The Other Boleyn Girl Part 60

Anne's dark eyes flashed with temper. "And G.o.d bless you, Mistress Seymour, if you forget that this Princess Dowager is the woman who defied the king her brother-in-law, trapped him into a false marriage and brought him much distress and pain."

Jane faced her without flinching. "I served her as we both did," she said gently. "And she was a very kind woman and a good mistress. Of course I say: 'G.o.d bless her.' With your leave I will go and say a prayer for her."

Anne looked as if she would very much like to refuse Jane permission to go, but she saw the avid glance of George's wife and remembered that any cat fight would be reported and enlarged on to the court within hours.

"Of course," she said sweetly. "Would anyone else like to go to Ma.s.s to pray with Jane while I go to celebrate with the king?"

The choice was not a hard one to make. Jane Seymour went alone, and the rest of us went through the great hall and up to the king's apartment.

He greeted Anne with a roar of joy, swept her up and kissed her. You would think he had never been Sir Loyal Heart to his Queen Katherine. You would think it had been his worst enemy who had died and not a woman who had loved him faithfully for twenty-seven years and died with a blessing for him on her lips. He summoned the master of the revels and ordered a feast to be prepared in a hurry, there would be an entertainment and dancing. The court of England was to make merry because one woman who had done nothing wrong had died alone, far from her daughter, and abandoned by her husband. Anne and Henry would wear yellow: the most joyful and sunny of colors. It was the color of royal mourning in Spain so it was a great jest on the Spanish amba.s.sador who would have to report the ambiguous insult to his master, the Spanish emperor.

I could not force a smile to my face at the sight of Henry and Anne glowing with triumph. I turned away and made for the door. A finger slid against my elbow stopped me. I turned and my uncle was beside me.

"You stay," he whispered quietly.

"This is a disgrace."

"Yes. Perhaps. But you stay."

I would have pulled away but his grip was firm. "She was your sister's enemy and thus ours. She nearly brought us all down. She nearly won."

"Because she was right," I whispered back. "And we all knew it."

His smile was genuine. He was truly amused by my indignation. "Right or not, she's dead now, and your sister is queen without anyone to gainsay her. Spain won't invade, the Pope will lift the excommunication. Hers might have been a just cause; but it dies with her. All we need is for Anne to have a son and we have it all. So you stay and look happy."

Obediently, I stood beside him as Henry and Anne drew into the bay of a window and talked together. There was something about their heads, so close together, and the rapid ripple of their talk which signaled to everyone that these were the greatest conspirators in the land. I thought that if Jane Seymour had seen them now she would have known that she could never penetrate that unity. When Henry wanted a mind as quick and as unscrupulous as his, it would always be Anne. Jane had gone to pray for the dead queen, Anne would dance on her grave.

The court, left to its own amus.e.m.e.nts, formed into little knots and couples, to chatter about the death of the queen. William, looking across the room and seeing me standing beside my uncle, my face sulky, came toward me to claim me.

"She's to stay here," my uncle said. "No wandering off."

"She's to follow her own desires," William said. "I won't have her ordered."

My uncle lifted his eyebrows. "An unusual wife."

"One who suits me," William said. He turned to me. "Did you want to stay or leave?"

"I'll stay now," I compromised. "But I won't dance. It's an insult to her memory, and I won't be part of it."

Jane Parker appeared at William's elbow. "They're saying she was poisoned," she said. "The Dowager Princess. They're saying she died suddenly in great pain, it was something slipped into her food. Who d'you think would have done such a thing?"

Studiously the three of us did not glance toward the royal couple: the two people in all the world who would have benefited most from the death of Katherine.

"It's a scandalous lie. I wouldn't repeat it, if I were you," my uncle counseled her.

"It's all around the court already," she defended herself. "Everyone is asking, if she was poisoned, who did it?"

"Then answer them all that she was not poisoned but died of an excess of spleen," my uncle replied. "Just as a woman can die of an excess of slander, I should think. Especially if she slanders a powerful family."

"This is my family," Jane reminded him.

"I keep forgetting," he returned. "You are so seldom at George's side, you are so seldom working for our benefit that sometimes I forget altogether that you are kin."

She held his look for a moment only and then her eyes dropped. "I would be more with George if he was not always with his sister," she said quietly.

"Mary?" My uncle deliberately misunderstood her.

Her head came up. "The queen. They are inseparable."

"Because he knows that the queen must be served and the family must be served. You too should be at her beck and call. You should be at his beck and call."

"I don't think he wants any woman at his beck and call," she said mutinously. "If it is not the queen it is no woman at all for him. He is either with her or with Sir Francis."

I froze. I did not dare look at William.

"It is your duty to be at his side whether he commands it or not," my uncle said flatly.

For a moment I thought she would retort, but then she smiled her sly smile and slid away.

