by V L Perry
I spent so much time in the Lady’s rooms that I’d almost forgotten what the rest of a palace outside the royal apartments was like: the piss-soaked rushes in narrow corridors, the greasy smells of cooking and bodies stifled under layers of unwashed linen. There was always some part of every palace being built up or torn down, and you might turn a corner to stumble over a pile of bricks or run into planks leaned against the wall. I kept to the main ways, since a woman alone was a target for any man, drunk or sober, at any hour. The fines for assault were heavy, but that was little comfort. I tried not to look like I was hurrying.
The workmen and stewards did not glance long at me as I passed. One gentlemen in a sapphire-colored doublet doffed his cap, however, with a too-loud “Good day to you, madam!”
My heart stopped. It was Tom Seymour.
He kissed me heartily on the mouth--the standard greeting at court, though Tom always did it with gusto, the way he did everything. There was wine on his lips, though it wasn’t two o’clock yet. I did not look behind me as he strolled away. Would he tell Jane he’d seen me? I seldom saw them together, but perhaps he would hold his tongue. Or, more likely, forget.
When I arrived at Kratzer’s door, a boy took the note and invited me to sit in the sunny windowseat in the outer chamber while I waited. Instead, once I was alone I walked round the table, examining the papers and instruments scattered across it.
There were squares and circles with symbols drawn within them, and an etched wooden box that had ten sides. Strange instruments hung on the cheese-colored walls: a thing that looked like half a pair of scissors, a wooden frame with a screw driven through it. I turned my head this way and that, trying to make sense of the drawings which lay over one another so that none was completely visible. The writing on them was so small and cramped that I couldn’t even tell if they were numbers or letters.
Voices came through the paneled door between the two rooms; one a man’s the other a young child’s. What would Kratzer be discussing so intently with the pageboy?
Another paper, clearly a letter, lay half-underneath the drawings. I could make out only a few words near the top: Invent an excuse as far from the truth as possible.
I dared not touch anything.
The door opened and the astronomer came out, guiding before him a boy of about seven, with sand-colored hair and dark eyes. If Kratzer was surprised to see me there, he gave no sign of it, nodding politely. The boy’s shining eyes stayed fixed on the astronomer’s face with an expression of worship.
The page admitted a woman, somewhere between old and no-longer-young; graying wisps of hair were escaping her pointed white cap. She curtsied low before Kratzer as the boy went to her side. Though she squinted a bit, the boy’s resemblance to her was unmistakable.
“Ah, Lady Dee,” he greeted her. “An excellent lesson today. Young Master John makes good progress. Next time he will be instructing me.”
If this was how Kratzer greeted his mistress, it certainly lacked passion. She twisted her hands, searching for a place to rest her eyes while she addressed him again. “Thank you, sir.” Her voice was squinty to match her looks. “Shall I bring him round again this week?”
“I’ve left a few hours free on Friday morning. We can begin at eight.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to leave, still holding the boy’s hand. At the door she turned. “If only you knew how grateful we are, sir, and how much…”
“Not at all, Lady Dee,” he replied, so smoothly that he did not seem to have interrupted her. “It is a pleasure to have a so fine pupil. Bring him back as often as you can.”
He held his pleasant smile as they left, then turned it on me. “I hope you do not come to check on the progress of my poor designs. I’m afraid you will be disappointed.”
I’d forgotten to pretend to be absorbed in the table’s clutter; looking down, I discovered that my hands were planted on either side of a sheet of parchment covered with symbols and shapes and drawings of what looked like boat oars. Underneath it lay the letter I’d been trying to read.
“What is this?” I blurted, indicating the drawing.
“My design for an astrolabe,” he answered, settling himself in one of the low-backed chairs. He motioned me to do the same, though he did not bother to explain what an astrolabe might be. The silence threatened to stretch to an uncomfortable length. I hoped he did not remember how abruptly I’d walked away from him at the Advent banquet; he’d given no sign of remembering me at all.
