Greenwich
The shouts and boisterous laughter of people in the cobbled courtyard caught Mary’s attention only for a moment. She was far too nervous and excited to watch her brother and his cronies, including the once-restrained Weston and Norris, throw snowballs at one another and duck guffawing in white icy breaths behind the glazed marble fountain. She was grateful that the snowfall was only two or three inches deep—enough to keep the courtiers outside for a while but not enough to stop a rider on the roads on an important mission. Her warm breath clouded the pane of glass through which she stared, and she turned back into the hall to continue toward the new queen’s apartments. It had been a chilly, blustery day much like this one, she remembered, that His Grace had wed Anne secretly here at cold Greenwich in the early hours of the morn—wed her hurriedly only two days after he had learned that the Lady Anne was pregnant.
But all that was hardly of consequence to Mary. Finally, there was a glimmer of hope she might escape the treacherous maze of duties and involved relationships and spies—Cromwell’s spies, Staff said. Today the long-treasured plan to leave the court and her family to secretly wed William Stafford and have a few days at Banstead before they must return to duties and the masks of pretense could become reality.
She nodded curtly to the yeoman guards at the double doors to the queen’s suite and they swung them wide. Staff had gone to Wivenhoe three days ago, but now awaited her arrival at a London inn. Everything hinged on her being allowed to leave the palace for a few days. Everything she had lived for these last hard months, even these long, long years since she had loved him, depended on Anne’s letting her go.
Anne sat in her massive curtained bed leaning on satin pillows each embroidered with her new crest. Her hair was loose and long and, though she looked pale, her eyes glowed with confidence and were no longer haunted with the fears of desertion and possession by the Tudor king she now knew to be her devoted servant. Jane Rochford sat in the corner doing nothing in particular and several ladies sewed on standing embroidery frames about the room. The languorous Mark Smeaton perched on the far edge of the bed playing almost pensively on an elaborately gilded and painted lute.
Mary curtseyed slightly and Anne nodded without a smile. Her eyes looked large and luminous framed by her dark brows and lashes. “Are you feeling better this morning, sister?” Mary asked.
“’Sblood, no, Mary. That is why I am not up yet, obviously. I take it that all the shouting is another game of ducks and geese or a snowball fight. Is George out there?”
“Yes, and many others. There is a new dusting of snow on the ground.”
“What a time to have the morning sickness for the babe. I never feel well until nearly noon and His Grace has a fit if he thinks I get up too early. Oh well, it will be well worth it when he is born. And,” she added as a smile lit her face, “it makes the whole court wonder if the queen is indeed with royal child already. I hope the French spies have told Francois and his snobby queen. It amuses me to tease them all, but soon everyone will be able to tell for certain anyway. I have made it clear to my sweet-faced lutenist that if he tells all he knows, I will have him strung up on the ramparts of the Tower.” Her slender foot kicked out in Smeaton’s direction under the covers and she shot him a smile.
“I will tell them nothing, Your Grace, nothing,” he sang back to her in tune with his strumming.
“I am glad you told me this terrible nausea and dizziness when I rise would not outlast a three-month span, Mary. I could not have managed it otherwise. And I can feel my fine slim waistline fast going.” She looked down at her barely rounded belly. “But the son for the throne, he will be worth it.”
“It is of a son I wished to ask, Your Grace.” Mary resisted the impulse to wring her hands and tried to keep her voice calm.
“My son, Mary?”
“No, Your Grace. Henry Carey, Will Carey’s son and mine. You see, I almost never see the lad and he grows so fast. And since you keep to your bed in the mornings and see His Grace much in the afternoons, I thought it might be a convenient time for you to let me visit him at Hatfield.” Anne’s almond-shaped eyes fastened on her blonde sister’s face. “It is sad for a child to be without a father and mother too.”
“I hope you do not mean that as another of your pious suggestions that the king’s illegitimate daughter Mary be allowed to visit her Spanish mother the Princess of Wales just because she is so ill this winter.”