Shadow of Persephone

by G Lawrence

  “Goodbye,” I whispered. “I hope I never see you again.”

  It was a hope not to be realised.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Norfolk House

  Lambeth, London

  Early Spring 1538

  The roads were slick with mud. Small rivers flowed, washing clumps of dirt and strands of hay fallen from wandering carts into gullies at the edge of the track. The skies were iron; fertile grey clouds full of rain bustling over us, sent flying across the skies by the rippling wind. The smell of damp wool, oily atop the breeze, rose from us, scenting the air, making it heavy.

  We had left Chesworth, riding on mules and horses, a train of baggage carts creaking behind us. We were making for Norfolk House, the traditional London residence of the dukes of Norfolk. Standing in Lambeth, opposite the King’s palace of Whitehall, our new home would take us into the centre of London life.

  In some ways, I was going home. My father’s house still stood in Lambeth, although now it was rented out to one of his friends, one of the few who would still trust him after all he had borrowed. I had been a child there. But in so many ways, it was not going home. My grandmother’s household was my home now; the women of the maidens’ chamber my family. I remembered little of London. Spying it on the horizon was like seeing a new world, full of promise and opportunity.

  The journey had taken three days. At night we had stopped at inns and taverns, where my grandmother and fortunate ladies got beds in warm rooms. The rest of us piled into attics, barns and sheds, wrapping cloaks about us as we rested on straw mattresses, trying to resist the attack of fleas hidden in creaking strands beneath. Wind crept through gaps in the walls, and three to a bed we slept, huddled together, enjoying the warmth of our close-pressed bodies. Each day, we rose and washed, heard Mass whilst the skies were still dark, and ate a swift bite of bread and meat before mounting horse. Down Stane Street, the old Roman road linking Chichester and London, we had ridden each day, chattering gaily about the delights of London, and what we would see of court and King.

  My grandmother travelled by litter, since she was sixty-one and her joints troubled her in cold weather, but the rest of us went by horse. At Chesworth we had hawked and hunted often. I knew how to handle a horse well by that time.

  My grandmother had been quiet of late. At the end of October in the year just passed her son, Lord Thomas Howard, had died whilst a prisoner in the Tower. As he was held for attempting to wed Lady Margaret Douglas, there had been rumours he would be beheaded, but in the end he had passed due to fever. Lady Margaret had also been imprisoned, but she had been sent to Syon Abbey, and although she too was sick, she recovered. There was gossip Thomas had been poisoned, some said by the King, but my uncle had been sentenced to death, so this seemed unlikely. Other tongues formed another name, saying Norfolk might have wanted to remove his much younger brother before another Howard was executed in public, bringing further shame to the family.

  My grandmother had been granted the body, but was not allowed to bury her son with the usual pomp. He had been taken to Thetford Abbey to join his father, and since then she had mourned him quietly. I could see grief upon her, a shroud. Sometimes her eyes were distant, and I knew she was thinking of her child, now dead, for love.

  But if she was morose, I had become light and merry.

  Not because I did not feel her pain, or did not mourn my uncle, but because we were on our way to London. That time was like a breath of winter air on the breeze, washing away all that had gone before. Manox was gone, and I was free of fear. I had turned fourteen years old in December, and was ready for excitement, happiness and pleasure.

  I was not the only one with a new lease of life. It was said the King was merry, pondering all his possible brides. Last November he had gone to the French Ambassador and told him he would like a French wife. The ambassador had suggested a few ladies, but the King had shocked him by asking if the potential brides could be dispatched to Calais so he could inspect them. This was completely unprecedented. The usual method of choosing a foreign bride was to send a trusted emissary to inspect the lady in a delicate, polite way, or to commission a portrait. What was not usual was to ask that royal women be paraded like whores in a brothel so the customer could select which one he wanted to ride.

  The ambassador, appalled at the suggestion, had said, “Perhaps, sire, you would like to mount them one after the other, and keep the one you find best broken in. Is that the way the knights of the Round Table treated women in the past?”

  The King had actually blushed.

  When King François heard, he laughed, saying the English King meant to do with women as he did with geldings, collect a few and make them trot so he could pick the best. But despite his amusement, François refused the notion. He was not about to send his daughters or kinswomen off to be treated like cattle going to market.

  “Had our King been asked to do the same with his sisters or daughters, he would not, either,” my aunt Katherine had said to my grandmother.

  “Most men only consider something an insult when it happens to their women,” she replied. “Only when their own pride is affronted by association can they sympathise with the plight of women.”

  But the implication he was going about his wooing in a crass manner had not put the King off. Other brides had been suggested, but many wondered what lady would dare marry him now, with three wives deep in the cold earth. One dead by his command, one by his abandonment and the third because, as many claimed, she had been neglected after the birth of the longed-for Prince. Our King was not the safest or most desirable match in the world.

  “Not that he understands that,” Norfolk had told my grandmother. “He thinks he is still the young, handsome, romantic prince who came to the throne on a wave of popularity with all women fainting at his feet and men staring on in envy.”

