I kept my silence, and my eyes down. When I looked up he was smiling at me, his ironical half-sad crooked smile. "Ah, little wife," he said gently. "We did not have much time together, did we? We did not bed very well nor very often. We did not learn tenderness or even desire. We only had a little time."

"I am sorry for that too," I said softly.

"Sorry that we did not bed?"

"My lord?" I said, genuinely confused by the sudden sharpness in his tone.

"It has been suggested, very politely by your kinsmen, that perhaps I had dreamed it all and we did not bed at all. Is that your wish? That I deny ever having had you?"

I was startled. "No! You know it is not my wishes that are consulted in these matters."

"And they have not told you to tell the king that I was impotent on our wedding night and every night thereafter?"

I shook my head. "Why would I say such a thing?"

He smiled. "To get our marriage set aside," he suggested. "So that you are an unmarried woman. And the next baby is Fitzroy and perhaps Henry can be prevailed on to make him legitimate, the son and heir to the throne. Then you are the mother of the next King of England."

There was a silence. I found I was staring blankly at him. "They never want me to do that?" I whispered.

"Oh you Boleyns," he said gently. "What happens to you, Mary, if they have our marriage set aside and push you forward? It overthrows the state of marriage and it names you, without contradiction, as a wh.o.r.e, a pretty little wh.o.r.e."

I felt my cheeks blaze but I kept my mouth shut. He looked at me for a moment and I saw the anger drain from his face and be replaced with a sort of weary compa.s.sion. "Say what you have to say," he recommended me. "Whatever they order you. If they press you to say that on our bedding night I juggled with silver pomanders all night and never lay between your legs, you can say that, swear it if you have to-and you will have to. You are going to face the enmity of Queen Katherine herself, and the hatred of all of Spain. I shall spare you mine. Poor silly little girl. If it had been a boy in that cradle I think they would have pushed you into perjury the moment you were churched, to get rid of me, and to lure Henry on."

We looked at each other very steadily for a moment. "Then, you and I must be the only people in the whole world who are not sorry it is a girl," I whispered. "Because I don't want more than I have now."

He smiled his bitter courtier smile. "But next time?"

The court went on its midsummer progress, down the dusty lanes to Suss.e.x and on to Winchester and thence to the New Forest so that the king could hunt deer every day from dawn till twilight and then feast on venison every night. My husband went with his king, close at his side, boys together, no thought of jealousy when the court was on the move and the hounds were running ahead of the horses and yelping, and the hawks were coming behind in their special cart with their trainers riding alongside and singing to them to keep them calm. My brother went too, riding alongside Francis Weston, astride a new black hunter, a big strong beast which the king had given him from the royal stables, as a further token of his affection for me and mine. My father was in Europe, as part of the unending negotiations between England, France and Spain, trying to rein in the ambitions of three greedy bright young monarchs all jockeying for the t.i.tle of the greatest king in Europe. My mother went with the court, with her own little train of servants. My uncle went, with his own men in Howard livery and with a wary eye always for the ambitions and pretensions of the Seymour family. The Percy family were there, Charles Brandon and Queen Mary, the London goldsmiths, the foreign diplomats: all the great men of England abandoned their fields, their farms, their ships, their mining, their trading, and their city houses to go hunting with the king, and not one dared to lag behind in case there was money being granted or land being dispensed, or favors to be had, or the king's dancing eyes might turn on a pretty daughter or a wife and a position might be gained.

I, thank G.o.d, was spared it this year, and I was glad to be away, riding slowly down the lanes to Kent. Anne met me in the neat courtyard of Hever Castle, her face as dark as a midsummer storm. "You must be mad," she said in greeting. "What are you doing here?"

"I want to be here with my baby this summer. I need to rest."

"You don't look like you need a rest." She scrutinized my face. "You look beautiful," she conceded grudgingly.

"But look at her." I pulled the white lace shawl back from Catherine's little face. She had slept for most of the journey, rocked by the jolting of the litter.

