I stammered.
‘Who insists that you bathe and wash your hair?’ she demanded fiercely.
‘You do. But I …’
‘Who helps you choose your clothes and prompts you with the king? Who has rescued you a thousand times when you’ve been too stupid and tongue-tied to know how to play him?’
‘You. But Anne …’
‘And what is there in this for me? I have no husband who can be given land to show the king’s favour. I have no husband to win high office because my sister is the king’s mistress. I get nothing from this. However high you rise I still get nothing. I have to have a place of my own.’
‘You should have a place of your own,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t deny it. All I was saying was that I don’t think you can be a duchess.’
‘And you should decide?’ she spat at me. ‘You who are nothing but the king’s diversion from the important business of making a son if he can and making war if he can raise an army?’
‘I don’t say I should decide,’ I whispered. ‘I just said that I don’t think they’ll let you do it.’
‘When it’s done, it’s done,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘And no-one will know until it’s done.’
Suddenly, like a striking snake, she reached out and grabbed my hand in a fierce grip. At once she twisted it behind my back and held me so that I could move neither forward nor backwards but only cry out in pain: ‘Anne! Don’t! You’re really hurting!’
‘Well, hear this,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Hear this, Mary. I am playing my own game and I don’t want you interrupting. Nobody will know anything until I am ready to tell them, and then they will know everything too late.’
‘You’re going to make him love you?’
Abruptly she released me and I gripped my elbow and my arm where the bones ached.
‘I’m going to make him marry me,’ she said flatly. ‘And if you so much as breathe a word to anyone, then I will kill you.’
After that I watched Anne with more care. I saw how she played him. Having advanced through all the cold months of the New Year at Greenwich, now, with the coming of the sun and our arrival in York Place, she suddenly retreated. And the more she withdrew from him the more he came on. When he came into a room she looked up and threw him a smile which went like an arrow to the centre of the target. She filled her look with invitation, with desire. But then she looked away and she would not look at him again for the whole of the visit.
He was in the train of Cardinal Wolsey and was supposed to wait on His Grace while the cardinal visited the king or the queen. In practice there was nothing for the young lord to do but to lounge around the queen’s apartments and flirt with anyone who would talk to him. It was clear that he only had eyes for Anne and she walked past him, danced with anyone who asked her but him, dropped her glove and let him return it to her, sat near him but did not speak to him, returned his poems and told him that she could help him no longer.
She went into the most unswerving of retreats, having been unswervingly in advance, and the young man did not begin to know what he could do to recapture her.
He came to me. ‘Mistress Carey, have I offended your sister in some way?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘She used to smile on me so charmingly and now she treats me very coldly.’
I thought for a moment, I was so slow at these things. On the one hand was the true answer: that she was playing him like a complete angler with a fish on the line. But I knew Anne would not want me to say that. On the other hand was the answer Anne would want me to give. I looked into Henry Percy’s anxious baby face for a moment of genuine compassion. Then I gave him the Boleyn smile and the Howard answer. ‘Indeed, my lord, I think she is afraid to be too kind.’
I saw the hope leap up in his trusting, boyish face. ‘Too kind?’
‘She was very kind to you, was she not, my lord?’
He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I’m her slave.’
‘I think she feared that she might come to like you too much.’
He leaned forward as if to snatch the words from my mouth. ‘Too much?’
‘Too much for her own peace of mind,’ I said very softly.
He leaped up and took two strides away from me and then came back again. ‘She might desire me?’
I smiled and turned my head a little so that he could not see my weariness at this deceit. He was not to be put off. He dropped to his knees before me and peered up into my face.
‘Tell me, Mistress Carey,’ he begged. ‘I have not slept for nights. I have not eaten for days. I am a soul in torment. Tell me if you think that she loves me, if you think that she might love me. Tell me, for pity’s sake.’
‘I cannot say.’ Indeed, I could not. The lies would have stuck in my throat. ‘You must ask her yourself.’
He sprang up, like a hare out of bracken with the beagle hounds behind it. ‘I will! I will! Where is she?’
‘Playing at bowls in the garden.’
He needed nothing more, he tore open the door and ran out of the room. I heard the heels of his boots ring down the stone stairs to the door to the garden. Jane Parker, who had been seated across the room from us, looked up.
‘Have you made another conquest?’ she asked, getting the wrong idea as usual.
I gave her a smile as poisonous as her own. ‘Some women attract desire. Others do not,’ I said simply.
He found her at the bowling green, losing daintily and deliberately to Sir Thomas Wyatt.
‘I shall write you a sonnet,’ Wyatt promised. ‘For handing me victory with such grace.’
‘No, no, it was a fair battle,’ Anne protested.
‘If there had been money on it I think I would be getting out my purse,’ he said. ‘You Boleyns only lose when there is nothing to gain by winning.’
Anne smiled. ‘Next time you shall put your fortune on it,’ she promised him. ‘See – I have lulled you into a sense of safety.’
‘I have no fortune to offer but my heart.’
‘Will you walk with me?’ Henry Percy interrupted, his voice coming out far louder than he intended.
Anne gave a little start as if she had not noticed him there. ‘Oh! Lord Henry.’
‘The lady is playing bowls,’ Sir Thomas said.
Anne
