The queen’s fall from power became more and more visible. In February the court entertained envoys from France. They were not delayed while their papers were scrutinised, they were welcomed with feastings and banquets and all sorts of parties, and it soon became clear that they were in England to arrange for the marriage of Princess Mary to either King Francis of France or to his son. Princess Mary was summoned from the quiet retreat of Ludlow Castle and presented to the envoys, encouraged to dance and to play and to sing and to eat. My God! How they made that child eat! As if she might swell in size before their very eyes in time to be of a marriageable girth within the months of the negotiations. My father, home from France in their train, was everywhere – advising the king, translating for the envoys, in secret conference with the cardinal as to how they should re-draw the alliances of Europe, and finally, plotting with my uncle how the family could be advanced through these turbulent times.
They decided between the two of them that Anne should be returned to court. People were starting to wonder why she had gone away. My father wanted the French envoys to see her. My uncle stopped me on the stair on my way to the queen’s rooms to tell me that Anne would be returning.
‘Why?’ I asked, as close to rudeness as I dared. ‘Henry was speaking to me of his desire for a son only the other night. If she comes back she’ll spoil everything.’
‘Did he speak of your son?’ he asked me bluntly, and at my silence he shook his head. ‘No. You make no progress with the king, Mary. Anne was right. We move forward not at all.’
I turned my head and looked out of the window. I knew I looked sullen. ‘And where d’you think Anne will take you?’ I burst out. ‘She won’t work for the good of the family, she won’t do as she is bid. She’ll go for her own profits and her own lands and her own titles.’
He nodded, stroking the side of his nose. ‘Aye, she’s a self-seeking woman. But he keeps asking for her, he’s hot for her in a way he never was for you.’
‘He has two children by me!’
My uncle’s dark eyebrows shot up at my raised voice. At once I dropped my head again. ‘I am sorry. But what more can I do? What can Anne do that I have not done? I have loved him and bedded him and borne him two strong children. No woman could do more. Not even Anne, though she’s so precious to everyone.’
‘Perhaps she can do more,’ he said, ignoring my irrelevant spite. ‘If she were to conceive a child by him right now, he might marry her. He’s so desperate for her he might do that. He’s desperate for her, he’s desperate for a child, the two desires might come together.’
‘And what about me?’ I cried.
He shrugged. ‘You can go back to William,’ he said as if it did not matter at all.
A few days later, Anne returned to court as discreetly as she had left and within the day was the centre of everyone’s attention. I had my bedfellow and my companion again, and I found myself tying the laces of her dresses when we woke in the morning and combing her hair at night. She commanded my service just as once she had been forced to give me hers.
‘Didn’t you fear I would have won him back?’ I asked curiously as I was brushing her hair before we went to bed.
‘You don’t matter,’ she said confidently. ‘Not for a moment. This is my spring, this will be my summer. I will have him dancing at the end of my string. Nothing will set him free of my spell. It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what any woman does. He is besotted. He is mine for the taking.’
‘Just for the spring and the summer?’ I asked.
Anne looked thoughtful. ‘Oh, who can hold a man for long? He’s on the very crest of the wave of his desire, I can hold him there; but at the end of it, the wave has to break. No-one stays in love forever.’
‘If you want to marry him you’ll have to hold him for a lot longer than a couple of seasons. D’you think you can hold him for a year? For two?’
I could have laughed aloud to see the confidence drain from her face.
‘By the time he gets free to wed, if he ever gets free to wed, he won’t be hot for you any more anyway. You’ll be on the wane, Anne. You’ll be half-forgotten. A woman who has had her best years, has reached her mid-twenties, and still unmarried.’
She thumped down in the bed and slapped the pillow. ‘Don’t you ill-wish me,’ she said crossly. ‘My God, sometimes you sound like an Edenbridge crone. Anything could happen for me, I can make anything happen for me. It is you who’ll be on the wane, because it is you who is too lazy to make your own destiny. But I wake every day with an utter determination to have my own way. Anything could happen for me.’
By May the business with the French envoys was all but finished. Princess Mary was to marry either the French king or his second son as soon as she was a woman. They held a great tennis tournament to celebrate and Anne was made mistress of the order of the players and made great work of a chart listing all the men of the court with their names on little flags. The king found her poring over it with one little flag absent-mindedly pressed to her heart.
‘What have you there, Mistress Boleyn?’
‘The order of the tennis tournament,’ she said. ‘I have to match each gentleman fairly so that all can play and we are certain of a true winner.’
‘I meant what have you there, in your hand?’
Anne started. ‘I forgot I was holding it,’ she said quickly. ‘Just one of the names. I am placing the names in the order of play.’
‘And who is the gentleman that you hold so close?’
She managed to blush. ‘I don’t know, I had not looked at the name.’
‘May I?’ He held out his hand.
She did not give him the little flag. ‘It means nothing. It was just the flag that was in my hand as I was puzzling. Let me put it where it should be on the board and we’ll consider the order of play together, Your Majesty.’
He was alert. ‘You seem ashamed, Mistress Boleyn.’
She flared up a little. ‘I am ashamed of nothing. I just don’t want to seem foolish.’
‘Foolish?’
