He looked past her and saw me. “Why, Mary!” he exclaimed, beaming with delight. “The beautiful Lady Carey, back with us again.”
I dropped my curtsy and looked up into his face. “Lady Stafford, if you please, Your Majesty. I have remarried.”
His quick nod showed that he remembered—and remembered the peal his wife had rung over his head as she banished me from court. As I saw his smile stay constant, and his eyes stay warm on my upturned face, I thought what a poisonous witch my sister was. She had sought and obtained my banishment quite alone, it had not been the will of the king at all. He would have forgiven me at once. If Anne had not needed me to help her hide her pregnancy then she would have left me at the little farmhouse forever.
“And you have a child?” he asked. He could not help a swift glance over my head to Anne, looking from the fertile Boleyn girl to the barren one.
“A girl, Your Majesty,” I said, thanking God that it had not been a son.
“William is a lucky man.”
I smiled up at him intimately. “I certainly tell him so.”
Henry laughed and reached out a hand to draw me closer. “Is he not here?” he said, looking around his gentlemen.
“He was not asked…” I started.
At once he grasped my meaning. He turned back to his wife. “Why is Sir William not bidden back to court with his wife?” he asked.
Anne never even wavered. “Of course he was summoned. I invited them both to come back to us as soon as my dear sister was churched.”
I could do nothing but admire her as she delivered this barefaced lie. Nothing for me to do but accept the lie and then play it for all I was worth. “He will join me tomorrow if it please Your Majesty. And if I may, I will have my daughter with me too.”
“The court is no place for a baby,” Anne said flatly.
At once Henry rounded on her. “More the pity. And more the pity I should hear that from my wife. This court is the very place for a baby, as I would have thought you, of all people, would know.”
“I was thinking of the baby’s health, my lord,” Anne said coldly. “I was thinking that she should be brought up in the country.”
“Her mother can be the judge of that,” Henry said grandly.
I smiled, honey sweet, and then I snatched at my chance. “Indeed, with your permission, I should like to take my baby into the country, to Hever this summer. She can meet my other children.”
“My son Henry,” Anne reminded me.
I turned a beguiling gaze upward to the king.
“Why not?” he said. “Whatever you wish, Lady Stafford.”
He offered me his arm and I swept him a curtsy and slipped my hand in the crook of his elbow. I gazed up at him as if he were still the most handsome prince in Europe, and not the balding fat man he had become. The clear line of his jaw had thickened. The hair on the top of his head was thin and sparse. The rosebud mouth which had been so kissable in a young face was now a self-indulgent little pout, and his dancing eyes were occluded by the fat of his eyelids and the puff of his cheeks. He looked like a man both indulged and yet unhappy. A man like a sulky child.
I smiled radiantly up at him, I tilted my head toward him, laughed at his remarks, and made him laugh with tales of my buttermaking and my cheesemaking, until we were at the high table and he went to his throne as King of England, and I went to my seat at the table for the ladies in waiting.
We sat long over dinner, this court had become gluttons. There were twenty different meat dishes: game and killed meat, birds and fish. There were fifteen different puddings. I watched Henry taste a little of everything, and continually send for more. Anne sat beside him with a face like ice, picking at her plate, her eyes forever flicking to one side and then the other as if she would see where danger waited.
When the plates were finally taken away there was a masque and then the court set to dancing in earnest. I kept a close watch on the side door to the left of the fireplace, even when I was taking my place in a circle of dancers, even when I was flirting with my old friends of the court. After midnight, my watch was rewarded: the door opened and my husband William slipped in, and looked around for me.
The candles were guttering down and there were so many people dancing and moving around that he was not seen. I excused myself from the dance and went over to him and he drew me at once into an alcove, behind a curtain.
“My love,” he said and took me in his arms. “It feels like a lifetime.”
“For me too. Is the baby all right? Settled in?”
“I left her and the nurse sound asleep. And I have good lodgings for them and for us too as soon as you can get away from court.”
“I’ve done better than that,” I said delightedly. “The king was pleased to see me and he asked for you. You are to come to court tomorrow. We can be here together. He said that we could take Baby Anne to Hever for the summer.”
“Did Anne ask it for you?”
I shook my head. “It’s Anne I have to thank for my exile,” I said. “She wouldn’t even have let me see my children if I had not asked it of the king.”
He gave a low whistle. “You must have thanked her kindly for that.”
I shook my head. “No point complaining of her very nature.”
“And how is she?”
“Sour,” I whispered very low. “Sick. And sad.”
Summer 1535
THAT NIGHT GEORGE AND I SAT IN ANNE’S ROOM AS SHE PREPARED for bed. The king had said he would lie with her that night and she had bathed and asked me to brush her hair.
“You do make sure he is careful, don’t you?” I asked her anxiously. “It’s a sin that he should lie with you at all.”
George gave a short laugh from where he was stretched out on her bed, his boots on her fine covers.
