Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“I am! Truly, I am! Unblemished!”

“You have to lead him on and bring him on and yet forever draw back.”

I wait, I have no idea what he wants of me.

“In short he is not just to lust for you; he has to fall in love with you.”

“But why?” I ask. “So that he gets me a good husband?”

My uncle leans forward, his mouth to my ear. “Listen, fool. So that he makes you his wife, his own wife, the next Queen of England.”

My exclamation of surprise is silenced by Lady Rochford, who pinches the back of my hand sharply. “Ow!”

“Listen to your uncle,” she says. “And keep your voice down.”

“But he is married to the queen,” I mutter.

“He can still fall in love with you,” my uncle says. “Stranger things have happened. And he has to know that you are a virgin untouched, a little rose, that you are a good enough girl to be Queen of England.”

I glance back toward the woman who already is the Queen of England. She is smiling down at the Lady Elizabeth, who is doing a little hopping dance in time to the music. The king is tapping his good foot in time to the beat. Even Princess Mary looks happy.

“Perhaps not this year, perhaps not next,” my uncle says. “But you must keep the king interested, and you must lead him into honorable love. Anne Boleyn led him on and held him off, and kept him coming on for six years, and she started when he was in love with his wife. This is not the work of a day. This is a masterpiece; it will be your life’s work. You are not to give him the least idea that he could make you his mistress. He has to honor you, Katherine, as if you were a young lady fit only for marriage. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He is king. Doesn’t he know everybody’s thoughts anyway? Doesn’t God tell him?”

“God help us, the girl is an idiot,” my uncle mutters. “Katherine, he is a man like any other, only now, in his old age, more suspicious and more vindictive than most. He has enjoyed an easier life than most; he has been idle for all his days. He has had kindness everywhere he has ever gone, no one has said no to him since he got rid of Katherine of Aragon. He is used to having his own way in everything. This is the man you have to delight, a man brought up to indulgence. You have to make him think you are special; he is surrounded by women who pretend to adore him. You have to do something special. You have to make him aroused and yet keep his hands off you. This is what I am asking you to do. You can have new gowns and Lady Rochford’s help, but this is what I want. Can you do it?”

“I can try,” I say doubtfully. “But what happens then? When he is in love and aroused but trusting? What happens then? I can hardly tell him that I am hoping to be queen while I serve the queen.”

“You leave that to me,” he says. “You do your part, and I will do mine. But you have to do your part. Just as you are: but a little more, a little more warmly. I want you to bring him on.”

I hesitate. I am longing to say yes, I am longing for the gifts that will come my way and the fuss that everyone will make of me if I am seen to take the king’s eye. But Anne Boleyn, my cousin, this man’s niece, must have felt that, too. He may have given her the very same advice, and look where it got her. I don’t know how much of a part he played in helping her to the throne, nor whether he helped her onto the scaffold. I don’t know if he will take better care of me than he did of her. “What if I can’t do it?” I ask. “What if something goes wrong?”

He smiles down at me. “Are you telling me that you doubt for a moment that you can make any man fall in love with you?”

I try to keep my face grave, but my own vanity is too much for me and I smile back at him. “Not really,” I say.

We are riding to London, to the palace of Westminster for the opening of parliament. But this riding back to London is not the same as when we were riding out. Something has happened. I feel as if I am an old hound, the pack leader, who can lift her grizzled head and smell the change in the wind. When we rode out, the king was between the queen and young Kitty Howard, and anyone looking at them would have seen him distribute his smiles between his wife and her friend. Now, to me, perhaps only to me, the scene is quite different. Once again the king rides between the queen and her little favorite but this time his head is turned, all the time, to his left. It’s as if his round face has swiveled on the fleshy neck and got stuck. Katherine holds his attention like a dancing mayfly holds the attention of the fat, gaping carp. The king is goggling at Katherine Howard as if he cannot take his eyes from her; and the queen, on his right, and even the Princess Mary on her other side, cannot divert him, cannot distract him, can do nothing but provide a shield for his infatuation.

I have seen this before – my God – so many times. I have been at Henry’s court since I was a maid and Henry was a boy, and I know him: a boy in love, a man in love, and now an old fool in love. I saw him run after Bessie Blount, after Mary Boleyn, after her sister Anne, after Madge Shelton, after Jane Seymour, after Anne Bassett, and now this: this pretty child. I know how Henry looks when he is besotted: a bull, ready to be led by the nose. He is at this point now. If we Howards want him, we have him. He is caught.

The queen reins back to speak with me, and leaves Katherine Howard, Catherine Carey, Princess Mary, and the king riding together before us. They barely turn their heads to see that she has gone. She is becoming a cipher, a person of no significance.

“The king likes Kitty Howard,” she observes to me.

“And Lady Anne Bassett,” I say equably. “Young people make him merry. You have enjoyed the company of the Princess Mary, I think.”

“No,” she says shortly; there is no diverting her. “He likes Katherine.”

“No more than any other,” I persist. “Mary Norris is a favorite.”

“Lady Rochford, be my friend: what am I to do?” she asks me simply.

“Do? Your Grace?”

“If he has a girl…” She breaks off to find the right word. “A whore.”

“A lover,” I correct her rapidly. “Whore is a very bad word, Your Grace.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Ach, so? Lover.”

“If he takes a lover, you must pay no attention.”

She nods. “This is what Queen Jane do?”

“Yes indeed, Your Grace. She did not notice.”

