by V L Perry
Jane and I stayed a moment in the outer chamber, listening to their voices rise shrilly inside; it sounded like a quarrel, though we could not make out words. Meg shooed us out, bidding us find some amusement for ourselves as she shut the great oak door to the apartments behind us.
You know about that day; I need not describe it here. How rich her gown, how elaborate the decorations, how pretty the speeches and poems and pageants…every ambassador in England sent a full report of it back to his master, and of course it is in the great Chronicle. Or perhaps you have only heard it from your granddam, or someone else who was there. Perhaps the records have been destroyed by now; so much from her time is gone, erased as if it never was. She cannot be wiped out completely; however many papers are burnt or wood scoured or windowpanes reset, memories still remain. And Elizabeth, of course.
But that day, and the dazzling coronation that followed it, seemed to blaze across heaven itself. A new era was dawning, an age of rebirth and reform, glorious with promise, bright with anticipation. The birth announcement for the prince was already prepared: what was written would be. And the queen was the subject of every pen and tongue, so solidly real it seemed impossible she could ever be forgotten.
No one missed two maids of honor; there was no place for us in the procession of sixty ladies. Jane and I stayed behind at Greenwich with the lesser household, watching the barges move off down the sun-splashed river. From upstream the sounds of canon fire echoed back to us. But no cheering.
Jane turned away before they were out of sight; I watched until the last waving pennant disappeared. No pen would capture us there beside her. We were alone together, forgotten. And when future generations read of that day, it would be as if we never were.
The two weeks following the queen’s coronation were so full of merrymaking, of games
and dances, eating and drinking at all hours that even my uncle remarked he had never seen so much pastime. Diplomats from all over Europe came to bring her greetings (with the exception of Chapuys, of course) and artists, poets, musicians and scholars converged on her apartments to celebrate her and seek her patronage. Suddenly every poem, every book, every song, every treatise and pamphlet and design and fountain and doorframe must bear her name, her badge, her initials.
The great lords and ladies of the country came to pay homage to her, and Tom Seymour flirted with every unmarried woman, from the old Dowager Duchess (Norfolk’s mother!) to the fifteen-year-old widowed Lady Borough, who trotted round him like a lovesick colt. Jane and I watched him stroke their wrists and kiss their cheeks, and we exchanged a look which was acknowledgement, apology, forgiveness and acceptance all at once. No words were needed between us.
Nicholas Kratzer came to visit twice, which was once more than he had to. Though he nodded courteously at me, we never exchanged words.
Holbein came to paint her in stylized Tudor-portrait fashion, her costume and setting replete with symbols of fertility, longevity and love.
Cromwell came regularly to private suppers, puffed up with success. He had returned to court after some weeks, though he soon left again on a longer journey to the continent – some said to Antwerp, some said to accompany Norfolk to Italy. The queen did not ask him. Either she knew already, or she did not know and knew he would not tell her.
These days Cromwell’s eyelids drooped more than they normally did, and the lines around his eyes and mouth looked more deeply etched. Since Elizabeth Barton had run shouting through the streets on the queen’s coronation day about the folly of this marriage, he’d had the unenviable task of reining her in. All his attention and energy was devoted to collecting every existing copy of The Nun’s Book, along with every tract and pamphlet written by or about the Holy Maid of Kent. There were hundreds of them, so we heard, thousands; houses were searched, printing presses monitored by Cromwell’s extensive spy network, baggage opened at every English port to find books hidden in pouches and false bottoms of trunks.
Only Thomas More stayed away. I’d become more curious to see him, this man who seemed to connect all other men together somehow,
The queen’s household swelled to the size befitting her new rank. Among the newcomers was Jane’s older sister Elizabeth; they looked extraordinarily alike, especially in the nose and chin, though Elizabeth’s eyes were large and beautiful. And she always had a sweet smile for everyone, even her brothers. I seldom heard her say aught but yes or no. Perhaps that was the secret to her happiness.