Anne turned her head. ‘Please let me put this name down and you can advise me on the order of play.’
He put out his hand. ‘I want to know the name on the flag.’
For an awful moment I thought that she was not play-acting with him. For an awful moment I thought he was about to discover that she was cheating so that our brother George had the best place in the draw. She was so completely confused and distressed by his pressing to know the name that even I thought that she had been caught out. The king was like one of his best pointer dogs on the scent. He knew that something was being hidden and he was racked by his curiosity and his desire.
‘I command it,’ he said quietly.
With tremendous reluctance Anne put the little flag into his outstretched hand, swept a curtsey and walked away from him. She did not look back; but once she was out of sight we all heard her heels patter and her dress swish as she ran away from the tennis court back up the stone-flagged path to the castle.
Henry opened his hand and looked at the name on the flag that she had been holding to her breast. It was his own name.
Anne’s tennis tournament took two days to complete and she was everywhere, laughing, ordering, umpiring and scoring. At the end there were four matches left to play: the king against our brother George, my husband William Carey against Francis Weston, Thomas Wyatt, newly returned from France, against William Brereton, and a match between a couple of nobodies which would take place while the rest of us were dining.
‘You had best make sure that the king doesn’t play Thomas Wyatt,’ I said to Anne in an undertone as our brother George and the king went onto the court together.
‘Oh why?’ she asked innocently.
‘Because there’s too much riding on this. The king wants to win in front of the French envoys and Thomas Wyatt wants to win in front of you. The king won’t take kindly to being beaten in public by Thomas Wyatt.’
She shrugged. ‘He’s a courtier. He won’t forget the greater game.’
‘The greater game?’
‘Whether it is tennis or jousting or archery or flirtation the game is to keep the king happy,’ she said. ‘That’s all we are here for, that’s all that matters. And we all know that.’
She leaned forward. Our brother George was in place, ready to serve, the king alert and ready. She raised her white handkerchief and dropped it. George served, it was a good one, it rattled on the roof of the court and dropped down just out of Henry’s reach. He lunged for it and got it back over the net. George, quick on his feet and twelve years younger than the king, smashed the ball past the older man and Henry raised his hand and conceded the point.
The next serve was an easy one for the king to reach and he did a smooth passing shot that George did not even attempt to chase. The play ebbed and flowed, both men running and hitting the ball as hard as they could, apparently giving no quarter and allowing no favours. George was steadily and consistently losing but he did it so carefully that anyone watching would have thought the king the better player. Indeed, he probably was the better player in terms of skill and tactics. It was only that George could have outrun him twice over. It was only that George was lean and fit, a young man of twenty-four, while the king was a man with a thickening girth, a man heading towards the middle years of his life.
They were near the end of the first set when George sent up a high ball. Henry leaped to smash it past George and take the point but then he fell and crashed down on the court and let out a terrible cry.
All the ladies of the court screamed, Anne was on her feet at once, George jumped the net and was first at the king’s side.
‘Oh God, what is it?’ Anne called.
George’s face was white. ‘Get a physician,’ he shouted. A page went flying up to the castle, Anne and I hurried to the gate of the court, tore it open and went in.
Henry was red-faced and cursing with the pain. He reached for my hand and clung to it. ‘Damnation. Mary, get rid of all these people.’
I turned to George. ‘Keep everyone out.’
I saw the quick embarrassed look Henry shot towards Anne and realised that the pain he was suffering was less than the injury to his pride at the thought of her seeing him on the ground with tears squeezing from under his eyelids.
‘Go, Anne,’ I said quietly.
She did not argue. She withdrew to the gate of the tennis court and waited, as the whole court waited, to hear what had struck the king down in the very moment of his triumphant shot.
‘Where is the pain?’ I asked him urgently. My terror was that he would point to his breast or to his belly and it would be something torn inside him, or his heart missing its beat. Something deep and irreparable.
‘My foot,’ he said, choking on the words. ‘Such a fool. I came down on the side of it. I think it’s broken.’
‘Your foot?’ The relief made me almost laugh out loud. ‘My God, Henry, I thought you were dead!’
He looked up at that and grinned through his scowl. ‘Dead of tennis? I have given up jousting to keep myself safe and you think that I might be dead of tennis?’
I was breathless with relief. ‘Dead of tennis! No! But I thought perhaps … it was so sudden, and you went down so fast …’
‘And at the hand of your brother!’ he finished, and then suddenly the three of us were howling with laughter, the king’s head cradled in my lap, George gripping his hands, and the king torn between the intense pain of his broken foot and the ludicrous thought that the Boleyns had attempted to assassinate him with tennis.
The French envoys were due to leave, their treaties signed, and we were to have a great masque and party to bid them farewell. It was to take place in the queen’s apartments, without her invitation, without even her desire. The master of the revels merely arrived and abruptly announced that the king had ordered that the masque should take place in her rooms. The queen smiled as if it was the very thing that she wanted and let him measure up for awnings and tapestries and scenery. The queen’s ladies were to wear gowns of gold or silver and to dance with the king and his companions who would enter disguised.
