Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (164 page)

He puts his hand down between us and grabs onto himself. I have seen them with the horses in the stables at Duren, and I know well enough what is going on in this hard fumbling. I snatch a breath sideways, and I brace myself for the pain. He gives a little grunt of frustration, and I can feel his hand pumping away, but still nothing happens. He punches repeatedly at my thigh with his moving hand, but that is all. I lie very still. I don’t know what he wants to do, nor what he expects of me. The stallion at Duren went rigid and reared up. This king seems to be weakening.

“My lord?” I whisper.

He throws himself off me and grunts a word that I don’t know. His head is buried in the richly embroidered pillow; he is still facedown. I don’t know if he has finished or is merely beginning. He turns his head to me. His face is very red and sweating. “Anne . . .” he starts.

At that fatal name he stops, freezes into silence. I realize that he has said her name, the first Anne that he loved, that he is thinking of her, the lover who drove him to madness and whom he killed in jealous resentment.

“I, Anne of Cleves, am,” I prompt him.

“I know that,” he says shortly. “Fool.”

With a great heave that pulls all the bedcovers off me, he turns around and lies with his back to me. The air released from the bed is stale with an awful smell. This is the smell of the wound on his leg, this is the smell of putrid flesh, this is the smell of him. It will scent my sheets forever, till death us do part. I had better get used to it.

I lie very still. To put a hand on his shoulder would, I think, be wanton behavior, and so I had better not, though I am sorry if he is weary and haunted by the other Anne tonight. I will have to learn
not to mind about the smell and about the feeling of being pressed down. I shall have to do my duty.

I lie in the darkness and look up at the rich canopy of the bed above me. In the dimming light that gets darker as each square block candle, one by one, gutters and goes out, I can see the glint of gold thread and the rich colors of the silks. He is an old man, poor old man, forty-eight years old, and it has been a long and exhausting day for us both. I hear him sigh again and then the sigh turns into a deep, bubbling snore. When I am certain that he is asleep, I put my hand lightly on his shoulder, where the thick damp linen of his nightshirt covers the fat sweaty bulk of him. I am sorry that he should fail this night, and if he had stayed awake, and if we had spoken the same language and were able to tell each other the truth, then I would have told him that even though there is no desire between us I hope to be a good wife to him and a good queen for England. That I feel pity for him in his old age and weariness, and that no doubt when he is rested and less tired we will be able to make a child, the son that we both want so much. Poor sick old man, I would have given much to be able to tell him not to worry, that it will come out all right, that I do not want a young handsome prince, that I will be kind to him.

Katherine, Greenwich Palace, January 7, 1540

The king was already gone before we arrived in the chamber on the day after the wedding, so I missed seeing the King of England in his nightshirt on his wedding morning, though I had set my heart on it. The maids of work went in with her ale, and wood for her fire, and water to wash in, and we waited until we were called to help her dress. She was sitting up in bed with her nightcap on and a neat plait down her back, not a hair out of place. She didn’t look like a girl who had made merry all night, I must say. She looked exactly the same as when we put her to bed last night, quite calm and pretty in that cowlike way, and pleasant enough with everyone, not asking for any special favors and not complaining of anything. I was by the bed and since nobody was taking any notice of me I twitched up the sheet and had a quick look.

I didn’t see a thing. Exactly so. Not one solitary thing. Speaking as a girl who has had to smuggle a sheet down to the pump and wash it quickly and sleep on it damp more than once, I know when a man and a maid have used a bed for more than sleeping. Not this bed. I would put my precious reputation on the fact that the king did not have her and she did not bleed. I would put the Howard fortune on a bet that they slept just as we left them, when we put them to bed, side by side like a pair of little dolls. The bottom sheet was not even rumpled, never mind soiled.
I would bet Westminster Abbey that nothing has happened between them.

I knew who would want to know at once, Lady Nosy-Parker of course. I made a curtsy and went from the room as if I were running an errand and found her, just coming from her own chamber. As soon as she saw my face she snatched my hands and drew me back into her room.

“I bet you a fortune that he has not had her,” I say triumphantly, without a word of explanation.

One thing that I like about Lady Rochford is that she always knows what I am talking about. I never have to explain anything to her.

“The sheets,” I say. “Not a mark on them, they’re not even creased.”

“Nobody has changed them?”

I shake my head. “I was first in, after the maids.”

She reaches in the cupboard by the bed and brings out a sovereign and gives it to me. “That’s very good,” she says. “You and I, between us, should always be the first to know everything.”

I smile, but I am thinking about some ribbons I shall buy with the sovereign to trim my new gown, and perhaps some new gloves.

“Don’t tell anyone else,” she cautions me.

“Oh?” I protest.

“No,” she says. “Knowledge is always precious, Katherine. If you know something that no one else knows, then you have a secret. If you know something that everyone else knows then you are no better than them.”

“Can’t I at least tell Anne Bassett?”

“I’ll tell you when you can tell her,” she says. “Perhaps tomorrow. Now go back to the queen. I am coming in a minute.”

