"What?" I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity.

"Pearls," she said shortly. She turned to the page. "Tell the king that I am honored by his gift," she said. "And that I will wear them at dinner tonight to thank him myself. Tell him," she smiled as if at some private joke, "that he will find he has a kind mistress and not a cruel one."

The young man nodded solemnly, got to his feet, made a deep bow to Anne and a flirtatious bob to me, and took himself out of the room. Anne closed the box and tossed it across to me. I looked at the pearls, they were magnificent, set on a chain of gold.

"What did your message mean?" I asked. "That you will be kind and not cruel?"

"I can't give myself to him," she said, as prompt as any huckster who knows the value to a penny. "But we had words this morning because he wanted to take me into his privy chamber after Ma.s.s and I would not go."

"What did you say?"

"I lost my temper," she confessed. "I swore that he wanted to treat me as a wh.o.r.e and dishonor me and dishonor himself and destroy any chance we had of a proper decision from Rome. If anyone thinks that I am his wh.o.r.e then I will never supplant Katherine. I'd be no better than you."

"You lost your temper?" I asked, going at once to the worst part of this. "What did he do?"

"Fell back," Anne said ruefully. "Shot out of the room like a cat scalded by a falling pan. But see what comes of it? He cannot bear me to be displeased with him. I have him dancing like a boy for me."

"At the moment," I said warningly.

"Oh, tonight I shall be kind as I promised. I shall dress and sing and dance only for him."

"And after dinner?"

"I let him touch me," she said unwillingly. "I let him stroke my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and I let him put his hand up my skirt. But I never take off my gown for him. I really don't dare."

"D'you pleasure him?"

"Yes," she said. "He insists on it and I can't see how to avoid it. But sometimes-" She rose from the window seat and paced to the center of the room. "When he has stripped off his hose he pushes it into my hand and I hate him for it. It feels like an insult to me, to use me like this and then..." She broke off, speechless with temper. "Then he reaches his pleasure and he spouts like a stupid whale, such a mess and wetness and I think..." She slammed her fist into her palm. "I think G.o.d, oh G.o.d-I need a baby and there is all this going to waste! Going to waste in my hand when it should be in my belly! For G.o.d's sake! Apart from it being a sin, it's such madness!"

"There's always more," I said practically.

The look she turned on me was haunted. "There's not always more of me," she said. "He's mad to touch me now but he's been waiting three years. What if we have to wait another three years? How am I to keep my looks? How am I to stay fertile? He might well be l.u.s.ty till he is sixty, but what about me?"

"Does he not think badly of you?" I asked. "These are wh.o.r.e's tricks you are playing with him."

Anne shook her head. "I have to do something to keep him hot for my touch. I have to keep him coming forward and hold him off, all at the same time."

"There are other things you can do," I volunteered.

"Tell me."

"You can let him watch you."

"Let him watch me do what?"

"Let him watch you while you touch yourself. He loves that. It makes him almost weep with l.u.s.t."

She looked intensely uncomfortable. "For shame."

I laughed shortly. "You let him watch you undress, one thing then another, very slowly. Last of all you lift your shift and put your fingers to your cunny and open it up to show him."

She shook her head. "I couldn't do it..."

"And you can take him in your mouth." I hid my amus.e.m.e.nt at her shrinking.

"What?" She looked at me with unveiled disgust.

"You can kneel before him and take it in your mouth. He loves that too."

"You've done that with him?" she demanded, her nose wrinkled.

I looked her straight in the eye. "I was his wh.o.r.e," I said. "And our brother has his stewardships and our father is a wealthy man because of it. When he lay on his back I would lie on him and kiss him down from his mouth to his parts and then lick his parts like a cat lapping at milk. Then I would take him in my mouth and suck on it."

Anne's face was a picture of curiosity and revulsion. "And did he like that?"

"Yes," I said, brutally frank. "He adored it; it gave him as great a pleasure as anything else. And you can look as if you cannot bear the thought of it, you can set yourself up as high as you like; but if you have to hold him with wh.o.r.e's tricks then you had better learn some new wh.o.r.e's tricks and do them well."

For a moment I thought that she would flare up, but she went quiet and nodded her head.

"I'm sure that the queen never did such a thing," she said with deep resentment.

"No," I said, exercising my constant resentment for a brief moment. "But she was his beloved wife that he married for love; and you and I are just wh.o.r.es."

The tricks Anne learned to play with the king soothed his temper, but made her more irritable than ever. I opened the door to her chamber one day and I heard her voice raised in a breaking storm.

Henry was facing the door as I came in, and the look that he shot me was almost pleading. I stared aghast as Anne railed at him. She had her back to me, she did not even hear the door click, she was in such a rage as to be blind and deaf except to her own loud words.

"And then to find that she, she she! is still sewing your shirts, and she mocks me with this, she took them out in front of me and asked me to thread her needle. Asked me before all the ladies to thread the needle as if I were some serving woman."

"I never asked her..."

"Oh? What happens? Does she go to your rooms and steal your shirts away in the night? Does the groom of the bedchamber filch them and pa.s.s them on to her? Do you sleepwalk and carry them to her by accident?"

"Anne, she is my wife. She has sewed my shirts for twenty years. I had no idea that you would object. But I will tell her that I don't want her to do them any more."

"You had no idea that I would object? Why don't you go back to her bed and see if I object to that! I sew as well as she does, a good deal better actually, since I am not so old and shortsighted that someone else has to thread my needle for me. But you do not bring your shirts to me. You snub me..." Her voice quavered. "Before the whole court you snub me by taking your shirts to her." She grew stronger with indignation. "You might as well say to the world: this is my wife and the woman I trust, and this is my mistress who is for the night and for play."

