Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

This edition published by Harper 2017

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 2001

Cover design and illustration: Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover images © Hever Castle Ltd, Kent, UK / Bridgeman Images (portrait of Anne Boleyn (1507–36), Second wife of Henry VIII of England, 1534, English School); Shutterstock.com (frame).

Prelim pages, fragment of the letter written by Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII from the Tower of London in 1536, reproduced by permission of the British Library (OTHO.C.X.228)

End of text, reconstruction of a letter written by Mary Boleyn to the Secretary of State Thomas Cromwell in 1534. Lettering © Stephen Raw

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780006514008

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780007370146

Version: 2018-06-21

Dedication

For Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Spring 1521

Spring 1522

Summer 1522

Winter 1522

Spring 1523

Summer 1523

Winter 1523

Spring 1524

Summer 1524

Winter 1524

Spring 1525

Autumn 1525

Spring 1526

Summer 1526

Autumn 1526

Winter 1526

Spring 1527

Summer 1527

Autumn 1527

Winter 1527

Summer 1528

Autumn 1528

Spring 1529

Summer 1529

Autumn 1529

Christmas 1529

Summer 1530

Autumn 1530

Christmas 1530

Spring 1531

Summer 1531

Autumn 1531

Spring 1532

Summer 1532

Autumn 1532

Winter 1532

Spring 1533

Summer 1533

Autumn 1533

Winter 1533

Spring 1534

Summer 1534

Winter 1535

Spring 1535

Summer 1535

Autumn 1535

Winter 1536

Spring 1536

May 1536

Bonus Audio Content

Author’s Note

Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels

Gardens for The Gambia

About the Author

Also by Philippa Gregory

About the Publisher

Spring 1521

I could hear a roll of muffled drums. But I could see nothing but the lacing on the bodice of the lady standing in front of me, blocking my view of the scaffold. I had been at this court for more than a year and attended hundreds of festivities; but never before one like this.

By stepping to one side a little and craning my neck, I could see the condemned man, accompanied by his priest, walk slowly from the Tower towards the green where the wooden platform was waiting, the block of wood placed centre stage, the executioner dressed all ready for work in his shirtsleeves with a black hood over his head. It looked more like a masque than a real event, and I watched it as if it were a court entertainment. The king, seated on his throne, looked distracted, as if he was running through his speech of forgiveness in his head. Behind him stood my husband of one year, William Carey, my brother, George, and my father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, all looking grave. I wriggled my toes inside my silk slippers and wished the king would hurry up and grant clemency so that we could all go to breakfast. I was only thirteen years old, I was always hungry.

The Duke of Buckinghamshire, far away on the scaffold, put off his thick coat. He was close enough kin for me to call him uncle. He had come to my wedding and given me a gilt bracelet. My father told me that he had offended the king a dozen ways: he had royal blood in his veins and he kept too large a retinue of armed men for the comfort of a king not yet wholly secure on his throne; worst of all he was supposed to have said that the king had no son and heir now, could get no son and heir, and that he would likely die without a son to succeed him to the throne.

Such a thought must not be said out loud. The king, the court, the whole country knew that a boy must be born to the queen, and born soon. To suggest otherwise was to take the first step on the path that led to the wooden steps of the scaffold which the duke, my uncle, now climbed, firmly and without fear. A good courtier never refers to any unpalatable truths. The life of a court should always be merry.

Uncle Stafford came to the front of the stage to say his final words. I was too far from him to hear, and in any case I was watching the king, waiting for his cue to step forward and offer the royal pardon. This man standing on the scaffold, in the sunlight of the early morning, had been the king’s partner at tennis, his rival on the jousting field, his friend at a hundred bouts of drinking and gambling, they had been comrades since the king was a boy. The king was teaching him a lesson, a powerful public lesson, and then he would forgive him and we could all go to breakfast.

The little faraway figure turned to his confessor. He bowed his head for a blessing and kissed the rosary. He knelt before the block and clasped it in both hands. I wondered what it must be like, to put one’s cheek to the smooth waxed wood, to smell the warm wind coming off the river, to hear, overhead, the cry of seagulls. Even knowing as he did that this was a masque and not the real thing, it must be odd for Uncle to put his head down and know that the executioner was standing behind.

The executioner raised his axe. I looked towards the king. He was leaving his intervention very late. I glanced back at the stage. My uncle, head down, flung wide his arms, a sign of his consent, the signal that the axe could fall. I looked back to the king, he must rise to his feet now. But he still sat, his handsome face grim. And while I was still looking towards him there was another roll of drums, suddenly silenced, and then the thud of the axe, first once, then again and a third time: a sound as domestic as chopping wood. Disbelievingly, I saw the head of my uncle bounce into the straw and a scarlet gush of blood from the strangely stumpy neck. The black-hooded axeman put the great stained axe to one side and lifted the head by the thick curly hair, so that we could all see the strange mask-like thing: black with the blindfold from forehead to nose, and the teeth bared in a last defiant grin.

The king rose slowly from his seat and I thought, childishly, ‘Dear God, how awfully embarrassing this is going to be. He has left it too late. It has all gone wrong. He forgot to speak in time.’

But I was wrong. He did not leave it too late, he did not forget. He wanted my uncle to die before the court so that everybody might know that there was only one king, and that was Henry. There could be only one king, and that was Henry. And there would be a son born to this king – and even to suggest otherwise meant a shameful death.

The court returned quietly to Westminster Palace in three barges, rowed up the river. The men on the riverbank pulled off their hats and kneeled as the royal barge went swiftly past with a flurry of pennants and a glimpse of rich cloth. I was in the second barge with the ladies of the court, the queen’s barge. My mother was seated near me. In a rare moment of interest she glanced at me and remarked, ‘You’re very pale, Mary, are you feeling sick?’

‘I didn’t think he would be executed,’ I said. ‘I thought the king would forgive him.’

My mother leaned forward so that her mouth was at my ear and no-one could have heard us over the creaking of the boat and the beat of the rowers’ drum. ‘Then you are a fool,’ she said shortly. ‘And a fool to remark it. Watch and learn, Mary. There is no room for mistakes at court.’

Spring 1522

‘I am going to France tomorrow and I shall bring your sister Anne home with me,’ my father told me on the stairs of Westminster Palace. ‘She’s to have a place in the court of Queen Mary Tudor as she returns to England.’

‘I thought she’d stay in France,’ I said. ‘I thought she’d marry a French count or somebody.’

He shook his head. ‘We have other plans for her.’

I knew it was pointless to ask what plans they had. I would have to wait and see. My greatest dread was that they would have a better marriage for her than I had made, that I would have to follow the hem of her gown as she swept ahead of me for the rest of my life.

‘Wipe that surly look off your face,’ my father said sharply.

At once I smiled my courtier’s smile. ‘Of course, Father,’ I said obediently.

He nodded and I curtsied low as he left me. I came up from my curtsey and went slowly to my husband’s bedroom. I had a small looking glass on the wall and I stood before it and gazed at my own reflection. ‘It’ll be all right,’ I whispered to myself. ‘I am a Boleyn, that’s not a small thing to be, and my mother was born a Howard, that’s to be one of the greatest families in the country. I’m a Howard girl, a Boleyn girl.’ I bit my lip. ‘But so is she.’

I smiled my empty courtier’s smile and the reflected pretty face smiled back. ‘I am the youngest Boleyn girl, but not the least. I am married to William Carey, a man high in the king’s favour. I am the queen’s favourite and youngest lady in waiting. Nobody can spoil this for me. Not even she can take this from me.’

Anne and Father were delayed by spring storms and I found myself hoping, childishly, that her boat would sink and she would drown. At the thought of her death I felt a confusing pang of genuine distress mixed with elation. There could hardly be a world for me without Anne, there was hardly world enough for us both.

In any case, she arrived safely enough. I saw my father walking with her from the royal landing stage up the gravelled paths to the palace. Even from the first-floor window, looking down I could see the swing of her gown, the stylish cut of her cloak, and a moment of pure envy swept through me as I saw how it swirled around her. I waited till she was out of sight and then I hurried to my seat in the queen’s presence chamber.

I planned that she should first see me very much at home in the queen’s richly tapestried rooms, and that I should rise and greet her, very grown-up and gracious. But when the doors opened and she came in I was overcome by a rush of sudden joy, and I heard myself cry out ‘Anne!’ and ran to her, my skirt swishing. And Anne, who had come in with her head very high, and her arrogant dark look darting everywhere, suddenly stopped being a grand young lady of fifteen years and threw out her arms to me.

‘You’re taller,’ she said breathlessly, her arms tight around me, her cheek pressed to mine.

‘I’ve got such high heels.’ I inhaled the familiar perfume of her. Soap, and rosewater essence from her warm skin, lavender from her clothes.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes. You?’

‘Bien sur! How is it? Marriage?’

‘Not too bad. Nice clothes.’

‘And he?’

‘Very grand. Always with the king, high in his favour.’

‘Have you done it?’

‘Yes, ages ago.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘Very much.’

She pulled back to read my face.

‘Not too much,’ I said, qualifying. ‘He does try to be gentle. He always gives me wine. It’s just all rather awful, really.’

Her scowl melted away and she giggled, her eyes dancing. ‘How is it awful?’

‘He pisses in the pot, right where I can see!’

She collapsed in a wail of laughter. ‘No!’

‘Now, girls,’ my father said, coming up behind Anne. ‘Mary, take Anne and present her to the queen.’

At once I turned and led her through the press of ladies in waiting to where the queen was seated, erect in her chair at the fireside. ‘She’s strict,’ I warned Anne. ‘It’s not like France.’

Katherine of Aragon took the measure of Anne with one of her clear blue-eyed sweeps and I felt a pang of fear that she would prefer my sister to me.

Anne swept the queen an immaculate French curtsey, and came up as if she owned the palace. She spoke in a voice rippling with that seductive accent, her every gesture was that of the French court. I noted with glee the queen’s frosty response to Anne’s stylish manner. I drew her to a windowseat.

‘She hates the French,’ I said. ‘She’ll never have you around her if you keep that up.’

Anne shrugged. ‘They’re the most fashionable. Whether she likes them or not. What else?’

‘Spanish?’ I suggested. ‘If you have to pretend to be something else.’

Anne let out a snort of laughter. ‘And wear those hoods! She looks as if someone stuck a roof on her head.’

‘Ssshhh,’ I said reprovingly. ‘She’s a beautiful woman. The finest queen in Europe.’

‘She’s an old woman,’ Anne said cruelly. ‘Dressed like an old woman in the ugliest clothes in Europe, from the stupidest nation in Europe. We have no time for the Spanish.’

‘Who’s we?’ I asked coldly. ‘Not the English.’

‘Les Français!’ she said irritatingly. ‘Bien sur! I am all but French now.’

‘You’re English born and bred, like George and me,’ I said flatly. ‘And I was brought up at the French court just like you. Why do you always have to pretend to be different?’

‘Because everyone has to do something.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Every woman has to have something which singles her out, which catches the eye, which makes her the centre of attention. I am going to be French.’

‘So you pretend to be something that you’re not,’ I said disapprovingly.

She gleamed at me and her dark eyes measured me in a way that only Anne could do. ‘I pretend no more and no less than you do,’ she said quietly. ‘My little sister, my little golden sister, my milk and honey sister.’

I met her eyes, my lighter gaze into her black, and I knew that I was smiling her smile, that she was a dark mirror to me. ‘Oh that,’ I said, still refusing to acknowledge a hit. ‘Oh that.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘I shall be dark and French and fashionable and difficult and you shall be sweet and open and English and fair. What a pair we shall be. What man could resist us?’

I laughed, she could always make me laugh. I looked down from the leaded window and saw the king’s hunt returning to the stable yard.

‘Is that the king on his way?’ Anne asked. ‘Is he as handsome as they say?’

‘He’s wonderful. He really is. He dances and rides, and – oh – I can’t tell you!’

‘Will he come here now?’

‘Probably. He always comes to see her.’

Anne glanced dismissively to where the queen sat sewing with her ladies. ‘Can’t think why.’

‘Because he loves her,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful love story. Her married to his brother and his brother dying like that, so young, and then her not knowing what she should do or where she could go, and then him taking her and making her his wife and his queen. It’s a wonderful story and he loves her still.’

Anne raised a perfectly arched eyebrow and glanced around the room. All the ladies in waiting had heard the sound of the returning hunt and had spread the skirts of their gowns and moved in their seats so that they were placed like a little tableau to be viewed from the doorway when the door was flung open and Henry the king stood on the threshold and laughed with the boisterous joy of an indulged young man. ‘I came to surprise you and I catch you all unawares!’

The queen started. ‘How amazed we are!’ she said warmly. ‘And what a delight!’

The king’s companions and friends followed their master into the room. My brother George came in first, checked on the threshold at the sight of Anne, held his pleasure hidden behind his handsome courtier’s face, and bowed low over the queen’s hand. ‘Majesty.’ He breathed on her fingers. ‘I have been in the sun all the morning but I am only dazzled now.’

She smiled her small polite smile as she gazed down at his bent dark curly head. ‘You may greet your sister.’

‘Mary is here?’ George asked indifferently, as if he had not seen us both.

‘Your other sister, Anne,’ the queen corrected him. A small gesture from her hand, heavy with rings, indicated that the two of us should step forward. George swept us a bow without moving from the prime place near the throne.

‘Has she changed much?’ the queen asked.

George smiled. ‘I hope she will change more with a model such as you before her eyes.’

The queen gave a little laugh. ‘Very pretty,’ she said appreciatively, and waved him towards us.

‘Hello, little Miss Beautiful,’ he said to Anne. ‘Hello, Mistress Beautiful,’ to me.

Anne regarded him from under her dark eyelashes. ‘I wish I could hug you,’ she said.

‘We’ll go out, as soon as we can,’ George decreed. ‘You look well, Annamaria.’

‘I am well,’ she said. ‘And you?’

‘Never better.’

‘What’s little Mary’s husband like?’ she asked curiously, watching William as he entered and bowed over the queen’s hand.

‘Great-grandson of the third Earl of Somerset, and very high in the king’s favour.’ George volunteered the only matters of interest: his family connections and his closeness to the throne. ‘She’s done well. Did you know you were brought home to be married, Anne?’

‘Father hasn’t said who.’

‘I think you’re to go to Ormonde,’ George said.

‘A countess,’ Anne said with a triumphant smile to me.

‘Only Irish,’ I rejoined at once.

My husband stepped back from the queen’s chair, caught sight of us, and then raised an eyebrow at Anne’s intense provocative stare. The king took his seat beside the queen and looked around the room.

‘My dear Mary Carey’s sister has come to join our company,’ the queen said. ‘This is Anne Boleyn.’

‘George’s sister?’ the king asked.

My brother bowed. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

The king smiled at Anne. She dropped him a curtsey straight down, like a bucket in a well, head up, and a small challenging smile on her lips. The king was not taken, he liked easy women, he liked smiling women. He did not like women who fixed him with a dark challenging gaze.

‘And are you happy to be with your sister again?’ he asked me.

I dipped a low curtsey and came up a little flushed. ‘Of course, Your Majesty,’ I said sweetly. ‘What girl would not long for the company of a sister like Anne?’

His eyebrows twitched together a little at that. He preferred the open bawdy humour of men to the barbed wit of women. He looked from me to Anne’s slightly quizzical expression and then he got the joke and laughed out loud, and snapped his fingers and held out his hand to me. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘No-one can overshadow the bride in her early years of wedded bliss. And both Carey and I have a preference for fair-haired women.’

Everyone laughed at that, especially Anne who was dark, and the queen whose auburn hair had faded to brown and grey. They would have been fools to do anything but laugh heartily at the king’s pleasantry. And I laughed as well, with more joy in my heart than they had in theirs, I should think.

The musicians played an opening chord, and Henry drew me to him. ‘You’re a very pretty girl,’ he said approvingly. ‘Carey tells me that he so likes a young bride that he’ll never bed any but twelve-year-old virgins ever again.’

It was hard to keep my chin up and my smile on my face. We turned in the dance and the king smiled down on me.

‘He’s a lucky man,’ he said graciously.

‘He is lucky to have your favour,’ I started, stumbling towards a compliment.

‘Luckier to have yours, I should think!’ he said with a sudden bellow of laughter. Then he swept me into a dance, and I whirled down the line of dancers and saw my brother’s quick glance of approval, and what was sweeter still: Anne’s envious eyes as the King of England danced past her with me in his arms.

Anne slipped into the routine of the English court and waited for her wedding. She still had not met her husband-to-be, and the arguments about the dowry and settlements looked as if they would take forever. Not even the influence of Cardinal Wolsey, who had his finger in this as well as every other pie in the bakehouse of England, could speed the business along. In the meantime she flirted as elegantly as a Frenchwoman, served the king’s sister with a nonchalant grace, and squandered hours every day in gossiping, riding, and playing with George and me. We were alike in tastes and not far apart in age; I was the baby at fourteen to Anne’s fifteen and George’s nineteen years. We were the closest of kin and yet almost strangers. I had been at the French court with Anne while George had been learning his trade as a courtier in England. Now, reunited, we became known around the court as the three Boleyns, the three delightful Boleyns, and the king would often look round when he was in his private rooms and cry out for the three Boleyns and someone would be sent running from one end of the castle to fetch us.

Our first task in life was to enhance the king’s many entertainments: jousting, tennis, riding, hunting, hawking, dancing. He liked to live in a continual roar of excitement and it was our duty to ensure that he was never bored. But sometimes, very rarely, in the quiet time before dinner, or if it rained and he could not hunt, he would find his own way to the queen’s apartments, and she would put down her sewing or her reading and send us away with a word.

If I lingered I might see her smile at him, in a way that she never smiled at anyone else, not even at her daughter the Princess Mary. And once, when I had entered without realising the king was there, I found him seated at her feet like a lover, with his head tipped back to rest in her lap as she stroked his red-gold curls off his forehead and twisted them round her fingers where they glowed as bright as the rings he had given her when she had been a young princess with hair as bright as his, and he had married her against the advice of everyone.

I tiptoed away without them seeing me. It was so rare that they were alone together that I did not want to be the one to break the spell. I went to find Anne. She was walking in the cold garden with George, a bunch of snowdrops in her hand, her cloak wrapped tight about her.

‘The king is with the queen,’ I said as I joined them. ‘On their own.’

Anne raised an eyebrow. ‘In bed?’ she asked curiously.

I flushed. ‘Of course not, it’s two in the afternoon.’

Anne smiled at me. ‘You must be a happy wife if you think you can’t bed before nightfall.’

George extended his other arm to me. ‘She is a happy wife,’ he said on my behalf. ‘William was telling the king that he had never known a sweeter girl. But what were they doing, Mary?’

‘Just sitting together,’ I said. I had a strong feeling that I did not want to describe the scene to Anne.

‘She won’t get a son that way,’ Anne said crudely.

‘Hush,’ George and I said at once. The three of us drew a little closer and lowered our voices.

‘She must be losing hope of it,’ George said. ‘What is she now? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?’

‘Only thirty-seven,’ I said indignantly.

‘Does she still have her monthly courses?’

‘Oh George!’

‘Yes she does,’ Anne said, matter-of-factly. ‘But little good they do her. It’s her fault. It can’t be laid at the king’s door with his bastard from Bessie Blount learning to ride his pony.’

‘There’s still plenty of time,’ I said defensively.

‘Time for her to die and him to remarry?’ Anne said thoughtfully. ‘Yes. And she’s not strong, is she?’

‘Anne!’ For once my recoil from her was genuine. ‘That’s vile.’

George glanced around once more to ensure that there was no-one near us in the garden. A couple of Seymour girls were walking with their mother but we paid no attention to them. Their family were our chief rivals for power and advancement, we liked to pretend not to see them.

‘It’s vile but it’s true,’ he said bluntly. ‘Who’s to be the next king if he doesn’t have a son?’

‘Princess Mary could marry,’ I suggested.

‘A foreign prince brought in to rule England? It’d never hold,’ George said. ‘And we can’t tolerate another war for the throne.’

‘Princess Mary could become queen in her own right and not marry,’ I said wildly. ‘Rule as a queen on her own.’

Anne gave a snort of disbelief, her breath a little cloud on the cold air. ‘Oh aye,’ she said derisively. ‘She could ride astride and learn to joust. A girl can’t rule a country like this, the great lords’d eat her alive.’

The three of us paused before the fountain that stood in the centre of the garden. Anne, with her well-trained grace, sat on the rim of the basin and looked into the water, a few goldfish swam hopefully towards her and she pulled off her embroidered glove and dabbled her long fingers in the water. They came up, little mouths gaping, to nibble at the air. George and I watched her, as she watched her own rippling reflection.

‘Does the king think of this?’ she asked her mirrored image.

‘Constantly,’ George answered. ‘There is nothing in the world more important. I think he would legitimise Bessie Blount’s boy and make him heir if there’s no issue from the queen.’

‘A bastard on the throne?’

‘He wasn’t christened Henry Fitzroy for no reason,’ George replied. ‘He’s acknowledged as the king’s own son. If Henry lives long enough to make the country safe for him, if he can get the Seymours to agree, and us Howards, if Wolsey gets the church behind him and the foreign powers … what should stop him?’

‘One little boy, and he a bastard,’ Anne said thoughtfully. ‘One little girl of six, one elderly queen and a king in the prime of his life.’ She looked up at the two of us, dragging her gaze away from her own pale face in the water. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked. ‘Something has to happen. What’s it going to be?’

Cardinal Wolsey sent a message to the queen asking us to take part in a masque on Shrove Tuesday which he was to stage at his house, York Place. The queen asked me to read the letter and my voice trembled with excitement over the words: a great masque, a fortress named Chateau Vert, and five ladies to dance with the five knights who would besiege the fort. ‘Oh! Your Majesty …’ I started and then fell silent.

‘Oh! Your Majesty, what?’

‘I was just wondering if I might be allowed to go,’ I said very humbly. ‘To watch the revels.’

‘I think you were wondering a little more than that?’ she asked me with a gleam in her eyes.

‘I was wondering if I might be one of the dancers,’ I confessed. ‘It does sound very wonderful.’

‘Yes, you may be,’ she said. ‘How many ladies does the cardinal command of me?’

‘Five,’ I said quietly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Anne sit back in her seat and close her eyes for just a moment. I knew exactly what she was doing, I could hear her voice in my head as loudly as if she was shouting: ‘Choose me! Choose me! Choose me!’

It worked. ‘Mistress Anne Boleyn,’ the queen said thoughtfully. ‘The Queen Mary of France, the Countess of Devon, Jane Parker, and you, Mary.’

Anne and I exchanged a rapid glance. We would be an oddly assorted quintet: the king’s aunt, his sister Queen Mary, and the heiress Jane Parker who was likely to be our sister-in-law, if her father and ours could agree her dowry, and the two of us.

‘Will we wear green?’ Anne asked.

The queen smiled at her. ‘Oh, I should think so,’ she said. ‘Mary, why don’t you write a note to the cardinal and tell him that we will be delighted to attend, and ask him to send the master of the revels so that we can all choose costumes and plan our dances?’

‘I’ll do it.’ Anne rose from her chair and went to the table where the pen and ink and paper were ready. ‘Mary has such a cramped hand he will think we are writing a refusal.’

The queen laughed. ‘Ah, the French scholar,’ she said gently. ‘You shall write to the cardinal then, Mistress Boleyn, in your beautiful French, or shall you write to him in Latin?’

Anne’s gaze did not waver. ‘Whichever Your Majesty prefers,’ she said steadily. ‘I am reasonably fluent in both.’

‘Tell him that we are all eager to play our part in his Chateau Vert,’ the queen said smoothly. ‘What a shame you can’t write Spanish.’

The arrival of the master of the revels to teach us our steps for the dance was the signal for a savage battle fought with smiles and the sweetest words as to who would play which role in the masque. In the end the queen herself intervened and gave us our parts without allowing any discussion. She gave me the role of Kindness, the king’s sister Queen Mary got the plum part of Beauty, Jane Parker was Constancy – ‘Well she does cling on so,’ Anne whispered to me. Anne herself was Perseverance. ‘Shows what she thinks of you,’ I whispered back. Anne had the grace to giggle.

We were to be attacked by Indian women – in reality the choristers of the royal chapel – before being rescued by the king and his chosen friends. We were warned that the king would be disguised and we should take great care not to penetrate the transparent ruse of a golden mask strapped on a golden head, taller than anyone else in the room.

It was a great romp in the end, far more fun than I had expected, much more of a play-fight than a dance. George flung rose petals at me and I drenched him with a shower of rosewater. The choristers were just little boys and they got over-excited and attacked the knights and were swung off their feet and spun around and dumped, dizzy and giggly, on the ground. When we ladies came out from the castle and danced with the mystery knights it was the tallest knight who came to dance with me, the king himself, and I, still breathless from my battle with George, and with rose petals in my headdress and my hair, and sugared fruit tumbling out of the folds of my gown, found that I was laughing and giving my hand to him, and dancing with him as if he were an ordinary man and I little more than a kitchen maid at a country romp.

When the signal for the unmasking should have come the king cried out: ‘Play on! Let’s dance some more!’ and instead of turning and taking another partner he led me out again, a country dance when we went hand to hand and I could see his eyes gleaming at me through the slits in his golden mask. Reckless and laughing, I smiled back up at him and let that sunny approbation sink into my skin.

‘I envy your husband when your dress comes off tonight, you will shower him with sweets,’ he said in an undertone when the dance brought us side by side as we watched another couple in the centre of the ring.

I could not think of a witty reply, these were not the formal compliments of courtly love. The image of a husband being showered with sweets was too domestic, and too erotic.

‘Surely you should envy nothing,’ I said. ‘Surely everything is all yours.’

‘Why would that be?’ he asked.

‘Because you are king,’ I started, forgetting that he was supposed to be in impenetrable disguise. ‘King of Chateau Vert,’ I recovered. ‘King for a day. It should be King Henry who envies you, for you have won a great siege in one afternoon.’

‘And what d’you think of King Henry?’

I looked up at him, my innocent look. ‘He is the greatest king that this country has ever known. It is an honour to be at his court and a privilege to be near him.’

‘Could you love him as a man?’

I looked down and blushed. ‘I would not dare to think of it. He has never so much as glanced towards me.’

‘Oh he has glanced,’ the king said firmly. ‘You can be sure of that. And if he glanced more than once, Miss Kindness, would you be true to your name and be kind to him?’

‘Your …’ I bit my lip and stopped myself saying: ‘Your Majesty’. I looked around for Anne; more than anything, I wanted her by my side and her wits at my service.

‘You are named Kindness,’ he reminded me.

I smiled at him, peeping up through my golden mask. ‘I am,’ I said. ‘And I suppose I should have to be kind.’

The musicians finished the dance and waited, poised for the king’s orders. ‘Unmask!’ he said and tore his own mask off his face. I saw the king of England, gave a wonderful little gasp and staggered.

‘She’s fainting!’ George cried out, it was beautifully done. I fell into the king’s arms as Anne, fast as a snake, unpinned my mask, and – brilliantly – pulled off my headdress so that my golden hair tumbled down like a stream over the king’s arm.

I opened my eyes, his face was very close. I could smell the perfume on his hair, his breath was on my cheek, I watched his lips, he was close enough to kiss me.

‘You have to be kind to me,’ he reminded me.

‘You are the king …’ I said incredulously.

‘And you have promised to be kind to me.’

‘I didn’t know it was you, Your Majesty.’

He lifted me gently and carried me over to the window. He opened it himself and the cold air blew in. I tossed my head and let my hair ripple in the draught.

‘Did you faint for fright?’ he asked, his voice very low.

I looked down at my hands. ‘For delight,’ I whispered, as sweet as a virgin in confession.

He bent his head and kissed my hands and then rose to his feet. ‘And now we dine!’ he called out.

I looked over to Anne. She was untying her mask and watching me with a long calculating look, the Boleyn look, the Howard look that says: what has happened here, and how may I turn it to my advantage? It was as if under her golden mask was another beautiful mask of skin, and only beneath that was the real woman. As I looked back at her she gave me a small secret smile.

The king gave his arm to the queen, she rose from her chair as gay as if she had been enjoying watching her husband flirt with me; but as he turned to lead her away she paused and her blue eyes looked long and hard at me, as if she were saying goodbye to a friend.

‘I hope you will soon recover from your faintness, Mistress Carey,’ she said gently. ‘Perhaps you should go to your room.’

‘I think she is light-headed from lack of food,’ George interposed quickly. ‘May I bring her in to dine?’

Anne stepped forward. ‘The king frightened her when he unmasked. No-one guessed for a moment that it was you, Your Majesty!’

The king laughed in delight, and the court laughed with him. Only the queen heard how the three of us had turned her order so that despite her declared wishes, I would be brought in to dine. She measured the strength of the three of us. I was no Bessie Blount, who was next to nobody; I was a Boleyn, and the Boleyns worked together.

‘Come and dine with us then, Mary,’ she said. The words were inviting but there was no warmth in them at all.

