Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  I touched her forehead again, and put my ear to her breast. Her heart was beating steadily and strongly, but her eyes were shut. My mother, her face like stone, was bundling up the stained sheets, wrapping them around the mess. She turned to where the fire was burning, a little summertime fire.

  ‘Stoke it up,’ she said shortly.

  I hesitated, glancing to Anne. ‘She’s so hot.’

  ‘This is more important,’ she said. ‘This has to be gone before anyone has even the slightest idea of it.’

  I put the poker into the fire and turned over the hot embers. My mother knelt at the fireside and ripped the sheet into a strip and laid it on the flames, it curled and burned with a hiss. Patiently, she ripped another and another, until she came to the very centre of the bundle, the awful dark mess which had been Anne’s baby. ‘Put on kindling,’ she said shortly.

  I looked at her in horror. ‘Shouldn’t we bury …?’

  ‘Put on kindling,’ she spat at me. ‘How long d’you think any of us will last if everyone knows that she cannot carry a baby?’

  I looked into her face and measured the power of her will. Then I piled the fire with the little scented fir cones, and when they burned up brightly we packed the guilty bundle onto the flames and sat back on our heels like a pair of old witches and watched all that was left of Anne’s baby go up the chimney like some dreadful curse.

  When the sheet was burned, and the sizzling mess gone too, my mother threw on some more fir cones and some herbs from the floor to purify the smell of the room, and only then did she turn back to her daughter.

  Anne was awake, leaning up on one elbow to watch us, her eyes glassy.

  ‘Anne?’ my mother said.

  With an effort my sister turned her gaze up to her.

  ‘Your baby is dead,’ my mother said flatly. ‘Dead and gone. You have to sleep and get well. I expect you to be up within the day. Do you hear me? If anybody asks you about the baby you will say that you made a mistake, that there was no baby. There never has been a baby and you never announced one. But for a certainty, one will come soon.’

  Anne turned a blank look to her mother. For a moment I was seized with a dreadful fear that the posset and the pain and the heat had driven her mad, and that she would forever look without seeing, hear without understanding.

  ‘The king too,’ my mother said, her voice cold. ‘Just tell him you made a mistake, that you were not with child. A mistake is innocent enough but a miscarriage is proof of sin.’

  Anne’s face never changed. She did not even protest her innocence. I thought she was deaf. ‘Anne?’ I said gently.

  She turned to me, and when she saw my shocked eyes, and the smuts on my face, I saw her expression alter. She understood that something very terrible had taken place.

  ‘Why are you in such a mess?’ she asked coldly. ‘It’s not as if anything has happened to you, has it?’

  ‘I’ll tell your uncle,’ my mother said. She paused at the threshold and looked at me. ‘What has she done that this should happen?’ she asked as coldly as if she were inquiring after a broken piece of china. ‘She must have done something to lose her child like this. D’you know what it was?’

  I thought of the days and nights of seducing the king and breaking the heart of his wife, of the poisoning of three men and the destruction of Cardinal Wolsey. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  My mother nodded and went from the room without touching her daughter, without another word to either of us. Anne’s empty gaze came back to me, her face as blank as the gold hawk mask. I kneeled at the head of her bed and held out my arms. Her expression never altered but she leaned slowly towards me and rested her heavy head on my shoulder.

  It took us all that night and the next day to get Anne back on her feet again. The king kept away, once we gave out that she had a cold. Not so my uncle, he came to the doorway of her bedchamber as if she were still nothing more than a Boleyn girl. I saw her eyes darken with rage at his disrespect.

  ‘Your mother has told me,’ he said shortly ‘How could such a thing happen?’

  Anne turned her head. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You consulted no wise women to conceive? You tried no potions or herbs or anything? You invoked no spirits and did no spells?’

  Anne shook her head. ‘I would not touch such things,’ she said. ‘You can ask anyone. Ask my confessor, ask Thomas Cranmer. I have a care to my soul as much as you.’

  ‘I have more of a care for my neck,’ he said grimly. ‘Do you swear it? For I may have to swear for you one day.’

  ‘I swear it,’ Anne said sulkily.

  ‘Get up as soon as you can and conceive another, and it had better be a boy.’

  The look she turned on him was so filled with hatred that even he recoiled. ‘Thank you for that advice,’ she snarled. ‘It is something that had occurred to me before. I have to conceive as swiftly as possible and it has to go full term and it has to be a boy. Thank you, Uncle. Yes. I know that.’

  She turned her face away from him to the rich hangings on her bed. He waited for a moment and then he smiled his grim hard-faced smile at me, and went away. I closed the door and Anne and I were alone.

  Her eyes, when she looked at me, were filled with fear. ‘But what if the king cannot get a legitimate son?’ she whispered. ‘He never did it with her. I will get all the blame and what will happen to me then?’

  Summer 1534

  In the first days of July I was sick in the mornings and my breasts were tender to the touch. William, kissing my belly in a dark-shaded room one afternoon, patted me with his hand and said quietly: ‘What d’you think, my love?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About this round little belly.’

  I turned my head away so he could not see me smile. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Well I have,’ he said bluntly. ‘Now tell me. How long have you known?’

  ‘Two months,’ I confessed. ‘And I have been torn between joy and fear, for this will be our undoing.’

  He gathered me into the fold of his arm. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘This is our firstborn Stafford and a cause for the greatest of joy. I couldn’t be more pleased. A son to bring the cows in or a daughter to do the milking, what a clever girl you are.’

  ‘D’you want a boy?’ I asked curiously, thinking of the constant theme of the Boleyns.

  ‘If you have one,’ he said easily. ‘Whatever you have in there, my love.’

  I was released from court to meet my children at Hever in July and August while Anne and the king went off. William and I had the best summer we had ever spent together with the children, but when the time came to go back to court I was carrying the baby so high and so proudly that I knew I would have to tell Anne the news and hope that she would shield me from my uncle’s rage in my pregnancy, as I had shielded her miscarriage from the king.

  I was lucky when I arrived at Greenwich. The king was out hunting and most of the court with him. Anne was sitting in the garden, on a turf bench, an awning over her head and a group of musicians playing to her. Someone was reading love poetry. I paused for a moment and took a second look at them. They were all older than I had remembered. This was no longer the court of a young man. They were all seasoned in a way that they had not been when Queen Katherine had been on the throne. There was a hint of extravagance and glamour about them all, there were a great deal of pretty words being spoken and a certain heat in the group which was not all late-summer sunshine and wine. It had become a sophisticated court, an older court; I could almost have said corrupt. It felt as if anything could happen.

  ‘Why, here is my sister,’ Anne remarked, shading her eyes with her hand. ‘Welcome back, Mary. Have you had enough of the country?’

  I kept my riding cloak loosely about me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have come seeking the sunshine of your court.’

  Anne giggled. ‘Very nicely put,’ she said. ‘I shall have you trained as a true courtier yet. How is my son Henry?’