At once, he excused himself and came toward me, resting one foot on the flight of steps and looking up at me.
“How now, Lady Carey? I see you are as beautiful as ever this day.”
“How are you, Sir William?”
“I am well. Where is Anne, and the king?”
“She’s in her room. And the king is going out to ride.”
“So are you at liberty?”
“As a bird in the sky.”
He smiled at me, his secret knowing smile. “May I have the pleasure of your company? Shall we take a little walk?”
I went down the steps toward him, enjoying the sensation of his eyes on me. “Certainly.”
He drew my hand into the crook of his arm and we walked along the lower terrace, he matched his pace to mine and leaned toward me to whisper in my ear. “You are the most delicious thing, my wife. Tell me we don’t have to walk for too long.”
I kept my face forward but I could not help but giggle. “Anyone who saw me come from the palace will know I have been in the garden for no more than half a moment.”
“Oh but if you are obeying your husband,” he pointed out persuasively. “An admirable thing in a wife.”
“If you order me,” I suggested.
“I do,” he said firmly. “I absolutely command you.”
I caressed the fur trim of his doublet with the back of my hand. “Then what can I do but obey?”
“Excellent.” He turned and guided us in by one of the little garden doors and the moment it was shut behind us he took me in his arms and kissed me, and then led me up to his bedroom where we made love for all of the afternoon while Anne, the lucky Boleyn girl, the favored Boleyn girl, lay sick with fear on her spinster bed.
That evening there was an entertainment and a dance. Anne as usual had the leading part and I was one of the dancers. Anne was paler than ever, white-faced in a silver gown. She was such a ghost of her former beauty that even my mother noticed. She summoned me with a crook of her finger from where I was waiting to say my piece in the play and dance my dance.
“Is Anne ill?”
“No more than usual,” I said shortly.
“Tell her to rest. If she loses her looks she will lose everything.”
I nodded. “She does rest, Mother,” I said carefully. “She lies on her bed, but there is no resting from fear. I have to go and dance now.”
She nodded and let me go. I circled the hall and then made my entrance in the masque. I was a star descending from the western sky and blessing the earth with peace. It was some kind of reference to the war in Italy and I knew the Latin words but had not troubled myself with the meaning. I saw Anne grimace and knew that I had pronounced something wrong. I should have felt ashamed but my husband, William, winked at me and stifled a laugh. He knew that I should have been learning my lines when I had been in bed with him that afternoon.
The dance was completed and a handful of strange gentlemen entered the room wearing masks and dominoes and picked out their partners to dance. The queen was amazed. Who could they be? We were all amazed, and none more so than Anne who smiled when a thick-set man, taller than most of the rest, asked her to dance with him. They danced together till midnight and Anne laughed at her own surprise when at unveiling she discovered that it was the king. She was still as white as her gown at the end of the evening, not even the dancing had flushed her skin.
We went to our room together. She stumbled on the stair and when I put out a hand to steady her I felt her skin was cold and wet with sweat.
“Anne, are you sick?”
“Just tired,” she said faintly.
In our room when she washed the powder off her face I could see that her color had drained to that of vellum. She was shivering, she did not want to wash or comb her hair. She tumbled into bed and her teeth chattered. I opened the door and sent a servant running for George. He came, pulling his cape over his nightshirt.
“Get a doctor,” I said. “This is more than tiredness.”
He looked past me into the room where Anne was hunched up in bed, the covers piled around her shoulders, her skin as yellow as a little old lady, her teeth chattering with cold.
“My God, the sweat,” he said, naming the most terrifying illness after the plague itself.
“I think so,” I said grimly.
He looked at me with fear in his eyes. “What will happen to us if she dies?”
The sweat had come to court with a vengeance. Half a dozen people who had been dancing were in their chambers. One girl had already died, Anne’s own maid was sick as a dog in the rooms which she shared with half a dozen others, and while I was waiting for the physician to send some medicines for Anne, I had a message from William telling me not to come near him, but to take a bath with spirit of aloes in the water, for he had the sweat and prayed to God that he had not given it to me.
I went along to his chamber and spoke to him from the doorway. He had the same yellowish tinge to his face as Anne, and he too was piled with blankets and still shivering with cold.
“Don’t come in,” he ordered me. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Are you being cared for?” I asked.
“Yes, and I’ll take a wagon to Norfolk,” he said. “I want to be home.”
“Wait a few days and go when you are better.”
He looked at me from the bed, his face contorted with the pain of the illness. “Ah, my silly child-wife,” he said. “I can’t afford to wait. Care for the children at Hever.”
“Of course I will,” I said, still not understanding him.
“D’you think we made another baby?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
William closed his eyes for a moment as if he were making a wish. “Well, whatever happens is in the hands of God,” he said. “But I should have liked to have made a true Carey on you.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that,” I said. “When you are better.”
He gave me a little smile. “I’ll think of that, little wife,” he said tenderly, though his teeth still chattered. “And if I am not at court for a while, do you take care of yourself and of our children.”
