To Obey and Serve

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To Obey and Serve Page 19

by V L Perry


  “Thank you, Your Grace.” For the first—and only time, I raised my eyes to look directly into the king’s. And they were shocking, not just in the intensity of their gaze but in their gentleness. They seemed to both invite and reassure. And they were brown. I had never noticed that before.

  I rode away full of thoughts that I did not really listen to until we were well past Chatham.

  The sounds of Mass within the stone walls of St. Martin’s just reached me outside in the churchyard, faint as the puffs of incense on the early summer breeze. I stood at the edge of her grave, not hearing but remembering.

  There had been a deathbed scene, of course, but I will not write of it here. It would sound too maudlin, too much the stuff of melodrama, for it to ring true. Then I would have to tear the pages out from this beautiful book, and I will not do so. My mother hated waste.

  Before that, there had been the Last Rites, and before that an endless time—how many weeks?—when she drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes taking a little barley broth, most often waving it away with a trace of her old brusqueness. She seldom spoke, only indicating with her head when she wanted the sheets changed, or a drink of cider, or the shutters open or closed. Her face looked waxy, unnaturally flattened as she slept, but it may have been a trick of the candlelight. I had dreaded what each new morning might show me.

  I tried not to remember how thin she’d become, how fragile. How he hair seemed attached to her head only as cobwebs are attached between reeds, breaking off at any slight disturbance; or of the sore that grew at the corner of her mouth and never seemed to heal, the way her eyes seemed both sunken and larger. The doctors had called it a cancer, eating her from the inside. Instead I thought of her hands: how capable and white they’d been, the cords on the back standing out like strong rope. How her voice use to rise when she called my name across the lawn, long ago, when the shadowy figure beside her in my mind’s eye must have been my father. How she had seemed to care for everyone in our parish—the old, the sick, the motherless young—more than she did for me.

  I thought of the letters I had never written her, the sights and sounds from Europe that I had never told her about. Of how right she’d been, though I hadn’t known it. How I had never known her, or thanked her.

  “You were right about Elizabeth Barton, mother,” I said out loud into the empty churchyard. The words rolled away over the low fence and across the Kentish hills dotted with sheep.

  I could not have stayed through the service in the church. Half the hangings, the vestments, the cloths used to drape the statues were from my mother’s hands. The altar cloth was the very one she’d had on her lap the day she spoke to me about leaving for the court; I had recognized a cross worked in silver that I’d stared at while trying not to answer her. She was all around me, but not for long.

  There was shadowed coolness under the trees here, but no comfort. Some of the gravestones around me were new, but many more were ancient, their corners crumbled and their inscriptions worn away. How long until even your name was gone, until there was no memory of you left?

  At dusk I walked home, not seeing the great spire of the church with its tiny slit windows, or the countryside about me bursting into green glory. My home now, though it had never felt like home. I wondered if any place ever would.

  Everything was left to me, of course, all property and furnishings, as well as my father’s pension, which would cease upon my marriage. (For marriage and death are often the same in the eyes of the law.) There were debts, though easily paid out of the income from the tenants, and servants’ wages to be discharged quarterly. I could get by with a smaller staff, though only if I returned to live here regularly.

  “Unless you choose to stay at court,” she said once during a lucid moment, and there was something in her tone that made me tense. Did rumor travel faster than pestilence? How could she have heard already, unless my uncle had written her even before he spoke to me?

  “I never wanted you to get mixed up in politics,” she added, and broke into a coughing fit. When she finally settled back, she’d added, “Though in life we do what we must to survive. These will not be easy times for you, daughter, and I give you my blessing whatever path you take. I love you.”

  I could not say it back. I’d never heard those words from her lips before, and did not know how to push them out of me. They were still locked inside me now, along with the tears.

  What had that last blessing meant?