We were to sit where we pleased, the knights of the Chateau Vert and the ladies, all mixed up informally at a round table. Cardinal Wolsey as the host sat opposite the king with the queen at the third point on the table and the rest of us scattered where we chose. George put me next to him and Anne summoned my husband to her side and diverted him, while the king, seated opposite me, stared at me and I, carefully, looked away. On Anne’s right was Henry Percy of Northumberland, on George’s other side was Jane Parker, watching me intently, as if she were trying to discover the trick of being a desirable girl.

I ate only a little, though there were pies and pasties and fine meats and game. I took a little salad, the queen’s favourite dish, and drank wine and water. My father joined the table during the meal and sat beside my mother who whispered quickly in his ear and I saw his glance flick over me, like a horse-trader assessing the value of a filly. Whenever I looked up the king’s eyes were on me, whenever I looked away I was conscious of his stare still on my face.

When we had finished, the cardinal suggested that we go to the hall and listen to some music. Anne was at my side and steered me down the stairs so that when the king arrived the two of us were seated on a bench against the wall. It was easy and natural for him to pause to ask me how I did now. Natural that Anne and I should stand as he came past us, and that he should sit on the vacant bench and invite me to sit beside him. Anne drifted away and chattered to Henry Percy, shielding the king and me from the court, most especially from the smiling gaze of Queen Katherine. My father went up to speak to her while the musicians played. It was all done with complete ease and comfort, and it meant that the king and I were all but concealed in a crowded room with music loud enough to drown our whispered conversation, and every member of the Boleyn family well placed to hide what was going on.

‘You are better now?’ he asked me in an undertone.

‘Never better in all my life, sire.’

‘I am riding out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Would you care to come with me?’

‘If Her Majesty can spare me,’ I said, determined not to risk the queen’s displeasure.

‘I will ask the queen to release you for the morning. I shall tell her that you need the fresh air.’

I smiled. ‘What a fine physician you would make, Your Majesty. If you can make a diagnosis and provide the cure all in the space of a day.’

‘You must be an obedient patient and do whatever I advise,’ he warned me.

‘I will.’ I looked down at my fingers. I could feel his gaze on me. I was soaring, higher than I could have dreamed.

‘I may order you to bed for days at a time,’ he said, his voice very low.

I snatched a quick look at his intense gaze on my face and felt myself blush and heard myself stammer into silence. The music abruptly stopped. ‘Do play again!’ my mother said. Queen Katherine looked around for the king and saw him seated with me. ‘Shall we dance?’ she asked.

It was a royal command. Anne and Henry Percy took their places in a set, the musicians started to play. I rose to my feet and Henry went to sit beside his wife and watch us. George was my partner.

‘Head up,’ he snapped as he took my hand. ‘You look hangdog.’

‘She’s watching me,’ I whispered back.

‘Course she is. More to the point he’s watching you. And most important of all, Father and Uncle Howard are watching you, and they expect you to carry yourself as a young woman on the rise. Up you go, Mistress Carey, and all of us go up with you.’

I raised my head at that and I smiled at my brother as if I were carefree. I danced as gracefully as I could, I dipped and turned and twirled under his careful hand. And when I looked up at the king and the queen they were both watching me.

They held a family conference at my uncle Howard’s great house in London. We met in his library where the dark bound books muffled the noise from the streets. Two men in our Howard livery were stationed outside the door to prevent any interruptions, and to ensure that no-one stopped and eavesdropped. We were to discuss family business, family secrets. No-one but a Howard could come near.

I was the very cause and subject of the meeting. I was the hub around which these events would turn. I was the Boleyn pawn that must be played to advantage. Everything was concentrated on me. I felt my very wrists throb with a sense of my own importance, and a contradictory flutter of anxiety that I would fail them.

‘Is she fertile?’ Uncle Howard asked my mother.

‘Her courses are regular enough and she’s a healthy girl.’

My uncle nodded. ‘If the king has her, and she conceives his bastard, then we have much to play for.’ I noticed with a sort of terrified concentration that the fur on the hem of his sleeves brushed against the wood of the table, the richness of his coat took on a lustre from the light of the flames of the fire behind him. ‘She can’t sleep in Carey’s bed any more. The marriage has to be put aside while the king favours her.’

I gave a little gasp. I could not think who would say such a thing to my husband. And besides, we had sworn that we would stay together, that marriage was for the making of children, that God had put us together and no man could put us apart.

‘I don’t …’ I started.

Anne tweaked at my gown. ‘Hush,’ she hissed. The seed pearls on her French hood winked at me like bright-eyed conspirators.

‘I’ll speak to Carey,’ my father said.

George took my hand. ‘If you conceive a child the king has to know that it is his and none other’s.’

‘I can’t be his mistress,’ I whispered back.

‘No choice.’ He shook his head.

‘I can’t do it,’ I said out loud. I gripped tightly on my brother’s comforting clasp and looked down the long dark wood table to my uncle, as sharp as a falcon with black eyes that missed nothing. ‘Sir, I am sorry, but I love the queen. She’s a great lady and I can’t betray her. I promised before God to cleave only to my husband, and surely I shouldn’t betray him? I know the king is the king; but you can’t want me to? Surely? Sir, I can’t do it.’

He did not answer me. Such was his power that he did not even consider replying. ‘What am I supposed to do with this delicate conscience?’ he asked the air above the table.

‘Leave it to me,’ Anne said simply. ‘I can explain things to Mary.’

‘You’re a little young for the task of tutor.’

She met his look with her quiet confidence. ‘I was reared in the most fashionable court in the world,’ she said. ‘And I was not idle. I watched everything. I learned all there was to see. I know what is needed here, and I can teach Mary how to behave.’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘You had better not have studied flirtation too closely, Miss Anne.’

Her serenity was that of a nun. ‘Of course not.’

I felt my shoulder lift, as if I would shrug her away. ‘I don’t see why I should do what Anne says.’

I had disappeared, though this whole meeting was supposed to be about me. Anne had stolen their attention. ‘Well, I shall trust you to coach your sister. George, you too. You know how the king is with women, keep Mary in his sight.’

They nodded. There was a brief silence.

‘I’ll speak with Carey’s father,’ my father volunteered. ‘William will be expecting it. He’s no fool.’

My uncle glanced down the table to Anne and George where they stood either side of me, more like jailers than friends. ‘You help your sister,’ he ordered them. ‘Whatever she needs to ensnare the king, you give her. Whatever arts she needs, whatever goods she should have, whatever skills she lacks, you get them for her. We are looking to the two of you to get her into his bed. Don’t forget it. There will be great rewards. But if you fail, there will be nothing for us at all. Remember it.’

My parting with my husband was curiously painful. I walked into our bedroom as my maid was packing my things to take them to the queen’s rooms. He stood amid the chaos of shoes and gowns thrown on the bed, and cloaks tossed over chairs, and jewel boxes everywhere; and his young face showed his shock.

‘I see you are on the rise, madam.’

He was a handsome young man, one that any woman might have favoured. I thought that if we had not been ordered by our families into this marriage and now out of it that we might have liked each other. ‘I am sorry,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You know that I have to do what my uncle and my father tell me.’

‘I know that,’ he said bluntly. ‘I have to do what they all order as well.’

To my relief, Anne appeared in the doorway, her mischievous smile very bright. ‘How now, William Carey? Well met!’ It seemed as if it were her greatest joy to see her brother-in-law amid the mess of my things and the wreckage of his own hopes for a marriage and a son.

‘Anne Boleyn.’ He bowed briefly. ‘Have you come to help your sister onwards and upwards?’

‘Of course.’ She gleamed at him. ‘As we all should do. None of us will suffer if Mary is favoured.’

She held his gaze for one fearless moment, and it was he who turned away to look out of the window. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘The king bids me to go hunting with him.’ He hesitated a moment and then he came across the room to where I stood surrounded by the scatterings of my wardrobe. Gently, he took my hand and kissed it. ‘I am sorry for you. And I am sorry for me. When you are sent back to me, perhaps a month from now, perhaps a year, I will try to remember this day, and you looking like a child, a little lost among all these clothes. I will try to remember that you were innocent of any plotting; that today at least, you were more a girl than a Boleyn.’

The queen observed that I was now a single woman, lodged with Anne as my bedfellow in a little room off her chambers, without comment. Her outward manner to me changed not at all. She remained courteous and quiet-spoken. If she wanted me to do something for her: write a note, sing, take her lap dog from the room, or send a message, she asked me as politely as she had ever done. But she never again asked me to read to her from the Bible, she never asked me to sit at her feet while she sewed, she never blessed me when I went to bed. I was no longer her favourite little maid.

It was a relief to go to bed at night with Anne. We drew the curtains around us so that we were safe to whisper in the shadowy darkness without being overheard and it was like France in the days of our childhood. Sometimes George would leave the king’s rooms and come to find us, and climb onto the high bed, balance his candle perilously on the bedhead, and bring out his pack of cards or his dice and play with us while the other girls in nearby rooms slept, not knowing that a man was hidden in our chamber.

They did not lecture me about the role I was to play. Cunningly, they waited for me to come to them and tell them that it was beyond me.

I said nothing while my clothes were moved from one end of the palace to the other. I said nothing when the whole court packed and moved to the king’s favourite palace, Eltham in Kent, for the spring. I said nothing when my husband rode beside me during the progress and talked to me kindly of the weather and the condition of my horse, which was Jane Parker’s, lent under protest, as her contribution to the family ambition. But when I had George and Anne to myself in the garden at Eltham Palace, I said to George:

‘I don’t think I can do this.’

‘Do what?’ he asked unhelpfully. We were supposed to be walking the queen’s dog, which had been carried on the pommel of the saddle for the day’s ride and was thoroughly jolted and sick-looking. ‘Come on, Flo!’ he said encouragingly. ‘Seek! Seek!’

‘I can’t be with my husband and the king at the same time,’ I said. ‘I can’t laugh with the king when my husband is watching.’

‘Why not?’ Anne rolled a ball along the ground for Flo to chase after. The little dog watched it go without interest. ‘Oh go on, you stupid thing!’ Anne exclaimed.

‘Because I feel all wrong.’

‘D’you know better than your mother?’ Anne asked bluntly.

‘Of course not!’

‘Better than your father? Your uncle?’

I shook my head.

‘They are planning a great future for you,’ Anne said solemnly. ‘Any girl in England would die for your chances. You are on the way to becoming the favourite of the king of England, and you are simpering round the garden wondering if you can laugh at his jokes? You’ve got about as much sense as Flo here.’ She put the tip of her riding boot under Flo’s unwilling arse and pushed her gently along the path. Flo sat down, as stubborn and as unhappy as me.

‘Gently,’ George cautioned her. He took my cold hand and tucked it in the crook of his elbow. ‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ he said. ‘William was riding with you today to show that he gives his consent, not to make you feel guilty. He knows that the king must have his way. We all know that. William’s happy enough about it. There will be favours for him which you will have been the means of his getting. You’re doing your duty by him by advancing his family. He’s grateful to you. You’re not doing anything wrong.’

I hesitated. I looked from George’s brown honest eyes to Anne’s averted face. ‘There’s another thing,’ I said, forced to confess.

‘What is it?’ George asked. Anne’s eyes followed Flo but I knew that her attention was turned on me.

‘I don’t know how to do it,’ I said quietly. ‘You know, William did it once a week or so, and that in the dark, and quickly done, and I never much liked it. I don’t know what it is I am supposed to do.’

George gave a little gulp of laughter and put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to laugh. But you have it all wrong. He doesn’t want a woman who knows what to do. There are dozens of them in every bath house in the City. He wants you. It’s you he likes. And he’ll like it if you are a little shy and a little uncertain. That’s all right.’

‘Hulloah!’ came a shout from behind us. ‘The Three Boleyns!’

We turned and there was the king on the upper terrace, still dressed in his travelling cloak with his hat rakishly set on his head.

‘Here we go.’ George swept a low bow. Anne and I sank down into our curtseys together.

‘Are you not tired from your ride?’ the king asked. The question was general but he was looking at me.

‘Not at all.’

‘That’s a pretty little mare you were riding, but too short in the back. I shall give you a new horse,’ he said.

‘Your Majesty is very kind,’ I said. ‘She’s a borrowed horse. I should be glad to have a horse of my own.’

‘You shall pick out your choice in the stables,’ he said. ‘Come, we can go and look now.’

He held out his arm to me and I put my fingers gently on the rich cloth of his sleeve.

‘I can hardly feel you.’ He put his hand on my own and pressed it tighter. ‘There. I want to know that I have you, Mistress Carey.’ His eyes were very blue and bright, he took in the top of my French hood and then my golden-brown hair, smoothed back under the hood, and then my face. ‘I do want to know that I have you.’

I felt my mouth go dry and I smiled, despite the breathless feeling that was something between fear and desire. ‘I am happy to be with you.’

‘Are you?’ he asked, suddenly intent. ‘Are you really? I want no false coin from you. There are many who would urge you to be with me. I want you to come of your own free will.’

‘Oh Your Majesty! As if I did not dance with you at Cardinal Wolsey’s revels without even knowing that it was you!’

He was pleased with the recollection. ‘Oh yes! And you all but fainted when I unmasked and you discovered me. Who did you think it was?’

‘I didn’t think. I know it was foolish of me. I thought you were perhaps a stranger in court, a new and handsome stranger, and I was so pleased to be dancing with you.’

He laughed. ‘Oh Mistress Carey, such a sweet face and such naughty thoughts! You hoped that a handsome stranger had come to court and chose to dance with you?’

‘I don’t mean to be naughty.’ I was afraid for a moment that it was too sugary even for his taste. ‘I just forgot how I should behave when you asked me to dance. I am sure I would never do anything wrong. There was just a moment when I –’

‘When you?’

‘When I forgot,’ I said softly.

We reached the stone archway which led into the stables. The king paused in the shelter of the arch and turned me towards him. I could feel myself alive in every part of my body, from my riding boots, slippery on the cobblestones, to my upward glance at his face.

‘Would you forget again?’

I hesitated, and then Anne stepped forward and said lightly: ‘What horse does Your Majesty have in mind for my sister? I think you’ll find she’s a good horsewoman.’

He led the way into the stables, releasing me for a moment. George and he looked at one horse and then another. Anne came to my side.

‘You have to keep him coming forward,’ she said. ‘Keep him coming forward but never let him think that you come forward yourself. He wants to feel that he is pursuing you, not that you are entrapping him. When he gives you the choice of coming forward or running away, like then – you must always run away.’

The king turned and smiled at me as George told a stable boy to lead a handsome bay horse from the stall. ‘But don’t run too fast,’ my sister warned. ‘Remember he has to catch you.’

I danced with the king that evening before the whole of the court, and the next day I rode my new horse at his side when we went hunting. The queen, seated at the high table, watched us dance together, and when we rode out she waved farewell to him from the great door of the palace. Everyone knew that he was courting me, everyone knew that I would consent when I was ordered to do so. The only person who did not know this was the king. He thought that the pace of the courtship was determined by his desire.

The first rent day came a few weeks later in April when my father was appointed treasurer of the king’s household, a post which brought him access to the king’s daily wealth which he could peculate as he thought best. My father met me as we went in to dinner, and took me from the queen’s train for a quiet word as Her Majesty went to her place at the top table.

‘Your uncle and I are pleased with you,’ he said briefly. ‘Be guided by your brother and sister, they tell me that you are doing well.’

I bobbed a little curtsey.

‘This is just the start for us,’ he reminded me. ‘You’ve got to have him and hold him, remember.’

I flinched a little from the words of the wedding mass. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I don’t forget.’

‘Has he done anything yet?’

I glanced towards the great hall where the king and the queen were taking their place. The trumpeters were in position to announce the arrival of the procession of servers from the kitchen.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Just eyes and words.’

‘And you reply?’

‘With smiles.’ I did not tell my father that I was half-delirious with pleasure at being courted by the most powerful man in the kingdom. It was not hard to follow my sister’s advice and smile and smile at him. It was not hard to blush and feel that I wanted to run away and at the same time wanted to draw closer.

My father nodded. ‘Good enough. You may go to your place.’

I curtsied again and hurried into the hall just ahead of the servers. The queen looked at me a little sharply, as if she might reprimand me, but then she glanced sideways and caught sight of her husband’s face. His expression was fixed, his gaze locked onto me, as I made my way up the hall and took my place among the ladies in waiting. It was an odd expression, intent, as if for a moment he could see nothing and hear nothing, as if the whole of the great hall had melted away for him and all he could see was me in my blue gown with my blue hood and my fair hair smoothed away off my face, and a smile trembling on my lips as I felt his desire. The queen took in the heat of his look, pressed her lips together, smiled her thin smile, and looked away.

He came to her rooms that evening. ‘Shall we have some music?’ he asked her.

‘Yes, Mistress Carey can sing for us,’ she said pleasantly, gesturing me forward.

‘Her sister Anne has the sweeter voice,’ the king countermanded. Anne threw me a swift triumphant glance.

‘Will you sing us one of your French songs, Miss Anne?’ the king asked.

Anne swept one of her graceful curtsies. ‘Your Majesty has only to command,’ she said, the hint of the French accent strong in her voice.

The queen watched this exchange, I could see that she was wondering if the king’s fancy was moving to another Boleyn girl. But he had outwitted her. Anne sat on a stool in the middle of the room, her lute on her lap, her voice sweet – as he said, sweeter than mine. The queen sat in her usual chair, with padded embroidered arms and a cushioned back which she never leaned against. The king did not take the matching chair beside hers, he strolled over to me and took Anne’s vacated space, and glanced at the sewing in my hands.

‘Very fine work,’ he remarked.

‘Shirts for the poor,’ I said. ‘The queen is good to the poor.’

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘How quickly your needle goes in and out, I should make such a knot of it. How tiny and deft your fingers are.’

His head was bent towards my hands, I found I was looking at the base of his neck and thinking that I should like to touch the thick curling hair.

‘Your hands must be half the size of mine,’ he said idly. ‘Stretch them out and show me.’

I stabbed the needle into the shirts for the poor people and stretched out my hand to show him, palm up, towards him. His gaze never left my face as he put his hand out too, palm to palm towards mine yet not touching. I could feel the warmth of his hand against my hand, but I could not take my eyes from his face. His moustache curled a little around his lips, I wondered if the hair would be soft, like my husband’s dark sparse curls, or wiry like spun gold. It looked as if it might be strong and scratchy, his kiss might buff my face to redness, everyone would know we had been kissing. Beneath the little curls of hair his lips were sensual, I could not take my eyes from them, I could not help but think about the touch of them, the taste of them.

Slowly, he brought his hand closer to mine, like dancers closing in a pavane. The heel of his hand touched the heel of mine and I felt the touch like a bite. I jumped a little and I saw his lips curve as he saw that his touch was a shock to me. My cool palm and fingers extended along his, my fingers stopping short of his at the top joints. I felt the sensation of his warm skin, a callus on one finger from archery, the hard palms of a man who rides and plays tennis and hunts and can hold a lance and a sword all the day. I dragged my gaze from his lips and took in his whole face, the bright alertness of his gaze focused on me like a sun through a burning glass, the desire which radiated from him like heat.

‘Your skin is so soft.’ His voice was as low as a whisper. ‘And your hands are tiny, as I thought.’

The excuse of measuring the span of our fingers had long been exhausted, but we remained still, palm to palm, eyes on each other’s face. Then slowly, irresistibly, his hand cupped around mine and he held it, gently but firmly within his own.

Anne finished one song and started another, without a change of key, without a break in her voice, keeping the spell of the moment.

It was the queen who interrupted. ‘Your Majesty is disturbing Mistress Carey,’ she said, with a little laugh as if the sight of her husband handfast with another woman, twenty-three years her junior, was amusing. ‘Your friend William will not thank you for making his wife idle. She has promised to hem these shirts for the nuns at Whitchurch nunnery and they are not half done.’

He let me go and turned his head to his wife. ‘William will forgive me,’ he said carelessly.

‘I am going to have a game of cards,’ the queen said. ‘Will you play with me, husband?’

For a moment I thought she had done it, drawn him away from me by his long-established affection. But as he rose to his feet to do as she wanted, he glanced back and saw me looking up at him. There was almost no calculation in my look – almost none. I was nothing more than a young woman gazing up at a man, with desire in her eyes.

‘I shall have Mistress Carey as my partner. Shall you send for George and have another Boleyn for your partner? We could have a matched pair.’

‘Jane Parker can play with me,’ the queen said coolly.

‘You did that very well,’ Anne said that night. She was seated by the fire in our bedroom, brushing her long dark hair, her head tipped to the side so that it fell like a scented waterfall over her shoulder. ‘The bit with the hands was very good. What were you doing?’

‘He was measuring his hand span against mine,’ I said. I finished the plait of my fair hair and pulled my nightcap on my head and tied the white ribbon. ‘When our hands touched I felt …’

‘What?’

‘It was like my skin was on fire,’ I whispered. ‘Really. Like his touch could burn me.’

Anne looked at me sceptically. ‘What d’you mean?’

The words spilled out of my mouth. ‘I want him to touch me. I am absolutely dying for him to touch me. I want his kiss.’

Anne was incredulous. ‘You desire him?’

I wrapped my arms around myself and sank onto the stone windowseat. ‘Oh God. Yes. I didn’t realise this was where I was going. Oh yes. Oh yes.’

She grimaced, her mouth pulled down. ‘You’d better not let Father and Mother hear that,’ she warned. ‘They’ve ordered you to play a clever game, not moon around like a lovesick girl at twilight.’

‘But don’t you think he wants me?’

‘Oh, for the moment, yes. But next week? Next year?’

There was a tap on our bedroom door and George put his head around it. ‘Can I come in?’

‘All right,’ Anne said ungraciously. ‘But you can’t stay long. We’re going to bed.’

‘I am too,’ he said. ‘I’ve been drinking with Father. I am going to bed and tomorrow, when I am sober, I shall arise early and hang myself.’

I hardly heard him, I was staring out of the window and thinking of the touch of Henry’s hand against my own.

‘Why?’ Anne asked.

‘My wedding is to be next year. Envy me, why don’t you?’

‘Everyone gets married but me,’ Anne said irritably. ‘The Ormondes have fallen through and they have nothing else for me. Do they want me to be a nun?’

‘Not a bad choice,’ George said. ‘D’you think they’d take me?’

‘In a nunnery?’ I caught the sense of the talk and turned around to laugh at him. ‘A fine abbess you’d make.’

‘Better than most,’ George said cheerfully. He went to sit on a stool, missed his seat and thudded down on the stone floor.

‘You’re drunk,’ I accused.

‘Aye. And sour with it.’

‘There’s something about my future wife that strikes me as very odd,’ George said. ‘Something a little …’ he searched for the word. ‘Rancid.’

‘Nonsense,’ Anne said. ‘She’s got an excellent dowry and good connections, she’s favourite of the queen and her father is respected and rich. Why worry?’

‘Because she’s got a mouth like a rabbit snare, and eyes that are hot and cold at the same time.’

Anne laughed. ‘Poet.’

‘I know what George means,’ I said. ‘She’s passionate and somehow secretive.’

‘Just discreet,’ Anne said.

George shook his head. ‘Hot and cold at once. All the humours muddled up together. I shall live a dog’s life with her.’

‘Oh marry her and bed her and send her to the country,’ Anne said impatiently. ‘You’re a man, you can do what you like.’

He looked more cheerful at that. ‘I could push her down to Hever,’ he said.

‘Or Rochford Hall. And the king’s bound to give you a new estate on your marriage.’

George raised his stone decanter to his lips. ‘Anyone want some of this?’

‘I will,’ I said, taking the bottle and tasting the tart cold red wine.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Anne said primly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Mary, drinking in your nightcap.’ She turned back the covers and climbed into bed. She inspected George and me as she folded the sheets around her hips. ‘Both of you are a good deal too easy,’ she ruled.

George pulled a face. ‘Told us,’ he said cheerfully to me.

‘She’s very strict,’ I whispered in mock-respect. ‘You’d never think she spent half her life flirting in the French court.’

‘More Spanish than French, I think,’ George said, wantonly provocative.

‘And unmarried,’ I whispered. ‘A Spanish duenna.’

Anne lay down on the pillow, hunched her shoulders and pulled the covers into place. ‘I’m not listening, so you can save your breath.’

‘Who’d have her?’ George demanded. ‘Who’d want her?’

‘They’ll find her someone,’ I said. ‘Some younger son, or some poor old broken-down squire.’ I gave the flask to George.

‘You’ll see,’ came from the bed. ‘I’ll make a better marriage than either of you. And if they don’t forge me one soon, I’ll do it for myself.’

George passed the stone flask back to me. ‘Drain it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had more than enough.’

I finished the last swig of drink and went round to the other side of the bed. ‘Goodnight,’ I said to George.

‘I’ll sit here awhile beside the fire,’ he said. ‘We are doing well, aren’t we, us Boleyns? Me betrothed, and you on your way to bedding the king, and little Mademoiselle Parfait here free on the market with everything to play for?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We are doing well.’

I thought of the intent blue gaze of the king on my face, the way his eyes travelled from the top of my headdress down to the top of my gown. I turned my face into the pillow so that neither of them could hear me. ‘Henry,’ I whispered. ‘Your Majesty. My love.’

Next day there was to be a joust in the gardens of a house a little distance from Eltham Palace. Fearson House had been built in the last reign by one of the many hard men who had come to their wealth under the king’s father, himself the hardest man of them all. It was a big grand house, free of any castle wall or moat. Sir John Lovick had believed that England was at peace forever and built a house which would not be defended, indeed which could not be defended. His gardens were laid around the house like a chequerboard of green and white: white stones and paths and borders around low knot gardens of green bay. Beyond them lay the park where he ran deer for hunting, and between the park and the gardens was a beautiful lawn kept ready all the year round for the king’s use as a jousting green.

The tent for the queen and her ladies was hung in cherry-red and white silk, the queen was wearing a cherry gown to match and she looked young and rosy in the bright colour. I was in green, the gown I had worn at the Shrove Tuesday masque when the king singled me out from all the others. The colour made my hair glow more golden and my eyes shone. I stood beside the queen’s chair and knew that any man looking from her to me would think that she was a fine woman, but old enough to be my mother, while I was a woman of only fourteen, a woman ready to fall in love, a woman ready to feel desire, a precocious woman, a flowering girl.

The first three jousts were among the lower men of the court, hoping to attract attention by risking their necks. They were skilled enough, there were a couple of exciting passes, and one good moment when the smaller man unhorsed a bigger rival which made the common people cheer. The little man dismounted and took off his helmet to acknowledge the applause. He was handsome, slight and fair-haired. Anne nudged me. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Only one of the Seymour boys.’

The queen turned her head. ‘Mistress Carey, would you go and ask the master of the horse when my husband is riding today and what horse he has chosen?’

I turned to do her bidding, and I saw why she was sending me away. The king was coming slowly across the grass towards our pavilion and she wanted me out of his way. I curtsied and dawdled to the doorway, timing my departure so that he saw me hesitating under the awning. At once he excused himself from a conversation and hurried over. His armour was polished bright as silver, the trimming on it was gold. The leather straps holding his breastplate and armguards were red and smooth as velvet. He looked taller, a commanding hero from long-ago wars. The sun shining on him made the metal burn with light so that I had to step back into the shade and put my hand up to my eyes.

‘Mistress Carey, in Lincoln green.’

‘You are all bright,’ I said.

‘You would be dazzling if you were in the darkest of blacks.’

I said nothing. I just looked at him. If Anne or George had been close by they could have prompted me with some compliment. But I was empty of wit, it was all crowded out by desire. I could say and do nothing but just look at him and know that my face was full of longing. And he said nothing too. We stood, gazes locked, intently interrogating each other’s faces as if we might understand the other’s desire from his eyes.

‘I must see you alone,’ he said finally.

I did not coquet. ‘Your Majesty, I cannot.’

‘You don’t want to?’

‘I dare not.’

He took in a deep breath at that, as if he would sniff out lust itself. ‘You could trust me.’

I tore my eyes from his face and looked away, seeing nothing. ‘I dare not,’ I said again simply.

He reached out and took my hand to his lips and kissed it. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my fingers and, at last, the gentle stroke of the curls of his moustache.

‘Oh, soft.’

He looked up from my hand. ‘Soft?’

‘The touch of your moustache,’ I explained. ‘I have been wondering how it felt.’

‘You have been wondering how my moustache felt?’ he asked.

I could feel my cheeks growing warm. ‘Yes.’

‘If you were kissed by me?’

I dropped my gaze to my feet so that I should not see the brightness of his blue eyes, and gave a little imperceptible nod.

‘You have been wishing to be kissed by me?’

I looked up at that. ‘Your Majesty, I have to go,’ I said desperately. ‘The queen sent me on an errand and she will wonder where I am.’

‘Where did she bid you go?’

‘To your master of horse, to find out what horse you are riding and when you are to ride.’

