by V L Perry
One called out to us as we passed, though I could not tell her age or the shape of her body under the scarves, belts, beads, cowrie shells and glittering chains that wrapped around her head and crossed over her breasts: “Something you want, good gentlewomen. I have it.”
“What do you have that we could want?” Jane Seymour never lacked courage. Good sense was another matter.
The gypsy woman smiled, her eyes crinkled up at the corners like a fisherman’s net; she must have been older than her voice betrayed. The dog at her side looked up at us mistrustfully and slunk behind her skirts. She turned for a moment to spit brown juice out of the side of her mouth, narrowly missing the dog, then held out a vial. “A love potion, kind lady. Take it, and any man you wish for shall be yours.”
“Jane,” I hissed when it became apparent she was not going to keep walking. And I realized that this was what she’d been seeking all along.
She stepped over and held out a halfpenny on her narrow white palm. “Tell my fortune, then.”
The woman took the coin and held Jane’s hand in her cracked brown ones, turning it this way and that. What she saw made her squint, then frown, then a grin split her mouth wide, turning to witchlike laughter. Her few teeth looked like roasted chestnuts; her breath was like compost.
The first curfew trumpet sounded, far away. We had to leave, else we’d be shut out of the gate by dark.
Still cackling, the woman placed Jane’s penny back into her hand and spat on it
That was the first day of the last week of the world.
Tuesday was quiet.
On Wednesday, Queen Katharine of Aragon was formally declared the Dowager Princess of Wales. Just like that.
The Lady dressed in purple on Thursday – a puzzling choice. The priests wore purple vestments on that day, yet the king also wore a slashed purple doublet, the color of royalty. As always, she let those around her whisper about its meaning, and smiled to herself. Her kirtle and overskirt billowed freely, trailing behind her like a wake in a stream.
On the Good Friday morning in the Year of Our Lord 1533, I opened my eyes. The world was still in place. Would the sun topple out of the sky as it reached its zenith? Or would it simply sink below the horizon as it did every night, never to rise again?
“Get up,” Jane nudged me.
The day crawled by, bright and mild, beckoning to us. Or so it looked through the cracks between the curtains. The casements in her outer apartments were hung with dark green cloth, in keeping with the Tenebrae, the darkening of the churches: all candles were extinguished, all vestments were black. Yesterday’s bread and a cup of flat ale for breakfast, then a long day of fasting and prayer, with the Adoration of the Cross at noon.
Cranmer—Archbishop Cranmer now-- unveiled the crucifix before the altar. He must be wearing Warham’s old vestments, as there had not been time to measure him for new ones. They dangled a few inches above his ankles. He and the bishops each crawled on their knees, one by one, to kiss the feet of the crucifix figure.
The rest followed. The Lady, as Marchioness of Pembroke, took her place among the peers. Jane and I stayed in the back of the abbey with the rest, and kissed the crosses the priests brought to us.
The king followed last of all. He was barefoot and without a hat, looking more naked than I had imagined he could; somehow he seemed more a man on all fours with his hair hanging down. His feet were surprisingly delicate-looking; I wondered if they were cold. The stones must be hard on his knees, and chilly even on this mild day.
Later that day I was closer to him than I had ever been, when we gathered in the Lady’s apartments after the last candle was extinguished and the crucifix had been ritually sealed in its sepulcher. Three o’clock was the ancient ninth hour, when Christ died. We spent that hour in utter silence, shrouded in dimness. But a little before four o’clock, Mistress Gainsford had come with news that Holbein was waiting in the long chamber adjacent.
“Very good,” the Lady said, and her excitement was high; she was as spirited as a colt all that spring. “We will go to meet him there.”
Things grew more mysterious when Cranmer, Cromwell, Holbein, and many of the king’s household men arrived in turn with great ceremony. Chapuys was there, of course, his thin dark face ever with its ferreting look, as well as Dinteville; de Selve had been called back to Venice. It was more crowded than the Advent banquet, and far odder, for the hush of voices did not rise above a murmur. Yet there was a festive air; what was going on?
