At once I was between her and the door, barring her way. “You are not to distress His Majesty,” I said. “He would not want to know this. These are women’s secrets, they should be kept among women. Let us keep this between ourselves and deal with it privately and you shall have the queen’s favor, and mine. I shall see that you are well paid for tonight’s work and for your discretion. I shall see that you are well paid, Mistress. I promise you.”
She did not even glance up at me. She was holding the bundle wrapped in her arms, the horror of it hidden by the swaddling bands. For one dreadful moment I thought I saw it move, I imagined the little flayed hand putting the cloth aside. She lifted it up toward my face, and I shrank back from it. She took her chance and opened the door.
“You shan’t go to the king!” I swore, clinging to her arm.
“Don’t you know?” she asked me, her voice almost pitying. “Don’t you know that I am his servant already? That he sent me here to watch and listen for him? I was appointed for this from the moment that the queen first missed her courses.”
“Why?” I gasped.
“Because he doubts her.”
I put my hand to the wall to support me, my head was whirling. “Doubts her?”
She shrugged. “He did not know what was wrong with her that she could not carry a child.” She nodded to the limp huddle of cloth. “Now he will know.”
I licked my dry lips. “I will pay you anything you ask, to put that down and go to the king and tell him that she has lost a baby but she is able to conceive another,” I said. “Whatever he is paying you, I will double it. I am a Boleyn, we are not without influence and wealth. You can be one of the Howard servants for the rest of your life.”
“This is my duty,” she said. “I have been doing it since I was a young girl. I have made a solemn vow to the Virgin Mary never to fail in my task.”
“What task?” I demanded wildly. “What duty? What are you talking about now?”
“Witch-taking,” she said simply. And then she slipped out of the door with the devil’s baby in her arms and was gone.
I shut the door on her and slid the bolt. I wanted no one to come into the room until the mess was cleaned up, and Anne fit to fight for her life.
“What did she say?” she asked.
Her skin was white and waxy. Her dark eyes were like chips of glass. She was far away from this hot little room and the sense of danger.
“Nothing of importance.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. Why don’t you sleep now?”
Anne glared at me. “I will never believe it,” she said flatly, as if she were talking not to me, but to some inquisition. “You can never make me believe it. I am not some ignorant peasant crying over a relic which is chipwood and pig’s blood. I will not be turned from my way by silly fears. I will think and I will do, and I will make the world to my own desire.”
“Anne?”
“I won’t be frightened by nothing,” she said staunchly.
“Anne?”
She turned her face away from me, to the wall.
As soon as she was asleep I opened the door and called a Howard—Madge Shelton—into the room to sit with her. The maids swept away the bloodstained sheets and brought clean rushes for the floor. Outside in the presence chamber, the court was waiting for news, the ladies half-dozing, their heads in their hands, some people playing cards to while away the time. George was leaning against a wall in low-voiced conversation with Sir Francis, heads as close as lovers.
William came toward me and took my hand, and I paused for a moment and drew strength from his touch.
“It’s bad,” I said shortly. “I can’t tell you now. I have to tell Uncle something. Come with me.”
George was at my side at once. “How is she?”
“The baby’s dead,” I said shortly.
I saw him blanch as white as a maid and he crossed himself. “Where’s Uncle?” I asked, looking round.
“Waiting for news in his rooms like the rest of them.”
“How’s the queen?” someone asked me.
“Has she lost the baby?” someone else said.
George stepped forward. “The queen is sleeping,” he said. “Resting. She bids you all to go to your beds and in the morning there will be news of her condition.”
“Did she lose the baby?” someone pressed George, looking at me.
“How should I know?” George said blandly, and there was an irritated buzz of disbelief.
“It’s dead then,” someone said. “What is wrong with her that she cannot give him a son?”
“Come on,” William said to George. “Let’s get out of here. The more you say, the worse it will get.”
With my husband and my brother on either side of me we pushed out through the court and down the stair to Uncle Howard’s chambers. His dark-liveried servant let us in without a word. My uncle was at the big table, some papers spread out before him, a candle throwing a yellow glow all around the room.
When we entered he nodded to the servant to stir the fire and light another branch of candles.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Anne went into labor and gave birth to a dead baby,” I said flatly.
He nodded, his grave face showing no emotion.
“There were things wrong with it,” I said.
“What sort of things?”
“Its back was flayed open, and its head was big,” I said. I could feel my throat tightening in disgust and I gripped William’s hand a little tighter. “It was a monster.”
Again he nodded as if I were telling him news of a most ordinary and distant nature. But it was George who gave a small strangled exclamation in his throat and felt for the back of a chair to support him. My uncle seemed to pay no attention, but he saw everything.
“I tried to stop the midwife taking it out.”
“Oh?”
“She said that she was already hired by the king.”
“Ah.”
“And when I offered her money to stay or to leave the baby she said that it was her duty to the Virgin Mary to take the baby because she was a…”
“A…?”
