The Other Boleyn Girl Part 66

George stiffened. He could see from the window the return of the hunting party to court.

"Run downstairs, Mary, and tell the king I am come," Anne said, not moving from George's embrace.

I ran downstairs as the king was dismounting from his horse. I saw him wince as he stepped to the ground and his weight went onto his injured leg. Jane was riding beside him, a phalanx of Seymours around them. I looked around for my father, for my mother, for my uncle. They were thrust to the back, eclipsed.

"Your Majesty," I said, sweeping him a curtsy. "My sister the queen has arrived and bids me to give Your Majesty her compliments."

Henry looked at me, he was wearing his sulky face, his forehead grooved with pain, his mouth pursed. "Tell her I am wearied from my riding, I will see her at dinner," he said shortly.

He went past me with a heavy tread, walking unevenly, favoring his hurt leg. Sir John Seymour helped his daughter from her horse. I noted the new riding gown, the new horse, the diamond winking on her gloved hand. I longed so much to spit some venom at her that I had to bite the tip of my tongue, to make myself smile sweetly at her, and step back as her father and her brother escorted her through the great doors to her apartments-the apartments of the king's favorite.

My father and my mother followed the Seymours, in their train. I waited for them to ask me how Anne was, but they pa.s.sed me with no more than a nod. "Anne is well," I volunteered, as my mother went by.

"Good," she said coolly.

"Will you not come to wait on her?"

Her face was as blank as a barren woman. It was as if none of us had ever been born to her. "I will visit her when the king goes to her rooms," she said.

I knew then that Anne and George and I were on our own.

The ladies returned to Anne's room like a flock of buzzards, uncertain where the best pickings were to be had. I noted, with bitter amus.e.m.e.nt, the crisis in headgear which Anne's confident return had caused. Some of them went back to French hoods which Anne continued to wear. Some of them stayed in the heavy gable hoods which Jane favored. All of them were desperate to know whether they should be in the queen's beautiful apartment or over the way with the Seymours. Where might the king come next? Where might he prefer? Madge Shelton wore a gable hood and was trying to wheedle her way into Jane Seymour's circle. Madge for one thought that Anne was in decline.

I entered the room and three women fell silent the moment I approached them. "What's the news?" I asked.

No one would tell me. Then Jane Parker, always the most reliable of all scandal mongers, came to my side. "The king has sent Jane Seymour a gift, a huge purse of gold, and she has refused it."

I waited.

Jane's eyes were bright with delight. "She said she could not take such gifts from the king until she was a married woman. It would compromise her."

I was silent for a moment, trying to decode this arcane statement. "Compromise her?"

Jane nodded.

"Excuse me," I said. I made my way through the women to Anne's privy chamber. George was in there with her, Sir Francis Weston with him. "I would speak with you alone," I said flatly.

"You can speak in front of Sir Francis," Anne said.

I took a breath. "Have you heard about Jane Seymour refusing the king's gift?"

They shook their heads. "She is supposed to have said that she could not take such gifts from him until she was a married woman, because it might compromise her."

"Oho," Sir Francis said.

"I suppose it is nothing more than her flaunting her virtue; but the court's abuzz with it," I said.

"It reminds the king that she could marry another," George said. "He'll hate the sound of that."

"It parades her virtue," Anne added.

"And it'll get out," Sir Francis said. "This is theater. She didn't turn down that horse, did she? Or the diamond ring? Or the locket with his picture inside? But the court now thinks, and the world will soon think, that the king is interested in a young woman who has no ambition for wealth. Touche! And all in one tableau."

Anne gritted her teeth. "She is insufferable."

"And there's nothing you can do to pay her back," George said. "So don't even think about it. Head up, smile on, and enchant him if you can."

"There may be mention at dinner of the alliance with Spain," Sir Francis cautioned her as she rose from her chair. "Better say nothing against it."

Anne looked back over her shoulder at him. "If I have to become Jane Seymour myself, I might as well be set aside," she said. "If everything that is me-my wit and my temper and my pa.s.sion for the reform of the church-has to be denied, then I have set my own self aside. If what the king wants is a biddable wife then I should never have tried for the throne in the first place. If I cannot be me, I might as well not be here at all."

