He took my hands and smiled his irresistible Boleyn smile. “Mary, have done. These are dangerous times and the only comfort to me is Francis’s love. Let me have that. Because as God is my witness I have few other joys, and I think we are in the greatest of danger.”
Anne’s train of escorts rode past and she pulled up her horse beside us with a radiant smile. She was wearing a riding habit in darkest red and a dark red hat set back on her head with a long feather pinned on the brim with a great ruby brooch.
“Vivat Anna!” my brother called, responding to her emphatic style.
She looked past us, into the shadows of the great hall, expecting to see the king waiting for her. Her expression did not change when she saw that he was missing.
“Are you well?” I asked, coming forward.
“Of course,” she said brightly. “Why should I not be?”
I shook my head. “No reason,” I said cautiously. Clearly, we were to say nothing about this dead baby as we had always said nothing about the others.
“Where is the king?”
“Hunting,” George said.
Anne strode into the palace, servants running before her to throw open the doors.
“He knew I was coming?” she threw over her shoulder.
“Yes,” George replied.
She nodded and waited until we were in her rooms with the doors shut. “And where are my ladies?”
“Some of them are hunting with the king,” I said. “Some of them are…” I found I did not know how to end the sentence. “Some of them are not,” I said hopelessly.
She looked past me and raised a dark eyebrow at George. “Will you tell me what my sister means?” she asked. “I knew her French and Latin were incomprehensible but now English seems to be beyond her too.”
“Your ladies are flocking to Jane Seymour,” he said flatly. “The king has given her Thomas Cromwell’s apartments, he dines with her every day. She has a little court over there.”
She gasped for a moment and looked from our brother to me. “Is this true?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He has given her Thomas Cromwell’s rooms? He can go straight to her rooms without anyone even knowing?”
“Yes.”
“Are they lovers?”
I looked at George.
“No way of knowing,” he said. “My wager is not.”
“Not?”
“She seems to be refusing to take the addresses of a married man,” he said. “She is playing on her virtue.”
Anne went to the window, walking slowly, as if she would puzzle out this change in her world. “What does she hope for?” she asked. “If she is calling him on and holding him off at the same time?”
Neither of us answered her. Who would know better than us?
Anne turned, her eyes as sharp as a cat’s. “She thinks to put me aside? Is she mad?”
We neither of us answered.
“And Cromwell was ordered out for this shower of Seymours?”
I shook my head. “Cromwell offered his rooms.”
She nodded slowly. “So Cromwell is openly against me now.”
She looked to George for comfort, an odd look, as if she were not sure of him. But George had never failed her. Tentatively, he went closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder, brother-like. Instead of turning to him for a hug, she stepped back until he was standing behind her and then she rested her head back against his chest. He gave a sigh and wrapped his arms around her and rocked her gently as they stood, looking out of the window where the Thames sparkled in the wintry sunshine.
“I thought you might be afraid to touch me,” she said softly.
He shook his head. “Oh, Anne. According to the laws of the land and the church I am anathemetized ten times over before breakfast.”
I shuddered at that; but she giggled like a girl.
“And whatever we have done, it was done for love,” he said gently.
She turned in his arms and looked up at him, scrutinizing his face. I realized that I had never in my life seen her look at anyone like that before. She looked at him as if she cared what he felt. He was not just a step on the stair of her ambition. He was her beloved. “Even when the outcome was monstrous?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t pretend to know the theology. But my mare has dropped a foal with one leg joined to the other and I didn’t dip her for a witch. These things happen in nature, they can’t always mean something. You were unlucky, nothing more.”
“I won’t let it frighten me,” she said staunchly. “I’ve seen saint’s blood made from the blood of pigs, and holy water scooped up from a stream. Half of this church’s teaching is to lead you on, half to frighten you into your place. I won’t be bribed onward, and I won’t be frightened. Not by anything. I took a decision to build my own road and I will do it.”
If George had been listening he would have heard the sharp nervous edge in her voice. But he was watching her bright determined face. “Onward and upward, Anna Regina!” he said.
She beamed at him. “Onward and upward. And the next will be a boy.”
She turned in his arms and put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him, as if he were a trusted lover. “So what am I to do?”
“You have to get him back,” he said earnestly. “Don’t rail at him, don’t let him see your fear. Call him back to you with every trick you know. Enchant him again.”
She hesitated and then she smiled and told him the truth behind the bright face. “George, I’m ten years older than when I courted him first. I am nearing thirty. He’s had only one live child off me, and now he knows that I gave birth to a monster. I will repel him.”
George tightened his grip on her waist. “You can’t repel him,” he said simply. “Or we all fall. You have to draw him back to you.”
“But it was me who taught him to follow his desires. Worse than that, I filled his stupid head with the new learning. Now he thinks that his desires are God’s manifestations. He only has to want something to think that it is God’s will. He doesn’t have to confirm it with priest, bishop, or Pope. His whims are holy. How can anyone make such a man return to his wife?”
George looked over her head to me for help. I came a little closer. “He likes comfort,” I said. “A little soothing. Pet him, tell him he is wonderful, praise him, and be kind to him.”