Anne politely glanced. "Sweet," she said, without much conviction. "But why didn't you send her down with the wet nurse?"

I sighed at the impossibility of convincing Anne that there was anywhere better to be than the court. I led the way into the hall and let the wet nurse take Catherine from my arms to change her swaddling clothes.

"And then bring her back to me," I stipulated.

I sat on one of the carved chairs at the great hall table and smiled at Anne as she stood before me, as impatient as an interrogator.

"I'm not really interested in the court," I said flatly. "It's having a baby; you wouldn't understand. It's as if I suddenly know what the purpose of life is. It's not to rise in the king's favor nor to make one's way at court. Nor even to raise one's family a little higher. There are things that matter more. I want her to be happy. I don't want her to be sent away as soon as she is old enough to walk. I want to be tender with her, I want her to be schooled under my eye. I want her to grow up here and know the river and the fields and the willows in the watermeadows. I don't want her to be a stranger in her own country."

Anne looked rather blank. "It's just a baby," she said flatly. "And chances are she'll die. You'll have dozens more. Are you going to be like this over all of them?"

I flinched at the thought of it, but she didn't even see. "I don't know. I didn't know I'd feel like this over her. But I do, Anne. She's the most precious thing in the world. Much more important to me than anything else. I can't think about anything but caring for her and seeing that she is well and happy. When she cries it's like a knife in my heart, I can't bear the thought of her crying at all. And I want to see her grow. I won't be parted from her."

"What does the king say?" Anne demanded, going to the one central point for a Boleyn.

"I haven't told him this," I said. "He was happy enough that I should go away for the summer and rest. He wanted to get off hunting. He was in a fever to go this year. He didn't mind too much."

"Didn't mind too much?" she repeated incredulously.

"He didn't mind at all," I corrected myself.

Anne nodded, nibbling her fingers. I could almost see the calculations of her brain as she picked over what I was saying. "Very well then," she said. "If they don't insist that you go to court I don't see why I should worry. It's more amusing for me to have you here, G.o.d knows. You can chatter to that merciless old woman at least and spare me her unending talk."

I smiled. "You really are very disrespectful, Anne."

"Oh yes, yes, yes," she said impatiently, drawing up a stool. "But now tell me all the news. Tell me about the queen, and I want to know what Thomas More has said about the new tract from Germany. And what are the plans for the French? Is it to be war again?"

"I am sorry." I shook my head. "Someone was talking about it the other night but I wasn't listening."

She made a little noise and leaped to her feet. "Oh very well then," she said irritably. "Talk to me about the baby. That's all you're interested in, isn't it? You sit with your head half-c.o.c.ked listening for her all the time, don't you? You look ridiculous. For heaven's sake sit up straight. The nurse won't bring her back any quicker for you looking like a hound on point."

I laughed at the accuracy of her description. "It's like being in love. I want to see her all the time."

"You're always in love," Anne said crossly. "You're like a big b.u.t.ter ball, always oozing love for someone or other. Once it was the king and we did very well out of that. Now it's his baby, which will do us no good at all. But you don't care. It's always seep seep seep with you: pa.s.sion and feeling and desire. It makes me furious."

I smiled at her. "Because you are all ambition," I said.

Her eyes gleamed. "Of course. What else is there?"

Henry Percy hovered between us, tangible as a ghost. "Don't you want to know if I have seen him?" I asked. It was a cruel question and I asked it hoping to see pain in her eyes, but I got nothing for my malice. Her face was cold and hard, she looked as if she had finished weeping for him and as if she would never weep for a man again.

"No," she said. "So you can tell them when they ask that I never mentioned his name. He gave up, didn't he? He married another woman."

"He thought you'd abandoned him," I protested.

She turned her head away. "If he'd been a proper man he'd have gone on loving me," she said, her voice harsh. "If it had been the other way round I'd never have married while my lover was free. He gave in, he let me go. I'll never forgive him. He's dead for me. I can be dead for him. All I want to do is to get out of this grave and get back to court. All that there is left for me is ambition."