George went to her, raised her hand and kissed it. "No, for we all adore you," he said. "And this is just a pa.s.sing whim of the king's. He wants Jane now as he wanted Madge, as he wanted Lady Margaret. He'll come to his senses and come back to you. Look how long the queen held him. He went and came back to her a dozen times. You are his wife, the mother of his princess, just as she was. You can hold him."

She smiled at that, straightened her shoulders, and nodded to me to open the door. I heard the buzz as she went out, dressed in rich green velvet, emeralds in her ears, diamonds sparkling on her green hood, the golden "B" on the choker of pearls at her neck.

It grew very cold toward the end of February and the Thames froze outside the palace. The landing stage extended like a path over a floor of white ice, the steps at the landing gate led down to a smooth sheet of gla.s.s. The river became like a strange road, which might lead anywhere. In the thinner parts when I looked down I could see the water moving, green and perilous, below the clear sheet of ice.

The gardens, the walkways, the walls and the allees allees around Greenwich all took on a miraculous whiteness as it snowed and then froze and then snowed again. In the pleasure gardens the espaliered walkways were frosted. On the sunny mornings the spiders' webs shone with white crystals like magical lacemaking thrown over the thinnest branches. Every twig, every thinnest blade was lined with white, as if an artist had gone around the whole garden determined to make one see the detail of every branch on every tree. around Greenwich all took on a miraculous whiteness as it snowed and then froze and then snowed again. In the pleasure gardens the espaliered walkways were frosted. On the sunny mornings the spiders' webs shone with white crystals like magical lacemaking thrown over the thinnest branches. Every twig, every thinnest blade was lined with white, as if an artist had gone around the whole garden determined to make one see the detail of every branch on every tree.

It was freezing cold at night with an icy wind which blew from the east, a Russian wind. But during the day the sun was very bright and it was delightful to run in the gardens and to play at bowls on the frozen gra.s.s while the robins hopped in the dark yew trees of the allee allee and waited for crumbs, and great flocks of cold-loving geese flew overhead with their wings creaking and their long heads extended, searching for open water. and waited for crumbs, and great flocks of cold-loving geese flew overhead with their wings creaking and their long heads extended, searching for open water.

The king declared that we should have a winter fair and that there should be jousting on ice-skates and skate-dancing and a masque for winter with sledges and fire-eaters and Muscovite tumblers. There was a bear baiting, ten times funnier than an ordinary baiting, when the poor animal slid and fell and lunged toward the skidding dogs. One dog raced in for a snap and thought to race out again but found his scrabbling feet had no purchase on the ice and the bear drew him in to his death with one heavy paw on his back. The king roared with laughter at the sight.

They drove down oxen from Smithfield, using the frozen river as a high road, and roasted them on spits over great fires on the riverbank, and the lads ran from kitchen to riverside with hot bread, the kitchen dogs barking and running alongside them all the way, hoping for a mishap.

Jane was a winter princess in white and blue, white fur at her neck and on the hood of her cape. She skated very unsteadily and had to be held up by her brother on one side and her father on the other. They wheeled her toward the king and pushed her, pa.s.sively beautiful, toward the throne and I thought that to be a Seymour girl must be very like being a Boleyn girl, when your father and your brother thrust you toward the king and you have neither the ability nor the wisdom to race away.

Henry always had a chair for her by his side. The throne for the queen was on his right, as it must be, but on his left there was a seat for Jane if she chose to rest after skating. The king did not skate, his leg was still not healed and there was talk of French physicians or perhaps even a pilgrimage to Canterbury to ease his pain. Only Jane could wipe his frown away, and she managed it by doing nothing. She stood beside him, she let them push her around on skates before him, she flinched at the c.o.c.kfighting, she gasped at the fire-eater, she behaved as she always had done, as a complete ninny, and it soothed the king in a way that Anne could not do.

Anne came down to dine on the ice with the king for every one of the three days, and seeing her glide about on her sharp whalebone skates with the grace of a Russian dancer, I thought that all we Boleyns were on thin ice this season. The most innocent word from her could make the king scowl, there was no pleasing him. He watched her all the time, with his suspicious piggy eyes screwed up. He rubbed his fingers as he watched her, pulling at the ring on his smallest finger.