She turned her head under the hairbrush. “I’m in little danger of rough wooing.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Some nights he cannot do it. Some nights he cannot get hard at all. It’s disgusting. I have to lie underneath him while he heaves around and sweats and grunts. And then he gets angry, and he is angry with me! As if I had anything to do with it.”
“Is it drink?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You know the king. He’s always half-drunk by night.”
“If you tell him you’re with child…” I said.
“I’ll have to tell him in June, won’t I?” she remarked. “As soon as it quickens, I’ll tell him then. He’ll cancel the court’s progress and we can all stay at Hampton Court. George will have to ride out and hunt with him and keep that moon-faced Jane off his neck.”
“Archangel Gabriel couldn’t keep the women off him,” George said negligently. “You’ve set a pattern, Anne, you’ll live to regret it. They all of them hold him at arm’s length and promise him the earth. It was easier when they were all like pretty Mary here—took a little romp and were paid a couple of manors for it.”
“I think you got the manors,” I said sharply. “And Father. And William Carey. As I recall, I got a pair of embroidered gloves and a pearl necklace.”
“And a ship named for you, and a horse,” Anne said with her accurate envious memory. “And gowns without number, and a new bed.”
George laughed. “You have an inventory as if you were a groom of the household, Anne.” He stretched out a hand for her and pulled her to the bed to lie back on the pillow beside him. I looked at the two of them, as intimate as twins, side by side in the big bed of England.
“I’ll leave you,” I said shortly.
“Run off to Sir Nobody,” Anne threw over her shoulder, and twitched the richly embroidered curtains of the bed so they were both shielded from my sight.
William was waiting for me, in the garden, looking out over the river, his face dark.
“What’s the matter?”
“He’s arrested Fisher,” he said. “I never thought he’d dare.”
“Bishop Fisher?”
“I thought
he had a charmed life. Henry always loved him, and he seemed to be allowed to defend Queen Katherine and emerge unscathed. He’s been her man without swerving. She’ll grieve for him.”
“But he’ll just be in the Tower for a week or so, won’t he? And then apologize, or whatever?”
“It depends what they demand of him. He won’t take the oath of succession, I’m sure of that. He can’t say that Elizabeth is to succeed in the place of Mary, he’s written a dozen books and preached a million sermons in defense of the marriage, he can’t disinherit her daughter.”
“Then he’ll just stay there,” I said.
“I suppose so,” William repeated.
I drew a little closer and put my hand on his arm. “Why are you so worried?” I asked. “He’ll have his books and his things, his friends will visit him. He’ll be released at the end of the summer.”
William turned from the river and took my hands in his. “I was there when Henry ordered him sent to the Tower,” he said. “He was at Mass while he was doing his business. Think of that, Mary. He was at Mass when he ordered a bishop to the Tower.”
“He’s always done his business while hearing Mass,” I said. I was unwilling to recognize my husband’s earnestness. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“These are Henry’s laws,” my husband said, holding my hands and not releasing me. “The Oath of Succession and then the Supremacy Act, and then the Treason Act. These aren’t the laws of the land. These are Henry’s laws that set a trap to catch his enemies, and Fisher and More have fallen into it.”
“He’s hardly going to behead them…” I said reasonably. “Oh William, really! One is the most revered churchman in the land, and the other was Lord Chancellor. He’d hardly dare behead them.”
“If he dares to try them for treason then none of us is safe.”
I found I had lowered my voice to match him. “Because?”
“Because he will have found that the Pope does not protect his servants. That English men and women do not rise up against tyranny. That no one is so well thought of, or so well connected, that they cannot be arrested under a new law of his devising. How long d’you think Queen Katherine will be free once her advisor is imprisoned?”
I pulled my hands away. “I won’t listen to this,” I said. “It’s to fear shadows. My Grandfather Howard was in the Tower for treason and came out smiling. Henry wouldn’t execute Thomas More, he loves him. They may be at loggerheads now but More was his greatest friend and joy.”
“What about your Uncle Buckingham?”
“That was different,” I said. “He was guilty.”
My husband let me go and turned back to the river. “We’ll see,” was all he said. “Pray God you’re right and I am wrong.”
Our prayers were not answered. Henry did the thing that I thought he would never dream of doing. He sent Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More to trial for claiming that Queen Katherine had been truly married to him. He let them lay their lives down to declare that he was not the head of the Church, an English Pope. And those two, men without a stain on their conscience, two of the finest men in England, walked out to the scaffold and laid their heads on the blocks as though they had been the lowest of traitors.
They were very quiet days at court, the days in June when Fisher died, when More died. Everyone felt that the world had grown a little more dangerous. If Bishop Fisher could be beheaded, if Thomas More could walk to the scaffold, then who could call themselves safe?
George and I waited with increasing impatience for Anne’s baby to quicken in the womb so that she could tell the king that she was with child; but mid-June came and still nothing had happened.
“Could you have mistaken your time?” I asked her.
“Is that likely?” she retorted. “Do I think of anything else?”
“Could it move so slightly that you cannot feel it?” I asked.