Anne, Grandmother Boleyn, Baby Catherine and I settled down to spend the summer together in enforced companionship. As I grew stronger and the pain in my privates eased, I got back on my horse and started to ride out in the afternoons. I rode all around our valley and up to the hills of the Weald. I watched the hay meadows turn green again after their first cut, and the sheep grow white and fluffy with new wool. I wished the reapers joy at the harvest when they went into the wheatfields to sickle the first of the crop and saw them load the grain into great carts and take it to the granary and the mill. We ate hare one night after the reapers had sent in the dogs after the animals trapped in the last stand of wheat. I saw the cows separated from their calves for weaning and felt my own b.r.e.a.s.t.s ache with sympathy when I saw them crowding around the gate and trying to break through the thick-set hedges, barging and tossing their heads and bellowing for their babies.

"They'll forget, Lady Carey," the cowman said to me consolingly. "They won't cry for more than a few days."

I smiled at him. "I wish we could leave them a little longer."

"It's a hard world for man and beast," he said firmly. "They have to go, or how will you get your b.u.t.ter and your cheese?"

The apples swelled round and rosy in the orchard. I went into the kitchen and asked the cook to make us great fat apple dumplings for our dinner. The plums grew rich and dark and split their skins, and the lazy late-summer wasps buzzed around the trees and grew drunk on the syrup. The air was sweet with honeysuckle and the heady perfume of fruit fattening on the bough. I wanted the summer never to end. I wanted my baby always to stay this small, this perfect, this adorable. Her eyes were changing color from the dark blue of birth to a darker indigo, almost black. She would be a dark-eyed beauty like her sharp-tempered aunt.

She smiled now when she saw me, I tested her over and over again, and I grew quite cross with my Grandmother Boleyn who claimed that a baby was blind until two or three years of age and that I was wasting my time hanging over her cradle, and singing to her, and spreading a carpet under the trees and lying on it with her and spreading her little fingers to tickle her palms, and taking up her tiny fat foot to nibble her toes.

The king wrote to me once, describing the hunting and the kills he had made. It sounded as if there would not be a deer left in the New Forest by the time he was satisfied. At the end of the letter he said that the court would be back at Windsor in October, and Greenwich for Christmas, and that he expected me there, without my sister of course, and without our baby to whom he sent a kiss. Despite the tenderness of the kiss to our child, I knew that the joy of my summer with my baby was at an end, whatever my wishes might be; and that like a peasant woman who has to leave her child and go back to the field, it was time for me to go back to my work.

Winter 1524 I FOUND THE KING AT WINDSOR IN MERRY MOOD. THE HUNTING had gone well, the company had been excellent. There was a rumor about a flirtation with one of the queen's new ladies, one Margaret Shelton, a Howard cousin of mine, newly come to court, and another story, more comical than true, about a lady who took every fence neck and neck with the king until, in sheer despair of outriding her, he had her behind a bush, and rode away before she had rearranged her dress. She was stuck on the ground until someone came by who would lift her back up into the saddle, and her hope of taking my place was over. had gone well, the company had been excellent. There was a rumor about a flirtation with one of the queen's new ladies, one Margaret Shelton, a Howard cousin of mine, newly come to court, and another story, more comical than true, about a lady who took every fence neck and neck with the king until, in sheer despair of outriding her, he had her behind a bush, and rode away before she had rearranged her dress. She was stuck on the ground until someone came by who would lift her back up into the saddle, and her hope of taking my place was over.

There were bawdy tales of drinking bouts and my brother George had a bruise over one eye after a brawl in a tavern, and some running joke about a young page who had been besotted with George and had been sent home in disgrace after penning him a dozen lovesick sonnets all signed Ganymede. All in all the gentlemen of the court had been merry and the king himself was in high spirits.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed me up and held me tight and kissed me hard when he saw me, before all the court, though, thank G.o.d, the queen was not there. "Sweetheart, I have missed you," he said exuberantly. "Tell me that you have missed me too."