“That was Sir Rowland Dee’s widow,” he continued. “I knew him slightly in his days as Gentleman Sewer. The king has not been able to provide as generous a pension to the family as he would like, so I have taken it upon myself to begin his son’s tutoring. I believe my efforts will not cause too much harm. My remarks to Lady Dee were rather understated; the boy is a wonderfully adept mind. In a year or two he will be ready for the chantry school at Chelmsford.”
“I thought you were an astronomer,” I said. I indicated the measuring sticks on the table. “Do you measure the distance to the stars?”
“More of a mathematician,” he replied. “Although my many functions often overlap.” He shuffled among the papers on the table, turned one around for me to see. “This is the design for the great astronomical clock the king has commissioned for Hampton Court.”
His appearance was more fitting to a mathematician, all planes and angles. His eyes were a brilliant shade of green, half-hidden under heavy lids. Certainly he did not resemble the diviners and fortune-tellers one saw wandering wild-eyed and untucked about the countryside. We had more than our share of them in Kent.
“But I imagine you’re not here out of an interest in mathematics,” he said. “Your mistress has sent you to me to study the art of letters. She says you show exceptional ability, and feels your talents should be developed further.”
Then either she had lied, or Kratzer was lying now. “The truth, Master Kratzer, is that I have had little schooling. But I would learn more,” I added hastily. Whatever her purpose for wanting me here, I’d need to stay in his good graces to accomplish it.
He nodded gravely, for all the world like a schoolmaster addressing a roomful of pupils. “Then we can start on Utopia,” he said. “I’ve long been wanting to make a translation. Between your German and my English, we shall see how much harm we may do to it.” So he did remember me after all.
I spent many hours in Master Kratzer’s sunny outer chamber late that winter, watching my breath steam onto the page as I bent over it, my fingers grown numb with chill and cramp.
He gave me Holbein’s ABC to copy from, each letter decorated with figures so small that I had to hold the paper close to see that every one showed Death, a dancing skeleton, in a different situation. The illustration for D, for instance, showed Death riding on the back of a king; underneath, I read: The physician cutteth off a long disease, and he that is to day a king to morrow shall die.
To prophesy the king’s death was treason.
“You should take care, Master Kratzer,” I warned.
“’Tis Scripture,” he replied with a grin. “God’s own word.” Everything was a joke to him.
Before he would teach me to make the sweeping strokes that formed the letters, he made me learn how to prepare a quill by soaking it in water, then plunging the end into a lead box filled with hot sand so it would harden and not shatter. He showed me the different uses of swan, goose and even peacock feathers, the way feathers from the left wing fit into the right hand and vice versa. I learned how to cut and shape a nib to achieve different thicknesses, how to dip the right amount of ink to avoid dripping or running out too soon. On my best day I could make as many as seven letters with each dip of the quill into the inkpot, though he could make a dozen.
There was something almost magical about those little markings that spelled out thoughts on the page. They were so small, yet they could turn the world upside-down, build up cities and lives or tear them apart. Dabbling in magic was alway
s dangerous.
But I could not stop.
I learned the alchemy of the words themselves, the magic of mixing egg white, iron gall, vinegar and alum into a greenish-grey ink that smelt of sulphur. I ran my fingers over thin parchment to feel its fragility, over the vellum’s thick smoothness and the rougher grain on the hair side, the woven roughness of paper that felt like starched linen and broke if you bent it. We had a whole lesson on the different ways each of these soaked up the ink and how to position the wrist to change the pressure of the nib, how to place a cloth beneath the wrist to prevent sweating, and the proper way to sprinkle sand over finished words. I spent one long morning using a dry nib to scrape fresh writing from a piece of vellum, undoing the words, watching them vanish.
“You will make mistakes,” he told me. “You may as well learn first how to correct them.”
