Gently he took my hands and unfolded the clenched fingers. "But Mary. How else would she have made a monstrous child but from a monstrous union? She must have lain in sin."

"With whom, for G.o.d's sake? Do you you think she has made a contract with the devil?" think she has made a contract with the devil?"

"Don't you think she would do so, if it got her a son?" he demanded.

That stopped me. Unhappily, I looked up into his brown eyes. "Hush," I said, afraid of the very words. "I don't want to think it."

"What if she did perform some witchcraft, and it gave her a monster child?"

"Then?"

"Then he would be right to put her aside."

For a moment I tried to laugh. "This is a sorry jest at this sorry time, William."

"No jest, wife."

"I can't see it!" I cried in sudden impatience at the way the world had so suddenly turned. "I can't comprehend what's happened to us!"

Disregarding the fact that we were in the garden and that any of the court could come upon us at any moment, he slipped his arm around my waist and folded me in to him, as intimate as if we were in the stable yard of his farm. "Love, my love," he said tenderly. "She must have done something very bad to give birth to a monster. And you don't even know what it was. Have you never run a secret errand for her? Fetched a midwife? Bought a potion?"

"You yourself..." I started.

He nodded. "And I have buried a dead baby. Please G.o.d this matter can be settled quietly and they never ask too many questions."

The only previous time that the court had abandoned a queen in an empty palace was when the king and Anne had ridden out laughing, and left Queen Katherine alone. Now Henry did it again. Anne watched, unseen, from the window of her bedroom, kneeling up on a chair, still too weak to stand, while he, with Jane Seymour riding at his side, led the progress of the court to Greenwich, his favorite palace.

In the train of merry courtiers behind the laughing king and the new pretty favorite was my family, father, mother, uncle and brother, jockeying for the king's favor, while William and I rode with our children. Catherine was quiet and reserved, and she glanced back at the palace and then looked up at me.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It doesn't seem right to be riding away without the queen," she said.

"She'll join us later, when she feels well again," I said comfortingly.

"D'you know where Jane Seymour will have her rooms at Greenwich?" she asked me.

I shook my head. "Won't she share with another Seymour girl?"

"No," my young daughter said shortly. "She says that the king is to give her beautiful apartments of her own, and her own ladies in waiting. So that she can practice her music."

I did not want to believe Catherine but she was quite right. It was given out that Secretary Cromwell himself had given up his rooms at Greenwich so that Mistress Seymour could warble away to her lute without disturbing the other ladies. In fact, Secretary Cromwell's rooms had a private pa.s.sage connecting the apartment to the king's privy chamber. Jane was ensconced in Greenwich as Anne had been before her, in rival rooms to the queen's apartment, as a rival court.

As soon as the court was settled, a little group of Seymours met and talked and danced and played in Jane's new grand apartments, and the queen's ladies, without the queen to wait on, found their way over to Jane's rooms. The king was there all the time, talking, reading, listening to music or poetry. He dined with Jane informally, in his rooms or hers, with Seymours around the table to laugh at his jests or divert him with gambling, or he took her into dinner in the great hall and sat her near to him, with only the queen's empty throne to remind anyone that there was a Queen of England left behind in an empty palace. Sometimes, as I looked at Jane leaning forward to say something to Henry over my sister's empty seat, I felt as if Anne had never been and there was nothing to stop Jane moving from one chair to the other.

She never wavered in her sweetness to Henry. They must have reared her on a diet of sugar beet in Wiltshire. She was utterly unendingly pleasant to Henry whether he was in a sour mood because of the pain in his leg, or whether he was exultant as a boy crowing in triumph because he had brought down a deer. She was always very calm, she was always very pious-he often found her on her knees before her little prie dieu with her hands clasped on her rosary, and her head uplifted-and she was always unendingly modest.

She set aside the French hood, the stylish half-moon-shaped headdress which Anne had introduced when she first came back to England. Instead, Jane wore a gable hood, like Queen Katherine had done, which only a year ago marked the wearer as someone impossibly dowdy and dull. Henry himself had sworn that he hated Spanish dress, but its very sternness suited Jane's cool beauty as a foil. She wore it like a nun might wear a coif-to demonstrate her disdain for worldly show. But she wore it in palest blue, in softest green, in b.u.t.ter yellow: all clean light colors as if her very palette was mild.

I knew that she was halfway to my sister's place when Madge Shelton, bawdy, flirtatious, loose-living little Madge Shelton, appeared at dinner in a gable hood in pale blue with a high-necked gown to match and her French sleeves remodeled to an English cut. Within days every woman in the court wore a gable hood and walked with her eyes downcast.

Anne joined us in February, riding into court with the greatest show: the royal standard rippling over her head, the Boleyn standard coming along behind her, and a great train of liveried serving men and gentlemen on horseback. George and I were waiting for her on the steps with the great doors open wide behind us, and Henry noticeable by his absence.

"Shall you tell her about Jane's rooms?" George asked me.

"Not I," I said. "You can."

"Francis says to tell her in public. She'll rule her temper in front of the court."

"You discuss the queen with Francis?"

"You talk with William."

"He is my husband."

George nodded, looking toward the first men in Anne's train as they approached the door.

"You trust William?"

"Of course."

"I feel the same about Francis."

"It's not the same."

"How would you know what his love is like to me?"

"I know that it can't be as a man loves a woman."

"No. I love him as a man loves a man."

"It's against holy writ."

He took my hands and smiled his irresistible Boleyn smile. "Mary, have done. These are dangerous times and the only comfort to me is Francis's love. Let me have that. Because as G.o.d is my witness I have few other joys, and I think we are in the greatest of danger."