I do as I am told, and as I go out I see she is writing a note. She will be writing to my uncle to tell him that I believe that the king has not bedded his wife. I hope she tells him that it was I who thought this first and not her. Then there may be another sovereign
to go with the first. I begin to see what he means about great places bring great favors. I have been in royal service for only a matter of days and already I am two sovereigns wealthier. Give me a month, and I shall make my fortune.

Jane Boleyn, Whitehall Palace, January 1540

We have moved to Whitehall Palace, where the wedding is to be celebrated by a weeklong jousting tournament, and then the last of the visitors will go back to Cleves and we will all settle into our new lives with a new Queen Anne. She has never before seen anything on the scale or of the style of this tournament, and she is rather endearing in her excitement.

“Lady Jane, where I sit?” she demands of me. “And how? How?”

I smile at her bright face. “You sit here,” I say, showing her the queen’s box. “And the knights will come into the arena, and the heralds will announce them. Sometimes they will tell a story, sometimes recite a poem about their costume. Then they fight either on horseback, riding down the lists here; or hand-to-hand with swords, on the ground.” I think how to explain.

I never know how much she understands now, she is learning to speak so quickly. “It is the greatest tournament the king has planned in many years,” I say. “It will last for a week. There will be days of celebrations with beautiful costumes, and everyone in London will come to see the masques and the battles. The court will be at the forefront, of course, but behind them will be the gentry and the great citizens of London and then behind them the common people will come in their thousands. It is a great celebration for the whole country.”

“I sit here?” she says, gesturing at the throne.

I watch her take her seat. Of course, to me this box is filled with ghosts. The seat is hers now; but it was Queen Jane’s before her, and Queen Anne’s before that, and when I was a young woman, not even married, just a girl filled with hopes and ambitions and passionately in love, I served Queen Katherine, who sat in that very chair under her own canopy that the king had ordered should be sewn with little gold Ks and Hs for Katherine and Henry, and he himself had ridden out under the name Sir Loyal Heart.

“This new is?” she asks, patting the curtains that are swagged around the royal box.

“No,” I say, forced by my memories to tell the truth. “These are the curtains that are always used. Look, you can see.” I turn the fabric over and she can see where other initials have been. They have cut the embroidery from the front of the curtains but left the old sewing at the back. Clearly one can see K and H, entwined with lovers’ knots. Oversewn, beside each H, is an H&A. It is like summoning a ghost to see her initials here again. These were the curtains which kept the sun from her head that May Day tournament when it was so hot, and we all knew that the king was angry, and we all knew that the king was in love with Jane Seymour, but none of us knew what would happen next.

I remember Anne leaning over the front of the box and dropping her handkerchief down to one of the jousters, shooting a sidelong smile at the king to see if he was jealous. I remember the cold look on his face, and I remember she went pale and sat back again. He had the warrant for her arrest in his doublet then, at that very moment, but he said nothing. He was planning to send her to her death, but he sat beside her for much of the day. She laughed and she chattered and she gave out her favors. She smiled at him and flirted, and she had no idea he had made up his mind that she would die. How could he do such a thing to her? How could he? How could he sit beside her, with his new lover standing smiling, behind them
both, and know that within days Anne would be dead? Dead, and my husband dead with her, my husband dying for her, my husband dying for love of her. God forgive me for my jealousy. God forgive her for her sins.

Seated in her place, her initials showing like a dark stain on the hidden underside of her curtains, I shudder as if someone has laid a cold finger on my neck. If any place is haunted, it will be here. These curtains have been stitched and overstitched with the initials of three doomed, pretty girls. Will the court seamstresses be ripping out another A in a few years? Will this box host another ghost? Will another queen come after this new Anne?

“What?” she asks me, the new girl who knows nothing.

I point to the neat stitches. “K: Katherine of Aragon,” I say simply. “A: Anne Boleyn. J: Jane Seymour.” I turn the curtain right side round so that she can see her own initials standing proud and new on the fair side of the fabric. “And now, Anne of Cleves.”

She looks at me with her straight gaze, and for the very first time I think that perhaps I have underestimated this girl. Perhaps she is not a fool. Perhaps behind that honest face there is quick intelligence. Because she cannot speak my language I have talked to her as if she is a child and I have thought of her with the wit of a child. But she is not frightened by these ghosts—she is not even haunted by them, as I am.

She shrugs. “Queens before,” she says. “Now: Anne of Cleves.”

Either this is a high courage, or it is the stoicism of the very stupid.

“Are you not afraid?” I ask very quietly.

She understands the words, I know she does. I can see it in her stillness and the sudden attentive tilt of her head. She looks at me directly. “Afraid of nothing,” she says firmly. “Never afraid.”

For a moment I want to warn her. She is not the only brave girl to sit in this box to be honored as queen and then end her life stripped of her title, facing death alone. Katherine of Aragon
had the courage of a crusader, Anne the nerves of a whore. The king brought them both down to nothing. “You must take care,” I say.

“I afraid of nothing, am,” she says again. “Never afraid.”