"Before G.o.d..." the king started.

"Before G.o.d, you have hurt me with this, Henry!"

At the quaver in her voice he was quite unmanned. He opened his arms to her but she shook her head. "No, no, I won't run to you and have you kiss my tears away and make me tell you that it doesn't matter. It does matter, it matters more than anything."

She put her hand to her eyes and walked past him, she opened the door to her privy chamber and went in without even glancing at him. In the silence that followed we heard her close the door and turn the key in the lock.

The king and I looked at each other.

He looked stunned. "Before G.o.d, I never meant to hurt her."

"About some shirts?"

"The queen still sews my shirts for me. Anne didn't know. She has taken it badly."

"Oh," I said.

Henry shook his head. "I shall tell the queen she shall no longer sew them for me."

"I think that would be wise," I said gently.

"And when she comes out, will you tell her that I was much grieved to have caused her so much pain? And tell her that the offense will never be repeated?"

"Yes," I said. "I'll tell her."

"I shall send for a goldsmith and have him make her something pretty," he said, warming to the thought. "And when she is happy again she will forget that this quarrel ever took place."

"She will be happy by the time she has rested," I said hopefully. "Of course it's hard for her, waiting to be married to you. She loves you so very much."

For a moment he looked like the boy who had been in love with Katherine. "Yes, that's why she calls up such a storm. Because she loves me so much."

"Of course," I rea.s.sured him. The last thing I wanted was for Henry to see how disproportionate Anne's anger was to the facts.

He looked tender again. "I know. I have to be patient with her. And she's very young, and she knows almost nothing of the world."

I kept my mouth shut, thinking of the young girl I had been when my family had handed me over to him, and how I had never been allowed a whispered protest, let alone a temper tantrum.

"I'll get her some rubies," he said. "A virtuous woman, rubies, you know."

"She'll like that," I said with certainty.

Henry gave her rubies, and she rewarded him with more than a smile. She came back to her room very late one night with her gown all disheveled and her hood in her hand. I had been asleep in bed, I never waited up for her as she used to do for me. She pulled the covers off me to make me wake up and unlace her.

"I did what you said and he adored it," she said. "And I let him play in my hair and with my b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

"So you are friends again," I said. I unlaced her stomacher and pulled the petticoat over her head.

"And Father is to become an earl," Anne said with quiet satisfaction. "Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde. I am to be Lady Anne Rochford and George will be Lord Rochford. Father is to go back to Europe to make the peace, and Lord George our brother is to go with him. Lord George our brother is to become one of the king's most favored amba.s.sadors."

I gasped at this tumble of favors. "An earldom for Father?"

"Yes."

"And George will be Lord Rochford! How grand for him, he'll love it! And an amba.s.sador!"

"As he has always wanted."

"And me?" I asked. "What is there for me?"

Anne fell into bed and let me pull her shoes off her feet and peel down her stockings. "You stay as the widow Lady Carey," she said. "Just the other Boleyn girl. I can't do everything, you know."

Christmas 1529 THE COURT WAS TO MEET AT GREENWICH, AND THE QUEEN was to be present. She was to receive every honor and Anne was not to be seen. was to be present. She was to receive every honor and Anne was not to be seen.

"What now?" I asked George. I sat on his bed while he lounged in the window seat. His man was packing his trunks for his trip to Rome, and every now and then George would look up and shout at his impa.s.sive servant: "Not the blue cape, it has the moth." Or: "I hate that hat, give it to Mary for young Henry."

"What now?" He repeated my question.

"I've been summoned to the queen's apartments and I am to live in my old room in her wing of the palace. Anne is to be in her rooms at the tiltyard all on her own. I think Mother is to stay with her, but I, and all the ladies in waiting, are to wait on the queen, not on Anne."

"It can't be a bad sign," George said. "He's expecting a lot of people out of the City to watch them dine over the days of Christmas. The last thing he can afford are the merchants and the city traders saying that he is incontinent. He wants everyone to think that he has chosen Anne for the benefit of England, not for l.u.s.t."

I glanced a little nervously at the servant.

"Joss is all right," George said. "Rather deaf, thank G.o.d. Aren't you, Joss?"

The man did not turn his head.

"Oh well, leave us," George said. Still the man went on, stolidly packing.

"All the same you should take care," I said.

George raised his voice. "Leave us, Joss. You can finish later."

The man started, looked round, bowed to George and to me, and went out.

George left the window seat and sprawled on the bed at my side. I pulled his head down so that it rested in my lap and made myself comfortable against the headboard.

"D'you think it will ever happen?" I asked idly. "It feels as if we have been planning this wedding for a hundred years."

He had closed his dark eyes but now he opened them and looked up at me. "G.o.d knows," he said. "G.o.d knows what it will have cost when it does come: the happiness of a queen, the safety of the throne, the respect of the people, the sanct.i.ty of the church. Sometimes it seems to me as if you and I have spent our lives working for Anne, and I don't even know what we have gained from it."

"And you an heir to an earldom? To two earldoms?"

"I wanted to go on crusade and murder unbelievers," he said. "I wanted to come home to a beautiful woman in a castle who would worship me for my courage."

"And I wanted a hop field and an apple orchard and a sheep run," I said.

"Fools," George said, and closed his eyes.

He was asleep in a few minutes. I held him gently, watching his chest rise and fall, and then I leaned my head back against the brocade covering the headboard and closed my eyes and drifted into sleep myself.