by V L Perry
The look Mary Boleyn gave me was kind, but tinged with something else. It might almost have been pity.
At Mass the queen, who customarily blessed each member of her household before beginning the day’s duties, passed me over and did not look in my face.
All the rest of that day she laughed and chatted with the others, and seemed to make a point of treating Jane with especial care, calling upon her to read Scripture. Had she noted the friendship between us, and was part of my punishment to be watching her favor one while ignoring the other? The usual roles had been reversed, the household paying attention to my every movement while the woman who had shown me such kindness now treated me as if I were pestilence itself.
There were no whispers, no nudges. But always when I was among them the air was tense, expectant, as if something had just been cut off or was about to happen. Perhaps both.
Only one person treated me exactly as she had before, neither fawned nor sat in judgment, and asked me no questions. But perhaps Jane was merely biding her time.
The weather was odd. Rain falling in bright sunshine. Or a storm that blew up on a clear day and passed within minutes, leaving everything steaming. I was always too warm or too chilly, sometimes both together.
There were no more messages from the king. Perhaps I had thrown my only chance down that dark hole in the house of easement.
As the summer waxed stronger, we spent as much time as we could outdoors, though the queen could not ride and hunt. When men cannot take their pleasure in one manner, they turn to other outlets. So unlike this time last year, when he had watched her swelling belly as eagerly as a child watches a new kitten, the king now spent a great deal of time away from court, and away from her.
For there had been quarrels of late.
They were not about me, but they were. When he came late to their private supper of partridge and stewed fruit in her privy closet, or when he ____she scolded him for it. I prepare for you and you do not come, you humiliate me before my ladies, they see how you abandon me…on and on. And of course he could hear the real words behind them: How dare you pursue one of my women right in front of me? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? You turned the world upside-down, for me! And now you treat me like this? I am no serving wench to be dallied with and tossed aside!
He might have taken such words from the cherished jewel who bore the seed of his prince, but now he merely looked at her, his eyes narrowed. They were narrower now than in the portraits from his youth; he was putting on weight. In the candlelight he could still cut the figure of a young knight, but in the daytime you noticed more the extra flesh on his arms, the little nets of suspicion growing around his eyes.
“Remember where you came from, madam,” he said calmly to her one night before pushing back his chair, “and close your eyes to it as your betters have done.” He shut the door gently on his way out. He could be most frightening when he maintained his composure. It meant his mind was working.
I remained invisible. She did not vent her frustration directly on me. But she had ways of making her thunderous moods felt:
She found that one of the chamberers had repeated to Chapuys some trifling detail of her laundry, and dismissed her on the spot, paying no heed to the poor girl’s wailing until Meg intervened.
“She’s a simple creature,” Meg said. “She meant no harm; what matter if the dirty spy knows how often your sheets are washed?”
“That filthy Spaniard spreads his lies like plague,” the queen replied. “I could minister to orphans with my own hands, and he’d write that I only did it so I can sacrifice them in Satanic rituals. He does not come within ten feet of my door, yet he knows what is said and done in my private quarters. And what he doesn’t know, he invents. I will tolerate no spies among me.”
The girl sobbed louder, her wits obviously addled; she seemed to forget to wipe her nose, and the green lather hung and dropped in great strings. “Get her out of here,” the queen said, disgusted. Though at Meg’s urging, she dropped a handful of ducats into the girl’s apron before sending her off.
I let my eyes adjust to the dimness of the little chamber, no bigger than a pantry. The hastily-scrawled summons had bidden me follow the page to this place, where I half-expected to find the king, perhaps with blankets and chilled wine at the ready. What excuse could I make, how to put him off?
Once I got there, however, I knew this was no assignation. Jane’s words in the gallery came back to me: “secret meetings in Cromwell’s rooms at night.” I strained to make out the faces around the little table, looking for the one I both hoped and feared to see.
Some of them I knew to be the queen’s enemies: Eliza’s father Sir Anthony Browne, who hated all things French, despite (or perhaps because of) being ambassador to France; Carew, whose stubborn loyalty to the half-century-old claims of the Yorkists put him Lord Exeter’s camp. Others were her friends, or close kin: her cousin Francis Bryan, his single eye glinting in the candlelight, the other covered by a patch; Cromwell, her brother in spirit, now the king’s secretary, who had worked so hard to raise her high. And her sister-in-law, of course.
And, sitting at the far end, my uncle. I had to resist the urge to rub my eyes, so unbelievable did his presence here seem after seeing him bid her goodnight just hours ago. She had teased him about being too old to stay up late, and he’d made some gracious answer. Now here he was. It was all too romantic: a candlelit treason plot in a darkened chamber. I fought back a laugh, though my spine had turned to ice. Still, there was a tiny flicker of relief that Kratzer was not among them.
My uncle cleared his throat; he looked even less comfortable than I felt. “His Majesty takes an interest in you,” he began.
“If he does, I am very sorry for it,” I replied. “I assure your grace that I’ve done nothing to encourage His Majesty’s affections.”