I thought how many times the queen had pretended not to recognise her husband when he came into her rooms disguised, how many times she had watched him dance with her ladies, how often he had led me out before her and that now she and I would watch him dance with Anne. Not a flicker of resentment crossed her face for even a moment. She thought that she would choose the dancers, as she had always done before, a little piece of patronage, one of the many ways to control the court. But the dancing master already had a list of the ladies who were to play the parts. They had been named by the king, and the queen was left with nothing to do, she was a cipher in her own rooms.
It took them all day to prepare for the masque, and the queen had nowhere to sit while they hammered the draperies into the wooden panelling. She retired to her privy chamber while the rest of us tried on our gowns and practised our dance, too excited to care that we could hardly hear the beat of the music over the noise of the workmen. The queen went to bed early to get away from the noise and the disruption while the rest of us feasted late in the hall.
The next day the French envoys came to dine at noon in the great hall. The queen sat at Henry’s right hand but his eyes were on Anne. The trumpets sounded and the servers marched in like soldiers, all in step in their bright liveries, bringing dish after dish to the top table and then to the other tables in the hall. It was a feast of quite ludicrous proportions, every sort of beast had been killed and gutted and cooked to demonstrate the wealth of the king and the richness of his kingdom. The pinnacle of the feast was the dish of fowls with a peacock cooked and presented all in its feathers, a great towering piece of fancy. It was stuffed with a swan which had been stuffed with chicken which had been stuffed with a lark. The carver’s task was to get a perfect slice from every bird without disturbing the beauty of the dish. Henry took a taste of everything but I saw Anne refuse all that she was offered.
Henry beckoned the server with one crook of his finger and whispered in his ear. He sent Anne the heart of the dish, the lark. She looked up as if she were surprised – as if she had not been following every move that he had made – and she smiled at him and bowed her head in thanks. Then she tasted the meat. As she put a small slice in her smiling mouth, I saw him shudder with desire.
After dinner the queen and her ladies, Anne and I among them, retired from the great hall and hurried to our rooms to change. Anne and I helped each other lace into the tight stomachers of our cloth of gold gowns, and Anne complained as I pulled her laces tight.
‘Too much lark,’ I said unsympathetically.
‘Did you see how he watches me?’
‘Everyone saw.’
She pushed her French hood far back on her head so that her dark hair showed, and straightened the gold ‘B’ that she always wore round her neck.
‘What d’you see when my hood is set back like this?’
‘Your smug face.’
‘A face without a line on it. Hair that is glossy and dark without one thread of grey.’ She stepped back from the mirror and admired the golden gown. ‘Dressed like a queen,’ she said.
There was a knock on the door and Jane Parker put her head into the room. ‘Talking secrets?’ she asked hungrily.
‘No,’ I said unhelpfully. ‘Just getting ready.’
She opened the door and slipped inside. She was wearing a silver gown, cut low to show her breasts, and then tugged down a bit lower still; and a silver hood. When she saw how Anne was wearing her hood she at once went to the mirror and pushed her own back a little. Anne winked at me behind her back.
‘He does favour you above all others,’ she said confidentially to Anne. ‘Anyone can see that he desires you.’
‘Indeed.’
Jane turned to me. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel jealous? Isn’t it odd bedding a man who desires your sister?’
‘No,’ I said shortly.
Nothing would halt the woman. Her speculation was like the slime trail after a snail. ‘I would find it very odd. And then, when you come from his bed, you get into bed with Anne and the two of you are side by side and all but naked. He must wish he could come to your room and have both of you at once!’
I was stunned. ‘That’s filthy talk. His Majesty would be much offended.’
She gave a smile which would have been better in a bawdy house than in a lady’s room. ‘Of course, there’s only one man who comes in here to the two beautiful sisters, after their bed time, and that’s my husband. I know he visits most nights. For sure he’s never in my bed.’
‘Good God, who can blame him?’ Anne exclaimed roundly. ‘For I’d rather sleep with a worm than have you whispering in my ear all the night. Go, Jane Parker, and take your foul mouth and your worse mind to the necessary room where it belongs. Mary and I are going to dance.’
Almost as soon as the French envoys were gone, as if he had been waiting for quietness and secrecy, Cardinal Wolsey created a hidden court of law and summoned witnesses, prosecutors, and defendants. He was judge, of course. That way it seemed to be Wolsey, only Wolsey, acting on principle and not on instruction. That way a divorce could be ordered by the Pope, and not requested by the king. Amazingly, Wolsey’s court remained a secret. No-one except those ferried quietly downriver to Westminster knew of it. Not Mother, always alert for the family’s benefit, not Uncle Howard, the spymaster. Not I, warm from the king’s bed, not Anne, enfolded in his confidence. Most importantly, not even the queen knew of her court. For three days they had an innocent woman’s marriage on trial and she did not even know it.
For Wolsey’s secret court at Westminster was to try Henry himself for cohabiting unlawfully with the wife of his dead brother Arthur: a charge so grave and a court so preposterous that they must have been pinching themselves as they swore themselves in and watched their king walk, head penitently bowed, into the dock, accused of sin by his own Lord Chancellor. Henry confessed that he had married his brother’s wife on the basis of a mistaken papal dispensation. He said that at the time, and after, he had ‘grave doubts’. Wolsey unblinkingly ordered that the matter should be put before a papal legate – his unbiased self – and the king agreed, named a lawyer and withdrew from the proceedings. The court sat for three days and then summoned theologians to give evidence that it was unlawful to marry the wife of a dead brother. My uncle’s spy network finally picked up news of the secret court when he heard of an inquiry made to the Bishop of Lincoln. At once Anne, George and I were summoned before him to his rooms at Windsor.
