Page 9 of Boleyn Traitor
‘I’m cursed,’ Anne whispers. ‘The queen has cursed me.’
‘It’s gone?’ Elizabeth Boleyn confirms coldly. This is not the first time she has sat beside a queen birthing a dead prince. More than once, she has rolled up bloodied sheets with a crowned monogram and burned little messes and thrown the ashes down the jakes.
‘Long gone,’ the midwife says.
‘But she can get another child?’
‘Nothing to stop her if the husband can do his part,’ the woman says agreeably.
‘Then stay and clean her up. She has to be up and riding and dancing as soon as she can.’
‘Women’s work,’ is all the old woman says, smiling grimly, as if women’s work is well-known to be dancing and riding and conceiving and cleaning up bloodstained sheets and broken hearts. She takes the bloody linen out to the stool room.
‘Pay the woman when she’s finished,’ my mother-in-law says to me. ‘And tell her to keep her mouth shut.’
She turns to go, and sees George and Anne, still entwined. ‘Oh, go to your room, George,’ she orders him with sudden irritability. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all.’
‘But what are we to say?’ I ask.
She pauses in the doorway. ‘We say nothing. We never announced a baby. There was no baby; we never said there was.’
‘She told the king.’ I point out quietly, when George and Anne are silent.
‘She admits to him that she made a mistake; she missed a courseor two, and she hoped... We never say “miscarry”. Nor “dead-birth”. We never say “dead”.’
‘I went to France, Lady Mother,’ George points out quietly. ‘I told the King of France that Anne was with child and that we’d visit when he was born.’
‘The King of France isn’t going to complain, is he? He’ll be merry as May Day at our grief. But it doesn’t matter what he thinks. What matters is what our king thinks. What matters is that our king never hears the word “miscarry” again. Never hears anyone say his baby was “dead-born”. He heard it enough times from the first wife. He’s never to hear it from Anne.’
OVER THE NEXTfew days, I watch us Boleyns and Howards tell a bold-faced lie and dare anyone to contradict us. I am the key to the cypher of lies, as people whisper questions to me that they would not dare ask Anne’s mother Elizabeth Boleyn, or her uncle Thomas Howard. Again and again, I confide – in strictest confidence – that Anne thought she was with child, but her course was just late, by a month or so: a little mistake, natural to a new wife. The quickest way to spread a story in this court is to swear secrecy.
The only person with a right to know is the king; and he asks nothing. His court, the reformation of his religion, the revolution in his country – his entire life – is based on the belief that his first wife could not bear him a son because their marriage was invalid and so not blessed by God. His new marriage is valid,ergoit is blessed by God,ergohe will have a son. It is a matter of logic: the king’s own brand of logic that cannot be denied. Whatever happened to Anne (and we all stoutly maintain that nothing happened), the king’s seed cannot fail. Since the perfect king has a perfect wife, he is bound to get a perfect son on her.
Gertrude Courtenay pays us another unwanted visit, and I manage to talk for half an hour without deviating from our lie. EverythingI say will be on the desk of the Spanish ambassador within an hour and read in Toledo within the month. She tries to make me admit it was a deadbirth, and I widen my limpid grey eyes and say that a young wife, a young mother, is apt to make mistakes and that next time there will be no mistake and there will be a boy. Gertrude Courtenay can take that back to the Spanish ambassador, the old lords, and the hidden Papists. She can tell it to the West Country that her family commands as if it were their fiefdom; she can whisper it to the Lady Mary and write it to the old queen. It makes no difference if the Spanish party believe our lie or not. There is a new law of England – Anne’s law, passed by Anne’s parliament – that says that Anne is queen and her son will be the next king. Whether her son comes this year or next, that is still the law.
Anne rises up from her bed in days. She dines with the court, keeps the king in a ripple of laughter, dances with him, smiling into his warm face, and praises him for the reforms he is proposing for the Church, and no one remarks that her belly was rounded and now it is flat.
Only the Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, speaks of it. But never to his niece the queen, nor to her mother – his sister. It is me, that he follows to the edge of the great hall after dinner, as they take away the tables to make space for dancing.
‘Is she quite well now?’ His dark eyes sweep my face; his hard lean face is turned towards me.
‘She is, Your Grace.’
Anne is laughing with the king, leading him to the card table to play whist with George and the king’s brother-in-law, Charles Brandon.
‘Is she able to get another child? She got Elizabeth easily, didn’t she? My sister tells me nothing but lies.’
‘Do you trust anyone, Your Grace?’ I ask curiously.
‘I trust you,’ he tells me. ‘You’ve never coined the truth to me, nor clipped it. You keep your eyes open, and you’re not squeamish. That’s why I prefer you to any other, my little poppet. Will she get another?’
‘The midwife said she can, if the husband could do his part.’
‘God’s breath! The midwife said that? And everyone heard her? She questioned the king’s potency?’
‘Oh – she didn’t know she was speaking of the king. They gave her my name. She thought she was speaking about George. She thought it was my dead-birth.’
He makes a little grimace of sympathy. ‘No reason for you to give up hope, anyway. You’re not yet thirty – plenty of time.’