“Your sister is most…pleasant,” I said to Jane once.
“Yes,” she replied. “We’re nothing alike.”
And to my amazement, Eliza Browne returned, transformed from an object of pity and scorn into a respectable court lady through the magic of a marriage ceremony. The queen greeted her with a kiss; we had heard through Lady Exeter, who was related to Eliza on her mother’s Neville side, about her three miscarriages since the birth of her child last summer. For a woman to conceive so many times in quick succession was to all but guarantee death for child and mother. The Earl of Worcester was a swine.
Yet Eliza still appeared slender and pink-cheeked, and accepted the queen’s kiss with tears in her eyes, curtseying low: “Your Majesty.” Poor thing; no doubt she was desperately glad to return to her place here with us.
We would join the queen in her confinement, a month before her prince was due. From the day the great oak doors of the queen's apartments closed behind her to begin her confinement, only those of us who served her could go in or out. All the men of her household—from her chamberlain Lord Burgh to the pages--held communication with her through us. She still managed her household accounts, asking that the books be brought to her so she could check them; she still sent and received letters. I would be free of my uncle’s scrutiny for a few weeks, at least.
The lapdogs were with us too, though only the bitches; the stewards took care of the male dogs, and the queen sent word several times each day to inquire how they did. There were only four dogs with us—or it may have been five, or three, it was so long ago--but it seemed like more. They pissed and shit everywhere, and their hair was constantly floating into our wine, our food, our noses and eyes. Jane pulled a long strand from between her teeth one day, and spat into the floor rushes in the inner chamber where we sat. We could not open the doors or windows to air the place; the physicians had warned that any outside draughts could be fatal, and besides, there must be no risk of her being seen by anyone outside until after the prince was born. After only a week or so the place smelled like a barn, for all the perfume in the air and rosecakes burning in the braziers.
On the other hand, we had whatever we wanted to eat, and as much of it as we could put away, any hour we wanted it. She asked for fruit and soft white cheese, honey cakes and wine the color of her favorite amber ring, and she passed most of it on to us. Court rules ended outside her doors, and we all ate at the same time, scattered about the rooms on chairs and in window-seats. There was no regular work and no exhausting hunts or court functions to attend. As prisons went, it was a soft one, filled with cushions and the king’s most prized tapestries, including the one of St. Ursula with her 11,000 virgins. It should have been a holiday.
But it was not. Her cheerfulness before us was forced, to cover for what we’d all heard just before she’d taken her chamber: a quarrel with the king, so loud and vehement it carried to the back chamber where we stood, hardly breathing.
And only I knew the truth, and could tell no one: it wasn’t about the christening cloth. It wasn’t the tension of waiting, or the humors of a tired pregnant woman. It was my fault.
The day before the great procession into the confinement chamber, I’d come out of the queen’s apartments carrying a stack of linens and cushion covers when I bumped into a tall, padded shoulder in a satin doublet. Struggling to see over the pile, I tried to curtsey without dropping any of the folded cloths. So it took me a moment to realize I had walked straight into the king himself.
He was not sup
posed to be anywhere near the birthing chamber. There was no reason for him to be here at all, having a hearty conversation with Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador. A king must ever be courteous to his foreign diplomats, though he probably didn’t have to stand so close or talk so low. Certainly he had little patience with those who opposed his marriage to the queen—his treatment of de Dinteville was only one example. And Chapuys considered the queen only a little better than Lucifer himself.
Yet there they stood together, just outside the door, when I collided with him. In my fumbling rush to curtsey low, the rest of the linens slid out from the bottom and Chapuys swooped down to retrieve them.
“Allow me, gentle lady.” I had never exchanged a word with him—he was not permitted within ten feet of the queen’s outer chamber doors—but his smile was warm as I imagined the Spanish sun might be. At least the teeth showing under his mustache were even. I returned the smile with thanks.
