The Last Boleyn(166)

“Sweetheart.” Staff’s hands were warm on her waist. “Come away from the window. I did not mean to speak such violence. There has been enough killing,” he said against her hair. He lifted her in his arms as sure and strong as he had that first time in the vast reaches of Greenwich when she had been Will Carey’s wife and had thought that her life ahead would be all darkness. He laid her carefully on the sheets in the morning sunlight which streamed through the window. He lay beside her and pulled her against his body. She sighed and clung to him desperately, trembling, but no tears came as they had over the long weeks of Anne’s trial, the long weeks of waiting for George’s and Anne’s deaths.

She pressed her face into his shoulder to stop the thoughts of Anne and George on the scaffold. But her eyes shot open as she pictured the poor girl, Meg Roper, receiving from the cruel pike her father’s terrible head and cherishing it tenderly in her arms. Sir Thomas More had been beheaded at the king’s cold command as Anne had today. And now, surely, Mary’s own father was somewhere on the road to Hever.

They lay there, unspeaking, and the bird warbling from outside washed in with the sun and mingled with their quiet breathing. She stared at the white plaster ceiling that had watched her as a girl and it all came flooding back. Father was taking her to Brussels, but she was afraid and only eight years old. Then he took her away to France, and after she went, George and Anne still laughed together in the summer gardens and it was not fair. Had any of the Bullens loved each other enough along the way, knowing that they loved and cherished each other? But it was different with her and Staff. And for her children, it would be even better. She would spend the rest of her life making sure of that.

Rapid knocks rained on their door and they both shot upright as Nancy’s voice came to them from the other side. “Your lord father has ridden in, my lady. He is in the solar. Little Andrew is with your mother. Shall I come in to help you dress?”

They were up and Staff had his breeks on and his shirt half tucked in when she finished talking. Mary dashed to retrieve her chemise and to brush her hair. “Yes, yes, Nance, and hurry.”

Nancy dressed her and would have set her hair had not Staff stood ready and had not her heart pounded so to see her father. He was here at last, come home to Hever, but he had come too early to have stayed for Anne’s beheading. He had failed to save his world, but he had come home to them at Hever.

Nancy helplessly left her mistress’s hair long and loose and gave it a last quick brush. Mary descended the stairs on Staff’s arm. She began to tremble uncontrollably. She was terrified to hear the news he would bring and terrified she would see no understanding in his eyes even now. And the cold, hard stare from the king’s portrait at the bottom of the steps.

“Do not fear, my love,” Staff said and pushed the door open.

Her father paced in broken lines before the unlit hearth and her mother sat slumped back in a chair near him. The morning sun made the room strangely bright and cheerful and stained patches of the carpet and walls red or blue through the windows.

Thomas Boleyn stopped, and his narrow eyes took them in. It seemed to Mary he had shrunk inward and his gaze seemed to come from deep inside some dark space. “You cry not, Mary. How often I have seen you cry, but not for Anne?”

“I have cried and prayed for my dear sister and brother for two long months, father, when you were not here to see. Now the only tears I have left are inside.”

His eyes focused hard on her and he began his rehearsed words. “The queen is dead by now—murdered by the king—as was your brother yesterday. George died bravely, they told me, and I know the queen must have too. I could not stay to hear of that. Anne was quite magnificent at her trial. Be that as it may, they both wished to be remembered to you, Mary, and Anne to your husband also. I had a note from Anne to you somewhere, but in my departure, I seem to have misplaced it. It will arrive packed in with my things somewhere. Anne bid me tell you to relate her love—and the truth of her unjust death—to the Princess Elizabeth when she is old enough to understand. She wanted both you and little Catherine to be sure to look to that.”

Mary left Staff standing behind her mother’s chair with his hands on her shoulders and took two steps closer to her father. “I shall see to it as a solemn trust, father. Anne gave Henry Carey into my keeping also, though there are other monies for his education.”

“Yes, she told me so.” He said nothing else and continued to regard her awkwardly as though she were a person he did not know.

“And you, father?” She reached out carefully and rested her fingers on his tense arm.

“I, Mary?” He pulled away and began to pace again. “I have failed, failed completely.”

“But mother and I still love you, father,” she ventured shakily. “You have Hever.”

“Hever? Love? I spoke of all our plans. That black reptile Cromwell has been elevated to my vacant office of Lord Privy Seal. Traitors, traitors all! Norfolk her judge, the whining bitch Rochford their condemner—no wonder George could never love her or get her with child! And your dear cousin Francis Bryan was only too happy to ride to Jane Seymour and tell her that the queen had been condemned! Damn them all! Rats always leave a sinking ship no matter how grand or important the ship or the fact it might have yet been saved.”

“My lord was telling me that we are not to have their bodies to bury,” came Elizabeth Boleyn’s rasping voice as she looked vacantly at Mary. “The guards were to bury them under the floor of the little church within The Tower where the jailers worship. At least it is a consecrated church though no place for a Howard and a queen. What did you call that church, my lord?”