‘Divorced for what purpose?’ he demanded, his voice tight with excitement.
Anne was almost panting at the news. ‘He must be doing it for me. He must be planning to set aside the queen for me.’
‘Has he proposed?’ my uncle demanded, straight to the point.
She met his gaze. ‘No. How can he? But I will wager any prize you like that he will ask me the moment he is free of the queen.’
My uncle nodded. ‘How long can you hold him?’
‘How long can it take?’ Anne countered. ‘The court is in session now. It will hand down a judgement, the queen will be set aside, the king will be free at last; and voilà! Here am I!’
Despite himself he smiled at her assurance. ‘Voilà. So you are,’ he concurred.
‘So you agree, it is to be me.’ Anne drove a bargain with him. ‘Mary shall leave court or stay as I require. The family will support me with the king, as I need. We play this only for my benefit. There is no choice, Mary is not reinstated, you do not urge her on. I am the only Boleyn girl we put forward.’
My uncle looked at my father. My father looked from one daughter to the other and shrugged. ‘I doubt either of them,’ he said flatly. ‘Surely he’ll aim higher than a commoner. Clearly it won’t be Mary. She’s had her heyday and he’s cooled towards her.’
I felt myself chilled all through at this loveless analysis. But my father did not even look at me. This was business. ‘So it won’t be Mary. But I doubt very much if his passion for Anne will take him forward in preference to a French princess.’
My uncle thought for a moment. ‘Which do we support?’
‘Anne,’ my mother recommended. ‘He’s mad for Anne. If he can rid himself of his wife this month I think he might have Anne.’
My uncle looked from my sister to me as one might choose an apple to eat. ‘Anne then,’ he said.
Anne did not even smile. She just gave a little sigh of relief.
My uncle pushed back his chair and rose to his feet.
‘What about me?’ I asked awkwardly.
They all looked towards me as if for a moment they had forgotten I was there.
‘What about me? Am I to go to his bed if he sends for me? Or am I to refuse?’
My uncle did not decide. That was the moment when I felt Anne’s supremacy. My uncle, the head of my family, the fount of authority in my world, looked to my sister for her decision.
‘She can’t refuse,’ she said. ‘We don’t want some slut getting into his bed and diverting him. He must keep Mary as his mistress for the nights and he’ll go on falling in love with me during the day. But you must be dull, Mary, like a dull wife.’
‘I don’t know I can do that,’ I said irritably.
Anne gave her sexy gurgle of laughter. ‘Oh you can,’ she said with a sly sideways smile at my uncle. ‘You can be wonderfully dull, Mary. Don’t underrate yourself.’
I saw my uncle hide a smile and I felt my cheeks burn with rage. George leaned towards me and I felt his comforting weight against my shoulder, as if to remind me that it would do me no good to protest.
Anne raised an eyebrow at my uncle and he nodded that we could leave. She led the way from the room, I followed the hem of her gown as I had always dreaded that I would have to do. I kept my eyes down as she led us out into the sunshine and walked up by the archery butts and looked out over the garden and the steeply stepped terraces down to the moat, and then the little town and the river beyond. George touched my hand with his fingers but I hardly felt him. I was consumed with rage that I had been put aside for my sister. My own family had decided that I was to be the whore and she was to be the wife.
‘So I shall be queen,’ Anne said dreamily.
‘I shall be brother-in-law to the King of England,’ George said, as if he could hardly believe it.
‘And what shall I be?’ I spat. I would not be the king’s favourite, I would not be the centre of the court. I would lose the place I had worked for ever since I was twelve years old. I would be last year’s whore.
‘You’ll be my lady in waiting,’ Anne said sweetly. ‘You’ll be the other Boleyn girl.’
No-one knew how much the queen knew of the disaster which was being prepared for her. She was a queen of ice and stone in these spring days, while the cardinal trawled the universities of Europe for evidence against a wife who was completely innocent of any sin. As if to challenge the fates the queen started work on yet another new altar cloth, a match of the one she had started before; the two of them would be a massive project which would take years, and a full court of ladies in waiting, to complete. It was as if everything, even her sewing, must demonstrate to the world that she would live and die as queen of England. How else could it be? No queen had ever been set aside before.
She had asked me to help her by blocking in the blue sky above the angels. It had been drawn for her by a Florentine artist and was very much in the new style, with luscious rounded bodies half-hidden by the angels’ feathery wings, and bright expressive faces on the shepherds around the crib. It was as good as a play to look at the drawing the artist had made, the people were as vivid as if they were alive. I was glad that it would not be me who had to follow the tiny detailed lines with my needle. Long before the sky was done Wolsey would have passed sentence, the Pope confirmed it and she would be divorced and in a nunnery, and the nuns could sew the difficult draperies and the feathery wings while we Boleyns closed the trap on the bachelor king. I finished one long hank of blue silk for a tiny square of sky and took my needle to the light of the narrow window when I suddenly saw the brown head of my brother race up the steps which ran around the moat and then he was out of sight, though I craned forward to see why he was running.
