I took half a step inside the room.

"Don't come any closer!" he snapped. "Just go!"

His tone was rude, and I turned on my heel and went out of the room in something of a pet and closed the door behind me with a little slam, so that he should know that I was offended.

It was the last time that I ever saw him alive.

George and I had been at Hever for little more than a week when Anne arrived traveling almost alone, in an open wagon. She was faint with exhaustion when she arrived and neither George nor I had the courage to nurse her ourselves. A wise woman from Edenbridge came in and took her to the tower room and sent for enormous portions of food and wine, some of which, we hoped, were actually eaten by Anne. The whole country was either sick or in a terror of sickness. Two maids left the castle to nurse their parents in nearby villages and both of them died. It was a most fearsome disease and George and I woke every morning in a sweat of terror and spent the rest of the day wondering if we too were destined to die.

The king, at the first signs of sickness, had left at once and gone to Hunsdon. That in itself was bad enough for the Boleyns. The court was in chaos, the country gripped by death. Worse for us: Queen Katherine was well, the Princess Mary was well, and the two of them, with the king, traveled together for the whole of the summer, as if they were the only ones blessed by heaven, untouched in a sea of sickness.

Anne fought for life, as she had fought for the king, a long dogged battle in which she brought all her determination to bear against almost impossible odds. Love letters came from the king, marked Hunsdon, t.i.ttenhanger, Ampthill, recommending one cure or another, promising that he had not forgotten her and that he still loved her. But clearly, the divorce could not progress while there was no business being done at all, when even the cardinal himself was sick. It was half-forgotten and the queen was at the king's side and their engaging little princess was their best companion and greatest entertainment. Everything had somehow stopped for the summer and Anne's sense of the flying of time, and Anne's desperation, were nothing to a man whose greatest fear was illness, and who was miraculously blessed with good health amid a sea of misery.

By our good fortune, the Boleyn luck, the sweat did not come to Hever and the children and I were safe in the familiar green fields and meadows. I had a letter from William's mother which told me that he had reached his home, as he had wanted, before he had died. It was a short cold letter which at the end congratulated me on being a free woman again; as if she rather thought that my marriage vows had never constrained me very much in the past.

I read the letter in the garden, on my favorite seat, looking toward the moat and the stone walls of the castle. I thought of the man I had cuckolded and who, in the last few months, had become such a delightful lover and husband. I knew that I had never given him his due. He had been married to a child and left by a girl, and when I came back to him as a woman it was always with an element of calculation in my kiss.

Now I realized that his death had set me free. If I could escape another husband, I might buy a little manor farm on my family's lands in Kent or Ess.e.x. I might have land that I could call my own and crops that I could watch grow. I might at last become a woman in my own right instead of the mistress of one man, the wife of another, and the sister of a Boleyn. I might bring up my children under my own roof. Of course, I had to get some money from somewhere, I had to persuade some man, Howard, Boleyn, or king, to give me a pension so that I could raise my children and feed myself, but it might be possible for me to gain enough to be a modest widow living in the country on my own little farm.

"You cannot really want to be a n.o.body," George exclaimed as I outlined this plan as we were walking together in the woods. The children were hiding behind trees and stalking us as we walked slowly ahead of them. We were to play the parts of a pair of deer. George was wearing a bunch of twigs in his hat to signify antlers. Now and then we could hear little Henry's irresistible chuckle of excitement as he crashingly approached, believing himself completely unseen and unheard. I could not help thinking of his father's enthusiasm for disguises and how he too always thought that people were baffled by the simplest stratagem. Now, I indulged my son and pretended that I did not hear his noisy dash from tree to tree nor see him run from shadow to bush.

"You have been the favorite of the court," George protested. "Why would you not want to make a grand marriage? Father or Uncle could get the pick of England for you. When Anne becomes queen then you could have a French prince."

"It's still woman's work whether it's done in a great hall or in the kitchen," I said bitterly. "I know it well enough. It's earning no money for yourself and everything for your husband and master. It's obeying him as quickly and as well as if you were a groom of the servery. It's having to tolerate anything he chooses to do, and smile as he does it. I've served Queen Katherine in these last few years. I've seen how life has been for her. I wouldn't be a princess, not even for a princess's dowry. I wouldn't even be a queen. I have seen her shamed and humiliated and insulted, and all she could do was kneel on her prie dieu, pray for a little help, and get to her feet and smile at the woman who was triumphing over her. I don't think much of that, George."

Catherine behind us made an excited little rush and caught at my gown. "Caught you! I caught you!"

George turned and lifted her up, tossed her in the air and handed her to me. She was heavy now, a firm-bodied little four-year-old smelling of sunshine and leaves.

"Clever girl," I said. "You are a great hunter."

"And what about her?" George asked. "Would you deny her a great place in the world? She will be the Queen of England's niece. Think of that."

I hesitated. "If women could only have more," I said longingly. "If we could have more in our own right. Being a woman at court is like forever watching a pastrycook at work in the kitchen. All those good things, and you can have nothing."

