To Obey and Serve

by V L Perry

  “How is it with you, lady?” he asked, and the voice he used was the gentle one. “How can we make you merry? Come back with us; we will dance one more time.”

  I opened my mouth, and had to try twice before I could speak: “The queen, sire. She will see.”

  His broad shoulders slumped, and Jupiter the god was a sorrowful little boy. “I never meant to make you unhappy,” he said low. “Anything that you want, or may need…I shall see to it…”

  There was that loud, shrill, laugh that drilled into my ears. I thought for an instant that she had heard us, but no, it was impossible for our words to have carried across the din of the hall. The king frowned and straightened up, making his way down the rows toward the Admiral’s secretary rather than returning to the high table. As I slipped out I saw the queen’s face, a pale oval with glinting dark eyes. Beside her, the Admiral stared disgustedly. Her headdress and gown were of the same dark green as the arras behind her, so for a moment it seemed in the flickering light that her face floated by itself above the rich table.

  Those eyes burned into me all the way down the long corridor and into the courtyard, where I lost what little I’d eaten into the steaming snow.

  “…and the Admiral asked her, `Madame, do you mock me?’ She laughed right in his face, after all, while he was speaking; what could he think?”

  “And then?” I tried to look as though I cared, but it was difficult to stay awake. Bess sat up in her bed, staring at us. She’d not been there to see how the little drama played out, and was sure to tell the others. All my bones felt heavy, and my head twisted with pain. This is how the Princess Mary feels, I thought. They say she is prone to headaches.

  Jane sighed. “She pointed to where you stood with the king and said, `No, my lord, not you. His Majesty went to fetch your secretary, but he met a lady who made him forget the matter!’”

  “She should have known what he was up to,” Bess said. “Kings don’t fetch secretaries.”

  “He left the table to seek me?”

  “He appeared to seek you.” Jane shook her head. Bess was right, though; the subterfuge was shallow at best. He wanted her to know. He was flaunting not me, but the fact that her hold over him was broken at last.

  The incident with Lady Rochford had changed very little between the queen and I. She continued to punish me: fining me for a comb that had gone missing, scolding me for coming late to evening prayers after returning breathless from walking the evil-tempered lapdog Weston had given her. Though now there was a different cast about her, almost as if she did it out of expectation. Clearly her heart was no longer in it.

  Late that month word spread, from the privy closet to the farthest reaches of the palace, that the queen’s courses had come on as usual. Either she had been mistaken about being pregnant, or she was mad to try such a scheme. For how long would she have been able to hide it from us, who knew every detail of her body and its rhythms?

  The Act of Succession was reinforced, this time with specific order to administer the Oath to the universities, and examine the faculty and students for any hint of Papal heresy. Any lectures, any writings that might favor any a “foreign authority or potentate” were now banned from the curriculum. Cromwell’s agents would arrive in person to examine and enforce the new regulations.

  For some reason I had a strange urge to talk of it with Kratzer. He had worn the robes of a professor there, when Wolsey had commissioned him to teach astronomy and geography years ago. He had placed the sundial there after the university had condemned Luther’s heresies. Yet he seemed to know a great deal about those heresies; he owned Lutheran books, and trafficked with known Lutherans on the continent. Jane was right, it was dangerous to get too close to him. But still, I wished I could have heard him speak of it, even to someone else.

  I remembered Cromwell’s smile on that merry evening in the Lady’s chambers three years ago, during the game of translating the sundial poem. He’d had the look of a serpent waiting for the bird to flit closer. Reform and rebellion had never been a game to him.

  Parliament authorized Cromwell to investigate—they said “visit”-- the small monasteries and convents for signs of heresy, blasphemy, or corruption. Those that did not meet his standards had their lands confiscated by the Crown, their furnishings and possessions stripped. Some of the reports sounded like they were directly from Boccaccio or Chaucer: tale after tale of vice, lust, corruption and greed. A friar had committed peccatum sodomiticum with his entire staff of boys in Lincolnshire; in Kent, an abbot kept the convent under his governance as his personal harem and brothel, supplementing his income by hiring out nuns to wealthy landowners nearby. Masses for the dead went unsung while the dedicated servants of God slept off the effects of their wine and debauchery. And so on.