He described how he’d learned in the monastery at Mauerbach to prepare the skins-- sheep for parchment, calves for vellum--by scraping and stretching them on a frame, soaking them with lime to remove the hair and using chalk and pumice to smooth and whiten them. The process was expensive and time-consuming, and it was easier to simply buy the materials from the guilds. “Nowadays any fool can write a book, and have it printed by the hundreds, too,” he sighed.
At night I dreamed about the letters uncurling behind my hand as it moved across the parchment. I hadn’t yet done much more than copying the ABC, or scratching bland reports of meals and daily activities for my mother, though I never sent them. These I wrote in Kratzer’s rooms, the only place I could be alone. He was always there, of course, but I took little note of him.
Once, for practice, I wrote Tom Seymour’s name, immediately blotting it so that the ink soaked through the page.
It seemed foolhardy, even dangerous, to put down one’s thoughts where they could easily be discovered. Or later regretted. Yet I longed for the feel of the pen in my hand even when I was embroidering or plucking at the lute.
Jane noticed the ink on my fingers.
“What’s he having you write?” she asked me one day.
“Who?” I said. “Nothing; it was an accident.”
She set her mouth. “Fine.”
They’ll talk as they please, anyway, the Lady’s voice echoed in my head. But Jane never seemed to keep company with the others; she preferred being off on her own. Where she went, and who she might be with, was a subject they others loved to speculate on--like a den of lions, always hungry to feast on someone. I knew they did the same when I was gone.
All the same, I started using some of the writing sand to scrub my fingers in Kratzer’s washbowl before I returned to my duties.
On the twentieth night of January we rose from our beds in maid’s chamber at Hampton Court and pulled on clean white shifts, our breath freezing in clouds. The cold crept uninvited up our legs, caressed our necks and wrists like an unwelcome lover. In the dark, wrapped in cloaks and shawls, it was impossible to tell who was who. Someone in the front of the procession took one candle from the wall sconce and blew the other out.
Through the backstairs room off the Queen’s gallery, down the stairs, out to the Fountain Court and round to the opposite side to the chapel royal, we followed the candle single file, like nuns, but on the opposite mission. Our footsteps shuffled on the stone-flagged floor, though no one even whispered. On St. Agnes’s Eve, a maid must pray alone and speak to no one if she was to dream of her future husband.
The hall outside the chapel antechamber was icy, in spite of the velvet hangings that supposedly blocked draughts. We waited there as, one by one, each one took her turn alone in the chapel for a few minutes. The rest of us shuffled about, too cold to keep still and too cold to move. The guards did no more than glance at us; they knew why we were there. I could feel the frost from the casement-window on my forehead, though my skin did not touch it. Most of the fires were extinguished for the night, the chimneys silhouetted against the star-filled sky. My lips and fingers were numb when I finally knelt alone in one of the pews.
I did not quite know what to do. This was not the same as asking God to send me a proper and pious marriage; this was a silly vanity of merely wanting to know what he would look like, how fine his form and how fat his purse. I wondered if such superstitions bothered God, or if He even bothered to notice them.
Instead I gazed up at the blue and gold ceiling, the carved friezes above the altar that I never had a chance to see when my head was bowed in prayer. It was weirdly pleasant to be in the chapel alone at night; the shadows cast themselves differently when they were not blocked by so many bodies. If I held my breath I could even hear the heat rising from the coals in the braziers.
Almost anything could happen in such a place between midnight and dawn—even an agent of Satan to suddenly step from the shadows behind the altar. Not to frighten or strike a bargain, but just for a chat, theological debate on the nature of good and evil…
I stood up quickly and crossed myself.
My skin broke again into goosebumps the moment I came back out to where the rest of them were gathered. Nan moved sharply away when my skirts brushed hers. We filed in procession back to the maids’ chamber, and settled down right away to the important business of dreaming.
Good St. Agnes, play thy part,
And sent to me my own sweetheart,
And shew me such a happy bliss,
This night of him to have a kiss.
