Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“ To my rooms,” Princess Mary corrects me quietly.

“To my rooms,” I repeat.

“Shall you change your gown for dinner?”

“Yes.” I see that my ladies-in-waiting have already put on their best; Kitty Howard’s cap is so far back on her head she might as well dispense with it altogether, and she is loaded with chains of gold strung with little seed pearls. She has diamonds dancing in her ears and pearls wound round and round her neck. She must have come into some money from somewhere. I have never seen her wear more than a little chain of thin gold before. She sees me looking at her, and she sweeps me a curtsy and then spins on the spot so I can admire the effect of a new gown of rose silk with an underskirt of deep pink.

“Pretty,” I say. “New?”

“Yes,” she says, and then her eyes slide away like a child caught out in thieving, and I know at once that all this finery has come from the king.

“Shall I come and help you dress?” she asks, almost apologetically.

I nod, and she and two of the other maids-in-waiting follow me into my inner privy chamber. My gown for dinner is already laid out, and Katherine runs to the chest and takes out my linen.

“So fine,” she says approvingly, smoothing the white-on-white embroidery on my shifts.

I slip on the shift and sit before the mirror so that Katherine can brush my hair. Her touch is gentle as she twists my hair up into a gold-encrusted net, and we disagree only when she puts my hood far back on my head. I put it right, and she laughs at me. I see our faces side by side in the mirror, and her eyes meet mine, as innocent as a child, without any shadow of deceit. I turn and speak to the other girls. “Leave us,” I say.

From the glances they exchange as they go, I see that her new riches are common knowledge and that everyone knows where those pearls came from. They are expecting a jealous storm to break on Kitty Howard’s little head.

“The king likes you,” I say to her bluntly.

The smile has faded from her eyes. She shifts from one little pink-slippered foot to the other. “Your Grace…” she whispers.

“He does not like me,” I say. I know I am too blunt, but I have not the words to dress this up like a lying Englishwoman.

Her color rises up from her low-cut neckline to burn in her cheeks. “Your Grace…”

“Do you desire him?” I ask. I don’t have the words to disguise the question in a lengthy conversation.

“No!” she says instantly, but then she bows her head. “He is the king… and my uncle says, indeed, my uncle orders me…”

“You are not free?” I suggest.

Her gray eyes meet mine. “I am a girl,” she says. “I am only a young girl; I am not free.”

“Can you refuse to do what they want?”

“No.”

There is a silence between us, as we both come to realize the simple truth that is being spoken. We are two women who have recognized that we cannot control the world. We are players in this game, but we do not choose our own moves. The men will play us for their own desires. All we can do is try to survive whatever happens next.

“What will happen to me, if the king wants you for his wife?” I know, as the words come awkwardly into my mouth, that this is the central, unsayable question.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows that.”

“Would he have me killed?” I whisper.

To my horror, she does not start back in terror and exclaim a denial. She looks at me very steadily. “I don’t know what he will do,” she says again. “Your Grace, I don’t know what he wants or what he can do. I don’t know the law. I don’t know what he is able to do.”

“He will command you to his side,” I say through cold lips. “I see that. Wife or whore. But will he send me to the Tower? Will he have me killed?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She looks like a frightened child. “I can’t tell. Nobody tells me anything except that I have to please him. And I have to do that.”

The queen is in the royal box high above the jousting lists, and though she is pale with anxiety she carries herself like a queen indeed. She has a smile for the hundreds of Londoners who have flocked to the palace to see the royal family and the nobles, the mock battles, the pageants, and the jousts. There are to be six challengers and six defenders, and they circle the arena with their entourages and their shields and their banners. The trumpets scream out the fanfare, and the crowd shouts their bets, and it is like a dream with the noise and the heat and the glare of the sun beating off the golden sand in the arena.

If I stand at the rear of the royal box and half close my eyes, I can see ghosts today. I can see Queen Katherine leaning forward and waving her hand to her young husband; I can even see his shield with this motto: Sir Loyal Heart.

Sir Loyal Heart! I would laugh if the king’s changeable heart had not been the death of so many. Loyal only to its own desires is the king’s heart, and this day, this May Day, it has changed again, like the spring wind, and is blowing another way.

I step to one side, and a ray of sunshine peeping through a gap in the awning dazzles me; for a moment I see Anne at the front of the box, my Anne, Anne Boleyn with her head flung back in laughter and the white line of her throat exposed. It was a hot May Day that year, Anne’s last year, and she blamed the sun when she was sweating with fear. She knew that she was in trouble, but she had no idea of her danger. How should she have known? We none of us knew. We none of us dreamed that he would put that long, lovely neck down on a block of wood and hire a French swordsman to hack it off. How should anyone dream that a man would do that to the wife he had adored? He broke the faith of his kingdom to have her. Why would he then break her?

If we had known… but it is pointless to say: if we had known.

Perhaps we would have run away. Me, and George my husband, and Anne his sister, and Elizabeth her daughter. Perhaps we might have run away and been free of this terror and this ambition and this lust for this life that is the English court. But we did not run. We sat like hares, cowering in the long grass at the sound of the hounds, hoping that the hunt would pass by; but that very day the soldiers came for my husband and for my beloved sister-in-law Anne. And I? I sat mum and let them go, and I never said one word to save them.

But this new young queen is no fool. We were afraid, all three of us; but we did not know how very afraid we should have been. But Anne of Cleves knows. She has spoken with her ambassador, and she knows there is to be no coronation. She has spoken with the Princess Mary and knows that the king can destroy a blameless wife by sending her far away from court, to a castle where the cold and damp will kill her if the poison does not. She has even spoken to little Katherine Howard, and now she knows that the king is in love. She knows that ahead of her there must be shame and divorce at the least, execution at the worst.

Yet here she sits, in the royal box, with her head held high, dropping her handkerchief to signify the start of a charge, smiling with her usual politeness on the victor, leaning forward to put the circlet of bay leaves on his helmet, to give him a purse of gold as his prize. Pale under her modest, ugly hood, doing her duty as Queen of the Joust as she has done her duty every day since she set foot in this country. She must be sick to her belly with terror, but her hands on the front of the box are gently clasped and do not even tremble. When the king salutes her, she rises up from her chair and curtsies respectfully to him; when the crowd calls her name, she turns and smiles and raises her hand when a lesser woman would scream for rescue. She is utterly composed.