  “It matters not,” said my grandmother. “There are plenty of princes and dukes who will risk a sister or daughter to gain our King as their ally.”

  Christina of Denmark had been suggested anew, and the King was said to favour her at first, but Marie de Guise had also been mentioned. Marie was said to be a great beauty, but was also a tall woman and the King seemed to think he needed a larger lady now to suit his build. Mentioned in passing were the daughters of the Duke of Cleves, a Catholic state of the north which held some Lutheran sympathies, rather like England, and other French matches were put forward, but the King had offered marriage to Marie.

  Swiftly, the lady had accepted the hand of King James of Scotland.

  The King was bitterly disappointed, and went about declaring the lady had been tricked, for England was a greater match than Scotland and he was a better man than his “beggarly and stupid” young nephew.

  No one dared mention that perhaps the lady herself had not been keen on the idea of risking her neck.

  At first, the King had been reluctant to cede, carrying on about Marie until the ambassador was forced to ask if the King would take another man’s wife as his queen? Some giggled behind lace sleeves that the King did not have much respect for, or a virtuous approach towards, the married state. He had a habit of picking a new wife whilst his present one was still living, had wed the wife of his brother, then the sister of his mistress, and tended to hunt amongst the women who served his wife when seeking a new one.

  It was said that Marie, upon hearing the King wanted her because she was a larger woman with a voluptuous figure, had remarked she might be a big woman, but she had a little neck. Perhaps it was only rumour, but seeing as the comment was close to what my cousin had cried hysterically in the Tower before her death, that remark seemed to deflect the interest of the King.

  So the King had headed back to Christina, saying he had favoured her all along. His painter, Hans Holbein, had been sent to get a likeness and other men were to report on her character. The King was taking no risks. He wanted his fourth wife, or second in his mind since his unions to Katherine and Anne had been annulled, to
be beautiful, modest and cultured as well as dynastically valuable.

  “He seeks Katherine, Anne and Jane,” my grandmother had said. “A combination of virtues he admired in them all.” She shook her head. “He seeks the perfect woman, the one who will not disappoint him as all the others did.”

  “How did Queen Jane disappoint, my lady?” I asked.

  “By not being Anne,” she said. “And Anne disappointed for not being Katherine. He wants spirit and diffidence, wildness and decorum, beauty and humility, wisdom and innocence. He seeks what cannot be found.”

  As his men headed to the court of the Archduchess of Austria, where Christina was living, the King had cast off his mourning clothes. He was ready to head to the altar.

  The King was also enthused because his attacks on the monasteries were being shown to be virtuous, in his eyes at least. Many relics had been proved false. Just that February, the Rood of Grace, a representation of the Crucifixion of Christ held at the Cistercian Abbey of Boxley in Kent, had been revealed as a fraud. Pilgrims had long gone there, for the figure of Christ moved, his hands and feet twitching, eyes rolling, head nodding and lips muttering prayers, or so people thought. It had been uncovered as a falsehood, monks tugged on wires, levers and pulleys to make their Christ move. It had been brought to London and smashed to bits by the Bishop of Rochester outside St Paul’s.

  In response, some had wailed, thinking discoveries such as this were falsified, the relics were real, and these charges were made up. Others howled for more, shouting the Church was superstitious, corrupt. More relics had been destroyed, more monasteries dissolved. Necklaces adorning statues of saints had been taken down, the statues themselves smashed. Shrines were being abandoned, secretly visited under cover of night by those who regarded the obliteration of their closest links to God with horror and disbelief.

  Saints and shrines… relics and offerings… these were the things the people of England had relied on for centuries so they might reach out and touch the power of the Almighty, that they might plead for aid. All this was going, swept away by the King. Many hoped it was only temporary, and blamed Cromwell for influencing the King. Others said the King was corrupt, hungry for gold, stealing his people from the light of Christ.

  “London ho!” called a man from the front, taking my thoughts from the King to his city.

  We were not to ride into London itself, but about it, for Lambeth was a little upstream from the main city, but from where we stood, I could see it; a sprawling, disorganised swell of streets and buildings swarming about the flowing river.

  The first sight of London was magnificent, marred only by the overwhelming stench. It was not as though the smell was all bad, there were scents upon scents riding the air, but it was powerful, as though I had ridden into an invisible wall. There was the river, fishy and rank, the scent of bakehouses, crisping bread and meat baking in crusty pies. There was blood, an iron tang on the cold wind, rising from yards where animals were slaughtered. There was the faint whiff of tanning and dog shit, one of the principal ingredients of that smelly art.

  The skyline was crowded with the spires of churches, and below, the towers of palaces and castles of the King. Far below all of these were the houses of nobles, then the squat dwellings of common people, crowded brick and wood shoulders crushed together, jostling for space. Slate and tiled roofs winked in the sunlight. I noted the absence of thatch, which was common in the country, and was told it was a fire risk in crowded London. Many houses had two or three levels, and most overhung the road. “Where people cannot build up, they build out,” said Kat with a smile. “But it makes the streets dark, even in day.”

