by V L Perry
The king himself was unable to attend, but sent his gentlemen of the privy chamber in his stead. We watched her take the news stoically, holding our breath for a display or temper or tears which did not come. Instead she laughed, high and shrill. It was a sound we were coming to hear more often.
By the end of the week all was prepared, and we gathered in the outer chamber at eight o’clock on Friday morning for the ceremony.
The musicians entered first, each playing as though his instrument should drown out the others. Noise was prized above harmony, for evil spirits must be kept away. Next came the great ladies—Rochford, Wingfield, Berkeley, Exeter, Douglas and Worcester—followed by the Lady herself. As a maid she should have walked with us, but as our mistress she had a status all her own. It was traditionally the bride’s place.
Instead the bride followed her, in a russet gown with a white kirtle that we had spent a day frantically sewing with green and white lovers’ knots. Her plain brown hair was loose down her back, and she was crowned with a wreath of rosemary and bay leaves. According to custom, she was escorted by two bachelors—her bridegroom and Edward Seymour. We followed, scattering more roses, sweet herbs and violets. The gentlemen from the king’s and the Lady’s households made up the rest.
The Lady kissed the bride and stepped back as her chaplain, William Latimer, began the ceremony. The words were the ones we all knew, promising each other to love and cherish in sickness, health, wealth, poverty, and the bride vowing to be buxom in bed. Yet the gold-and-emerald ring—another gift from the Lady—was not sprinkled with holy water before the exchange. After the nuptial mass, Latimer gave a short, Lutheran sermon on the duties of a husband and wife, and ways they might “preserve and stimulate their mutual love.” And the Paternoster was in English.
“A pity Cranmer didn’t preside today,” Nan Cobham murmured to Jane on my other side. “He’d be the perfect one to give the newlyweds some advice.”
“Shhh,” Jane whispered. “Show some respect.” We exchanged a glance, then pretended we hadn’t.
As I watched Ann Gainsford—now Lady Zouche—tossing flowers to the eager crowd of women, the image of Death dancing before the new-married lady flashed across my mind. Then I thrust it away.
The banqueting chamber had been hung with garlands of gilded wheat ears, and the cloth hung behind the raised seats of honor for the bride, the groom and their generous patron. Gifts of pewter cups and plate from Cromwell, embroidered bed hangings, warming pans, candlesticks, satin pillowcases, inlaid caskets, perfumes, herbs, flowers and costly fruits steadily piled up on the table beside them.
Of course the feast was not as grand as it would be for a royal entertainment, but the courses carried round to tables were good, though it was a Friday: fried cod with leeks, salmon baked in sauce, cold pike and sturgeon, eel pie, whelks, shrimps, trout in breadcrumbs with spices, prawn pasties in the shape of flowers and kissing birds, along with white manchet bread, oranges from Italy, and wafers with honeyed wine. The bride-cake was broken and distributed among the guests. Most of the unmarried maids put their pieces away, to place under their pillows that night and bring dreams of future love. There were small cream-and-spice cakes that were supposed to be saved for later, to be sprinkled over the newlywed pair in bed, though Lord Rochford, Norris, Brereton, and Tom Seymour were busy throwing them at one another.
The subtleties in the last course included a sugarplate sculpture of Whitehall palace, and the arms of the Zouche family done in marchpane. The bride’s eyes grew moist when she saw it. More than any other gift or gesture the Lady had made, I think that one touched her the most.
Servers passed cups of wine on gilt trays, and I grabbed one as it went by. It was hypocras, the color of honey, sweet and thick. A rare treat, usually reserved for the king and queen at banquets.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Jane murmured.
I shrugged. “Never worry. Time for you to go and disappear with that servant lad of Cromwell’s, Will What’s-his-name. I’ll bet he’s waiting for you behind an arras somewhere.”
She sighed. “I only told you because I thought you’d want to know. Would you rather have heard it from that Cobham harpy, or one of the others?” Lately her classical references had improved.
“I know,” I said. “Friends are eager to mourn as well as to make merry. Sometimes too eager.”
