Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘I want to see the Princess Mary,’ she said quietly. ‘That is all.’

  ‘Go!’ he bellowed. ‘Go! For God’s sake! Go! And leave us all in peace. Go and stay there!’

  Slowly, Queen Katherine shook her head. ‘I would not leave you, not even for my daughter, though you will break my heart,’ she said quietly.

  There was a long painful silence. I looked up. There were tears on her face but her expression was completely calm. She knew that she had just surrendered the chance to see her child, even if her child was dying.

  Henry glared at her with absolute hatred for a moment and the queen turned her head and nodded to a server behind her. ‘More wine for His Majesty,’ she said coolly.

  Angrily, the king leaped to his feet and pushed back his chair. It scraped like a scream on the wooden floor. The ambassador and the lord chancellor and the rest of us rose uncertainly with him. Henry dropped back into his chair as if he were exhausted. We dipped up and down, lost. Queen Katherine looked at him, she seemed as drained as he did by their quarrel, but she was not beaten.

  ‘Please,’ she said very quietly.

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  A week later and she asked him again. I was not with her when that scene was played out but Jane Seymour told me, very wide-eyed with horror, that the queen had stood her ground when the king had raged. ‘How could she dare?’ she asked.

  ‘For her child,’ I said bitterly. I looked at Jane’s young face and thought that before I had my son I had been as great a fool as this ninny. ‘She wants to be with her daughter,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  Not until the princess was said by her doctors to be near to death, and asking every day when her mother was coming, did Henry release the queen. He ordered that Princess Mary should be taken by litter to Richmond Palace and the queen could meet her there. I went down to the stable yard to see her off.

  ‘God bless Your Majesty and the princess.’

  ‘At least I can be with her,’ was all she said.

  I nodded and stepped back and the cavalcade went past me, the queen’s standard in front, half a dozen horsemen following the flag, and next came the queen and a couple of her ladies, then the outriders, and then she was gone.

  William Stafford was on the other side of the stable yard, watching me waving farewell.

  ‘So, at last, she can see her daughter.’ He strolled across to where I stood, holding my dress away from the mud. ‘They say that your sister swears that the queen will never return to court. She says that the queen so foolishly loves her daughter that she has gone to her and lost the crown of kingdom in one ride.’

  ‘I don’t know that, or anything else,’ I said stubbornly.

  He laughed, his brown eyes gleaming at me. ‘You seem very ignorant today. Do you not rejoice in your sister’s rise to greatness?’

  ‘Not at this price,’ I said shortly, and I turned and walked away from him.

  I had barely gone half a dozen steps before he was beside me. ‘And what of you, Lady Carey? I have not seen you for days. D’you ever look for me?’

  I hesitated. ‘Of course I don’t look for you.’

  He fell into step beside me. ‘I don’t expect it,’ he said with sudden earnestness. ‘I might joke with you, madam. But I know very well that you’re far above me.’

  ‘I am,’ I said ungraciously.

  ‘Oh I know it,’ he assured me again. ‘But I thought that we quite liked each other.’

  ‘I cannot play these games with you,’ I said gently. ‘Of course I don’t look for you. You are in service to my uncle and I am the daughter of the Earl of Wiltshire –’

  ‘A rather recent honour,’ he supplemented quietly.

  I frowned, a little distracted by the interruption. ‘Whether it is today’s honour or goes back a hundred years makes no difference,’ I said. ‘I am the daughter of an earl and you are a nobody.’

  ‘But what of you, Mary? Leaving aside the titles? Do you, Mary, pretty Mary Boleyn, never look for me? Never think of me?’

  ‘Never,’ I said flatly, and left him standing in the archway to the stable yard.

  Summer 1531

  The court moved to Windsor and the queen brought the Princess Mary, still very pale and thin, back with her to the castle. The King could not help but be tender to his only legitimate child. His attitude to his wife mellowed, and then hardened again, depending on whether he was with my sister or at the bedside of their daughter. The queen, sleepless with praying and nursing the princess, was never too weary to greet him with a smile and a curtsey, was always a steady star in the firmament of the court. She and the princess was to rest at Windsor for the summer.

  She smiled at me when I came in with a posy of early roses. ‘I thought the Princess Mary might like these by her bedside,’ I said. ‘They smell very sweet.’

  Queen Katherine took them from me and sniffed at them. ‘You are a countrywoman,’ she said. ‘None of my other ladies would think of picking flowers and bringing them indoors.’

  ‘My children love to bring flowers into their rooms,’ I said. ‘They make crowns and necklaces from daisies. When I kiss Catherine goodnight I often find buttercups on her pillow where they have fallen from her hair.’

  ‘The king has said that you can go to Hever while the court is travelling?’

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled at her accurate reading of my contentment. ‘Yes, and stay there all the summer.’

  ‘So we shall be with our children then, you and I. You will come back to court in the autumn?’

  ‘I will,’ I promised. ‘And I will come back to your service if you want me, Your Majesty.’

  ‘And then we start again,’ she said. ‘Christmas when I am unchallenged queen and summer when I am deserted.’

  I nodded.

  ‘She holds him, doesn’t she?’ She looked out of the windows which faced towards the garden and the river. In the distance we could see the king with Anne, walking on the riverside path before they rode out on their summer progress.

  ‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

  ‘What’s her secret, d’you think?’

  ‘I think they’re very alike.’ My distaste for the two of them crept into my tone. ‘They both know exactly what they want and they both stop at nothing to get it. They both have the ability to be absolutely single-minded. It’s why the king was such a great sportsman. When he chased a stag he saw nothing in his whole heart but the stag. And Anne is the same. She schooled herself to follow only her interest. And now their desires are the same. It makes them …’ I paused, thinking of the right word. ‘Formidable,’ I said.

  ‘I can be formidable,’ the queen said.

  I gave her a sideways glance. If she had not been queen I would have put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

  ‘Who knows it better than I? I have seen you stand up to the king in one of his rages, I have seen you take on two cardinals and the Privy Council. But you serve God, and you love the king, and you love your child. You don’t think absolutely singly, “what is it that I want?”’

  She shook her head. ‘That would be the sin of selfishness.’

  I looked towards the two figures by the river’s edge, the most selfish two people that I knew. ‘Yes.’

  I went down to the stable yard to make sure that they had the trunks loaded and my horse ready for us to start next morning and found William Stafford checking the wheels of the wagon.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, a little surprised to find him there.

  He straightened up and turned his bright smile on me. ‘I am to escort you. Did your uncle not say?’

  ‘I am sure he said someone else.’

  His smile broadened to a grin. ‘It was. But he is not fit to ride tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s ill with drink.’

  ‘Drunk now, and not fit to ride tomorrow?’

  ‘I should have said he will be ill with drink.’

  I waited.

  ‘He