“Get you gone from my presence!” said Anne. “You are banished from court.”

The girl’s reply was to go straight to the King, who imediately countermanded the Queen’s order.

He left the girl and went to Anne.

“What means this?” he demanded.

“I will not have you parade your infidelities right under my nose!”

“Madam!” roared the King. “I would have you know I am master here!”

“Nevertheless,” she said, “you cannot expect me to smile on your mistresses and to treat them as though they were the most faithful of my attendants.”

He said coarsely: “If that is what I wish, you shall do it . . . as others did before you!”

“You mistake me,” she answered.

“I mistake you not. From where do you derive your authority if not from me! Consider from what I lifted you. I have but to lift my finger to send you back whence you came!”

“Why not lift it then?” she blazed. “Your pretty little mistress doubtless would grace the throne better than I. She is so brilliant! Her conversation is so witty! The people would acclaim her. But, Henry, do you not think she might put you a little in the shade. . . . Such wit . . . such brilliance!”

He looked at her with smoldering eyes; there were occasions when he could forget he was a king and put his hands about that little neck, and press and press until there was no breath left in her. But a king does not do murder; others do it for him. It was a quick thought that passed through his mind and was gone before he had time to realize it had been there.

He turned and strode out of the room.

Jane Rochford had overheard that quarrel. She was excited; it gave her a pleasurable thrill to know that Anne was having difficulties with her husband, just as she herself had with George, though with a difference.

Jane crept away and came back later, begging a word with the Queen. Could the ladies be dismissed? Jane whispered. What she had to say was for Anne’s ears alone.

She expressed her sympathy.

“Such a sly wench! I declare she deliberately sets out to trap the King. All that modesty and reluctance . . .” Jane glanced sideways at Anne; had her barb struck a vulnerable spot? Oh, how did it feel, where you have shown reluctance to a king and complete indifference to the feelings of his wife, to find your position suddenly reversed; yourself the neglected wife and another careless of your feelings? Jane was so excited she could scarcely talk; she wanted to laugh at this, because it seemed so very amusing.

“But I have not come to commiserate with you, dear sister. I want to help. I have a plan. Were I to let her people know that she is in danger of disgracing herself—oh, I need not mention His Majesty—it might be a friendly warning. . . . I would try. I trow that, were she removed from court, the King would be the most loyal of husbands; and how can a woman get children when her husband has no time for her, but only for other women!”

Jane spoke vehemently, but Anne was too sick at heart to notice it. Everywhere she looked, disaster was threatening. She was young and healthy, but her husband was neither so young nor so healthy; she could not get a child, when the most urgent matter she had ever known was that she should first get with child, and that the child should be a son. The King’s health was doubtless to blame, but the King never blamed himself; when he was in fault he blamed someone else. There was evidence of that all about him, and had been for years. Francis had made an alarming move; he had begun to talk once more of a match between his son and Mary. What could that mean, but one thing! Mary was a bastard; how could a bastard marry the son of the King of France?

There was only one answer: The King of France no longer regarded Mary as a bastard. Her hopes had soared when Clement died and Paul III took his place; Paul had seemed more inclined to listen to reason, but what did she know of these matters? Only what it was deemed wise to tell her! Francis, whom she had regarded as a friend to herself, who had shown decided friendship when they had met at Calais, had decided it was unsafe to quarrel with Charles and with Rome. France was entirely Catholic—that was the answer. Francis could not stand out against his people; his sympathy might be with Anne, but a king’s sympathy must be governed by diplomacy; Francis was showing a less friendly face to Anne. She saw now that the whole of Europe would be against the marriage; that would have meant nothing, had Henry been with her, had Henry been the devoted lover he had remained during the waiting years. But Henry was turning from her; this sly, meek, pretty girl from the opposite camp was proof of that. She was filled with terror, for she remembered the negotiations which had gone on before news of a possible divorce had reached Katharine. Everyone at court had known before Katharine; they had whispered of The King’s Secret Matter. Was the King now indulging once more in a secret matter? Terrified, she listened to Jane; she was ready to clutch at any straw. That was foolish—she might have known Jane was no diplomatist. Jane’s art was in listening at doors, slyly setting one person against another.

Henry discovered what Jane was about.

“What!” he shouted. “This is the work of Rochford’s wife. She shall be committed to the Tower by the Traitor’s Gate.” She wept and stormed, cursing herself for her folly. To think she had come to this by merely trying to help Anne! What would become of her now? she wondered. If ever she got out of the Tower alive, she would be clever, subtle. . . . Once before she had been careless; this time she had been equally foolish, but she had learned her lesson at last. George would bear her no gratitude for what she had done; he would say: “What a clumsy fool you are, Jane!” Or if he did not say it, he would think it.

All this she had done for George really . . . and he cared not, had no feeling for her at all. “Methinks I begin to hate him!” she murmured, and looked through her narrow windows onto the cobbles beneath.

George came to see his sister; he was secretly alarmed.

“Jane has been sent to the Tower!” he said. Anne told him what had happened. “This grows mightily dangerous, Anne.”

“You to tell me that! I assure you I know it but too well.”

“Anne, you must go very carefully.”

“You tell me that persistently,” she answered pettishly. “What must I do now? I have gone carefully, and I have been brought to this pass. What is happening to us? Mary in disgrace, our father quite often absenting himself from court, shamefaced, hardly looking at me! And Uncle Norfolk becoming more and more outspoken! You, alarmed that I will not be cautious, and I . . .”