Anne tried to dazzle him with her high spirits and her beauty. She kept her temper with him, though he was sour and dull. She danced, she gambled, she laughed, she skated, she was all joy, all light. She threw Jane Seymour into the background, no man ever had eyes for another woman when Anne was in radiant mood. Not even the king could look away from her as she went through the dancing court, her head high, that turn of the neck as someone spoke to her, surrounded by men who wrote poems to her beauty, musicians playing songs for her, the very center of the excitement of the court at play. The king could not take his eyes off her, but his gaze was no longer entranced. He stared at her as if he would understand something about her, as if he would unravel her charm so that he might see her unwoven, robbed of everything that had made her once so lovely to him. He stared at her like a man might stare at a tapestry that has cost him a fortune and that he suddenly sees one morning as valueless, and wants to unknot. He stared at her as if he could not believe that she had cost him so dear, and repaid him so little. And not even Anne's charm and vivacity could make him think that the bargain was a good one.

While I watched Anne, George and Sir Francis were watching Cromwell. There was a whispered rumor that the king might put Anne aside on grounds that the marriage had been invalid from the start. George and I scoffed at it, but Sir Francis pointed to the fact that parliament was to be dissolved in April, with no good reason given.

"What difference does that make?" George asked him.

"So all the good country knights are back in their s.h.i.+res if the king makes a move against the queen," Francis answered.

"They'd hardly defend her," I said. "They hate her."

"They might defend the idea of queens.h.i.+p," he said. "They were forced to swear against Queen Katherine, they were forced to swear that they denied the Princess Mary, that they recognized Princess Elizabeth. If the king now sets Anne aside they might feel that he has played them for fools, and they won't like that. If he returns to the Pope's view, they might find it a turnaround too quick to swallow."

"But the queen is dead," I said, thinking of my old mistress Katherine. "Even if his marriage to Anne is dissolved, he can't go back to the queen."

George tutted under his breath at my slowness, but Sir Francis was more patient. "The Pope's view is still that the marriage with Anne is invalid. And so now Henry is a widower; and free to marry again."

Instinctively George and Francis and I all looked toward the king. He was rising from his throne on the ice-blue dais. Sir John Seymour and Sir Edward Seymour were either side of him, raising him up. Jane was standing before him, her lips slightly parted on a smile as if she had never seen a more handsome man than this fat invalid.

Anne, skating on the other side of the ice with Henry Norris and Thomas Wyatt, glided over and called casually: "How now, husband? Are you not staying?"

He looked at her. The color was whipped into her cheeks by the cold wind, she was wearing her scarlet riding hat with the long feather, and a strand of hair was tickling her cheek. She looked radiant, undeniably beautiful.

"I am in pain," he said slowly. "While you have been disporting yourself, I have been suffering. I am going to my rooms to rest."

"I'll come with you," she said instantly, gliding forward. "If I had known I would have stayed at your side, but you told me to go and skate. My poor husband. I shall make you a tisane and sit with you and read to you, if you like."

He shook his head. "I would rather sleep," he said. "I would rather have silence than your reading."

Anne flushed. Henry Norris and Thomas Wyatt looked away, wis.h.i.+ng themselves elsewhere. The Seymours kept their faces diplomatically bland.

"I will see you at dinner then," Anne said, curbing her temper. "And I shall pray that you are rested and free from pain."

Henry nodded and turned away from her. The Seymours took his arms and helped him over the rich rugs which had been laid on the ice so that he should not slip. Jane, with a meek little smile as if to apologize for being favored, tripped along in his wake.

"And where d'you think you're going, Mistress Seymour?" Anne's voice was like a whiplash.

The younger woman turned and curtsied to the queen. "He told me to follow and to read to him," she said simply, her eyes downcast. "I can't read Latin very well. But I can read a little French."

"A little French!" exclaimed my sister, tri-lingual since she was six years old.

"Yes," Jane said proudly. "Though I don't understand it all."

"I wager you understand nothing," Anne said. "You can go."

Spring 1536 THE ICE MELTED BUT THE WEATHER HARDLY SEEMED TO WARM. The snowdrops flowered in clumps all around the bowling green, but the green was so waterlogged that we could not play, and the paths themselves were too wet for walking. The king's leg was not healing, it was an open wound and the different potions and poultices they laid on it seemed only to inflame it the more. He began to fear that he would never dance again, and the news that King Francis of France was in high spirits and good health made him all the more sour. The snowdrops flowered in clumps all around the bowling green, but the green was so waterlogged that we could not play, and the paths themselves were too wet for walking. The king's leg was not healing, it was an open wound and the different potions and poultices they laid on it seemed only to inflame it the more. He began to fear that he would never dance again, and the news that King Francis of France was in high spirits and good health made him all the more sour.