I could not help but smile into his bright eager face. "Of course," I said. "And I hear on all sides that Your Majesty has amused yourself."

There was a little guffaw from the king's most intimate friends and he grinned a little sheepishly himself. "My heart ached for you night and day," he said with the exquisite mock courtesy of courtly love. "I pined in outer darkness. And you are well? And our baby?"

"Catherine is very beautiful and grows well and strong," I said with a tiny stress on her name to prompt him. "She is most beautifully fashioned, a true Tudor rose."

My brother George stepped forward and the king released me so that George could kiss my cheek.

"Welcome back to court, my sister," he said cheerily. "And how is the little princess?"

There was a moment of stunned silence. The smile was wiped from Henry's face. I gaped at George in blank horror at the terrible error he had made. He spun on his heel in a flash and turned to the king: "I call little Catherine a princess because she is fawned over as if she were a queen in the making. You should see the clothes that Mary has sewn for her, embroidered with her own hands. And the bed linen that the little empress reclines on! Even her swaddling clouts have her initials. You would laugh, Your Majesty. You would laugh to see her. She is a little tyrant at Hever, it must all be done to her direction. She is a veritable cardinal. She is a pope of the nursery."

It was a wonderful recovery. Henry relaxed and laughed at the thought of the little baby's dictatorship, all the courtiers instantly echoed his laughter with their own smiles and t.i.tters at George's description of the baby.

"Is it really so? Do you indulge her so much?" the king asked me.

"She is my first," I excused myself. "And all her clothes will be used again for the next one."

It was a perfect note to hit. At once Henry thought of the next one and we had moved onward. "Oh yes," he said. "But what will the princess do with a rival in the nursery?"

"I hope she will be too small to know much about it," George suggested smoothly. "She might have a little brother before she is more than a year old. There are only months between Mary and Anne, remember. We are fertile stock."

"Oh George, for shame," my mother said, smiling. "But a little boy at Hever would bring us all such joy."

"Me too," said the king, looking at me with warm eyes. "A little boy would be a great joy to me."

As soon as my father came home from France there was another family conference. This time I had a chair placed for me before the table. I was no longer a girl under instruction, I was a woman with the king's favor. I was no longer their p.a.w.n. I was at the very least a castle, a player in the game.

"Say she conceives again and this time it is a boy," my uncle said softly. "Say the queen is prompted by her own conscience to retire and set him free to remarry. He would be very tempted by a pregnant mistress."

For a moment I thought I had dreamed this plan, and then I knew I had been waiting for this moment. My husband William had warned me of this, and it had stayed in the back of my mind as a thought too awful to contemplate.

"I am married already," I observed.

My mother shrugged. "No more than a few months. It was hardly consummated at all."

"It was consummated," I said steadily.

My uncle raised his eyebrow to prompt my mother.

"She was young," my mother said. "How would she know what was happening? She could swear it was never fully done."

"I can't do it." I spoke to my mother and then I turned to my uncle. "I dare not do it. I can't take her throne, I can't take her place. She's a princess three times over, and I'm just a Boleyn girl. I swear to you: I can't do it."

It was nothing to him. "You need do nothing out of the ordinary," he said. "You will marry as you are bid, as you did once before. And I will order all the rest."

"But the queen will never retire," I said desperately. "She has said so herself, she told me herself. She said she would die first."

My uncle exclaimed, pushed his chair back and took a step to look out of the window. "She's in a strong position at the moment," he conceded. "While her nephew is in alliance with England, n.o.body can upset that agreement, least of all Henry, for a baby not yet conceived. But the moment the war against France is won, and the spoils divided, then she is nothing but a woman too old for him who can never give him an heir. She knows, as we all do, that she has to go."

"When the war is won, perhaps," my father worried. "But we dare not risk a breach with Spain just now. I have spent all this summer trying to broker such an alliance and make it stick."

"Which comes first?" my uncle asked drily. "Country or family? Because we cannot use Mary as we should, without risking the well-being of the country."