"What about Henry then?" he said, temptingly. "Your Henry is the nephew of the King of England, known well enough as his son. If (G.o.d forbid) Anne does not have a son, then Henry could claim the throne of England, Mary. Your son is the son of a king, and he could be his heir."

I did not glow at the thought. I looked fearfully into the wood where my staunch little boy was struggling to keep up with us and muttering to himself hunting songs of his own composing.

"Please G.o.d he is safe," was all I said. "Please G.o.d he is safe."

Autumn 1528 ANNE SURVIVED HER ILLNESS AND GREW STRONGER IN THE clean air of Hever. When she came from her chamber I still would not sit with her, I was so afraid of taking the sickness to my children. She tried to be witty about my fears but there was an edge to her voice. She had felt betrayed by the king when he had fled the court, and she was mortally offended that he had spent the summer with Queen Katherine and with the Princess Mary. clean air of Hever. When she came from her chamber I still would not sit with her, I was so afraid of taking the sickness to my children. She tried to be witty about my fears but there was an edge to her voice. She had felt betrayed by the king when he had fled the court, and she was mortally offended that he had spent the summer with Queen Katherine and with the Princess Mary.

She was determined to find him as soon as the cooler weather came, and the sweating sickness pa.s.sed away. I was hoping that I might be overlooked in the rush to get Anne on the throne.

"You have to come back with me," Anne said flatly.

We were at our favorite seat by the moat of the castle. Anne was seated on the stone bench, George sprawled on the gra.s.s before her. I was seated on the gra.s.s, leaning back against the bench, watching my children solemnly paddling their little feet in the water. It was shallow water at the bank, but I could not take my gaze off them.

"Mary!" Anne's voice was sharp.

"I heard you," I said, not turning my head.

"Look at me!"

I glanced up at her.

"You have to come back with me, I can't manage without you."

"I don't see why-"

"I do," George said. "She has to have a bedfellow that she can trust. When she closes her bedroom door behind her she has to know that no one is going to prattle to the queen that she's crying, or tell Henry that she's furious. She's acting a part every day of her life, she needs a band of traveling players to be with. She has to have some people around her that she can know, that can know her. It can't be all masquerade."

"Yes," Anne said, surprised. "That's just how it is. How did you know?"

"Because Francis Weston is a friend to me," George said frankly. "I need someone to whom I am not brother or son or husband."

"Nor lover," I prompted.

He shook his head. "Just friend. But I know how Anne needs you, because I need him."

"Well I need my children," I said stubbornly. "And Anne manages well enough without me."

"I am asking you as my sister." Something in her tone made me look at her a little more closely. This illness had knocked some of the arrogance out of her, she sounded for a moment like a woman who needed a sister's tenderness. Slowly, very slowly, in an unfamiliar gesture, Anne stretched out her hand to me.

"Mary...I can't do this on my own," she whispered. "It nearly killed me last time. I knew something would break inside me if I had to keep going. And now I have to go back to court and it will start all over again."

"Can't you keep the king without such effort?"

She leaned back and closed her eyes. For a moment she did not look like the most determined, the most brilliant young woman in a brilliant court. She looked like an exhausted girl who has seen the depths of her own fear. "No. The only way I know is always to be the best there is."

I reached out and touched her hand and felt her fingers grip mine. "I'll come and help."

"Good," she said quietly. "I do need you, you know. Stay beside me, Mary."

Back at court, at Bridewell Palace, the game had changed again. The Pope, weary at last of the endless demands from England, was sending an Italian theologian, Cardinal Campeggio, to London to resolve finally and absolutely the matter of the king's marriage. Far from being threatened by this new development the queen seemed to welcome it. She was looking well. There was a glow on her skin from the summer sun and she had been happy in the company of her daughter. The king, shaken by his terror of infection, had been easy to entertain. Together they had discussed the cause of the illness which had swept the country, planned measures for prevention, and composed special prayers which they had ordered to be said in every church. Together they had worried about the health of the country which they had ruled for so long. Anne, though never far from the king's thoughts, lost some of her glamour when she was merely one of the many sick. Once again, the queen was his only constant and reliable friend in a dangerous world.

I could see the difference in her the moment we came into her apartment in the palace. She wore a new gown of dark red velvet which suited the warm color of her skin. She did not look like a young woman-she would never be a young woman again; but she had a confident poise which Anne could never learn.

She welcomed Anne and me with a faint ironic smile. She inquired after my children, she asked after Anne's health. If she thought for a moment that the country would have been a better place if the sweat had carried off my sister, as it had taken so many others, there was no sign of that in her face.

In theory, we were still her ladies in waiting, though the presence chamber and the privy chamber which had been allocated to us were almost as large as the queen's own rooms. Her ladies flitted from her rooms to ours, to the king's presence chambers. The steady discipline of the court was breaking down, there was a sense now that almost anything could happen. The king and queen were on terms of quiet courtesy. The papal legate was on his way from Rome but taking an inordinate time over the journey. Anne was back at court indeed, but the king had spent a happy summer without her, it might be that his pa.s.sion had cooled.