The season of Lent came and so there was no more dancing and no more feasting. No chance either that Anne might seduce him into her bed and get another baby in her belly. No one, not even the king and the queen, could lie together in Lent and so Anne had to endure the sight of Henry seated on a padded chair, his lame leg resting on a footstool, with Jane reading devotional tracts at his side, in the knowledge that she could not even claim her right as his wife that he should come to her bed.

She was surpa.s.sed and overlooked. Every day there were fewer and fewer ladies in her chamber, they were nominated and paid to be ladies in waiting to the queen but they were all in Jane Seymour's rooms. The only ones who stayed faithful were those who were not welcome anyway: our family, Madge Shelton, Aunt Anne, my daughter Catherine, and me. Some days the only gentlemen in her rooms were George and his circle of friends: Sir Francis Weston, Sir Henry Norris, Sir William Brereton. I was mixing with the very men that my husband had warned me against, but Anne had no other friends. We would play cards, or send for the musicians, or if Sir Thomas Wyatt was visiting we would hold a tournament of poetry, each man writing a line of a love sonnet to the most beautiful queen in the world; but there was something hollow at the heart of it, an empty s.p.a.ce where the joy should be. It was all falling away from Anne and she did not know how to recapture it.

In the middle days of March she swallowed her pride and sent me to summon our uncle.

"I cannot come now, I have some business to attend to. You may tell the queen I will come to her this afternoon."

"I did not think that one could tell a queen to wait," I observed.

In the afternoon when he came, Anne greeted him without any sign of displeasure and drew him into the bay of a window so that they might talk alone. I was close enough to hear them speak, though neither of them ever raised their voices above a polite hiss.

"I need your help against the Seymours," she said. "We have to get rid of Jane."

He shrugged regretfully. "My niece, you have not always been as helpful to me as I might have wished. There was a moment only a little while ago when you accused me to the king himself. If you were no longer queen I do not think you could become a Howard again."

"I am a Boleyn girl, a Howard girl," she whispered, her hand on the golden "B" at her throat.

"There are many Howard girls," he said easily. "My wife the d.u.c.h.ess keeps house with half a dozen of them at Lambeth, cousins of yours, all as pretty as you, as Mary, as Madge. All as high-spirited, as hot-blooded. When he is weary of a milksop there will be a Howard girl to warm his bed, there always will be another one."

"But I am the queen! Not another girl in waiting."

He nodded. "I will make you an offer. If George gets the Order of the Garter in April then I will stand by you. See if you can achieve that for the family and we will see what the family can do for you."

She hesitated. "I can ask it for him."

"Do that," my uncle counseled. "If you can bring some good to the family then we can make a new contract with you, defend you against your enemies. But this time you must remember, Anne, who your master is."

She bit the inside of her lip against defiance, she curtsied to him, and she kept her head down.

On 23 April the king gave the Order of the Garter to Sir Nicholas Carew, a friend of the Seymours, nominated by them. My brother George was overlooked. That night at the feast given to celebrate the new awards, my uncle and Sir John Seymour were seated side by side to share a trencher of good meats, and got on together wonderfully well.

Next day Jane Seymour was sitting with us in the queen's apartments for once, and so the queen's rooms were abuzz with the full complement of the court. The musicians had been called, there was to be dancing. The king was not expected, Anne had challenged him to a game of cards and he had replied coolly that he was much engaged with business.

"What's he doing?" she asked George when he came to her with the king's refusal.

"I don't know. He's seeing the bishops. And he's seeing most of the lords one by one."

"About me?"

Carefully, neither of them looked toward Jane who was the center of attention in the queen's own rooms.

"I don't know," George said miserably. "I suppose I'd be the last to know. But he did ask what men visit you daily."

Anne looked quite blank. "Well, they all do," she said. "I am the queen."

"Certain names have been mentioned," George said. "Henry and Francis among them."

Anne laughed. "Henry Norris haunts the court for the benefit of Madge." She turned around and saw him leaning over Madge's shoulder ready to turn the page for her as she sang. "Sir Henry! Come here, if you please!"