‘I can tell her that myself. Why should you walk around in the burning sun?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s no trouble to me to go for her.’

He made a little tutting noise. ‘And she has servants enough to run around the jousting green, God knows. She has a full Spanish retinue while I am begrudged my little court.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Anne coming through the hangings of the queen’s room and freeze as she saw the king and me close together.

Gently he released me. ‘I shall go to see her now and answer her questions about my horses. What will you do?’

‘I’ll come in a moment,’ I said. ‘I need to take a little moment before I go back in, I feel all …’ I broke off at the impossibility of describing what I was feeling.

He looked at me tenderly. ‘You’re very young to be playing this game, aren’t you? Boleyn or no Boleyn. They’ll be telling you what to do and putting you in my way, I suppose.’

I would have confessed to the family’s plot to ensnare him but for Anne, waiting in the shadows of the jousting tent. With her watching me, I just shook my head. ‘It’s no game to me.’ I looked away, I let my lip tremble. ‘I promise you, it’s no game to me, Your Majesty.’

His hand came up, he took my chin and turned my face towards him. For one breathless moment I thought with dread and with delight that he was going to kiss me, in front of everyone.

‘Are you afraid of me?’

I shook my head and resisted the temptation to turn my face to his hand. ‘I am afraid of what may happen.’

‘Between us?’ He smiled, the confident smile of a man who knows that the woman he desires is only moments away from his arms. ‘Nothing bad will come to you for loving me, Mary. You can have my word on it, if you like. You will be my mistress, you will be my little queen.’

I gasped at that potent word.

‘Give me your scarf, I want to wear your favour while I joust,’ he said suddenly.

I looked around. ‘I can’t give it to you here.’

‘Send it to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell George to come to you, give it to him. I won’t wear it so it shows. I’ll tuck it into my breastplate. I’ll wear it against my heart.’

I nodded.

‘So you give me your favour?’

‘If you wish,’ I whispered.

‘I wish it so much,’ he said. He bowed and turned towards the entrance of the queen’s tent. My sister Anne had disappeared like a helpful ghost.

I gave them all a few minutes and then I went back into the tent myself. The queen gave me a sharp interrogatory look. I sank into a curtsey. ‘I saw the king coming to answer your questions himself, Your Majesty,’ I said sweetly. ‘So I came back.’

‘You should have sent a servant in the first place,’ the king said abruptly. ‘Mistress Carey should not be running round the jousting ground in this sun. It’s far too hot.’

The queen hesitated for only a moment. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘It was thoughtless of me.’

‘It’s not me you should apologise to,’ he said pointedly.

I thought she would balk at that, and from the tension in Anne’s body at my side I knew that she too was waiting to see what a Princess of Spain and a Queen of England would do next.

‘I am sorry if I inconvenienced you, Mistress Carey,’ the queen said levelly.

I felt no triumph at all. I looked across the richly carpeted tent at a woman old enough to be my mother and felt nothing but pity for the pain I would cause her. For a moment I did not even see the king, I saw only the two of us, bound to be each other’s grief.

‘It is a pleasure to serve you, Queen Katherine,’ I said, and I meant it.

For a moment she looked at me as if she understood some of what was in my mind and then she turned to her husband. ‘And are your horses fit for today?’ she asked. ‘Are you confident, Your Majesty?’

‘It’s me or Suffolk today,’ he said.

‘You will be careful, sire?’ she said softly. ‘There’s no harm in losing to a rider like the duke; and it would be the end of the kingdom if anything happened to you.’

It was a loving thought, but he took it with no grace at all. ‘It would be indeed, since we have no son.’

She flinched and I saw the colour go from her face. ‘There is time,’ she said, her voice so quiet that I could hardly hear it. ‘There is still time …’

‘Not much,’ he said flatly. He turned away from her. ‘I must go and get ready.’

He went past me without a glance, though Anne and I and all the other ladies sank down into a curtsey as he passed by. When I rose up the queen was looking towards me, not as if I were a rival, but as if I were still her favourite little maid in waiting who might bring her some comfort. She looked at me as if for a moment she would seek someone who would understand the dreadful predicament of a woman, in this world ruled by men.

George strolled into the room and kneeled before the queen with his easy grace. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I have come to visit the fairest lady in Kent, in England and the world.’

‘Oh George Boleyn, rise up,’ she said, smiling.

‘I would rather die at your feet,’ he offered.

She gave him a little tap on the hand with her fan. ‘No, but you can give me odds for the king’s joust if you want.’

‘Who would bet against him? He is the finest of horsemen. I will give you a wager of five to two against the second joust. Seymours against Howards. There’s no doubt in my mind of the winner.’

‘You would offer me a bet on the Seymours?’ the queen asked.

‘Have them carry your blessing? Never,’ George said quickly. ‘I would have you bet on my cousin Howard, Your Majesty. Then you can be sure of winning, you can be sure of betting on one of the finest and most loyal families in the country, and you can have tremendous odds as well.’

She laughed at that. ‘You are an exquisite courtier indeed. How much do you want to lose to me?’

‘Shall we say five crowns?’ George asked.

‘Done!’

‘I’ll take a bet,’ Jane Parker said suddenly.

George’s smile vanished. ‘I could not offer you such odds, Mistress Parker,’ he said civilly. ‘For you have all my fortune at your command.’

It was still the language of courtly love, the constant flirtatiousness which went on in the royal circles night and day and sometimes meant everything, but more often than not meant nothing at all.

‘I’d just like to bet a couple of crowns.’ Jane was trying to engage George in the witty flattering conversation that he could do so well. Anne and I watched her critically, not disposed to help her with our brother.

‘If I lose to Her Majesty – and you will see how graciously she will impoverish me – then I will have nothing for any other,’ George said. ‘Indeed, whenever I am with Her Majesty I have nothing for any other. No money, no heart, no eyes.’

‘For shame,’ the queen interrupted. ‘You say this to your betrothed?’

George bowed to her. ‘We are betrothed stars circling a beautiful moon,’ he said. ‘The greatest beauty makes everything else dim.’

‘Oh run away,’ the queen said. ‘Go and twinkle elsewhere, my little star Boleyn.’

George bowed and went to the back of the tent. I drifted after him. ‘Give it me quick,’ he said tersely. ‘He’s riding next.’

I had a yard of white silk trimming the top of my dress, which I took and pulled through the green loops until it was free and then handed it to George. He whisked it into his pocket.

‘Jane sees us,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘No matter. She’s tied to our interest whatever her opinion. I have to go.’

I nodded and went back into the tent as he left. The queen’s eyes rested briefly on the empty loops at the front of my gown, but she said nothing.

‘They’ll start in a moment,’ Jane said. ‘The king’s joust is next.’

I saw him helped into his saddle, two men supporting him as the weight of his armour nearly bore him down. Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s brother-in-law, was arming also, and the two men rode out together and came past the entrance to the queen’s tent. The king dipped his lance in salute to her, and held it down as he rode past the length of the tent. It became a salute to me, the visor of his helmet was up, I could see him smile at me. There was a tiny flutter of white at the shoulder of his breastplate which I knew was the kerchief from my gown. The Duke of Suffolk rode behind him, dipped his lance to the queen and then stiffly nodded his head to me. Anne, standing behind me, gave a little indrawn breath.

‘Suffolk acknowledged you,’ she whispered.

‘I thought so.’

‘He did. He bowed his head. That means the king has spoken to him of you, or spoken to his sister Queen Mary, and she has told Suffolk. He’s serious. He must be serious.’

I glanced sideways. The queen was looking down the list where the king had halted his horse. The big charger was tossing his head and sidling while he waited for the trumpet blast. The king sat easily in the saddle, a little golden circlet round his helmet, his visor down, his lance held before him. The queen leaned forward to see. There was a trumpet blast and the two horses leaped forward as the spurs were driven into their sides. The two armoured men thundered towards each other, divots of earth flying out from the horses’ hooves. The lances were down like arrows flying to a target, the pennants on the end of each lance fluttering as the gap closed between them, then the king took a glancing blow which he caught on his shield, but his thrust at Suffolk slid under the shield and thudded into the breastplate. The shock of the blow threw Suffolk back off his horse and the weight of his armour did the rest, dragging him over the haunches, and he fell with an awful thud to the ground.

His wife leaped to her feet. ‘Charles!’ She whirled out of the queen’s pavilion, lifting her skirts, running like a common woman towards her husband as he lay unmoving on the grass.

‘I’d better go too.’ Anne hurried after her mistress.

I looked down the lists to the king. His squire was stripping him of his heavy armour. As the breastplate came off my white kerchief fluttered to the ground, he did not see it fall. They unstrapped the greaves from his legs and the guards from his arms and he pulled on a coat as he walked briskly up the lists to the ominously still body of his friend. Queen Mary was kneeling beside Suffolk, his head cradled in her arms. His squire was stripping off the heavy armour from his master as he lay there. Mary looked up as her brother came closer and she was smiling.

‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘He just swore an awful oath at Peter for pinching him with a buckle.’

Henry laughed. ‘God be praised!’

Two men carrying a stretcher ran forward. Suffolk sat up. ‘I can walk,’ he said. ‘Be damned if I’m carried from the field before I’m dead.’

‘Here,’ Henry said and heaved him to his feet. Another man came running to the other side and the two of them started to walk him away, his feet dragging and then stumbling to keep pace.

‘Don’t come,’ Henry called to Queen Mary over his shoulder. ‘Let us make him comfortable and then we’ll get a cart or something and he can ride home.’

She stopped where she was bid. The king’s page came running up with my kerchief in his hands, taking it to his master. Queen Mary put out her hand. ‘Don’t bother him now,’ she said sharply.

The lad skidded to a halt, still holding my kerchief. ‘He dropped this, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘Had it in his breastplate.’

She put out an indifferent hand for it and he gave it to her. She was looking after her husband being helped into the house by her brother and Sir John Lovick hurrying ahead of them, opening doors and shouting for servants. Absently she walked back to the queen’s pavilion with my kerchief balled up in her hand. I went forward to take it from her and then I hesitated, not knowing what to say.

‘Is he all right?’ Queen Katherine asked.

Queen Mary found a smile. ‘Yes. His head is clear; and no bones broken. His breastplate is hardly dented.’

‘Shall I have that?’ Queen Katherine asked.

Queen Mary glanced down at my crumpled kerchief. ‘This! The king’s page gave it me. It was in his breastplate.’ She handed it over. She was quite blind and deaf to anything but her husband. ‘I’ll go to him,’ she decided. ‘Anne, you and the rest can go home with the queen after dinner.’

The queen nodded her permission and Queen Mary went quickly from the pavilion towards the house. Queen Katherine watched her go, my kerchief in her hands. Slowly, as I knew she would, she turned it over. The fine silk slipped easily through her fingers. At the fringed hem she saw the bright green of the embroidered silk monogram: MB. Slowly, accusingly, she turned towards me.

‘I think this must be yours,’ she said, her voice low and disdainful. She held it at arm’s length, between finger and thumb, as if it were a dead mouse that she had found at the back of a cupboard.

‘Go on,’ Anne whispered. ‘You’ve got to get it.’ She pushed me in the small of my back and I stepped forward.

The queen dropped it as I reached her, I caught it as it fell. It looked a sorry bit of cloth, something you might wash a floor with.

‘Thank you,’ I said humbly.

At dinner the king hardly looked at me. The accident had thrown him into the melancholy that was such a characteristic of his father, which his courtiers too were learning to fear.

The queen could not have been more pleasant and more entertaining. But no conversation, no charming smiles, no music could lift his spirits. He watched the antics of his Fool without laughing, he listened to the musicians and drank deep. The queen could do nothing to cheer him, because she was partly the cause of his ill-humour. He was looking at her as a woman near her change of life, he saw Death at her shoulder. She might live for a dozen years more, she might live for a score. Death was even now drying up her courses and putting the lines on her face. The queen was heading towards old age and she had made no heirs to follow them. They might joust and sing and dance and play all the day but if the king did not put a boy into Wales as prince then he had failed in his greatest, most fundamental duty to the kingdom. And a bastard on Bessie Blount would not do.

‘I am sure that Charles Brandon will soon be well again,’ the queen volunteered. There were sugared plums on the table and a rich sweet wine. She took a sip but I thought that she had little relish for it while her husband sat beside her with a face so drawn and dark that he could have been his father who had never liked her. ‘You must not feel that you did wrong, Henry. It was a fair joust. And you’ve taken hits from him before, God knows.’

He turned in his chair and looked at her. She looked back at him and I saw the smile drain from her face at the coldness of his stare. She did not ask him what was the matter. She was too old and wise ever to ask an angry man what was troubling him. Instead, she smiled, a dauntless endearing smile, and she raised her glass to him.

‘Your health, Henry,’ she said with her warm accent. ‘Your health and I must thank God that it was not you that was hurt today. Before now, I have been the one running from the pavilion to the lists with my heart half broken with fear; and though I am sorry for your sister Queen Mary, I have to be glad that it was not you that was hurt today.’

‘Now that,’ Anne said in my ear, ‘that is masterly.’

It worked. Henry, seduced by the thought of a woman sick with fear over his well-being, lost his dark sulky look. ‘I would never cause you a moment of uneasiness.’

‘My husband, you have caused me days and nights of them,’ Queen Katherine said, smiling. ‘But as long as you are well and happy, and as long as you come home at the end of it all; why should I complain?’

‘Aha,’ Anne said quietly. ‘And so she gives him permission and your sting is drawn.’

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked.

‘Wake up,’ Anne said brutally. ‘Don’t you see? She’s called him out of his bad temper and she has told him that he can have you, as long as he comes home afterwards.’

I watched him lift his glass in a return toast to her.

‘So what happens next?’ I asked. ‘Since you know everything?’

‘Oh he has you for a while,’ she said negligently. ‘But you won’t come between them. You won’t hold him. She’s old, I grant you. But she can act as if she adores him and he needs that. And when he was little more than a boy she was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. It’ll take a lot to overcome that. I doubt that you’re the woman to do it. You’re pretty enough and half in love with him, which is helpful, but I doubt that a woman such as you could command him.’

‘Who could do it?’ I demanded, stung by her dismissal of me. ‘You, I suppose?’

She looked at the two of them as if she were a siege engineer measuring a wall. There was nothing in her face but curiosity and professional expertise. ‘I might,’ she said. ‘But it would be a difficult project.’

‘It’s me that he wants, not you,’ I reminded her. ‘He asked for my favour. He wore my kerchief under his breastplate.’

‘He dropped it and forgot it,’ Anne pointed out with her usual cruel accuracy. ‘And anyway, what he wants is not the issue. He’s greedy and he’s spoiled. He could be made to want almost anything. But you’ll never be able to do that.’

‘Why should I not do that?’ I demanded passionately. ‘What makes you think that you could hold him and I could not?’

Anne looked at me with her perfectly beautiful face as lovely as if it were carved from ice. ‘Because the woman who manages him will be one who never stops for a moment remembering that she is there for strategy. You are all ready for the pleasures of bed and board. But the woman who manages Henry will know that her pleasure must be in managing his thoughts, every minute of the day. It would not be a marriage of sensual lust at all, though Henry would think that was what he was getting. It would be an affair of unending skill.’

The dinner ended at about five o’clock on the cool April evening and they brought the horses around to the front of the house so that we could say goodbye to our host and mount and ride back to Eltham Palace. As we left the banqueting tables I saw the servants tipping the leftover loaves and meats into great panniers which would be sold at a discount at the kitchen door. There was a trail of extravagance and dishonesty and waste that followed the king round the country like slime behind a snail. The poor people who had come to watch the jousting and stayed on to watch the court dine now gathered at the kitchen door to collect some food from the feast. They would be given the broken meats: the slicings from the loaves, the off-cuts from the meats, the puddings which had been half-eaten. Nothing would be wasted, the poor would take anything. They were as economical as keeping a pig.

It was these perks that made a place in the king’s household such a joy for his servants. In every place, every servant could perform a little cheat, put a little by. The lowliest server in the kitchen had a little business in crusts of the pastry from the pies, in lard from the basting, in the juices of the gravy. My father was at the top of this heap of off-cuts, now that he was controller of the king’s household: he would watch the slice that everyone took of their bit of business, and he would take a slice of his own. Even the trade of lady in waiting who looks as if she is there to provide company and little services for the queen is well-placed to seduce the king under her mistress’s nose, and cause her the most grief that one woman can cause to another. She too has her price. She too has her secret work which takes place after the main dinner is over and when the company are looking the other way, and which trades in off-cuts of promises and forgotten sweetmeats of love-play.

We rode home as the light faded from the sky and it grew grey and cool. I was glad of my cloak which I tied round me, but I kept my hood pushed back so that I could see the way before me and the darkening skies above me, and the little pinpricks of stars showing in the pale grey sky. We had been riding for half the journey when the king’s horse came alongside mine.

‘Did you enjoy your day?’ he asked.

‘You dropped my kerchief,’ I said sulkily. ‘Your page gave it to Queen Mary and she gave it to Queen Katherine. She knew it at once. She gave it back to me.’

‘And so?’

I should have thought of the small humiliations which Queen Katherine managed, as part of the duty of queenship. She never complained to her husband. She took her troubles to God; and only then in a very low whispered prayer.

‘I felt dreadful,’ I said. ‘I should never have given it to you in the first place.’

‘Well now you have it back,’ he said without sympathy. ‘If it was so precious.’

‘It’s not that it was precious,’ I pursued. ‘It’s that she knew without a doubt that it was mine. She gave it back to me in front of all the ladies. She dropped it to the ground, it would have fallen to the floor if I had not caught it.’

‘So what has changed?’ he demanded, his voice very hard, his face suddenly ugly and unsmiling. ‘So what is the difficulty? She has seen us dancing together and talking together. She has seen me seeking your company, you have been handclasped with me before her very eyes. You didn’t come to me then with your complaints and your nagging.’

‘I’m not nagging!’ I said, stung.

‘Yes you are,’ he said flatly. ‘Without cause, and, may I say, without position. You are not my mistress, madam, nor my wife. I don’t listen to complaints about my behaviour from anyone else. I am the King of England. If you don’t like how I behave then there is always France. You could always go back to the French court.’

‘Your Majesty … I …’

He spurred his horse and it went into a trot and then into a canter. ‘I give you goodnight,’ he said over his shoulder and he rode away from me with his cloak in a flurry and the plume in his hat streaming, and he left me with nothing to say to him, no way to call him back.

I would not speak to Anne that night though she marched me in silence from the queen’s rooms to our own and expected a full account of everything that had been said and done.

‘I won’t say,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Leave me alone.’

Anne took off her hood and started to unplait her hair. I jumped onto the bed, threw off my gown, pulled on my night shift and slipped between the sheets without brushing my hair or even washing my face.

‘You’re surely not going to bed like that,’ Anne said, scandalised.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said into the pillow, ‘leave me alone.’

‘What did he …?’ Anne started as she slid into bed beside me.

‘I won’t say. So don’t ask.’

She nodded, turned and blew out her candle.

The smell of the smoke from the snuffed wick blew towards me. It smelled like the scent of grief. In the darkness, shielded from Anne’s scrutiny, I turned over, lay on my back staring up at the tester above my head and considered what would happen if the king were so angry that he never looked at me again.

My face felt cold. I put my hand to my cheeks and found that they were wet with tears. I rubbed my face on the sheet.

‘What is it now?’ Anne asked sleepily.

‘Nothing.’

‘You lost him,’ Uncle Howard said accusingly. He looked down the long wooden dining table in the great hall at Eltham Palace. Our retainers stood on guard at the doors behind us, there was no-one in the hall but a couple of wolfhounds and a boy asleep in the ashes of the fire. Our men in Howard livery stood at the doors at the far end. The palace, the king’s own palace, had been made secure for the Howards so that we could plot in private.

‘You had him in your hand and you lost him. What did you do wrong?’

I shook my head. It was too secret to spill on the unyielding surface of the high table, to offer up to flint-faced Uncle Howard.

‘I want an answer,’ he said. ‘You lost him. He hasn’t looked at you for a week. What have you done wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ I whispered.

‘You must have done something. At the jousting he had your kerchief under his breastplate. You must have done something to upset him after that.’

I shot a reproachful look at my brother George: the only person who could have told Uncle Howard about my scarf. He shrugged and made an apologetic face.

‘The king dropped it and his page gave my scarf to Queen Mary,’ I said, my throat tight with nervousness and distress.

‘So?’ my father said sharply.

‘She gave it to the queen. The queen returned it to me.’ I looked from one stern face to another. ‘They all knew what it meant,’ I said despairingly. ‘When we rode home I told him that I was unhappy at him letting my favour be found.’

Uncle Howard exhaled, my father slapped the table. My mother turned her head away as if she could hardly bear to look at me.

‘For God’s sake.’ Uncle Howard glared at my mother. ‘You assured me that she had been properly brought up. Half her life spent in the French court and she whines at him as if she were a shepherd girl behind a haystack?’

‘How could you?’ my mother asked simply.

I flushed and dropped my head until I could see the reflection of my own unhappy face in the polished surface of the table. ‘I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ George interceded. ‘You’re taking too dark a view. He won’t stay angry for long.’

‘He sulks like a bear,’ my uncle snapped. ‘Don’t you think there are Seymour girls dancing for him at this very moment?’

‘None as pretty as Mary,’ my brother maintained. ‘He’ll forget that she ever said a word out of place. He might even like her for it. It shows she’s not overly groomed. It shows there’s a bit of passion there.’

My father nodded, a little consoled, but my uncle drummed the table with his long fingers. ‘What should we do?’

‘Take her away.’ Anne spoke suddenly. She drew attention at once in the way that a late speaker always does, but the confidence in her voice was riveting.

‘Away?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Send her down to Hever. Tell him that she’s ill. Let him imagine her dying of grief.’

‘And then?’

‘And then he’ll want her back. She’ll be able to command what she likes. All she has to do –’ Anne gleamed her spiteful little smile ‘– All she has to do when she returns is to behave so well that she enchants the most educated, the most witty, the most handsome prince in Christendom. D’you think she can do it?’

There was a cold silence while my mother and my father and my Uncle Howard and even George all inspected me in silence.

‘Neither do I,’ Anne said smugly. ‘But I can coach her well enough to get her into his bed, and whatever happens to her after that is in the hands of God.’

Uncle Howard looked intently at Anne. ‘Can you coach her in how to keep him?’ he asked.

She raised her head and smiled at him, the very picture of confidence. ‘Of course, for a while,’ she said. ‘He’s only a man after all.’

Uncle Howard laughed shortly at the casual dismissal of his sex. ‘You have a care,’ he urged. ‘We men are not where we are today because of some sort of accident. We chose to get into the great places of power, despite the desires of women; and we chose to use those places to make laws which will hold us there forever.’

‘True enough,’ Anne granted. ‘But we’re not talking of high policy. We’re talking of catching the king’s desire. She just has to catch him and hold him for long enough for him to make a son on her, a royal Howard bastard. What more could we ask?’

‘And she can do that?’

‘She can learn,’ Anne said. ‘She’s halfway there. She is his choice, after all.’ The little shrug she gave indicated that she did not think much of the king’s choice.

There was a silence. Uncle Howard’s attention had moved from me and my future as the brood mare for the family. Instead he was looking at Anne as if he had seen her for the first time. ‘Not many maids of your age think as clearly as you.’

She smiled at him. ‘I’m a Howard like you.’

‘I’m surprised you don’t try for him yourself.’

‘I thought of it,’ she said honestly. ‘Any woman in England today would be bound to think of it.’

‘But?’ he prompted her.

‘I’m a Howard,’ she repeated. ‘What matters is that one of us catches the king. It hardly matters which one. If his taste is for Mary and she has his acknowledged son then my family becomes the first in the kingdom. Without rival. And we can do it. We can manage the king.’

Uncle Howard nodded. He knew that the king’s conscience was a domesticated beast, given to easy herding but prone to sudden stubborn stops. ‘It seems we have to thank you,’ he said. ‘You have planned our strategy.’

She acknowledged his thanks, not with a bow, which would have been graceful. Instead, she turned her head like a flower on the stem, a typically arrogant gesture. ‘Of course I long to see my sister as the king’s favourite. These things are my business quite as much as yours.’

He shook his head as my mother made a shushing noise at her overly confident eldest daughter. ‘No, let her speak,’ he said. ‘She’s as sharp as any of us. And I think she’s right. Mary must go to Hever and wait for the king to send for her.’

‘He’ll send,’ Anne said knowledgably. ‘He’ll send.’

I felt like a parcel, like the curtains for a bed, or the plates for the top table, or the pewter for the lower tables in the hall. I was to be packed up and sent to Hever as bait for the king. I was not to see him before I left, I was not to speak to anyone about my going. My mother told the queen that I was overtired and asked for me to be excused from her service for a few days so that I might go home and rest. The queen, poor lady, thought that she had triumphed. She thought that the Boleyns were in retreat.

It was not a long ride, a little more than twenty miles. We stopped to dine at the roadside, eating nothing more than bread and cheese which we had carried with us. My father could have called on the hospitality of any great house along the way, he was well enough known as a courtier high in the favour of the king, and we would have been nobly entertained. But he did not want to break the journey.

The high road was rutted and pitted with potholes, every now and then we saw a broken cart wheel where a traveller had been overturned. But the horses stepped out well enough on the dry ground and every now and then the going was so good that we broke into a canter. The verges on the side of the road were thick with the white of gypsy lace and big-faced white daisies, and lush with the early summer greenness of grass. In the hedges the honeysuckle twisted around the bursting growth of hawthorn and may, at the roots were pools of purple-blue self-heal and the gangly growth of ladies’ smock with dainty flowers of white, veined with purple. Behind the hedges in the thick lush pastures were fat cows with their heads down, munching, and in the higher fields there were flocks of sheep with the occasional idle boy watching over them from the shade of a tree.

The common land outside of the villages was mostly farmed in strips and they made a pretty sight where they were gardened in rows with onions and carrots drawn up like a retinue on parade. In the villages themselves the cottage gardens were tumbling confusions of daffodils and herbs, vegetables and primroses, wild beans shooting and hawthorn hedgerows in flower with a corner set aside for a pig, and a rooster crowing on the dunghill outside the back door. My father rode in a quiet satisfied silence when the road took us onto our own land, downhill, through Edenbridge, and through the wet meadowlands towards Hever. The horses went slower as the going grew heavier on the damp road, but my father was patient now we were nearing our estate.

It had been his father’s house before it was his; but it went no further back in our family than that. My grandfather had been a man of no more than moderate means who had risen by his own skills in Norfolk, apprenticed to a mercer, but eventually became Lord Mayor of London. For all that we clung to our Howard connection it was only a recent one, and only through my mother who had been Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, a great catch for my father. He had taken her to our grand house at Rochford in Essex and then brought her to Hever where she had been appalled at the smallness of the castle, and the cosy poky private rooms.

At once he had set to rebuild it to please her. First he put a ceiling across the great hall, which had been open to the rafters in the old style. In the space he created above the hall he made a set of private rooms for us where we could dine and sit in greater comfort and privacy.

My father and I turned in at the gates of the park, the gatekeeper and his wife tumbling out to make their bow as we went by. We rode past them with a wave, and up the dirt road to the first river, which was spanned by a little wooden bridge. My horse did not like the look of this, she jibbed at it as soon as she heard the echo of her hoofbeats on the hollow wood.

‘Fool,’ my father said briefly, leaving me to wonder whether he meant me or the horse, and put his own hunter before mine and led the way across. My horse followed behind, very docile when she could see that there was no danger, and so I rode up to the drawbridge of our castle behind my father and waited while the men came out of the guard room to take our horses and lead them away to the stables at the back. My legs felt weak after the long ride when they lifted me down from the saddle but I followed my father across the drawbridge and into the shadow of the gatehouse, under the forbidding thick teeth of the portcullis and into the welcoming little castle yard.

The front door stood open, the yeoman of the ewry and the chief household men came out and bowed to my father, half a dozen servants behind them. My father ran his eyes over them: some were in full livery, some were not, two of the servant girls were hastily untying the hessian aprons they wore over their best aprons underneath, and disclosing some very dirty linen as they did so; the spit boy, peeping out from the corner of the yard, was filthy with deeply engrained dirt and half-naked in his rags. My father took in the general sense of disorder and carelessness and nodded at his people.

‘Very well,’ he said guardedly. ‘This is my daughter Mary. Mistress Mary Carey. You have prepared rooms for us?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’ The groom of the bedchambers bowed. ‘Everything is ready. Mistress Carey’s room is ready.’

‘And dinner?’ my father demanded.

‘At once.’

‘We’ll eat in the private rooms. I’ll have dinner tomorrow in the great hall and people can come and see me. Tell them I will dine in public tomorrow. But this evening I won’t be disturbed.’

One of the girls came forward and dipped a curtsey to me. ‘Shall I show you your room, Mistress Carey?’ she asked.