Anne summoned me to her privy room in the hour before the dinner. She noticed at once that I was not dressed in yellow for the feast. "You'd better hurry," she said.

"I'm not coming."

For a moment I thought she might challenge me, but she chose to avoid a quarrel. "Oh very well," she said. "But tell everyone that you are sick. I don't want anyone asking questions."

She glanced at herself in the mirror. "Can you tell?" she asked. "I am fatter with this one than the others. It means the baby is growing better, doesn't it? He's strong?"

"Yes," I said to rea.s.sure her. "And you're looking well."

She seated herself before her mirror. "Brush my hair. n.o.body does it like you."

I took off her yellow hood and pulled the thick glossy hair back off her shoulders. She had two brushes made of silver and I used one and then the other, as if I were grooming a horse. Anne tipped back her head and gave herself up to the idle pleasure. "He should be strong," she said. "No one knows what went into the making of this baby, Mary. No one will ever know."

I felt my hands suddenly heavy and unskilled. I was thinking of the witches she might have consulted, of spells she might have undertaken.

"He should be a great prince for England," she said quietly. "For I went on a journey to the very gates of h.e.l.l to get him. You will never know."

"Don't tell me then," I said, coward-like.

She laughed shortly. "Oh yes. Draw your hem back from my mud, little sister. But I have dared things for my country that you could only dream of."

I forced myself to brush her hair again. "I'm sure," I said soothingly.

She was quiet for a moment, then suddenly, she opened her eyes. "I felt it," she said in a tone of quiet wonderment. "Mary, I suddenly felt it."

"Felt what?"

"Just then, I felt it. I felt the baby. It moved."

"Where?" I demanded. "Show me."

She slapped at her hard boned stomacher in frustration. "In here! In here! I felt it-" She broke off. I saw her face glow in a way I had never seen before. "Again," she whispered. "A little flutter. It's my child, it's quickened. Praise G.o.d I am with child, a live child."

She rose from her chair, her dark hair still tumbled around her shoulders. "Run and tell George."

Even knowing their intimacy I was surprised. "George?"

"I meant the king." She corrected herself swiftly. "Fetch the king to me."

I ran from the room to the king's apartments. They were dressing him for dinner but there were half a dozen men in the privy chamber with him. I dipped a curtsy at the door and he turned and beamed with pleasure at seeing me. "Why, it's the other Boleyn girl!" he said. "The sweet-tempered one."

More than one man sn.i.g.g.e.red at the jest. "The queen begs to see you at once, sire," I said. "She has good news for you that cannot keep."

He raised one of his sandy brows, he was very regal these days. "So she sends you running like a page, to fetch me like a puppy?"

I curtsied again. "Sire, it is news I was happy to run for. And you would come for this whistle, if you knew what it was."

Someone muttered behind me, and the king threw on his golden coat and smoothed the ermine cuff. "Come then, Lady Mary. You shall lead this eager puppy to the whistle. You could lead me anywhere."

I rested my hand lightly on top of his outstretched arm, and did not resist as he drew me a little closer. "Your married life seems to suit you, Mary," he said intimately as we went down the stairs, half of the gentlemen of the chamber following us. "You are as pretty as when you were a girl, when you were my little sweetheart."

I was always wary when Henry grew intimate. "That's a long time ago," I said cautiously. "But Your Grace is twice the prince you were then."

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I cursed myself for a fool. I had meant to say that he was more powerful, more handsome now. But, idiot that I was, it sounded as if I was telling him that he was twice as fat as he had been then-which was also appallingly true.

He stopped dead on the third stair from the bottom. I was tempted to fall to my knees. I did not dare look up at him. I knew that in all the world there had never been a more incompetent courtier than I with my desire to turn a pretty phrase and my absolute inability to get it right.

There was a great bellow of sound. I peeped up at him and saw, to my intense relief, that he was shouting with laughter. "Lady Mary, are you run mad?" he demanded.

I was starting to laugh too, out of sheer relief. "I think so, Your Grace," I said. "All I was trying to say was that then you were a young man and I a girl and now you are a king among princes. But it came out..."

Again his great shout of laughter drowned me out, and the courtiers on the stairs behind us craned their necks and leaned down, wanting to know what was amusing the king, and why I was torn between blushing for shame, and laughing myself.

Henry grabbed me round the waist and hugged me tight. "Mary, I adore you," he said. "You are the best of the Boleyns, for no one makes me laugh as you do. Take me to my wife before you say something so dreadful that I shall have to have you beheaded."

I slipped from his grip and led the way to the queen's rooms, and showed him in, all his gentlemen following. Anne was not in her presence chamber, she was still in her inner room. I tapped on the door, and announced the king. She was still standing with her hair down, her hood in her hand, and that wonderful glow about her.