Last to arrive was the king himself. He seemed to fill the space, as tall and broad as the room. Even without his jewels and velvets, clad in a rough-woven shirt, he was magnificent.
The Lady presided formally over the occasion, as she loved to do. All the furniture and chests had been cleared away; only a single cushioned easel was set up on the floor, on which sat a wide rectangular object, taller than a man, draped with a green cloth.
She stood beside the king, and even though it was as solemn an occasion as a Christian could imagine, and even though the company assembled gave all appearances of a formal state occasion, and though they tried to hide it in her voluminous skirts, their hands were firmly clasped. You wouldn’t have been able to tell unless you were standing directly behind them. Every so often one of them gave the other’s hand a little squeeze or shake. Whatever the future held, they awaited it eagerly, like children. That is how I prefer to remember them, even now.
At Holbein’s nod, two of the yeomen pulled back the cloth, and the painter announced, “Behold the moment before you, made through the grace of Our Lord!”
It was a painting. Of course we’d guessed that, but the painting itself was not a religious scene, or a portrait of the king or the Lady, as I’d expected. Instead the living countenances of de Dinteville and de Selve looked out beyond us, staid and rigid.
I looked. We all looked, for a long breathless moment.
Behind the men hung a green cloth, and they stood before a table as though waiting for an audience. The chamber they stood in was like to this one; I recognized the green curtain and the table. Yet the floor was different, all circles and angles that formed a weird pattern. It hurt my eyes to look at it, so I moved them up to the men’s faces.
It was like them, but not. As Holbein had captured them, they seemed somehow taller, yet shrunk. I had never seen de Dinteville stand so casually, one arm leaning on the carpeted table behind him. One of his legs was thrust forward, seeming to fill the space. There was so much familiar and yet strange about the scene that my eyes kept roaming over it and over it, as if afraid to settle on one spot. I saw things that should have been comforting yet filled me with a nameless dread:
The crucifix in the upper left of the painting, above de Dinteville’s shoulder, nearly hidden by the green cloth.
The broken string on the lute between them; what did it mean?
The globe on the table to de Dinteville’s left: it was Kratzer’s. So were the dial and cylinder, and several other instruments that had been missing for weeks; here they were, restored in paint. I recognized an astrolabe, and a sextant.
The book open to de Selve’s right was the same volume I’d seen resting on Kratzer’s table many times, but only now did I realize it was a hymnal. In German.
It was merely a portrait of two men I’d seen on a handful of occasions – nothing mysterious, yet it was wonderful and terrible. I could not describe it then, even to myself, on that Good Friday at the end of the world, and cannot now. But the scene painted on those oak panels was an impossible imitation of the men we knew and the chamber we stood in; it copied the things, the men, the placement of the room and the light, but the same things could not possibly look like that in life. I did not know why.
Until Jane spoke. “It’s a skull,” she said, almost to herself.
Stretched across the lower portion of the scene was a dark-white streak, a skull flattened and distorted; it was still possible to make out the hollows of the nose and eyes, and its brow
seemed to frown, making its grin more terrible.
Was it a reminder that all things must die, an allegory of learning, an exhortation to make the most of the time we had, a prophecy of the future, a celebration of rebirth and a new age of glory? Why would the king permit a portrait celebrating Dinteville, who opposed his marriage to the Lady? Was it an allegory of forgiveness, of changing times? Or a warning to those who would not change?
The painting was full of things I did not understand, and never would. Something I could never touch, a world I could never enter, though I stood in the same room and the same moment in time, captured forever. Even now the minutes were going forward, one after another, until this place and moment would be gone, part of the past. As soon as we moved, the spell would be broken. It happened so quickly. It happened to us all. I did not know why I should want to weep.