I followed her at my father’s nod. We went through the broad front door and turned left along a narrow hall. At the end a tiny spiral stone staircase led us upwards to a pretty room with a small bed hung with curtains of pale blue silk. The windows looked out over the moat and the park beyond. A door out of the room would lead me into a small gallery with a stone fireplace which was my mother’s favourite sitting room.

‘D’you want to wash?’ the girl asked awkwardly. She gestured towards a jug and ewer filled with cold water. ‘I could get you some hot water?’

I stripped off my riding gloves and handed them to her. ‘Yes,’ I said. For a moment I thought of the palace at Eltham and the constant sycophantic service. ‘Get me some hot water and see that they bring my clothes up. I want to change out of this riding dress.’

She bowed and left the room by the little stone staircase. As she went I could hear her muttering to herself: ‘Hot water. Clothes,’ so as not to forget. I went to the windowseat, kneeled up and looked out of the little window through the leaded panes.

I had spent the day trying not to think of Henry and the court I was leaving behind me, but now at this comfortless homecoming I realised that I had not just lost the love of the king, I had lost the luxuries which had become essential to me. I did not want to be Miss Boleyn of Hever again. I did not want to be the daughter of a small castle in Kent. I had been the most favoured young woman in the whole of England. I had gone far beyond Hever and I did not want to come back.

My father stayed no more than three days, long enough to see his land agent and those tenants who urgently wanted to speak to him, time enough to solve a dispute about a boundary post and to order his favourite mare put to the stallion, and then he was ready to leave again. I stood on the drawbridge to bid him farewell and I knew that I must look sorrowful indeed since even he noticed as he swung himself up into the saddle.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded, bracingly. ‘Not missing court, are you?’

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. There was no point telling my father that indeed I missed the court, but that I missed most, unbearably, the sight of Henry.

‘No-one to blame but yourself,’ my father said robustly. ‘We have to trust to your brother and sister to set it right for you. If not, then God knows what will become of you. I’ll have to get Carey to take you back, and we’ll have to hope that he forgives you.’

He laughed aloud at the shocked look on my face.

I drew closer to my father’s horse and put my hand on his gauntlet where it rested on the reins. ‘If the king asks for me would you tell him that I am very sorry if I offended him?’

He shook his head. ‘We play this Anne’s way,’ he said. ‘She seems to think she knows how to manage him. You have to do as you are bid, Mary. You bodged it once, you have to work under orders now.’

‘Why should Anne be the one who says how things are done?’ I demanded. ‘Why d’you always listen to Anne?’

My father took his hand from under my grip. ‘Because she’s got a head on her shoulders and she knows her own value,’ he said bluntly. ‘Whereas you have behaved like a girl of fourteen in love for the first time.’

‘But I am a girl of fourteen in love for the first time!’ I exclaimed.

‘Exactly,’ he said unforgivingly. ‘That’s why we listen to Anne.’

He did not trouble to say goodbye to me, but turned his horse away, trotted over the drawbridge and then down the track towards the gates.

I raised my hand to wave in case he looked back; but he did not. He rode straight-backed, looking forward. He rode like a Howard. We never look back. We have no time for regrets or second thoughts. If a plan goes awry we make another, if one weapon breaks in our hands we find a second. If the steps fall down before us we overleap them and go up. It is always onwards and upwards for the Howards; and my father was on his way back to court and to the company of the king without a backwards glance for me.

By the end of the first week I had taken a turn around every walk that there was in the garden and explored the park in every direction from my starting point at the drawbridge. I had started a tapestry for the altar of St Peter’s church at Hever and completed a square foot of sky which was very boring indeed, being nothing but blue. I had written three letters to Anne and George and sent them off by messenger to the court at Eltham. Three times he had gone for me and come back with no reply except their good wishes.

By the end of the second week I was ordering my horse out of the stables in the morning and going for long rides on my own, I was too irritable even for the company of a silent servant. I tried to keep my temper hidden. I thanked the maid for any little service she did for me, I sat to eat my dinner and bowed my head when the priest said grace as if I did not want to leap up and scream with frustration that I was trapped in Hever while the court was on the move from Eltham to Windsor and I not with them. I did everything I could to contain the fury that I was so far from court, and so terribly left out of everything.

By the third week I had slid into a resigned despair. I heard nothing from anyone and I concluded that Henry did not want to send for me to return, that my husband was proving intractable and did not want a wife carrying the disgrace of being the king’s flirtation – but not his mistress. Such a woman could not add to a man’s prestige. Such a woman was best left in the country. I wrote to Anne and to George twice in the second week but still they did not reply. But then, on Tuesday of the third week, I received a scrawled note from George.

Don’t despair – I wager you are thinking yourself quite abandoned by us all. He speaks of you constantly and I remind him of your many charms. I should think he will send for you within the month. Make sure that you are looking well!

Geo.

Anne bids me tell you that she will write in a little while.

George’s letter was the only moment of relief during my long wait. As I entered my second month of waiting, the month of May, always the happiest month at court as the season for picnics and journeyings started again, it seemed to me that my days were very long.

I had no-one to talk to, I had no company to speak of at all. My maid chattered to me while she dressed me. At breakfast I dined alone at the top table and spoke only to claimants who came to the house with business for my father to transact. I walked in the garden for a little while. I read some books.

In the long afternoons I had my hunter brought round and I rode in wider and wider sweeps of the countryside. I began to learn the lanes and byways that stretched around my home and even started to recognise some of our tenants on their little farms. I learned their names and started to rein in my horse when I saw a man working in the fields and ask him what he was growing, and how he was doing. This was the best time for the farmers. The hay was cut and drying in windrows, waiting to be pitchforked into great stacks and thatched to keep dry for winter feed. The wheat and barley and rye were standing tall in the fields and growing in height and plumpness. The calves were growing fat on their mothers’ milk and the profits from this year’s wool sales were being counted in every farmhouse and cottage in the county.

It was a time for leisure, a brief respite in the hard work of the year, and the farmers held little dances on the village green, and races and sports before the main work of harvesting.

I, who had first ridden into the Boleyn estate looking around me and recognising nothing, now knew the country all around the estate wall, the farmers and the crops they were growing. When they came to me at dinner time and complained that such a man was not properly farming his strip which he held by agreement with his village, I knew straightaway what they were speaking of because I had ridden that way the day before and seen the land left to grow weeds and nettles, the only wasted lot among the well-tended common fields. It was easy for me, as I ate my dinner, to warn the tenant that his land would be taken from him if he did not use it for growing a crop. I knew the farmers who were growing hops and the ones who were growing vines. I made an agreement with one farmer that if he should get a good crop of grapes then I would ask my father to send to London for a Frenchman to come on a visit to Hever Castle and teach the art of winemaking.

It was no hardship to ride around every day. I loved being outside, hearing the birds singing as I rode through the woods, smelling the flowering honeysuckle as it cascaded through the hedges on either side of the track. I loved my mare Jesmond, which the king had given me: her eagerness to canter, the alert flicker of her ears, her whinny when she saw me come into the stable yard, a carrot in my hand. I loved the lushness of the meadows by the river, the way they shimmered white and yellow with flowers, and the blaze of red poppies in the wheatfields. I loved the weald and the buzzards circling in the sky in great lazy loops, even higher than larks, before turning on their broad wings and wheeling away.

It was all makeweight, it was all a way of filling the time since I could not be with Henry and could not be at court. But I had a growing sense that if I were never to go to court again, then I could at least be a good and fair landlord. The more enterprising young farmers outside Edenbridge could see that there was a market for lucerne. But they knew no-one who grew it, nor where they could get the seeds. I wrote for them to a farmer on my father’s estate in Essex, and got them both seeds and advice. They planted a field while I was there, and promised to plant another when they saw how the crop liked the soil. And I thought, even though I was no more than a young woman, I had done a wonderful thing. Without me they would not have gone further than slapping their hands on the table at the Hollybush and swearing that a man could make some money from the new crops. With my help they were able to try it out, and if they made a fortune then there would be two more men rising up in the world, and if my grandfather’s story were anything to go by, then no-one could tell how high they might aspire.

They were glad of it. When I rode out to the field to see how the ploughing was going they came across, kicking the mud off their boots, to explain how they were casting their seed. They wanted a lord who took an interest. In the absence of anyone else: they had me. And they knew well enough that if I took an interest in the crop I might be persuaded to take a share. I might have some money tucked away that I might invest, and then we could all grow prosperous together.

I laughed at that, looking down from my horse into their brown weatherbeaten faces. ‘I have no money.’

‘You’re a great lady at court,’ one of them protested. His gaze took in the neat tassels on my leather boots, the inlaid saddle, the richness of my dress and the golden brooch in my hat. ‘There’s more on your back today than I earn in a year.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘And that’s where it stays. On my back.’

‘But your father must give you money, or your husband,’ the other man said persuasively. ‘Better to gamble it on your own fields than on the turn of a card.’

‘I’m a lady. It’s none of it mine. Look at you. You’re doing well enough – is your wife a rich woman?’

He chuckled sheepishly at that. ‘She’s my wife. She does as well as I do. But she doesn’t own anything of her own.’

‘It’s the same for me,’ I said. ‘I do as my father does, as my husband does. I dress as is proper for their wife or their daughter. But I don’t own anything on my own account. In that sense I am as poor as your wife.’

‘But you are a Howard and I am a nobody,’ he observed.

‘I’m a Howard woman. That means I might be one of the greatest in the land or a nobody like you. It all depends.’

‘On what?’ he asked, intrigued.

I thought of the sudden darkening of Henry’s face when I displeased him. ‘On my luck.’

Summer 1522

In the middle of my third month of exile, the month of June, with the garden of Hever filled with heavy-headed roses and their scent hanging in the air like smoke, I had a letter from Anne.

It is done. I have put myself in his way and talked about you. I have told him that you miss him unbearably and you are pining for him. I have told him that you have displeased your family by showing too openly your love for him and you have been sent away to forget him. Such is the contrary nature of men that he is much excited at the thought of you in distress. Anyway, you can come back to court. We are at Windsor. Father says you can order half a dozen men from the castle to escort you and come at once. Make sure that you arrive quietly before dinner and come straight to our room where I will tell you how you are to behave.

Windsor Castle, one of Henry’s prettiest castles, sat on the green hill like a grey pearl on velvet, the king’s standard fluttering from the turret, the drawbridge open, and a continual coming and going of carts and pedlars and brewers’ drays and wagons. The court sucked the wealth out of the countryside wherever it rested and Windsor was experienced in servicing the profitable appetites of the castle.

I slipped into a side door and found my way to Anne’s rooms, avoiding anyone who knew me. Her room was empty. I settled myself down to wait. As I had expected, at three o’clock she came into the room, pulling her hood off her hair. She jumped when she saw me.

‘I thought you were a ghost! What a fright you gave me.’

‘You told me to come privately to your room.’

‘Yes, I wanted to tell you how things are. I was speaking to the king just a moment ago. We were in the tiltyard watching Lord Percy. Mon dieu! It’s so hot!’

‘What did he say?’

‘Lord Percy? Oh he was enchanting.’

‘No, the king.’

Anne smiled, deliberately provoking. ‘He was asking about you.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘Let me think.’ She tossed her hood on the bed and shook her hair free. It tumbled in a dark wave down her back and she swept it up in one hand to leave her neck cool. ‘Oh, I can’t remember. It’s too hot.’

I was too experienced in Anne’s teasing to let her torment me. I sat quietly in the little wooden chair by the empty fireplace and did not turn my head while she washed her face and splashed her arms and neck and tied her hair back again, with many exclamations in French and complaints about the heat. Nothing made me look around.

‘I think I can remember now,’ she offered.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’ll see him myself at dinner. He can tell me anything he wants to tell me then. I don’t need you.’

She bridled at that at once. ‘Oh yes you do! How will you behave? You don’t know what to say!’

‘I knew enough to have him head over heels in love with me and ask for my kerchief,’ I observed coolly. ‘I should think I know enough to talk to him civilly after dinner.’

Anne stepped back and measured me. ‘You’re very calm,’ was all she said.

‘I’ve had time to think,’ I replied levelly. ‘And?’

‘I know what I want.’ She waited.

‘I want him,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Every woman in England wants him. I never thought that you would prove exceptional.’

I shrugged off the snub. ‘And I know that I can live without him.’

Her gaze narrowed. ‘You’ll be ruined, if William doesn’t take you back.’

‘I could bear that too,’ I rejoined. ‘I liked it at Hever. I liked riding out every day and walking round the gardens. I was on my own there for nearly three months, and I’ve never been on my own in my whole life before. I realised that I don’t need the court and the queen and the king or even you. I liked riding out and looking at the farmland, I liked talking to the farmers and watching their crops and seeing how things grow.’

‘You want to become a farmer?’ she laughed scornfully.

‘I could be happy as a farmer,’ I said steadily. ‘I’m in love with the king –’ I snatched a breath ‘– oh, very much. But if it all goes wrong, I could live on a little farm and be happy.’

Anne went to the chest at the foot of the bed and drew out a new hood. She watched herself in the mirror as she smoothed back her hair and drew on the headdress. At once her dramatic dark looks took on a new elegance. She knew it, of course.

‘If I were in your shoes it would be the king or nothing for me,’ she said. ‘I’d put my neck on the block for a chance at him.’

‘I want the man. Not because he’s king.’

She shrugged. ‘They’re one and the same thing. You can’t desire him like an ordinary man and forget the crown on his head. He’s the best there is. There is no greater man than him in the kingdom. You’d have to go to France for King Francis or Spain for the emperor to find his equal.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve seen the emperor and the French king and I wouldn’t look twice at either of them.’

Anne turned from the glass and tugged her bodice down a little lower so that the curve of her breasts showed. ‘Then you’re a fool,’ she said simply.

When we were ready she led me to the queen’s chambers. ‘She’ll accept you back, but she won’t give you a warm welcome,’ Anne threw over her shoulder as the soldiers before the queen’s door saluted us, and held the double doors open. The two of us, the Boleyn girls, walked in as if we owned half the castle.

The queen was sitting in the windowseat, the windows flung wide open for the cooler evening air. Her musician was beside her, singing as he played his lute. Her women were around her, some of them sewing, some of them sitting idle, waiting for the summons to dinner. She looked perfectly at peace with the world, surrounded by friends, in her husband’s home, looking out from her window over the little town of Windsor and the pewter-coloured curve of the river beyond. When she saw me her face did not change. She was too well-trained to betray her disappointment. She gave me a small smile. ‘Ah, Mistress Carey,’ she said. ‘You are recovered and returned to court?’

I sank into a curtsey. ‘If it please Your Majesty.’

‘You have been at your parents’ home, all this long time?’

‘Yes. At Hever Castle, Your Majesty.’

‘You must have rested well. There is nothing in that part of the world but sheep and cows, I think?’

I smiled. ‘It is farmland,’ I agreed. ‘But there was much for me to do. I enjoyed riding out and looking at the fields and talking to the men who work them.’

For a moment, I could see that she was intrigued by the thought of the land, which after all her years in England she still only saw as a place for hunting and picnics and the summer progress. But she remembered why I had left court in the first place. ‘Did His Majesty order your return?’

I heard a little warning hiss from Anne behind me but I disregarded it. I had a romantic, foolish thought, that I did not want to look this good woman in her honest eyes and lie to her. ‘The king sent for me, Your Majesty,’ I said respectfully.

She nodded and looked down at her hands where they were quietly clasped in her lap. ‘Then you are fortunate,’ was all she said.

There was a brief silence. I wanted very much to tell her that I had fallen in love with her husband but I knew that she was far above me. She was a woman whose spirit had been hammered and forged until she could only ring true. Compared with the rest of us she was silver, while we were pewter, a common mixture of lead and tin.

The great double doors swung open. ‘His Majesty the king!’ the herald announced and Henry strolled into the room. ‘I am come to lead you into dinner,’ he started, and then he saw me and stopped in his tracks. The queen’s considering gaze flicked from his transfixed face to mine and back again.

‘Mary,’ he exclaimed.

I forgot even to curtsey. I just stared at him.

A little warning tut from Anne failed to recall me. The king crossed the room in three long strides and took my hands in his, and held them to his chest. I felt the scratch of his embroidered doublet under my fingers, the caress of his silk shirt through the slashings.

‘My love,’ he said in a low whisper. ‘You are welcome back to court.’

‘I thank you …’

‘They told me that you were sent away to learn a lesson. Did I do right to say you could come back unlearned?’

‘Yes. Yes. Perfectly right,’ I stumbled.

‘You were not scolded?’ he pressed.

I gave a little laugh and looked up at his intent blue gaze. ‘No. They were a little cross with me, but that was all.’

‘You wanted to come back to court?’

‘Oh yes.’

The queen rose to her feet. ‘So. Let us go to dinner, ladies,’ she said generally. Henry threw a quick glance at her over his shoulder. She held out her hand to him, imperious as a daughter of Spain. He turned to her with the old habit of devotion and obedience and I could not think how to recapture him. I stepped behind her and bent low to arrange the train of her gown while she stood, queenly; despite her stockiness, beautiful; despite the weariness in her face.

‘Thank you, Mistress Carey,’ she said gently. And then she led us in to dinner with her hand resting lightly on her husband’s arm, and he inclined his head to her to hear something she said, and he did not look back at me again.

George greeted me at the end of dinner, strolling to the queen’s table where we ladies were seated with wine and sweetmeats before us. He brought me a sugared plum. ‘Sweets for the sweet,’ he said, planting a kiss on my forehead.

‘Oh George,’ I said. ‘Thank you for your note.’

‘You were bombarding me with desperate cries,’ he said. ‘Three letters I got from you in the first week. Was it so awful?’

‘The first week was,’ I said. ‘But then I became accustomed. By the end of the first month I was rather taking to the country life.’

‘Well, we all did our best for you here,’ he said.

‘Is Uncle at court?’ I asked, looking around. ‘I don’t see him.’

‘No, in London with Wolsey. But he knows all that is going on, don’t you worry. He said to tell you that he will be hearing reports of you and he trusts you now know how to behave.’

Jane Parker leaned across the table. ‘Are you going to be a lady in waiting?’ she asked George. ‘For you are sitting at our table and on a lady’s stool.’

George rose unhurriedly. ‘I beg your pardon, ladies. I did not mean to intrude.’

Half a dozen voices assured him that he did not intrude. My brother was a handsome young man and a popular visitor to the queen’s rooms. No-one but his sour-tongued betrothed objected to him joining our table.

He bowed over her hand. ‘Mistress Parker, thank you for reminding me to leave you,’ he said courteously, his irritation clear behind his sweet tones. He bent and kissed me firmly on the lips. ‘God speed you, little Marianne,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘You are carrying the hopes of your family.’

I caught his hand as he was about to go. ‘Wait, George, I wanted to ask you something.’

He turned back. ‘What?’

I tugged at his hand to make him lean down to me so that I could whisper in his ear. ‘Do you think that he loves me?’

‘Oh,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Oh, love.’

‘Well, do you?’

He shrugged. ‘Whatever does it mean? We write poems about it all day and sing songs about it all night but if there is such a thing in real life I’m damned if I know.’

‘Oh George!’

‘He wants you, I can tell you that. He’s prepared to go through a degree of trouble to have you. If that means love to you then yes, he loves you.’

‘That’s enough for me,’ I said with quiet satisfaction. ‘Wants me, and is prepared to go through a degree of trouble. That sounds like love to me.’

My handsome brother bowed. ‘If you say so, Mary. If that is good enough for you.’ He straightened up and immediately stepped back. ‘Your Majesty.’

The king stood before me. ‘George, I cannot allow you to spend the evening talking to your sister, you are the envy of the court.’

‘I am,’ George said with all his courtier charm. ‘Two beautiful sisters and not a care in the world.’

‘I thought we should have some dancing,’ the king said. ‘Will you lead out Mistress Boleyn and I will take care of Mistress Carey, here?’

‘I should be delighted,’ George said. Without looking around for her, he snapped his fingers and, alert as ever, Anne appeared at his side.

‘We’re to dance,’ he said shortly.

The king waved his hand and the musicians struck up a quick country dance so we arranged ourselves in a ring of eight people and started the flowing steps first one way then the other. At the opposite side of the circle I saw George’s familiar beloved face and, beside him, Anne’s smooth smile. She looked as she did when she was studying a new book. She was reading the king’s mood as carefully as she might look at a psalter. She was looking from him to me as if to measure the urgency of his desire. And, while never turning her head, she was checking the mood of the queen, trying to get an idea of what she had seen or what she felt.

I smiled to myself. Anne had met her match in the queen, I thought. No-one could penetrate beneath the veneer of the daughter of Spain. Anne was a courtier beyond all others but she had been born a commoner. Queen Katherine had been born a princess. From the moment she could talk she had been taught to guard her tongue. From the moment she could walk she had been taught to step carefully and speak kindly to both rich and poor, for you never knew when you might need both rich and poor. Queen Katherine had been a player in a highly competitive, highly wealthy court before Anne had even been born.

Anne might look around all she liked to see how the queen was bearing up under the sight of me, close to the king, our gazes locked on each other, desire very hot between us. Anne might look; but the queen never betrayed any emotion more than polite interest. She clapped at the end of the dances and once or twice cried out congratulations. And then suddenly the dance ended, and Henry and I were left stranded without musicians playing, without other dancers encircling us and hiding us. We were left alone, exposed, still handclasped with his eyes on my face and me looking up at him in silence, locked together as if we might stay that way forever.

‘Bravo,’ said the queen, her voice completely steady and confident. ‘Very pretty.’

‘He’ll send for you,’ Anne said that night as we undressed in the room. She shook out her dress and laid it carefully in the chest at the foot of the bed, her hood at the other end, her shoes carefully set side by side under the bed. She pulled on her night shift and sat before the mirror to brush her hair.

She handed the brush to me and she closed her eyes as I set about the long strokes from head to waist.

‘Perhaps tonight, perhaps during the day tomorrow. You’ll go.’

‘Of course I’ll go,’ I said.

‘Well, remember who you are,’ Anne warned. ‘Don’t let him just have you in a doorway or somewhere hidden and hurried. Insist on proper rooms, insist on a proper bed.’

‘I’ll see,’ I said.

‘It’s important,’ she cautioned me. ‘If he thinks he can take you like a slut then he’ll have you and forget you. If anything, I think you should hold out a little longer. If he thinks you’re too easy he’ll not have you more than once or twice.’

I took her soft hanks of hair in my hand and plaited them.

‘Ow,’ she complained. ‘You’re pulling.’

‘Well, you’re nagging,’ I said. ‘Leave me to do it my way, Anne. I’ve not done so badly so far.’

‘Oh that.’ She shrugged her white shoulders and smiled at her reflection in the mirror. ‘Anyone can attract a man. The trick is to keep him.’

The knock at the door startled us both. Anne’s dark eyes flew to the mirror, to my reflected image looking blankly back at her.

‘Not the king?’

I was already opening the door.

George was standing there, in the red suede doublet he had worn at dinner, the white fine linen shirt gleaming through the slashings, the red cap embroidered with pearls on his dark head.

‘Vivat! Vivat Marianne!’ He came quickly in and closed the door behind him. ‘He asked me to invite you to take a glass of wine with him. I’m to apologise for the lateness of the hour, the Venetian ambassador has only just left. They talked of nothing but war with France and now he is filled with passion for England, Henry and St George. I’m to assure you that you’re free to make your choice. You can take a glass of wine and come back to your own bed. You’re to be your own mistress.’

‘Any offer?’ Anne asked.

George raised a supercilious eyebrow. ‘Show a little elegance,’ he reprimanded her. ‘He’s not buying her outright. He’s inviting her for a glass of wine. We’ll fix the price later on.’

I put my hand to my head. ‘My hood!’ I exclaimed. ‘Anne, quick! Plait up my hair.’

She shook her head. ‘Go as you are,’ she said. ‘With your hair down around your shoulders. You look like a virgin on your wedding day. I’m right, aren’t I, George? That’s what he wants.’

He nodded. ‘She’s lovely like that. Loosen her bodice a bit.’

‘She’s supposed to be a lady.’

‘Just a bit,’ he suggested. ‘A man likes a glimpse of what he’s buying.’

Anne untied the laces at the back of my bodice until the boned stomacher was a little looser. She tugged it down at the waist so it sat lower and more invitingly. George nodded. ‘Perfect.’

She stepped back and looked at me as critically as my father had looked at the mare he had sent to the stallion. ‘Anything else?’

George shook his head.

‘She’d better wash,’ Anne suddenly decided. ‘Under her arms and her cunny at least.’

I would have appealed to George. But he was nodding, as intent as a farmer. ‘Yes, you should. He has a horror of anything rank.’

‘Go on.’ Anne gestured to the jug and ewer.

‘You two go out,’ I said.

George turned for the door. ‘We’ll wait outside.’

‘And your bum,’ Anne said as he closed the door. ‘Don’t skimp on it, Mary. You’ve got to be clean all over.’

The closing door cut off my response which was not that of a young lady. I washed myself briskly in cold water and rubbed myself dry. I took some of Anne’s flower water and patted it on my neck and hair and on the tops of my legs. Then I opened the door.

‘Are you clean?’ Anne asked sharply.

I nodded.

She looked at me anxiously. ‘Go on then. And you can resist for a bit, you know. Show a little doubt. Don’t just fall into his arms.’

I turned my face away from her. She seemed to me quite unbearably crass about the whole matter.

‘The girl can have a bit of pleasure,’ George said gently.

Anne rounded on him. ‘Not in his bed,’ she said sharply. ‘She’s not there for her pleasure but for his.’

I didn’t even hear her. All I could hear was the thud of my heart pounding in my ears and my knowledge that he had sent for me, that I would be with him soon.

‘Come on,’ I said to George. ‘Let’s go.’

Anne turned to go back into the room. ‘I’ll wait up for you,’ she said.

I hesitated. ‘I might not come back tonight.’

She nodded. ‘I hope you don’t. But I’ll wait up for you anyway. I’ll sit by the fire and watch the dawn come in.’

I thought for a moment about her keeping a vigil for me in her spinster bedroom while I was snug and loved in the King of England’s bed. ‘My God, you must wish it was you,’ I said with sudden acute delight.

She did not flinch from it. ‘Of course. He is the king.’

‘And he wants me,’ I said, hammering the point home.

George bowed and offered me his arm and led me down the narrow stairs to the lobby before the great hall. We went through it like a pair of interlinked ghosts. No-one saw us pass. There were a couple of the scullions sleeping in the ashes of the fire and half a dozen men dozing head-down on tables around the room.

We went past the top table and through the doors where the king’s private rooms began. There was a set of broad stairs richly hung with a beautiful tapestry, the colours drained from the bright silks by the moonlight. There were two men at arms before the presence chamber and they stood aside to let me pass when they saw me with my golden hair let down and the confident smile on my face.

The presence chamber behind the double doors was a surprise to me. I had only ever seen it crowded with people. This was where everyone came to have sight of the king. Petitioners would bribe senior members of the court to allow them to stand here in case the king noticed them and asked them how they did, and what they wanted of him. I had never seen this big vaulted room other than packed with people in their most handsome clothes, desperate for the king’s attention. Now it was silent, shadowy. George pressed his hand on my cold fingertips.

Ahead of us were the doors to the king’s private chambers. Two men at arms stood with pikes crossed. ‘His Majesty commands our presence,’ George said briefly.

There was a short chime as the pikes clashed, the two men presented arms, bowed, and swung the double doors open.

The king was seated before the fire, wrapped in a warm robe of velvet trimmed with fur. As he heard the door open he leaped to his feet.

I dropped into a deep curtsey. ‘You sent for me, Majesty.’

He could not take his eyes from my face. ‘I did. And I thank you for coming. I wanted to see … I wanted to talk … I wanted to take a little …’ He broke off finally. ‘I wanted you.’

I stepped a little closer. He would smell Anne’s perfume from that distance, I thought. I tossed my head and felt the weight of my hair shift. I saw his eyes go from my face to my hair and back again. Behind me, I heard the door closing as George went out without a word. Henry did not even see him go.

‘I am honoured, Your Majesty,’ I murmured.

He shook his head, not in impatience, but as the gesture of a man who cannot waste time on play. ‘I want you,’ he said again, flatly, as if that were all that a woman would need to know. ‘I want you, Mary Boleyn.’

I took a small step closer to him. I leaned towards him. I felt the warmth of his breath and then the touch of his lips on my hair. I did not move forward or back.

‘Mary,’ he whispered and his voice was choked with his desire.

‘Your Majesty?’

‘Please call me Henry. I want to hear my name on your lips.’

‘Henry.’

‘D’you want me?’ he whispered. ‘I mean as a man? If I were a farmer on your father’s estate, would you want me then?’ He put his hand under my chin to lift up my face so that he could look into my eyes. I met his bright blue gaze. Carefully, delicately I put my hand to his face and felt the softness of his curling beard under my palm. At once he closed his eyes at my touch and then turned his face and kissed my hand where it cupped his chin.

