“Praise God for it,” she said piously and bent her head to her work.
“Amen,” I returned, as sweet as she.
They were long days for me at Westminster in Anne’s court. I could see William only by chance during the day. As a gentleman usher he was required to be in close attendance to the king. Henry took a liking to him, consulted him about horses and often rode with him at his side. I thought it ironic that my William, a man completely unsuited to the life of court, should find himself so favored. But Henry liked straightforward speech as long as it agreed with him.
Only at night could William and I be alone together. He had hired some rooms just across the road from the great palace of Westminster, an attic in the very rafters of an old building. When we lay awake after making love I could hear the sleepy birds settling in their nests in the thatch. We had a little pallet bed, a table and two stools, a fireplace where we warmed up our dinner from the palace, and nothing more. We wanted nothing more.
I woke at dawn every morning to his touch, the delight of his warmth and the heady smell of his skin. I had never before lain with a man who had loved me completely, for myself, and it was a dizzy experience. I had never lain with a man whose touch I adored without any need to hide my adoration, or exaggerate it, or adjust it at all. I simply loved him as if he were my one and only lover, and he loved me too with the same simplicity of appetite and desire which made me wonder what I thought I had been doing all those years when I had been dealing in the false coin of vanity and lust. I had not known then that all along there had been this other currency of pure gold.
Anne’s coronation was overshadowed by a violent quarrel with our uncle. I was in her room when he raged at her, swearing that she had become so great in her own mind that she forgot who put her there. Anne, infuriatingly smug, put her hand on her swelling belly and told him that she was great in her body, and that she was very well aware who had put it there.
“By God, Anne, you will remember your family,” he swore.
“How should I forget them? They are around me like wasps around a honeypot. Every time I step, I trip over one of you, asking for another favor.”
“I don’t ask,” he snapped. “I have rights.”
She turned her head at that. “Not over me! You are speaking to your queen.”
“I am speaking to my niece who would have been banished from the court in disgrace for bedding Henry Percy if it were not for me,” he spat at her.
She leaped to her feet as if she would fly at him.
“Anne!” I cried out. “Sit! Be still!” I looked at my uncle. “She must not be upset! The baby!”
He looked murderously at her, then he got his temper under control. “Of course,” he said with stilted politeness. “Sit, Anne. Be calm.”
She sank down into her seat again. “Never speak of that,” she hissed at him. “I swear it, uncle or no uncle, if you raise that old slander against me I will have you out of court.”
“I am Earl Marshal,” he said through his teeth. “I was one of the greatest men in England when you were still in the nursery.”
“And before Bosworth your father was a traitor in the Tower,” she said triumphantly. “Remember, as I do, that we are Howards together. If you are not on my side, I am not on yours. You could see the inside of the Tower again at one word from me.”
“Say it,” he spat at her and stalked from the room without a bow. She stared after him. “I hate him,” she said very quietly. “I will see him broken to a nobody.”
“Don’t think that,” I said hastily. “You need him.”
“I need no one,” she said flatly. “The king is wholly mine. I have his heart, I have his desire, and I am carrying his son. I need no one.”
The quarrel with Uncle Howard was still not mended when he arrived to escort Anne to her coronation in the City. It was to be, as George had predicted, the finest coronation that anyone had ever seen. Anne had ordered them to burn away the pomegranate crest on Queen Katherine’s barge as if Katherine had been a usurper, instead of rightful queen. In their place was Anne’s own coat of arms and her initials entwined with Henry’s. People mocked even that—saying that they read HA HA! and the last laugh was on poor England. Anne’s new motto was everywhere: “the most happy.” Even George had snorted when he first heard it. “Anne, happy?” he said. “When she is Queen of Heaven and has pulled down the Virgin Mary herself.”
We went by barges to the Tower of London, flying flags of gold and white and silver, and the king was waiting for us at the great watergate. They held our barge steady as Anne disembarked, and I watched her, almost as if she was a stranger to me. She rose off her throne and glided down the gangplank as if she had been a queen born and bred. She was wonderfully gowned in silver and gold with a fur cape around her shoulders. She did not look like my sister, she did not look like any mortal woman at all. She carried herself as if she were the greatest queen that had ever been born.
We spent two nights in the Tower and on the first there was a great dinner and entertainment at which Henry gave out honors to celebrate the day. He made eighteen Knights of the Bath and gave out a dozen knighthoods, three of them to his favorite gentlemen ushers, including my husband. William came to find me, after the king had tapped him on the shoulder with his sword and given him the kiss of fealty. He led me out for a dance where we could mingle with the court and hope that no one would notice the queen’s sister dancing with a gentleman usher.
“Well then, my Lady Stafford,” he said softly. “How is this for ambition?”
“Vaulting,” I said. “You will be as high as a Howard, I know it.”
“Actually I am glad of it,” he said, reverting to a low confidential whisper as we watched the pair of dancers in the middle of the circle. “I did not want you to be lowered by marrying me.”
“I would have married you if you had been a peasant,” I said firmly.
He chuckled at that. “My love, I saw how upset you were about the fleabites. I don’t think you would have married me if I had been a peasant at all.”
