I nodded at the good sense, and settled back into my chair.
“All well at court?” the old lady asked. “How is my son? And your mother?”
“Well,” George said briefly. “Father has been in Venice for the last month, working for the alliance. Wolsey’s business. Mother is well, in attendance on the queen.”
“The queen well?”
George nodded. “She’s not on progress with the king this year. Much diminished at court.”
The old lady nodded at the familiar story of a woman traveling too slowly toward her death. “And the king? Is Mary still his favorite?”
“Mary or Anne,” George said, smiling. “He seems to have a taste for Boleyn girls. Mary is still favorite.”
My grandmother turned her acute bright gaze on me. “You’re a good girl,” she said approvingly. “How long are you here for?”
“A week,” I said. “That’s all I was allowed.”
“And you?” she asked, turning to George.
“I think I’ll stay a few days,” he said idly. “I had forgotten how pretty Hever is in summer. I might stay and take Mary home when we have to go back to court.”
“I shall be with the children all day,” I warned him.
“That’s all right,” he smiled. “I shan’t need company. I shall write. I think I shall become a poet.”
I took George’s advice and did not approach Catherine until I had gone to my little room, up the tiny winding stair, washed my face in the bowl of water, and looked out of the leaded windows over the darkening parkland around the castle. I saw a flicker of white of a barn owl and heard his interrogative hoot, and then the answer from his mate in the woods. I heard a fish jump in the moat, and saw the stars start to prick silver dots in the blue-gray sky. Then, and only then, I went to the nursery to find my daughter.
She was seated in front of the fire on her stool, a bowl of milk with bread on her lap, her spoon suspended halfway to her mouth as she listened to the talk over her head as her nursemaid gossiped with another maid. When they saw me, they leaped to their feet and Catherine would have dropped her bowl if the nursemaid had not been quick to snatch it from her. The other maid disappeared with a flick of her gown, and the nursemaid seated herself beside Catherine and made a fine show of watching my daughter eat, and making sure that she was not too close to the fire.
I took a seat and said nothing, until the fuss subsided a little and I could watch Catherine as she spooned the last of her supper. Her nursemaid took the bowl out of her hands and I nodded to her to leave the room and she went without saying another word.
I felt in the pocket of my gown. “I have brought you a little present,” I said. It was an acorn on a string, cleverly carved into a face. The little cup of the acorn made a hat on the head. At once she smiled and put out her hand for it. Her palm was plump like a baby’s still, her fingers tiny. I put the acorn into her hand and felt the softness of the skin.
“Shall you give him a name?” I asked.
A little frown puckered the smoothness of her forehead. Her golden-bronze hair was pulled away from her face and half-hidden by her nightcap. I gently touched the ribbon of the nightcap and then the golden ringlets which bobbed below the brim. She did not flinch from my touch, she was all-absorbed in the acorn.
“What shall I call him?” Her blue eyes flashed up at me.
“He’s from an oak tree. He is an acorn,” I said. “That’s the tree that the king wants us all to plant. It grows into strong wood for his ships.”
“I shall call him Oakey,” she said with decision. She clearly had no interest in the king or his ships. She twitched the string and the little acorn bobbed. “Dancing,” she said with satisfaction.
“Would you like to sit on my lap with Oakey and I could tell you a story about him going to a great revel and dancing with all the other acorns?” I asked.
For a moment she hesitated.
“The hazelnuts came too,” I said temptingly. “And the chestnuts. It was a great woodland ball. I think the berries were there.”
It was enough. She rose from her stool and came toward me and I lifted her onto my lap. She was heavier than I remembered: a child of solid flesh and bone, not the dream child that I thought of night after night. I put her on my knee and felt the warmth and strength of her. I rested my cheek against the warm cap and felt her curls tickle my neck. I inhaled the sweet scent of her skin, that wonderful baby-child scent.
“Tell,” she commanded and sat back to listen, as I started the story of the Woodland Revel.
We had a wonderful week together: George, the babies and me. We walked in the sunshine and took picnics out into the hay meadows where the soft grass was starting to grow through the stubble again. When we were out of sight of the castle I would strip the swaddling off Baby Henry and let him kick his legs in the warm air and move freely. I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen. And George and Catherine ran races in which he was more and more outrageously handicapped so at first he had to hop, and then he had to crawl, and at the end of the week he could only be trundled along on his hands with me holding his feet in order to make it fair, so that she could win on her unsteady little feet.
The night we were due to go back to court I could not eat my dinner, I was so sick with grief, I could not bring myself to tell her that I was leaving. I stole away in the dawn like a thief and told her nursemaid to tell her when she woke that her mother would come back again as soon as she could, and to be a good girl and look after Oakey. I rode until midday in a haze of misery and did not notice that it had been raining since we set out until George remarked at noon: “For pity’s sake let’s get out of this rain and find something to eat.”