For the first time since Kratzer had gone, I wished he was there to tell me.
On Saturday morning we processed behind the Lady to Mass in her closet at Westminster. She wore Katharine of Aragon’s jewels, as she had on the trip to Calais. And her cloth-of-gold gown was girded below the waist with a silver chain, so that all might see the swollen belly she thrust proudly forward.
Guesses and rumors were not the same as being confronted with the sight itself. But to see their faces, plenty of others had not known at all, or not wanted to believe; Chapuys looked green as an early apple. It was hard not to feel sorry for the little Spaniard, he looked so ready to choke.
Mary Howard carried the Lady’s train, and all sixty of us followed behind – her entire household, great ladies and ladies of the privy chamber and maids of honor. Jane and I were near the very back, two faces among many, easily overlooked.
But she was the Lady no longer; I must think of her as queen now. Naming a thing made it so. I did not like the word. It sounded too much like quean, the word for the common trollops who worked the docks, and many a wit in those days thought himself clever for punning on it. Words can be trusted even less than people.
Easter came and went, like any other Easter, except that the world had changed forever. But at least it was still here. If Lady Rochford was disappointed, she gave no sign of it, joining in the evening’s revelry as gaily as a girl.
That night the moon was three-quarters full, clouded by a golden haze. I imagined it thus during the pagan festivals of a thousand years ago. The moon had once been a goddess, I thought as I stood in the privy garden--the light by which primitives searched for reason and comfort against the mad world. It pulled the tides of the ocean, and the strange tides that ran in the blood on nights such as this.
There was a rustling behind me, and Jane stepped up, also looking at the moon. She had on a cloak, and the night was bright enough that her skin seemed to glow against the dark wool.
“Jane,” I said by way of greeting, “do you think the future is ours to do with as we please? Or are we set only on paths of God’s design?”
She did not hesitate. “If that’s what Master Kratzer’s teaching you, you’d do just as well to stay in the queen’s apartments and listen to what goes back and forth there.
“I know who you’re waiting for,” she added, “and I won’t stay. I wanted to wish you a happy Easter.” She went along the path toward the queen’s apartments, where the shadows danced against the brightly-lit windows; ghosts of music and laughter occasionally swept over to me.
“Jane,” I called, though I tried to keep my voice low, “you do not approve of all this?” For a moment she turned, but did not answer. I can still see her standing here, only her
face and hands lit white against the blackness, the pear branches swaying above her in the breeze. Sometimes I see her there in my dreams. “God has given her a chance,” she said at last. “And so shall I.”
What was there to do after a rebirth? Scripture said little about what happened after Christ’s return, what the Marys Since He had not seen fit to give instructions, there was nothing to do but keep on living, in this strange new world in which a simple courtier’s daughter was now queen.
There was the coronation to prepare for, of course. On Whitsun, just as Kratzer had forecast. It was to be a splendid affair, lasting for days. The king emptied the treasury, paid for gowns and jewels and barges, arranged a great feast, and ordered every peer of the realm to attend. Normally kings did not have to order this.
Jane and I were not to be among the party. Places in the procession were highly coveted, jealously guarded, and only ladies of great rank would have the honor of readying her, carrying her train, or holding her napkin at the banquet afterwards.
The Thursday before Whitsun, the day the queen was to process to the Tower to take up residence there according to custom, Lady Exeter and her husband were both suddenly too ill to attend. Norfolk had left for urgent business on the continent. The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk—the king’s brother-in-law and his own sister--did not bother to offer any excuse for their absence. Lady Rochford, Lady Wingfield, and Lady Zouche rushed about, finishing the household’s packing, taking orders from my uncle and Lord Burgh. Meg and Mary Howard had spent the morning dressing her and getting her makeup just right: for if she was to be seen by thousands of people, she must look the part. Yet she was short-tempered and dismissed them after Meg tried to redraw the kohl around her eyes yet again; perhaps the anxiety of the days ahead upset her humors.