‘What is it, Lady Carey?’ the queen asked from behind me, her voice absolutely expressionless.
‘My brother running in,’ I said. ‘May I go down and see him, Your Majesty?’
‘Of course,’ she said calmly. ‘If there is important news you might bring it straight to me, Mary.’
I kept the needle in my hand as I left the room and hurried down the stone steps to the great hall. George had just burst in through the door.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘I must find Father,’ he said. ‘The Pope’s been captured.’
‘What?’
‘Where is Father? Where is he?’
‘Perhaps with the clerks.’
At once George turned to go to their offices. I hurried after him and grabbed his sleeve but he pulled himself free. ‘Wait, George! Captured by who?’
‘By the army of Spain,’ he said. ‘Mercenaries, in the employ of Charles of Spain, and the word is that they ran out of control, they sacked the Holy City and captured His Holiness.’
I stood stock still for a moment, shocked into silence. ‘They’ll let him go,’ I said. ‘They couldn’t be so …’ The very words failed me. George was almost hopping from one foot to another in his urgency to run onwards.
‘Think!’ he counselled me. ‘What does it mean if the Pope is captured by the armies of Spain? What does it mean?’
I shook my head. ‘That the Holy Father is in danger,’ I said feebly. ‘You cannot capture the Pope …’
George laughed out loud. ‘Fool!’ He took me by the hand and pulled me after him, up the stairs to the offices of the clerks. He hammered on the door and put his head around it. ‘Is my father here?’
‘With the king,’ someone replied. ‘In his privy chamber.’
George spun on his heel and ran back down the stairs. I picked up the long skirt of my gown and pattered after him. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Who can grant the king a divorce?’ George demanded, pausing on the turn of the stair. He looked up at me, his brown eyes ablaze with excitement. I hesitated above him, like a defender of the circular stair.
‘Only the Pope,’ I stumbled.
‘Who holds the Pope?’
‘Charles of Spain, you say.’
‘Who is Charles of Spain’s aunt?’
‘The queen.’
‘So d’you think the Pope is going to grant the king a divorce now?’
I paused. George jumped up two steps and kissed my open mouth. ‘Silly girl,’ he said warmly. ‘This is disastrous news for the king. He’s never going to get free of her. It’s all gone awry and we Boleyns gone awry with it.’
I snatched at his hand as he would have run away from me. ‘So why are you so happy? George! If we are ruined? Why are you so merry?’
He laughed up at me. ‘I’m not happy, I’m maddened,’ he half-shouted. ‘For a moment I had started to believe our own madness. I had started to believe that Anne would be his wife and the next Queen of England. And now I am sane again. Thank God. That is why I laugh. Now let me go, I have to tell Father. I had the news from a boatman come upriver with a message for the cardinal. Father will like to know first, if I can find him.’
I let him go, in his wildness there was no holding him.
I heard his boots rattle down the stone stairs and then the bang of the opening door of the great hall, a few hasty steps across the stone floor of the hall, the yelp of a dog as he kicked it aside, and then the door creaked shut. I sank down on the stairs, where he had left me, the queen’s embroidery needle still in my hand, wondering where we Boleyns were now, since all the power had shifted back to the queen again.
George had not told me whether or no I might tell the queen and I judged it safer to say nothing when I went back to her rooms. I smoothed out my face, pulled down the stomacher of my dress, and composed myself before I opened the door.
She knew already. I could tell by the way the altar cloth was flung aside and she was standing at the window, looking out, as if she could see all the way to Italy and her victorious young nephew who had promised to love and reverence her, riding in triumph into Rome. When I came in the room she shot one quick cautious glance at me and then gave a little giggle, when she saw my stunned expression.
‘You have heard the news?’ she guessed.
‘Yes. My brother was running to my father with it.’
‘It will make a difference to everything,’ she asserted. ‘Everything.’
‘I know it.’
‘And your sister will be in such a difficult position when she hears,’ she said slyly.
An irresistible giggle escaped me. ‘She called herself a storm-tossed maiden!’ I said with a wail of laughter.
The queen clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Anne Boleyn? Storm-tossed?’
I nodded. ‘Gave him a jewel engraved with a maiden in a storm-tossed boat!’
The queen crammed the knuckles of her hand into her mouth. ‘Hush! Hush!’
We heard the noise of people outside the door and in one quick movement she was back in her place, the big frame of embroidery pulled towards her, her heavy gable hood bent over her work, her face grave. She glanced at me and nodded me towards my work. I took the needle and thread that I had carried all this while, so that when the guards opened the door the queen and I were industriously stitching in silence.
It was the king himself, without companions. He came in, saw me, checked for a moment and then came on, as if he was glad to have me as a witness for what he might say to his wife of so many years.
‘It appears that your nephew has committed the most awful of crimes,’ he said without preamble, his voice hard and angry.
She raised her head. ‘Your Majesty,’ she said, and sank into a curtsey.
‘I say, the most awful of crimes.’
‘Why, what has he done?’