“For God’s sake, why do you think you’re here, girl?” he spat, then took a breath. He was nervous, then. There was more grey in his beard than there’d been this time a year ago. I wondered if his face, grown lined in fulfilling the needs and whims of royalty, were at all like my father’s would be now had he lived. Would my father have seen me as a pawn, harangued me like this? Probably. I kept my hands folded, my heart like a rabbit in a snare. Play the wide-eyed fool, and they may change their minds.
But my uncle, whatever else he was, was no fool. “You are clever, my dear. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, quite lovely. Even Chapuys has noticed you, and told his master of the king’s great fancy for you. It will be a small matter to encourage his interest.” He paused. The tic under his left eye meant he was thinking.
“You may even find your task quite enjoyable.” Lady Rochford’s tongue caressed the words.
“I see,” I said slowly. “Only adultery will save his immortal soul.”
“Come, you’re not so stupid as that, girl,” Carew said gruffly. “Nor so nice in your conduct, if I hear aright. But the king fancies you, and every night he spends with you will keep him out of the queen’s bed. You could help the Princess too,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “Mary, I mean – I know you harbor a fondness for her. The aid you wish to offer her can come from us.” I tried to keep my face straight, though I was sure Cromwell saw the pulse jump in my neck. His small piglike eyes missed nothing.
“And you’d not do badly for yourself,” Browne added. “Others have risen to the throne form the queen’s service.”
What a fool they must think me. “You offer me a throne, Sir Anthony, when the most I’d be likely to get is marriage to some…mature nobleman with a few acres of land?”
“You may rest your mind about reward, if that will soothe your conscience,” Bryan chuckled.
“And what is to stop my conscience, Sir Francis, from telling Her Grace tomorrow morning that I saw you here tonight?”
He smiled like Lucifer welcoming a damned soul into hell. “I think, lady, she’d be at least as interested in what you were doing here. You’re
not on such good terms with her these days; it’d be a shame to lose your place at court. Or anything else,” he added.
“Enough,” said Cromwell. No diplomacy, that son of a clothworker; he knew how to use it, but would not bother. “We did not bring you here for your own sake, but for the sake of His Majesty and the country. England needs an heir. The wife he’s got now can’t give him one. Mayhap you can, or someone else, what does it matter? What’s needed now is a way for the king to extract himself from the…situation…in which he finds himself trapped.”
“Surely the king needs no help from one such as me.”
Carew clenched his graying head in his hands, the closest I had ever seen him to despair. “If only he’d stop tupping her. We plan and wait for just the right time…you’ve no idea what it’s like, and next thing you know she’s breeding again like a bitch, and all our work must come to a halt. She does it deliberately.”
“She does unholy things to procure his services,” said Lady Rochford. “And he can only perform on the nights she summons him. His Grace is under an evil spell.”
“We need time, at least,” my uncle said. “A window of time when we can be sure there is no chance of her being with child. You must take care, though, that the king sees nothing of your…affliction. Such things sit ill with him.”
Lady Rochford was still grinning her rotten grin at me, and suddenly I felt a wave of such dizzying comprehension that I almost had to brace myself to remain standing. The book of prophecy. The drawings, the rhymes. The queen of clubs that had vanished from the playing deck, and which Ann Saville had found nailed to the underside of a chair when the court was moving from Greenwich to Whitehall.
Witchcraft.
“What we ask is not for ourselves, but for the sake of the realm.” Cromwell waited.
“What you ask,” I said, “is treason.”
He still did not blink. “Only if we fail.”
There was a long moment. “If it be the sin of it, let that not put you off,” my uncle added. “You can easily confess and be forgiven. A little sin washes away. Your rewards will last much longer.”
I remembered when I was leaving on the journey for the continent, fourteen years old and frightened. Right there in the straw-strewn courtyard I had vomited up the Eucharist I’d taken at Lauds, and cried to think I would not have Christ’s Presence with me as I traveled. My uncle had knelt beside me in the cold dawn light, while the carts and retinue waited, and reassured me that it was the taking itself that mattered, not whether it stayed. I had never heard anyone say such a thing, and stared; it came to me now that it had been much more than simply comforting a sick girl. It had been a seed of rebellion.
“It is kind of you to worry for my soul’s sake, uncle,” I said, and heard in my voice the same half-pitying contempt the queen used when addressing Norfolk. “I take your meaning very well.”
I did not ask permission to leave.
That very week a letter arrived from my mother. She had never written me before; the news could only be bad. The seal was broken when my uncle handed it to me. It was written in the hand of her chaplain. A fever; she was sinking fast.
I could not bring myself to face my uncle, now that I knew what he truly was. But the thought of asking leave from the queen herself was equally terrible.
Jane came to find me in the maids’ chamber. Eliza and Bess Holland were there too, looking out over the garden and gossiping, eating slices of apples and cheese from a linen handkerchief.
“Leave us,” she said abruptly, and they started. I had never heard that tone in her voice before. Apparently no one had.
“By what right…” Bess began hotly, but Eliza took her by the sleeve and pulled her out. No doubt they stayed on the other side of the door to listen, since Jane kept her voice low and came over close to me.