Henry went in and I shut the door behind him, and stood before it so that no eavesdropper could get close. It was the greatest moment of Anne's career, I wanted her to savor it. She could tell the king that she was pregnant with a baby and for the first time since Elizabeth she had felt a child quicken in her womb.

William came in at the back of the room and saw me, before the door. He touched a shoulder and an elbow and found his way through the crowd. "Are you on guard?" he asked. "You've got your arms akimbo like a fishwife guarding her bucket."

"She's telling him that she's with child. She has the right to do that without some d.a.m.ned Seymour girl popping in."

George appeared at William's side. "Telling him?"

"The baby quickened," I said, smiling up into my brother's face, antic.i.p.ating his joy as my own. "She felt it. She sent me for the king at once."

I was expecting to see his joy but I saw something else; a shadow crossed his face. It was how George looked when he had done something bad. It was George's guilty look. It flashed through his eyes so fast that I was hardly certain that I had seen it, but for a moment I knew with absolute certainty that his conscience was not clear, and I guessed that Anne had taken him as her companion on her journey to the gates of h.e.l.l to conceive this child for England.

"Oh G.o.d, what is it? What have you two done?"

At once he smiled his shallow courtier's smile. "Nothing! Nothing. How happy they will be! What a couple of days this has been! Katherine dead and the new prince quickened in the womb. Vivat Vivat Boleyns!" Boleyns!"

William smiled at him. "Your family always impresses me by its ability to see everything in the light of its own interests," he said politely.

"You mean rejoicing that the queen is dead?"

"Princess Dowager." William and I spoke together.

George grinned. "Aye. Her. Of course we celebrate it. Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don't see that there is in life only ever one goal."

"And what is that?" William asked.

"More," George said simply. "Just more of anything. More of everything."

All through the cold dark days of January, Anne and I sat together, read together, played cards together and listened to her musicians. George was forever with Anne, as attentive as a devoted husband, forever fetching her drinks and cushions for her back, and she bloomed under his attention. She took a fancy to Catherine and would have her with us too, and I watched Catherine carefully copying the manners of the ladies of the court until she could deal a card pack, or pick up a lute, with the same grace.

"She'll be a true Boleyn girl," Anne said approvingly of her. "Thank G.o.d she has my nose and not yours."

"I do thank G.o.d for it every night," I said, though sarcasm was always lost on Anne.

"We could look for a good match for her," Anne said. "As my niece she should do very well. The king himself will take an interest."

"I don't want her married yet, nor against her choice," I said.

Anne laughed. "She's a Boleyn girl, she has to marry to suit the family."

"She's my girl," I said. "And I won't have her sold off to the highest bidder. You can get Elizabeth betrothed in the cradle, that's your right. She'll be a princess some day. But my children can be children before they are wed."

Anne nodded, letting it go. "Your son is still mine though," she said, evening the score.

I gritted my teeth. "I never forget it," I said quietly.

The weather held very fair. Every morning there was a white ground frost and the scent of the deer was strong for the hounds as they streamed across the park and out into the countryside. The going was hard for the horses. Henry changed his mount two or three times a day, steaming with the heat of his thick winter cape, waiting impatiently for the groom to come running up with the strong big hunter dancing at the end of the reins. He rode like a young man because he felt like a young man again, one who could sire a son on a pretty wife. Katherine was dead and he could forget that she had ever been. Anne was carrying his child and it restored his faith in himself. G.o.d was smiling on Henry, as he trusted that G.o.d must do. The country was at peace and there was no threat of a Spanish invasion now that the queen was dead. The proof of the decision was in the outcome. Since the country was at peace and Anne with child then G.o.d must have agreed with Henry and cast His lot against the Pope and the Spanish emperor. Secure in the knowledge that he and G.o.d were of the same mind in this, as in every matter, Henry was a happy man.

Anne was contented. Never before had she felt the world coming to her fingertips. Katherine had been her rival, the shadow queen who had always darkened her own steps to the throne, and now Katherine was dead. Katherine's daughter had threatened the right of Anne's children to rule and now Katherine's daughter had been forced to concede that she would take second place, and Anne's daughter Elizabeth was promised the loyalty of every man, woman and child in the country-and those that refused to promise were either in the Tower or dead on the block. And best of all, Anne had a baby strong and growing inside her.

Henry announced that there was to be a jousting tournament and every man who called himself a man should take his armor and his horse and enter the lists. Henry himself would be riding, his renewed sense of youth and confidence prompted him to take a challenge again. William, complaining mightily of the expense, borrowed his armor from another impoverished knight and rode, taking immense care of his horse, on the first day of the tournament. He kept his seat but the other man was easily declared victor.

"G.o.d help me, I have married a coward," I said when he came to find me in the ladies' tent, Anne seated at the front under the awning and the rest of us, well-wrapped in furs, were standing behind her.