The Boleyn Inheritance. Philippa Gregory

Mary Norris, with other ambitious maids who know nothing and hope for everything. I will guide and advise them as a woman who has served queens before. Catherine Carey will not be whispering to her friends of the time that she spent with her Aunt Anne in the Tower, the last-moment agreements, the scaffold-step promises, the reprieve that they swore was coming and yet never came. She will not tell them that we all let Anne go to the block – her saintly mother as guilty as any other. She has been raised as a Carey but she is a Boleyn, a king’s bastard and a Howard through and through; she will know to keep her mouth shut.

      In the absence of the new queen we have to settle into the rooms without her. We have to wait. The weather has been bad for her journey and she is making slow progress from Cleves to Calais. They now think that she will not get here in time for a Christmas wedding. If I had been advising her I would have told her to face the danger, any danger, and come by ship. It is a long journey, I know, and the English Sea in winter is a perilous place, but a bride should not be late for her wedding day; and this king does not like to wait for anything. He is not a man to deny.

      In truth, he is not the prince that he was. When I was first at court and he was the young husband of a beautiful wife, he was a golden king. They called him the handsomest prince in Christendom and that was not flattery. Mary Boleyn was in love with him, Anne was in love with him, I was in love with him. There was not one girl at court, nor one girl in the country, who could resist him. Then he turned against his wife, Queen Katherine, a good woman, and Anne taught him how to be cruel. Her court, her clever young merciless court, persecuted the queen into stubborn misery and taught the king to dance to our heretic tune. We tricked him into thinking that the queen had lied to him, then we fooled him into thinking that Wolsey had betrayed him. But then his suspicious mind, rootling like a pig, started to run beyond our control. He started to doubt us as well. Cromwell persuaded him that Anne had betrayed him, the Seymours urged him to believe that we were all in a plot. In the end the king lost something greater than a wife, even two wives; he lost his sense of trust. We taught him suspicion, and the golden boyish shine tarnished on the man. Now, surrounded by people who fear him, he has become a bully. He has become a danger, like a bear that has been baited into surly spite. He told the Princess Mary he would have her killed if she defied him, and then declared her a bastard and princess no more. The Princess Elizabeth, our Boleyn princess, my niece, he has declared illegitimate and her governess says that the child is not even properly clothed.

      And lastly, this business with Henry Fitzroy, the king’s own son: one day to be legitimised and proclaimed the Prince of Wales, the next day dead of a mystery illness and my own lord told to bury him at midnight? His portraits destroyed, and all mention of him forbidden? What sort of a man is it who can see his son die and be buried without saying a word? What sort of a father can tell his two little girls that they are no children of his? What sort of a man can send his friends and his wife to the gallows and dance when their deaths are reported to him? What kind of a man is this, to whom we have given absolute power over our lives and souls?

      And perhaps even worse than all of this: the good priests hanged from their own church beams, the devout men walking to the stake to be burned, their eyes down, their thoughts on heaven, the uprisings in the North and the East, and the king swearing that the rebels could trust him, that he would be advised by them, and then the dreadful betrayal that put the trusting fools on gallows in their thousands around the country, that made my lord Norfolk the butcher of his countrymen. This king has killed thousands, this king goes on killing thousands of his own people. The world outside England says he has run mad and waits for our rebellion. But like frightened dogs in the bear pit we dare do no more than watch him and snarl.

      He is merry now, anyway, despite the new queen’s failure to arrive. I have yet to be presented to him but they tell me he will greet me and all her ladies kindly. He is at dinner when I steal into his rooms to see the new queen’s portrait that he keeps in his presence chamber. The room is empty, the portrait is on an easel lit by big square candles. She is a sweet-looking thing, it must be said. She has an honest face, a straight gaze from lovely eyes. I understand at once what he likes in her. She has no allure; there is no sensuality in her face. She does not look flirtatious or dangerous or sinful. She has no polish, she has no sophistication. She looks younger than her twenty-four years, I could even say she looks a little simple to my critical gaze. She will not be a queen as Anne was a queen; that is a certainty. This is not a woman who will turn court and country upside down to dance to a new tune. This is not a woman who will turn men half-mad with desire and demand that they write of love in poetry. And, of course, this is exactly what he wants now – never again to love a woman like Anne.

      Anne has spoiled him for a challenge, perhaps forever. She set a fire under his court and in the end everything was burned up. He is like a man whose very eyebrows have been scorched, and I am the woman whose house is ashes. He does not want ever again to marry a desirable mistress. I never again want to smell smoke. He wants a wife at his side who is as steady as an ox at the plough, and then he can seek flirtation and danger and allure elsewhere.

      ‘A pretty picture,’ a man says behind me and I turn to see the dark hair and long, sallow face of my uncle, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, the greatest man in the kingdom after the king himself.

      I sweep him a deep curtsey. ‘It is indeed, sir,’ I say.

      He nods, his dark eyes steady. ‘Do you think it will prove to be a good likeness?’

      ‘We’ll know soon enough, my lord.’

      ‘You can thank me for getting you a post in her household,’ he says casually. ‘It was my doing. I took it as a personal matter.’

      ‘I do thank you very much. I am in your debt for my life itself. You know, you have only ever to command me.’

      He nods. He has never shown me kindness, except the once, one great favour: pulling me from the fire that burned down the court. He is a gruff man of few words. They say he only really loved one woman and that was Katherine of Aragon, and he watched her thrust down to poverty, neglect and death, in order to put his own niece in her place. So his affections are of little value, anyway.

      ‘You will tell me how things go on in her rooms,’ he says, nodding at the portrait. ‘As you always have done.’ He holds out his arm to me, he is giving me the honour of leading me into dinner. I curtsey again, he likes a show of deference, and I put my hand lightly on his arm. ‘I shall want to know if she pleases the king, when she conceives, who she sees, how she behaves, and if she brings in any Lutheran preachers. That sort of thing. You know.’

      I know. We walk to the door together.

      ‘I expect her to try to lead him in the matter of religion,’ he says. ‘We can’t have that. We can’t have him turning any further to reform; the country won’t tolerate it. You must look at her books and see if she is reading any forbidden writing. And watch her ladies to see if they are spying on us, if they report to Cleves. If any of them express any heresy I want to know at once. You know what you have to do.’

      I do. There is not a member of this wide-ranging family who does not know their task. We all work to maintain the power and wealth of the Howards and we stand together.

      I can hear the roar of the feasting court from the hall as we walk towards it, serving men with great jugs of wine and platters of meat marching in line to serve the hundreds of people who dine every day with the king. In the gallery above are the people who have come to watch, to see the great monster that is the inner court of the noblest people, a beast with a hundred mouths and a million schemes, and two hundred eyes watching the king as the only source of all wealth, all power, and all favour.

      ‘You will find him changed,’ the duke says very softly, his mouth to my ear. ‘We all find him hard to please.’

      I think of the spoiled boy who could be distracted in a moment with a joke or a bet or a challenge. ‘He was always flighty.’

      ‘He’s worse than that now,’ my lord says. ‘His temper shifts without warning, he is violent; he will lash out against Cromwell and hit him in the face, he can turn in a moment. He can take a rage that turns him scarlet. Something that pleases him in the morning can anger him at dinner. You