  All the next day, and the next, I listened to the endless rustling of the breeze in the great

  oaks that bordered the garden, the twittering of birds that did not know they were in a manor garden in Kent, in England, in the year 1534. For them everything was as it had always been. They had nothing to fear except the cats that roamed the yard.

  I tried to remember what Kratzer had said about Luther; it had made a simple kind of sense at the time. The idea that all things were ordered by God was at once comforting and discouraging. But if it were so, could there be any true sin? There were those who said even Lucifer’s rebellion must have been God’s will.

  The fishpond was covered with a layer of floating green scum. The few servants had not been able to keep up with all the work since my mother fell ill. I found the net attached to its long pole and lifted out the worst of it. My gown was too fine for this work, though I cared little when a few drops of evil-smelling muck spattered my sleeves.

  Why did no one paint scenes of country life? Only jeweled fabrics in which stiff bodies were trapped, or endless Madonnas and Crucifixions. Most of humanity would live and die without ever a picture made of them, as forgotten as though they had never been. If a farmer were to be painted alongside his haycocks, or a scullery maid with her broom, would they too be remembered down the centuries? Perhaps they held their own kind of beauty and majesty.

  Why should not a country woman be as worthy as a queen? It was that kind of thinking that led to the normal order being torn asunder: peasants ransacked the countryside, and maids supplanted mistresses.

  I could remain here, content to count the stocks in the buttery and skim the fishpond and pick herbs and hear the breeze, speaking only to the servants, never seeing or smelling or tasting court life again. My uncle would be furious, but he’d have nothing to say about it.

  I could continue to resist, risk the king’s displeasure, keep enduring the queen’s undeserved wrath.

  I could marry a gentleman-courtier and raise a brood of children, making appearances at court twice a year, at Advent and Pentecost. Safe, out of her reach and his. With this property as my dowry, I could make a good enough match with a middling courtier. I pictured Jane as my sister-in-law, the two of us sewing cozily before the great hearth at Wulfhall.

  Or I could return to court, be next in the line of royal mistresses. But perhaps the last.

  I could not pray in my mother’s private chapel. Nor in the village church in Aldington, so near to the mound of fresh earth where she lay.

  I went to the chapel of Court-at-Street. It took me all morning; a short pilgrimage, you might say. By the time I entered its cool stone shade, my linen gown was stuck wetly to my back and under my arms.

  It was so small I could nearly have touched the opposite walls by stretching out my arms. This was where Elizabeth Barton had first proclaimed her visions, where she had fallen into fits before the entire congregation and become the Holy Maid of Kent. For years it had been a place of pilgrimage; perhaps her execution had cast a pall upon the place, given it its haunted air. Odd. You’d think it would be swarming with more visitors than ever. But for an elderly priest who nodded sleepily at me, I was alone.

  Seated on one of the rough wooden benches, I tried to search for God’s will. Jane was so sure of it; so, for that matter, were the king, and the Holy Maid, and everybody else who had a role to play in this drama. But what of me?

  My head hung lower, and perhaps I dozed, for I know no other way to describe what happened:


  I saw a sword flashing down, and jewels dripping blood. An infant wailed high and thin, somewhere far away; was that a woman’s voice sobbing just underneath it? The walls of the chapel crumbled and I could see the fields spreading far away on all sides, the open stonework window now a ruined half-circle. My legs and arms stung from the nettles growing up around me, as high as my waist.

  Scraps of parchment whirled about me as if in a storm-wind; I could grasp at some of them, read the names written on them; some I recognized—including the queen’s, Jane’s, even Kratzer’s--but could not find my own.

  I jerked my head up, the priest glancing at me from where he kept his own prayers. All was quiet in the dim little chapel, the smells of sunshine and sheep breezing in from the single window. My heart felt as if it would burst through my chest, and I shivered like a damned soul. That was my first vision, and my last. It was enough to keep me from ever asking for intercession again; from now on I would simply take events as they came before me, looking neither forward nor back.

