Page 7 of Boleyn Traitor
‘Milk in her bed.’
Anne laughs like a young girl. ‘Jane, you are the best of sisters.’
I laugh, too. This is what it is to be a great courtier – I can stoop to the pettiest of spites or undertake the greatest of embassies. No one but George and I can do both great and small acts for our queen.
Anne and I sleep curled up together, like loving sisters, and I think: this is the life I wanted – to serve with love and to be treasured for it. This is the family I wanted, when I was sent away from home in childhood. This is the love that I missed then, raised as a courtier and not as a beloved daughter. This is the woman I wanted to be: at the centre of power, serving a woman of power.
IAM WAKENED BYthe clutch of her hand like a vice on my wrist. ‘What?’ I demand, half asleep.
‘Get George.’
‘What?’ I say stupidly. ‘What?’
‘Get up, light the candles and get George, you damned fool,’ Anne says through her teeth, biting back a moan of pain.
I feel the sheets are wet beneath me; for a moment, in sleepy confusion, I think Agnes has poured milk into our bed in an instant revenge, but when I touch it, my fingers are black in the darkness.
I light a candle from the embers of the fire and throw back the sheets. Anne is lying in a spreading pool of red.
‘Get George!’
I don’t argue. I throw a robe around my shoulders and dive out through the connecting door to the king’s rooms, run barefoot through the gallery. Our door is unlocked. I cross our hall to our bedroom and shake George’s naked shoulder.
He rolls over at once. ‘Jane? What is it?’
With a jolt of horror, I see my hand has left a bloodstain on our sheets. George looks down at it. ‘That’s Anne’s blood,’ I tell him. ‘She’s losing the baby.’
In one swift movement, he is out of bed, pulling on his shirt, heaving up his breeches. I want him to hold me, but he fends me off.
‘Get the midwife,’ he says.
‘I don’t know where she lives!’
‘Then wake my mother,’ he says. ‘Just her. Don’t say a word to anyone else.’
‘Wait for me... you can’t go to Anne’s bedroom—’
But he has already lit a candle and gone through the door so quickly that the flame streams back and shows his handsome face like a mask of fear.
The Boleyn family rooms are beside ours. I tap on the bright new shield of the three black bulls and the blood red invertedV, and I go in. Beyond the hall is a presence chamber, the privy chamber,and the master bedroom. I tiptoe through the rooms, my bare feet shrinking from the strewing rushes. I tap on the bedroom door and hear the rumbling snore of my father-in-law.
No one hears my knock. I open the door and peer in.
My mother-in-law, the Countess of Wiltshire, is lying on her side, facing the door, her eyes closed. Beside her is the mound of my father-in-law, heaped with furs.
Gently, I touch her shoulder with my clean hand, my bloody fingers behind my back. ‘It’s Anne,’ I whisper. ‘She’s ill.’
She wakes at once and slips out of bed without disturbing her sleeping husband. Her robe is at the foot of her bed with her Turkey leather slippers.
‘The baby?’
‘I don’t know.’
I do know; but I dare not say. ‘George sent me to wake you and to fetch a midwife.’
‘My woman knows where she lives,’ she says. ‘Wake her and tell her to fetch Emily la Leche from her house in Duck Lane. Tell her that it’s you that’s sick, that I said to bring her to you in the queen’s rooms.’
I see that the Boleyns will give me a dead baby before I get a live one. Elizabeth Boleyn does not wait for me to agree but hurries out. One outflung hand points to the women servants’ door, and then she is gone. She does not take my candle; she goes down the shadowy gallery without a light, as if she can see in darkness like a cat.