‘Yes,’ I said, caring not at all that it was nonsense. I could not imagine this man as anything but King of England. He could no more deny being king than I could deny being a Howard. ‘If you were a nobody and I were a nobody I would love you,’ I whispered. ‘If you were a farmer with a field of hops I would love you. If I were a girl who came to pick the hops would you love me?’

He drew me closer to him, his hands warm on my stomacher. ‘I would,’ he promised. ‘I would know you anywhere for my true love. Whoever I was and whoever you were, I would know you at once for my true love.’

His head came down and he kissed me gently at first and then harder, the touch of his lips very warm. Then he led me by the hand towards the canopied bed and lay me down on it and buried his face in the swell of my breasts where they showed above the stomacher that Anne had helpfully loosened for him.

At dawn I raised myself on my elbow and looked out of the leaded panes of the window to where the sky was growing pale and I knew that Anne would be watching for the sun too. Anne would be watching the light slowly filling the sky and knowing that her sister was the king’s mistress and the most important woman in England, second only to the queen. I wondered what she made of that as she sat in the windowseat and listened to the first birds tentatively sounding out their notes. I wondered how she felt, knowing that I was the one the king had chosen, the one who was carrying the ambitions of the family. Knowing that it was me and not her in his bed.

In truth, I did not have to wonder. She would be feeling that disturbing mixture of emotions that she always summoned from me: admiration and envy, pride and a furious rivalry, a longing to see a beloved sister succeed, and a passionate desire to see a rival fall.

The king stirred. ‘Are you awake?’ he asked from half-under the covers.

‘Yes,’ I said, instantly alert. I wondered if I should offer to leave, but then he emerged head first from the tangle of bedding and his face was smiling.

‘Good morrow, sweetheart,’ he said to me. ‘Are you well this morning?’

I found I was beaming back at him, reflecting his joy. ‘I’m very well.’

‘Merry in your heart?’

‘Happier than I have ever been in my life before.’

‘Then come to me,’ he said, opening his arms, and I slid down the sheets and into the warm musky-scented embrace, his strong thighs pressing against me, his arms cradling my shoulders, his face burrowing into my neck.

‘Oh Henry,’ I said foolishly. ‘Oh, my love.’

‘Oh I know,’ he said engagingly. ‘Come a little closer.’

I did not leave him till the sun was fully up and then I was in a hurry to be back in my room before the servants were about.

Henry himself helped me into my gown, tied the laces at the back of my stomacher, put his own cloak around my shoulders against the chill of the morning. When he opened the door my brother George was lounging in the windowseat. When he saw the king, he rose to his feet and bowed, cap in hand, and when he saw me behind the king he gave me a sweet smile.

‘See Mistress Carey back to her room,’ the king said. ‘And then send the groom of the bedchamber in, would you, George? I want to be up early this morning.’

George bowed again and offered me his arm.

‘And come with me to hear Mass,’ the king said at the door. ‘You can come with me to my private chapel today, George.’

‘I thank you.’ George accepted with nonchalant grace the greatest honour that any courtier could receive. The door to the privy chamber closed as I curtsied and then we went quickly through the audience chamber and through the great hall.

We were too late to avoid the lowest of the servants, the lads employed to keep the fires burning were dragging great logs into the hall. Other boys were sweeping the floor, and the men at arms who had slept where they had dined were opening their eyes and yawning and cursing the strength of the wine.

I put the hood of the king’s cloak up over my dishevelled hair and we went quickly and quietly through the great hall and up the staircase to the queen’s apartments.

Anne opened the door at George’s knock and drew us in. She was white-faced with lack of sleep, her eyes red. I took in the delicious sight of my sister on the rack of jealousy.

‘Well?’ she asked sharply.

I glanced at the smooth counterpane on the bed. ‘You didn’t sleep.’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘And I hope you slept but little.’

I turned away from her bawdiness.

‘Come now,’ George said to me. ‘We only want to know that all is well with you, Mary. And Father will have to know and Mother and Uncle Howard. You’d better get used to talking about it. It’s not a private matter.’

‘It’s the most private matter in the world.’

‘Not for you,’ Anne said coldly. ‘So stop looking like a milkmaid in springtime. Did he have you?’

‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

‘More than once?’

‘Yes.’

‘Praise God!’ George said. ‘She’s done it. And I have to go. He asked me to hear Mass with him.’ He crossed the room and caught me up into a hard hug. ‘Well done. We’ll talk later. I have to go now.’

He banged the door indiscreetly as he left and Anne made a little tutting noise and then turned to the chest which held our clothes.

‘You’d better wear your cream gown,’ she said. ‘No need to look the whore. I’ll get you some hot water. You’ll have to bathe.’ She raised her hand to my protests. ‘Yes, you will. So don’t argue. And wash your hair. You have to be spotless, Mary. Don’t be such a lazy slut. And get out of that gown and hurry, we have to go to Mass with the queen in less than an hour.’

I obeyed her, as I always did. ‘But are you happy for me?’ I asked as I struggled out of the stomacher and petticoat.

I saw her face in the mirror, the leap of jealousy veiled by the sweep of her eyelashes. ‘I am happy for the family,’ she said. ‘I hardly ever think about you.’

The king was in his private gallery, overlooking the chapel, hearing matins as we filed past to the queen’s adjoining room. Straining my ears I could just hear the mutter of the clerk putting papers before the king for him to glance at and sign as he watched the priest in the chapel below go through the familiar motions of the Mass. The king always did his business at the same time as hearing the morning service, he followed his father in this tradition, and there were many who thought the work was hallowed. There were others, my uncle among them, who thought that it showed that the king was in a hurry to get the work out of the way and that he only ever gave it half his mind.

I kneeled on the cushion in the queen’s private room, looking at the ivory gleam of my gown as it shimmered, hinting at the contours of my thighs. I could still feel the warmth of him in the tenderness between my legs, I could still taste him on my lips. Despite the bath which Anne had insisted that I took, I still fancied that I could smell the sweat from his chest on my face and in my hair. When I closed my eyes it was not in prayer, but in a reverie of sensuality.

The queen was kneeling beside me, her face grave, her head erect under the heavy gable hood. Her gown was open a little at the neck so that she might slide her finger inside and touch the hair shirt that she always wore next to her skin. Her sober face was drawn and tired, her head bowed over her rosary, the old slack skin on her chin and cheeks looking weary and pouched under her tightly closed eyes.

The Mass went on interminably. I envied Henry the distraction of the state papers. The queen’s attention never wavered, her fingers were never idle on her beads, her eyes were always closed in prayer. Only when the service ended and the priest wiped the chalices in the white cloths and took them away did she give a lingering sigh, as if she had heard something that none of us had ears for. She turned and smiled on all of us, all her ladies, even me.

‘And now let us go to break our fast,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Perhaps the king will eat with us.’

As we filed past his door, I felt myself dawdle, I could not believe that he would let me go by without a word. As if he sensed my desire, my brother George flung open the door at the exact moment that I was lingering and said loudly: ‘A good morning to you, my sister.’

In the room behind him Henry looked up quickly from his work and saw me, framed in the doorway, in the cream gown that Anne had chosen for me, with my cream headdress pulling my rich hair off my young face. He gave a little sigh of desire at the sight of me and I felt my colour rise, and my smile warm my face.

‘Good day, sire. And good day to you, my brother,’ I said softly, while my eyes never left Henry’s face.

Henry rose to his feet and stretched out his hand as if to draw me in. He checked himself with a glance at his clerk.

‘I’ll take my breakfast with you,’ he said. ‘Tell the queen I will come along in a few moments. Just as soon as I have finished these … these …’ His vague gesture indicated that he had no idea what the papers were.

He came across the room, like a dazed trout swimming towards a poacher’s bright lantern. ‘And you, this morning, are you well?’ he said quietly, for my ears only.

‘I am.’ I shot a quick, mischievous glance up at his intent face. ‘A little weary.’

His eyes danced at the admission. ‘Did you not sleep well, sweeting?’

‘Hardly at all.’

‘Was the bed not to your liking?’

I stumbled, I was never as skilled as Anne at this sort of word-play. In the end I said nothing but what was simply true. ‘Sire, I liked it very well.’

‘Would you sleep there again?’

In a delicious moment I found the right response. ‘Oh sire. I was hoping I would not sleep there again very soon.’

He threw back his head and laughed, he snatched up my hand and, turning it over, pressed a kiss into the palm. ‘My lady, you have only to command me,’ he promised. ‘I am your servant in every way.’

I bowed my head to watch his mouth press my hand, I could not take my eyes from his face. He raised his head and we looked at each other, a long mutual look of desire.

‘I should go,’ I said. ‘The queen will wonder where I am.’

‘I shall follow you,’ he said. ‘Believe it.’

I shot him a quick smile then I turned and ran down the gallery after the queen’s ladies. I could hear my heels going tap tap tap on the stones beneath the rushes, I could hear the rustle of my silk gown. I could sense, in every part of my alert body, that I was young and lovely and beloved. Beloved by the King of England himself.

He came to breakfast and smiled as he took his seat. The queen’s pale eyes took in the rosy colour of my face, the rich gleam of my cream gown, and looked away. She called for some musicians to play for us while we ate, and for the queen’s master of the horse to attend us.

‘Will you go hunting today, sire?’ she asked him pleasantly.

‘Yes, indeed. Would any of your ladies care to follow the hunt?’ the king invited.

‘I am sure they would,’ she said with her usual pleasant tone. ‘Mademoiselle Boleyn, Mistress Parker, Mistress Carey? I know you three for keen riders. Would you like to ride with the king today?’

Jane Parker shot a swift malicious gleam at me for being named third. She does not know, I thought, inwardly hugging myself. She can triumph all she likes because she does not know.

‘We would be enchanted to ride with the king,’ Anne said smoothly. ‘All three of us.’

In the great courtyard before the stables the king mounted his big hunter while one of the grooms lifted me up into the saddle of the horse he had given me. I hooked my leg firmly around the pommel and arranged my gown to fall becomingly to the ground. Anne scrutinised me, without missing the tiniest detail, as she always did, and I was pleased when her head, capped with the neatest of French hunting hats with a dainty plume, gave a small approving nod. She called to the groom to lift her up into the saddle and she brought her hunter up beside mine and held him steady while she leaned over.

‘If he wants to take you off into the woods and have you, you’re to say no,’ she whispered. ‘Try to remember that you are a Howard girl. You’re not a complete slut.’

‘If he wants me …’

‘If he wants you, he’ll wait.’

The huntsman blew his horn and every horse in the courtyard stiffened with excitement. Henry grinned across at me like an excited boy and I beamed back. My mare, Jesmond, was like a coiled spring, and when the master of the hunt led the way over the drawbridge we trotted quickly after him, the hounds like a sea of brindle and white around the horses’ hooves. It was a bright day but not too hot, a cool wind moved the grass of the meadow as we trotted away from the town, the haymakers leaned on their scythes and watched us pass, doffing their caps as they saw the bright colours of the aristocratic riders, and then dropping to their knees as they saw the king’s standard.

I glanced back at the castle. A casement window in the queen’s apartments stood open and I saw her dark hood and her pale face looking out after us. She would meet us for dinner and she would smile at Henry and smile at me as if she had not seen us, riding side by side, out for a day’s sport together.

The yelping of the hounds suddenly changed in tone and then they fell silent. The huntsman blew his horn, the long loud blast which meant that the hounds had taken a scent.

‘Hulloa!’ Henry shouted, spurring his horse forward.

‘There!’ I cried. At the end of the avenue of trees opening before us I saw the outline of a large stag, his antlers held flat on his back as he crashed away from the hunt. At once the hounds streamed out behind him, almost silent except for the occasional bark of excitement. They plunged into the undergrowth and we pulled up the horses and waited. The huntsmen trotted anxiously away from the hunt, criss-crossing the forest by the little rides, hoping to spot the deer break away. Then one of them suddenly stood high in his stirrups and blew a loud note on his horn. My horse reared with excitement at the sound and spun round towards him. I clung gracelessly to the pommel and to a handful of mane, caring nothing how I looked as long as I did not tumble off backwards into the mud.

The stag broke away and was racing for his life across the rough empty ground at the edge of the woods that led to the watermeadows and the river. At once the dogs poured after him and the horses after them in a breakneck race. The hooves pounded all around me, I had my eyes squinted, half-shut, as divots of mud flew up into my face, I crouched low over Jesmond’s neck, urging her onwards. I felt my hat tear from my head and tumble away, then there was a hedge before me, white with summer blossom. I felt Jesmond’s powerful hindquarters bunch up beneath me and with one great leap she cleared it, hit the ground on the far side, recovered and was pounding into her fastest gallop again. The king was ahead of me, his attention fixed on the stag which was gaining on us. I could feel the ripple of my hair as it shook out from the pins and I laughed recklessly to feel the wind in my face. Jesmond’s ears went back to hear me laugh and then forward as we came to another hedge with a nasty little ditch before it. She saw it as I did and checked only for a moment and then made a mighty cat-jump: all four feet off the ground at once in order to clear it. I could smell the perfume of crushed honeysuckle as her hooves clipped the top of the hedge, then we were on and on, even faster. Ahead of me the little brown dot that was the stag plunged into the river and started to swim strongly for the other side. The master of the hunt desperately blew for the hounds not to follow the beast into the water but to come back to him and to run down the bank to keep pace with the quarry to bait it as it came to shore. But they were too excited to listen. The whippers-in surged forward but half the pack were after the deer in the river, some of them swept away by the fast current, all of them powerless in the deep water. Henry pulled up his horse and watched the chaos develop.

I was afraid that it would make him angry but he threw back his head and laughed as if he delighted in the stag’s cunning.

‘Go then!’ he shouted after him. ‘I can eat venison here without cooking you! I have a larder of venison!’

Everyone around us laughed as if he had made a wonderful jest and I realised that everyone had been afraid that the failure of the hunt would turn his mood sour. Looking from one bright delighted face to another I thought for one illuminating moment what fools we were to make this one man’s temper the very centre of our lives. But then he smiled towards me and I knew that for me at least, there was no choice.

He took in my mud-splashed face and my tumbling tangled hair. ‘You look like a maid for country matters,’ he said, and anyone could have heard the desire in his voice.

I pulled off my glove and put my hand to my head, ineffectually twisting a knot of hair and tucking it back. I gave him a little sideways smile which acknowledged his bawdiness and yet refused to answer it.

‘Oh shush,’ I ordered softly. Behind his intent face I saw Jane Parker suddenly gulp as if she had swallowed a horse fly and I saw that she had realised at last that she had better mind her manners around us Boleyns.

Henry dropped from his horse, threw the reins to his groom and came to my horse’s head. ‘Will you come down to me?’ he asked, his voice warm and inviting.

I unhooked my knee and let myself slide down the side of my horse and into his arms. He caught me easily and set me on my feet but he did not release me. Before the whole court kissed me on one cheek and then another ‘You are the Queen of the Hunt.’

‘We should crown her with flowers,’ Anne suggested.

‘Yes!’ Henry was pleased with the thought and within moments half the court was plaiting honeysuckle garlands and I had a crown of haunting honey perfume to put on my tumbled golden-brown hair.

The wagons came up with the things for dinner and they put up a little tent for fifty diners, the king’s favourites, and chairs and benches for the rest, and when the queen arrived, ambling on her steady palfrey, she saw me seated at the king’s left hand and crowned with summer flowers.

Next month and England was finally at war with France, a war declared and formal, and Charles, the Emperor of Spain, aimed his army like a lance at the heart of France while the English army in alliance with him marched out of the English fort of Calais, and headed south down the road to Paris.

The court lingered near the City, anxious for news, but then the summertime plague came to London and Henry, always fearful of illness, ruled that the summer progress should start at once. We fled rather than moved to Hampton Court. The king ordered that all the food should be brought from the surrounding country, nothing could come from London. He forbade merchants and traders and artisans to follow the court from the unhealthy stews of the capital. The clean palace on the fresh water must be kept safe from illness.

The news from France was good, and the news from the City was bad. Cardinal Wolsey organised the court to go south and then west, staying at the great houses of the great men, entertained with masques and dinners and hunting and picnics and jousts, and Henry went like a boy, easily diverted by the passing scene. Every courtier living on the route had to play host to the king as if it were his greatest joy instead of his most dreaded expense. The queen travelled with the king, riding by his side through the pretty countryside, sometimes travelling in a litter if she were tired, and though I might be sent for during the night, he was attentive and loving to her during the day. Her nephew was the English army’s only ally in Europe, the friendship of her family meant victory to an English army. But Queen Katherine was more to her husband than an ally in wartime. However much I might please Henry, he was still her boy – her lovely indulged spoilt golden boy. He might summon me or any other girl to his room, without disturbing the constant steady affection between them which had sprung from her ability, long ago, to love this man who was more foolish, more selfish, and less of a prince than she was a princess.

Winter 1522

The king kept his court at Greenwich for Christmas and for twelve days and nights there was nothing but the most extravagant and beautiful parties and feastings. There was a Christmas master of the revels – Sir William Armitage – and it was his task to dream up something new for every day. His daily programme followed a delightful pattern of something for us to do out of doors in the morning – a boat race to watch, jousting, or an archery competition, bear baiting, a dog fight, a cocking match, or a travelling show with tumblers and fire-eaters, followed by a great dinner in the hall with fine wine and ale and small beer and every day some enchanting pudding made of sculpted marchpane as fine as a piece of art. In the afternoon there would be a diversion: a play or a talk, some dancing or a masque. We all had parts to play, we all had costumes to wear, we all had to be as merry as we could be, for the king was always laughing this winter and the queen never stopped smiling.

The inconclusive campaign against France had ended with the cold weather, but everyone knew that come the spring there would be another series of battles and England and Spain would jointly venture against their enemy. The King of England and the queen from Spain were united in every sense of the word that Christmas season, and once a week without fail they dined privately together and he slept in her bed that night.

But every other night, also without fail, George would come to the room I shared with Anne and tap on the door and say: ‘He wants you,’ and I would go to my love, to my king, at the run.

I never stayed for the whole night. There were foreign ambassadors from all over Europe bidden to Greenwich for Christmas and Henry would not show such a snub to the queen before them. The Spanish ambassador in particular was a stickler for etiquette and he was a close friend to the queen. Knowing the part I played at court, he did not like me; and I would not have enjoyed bumping into him coming out of the king’s private rooms all flushed and dishevelled. Better by far that I should slip from the king’s warm bed and hurry back to my chamber with George yawning at my side, hours before the ambassador arrived to hear Mass.

Anne was always up and waiting for me, with ale ready mulled and the fire banked in to warm our chamber. I would jump into bed and she would throw a woollen wrap around my shoulders and sit beside me and comb out the tangles from my hair while George put another log on the fire and sipped at his own cup.

‘It’s weary work, this,’ he said. ‘I fall asleep most afternoons. I cannot keep my eyes open.’

‘Anne puts me to bed after my dinner as if I were a child,’ I said resentfully.

‘What d’you want?’ Anne asked. ‘To be as haggard as the queen?’

‘She’s not looking too bonny,’ George agreed. ‘Is she ill?’

‘Just old age, I think,’ Anne said uncaringly. ‘And the effort of appearing happy all the time. She must be exhausted. Henry takes a lot of pleasing, doesn’t he?’

‘No,’ I said smugly, and the three of us laughed.

‘Has he said if he is giving you a special gift for Christmas?’ Anne asked. ‘Or George? Or any of us?’

I shook my head. ‘He hasn’t said.’

‘Uncle Howard sent a gold chalice wrought with our arms for you to give to him,’ Anne said. ‘It’s safe in the cupboard. It’s worth a fortune. I only hope we see some return on it.’

I nodded drowsily. ‘He has promised me a surprise.’ At once the two of them were alert. ‘He wants to take me to the shipyard tomorrow.’

Anne made a grimace of disdain. ‘I thought you meant a gift. Are we all to go? The whole court?’

‘Just a small party.’ I closed my eyes and started to drift off into sleep. I heard Anne get up from the bed and move about the room, unpacking my clothes from the chest and laying them out for the morning.

‘You must wear your red,’ she said. ‘And you can borrow my red cape trimmed with swansdown. It’ll be cold on the river.’

‘Thank you, Anne.’

‘Oh, don’t think I’m doing it for you. I am doing this for the advancement of the family. None of this is for you, as yourself.’

I hunched my shoulders against the coldness of her tone but I was too tired to retort. Dimly, I heard George put down his cup and rise from his chair. I heard his soft kiss on Anne’s forehead.

‘Weary work but everything to play for,’ he said quietly. ‘Goodnight, Annamaria – I leave you to your duties and go to mine.’

I heard her seductive chuckle. ‘The whores of Greenwich are a noble calling, my brother. I shall see you tomorrow.’

Anne’s cape looked wonderful over my red riding habit and she lent me her smart little French riding hat as well. Henry, Anne, I, George, my husband William, and half a dozen others rode alongside the river to the shipyard where they were building the king’s new ship. It was a bright wintry day, the sun sparkled on the water, the fields either side of the river were noisy with the sound of water birds, the geese from Russia overwintering at our milder watermeadows. Against their continual gabble, the quacking of ducks and the call of snipe and curlew were very loud. We cantered beside the river in a little group, my horse shouldering against the king’s big hunter, Anne and George on either side of us. Henry pulled up to a trot and then a walk as we came near to the dock.

The foreman came out as he saw our party approaching and pulled off his hat and bowed low to the king.

‘I thought to ride out and see how you do,’ the king said, smiling down on him.

‘We are honoured, Your Majesty.’

‘And how goes the work?’ The king swung himself down from the saddle and tossed the reins of his horse to a waiting groom. He turned and lifted me down and tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow and led me to the dry dock.

‘So what d’you think of her?’ Henry asked me, squinting up at the smooth oak side of the half-built ship as she rested on the great wooden rollers. ‘Don’t you think she is going to be most lovely?’

‘Lovely and dangerous,’ I said, looking at the gun doors. ‘Surely the French have nothing as good as this.’

‘Nothing,’ Henry said proudly. ‘If I’d had three beauties like this one at sea last year I would have destroyed the French navy as they skulked in port, and I should have been King of England and France in deed as well as word today.’

I hesitated. ‘The French army is said to be very strong,’ I ventured. ‘And Francis very resolute.’

‘He’s a peacock,’ Henry said crossly. ‘All show. And Charles of Spain will take him in the south as I come at him from Calais. The two of us will divide France between us.’ Henry turned to the shipwright. ‘When will she be ready?’

‘In spring,’ the man answered.

‘Is the draughtsman here today?’

The man bowed. ‘He is.’

‘I have a fancy to have a sketch made of you, Mistress Carey. Will you sit for a moment and let the man take your likeness?’

I flushed with pleasure. ‘Of course, if you wish it.’

Henry nodded to the shipwright who shouted from the platform to the quay below us and a man came running. Henry helped me down the ladder and I sat on a pile of newly sawn planks while a young man in rough homespun cloth sketched a quick likeness of my face.

‘What will you do with the picture?’ I asked curiously, trying to keep still and hold a smile on my lips.

‘Wait and see.’

The artist put his paper to one side. ‘I have enough.’

Henry put out his hand to me and raised me to my feet. ‘Then, sweeting, let’s ride home to our dinner. I’ll take you home around the watermeadows, there’s a good gallop to the castle.’

The grooms were walking the horses around so that they did not catch cold. Henry threw me up into my saddle and then mounted his own horse. He glanced over his shoulder to see that everyone was ready. Lord Percy was tightening Anne’s girth. She looked down and gave him her slow provocative smile. Then we all turned and rode back to Greenwich as the sun set primrose and cream in the cold winter sky.

Christmas dinner lasted for nearly all the day and I was sure that Henry would send for me that night. Instead he announced that he would visit the queen and I had to be among the ladies who sat with her, waiting for him to finish drinking with his friends and come to bed in the queen’s apartments.

Anne pushed a half-sewn shirt into my hands and sat beside me, firmly planting herself on the skirts of my outspread gown so I could not rise without her letting me up. ‘Oh leave me alone,’ I said under my breath.

‘Take that miserable look off your face,’ she hissed. ‘Do your sewing and smile as if you were enjoying it. No man is going to desire you when you look as sulky as a baited bear.’

‘But to spend Christmas night with her …’

Anne nodded. ‘D’you want to know why?’

‘Yes.’

‘Some beggarly soothsayer told him that he would get a son tonight. He’s hoping the queen might give him an autumn child. Lord, what fools men are.’

‘A soothsayer?’

‘Yes. Foretold a son, if he forsook all other women. No need to ask who paid her.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘My guess is that we’d find Seymour gold in her pocket if we turned her upside down and shook her very hard. But it’s too late for that now. The damage is done. He’ll be in the queen’s bed tonight and every night till twelfth night. So you had better make sure that when he walks past you to do his duty he remembers what he’s missing.’

I bent my head lower over my sewing. Anne, watching me, saw a tear fall on the hem of the shirt and saw me blot it with my finger.

‘Little fool,’ she said roughly. ‘You’ll get him back.’

‘I hate the thought of him lying with her,’ I whispered. ‘I wonder if he calls her sweeting, too?’

‘Probably,’ Anne said bluntly. ‘Not many men have the wit to vary the tune. But he’ll do his duty by her and then look around again, and if you catch his eye and smile then it will be you again.’

‘How can I smile when my heart is breaking?’

Anne gave a little giggle. ‘Oh what a tragedy queen! You can smile when your heart is breaking because you are a woman, and a courtier, and a Howard. That’s three reasons for being the most deceitful creature on God’s earth. Now sshh – here he comes.’

George came in first with a quick smile for me and went to kneel at the queen’s feet. She gave him her hand with a pretty blush, she was glowing with pleasure that the king was coming to her. Henry came in next with my husband, William, and with his hand on Lord Percy’s shoulder. He walked past me with nothing more than a nod of his head though Anne and I stood as he entered the room and dipped low into a curtsey. He went straight to the queen, kissed her on the lips and then led the way into her privy chamber. Her maids went in with them and shortly came out and closed the door. The rest of us were left outside in silence.

William looked around and smiled at me. ‘Well met, good wife,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Shall you be keeping your present quarters for much longer, d’you think? Or will you want me as a bedfellow again?’

‘That must depend on the command of the queen and of our uncle,’ George said evenly. His hand slid along his belt to where his sword would hang. ‘Marianne cannot choose for herself, as you know.’

William did not rise to the challenge. He gave me a rueful smile. ‘Peace, George,’ he said. ‘I don’t need you to explain it all to me. I should know by now.’

I looked away. Lord Percy had drawn Anne into an alcove and I heard her seductive giggle at something that he said. She saw me watching and said more loudly: ‘Lord Percy is writing sonnets to me, Mary. Do tell him that his lines don’t scan.’

‘It’s not even finished,’ Percy protested. ‘I was just telling you the first line and already you are too critical.’

‘“Fair lady – thou dost treat me with disdain –”’

‘I think that’s a very good start,’ I said helpfully. ‘How would you go on, Lord Percy?’

‘It’s clearly not a good start,’ George said. ‘To start a courtship with disdain is the very worst start you could make. A kind start would be more promising.’

‘A kind start would be certainly startling, from a Boleyn girl,’ William said with a barb in his tone. ‘Depending on the suitor, of course. But now I think of it – a Percy of Northumberland might get a kind start.’

Anne flashed him a look which was something less than sisterly but Henry Percy was so absorbed in his poem that he hardly heard him. ‘It goes on with the next line, which I don’t have yet, and then it goes something something something something, my pain.’

‘Oh! To rhyme with disdain!’ George declared provokingly. ‘I think I’m beginning to get this.’

‘But you must have an image that you pursue throughout the poem,’ Anne said to Henry Percy. ‘If you are going to write a poem to your mistress you must compare her to something and then twist the comparison round to some witty conclusion.’

‘How can I?’ Percy asked her. ‘I cannot compare you to anything. You are yourself. What should I compare you to?’

‘Oh very pretty!’ George said approvingly. ‘I say, Percy, your conversation is better than your poetry, I should stay on one knee and whisper in her ear, if I was you. You’ll triumph if you stick to prose.’

Percy grinned and took Anne’s hand. ‘Stars in the night,’ he said.

‘Something something something something, some delight,’ Anne rejoined promptly.

‘Let’s have some wine,’ William suggested. ‘I don’t think I can keep up with this dazzling wit. And who will play me at dice?’

‘I’ll play,’ George said before William could challenge me. ‘What will the stakes be?’

‘Oh a couple of crowns,’ William said. ‘I should hate to have you as my enemy for a gambling debt, Boleyn.’

‘Or any other cause,’ my brother said sweetly. ‘Especially since Lord Percy here might write us a martial poem about fighting.’

‘I don’t think something something something, is very threatening,’ Anne remarked. ‘And that is all that his lines ever say.’

‘I am an apprentice,’ Percy said with dignity. ‘An apprentice lover and an apprentice poet and you are treating me unkindly. “Fair lady – thou dost treat me with disdain –” is nothing but the truth.’