I turned to laugh at him and then I caught a furious glance from George who was paired to dance with Madge Shelton. At once I steadied myself. “George is watching us.”
William nodded. “He’d do better to take care of himself.”
“Oh why?”
It was our turn to dance. William took me to the center of the circle and we danced together, three steps one way, three steps the other. It was a courtship dance, it was hard to perform without drawing close and locking our gaze. I kept reminding myself not to let my face show my delight in him. William was less discreet than me. Every time I stole a glance at him his eyes were on me as if he would eat me up. I was relieved when we danced around the line of the circle and out under an arch of arms, and the dance became general again.
“What about George?”
“Bad company,” William said shortly.
I laughed out loud. “He’s a Howard, and a friend of the king,” I said. “He’s supposed to be in bad company.”
I saw him change tack. “Oh, it’s nothing, I suppose.”
The musicians reached the end and played a final chord. I drew William to the side of the hall.
“Now tell me truly what you mean.”
“Sir Francis Weston is forever with him,” William said, driven to speak. “And he has a bad reputation.”
At once I was on my guard. “You’ll have heard of nothing but a young man’s wildness.”
“More,” William said shortly.
“What more?”
William looked about him as if he wanted to escape this inquisition. “I’ve heard they’re lovers.”
I took a little breath.
“You knew?”
I nodded, saying nothing.
“My God, Mary.” William took a step away from me, and then came back to my side. “You did not tell me? Your own brother deep in sin and you didn’t tell me?”
“Of course not,”
I exclaimed. “I don’t hold him up to shame. He is my brother. And he might change.”
“You give him loyalty before me?”
“As well as you,” I said swiftly. “William, this is my brother. We are the three Boleyns, we all three need each other. We all three know a dozen things, a score of things which are the greatest of secrets. I am not yet wholly Lady Stafford.”
“Your brother is a sodomite!” he hissed at me.
“And still my brother!” I grabbed his arm, careless of who might see us, and dragged him to an alcove. “He is a sodomite, and my sister is a whore, and perhaps a poisoner, and I am a whore. My uncle has been the falsest of friends, my father a time-server, my mother—God knows—some even say she had the king before the two of us! All of this you knew or you could have deduced. Now tell me, am I good enough for you? For I knew that you were a nobody and I came to find you all the same. If you want to rise to be a somebody in this court you will get blood or shit on your hands. I have had to learn this through a hard apprenticeship since I was a little girl. You can learn it now if you have the stomach.”
William gasped at my vehemence and stepped back to take me in. “I didn’t mean to distress you.”
“He is my brother. She is my sister. Come what will, they are my kin.”
“They could be our enemies both,” he warned.
“They could be my enemies till death and they would still be my brother and sister,” I said.
We paused.
“Kin and enemies all at once?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “It depends on how this great gamble goes.”
William nodded.
“So what do they say about him?” I asked more steadily. “What did you hear?”
“It’s not widely known, thank God, but they say there is a secret court within a court, they circle your sister, they are her closest friends, but at the same time they are lovers among themselves. Sir Francis is one, Sir William Brereton another. Hard gamblers, great horse-riders, men who will do anything for a dare, anything that brings them pleasure or excitement—and George is among them. They’re always around the queen, it’s her rooms where they meet and flirt and play. So Anne is compromised too.”
I looked across the hall at my brother. He was leaning over the back of Anne’s throne and whispering in her ear. I saw her tilt her head to his intimate whisper and giggle.
“This life would corrupt a saint, never mind a young man.”
“He wanted to be a soldier,” I said sadly. “A great crusader, a knight with a white shield riding out against the infidel.”
William shook his head. “We’ll save the boy Henry from this if we can,” he said.
“My son?”
He nodded. “Our son. We’ll try to give him a life of some purpose, not idleness and pleasure-seeking. And you had better warn your brother and your sister that their circle of friends are the subject of whispers, and he the worst.”
Anne entered the City the following day, I helped her to dress in her white gown with a white surcoat and a mantle of white ermine. She wore her dark hair loose about her shoulders with a golden veil and circlet of gold. She rode into London on a litter pulled by two white ponies with the Barons of the Cinque Ports holding a canopy of cloth of gold over her head, and the whole court, dressed in their finest, following on foot behind her. There were triumphal arches, there were fountains pouring wine, there were loyal poems at every stopping point, but the whole procession wound through a city of terrible silence.
Madge Shelton was beside me as we walked behind Anne’s litter in the silence which grew increasingly ominous as we went down the narrow streets to the cathedral. “Good God, this is dreadful,” she muttered.
London was sulking, the people were out in their thousands but they did not wave flags or call blessings or shout Anne’s name. They stared at her with a dreadful hungry curiosity as if they would see the woman who had wrought such a change in England, such a change in the king, and who had finally cut the very mantle of queenship into her own gown.
If her entrance to the City was bleak, her coronation on the second day of silent celebrations was no better. This time she wore crimson velvet trimmed with the softest whitest fur of ermine with a mantle of purple, and a face like thunder.
“Aren’t you happy now, Anne?” I asked as I twitched her train straight.