“I’ll leave you alone, then,” she said, and she did.
There was a masque, something about Cupid and Psyche and Heracles and Diana. I didn’t think that was the way the story was supposed to go, but to tell the truth not much was making sense by that time; the wine bowls were empty as fast as the servers could refill them, and both Cupid and Venus kept giggling and forgetting lines, while chaste Diana found it difficult to keep parts of her costume from falling.
It was only four o’clock when Tom Seymour cried that the couple had better be off to bed, though the sun had already begun its pale orange slant toward the frozen earth.
Meg and I stood close by Lady Zouche to untie her garters, blocking her from the young (and not so young) men who would have done the honors for her. Francis Weston caught one and pinned it to his hat; Brereton pushed the other over his sword hilt and sniggered drunkenly. The procession to Zouche’s apartments—two private rooms lately presented him by the king—was supposed to represent the bride’s unwillingness to go to her husband’s bed, losing slippers, gloves and laces in her struggle along the way. If the guests were drunk enough, as they were now, she was in danger of losing even more.
“Silk is not warm,” giggled Mary Howard. “You’ll have to make sure you don’t freeze somehow, this long winter night.”
We brushed her hair and took the cast-aside garlands and clothing into the other room, where the men had readied George. When we opened the door the crush of people pushed us back inside, for the entire party was supposed to try to crowd into the small bedchamber.
Brereton lifted the sheets and George climbed in, wearing only his shirt, his hose and a wide grin. Tom Seymour smashed a spice-cake on George’s head and rubbed it into his beard. Jane, the best of us at needlework, offered to carry out the tradition of sewing them into the sheets. The sack posset was passed around, and after everyone had drunk the mixture of milk, eggs, sugar, wine and spices, the cup was filled again to the very top and the bride and groom forced to finish it between them.
Latimer gave the final benediction over the bedded couple. Lady Zouche’s gentle, pockmarked face was pink, her eyes lowered. Meg flung the bride’s stocking in the air, and there was a rush among the maids; Madge Shelton caught it, of all people, and no sooner did she wave it in victory than Henry Norris lifted her skirt, saying that he wanted one as well.
“We’ll leave you to your work!” shouted Carew, and the Lady had to chase them all out into the corridor, setting a yeoman to guard the door and shushing her brother and Bryan, who were singing about a tailor’s daughter threading a needle. They would have sung at the closed door all night if she’d not pushed them back toward her apartments, reminding them that there was still more feasting and a long evening of dancing ahead.
The next course of sweetmeats had been laid out when we returned to the Lady’s chambers—suckets and kissing comfits and balls of sugared cinnamon, all to sweeten and spice the senses. There was little left for us to do throughout the long night but fall to satisfying our own sugared pleasures.
Some time later, I was sitting on one of the benches, watching the carved roses and heraldic emblems on the ceiling (which kept moving annoyingly as I tried to count them), when Kratzer was suddenly beside me.
“Hello,” he said.
I could think of nothing to say. Or think why the sight of him made me feel suddenly afraid, as if everything was about to change. “Why do you not dance?”
Had he seen me turn away Weston, Brereton, Poyntz? “I’ve had some wine,” I said.
He chuckled. “To see a wedding, you’d hardly think marriage was a
sacrament.” His words were clear, though loud, and he leaned to one side. Not holding his wine so well tonight.
“Something bothers me about all this.” Kratzer was like a blank page onto which I could pour my thoughts. “It’s an odd time of year for a wedding. They didn’t even post the banns.”
“It’ll be their last chance before Lent, and then half the year is taken up with Advent and fast days…yes, I can see how much more convenient it would be to get rid of them all.”
Tom Seymour was scratching that cinnamon-colored beard in a lazy, sensual way, like a cat grooming. He moved out of my line of vision, and I shifted a little to watch him address a giggling knot of women, Mary Boleyn among them. Like a hawk watching its prey, Jane’s voice taunted in my head.