That was how I came to be brushing her hair, alone for a few moments in her privy chamber. “It will soothe me,” she said, motioning me to shut the door as I came in.
Meg and Mary had already arranged her hair loose, and tied the sides discreetly with thread to keep it from blowing into her eyes; I untied them and drew the ivory-backed hairbrush through the silky hair. She closed her eyes like a cat being stroked.
I’d expected her to look happy, triumphant. Instead she looked tired. The white lead ceruse did little to hide the dark circles under her eyes, or the strain already showing around her mouth. The riding, walking, standing and kneeling she would have to do in heavy robes on a warm summer day would be an ordeal for any woman, even one not six months pregnant.
I brushed and brushed, and we both fell into a kind of spell. In truth, there was something otherworldly about the whole thing: today was unlike any other day in English history, one that would shake the world, and in some way we knew it. Yet it felt like an ordinary day. Just a woman brushing another woman’s hair in an oak-panelled room, a single narrow window admitting May-morning light and air.
The fact was that very few Queens of England had been English. The Royal Book laid down all sorts of provisions for welcoming foreign princesses to the city for their marriage – though none for commoners. Few queens, too, had been crowned and anointed in their own right. Kings married them for their dowries and for the alliances they sealed; beauty, age, and temperament did not enter into the negotiations. Few queens expected their marriages to be happy. Fruitful, yes, but not happy.
When kings married a commoner, the very commoners who should have rejoiced so much at the elevation of one of their own instead felt betrayed. The king’s own grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville, had ensnared Edward IV through witchcraft. They said too that King Henry VIII much resembled his grandfather Edward, both in body and spirit.
Elizabeth Woodville had also been haughty to her enemies, her friends, and her allies alike. But she had filled the royal nurseries with princes and princesses, and from then on her position was firm as the coronation stone itself. The queen had her work cut out for her, but the swelling body beneath her coronation robes would assure people that God smiled upon this marriage from the beginning.
“You’ve been brushing ever slower for the past five minutes,” she said, breaking my reverie. “Whatever can you be thinking of?”
I could not think what else to answer. “Of Elizabeth Woodville, my lady.”
To my relief she laughed. “Elizabeth Woodville! Do I remind you so much of her? She was fair, with golden hair and em
erald eyes, at least in portraits, and I am dark enough to be called the `night crow,’ as Wolsey called me.” She rested her hands on her velvet-covered stomach, her fingers long and white against the crimson. “The king’s grandfather married her for love, in secret. It runs in the family, you see. And many hated her but could not touch her.” Her forehead creased. “Today I will begin to woo them as the king wooed me. It may take time—not as much time, pray God!—but soon I will have help from my son.” She sat back and I lifted the coronet of seed pearls onto her shining dark head, fastening it there with pins that would not show.
Her great dark eyes were shining as if with belladonna. Strange that, at that moment, decked out for the first time as a queen, I saw her completely as a woman, one who hungered to be loved. All the insults, the slander, the accusations cut her more than she had shown. It will change soon, she’d told herself, and soon had dragged on for years. When I am queen, I will win them. Today was the beginning.
I remembered something else about Elizabeth Woodville: while her husband lived, she had reigned supreme. But as soon as he was dead at forty, her family’s Protectorship had been usurped by Richard III, her marriage declared invalid and her children bastards. She’d been forced to flee to sanctuary, seen both her sons murdered and the crown pass to the rival house of Lancaster. Fortune is a wheel.
“It’s in God’s hands, my lady,” I said.
“Amen to that.”
The yeomen guards in the outer chamber announced Viscount Rochford, and he all but pushed me out of the way as I left. I never liked the queen’s father, a dry, sour man who wore his richest furred doublet on a day like today; he’d sweat himself sick by afternoon. He seldom came to her apartments. From their raised voices carrying through the oak door, I gathered she did not like him well either.