Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

He takes me by the hand and he draws me to him. “Sweet maid,” he breathes. “Oh God, sweet maid.”

I give a little gasp as if I am afraid, but I look up at him as if I would be kissed. This is rather nasty, really. He is awfully like my step-grandmother’s steward at Horsham – very old. Old enough to be my grandfather almost, and his mouth is trembling and his eyes are wet. I admire him because he is the king, of course. He is the greatest man in the world, and I love him as my king. And my uncle has made clear that there are new dresses involved if I can lead him on. But it is not very nice when he holds me round the waist and puts his mouth wetly on my neck, and I can feel his spittle cold on my skin.

“Sweet maid,” he says again, and he nuzzles me with a moist kiss, which is like being sucked by a fish.

“Your Grace!” I say breathlessly. “You must let me go.”

“I will never let you go!”

“Your Grace, I am a maid!”

This works wonderfully well; he lets me go a little way and I can step back, and though he takes both my hands, at least I don’t have him breathing down the front of my gown.

“You are a sweet maid, Katherine.”

“I am an honest maid, sire,” I say breathlessly.

He has tight hold of my hands, and he draws me to him. “If I were a free man, would you be my wife?” he asks simply.

I am so surprised by the speed of this that I cannot say a word. I just look at him as if I were a complete milkmaid, and stupid as a dairy cow. “Your wife? Your wife, sire?”

“My marriage is not a true one,” he says quickly; all the time he is pulling me closer, his hand sliding round my waist again. I think that the words are just to dazzle me while he backs me into the corner and gets a hand up my skirt, so I keep moving and he keeps talking. “My marriage is invalid. For several reasons. My wife was precontracted and not free to marry. My conscience warned me of this, and for my soul’s sake I cannot lie with her in a holy union. I know in my deepest heart that she is another man’s wife.”

“Is she?” Surely, he can’t imagine I am fool enough to believe this for a moment.

“I know it, my conscience warns me. God speaks to me. I know it.”

“Does He? Do you?”

“Yes,” he says firmly. “And so I did not fully consent at my wedding. God knew of my doubts then, and I have not lain with her. So the marriage is no marriage, and I will soon be free.”

So he does think me fool enough, because he has fooled himself. Good God, what men can do to their brains when their cocks are hard. It is truly amazing.

“But what will happen to her?” I ask.

“What?” His hand, which is creeping up my stomacher to my breast, is halted at the thought.

“What will happen to the queen?” I ask. “If she is no queen anymore?”

“How should I know?” he says, as if it is nothing to do with him. “She should not have come to England if she was not free to marry. She is a promise breaker. She can go home again.”

I don’t think that she will want to go home again, not to that brother of hers, and she has taken a liking to the royal children, and to England. But his hand is pulling urgently on my waist, and he is turning me to face him.

“Katherine,” he says longingly. “Tell me that I can think of you? Or is there another young man? You’re a young woman, surrounded by temptation in a lascivious court, a dirty-minded, lustful court with many bad, filthy-headed boys. I suppose one of them will have taken your fancy? Promised you some fairing for a kiss?”

“No,” I say. “I told you. I don’t like boys. They are all too silly.”

“You don’t like boys?”

“Not at all.”

“So what do you like?” he asks. His voice is lilting with admiration of himself. He knows the reply in this song.

“I daren’t say.” His hand is creeping up from my waist again, in a moment he will be fondling my breast. Oh, Thomas Culpepper, I wish to God this was you.

“Tell me,” he says. “Oh, tell me, pretty Katherine, and I will give you a present for being an honest girl.”

I snatch a quick breath of clean air. “I like you,” I say simply, and one hand clamps – smack – on my breast and the other pulls me toward him, and his mouth comes down on mine, all wet and sucking, and it is really very horrible. But on the other hand I have to wonder what present I get for being an honest girl.

He gives me the estates of two convicted murderers: that is, a couple of houses and some goods, and some money. I can’t believe it. That I should have houses, two houses, and land, and money of my own!