She looked as blankly at me as if I were speaking Hebrew. “I am his lover, not his mother,” she said flatly.
“He wants a mother now,” George said. “He’s hurt and he feels old and battered. He fears old age, he fears death. The wound on his leg stinks. He is in terror of dying before he has made a prince for England. What he wants is a woman to be tender to him until he feels better again. Jane Seymour is all sweetness. You have to out-sweeten her.”
She was silent. We all knew that it was not possible to be sweeter than Jane Seymour when she had the crown in her sights. Not even Anne, that most consummate seductress, could out-sweeten Jane Seymour. The brightness had died from her face and for a moment in her thin pallor I saw the hard face of our own mother.
“By God I hope it kills her,” she suddenly swore vindictively. “If she gets her hand on my crown and her arse on my throne I hope it is the death of her. I hope she dies young. I hope she dies in childbed in the very act of giving him a boy. And I hope the boy dies too.”
George stiffened. He could see from the window the return of the hunting party to court.
“Run downstairs, Mary, and tell the king I am come,” Anne said, not moving from George’s embrace.
I ran downstairs as the king was dismounting from his horse. I saw him wince as he stepped to the ground and his weight went onto his injured leg. Jane was riding beside him, a phalanx of Seymours around them. I looked around for my father, for my mother, for my uncle. They were thrust to the back, eclipsed.
“Your Majesty,” I said, sweeping him a curtsy. “My sister the queen has arrived and bids me to give Your Majesty
her compliments.”
Henry looked at me, he was wearing his sulky face, his forehead grooved with pain, his mouth pursed. “Tell her I am wearied from my riding, I will see her at dinner,” he said shortly.
He went past me with a heavy tread, walking unevenly, favoring his hurt leg. Sir John Seymour helped his daughter from her horse. I noted the new riding gown, the new horse, the diamond winking on her gloved hand. I longed so much to spit some venom at her that I had to bite the tip of my tongue, to make myself smile sweetly at her, and step back as her father and her brother escorted her through the great doors to her apartments—the apartments of the king’s favorite.
My father and my mother followed the Seymours, in their train. I waited for them to ask me how Anne was, but they passed me with no more than a nod. “Anne is well,” I volunteered, as my mother went by.
“Good,” she said coolly.
“Will you not come to wait on her?”
Her face was as blank as a barren woman. It was as if none of us had ever been born to her. “I will visit her when the king goes to her rooms,” she said.
I knew then that Anne and George and I were on our own.
The ladies returned to Anne’s room like a flock of buzzards, uncertain where the best pickings were to be had. I noted, with bitter amusement, the crisis in headgear which Anne’s confident return had caused. Some of them went back to French hoods which Anne continued to wear. Some of them stayed in the heavy gable hoods which Jane favored. All of them were desperate to know whether they should be in the queen’s beautiful apartment or over the way with the Seymours. Where might the king come next? Where might he prefer? Madge Shelton wore a gable hood and was trying to wheedle her way into Jane Seymour’s circle. Madge for one thought that Anne was in decline.
I entered the room and three women fell silent the moment I approached them. “What’s the news?” I asked.
No one would tell me. Then Jane Parker, always the most reliable of all scandal mongers, came to my side. “The king has sent Jane Seymour a gift, a huge purse of gold, and she has refused it.”
I waited.
Jane’s eyes were bright with delight. “She said she could not take such gifts from the king until she was a married woman. It would compromise her.”
I was silent for a moment, trying to decode this arcane statement. “Compromise her?”
Jane nodded.
“Excuse me,” I said. I made my way through the women to Anne’s privy chamber. George was in there with her, Sir Francis Weston with him. “I would speak with you alone,” I said flatly.
“You can speak in front of Sir Francis,” Anne said.
I took a breath. “Have you heard about Jane Seymour refusing the king’s gift?”
They shook their heads. “She is supposed to have said that she could not take such gifts from him until she was a married woman, because it might compromise her.”
“Oho,” Sir Francis said.
“I suppose it is nothing more than her flaunting her virtue; but the court’s abuzz with it,” I said.
“It reminds the king that she could marry another,” George said. “He’ll hate the sound of that.”
“It parades her virtue,” Anne added.
“And it’ll get out,” Sir Francis said. “This is theater. She didn’t turn down that horse, did she? Or the diamond ring? Or the locket with his picture inside? But the court now thinks, and the world will soon think, that the king is interested in a young woman who has no ambition for wealth. Touché! And all in one tableau.”
Anne gritted her teeth. “She is insufferable.”
“And there’s nothing you can do to pay her back,” George said. “So don’t even think about it. Head up, smile on, and enchant him if you can.”
“There may be mention at dinner of the alliance with Spain,” Sir Francis cautioned her as she rose from her chair. “Better say nothing against it.”
Anne looked back over her shoulder at him. “If I have to become Jane Seymour myself, I might as well be set aside,” she said. “If everything that is me—my wit and my temper and my passion for the reform of the church—has to be denied, then I have set my own self aside. If what the king wants is a biddable wife then I should never have tried for the throne in the first place. If I cannot be me, I might as well not be here at all.”
