She laughed at the thought of their efforts. There was always laughter round Mary Tudor. All around the court those words were whispered—“Enceinte! Is the Queen enceinte? If only...the Queen is enceinte!”

Louise questioned the ladies around the Queen; she even questioned little Anne. The angry, frustrated woman buried her head in her hands and raged; she visited her astrologer; she studied her charts. “The stars have said my son will sit on the throne of France. That old man...he is too old, and too cold...”

“He behaves like a young and hot one,” said Marguerite.

“He is a dying fire...”

“A dying fire has its last flicker of warmth, my mother!”

Mary loved to tease them, feigning sickness. “I declare I cannot get up this morning. I do not know what it can be, except that I may have eaten too heartily last evening...” Her wicked eyes sparkling; her sensuous lips pouting.

“The Queen is sick this morning...she looked blooming last night. Can it be...?”

Mary threw off her clothes and pranced before her mirror.

“Anne, tell me, am I not fattening? Here...and here. Anne, I shall slap you unless you say I am!” And she would laugh hysterically and then cry a little. “Anne Boleyn, did you never see my Lord of Suffolk? How my body yearns for that man!” Ambition was strong in Mary. “I would be mother to a king of France, Anne. Ah, if only my beautiful beau-fils were King of France! Do you doubt, little Boleyn, that he would have had me with child ere this? What do I want from life? I do not know, Anne....Now, if I had never known Charles...” And she grew soft, thinking of Charles Brandon, and the King would come and see her softness, and it would amuse her maliciously to pretend the softness was for him. The poor old King was completely infatuated by the giddy creature; he would give her presents, beautiful jewels one at a time, so that she could express her gratitude for each one. The court tittered, laughing at the old man. “That one will have his money’s worth!” It was a situation to set a French court, coming faster and faster under the influence of Francois, rocking with laughter.

Wildly, Mary coquetted with the willing Francois. If she cannot get a child from the King, whispered the court, why not from Francois? She would not lose from such a bargain; only poor Francois would do that. What satisfaction could there be in seeing yourself robbed of a throne by your own offspring? Very little, for the child could not be acknowledged as his. Oh, it was very amusing, and the French were fond of those who amused them. And that it should be Mary Tudor from that gloomy island across the Channel, made it more amusing still. Ah, these English, they were unaccountable. Imagine it! An English princess to give them the best farce in history! Francois was cautious; Francois was reckless. His ardor cooled; his passion flared. There was none, he was sure, whom he could enjoy as heartily as the saucy, hot-blooded little Tudor. There were those who felt it their duty to warn him. “Do you not see the web stretched out to catch you?” Francois saw, and reluctantly gave up the chase.

On the first day of January, as Anne was coming from the Queen’s apartment, she met Louise—a distraught Louise, her black hair disordered, her eyes wild.

Anne hesitated, and was roughly thrust aside.

“Out of my way, child! Have you not heard the news? The King is dead.”

Now the excitement of the court was tuned to a lower key, though it had increased rather than abated. Louise and her daughter were overjoyed at the death of the King, but their happiness in the event was overshadowed by their fear. What of the Queen’s condition? They could scarcely wait to know; they trembled; they were suspicious. What did this one know? What had that one overheard? Intrigue...and, at the heart of it, mischievous Mary Tudor.

The period of mourning set in, and the Queen’s young body was seen to broaden with the passing of the days. Louise endured agonies; Francois lost his gaiety. Only the Queen, demure and seductive, enjoyed herself. In her apartments Louise pored over charts; more and more men, learned in the study of the stars, came to her. Is the Queen enceinte? She begged, she implored to be told this was not so, for how could she bear it if it were! During those days of suspense she brooded on the past; her brief married life, her widowhood; the birth of her clever Marguerite, and then that day at Cognac nearly twenty-one years ago when she had come straight from the agony of childbirth to find her Caesar in her arms. She thought of her husband, the profligate philanderer who had died when Francois was not quite two years old, and whom she had mourned wholeheartedly and then had given over her life to her children, superintending the education of both of them herself, delighting in their capacity for learning, their intellectual powers which surely set them apart from all others; they were both of them so worthy of greatness—a brilliant pair, her world, or at least Caesar was; and where that king of men was concerned, was not Marguerite in complete accord with her mother? He should be King of France, for he was meant to be King of France since there was never one who deserved the honor more than he, the most handsome, the most courteous, the most virile, the most learned Francois. And now this fear! This cheating of her beautiful son by a baggage from England! A Tudor! Who were the Tudors? They did not care to look far back into their history, one supposed!