“You tell me,” she said. “You’re the sow that’s always in farrow. Could it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes, you do know,” she said. Her little pursed mouth was shut in a thin bitter line. “We both know. We both know what’s happened. It’s died in there. It’s five months now and I’m no bigger than when I was three months gone. It’s dead inside me.”
I looked at her in horror. “You must see a physician.”
She snapped her fingers in my face. “I’d as soon see the devil himself. If Henry knows that there is a dead baby inside me he’ll never come near me again.”
“It will make you sick,” I warned her.
She laughed, a shrill bitter laugh. “It will be the death of me, one way or another. For if I let out one word that this is the second baby I’ve failed to carry, then I am thrown aside and ruined. What am I to do?”
“I’ll go to a midwife myself and ask her if there is something you could take to get rid of it.”
“You’d better make sure she doesn’t know it’s for me,” Anne said flatly. “If one whisper of this gets out, then I am lost, Mary.”
“I know,” I said grimly. “I’ll get George to help me.”
That evening, before dinner, the two of us made our way down the river. A private ferryboatman took us, we didn’t want the great family barge. George knew a bath house for whores. There was a woman who lived nearby who was reputed to be able to cast spells, or stop a baby, put a curse on a field of cows, or make river trout come to the line. The bath house overlooked the river, with bay windows leaning out over the water. There was a shielded candle in every window, and women seated half-naked by the light, so that they could be seen from the river. George pulled his hat down over his eyes and I drew the hood of my cape forward. We put the boat in at the landing stage, and I ignored the girls leaning out of the windows above our heads and cooing at George.
“Wait here,” George ordered the boatman, as we went up the slippery wet steps. He took my elbow and guided me across the filth of the cobbled street to the house on the corner. He knocked at the door, and as it silently opened, he stood back and let me go in alone. I hesitated on the doorway, peering into the darkness.
“Go on,” George said. An abrupt shove in the small of my back warned me that he was in no mood for delays. “Go on. We’ve got to get this for her.”
I nodded and went inside. It was a small room, smoky from the sluggish fire of driftwood burning in the fireplace, furnished with nothing more than a little wooden table and a pair of stools. The woman was seated at the table: an old woman, stoop-backed and gray-haired, a face lined with knowledge, bright blue eyes which saw everything. A little smile revealed a mouthful of blackened teeth.
“A lady of the court,” she remarked, taking in my cloak and the hint of my rich gown at the front opening.
I laid a silver coin on the table. “That’s for your silence,” I said flatly.
She laughed. “I’ll be not much use to you, if I’m silent.”
“I need help.”
“Want someone to love you? Want someone dead?” Her bright gaze scanned me as if she would take me all in. Her grin beamed out again.
“Neither,” I said.
“Baby trouble then.”
I pulled up a stool and sat down, thinking of the world divided so simply into love, death and childbirth. “It’s not for me, it’s for my friend.”
She gave a delighted little giggle. “As ever.”
“She was with child, but she’s now in her fifth month and the baby isn’t growing and isn’t moving.”
At once the old woman was more interested. “What does she say?”
“She thinks it’s dead.”
“Is she still growing stouter?”
“No. She’s no bigger than two months ago.”
“Sick in the mornings, her breasts tender?”
“Not now.”
She nodded her head. “Has she bled?”
“No.”
“Sounds like the baby is dead. You’d better take me to her, so that I can be sure.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “She’s very closely guarded.”
She gave a short laugh. “You won’t believe the houses that I have got in and out.”
“You can’t see her.”
“Then we can take a chance. I can give you a drink, it’ll make her sick as a dog and the baby will come away.”
I nodded eagerly but she held up a hand. “But what if she’s mistaken? If it’s a live baby in there? Just resting awhile? Just gone quiet?”
I looked at her, quite baffled. “What then?”
“You’ve killed it,” she said simply. “And that makes you a murderer, and her, and me too. D’you have the stomach for that?”
I shook my head slowly. “My God, no,” I said, thinking of what would happen to me and mine if anyone knew that I had given the queen a potion to make her miscarry a prince.
I rose to my feet and turned away from the table to look out of the window at the cold gray river. I summoned my memory of Anne as I had seen her at the start of this pregnancy, her higher color, her swelling breasts; and as she was now, pale, drained, dry-looking.
“Give me the drink. She can be the one to choose whether to take it or no.”
The woman rose from her stool and waddled toward the back of the room. “That’ll be three shillings.”
I said nothing to the absurdly high fee but put the silver coins down on the greasy table in silence. She snatched them up with one quick movement. “It’s not this you need fear,” she said suddenly.
I was halfway to the door but I turned back. “What d’you mean?”
“It’s not the drink but the blade you should fear.”
I felt a cold shiver, as if the gray mist from the river had just crept all over the skin of my back. “What d’you mean?”
She shook her head, as if she had been asleep for a moment. “I? Nothing. If it means something to you, then take it to heart. If it means nothing, it means nothing. Let it go.”
I paused for a moment in case she would say anything more, and when she was silent I opened the door and slipped out.