Anne laughed and held out her hand for him to kiss. William drew a couple of dice from his pocket and rolled them on the table. I poured him a glass of wine and put it by him. I felt oddly comforted to be serving him when the man that I loved was bedding his wife in the room next door. I felt that I had been put aside, and for all I knew I might have to stay to one side.

We played until midnight and still the king did not emerge.

‘What d’you think?’ William asked George. ‘If he means to spend the night with her we might as well go to our beds.’

‘We’re going,’ Anne said firmly. She held out a peremptory hand to me.

‘So soon?’ Percy pleaded. ‘But stars come out at night.’

‘Then they fade at dawn,’ Anne replied. ‘This star needs to veil herself in darkness.’

I rose to go with her. My husband looked at me for a moment. ‘Kiss me goodnight, wife,’ he ordered.

I hesitated and then I went across the room. He expected me to put a cool kiss on his cheek but instead I bent over and kissed him on his lips. I felt him respond as I touched him. ‘Goodnight, husband. And I wish you a merry Christmas.’

‘Goodnight, wife. My bed would have been warmer tonight with you in it.’

I nodded. There was nothing I could say. Without intending it, I glanced towards the closed door of the queen’s privy chamber where the man I adored slept in the arms of his wife.

‘Maybe we’ll all end up with our wives in the end,’ William said quietly.

‘For sure,’ George said cheerfully, shovelling his winnings from the table into his cap, and then pouring them into the pocket of his jacket. ‘For we will be buried alongside each other, whatever our preferences in life. Think of me, melting to dust with Jane Parker.’

Even William laughed.

‘When will it be?’ Percy asked. ‘Your happy nuptial day?’

‘Sometime after midsummer. If I can contain my impatience for that long.’

‘She brings a handsome dowry,’ William remarked.

‘Oh who cares for that?’ Percy exclaimed. ‘Love is all that matters.’

‘Thus speaks one of the richest men in the kingdom,’ my brother observed wryly.

Anne held out her hand to Percy. ‘Pay no attention, my lord. I agree with you. Love is all that matters. At any rate, that’s what I think.’

‘No you don’t,’ I said as soon as the door was shut behind us.

Anne gave me a tiny smile. ‘I wish you would take the trouble to see who I am talking to, and not what I am saying.’

‘Percy of Northumberland? You are talking of marriage for love to Percy of Northumberland?’

‘Exactly. So you can simper at your husband all you like, Mary. When I marry I shall do better than you by far.’

Spring 1523

In the early weeks of the New Year the queen found her youth again, and blossomed like a rose in a warm room, her colour high, her smiles ready. She put aside the hair shirt she usually wore under her gown, and the telltale rough skin at her neck and shoulders disappeared as if smoothed away by joy. She did not tell anyone the cause of these changes; but her maid told another that she had missed one of her courses, and that the soothsayer was right: the queen had taken with child.

Given her past history of not going full term, there was every reason for her to be on her knees, her face turned up to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the little prie dieu in the corner of her privy chamber, and every morning found her there, one hand upon her belly, one hand on her missal, her eyes closed, her expression rapt. Miracles could happen. Perhaps a miracle was happening for the queen.

The maids gossiped that her linen was clean again in February and we began to think that soon she would tell the king. Already he had the look of a man waiting for good news, and he walked past me as if I were invisible. I had to dance before him and attend his wife and endure the smirks of the ladies and know once again that I was nothing more than a Boleyn girl, and not the favourite any more.

‘I can’t stand it,’ I said to Anne. We were sitting by the fireplace in the queen’s apartments. The others were walking with the dogs, but Anne and I had refused to go out. The mist was coming off the river and it was a bitterly cold day. I was shivering inside a fur-lined gown. I had not felt well since Christmas night when Henry had gone past me into her room. He had not sent for me since then.

‘You are taking it hard,’ she observed contentedly. ‘That’s what comes of loving a king.’

‘What else could I do?’ I asked miserably. I moved to the windowseat to get more light on my sewing. I was hemming the queen’s shirts for the poor, and just because they were for old labouring men did not mean that I was allowed sloppy work. She would look at the seams and if she thought they were clumsily executed she would ask me, very pleasantly, to do them again.

‘If she has a child and it’s a son then you might as well have stayed with William Carey and started your own family,’ Anne observed. ‘The king will be at her beck, and your days will be done. You’ll just be one of many.’

‘He loves me,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’m not one of many.’

I turned my head away and looked out of the window. The mist was curling off the river in great coils, like dust under a bed.

Anne gave a hard little laugh. ‘You’ve always been one of many,’ she said brutally. ‘There are dozens of us Howard girls, all with good breeding, all well taught, all pretty, all young, all fertile. They can throw one after another on the table and see if one is lucky. It’s no real loss to them if one after another is taken up and then thrown aside. There’s always another Howard girl conceived, there’s always another whore in the nursery. You were one of many before you were even born. If he does not cleave to you then you go back to William, they find another Howard girl to tempt him, and the dance starts all over again. Nothing is lost for them.’

‘Something is lost for me!’ I cried out.

She put her head on one side and looked at me, as if she would sift the reality from the impatience of childish passion. ‘Yes. Perhaps. Something is lost for you. Your innocence, your first love, your trust. Perhaps your heart is broken. Perhaps it will never mend. Poor silly Marianne,’ she said softly. ‘To do one man’s bidding to please another man and get nothing for yourself but heartbreak.’

‘So who would come after me?’ I asked her, turning my pain into taunting. ‘Who d’you think the next Howard girl will be that they push into his bed? Let me guess – the other Boleyn girl?’

She flashed me a quick black glance and then her dark eyelashes swept down on her cheeks. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I make my own plans. I don’t risk being taken up and dropped again.’

‘You told me to risk it,’ I reminded her.

‘That was for you,’ she said. ‘I would not live my life as you live yours. You would always do as you were bid, marry where you were told, bed where you were ordered. I am not like you. I make my own way.’

‘I could make my own way,’ I said.

Anne smiled disbelievingly.

‘I’d go back to Hever and live there,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t stay at court. If I am put aside I could go to Hever. At least I will always have that now.’

The door to the queen’s apartment opened and I glanced up as the maids came out, lugging the sheets from the queen’s bed.

‘That’s the second time this week she’s ordered them to be changed,’ one said irritably.

Anne and I exchanged a quick look. ‘Are they stained?’ Anne demanded urgently.

The maid looked at her insolently. ‘The queen’s sheets?’ she asked. ‘You ask me to show you the queen’s own bed linen?’

Anne’s long fingers went to her purse and a piece of silver changed hands. The maid’s smile was triumphant as she pocketed the coin. ‘Not stained at all,’ she said.

Anne subsided and I went to hold the door open for the two women.

‘Thank you,’ the second one said, surprised at my politeness to a servant. She nodded to me. ‘Rank with sweat, poor lady,’ she said quietly.

‘What?’ I asked. I could hardly believe that she was giving me freely a piece of information that a French spy would pay a king’s ransom for, and that every courtier in the land was longing to know. ‘Are you saying the queen is having night sweats? That her change of life is on her?’

‘If not now then very soon,’ the maid said. ‘Poor lady.’

I found my father with George in the great hall, head to head while the servants set the great trestle tables for dinner around them. He beckoned me to him.

‘Father,’ I said, dropping him a curtsey.

He kissed me coolly on the forehead. ‘Daughter,’ he said. ‘Did you want to see me?’

For a chilling moment I wondered if he had forgotten my name. ‘The queen is not with child,’ I told him. ‘She started her course, this day. She missed her other times because of her age.’

‘God be praised!’ George said exultantly. ‘I bet myself a gold crown on this. That is good news.’

‘The best,’ my father said. ‘The best for us, the worst for England. Has she told the king?’

I shook my head. ‘She started to bleed this afternoon, she has not seen him yet.’

My father nodded. ‘So we have the news before him. Anyone else know it?’

I shrugged. ‘The maids who changed her linen, and so anyone who was paying them. Wolsey, I suppose. Perhaps the French might have bought a maid.’

‘Then we have to be fast if we want to be the ones to tell him. Should I?’

George shook his head. ‘Too intimate,’ he said. ‘What about Mary?’

‘It puts her before him at the very moment of his disappointment,’ my father mused. ‘Better not.’

‘Anne then,’ George said. ‘It should be one of us to remind him of Mary.’

‘Anne can do it,’ my father agreed. ‘She could turn a polecat off the scent of a mouse.’

‘She’s in the garden,’ I volunteered. ‘At the archery butts.’

The three of us walked from the great hall into the bright light of the spring sunshine. There was a cold wind blowing through the yellow daffodils that nodded in the sunshine. We could see the little group of courtiers at the archery butts, Anne among them. As we watched she stepped up, sighted the target, drew her bow and we heard the twang of the string and the satisfying thud as the arrow hit the bullseye. There was a scattering of applause. Henry Percy strode up to the target and plucked Anne’s arrow from it and tucked it into his own quiver, as if he would keep it.

Anne was laughing, holding out her hand for her arrow, as she glanced over and saw us. At once, she turned from the company and came towards us.

‘Father.’

‘Anne.’ He kissed her more warmly than he had kissed me.

‘The queen has started her courses,’ George said bluntly. ‘We think that you should tell the king.’

‘Rather than Mary?’

‘It makes her look low,’ my father said. ‘Tattling with chambermaids, watching them empty piss pots.’

For a moment I thought that Anne would remark that she did not want to look low either, but she shrugged her shoulders. She knew that serving the Howard family ambition always had a price attached.

‘And make sure that Mary is back in his eye,’ my father said. ‘When he turns against the queen it must be Mary who picks him up.’

Anne nodded. ‘Of course.’ Only I could have heard the edge in her voice. ‘Mary comes first.’

The king came to the queen’s rooms that evening as usual to sit beside her at the fireside. We three of us watched him, certain that he must tire of this domestic peace. But the queen was skilful in entertaining him. There was always a game of cards or dice going on, she had always read the most recent books and could venture and defend an interesting opinion. There were always other visitors, learned or well-travelled men who would talk with the king, there was always the best music, and Henry loved good music. Thomas More was a favourite of hers and sometimes the three of them would walk on the flat roofs of the castle and look at the night skies. More and the king would speak of interpretations of the Bible and whether there would ever come a time when it would be right to allow an English Bible that common people could read. And there were always pretty women. The queen was wise enough to fill her rooms with the prettiest women in the kingdom.

This evening was no exception, she entertained him as if he were a visiting ambassador that she had to favour. After he had talked with her for a while someone asked if he would sing and he took the floor and sung us one of his own compositions. He asked for a lady to take the soprano part and Anne reluctantly and modestly came forward and said that she would try. Of course she had it note perfect. They sang an encore, well pleased with themselves, and then Henry kissed Anne’s hand and the queen called for wine for our two songsters.

It was nothing more than a touch to his hand and Anne had him a little aside from the rest of the court. Only the queen and us Boleyns knew that the king had been drawn away. The queen called for one of the musicians to play us another air, she had too much sense ever to be caught glaring after her husband as he started another flirtation. She shot one quick look at me to see how I was taking the sight of my sister on the king’s arm and I gave her a bland, innocent smile.

‘You are becoming a fine courtier, my little wife,’ William Carey remarked.

‘I am?’

‘When you first came to court you were a fresh piece of goods, hardly glazed by the French court, but now the gilt seems to be entering your soul. Do you ever do a thing without thinking twice?’

For a moment I would have defended myself but I saw Anne speak a sentence to the king and saw him glance back at the queen. Anne put her hand gently on his sleeve and said another soft word. I turned away from William, quite deaf to him, and instead watched the man I loved. I saw his broad shoulders bend and drop down, as if half his power had gone from him. He looked at the queen as if she had betrayed him, his face vulnerable as a child. Anne turned so he was shielded from the rest of the court and George went forward to ask the queen if we might dance, to keep the attention away from Anne, pouring sorrow into the king’s ear.

I could not bear it, I slipped away from the girls who were clamouring to dance and went to Henry, pushing past Anne to get to him. His face was pale, his eyes tragic. I took his hands and said only: ‘Oh my dear.’

He turned to me at once. ‘Did you know too? Do all her ladies know?’

‘I think so,’ Anne said. ‘We cannot blame her for not wanting to tell you, poor lady, it was her last hope. It was your last chance, sire.’

I felt his fingers grip my hand a little tighter. ‘The soothsayer told me …’

‘I know,’ I said gently. ‘She was probably bribed.’

Anne melted away, and the two of us were alone.

‘And I lay with her and tried so hard, and hoped …’

‘I prayed for you,’ I whispered. ‘For you both. I was so hoping that you would have a son, Henry. Before God, I would rather that she gave you a legitimate son than any other wish in the world.’

‘But she cannot now.’ His mouth shut like a trap. He looked like a spoilt child, who cannot get what he wants.

‘No, not any more,’ I confirmed. ‘It is over.’

Abruptly he dropped my hands and turned away from me. The dancers parted before his rapid advance as he strode through the sets. He went to the queen, who was seated smiling on her court and said, loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘I’m told you are unwell, madam. I could wish you had told me yourself.’

At once she looked to me, her sharp gaze accusing me of betraying her most intimate secret. Minutely I shook my head. She looked for Anne in the dancers and saw her, with George’s hand in hers. Blandly, Anne looked back.

‘I am sorry, Your Majesty,’ the queen said with her immense dignity. ‘I should have chosen a more fitting time to discuss this with you.’

‘You should have chosen a more immediate time,’ he corrected her. ‘But since you are unwell I suggest that you dismiss your court and bide by yourself.’

Those of the queen’s court who grasped at once what was happening whispered quickly to their neighbours. But most of them stood and stared at the king’s sudden storm of bad humour, and at the queen’s white-faced endurance.

Henry turned on his heel, snapped his fingers for his friends: George, Henry, William, Charles, Francis, as if he were calling his dogs, and marched out of the queen’s rooms without another word. I was pleased to see that of all of them, my brother George swept her the deepest bow. She let them go without a word, and rose and went quietly into her own privy chamber.

The musicians who had been fiddling away sounding more and more ragged, found their tune had died and they looked around for orders.

‘Oh go,’ I said in sudden impatience. ‘Can’t you see there’ll be no more dancing and no more singing for tonight? Nobody here needs music. God knows, nobody wants to dance.’

Jane Parker looked at me in surprise. ‘I’d have thought you’d have been glad. The king on bad terms with the queen, and you ready to be picked up like a bruised peach in the gutter.’

‘And I’d have thought you’d have had more sense than to say such a thing,’ Anne said roundly. ‘To speak thus of your sister-in-law to be! You had better take care or you won’t be welcome in this family.’

Jane did not back down to Anne. ‘There’s no breaking a betrothal. George and I are as good as wed in church. It’s just a question of settling the day. You can welcome me or you can hate me, Miss Anne. But you can’t forbid me. We are promised before witnesses.’

‘Oh what does it matter!’ I cried out. ‘What does any of it matter?’ I turned and ran to my chamber. Anne slipped in after me.

‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded tersely. ‘Is the king angry with us?’

‘No, though he should be, for we did a nasty piece of work in telling him the queen’s secret.’

‘Oh aye,’ Anne nodded, quite unmoved. ‘But he was not angry with us?’

‘No, he’s hurt.’

Anne went to the door.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to get them to bring the bath here,’ she said. ‘You’re going to wash.’

‘Oh Anne,’ I said irritably. ‘He’s heard the worst news in his life. He’s in the worst of tempers. He’s hardly going to send for me tonight. I can wash tomorrow, if I have to.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m taking no chances,’ she said. ‘You wash tonight.’

She was wrong, but only by a day. The next day the queen sat alone in her room with her ladies and I dined in the privy chamber with my brother, with his friends, and with the king. It was a merry merry evening with music and dancing and gambling. And that night I was in the king’s bed once more.

This time Henry and I were all but inseparable. The court knew that we were lovers, the queen knew, even the common people who came out from London to watch us dine knew. I wore his gold bracelet around my wrist, I rode his hunter to hounds. I had a pair of matched diamonds for my ears, I had three new gowns, one of cloth of gold. And one morning in bed he said to me:

‘Did you never wonder what came of that sketch that I asked the artist at the shipyard to do?’

‘I’d forgotten him,’ I said.

‘Come here and kiss me and I will tell you why I ordered him to draw you,’ Henry said lazily.

He lay back on the pillows of his bed. It was late in the morning but the curtains were still drawn around us, shielding us from the servants coming in to make up the fire, to bring him hot water, to empty the piss pot. I swarmed up the bed towards him, leaning my round breasts against his warm chest, letting my hair tumble forward in a veil of gold and bronze. My mouth came down on his, I inhaled the warm erotic scent of his beard, felt the soft prickle of the hairs around his mouth, pushed deeper against his lips and felt, as much as heard, his little groan of desire as I kissed him hard.

I raised my head and smiled into his eyes. ‘There is your kiss,’ I whispered throatily, feeling my desire rise with his. ‘Why did you order the artist to draw me?’

‘I shall show you,’ he promised. ‘After Mass. We’ll ride down to the river and you shall see my new ship and your likeness at the same time.’

‘Is the ship ready?’ I asked. I was reluctant to move away from him but he pulled back the covers and was ready to rise.

‘Yes. We’ll see her launched next week sometime,’ he said. He drew back the bed curtains a little and shouted for a servant to fetch George. I threw on my gown and my cloak and Henry held my hand to help me down from the bed. He kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’ll break my fast with the queen,’ he decided. ‘And then we’ll go out and see the ship.’

It was a lovely morning. I was wearing a new riding habit of yellow velvet, made for me with a bolt of cloth the king had given me. Anne was at my side in one of my old gowns. It gave me a fierce joy to see her wearing my hand-me-downs. But then, in the contradictory way of sisters, I admired what she had done with it. She had ordered it to be shortened and re-cut in the French way and she looked stylish. She wore it with a little French hat made from the material she had saved by cutting the skirt straighter. Henry Percy of Northumberland could not keep his eyes off her, but she flirted with equal charm with all of the king’s companions. There were nine of us riding out. Henry and I side by side in the lead. Anne behind me with Percy and William Norris. George and Jane, a silent ill-matched couple, next, and Francis Weston and William Brereton came behind, laughing and cracking jokes. We were preceded only by a couple of grooms and followed by four mounted soldiers.

We rode by the river. The tide was coming in and the waves splashed on the shore, white-capped. The seagulls, blown inland, cried and wheeled above our heads, their wings as bright as silver in the spring sunshine. The hedgerows were greening with the fresh colour of spring growth, primroses like pale pats of creamy butter in the sunny spots on the banks. The track alongside the river was hard-packed mud and the horses cantered along at a good easy pace. As we rode, the king sang me a lovesong of his own composing, and when I heard it over the second time I sang it with him and he laughed at my attempt at harmony. I did not have Anne’s talent, I knew. But it did not matter. That day nothing mattered, nothing could matter, but that my beloved and I were riding out together in the brightest of sunshine, on a little journey for pleasure, and he was happy, and I was happy in his sight.

We reached the shipyard sooner than I wanted and Henry himself stood beside my horse, lifted me down from the saddle and held me for a swift kiss when my feet were on the ground.

‘Sweetheart,’ he whispered. ‘I have a little surprise for you.’

He turned me around and stepped to one side so that I could see his beautiful new ship. She was almost ready for the sea now, she had the characteristic high poop deck and prow of a fighting ship, built for speed.

‘Look,’ Henry said, seeing me taking in her lines but not the detail. He pointed to her name carved and enamelled in gold in bold curly letters at the ornate prow. It said: ‘Mary Boleyn’.

For a moment I stared, reading the letters of my name but not understanding. He did not laugh at my astounded face, he watched me, seeing my surprise turn to puzzlement and then to dawning understanding.

‘You named her for me?’ I asked. I could hear my voice quaver. It was an honour too great for me. I felt too young, too small a person altogether to have a ship, and such a ship, named for me. And now everyone in the world would know that I was the king’s mistress. There could be no denial.

‘I did, sweetheart.’ He was smiling. He expected me to be delighted.

He tucked my cold hand under his elbow and urged me to the front of the ship. There was a figurehead, looking out with a proud beautiful profile, looking out over the Thames, out to sea, to France. It was me, with my lips slightly parted, slightly smiling, as if I was a woman to want such an adventure. As if I were not the cat’s-paw of the Howard family but a courageous lovely woman in my own right.

‘Me?’ I asked, my voice a thread above the sound of the water splashing at the side of the dry dock.

Henry’s mouth was at my ear, I could feel the warmth of his breath on my cold cheek.

‘You,’ he said. ‘A beauty, like you. Are you happy, Mary?’

I turned to him and his arms came around me and I stood up on tiptoe and buried my face in the warmth of his neck and smelled the sweet scent of his beard and his hair. ‘Oh Henry,’ I whispered. I wanted my face hidden from him, I knew that he would see no pleasure but a terror at rising so high, so publicly.

‘Are you happy?’ he insisted. He turned my face up, with a hand under my chin, so that he could scan me as if I were a manuscript. ‘It is a great honour.’

‘I know.’ My smile trembled on my lips. ‘I thank you.’

‘And you shall launch her,’ he promised me. ‘Next week.’

I hesitated. ‘Not the queen?’

I was fearful of taking her place to launch the newest and greatest ship that he had ever built. But of course it had to be me. How could she launch a ship that bore my name?

He shrugged her away as if they had not been husband and wife for thirteen years. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘Not the queen. You.’

I found a smile from somewhere and hoped that it was convincing and that it hid my terrified sense that I was going too far, too fast, and that the end of this road was not the sort of carefree joy that we had felt this morning, but something darker and more fearful. For all that we had ridden, singing out of tune together, we were not a lover and his lass. If my name was on this ship, if I launched it next week, then I was a declared rival to the Queen of England. I was an enemy to the Spanish ambassador, to the whole nation of Spain. I was a powerful force in the court, a threat to the Seymour family. The higher I rose in the king’s favour the greater the dangers that opened up around me. But I was a young woman of only fifteen years old. I could not yet revel in ambition.

As if she could read my reluctance, Anne was at my side. ‘You do my sister a great honour, sire,’ she said smoothly. ‘It is a most exquisite ship, as lovely as the woman you named her for. And a strong and powerful ship – like yourself. God bless her and send her against our enemies. Whoever they may be.’

Henry smiled at the compliment. ‘She is bound to be a lucky ship,’ he said. ‘With the face of an angel going before her.’

‘D’you think she’ll have to fight the French this year?’ George asked, taking my hand and giving my fingers a quick hidden pinch to recall me to my work as a courtier.

Henry nodded, looking grim. ‘Without doubt,’ he said. ‘And if the Spanish emperor will move in concert with me, we will follow my plan of our attack in the north of France, as he attacks in the south, then we cannot fail to curb Francis’s arrogance. This summer we will do it, without fail.’

‘If we can trust the Spanish,’ Anne said silkily.

Henry’s face darkened. ‘It is they who have the greatest need of us,’ he said. ‘Charles had better remember that. This is not a matter of family or kinship. If the queen is displeased with me for one reason or another she must remember that she is a queen of England first, and a princess of Spain second. Her first loyalty must be to me.’

Anne nodded. ‘I should hate to be so divided,’ she said. ‘Thank God we Boleyns are English through and through.’

‘For all your French gowns,’ Henry said with a sudden gleam of humour.

Anne smiled back at him. ‘A gown is a gown,’ she said. ‘Like Mary’s gown of yellow velvet. But you of all people would know that underneath there is a true subject with an undivided heart.’

He turned to me at that and smiled at me as I looked up at him. ‘It is my pleasure to reward such a faithful heart,’ he said.

I felt that there were tears in my eyes and I tried to blink them away without him seeing, but one stood on my eyelashes. Henry bent down and kissed it. ‘Sweetest girl,’ he said gently. ‘My little English rose.’

The whole court turned out to launch the ship, the Mary Boleyn, and only the queen pleaded an indisposition and stayed away. The Spanish ambassador was there to watch the vessel slip into the water, and whatever reservations he felt about the name of the ship he kept to himself.

My father was in a silent frenzy of irritation at himself, at me, at the king. The great honour which had been done to me and to my family had turned out to have a price attached. King Henry was a subtle monarch in such matters. When my uncle and father had thanked him for the compliment of using their name he thanked them for the contribution that he was sure they would want to make to the fitting out of such a ship which would so redound to their credit as it carried the Boleyn name across the seas.

‘And so the stakes go up again,’ George said cheerfully as we watched the boat slide over the rollers into the salty river waters of the Thames.

‘How can they get any higher?’ I asked from the corner of my smiling mouth. ‘I have my life on the table.’

The shipyard workers, already half drunk on free ale, waved their caps and cheered. Anne smiled and waved in reply. George grinned at me. The wind stirred the feather in his cap, ruffled his dark curls. ‘Now it’s costing Father money to keep you in the king’s favour. Now it’s not just your heart and happiness on the table, my little sister, it’s the family fortune. We thought we were playing him for a lovesick fool, but it turns out he’s playing us for money lenders. Stakes go up. Father and Uncle will want to see a return for this investment. You see if they don’t.’

I turned away from George and found Anne. She was a little distance from the court, Henry Percy beside her as usual. They were both watching the ship as the barges towed her out into the river and then turned her, and, struggling against the current, brought her back alongside the jetty and started to tie her up so that she could be fitted out as she lay in the water. Anne’s face was bright with the joy that flirtation always brought her.

She turned and smiled at me. ‘Ah, the Queen of the Day,’ she said mockingly.

I made a little grimace. ‘Don’t tease me, Anne. I have had enough from George.’

Henry Percy stepped forward and took my hand and kissed it. As I looked down at the back of his blond head I realised how high my star was rising. This was Henry Percy, son and heir to the Duke of Northumberland. There was no other man in the kingdom who had fairer prospects or a greater fortune. He was the son of the richest man in England, second only to the king, and he was bowing his head to me and kissing my hand.

‘She shall not tease you,’ he promised me, coming up smiling. ‘For I shall take you in to dine. I’m told that the cooks from Greenwich were out here at dawn to get everything ready. The king is going in, shall we follow?’

I hesitated but the queen, who always created a sense of formality, was left behind at Greenwich, lying in a darkened room with a pain in her belly and fear in her heart. There was no-one at the dockside but the feckless idle men and women of the court. No-one cared about precedence, except in the sense that winners must come first. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

Lord Henry Percy offered his other arm to Anne. ‘Shall I have two sisters?’

‘I think you would find the Bible forbids it,’ Anne said provocatively. ‘The Bible orders a man to choose between sisters and to stay with his first choice. Anything else is a cardinal sin.’

Lord Henry Percy laughed. ‘I’m sure I could get an indulgence,’ he said. ‘The Pope would surely grant me a dispensation. With two sisters like this, what man could be made to choose?’

We did not ride home until it was twilight and the stars were starting to come out in the pale grey sky of spring. I rode beside the king, my hand in his, and we let the horses amble along the riverside tow track. We rode under the archway of the palace and up to the opening front door. Then he pulled up his horse and he lifted me down from the saddle and whispered in my ear: ‘I wish you were queen for all the days, and not just for one day in a pavilion by the river, my love.’

‘He said what?’ my uncle asked.

I stood before him, like a prisoner under question before the court. Behind the table in the Howard rooms were seated Uncle Howard, Duke of Surrey, and my father and George. At the back of the room, behind me, Anne was sitting beside my mother. I, alone before the table, stood like a disgraced child before my elders.

‘He said that he wished I was queen for all the days,’ I said in a small voice, hating Anne for betraying my confidence, hating my father and my uncle for their cold-hearted dissection of lovers’ whispers.

‘What d’you think he meant?’

‘Nothing,’ I said sulkily. ‘It’s just love talk.’

‘We need to see some repayment for all these loans,’ my uncle said irritably. ‘Has he said anything about giving you land? Or something for George? Or us?’

‘Can’t you hint him into it?’ my father suggested. ‘Remind him that George is to be married.’

I looked to George in mute appeal.

‘The thing is that he’s very alert for that sort of thing,’ George pointed out. ‘Everyone does it to him all the time. When he walks from his privy chamber to Mass every morning, his way is lined with people just waiting to ask him for a favour. I should think what he likes about Mary here is that she’s not like that. I don’t think she’s ever asked for anything.’

‘She has diamonds worth a fortune in her ears,’ my mother put in sharply from behind me. Anne nodded.

‘But she didn’t ask for them. He gave them freely. He likes to be generous when it’s unexpected. I think we have to let Mary play this her own way. She has a talent for loving him.’

I bit my lip on that, to stop myself saying a word. I did have a talent for loving him. It was perhaps the only talent I had. And this family, this powerful network of men, were using my talent to love the king as they used George’s talents at swordplay, or my father’s talent for languages, to further the interests of our family.

‘Court moves to London next week,’ my father remarked. ‘The king will see the Spanish ambassador. There’s little chance of him making any greater move towards Mary while he needs the Spanish alliance to fight the French.’

‘Better work for peace then,’ my uncle recommended wolfishly.