She showed a smile which was more a grimace. “The most happy,” she said bitterly, quoting her own motto. “The most happy. I should be, shouldn’t I? I have everything I ever wanted, and it was only me, first and last, who believed that I could get it. I am queen, I am the wife of the King of England. I have thrown down Katherine and taken her place. I should be the happiest woman in the world.”
“And he loves you,” I said, thinking of how my life was transformed by being loved by a good man.
Anne shrugged her shoulders. “Oh yes,” she said indifferently. She touched her belly. “If only I could know it was a boy. If only I could have been crowned with a prince already in the nursery.”
Gently I patted her shoulder, awkward at the intimacy. Since we had stopped sharing a bed we seldom touched. Since she had a household of maids I no longer brushed her hair or laced her gown. She was intimate still with George but she had grown apart from me; and the theft of my son had left an unspoken resentment between us. I felt odd that she should confide a weakness to me. The polished veneer of queenship had spread over Anne like a glaze over a figurine.
“Not long to wait,” I said gently.
“Three months.”
There was a knock at the door and Jane Parker came in, her face bright with excitement. “They’re waiting for you!” she said breathlessly. “It’s time. Are you ready?”
“I beg your pardon?” Anne said glacially. At once my sister disappeared behind the mask of queenship. Jane dropped into a curtsy. “Your Majesty! I beg your pardon! I should have said that they are waiting for Your Majesty.”
“I’m ready,” Anne said and rose to her feet. The rest of her court came into the room and the ladies in waiting arranged the long train of her cape, I straightened her headdress, and spread her long dark hair over her shoulders.
Then my sister, the Boleyn girl, went out to be crowned Queen of England.
I spent the night of Anne’s coronation with William in my bedroom in the Tower. I should have had Madge Shelton to share my bed but she whispered to me that she would be gone all night so while the feasting of the court went on, William and I crept away to my room, locked the door, threw another log on the fire, and slowly, sensually, undressed and made love.
We woke through the night made love and dozed again in a sleepy cycle of arousal and satisfaction, and by five o’clock in the morning, when it was starting to get light, we were both deliciously exhausted and ravenous with hunger.
“Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s go out and find something to eat.”
We pulled on our clothes and I put on a cape with a hood to hide my face and we crept from the sleeping Tower into the streets of the City. Half the men of London seemed to be drunk in the gutters from the free wine that had poured from the fountains to celebrate the triumph of Anne. We stepped over limp bodies all the way up the hill to the Minories.
We walked hand in hand, careless of being seen in this city which was sick with drink. William led the way to a baker’s shop and stepped back to see if smoke was coming from the crooked chimney.
“I can smell bread,” I said, snuffing at the air and laughing at my own hunger.
“I’ll knock him up,” William said and hammered on the side door.
A muffled shout from inside answered him and the door was thrown open by a man with a red face smeared with white flour.
“Can I buy a loaf of bread?” William asked. “And some breakfast?”
The man blinked at the brightness of the light in the street. “If you have the money,” he said sulkily. “For God knows I have squandered all of mine.”
William d
rew me into the bakehouse. It was warm inside and smelled sweet. Everywhere was covered with a fine dust of white flour, even the table and the stools. William swept a seat with his cape and set me down on it.
“Some bread,” he said. “A couple of mugs of small ale. Some fruit if you have it, for the lady. A couple of eggs, boiled, a little ham perhaps? A cheese? Anything nice.”
“This is my first batch of the day,” the man grumbled. “I have hardly broken my own fast. Never mind running around slicing ham for the gentry.”
A little chink and the gleam of a silver coin changed everything.
“I have some excellent ham in my larder and a cheese just up from the country that my own cousin made,” the baker said persuasively. “And my wife shall rise and pour you the small ale herself. She’s a good brewer, there’s not a better taste in all of London.”
“Thank you,” William said gracefully as he sat down beside me and winked, and rested his arm comfortably around my waist.
“Newly wed?” the man asked, shoveling loaves out of the oven and seeing William’s gaze on my face.
“Yes,” I said.
“Long may it last,” he said doubtfully, and turned the loaves onto the wooden counter.
“Amen to that,” William said quietly, and drew me to him and kissed me on the lips and whispered privately in my ear: “I am going to love you like this forever.”
William saw me into the little wicket gate to the Tower before going down to the river, hiring a river boatman and entering through the watergate. Madge Shelton was in our room when I got in, but too absorbed in brushing her hair and changing her gown to wonder where I had been so early in the morning. Half the court seemed to be waking up in the wrong beds. The triumph of Anne, the mistress who had become a wife, was an inspiration to every loose girl in the country.
I washed my face and hands and dressed ready to go with Anne and the other ladies to matins. Anne, in her first day of queenship, was dressed very richly in a dark gown with a jeweled hood and a long string of pearls twisted twice around her neck. She still wore her golden “B” for Boleyn, and carried a prayerbook encased in gold leaf. She nodded when she saw me and I dropped into a deep curtsy and followed the hem of her gown as if I was honored to do so.
The Other Boleyn Girl Page 46
