Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

It is like my dreams. I have never been happier in my life. I did not know I could be so happy. It is like the childhood I never had, to be surrounded by handsome playmates, my old friends from the days at Lambeth, with all the money in the world to spend, a circle of young men all desperate for my attention, and watched overall by a tender, loving man like a kindly father who never lets anyone say an unkind word to me and plans amusements and gifts for me every day of my life. I must be the happiest girl in England. I tell the king this, and he smiles and chucks me under the chin and tells me that I deserve it, for without doubt, I am the best girl in England.

And it is true: I earn this pleasure, I am not idle; I have my duties to do, and I do them as well as I can. All the work of the queen’s rooms I leave to others of course, my lord Chamberlain deals with all the requests for help and justice and petitions – I should not be bothered with such things, and anyway, I never know what I am supposed to do with all the paupers and homeless nuns and distressed priests. Lady Rochford takes care of the running of my rooms and making sure that everything is done as well as Queen Anne had it done; but the servicing of the king falls to me alone. He is old, and his appetite in the bedroom is strong, but the execution is not easy for him because of his great age and because he is so very fat. I have to use all my little tricks to help him along, poor old soul. I let him watch me slip off my nightgown. I make sure the candles stay lit. I sigh in his ear as if I am swooning with desire, a thing that all men love to believe. I whisper to him that all the young men of the court are nothing compared to him, that I despise their silly, youthful faces and light desires, that I want a man, a real man. When he has taken too much to drink or is too weary to get himself above me, I even do a trick that my dearest Francis taught me, and sit astride him. He loves that; he has had only whores do that for him before; it is a forbidden pleasure that God doesn’t allow for some reason. So it thrills him that a pretty wife with her hair let down over her shoulders should rear above him and torment him like a Smithfield harlot. I don’t complain of having to do this; actually it is far nicer for me than being crushed beneath him with the smell of his breath and the stench of his rotting leg making me sick as I moan with pretend pleasure.

This is not easy. Being the wife of a king is not all dancing and parties in the rose garden. I work as hard as any dairymaid, but I work at night in secret, and nobody must ever know what it costs me. Nobody must ever know that I am so disgusted that I could vomit; nobody must ever know that it almost breaks my heart that the things I learned to do for love are now done to excite a man who would be better off saying his prayers and going to sleep. Nobody knows how hard I earn my sables and my pearls. And I can never tell them. It can never be said. It is a deep, deep secret.

When he has finished at last, and is snoring, that is oddly the only time of the day that I feel dissatisfied with my great good fortune. Often then I get up, feeling restless and stirred up. Am I going to spend every night of my womanhood seducing a man old enough to be my father? Almost my grandfather? I am just fifteen years old; am I never going to taste a sweet kiss again from a clean mouth, or feel the smoothness of young skin, or have a hard, muscled chest bearing down on me? Shall I spend the rest of my life jigging up and down on something helpless and limp and then crying out with pretended delight when it slowly, flaccidly stirs beneath me? When he farts in his sleep, a great royal trumpet that adds to the miasma under the bedclothes, I get up in a bad temper and go out to my private chamber.

And always, like my good angel, Lady Rochford is there, waiting for me. She understands how it is. She knows what I have to do and how, some nights, it leaves me feeling irritable and sore. She has a cup of hot mead and some little cakes ready for me; she seats me in a chair by the fire and puts the warm cup in my hand, then brushes my hair slowly and sweetly until the anger passes and I am calm again.

“When you get a son, you will be free of him,” she whispers so quietly that I can hardly hear her. “When you are sure you have conceived a child, he will leave you alone. No more false alarms. When you tell him you are with child, you must be certain, and then you will have nearly a year at peace. And after you have had a second son your place will be assured and you can take your own pleasures and he will not know and not mind.”

“I shall never have pleasure again,” I say miserably. “My life is over before it has even begun. I am only fifteen, and I am tired of everything.”

Her hands caress my shoulders. “Oh, you will,” she says certainly. “Life is long, and if a woman survives, she can take her pleasures one way or another.”