She is silent for a second. “They do not think her a fool for this?”

“They thought her queenly,” I say. “A queen does not complain of her husband the king.”

“That is what Queen Anne do?”

I hesitate. “No. Queen Anne was very angry; she made much noise.” God spare us ever again from the storm that broke over our heads on the day that Anne found Jane Seymour squirming and giggling on the king’s lap. “The king was then angry with her. And…”

“And?”

“It is dangerous to anger the king. Even if you are queen.”

She is silent at this; it has not taken her long to learn that the court is a death trap for the unwary.

“Who was the king’s lover then? When Queen Anne made much noise?”

This is rather awkward to tell the king’s new wife. “He was courting Lady Jane Seymour, who became queen.”

She nods. I have learned that when she looks most stolid and stupid, it is then that she is thinking the most furiously.

“And Queen Katherine of Aragon? She makes a noise?”

I am on firmer ground here. “She never once complained to the king. She always greeted him with a smile, whatever she had heard, whatever she feared. She was always a most courteous wife and queen.”

“But he took a lover? Just the same? With such a queen at his side? Her, a princess whom he had married for love?”

“Yes.”

“And was that lover Lady Anne Boleyn?”

I nod.

“A lady-in-waiting? Her own lady-in-waiting?”

I nod again at the remorseless march of her logic.

“So both his two queens were ladies-in-waiting? He see them in the queen’s rooms? He meet them there.”

“That is so,” I say.

“He meet them while the queen watches. He dance with them in her rooms. He agree that they should meet later?”

I cannot deny it. “Er, yes.”

She looks ahead to where Katherine Howard is riding close to the king and watches as he leans over and puts his hand on hers, as if to correct how she is holding the reins. Katherine looks up at him as if his touch is an honor she can hardly bear. She leans slightly toward him, yearning; we both hear her breathless little giggle.

“Like that,” she says flatly.

I can think of nothing to say.

“I see,” says the queen. “I understand now. And a wise woman say nothing?”

“She says nothing.” I hesitate. “You cannot prevent it, Your Grace. Whatever comes of it.”

She bows her head, and to my surprise I see a tear fall onto the pommel of her saddle. She covers it quickly with her gloved finger. “Yes, I can do nothing,” she whispers.

We have been settled in our apartments at Westminster for only a few days when I am summoned to the rooms of my kinsman the Duke of Norfolk. I go at midday, before we dine, and I find him pacing about his rooms, not his usual contained self at all. It is so unusual to see him disturbed that I am at once alert to danger. I do not enter the room but stay by the wall, as I would if I had opened the wrong door in the Tower and found myself among the king’s lions. I stay by the door and my hand rests on the doorknob.

“Sir?”

“Have you heard? Did you know? Cromwell is to be an earl? A damned earl?”

“He is?”

“Did I not just say so? Earl of Essex. Earl of bloody Essex! What do you think of that, madam?”

“I think nothing, sir.”

“Have they consummated the marriage?”

“No!”

“Do you swear? Are you certain? They must have done. He’s got it up at last, and he’s paying his bawd. He must be pleased with Cromwell for something!”

“I am utterly certain. I know they have not. And she is unhappy; she knows he is attracted to Katherine, and she is anxious about that. She spoke to me of it.”

“But he is rewarding the minister who gave him the queen. He must be pleased with the marriage; something must have pleased him. He must have learned something; he must be turning from us for some reason. He is rewarding Cromwell, and Cromwell brought him the queen.”

“I swear to you, my lord, I have held nothing back from you. The king has been coming to her bed almost every night since the end of Lent, but it is no better than it was before. The sheets are clean, her hair is still in plaits, her nightcap straight every morning. She cries sometimes, during the day, when she thinks no one is watching. This is not a well-loved woman; this is a hurt girl. I swear she is a virgin still.”

The duke rounds on me in his rage. “Then why would he make Cromwell Earl of Essex?”

“It must be for some other reason.”

“What other reason? This is Cromwell’s great triumph: this alliance with the Protestant dukes and the king, this alliance against France and Spain, sealed with this marriage with the Flanders girl. I have an alliance with the King of France at my fingertips. I have filled the king’s head with suspicions against Cromwell. Lord Lisle has told him that Cromwell favors reformers, has hidden heretics away in Calais. Cromwell’s favorite preacher is to be accused of heresy. Everything is piling up against him, but then he gets an earldom. Why is that? The earldom is his reward. Why would the king reward him if he is not pleased with him?”

I shrug my shoulders. “My lord uncle. How should I know?”

“Because you are here to know!” he shouts at me. “You are put at court and kept at court and dressed and fed at court so that you shall know everything, and so that you shall tell me! If you know nothing, what is the point of your being here? What was the point of sparing you from the scaffold?”

I feel my face grow stiff with fear at his anger. “I know what goes on in the queen’s rooms,” I say softly. “I cannot know what happens in the Privy Council.”

“You dare to say that I should know? That I am remiss?”

Mutely, I shake my head.

“How should anybody know what the king thinks when he keeps his own counsel and rewards the man whose face he has been slapping in public for the past three months? How should anyone know what is happening when Cromwell is blamed for the worst marriage the king has ever made and is now to lord it around us as earl, as damned Earl of damned-to-hell Essex?”

I find that I am pressed back against the wall and the silky feel of the tapestry is behind my outspread hands. I can feel the fabric grow damp with my cold sweat.