The king watched us, grinning. I made one final deep obeisance, and the king dropped a single handkerchief on top of the pile I clutched. He looked at me a long, warm minute, and I felt the heat in my neck.
“A pity to wall up such a flower, wouldn’t you say?” he said to Chapuys, for all the world as if they were old friends chatting in a tavern.
“Indeed, Your Grace, though some flowers bloom best in the hothouse.” They chuckled, and it would have been a joke, except that just then the king—the king of England, Henry, by the Grace of God, Fidei Defensor, etc., etc.—brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen across my forehead from under my hood. His hand lingered on my face, and I dared not look at him.
And just at that moment, Nan and Meg came round the corner and his hand dropped and I hurried away down a side corridor with my bundle. I did not drop one thing. On my way I passed bin Rahmat, the Moorish physician Nicholas had spoken of on the night of the Advent banquet. He made a little bow, but I did not stop until I reached the lying-in chamber, and put the bundle down beside me while I caught my breath.
It was clear that Nan and Meg, or one of them, had told the queen, though they had not seen me well and did not know who it had been. And so she suspected us all. What should have been a restful retreat was instead a torment of nerves and suspicion, everyone poised and ready to accuse or defend. Madge let the others think it had been her, and simpered idiotically whenever anyone hinted at it. Jane watched my face when others told the story (which grew, and grew, until Lady Exeter the next night whispered to the others the king had a new mistress), but for reasons of her own said nothing.
Lady Exeter blamed the queen. “Her Grace can't make up her mind whether she's a queen or plain Nan Bullen the Kentish girl, since she doesn't know from day to day which one His Majesty prefers!”
I couldn't help feeling sorry for her as she lay evenings, mornings and long afternoons upon the elaborately carved bed, piled high with goosedown pillows and velvet coverlets. A woman should be surrounded by her closest married friends during her confinement, as well as the midwife and her own mother. (Lady Boleyn seemed a kind woman, though easily flustered and distracted; more often than not, her daughter had to reassure her that all was well, would be well. I wondered how much help she would be when the time came.) The queen had most of England's greatest ladies to attend her, and could trust none of them, lying huge and swollen at their mercy. Better to be a shopkeeper or a farmer's wife, keeping at their work until they dropped their babes from their wombs.
While we waited, my mind twisted round and round a single thought: what would Chapuys write of the day outside the lying-in chamber? Would he name me? I did not think he knew my name, though he might inquire to discover it. What Chapuys did not know, he invented. Yet he knew somehow of the quarrel between the queen and her father on the eve of her coronation, had written his master of it. That could only mean that one of the women in this room had told him. Despite all precautions, information was still somehow coming in…and going out.
Surely it would all be forgotten when the prince was born; Chapuys’s pen would be too busy then telling the Emperor and Queen Katharine and Princess Mary (as I still thought of them) of God’s judgment against their cause. Then the king would love only his wife and trouble me no more. She would forgive us and be merry again. So I prayed along with everyone else, for the first time in years: send England a healthy prince.
I got to know them all in that close time, more than I had in almost two years of living practically on top of each other, eating and sleeping and traveling together: I grew to know Meg’s impatient sighs and the Madge chewed her food like a rabbit, using only her front teeth. Her back teeth must be hurting, or gone. Grace Parker was afraid of the dark; Mary Boleyn longed for her children at Hever. Eliza Browne was a dear girl, though a bit dull. And Ann Saville would gossip and laugh about somebody with you, then go away to do the same about you with someone else.
Mary Howard sighed over her absence from the Duke of Richmond; she was to marry him in scarce three months. When the queen gave birth to her prince, Mary and her husband would move further down the line of succession. She no doubt prayed devoutly for it. There was ambition in the way many of the other privy chamber ladies placed pillows behind the queen’s shoulders, brought her cooled drinks and dainty foods, but Mary and Meg were the only ones who did it with real tenderness. Every now and then Mary even had a kind smile or word for me.
