LITMIR.BIZ

      It was not a long ride, a little more than twenty miles. We stopped to dine at the roadside, eating nothing more than bread and cheese which we had carried with us. My father could have called on the hospitality of any great house along the way, he was well enough known as a courtier high in the favour of the king, and we would have been nobly entertained. But he did not want to break the journey.

      The high road was rutted and pitted with potholes, every now and then we saw a broken cart wheel where a traveller had been overturned. But the horses stepped out well enough on the dry ground and every now and then the going was so good that we broke into a canter. The verges on the side of the road were thick with the white of gypsy lace and big-faced white daisies, and lush with the early summer greenness of grass. In the hedges the honeysuckle twisted around the bursting growth of hawthorn and may, at the roots were pools of purple-blue self-heal and the gangly growth of ladies’ smock with dainty flowers of white, veined with purple. Behind the hedges in the thick lush pastures were fat cows with their heads down, munching, and in the higher fields there were flocks of sheep with the occasional idle boy watching over them from the shade of a tree.

      The common land outside of the villages was mostly farmed in strips and they made a pretty sight where they were gardened in rows with onions and carrots drawn up like a retinue on parade. In the villages themselves the cottage gardens were tumbling confusions of daffodils and herbs, vegetables and primroses, wild beans shooting and hawthorn hedgerows in flower with a corner set aside for a pig, and a rooster crowing on the dunghill outside the back door. My father rode in a quiet satisfied silence when the road took us onto our own land, downhill, through Edenbridge, and through the wet meadowlands towards Hever. The horses went slower as the going grew heavier on the damp road, but my father was patient now we were nearing our estate.

      It had been his father’s house before it was his; but it went no further back in our family than that. My grandfather had been a man of no more than moderate means who had risen by his own skills in Norfolk, apprenticed to a mercer, but eventually became Lord Mayor of London. For all that we clung to our Howard connection it was only a recent one, and only through my mother who had been Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, a great catch for my father. He had taken her to our grand house at Rochford in Essex and then brought her to Hever where she had been appalled at the smallness of the castle, and the cosy poky private rooms.

      At once he had set to rebuild it to please her. First he put a ceiling across the great hall, which had been open to the rafters in the old style. In the space he created above the hall he made a set of private rooms for us where we could dine and sit in greater comfort and privacy.

      My father and I turned in at the gates of the park, the gatekeeper and his wife tumbling out to make their bow as we went by. We rode past them with a wave, and up the dirt road to the first river, which was spanned by a little wooden bridge. My horse did not like the look of this, she jibbed at it as soon as she heard the echo of her hoofbeats on the hollow wood.

      ‘Fool,’ my father said briefly, leaving me to wonder whether he meant me or the horse, and put his own hunter before mine and led the way across. My horse followed behind, very docile when she could see that there was no danger, and so I rode up to the drawbridge of our castle behind my father and waited while the men came out of the guard room to take our horses and lead them away to the stables at the back. My legs felt weak after the long ride when they lifted me down from the saddle but I followed my father across the drawbridge and into the shadow of the gatehouse, under the forbidding thick teeth of the portcullis and into the welcoming little castle yard.

      The front door stood open, the yeoman of the ewry and the chief household men came out and bowed to my father, half a dozen servants behind them. My father ran his eyes over them: some were in full livery, some were not, two of the servant girls were hastily untying the hessian aprons they wore over their best aprons underneath, and disclosing some very dirty linen as they did so; the spit boy, peeping out from the corner of the yard, was filthy with deeply engrained dirt and half-naked in his rags. My father took in the general sense of disorder and carelessness and nodded at his people.

      ‘Very well,’ he said guardedly. ‘This is my daughter Mary. Mistress Mary Carey. You have prepared rooms for us?’

      ‘Oh yes, sir.’ The groom of the bedchambers bowed. ‘Everything is ready. Mistress Carey’s room is ready.’

      ‘And dinner?’ my father demanded.

      ‘At once.’

      ‘We’ll eat in the private rooms. I’ll have dinner tomorrow in the great hall and people can come and see me. Tell them I will dine in public tomorrow. But this evening I won’t be disturbed.’

      One of the girls came forward and dipped a curtsey to me. ‘Shall I show you your room, Mistress Carey?’ she asked.

      I followed her at my father’s nod. We went through the broad front door and turned left along a narrow hall. At the end a tiny spiral stone staircase led us upwards to a pretty room with a small bed hung with curtains of pale blue silk. The windows looked out over the moat and the park beyond. A door out of the room would lead me into a small gallery with a stone fireplace which was my mother’s favourite sitting room.

      ‘D’you want to wash?’ the girl asked awkwardly. She gestured towards a jug and ewer filled with cold water. ‘I could get you some hot water?’

      I stripped off my riding gloves and handed them to her. ‘Yes,’ I said. For a moment I thought of the palace at Eltham and the constant sycophantic service. ‘Get me some hot water and see that they bring my clothes up. I want to change out of this riding dress.’

      She bowed and left the room by the little stone staircase. As she went I could hear her muttering to herself: ‘Hot water. Clothes,’ so as not to forget. I went to the windowseat, kneeled up and looked out of the little window through the leaded panes.

      I had spent the day trying not to think of Henry and the court I was leaving behind me, but now at this comfortless homecoming I realised that I had not just lost the love of the king, I had lost the luxuries which had become essential to me. I did not want to be Miss Boleyn of Hever again. I did not want to be the daughter of a small castle in Kent. I had been the most favoured young woman in the whole of England. I had gone far beyond Hever and I did not want to come back.