Percy was so absorbed in his poem that he hardly heard him. ‘It goes on with the next line, which I don’t have yet, and then it goes something something something something, my pain.’
‘Oh! To rhyme with disdain!’ George declared provokingly. ‘I think I’m beginning to get this.’
‘But you must have an image that you pursue throughout the poem,’ Anne said to Henry Percy. ‘If you are going to write a poem to your mistress you must compare her to something and then twist the comparison round to some witty conclusion.’
‘How can I?’ Percy asked her. ‘I cannot compare you to anything. You are yourself. What should I compare you to?’
‘Oh very pretty!’ George said approvingly. ‘I say, Percy, your conversation is better than your poetry, I should stay on one knee and whisper in her ear, if I was you. You’ll triumph if you stick to prose.’
Percy grinned and took Anne’s hand. ‘Stars in the night,’ he said.
‘Something something something something, some delight,’ Anne rejoined promptly.
‘Let’s have some wine,’ William suggested. ‘I don’t think I can keep up with this dazzling wit. And who will play me at dice?’
‘I’ll play,’ George said before William could challenge me. ‘What will the stakes be?’
‘Oh a couple of crowns,’ William said. ‘I should hate to have you as my enemy for a gambling debt, Boleyn.’
‘Or any other cause,’ my brother said sweetly. ‘Especially since Lord Percy here might write us a martial poem about fighting.’
‘I don’t think something something something, is very threatening,’ Anne remarked. ‘And that is all that his lines ever say.’
‘I am an apprentice,’ Percy said with dignity. ‘An apprentice lover and an apprentice poet and you are treating me unkindly. “Fair lady – thou dost treat me with disdain –” is nothing but the truth.’
Anne laughed and held out her hand for him to kiss. William drew a couple of dice from his pocket and rolled them on the table. I poured him a glass of wine and put it by him. I felt oddly comforted to be serving him when the man that I loved was bedding his wife in the room next door. I felt that I had been put aside, and for all I knew I might have to stay to one side.
We played until midnight and still the king did not emerge.
‘What d’you think?’ William asked George. ‘If he means to spend the night with her we might as well go to our beds.’
‘We’re going,’ Anne said firmly. She held out a peremptory hand to me.
‘So soon?’ Percy pleaded. ‘But stars come out at night.’
‘Then they fade at dawn,’ Anne replied. ‘This star needs to veil herself in darkness.’
I rose to go with her. My husband looked at me for a moment. ‘Kiss me goodnight, wife,’ he ordered.
I hesitated and then I went across the room. He expected me to put a cool kiss on his cheek but instead I bent over and kissed him on his lips. I felt him respond as I touched him. ‘Goodnight, husband. And I wish you a merry Christmas.’
‘Goodnight, wife. My bed would have been warmer tonight with you in it.’
I nodded. There was nothing I could say. Without intending it, I glanced towards the closed door of the queen’s privy chamber where the man I adored slept in the arms of his wife.
‘Maybe we’ll all end up with our wives in the end,’ William said quietly.
‘For sure,’ George said cheerfully, shovelling his winnings from the table into his cap, and then pouring them into the pocket of his jacket. ‘For we will be buried alongside each other, whatever our preferences in life. Think of me, melting to dust with Jane Parker.’
Even William laughed.
‘When will it be?’ Percy asked. ‘Your happy nuptial day?’
‘Sometime after midsummer. If I can contain my impatience for that long.’
‘She brings a handsome dowry,’ William remarked.
‘Oh who cares for that?’ Percy exclaimed. ‘Love is all that matters.’
‘Thus speaks one of the richest men in the kingdom,’ my brother observed wryly.
Anne held out her hand to Percy. ‘Pay no attention, my lord. I agree with you. Love is all that matters. At any rate, that’s what I think.’
‘No you don’t,’ I said as soon as the door was shut behind us.
Anne gave me a tiny smile. ‘I wish you would take the trouble to see who I am talking to, and not what I am saying.’
‘Percy of Northumberland? You are talking of marriage for love to Percy of Northumberland?’
‘Exactly. So you can simper at your husband all you like, Mary. When I marry I shall do better than you by far.’
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
