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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Boleyn

H enry rides ahead of his guards, galloping across Brynd’s drawbridge a full hour before his retinue.

“My queen!” he bellows, his voice reaching through the castle and into Boleyn’s bedchamber.

She doesn’t have her shoes on yet, but she escapes her maids and slips down the stairs and across the vestibule, out onto the cobbles.

Henry sees her bare feet and strides towards her, laughing at her impropriety. He sweeps her up into his arms.

“You feral woman. You could have fallen and hurt the baby.”

She slaps him on the chest playfully. “Never mind hurting myself.”

He carries her into the palace, past dozens of courtiers. She spots Lady Seymour among them, head low, eyes up, watching them. Go and tell your queen of this , she thinks, as Henry carries her directly to her bedchamber, dismisses the maids waiting there and promptly undoes all their work.

Afterwards, they lie in bed, limbs interlocked, the draught wafting her hair across Henry’s shoulder.

One of his hands is splayed protectively across her belly.

She twists to move it to her waist. She doesn’t want to exclude him, but the baby isn’t his.

Not yet. For now it is her precious burden alone.

“We will raise him to be the greatest king that Elben has ever known,” Henry says, almost to himself.

“It will be difficult to top his father, but we will try.”

He pushes her hair away from her cheek.

“Do you mean that, Boleyn?”

He is ten years older than her, but he looks like a boy who’s tumbled from a tree.

“How can you ask me that when you have just conquered an entire country?”

“People will say that Lothair is insignificant and weak. They won’t understand that in truth it’s Quisto we have wounded.”

She runs a hand down his cheek, his beard, his chest. “They will understand. Your ambassadors are clever.”

“Your father is a good man.”

“My father would have been no one if you had been like other kings.”

Lord Boleyn is by no means a commoner, but until Henry inherited the throne, he was a nobody.

His fine, surgeon-sharp mind and talent for collecting languages had been neglected.

All because his branch of the family tree was too far removed from the higher ranks of nobility.

It was only when Henry came to power that Lord Boleyn’s talents were recognised and wielded for the good of Elben.

The Boleyns’ ascent is chained to Henry’s understanding that knowledge can be found in the lowliest of men, and that power can be forged as well as trickled down a bloodline.

This is another way of thinking that Boleyn and Henry share.

“Tell me the story of your childhood,” Henry says.

She laughs. “You know it better than me by now!”

“I like hearing it. It sounds so full of… so full.”

He strokes her body, from her collarbone, down her arm and to the bump of her hipbone and up again.

The movement becomes the sway of ritual as she tells him once more of the way she and George and Mary were raised.

Of summer days eating plums in the orchard at Hever Castle.

Winter nights by the fire where both mother and father sat with all three of their children, drilling each of them in turn in Capetian and Uuvekese and the languages of the vanished empires.

She tells Henry of the tutors the three of them shared, and how they had talked freely to their parents of who they wished to marry, and discussed suitable potential matches that might accord with their tastes.

Whenever Henry looks at Boleyn, it is with hunger. When she tells this story, the type of hunger changes.

“That is what I want for our son,” Henry says as she finishes. “I’ll listen to him. I’ll find him a happy match, the way you and I have happiness. And if we have a second son, I’ll listen to him too. They can learn everything together.”

“Yes,” she says. There is no need for her to say more.

She knows that this is not about their theoretical sons, but about Henry and Arthur.

Arthur and Henry. The first and the second, until the second became the only.

It is her turn to stroke him, to pull him towards her and cradle him within her limbs.

They make love again, languorously, with their eyes, hands and mouths.

When they’re finished, the fire has sunken to embers and the sun lands high on the wall above them, turning grey stone to butter.

“Tell me more about this book of the bishop’s then,” Henry says. “Who is this Wyatt you wrote to me about?”

“He fancies himself a jester.”

“Ah well, you could do with one of those. Bring you down a peg or two,” Henry laughs. She slaps him on the chest again, but he catches her wrist and looks at her more seriously. “Don’t do that in public again, Boleyn. It undermines me in front of our subjects.”

His magic sparks across her skin. If he wanted it to, he could make it hurt her. She thinks how much he must love her that he stops it from doing so.

“Of course, my love,” she says. He lets go, kisses her on the nose.

“So? What has the jester discovered?”

“ I am the one who discovered it. The jester merely did the hard work.”

It has taken Wyatt longer than it should have, but he now feels confident that he has translated the Old Elbenese correctly.

“I have not read his report yet,” she tells Henry. “I was waiting for you. Shall we look at it together?”

As Henry sits up, she reaches for the roll of parchment Wyatt gave her the previous evening. She had intended to read it first herself, but she had been so tired the words blurred. This way is better, though – they can read the parchment together.

“There’s something about the flow of power coming from the castles rather than from you…” she begins.

Boleyn is suddenly aware that her uncovered back is very cold. She can’t meet Henry’s eyes. This information skirts treason. Worse; it teeters on heresy.

“Which book is this?” Henry says.

“It’s very old. Before your father’s time.”

“Bring it to me.”

She gets up, wrapping the blanket around her naked body and leaving Henry uncovered to show him that she doesn’t take kindly to being ordered around.

The book is on the window seat, its ancient pages curled.

Henry examines it, pausing over the circled words as Boleyn points them out.

Then he flips the book over and stares intently at the cover.

“We couldn’t decipher the title or the author,” Boleyn says.

“I can.” Henry’s eyesight, like everything about him, is better than any common man’s. “Boleyn, this is a very dangerous book.”

Boleyn laughs. The notion that any book could be dangerous is preposterous to her. People are dangerous. Swords and cannons are dangerous. Books can only ever be sustenance.

“You wouldn’t laugh if you could see what I can.”

“What do you see then, oh great one?” she asks.

Henry points at the faded lettering. “This book was written for a particular person. A queen. It belonged to Isabet.”

He may as well have punched Boleyn. She feels faint, and then she feels sick, and then she is coated in her own foolishness.

“I didn’t realise.”

The queen that exists only in cautionary tales of what happens when a consort betrays her country, king and god. The queen whose name for ever hangs over Brynd like storm clouds.

Henry lifts her onto his lap. “You weren’t to know, Boleyn. You’re only trying to help me. But you won’t find help in this book, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“More should never have let you take it. I didn’t think he would.”

Boleyn doesn’t mention that she didn’t give More much choice in the matter.

“Besides, I don’t think we should be looking to the past for answers,” he says. “Let us think of the future instead.”

He splays a hand over her stomach again.

Boleyn forces herself to smile. She has made his life more difficult at a time when he should be celebrating his victory over Lothair. “I was looking in the wrong books. I’ll find something of use to you, Henry. I promise.”

“My darling,” he says. “You’re not going to let this pregnancy slow you down, are you?”

“Why should it?” she lies, collecting the book. “I’ll return this to the bishop.”

“No.”

Henry takes it from her. He makes a fist, and the book, thick though it is, folds and crumples as though it were tin.

“What are you doing?” she whispers.

“This should never have survived so long.”

He opens his hand. A pitiful ball of paper and leather sits on his palm.

Even if she had been allowed to, Boleyn knows that the pages would only tear if she tried to rescue them.

Henry goes to the fire and tosses the ball into it, stoking the embers until they catch on the paper.

The flame runs along the edge of a page and then rises, like a flag unfurling.