Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (112 page)

“Good,” my uncle said, unimpressed. “He’s a rogue given half a chance.”

“He won’t have a chance with me,” I said.

♦   ♦   ♦

Anne and I were ready for bed, dressed in our night shifts, the maids dismissed, when there was the familiar tap at the door. “Could only be George,” Anne said. “Come in.”

Our handsome brother lounged at the door with a pitcher of wine in one hand and three glasses in the other. “I come to worship at the shrine of beauty.” He was quite drunk.

“You can come in,” I said. “We are wonderfully beautiful.”

He kicked the door shut behind him. “Much better by candlelight,” he said, surveying the two of us. “Good God, Henry must go mad to think that he had the one of you and wants the other and can have neither.”

Anne was never pleased to be reminded that the king had been my lover. “He is always attentive to me.”

George rolled his eyes at me. “Drink?”

We all took a glass and George threw another log on the fire. There was a whisper of sound from the other side of the door. George, suddenly lithe and quick, was up at the door and tore it open. Jane Parker stood there, just straightening up from where she had been bending to put her eye to the keyhole.

“My dear wife!” George said with a voice like honey. “If you want me in your bed you don’t have to crawl around my sister’s rooms, you can just ask.”

She flushed to the roots of her hair and peered past him to Anne, in bed, her gown slipping from her naked shoulder, and me in my nightdress at the fireside. There was something about the way she looked at the three of us that made me flinch. She always made me feel ashamed, as if I had been doing something wrong. But it was as if she would collude with us. She looked as if she wanted to know dirty secrets, and share them.

“I was passing the door and I heard voices,” she said awkwardly. “I was afraid that someone was disturbing Lady Anne. I was just about to knock to make sure that her ladyship was all right.”

“You were going to knock with your ear?” George asked, puzzled. “With your nose?”

“Oh leave it, George,” I said suddenly. “There is nothing wrong, Jane. George came to have a drink with us and say good night. He’ll come to your room in a moment.”

She looked very far from grateful for my intervention. “He can come or not as he likes,” she said. “He can stay here all night if that is his pleasure.”

“Leave me,” Anne said simply. She spoke as if she would not descend to brawl with Jane.

George bowed in obedience and smartly shut the door in Jane’s face. He turned and put his back to it and, without caring that she would certainly hear, laughed aloud. “What a little snake!” he cried. “Oh Mary, you shouldn’t rise to her. Follow Anne’s lead: ‘Leave me.’ Good God! It was tremendous: ‘Leave me.’”

He came back to the fireside and poured us all wine. He handed the first glass to me and the second to Anne and then he held up his own to toast us both.

Anne did not raise her glass and she did not smile at him. “Next time,” she observed, “you will serve me first.”

“What?” he asked, confused.

“When you pour a glass of wine, it comes first to me. When you open my bedroom door you ask me if I want to admit the visitor. I am going to be queen, George, and you must learn to serve me as a queen.”

He did not flare up at her as he had done when he was freshly home from Europe. Even in that short time he had seen that Anne had great power. She did not care if she quarreled with her uncle, or with any of the men at court that could have been her allies. She did not care who hated her, as long as the king was at her beck and call. And she could ruin any man she chose.

George put his glass down on the hearth and crawled up on the bed so that he was on his hands and knees, with his face just inches from hers. “My little queen in waiting,” he purred.

Anne’s face softened at his intimacy.

“My little princess,” he whispered. Gently he kissed her on the
nose and then the lips. “Don’t be a shrew with me,” he begged her. “We all know that you are the first lady of the kingdom, but be sweet to me, Anne. We’ll all be so much happier if you are sweet to me.”

Unwillingly, she smiled. “You must show me every respect,” she warned him.

“I will lie beneath your horse’s hooves,” he promised her.

“And never take liberties.”

“I would rather die.”

“Then you can come here and I will be sweet to you,” she said.

He leaned forward and kissed her again. Her eyes closed and her lips smiled and then parted. I watched as he pressed closer, and his finger went to her bare shoulder and stroked her neck. I watched, quite fascinated and quite horrified, as his fingers went into her smooth dark hair and pulled her head back for his kiss. Then she opened her eyes with a little sigh. “Enough.” And she pushed him gently off the bed. George returned to his place at the fireside and we all pretended that it was nothing more than a brotherly kiss.

