest. ‘There is a certain heat in the air, this summer.’

  I set my teeth on my temper. ‘You were supposed to keep him interested in me, not fling him off course.’

  She shrugged again. ‘He’s a man. Easier to interest than turn away.’

  ‘I am curious about one thing,’ I said. If the words had been knives I would have thrown them blade-first into her self-satisfied, smiling face. ‘Clearly, you have his attention if he is giving you such gifts. You have moved upwards at court. You are the favourite.’

  She nodded, her satisfaction hung around her like the warm scent of a stroked cat.

  ‘Clearly you do this despite the fact that he is my acknowledged lover.’

  ‘I was told to,’ she said insolently.

  ‘You were not told to supplant me,’ I said sharply.

  She shrugged, all innocent. ‘I can’t help it if he desires me,’ she said, her tone like milk. ‘The court is filled with men who desire me. Do I encourage them? No.’

  ‘It’s me you’re talking to, remember,’ I said grimly. ‘Not one of your fools. I know that you encourage everybody.’

  She gave me that same bland smile.

  ‘What d’you hope for, Anne? To be his mistress? To push me out of my place?’

  At once the smug joy in her face was replaced by an absorbed thought-fulness. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But it’s a risk.’

  ‘Risk?’

  ‘If I let him have me, the chances are he’ll lose interest. He’s hard to hold.’

  ‘I don’t find him so.’ I scored a small point.

  ‘You get nothing. And he married off Bessie Blount to a nobody when he had finished with her. She gained nothing from it either.’

  I bit my tongue so hard that I could taste the blood in my mouth. ‘If you say so, Anne.’

  ‘I think I’ll hold out. Hold out till he sees that I am not a Bessie Blount, and not a Mary Boleyn. A greater thing by far. Hold out till he sees that he has to make me an offer, a very great offer.’

  I paused for a moment. ‘You’ll never get Henry Percy back if that’s what you’re hoping,’ I warned her. ‘He won’t give you Percy for your favour.’

  She was across the room in two great strides and she snatched both of my wrists, her fingernails digging in. ‘You never mention his name again,’ she hissed. ‘Never!’

  I wrenched my hands away, and grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘I’ll say what I want to you,’ I swore. ‘Just as you say what you want to me. You’re accursed, Anne, you lost your one love and now you want anything that’s not yours. You want anything that’s mine. You’ve always wanted anything that was mine.’

  She pulled out of my grip and flung open the door. ‘Leave me,’ she ordered.

  ‘You can go,’ I corrected her. ‘This is my room, remember.’

  For a moment we glared at each other, stubborn as cats on the stable wall, full of mutual resentment and something darker, the old sense between sisters that there is only really room in the world for one girl. The sense that every fight could be to the death.

  I moved away first. ‘We’re supposed to be on the same side.’

  She slammed the door shut. ‘It’s our room,’ she stipulated.

  The lines between Anne and me were now clearly drawn. All our childhood it had been a question as to which of us was the best Boleyn girl, now our girlhood rivalry was to be played out on the greatest stage in the kingdom. By the end of the summer one of us would be the acknowledged mistress of the king; the other would be her maid, her assistant, perhaps her Fool.

  There was no way I could defeat her. I would have plotted against her