I was appalled. The Queen of England! How dare she appear almost naked in public, dressed as a harlot and an evil queen? Jezebel was wicked, a symbol of wickedness, and an enemy of the Lord. I watched carefully as Elijah harangued her, pointing his fingers sanctimoniously at a mock Torah. Behind them came a pudgy, greasy-haired King Ahab, licking his fingers and giggling. Who were her accomplices? The onlookers laughed and cheered them on, clearly delighting in the sacrilegious display.
No one took notice of my elaborate costume, even with the camel trailing behind. No, they were too enthralled with Jezebel.
A Cleopatra entered the hall, with snakes coiling around her belly. They cosied up to her and slithered into the private reaches of her costume. A drunken Mark Antony followed, and then Julius Caesar, falling down regularly in fits. Foam spouted out of his mouth (replenished from a container of whipped egg whites he carried). The crowd cried, “Fall, mighty Caesar!” Every ten feet he obliged.
Troilus and Cressida made the next entrance. They hung upon each other, these lovers of ancient Troy, kissing and caressing. Then a large company of oiled athletes grabbed hold of Cressida and, before Troilus’s weeping eyes, pulled up her skirt and made sport of her, fingering her private parts, whilst she swooned in ecstasy and jerked spasmodically in mock fulfilment.
What had become of the gentle, knightly disguises of my past? Was this what Twelfth Night had turned into? I looked round. A few old-timers were decked out in the beautiful, intricate costumes I had expected, whilst all around them rioted obscene youth.
The Abbot of Misrule appeared on the dais, to a great gasp. He was a human-sized private part, complete even to a ring of circumcision. Around his feet sprouted black wires, to mimic pubic hairs, which shook and swayed. The organ itself stood upright, turgid and blushing. The Abbot wiggled back and forth to command attention.
“D to ughter. “I stand before you, at your service.” Screams of laughter. “Some of you have seen me often. To others I am as yet unknown.” He bowed toward the “nuns.” “Or perhaps not so?” More laughter. “Now you are all agreed to do exactly as I command you. I desire, therefore, that everyone with a bodypart like my own gather at the far end of the Hall. Those who are cloven between the legs, stay here.”
Eager to see what he had in mind, the entire company rushed to obey. I was pushed along in the company of men, so that I lost my camel. But what matter? My costume, my entire idea, was passé. No one cared about the Wise Men, or their camels.
Game after game followed, under the direction of the Abbot. Obscene, silly games. When the youngsters tired of them (for obscenity runs its course, like any other novelty), they were ready to dance.
The dancing would begin with the basse dance, a stately, slow entrance step designed to show off elaborate costumes and set a tone of solemnity. Set in the midst of this rowdy, bawdy evening, it seemed out of place. But perhaps it would help turn the mood, let me recapture the ambiance wherein I felt most at home. I looked round at the glittering company, all animal-masked and yet half naked. Somehow it made me shiver.
“And so we dance, to bring the days of Christmas to a close. Each man choose a partner, for reasons of his heart,” said the Abbot. He sounded weary.
Until now I had refused to speak to Catherine, because I was so offended by her costume. Now I said, “I, the wise astrologer, the magus, would fain dance with ... Jezebel.”
From the midst of the company, Jezebel came slowly and insolently forward and took her place by my side.
As the rest of the men took partners, I allowed myself to gaze at Catherine, in all her wanton disguise. I drowned in the sight of her: her waves of thick auburn hair, her ivory-skinned body, her voluptuous belly, indented like an hourglass.
“We are citizens of the East,” I bowed. “It is fitting that we should keep company.” Silent, she inclined her head. I took her jewelled fingers. It was the first time in days I had touched her, and it sent pulsations through me.
Behind the Abbot of Misrule the partners lined up, like a great snake. At last everyone was paired off, and the creature began to move, undulating slowly forward to the coaxing notes of flute and shawm. I felt the hairs prickling on my neck at the ancient, commanding music, and at the sexual nearness of this creature by my side. This creature, who was also my wife. But never truly mine, never mine, I always sensed ... and so it heightened the leaping desire in me.
“Jezebel was evil,” I whispered. But it was only words; I did not care that she was evil. She beguiled me. (Or was it merely desire for the moist ecstasy that lay beneath her gauzy skirt? To this day I do not know.)
“She had a fool for a husband,” whispered the creature. She made it all sound excusable. “Ahab was so intimidated by the prophets. As More and the Pope tried to intimidate you. Thanks be to God I have not such a womanish husband.” She squirmed toward me for a kiss, and as she turned, a gap appeared in her costume’s belly-band, and I could see the red hairs guarding her secret places. 0 God! It triggered my blood, and I felt myself stirring. Had she twisted that way before? Had others seen? Seen what only I was privileged to pofont size="3">The tempo livened.
A double bransle. Good. Now I would show myself. About a third of the company left the dancing, knowing they could not compete.
“Play on,” whined the Phallus-Abbot. He tilted somewhat. Was he wilting ? As if he could read our thoughts, he bent over. “The end draws nigh,” he rasped. Then he sought a chair and slumped into it.
