Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in the shadowy room, looking out over the grey slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realised that George was wrong, and my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong – for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love. I didn’t want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn’t want the arid glamour of George’s life. I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.

  Hardly knowing what I was doing, I rose up from the bed and kicked the clothes aside. ‘William,’ I said to the empty room. ‘William.’

  I went down to the stable yard and I ordered my horse to be brought from her stall and said that I was going to Hever to see my children. It was a certainty that my uncle would have a pair of eyes and ears listening and watching in the stable yard but I hoped to be gone before a message could be got to him. The court had gone from the bowling green to dinner, and I thought that if I was lucky, I might be away before any spy found my uncle at liberty to deliver the report which told him that his niece had left for her home without an escort.

  It was dark within a couple of hours, that cold spring dark that comes on first very grey and then quickly as black as winter. I was hardly clear of the city, coming into a little village that called itself Canning where I could see the high walls and porter’s door of a monastery. I hammered on the door and when they saw the quality of my horse, they took me in and showed me to a small white-washed cell and gave me a slice of meat, a slice of bread, a piece of cheese and a cup of small ale for my dinner.

  In the morning they offered me exactly the same fare to break my fast and I took Mass on a rumbling belly, thinking that Henry’s fulminations against the corruption and wealth of the church should make allowances for little communities like this.

  I had to ask for directions to Rochford. The house and the estate had been in the Howard family for years but we seldom visited it. I had been there only once, and that by river. I had no idea of the road. But there was a lad in the stable who said that he knew his way to Tilbury, and the monk who served as master of the horse for the couple of riding mules and the draft horses for ploughing said that the boy could ride with me on an old cob to show me the way.

  He was a nice lad, called Jimmy, and he rode bareback, kicking his bare heels against the dusty sides of his old horse, singing at the top of his voice. We made an odd couple: the urchin and the lady, as we rode along the track beside the river. It was hard riding, the track was dust and pebbles in some places, mud in others. Where it crossed the streams which flowed to the Thames there were fords and sometimes deceptive quagmires where my horse shied and fretted at the shifting sand and sucking mud beneath her feet and only the steadiness of Jimmy’s old hack kept her going on. We ate our dinner at a farm in a village called Rainham. The goodwife offered me a boiled egg and some black bread as being all that the house could afford. Jimmy ate bread with nothing else, and seemed well pleased. There were a couple of dried apples for our dessert and I nearly laughed as I thought of the dinner I was missing at the palace at Westminster, with the half-dozen side dishes and the dozens of meat dishes served on gold platters.

  I was not nervous. For the first time ever I felt as if I had taken my life into my own hands and I could command my own destiny. For once I was obedient neither to uncle nor father nor king, but following my own desires. And I knew that my desire led me, inexorably, to the man I loved.

  I did not doubt him. I did not think for one moment that he might have forgotten me, or taken up with some drab from the village, or married an heiress picked out for him. No, I sat on the tailboard of a wheel-less wagon and watched Jimmy spitting apple pips up into the air, and for once I had the sense to trust.

  We rode for a couple more hours after dinner and came into the little market town of Grays as it started to get dark. Tilbury was further down the road, Jimmy assured me, but if I wanted Rochford, beyond Southend, he had a notion that I could cut away from the river and ride due east.

  Grays boasted a little ale house, no farmhouse of any size, but a good manor house, drawn back from the road. I toyed with the idea of riding up to the manor house and claiming my right, as a benighted traveller, to their hospitality. But I was afraid of my uncle’s influence, which stretched all over the kingdom. And I was starting to become uneasy about the dust in my hair and the dirt on my face and clothes. Jimmy was as filthy as a street urchin, no house of any quality would have put him anywhere but in the stable.

  ‘We’ll go to the ale house,’ I decided.

  It was a better place than it at first appeared. It profited from the traffic to and from Tilbury where travellers from the capital frequently chose to embark, rather than wait for the tide or the barges to take their ships up to the pool of London. They could offer me a bed with curtains in a shared room, and Jimmy a straw mattress in the kitchen. They killed and cooked a chicken for my dinner and served it with wheaten bread and a glass of wine. I even managed to wash in a basin of cold water so my face was clean, even if my hair was filthy. I slept in my clothes, and kept my riding boots under my pillow for fear of thieves. In the morning I had the uneasy sense that I smelled, and a string of fleabites across my belly under my stomacher which itched more and more infuriatingly as the day went on.

  I had to let Jimmy go in the morning. He had promised only to show me the way to Tilbury, and it was a long ride back for a little lad on his own. He was not in the least daunted by it. He hopped from the mounting block onto the bowed back of his hack and accepted a coin from me, and a hunk of bread and cheese for his dinner on the road. We rode out together till our paths diverged and he pointed me on the track towards Southend, and then went westwards himself, back towards London.

  It was empty countryside that I rode through alone. Empty and flat and desolate. I thought that farming this land would be very different from being enfolded in the fertile weald of Kent. I rode briskly, and kept a good look about me, apprehensive that the desolate road through the marshes could be haunted by thieves. In fact, the sheer emptiness of the countryside was my friend. There were no highwaymen since there were no travellers to steal from. In the hours from dawn till noon I saw only a little lad scaring crows from a newly sown vegetable patch, and in the distance a ploughman churning the mud on the edge of the marsh, a plume of seagulls rising up like smoke behind him.

  The going was slow as the track went through the marshes and became waterlogged and muddy. The wind blew in from the river bringing the smell of brine. I passed a couple of villages which were little more than mud, shaped into houses, with mud walls and mud roofs. A couple of children stared and then ran after me, crying with excitement as I went past, and they were the colour of mud, too. It was getting to be dusk as I rode into Southend and I looked around for somewhere that I could spend the night.

  There were a few houses, and a small church, and the priest’s house beside it. I tapped on the door and the housekeeper answered me with a discouraging scowl. I told her that I was travelling and asked her for hospitality and she showed me, with the most unwilling air, into a small room which adjoined the kitchen. I thought that if I had been a Boleyn and a Howard I would have cursed her for her rudeness, but instead I was a poor woman, with nothing in the world but a handful of coins and an absolute determination.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, as if it were an adequate lodging. ‘And can I have some water to wash in? And something to eat?’

  The chink of the coins in my purse changed her refusal to an assent and she went to fetch me water and then a bowl of meat pottage, which looked and tasted very much as if it had been in the pot for a couple of days. I was too hungry to care, and too tire