A ghostly pale figure lay on the bed, swathed in voluminous robes and a nunlike mourning veil and cap, all in white. Around her sat several black-clad maids of honor and an older lady, very finely attired, who must surely be the dame d’honneur in charge of them. She watched as Anne sank into a deep curtsey.
Queen Mary propped herself up on one elbow, regarding her new maid of honor. She had exquisite features, with green eyes, pouting lips, and fair skin like her brother, King Henry; a tendril of flaming red hair had escaped from her cap. She looked younger than her eighteen years, with her slender child’s hand extended to be kissed.
“You must be Mistress Anne Boleyn,” she said in English. “I can see the family likeness.” She smiled. “Welcome. I am sorry to have to receive you in such sad circumstances.”
“I am sorry for your Highness’s tragic loss,” Anne said.
The Queen smiled at her. “Thank you. It was bad enough losing my kind husband, without having to suffer this incarceration for forty days. How do you like my deuil blanc? It is traditional for French queens to wear white mourning. God’s blood, I look like a nun. I feel like a nun.” The dame d’honneur was looking on benignly. Obviously she did not understand English.
“Could your Highness not wear something else in private?” Anne asked.
Mary giggled. “I like your daring, Mistress Anne! But I dare not, not with Madame Louise bearing down on me unannounced at all hours. And it would look disrespectful to my late husband.” For a moment she looked as if she was going to cry. “King Louis was very good to me. I miss him.” Her face brightened again. “You will be glad to be with your sister.”
Anne nodded. It was true, although she knew it would not be long before jealousy reared its malevolent head between her and Mary. It had ever been so. She could feel her sister’s eyes on her.
“We are fortunate to be serving your Highness together,” she said.
“But not fortunate to be doing it in this place,” Queen Mary sighed. “Oh, the time does drag. I am willing the weeks to pass.”
Anne was already willing it too. Yet she had no choice but to take her place alongside her fellow maids of honor and ladies-in-waiting and tend to her new mistress.
She soon found that some of the maids were about her own age, and high-spirited, which made life more tolerable. They were kept in check by the dame d’honneur, whose name was Madame d’Aumont. Anne soon learned that she was impeccably connected, having once served the saintly Queen Jeanne, King Louis’s repudiated first wife, and married one of his most trusted seigneurs.
It was hard not to compare young Queen Mary to the Regent Margaret. She seemed a kind girl with a wicked sense of humor and a naturally sunny disposition, but she had none of the Regent’s intellectual interests.
King Fran?ois—for so he was already calling himself—came to see the Queen almost every day. He was just as Anne had imagined him—tall, dark, saturnine, and lascivious, with a perpetual shadow of growth on his chin. When he looked at her—or at any woman—it was as if he was seeing her naked. His eyes were lustful, his long nose devilish, his lips sensual. No female was too lowly to escape his interest, and Anne had to stand there and look pleased when he tipped her chin up and told her she was charming, then lowered his gaze to the swell of her breasts. Yet she had to admit to herself that there was a certain attraction about him, which might spell ruin for any gullible lady. But not her!
The Queen’s ladies were bursting with gossip about him, but Mary herself, Anne noticed, did not censure them. Instead she took a mischievous pleasure in joining in, knowing that Madame d’Aumont could not understand her.
“They say he is habitually clothed in women,” giggled pale-eyed Lady Elizabeth Gray, sister to the Marquess of Dorset. Florence Hastings blushed all over her pretty face.
“He considers whoring a sport on a par with hunting,” the Queen chimed in.
“People say he boasts of his special ‘petite bande’ of courtesans, and drinks from many fountains,” Mary Boleyn laughed.
“The word is,” murmured Mary Fiennes, with an impish smirk, “that he has had spyholes and secret doors made in his palaces, so that he can watch women undressing and making love.”
This was greeted by a chorus of mirth. Anne wondered if the Queen knew that Fran?ois had spied on her and Louis.
But Mary was warming to their theme. “I read that Alexander the Great paid attention to women when he had no affairs of state—but King Fran?ois attends to state affairs when there are no women!” There were more shrieks of laughter.
“God pity his new bride.” Queen Mary shuddered. “You know he married Louis’s daughter Claude last year? She is no match for him, poor little cripple.”
It was plain to all that, for the moment, Fran?ois’s chief interest was in young Queen Mary. His constant concern for her health was transparently a means of asking the question he could not, in propriety, put to her. His mother was as bad—descending on the young widow as she lay in her dark chamber and asking pointed questions. You could not blame them, of course, for upon this crucial matter turned Fran?ois’s likelihood of keeping the crown he had so long coveted.
“I would love to see his face if I told him I was pregnant,” Queen Mary said, after yet another interrogation. Her mischievous streak was surfacing more and more, and one day she could not resist telling Fran?ois that she had a craving for cherries. “Sadly they are out of season,” she complained, “so I shall just have to go without. But I have never fancied anything so much in my life.”
Anne, who was in attendance, was hard put to keep a straight face, especially when she saw the King’s look of alarm. But then she saw the angry glint in his eyes.
“The Queen has gone too far,” she said to Mary later. “He looks as if he could be dangerous if provoked.”
“I don’t think she realizes how perilous it might be to cross him,” Mary agreed. “They still speak of a queen of France who took lovers and was found out. She was put in prison and strangled there.”
Anne shuddered. “We must never leave her alone at any time. We must warn the others.” It was agreed between them all, and Madame d’Aumont, that four of them at least would be in attendance at all times.
Fran?ois kept returning to the black-hung chamber, oblivious to the fact that his visits were increasingly unwelcome to the Queen.
“I have had enough,” she seethed, after his questions had become a little too personal.
“What will your Highness do?” asked the dame d’honneur. She was clearly uneasy about the conduct of her royal master, but nervous of offending him.
“Put an end to his nonsense,” Queen Mary declared.
The next day she sent to ask if the King would visit her. He came with all speed, and Anne was present at their meeting.