“Of course,” I said. “But you will come back, as soon as you are better?”
“The moment I am well again I will come back,” he promised. “You go to Hever and be with the children.”
“I don’t know when they’ll let me go.”
“Go today,” he advised. “There’ll be uproar when they know how many people have taken the sweat. It’s very bad, my love. It’s very bad in the City. Henry will be off like a hare, mark my words. No one will look for you for a week, and you can be safe with the children in the country. Find George and get him to take you. Go now.”
I hesitated for a moment, tempted to do as he told me.
“Mary, if this was the last thing I told you to do I could not be more serious. Go to Hever and care for the children while the court is sick. It would be very bad if your babies were to lose both mother and father to the sweat.”
“But what d’you mean? You won’t die?”
He managed a smile. “Of course not. But I’ll be happier in my mind on my journey to my home if I know you are safe. Find George and tell him that I commanded you to go, and him to escort you safely.”
I took half a step inside the room.
“Don’t come any closer!” he snapped. “Just go!”
His tone was rude, and I turned on my heel and went out of the room in something of a pet and closed the door behind me with a little slam, so that he should know that I was offended.
It was the last time that I ever saw him alive.
George and I had been at Hever for little more than a week when Anne arrived traveling almost alone, in an open wagon. She was faint with exhaustion when she arrived and neither George nor I had the courage to nurse her ourselves. A wise woman from Edenbridge came in and took her to the tower room and sent for enormous portions of food and wine, some of which, we
hoped, were actually eaten by Anne. The whole country was either sick or in a terror of sickness. Two maids left the castle to nurse their parents in nearby villages and both of them died. It was a most fearsome disease and George and I woke every morning in a sweat of terror and spent the rest of the day wondering if we too were destined to die.
The king, at the first signs of sickness, had left at once and gone to Hunsdon. That in itself was bad enough for the Boleyns. The court was in chaos, the country gripped by death. Worse for us: Queen Katherine was well, the Princess Mary was well, and the two of them, with the king, traveled together for the whole of the summer, as if they were the only ones blessed by heaven, untouched in a sea of sickness.
Anne fought for life, as she had fought for the king, a long dogged battle in which she brought all her determination to bear against almost impossible odds. Love letters came from the king, marked Hunsdon, Tittenhanger, Ampthill, recommending one cure or another, promising that he had not forgotten her and that he still loved her. But clearly, the divorce could not progress while there was no business being done at all, when even the cardinal himself was sick. It was half-forgotten and the queen was at the king’s side and their engaging little princess was their best companion and greatest entertainment. Everything had somehow stopped for the summer and Anne’s sense of the flying of time, and Anne’s desperation, were nothing to a man whose greatest fear was illness, and who was miraculously blessed with good health amid a sea of misery.
By our good fortune, the Boleyn luck, the sweat did not come to Hever and the children and I were safe in the familiar green fields and meadows. I had a letter from William’s mother which told me that he had reached his home, as he had wanted, before he had died. It was a short cold letter which at the end congratulated me on being a free woman again; as if she rather thought that my marriage vows had never constrained me very much in the past.
I read the letter in the garden, on my favorite seat, looking toward the moat and the stone walls of the castle. I thought of the man I had cuckolded and who, in the last few months, had become such a delightful lover and husband. I knew that I had never given him his due. He had been married to a child and left by a girl, and when I came back to him as a woman it was always with an element of calculation in my kiss.
Now I realized that his death had set me free. If I could escape another husband, I might buy a little manor farm on my family’s lands in Kent or Essex. I might have land that I could call my own and crops that I could watch grow. I might at last become a woman in my own right instead of the mistress of one man, the wife of another, and the sister of a Boleyn. I might bring up my children under my own roof. Of course, I had to get some money from somewhere, I had to persuade some man, Howard, Boleyn, or king, to give me a pension so that I could raise my children and feed myself, but it might be possible for me to gain enough to be a modest widow living in the country on my own little farm.
“You cannot really want to be a nobody,” George exclaimed as I outlined this plan as we were walking together in the woods. The children were hiding behind trees and stalking us as we walked slowly ahead of them. We were to play the parts of a pair of deer. George was wearing a bunch of twigs in his hat to signify antlers. Now and then we could hear little Henry’s irresistible chuckle of excitement as he crashingly approached, believing himself completely unseen and unheard. I could not help thinking of his father’s enthusiasm for disguises and how he too always thought that people were baffled by the simplest stratagem. Now, I indulged my son and pretended that I did not hear his noisy dash from tree to tree nor see him run from shadow to bush.
“You have been the favorite of the court,” George protested. “Why would you not want to make a grand marriage? Father or Uncle could get the pick of England for you. When Anne becomes queen then you could have a French prince.”
