Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  By May the business with the French envoys was all but finished. Princess Mary was to marry either the French king or his second son as soon as she was a woman. They held a great tennis tournament to celebrate and Anne was made mistress of the order of the players and made great work of a chart listing all the men of the court with their names on little flags. The king found her poring over it with one little flag absent-mindedly pressed to her heart.

  ‘What have you there, Mistress Boleyn?’

  ‘The order of the tennis tournament,’ she said. ‘I have to match each gentleman fairly so that all can play and we are certain of a true winner.’

  ‘I meant what have you there, in your hand?’

  Anne started. ‘I forgot I was holding it,’ she said quickly. ‘Just one of the names. I am placing the names in the order of play.’

  ‘And who is the gentleman that you hold so close?’

  She managed to blush. ‘I don’t know, I had not looked at the name.’

  ‘May I?’ He held out his hand.

  She did not give him the little flag. ‘It means nothing. It was just the flag that was in my hand as I was puzzling. Let me put it where it should be on the board and we’ll consider the order of play together, Your Majesty.’

  He was alert. ‘You seem ashamed, Mistress Boleyn.’

  She flared up a little. ‘I am ashamed of nothing. I just don’t want to seem foolish.’

  ‘Foolish?’

  Anne turned her head. ‘Please let me put this name down and you can advise me on the order of play.’

  He put out his hand. ‘I want to know the name on the flag.’

  For an awful moment I thought that she was not play-acting with him. For an awful moment I thought he was about to discover that she was cheating so that our brother George had the best place in the draw. She was so completely confused and distressed by his pressing to know the name that even I thought that she had been caught out. The king was like one of his best pointer dogs on the scent. He knew that something was being hidden and he was racked by his curiosity and his desire.

  ‘I command it,’ he said quietly.

  With tremendous reluctance Anne put the little flag into his outstretched hand, swept a curtsey and walked away from him. She did not look back; but once she was out of sight we all heard her heels patter and her dress swish as she ran away from the tennis court back up the stone-flagged path to the castle.

  Henry opened his hand and looked at the name on the flag that she had been holding to her breast. It was his own name.

  Anne’s tennis tournament took two days to complete and she was everywhere, laughing, ordering, umpiring and scoring. At the end there were four matches left to play: the king against our brother George, my husband William Carey against Francis Weston, Thomas Wyatt, newly returned from France, against William Brereton, and a match between a couple of nobodies which would take place while the rest of us were dining.

  ‘You had best make sure that the king doesn’t play Thomas Wyatt,’ I said to Anne in an undertone as our brother George and the king went onto the court together.

  ‘Oh why?’ she asked innocently.

  ‘Because there’s too much riding on this. The king wants to win in front of the French envoys and Thomas Wyatt wants to win in front of you. The king won’t take kindly to being beaten in public by Thomas Wyatt.’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s a courtier. He won’t forget the greater game.’

  ‘The greater game?’

  ‘Whether it is tennis or jousting or archery or flirtation the game is to keep the king happy,’ she said. ‘That’s all we are here for, that’s all that matters. And we all know that.’

  She leaned forward. Our brother George was in place, ready to serve, the king alert and ready. She raised her white handkerchief and dropped it. George served, it was a good one, it rattled on the roof of the court and dropped down just out of Henry’s reach. He lunged for it and got it back over the net. George, quick on his feet and twelve years younger than the king, smashed the ball past the older man and Henry raised his hand and conceded the point.

  The next serve was an easy one for the king to reach and he did a smooth passing shot that George did not even attempt to chase. The play ebbed and flowed, both men running and hitting the ball as hard as they could, apparently giving no quarter and allowing no favours. George was steadily and consistently losing but he did it so carefully that anyone watching would have thought the king the better player. Indeed, he probably was the better player in terms of skill and tactics. It was only that George could have outrun him twice over. It was only that George was lean and fit, a young man of twenty-four, while the king was a man with a thickening girth, a man heading towards the middle years of his life.

  They were near the end of the first set when George sent up a high ball. Henry leaped to smash it past George and take the point but then he fell and crashed down on the court and let out a terrible cry.

  All the ladies of the court screamed, Anne was on her feet at once, George jumped the net and was first at the king’s side.

  ‘Oh God, what is it?’ Anne called.

  George’s face was white. ‘Get a physician,’ he shouted. A page went flying up to the castle, Anne and I hurried to the gate of the court, tore it open and went in.

  Henry was red-faced and cursing with the pain. He reached for my hand and clung to it. ‘Damnation. Mary, get rid of all these people.’

  I turned to George. ‘Keep everyone out.’

  I saw the quick embarrassed look Henry shot towards Anne and realised that the pain he was suffering was less than the injury to his pride at the thought of her seeing him on the ground with tears squeezing from under his eyelids.

  ‘Go, Anne,’ I said quietly.

  She did not argue. She withdrew to the gate of the tennis court and waited, as the whole court waited, to hear what had struck the king down in the very moment of his triumphant shot.

  ‘Where is the pain?’ I asked him urgently. My terror was that he would point to his breast or to his belly and it would be something torn inside him, or his heart missing its beat. Something deep and irreparable.

  ‘My foot,’ he said, choking on the words. ‘Such a fool. I came down on the side of it. I think it’s broken.’

  ‘Your foot?’ The relief made me almost laugh out loud. ‘My God, Henry, I thought you were dead!’

  He looked up at that and grinned through his scowl. ‘Dead of tennis? I have given up jousting to keep myself safe and you think that I might be dead of tennis?’

  I was breathless with relief. ‘Dead of tennis! No! But I thought perhaps … it was so sudden, and you went down so fast …’

  ‘And at the hand of your brother!’ he finished, and then suddenly the three of us were howling with laughter, the king’s head cradled in my lap, George gripping his hands, and the king torn between the intense pain of his broken foot and the ludicrous thought that the Boleyns had attempted to assassinate him with tennis.

  The French envoys were due to leave, their treaties signed, and we were to have a great masque and party to bid them farewell. It was to take place in the queen’s apartments, without her invitation, without even her desire. The master of the revels merely arrived and abruptly announced that the king had ordered that the masque should take place in her rooms. The queen smiled as if it was the very thing that she wanted and let him measure up for awnings and tapestries and scenery. The queen’s ladies were to wear gowns of gold or silver and to dance with the king and his companions who would enter disguised.

  I thought how many times the queen had pretended not to recognise her husband when he came into her rooms disguised, how many times she had watched him dance with her ladies, how often he had led me out before her and that now she and I would watch him dance with Anne. Not a flicker of resentment crossed her face for even a moment. She thought that she would choose the dancers, as she had always done before, a little piece of patronage, one of the many ways to control the cou