‘His army has captured the Holy Father and imprisoned him. A blasphemous act, a sin against St Peter himself.’
A small frown creased her weary face. ‘I am sure he will release the Holy Father and restore him at once,’ she said. ‘Why would he not?’
‘He would not, because he knows that if he holds the Pope in his power then he holds all of us in his hand! He knows that we are cat’s-paws! He seeks to rule us all by ruling the Pope!’
The queen’s head was turned to her work again but I could not take my gaze from Henry. This was a new man, one I had not seen before. He was not angry in his usual red rage. He was coldly angry; today he had all the power of a grown man who has been a tyrant since eighteen.
‘He is a very ambitious young man,’ she concurred sweetly. ‘As you were at his age, I remember.’
‘I did not seek to command all of Europe and destroy the plans of greater men!’ he said, bitingly.
She looked up at him and smiled with her constant, pleasant confidence. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It is almost as if he is divinely guided, is it not?’
My uncle ruled that we should all behave as if we were not defeated. So, as if nothing had gone wrong for us, as if the Boleyns were not overthrown, the laughter, the music and the flirtations continued in Anne’s rooms. No-one called them my rooms any more, though they had once been given to me and furnished for me. Just as the queen had become a ghost, I had become a shadow. Anne had lived and bedded with me; but now she was the substance and I was the shadow. It was Anne who called for cards, and Anne who called for wine, and Anne who looked up and smiled that sleek confident smile when the king came into the room.
There was nothing I could do but take second place and smile. The king might bed me at night, but all the day he was Anne’s. For the first time in all the long while that I had been his lover I felt like a whore indeed, and it was my own sister who shamed me.
The queen, left alone for much of the time, continued work on the altar cloth, spent hours before her prie dieu, and met constantly with her confessor, John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester. For many hours he was with the queen and when he came out of her chamber he was grave and quiet. We used to watch him walk down the cobbled hill to his boat on the river and laugh at his slow pace. He walked with his head bent, as if weighed down by thought.
‘She must have sinned like the devil,’ Anne remarked. Everyone listened, waiting for the jest.
‘Oh why?’ George prompted her.
‘Because she confesses for hours every day,’ Anne exclaimed. ‘God knows what that woman must have done, but she confesses for longer than I dine!’
There was a roar of easy, sycophantic laughter, and Anne clapped her hands and called for music. Couples lined up to dance. I stayed at the window, watching the bishop walk away from the castle and from the queen and wondered indeed what the two of them did discuss in such length. Could it be that she knew exactly what the king was planning? Could it be that she was hoping to turn the church, the very church in England, against him?
I squeezed past the dancers and went to the queen’s rooms. As usual these days, there was silence; no music pouring from the open windows, the doors were shut where they used to be flung wide open to visitors. I opened them and went in.
Her receiving room was empty. The altar cloth was where she had left it, spread over stools. The sky was only half-finished, it would never be done while she had no-one to work with her. I wondered that she could bear to sew alone at one corner and see the yards and yards of empty material ahead of her. The fire was out in the hearth, the place was cold. I had a moment of real apprehension. For a moment I thought – what if she has been taken? It was a mad thought, for who could arrest a queen? Where could a queen be taken? But just for a moment I thought that the silence and emptiness of the room could only mean one thing, that Henry had suddenly snapped, and, refusing to wait for a moment longer, had sent his soldiers to take her away.
Then I heard a tiny sound. It was so pitiful that I thought it was the wail of a child. It came from her privy chamber.
I didn’t stop to think, there was something in that heartbroken cry that would call to anyone; I opened the door, and went in.
It was the queen. Her head was buried in the rich covers on her bed, her hood pushed askew. She was kneeling as if to pray but she had the covers stuffed into her mouth and all the sound that she could make was this dreadful, heartbroken keening. The king was standing behind her, hands on hips like an executioner on Tower Green. He glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the opening door and saw me; but he showed no sign of recognition. His face was blank and stern, like a man driven beyond himself.
‘And so I must tell you that the marriage was indeed unlawful and must and will be annulled.’
The queen raised her tearstained face from the bed. ‘We had a dispensation.’
‘A Pope cannot dispense with the law of God,’ Henry said firmly.
‘It is not the law of God …’ she whispered.
‘Don’t argue with me, madam,’ Henry interrupted. He feared her intelligence. ‘You must learn that you will no longer be my wife and my queen. You must step aside.’
She turned her tearstained face to him. ‘I cannot step aside,’ she said. ‘Even if I wished to. I am your wife and your queen. Nothing can prevent that. Nothing can put it aside.’
He headed for the door, desperate to be away from her agony. ‘I have told you, so you have heard it from my own lips,’ he said at the doorway. ‘You cannot complain that I have not been honest with you. I have told you that this is how it must be.’
‘I have loved you for years,’ she cried after him. ‘I gave my womanhood to you. Tell me, in what way have I offended you? What have I ever done which was displeasing?’
He was nearly gone, I pressed back against the panelled wall so that he could get past me; but at that final plea he checked and turned for a moment.
‘You had to give me a son,’ he said simply. ‘You did not do that.’
‘I tried! God knows, Henry! I tried! I bore you a son, that he did not live was no fault of mine. God wanted our little prince in heaven; that was no fault of mine.’