Anne's train of escorts rode past and she pulled up her horse beside us with a radiant smile. She was wearing a riding habit in darkest red and a dark red hat set back on her head with a long feather pinned on the brim with a great ruby brooch.

"Vivat Anna!" my brother called, responding to her emphatic style.

She looked past us, into the shadows of the great hall, expecting to see the king waiting for her. Her expression did not change when she saw that he was missing.

"Are you well?" I asked, coming forward.

"Of course," she said brightly. "Why should I not be?"

I shook my head. "No reason," I said cautiously. Clearly, we were to say nothing about this dead baby as we had always said nothing about the others.

"Where is the king?"

"Hunting," George said.

Anne strode into the palace, servants running before her to throw open the doors.

"He knew I was coming?" she threw over her shoulder.

"Yes," George replied.

She nodded and waited until we were in her rooms with the doors shut. "And where are my ladies?"

"Some of them are hunting with the king," I said. "Some of them are..." I found I did not know how to end the sentence. "Some of them are not," I said hopelessly.

She looked past me and raised a dark eyebrow at George. "Will you tell me what my sister means?" she asked. "I knew her French and Latin were incomprehensible but now English seems to be beyond her too."

"Your ladies are flocking to Jane Seymour," he said flatly. "The king has given her Thomas Cromwell's apartments, he dines with her every day. She has a little court over there."

She gasped for a moment and looked from our brother to me. "Is this true?"

"Yes," I said.

"He has given her Thomas Cromwell's rooms? He can go straight to her rooms without anyone even knowing?"

"Yes."

"Are they lovers?"

I looked at George.

"No way of knowing," he said. "My wager is not."

"Not?"

"She seems to be refusing to take the addresses of a married man," he said. "She is playing on her virtue."

Anne went to the window, walking slowly, as if she would puzzle out this change in her world. "What does she hope for?" she asked. "If she is calling him on and holding him off at the same time?"

Neither of us answered her. Who would know better than us?

Anne turned, her eyes as sharp as a cat's. "She thinks to put me aside? Is she mad?"

We neither of us answered.

"And Cromwell was ordered out for this shower of Seymours?"

I shook my head. "Cromwell offered his rooms."

She nodded slowly. "So Cromwell is openly against me now."

She looked to George for comfort, an odd look, as if she were not sure of him. But George had never failed her. Tentatively, he went closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder, brother-like. Instead of turning to him for a hug, she stepped back until he was standing behind her and then she rested her head back against his chest. He gave a sigh and wrapped his arms around her and rocked her gently as they stood, looking out of the window where the Thames sparkled in the wintry sunshine.

"I thought you might be afraid to touch me," she said softly.

He shook his head. "Oh, Anne. According to the laws of the land and the church I am anathemetized ten times over before breakfast."

I shuddered at that; but she giggled like a girl.

"And whatever we have done, it was done for love," he said gently.

She turned in his arms and looked up at him, scrutinizing his face. I realized that I had never in my life seen her look at anyone like that before. She looked at him as if she cared what he felt. He was not just a step on the stair of her ambition. He was her beloved. "Even when the outcome was monstrous?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I don't pretend to know the theology. But my mare has dropped a foal with one leg joined to the other and I didn't dip her for a witch. These things happen in nature, they can't always mean something. You were unlucky, nothing more."

"I won't let it frighten me," she said staunchly. "I've seen saint's blood made from the blood of pigs, and holy water scooped up from a stream. Half of this church's teaching is to lead you on, half to frighten you into your place. I won't be bribed onward, and I won't be frightened. Not by anything. I took a decision to build my own road and I will do it."

If George had been listening he would have heard the sharp nervous edge in her voice. But he was watching her bright determined face. "Onward and upward, Anna Regina!" he said.

She beamed at him. "Onward and upward. And the next will be a boy."

She turned in his arms and put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him, as if he were a trusted lover. "So what am I to do?"

"You have to get him back," he said earnestly. "Don't rail at him, don't let him see your fear. Call him back to you with every trick you know. Enchant him again."

She hesitated and then she smiled and told him the truth behind the bright face. "George, I'm ten years older than when I courted him first. I am nearing thirty. He's had only one live child off me, and now he knows that I gave birth to a monster. I will repel him."

George tightened his grip on her waist. "You can't repel him," he said simply. "Or we all fall. You have to draw him back to you."

"But it was me who taught him to follow his desires. Worse than that, I filled his stupid head with the new learning. Now he thinks that his desires are G.o.d's manifestations. He only has to want something to think that it is G.o.d's will. He doesn't have to confirm it with priest, bishop, or Pope. His whims are holy. How can anyone make such a man return to his wife?"

George looked over her head to me for help. I came a little closer. "He likes comfort," I said. "A little soothing. Pet him, tell him he is wonderful, praise him, and be kind to him."

She looked as blankly at me as if I were speaking Hebrew. "I am his lover, not his mother," she said flatly.

"He wants a mother now," George said. "He's hurt and he feels old and battered. He fears old age, he fears death. The wound on his leg stinks. He is in terror of dying before he has made a prince for England. What he wants is a woman to be tender to him until he feels better again. Jane Seymour is all sweetness. You have to out-sweeten her."

She was silent. We all knew that it was not possible to be sweeter than Jane Seymour when she had the crown in her sights. Not even Anne, that most consummate seductress, could out-sweeten Jane Seymour. The brightness had died from her face and for a moment in her thin pallor I saw the hard face of our own mother.

"By G.o.d I hope it kills her," she suddenly swore vindictively. "If she gets her hand on my crown and her a.r.s.e on my throne I hope it is the death of her. I hope she dies young. I hope she dies in childbed in the very act of giving him a boy. And I hope the boy dies too."