Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

One thing that I like about Lady Rochford is that she always knows what I am talking about. I never have to explain anything to her.

“The sheets,” I say. “Not a mark on them, they’re not even creased.”

“Nobody has changed them?”

I shake my head. “I was first in, after the maids.”

She reaches in the cupboard by the bed and brings out a sovereign and gives it to me. “That’s very good,” she says. “You and I, between us, should always be the first to know everything.”

I smile, but I am thinking about some ribbons I shall buy with the sovereign to trim my new gown, and perhaps some new gloves.

“Don’t tell anyone else,” she cautions me.

“Oh?” I protest.

“No,” she says. “Knowledge is always precious, Katherine. If you know something that no one else knows, then you have a secret. If you know something that everyone else knows then you are no better than them.”

“Can’t I at least tell Anne Bassett?”

“I’ll tell you when you can tell her,” she says. “Perhaps tomorrow. Now go back to the queen. I am coming in a minute.”

I do as I am told, and as I go out I see she is writing a note. She will be writing to my uncle to tell him that I believe that the king has not bedded his wife. I hope she tells him that it was I who thought this first and not her. Then there may be another sovereign to go with the first. I begin to see what he means about great places bring great favors. I have been in royal service for only a matter of days and already I am two sovereigns wealthier. Give me a month, and I shall make my fortune.

We have moved to Whitehall Palace, where the wedding is to be celebrated by a weeklong jousting tournament, and then the last of the visitors will go back to Cleves and we will all settle into our new lives with a new Queen Anne. She has never before seen anything on the scale or of the style of this tournament, and she is rather endearing in her excitement.

“Lady Jane, where I sit?” she demands of me. “And how? How?”

I smile at her bright face. “You sit here,” I say, showing her the queen’s box. “And the knights will come into the arena, and the heralds will announce them. Sometimes they will tell a story, sometimes recite a poem about their costume. Then they fight either on horseback, riding down the lists here; or hand-to-hand with swords, on the ground.” I think how to explain.

I never know how much she understands now, she is learning to speak so quickly. “It is the greatest tournament the king has planned in many years,” I say. “It will last for a week. There will be days of celebrations with beautiful costumes, and everyone in London will come to see the masques and the battles. The court will be at the forefront, of course, but behind them will be the gentry and the great citizens of London and then behind them the common people will come in their thousands. It is a great celebration for the whole country.”

“I sit here?” she says, gesturing at the throne.

I watch her take her seat. Of course, to me this box is filled with ghosts. The seat is hers now; but it was Queen Jane’s before her, and Queen Anne’s before that, and when I was a young woman, not even married, just a girl filled with hopes and ambitions and passionately in love, I served Queen Katherine, who sat in that very chair under her own canopy that the king had ordered should be sewn with little gold Ks and Hs for Katherine and Henry, and he himself had ridden out under the name Sir Loyal Heart.

“This new is?” she asks, patting the curtains that are swagged around the royal box.

“No,” I say, forced by my memories to tell the truth. “These are the curtains that are always used. Look, you can see.” I turn the fabric over and she can see where other initials have been. They have cut the embroidery from the front of the curtains but left the old sewing at the back. Clearly one can see K and H, entwined with lovers’ knots. Oversewn, beside each H, is an H &A. It is like summoning a ghost to see her initials here again. These were the curtains which kept the sun from her head that May Day tournament when it was so hot, and we all knew that the king was angry, and we all knew that the king was in love with Jane Seymour, but none of us knew what would happen next.

I remember Anne leaning over the front of the box and dropping her handkerchief down to one of the jousters, shooting a side-long smile at the king to see if he was jealous. I remember the cold look on his face, and I remember she went pale and sat back again. He had the warrant for her arrest in his doublet then, at that very moment, but he said nothing. He was planning to send her to her death, but he sat beside her for much of the day. She laughed and she chattered and she gave out her favors. She smiled at him and flirted, and she had no idea he had made up his mind that she would die. How could he do such a thing to her? How could he? How could he sit beside her, with his new lover standing smiling, behind them both, and know that within days Anne would be dead? Dead, and my husband dead with her, my husband dying for her, my husband dying for love of her. God forgive me for my jealousy. God forgive her for her sins.

Seated in her place, her initials showing like a dark stain on the hidden underside of her curtains, I shudder as if someone has laid a cold finger on my neck. If any place is haunted, it will be here. These curtains have been stitched and overstitched with the initials of three doomed, pretty girls. Will the court seamstresses be ripping out another A in a few years? Will this box host another ghost? Will another queen come after this new Anne?

“What?” she asks me, the new girl who knows nothing.

I point to the neat stitches. “K: Katherine of Aragon,” I say simply. “A: Anne Boleyn. J: Jane Seymour.” I turn the curtain right side round so that she can see her own initials standing proud and new on the fair side of the fabric. “And now, Anne of Cleves.”

She looks at me with her straight gaze, and for the very first time I think that perhaps I have underestimated this girl. Perhaps she is not a fool. Perhaps behind that honest face there is quick intelligence. Because she cannot speak my language I have talked to her as if she is a child and I have thought of her with the wit of a child. But she is not frightened by these ghosts – she is not even haunted by them, as I am.