“It’s still woman’s work whether it’s done in a great hall or in the kitchen,” I said bitterly. “I know it well enough. It’s earning no money for yourself and everything for your husband and master. It’s obeying him as quickly and as well as if you were a groom of the servery. It’s having to tolerate anything he chooses to do, and smile as he does it. I’ve served Queen Katherine in these last few years. I’ve seen how life has been for her. I wouldn’t be a princess, not even for a princess’s dowry. I wouldn’t even be a queen. I have seen her shamed and humiliated and insulted, and all she could do was kneel on her prie dieu, pray for a little help, and get to her feet and smile at the woman who was triumphing over her. I don’t think much of that, George.”
Catherine behind us made an excited little rush and caught at my gown. “Caught you! I caught you!”
George turned and lifted her up, tossed her in the air and handed her to me. She was heavy now, a firm-bodied little four-year-old smelling of sunshine and leaves.
“Clever girl,” I said. “You are a great hunter.”
“And what about her?” George asked. “Would you deny her a great place in the world? She will be the Queen of England’s niece. Think of that.”
I hesitated. “If women could only have more,” I said longingly. “If we could have more in our own right. Being a woman at court is like forever watching a pastrycook at work in the kitchen. All those good things, and you can have nothing.”
“What about Henry then?” he said, temptingly. “Your Henry is the nephew of the King of England, known well enough as his son. If (God forbid) Anne does not have a son, then Henry could claim the throne of England, Mary. Your son is the son of a king, and he could be his heir.”
I did not glow at the thought. I looked fearfully into the wood where my staunch little boy was struggling to keep up with us and muttering to himself hunting songs of his own composing.
“Please God he is safe,” was all I said. “Please God he is safe.”
Autumn 1528
ANNE SURVIVED HER ILLNESS AND GREW STRONGER IN THE clean air of Hever. When she came from her chamber I still would not sit with her, I was so afraid of taking the sickness to my children. She tried to be witty about my fears but there was an edge to her voice. She had felt betrayed by the king when he had fled the court, and she was mortally offended that he had spent the summer with Queen Katherine and with the Princess Mary.
She was determined to find him as soon as the cooler weather came, and the sweating sickness passed away. I was hoping that I might be overlooked in the rush to get Anne on the throne.
“You have to come back with me,” Anne said flatly.
We were at our favorite seat by the moat of the castle. Anne was seated on the stone bench, George sprawled on the grass before her. I was seated on the grass, leaning back against the bench, watching my children solemnly paddling their little feet in the water. It was shallow water at the bank, but I could not take my gaze off them.
“Mary!” Anne’s voice was sharp.
“I heard you,” I said, not turning my head.
“Look at me!”
I glanced up at her.
“You have to come back with me, I can’t manage without you.”
“I don’t see why—”
“I do,” George said. “She has to have a bedfellow that she can trust. When she closes her bedroom door behind her she has to know that no one is going to prattle to the queen that she’s crying, or tell Henry that she’s furious. She’s acting a part every day of her life, she needs a band of traveling players to be with. She has to have some people around her that she can know, that can know her. It can’t be all masquerade.”
“Yes,” Anne said, surprised. “That’s just how it is. How did you know?”
“Because Francis Weston is a friend to me,” George said frankly. “I need someone to whom I am not brother or son or husband.”
“Nor lover,” I prompted.
He shook his head. “Just friend. But I know how Anne needs you, because I need him.”
“Well I need my children,” I said stubbornly. “And Anne manages well enough without me.”<
br />
“I am asking you as my sister.” Something in her tone made me look at her a little more closely. This illness had knocked some of the arrogance out of her, she sounded for a moment like a woman who needed a sister’s tenderness. Slowly, very slowly, in an unfamiliar gesture, Anne stretched out her hand to me.
“Mary…I can’t do this on my own,” she whispered. “It nearly killed me last time. I knew something would break inside me if I had to keep going. And now I have to go back to court and it will start all over again.”
“Can’t you keep the king without such effort?”
She leaned back and closed her eyes. For a moment she did not look like the most determined, the most brilliant young woman in a brilliant court. She looked like an exhausted girl who has seen the depths of her own fear. “No. The only way I know is always to be the best there is.”
I reached out and touched her hand and felt her fingers grip mine. “I’ll come and help.”
“Good,” she said quietly. “I do need you, you know. Stay beside me, Mary.”
Back at court, at Bridewell Palace, the game had changed again. The Pope, weary at last of the endless demands from England, was sending an Italian theologian, Cardinal Campeggio, to London to resolve finally and absolutely the matter of the king’s marriage. Far from being threatened by this new development the queen seemed to welcome it. She was looking well. There was a glow on her skin from the summer sun and she had been happy in the company of her daughter. The king, shaken by his terror of infection, had been easy to entertain. Together they had discussed the cause of the illness which had swept the country, planned measures for prevention, and composed special prayers which they had ordered to be said in every church. Together they had worried about the health of the country which they had ruled for so long. Anne, though never far from the king’s thoughts, lost some of her glamour when she was merely one of the many sick. Once again, the queen was his only constant and reliable friend in a dangerous world.