My father hesitated.

"Of course, you're not blood kin," my uncle said, quietly venomous. "Only a Howard by marriage."

"Family comes first," my father said slowly. "It must do."

"Then we may have to sacrifice the alliance with Spain against France," my uncle said coldly. "It is more important to us to get rid of Queen Katherine than it is to make peace in Europe. It is more important to get our girl into the king's bed than to save the lives of Englishmen. There are always more men who can be pressed for soldiers. But this chance for us Howards comes once in a century."

Spring 1525 WE HEARD THE NEWS FROM PAVIA IN MARCH. A MESSENGER burst in upon the king in the early morning while he was still half-dressed, and he came running like a boy to the queen, a herald flying before him to hammer on the door of the queen's apartments and shout: "His Majesty is coming: the king!" so that we tumbled out of our rooms in different states of undress and only the queen was composed and elegant in a gown thrown over her nightshirt. Henry banged the door coming into the room and ran through us, while we twittered like an aviary of blind thrushes, straight to his queen. He did not even look at me, though I was deliciously rumpled with my hair in a cloud of gold around my face. But it was not to me that Henry raced with the best news he had ever heard. He brought the news to his queen, to the woman who had made for him an unbreakable alliance with her country of Spain. He had been unfaithful to her many times, he had been unfaithful to their policy many times. But when it triumphed, in this moment of intense joy, it was to her that he took the news, it was Katherine who was queen in his heart once more. burst in upon the king in the early morning while he was still half-dressed, and he came running like a boy to the queen, a herald flying before him to hammer on the door of the queen's apartments and shout: "His Majesty is coming: the king!" so that we tumbled out of our rooms in different states of undress and only the queen was composed and elegant in a gown thrown over her nightshirt. Henry banged the door coming into the room and ran through us, while we twittered like an aviary of blind thrushes, straight to his queen. He did not even look at me, though I was deliciously rumpled with my hair in a cloud of gold around my face. But it was not to me that Henry raced with the best news he had ever heard. He brought the news to his queen, to the woman who had made for him an unbreakable alliance with her country of Spain. He had been unfaithful to her many times, he had been unfaithful to their policy many times. But when it triumphed, in this moment of intense joy, it was to her that he took the news, it was Katherine who was queen in his heart once more.

He threw himself at her feet and s.n.a.t.c.hed up her hands and covered them with kisses and Katherine laughed like a girl again and cried out with impatience: "What is it? Tell me! Tell me! What is it?" while Henry could do nothing more than say: "Pavia! G.o.d be praised! Pavia!"

He leaped to his feet and danced her around the room, jumping like a boy. The gentlemen of his train came running in, he had outstripped them in the race to get to the queen. George came tumbling into the room with his friend Francis Weston, saw me and came to my side.

"What on earth is going on?" I asked, smoothing my hair back and tying my skirt around my waist.

"A great victory," he said. "A decisive victory. The French army is said to be all but destroyed. France lies open before us. Charles of Spain can have his pick of the south, we shall overrun the north. France is no more. It is destroyed. It will be the Spanish empire up to the borders of the English kingdom in France. We have hammered the French army into the ground and we are the unquestioned masters of France, and joint rulers of most of Europe."

"Francis defeated?" I asked disbelievingly, thinking of the ambitious dark prince who had been the rival of our golden king.

"Smashed to pieces," Francis Weston confirmed. "What a day for England! What a triumph!"

I looked across at the king and queen. He was no longer attempting to dance, he had lost the rhythm of the steps, instead he had wound her in his arms and was kissing her forehead, her eyes and her lips. "My dearest," he said. "Your nephew is a great general, this is a great gift he has given us. We will have France at our feet. I shall be King of England and France in reality as well as t.i.tle. And Richard de la Pole is dead-his threat to my throne is dead with him. King Francis himself is taken prisoner, France is destroyed. Your nephew and I are the greatest kings in Europe and our alliance will own everything. Everything that my father planned from you and your family has been given to us this day."