She shrugs. “Queens before,” she says. “Now: Anne of Cleves.”

Either this is a high courage, or it is the stoicism of the very stupid.

“Are you not afraid?” I ask very quietly.

She understands the words, I know she does. I can see it in her stillness and the sudden attentive tilt of her head. She looks at me directly. “Afraid of nothing,” she says firmly. “Never afraid.”

For a moment I want to warn her. She is not the only brave girl to sit in this box to be honored as queen and then end her life stripped of her title, facing death alone. Katherine of Aragon had the courage of a crusader, Anne the nerves of a whore. The king brought them both down to nothing. “You must take care,” I say.

“I afraid of nothing, am,” she says again. “Never afraid.”

I was dazzled by the beauty of the palace of Greenwich, but I am shaken to my shoes by Whitehall. More like a town than a palace, it is a thousand halls and houses, gardens and courts, in which only the nobly born and bred seem to find their way around. It has been the home of the Kings of England forever, and every great lord and his family have their own houses built inside the half a dozen acres of the sprawling palace. Everyone knows a secret passage, everyone knows a quick route, everyone knows a door that is conveniently left open to the streets, and a quick way down to a pier on the river where you can get a boat. Everyone but me and my Cleves ambassadors, who are lost inside this warren a dozen times a day and who feel more stupid and more like peasants abroad each time.

Beyond the gates of the palace is the city of London, one of the most crowded, noisy, populous cities in the world. From dawn I can hear the street sellers calling, even from my set of rooms hidden deep inside the palace. As the day goes on the noise and business increases until it seems that there is nowhere in the world that can be at peace. There is a constant stream of people through the palace gates with things to sell and bargains to make and, from what Lady Jane tells me, a continual stream of petitions for the king. This is the true home of his Privy Council; his parliament sits just down the road at the Palace of Westminster. The Tower of London, the great fortified lodestone of every king’s power, is just down the river. If I am to make this great kingdom my home, I shall have to learn my way around this palace, and then find my way around London. There is no point in hiding in my closet, overwhelmed by the noise and the bustle; I have to get out into the palace and let the people – who crowd in their thousands from dawn till nightfall – look at me.

My stepson, Prince Edward, is on a visit to court; he can watch the jousting tomorrow. He is allowed to court only seldom for fear of taking an infection, and never in the summertime for fear of the plague. His father worships the boy, for his own little fair head, I am sure; but also because he is the only boy, the only Tudor heir. A single boy is such a precious thing. All the hopes of this new line rest on little Edward.

Lucky that he is such a strong, healthy child. He has hair of the fairest gold, and a smile that makes you want to catch him up and hug him. But he is strongly independent and would be most offended if I were to press my kisses on him. So when we go to his nursery, I take care only to sit near him and let him bring his toys to me, one by one, and each one he puts into my hand, with great pleasure and interest. “Glish,” he says. “Maow.” And I never catch his little fat hand and plant a kiss in the warm palm, though he looks up at me with eyes as dark and as round as toffee and with a smile as sweet.

I wish I could stay in his nursery all day. It does not matter to him that I cannot speak English or French or Latin. He hands a carved wooden top to me and says solemnly, “moppet,” and I reply, “moppet,” and then he fetches something else. We neither of us need a great deal of language nor a great deal of cleverness to pass an hour together.

When it is time for him to eat, he allows me to lift him up into his little seat, and sit beside him as he is served with all the honor and respect that his own father commands. They serve this little boy on bended knee, and he sits up and takes his share from any one of a dozen rich dishes as if he were king already.

I say nothing as yet, because it is early days for me as his stepmother; but after I have been here awhile longer, perhaps after my coronation next month, I shall ask my lord the king if the boy cannot have a little more freedom to run about and play, and a plainer diet. Perhaps we can visit him more often in his own household, even if he cannot come to court. Perhaps I might be allowed to see him often. I think of him, poor little boy, without a mother to care for him, and I think that I might have the raising of him, and see him grow into a young man, a good young man to be King Edward for England. And then I could laugh at myself for the selfishness of duty. Of course I want to be a good stepmother and queen to him, but more than anything else I long to mother him. I want to see his little face light up when I come into the room, not just for these few days, but every day. I want to hear him say “Kwan,” which is all he can manage of “Queen Anne.” I want to teach him his prayers and his letters and his manners. I want him for my own. Not just because he is motherless, but because I am childless and I want someone to love.

This is not my only stepchild, of course. But the Lady Elizabeth is not allowed to come to court at all. She is to stay at Hatfield Palace, some distance from London, and the king does not recognize her except as his bastard, got on Lady Anne Boleyn; there are those who say she is not even that, but another man’s child. Lady Jane Rochford – who knows everything – showed me a portrait of Elizabeth and pointed to her hair, which is red as coals in a brazier, and smiled as if to say there could be little doubt that this is the king’s child. But King Henry has made it his right to decide which children he shall acknowledge, and Lady Elizabeth will be brought up away from court as a royal bastard and married to a minor nobleman when she is of age. Unless I can speak to him first. Perhaps, when we have been married awhile, perhaps if I can give him a second son, perhaps then he will be kinder to the little girl who needs kindness.