The double bransle was a middling sort of dance. It required a knowledge of steps, but did not demand a great deal of rigour. Catherine and I executed it neatly. But she did not speak during all the dances, keeping a mysterious silence. At length there were only the exhibition dances left, at which I intended to perform. Always in the past, this had been the grand culmination of the evening, the performance the entire company yearned for. But now I sensed that it was an indulgence, not a desired offering. It was something the people allowed the monarch to perform, humouring him, not something they truly relished.
I danced perfectly, keeping pace with the music, the increasing intricacy. One by one the others faded back, leaving only me. I commanded the stage as I had done before, as I always had done, or believed I had done. My timing was perfect; there was no fault in my performance. I landed precisely as I should, and stood rigid, my arms outstretched. Applause, as manners dictated, filled my ears. As I stood, slippers clinging to my perfectly positioned feet (and no wetness within), I heard the clock tolling midnight.
“Christmas—Christmas departs,” mourned the Phallus. “Our costumes we must lay by, our everyday lives take up.” He bowed, shuddered, swayed. “We must unmask.” He ripped off his head-covering, that impudent, rounded protuberance. It was Tom Seymour. The company gasped.
The pox-infested Francis I removed his mask. Bishop Gardiner!
When my turn came, I peeled off my own silver visor carefully. “I, Balthazar, King of the East, happily existed for one evening amongst you. Now I am consigned to darkness again, to await another resurrection.” People clapped and pretended to be surprised. “There is yet another gift and surprise to be revealed,” I announced. “It is this.” I held aloft a velvet-lined box, wherein nestled a golden coin, minted but a fortnight past. “A gold sovereign, in honour of my beloved Queen, Catherine. On this side is her likeness. On the other, the seal of England, with her own motto, the motto I have bestowed upon her: Rutilans Rosa Sine Spina. The Rose Without a Thorn.”
Now true silence fell upon the company. To mint a special issue of coin, in honour of one’s bride ... such a token of love robbed them of speech. As it robbed Catherine.
“0 Your Majesty—” she began, then her words died.
I encircled her waist. “Unmask,” I commanded.
Stiffly, she obeyed. She peeled the mask from her eyes, said softly, “I disguise myself as what I am not—a Jezebel.” She stretched out trembling fingers to grasp the coin of honour. “Thank you,” she whispered.
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It took over two hours for all to unmask, and after the first few moments it grew tedious. But it was an integral part of the ceremony, and I would not cheat anyone of it. I stood, as if I thirsted to know every identity, and laughed as lou#8212;God, how they wandered. Cromwell ...
“The Lutheran revolt goes on,” he said. “All the Low Countries and half of Germany have been seduced. The other half of the Empire fights back, like a man taken with plague. The heretical outbreaks are the black pustules which weaken and drain the entire system. Spain is the patient’s mouth, wherein the medicine—orthodox Catholicism—is poured in full-strength to combat it. Alas, all it does is burn the mouth—as the Inquisition is blistering Spain—without ever touching the buboes themselves.”
“My, my. Such poetic analogies. I now understand where your son gets his wild conceits and fantastical metaphors. And to think I thought you merely a tough and literal-minded soldier. But what of the Scots? You have fought them; you know them best of anyone. What news from our spies there?”
“The North mocks you,” he said plainly. “They are a nest of traitors you must needs clean out again and again.” His eyes danced. He loved killing Scots, riding over the River Tweed and burning their simple homes and terrorizing them. “But they have no truck with the Emperor,” he had to admit. “They are not at the moment in league with any of Your Majesty’s enemies.”
“May I speak?” young Lord Clinton, all bursting with power and prowess, asked politely. I gave him leave. He stood slowly, and as he rose, his physical presence dominated the table—except where it met my own presence. There it stuck.
“I am Lincolnshire born and bred,” he said. “A Northman of the realm. You know not, any of you, what it is to be a Northman. We live and take our selfhood from the moors, the wild mountains, far from London and courtish ways. We are conservative, it is said. Those on the frontiers are always conservative. They believe in werewolves and saints. There are no half-measures about them. Percy of the North—Northumberland, to be correct—was called Hotspur. We are either hot or cold, and our loyalties outlast our lives. We believe—”
“What is it, Clinton?” I cut off his inferior poetical ramblings. “Is there something I need g at the floor. I wanted to be alone; I did not want to be alone. There was only one person for such a mood—Will.
“You have sent for me?”
I scarce was able to look up. “Yes. I need you.” I had never spoken those words before to any man.
“I am here. What troubles you?”
I told him, then. How death had me and those I loved by the throat. How I felt his very fingers on my windpipe, until I scarce could breathe. I named those he had already claimed, and those he was even now in the process of possessing.
“I feel him, too,” admitted Will. “Of late I have had to note that there is something chronically wrong with my body. I never have the whole functioning of it any longer. There is always something I must favour, some part I am waiting to have healed. It is disheartening. We are not what once we were. But that is not a signal that death is at hand. Merely that we are being granted a long life. Deaths of those we love en route are also signs we are being spared. Philosophers who discuss the possibility of long life always say that old people long to die, because they are so lonely, having outlived everyone they have had links with. Why is that? Why are they lonely? There are as many people about as in their youth. But the ability to form strong links apparently ceases after a certain age. Affinity arises in youth, and, if we are lucky, endures through to old age.”