“A witch-taker,” I whispered.
I felt the odd sensation of the floor floating underneath my feet and all the sounds of the room coming from far away. Then William pressed me into a chair and held a glass of wine to my lips. George did not touch me, he was clinging to the back of the chair and his face was as white as mine.
My uncle was unmoved.
“The king hired a witch-taker to spy on Anne?”
I took another sip of wine and nodded.
“Then she is in very great danger,” he remarked.
There was another long silence.
“Danger?” George whispered, pushing himself upright.
My uncle nodded. “A suspicious husband is always a danger. A suspicious king even more so.”
“She’s done nothing,” George said stoutly. I stole a curious sideways glance at him, hearing him repeat the litany Anne had sworn when she had seen the monster that her body had made.
“Perhaps,” my uncle conceded. “But the king thinks she has done something, and that is enough to destroy her.”
“And what will you do to protect her?” George asked cautiously.
“You know, George,” my uncle said slowly, “the last time I had the pleasure of a private conversation with her she said that I might leave the court and be damned to me, she said that she had got where she was by her own efforts and that she owed me nothing, and she threatened me with imprisonment.”
“She’s a Howard,” I said, putting the wine aside.
He bowed. “She was.”
“This is Anne!” I exclaimed. “We all spent our lives to get her here.”
My uncle nodded. “And has she repaid us with great thanks? You were exiled from court, as I remember. You’d still be there if she had not needed your service. She has done nothing to recommend me to the k
ing, on the contrary. And George, she favors you, but are you one shilling the richer than when she came to the throne? Did you not do as well when she was his mistress?”
“This is not a matter of favor but a matter of life and death,” George said hotly.
“As soon as she bears a son her position is secure.”
“But he can’t make a son!” George shouted. “He couldn’t make a son on Katherine, he cannot make one on her. He is all but impotent! That’s why she has been going mad with fear…”
There was a deadly silence. “God forgive you for putting all of us in such danger,” my uncle said coldly. “It’s treason to say such a thing. I did not hear it. You did not say it. Now go.”
William helped me to my feet and the three of us went slowly from the room. On the threshold George spun around, about to complain, but the door silently closed in his face before he could speak.
Anne did not wake until the middle of the morning and then she had a raging temperature. I went to find the king. The court was packing to move to Greenwich Palace and he was away from the noise and the bustle, playing bowls in the garden, surrounded by his favorites, the Seymours very prominent among them. I was glad to see George at his side, looking confident and smiling, and my uncle among the watchers. My father offered the king a wager at good odds and the king took the bet. I waited till the last ball had been rolled and my father, laughing, handed over twenty gold pieces, before I stepped forward and made my curtsy.
The king scowled to see me. I saw at once that neither Boleyn girl was in favor. “Lady Mary,” he said coolly.
“Your Majesty, I am come from my sister, the queen.”
He nodded.
“She asks that the court delay the move to Greenwich for a week until she has perfectly recovered her health.”
“It’s too late,” he said. “She can join us there when she is well.”
“They have hardly started packing yet.”
“It’s too late for her,” he corrected me. There was an instantly suppressed little mutter around the bowling green. “It is too late for her to ask favors of me. I know what I know.”
I hesitated. A very strong part of me wanted to take him by the collar of his jacket and shake the fat selfishness out of him. I had left my sister sick after a nightmarish childbirth and here was her husband, taking his ease, playing bowls in the sunshine and warning the court that she was far from his favor.
“Then you must know that she, and I, and all we Howards have never swerved for a moment from our love and loyalty to you,” I said. I saw my uncle’s scowl at the claim of kinship.
“Let us hope you are not all tested,” the king said unpleasantly. Then he turned from me and beckoned to Jane Seymour. Modestly, eyes downcast, she tiptoed forward from the queen’s ladies.
“Walk with me?” he asked in a very different voice.
She curtsied as if it were too much of an honor for her even to speak, and then laid her little hand on his bejeweled sleeve and they walked off together, the court falling into line at a discreet distance behind them.
The court was buzzing with rumors which George and I, working alone, could not deny. Once it had been a hanging offense to say one word against Anne. Now there were songs and jokes about her flirtatious court circle, and scandalous insinuations about her inability to carry a child.
“Why doesn’t Henry silence them?” I asked of William. “God knows he has the power of the law to do so.”
He shook his head. “He is allowing them to say anything,” he said. “They say she has done everything but sell her soul to the devil.”
“Fools!” I stormed.
Gently he took my hands and unfolded the clenched fingers. “But Mary. How else would she have made a monstrous child but from a monstrous union? She must have lain in sin.”
“With whom, for God’s sake? Do you think she has made a contract with the devil?”
“Don’t you think she would do so, if it got her a son?” he demanded.
That stopped me. Unhappily, I looked up into his brown eyes. “Hush,” I said, afraid of the very words. “I don’t want to think it.”
“What if she did perform some witchcraft, and it gave her a monster child?”
