Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (135 page)

But Henry had passed a law, another new law, which said that English disputes could only be judged in English courts. Suddenly, there could be no legal appeal to Rome. I remembered telling Henry that Englishmen would like to see justice done in an English court, never dreaming that English justice would come to mean Henry's whim, just as the church had come to mean Henry's treasury, just as the Privy Council had come to mean Henry and Anne's favourites.

Nobody at the Easter feast mentioned Queen Katherine. It was as if she had never been. Nobody remarked upon it when the stonemasons set to work chipping away the pomegranates of Spain, which had been in place for so long that the stone had weathered like a mountain that has always been there. Nobody asked what Katherine's new title would be, now that there was a new queen in England. Nobody spoke of her at all, it was as if she had died a death so shameful that we were all trying to forget her.

Anne nearly staggered under the weight of the robes of state and the
diamonds and jewels in her hair, on her train, on the hem of her gown and laden around her throat and arms. The court was absolutely at her service, and clearly unenthusiastic. George told me that the king planned to have her crowned at Whitsun which this year would fall in June.

‘In the City?' I asked.

‘It'll be a performance to put Katherine's coronation in the shade,' he said. ‘It has to be.'

William Stafford did not return to court. I minded the tone of my voice very carefully and asked my uncle, while we were watching the king play at bowls, whether he had made William Stafford his master of horse because I would dearly love to have a new hunter for the season.

‘Oh no,' he said, hearing the lie the moment that it was out of my mouth. ‘He has gone. I had a little word with him after Calais. You won't see him again.'

I kept my face very still and I did not gasp or flinch. I was a courtier as well as he, and I could take a hit and still ride on. ‘Has he gone to his farm?' I asked, as if I did not much care one way or another.

‘That, or ridden off to the crusades,' my uncle said. ‘Good riddance.'

I turned my attention to the game and when Henry made a good throw I clapped very loudly and said: ‘Hurrah!' Someone offered me a bet but I refused to bet against the king and caught a quick smile from him for that little piece of flattery. I waited till the game was over and when it was clear that Henry was not going to summon me to walk with him, I slipped away from the crowd around him and went to my room.

The fire was out in the little fireplace. The room faced west and was gloomy in the morning. I sat up on my bed and huddled the clothes over my feet and put a blanket around my shoulders like a poor woman in a field. I was miserably cold. I tightened the blanket around me but it did not warm me. I remembered the days on the beach at Calais, the smell of the sea and the gritty sand under my back and in my linen while William touched me and kissed me. In those nights in France I dreamed of him, and woke every morning quite weak with longing, with sand on my pillow from my hair. Even now, my mouth still yearned for his kisses.

I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in the shadowy room, looking out over the grey slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realised that George was wrong, and my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong – for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of
passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love. I didn't want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn't want the arid glamour of George's life. I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.

Hardly knowing what I was doing, I rose up from the bed and kicked the clothes aside. ‘William,' I said to the empty room. ‘William.'

I went down to the stable yard and I ordered my horse to be brought from her stall and said that I was going to Hever to see my children. It was a certainty that my uncle would have a pair of eyes and ears listening and watching in the stable yard but I hoped to be gone before a message could be got to him. The court had gone from the bowling green to dinner, and I thought that if I was lucky, I might be away before any spy found my uncle at liberty to deliver the report which told him that his niece had left for her home without an escort.

It was dark within a couple of hours, that cold spring dark that comes on first very grey and then quickly as black as winter. I was hardly clear of the city, coming into a little village that called itself Canning where I could see the high walls and porter's door of a monastery. I hammered on the door and when they saw the quality of my horse, they took me in and showed me to a small white-washed cell and gave me a slice of meat, a slice of bread, a piece of cheese and a cup of small ale for my dinner.

In the morning they offered me exactly the same fare to break my fast and I took Mass on a rumbling belly, thinking that Henry's fulminations against the corruption and wealth of the church should make allowances for little communities like this.

I had to ask for directions to Rochford. The house and the estate had been in the Howard family for years but we seldom visited it. I had been there only once, and that by river. I had no idea of the road. But there was a lad in the stable who said that he knew his way to Tilbury, and the monk who served as master of the horse for the couple of riding mules and the draft horses for ploughing said that the boy could ride with me on an old cob to show me the way.

He was a nice lad, called Jimmy, and he rode bareback, kicking his bare heels against the dusty sides of his old horse, singing at the top of his voice. We made an odd couple: the urchin and the lady, as we rode along the track beside the river. It was hard riding, the track was dust and pebbles in some places, mud in others. Where it crossed the streams
which flowed to the Thames there were fords and sometimes deceptive quagmires where my horse shied and fretted at the shifting sand and sucking mud beneath her feet and only the steadiness of Jimmy's old hack kept her going on. We ate our dinner at a farm in a village called Rainham. The goodwife offered me a boiled egg and some black bread as being all that the house could afford. Jimmy ate bread with nothing else, and seemed well pleased. There were a couple of dried apples for our dessert and I nearly laughed as I thought of the dinner I was missing at the palace at Westminster, with the half-dozen side dishes and the dozens of meat dishes served on gold platters.