He had halted before a monastery where the bell was starting to toll for Nones and he dropped to the ground and lifted me down from the saddle. “Have you cried all the way?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I can’t bear to think of…”
“Don’t think of it then,” he said briskly. He stood back while one of our men rang the big bell and announced us to the gatekeeper. When the big gate swung open George marched me into the courtyard and up the steps to the refectory. We were early, there were only a couple of monks laying out pewter plates on the table and pewter mugs for ale or wine.
George snapped his fingers at one of them and sent him scurrying for wine for the two of us, and then pressed the cold metal goblet into my hand. “Drink up,” he said firmly. “And stop crying. You have to be at court tonight and you can’t arrive with a white face and red eyes. They’ll never let you go again if it makes you ugly. You’re not a woman who can please herself.”
“You show me a woman in the world who can please herself,” I said, passionately resentful, and made him laugh.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know one. How glad I am that Baby Henry and I are men.”
We did not get to Windsor until evening and then we found the court on the brink of departure. Not even Anne could spare time from her packing to inspect me. She was in a flurry of preparation and I saw two new gowns disappearing into her box.
“What are those?”
“Gift from the king,” she said shortly.
I nodded, saying nothing. She shot me a sideways smile and then put in the matching hoods. I saw, as she undoubtedly meant that I should, that at least one was thickly sewn with seed pearls. I went to the window seat and watched her put her cape over the top of them all and then call for her maid to come and strap up the box. When the girl had come and the porter followed her to lug the box away, Anne turned to me challengingly: “So?”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Gowns?”
She turned, her clasped hands behind her back, demure as a schoolgirl. “He’s courting me,” she said. “Openly.”
“Anne, he is my lover.”
>
Lazily, she shrugged. “You weren’t here, were you? You’d strolled off to Hever, you wanted your children more than him. You weren’t exactly…” She paused. “Hot.”
“And you are?”
She smiled, as if at some inner jest. “There is a certain heat in the air, this summer.”
I set my teeth on my temper. “You were supposed to keep him interested in me, not fling him off course.”
She shrugged again. “He’s a man. Easier to interest than turn away.”
“I am curious about one thing,” I said. If the words had been knives I would have thrown them blade-first into her self-satisfied, smiling face. “Clearly, you have his attention if he is giving you such gifts. You have moved upward at court. You are the favorite.”
She nodded, her satisfaction hung around her like the warm scent of a stroked cat.
“Clearly you do this despite the fact that he is my acknowledged lover.”
“I was told to,” she said insolently.
“You were not told to supplant me,” I said sharply.
She shrugged, all innocent. “I can’t help it if he desires me,” she said, her tone like milk. “The court is filled with men who desire me. Do I encourage them? No.”
“It’s me you’re talking to, remember,” I said grimly. “Not one of your fools. I know that you encourage everybody.”
She gave me that same bland smile.
“What d’you hope for, Anne? To be his mistress? To push me out of my place?”
At once the smug joy in her face was replaced by an absorbed thoughtfulness. “Yes, I suppose so. But it’s a risk.”
“Risk?”
“If I let him have me, the chances are he’ll lose interest. He’s hard to hold.”
“I don’t find him so.” I scored a small point.
“You get nothing. And he married off Bessie Blount to a nobody when he had finished with her. She gained nothing from it either.”
I bit my tongue so hard that I could taste the blood in my mouth. “If you say so, Anne.”
“I think I’ll hold out. Hold out till he sees that I am not a Bessie Blount, and not a Mary Boleyn. A greater thing by far. Hold out till he sees that he has to make me an offer, a very great offer.”
I paused for a moment. “You’ll never get Henry Percy back if that’s what you’re hoping,” I warned her. “He won’t give you Percy for your favor.”
She was across the room in two great strides and she snatched both of my wrists, her fingernails digging in. “You never mention his name again,” she hissed. “Never!”
I wrenched my hands away, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “I’ll say what I want to you,” I swore. “Just as you say what you want to me. You’re accursed, Anne, you lost your one love and now you want anything that’s not yours. You want anything that’s mine. You’ve always wanted anything that was mine.”
She pulled out of my grip and flung open the door. “Leave me,” she ordered.
“You can go,” I corrected her. “This is my room, remember.”
For a moment we glared at each other, stubborn as cats on the stable wall, full of mutual resentment and something darker, the old sense between sisters that there is only really room in the world for one girl. The sense that every fight could be to the death.
I moved away first. “We’re supposed to be on the same side.”
She slammed the door shut. “It’s our room,” she stipulated.
The lines between Anne and me were now clearly drawn. All our childhood it had been a question as to which of us was the best Boleyn girl, now our girlhood rivalry was to be played out on the greatest stage in the kingdom. By the end of the summer one of us would be the acknowledged mistress of the king; the other would be her maid, her assistant, perhaps her Fool.