‘I do. I am a peacemaker,’ my father replied. ‘Blessed, aren’t I?’

The court in progress was always a mighty sight, part-way between a country fair, a market day, and a joust. It was all arranged by Cardinal Wolsey, everything in the court or the country was done by his command. He had been at the king’s side at the Battle of the Spurs in France, he had been almoner then to the English army and the men had never lain so dry at night nor eaten so well. He had a grasp of detail that made him attentive to how the court would get from one place to another, a grasp of politics that prompted him as to where we should stop and which lord should be honoured with a visit when the king was on his summer progress, and he was wily enough to trouble Henry with none of these things so the young king went from pleasure to pleasure as if the sky itself rained down supplies and servants and organisation.

It was the cardinal who ruled the precedence of the court on the move. Ahead of us went the pages carrying the standards with the pennants of all the lords in the train fluttering above their heads. Next there was a gap to let the dust settle and then came the king, riding his best hunter with his embossed saddle of red leather and all the trappings of kingship. Above his head flew his own personal standard, and at his side were his friends chosen to ride with him that day: my husband William Carey, Cardinal Wolsey, my father, and then trailing along behind them came the rest of the king’s companions, changing their places in the train as they desired, lagging back or spurring forward. Around them, in a loose formation, came the king’s personal guards mounted on horses and holding their lances at the salute. They hardly served to protect him – who would dream of hurting such a king? – but they kept back the press of people who gathered to cheer and gawp whenever we rode through a little town or a village.

Then there was another break before the queen’s train. She was riding the steady old palfrey which she always used. She sat straight in the saddle, her gown awkwardly disposed in great folds of thick fabric, her hat skewered on her head, her eyes squinting against the bright sunshine. She was feeling ill. I knew because I had been at her side when she had mounted her horse in the morning and I had heard the tiny repressed grunt of pain as she settled into the saddle.

Behind the queen’s court came the other members of the household, some of them riding, some of them seated in carts, some of them singing or drinking ale to keep the dust from the road out of their throats. All of us shared a careless sense of a high day and a holiday as the court left Greenwich and headed for London with a new season of parties and entertainments ahead of us, and who knew what might happen in this year?

The queen’s rooms at York Place were small and neat and we took only a few days to get unpacked and have everything to rights. The king visited every morning, as usual, and his court came with him, Lord Henry Percy among them. His lordship and Anne took to sitting in the windowseat together, their heads very close, as they worked on one of Lord Henry’s poems. He swore that he would become a great poet under Anne’s tuition and she swore that he would never learn anything, but that it was all a ruse to waste her time and her learning on such a dolt.

I thought that it was something for a Boleyn girl from a little castle in Kent and a handful of fields in Essex to call the Duke of Northumberland’s son a dolt, but Henry Percy laughed and claimed that she was too stern a teacher and talent, great talent, would out, whatever she might say.

‘The cardinal is asking for you,’ I said to Lord Henry. He rose up, in no particular hurry, kissed Anne’s hand in farewell, and went to find Cardinal Wolsey. Anne gathered up the papers they had been working on and locked them in her writing box.

‘Does he really have no talent as a poet?’ I asked.

She shrugged with a smile. ‘He’s no Wyatt.’

‘Is he a Wyatt in courtship?’

‘He’s not married,’ she said. ‘And so more desirable to a sensible woman.’

‘Too high, even for you.’

‘I don’t see why. If I want him, and he wants me.’

‘You try asking Father to speak to the duke,’ I recommended sarcastically. ‘See what the duke says.’

She turned her head to look out of the window. The long beautiful lawns of York Place stretched down below us, almost hiding the sparkle of the river at the foot of the garden. ‘I won’t ask Father,’ she said. ‘I thought I might settle matters on my own account.’

I was going to laugh then I realised she was serious. ‘Anne, this is not something you can settle for yourself. He’s only a young man, you’re only seventeen, you can’t decide these things for yourselves. His father is certain to have someone in mind for him, and our father and uncle are certain to have plans for you. We’re not private people, we’re the Boleyn girls. We have to be guided, we have to do as we are told. Look at me!’

‘Yes, look at you!’ She rounded on me with a sudden flare of her dark energy. ‘Married when you were still a child and now the king’s mistress. Half as clever as me! Half as educated! But you are the centre of the court and I am nothing. I have to be your lady in waiting. I cannot serve you, Mary. It’s an insult to me.’

‘I never asked you to …’ I stammered.

‘Who insists that you bathe and wash your hair?’ she demanded fiercely.

‘You do. But I …’

‘Who helps you choose your clothes and prompts you with the king? Who has rescued you a thousand times when you’ve been too stupid and tongue-tied to know how to play him?’

‘You. But Anne …’

‘And what is there in this for me? I have no husband who can be given land to show the king’s favour. I have no husband to win high office because my sister is the king’s mistress. I get nothing from this. However high you rise I still get nothing. I have to have a place of my own.’

‘You should have a place of your own,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t deny it. All I was saying was that I don’t think you can be a duchess.’

‘And you should decide?’ she spat at me. ‘You who are nothing but the king’s diversion from the important business of making a son if he can and making war if he can raise an army?’

‘I don’t say I should decide,’ I whispered. ‘I just said that I don’t think they’ll let you do it.’

‘When it’s done, it’s done,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘And no-one will know until it’s done.’

Suddenly, like a striking snake, she reached out and grabbed my hand in a fierce grip. At once she twisted it behind my back and held me so that I could move neither forward nor backwards but only cry out in pain: ‘Anne! Don’t! You’re really hurting!’

‘Well, hear this,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Hear this, Mary. I am playing my own game and I don’t want you interrupting. Nobody will know anything until I am ready to tell them, and then they will know everything too late.’

‘You’re going to make him love you?’

Abruptly she released me and I gripped my elbow and my arm where the bones ached.

‘I’m going to make him marry me,’ she said flatly. ‘And if you so much as breathe a word to anyone, then I will kill you.’

After that I watched Anne with more care. I saw how she played him. Having advanced through all the cold months of the New Year at Greenwich, now, with the coming of the sun and our arrival in York Place, she suddenly retreated. And the more she withdrew from him the more he came on. When he came into a room she looked up and threw him a smile which went like an arrow to the centre of the target. She filled her look with invitation, with desire. But then she looked away and she would not look at him again for the whole of the visit.

He was in the train of Cardinal Wolsey and was supposed to wait on His Grace while the cardinal visited the king or the queen. In practice there was nothing for the young lord to do but to lounge around the queen’s apartments and flirt with anyone who would talk to him. It was clear that he only had eyes for Anne and she walked past him, danced with anyone who asked her but him, dropped her glove and let him return it to her, sat near him but did not speak to him, returned his poems and told him that she could help him no longer.

She went into the most unswerving of retreats, having been unswervingly in advance, and the young man did not begin to know what he could do to recapture her.

He came to me. ‘Mistress Carey, have I offended your sister in some way?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘She used to smile on me so charmingly and now she treats me very coldly.’

I thought for a moment, I was so slow at these things. On the one hand was the true answer: that she was playing him like a complete angler with a fish on the line. But I knew Anne would not want me to say that. On the other hand was the answer Anne would want me to give. I looked into Henry Percy’s anxious baby face for a moment of genuine compassion. Then I gave him the Boleyn smile and the Howard answer. ‘Indeed, my lord, I think she is afraid to be too kind.’

I saw the hope leap up in his trusting, boyish face. ‘Too kind?’

‘She was very kind to you, was she not, my lord?’

He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I’m her slave.’

‘I think she feared that she might come to like you too much.’

He leaned forward as if to snatch the words from my mouth. ‘Too much?’

‘Too much for her own peace of mind,’ I said very softly.

He leaped up and took two strides away from me and then came back again. ‘She might desire me?’

I smiled and turned my head a little so that he could not see my weariness at this deceit. He was not to be put off. He dropped to his knees before me and peered up into my face.

‘Tell me, Mistress Carey,’ he begged. ‘I have not slept for nights. I have not eaten for days. I am a soul in torment. Tell me if you think that she loves me, if you think that she might love me. Tell me, for pity’s sake.’

‘I cannot say.’ Indeed, I could not. The lies would have stuck in my throat. ‘You must ask her yourself.’

He sprang up, like a hare out of bracken with the beagle hounds behind it. ‘I will! I will! Where is she?’

‘Playing at bowls in the garden.’

He needed nothing more, he tore open the door and ran out of the room. I heard the heels of his boots ring down the stone stairs to the door to the garden. Jane Parker, who had been seated across the room from us, looked up.

‘Have you made another conquest?’ she asked, getting the wrong idea as usual.

I gave her a smile as poisonous as her own. ‘Some women attract desire. Others do not,’ I said simply.

He found her at the bowling green, losing daintily and deliberately to Sir Thomas Wyatt.

‘I shall write you a sonnet,’ Wyatt promised. ‘For handing me victory with such grace.’

‘No, no, it was a fair battle,’ Anne protested.

‘If there had been money on it I think I would be getting out my purse,’ he said. ‘You Boleyns only lose when there is nothing to gain by winning.’

Anne smiled. ‘Next time you shall put your fortune on it,’ she promised him. ‘See – I have lulled you into a sense of safety.’

‘I have no fortune to offer but my heart.’

‘Will you walk with me?’ Henry Percy interrupted, his voice coming out far louder than he intended.

Anne gave a little start as if she had not noticed him there. ‘Oh! Lord Henry.’

‘The lady is playing bowls,’ Sir Thomas said.

Anne smiled at them both. ‘I have been so roundly defeated that I will take a walk and plan my strategy,’ she said and put her hand on Lord Henry Percy’s arm.

He led her away from the bowling green, down the winding path that led to a seat beneath a yew tree.

‘Miss Anne,’ he began.

‘Is it too damp to sit?’

At once he swung his rich cloak from his shoulder and spread it out for her on a stone bench.

‘Miss Anne …’

‘No, I am too chilled,’ she decided and rose up from the seat.

‘Miss Anne!’ he exclaimed, a little more crossly.

Anne paused and turned her seductive smile on him.

‘Your lordship?’

‘I have to know why have you grown so cold to me?’

For a moment she hesitated, then she dropped the coquettish play and turned a face to him which was grave and lovely.

‘I did not mean to be cold,’ she said slowly. ‘I meant to be careful.’

‘Of what?’ he exclaimed. ‘I have been in torment!’

‘I did not mean to torment you. I meant to draw back a little. Nothing more than that.’

‘Why?’ he whispered.

She looked down the garden to the river. ‘I thought it better for me, perhaps better for us both,’ she said quietly. ‘We might become too close in friendship for my comfort.’

He took a swift step from her and then back to her side. ‘I would never cause you a moment’s uneasiness,’ he assured her. ‘If you wanted me to promise you that we would be friends and that no breath of scandal would ever come to you, I would have promised that.’

She turned her dark luminous eyes on him. ‘Could you promise that no-one would ever say that we were in love?’

Mutely, he shook his head. Of course he could not promise what a scandal-mad court might or might not say.

‘Could you promise that we would never fall in love?’

He hesitated. ‘Of course I love you, Mistress Anne,’ he said. ‘In the courtly way. In the polite way.’

She smiled as if she were pleased to hear it. ‘I know it is nothing more than a May game. For me, also. But it’s a dangerous game when played between a handsome man and a maid, when there are many people very quick to say that we are made for each other, that we are perfectly matched.’

‘Do they say that?’

‘When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.’

‘What else do they say?’ He was quite entranced by this portrait.

‘They say that you love me. They say that I love you. They say that we have both been head over heels in love while we thought we were doing nothing but playing.’

‘My God,’ he said at the revelation. ‘My God, it is so!’

‘Oh my lord! What are you saying?’

‘I am saying that I have been a fool. I have been in love with you for months and all the time I thought I was amusing myself and you were teasing me, and that it all meant nothing.’

Her gaze warmed him. ‘It was not nothing to me,’ she whispered.

Her dark eyes held him, the boy was transfixed. ‘Anne,’ he whispered. ‘My love.’

Her lips curved into a kissable, irresistible smile. ‘Henry,’ she breathed. ‘My Henry.’

He took a small step towards her, put his hands on her tightly laced waist. He drew her close to him and Anne yielded, took one seductive step closer. His head came down as her face tipped up and his mouth found hers for their first kiss.

‘Oh, say it,’ Anne whispered. ‘Say it now, this moment, say it, Henry.’

‘Marry me,’ he said.

‘And so it was done,’ Anne reported blithely in our bedroom that night. She had ordered the bath tub to be brought in and we had gone into the hot water, one after another, and scrubbed each other’s backs and washed each other’s hair. Anne, as fanatical as a French courtesan about cleanliness, was ten times more rigorous than usual. She inspected my fingernails and toenails as if I were a dirty schoolboy, she handed me an ivory earscoop to clean out my ears as if I were her child, she pulled the lice comb through every lock of my head, reckless of my whimpers of pain.

‘And so? What is done?’ I asked sulkily, dripping on the floor and wrapping myself in a sheet. Four maids came in and started to bale out the water into buckets so that the great wooden bath could be carried away. The sheets they used to line the bath were heavy and sodden, it all seemed like a great deal of effort for very little gain. ‘For all I have heard is more flirtation.’

‘He’s asked me,’ Anne said. She waited till the door was shut behind the servants and then wrapped the sheet more tightly around her breasts and seated herself before the mirror.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Who is it now?’ I called in exasperation.

‘It’s me,’ George replied.

‘We’re bathing,’ I said.

‘Oh let him come in.’ Anne started to comb through her black hair. ‘He can pull out these tangles.’

George lounged into the room and raised a dark eyebrow at the mess of water on the floor and wet sheets, at the two of us, half naked, and Anne with a thick mane of wet hair thrown over her shoulder.

‘Is this a masque? Are you mermaids?’

‘Anne insisted that we should bathe. Again.’

Anne offered him her comb and he took it.

‘Comb my hair,’ she said with her sly sideways smile. ‘Mary always pulls.’ Obediently, he stood behind her and started to comb through her dark hair, a strand at a time. He combed her carefully, as he would handle his mare’s mane. Anne closed her eyes and luxuriated in his grooming.

‘Any lice?’ she asked, suddenly alert.

‘None yet,’ he reassured her, as intimate as a Venetian hairdresser.

‘So what’s done?’ I demanded, returning to Anne’s announcement.

‘I have him,’ she said frankly. ‘Henry Percy. He has told me he loves me, he has told me that he wants to marry me. I want you and George to witness our betrothal, he can give me a ring, and then it’s done and unbreakable, as good as a marriage in a church before a priest. And I shall be a duchess.’

‘Good God.’ George froze, the comb held in the air. ‘Anne! Are you sure?’

‘Am I likely to bodge this?’ she asked tersely.

‘No,’ he allowed. ‘But still. The Duchess of Northumberland! My God, Anne, you will own most of the north of England.’

She nodded, smiling at herself in the mirror.

‘Good God, we will be the greatest family in the country! We’ll be one of the greatest in Europe. With Mary in the king’s bed and you the wife of his greatest subject, we will put the Howards so high they can never fall.’ He broke off for a moment as he thought through to the next step.

‘My God, if Mary was to fall pregnant to the king and to have a boy, then with Northumberland behind him he could take the throne as his own. I could be uncle to the King of England.’

‘Yes,’ Anne said silkily. ‘That was what I thought.’

I said nothing, watching my sister’s face.

‘The Howard family on the throne,’ George murmured, half to himself. ‘Northumberland and Howards in alliance. It’s done, isn’t it? When those two come together. They would only come together through a marriage and an heir for both of them to strive for. Mary could bear the heir, and Anne could weld the Percys to his future.’

‘You thought I’d never achieve it,’ Anne said, pointing a finger at me.

I nodded. ‘I thought you were aiming too high.’

‘You’ll know another time,’ she warned me. ‘Where I aim, I will hit.’

‘I’ll know another time,’ I concurred.

‘But what about him?’ George warned her. ‘What if they disinherit him? Fine place you’ll be in then, married to the boy who used to be heir to a dukedom, but now disgraced and owning nothing.’

She shook her head. ‘They won’t do that. He’s too precious to them. But you have to take my part, George; and Father and Uncle Howard. His father has to see that we are good enough. Then they’ll let the betrothal stand.’

‘I’ll do all I can but the Percys are a proud lot, Anne. They meant him for Mary Talbot until Wolsey came out against the match. They won’t want you instead of her.’

‘Is it just his wealth that you want?’ I asked.

‘Oh, the title too,’ Anne said crudely.

‘I mean, really. What d’you feel for him?’

For a moment I thought she was going to turn aside the question with another hard joke which would make his boyish adoration of her seem like nothing. But then she tossed her head and the clean hair flew through George’s hands like a dark river.

‘Oh, I know I’m a fool! I know he is nothing more than a boy, and a silly boy at that, but when he is with me I feel like a girl myself. I feel as if we are two youngsters, in love and with nothing to fear. He makes me feel reckless! He makes me feel enchanted! He makes me feel in love!’

It was as if the Howard spell of coldness had been broken, smashed like a mirror, and everything was real and bright. I laughed with her and snatched up her hands and looked into her face. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ I demanded. ‘Falling in love? Isn’t it the most wonderful, wonderful thing?’

She pulled her hands away. ‘Oh, go away, Mary. You are such a child. But yes! Wonderful? Yes! Now don’t simper over me, I can’t stand it.’

George took a hank of her dark hair and twisted it onto the top of her head and admired her face in the mirror. ‘Anne Boleyn in love,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Who’d have believed it?’

‘It’d never have happened if he hadn’t been the greatest man in the kingdom after the king,’ she reminded him. ‘I don’t forget what’s due to me and my family.’

He nodded. ‘I know that, Annamaria. We all knew that you would aim very high. But a Percy! It’s higher than I imagined.’

She leaned forward as if to interrogate her reflection. She cupped her face in her hands. ‘This is my first love. My first and ever love.’

‘Please God that you are lucky and that it is your last love as well as your first,’ George said, suddenly sober.

Her dark eyes met his in the mirror. ‘Please God,’ she said. ‘I want nothing more in my life but Henry Percy. With that I would be content. Oh – George, I cannot tell you. If I can have and hold Henry Percy I will be so very content.’

Henry Percy came, at Anne’s bidding, to the queen’s rooms at noon the next day. She had chosen her time with care. The ladies had all gone to Mass, and we had the rooms to ourselves. Henry Percy came in and looked around, surprised at the silence and emptiness. Anne went up to him and took both his hands in hers. I thought for a moment that he looked, not so much courted as hunted.

‘My love,’ Anne said, and at the sound of her voice the boy’s face warmed; his courage came back to him.

‘Anne,’ he said softly.

His hand fumbled in the pocket of his padded breeches, he drew a ring out of an inner pocket. From my station in the windowseat I could see the wink of a red ruby – the symbol of a virtuous woman.

‘For you,’ he said softly.

Anne took his hand. ‘Do you want to plight our troth now, before witnesses?’ she asked.

He gulped a little. ‘Yes, I do.’

She glowed at him. ‘Do it then.’

He glanced at George and me as if he thought one of us might stop him.

George and I smiled encouragingly, the Boleyn smile: a pair of pleasant snakes.

‘I, Henry Percy, take thee, Anne Boleyn, to be my lawful wedded wife,’ he said, taking Anne by the hand.

‘I, Anne Boleyn, take thee, Henry Percy, to be my lawful wedded husband,’ she said, her voice steadier than his.

He found the third finger of her left hand. ‘With this ring I promise myself to you,’ he said quietly, and slipped it on her finger. It was too loose. She clenched a fist to hold it on.

‘With this ring, I take you,’ she replied.

He bent his head, he kissed her. When she turned her face to me her eyes were hazy with desire.

‘Leave us,’ she said in a low voice.

We gave them two hours, and then we heard, down the stone corridors, the queen and her ladies coming back from Mass. We knocked loudly on the door in the rhythm that meant ‘Boleyn!’ and we knew that Anne, even in a sated sleep, would hear it and jump up. But when we opened the door and went in, she and Henry Percy were composing a madrigal. She was playing the lute and he was singing the words they had written together. Their heads were very close so that they might both see the hand-written music on the stand, but excepting that intimacy, they were as they had been any day these last three months.

Anne smiled at me as George and I came into the room, followed by the queen’s ladies.

‘We have written such a pretty air, it has taken us all the morning,’ Anne said sweetly.

‘And what is it called?’ George asked.

‘“Merrily, merrily”,’ Anne replied. ‘It’s called “Merrily Merrily and Onward We Go”.’

That night it was Anne who left our bedchamber. She threw a dark cloak over her gown and went to the door as the palace tower bell rang for midnight.

‘Where are you going at this time of night?’ I demanded, scandalised.

Her pale face looked out at me from under the dark hood. ‘To my husband,’ she said simply.

‘Anne, you cannot,’ I said, aghast. ‘You will get caught and you will be ruined.’

‘We are betrothed in the sight of God and before witnesses. That’s as good as a marriage, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said unwillingly.

‘A marriage could be overthrown for non-consummation, couldn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I’m making it fast,’ she said. ‘Not even the Percy family will be able to wriggle out of it when Henry and I tell them that we are wedded and bedded.’

I kneeled up in the bed, imploring her to stay. ‘But Anne, if someone sees you!’

‘They won’t,’ she said.

‘When the Percys know that you and he have been slipping out at midnight!’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t see the how or where makes much difference. As long as it is done.’

‘If it should come to nothing –’ I broke off at the blaze of her eyes. In one stride she was across the room and she had her hands at the neck of my nightdress, twisting it against my throat. ‘That is why I am doing this,’ she hissed. ‘Fool that you are. So that it does not come to nothing. So that no-one can ever say that it was nothing. So that it is signed and sealed. Wedded and bedded. Done without possibility of denial. Now you sleep. I shall be back in the early hours. Long before dawn. But I shall go now.’

I nodded and said not a word until her hand was on the ring of the door latch. ‘But Anne, do you love him?’ I asked curiously.

The curve of her hood hid all but the corner of her smile. ‘I am a fool to own it, but I am in a fever for his touch.’

Then she opened the door, and was gone.

Summer 1523

The court saw in the May with a day of revels, planned and executed by Cardinal Wolsey. The ladies of the queen’s court went out on barges, all dressed in white, and were surprised by French brigands, dressed in black. A rescue party of freeborn Englishmen, dressed all in green, rowed to the rescue and there was a merry fight with water thrown from buckets, and water cannonade with pigs’ bladders filled with water. The royal barge, decorated all over in green bunting and flying a greenwood flag, had an ingenious cannon that fired little water bombs which blasted the French brigands out of the water, and they had to be rescued by the Thames boatmen who were well paid for their trouble and then had to be prevented from joining in the fight.

The queen was thoroughly splashed in the battle and she laughed as merry as a girl to see her husband with a mask on his face and a hat on his head, playing at Robin of Nottingham and throwing a rose to me, as I sat in the barge beside her.

We landed at York Place and the cardinal himself greeted us on shore. There were musicians hidden in the trees of the garden. Robin of Greenwood, half a head taller than anyone else and golden-haired, led me into the dance. I saw the queen’s smile never falter as the king took my hand and placed it on his green doublet, over his heart, and I tucked his rose into my hood so that it bloomed at my temple.

The cardinal’s cooks had surpassed themselves. As well as stuffed peacock and swan, goose and chicken, there were great haunches of venison and four different sorts of roasted fish, including his favourite, carp. The sweetmeats on the table were a tribute to the May, all made into flowers and bouquets in marchpane, almost too pretty to break and eat. After we had eaten and the day started to grow chilly, the musicians played an eerie little tune and led us up through the darkening gardens into the great hall of York Place.

It was transformed. The cardinal had ordered it swathed in green cloth, fastened at every corner with great boughs of flowering may. In the centre of the room were two great thrones, one for the king and one for the queen, with the king’s choristers dancing and singing before them. We all took our places and watched the children’s masque and then we all rose and danced too.

We made merry till midnight and then the queen rose and signalled to her ladies to leave the room. I was following in her train when my gown was caught by the king.

‘Come to me now,’ Henry said urgently.

The queen turned to make her farewell curtsey to the king and saw him, with his hand on the hem of my gown and me hesitating before him. She did not falter, she swept him her dignified Spanish curtsey.

‘I give you good night, husband,’ she said in her deep sweet tone. ‘Good night, Mistress Carey.’

I dropped like a stone into a curtsey to her. ‘Good night, Your Majesty,’ I whispered, my head down. I wished that the curtsey might take me down further, into the floor, into the ground below the floor, so she could not see my scarlet burning face as I came up.

When I rose up she was gone and he was turned aside. He had forgotten her already, it was as if a mother had left the young people to play at last. ‘Let’s have some more music,’ he said joyously. ‘And some wine.’

I looked around. The ladies of the queen’s court were gone with her. George smiled reassuringly at me.

‘Don’t fret,’ he said in an undertone.

I hesitated but Henry, who had been taking a glass of wine, turned back to me with a goblet in his hand. ‘To the Queen of the May!’ he said, and his court, who would have repeated Dutch riddles if he had recited them, obediently replied: ‘To the Queen of the May!’ and raised their glasses to me.

Henry took me by the hand and led me up to the throne where Queen Katherine had been sitting. I went with him but I could feel my feet drag. I was not ready to sit on her chair.

Gently he urged me up the steps and I turned and looked down at the innocent faces of the children below me, and the more knowing smiles from Henry’s court.

‘Let’s dance for the Queen of the May!’ Henry said, and swept a girl into a set and they danced before me, and I, seated on the queen’s throne, watching her husband dance, and flirt prettily with his partner, knew that I wore her tolerant mask-like smile on my own face.

A day after the May Day feast Anne came whirling into our room, whitefaced.

‘See this!’ she hissed and threw a piece of paper on the bed.

Dear Anne, I cannot come to see you today. My lord cardinal knows everything and I am bidden to explain to him. But I swear I shall not fail you.

‘Oh my God,’ I said softly. ‘The cardinal knows. The king will know too.’

‘So what?’ Anne demanded, like a striking adder. ‘So what if they all know? It’s a proper betrothal, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t they all know?’

I saw that the paper was shaking in my hand. ‘What does he mean, he will not fail you?’ I asked. ‘If it is an unbreakable betrothal then he cannot fail. There can be no question of failure.’

Anne took three swift steps across the room, came up short against the wall, wheeled around and took three steps back again, prowling like a lion in the Tower. ‘I don’t know what he means by that,’ she spat. ‘The boy’s a fool.’

‘You said you loved him.’

‘That doesn’t mean he’s not a fool.’ She reached a sudden decision. ‘I must go to him. He’ll need me. He’ll wilt beneath them.’

‘You cannot. You’ll have to wait.’

She flung open the clothes press and pulled out her cloak.

There was a thunderous knock on the door and we both froze. In one movement she had the cloak off her shoulders, slammed into the press and she was sitting on it, serene, as if she had been there all the morning. I opened the door. It was a serving man in the livery of Cardinal Wolsey.

‘Is Mistress Anne within?’

I opened the door a little wider so he could see her, thoughtfully gazing out over the garden. The cardinal’s barge with the distinctive red standards was moored at the bottom of the garden.

‘Will you please come to the cardinal in the audience room,’ he said.

Anne turned her head and looked at him without replying.

‘At once,’ he said. ‘My lord the cardinal said that you were to come at once.’

She did not flare up at the arrogance of the command. She knew as well as I did that since Cardinal Wolsey ran the kingdom, a word from him carried the same weight as a word from the king. She crossed to the mirror, threw one glance at her reflection. She pinched her cheeks to draw a little colour to them, bit her upper lip and then her lower.

‘Shall I come too?’ I asked.

‘Yes, walk beside me,’ she said in a rapid undertone. ‘It’ll remind him that you have the ear of the king. And if the king is there – soften him if you can.’

‘I can’t demand anything,’ I whispered urgently.

Even at this moment of crisis she shot me a swift patronising smile. ‘I know that.’

We followed the servant through the great hall and to Henry’s audience room. It was unusually deserted. Henry was out hunting, the court with him. The cardinal’s men in their scarlet livery were at the doors. They stepped back to let us through and then barred the way once more. His lordship had made sure that we would not be interrupted.

‘Mistress Anne,’ he said as she entered the room. ‘I have heard a most distressing piece of news today.’

Anne stood very still, her hands folded, her face serene. ‘I am sorry to hear that, Your Grace,’ she said smoothly.

‘It seems that my page, young Henry of Northumberland, has presumed on his friendship with you and on the freedom which I allow him to dally in the queen’s rooms and prattle of love.’

Anne shook her head, but the cardinal would not let her speak.

‘I have told him this day that such freakish sports are not fitting in one who will inherit the counties of the North and whose marriage is a matter for his father, for the king, and for me. He is not a lad on a farm who can tumble the milkmaid into the haystack and no-one think the less. The marriage of a lord as great as he is a matter of policy.’ He paused. ‘And the king and I make the policy in this kingdom.’