I was not nervous. For the first time ever I felt as if I had taken my life into my own hands and I could command my own destiny. For once I was obedient neither to uncle nor father nor king, but following my own desires. And I knew that my desire led me, inexorably, to the man I loved.

I did not doubt him. I did not think for one moment that he might have forgotten me, or taken up with some drab from the village, or married an heiress picked out for him. No, I sat on the tailboard of a wheel-less wagon and watched Jimmy spitting apple pips up into the air, and for once I had the sense to trust.

We rode for a couple more hours after dinner and came into the little market town of Grays as it started to get dark. Tilbury was further down the road, Jimmy assured me, but if I wanted Rochford, beyond Southend, he had a notion that I could cut away from the river and ride due east.

Grays boasted a little ale house, no farmhouse of any size, but a good manor house, drawn back from the road. I toyed with the idea of riding up to the manor house and claiming my right, as a benighted traveller, to their hospitality. But I was afraid of my uncle's influence, which stretched all over the kingdom. And I was starting to become uneasy about the dust in my hair and the dirt on my face and clothes. Jimmy was as filthy as a street urchin, no house of any quality would have put him anywhere but in the stable.

‘We'll go to the ale house,' I decided.

It was a better place than it at first appeared. It profited from the traffic to and from Tilbury where travellers from the capital frequently chose to embark, rather than wait for the tide or the barges to take their ships up to the pool of London. They could offer me a bed with curtains in a shared room, and Jimmy a straw mattress in the kitchen. They killed and cooked a chicken for my dinner and served it with wheaten bread and a glass of wine. I even managed to wash in a basin of cold water so my face was clean, even if my hair was filthy. I slept in my clothes, and kept
my riding boots under my pillow for fear of thieves. In the morning I had the uneasy sense that I smelled, and a string of fleabites across my belly under my stomacher which itched more and more infuriatingly as the day went on.

I had to let Jimmy go in the morning. He had promised only to show me the way to Tilbury, and it was a long ride back for a little lad on his own. He was not in the least daunted by it. He hopped from the mounting block onto the bowed back of his hack and accepted a coin from me, and a hunk of bread and cheese for his dinner on the road. We rode out together till our paths diverged and he pointed me on the track towards Southend, and then went westwards himself, back towards London.

It was empty countryside that I rode through alone. Empty and flat and desolate. I thought that farming this land would be very different from being enfolded in the fertile weald of Kent. I rode briskly, and kept a good look about me, apprehensive that the desolate road through the marshes could be haunted by thieves. In fact, the sheer emptiness of the countryside was my friend. There were no highwaymen since there were no travellers to steal from. In the hours from dawn till noon I saw only a little lad scaring crows from a newly sown vegetable patch, and in the distance a ploughman churning the mud on the edge of the marsh, a plume of seagulls rising up like smoke behind him.

The going was slow as the track went through the marshes and became waterlogged and muddy. The wind blew in from the river bringing the smell of brine. I passed a couple of villages which were little more than mud, shaped into houses, with mud walls and mud roofs. A couple of children stared and then ran after me, crying with excitement as I went past, and they were the colour of mud, too. It was getting to be dusk as I rode into Southend and I looked around for somewhere that I could spend the night.

There were a few houses, and a small church, and the priest's house beside it. I tapped on the door and the housekeeper answered me with a discouraging scowl. I told her that I was travelling and asked her for hospitality and she showed me, with the most unwilling air, into a small room which adjoined the kitchen. I thought that if I had been a Boleyn and a Howard I would have cursed her for her rudeness, but instead I was a poor woman, with nothing in the world but a handful of coins and an absolute determination.

‘Thank you,' I said, as if it were an adequate lodging. ‘And can I have some water to wash in? And something to eat?'

The chink of the coins in my purse changed her refusal to an assent and she went to fetch me water and then a bowl of meat pottage, which
looked and tasted very much as if it had been in the pot for a couple of days. I was too hungry to care, and too tired to argue. I ate it up and wiped the wooden trencher clean with a piece of bread, and then I fell into the little pallet bed and slept till dawn.

She was up in the morning in the kitchen, sweeping the floor and riddling the fire to cook her master's breakfast. I borrowed a drying sheet from her and went out into the yard to wash my face and hands. I washed my feet too, under the pump, scolded all the time by a flock of chickens. I very much wanted to strip off my clothes and wash all over, and then wear clean clothes, but I might as well have wished for a litter and bearers to take me the last few miles. If he loved me, he would not mind a little dirt. If he did not love me, then the dirt would be nothing to me – compared with that catastrophe.

The housekeeper was curious at breakfast as to what I was doing travelling alone. She had seen the horse and my gown and knew what both would be worth. I said nothing, slipped a slice of bread into the pocket of my gown, and went out to saddle my horse. When I was mounted and ready to go I called her out to the yard. ‘Can you tell me the way to Rochford?'

‘Out of the gate and turn left down the track,' she said. ‘Just keep heading eastwards. You should be there in about an hour. Who was it you wanted to see? The Boleyn family are always at court.'

I mumbled a reply. I did not want her to know that I, a Boleyn, had ridden out such a long way for a man who had not even invited me. As I grew nearer to his home I was more and more fearful and I did not need any witnesses to my boldness. I clicked to my horse, and rode out of the yard, turned left, as she had told me, and then straight into the rising sun.