George went to her, raised her hand and kissed it. “No, for we all adore you,” he said. “And this is just a passing whim of the king’s. He wants Jane now as he wanted Madge, as he wanted Lady Margaret. He’ll come to his senses and come back to you. Look how long the queen held him. He went and came back to her a dozen times. You are his wife, the mother of his princess, just as she was. You can hold him.”
She smiled at that, straightened her shoulders, and nodded to me to open the door. I heard the buzz as she went out, dressed in rich green velvet, emeralds in her ears, diamonds sparkling on her green hood, the golden “B” on the choker of pearls at her neck.
It grew very cold toward the end of February and the Thames froze outside the palace. The landing stage extended like a path over a floor of white ice, the steps at the landing gate led down to a smooth sheet of glass. The river became like a strange road, which might lead anywhere. In the thinner parts when I looked down I could see the water moving, green and perilous, below the clear sheet of ice.
The gardens, the walkways, the walls and the allées around Greenwich all took on a miraculous whiteness as it snowed and then froze and then snowed again. In the pleasure gardens the espaliered walkways were frosted. On the sunny mornings the spiders’ webs shone with white crystals like magical lacemaking thrown over the thinnest branches. Every twig, every thinnest blade was lined with white, as if an artist had gone around the whole garden determined to make one see the detail of every branch on every tree.
It was freezing cold at night with an icy wind which blew from the east, a Russian wind. But during the day the sun was very bright and it was delightful to run in the gardens and to play at bowls on the frozen grass while the robins hopped in the dark yew trees of the allée and waited for crumbs, and great flocks of cold-loving geese flew overhead with their wings creaking and their long heads extended, searching for open water.
The king declared that we should have a winter fair and that there should be jousting on ice-skates and skate-dancing and a masque for winter with sledges and fire-eaters and Muscovite tumblers. There was a bear baiting, ten times funnier than an ordinary baiting, when the poor animal slid and fell and lunged toward the skidding dogs. One dog raced in for a snap and thought to race out again but found his scrabbling feet had no purchase on the ice and the bear drew him in to his death with one heavy paw on his back. The king roared with laughter at the sight.
They drove down oxen from Smithfield, using the frozen river as a high road, and roasted them on spits over great fires on the riverbank, and the lads ran from kitchen to riverside with hot bread, the kitchen dogs barking and running alongside them all the way, hoping for a mishap.
Jane was a winter princess in white and blue, white fur at her neck and on the hood of her cape. She skated very unsteadily and had to be held up by her brother on one side and her father on the other. They wheeled her toward the king and pushed her, passively beautiful, toward the throne and I thought that to be a Seymour girl must be very like being a Boleyn girl, when your father and your brother thrust you toward the king and you have neither the ability nor the wisdom to race away.
Henry always had a chair for her by his side. The throne for the queen was on his right, as it must be, but on his left there was a seat for Jane if she chose to rest after skating. The king did not skate, his leg was still not healed and there was talk of French physicians or perhaps even a pilgrimage to Canterbury to ease his pain. Only Jane could wipe his frown away, and she managed it by doing nothing. She stood beside him, she let them push her around on skates before him, she flinched at the cockfighting, she gasped at the fire-eater, she behaved as she always had
done, as a complete ninny, and it soothed the king in a way that Anne could not do.
Anne came down to dine on the ice with the king for every one of the three days, and seeing her glide about on her sharp whalebone skates with the grace of a Russian dancer, I thought that all we Boleyns were on thin ice this season. The most innocent word from her could make the king scowl, there was no pleasing him. He watched her all the time, with his suspicious piggy eyes screwed up. He rubbed his fingers as he watched her, pulling at the ring on his smallest finger.
Anne tried to dazzle him with her high spirits and her beauty. She kept her temper with him, though he was sour and dull. She danced, she gambled, she laughed, she skated, she was all joy, all light. She threw Jane Seymour into the background, no man ever had eyes for another woman when Anne was in radiant mood. Not even the king could look away from her as she went through the dancing court, her head high, that turn of the neck as someone spoke to her, surrounded by men who wrote poems to her beauty, musicians playing songs for her, the very center of the excitement of the court at play. The king could not take his eyes off her, but his gaze was no longer entranced. He stared at her as if he would understand something about her, as if he would unravel her charm so that he might see her unwoven, robbed of everything that had made her once so lovely to him. He stared at her like a man might stare at a tapestry that has cost him a fortune and that he suddenly sees one morning as valueless, and wants to unknot. He stared at her as if he could not believe that she had cost him so dear, and repaid him so little. And not even Anne’s charm and vivacity could make him think that the bargain was a good one.
While I watched Anne, George and Sir Francis were watching Cromwell. There was a whispered rumor that the king might put Anne aside on grounds that the marriage had been invalid from the start. George and I scoffed at it, but Sir Francis pointed to the fact that parliament was to be dissolved in April, with no good reason given.
“What difference does that make?” George asked him.
“So all the good country knights are back in their shires if the king makes a move against the queen,” Francis answered.