I have never had such wealth in my life, and never any gift so easily earned. I have to acknowledge: it was easily earned. It is not nice to lead on a man who is old enough to be my father, almost old enough to be my grandfather. It is not very nice to have his fat hand rubbing at my breasts and his stinking mouth all over my face. But I must remember that he is the king, and he is a kind old man and a sweet, doting old man, and I can close my eyes most of the time and pretend that it is someone else. Also, it is not very nice to have dead men’s goods, but when I say this to Lady Rochford, she points out that we all have dead men’s goods one way or another – everything is either stolen or inherited – and a woman who hopes to rise in the world can’t afford to be particular.

I thought that I would be crowned as part of the May Day celebrations, but we are already less than a month away and no one has ordered any gowns or planned the order of the coronation, so I begin to think it won’t be this May Day, it can’t be. In the absence of any better advisor I wait until the Princess Mary and I are walking back from the Lady Chapel to the palace, and I ask her what she thinks. I have grown to like her more and more and trust her opinion. Also, because she has been the child and then the exile of this court, she knows better than most what it is to live here and yet know yourself to be an outsider.

At the very word coronation she gives me a quick look of such concern that I cannot take another step. I freeze to the spot and cry: “Oh, what have you heard?”

“Dear Anne, don’t cry,” she says quickly. “I beg your pardon. Queen Anne.”

“I’m not crying.” I show her my shocked face. “I am not.”

At once we both look round to see if anyone is watching us. This is how it is at court, always the glance over your shoulder for the spy; truth told only in whispers. She steps closer to me, and I take her hand and put it through my arm and we walk together.

“It can’t be this May Day because we would have had everything planned and ready by now if he was going to crown you,” she says. “I thought that in Lent, myself. But it’s not so bad. It means nothing. Queen Jane wasn’t crowned either. He would have crowned her if she had lived, once she had given him an heir. He will be waiting for you to tell him that you are with child. He will be waiting for you to have a child and then there will be the christening and then your coronation after that.”

I flush deeply at this and say nothing. She takes a glance at my face and waits until we have gone up the stairs, through my presence chamber, through my privy chamber, and to my little withdrawing chamber, where nobody comes without invitation. I close the door on the curious faces of my ladies and we are alone.

“There is a difficulty?” she says with careful tact.

“Not of my making.”

She nods, but neither of us wants to say more. We are both virgins in our mid-twenties, old for spinsters, afraid of the mystery of male desire, afraid of the power of the king, both living on the edge of his acceptance.

“You know, I hate May Day,” she says suddenly.

“I thought it was one of the greatest days of celebration of the year?”

“Oh, yes, but it is a savage celebration, pagan: not a Christian one.”

This is part of her Papist superstition, and I am going to laugh for a moment, but the gravity of her face stops me.

“It’s just to welcome the coming of spring,” I say. “There is no harm in it.”

“It is the time for putting off the old and taking on the new,” she says. “That’s the tradition, and the king lives it to the full, like a savage. He rode in a May Day tournament with a love message to Anne Boleyn on his standard, and then he put my mother aside for the Lady Anne on a May Day. Less than five years later, it was her turn: the Lady Anne was the new Queen of the Joust, with her champions fighting for her honor before her royal box. But the knights were arrested that afternoon, and the king rode away from her without even saying good-bye. That was the end of the Lady Anne, and the last time she saw him.”

“He didn’t say good-bye?” For some reason, this seems to me the worst thing of all. No one had told me this before.

She shakes her head. “He never says good-bye. When his favor has gone, then he goes swiftly, too. He never said good-bye to my mother either, he rode away from her and she had to send her servants after him to wish him Godspeed. He never told her that he would not return. He just rode out one day and never came back. He never said good-bye to the Lady Anne. He rode away from the May Day tournament and sent his men to arrest her. Actually, he never even said good-bye to Queen Jane, who died in giving him his son. He knew she was fighting for her life, but he did not go to her. He let her die alone. He is hard-hearted, but he is not hard-faced; he cannot stand women crying, he cannot stand good-byes. He finds it easier to turn his heart, and turn his face, and then he just leaves.”

I give a little shudder, and I go to the windows to check that they are tight shut. I have to stop myself from closing the shutters against the hard light. There is a cold wind coming off the river; I can almost feel it chilling me as I stand here. I want to go out to the presence chamber and surround myself with my silly girls, with a page boy playing the lute, with the women laughing. I want the comfort of the queen’s rooms around me, even though I know that three other women have needed their comfort before, and they are all dead.