“My Caesar shall be King!” determined Louise. And, unable to bear the suspense any longer, she went along to the Queen’s apartments and, making many artful enquiries as to her health, she perceived that Her Majesty was not quite as large about the middle as she had been yesterday. So she—for, after all, she was Louise of Savoy, a power in France even in the days of her old enemy and rival, Anne of Brittany—shook the naughty Queen until the padding fell from the creature’s clothes. And...oh, joy! Oh, blessed astrologers who had assured her that her son would have the throne! There was the wicked girl as straight and slender as a virgin.

So Mary left the court of France, and in Paris, secretly and in great haste, she married her Charles Brandon; and the court of France tittered indulgently until it began to laugh immoderately, for it was whispered that Brandon, not daring to tell his King of his unsanctioned marriage with the Queen of France and the sister of the King of England, had written his apologia to Wolsey, begging the great Cardinal to break the news gently to the King.

Francois triumphantly mounted the throne and married Claude, while Louise basked in the exquisite pleasure of ambition fulfilled; she was now Madame of the French court.

Little Anne stayed on to serve with Claude. The Duchesse d’Alencon had taken quite a fancy to the child, for her beauty and grace and for her intelligence; she was not yet eight years old, but she had much worldly wisdom; she knew that crippled Claude was submissive, ignored by her husband, and that it was the King’s sister who was virtually Queen of France. Anne would see brother and sister wandering in the palace grounds, their arms about each other, talking of affairs of state; for Marguerite was outstanding in a court where intellect was given the respect it deserved, and she could advise and help her brother; or Marguerite would read her latest writing to the King, and the King would show a poem he had written; he called her his pet, his darling, ma mignonne. She wanted nothing but to be his slave; she had declared she would be willing to follow her brother as his washer-woman, and for him she would cast to the wind her ashes and her bones.

The shadow of Anne of Brittany was banished from the court, and the King amused himself, and the court grew truly Gallic, and gayer than any in Europe. It was elegant; it was distinctive; its gallantry was of the highest order; its wit flowed readily. It was the most scintillating of courts, the most intellectual of courts, and Marguerite of Alencon, the passionately devoted slave and sister to the King, was queen of it.

It was in this court that Anne Boleyn cast off her childishness and came to premature womanhood, and with the passing of the years and the nourishing of that friendship which she enjoyed with the strange and fascinating Marguerite, she herself became one of the brightest of its brilliant lights.

Between the towns of Guisnes and Ardres was laid a brilliant pageant. A warm June sun showed the palace of Guisnes in all its glittering glory. A fairy-tale castle this, though a temporary one; and one on which many men had worked since February, to the great expense of the English people. It was meant to symbolize the power and riches of Henry of England. At its gates and windows had been set up sham men-at-arms, their faces made formidable enough to terrify those who looked too close; they represented the armed might of the little island across the Channel, not perhaps particularly significant in the eyes of Europe until the crafty statesman, that wily Wolsey, had got his hands on the helm of its ship of state. The hangings of cloth of gold, the gold images, the chairs decorated with pommels of gold, all the furnishings and hangings ornamented wherever possible with the crimson Tudor rose—these represented the wealth of England. The great fountain in the courtyard, from which flowed wine—claret, white wine, red wine—and over which presided the great stone Bacchus round whose head was written in Tudor gold, “Faietes bonne chere qui vouldra”—this was to signify Tudor hospitality.

The people of England, who would never see this lavish display and who had contributed quite a large amount of money towards it, might murmur; those lords who had been commanded by their King to set out on this most opulent and most expensive expedition in history might think uneasily of return to their estates, impoverished by the need to pay for their participation in it; but the King thought of none of these things. He was going to meet his rival, Francis; he was going to prove to Francis that he was the better king, which was a matter of opinion; he was going to show himself to be a better man, which some might think doubtful; he was going to show he was a richer king, which, thanks to his cautious father, was a fact; and that he was a power in Europe, of which there could no longer be a doubt. He could smile expansively at this glittering palace which he had erected as fitting to be the temporary resting place of his august self; he could smile complacently because in spite of its size it could not accommodate his entire retinue, so that all around the palace were the brightly colored tents of his less noble followers. He could congratulate himself that Francis’s lodging at Ardres was less magnificent than his; and these matters filled the King of England with a satisfaction which was immense.