The pain in her voice shook him, but he moved away. ‘You had to give me a son,’ he repeated. ‘I have to have a son for England, Katherine. You know that.’
Her face was bleak. ‘You have to reconcile yourself to God’s will.’
‘It is God himself who has prompted me to this,’ Henry shouted. ‘God himself has warned me that I must leave this false marriage of sin and start again. And if I do, I shall have a son. I know it, Katherine. And you –’
‘Yes?’ she said, as quick as her own greyhound on the scent, all her courage suddenly flaring up. ‘What for me? A nunnery? Old age? Death? I am a Princess of Spain and the Queen of England. What can you offer me instead of these?’
‘It is God’s will,’ he repeated.
She laughed at that, a dreadful sound, as wild as her crying had been. ‘God’s will that you should turn aside from your true wedded wife and marry a nobody? A whore? The sister of your whore?’
I froze, but Henry was gone, pushing past me out of the door. ‘It is God’s will and my will!’ he shouted from the outer chamber, and then we heard the door slam.
I crept backwards, desperate that she should not know that I had seen her cry, desperate that she should not see me, whom she had named as his whore. But she raised her head from her hands and said simply:
‘Help me, Mary.’
In silence I went forward. It was the first time in the seven years that I had known her that she had asked for help. She put out her arm to be dragged to her feet and I saw that she could hardly stand. Her eyes were bloodshot with crying.
‘You should rest, Your Majesty,’ I said.
‘I cannot rest,’ she replied. ‘Help me to my prie dieu and give me my rosary.’
‘Your Majesty …’
‘Mary,’ she croaked, her voice hoarse from that dreadful gape-mouthed whimpering. ‘He will destroy me, he will disinherit our daughter, he will ruin this country, and he will send his immortal soul to hell. I have to pray for him, for me, and for our country. And then I have to write to my nephew.’
‘Your Majesty, they will never let a letter reach him.’
‘I have ways to send it to him.’
‘Don’t write anything that could be held against you.’
She checked at that, hearing the fear in my voice. And then she smiled an empty bitter smile that did not reach her eyes. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Do you think it can be worse than this? I cannot be charged with treason, I am the Queen of England, I am England. I cannot be divorced, I am the wife of the king. He has run mad this spring and he will recover by autumn. All I have to do is get through the summer.’
‘The Boleyn summer,’ I said, thinking of Anne.
‘The Boleyn summer,’ she repeated. ‘It cannot last more than a season.’
She grasped the velvet upholstered prayer cushion of the prie dieu with her age-spotted hands and I knew that she could hear and see nothing in this world any more. She was close to her God. I went out quietly, closing the door behind me.
George was in the shadows of the queen’s public rooms, lurking like an assassin. ‘Uncle wants you,’ he said shortly.
‘George, I cannot go. Make an excuse for me.’
‘Come on.’
I stepped into the shaft of light streaming in through the open window and I blinked at the brightness. Outside I could hear someone singing and Anne’s carefree ripple of laughter.
‘Please George, tell him you couldn’t find me.’
‘He knows you were with the queen. I was ordered to wait until you came out. Whenever that was.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t betray her.’
George crossed the room with three swift steps, got hold of me under my elbow and marched me towards the door. He went so fast I had to run to keep up with him and as he strode down the stairs I would have lost my footing but for his vice-like grip on my arm.
‘What’s your family?’ he demanded through clenched teeth.
‘Boleyn.’
‘What’s your kin?’
‘Howards.’
‘What’s your home?’
‘Hever and Rochford.’
‘What’s your kingdom?’
‘England.’
‘Who’s your king?’
‘Henry.’
‘Then serve them. In that order. Did I say the Spanish queen once in that list?’
‘No.’
‘Remember it.’
I struggled against his determination. ‘George!’
‘Every day I give up my desires for this family,’ he said in a savage undertone. ‘Every day I dance attendance on one sister or the other and play pander to the king. Every day I deny my own desire, my own passion, I deny my own soul! I make my life a secret to myself. Now you come.’
He pushed me through the door of Uncle Howard’s private room without knocking. My uncle was seated at his desk, the sunlight falling brightly on his papers, a posy of early roses before him on the table. He glanced up when I came in and his keen gaze took in my rapid breathing and the distress in my face.
‘I need to know what passed between the king and the queen,’ he said without preamble. ‘A maid said you were in there with them.’
I nodded. ‘I heard her cry and I went in.’
‘She cried?’ he demanded incredulously.
I nodded.
‘Tell me.’
For a moment I was silent.
He looked at me once more and there was a world of power in his dark piercing gaze. ‘You tell me,’ he repeated.
‘The king told her that he is seeking an annulment because the marriage is invalid.’
‘And she?’
‘She accused him of Anne, and he did not deny it.’
A flame of fierce joy leaped into my uncle’s eyes. ‘How did you leave her?’
My uncle rose from the desk and walked around to me. Thoughtfully, he took my hand and spoke quietly. ‘You like to see your children in the summer, don’t you, Mary?’
My longing for Hever, for little Catherine and for my baby boy, made me dizzy. I closed my eyes for a moment and I could see them, I could feel them in my arms. I could smell that sweet baby smell of clean hair and sun-warmed skin.