“We have to go carefully, that is all. We have to stop this affair of the King’s with this girl; it must not be allowed to go on.”

“I care not! And it were not she, it would be another.”

“Anne, for God’s sake listen to reason! It matters not if it were another one; it only matters that it should be she!”

“You mean . . . there is more in this than a simple love affair?”

“Indeed I do.”

Madge Shelton looked in at the door.

“I beg your pardon. I had thought Your Majesty to be alone.” She and George exchanged cousinly greetings, and Madge retired.

“Our cousin is a beautiful girl,” said George.

Anne looked at him sharply.

He said: “You’ll hate what I am about to say, Anne. It is a desperate remedy, but I feel it would be effective. Madge is delightful, so young and charming. The other affair may well be beginning to pall.”

“George! I do not understand. . . .”

“We cannot afford to be over-nice, Anne.”

“Oh, speak frankly. You mean—throw Madge to the King, that he may forget that other . . .”

“It is not a woman we have to fight, Anne. It is a party!”

“I would not do it,” she said. “Why, Madge . . . she is but a young girl, and he . . . You cannot know, George. The life he has lived. . . .”

“I do know. Hast ever thought we are fighting for thy life?”

She tried to throw off her fears with flippancy. She laughed rather too loudly; he noticed uneasily that of late she had been given to immoderate laughter.

“Ever since I had thought to be Queen, there have been those ready to thrust prophecies under my eyes. I mind well one where I was depicted with my head cut off!” She put her hands about her throat. “Fret not, George. My husband, after the manner of most, amuses himself. He was all eagerness for me before our marriage; now? She shrugged her shoulders and began to laugh again.

“Be silent,” said George. “What of Elizabeth?”

She stopped laughing.

“What of Elizabeth?”

“It has been decreed that Mary Tudor is a bastard, because the King tired of her mother and decided—as she could no longer hope to give him a son—that he was no longer married to her. Oh, we know of his conscience, we know of his treatise . . . we know too well the story. But, Anne, we are alone and we need not fear each other. . . . Ah! What a good thing it is to have in this world one person of whom you need not cherish the smallest fear! Anne, I begin to think we are not so unlucky, you and I.”

“Please stop,” she said. “You make me weep.”

“This is no time for tears. I said Mary has been decreed a bastard, though her mother is of Spain and related to the most powerful man in Europe. Anne, you are but the daughter of the Earl of Wiltshire—Sir Thomas Boleyn not long since—and he was only raised to his earldom to do honor to you; he could be stripped of that honor easily enough. He is no Emperor, Anne! Dost see what I mean? Mary was made a bastard; what of Elizabeth? Who need fear her most humble relations?”

“Yes,” said Anne breathlessly. “Yes!”

“If the King has no sons, Elizabeth will be Queen of England . . . or Mary will! Oh, Anne, you have to fight this, you have to hold your place for your daughter’s sake.”

“You are right,” she said. “I have my daughter.”

“Therefore . . .”

She nodded. “You are right, George. I think you are often right. I shall remember what you said about our being lucky. Yes, I think we are; for who else is there, but each other!”

The next day she sent Madge Shelton with a message to the King. From a window she watched the girl approach him, for he was in the palace grounds. Yes, he was appreciative; who could help being so, of Madge! Madge had beauty; Madge had wit. She had made the king laugh; he was suggesting they should take a turn round the rose garden.

Anne soothed her doubts with the reflection that Madge was a saucy wench, able to take care of herself, and had probably had love affairs before. Besides . . . there was Elizabeth!

The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk was uneasy. Rumors came from the court, and one could not ignore them. All was not well with the Queen. She herself had quarreled with her stepson, the Duke, because he had spoken as she did not care to hear him speak, and it had been of the Queen. I never did like the man, she mused. Cruel, hard opportunist! One could tell which way the wind was blowing, by what he would have to say. Which way was the wind blowing? She liked not these rumors.

She was to be state governess to the Princess Elizabeth, a further sign of Anne’s friendship for her. “I do hope the dear child is well and happy. It is a terrible trial to be a queen, and to such a king!” she murmured to herself.

The Duchess was fractious in her own household. Those girls were noisy in their room at night, and she had heard it whispered that they were over-free with the young men.

She sent for Mary Lassells, whom she did not like overmuch. The girl was of humble birth, apt to look sullen; she was really a serving-maid, and should not be with the ladies. I must see to that one day, thought the duchess, and filed the matter away in that mental pigeon-hole which was crammed full of forgotten notes.

“Mary Lassells,” she said, when the girl came to her, “there is much noise in the ladies’ sleeping apartments at night. These ladies are under my care, and as since my granddaughter’s coronation I find myself with less and less leisure, I am going to take a few precautions to make sure of correct behavior on the part of these young people.”

The girl was smiling primly, as though to indicate that there was every reason for the Duchess to take precautions. This angered the Duchess; she did not wish to be reminded that she had been lax; she would have preferred the girl to look as though this were a quite unnecessary precaution being taken by an over-careful duenna.

“It will be your duty, Mary Lassells, every night when the ladies have retired, to see that the key of their apartment is placed in the lock outside the door. Then at a fixed hour I shall send someone to lock the door, and the key will be brought to me.”