‘He asked me for my hand in marriage and I gave it to him,’ Anne said steadily. I could see the gold ‘B’ she wore on the pearl choker around her neck bumping to her rapid heartbeat. ‘We are betrothed, my lord cardinal. I am sorry if the match is not to your liking but it is done. It cannot be undone.’

He shot her one dark look from under his plump hat.

‘Lord Henry has agreed to submit to the authority of his father and of the king,’ he said. ‘I am telling you this out of courtesy, Mistress Boleyn, and so that you may avoid giving offence to those set above you by God.’

She went white. ‘He never said that. He never said he would submit to his father’s authority instead of –’

‘Instead of yours? You know, I did wonder if that was how it was. Indeed, he did, Mistress Anne. All of this little matter is in the hands of the king and the duke.’

‘He is promised to me, we are betrothed,’ she said fiercely.

‘It was a de futuro betrothal,’ the cardinal ruled. ‘A promise to marry in the future if possible.’

‘It was de facto,’ Anne replied unswervingly. ‘A betrothal made before witnesses, and consummated.’

‘Ah.’ One podgy hand was raised in caution. The heavy cardinal’s ring winked at Anne as if to remind her that this man was the spiritual leader of England. ‘Please do not suggest that such a thing could have happened. It would be too imprudent. If I say that the betrothal was de futuro then that is what it was, Mistress Anne. I cannot be in the wrong. If a lady bedded a man on such slender surety she would be a fool. A lady who had given herself and then found herself abandoned would be totally ruined. She would never marry at all.’

Anne shot a swift sideways glance at me. Wolsey must have been aware of the irony of preaching the virtues of virginity to a woman who was sister to the most notorious adulteress in the kingdom. But his gaze never wavered.

‘It would be very injurious to you, Mistress Boleyn, if your affection for Lord Henry persuaded you to tell me such a lie.’

I could see her fighting her rising panic. ‘My lord cardinal,’ she said, and her voice quavered slightly. ‘I would be a good Duchess of Northumberland. I would care for the poor, I would see justice done in the North. I would protect England from the Scots. I would be your friend forever. I would be eternally in your debt.’

He smiled a little, as if the thought of Anne’s favour was not the greatest of bribes he had ever been offered. ‘You would be a delightful duchess,’ he said. ‘If not of Northumberland then elsewhere, I am sure. Your father will have to make that decision. It will be his choice where you are wed, and the king and I will have some say in the matter. Rest assured, my daughter in Christ, I will be careful of your wishes. I will bear in mind,’ he did not trouble to hide a smile, ‘I will bear in mind that you wish to be a duchess.’

He held out his hand and Anne had to step forward, curtsey, and kiss the ring, and then walk backwards from the room.

When the door shut on us she did not say a word. She turned on her heel and headed for the stone staircase down to the garden. She did not speak until we had marched down the pretty winding paths and were deep in a bower of roses which were sprawling around a stone seat and opening their white and scarlet petals to the sunshine.

‘What can I do?’ she demanded. ‘Think! Think!’

I was about to answer that I could think of nothing, but she was not talking to me. She was talking to herself. ‘Can I outflank Northumberland? Get Mary to plead my case with the king?’ She shook her head for a moment. ‘Mary can’t be trusted. She’d bodge it.’

I bit back my indignant denial. Anne strode up and down the grass, her skirts swishing around her high-heeled shoes. I sank down to the seat and watched her.

‘Can I send George to stiffen Henry’s resolve?’ She took another turn. ‘My father, my uncle,’ she said rapidly. ‘It’s in their interest to see me rise. They could speak to the king, they could influence the cardinal. They might find me a dowry which would attract Northumberland. They would want me as duchess.’ She nodded with sudden determination. ‘They must stand by me,’ she decided. ‘They will stand by me. And when Northumberland comes to London they will tell him that the betrothal is done, and that the marriage has taken place.’

The family meeting was convened in the Howard house in London. My mother and father were seated at the great table, my uncle Howard between them. Myself and George, sharing Anne’s disgrace, were standing at the back of the room. And it was Anne who was before the table like a prisoner before the bar. She did not stand with her head bowed as I always did. Anne stood with her head high, one dark eyebrow slightly raised, and she met my uncle’s glare as if she were his equal.

‘I am sorry that you have learned French practices along with your style of dress,’ my uncle said baldly. ‘I warned you before that I would have no whisper against your name. Now I hear that you have allowed young Percy improper intimacies.’

‘I have lain with my husband,’ Anne said flatly.

My uncle glanced at my mother.

‘If you say that, or anything like it, ever again, you will be whipped and sent to Hever and never brought back to court,’ my mother said quietly. ‘I would rather see you dead at my feet than dishonoured. You shame yourself before your father and your uncle if you say such a thing. You make yourself a disgrace. You make yourself hateful to us all.’

Seated behind Anne I could not see her face, but I saw her fingers take in a fold of her gown, as a drowning man might catch at a straw.

‘You will go to Hever until everyone has forgotten about this unfortunate mistake,’ my uncle ruled.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Anne said bitingly. ‘But the unfortunate mistake is not mine but yours. Lord Henry and I are married. He will stand by me. You and my father must bring pressure to bear on his father, on the cardinal and the king, to let this marriage be made public. If you will do this then I am the Duchess of Northumberland and you have a Howard girl in the greatest duchy of England. I would have thought that gain was worth a little struggle. If I am duchess and Mary has a son then he is the nephew of the Duke of Northumberland and the king’s bastard. We could put him on the throne.’

Uncle’s gaze flared at her. ‘This king executed the Duke of Buckingham two years ago for saying less than that,’ he said very quietly. ‘My own father signed the death warrant. This is not a king who is careless of his heirs. You will never, ever speak like this again or you will find yourself not at Hever but behind the walls of a nunnery for life. I mean it, Anne. I will not have the safety of this family jeopardised by your folly.’

He had shocked her with his quiet rage. She gulped and tried to recover. ‘I will say no more,’ she whispered. ‘But this could work.’

‘Can’t be done,’ my father said flatly. ‘Northumberland won’t have you. And Wolsey won’t let us leap up that high. And the king will do what Wolsey says.’

‘Lord Henry promised me,’ Anne said passionately.

My uncle shook his head and was about to rise from the table, the meeting was over.

‘Wait,’ Anne said desperately. ‘We can achieve this. I swear to you. If you will stand by me then Henry Percy will stand by me, and the cardinal and the king and his father will have to come round to it.’

My uncle did not hesitate for a moment. ‘They won’t. You are a fool. You can’t fight Wolsey. There isn’t a man in the country who is a match for Wolsey. And we won’t risk his enmity. He would put Mary out of the king’s bed and pop a Seymour girl in her place. Everything we are striving to do with Mary will be overset if we support you. This is Mary’s chance, not yours. We won’t have you spoil it. We’ll have you out of the way for the summer at least, perhaps for a year.’

She was stunned into silence. ‘But I love him,’ she said.

There was a silence in the room.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I love him.’

‘That means nothing to me,’ my father said. ‘Your marriage is the business of the family and you will leave that to us. You’ll go to Hever for at least a year’s banishment from court and think yourself lucky. And if you write to him, or reply to him, or see him again, then it will be a nunnery for you. A closed order.’

‘Well, that didn’t go too badly,’ George said with forced cheerfulness. He and Anne and I were walking down to the river to get the boat back to York Place. A servant in Howard livery went before us, pushing beggars and street sellers out of the way, and one came behind to guard us. Anne walked blindly, quite unaware of the eddy of disturbance all down the crowded street.

There were people selling goods from off the backs of carts, bread and fruit and live ducks and hens, fresh up from the country. There were fat London housewives bartering for the goods, quicker-tongued and quicker-witted than the countrymen and -women, who were slow and careful, hoping to get a fair price for their provender. There were pedlars with chapbooks and music sheets in their sacks, cobblers with sets of ready-made shoes trying to persuade people that they would fit all varieties of foot. There were flower sellers and watercress sellers, there were lounging pageboys and chimney sweeps, there were link boys with nothing to do till the dark came, and street sweepers. There were servants idling on their way to and from marketing, and outside every shop there was the wife of the owner, sat plump on her stool, smiling at the passers-by and urging them to step inside and see what was for sale.

George threaded Anne and me through this tapestry of business like a determined bodkin. He was desperate to get Anne home before the storm of her temper broke.

‘Went very well indeed, I’d say,’ he said staunchly.

We reached a pier leading out into the river and the Howard servant hailed a boat. ‘To York Place,’ George said tersely.

The tide was with us and we went quickly upriver, Anne looking blindly at the beach on either side strewn with the dirt of the city.

We landed at the York Place jetty and the Howard servants bowed and took the boat back to the City. George swept Anne and me up to our room and finally got the door closed behind us.

At once Anne whirled round on him and leaped like a wildcat. He grabbed her wrists in his hands and wrestled her away from his face.

‘Went pretty well!’ she shrieked at him. ‘Pretty well! When I have lost the man I love, and my reputation as well? When I am all but ruined and shall be buried in the country until everyone has forgotten about me? Pretty well! When my own father will not stand by me and when my own mother swears that she would rather see me dead? Are you mad, you fool? Are you mad? Or just dumb, blind, God-rotting stupid?’

He held her wrists. She made another slash at his face with her nails. I came from behind and pulled her backwards so that she should not stamp on his feet with her high heels. We reeled, the three of us, like drunkards in a brawl, I was crushed against the foot of the bed as she fought me as well as him, but I clung on around her waist, pulling her backwards as George gripped her hands to save his face. It felt as if we were fighting something worse than Anne, some demon that possessed her, that possessed all of us Boleyns: ambition – the devil that had brought us to this little room and brought my sister to this insane distress, and us to this savage battle.

‘Peace, for God’s sake,’ George shouted at her as he fought to avoid her fingernails.

‘Peace!’ she screamed at him. ‘How can I be at peace?’

‘Because you’ve lost,’ George said simply. ‘Nothing to fight for now, Anne. You’ve lost.’

For a moment she froze quite still, but we were too wary to let her go. She glared into his face as if she were quite demented and then she threw back her head and laughed a wild savage laugh.

‘Peace!’ she cried passionately. ‘My God! I shall die peacefully. They will leave me at Hever until I am peacefully dead. And I will never ever see him again!’

She gave a great heartbroken wail at that, and the fight went out of her and she slumped down. George released her wrists and caught her to him. She flung her arms around his neck and buried her face against his chest. She was sobbing so hard, so inarticulate with grief that I could not hear what she was saying, then I felt my own tears come as I made out what she was crying, over and over. ‘Oh God, I loved him, I loved him, he was my only love, my only love.’

They wasted no time. Anne’s clothes were packed and her horse saddled and George ordered to escort her to Hever that same day. Nobody told Lord Henry Percy that she had gone. He sent a letter to her; and my mother, who was everywhere, opened it and read it calmly before thrusting it on the fire.

‘What did he say?’ I asked quietly.

‘Undying love,’ my mother said with distaste.

‘Should we not tell him that she’s gone?’

My mother shrugged. ‘He’ll know soon enough. His father is seeing him this morning.’

I nodded. Another letter came at midday, Anne’s name scrawled on the front in an unsteady hand. There was a smudge, perhaps a tearstain. My mother opened it, granite-faced, and it went the way of the first.

‘Lord Henry?’ I asked.

She nodded.

I rose from my place at the fireside and sat in the windowseat. ‘I might go out,’ I said.

She turned her head. ‘You’ll stay here,’ she said sharply.

The old habit of obedience and deference to her had a strong hold on me. ‘Of course, my lady mother. But can I not walk in the garden?’

‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘Your father and uncle have ruled that you are to stay indoors, until Northumberland has dealt with Henry Percy.’

‘I’m not likely to stand in the way of that, walking in the garden,’ I protested.

‘You might send a message to him.’

‘I would not!’ I exclaimed. ‘Surely to God you can all see that the one thing, the one thing is that I always, always, do as I am told. You made my marriage at the age of twelve, madam. You ended it just two years later when I was only fourteen. I was in the king’s bed before my fifteenth birthday. Surely you can see that I have always done as I have been told by this family? If I could not fight for my own freedom I am hardly likely to fight for my sister’s!’

She nodded. ‘Good thing too,’ she said. ‘There is no freedom for women in this world, fight or not as you like. See where Anne has brought herself.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To Hever. Where at least she is free to go out on the land.’

My mother looked surprised. ‘You sound envious.’

‘I love it there,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I think I prefer it even to court. But you will break Anne’s heart.’

‘Her heart has to break and her spirit has to break if she is to be any use to her family,’ my mother said coldly. ‘It should have been done in her childhood. I thought they would teach you both the habits of obedience in the French court but it seems they were remiss. So it has to be done now.’

There was a tap at the door and a man in shabby clothes stood uneasily on the threshold.

‘A letter for Mistress Anne Boleyn,’ he said. ‘For none but her, and the young lord said I was to watch you read it.’

I hesitated, I glanced across at my mother. She gave me a quick nod of her head and I broke the red seal with the Northumberland crest, and unfolded the stiff paper.

My wife,

I will not be forsworn if you will stand by the promises we have made to each other. I will not desert you if you do not desert me. My father is most angry with me, the cardinal too, and I do fear for us. But if we hold to each other then they must let us be together. Send me a note, a word only, that you will stand by me, and I will stand by you.

Henry.

‘He said there should be a reply,’ the man said.

‘Wait outside,’ my mother said to the man, and closed the door in his face. She turned to me. ‘Write a reply.’

‘He’ll know her handwriting,’ I said unhelpfully.

She slid a piece of paper before me, put a pen in my hand and dictated the letter.

Lord Henry,

Mary is writing this for me as I am forbidden to put pen to paper to you. It is no use. They will not let us marry and I have to give you up. Do not stand against the cardinal and your father for my sake for I have told them that I surrender. It was only a betrothal de futuro and is not binding on either one of us. I release you from your half-promise and I am released from mine.

‘You will break both their hearts,’ I observed, scattering sand on the wet ink.

‘Perhaps,’ my mother said coolly. ‘But young hearts mend easily, and hearts that own half of England have something better to do than to beat faster for love.’

Winter 1523

With Anne away I was the only Boleyn girl in the world, and when the queen chose to spend the summer with the Princess Mary it was I who rode with Henry at the head of the court on progress. We spent a wonderful summer riding together, hunting, and dancing every night, and when the court returned to Greenwich in November I whispered to him that I had missed my course and I was carrying his child.

At once, everything changed. I had new rooms and a lady in waiting. Henry bought me a thick fur cloak, I must not for a moment get chilled. Midwives, apothecaries, soothsayers came and went from my rooms, all of them were asked the vital question: ‘Is it a boy?’

Most of them answered yes and were rewarded with a gold coin. The eccentric one or two said ‘no’ and saw the king’s pout of displeasure. My mother loosened the laces of my gown and I could no longer go to the king’s bed at night, I had to lie alone and pray in the darkness that I was carrying his son.

The queen watched my growing body with eyes that were dark with pain. I knew that she had missed her courses too, but there was no question that she might have conceived. She smiled throughout the Christmas feasts and the masques and the dancing, and she gave Henry the lavish presents that he loved. And after the twelfth night masque, when there was a sense that everything should be made clear and clean, she asked him if she might speak with him privately and from somewhere, God knows where, she found the courage to look him in the face and tell him that she had been clean for the whole of the season, and she was a barren woman.

‘Told me herself,’ Henry said indignantly to me that night. I was in his bedroom, wrapped in my fur cloak, a tankard of mulled wine in my hand, my bare feet tucked under me before a roaring fire. ‘Told me without a moment’s shame!’

I said nothing. It was not for me to tell Henry that there was no shame in a woman of nearly forty ceasing her bleeding. Nobody had known better than he that if she could have prayed her way into childbed they would have had half a dozen babies and all of them boys. But he had forgotten that now. What concerned him was that she had refused him what she should have given him, and I saw once again that powerful indignation which swept over him with any disappointment.

‘Poor lady,’ I said.

He shot me a resentful look. ‘Rich lady,’ he corrected me. ‘The wife of one of the wealthiest men in Europe, the Queen of England no less, and nothing to show for it but the birth of one child, and that a girl.’

I nodded. There was no point arguing with Henry.

He leaned over me to put his hand gently on the round hard curve of my belly. ‘And if my boy is in there then he will carry the name of Carey,’ he said. ‘What good is that for England? What good is that for me?’

‘But everyone will know he is yours,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows that you can make a child with me.’

‘But I have to have a legitimate son,’ he said earnestly, as if I or the queen or any woman could give him a son by wishing it. ‘I have to have a son, Mary. England has to have an heir from me.’

Spring 1524

Anne wrote to me once a week for all the long months of her exile and I was reminded of the desperate letters I had sent her when I had been banished from court. I remembered too that she had not bothered to reply. Now it was me at court and she was in outer darkness and I took a sister’s triumph in my generosity in replying to her often, and I did not spare her news of my fertility, and Henry’s delight in me.

Our Grandmother Boleyn had been summoned to Hever to be a companion to Anne, and the two of them, the young elegant woman from the French court, and the wise old woman who had seen her husband leap from next to nothing to greatness, quarrelled like cats on a stable roof from morning to night and made each other’s lives a complete misery.

If I cannot return to court, I shall go mad,

Anne wrote.

Grandmother Boleyn cracks hazelnuts in her hands and drops the shells everywhere. They crunch underfoot like snails. She insists that we walk out in the garden together every day, even when it is raining. She thinks that rainwater is good for the skin, and says this is why Englishwomen have such peerless complexions. I look at her weatherbeaten old leather and know that I would rather stay indoors.

She smells quite dreadful and is completely unaware of it. I told them to draw a bath for her the other day and they tell me that she consented to sit on a stool and let them wash her feet. She hums under her breath at the dinner table, she doesn’t even know she is doing it. She believes in keeping an open house in the grand old way and everyone, from the beggars of Tonbridge to the farmers of Edenbridge, is welcome into the hall to watch us eat as if we were the king himself with nothing to do with our money but give it away.

Please, please, tell Uncle and Father that I am ready to return to court, that I will do their bidding, that they need fear nothing from me. I will do anything to get away from here.

I wrote a reply at once.

You will be able to come to court soon, I am sure, because Lord Henry is betrothed against his will to Lady Mary Talbot. He was said to be weeping when he made his promise. He has gone to defend the Scottish border with his own men from Northumberland under his standard. The Percys have to hold Northumberland safe while the English army goes to France again this summer and, with the Spanish as our allies, finish the work they started last summer.

George’s wedding to Jane Parker is to take place this month at last, and I shall ask Mother if you can be present. She will surely not refuse you that.

I am well but very tired. The baby is very heavy and when I try to sleep at night it turns and kicks. Henry is kinder than I have ever known him, and we are both hoping for a boy.

I wish you were here. He is hoping for a boy so much. I am almost afraid as to what will happen if it is a girl. If only there was something one could do to make it be a boy. Don’t tell me about asparagus. I know all about asparagus. They make me eat it at every meal.

The queen watches me all the time. I am too big now for concealment and everyone knows it is the king’s baby. William has not had to endure anyone congratulating him on our first child. Everyone knows, and there is a sort of wall of silence that makes it comfortable for everyone but me. There are times when I feel like a fool: my belly going before me, breathless on the stairs, and a husband who smiles at me as if we were strangers.

And the queen …

I wish to God I did not have to pray in her chapel every morning and night. I wonder what she is praying for, since all hope for her is gone. I wish you were here. I even miss your sharp tongue.

Mary.

George and Jane Parker were finally to marry after countless delays in the little chapel at Greenwich. Anne was to be allowed up from Hever for the day, she could sit in one of the high boxes at the back where no-one would see her, but she was not allowed to attend the wedding feast. Most importantly for us, since the wedding was to take place in the morning, Anne had to ride up the day before and the three of us, George, Anne, and I, had the night together from dinner time till dawn.

We prepared ourselves for a night of talking like midwives settling in for a long labour. George brought wine and ale and small beer, I crept down to the kitchen and filched bread, meat, cheese and fruit from the cooks who were happy to pile a platter for me, thinking that it was my seven-month belly which was making me hungry.

Anne was in her cut-down riding habit. She looked older than her seventeen years and finer, her skin was pale. ‘Walking in the rain with the old witch,’ she said grimly. Her sadness had given her a serenity which had not been there before. It was as if she had learned a hard lesson: that chances in life would not fall into her lap like ripe cherries. And she missed the boy she loved: Henry Percy.

‘I dream of him,’ she said simply. ‘I so wish I didn’t. It’s such a pointless unhappiness. I am so tired of it. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But I am so tired of being unhappy.’

I glanced across at George. He was watching Anne, his face full of sympathy.

‘When is his wedding?’ Anne asked bleakly.

‘Next month,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘And then it will be over. Unless she dies, of course.’

‘If she dies he could marry you,’ I said hopefully.

Anne shrugged. ‘You fool,’ she said abruptly. ‘I can hardly wait for him in the hope that Mary Talbot drops dead one day. I’m quite a card to play once I’ve lived this down, aren’t I? Especially if you give birth to a boy. I’ll be aunt to the king’s bastard.’

Without meaning to, I put my hands protectively before my belly as if I did not want my baby to hear that it was only wanted if it was a boy. ‘It’ll carry the name of Carey,’ I reminded her.

‘But what if it is a boy and born healthy and strong and golden-haired?’

‘I shall call him Henry.’ I smiled at the thought of a strong golden-haired baby in my arms. ‘And I don’t doubt but the king will do something very fine for him.’

‘And we all rise,’ George pointed out. ‘As aunts and uncles to the king’s son, perhaps a little dukedom for him, perhaps an earldom. Who knows?’

‘And you, George?’ Anne asked. ‘Are you merry, this merry merry night? I had thought you’d be out roistering and drinking yourself into the gutter, not sitting here with one fat lady and one broken-hearted one.’

George poured some wine and looked darkly into his cup. ‘One fat lady and one broken-hearted one almost exactly suits my mood,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t dance or sing to save my life. She is a most poisonous woman, isn’t she? My beloved? My wife-to-be? Tell me the truth. It’s not just me, is it? There is something about her that makes you shrink from her, isn’t there?’

‘Oh nonsense,’ I said roundly. ‘She’s not poisonous.’

‘She sets my teeth on edge and she always has,’ Anne said bluntly. ‘If ever there’s tittle-tattle or dangerous scandal, or someone telling tales of someone else, she’s always there. She hears everything and she watches everyone, and she’s always thinking the worst of everyone.’

‘I knew it,’ George said glumly. ‘God! What a wife to have!’

‘She may give you a surprise on your wedding night,’ Anne said slyly, drinking her wine.

‘What?’ George said quickly.

Anne raised an eyebrow over the cup. ‘She’s very well-informed for a virgin,’ she said. ‘Very knowledgeable about matters for married women. Married women and whores.’

George’s jaw dropped. ‘Never tell me she’s not a virgin!’ he exclaimed. ‘I could surely get out of it if she was not a virgin!’

Anne shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen a man do anything that was not from politeness,’ she said. ‘Who would, for God’s sake? But she watches and listens, and she doesn’t care what she asks or what she sees. I heard her whispering with one of the Seymour girls about someone who had lain with the king – not you –’ she said quickly to me ‘– there was very worldly talk about kissing with an open mouth, letting one’s tongue lick and suchlike, whether one should lie on a king or underneath him, and where one’s hands should go, and what could be done to give him such pleasure as he might never forget it.’

‘And she knows these French practices?’ George asked, astounded.

‘She talked as if she did,’ Anne said, smiling at his amazement.

‘Well, by God!’ said George, pouring himself another glass of wine and waving the bottle at me. ‘Perhaps I will be a happier husband than I thought. Where your hands should go, eh? And where should they go, Mistress Annamaria? Since you seem to have heard this conversation as well as my lovely wife-to-be?’

‘Oh don’t ask me,’ Anne said. ‘I’m a virgin. Ask anyone. Ask Mother or Father or my uncle. Ask Cardinal Wolsey, he made it official. I’m a virgin. I am an attested official sworn-to-it virgin. Wolsey, the Archbishop of York himself, says I am a virgin. You can’t be more of a virgin than me.’

‘I shall tell you all about them,’ George said more cheerfully. ‘I shall write to you at Hever, Anne, and you can read my letter aloud to Grandmother Boleyn.’

George was pale as a bride on his wedding morning. Only Anne and I knew it was not from heavy drinking the night before. He did not smile as Jane Parker approached the altar, but she was beaming broad enough for them both.

With my hands clasped over my belly I thought it was a long time since I had stood before the altar and promised to forsake all others and cleave to William Carey. He glanced across at me with a slight smile, as if he too was thinking that we had not foreseen this when we had been handclasped, and hopeful, only four years ago.

King Henry was at the front of the church, watching my brother take his bride, and I thought that my family were doing well out of my heavy belly. The king had come late to my wedding, and more to oblige his friend William than to honour the Boleyns. But he was at the forefront of the well-wishers when this pair turned from the altar and came down the aisle of the church, and the king and I together led the guests into the wedding feast. My mother smiled on me as if I were her only daughter, as Anne left quietly by the side door of the chapel and took her horse and rode home to Hever accompanied only by serving men.

I thought of her riding to Hever alone, seeing the castle from the lodge gate, as pretty as a toy in the moonlight. I thought of the way the track curved through the trees and came to the drawbridge. I thought of the rattle of the drawbridge coming down and the hollow sound that the hoof beats made as the horse stepped delicately on the timbers. I thought of the dank smell of the moat and then the waft of meat cooking on a spit as one entered the courtyard. I thought of the moon shining into the courtyard and the haphazard line of the gable ends against the night sky, and I wished with all my contrary heart that I was squire of Hever and not the pretend queen of a masquing court. I wished with all my heart that I might have been carrying a legitimate son in my belly and that I could have leaned out of the window and looked out over my land, just a little manor farm perhaps, and known that it would be all his by right one day.

But instead I was the lucky Boleyn, the Boleyn blessed by fortune and the king’s favour. A Boleyn who could not imagine the boundaries of her son’s land, who could not dream how far he might rise.

Summer 1524

I withdrew from the court for the whole of the month of June to prepare for my lying in. I had a darkened room hung with thick tapestries, I should see no light nor breathe fresh air until I emerged six long weeks after the birth of my baby. Altogether I would be walled up for two and a half months. I was attended by my mother and by two midwives, a couple of serving maids and a lady’s maid supported them. Outside the chamber, taking turn and turn about night and day, were two apothecaries waiting to be called.

‘Can Anne be with me?’ I asked my mother as I eyed the darkened room.

She frowned. ‘Her father has ordered that she must stay at Hever.’

‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘It’ll be such a long time and I’d like her company.’

‘She can visit,’ my mother ruled. ‘But we can’t have her present at the birth of the king’s son.’

‘Or daughter,’ I reminded her.

She made the sign of the cross over my belly. ‘Please God it is a boy,’ she whispered.

I said nothing more, content to have carried my way by getting Anne to visit me. She came for a day and stayed for two. She had been bored at Hever, infuriated by our Grandmother Boleyn, desperate to get away, even to a darkened room and a sister biding her time by sewing little nightshirts for a royal bastard.

‘Have you been over to Home Farm?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve ridden past it.’

‘I wondered how they were getting on with their strawberry crop?’

She shrugged.

‘And the Peters’ farm? Did you go over for the sheep shearing?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘D’you know what hay crop we got this year?’

‘No.’

‘Anne, what on earth do you do all day?’

‘I read,’ she said. ‘I practise my music. I have been composing some songs. I ride every day. I walk in the garden. What else is there to do in the country?’

‘I go round and see the farms,’ I remarked.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘They’re always the same. The grass grows.’

‘What d’you read?’

‘Theology,’ she said shortly. ‘Have you heard of Martin Luther?’

‘Of course I’ve heard of him,’ I said, stung. ‘Enough to know that he’s a heretic and his books are forbidden.’

Anne gave her small secretive smile. ‘He’s not necessarily a heretic,’ she said. ‘It’s a matter of opinion. I have been reading his books and others who think like he does.’

‘You’d better keep it quiet,’ I said. ‘If Father and Mother find you’ve been reading banned books they’ll send you to France again, anywhere to get you out of the way.’

She shrugged. ‘No-one pays any attention to me, I’m quite eclipsed by your glory. There is only one way to come to the attention of this family and that is to climb into the king’s bed. You have to be a whore to be beloved by this family.’

I folded my hands over my swollen belly and smiled at her, quite unmoved by her malice. ‘There’s no need to pinch me because my stars have led me here. There was no need for you to set yourself at Henry Percy and onwards to disgrace.’

For a moment the mask of her beautiful face dropped and I saw the longing in her eyes. ‘Have you heard from him?’

I shook my head. ‘If he wrote to me they’d not let me have the letter,’ I said. ‘I think he’s still fighting against the Scots.’

She pressed her lips together to keep back a little moan. ‘Oh God, what if he is hurt or killed?’

I felt my baby stir and I put my warm hands on my loose stomacher. ‘Anne, he should be nothing to you.’

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