Читать книгу The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory - Страница 13

With Anne away I was the only Boleyn girl in the world, and when the queen chose to spend the summer with the Princess Mary it was I who rode with Henry at the head of the court on progress. We spent a wonderful summer riding together, hunting, and dancing every night, and when the court returned to Greenwich in November I whispered to him that I had missed my course and I was carrying his child.

At once, everything changed. I had new rooms and a lady in waiting. Henry bought me a thick fur cloak, I must not for a moment get chilled. Midwives, apothecaries, soothsayers came and went from my rooms, all of them were asked the vital question: ‘Is it a boy?’

Most of them answered yes and were rewarded with a gold coin. The eccentric one or two said ‘no’ and saw the king’s pout of displeasure. My mother loosened the laces of my gown and I could no longer go to the king’s bed at night, I had to lie alone and pray in the darkness that I was carrying his son.

The queen watched my growing body with eyes that were dark with pain. I knew that she had missed her courses too, but there was no question that she might have conceived. She smiled throughout the Christmas feasts and the masques and the dancing, and she gave Henry the lavish presents that he loved. And after the twelfth night masque, when there was a sense that everything should be made clear and clean, she asked him if she might speak with him privately and from somewhere, God knows where, she found the courage to look him in the face and tell him that she had been clean for the whole of the season, and she was a barren woman.

‘Told me herself,’ Henry said indignantly to me that night. I was in his bedroom, wrapped in my fur cloak, a tankard of mulled wine in my hand, my bare feet tucked under me before a roaring fire. ‘Told me without a moment’s shame!’

I said nothing. It was not for me to tell Henry that there was no shame in a woman of nearly forty ceasing her bleeding. Nobody had known better than he that if she could have prayed her way into childbed they would have had half a dozen babies and all of them boys. But he had forgotten that now. What concerned him was that she had refused him what she should have given him, and I saw once again that powerful indignation which swept over him with any disappointment.

‘Poor lady,’ I said.

He shot me a resentful look. ‘Rich lady,’ he corrected me. ‘The wife of one of the wealthiest men in Europe, the Queen of England no less, and nothing to show for it but the birth of one child, and that a girl.’

I nodded. There was no point arguing with Henry.

He leaned over me to put his hand gently on the round hard curve of my belly. ‘And if my boy is in there then he will carry the name of Carey,’ he said. ‘What good is that for England? What good is that for me?’

‘But everyone will know he is yours,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows that you can make a child with me.’

‘But I have to have a legitimate son,’ he said earnestly, as if I or the queen or any woman could give him a son by wishing it. ‘I have to have a son, Mary. England has to have an heir from me.’