“What are you going to do?”
“I will go to my mother in Kent,” I replied, refolding a chemise.
She shook her head. “About the king,” she insisted.
I sighed. The last thing I needed right now was a moral lecture. “His Majesty is my sovereign lord. He is also a married man. I have no intention of bringing shame and dishonor upon him, or on my family or name, if that’s what you’re going to tell me.”
“You simply think you can’t hold him,” she said. “But you could. If only you try.”
The world had gone mad indeed. Here was Jane Seymour, urging me to betrayal and corruption. “Better you than any of the jades in there,” she went on, jerking her head toward the queen’s apartments. Her headdress shifted slightly. “Half of them too stupid and the other half to raddled with pox to do anyone much good, let alone the king.”
I stopped and looked into her face. “Jane, give me one good reason why I should break my oath to the queen and risk my place in doing it.”
“So it is your conscience that holds you back? Or is it expediency?”
Conscience alone might not have dissuaded me. It hadn’t with Archduke Ferdinand himself, as a matter of fact, though she didn’t need to know that. “For what this is worth in England, Jane, I put some stock in the taking of an oath.”
“The same oath she made to Queen Katharine,” she replied calmly, “and look how she honored it. She’s no true queen, and she knows it. If she’d had a son…but she didn’t. God has judged her. She drives the king from the Church, from those who love him. He needs to be guided back. For the good of England…”
“…I’m to bed with the king at everyone’s bidding, like a cow led to breed. How will that lead the king back to his true wife and true faith?”
“He’ll never take her back,” Jane said. “Even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, he’ll never look like he’s given in to the Pope. There’s only going forward from here.”
She was right about that, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “Men take mistresses, Jane, and kings especially. It means nothing. How many has he taken and cast aside?” Truthfully, no one knew; aside from Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn, who had borne him children, there was nothing more to go on than rumors. He was remarkably discreet, give him that.
“You could be more than a mistress,” she said.
Her words hung in the air between us.
“Jane,” I said pleasantly, “someone has been telling Norfolk that I am sympathetic to Princess Mary’s cause, that I wish to help her and her mother regain their rightful places. Do you know who might have said that?”
“No,” she said. But she looked as though she’d farted at Mass. I pressed on, keeping my voice light: “Because surely no one could believe such a thing: it would be treason, would it not? People are fools to believe such nonsense, are they not?”
She blew out her breath, sat on the bed with her arms folded. “Do you fear every bit of nonsense people might say? I know you better than that.”
I turned back to my trunk, putting in stockings, a hairbrush, the rolled strips of rag I used each month. “It’s a long way from the bedroom to the throne room, and that’s a path I don’t picture myself on. He’d tire of me in a few weeks, at most.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t,” she said, and there was cold determination in her voice. “You could hold him. You’re the type he likes.”
The type? The type?
“You know. Books and all that.” She waved her hand. “Play the mysterious maiden; he likes foreign things, but not too foreign. You’re English enough when you want to be. Be witty and intellectual, but not too much. He likes to feel superior, but he also likes a challenge. And you’re beautiful. He likes that too.” She dropped that in carelessly, but I heard the wistfulness underneath. Jane wasn’t the envious type; she simply saw what was, and faced it.
“You seem to have this all planned out, Jane. Why not do it yourself?”
She gave a little laugh. “I’m not like you. Besides, he’d never look at me. Not with you around.”
“One way or another, you’ll get me dismissed, and I’ll be sent packing for good bac
k to the Kentish countryside, where I’ll go mad inside a month.”
“I only hope you keep your wits while you’re there, then,” she said. She sounded less disappointed than simply resigned; perhaps she’d had no great hope of persuading me in the first place. “Come back soon,” she said as she embraced me. “The court’s dull without you.” When she realized how it sounded, she added hastily, “And I pray for your mother’s speedy recovery.”
Before I left, she urged me once more, close to my ear: “Think on it. Many a woman dreams her whole life of a chance such as this, and never comes close to touching it.”
Did she? I almost asked, but did not.
The queen’s farewell was quite different. “Go,” she said, not looking up from where she sat in the audience chamber, “and don’t feel the need to hurry back.”
Someone must have told the king, for there was no other reason for him to be passing the gatehouse just at the moment I set out with two men-at-arms that morning. If he was hunting alone, he should have been gone by sunrise. If the queen were accompanying him, they would depart after a midmorning meal. But there he was, mounted on a black palfrey so shining with magnificence that it took me a moment to even notice who the rider was, talking and laughing with Henry Norris mounted at his side.
His hat was somehow on, though the feather danced in the breeze. Later I came to know that he always kept it on out of vanity over his thinning hair, though the locks beneath it now still shone like copper.
“We wish you a safe journey, mistress.” He touched one green-gloved hand to his hat. “And hope to see you back at court soon.” There were no gifts this time, no professions of adoration. Norris gave me a courtly nod. I did not envy him his choice of whether to tell the queen of this encounter or keep it to himself.