I nodded. Brandon. More. My sister Mary. Bessie. Will himself. But Catherine, my sweet Catherine ... her I loved, and that was a new thing. I was still capable of forming bonds. I was not past that stage.
Just as suddenly my unhappy mood was gone, and this melancholy talk annoyed me. I did not think, then, to trace the source of my reactions. I had grieved because Bessie, the love of my youth, was dying, but became indignant when Will suggested that my capacity for loving and being loved was being exhausted. You see, there was the problem of Catherine Howard, and fitting her into all this.
CI
Only a few hours later I lay on the silken sheets of the great royal bed, toying with Catherine. I had drawn the embroidered gold-threaded curtains about us, until we could play at being in a tent on the plains of France. Candlelight leapt up and down in the errant drafts of air seeping under the bed-drapes, but that made it all the more eerie and otherworldly, a playhouse for adults....
Catherine giggled as I touched her throat. I traced its curves and hollows, finding the skin slippery and moist. How was that possible in the dry days of winter?
“For New Year’s I was given a cream from Syria,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “It was compounded of substances we have not here in England.”
From Syria? “Who has been to Syria?” I could not help enquiring. No one traded openly with the Infidels these days.
“Francis Dereham,” she laughed. “He was a pirate in the Irish Sea for a time. Pirates ‘trade’ with everyone.”
I frowned.
“My cousin,” she whispered, tickling my ear with her tongue. “You rsickbed in January; lingered, hacking, through February and March; died in April.
Suddenly it was very important that I talk to someone. I called.
No sound came.
My throat was swollen, blocked up from disuse. I cleared it, rattling all the membranes. Now! I called.
Silence.
I was dumb! God had taken away my speech.
I strained all my muscles. Still, silence.
I was so stunned there was nothing for it but to fall back limply onto the pillows.
It could not be permanent. It must be some laggard part of my healing. When first I had fallen, I could not move my hands. Now I could. This dumbness, too, must fade. It must.
The fire exploded with sparks and hissing. Then it subsided into sighing. Like a woman, I thought.
But what had happened? There had been the morning, getting dressed. Then the seizure, the paralysis, the fall. My nose crunching. I put out a hand and touched my nose. It was heavily bandaged, with two wooden supports down each side. I had broken it, then.
Why had I pitched forward? What malady had seized me? I threw all my will and might behind my throat, and called again. Silence.
I had been struck dumb. Like John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias. Why? God never acted without reason. Zacharias had been struck dumb because he had argued with the angel Gabriel, when the angel came to announce the Good News.
My Scriptures were in their customary place, and I sought them out, turning to the portion about Zacharias.
Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.
And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.
And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God;
And behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in this season.
Had I, too, received a messenger or a sign, and refused to believe?
No. There had been no sign, no message. Of that I was certain. I would welcome a conversation with God, or his angel. All my life I had awaited it. But He had never spoken directly to me.
The door creaked open. Someone was checking on the royal patient. I made gestures for him to come forward. It was a page. I mimicked writing motions.
The lad looked clean frightened out of his skin. Perhaps, after all, they had expected me to die.
Dr. Butts followed, looking grave and curious. He carried his leather pouch, crammed with potions and flasks. He sat down on a footstool bean may own. The seasons. Sleep. Dreams. Memories. Music. Then I thought of specific things about those things. I imagined one leaf on one tree, saw it throug
h its entire life, from its swelling as a bud, to its sticky pale green unfoldings, to its flat, dark, dusty prime in high summer.
As I did this, first with the leaf and then with other things, I entered a sort of trance. I began to talk to God directly, yearning to open everything to Him, because only then could I be united with Him, only then could He reach into whatever was diseased in me and heal it. My speech was wordless, if that is possible for you to understand. I gave myself to God as nakedly as little Edward gave himself up to his nurse every evening, and with the same complete abandon.
I felt an odd bliss, a peaceful ecstasy. My eyes were closed—or were they open? I was not in any worldly place.
My answer came, too, but in wordless form. This palpable sense of peace meant that complete surrender was what God required of me: to continue to give myself to Him without reservation, as I had just done. It would take learning, but those moments would have to come more and more frequently. God would keep me dumb until I had learned to pray with my mind and whole being, rather than just with my lips.
CIII
Whilst I waited to be led further into this rich and baffling relationship with God, my earthly body must needs lie on the fur-warmed couch and endure the wait. It must be beguiled, for earthly hours are long to our earthly clay, even though they pass in a trance for the mystic.
Evening was coming on when Timothy Scarisbrick, a chamber-groom, entered with a tray of food for me. Where was Culpepper, I wondered, open every a woman. “This is a diatonic harp, gut-strung. We use it either alone, in single lines of melody, or else in what we call Cerdd Dant, where we sing poetry in counterpoint to the harp.” He swirled a bit in preparing himself to play.
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