  Highest of all was the spire of St Paul’s, the tallest in Europe, I was told, standing almost five hundred feet high, seeking to touch the hand of God. “It has been struck many times by lightening,” Joan said. “Some say it is God reaching down, to touch us with His grace.”

  Warily did I watch the spire after that. If lightening was God trying to touch His people, I would have thought He was not overly pleased with us.

  Outside Saint Paul’s was an open-air pulpit where crowds gathered to hear sermons. The surrounding streets were narrow, teeming with people, carts and animals and everywhere was the sound of church bells ringing in the frostbitten air.

  The city wall was ancient. It ran about the east of the city, standing over twenty foot high, wrapping about three sides of London, with four great gates; Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate. Two more gates stood as it roamed to the river at Newgate and Ludgate.

  The Tower of London, more a mass of towers running along a huge wall circling the central White Tower than one simple tower, shone brilliant, white and glaring in the dun sunshine. Joan told me there were many animals kept there as well as traitors. Presents sent by foreign kings, like bears, lions and wolves ended up in the Tower and the people of London could go to see them, paying a few coins to stare through iron bars at these beasts.

  The river was a mass of grey-blue-green water. Hosts of white swans floated on it like lily petals on a pond, along with hundreds of boats, some carrying timber or food into the city from ports outside London, some ferrying passengers from one side of the river to the other.

  “The streets are packed. It is quicker and safer to go by water, for thieves and vagabonds lurk in London’s alleyways,” Joan said.

  The bravest boatmen would try their luck under the arches of London Bridge, where fast-flowing weirs made the waters risky. The bridge was the only one in the city, linking it to the south bank. Nineteen arches bounded across the water with shops and houses piled on top of it, and on top of each other. It was an astonishing mess of chaotic magnificence which looked like it might tumble down at any moment. No one used London Bridge to cross to the south bank, Joan told me. It was slow going, walking or riding across the bridge, for there were so many people. It was one long market, where people went to shop and trade gossip.

  I could see people; bright coats and gowns bustling alongside ones of black and brown, men driving carts waving whips at people to get them out of the way. There were markets where stalls were set up, thick with wandering maids carrying heavy baskets, and men staggered from inns either in a state of unsteadily, wandering embrace with one another, or about to fight. There were constables to protect the city, but their two hundred and forty were no match for the legions of thieves, bawds, beggars and cutpurses roaming the streets. Men walked with a hand on their swords, or on a dagger if of commoner blood, and women were wary, travelling in packs if they could, or with servants if rich. Here and there I could see stocks and pillories, or blocks where women accused of fornication and men of cheating customers would be whipped. They were easy to spot, for they stood in crowded areas, on little scaffolds, so those held for punishment could be jeered at and degraded. It was the way of things. Those who did evil, and were caught, deserved their fate and were punished hard so they would not do it again. Some said women accused of adultery should suffer the punishment of death, as they had in the times of Christ.

  Treason, the worst sin of all, was met by death. At the end of London Bridge, I could make out heads on poles.

  The area of Lambeth itself was stuffed full of grand residences. Wealthy merchants and nobles also lived in the midst of the city alongside commoners, albeit with better houses boasting huge grounds and parks. We rode along gravelled roads, past immaculate gardens, orchards thick with trees and houses whose white fronts shimmered in the dying light of day. As we reached the centre of Lambeth where the most illustrious houses were, the streets became paved. “Only the best roads have cobbles,” said Kat. “It is the same in London. Main roads are paved, the rest are grit.”

  When we reached Norfolk House, I was amazed. I had thought Chesworth large. It was a dwarf to the giant that was Norfolk House.

  The house had a daunting gateway that led into a paved courtyard. There was a long gallery, much bigger than Chesworth’s, and the great hall opened to beautiful gardens
at the rear of the building.

  Westminster, which could be seen from my grandmother’s windows, was across the water, a city within a city. Houses and the old palace clustered about the abbey church which had a sanctuary for those in need. Whitehall, the King’s palace, was also opposite, a flowing site of twenty-three acres with gardens on the east side of the palace, and lodgings, cockpits, tennis courts and a sprawling tiltyard to the west. It was huge, some two thousand rooms, I was told, and furnished even more splendidly than Norfolk House, although such a thing I could barely imagine.

  Norfolk House was stunning. Great, wide chambers where dark oak panels were concealed by tapestry and painted cloth spilled into long corridors lit by candles and oil lamps, glowing amber and bronze. Clocks ticked on walls, portraits of my ancestors stared down with unseeing eyes and galleries held glimmering plate of pewter, gold and silver. There was little furniture, of course, like most houses, but in my grandmother’s rooms were masses of cushions set about ornate hearths, ready for us to gossip upon. There were beds of almost ridiculous size in the best rooms, hung with thick, embroidered cloth bearing the Howard lion and our mottos. Stools and trestle tables stood at the edges of the great hall, as though waiting to be taken out to dance, and in my grandmother and uncle’s rooms there were writing desks inlaid with mother-of-pearl that shimmered when light fell upon them.