“Did he hurt you?” Anne asked, putting her arms around her sister.
“No, but he would not take no for an answer, and I dared not fend him off. I felt dirty, soiled—I could not look Will in the face when I got back. But he too wanted his pleasure of me, so I said I was feeling sick, which was true, for I was terrified that he would guess. Oh, Anne, what shall I do? The King wants to see me again tonight!”
“Don’t go,” Anne warned her.
“But I dare not refuse. If he can be generous to our family, he can also withdraw his favor, or worse. I have to go. Oh, God, why me? Of all the ladies he could pick on.” And she wept again.
“You could tell Father.”
“Are you mad? He thinks little enough of me as it is.”
Anne sat Mary down on the settle. “I will tell him how distressed you are.”
“No!”
“Then plead illness. Go home to Hever. Will would understand.”
“I’d have to be ill indeed to do that. He would hate me being away.”
Anne lost patience. “Then there is nothing for it, unless of course you complain to the Queen.”
Mary looked horrified. “That’s unthinkable. She is a kind lady and I would not hurt her.”
“Well, I can think of nothing else you can do. I don’t know what else to say.” Anne felt utterly helpless and angry. “It’s disgraceful that a king who claims to be virtuous, and sets himself up as the living example of chivalry, can so basely abuse his power and get away with it,” she fumed.
—
Having made Mary take some bread and ale, Anne left her to her maid and went in search of their father. She found him in the office of the Board of the Green Cloth, seated at a large green baize table looking over lists of household accounts.
He looked up. “Anne! This is a pleasant surprise.”
“Not so pleasant when you hear what I have to say, Father,” she answered in a low voice. “And it is for your ears only.” She glanced at the two clerks seated at their high desks. Sir Thomas dismissed them.
“Now,” he said, when they were alone, “what is wrong?”
“The King has forced Mary to become his strumpet,” Anne told him.
“What?” Father was going a nasty puce color.
“He gave her no choice in the matter. He raped her, to be plain! I thought you should know.”
“How did she allow herself to get into this situation?” Father barked.
“Allow herself? I told you, he gave her no choice!” Anne’s temper was rising. “When the King commands, who dares deny him? And of course, he seems prepared to be very generous. Already he has granted land to Will.”
Sir Thomas sank back in his chair, grim-faced. “It’s deplorable—but it can do her no harm,” he said at length, “or any of us, for that matter. Bessie Blount was his mistress for five years, believe it or not, and bore him a son. She did very well out of it, and made a good marriage.”
“But Mary is already married, and painfully aware that she is cuckolding Will. What will she get out of it except misery and shame?”
“Money, honors, preferment for her family,” Father said, a calculating gleam in his eye.
Anne gaped at him. He would sell his daughter for money?
“We must all make the best of a bad situation,” he told her.
“I thought you would do something to prevent it.” Anne was furious with him.
“Alas, I am as powerless as Mary is. As you say, no one denies the King.”
“I would!” cried Anne defiantly, and left him sitting there, pushing past with an angry swish of her skirts.
—
Father was looking very pleased with himself. “I am appointed Treasurer of the Royal Household and Steward of Tonbridge,” he crowed.
He was walking with Anne along the river front at Greenwich, both of them enjoying the first warm afternoon of spring. It had been days before she could bring herself to speak to him after their altercation over Mary, but there was no avoiding him, and gradually she had allowed herself to thaw a little.
“The wages of sin?” she asked. It had been two months now since Mary had succumbed to the King. Will still did not know, and Mary, while resigned to having to endure Henry’s attentions, which she conceded were not so bad, was suffering agonies of guilt.
“I hardly think so!” Father snapped, jolted out of his good mood. “These appointments are rewards for my long service, and my assistance in indicting the Duke of Buckingham. They are no more than anyone would expect a man of my standing to receive. I resent your implication that I got them only because my daughter is bedding with the King!”
“How can you be so complacent?” Anne threw back.
“I can because I must!”
They walked on in silence, aware of the stares of others. Anne fixed her eyes on the river, where myriad boats were bobbing up and down or making their way toward London or Deptford and the sea. There was a stiff breeze and she had to hold on to her hood.
The King had visited the Queen’s apartments this morning and singled Anne out. In the weeks since his seduction of Mary, she had barely been able to bring herself to look at him, she hated him so much. Whenever he appeared, she saw not the monarch in his fine robes, but a selfish, lustful man overpowering her sister, without thought for her feelings or the consequences. He was despicable. So when he had noticed her today and asked her how she was settling in, she had responded with the barest of courtesies.
“Well, your Grace.” She’d kept her eyes downcast. If she had looked at him, he would have seen the loathing in them. It was exactly how she had felt seven years before about King Fran?ois.
There had been a pause.
“I am pleased to hear it,” King Henry had said, and moved away. But later Anne noticed that he kept looking at her. Was it speculation that she read in his eyes? Shame? Good! She hoped he realized that someone knew him for what he was.
She had not, of course, told Father of her coolness to the King. In his eyes, the sun rose and set with Henry Tudor.
“I should tell you that the Cardinal is dragging out the negotiations for your marriage,” Father said now, breaking the silence. “I don’t know what game he’s playing, but it’s proving impossible to reach any agreement on the terms of the contract. If it’s not finalized by the autumn, I’m pulling out.”
Thank God! Anne thought fervently. “As I have said before, sir, you would do better to demand the earldom of Ormond for yourself.”
“But you are twenty-one and still unwed. Does that not worry you?”
“Not at all,” she told him. “I have yet to meet the man I want to marry.”
“You mean, minx, the man I want you to marry!” Father growled.
“Let us hope that they are one and the same,” she said. She did so enjoy provoking him.
1523
Anne had noticed that of all the young gentlemen who frequented the Queen’s chamber, none came more often than Harry Percy.