“Perhaps there will be another wedding to celebrate soon,” Kratzer said, and from his silly grin and the way he leaned ever so slightly to one side I saw he’d had even more to drink than I’d thought. “Little heretic,” he half-whispered, “would it interest you to know that I have been asked to cast a horoscope? To find an auspicious day for a coronation. You could sell that information for enough to buy a new gown for the festivities.”
“I couldn’t win tuppence on that in the Cheapside markets.” A growing sense of danger pushed sluggishly against the wine-haze, though I pushed it back with another swallow from my cup.
“I have cast it,” Kratzer said, “and Whitsun looks promising. And a birth too, sometime after the Assumption of the Virgin. Fitting for the child that will save England from heresy. If the future come at all, of course.”
“What are you saying?” I sat up straight, steadying my head to keep it from falling off. “I thought you claimed no powers of prophecy, Kratzer.”
His face clouded; I had never called him that. “I have eyes to see,” he said. “Look around you; where is your mistress? And the king, do you know he rode from Greenwich this very night here to Whitehall?
It came together like a thunderclap. Her temper, her irregular appetite. The orders she’d given the ladies of the privy chamber not to change the sheets. And her high joyous hours, which I’d mistaken for the determined cheer of the defeated. Yet her moods were ever difficult to predict; she’d pulled herself together in Calais, pressed Jane, Meg and me into masquing with her, received the king of France in state as official English consort, laughed and danced with him for over an hour as though nothing had ever fazed her. Only now I understood how complete her metamorphosis had been, that the woman who returned from Calais was not the same one who’d left.
He took my silence as argument. “Tom Seymour’s a fool,” he spat. He grabbed a winecup from passing tray, none too gracefully; some slopped over the rim. “Look at him—really look. Arrogant and oafish, with nothing to offer a woman but a chance for early widowhood. He’ll end up on the scaffold if he doesn’t learn to guard that stupid tongue of his.”
Tom Seymour was, indeed, talking deep in a corner with Mary Boleyn. If you could call it talking. I could make out only the back of his auburn head, and the look in her slanting, cowlike eyes as she drew him toward her. You couldn’t even hate Mary Boleyn for a thing like that, I thought wearily. It would be like hating the birds for roosting in the trees. It was simply their nature.
I suddenly wished this conversation were not happening, that I were not in the palace of Whitehall in the city of London, that I had never come back to England at all. I cast about for words to drive it away, and the wine-spirits pushed them to my lips:
“And what have you to offer, Master Kratzer? Not much of anything, from what I hear; God allows men to hide their inconvenient mistakes behind stone walls. I’d choose widowhood over a living death such as that.”
He felt the blow, I could tell. Tom Seymour’s roaring, drunken laugh rolled across the room. I was sure he had not heard us, for his attention was nowhere near me. I understood that now.
“Ah.” Kratzer shook his head, his voice weighted with sadness. “Have you never heard Thomas More joke about the astrologer who could not foresee his own wife’s adultery?”
Edward Seymour’s excuse, I thought wearily. There was only one kind of man, and they all ruled the world.
“More’s a cruel bully,” I said. “His own weak flesh is not enough, nor the heretics he burns, but he must hurt his family and friends as well.
“But not as cruel as some.” After awhile I noticed he was no longer beside me. Good. I needed no one.
The next morning the Lady appeared almost madly cheerful. She rang the ladies of the privy chamber awake as the ewers were busy clearing away the debris from last night’s debauch.
Some gentlemen came as early as their wine-sodden heads could rise from bed, to roust the newlyweds out into the hard light of day. They gathered in the presence chamber, restless to proceed; only Brereton and Norris were missing from the rowdy group of the night before.
“They may have gone to be with the king,” Ann Saville said. Perhaps Brereton had left after sporting with her, or perhaps the wine and late evening were not sitting well with her; she had a drawn, nervous look. I was sure I looked no better; my head felt like pounded sand, and my teeth scraped drily against my tongue. If this was wine’s magic, I wanted no more of it.
Nor was Kratzer anywhere to be found; when George went to fetch him, he came back to report that the astronomer’s rooms were empty. The page said he’d gone to his house in Thames Street.
