Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  I was still Anne’s chief confidante and companion and one day in November she insisted that she and George and I walk by the flooded river at Greenwich Palace.

  ‘You must be wondering what will become of you, now that you have no husband,’ Anne started. She seated herself on a bench and looked up at me.

  ‘I thought I would live with you while you need me, and then go back to Hever,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘I can ask the king to allow that,’ she said. ‘It is in my gift.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I can ask him to provide for you,’ she said. ‘William left you almost nothing, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘The king used to pay William a pension of one hundred pounds a year. I can have that pension transferred to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I repeated.

  ‘The thing is,’ Anne said lightly, turning her collar up against the cold wind, ‘I thought I would adopt Henry.’

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘I thought I would adopt little Henry as my own son.’

  I was so astounded, I could only look at her. ‘You don’t even like him very much,’ I said, the first foolish thought of a loving mother. ‘You never even play with him. George has spent more time with him than you.’

  Anne glanced away, as if seeking patience from the river and the jumbled roof tops of the City beyond. ‘No. Of course. That’s not why I would adopt him. I don’t want him because I like him.’

  Slowly, I started to think. ‘So that you have a son, Henry’s son. You have a son who is a Tudor by birth. If he marries you then in the same ceremony he gets a son.’

  She nodded.

  I turned and took a couple of steps, my riding boots crunching on the frozen gravel. I was thinking furiously. ‘And of course, this way, you take my son away from me. So I am less desirable to Henry. In one move you make yourself the mother of the king’s son and you take away my great claim to his attention.’

  George cleared his throat, and leaned against the river wall, arms folded across his chest, his face a picture of detachment. I rounded on him. ‘You knew?’

  He shrugged. ‘She told me after she’d done it. She did it as soon as we told her that the family thought that you might take the eye of the king again. She only told Father and Uncle after the king had agreed and the deed was done. Uncle thought it a keen bit of play.’

  I found my throat dry and I swallowed. ‘A keen bit of play?’

  ‘And it means that you are provided for,’ George said fairly. ‘It puts your son close to the throne, it concentrates all the benefits on Anne, it’s a good plan.’

  ‘This is my son!’ I could hardly say the words, I was choking on my grief. ‘He is not for sale like some Christmas goose driven into market.’

  George rose from the wall and put his arm around my shoulders, turned me to face him. ‘No-one’s selling him, we’re making him all but a prince,’ he said. ‘We’re claiming his rights for him. He could be the next King of England. You should be proud.’

  I closed my eyes and felt the onshore wind on the cold skin of my face. I thought for a moment that I might faint or vomit, and more than anything else I longed for that, to be struck down so sick that they had to take me home to Hever and leave me there forever with my children.

  ‘And Catherine? What about my daughter?’

  ‘You can keep Catherine,’ Anne said precisely. ‘She’s only a girl.’

  ‘If I refuse?’ I looked up into George’s dark honest eyes. I trusted George, even though he had kept this from me.

  He shook his head. ‘You can’t refuse. She’s done it legally. Signed and sealed already. It’s done.’

  ‘George,’ I whispered. ‘This is my boy, my little boy. You know what my boy is to me.’

  ‘You’ll still see him,’ George said consolingly. ‘You’d be his aunt.’

  It was like a physical blow. I staggered, and would have lost my footing but for George’s arm. I turned to Anne who was sweetly silent, the smuggest of small smiles curving her lips. ‘It’s everything for you, isn’t it?’ I said, shaken by the depth of my hatred. ‘You have to have everything, don’t you? You have the King of England at your beck and call and you have to have my son too. You’re like a cuckoo that eats all the other babes in the nest. How far do we all have to go for your ambition? You’ll be the death of us all, Anne.’

  She turned her head away from the hatred on my face. ‘I have to be queen,’ was all she said. ‘And you all have to help me. Your son Henry can play his part in the advancement of this family and we will help him upwards, in return. You know that’s how it is, Mary. Only a fool rails against the way the dice fall.’

  ‘They’re weighted dice when I play with you,’ I said. ‘I shan’t forget this, Anne. On your deathbed I’ll remind you that you took my son because you were afraid that you could not make one of your own.’

  ‘I can make a son!’ she said, stung. ‘You did it! Why shouldn’t I?’

  I gave a little triumphant laugh. ‘Because you’re older every day,’ I said spitefully. ‘And so is the king. Who knows that you can make a child at all? I was so fertile with him that I had two children from him one after another, and one the most beautiful boy that God ever put on this earth. You’ll never have a boy like my Henry, Anne. You know in your very bones that you’ll never have a boy to match him. All you can do is steal my son because you know you’ll never have your own.’

  She was so white that she looked as if the sweat had come back to her.

  ‘Stop it,’ George said. ‘Stop it, you two.’

  ‘Never say that again,’ she hissed at me. ‘It’s to curse me. And if I fall, then you go down too, Mary. And George, and all of us. Never dare to say that again or I’ll have you sent to a nunnery and you’ll never see either of your children again.’

  She leaped up from her seat and swirled away in a ripple of fur-trimmed brocade. I watched her run up the path to the palace and thought what a dangerous enemy she was. She could run to Uncle Howard, she could run to the king. Anne had the ear of everyone who might command me. And if she wanted my son, if she wanted my life, she had only to tell either of them and it would be done.

  George put his hand on mine. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘But at least this way your children stay at Hever and you can see them.’

  ‘She takes everything,’ I said. ‘She has always taken everything. But I will never forgive her this.’

  Spring 1529

  Anne and I were in the hall of Blackfriars monastery, hidden by a curtain at the back. We could not stay away. Nobody who had the smallest pretext to be in court could bear to stay away. Nothing like it had ever happened in England before. It was the place they had chosen to hear the evidence for and against the marriage of the King and Queen of England, a most extraordinary hearing, a most extraordinary event.

  The court was at Bridewell Palace – just next door to the monastery. The king and queen would sit down to dinner in the great hall of Bridewell every night, and every day they would go to the court at Blackfriars and hear if their marriage had ever been valid, in all its long loving twenty years’ duration.

  It was a dreadful day. The queen was dressed in one of her finest gowns, she had clearly decided to defy the council’s command that she dress very plain. She was in her new red velvet gown with a petticoat of golden brocade. Her sleeves and the hem of the gown were trimmed with the rich black fur of sable. Her dark red hood framed her face and she did not look weary and sad, as she had done for the past two years; she looked fiery and animated, ready for battle.

  When the king was asked to speak to the court he said that he had had doubts about the validity of the marriage from the very beginning and the queen interrupted him – as no-one else in the world would dare to do – and said, very reasonably, that he had left his doubts silent for a long time. The king raised his voice and continued to the end of his prepared speech, but he was rattled.

&nbs