“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 grayhound 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 backward, 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 toward 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?”
“Praying,” I said.
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 window seat 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.”
Summer 1527
AFTER GEORGE LEFT ME AT HEVER I HEARD NOTHING FROM either him or Anne as the court made its progress through the English countryside in the sunny days of that perfect summer. I did not care. I had my children and my home to myself and no one watched me to see if I looked pale or jealous. No one whispered to another behind a shielding hand that I was in better or worse looks than my sister. I was free of the constant observation of the court, I was free of the constant struggle between the king and the queen. Best of all, I was free from my own constant jealous tally between Anne and myself.
My children were of an age where the whole day could fly by in a set of tiny activities. We fished in the moat with pieces of bacon on strings. We saddled up my hunter and each child took a turn in sitting on her for a walk. We went on expeditions across the castle drawbridge and into the garden to pick flowers or into the orchard for fruit. We ordered a cart lined with hay and I took the reins myself and drove us out of the park all the way to Edenbridge and drank small ale in the house there. I watched them kneel for Mass, their eyes round at the raising of the Host. I watched them as they fell asleep at the end of the day, their skin flushed with sunshine, their long eyelashes sweeping their plump cheeks. I forgot that there was such a thing as court and king and favorite.
Then, in August, I had a letter from Anne. It was brought to me by her most trusted groom, Tom Stevens, who had been born and bred in Tonbridge. “From my mistress, to be given to your own hands,” he said reverently on his knee before me in the dining hall.
“Thank you, Tom.”
“And none but you has seen it,” he said.
“Very good.”
“And none but you will see it for I shall stand guard over you while you read it and then put it in the fire for you and we shall watch it burn, my lady.”
I smiled but I began to feel uneasy. “Is my sister well?”
“As a young lamb in the meadow.”
I broke the seal and spread the papers.
Be glad for me for it is done and my fate is sealed. I have it. I am to be Queen of England. He asked me to marry him this very night and promised that he will be free within the month, when Wolsey is acting Pope. I had Uncle and Father join us at once, saying that I wanted to share my joy with my family, and so there are witnesses and he cannot withdraw. I have a ring from him which I am to keep hid for the meantime but it is a betrothal ring and he is sworn to be mine. I have done the impossible. I have caught the king and sealed the fate of the queen. I have overturned the order. Nothing will ever be the same for any woman in this country again.
We are to be married as soon as Wolsey sends word that he has annulled their marriage. The queen will know of it on our wedding day, and not before. She is to go to a nunnery in Spain. I don’t want her in my country.
You can be happy for me and for our kin. I shall not forget that you helped me to this and you will find that you have a true friend and sister in Anne, Queen of England.
I rested the letter on my lap and looked at the embers of the fire. Tom stepped forward.
“Shall I burn it now?”
“Let me read it once more,” I said.
He stepped back but I did not look at the excited scrawl of black ink again. I did not need to remind myself what she had written. Her triumph was in every line. The end of my life as the favorite of the English court was complete. Anne had won and I had lost and a new life would start for
her, she would be, as she already signed herself: Anne, Queen of England. And I would be next to nothing.
“So, at last,” I whispered to myself.
I handed Tom the letter and watched him push it to the very center of the red embers. It twisted in the heat and browned and then blackened. I could still read the words: I have overturned the order. Nothing will ever be the same for any woman in this country again.
I did not need to keep the letter to remember the tone. Anna triumphant. And she was right. Nothing would be the same for any woman in this country again. From this time onward no wife, however obedient, however loving, would be safe. For everyone would know that if a wife such as Queen Katherine of England could be put aside for no reason, then any wife could be put aside.
The letter burst suddenly into bright yellow flame, I watched it burn to soft white ash. Tom put a poker into the fire and mashed it into dust.
“Thank you,” I said. “If you go to the kitchen they will give you food.” I drew a silver coin from my pocket and gave it to him. He bowed and left me looking at the little specks of white ash floating on the smoke up the chimney and out to the night sky, which I could see through the great arch of brick and soot.
“Queen Anne,” I said, listening to the words. “Queen Anne of England.”
I was watching over the children having their morning nap when I saw a horseman with grooms, from the high window. I hurried down, expecting George. But the horse that came clattering into the courtyard belonged to my husband, William. He smiled at my surprise.
“Don’t blame me for being the harbinger of gloom.”
“Anne?” I asked.
He nodded. “Outflanked.”
I led him into the great hall and seated him in my grandmother’s chair nearest the fire.
“Now,” I said, when I checked that the door was shut and the room empty. “Tell me.”
“You remember Francisco Felipez, the queen’s servant?”
I nodded, admitting nothing.
“He requested safe conduct from Dover to Spain but it was a feint. He had a letter from the queen to her nephew and he tricked the king. He went by specially hired ship out of London that very morning and by sea to Spain. By the time they realized they’d lost him he’d gone. He’s got the queen’s letter to Charles of Spain; and all hell has broken loose.”