  I stayed too long in Kent. The summer waned, the days growing shorter. The daily rounds of overseeing the butter-making, the shearing, the preparing and storing of meat and poultry lulled me into a kind of death. It was not peace, though it might look like it on the surface: I could not stay, but could not bring myself to go back. My uncle’s letters came closer together, urging me to return, but I put them aside.

  The morning before I’d planned to leave, a letter arrived in the queen’s hand. I wondered before I read it why she hadn’t had anyone take it down for her, though the reason became clear soon enough:

  It was a notice that, if I did not return to court by tomorrow’s date, my place would be forfeit, my salary of five pounds a year and the right to eat at the king’s table permanently revoked. But the letter itself was dated two months back. She’d waited to send it until, she hoped, it was too late. Nor were there any condolences.

  That settled it. It settled many things, in fact. I would be on the road before another hour passed, moving toward whatever my fate held for me at the end of my journey.

  When I returned to Richmond, I did not go straight to the queen’s apartments. Instead I left my horse at the stables and made my way to the secret gallery connecting to the king’s chambers. It had been weeks since I’d torn up the letter that described it in such detail, but the guards still had standing orders to admit me (or any woman, I suppose) who reported there. As I crossed the leaf-crunchy courtyard, I could smell fire and furs inside.

  I held my hand before my face. It trembled so much that you could have seen it from across the courtyard. Stop, I willed it, and the hand slowed and was still.

  The smoky sunset lit warmly on my face for a moment. Then I went in, and it was gone.

  The king I returned to was not the same young Apollo who had taken Bessie Blount to his bed all those years ago, nor even the gallant monarch who’d written Assertio Septem Sacramentorum in defense of the Pope’s authority while secretly tupping Mary Boleyn in his free hours. The King Henry of 1534 had sent a prince of the church, as well as his own friend and former Lord Chancellor, to the Tower. This king had exiled his own wife and daughter in hopes of breaking their will to his, had exacted terrible justice against Elizabeth Barton and her supporters. And there was no telling what might follow, especially with Cromwell at his side:

  The Order of the Observant friars had been suppressed that summer, while I skimmed the fishpond and churned butter in Kent. We had heard rumblings there, but news travels slowly in the country, and it was not the clear sign it seems in hindsight: monasteries closed from time to time. Even Wolsey had dissolved some priories to fund his school in Ipswich and new college at Cambridge. The Observants had long been a thorn in the royal side: Peto (he of the Ahab sermon) was an Observant, and so were Elizabeth Barton’s priests. The Greenwich friars were among the first to refuse the Oath, and had been caught sending messages to the Princess Dowager last year. The king had tried to buy them with alms and favors, but to no avail. Two cartloads of them were drawn through the streets of London to the Tower, Jane told me, shuddering in the recounting the details (she had not seen it either, but heard it passed along). Some were tortured so badly they could not turn over in bed, or raise their hands to their mouths, and so lay starving.

  Cromwell had produced rich hangings and plate which he said were taken from the Observant monasteries at Richmond and Greenwich. Sworn to poverty, he scoffed, but living in hypocritical luxury. No one knew what to think. If this was how the king dealt with the order that had baptized the king himself and both his daughters, and blessed his wedding ceremony to Katharine of Aragon, it could not bode well for the rest of the clergy. Or the country.

  Pope Clement died early that autumn. As soon as the news was announced, the crowd waiting outside the Vatican broke into the chamber where he lay and stabbed his corpse, intending to drag it through the streets of Rome. There were claims of poisoned mushrooms, tainted wine; so many around him had been disappointed in his weakness and vacillation, his leaning toward a French alliance, that the suspects were too many to be counted. He was succeeded by Paul III, a cardinal with two bastard sons, one of whom had helped the Emperor’s troops sack Rome back in 1527.

  These were the dramas that played out on the stage of the world in the latter part of that year. But there were other, smaller dramas as well….