For some reason Kratzer’s absence did not bother me nearly as much as Brereton’s. Brereton should be here, and he was not.
“Well, let them sleep, the lie-abeds,” cried the Lady. “They’ll miss the fun.”
So the procession rapped on the door until George Zouche opened it, his reddish hair and beard tousled from sleep. “Or did you sleep at all, you rascal?” shouted Tom, and everyone piled in to sit on the bed and tease and congratulate. Lady Zouche, wrapped in a dressing gown of green silk, bore it with stolid grace. The Lady ordered them to rise, ready themselves and come to a breakfast in their honor. She was happier that morning that I had ever seen her, or ever saw her again.
For of course, as all now know, it had been her wedding-morning also. A secret ceremony in the cold January predawn, perhaps a hurried wedding night, without her husband by her side to watch the sun come up.
There was no sign that the earth had cracked in two overnight; the heavens had not rumbled in portent, nor the stars dropped from their spheres. But it could not stay so for long.
First there was Candlemas, the Sunday midway between the shortest day of winter and the first day of spring, when it seemed the world had always been and cold and dark and would always be so. The Feast of the Presentation of the Christ Child.
That February day her wild laugh rang out among the bare branches of the orchard at Whitehall. She shrieked to Wyatt, who was talking to Poytz some ways off, of her longing to eat apples, her fearful joy at what it meant. “The king says it means I am with child, though of course I tell him it’s nothing of the sort! After all, how could it be?”
Her breath puffed out in white clouds of steam as she laughed, and those of us walking behind stared. Was she gone mad with frustrated waiting? Women often did so; melancholy made the humors unbalanced. Krazter’s words echoed back to me: A coronation by Whitsun… I had never repeated them to anyone.
“Don’t be fools,” Jane told us, and I could not tell if her voice held admiration or contempt. “She knows exactly what she’s doing.”
Two days before Lent, the king held a Shrovetide banquet where Dinteville, the French ambassador, was the guest of honor. Invitations were limited to her intimate household and the highest peers of the realm, although Norfolk scowled all the way through – the quarrel with Dinteville last summer was still an open wound, and the forced invitation was salt poured in it. The Duke of Suffolk did not attend at all, and the Marchioness of Exeter was compelled to stand beside the Lady with a finger-bowl at the ready, eating nothing herself.
I was not close e
nough to hear the king remark drunkenly to the Duchess of Norfolk about the Lady’s “rich marriage,” her “great dowry” of plate and hangings, but I did not have to. I heard about it soon enough.
When Norfolk demanded later to know if what his wife had told him was true, the Lady laughed in his face. She knew how it infuriated him.
“I will say only this, uncle: if I am not with child by Easter, I shall go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. That will satisfy the Papists, will it not? If you are fortunate, perhaps you will be allowed to escort me personally.”
Norfolk left cursing.
Were they married?
There were the hints from both of them, her waxing and waning appetite, the high skittishness she exhibited, like a mare in foal, and her skirts ever fuller. Only Lady Rochford and Lady Wingfield were permitted to attend her in the privy chamber. Anne Saville would not answer directly when someone asked where she’d gone off to the night of the wedding banquet, though she tossed her head and dropped so many hints about attending to state business that Meg at last angrily bade her hold her tongue.
Meg was hurt, I could tell, not to be included in the secret. If the Lady had indeed had a marriage ceremony, she had chosen witnesses who she knew could not keep counsel for long.
“It’s a sure a sure sign of the end times,” Lady Rochford said. “After one and a half thousand years, Christ will return to wreak His vengeance. This marriage brings the world one step closer to the new Flood.”
“Last time she said it was meant to be fire,” Jane said to me, low. I bit my lip.
On the other hand, Katharine of Aragon still lived, and no announcement of divorce or annulment had been made. Cromwell, newly consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, still ran back and forth to the Continent with letters. The Lady sat beside the king at banquets and went hawking with him; for two hours each night, her bedchamber door was barred and she received no one.