Spring 1523

      In the early weeks of the New Year the queen found her youth again, and blossomed like a rose in a warm room, her colour high, her smiles ready. She put aside the hair shirt she usually wore under her gown, and the telltale rough skin at her neck and shoulders disappeared as if smoothed away by joy. She did not tell anyone the cause of these changes; but her maid told another that she had missed one of her courses, and that the soothsayer was right: the queen had taken with child.

      Given her past history of not going full term, there was every reason for her to be on her knees, her face turned up to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the little prie dieu in the corner of her privy chamber, and every morning found her there, one hand upon her belly, one hand on her missal, her eyes closed, her expression rapt. Miracles could happen. Perhaps a miracle was happening for the queen.

      The maids gossiped that her linen was clean again in February and we began to think that soon she would tell the king. Already he had the look of a man waiting for good news, and he walked past me as if I were invisible. I had to dance before him and attend his wife and endure the smirks of the ladies and know once again that I was nothing more than a Boleyn girl, and not the favourite any more.

      ‘I can’t stand it,’ I said to Anne. We were sitting by the fireplace in the queen’s apartments. The others were walking with the dogs, but Anne and I had refused to go out. The mist was coming off the river and it was a bitterly cold day. I was shivering inside a fur-lined gown. I had not felt well since Christmas night when Henry had gone past me into her room. He had not sent for me since then.

      ‘You are taking it hard,’ she observed contentedly. ‘That’s what comes of loving a king.’

      ‘What else could I do?’ I asked miserably. I moved to the windowseat to get more light on my sewing. I was hemming the queen’s shirts for the poor, and just because they were for old labouring men did not mean that I was allowed sloppy work. She would look at the seams and if she thought they were clumsily executed she would ask me, very pleasantly, to do them again.

      ‘If she has a child and it’s a son then you might as well have stayed with William Carey and started your own family,’ Anne observed. ‘The king will be at her beck, and your days will be done. You’ll just be one of many.’

      ‘He loves me,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’m not one of many.’

      I turned my head away and looked out of the window. The mist was curling off the river in great coils, like dust under a bed.

      Anne gave a hard little laugh. ‘You’ve always been one of many,’ she said brutally. ‘There are dozens of us Howard girls, all with good breeding, all well taught, all pretty, all young, all fertile. They can throw one after another on the table and see if one is lucky. It’s no real loss to them if one after another is taken up and then thrown aside. There’s always another Howard girl conceived, there’s always another whore in the nursery. You were one of many before you were even born. If he does not cleave to you then you go back to William, they find another Howard girl to tempt him, and the dance starts all over again. Nothing is lost for them.’

      ‘Something is lost for me!’ I cried out.

      She put her head on one side and looked at me, as if she would sift the reality from the impatience of childish passion. ‘Yes. Perhaps. Something is lost for you. Your innocence, your first love, your trust. Perhaps your heart is broken. Perhaps it will never mend. Poor silly Marianne,’ she said softly. ‘To do one man’s bidding to please another man and get nothing for yourself but heartbreak.’

      ‘So who would come after me?’ I asked her, turning my pain into taunting. ‘Who d’you think the next Howard girl will be that they push into his bed? Let me guess – the other Boleyn girl?’

      She flashed me a quick black glance and then her dark eyelashes swept down on her cheeks. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I make my own plans. I don’t risk being taken up and dropped again.’

      ‘You told me to risk it,’ I reminded her.

      ‘That was for you,’ she said. ‘I would not live my life as you live yours. You would always do as you were bid, marry where you were told, bed where you were ordered. I am not like you. I make my own way.’

      ‘I could make my own way,’ I said.

      Anne smiled disbelievingly.

      ‘I’d go back to Hever and live there,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t stay at court. If I am put aside I could go to Hever. At least I will always have that now.’

      The door to the queen’s apartment opened and I glanced up as the maids came out, lugging the sheets from the queen’s bed.

      ‘That’s the second time this week she’s ordered them to be changed,’ one said irritably.

      Anne and I exchanged a quick look. ‘Are they stained?’ Anne demanded urgently.

      The maid looked at her insolently. ‘The queen’s sheets?’ she asked. ‘You ask me to show you the queen’s own bed linen?’

      Anne’s long fingers went to her purse and a piece of silver changed hands. The maid’s smile was triumphant as she pocketed the coin. ‘Not stained at all,’ she said.

      Anne subsided and I went to hold the door open for the two women.

      ‘Thank you,’ the second one said, surprised at my politeness to a servant. She nodded to me. ‘Rank with sweat, poor lady,’ she said quietly.

      ‘What?’ I asked. I could hardly believe that she was giving me freely a piece of information that a French spy would pay a king’s ransom for, and that every courtier in the land was longing to know. ‘Are you saying the queen is having night sweats? That her change of life is on her?’

      ‘If not now then very soon,’ the maid said. ‘Poor lady.’