“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 judgment, 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 toward 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 toward 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 toward 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 favorite, I would not be the center 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 onward.
“Think!” he counseled 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.”
“W
ho 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 toward her, her heavy gable hood bent over her work, her face grave. She glanced at me and nodded me toward 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 curtsy.
“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 drea
dful, 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 paneled 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.”