Ann Saville spent much time clustered together with Nan Cobham and Lady Exeter. I did not go near them, though once or twice I saw Jane among them and wondered what could possibly draw her to them. She kept company too with Blanche Parry, a sturdy Welshwoman, recently arrived and already one of the queen’s favorites, though neither of us could see why. Together with Blanche and Elizabeth, Jane and I sewed yards and yards of green and white bands for swaddling, which she displayed for our mistress's approval. They were edged with tiny flowers in silver thread so cleverly worked they looked painted onto the silk.
Mary Boleyn, Lady Carey, attended her sister with a detached air, her beautiful doe’s eyes distant. Was she thinking how it might have been herself lying here on this stifling August day, wrapped in layers of silk coverlets emblazoned with the Tudor arms, waiting to deliver the prince that would be England’s salvation? Was she regretful, envious, accepting, delighted? You could never tell what Mary Boleyn was thinking. Perhaps she missed her children, though her queenly sister provided amply for them as her wards. The boy was none of the king’s line, Jane had whispered late one night as the fire was dying and the others nodded around us; his pointed, sallow face was a mirror of his true father, William Carey. But the girl, Katherine, was tall and red-haired. A girl-bastard could never hope to come near the throne, though she might make a good enough marriage with the queen’s aid.
Madge mumbled blessings on the child and hope for the mother's safe delivery, rubbing the saint’s medal Henry Norris had given her. It hung on a chain around her neck, and she rubbed it with more passion than was necessary. Lady Rochford placed a rounded statue of a woman in the corner of the bedchamber, which she said guarded mothers laboring in childbirth. She rubbed it with oil and whispered to it a few times each day, until Meg declared it a horrid thing and had it thrown out.
“What is magic but God’s will?” asked Mary Howard, trying to get us into the spirit of so many other afternoons. “If it be a sin to control one’s own destiny, why do we say that the Lord helps them who help themselves?”
It was a good question. Was there a difference between taking control of your destiny and trying to force it? I thought of little else as I aired the queen’s richly embroidered nightgowns, carried basins of water in and out, smoothed the coverlets on her bed as she walked about.
There were games and divinations that could predict a child’s sex, using seeds or string or apples or cards; there were relics to ensure the birth of sons, and charms and spells to bring about the desired result. We did none of them. Did not even talk or joke about it.
Instead we sat, an
d worked, and slept, and ate, and breathed in the stench of each other’s sweat, and on the seventh of September, at half-past three o’clock, the queen lay on the straw the midwives had spread before the hearth and brought forth her baby. And it was a girl.
OCTOBER 1537
It’s a boy, with a wide wailing mouth, the tiny dangling fig between his legs that will save the kingdom. A prince. At last. Born on St. Edward’s eve, though just barely; the candle-clock burns at just past two in the morning. Still it’s a sign: his name, chosen by the king many months before his getting, shall be Edward.
I hold the future king of England in my arms, washed and swaddled and waiting to be presented to his mother. The warm, milk-smelling heaviness of him, the duckling-fuzz of his hair, his tiny pointed fingertips. No lowly maid of honor should be granted such a privilege, but the midwife thrust him at me a moment ago when the queen suddenly cried out, a gush of blackish blood soaking the straw mat beneath her. Her sister and attendants gather about her, though I hang back.
The future king. I close my eyes and touch my nose to his softly sloping forehead; after this moment I might never touch him again. I whisper against his small eyelids, more of a hope than a prayer: Be like your father.
“Give him to me.” One of the other midwives realizes the mistake, all but snatches the precious bundle out of my arms to pass him to Elizabeth Seymour. I cannot help but notice that the midwife’s nails are caked with grime, an open sore festering on the back of one hand.
London explodes in rejoicing. Bonfires, bells, roast oxen, wine, dancing and singing, like Fasching and a coronation combined. Every door is garlanded, every alehouse opens a hogshead of wine for the poor. Two thousand guns fire from the Tower, where they echo off the stones paving a forgotten queen’s grave.