With Anne away I was the only Boleyn girl in the world, and when the queen chose to spend the summer with the Princess Mary it was I who rode with Henry at the head of the court on progress. We spent a wonderful summer riding together, hunting, and dancing every night, and when the court returned to Greenwich in November I whispered to him that I had missed my course and I was carrying his child.
At once, everything changed. I had new rooms and a lady in waiting. Henry bought me a thick fur cloak, I must not for a moment get chilled. Midwives, apothecaries, soothsayers came and went from my rooms, all of them were asked the vital question: ‘Is it a boy?’
Most of them answered yes and were rewarded with a gold coin. The eccentric one or two said ‘no’ and saw the king’s pout of displeasure. My mother loosened the laces of my gown and I could no longer go to the king’s bed at night, I had to lie alone and pray in the darkness that I was carrying his son.
The queen watched my growing body with eyes that were dark with pain. I knew that she had missed her courses too, but there was no question that she might have conceived. She smiled throughout the Christmas feasts and the masques and the dancing, and she gave Henry the lavish presents that he loved. And after the twelfth night masque, when there was a sense that everything should be made clear and clean, she asked him if she might speak with him privately and from somewhere, God knows where, she found the courage to look him in the face and tell him that she had been clean for the whole of the season, and she was a barren woman.
‘Told me herself,’ Henry said indignantly to me that night. I was in his bedroom, wrapped in my fur cloak, a tankard of mulled wine in my hand, my bare feet tucked under me before a roaring fire. ‘Told me without a moment’s shame!’
I said nothing. It was not for me to tell Henry that there was no shame in a woman of nearly forty ceasing her bleeding. Nobody had known better than he that if she could have prayed her way into childbed they would have had half a dozen babies and all of them boys. But he had forgotten that now. What concerned him was that she had refused him what she should have given him, and I saw once again that powerful indignation which swept over him with any disappointment.
‘Poor lady,’ I said.
He shot me a resentful look. ‘Rich lady,’ he corrected me. ‘The wife of one of the wealthiest men in Europe, the Queen of England no less, and nothing to show for it but the birth of one child, and that a girl.’
I nodded. There was no point arguing with Henry.
He leaned over me to put his hand gently on the round hard curve of my belly. ‘And if my boy is in there then he will carry the name of Carey,’ he said. ‘What good is that for England? What good is that for me?’
‘But everyone will know he is yours,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows that you can make a child with me.’
‘But I have to have a legitimate son,’ he said earnestly, as if I or the queen or any woman could give him a son by wishing it. ‘I have to have a son, Mary. England has to have an heir from me.’
Anne wrote to me once a week for all the long months of her exile and I was reminded of the desperate letters I had sent her when I had been banished from court. I remembered too that she had not bothered to reply. Now it was me at court and she was in outer darkness and I took a sister’s triumph in my generosity in replying to her often, and I did not spare her news of my fertility, and Henry’s delight in me.
Our Grandmother Boleyn had been summoned to Hever to be a companion to Anne, and the two of them, the young elegant woman from the French court, and the wise old woman who had seen her husband leap from next to nothing to greatness, quarrelled like cats on a stable roof from morning to night and made each other’s lives a complete misery.
If I cannot return to court, I shall go mad,
Anne wrote.
Grandmother Boleyn cracks hazelnuts in her hands and drops the shells everywhere. They crunch underfoot like snails. She insists that we walk out in the garden together every day, even when it is raining. She thinks that rainwater is good for the skin, and says this is why Englishwomen have such peerless complexions. I look at her weatherbeaten old leather and know that I would rather stay indoors.
She smells quite dreadful and is completely unaware of it. I told them to draw a bath for her the other day and they tell me that she consented to sit on a stool and let them wash her feet. She hums under her breath at the dinner table, she doesn’t even know she is doing it. She believes in keeping an open house in the grand old way and everyone, from the beggars of Tonbridge to the farmers of Edenbridge, is welcome into the hall to watch us eat as if we were the king himself with nothing to do with our money but give it away.
Please, please, tell Uncle and Father that I am ready to return to court, that I will do their bidding, that they need fear nothing from me. I will do anything to get away from here.
I wrote a reply at once.
You will be able to come to court soon, I am sure, because Lord Henry is betrothed against his will to Lady Mary Talbot. He was said to be weeping when he made his promise. He has gone to defend the Scottish border with his own men from Northumberland under his standard. The Percys have to hold Northumberland safe while the English army goes to France again this summer and, with the Spanish as our allies, finish the work they started last summer.
George’s wedding to Jane Parker is to take place this month at last, and I shall ask Mother if you can be present. She will surely not refuse you that.
I am well but very tired. The baby is very heavy and when I try to sleep at night it turns and kicks. Henry is kinder than I have ever known him, and we are both hoping for a boy.
I wish you were here. He is hoping for a boy so much. I am almost afraid as to what will happen if it is a girl. If only there was something one could do to make it be a boy. Don’t tell me about asparagus. I know all about asparagus. They make me eat it at every meal.
The queen watches me all the time. I am too big now for concealment and everyone knows it is the king’s baby. William has not had to endure anyone congratulating him on our first child. Everyone knows, and there is a sort of wall of silence that makes it comfortable for everyone but me. There are times when I feel like a fool: my belly going before me, breathless on the stairs, and a husband who smiles at me as if we were strangers.
And the queen …
I wish to God I did not have to pray in her chapel every morning and night. I wonder what she is praying for, since all hope for her is gone. I wish you were here. I even miss your sharp tongue.
Mary.
