Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘She’s my sister,’ I said passionately.

  ‘And I am your queen,’ she said, like ice.

  My knees ached on the floorboards but I did not want to move.

  ‘She has my son in her keeping,’ I said. ‘And my king at her beck and call.’

  ‘Go away,’ the queen repeated. ‘Soon the Christmas feast will be over and we will not meet again till Easter. Soon the Pope will come to his decision and when he tells the king that he has to honour his marriage to me then your sister will make her next move. What have I to expect, d’you think? A charge of treason? Or poison in my dinner?’

  ‘She wouldn’t,’ I whispered.

  ‘She would,’ the queen said flatly. ‘And you would help her. Go away, Lady Carey, I don’t want to see you again till Easter.’

  I rose to my feet and backed away, at the doorway I swept her a deep curtsey, as low as one would offer to an emperor. I did not show her my face, which was wet with tears. I bowed in shame. I went from her room and shut her door and left her alone, looking out over the frozen garden at the laughing court setting off down river to honour her enemy.

  The gardens were quiet with most of the court absent. I thrust my cold hands deep into the fur of my sleeves and walked down to the river, my head lowered, my cheeks icy with my tears. Suddenly, a pair of down-at-heel boots stopped before me.

  I looked up slowly. A good pair of legs if a woman cared to observe, warm doublet, brown fustian cape, smiling face: William Stafford.

  ‘Not gone with the court to visit your sister?’ he asked without a word of greeting.

  ‘No,’ I said shortly.

  He took a closer look at my downturned face.

  ‘Are your children all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘I’ve done a bad thing,’ I said, narrowing my eyes against the glare of the winter sunshine on the water, looking upriver to where the merry court was rowing away.

  He waited.

  ‘I discovered something about the queen and I told my uncle.’

  ‘Did he think it was a bad thing?’

  I laughed shortly. ‘Oh no. So far as he is concerned I am a credit to him.’

  ‘The duchess’s secret note,’ he guessed at once. ‘It’s all over the palace. She’s been banished from court. But nobody knows how she was detected.’

  ‘I …’ I started awkwardly.

  ‘No-one will learn it from me.’ Familiarly he took my cold hand and tucked it in the crook of his elbow and led me to walk beside the river. The sun was bright on our faces, my hand, trapped between his arm and his body, grew warmer.

  ‘What would you have done?’ I asked. ‘Since you keep your own counsel and pride yourself so much on being your own man.’

  Stafford gave me the most delighted sideways gleam. ‘I did not dare to hope that you remembered our talks.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, slightly flustered. ‘It means nothing.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I think I would have done as you did. If it had been her nephew planning an invasion then it would have been essential to read it.’

  We paused at the boundary of the palace gardens. ‘Won’t we open the gate and go on?’ he asked temptingly. ‘We could go to the village and have a mug of ale and a pocketful of roasted chestnuts.’

  ‘No. I have to go to dinner tonight, even though the queen has dismissed me till Easter.’

  He turned and walked beside me, saying nothing, but with my hand pressed warmly to his side. At the garden door he stopped. ‘I’ll leave you here,’ he said. ‘I was on my way to the stable yard when I saw you. My horse has gone lame and I want to see that they are fomenting her hoof properly.’

  ‘Indeed, I don’t know why you delayed for me at all,’ I said, a hint of provocation in my voice.

  He looked at me directly and I felt my breath come a little short. ‘Oh I think you do,’ he said slowly. ‘I think you know very well why I stopped to see you.’

  ‘Mr Stafford …’ I said.

  ‘I so hate the smell of the liniment they put on the hoof,’ he said quickly. He bowed to me and was gone before I could laugh or protest or even acknowledge that he had trapped me into flirting with him when it had been my hope to entrap him.

  Spring 1531

  With the death of the cardinal the church quickly learned that it had lost not only one of its greatest profiteers, but also its great protector. Henry fined the church with an enormous tax that emptied the treasuries and made the clergy realise that the Pope might still be their spiritual leader, but their leader on earth was a good deal closer to home and a good deal more powerful.

  Not even the king could have done it on his own. Supporting Henry’s attack on the church were the brightest thinkers of the age, the men in whose books Anne believed, who demanded that the church return to early purity. The very people of England, ignorant of theology, were not prepared to support their priests or their monasteries against Henry when he spoke of the right of English people to a church of England. The church at Rome seemed very much the church of Rome: a foreign institution, dominated at the moment by a foreign emperor. Better by far that the church should answer firstly to God, and be ruled, as everything else in the country was ruled, by the King of England. How else could he be king?

  No-one outside the church would argue with this logic. Inside the church only Bishop Fisher, the queen’s old stubborn faithful confessor made any protest when Henry named himself the supreme head of the church of England.

  ‘You should refuse to allow him to court,’ Anne said to Henry. They were seated in a window embrasure in the audience chamber of the palace of Greenwich. She lowered her voice only a little out of deference to the petitioners waiting to see him and the court all around them. ‘He’s always creeping into the queen’s rooms to whisper for hours. Who’s to say she’s confessing and he’s praying? Who knows what advice he is giving her? Who knows what secrets they are plotting?’

  ‘I cannot deny her the rites of the church,’ the king said reasonably. ‘She would hardly plot in the confessional.’

  ‘He’s her spy,’ Anne said flatly.

  The king patted her hand. ‘Peace, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I am head of the church of England, I can rule on my own marriage. It is all but done.’

  ‘Fisher will speak against us,’ she fretted. ‘And everyone will listen to him.’

  ‘Fisher is not supreme head of the church,’ Henry repeated, savouring the words. ‘I am.’ He looked over to one of the petitioners. ‘What d’you want? You can approach me.’

  The man came forward holding out a piece of paper, some quarrel about a will that the court of wards had been unable to resolve. Father, who had brought the man to court, stood back and let him make his petition. Anne slipped from Henry’s side to Father, touched his sleeve and whispered. They broke apart and she came back to the king, smiling.

  I was laying out the cards for us to play a game. I looked around for a gentleman to take the fourth hand. Sir Francis Weston stepped forward and bowed to me. ‘Can I stake my heart?’ he asked.

  George was watching the two of us, smiling at Sir Francis’s flirtatiousness, his eyes very warm.

  ‘You have nothing to stake,’ I reminded him. ‘You swore to me you lost it when you saw me in my blue gown.’

  ‘I got it back when you danced with the king,’ he said. ‘Broken but returned.’

  ‘It’s not a heart but a battered old arrow,’ Henry remarked. ‘You’re always loosing it off and then going to get it back again.’

  ‘It never finds its target,’ Sir Francis said. ‘I am a poor marksman beside Your Majesty.’

  ‘You’re a poor card player as well,’ Henry said hopefully. ‘Let’s play for a shilling a point.’

  A few nights later, Bishop Fisher was sick, and nearly died of his sickness. Three men at his dinner table died of poison, others in his household were sick too. Som