Page 104 of Boleyn Traitor
Inwardly, I think: can he even make a baby now? If he can do the act, is his seed not watery and weak? ‘Flatter him. Tell him that you missed a course, and you thought it must be a baby, because he’s so strong and potent that you’re sure his lovemaking will give you a child at once.’
Her face convulses in a grimace of distaste. ‘He hurts,’ she says, in a tiny voice. ‘And it takes ages. I don’t believe you can get a baby like that.’
I hesitate. ‘You have to pretend to pleasure,’ I tell her. ‘You have to tell him you love it.’
She sets her mouth in an ugly line. ‘Larding it on like a spit boy,’ she says resentfully.
‘Larding it on,’ I agree. ‘You tell him that you were so eager to make him happy, to give him good news, you were too eager. Because all you want is his happiness.’
‘I cry?’ she suggests.
‘You cry. But not like this. Not enough to spoil your face. And he loves you so much now that he’s certain to be tender with you this time, this first time. You ask him for his favour; you get him back into bed, and next time, or the time after, it’ll really happen. But never, never say that you were with child but you couldn’t keep it. Never say “miscarry”.’
‘Another word he’s not to hear? He’s not to hear the word “death”? And now not “miscarry”?’
‘Some words we never say in his hearing. You made a mistake with counting your courses, that’s all.’
‘Silly me,’ she says bitterly. ‘Stupid, stupid me.’
SHE HOPES THATthe king is so doting that he will crown her anyway. But he’s not going to spend a fortune on a wife who has not earned her place as queen. Even in love, he guards his power. He comes to her bed every third night or so, and he asks me, quietly, one evening, when her next course is due.
‘And how did you come to make such a mistake, even if she did?’ he demands. ‘You’re not a silly girl, Jane. You’re not a pretty fool.’
I scatter a treasury of words at his feet: her distress at his illness, her fears for him interrupted her courses, as can quite often happen. But her happiness at his returned health will make her fertile again, and his potency must make a child.
‘How many in her family?’ he asks. ‘How many babies did her mother bear?’
‘About ten,’ I say, as if we are in a stable discussing a broodmare.
‘Anne of Cleves was only one of four,’ he says thoughtfully.
I catch my breath. ‘The duchess, your sister?’
He gives me a sly little smile. ‘Jane, you know I’ve got to have a second son and a third if I can. And six miles upriver, there is a beautiful, fertile, royal woman, eating up a fortune in my royal palace, while her brother befriends the French and marries into their royal family. She’s more useful than ever, and she’s costing me as much as a sister as she would as a wife.’
‘Except that you love the queen so much,’ I remind him. ‘And she adores you. Nobody loves you more than she does. And she’s so pretty. I think she could have married any king in Europe, but she only has eyes for you.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I do.’ It is as if I have reminded him of a detail which had slipped from his mind. ‘And she’s very young, and from fertile stock.’
Greenwich Palace, May
1541
‘NOT WHELPING?’ MYuncle descends on me at the May Day festivities, which are subdued, since we have no Whitsun coronation ahead of us and nothing to celebrate.
‘She made a mistake with her courses; she did not miscarry,’ I specify.
‘Aye, I know that’s what you’re all saying,’ he says unpleasantly. ‘That’s what t’other one said, last time. I don’t see why you women think it’s better to say that she’s a fool who can’t count than a heifer who can’t get in calf.’
I am silent.
‘He goes to her bed?’ he confirms.
‘He does.’
‘And does his business?’
I am not such a fool as to reply.
