Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

I had thought that my heart would leap at the chance to be queen again. My chance to do my duty by this country, by its people, by the children whom I have come to love, and perhaps even to win my mother’s approval and to fulfill my brother’s ambitions. But I find, to my own amusement, as I examine my thoughts – and at last I have the privacy and peace to examine my thoughts – that it may be a better thing to be a single woman with a good income in one of the finest palaces in England than to be one of Henry’s frightened queens.

The royal guards come first, and then his companions, handsome and overdressed as always. Then he comes in with a touch of awkwardness, limping slightly on his sore leg. I sink down in a low curtsy, and I can smell the familiar stink of his wound as I come up. Never again will I have to wake with that smell on my sheets, I think, as I step forward and he kisses me on the forehead.

He looks me up and down, frankly, as a man appraising a horse. I remember that he told the court that I smell and that my breasts are slack, and I can feel my color rising. “You look well,” he says begrudgingly. I can hear the pique behind his praise. He was hoping I would pine with unrequited love, I am sure.

“I am well,” I say calmly. “Glad to see you.”

He smiles at that. “You must have known I would never treat you unfairly,” he says, happy at the thought of his own generosity. “If you are a good sister to me, then you will see I shall be kind to you.”

I nod and bow.

“Something’s different about you.” He takes a chair and gestures that I may sit on the lower chair beside him. I sit and smooth the embroidered skirt of the blue gown over my knees. “Tell me. I can judge a woman just by the look of her; I know that there is something different about you. What is it?”

“A new hood?” I suggest.

He nods. “It becomes you. It becomes you very well.”

I say nothing. It is French-cut. If the Howard girl has returned to court, he will be accustomed to the very height and folly of fashion. In any case, now that I no longer wear the crown, I can wear what I please. It’s funny, if I was of a mind to laugh, that he should prefer me dressed to my own taste over when I tried to please his. But what he likes in a woman he would not like in a wife. Katherine Howard may discover this.

“I have some news.” He looks around at my small court of companions, his gentlemen standing about. “Leave us.”

They go out as slowly as they dare. They are all longing to know what will happen next. I am certain that it will not be an invitation to me to return to him. I am certain that it will not be; and yet I am breathless to know.

“Some news that may distress you,” he says to prepare me. At once I think that my mother has died, far away, and without a chance for me to explain how I failed her.

“No need to cry,” he says quickly.

I put my hand to my mouth and nip my knuckles. “I am not crying,” I say steadily.

“That’s good,” he says. “And besides, you must have known it would happen.”

“I didn’t expect it,” I say foolishly. “I didn’t expect it so soon.” Surely they should have sent for me if they knew she was gravely ill?

“Well, it is my duty.”

“Your duty?” I want so much to know if my mother spoke of me in her last days that I hardly hear him.

“I am married,” he says. “Married. I thought I should tell you first, before you hear it from some gossip.”

“I thought it was about my mother.”

“Your mother? No. Why would it be about your mother? Why would I trouble myself about your mother? It is about me.”

“You said bad news.”

“What could be worse for you than to know that I have married another woman?”

Oh, a thousand things, a thousand things, I think, but I don’t say the thought aloud. The relief that my mother is alive rushes through me, and I have to grip the arms of my chair to steady myself and to look as grave and as bereft as I know he will want me to look. “Married,” I say flatly.

“Yes,” he says. “I am sorry for your loss.”

So it is indeed done. He will not return to me. I will never again be Queen of England. I cannot care for little Elizabeth; I cannot love Prince Edward; I cannot please my mother. It is indeed over. I have failed in what I was sent to do, and I am sorry for it. But, dear God, I am safe from him; I shall never be in his bed again. It is indeed utterly finished and over. I have to keep my eyes down and my face still so that he does not see my beam of joy at this freedom.

“To a lady of a most noble house,” he continues. “Of the Norfolk house.”

“Katherine Howard?” I ask, before his boasting makes him look more ridiculous than I already think him.

“Yes,” he says.

“I wish you much happiness,” I say steadily. “She is…” At that precise and dreadful moment I cannot find the English word. I want to say “charming,” but I cannot think of the word. “Young,” I finish lamely.

He shoots me a quick, hard look. “That is no objection to me.”

“None at all,” I say quickly. “I meant to say, charming.”

He thaws. “She is charming,” he agrees, smiling at me. “I know you liked her when she was in your rooms.”

“I did,” I say. “She was always pleasant company. She is a lovely girl.” I nearly say “child” but catch myself in time.

He nods. “She is my rose,” he says. To my horror, his eyes fill with the sentimental tears of an old bully. “She is my rose without a thorn,” he says thickly. “I feel that I have found her at last, the woman I have waited for all my life.”

I sit in silence. This is an idea so bizarre that I cannot find any words, English or German, to reply. He has been waiting all his life? Well, he has not been waiting very patiently. During the time of his long vigil he has seen off three, no, four wives, me among them. And Katherine Howard is very far from a rose without a thorn. She is, if anything, a little daisy: delightful, sweet-faced, but ordinary. She must be the most common commoner ever to sit on a better woman’s throne.

“I hope you will be very happy,” I say again.

He leans toward me. “And I think we will have a child,” he whispers. “Hush. It’s early days yet. But she is so very young, and she comes from fertile stock. She says she thinks it is so.”

I nod. His smug confiding to me, who was bought and put in his bed to endure him laboring hopelessly above me, pushing himself against me, patting my stomach and pulling at my breasts, repels me so much I can hardly congratulate him on achieving with a girl what he failed to do with me.

“So let us dine,” he says, releasing me from my embarrassment, and we rise. He takes my hand as if we were still married and leads me into the great hall of Richmond Palace, which was his father’s favorite new-built palace and is now mine. He seats himself alone, on a throne raised higher than any other, and I am seated not at his side – as I was when I was queen – but down the hall at a little distance, as if to remind the world that everything has changed and that I will never sit at his side as queen again.

I don’t need reminding. I know this.

Now let me see, what do I have?

I have eight new gowns ready made and another forty (forty! I can’t believe it myself!) in the making, and I am very displeased the dressmakers are so late with them, for it is my intention to wear a different gown to dinner every day of my life from now until the day I die, and to change my gown three times a day. That would be three new gowns a day, which would be hundreds a year, and since I may live till fifty years old that will be… well, I can’t work it out, but it is very many indeed. Thousands.