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.’
I found my father with George in the great hall, head to head while the servants set the great trestle tables for dinner around them. He beckoned me to him.
‘Father,’ I said, dropping him a curtsey.
He kissed me coolly on the forehead. ‘Daughter,’ he said. ‘Did you want to see me?’
For a chilling moment I wondered if he had forgotten my name. ‘The queen is not with child,’ I told him. ‘She started her course, this day. She missed her other times because of her age.’
‘God be praised!’ George said exultantly. ‘I bet myself a gold crown on this. That is good news.’
‘The best,’ my father said. ‘The best for us, the worst for England. Has she told the king?’
I shook my head. ‘She started to bleed this afternoon, she has not seen him yet.’
My father nodded. ‘So we have the news before him. Anyone else know it?’
I shrugged. ‘The maids who changed her linen, and so anyone who was paying them. Wolsey, I suppose. Perhaps the French might have bought a maid.’
‘Then we have to be fast if we want to be the ones to tell him. Should I?’
George shook his head. ‘Too intimate,’ he said. ‘What about Mary?’
‘It puts her before him at the very moment of his disappointment,’ my father mused. ‘Better not.’
‘Anne then,’ George said. ‘It should be one of us to remind him of Mary.’
‘Anne can do it,’ my father agreed. ‘She could turn a polecat off the scent of a mouse.’
‘She’s in the garden,’ I volunteered. ‘At the archery butts.’
The three of us walked from the great hall into the bright light of the spring sunshine. There was a cold wind blowing through the yellow daffodils that nodded in the sunshine. We could see the little group of courtiers at the archery butts, Anne among them. As we watched she stepped up, sighted the target, drew her bow and we heard the twang of the string and the satisfying thud as the arrow hit the bullseye. There was a scattering of applause. Henry Percy strode up to the target and plucked Anne’s arrow from it and tucked it into his own quiver, as if he would keep it.
Anne was laughing, holding out her hand for her arrow, as she glanced over and saw us. At once, she turned from the company and came towards us.
‘Father.’
‘Anne.’ He kissed her more warmly than he had kissed me.
‘The queen has started her courses,’ George said bluntly. ‘We think that you should tell the king.’
‘Rather than Mary?’
‘It makes her look low,’ my father said. ‘Tattling with chambermaids, watching them