No one dared to predict which way events might move and so there was a steady stream of people arriving to pay their respects to the queen and moving from her rooms to visit Anne. They crossed with another flow whose money was on the other horse. There was even talk that Henry would, in the end, come back to me and our growing nursery. I paid no attention until I heard my uncle had laughed with the king about his handsome boy at Hever.

I knew well enough, as did Anne, as did George, that my uncle never did anything by accident. Anne took George and me into her privy chamber and stood before us to accuse us.

"What's going on?" she demanded.

I shook my head but George looked shifty.

"George?"

"It's always true that your stars rise and fall in opposition," he said awkwardly.

"What d'you mean?" she asked frostily.

"They had a meeting of the family."

"Without me?"

George flung up his hands like a defeated fencer. "I was summoned. I didn't speak. I didn't say a thing."

Anne and I were on him at once. "They met without us there? What are they saying? What do they want now?"

George put us both at arm's length. "All right! All right! They don't know which way to jump. They don't know which way to go. They didn't want Anne to know for fear of offending her. But now that you are so luckily widowed, Mary, and he lost interest in Anne this summer, they are wondering if he might not be brought round to you again."

"He did not lose interest!" Anne swore. "I won't be supplanted." She rounded on me. "You she-dog! This would be your plan!"

I shook my head. "I've done nothing."

"You came back to court!"

"You insisted on it. I've hardly looked at the king, I've hardly said two words to him."

She turned from me and pitched face down on the bed as if she could not bear to look at either of us. "But you've got his son," she wailed.

"That's it really," George said gently. "Mary's got his son and now she's free to marry. The family think that the king might settle for her. And his dispensation applies to either of you. He can marry her if he wants."

Anne rose up from the pillows, tearstained.

"I don't want him," I said, exasperated.

"It doesn't matter, does it?" she said bitterly. "If they tell you to go forward then you will go forward and take my chair."

"As you took mine," I reminded her.

She sat up. "One Boleyn girl or the other." Her smile was as bitter as if she had been biting on a lemon. "We might either of us be Queen of England and yet we'll always be nothing to our family."

Anne spent the next weeks entrancing the king all over again. She drew him away from the queen, away even from his daughter. Slowly the court came to realize that she had won him back. There was n.o.body but Anne.

I watched the seduction with the detachment of a widow. Henry gave Anne a London house of her own. Durham House on The Strand, her own apartments over the tiltyard at Greenwich Palace for the Christmas season. The king's council publicly ruled that the queen should not dress too finely nor go out to be seen by the people. It was apparent to everyone that it was only a matter of time before Cardinal Campeggio ruled for divorce, Henry could marry Anne, and I could go home to my children and make a new life.

I was still Anne's chief confidante and companion and one day in November she insisted that she and George and I walk by the flooded river at Greenwich Palace.

"You must be wondering what will become of you, now that you have no husband," Anne started. She seated herself on a bench and looked up at me.

"I thought I would live with you while you need me, and then go back to Hever," I said cautiously.

"I can ask the king to allow that," she said. "It is in my gift."

"Thank you."

"And I can ask him to provide for you," she said. "William left you almost nothing, you know."

"I know," I said.

"The king used to pay William a pension of one hundred pounds a year. I can have that pension transferred to you."

"Thank you," I repeated.

"The thing is," Anne said lightly, turning her collar up against the cold wind, "I thought I would adopt Henry."

"You thought what?"

"I thought I would adopt little Henry as my own son."

I was so astounded, I could only look at her. "You don't even like him very much," I said, the first foolish thought of a loving mother. "You never even play with him. George has spent more time with him than you."

Anne glanced away, as if seeking patience from the river and the jumbled rooftops of the City beyond. "No. Of course. That's not why I would adopt him. I don't want him because I like him."

Slowly, I started to think. "So that you have a son, Henry's son. You have a son who is a Tudor by birth. If he marries you then in the same ceremony he gets a son."

She nodded.

I turned and took a couple of steps, my riding boots crunching on the frozen gravel. I was thinking furiously. "And of course, this way, you take my son away from me. So I am less desirable to Henry. In one move you make yourself the mother of the king's son and you take away my great claim to his attention."

George cleared his throat, and leaned against the river wall, arms folded across his chest, his face a picture of detachment. I rounded on him. "You knew?"

He shrugged. "She told me after she'd done it. She did it as soon as we told her that the family thought that you might take the eye of the king again. She only told Father and Uncle after the king had agreed and the deed was done. Uncle thought it a keen bit of play."

I found my throat dry and I swallowed. "A keen bit of play?"

"And it means that you are provided for," George said fairly. "It puts your son close to the throne, it concentrates all the benefits on Anne, it's a good plan."