Supervising this privy chamber is no sinecure, I must say. Under my command I have girls who in any decent town would be whipped at the cart tail for whores. Katherine’s chosen friends from Lambeth are without doubt the rowdiest sluts who ever came from a noble household where the lady of the house could not be troubled to mind them. Katherine has insisted that her friends from the old days should be invited to her privy chamber, and I can hardly refuse, especially since the senior ladies of her privy chamber are no company for her, but are mostly old enough to be her mother and have been foisted on her by her uncle. She needs some friends of her own age, but these chosen companions are not biddable girls from good families; they are women, lax women, the very companions who let her run wild and set her the worst example, and they will go on with their loose ways, too, if they can, even in the royal rooms. It is utterly unlike Queen Anne’s rule, and soon everyone will notice. I cannot imagine what my lord duke is thinking, and the king will give his child bride anything she asks. But a queen’s chamber should be the finest, most elegant place in the land, not a tiltyard for rough girls with the language of the stables.

Her liking for Katherine Tylney and Margaret Morton I can understand, though they are equally loud-mouthed and bawdy; and Agnes Restwold was a confidante from the old days. But I don’t believe she wanted Joan Bulmer to come into her service. She never mentioned her name once; but the woman wrote a secret letter and seems to have left her husband and wheedled her way in, and Katherine is either too kindhearted, or too fearful of what secrets the woman might spill, to refuse her.

And what does that mean? That she allows a woman to come into her chamber, the privy chamber, the best place in the land, because she can tell secrets of Katherine’s childhood? What can have taken place in the girl’s childhood that she cannot risk it being spoken? And can we trust Joan Bulmer to keep it quiet? At court? At a court such as this? When all the gossip is always centered on the queen herself? How am I to rule over this chamber when one of the girls at least has a secret so powerful hanging over the queen’s head that she can claim admittance?

These are her friends and companions, and there is really no way to improve them; but I had hoped that the senior ladies who have been appointed to wait on her might set a more dignified tone, and make a little headway against the childish chaos that Katherine enjoys. The most noble lady of the chamber is Lady Margaret Douglas, only twenty-one years old, the king’s own niece; but she is barely ever here. She simply vanishes from the queen’s rooms for hours at a time, and her great friend Mary, Duchess of Richmond, who was married to Henry Fitzroy, goes with her. God knows where. They are said to be great poets and great readers, which is no doubt to their credit. But who are they reading and rhyming with all the day? And why can I never find them? The rest of the queen’s ladies are all Howard women: the queen’s older sister, her aunt, her step-grandmother’s daughter-in-law, a network of Howard kin including Catherine Carey, who has reappeared promptly enough to benefit from the rise of a Howard girl. These are women who care only for their own ambitions, and do nothing to help me manage the queen’s rooms so that they at least appear as they should be.

But things are not as they should be. I am certain that Lady Margaret is meeting someone; she is a fool and a passionate fool. She has crossed her royal uncle once already, and been punished for a flirtation that could have been far worse. She was married to Thomas Howard, one of our kin. He died in the Tower for his attempt to marry a Tudor, and she was sent to live at the nunnery of Syon until she begged the king’s pardon and said she would marry only at his bidding. But now she is wandering out of the queen’s rooms in the middle of the morning and doesn’t come back until she arrives with a rush to go into dinner with us, straightening her hood and giggling. I tell Katherine that she should watch her ladies and make sure that their conduct befits a royal court, but she is hunting or dancing or flirting herself with the young men of the court, and her behavior is as wild as anyone’s, worse than most.

Perhaps I am overanxious. Perhaps the king would indeed forgive her anything; this summer he has been like a young man besottedly in love. He has taken her all round his favorite houses on the summer progress, and he has managed to hunt with her every day, up at dawn, dining in tented pavilions in the woods at midday, boating on the river in the afternoon, watching her shooting at the butts, or at a tennis tournament, or betting on the young men tilting at the quintain all the afternoon and then a late dinner and a long night of entertainment. Then he takes her to bed and the poor old man is up at dawn again the next day. He has smiled on her as she has twirled and laughed and been embraced by the most handsome young men at his court. He has staggered after her, always beaming, always delighted with her, limping for pain and stuffing himself at dinner. But tonight he is not coming to dinner, and they say he has a slight fever. I should think he is near to collapse from exhaustion. He has lived these last months like a young bridegroom when he is the age of a grandfather. Katherine gives him not a second thought and goes into dinner alone, arm in arm with Agnes, Lady Margaret arriving in the nick of time to slip in behind her; but I see my lord duke is absent. He is waiting on the king. He, at least, will be anxious for his health. There is no benefit to us if the king is sick and Katherine is not with child.