‘If you serve us well in this I shall let you go to Hever for the whole summer while the court is on progress. You can spend all summer with your children and no-one will trouble you. Your work will be done, I will release you from court. But you must assist me in this, Mary. You must tell me exactly what you think the queen plans to do.’
I gave a little sigh. ‘She said that she would write to her nephew. She said she knew a way to get a letter to him.’
He smiled. ‘I expect you to find out how she sends letters to Spain and to come and tell me. Do that and you shall be with your children a week later.’
I swallowed my sense of treachery.
He went back to his desk and turned to his papers. ‘You can go,’ he said carelessly.
The queen was at the table when I came into the room. ‘Ah, Lady Carey, can you light another candle for me? I can hardly see to write.’
I lit another candlestick and put it close to her paper. I could see she was writing in Spanish.
‘Would you send for Señor Felipez?’ she asked me. ‘I have an errand for him.’
I hesitated but she raised her head from the paper and gave me a little nod so I curtsied and went to the door where a manservant was on guard. ‘Fetch Señor Felipez,’ I said shortly.
In a moment he came. He was a yeoman of the ewery, a middle-aged man who had come over from Spain when Katherine was married. He had stayed in her household and despite marrying an Englishwoman and siring English children, he had never lost his Spanish accent nor his love of Spain.
I showed him into the room and the queen glanced at me. ‘Leave us,’ she said. I saw her fold the letter and seal it with her own sealing ring, the pomegranate of Spain.
I stepped outside the door and sat in a windowseat and waited like the spy I was until I saw him come out, tucking the letter into his jerkin, and then wearily I went to find Uncle Howard and tell him everything.
Señor Felipez left court next day and my uncle found me walking up the twisting path to the summit of Windsor Castle.
‘You can go to Hever,’ he said briefly. ‘You’ve done your work.’
‘Uncle?’
‘We’ll pick up Señor Felipez as he sets sail from Dover for France,’ he said. ‘Far enough from the court for no word of it to get back to the queen. We’ll have her letter to her nephew and that will be her ruin. It’ll be proof of treason. Wolsey’s at Rome, the queen will have to agree to a divorce to save her own skin. The king will be free to remarry. This summer.’
I thought of the queen’s belief that if she could only hold on till autumn, she would be safe.
‘Betrothal this summer, public wedding and coronation when we all return to London in the autumn.’
I swallowed. The icy knowledge that my sister would be Queen of England and I would be the king’s discarded whore froze me inside. ‘And I?’
‘You can go to Hever. When Anne is queen you can come back to court and serve as her lady in waiting, she’ll need her family around her then. But for now your work is done.’
‘Can I go today?’ was all I asked.
‘If you can find someone to take you.’
‘Can I ask George?’
‘Yes.’
I curtsied to him and turned to walk up the hill, my pace quicker.
‘You did well with Felipez,’ my uncle said as I hurried away. ‘It’s bought us the time that we needed. The queen thinks that help is on its way but she is all alone.’
‘I am glad to serve the Howards,’ I said shortly. It was better that no-one ever knew that I would have buried the Howards, every one of them, except George, in the great family vault and never thought that there was a loss.
George had been riding with the king and was not willing to get back into the saddle again. ‘I have a thick head. I was drinking and gambling last night. And Francis is impossible …’ He broke off. ‘I won’t set out for Hever today, Mary, I can’t stand it.’
I took his hands in mine and made him look me in the face. I knew there were tears in my eyes and I did nothing to stop them flowing down my cheeks. ‘George, please,’ I said. ‘What if Uncle changes his mind? Please help me. Please take me to my children. Please take me to Hever.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry. You know I hate it. I’ll take you. Of course I’ll take you. Send someone down to the stables and tell them to saddle our horses and we’ll start at once.’
Anne was in our room when I burst in to pack a few things in a bag and to see the chest corded up to send on after me in a wagon.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Hever. Uncle Howard says I can.’
‘But what about me?’ she demanded.
At the desperate tone in her voice I looked at her more closely. ‘What about you? You have everything. What in God’s name do you want more?’
She dropped to the stool before the little looking glass, rested her head on her hands and stared at herself. ‘He’s in love with me,’ she said. ‘He’s mad for me. I spend all my time bringing him close and holding him off. When he dances with me I can feel his hardness like a codpiece. He’s desperate to have me.’
‘So?’
‘I have to keep him like that, like a sauce pot on a charcoal burner. I have to keep him at the simmer. If he boils over what would become of me? I’d be scalded to death. If he cools off and goes and dips his wick somewhere else then I have a rival. That’s why I need you here.’
‘To dip his wick?’ I repeated her crude image.
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll have to manage without,’ I said. ‘You have only a few weeks. Uncle says that you’ll be betrothed this summer and married this autumn. I’ve played my part, and I can go.’
She did not even ask me what part I had played. Anne always had a vision like a lantern with the shutters down. She only ever shone in one direction. It was always Anne and then the Boleyns and then the Howards. She would never have needed the catechism that George shouted at me to remind me of my loyalties. She always knew where her interests lay.
‘I can do it for a few weeks more,’ she said. ‘And then I shall have it all.’