  AUTUMN 1534

  “Traitor!” hissed the queen. “How can you shame your family so?”

  For all her sluttish ways, Mary Boleyn, the Honorable Lady Carey, had a core of inner grace that kept her from biting back any of the obvious rejoinders about shame. I never forgot her as she stood there in an autumn-russet gown, listening politely while seeming to think about something else. Not for her the long months of terror and shame, weighted down with her secret; instead she’d stood before the queen and calmly informed her that she was with child. Granted, it was beginning to be obvious, but still she steered her own course through the storm.

  Her sister felt it, too. She closed her eyes a moment and drew in a deep breath. “Whose is it?”

  Mary only folded her hands over her belly. “I regret that I cannot tell you, Your Grace.”

  Whatever slender grip on self-control the queen had fell away then. She rose, her face

  white and the cords in her neck tensed. “It’s his, isn’t it?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Henry’s. You bitch.”

  For the first time, I saw Mary shocked. “No, Anne! I swear before God it’s not him. I would never deceive you like that. You know it!”

  “No, God knows, you have other ways of deceiving me. I’m your queen, I’m…” she could not quite keep her voice from going up, “your sister, and you whore behind my back and then refuse to tell me with whom? I could have helped you, saved you from your own foolishness by giving you a good marriage, and now it’s too late!” She was about to weep.

  Meg brought her a cup of watered wine, and the queen got control of herself little by little. Only then did Mary say, as if out of pity: “William Stafford.”

  “Stafford.” The queen’s voice was dull. “A Gentleman of the Bedchamber, not much more than a common soldier. He’ll send you away; the king will send you both away, don’t you know that? To hurt me. And I can do nothing.”

  “I never counted on your doing anything, Anne.” No one ever used the queen’s name; even the king called her little else but sweetheart or madam, depending on his humor. “Your Lutheran friends would say this is the fate chosen for me. The Church would say I’ve fallen into sin, but I’ve been there before and it doesn’t frighten me. And ‘tis no sin for a husband and wife to love each other and have a child.”

  “Husband,” the queen whispered in horror.

  “I have married him,”

  “What right had you?”

  “The right of any two who are free to join themselves together in the sight of God.”

  She was right. Marriage was the one sacrament a man
and woman could dispense themselves, without a priest. It was the easiest thing in the world; all you needed were witnesses. The king and queen had waited seven long years for a blessing from the Church which had never come, and all that time they could have exchanged simple vows in any chamber and been done with it. And she did not care to be reminded of it.

  “So I must send you away myself. For your sake and mine, Mary. Go and live happily

  ever after with your country squire that you’re so willing to toss away your life for.”

  Mary curtseyed deeply. Her hair, parted in two smooth wings under her hood, was the same amber color it had been when she first attracted the king. The queen’s dark hair was beginning to be shot through with silver—only a few strands, and only noticeable if you spent half an hour each day combing it by dawn and candlelight, but there all the same.

  I marveled as she went out that Mary Boleyn Carey Stafford must be shrewder than

  anyone guessed. She had done something I had not thought possible, for awhile at least: she had kept a secret at court.

  But some weeks later Mary made her mistake, writing to Cromwell requesting a pension for herself and Stafford: “I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen christened.” Or perhaps it was no mistake at all, but a clear message.

  Either way, the letter fell into the queen’s hands. She read it twice, and fed it silently to the flames. In the months remaining to her, none of us ever heard the queen mention her sister again. Passions of the heart may be excusable, but passions committed to paper are unforgivable.

  The queen remained angry the rest of that autumn

  She swallowed her rage at King Francois’s wish for a match between the Dauphin and Mary Tudor, and instead talked of a marrying the Princess Elizabeth to Francis’s youngest son, the Duke d’Angouleme. She had only us to listen, for the Admiral had not spoken with her about it. In fact, all week long he had said nothing to her at all, and the king did not present him to her. Tonight, though, there was a masked banquet in honor of his departure

 

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