Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  ‘I’ll suffocate.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. I had to do it.’

  ‘But I’m the queen.’

  ‘All the more reason.’

  The midwife came up behind me and said: ‘Is it all to your liking, Your Majesty?’

  Anne’s face was white. ‘It’s like a prison.’

  The midwife laughed and ushered her into the room. ‘They all say that. But you’ll be glad of the rest.’

  ‘Tell George I’ll want to see him later,’ Anne said over her shoulder to me. ‘And tell him to bring someone entertaining. I’m not going to be all alone in here. I might as well be imprisoned in the Tower.’

  ‘We’ll dine with you,’ I promised. ‘If you rest now.’

  With Anne withdrawn from court the king returned to his normal pattern of hunting every morning from six till ten and then coming in for his dinner. In the afternoon he would visit Anne and then there would be entertainments laid on for him in the evening.

  ‘Who does he dance with?’ Anne demanded, as sharp as ever though she lay hot and tired and heavy in the darkened room.

  ‘No-one in particular,’ I said. Madge Shelton had taken his eye and the Seymour girl, Jane. Lady Margaret Steyne was peacocking about in half a dozen new gowns. But none of this would matter if Anne had a boy.

  ‘And who hunts with him?’

  ‘Just his gentlemen,’ I lied. Sir John Seymour had bought his daughter a most handsome grey hunter. She had a dark blue gown to ride in and she looked well in the saddle.

  Anne looked suspiciously at me. ‘You’re not chasing after him yourself, are you?’ she asked nastily.

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve no desire to alter my station in life,’ I said honestly enough. Carefully, I kept my thoughts from William. If I let myself think of the set of his shoulders or the way he stretched when he was naked in the morning light, then I knew that my desire would show in my face. Anyone could read it. I was too much his woman.

  ‘And you watch the king for me?’ Anne insisted. ‘You do watch him, Mary?’

  ‘He’s waiting for the birth of his son, like the rest of the court,’ I said. ‘If you have a boy then nothing can touch you. You know that.’

  She nodded and closed her eyes and leaned back on the pillows. ‘God, I wish it was over,’ she said pettishly.

  ‘Amen,’ I said.

  Without my sister’s keen eyes on me I was free to spend time with William. Madge Shelton was frequently missing from my bedroom and she and I had developed an informal arrangement of always knocking at the door, and turning away from it immediately if it was locked from the inside. Madge was only a young girl but she had grown up quickly at court. She knew that her chances of a good marriage depended on the careful balance of catching a man’s desire without letting a shadow fall on her own reputation. And it was a wilder harder-living court than the one I had come to as a girl.

  George’s deceits worked as well. He and Sir Francis with William Brereton and Henry Norris were at a loose end without the queen in her court. They went hunting with Henry in the morning and sometimes they would be summoned to his council in the afternoon but mostly they were idle. They flirted with the queen’s ladies, they slipped up the river to the City, and they disappeared for unexplained nights. I caught him once in the early morning. I had been watching the sunshine on the river when a rowboat tied up to the palace landing stage and George paid off the boatman and came quietly up the garden path.

  ‘George,’ I said, stepping out from my seat in the roses.

  He gave a start. ‘Mary!’ At once his thoughts went to Anne. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s well. Where have you been?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘We went for a little entertainment,’ he said. ‘Some friends of Henry Norris. We went dancing and dining, a little gambling.’

  ‘Was Sir Francis there?’

  He nodded.

  ‘George –’

  ‘Don’t reproach me!’ he said quickly. ‘No-one else knows. We keep it quiet enough.’

  ‘If the king found out you would be banished,’ I said flatly.

  ‘He won’t find out,’ he said. ‘I know you heard of it but that was a groom who was gossiping. He’s silenced. Dismissed. That’s the end of it.’

  I took his hand and looked in his dark Boleyn eyes. ‘George, I fear for you.’

  He laughed, his courtier’s brittle laugh. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I have nothing to fear. Nothing to fear, nothing to look for, and nowhere to go.’

  Anne did not get her royal christening gown. They wrote to the queen with proposals for her separation from the king. They addressed her as Dowager Princess and she tore the parchment of the declaration with an angry pen-stroke when she crossed through the title. They threatened her that she would never see the Princess Mary her daughter again. They moved her to the most desolate of palaces: Buckden in Lincolnshire. Still she would not recant. Still she would not admit the possibility that she had not been the king’s lawful wife. In such an impasse, the christening gown seemed to matter very little and after she refused to part with it, saying that it was her own property brought from Spain, Henry did not insist.

  I thought of her, in a cold house on the edge of the Fens. I thought of her, separated from her daughter as I was parted from my son by the ambition of the same woman. I thought of her unswerving determination to do right in the sight of God. And I missed her. She had been like a mother to me when I had first come to court and I had betrayed her as a daughter will betray her mother, and yet never stop loving her.

  Autumn 1533

  Anne’s pains started at dawn and the midwife called me straightaway into the birthing chamber. I had to half-fight my way through courtiers and lawyers and clerks and officers of the court in the presence chamber outside the room. Nearest the door were the ladies in waiting assembled to assist the queen in her confinement, in fact doing nothing but frightening each other with nightmare stories of difficult births. Princess Mary was among them, her pale face screwed up into her habitual scowl of determination. I thought Anne cruel to make Katherine’s daughter a witness of the birth of the child that would disinherit her. I gave her a little smile as I went past her and she gave me that curious, half-hearted curtsey which was now her trademark. She could trust nobody, she would trust nobody ever again.

  Inside the room it was like a scene from hell. They had rigged up ropes on the bedposts and Anne was clinging onto them like a drowning woman. The sheets were already stained with her blood, and the midwives were brewing a caudle on the fire which was stoked high with logs. Anne was naked from the waist down. She was sweating and crying out with fear. Two other ladies in waiting were reciting their prayers in an irritating anxious drone and every now and again Anne would let out a shriek of renewed pain.

  ‘She must rest,’ one of the midwives said to me. ‘She’s fighting it.’

  I stepped up to the bed and waited. ‘Anne, rest,’ I said. ‘This is going to go on for hours.’

  ‘It’s you, is it?’ she said, throwing back her hair. ‘Thought you’d get up, did you?’

  ‘I came as soon as I was called. Do you want me to do anything for you?’

  ‘I want you to do this for me,’ she said, her wit as sharp as ever.

  I laughed. ‘Not I!’

  She stretched a hand to me and when I held it, she clung on. ‘God help me, I am in terror,’ she whispered.

  ‘God will help you,’ I said. ‘You’re having a Christian prince, aren’t you? You’re giving birth to a boy that is going to be the head of the church in England, aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said. ‘I am ready to vomit with fear.’

  ‘Oh you’ll vomit,’ I said cheerfully. ‘It gets an awful lot worse than this before it is better.’

  Anne was in labour for all of the day and then her pains grew faster and it was clear to us all that the baby was coming. She stopped fighting and went vague and dreamy, her body doing the work for he