Anne Boleyn: A Novel by Evelyn Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

brother’s widow...He let her go suddenly and for some moments there was silence between them.
    “I’ve ordered the Cardinal to see into it,” he said at last. She answered almost by instinct, still playing for time, trembling on the edge of an idea so tremendous she hardly dared formulate it to herself.
    “If Your Grace’s marriage is unlawful...what would it mean?”
    “That my daughter’s a bastard,” he said brutally, “that I’ve no wife and am free to take another.”
    As he spoke he was thinking of the French Princess. Then she suddenly came close to him and put her arms round his neck. He felt her shivering; she seemed suddenly small and gentle.
    “If Your Grace were really free,” she murmured, “then I might dare to think of you without hurt to your honor or to mine.” And with those words she left him, her light footsteps pattering down the stone corridor until the echo of them died away.
    That night she lay awake, listening to the snores of Catherine’s other ladies, the masque costume thrown on the floor, never to be worn again. The game was still to be played out, but for the first time, Anne saw the stake. The rumors were true; he did want a divorce and a new wife. He and Wolsey were determined to remove the Queen, and Anne knew she had not a chance against them. Everything was in their favor, and nothing in Catherine’s, she thought coldly. Catherine was old, looked more than her years, was past child-bearing, and had nothing to show the King for his years of marriage but that sickly redheaded brat. Anne disliked the little Princess Mary, a pious, solemn child, who sensed her mother’s antipathy to the new maid of honor, and treated Anne with stiff reserve. The Queen was too serious-minded to offer Henry much companionship; her prayers and her readings and her ordered life bored Anne to screaming pitch. God’s death, what charm would they hold for a young and lusty man! No, Catherine had no weapons...
    Anne moved, resting her head in the crook of her arms, and thought quite clearly that if she could keep the King’s love and continue to withstand him, she might become Queen of England.
    Queen of England. She stared at the ceiling, trying to imagine it; Catherine divorced, herself standing beside Henry at the head of the court; herself married, and by the Cardinal! she thought viciously, the Cardinal who’d prevented her marriage to Percy because she was too low-born. What a magnificent revenge!
    For a moment her excitement was swamped by a tide of hatred.
    “Don’t tilt with the Cardinal, I beg of you,” her brother had pleaded, and she remembered her answer. “I’ll tilt when I’m ready; sometimes a woman can succeed where men fail...”
    What did Wolsey think of her success with the King? Did he realize how Henry was besotted? He had spoken to her several times, his manner slightly condescending, and then passed on with his head held as high as if he were the King himself. A man with many enemies, she thought fiercely, her uncle, Norfolk, among them. In fact, he was surrounded by men who were only looking for a means of poisoning the King against him.
    She smiled slowly. What better means than a woman; declare herself Wolsey’s enemy, and she’d find supporters among the most powerful faction at court. She was sure of her uncle; Norfolk had always treated the Boleyns with contempt, as too parvenu to be redeemed by his sister’s infusion of Howard blood, but he had spoken to her father and to George on several occasions since she came under the King’s notice. Norfolk was a squint-eyed fox, but he was ambitious enough to help one of his own blood to the throne. No Howard had ever been able to resist intrigue; Anne had studied them and she knew the long history of wars and treachery in the family’s struggle to increase their power. And she was one of them. She had their skill and their ambition, and their pride; she also possessed the shrewdness of her merchant