♦   ♦   ♦

The next day Jane Parker was as confident as ever. She smiled at me, she curtsied at Anne and handed her cape as Anne was about to go out walking by the river with the king.

“I would have thought you would have been displeased this day, my lady.”

Anne took the cape. “Why?”

“The news,” Jane said.

“What news?” I asked, so that Anne did not appear curious.

Jane answered me, but she watched Anne. “The Countess of Northumberland is divorcing Henry Percy.”

Anne staggered for a moment and went white.

“Oh!” I cried, to draw the attention to me and from Anne. “What a scandal! Why should she divorce him? What an idea! How very wrong of her.”

Anne had recovered, but Jane had watched her. “Why,” Jane said, in a voice like silk. “She says that their marriage was never valid at all. She says that there was a pre-contract. She says that all along he has been married to you, Lady Anne.”

Anne’s head went up and she smiled at Jane. “Lady Rochford, you do bring me the most extraordinary tidings. And you do choose the strangest of times to bring them to me. Last night you were creeping and listening at my door, and now you are as filled with bad news as a dead dog with maggots. If the Countess of Northumberland is unhappy in her marriage then I am sure that we all grieve for her.” There was a little murmur from the ladies, more like avid curiosity than sympathy. “But if she wants to claim that Henry Percy was betrothed to me then it is simply not true. In either case, the king is waiting for me and you are delaying me.”

Anne tied her own cape and swept from the room. Two or three of her ladies followed her, as they should all have done. The rest held back, circling Jane Parker for more scandal.

“Jane, I am sure the king will want to see you attending Lady Anne,” I said spitefully.

At once she had to go, she followed Anne from the room and the others trailed behind her.

I picked up my skirts and ran like a schoolgirl to my uncle’s apartments.

♦   ♦   ♦

He was at his desk, though it was early in the afternoon. A clerk stood at his elbow, writing memoranda as my uncle dictated. My uncle frowned when I put my head around the door and then motioned me in and gestured that I should wait.

“What is it?” he asked. “I am busy. I’ve just heard that Thomas More is unhappy with the king’s matter against the queen. I didn’t expect him to like it but I was hoping his conscience could swallow it. I’d give a thousand crowns not to have Thomas More openly against us.”

“It’s something else,” I said tersely. “But important.”

My uncle waved the clerk from the room.

“Anne?” he asked.

I nodded. We were a family business now and Anne was our goods for sale. My uncle knew, without me telling him, that if I ran to his rooms first thing in the afternoon, then it was a crisis in our trading.

“Jane just said that the Countess of Northumberland is to petition for divorce against Henry Percy,” I said in a rush. “Jane said that she is arguing he was pre-contracted to Anne.”

“Damnation,” my uncle swore.

“Did you know?”

“Of course I knew she had it in mind. I thought she was going to plead desertion or cruelty or buggery or something. I thought we had moved her away from the pre-contract business.”

“We?”

He scowled at me. “We. Doesn’t matter who, does it?”

“No.”

“And how does Jane know?” he demanded irritably.

“Oh Jane knows everything. She was listening at Anne’s door last night.”

“What could she have heard?” he asked, the spymaster in him always alert.

“Nothing,” I said staunchly. “George was there and we were doing nothing but talking and drinking a glass of wine.”

“No one but George?” he asked sharply.

“Who else could it be?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“You cannot doubt Anne’s chastity.”

“She spends her life spinning her toils around men.”

Even I could not let this injustice go. “She spins her toils around the king, as you ordered.”

“So where is she now?”

“In the garden with the king.”

“Go to her straightaway and tell her to deny everything with Henry Percy. No betrothal of any sort, no pre-contract. Just a boy and a girl in springtime and a green affection. A pageboy making eyes at a lady in waiting. Nothing more than that, and never returned by her. Just him. Have you got that?”

“There are those who know different,” I warned him.

“They’re all bought,” he said. “Except Wolsey, and he’s dead.”