“Then?”
“Then he would be right to put her aside.”
For a moment I tried to laugh. “This is a sorry jest at this sorry time, William.”
“No jest, wife.”
“I can’t see it!” I cried in sudden impatience at the way the world had so suddenly turned. “I can’t comprehend what’s happened to us!”
Disregarding the fact that we were in the garden and that any of the court could come upon us at any moment, he slipped his arm around my waist and folded me in to him, as intimate as if we were in the stable yard of his farm. “Love, my love,” he said tenderly. “She must have done something very bad to give birth to a monster. And you don’t even know what it was. Have you never run a secret errand for her? Fetched a midwife? Bought a potion?”
“You yourself…” I started.
He nodded. “And I have buried a dead baby. Please God this matter can be settled quietly and they never ask too many questions.”
The only previous time that the court had abandoned a queen in an empty palace was when the king and Anne had ridden out laughing, and left Queen Katherine alone. Now Henry did it again. Anne watched, unseen, from the window of her bedroom, kneeling up on a chair, still too weak to stand, while he, with Jane Seymour riding at his side, led the progress of the court to Greenwich, his favorite palace.
In the train of merry courtiers behind the laughing king and the new pretty favorite was my family, father, mother, uncle and brother, jockeying for the king’s favor, while William and I rode with our children. Catherine was quiet and reserved, and she glanced back at the palace and then looked up at me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t seem right to be riding away without the queen,” she said.
“She’ll join us later, when she feels well again,” I said comfortingly.
“D’you know where Jane Seymour will have her rooms at Greenwich?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “Won’t she share with another Seymour girl?”
“No,” my young daughter said shortly. “She says that the king is to give her beautiful apartments of her own, and her own ladies in waiting. So that she can practice her music.”
I did not want to believe Catherine but she was quite right. It was given out that Secretary Cromwell himself had given up his rooms at Greenwich so that Mistress Seymour could warble away to her lute without disturbing the other ladies. In fact, Secretary Cromwell’s rooms had a private passage connecting the apartment to the king’s privy chamber. Jane was ensconced in Greenwich as Anne had been before her, in rival rooms to the queen’s apartment, as a rival court.
As soon as the court was settled, a little group of Seymours met and talked and danced and played in Jane’s new grand apartments, and the queen’s ladies, without the queen to wait on, found their way over to Jane’s rooms. The king was there all the time, talking, reading, listening to music or poetry. He dined with Jane informally, in his rooms or hers, with Seymours around the table to laugh at his jests or divert him with gambling, or he took her into dinner in the great hall and sat her near to him, with only the queen’s empty throne to remind anyone that there was a Queen of England left behind in an empty palace. Sometimes, as I looked at Jane leaning forward to say something to Henry over my sister’s empty seat, I felt as if Anne had never been and there was nothing to stop Jane moving from one chair to the other.
She never wavered in her sweetness to Henry. They must have reared her on a diet of sugar beet in Wiltshire. She was utterly unendingly pleasant to Henry whether he was in a sour mood because of the pain in his leg, or whether he was exultant as a boy crowing in triumph because he had brought down a deer. She was always very calm, she was always very pious—he often found her on her knees be
fore her little prie dieu with her hands clasped on her rosary, and her head uplifted—and she was always unendingly modest.
She set aside the French hood, the stylish half-moon-shaped headdress which Anne had introduced when she first came back to England. Instead, Jane wore a gable hood, like Queen Katherine had done, which only a year ago marked the wearer as someone impossibly dowdy and dull. Henry himself had sworn that he hated Spanish dress, but its very sternness suited Jane’s cool beauty as a foil. She wore it like a nun might wear a coif—to demonstrate her disdain for worldly show. But she wore it in palest blue, in softest green, in butter yellow: all clean light colors as if her very palette was mild.
I knew that she was halfway to my sister’s place when Madge Shelton, bawdy, flirtatious, loose-living little Madge Shelton, appeared at dinner in a gable hood in pale blue with a high-necked gown to match and her French sleeves remodeled to an English cut. Within days every woman in the court wore a gable hood and walked with her eyes downcast.
Anne joined us in February, riding into court with the greatest show: the royal standard rippling over her head, the Boleyn standard coming along behind her, and a great train of liveried serving men and gentlemen on horseback. George and I were waiting for her on the steps with the great doors open wide behind us, and Henry noticeable by his absence.
“Shall you tell her about Jane’s rooms?” George asked me.
“Not I,” I said. “You can.”
“Francis says to tell her in public. She’ll rule her temper in front of the court.”
“You discuss the queen with Francis?”
“You talk with William.”
“He is my husband.”
George nodded, looking toward the first men in Anne’s train as they approached the door.
“You trust William?”
“Of course.”
“I feel the same about Francis.”
“It’s not the same.”
“How would you know what his love is like to me?”
“I know that it can’t be as a man loves a woman.”
“No. I love him as a man loves a man.”
“It’s against holy writ.”