There was no way I could defeat her. I would have plotted against her but I had no allies and I had no power. None of my family saw any disadvantage in the king having me in his bed at night and Anne on his arm every day. To them it was an ideal situation, the clever Boleyn girl as his companion and advisor, the fecund Boleyn girl as his lover.
Only I saw what it cost her. At night, after dancing and laughing and continually drawing the attention of the court to her, she would sit before the mirror and pull off her hood and I would see her young face drained and exhausted.
Often George would come to our room and bring a glass of port wine for her and the two of us. George and I would put her into bed, draw the sheets up under her chin and watch her as she drained the glass and the color came slowly back into her cheeks.
“God knows where this is taking us,” George muttered to me one evening as we watched her sleep. “The king is besotted with her; the court is mad about her. What in God’s name is she hoping for?”
Anne stirred in her sleep.
“Hush,” I said, drawing the curtains around the bed. “Don’t wake her. I can’t stand another moment of her, I really cannot.”
George cocked a bright look at me. “That bad?”
“She sits in my place,” I said flatly.
“Oh, my dear.”
I turned my head away. “Everything I have gained she has taken from me,” I said, my voice low with passionate resentment.
“But you don’t want him so much now, do you?” George asked.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t mean I want to be pushed aside by Anne.”
He strolled with me to the door with his hand round my waist, idly resting on my hip. He kissed me full on the lips like a lover. “You know you’re the sweetest.”
I smiled at him. “I know I am a better woman than her. She’s ice and ambition, and she would see you on the gallows before surrendering her ambition. And I know that in me he has a lover who loves him for himself. But Anne has dazzled him, and dazzled the court, and dazzled even you.”
“Not me,” George said gently.
“Uncle likes her best,” I said resentfully.
“He likes nobody. But he wonders how far she might go.”
“We all wonder that. And what price she’s prepared to pay. Especially if it’s me that pays it.”
“It’s not an easy dance she’s leading,” George admitted.
“I hate her,” I said simply. “I could happily watch her die of her ambition.”
The court was to visit the Princess Mary at Ludlow Castle and we traveled due west all summer. She was only ten but she was old for her years, educated and schooled in the formal strict style which her mother had known at the Spanish court. She had a priest and a set of tutors, a lady companion and her own household in Wales where she was princess. We expected a dignified little woman, a girl on the brink of womanhood.
What we saw was someone very different.
She came into the great hall where her father was at dinner and had the ordeal of walking from doorway to high table with the eyes of everyone upon her. She was tiny, as small as a six-year-old, a perfect little doll with pale brown hair under her hood and a grave pale-skinned face. She was as dainty as her mother had been when she had first come to England, but she was tiny, a little child.
The king greeted her tenderly enough but I could see the shock on his face. He had not seen her for more than six months, he had expected her to have grown and bloomed into womanhood. But this was no princess who could be married within a year and sent to her new home, confident that within another two or three years she would be ready to bear children. This was a child herself, and a pale thin shy little child at that.
He kissed her and she was seated at his right hand at the high table where she looked down the hall and saw every eye on her. She ate hardly anything. She drank not at all. When he spoke to her she answered in whispered monosyllables. Undoubtedly she was learned, we had all her tutors troop in one after another to assure the king that she could speak Greek and Latin, and compile addition tables and knew the geography of her principality and of the kingdom. When they played some music and she danced she was graceful and light on he
r feet. But she did not look like a girl who was robust and buxom and fertile. She looked like a girl who could quite easily fade away, catch a little cold and die of it. This was the only legitimate heir to the throne of Henry’s father, and she did not look strong enough to lift the scepter.
George came for me early that night in Ludlow Castle. “He’s foul with temper,” he warned.
Anne stirred in our bed. “Not happy with his little dwarf?”
“It’s amazing,” George remarked. “Even half-asleep, you’re still as sweet as poison, Anne. Come on, Mary, he can’t be kept waiting.”
Henry was standing by the fire when I entered, one foot resting against a log, pushing it deeper into the red embers. He barely glanced up as I came into the room then he stretched out one peremptory hand for me and I went swiftly into his arms.
“This is a blow,” he said softly into my hair. “I had thought that she would be grown, nearly a woman. I had thought to marry her to Francis or even to his son, and bind us with an alliance to France. A girl is no good for me, no good at all. But a girl who cannot even be married!” He broke off, abruptly turned away and took two swift angry steps across the room. A game of cards was laid out on the table, the hands face down, half-finished. With one angry swipe he knocked them off the table, knocked the table over. At the crash there was a shout from the guard outside the door.
“Your Majesty?”
“Leave me!” Henry bellowed back.
He rounded on me. “Why would God do this to me? Why such a thing to me? No sons and a daughter who looks like the next winter might blow her away? I have no heir. I have no one to come after me. Why would God do such a thing to me?”