I never could remember any of my dreams. I lay listening to Jane’s even breathing beside me, and wondered what country lad would be revealed to her.
Let me say now that they were not bad women, not most of them. They feared what they did not understand, and so they feared me. But they feared so many other things too, like moonless nights, and the devil, and losing pins, and ugliness, and solitude. They were simple creatures, with simple wants: pretty gowns, a husband who would not be too harsh, a brood of children who would live to grow up.
For each woman in the Lady’s household was descended from the broad, twisting tree of English nobility, and each saw herself as the fruit that dangled temptingly from the last tapering branch, the final product of so many centuries of planting and sowing. But that fruit must not wither on the vine; it must be plucked when ripe, its seeds bursting forth into new life that kept the tree ever spreading, ever flourishing. Their only task was to make more like themselves in the brief season before they perished. Or rather, no--they were flowers, delicate and decorative and useless, who had been sheltered their whole lives in the warm glow of sunshine with no inkling of frost.
It was not their fault that they had absolutely no idea what to make of the weed in their midst.
The season before Lent was called Fasching in Vienna, with the streets full of vendors’ stalls offering roast piglets, honeyed wines and ale on every corner. Masked men and women danced half-naked in pagan costumes: Zeus and Leto, Persephone and Hades, nymphs, satyrs, devils and demigods, their bright festival cloaks hiding all kinds of secrets. Even the moon dulled in comparison to the torchlight mirrored in the river.
Gluttony, lust, vice were longer sins but bodily needs, no more to be regretted than purging. A staggering procession rallied round the Lord of Misrule, draped in motley velvet full of holes, who tossed sugarplums and roared edicts to the crowd. The demon Pantagruel flitted through the streets, pouring salt down the throats of drunkards to heighten their thirst. You could not always tell men from women, for they’d costumed and painted themselves, or dressed in clothing opposite their sex. Once I saw a man naked to the waist holding an infant to his nipple and roaring with laughter as the child tried to suckle. Once I saw an elegantly dressed lady embrace another woman for a passionate kiss, saw them retreat down an alley together. It was in some ways like a holy day; the door between the worlds was not shut quite so tight, and anything could happen.
But here in dreary England the Lenten season was marked only with plays and masques that ran endlessly on the themes of virtue, chastity,
piety. The court was somber as a monastery. I pitied the priests hearing Shrovetide confessions, probably struggling not to fall asleep from boredom.
Even my pleasures were monastic. We were hard at work on More’s Utopia, itself a place run like a monastery. What kind of man would dream of living here? More must be as tyrannical to his own family as he was to the heretics he ordered burned at Smithfield. No wonder Dame Alice fought all his attempts to improve her mind, since his nagging and bullying had driven his first wife to the illness that eventually killed her.
One dark afternoon during Holy Week I was incautious enough to mention this, and for the first time saw Kratzer frown.
“Where have you heard this?” he asked.
It was common gossip among the Lady’s household, where More’s opposition to the king’s Great Matter was a continual thorn in her side. When I’d asked Jane about Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, she had shrugged.
“More? A man who prides himself on reputation above all worldly things, and thinks himself modest for it.” Yet he cared little for the modesty of his daughters, even bringing a gentleman visitor to their bedchamber one morning before they were up and yanking the cover off them. When Margaret and Cecily quickly turned onto their bellies to hide their nakedness, their father only laughed that now the young man could choose which he wanted for his wife, “having seen both sides.”
More’s fascination with nakedness was even here, in Utopia, where betrothed couples looked on each other unclothed in the presence of elderly chaperones—like a buyer inspecting a horse. The man must truly be mad.
“There are few secrets at court, Master Kratzer, as you know,” I replied instead.
“And even less truth, it seems. I myself was a tutor in More’s household, and they are a
good, respectable English family. He is a man as careful of his reputation as of his conscience. It does no good to spread such tales about.”