“He might have told the king, back then, before anyone knew that the king would fall in love with Anne.”

“He’s dead,” my uncle said with relish. “He can’t repeat it. And everyone else will fall over themselves to assure the king that Anne is as chaste as the Virgin Mary. Henry Percy quicker than anyone. It’s only that damned wife of his who is so desperate to get out of that marriage that she’d risk everything.”

“Why does she hate him so?” I wondered.

He gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Good God, Mary, you are the most delightful fool. Because he
was
married to Anne, and she knows it. Because he was in love with Anne, and she knows it. And because losing Anne turned his head to melancholy and he has been a man destroyed ever since. No wonder she doesn’t want to be his wife. Now go and find your sister and lie your head off. Open those beautiful eyes of yours and tell lies for us.”

♦   ♦   ♦

I found the king and Anne at the riverside walk. She was talking earnestly to him and his head was inclined toward her as if he
could not risk missing a single word. She glanced up when she saw me coming. “Mary will tell you,” she said. “She was my bedfellow then when I was nothing more than a girl new to court.”

Henry looked up at me and I could see the hurt in his face.

“It’s the Countess of Northumberland,” Anne explained. “Spreading slander about me to save herself from a marriage that she has grown tired of.”

“What can she be saying?”

“The old scandal. That Henry Percy was in love with me.”

I smiled at the king with all the warmth and confidence I could muster. “Of course he was, Your Majesty. Don’t you remember what it was like when Anne first came to court? Everyone was in love with her. Henry Percy among them.”

“There was talk of a betrothal,” Henry said.

“With the Earl of Ormonde?” I asked quickly.

“They couldn’t agree the dowry and the title,” Anne said.

“I meant between you and Henry Percy,” he persisted.

“There was nothing,” she said. “A boy and a girl at court, a poem, a few words, nothing at all.”

“He wrote three poems to me,” I said. “He was the most idle page that the cardinal ever had. He was always writing poems to everyone. What a shame that he has married a woman with no sense of humor. But thank God she had no love of poetry or she would have run away even sooner!”

Anne laughed but we could not turn Henry off his course.

“She says there was a pre-contract,” he persisted. “That you and he were betrothed.”

“I have told you we were not.” Anne contradicted him with a little edge to her voice.

“But why should she say it if it is not so?” Henry demanded.

“To rid herself of her husband!” Anne snapped.

“But why choose that lie, rather than another? Why not say he was married to Mary here? If she had his poems too?”

“I expect she will,” I said wildly, hoping to delay the explosion from Anne. But her temper was rising up in her and she could not stop it. She pulled her hand from the crook of his arm.

“What are you suggesting?” she demanded. “What are you saying of me? Are you calling me unchaste? When I stand here and swear to you that I have never, ever looked at another man? And now you—of all people in the world—accuse me of being pre-contracted! You! Who sought me out and courted me with another wife still living? Which of us is the more likely to be a bigamist, think you? A man with a wife tucked away in a beautiful house in Hertfordshire, fawned on by her own court, visited by everyone, a queen in exile, or the girl who once had a poem written to her?”

“My marriage is invalid!” Henry shouted back at her. “As every cardinal in Rome knows!”

“But it took place! As every man, woman and child in London knows. You spent enough money on it, God knows. You were merry enough about it then! But nothing took place for me, no promises were made, no rings were given, nothing nothing nothing! And you torment me with this nothing.”

“Before God!” he swore. “Will you listen to me?”

“No!” she screamed, quite beyond control. “For you are a fool and I am in love with a fool and the more fool me. I will not listen to you but you will listen to every spiteful worm that would spit poison in your ear!”

“Anne!”

“No!” she cried and flung herself away from him.

In two swift strides he was after her and had caught her to him. She lashed out at him and hit him on the padded shoulders of his jacket. Half the court flinched to see the monarch of England
assaulted, no one knew what to do. Henry grabbed her hands and slammed them behind her back, holding her so that her face was as close to him as if they were making love, her body pressed to his, his mouth close enough to bite or to kiss. I saw the look of avid lust that spread over him the moment he had her close.