Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  George stayed with us in the country for two weeks, as relieved as I was to be away from the court which was waiting, like the hounds in a ring around a wounded doe, for the moment that the queen could be dragged down. Neither of us wanted to be there the moment that the cardinals’ court ruled against the innocent queen and sent her in disgrace from the country that she had called her home. And then George received a letter from our father.

  George,

  It has gone awry. Campeggio announced today that he can take no decision without the Pope. The court is adjourned, Henry is black with rage and your sister beside herself.

  We are all to leave on progress at once and the queen is to be left behind in disgrace.

  You and Mary must come and be with Anne, no-one but you can manage her temper.

  Boleyn.

  ‘I shan’t go,’ I said simply.

  We were sitting together in the great hall after dinner. Grandmother Boleyn had gone to bed, the children were fast asleep in their own little beds after a day of running and hiding and playing catch.

  ‘I’ll have to,’ George said.

  ‘They said I could spend the summer with my children. They promised me that.’

  ‘If Anne needs you –’

  ‘Anne always needs me, she always needs you. She always needs all of us. She is trying to do something impossible – push a good woman out of marriage, push a queen off her throne. Of course she needs an army. You always need an army for a treasonous insurrection.’

  George glanced to see that the doors to the hall were shut. ‘Careful.’

  I shrugged. ‘This is Hever. This is why I come to Hever. So that I can speak. Tell them that I was sick. Tell them I might have the sweat. Tell them I said I would come as soon as I am well again.’

  ‘This is our future.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘We’ve lost. Everyone knows it but us. Katherine will keep the king, as in very justice she should. Anne will become his mistress. We’ll never make it to the throne of England. Not in this generation. You’ll have to hope that Jane Parker gives you a pretty girl. And you can throw her into that den of wolves and see who snaps her up.’

  He laughed shortly at that. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow. We cannot all surrender.’

  ‘We’ve lost,’ I said flatly. ‘No shame in surrender when you are completely and utterly defeated.’

  Dear Mary,

  George tells me that you do not come to court because you think my cause is lost. Be very careful to whom you say this. Cardinal Wolsey will lose his house, his lands and his fortune, he will be displaced from the Lord Chancellorship, he will be a ruined man because he failed in my business. So do not you forget that you too are to work at my business, and I will not tolerate a servant with half a heart.

  I have the king under my thumb and dancing to my bidding. I am not going to be defeated by two old men and their lack of courage. You speak too soon when you speak of my defeat. I have staked my life on becoming Queen of England. I have said that I shall do it, and I will do it.

  Anne

  Come to Greenwich in the autumn without fail.

  Autumn 1529

  Everything that Anne had threatened against Wolsey came true, and it was our Uncle Howard with the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s dear friend and brother-in-law, who had the pleasure of taking the Great Seal of England off the disgraced cardinal. They would have the pickings of his enormous fortune too.

  ‘I said I would bring him down,’ Anne remarked smugly to me. We were reading in the windowseat of her presence chamber of her new London house: Durham House. By standing at the window and craning her head Anne could just see York Place where the cardinal had once reigned supreme and where she had courted Henry Percy.

  There was a tap at the door. Anne looked at me to answer for her. ‘Come in!’ I called.

  It was one of the king’s pages, a handsome young man of about twenty. I smiled at him, his eyes danced at the attention. ‘Sir Harold?’ I asked politely.

  ‘The king begs his sweet mistress to accept this gift,’ the youth said and dropped to one knee before Anne, holding out a small box.

  She took it from him and opened it. She gave a little satisfied purr at the contents.

  ‘What?’ I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity.

  ‘Pearls,’ she said shortly. She turned to the page. ‘Tell the king that I am honoured by his gift,’ she said. ‘And that I will wear them at dinner tonight to thank him myself. Tell him,’ she smiled as if at some private joke, ‘that he will find he has a kind mistress and not a cruel one.’

  The young man nodded solemnly, got to his feet, made a deep bow to Anne and a flirtatious bob to me, and took himself out of the room. Anne closed the box and tossed it across to me. I looked at the pearls, they were magnificent, set on a chain of gold.

  ‘What did your message mean?’ I asked. ‘That you will be kind and not cruel?’

  ‘I can’t give myself to him,’ she said, as prompt as any huckster who knows the value to a penny. ‘But we had words this morning because he wanted to take me into his privy chamber after Mass and I would not go.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I lost my temper,’ she confessed. ‘I swore that he wanted to treat me as a whore and dishonour me and dishonour himself and destroy any chance we had of a proper decision from Rome. If anyone thinks that I am his whore then I will never supplant Katherine. I’d be no better than you.’

  ‘You lost your temper?’ I asked, going at once to the worst part of this. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Fell back,’ Anne said ruefully. ‘Shot out of the room like a cat scalded by a falling pan. But see what comes of it? He cannot bear me to be displeased with him. I have him dancing like a boy for me.’

  ‘At the moment,’ I said warningly.

  ‘Oh, tonight I shall be kind as I promised. I shall dress and sing and dance only for him.’

  ‘And after dinner?’

  ‘I let him touch me,’ she said unwillingly. ‘I let him stroke my breasts and I let him put his hand up my skirt. But I never take off my gown for him. I really don’t dare.’

  ‘D’you pleasure him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He insists on it and I can’t see how to avoid it. But sometimes –’ She rose from the windowseat and paced to the centre of the room. ‘When he has stripped off his hose he pushes it into my hand and I hate him for it. It feels like an insult to me, to use me like this and then …’ She broke off, speechless with temper. ‘Then he reaches his pleasure and he spouts like a stupid whale, such a mess and wetness and I think …’ She slammed her fist into her palm. ‘I think God, oh God – I need a baby and there is all this going to waste! Going to waste in my hand when it should be in my belly! For God’s sake! Apart from it being a sin, it’s such madness!’

  ‘There’s always more,’ I said practically.

  The look she turned on me was haunted. ‘There’s not always more of me,’ she said. ‘He’s mad to touch me now but he’s been waiting three years. What if we have to wait another three years? How am I to keep my looks? How am I to stay fertile? He might well be lusty till he is sixty, but what about me?’

  ‘Does he not think badly of you?’ I asked. ‘These are whore’s tricks you are playing with him.’

  Anne shook her head. ‘I have to do something to keep him hot for my touch. I have to keep him coming forward and hold him off, all at the same time.’

  ‘There are other things you can do,’ I volunteered.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You can let him watch you.’

  ‘Let him watch me do what?’

  ‘Let him watch you while you touch yourself. He loves that. It makes him almost weep with lust.’

  She looked intensely uncomfortable. ‘For shame.’

  I laughed shortly. ‘You let him watch you undress, one thing then another, very slowly. Last of all you lift your shift and put your fingers to your cunny and open it up to show him.’

  Sh