The Other Boleyn Girl. Philippa Gregory
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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