Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  She did not jump when she saw us on the bed together, and I – still half-asleep and frozen into stillness with a sort of fear at her furtiveness – did not move either. I kept my eyelids half-closed and I watched her through my eyelashes.

  She kept very still, she did not enter nor leave, but she took in every inch of us: George’s head turned into my lap, the spread of my legs under my gown. My head tipped back, my hood tossed on the windowseat, my hair tumbled about my sleeping face. She took us in as if she were studying us to paint a miniature, as if she were collating evidence. Then, as silently as she had come, she slid out again.

  At once I shook George and put my hand over his mouth as he woke.

  ‘Sssh. Jane was here. She may still be outside the door.’

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Jane! Your wife, Jane!’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She said nothing. She just came in and looked at us, asleep together on the bed, she looked all around and then she crept away.’

  ‘She didn’t want to wake me.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said uncertainly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘She looked – odd.’

  ‘She always looks odd,’ he said carelessly. ‘On the scent.’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ I said. ‘But when she looked at us I felt quite …’ I broke off, I could not find the words. ‘I felt quite dirty,’ I said eventually. ‘As if we were doing something wrong. As if we were …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Too close.’

  ‘We’re brother and sister,’ George exclaimed. ‘Of course we’re close.’

  ‘We were on the bed asleep together.’

  ‘Of course we were asleep!’ he exclaimed. ‘What else should we be doing together on the bed? Making love?’

  I giggled. ‘She makes me feel like I shouldn’t even be in your room.’

  ‘Well, you should,’ he said stoutly. ‘Where else can we talk without half the court as well as her prowling round and listening? She’s just jealous. She’d give a king’s ransom to be on the bed with me in the afternoon, and I’d as soon put my head into a mantrap as into her lap.’

  I smiled. ‘You don’t think she matters at all?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said lazily. ‘She’s my wife. I can manage her. And the way the fashion is for marriage, I might just throw her off and marry a pretty one instead.’

  Anne absolutely refused to spend the Christmas feast at Greenwich if she were not to be the centre of the attention. Although Henry tried again and again to explain to her that it was for the good of their cause she railed at him for preferring the queen at his side.

  ‘I shall go!’ she threw at him. ‘I shan’t stay here and be insulted by neglect. I shall go to Hever. I shall spend the Christmas feast there. Or perhaps I shall go back to the French court. My father is there, I could spend a happy time there, I think. I was always very much admired in France.’

  He went white as if she had knifed him. ‘Anne, my own love, don’t say such things.’

  She rounded on him. ‘Your own love? You don’t even want me at your side on Christmas Day!’

  ‘I want you there, on that day and every day. But if Campeggio is even now reporting to the Pope I want everyone to know that I am putting the queen aside for the purest of reasons, for the very best of reasons.’

  ‘And I am impure?’ she demanded, snatching at the word.

  The quickness of wits that she had brought to flirtation was now being exercised on Henry as a weapon. And he was as helpless now as he had been then.

  ‘My own true love, you are an angel to me,’ he said. ‘And I want the rest of the world to know it. I have told the queen that you shall be my wife because you are the finest that England can offer. I told her that.’

  ‘You discuss me with her?’ She gave a little breathy scream. ‘Oh no! This is to add insult to insult. And she tells you that I am not, perhaps. She tells you that when I was her lady in waiting I was no angel. She tells you that I am not fit to make your shirts, perhaps!’

  Henry dropped his head in his hands. ‘Anne!’

  She spun away from him and turned to the window. I kept my head down over the book I was supposed to be reading and passed my finger along the line of the words but I saw nothing. Covertly, the two of us, king and former mistress, both watched her. The strain in her shoulders made her shudder for a couple of sobs, and then her shoulders eased, and she turned back to him. Her eyes were shining with tears, her anger had flushed colour into her cheeks. She looked aroused. She went towards him and she took his hands.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she cooed. ‘Forgive me, love.’

  He looked up at her as if he could not believe his luck. He opened his arms and she slithered onto his lap and wound her arms around his neck.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she whispered.

  As quietly as I could I rose from my seat and went to the door. Anne nodded for me to leave, and I went out. As I closed the door behind me I heard her say: ‘But I shall go to Durham House and you shall pay for me to keep Christmas there.’

  The queen welcomed me back into her rooms with a small triumphant smile. She thought, poor lady, that Anne’s absence meant a weakening of Anne’s influence. She had not heard, as I had, the list of penances that Anne had set her lover to pay for her absence from court. She did not know, as the rest of the court knew only too well, that Henry’s politeness to her over the Christmas feast was to be a matter of form.

  She found it out soon enough. He never dined with her alone in her rooms. He never spoke to her unless someone was watching. He never danced with her at all. Indeed, he excused himself from much of the dancing and merely watched the dancers. There were some new girls at court who were twirled by their partners under his eyes, a new Percy heiress, a new Seymour girl. From every county in England that could gain a place at court came a new girl to enchant the king and perhaps get a chance at the throne. But the king was not to be diverted. He sat beside his wife looking drawn, and he thought of his mistress.

  That night the queen knelt for a long while before her prie dieu and the other ladies fell asleep in their seats waiting for her to dismiss us and send us to our beds. When she rose up and turned around there was only me still awake.

  ‘Half a dozen Peters,’ she said, looking at their neglect of her in her time of sadness.

  ‘I am sorry for it,’ I said.

  ‘Whether she is here or whether she is gone seems to make no difference,’ she said with a forlorn wisdom. She bowed her head under the weight of the hood and I stepped forward and slipped off the pins and lifted it from her head. Her hair was very grey now, I thought she had aged more in this last year than she had done in the previous five.

  ‘It is just a passion that he will overcome,’ she said, more to herself than to me. ‘He would tire of her, as he tired of them all. Bessie Blount, you, Anne is only one of a line.’

  I did not reply.

  ‘As long as he does not fall into a sin against the Holy Church, while she has her spell on him,’ she continued. ‘It’s the one thing that I pray for, that he does not sin. I know he will come back to me.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I said quietly. ‘What if he does not come? What if they annul your marriage and he marries her? Do you have somewhere to go? Have you secured your own safety if it all goes wrong?’

  Queen Katherine turned her tired blue eyes on me as if she saw me for the first time. She held out her arms so that I could unlace the top part of her gown and then turned round so that I could slip it off her shoulders. Her skin was scraped raw by the irritation of her hair shirt. I made no remark, she did not like us ladies even to see it.

  ‘I do not prepare for defeat,’ she said simply. ‘It would be to betray myself. I know that God will turn Henry’s mind back to me and we will be happy together again. I know that my daughter will be Queen of England and she will be one of the finest queens that ever reigned. Her grandmother was Isabella of Casti