  The queen tried to urge him to save the houses that had hope of being reformed, even offering to buy some of the smaller ones with the income from her Pembroke estates. Her conscience did not prevent her from accepting some of the plate and furnishings Cromwell offered her for her own use. There was a particularly rich set of tapestries in her rooms at Hampton, depicting the story of Bathsheba. Not a very monkish scene, admittedly.

  Jane was horrified—not at the stories, of course, which she dismissed out of hand. “He—Cromwell, I mean—he does it for love of profit, not reform,” she whispered one day in the privacy of the gallery. “Reform would mean turning them from the error of their ways, restoring the monasteries to health. Instead he plunders.” She looked earnestly at me in a way I could not read. I turned away toward the leaded window; the grey December day seemed to cast its shade over everything within.

  But why, Nicholas’s voice asked in my head, was there so much to plunder?

  The king had gone with Cromwell on one such overnight inspection. So I was surprised when I entered the outer chamber one evening to find him back early, standing over her looking grim while she sat collapsed tearfully in a chair. All around them the white faces of her household and visitors (I noted Norris, Weston, and Brereton among them, as well as her brother and Carew) were frozen as if in a tableau: some with dread, others with expectation. From across the room I saw Nan Cobham’s nostrils twitch.

  My mind leaped to the worst: another tantrum that Mary and Katharine had refused the Oath. Or a conspiracy to aid them had been discovered in the North, where all bad things in England began. Or he was wroth with her about her sister, or because she had quarreled with Norfolk again.

  Or it was about me.

  From the look on his face, he wanted to be there no more than I did. Neither of them so much as glanced at me.

  “Where’s Purkoy?” she cried. “Where’s Purkoy?” The little white dog Weston had given her, the one I had walked that very morning. I noted suddenly how quiet the chamber was without its constant yapping and whining.

  “Dead,” the king said at last. “In a fall.”

  She leaned her face into those long, white hands, her hair sweeping down like two curtains to hide her on either side. But I could tell she was weeping. A flicker of pity pushed its way up in my chest like a small flame, guttering and then going out. She had chosen her fate, labored for it. If she now found herself in a trap from which there was no escape, let her learn to live in a trap. Better women than she had done so.

  King Henry looked as if all this was an unpleasant mess he had to clean up before hurrying off to something else--tennis, perhaps. He wasn't good at tending to messes himself, preferring to appoint people to do so in his stead. When they themselves became too messy, they were in turn swept away. As Cromwell had swept in to replace Wolsey, as this queen had replaced Queen Katharine. Was the cycle never to end?

  “Come, madam,” the king said. “You must not upset yourself so, not when the time is so ripe.”

  For a moment no one understood his words, until the queen reached out one hand and placed it into his, her head still down. He guided her through the connecting corridors to the bedchamber, where the door shut like a ro
ck sealing a tomb.

  No sacrifice was too great for her ambition. She may have thought of it as keeping a bargain, or paying penance, or even as a good work. It was not an act of desperation, a grasping at straws. Not then.

  But whatever they made in that chamber hung with looted penance and idolatrous images, I wouldn’t call it love.

  I left. I did not know where I was going, only that I needed to get away.

  I stopped a moment in the gallery with my back to the portraits, leaning my forehead against the leaded casement. Cold. I was always cold here, had been cold all my life. My own reflection looked back at me from the dark window, the cheeks more sunken, the eyes more strained that I could remember seeing them. My breath fogged the glass, so that if I stood here long enough I might become invisible to myself.

  “Poor dear.” The smell announced the speaker even before I recognized the voice. Lady Rochford glided up beside me like a draft. How long had she been permitted back at court? I had not seen her in the queen’s apartments just now; perhaps she was keeping her distance, as I was.

  “Why do you weep here alone?” she asked. “One as pretty as you…or do you wish to be alone, is that it?”

  I would not look at her. I would breathe through my mouth and not gag.

  Her eyes raked me up and down. “You might learn to see opportunity where it seeks you. But then you’re not the ambitious type, are you?” She leaned in close to whisper. I held my breath. “Take a mixture of pennyroyal and mistletoe in your wine, and he will come out.”

  Determined not to run, I turned stiffly and left the gallery with my head high. I both hoped and dreaded to run into Jane. But I didn’t.

  The queen was with child again by January, and there this time there was no waiting for the quickening to announce the news.

  “Praise God we will have a prince this time next year,” said Mary Howard fervently. She’d have no children of her own anytime soon, so this was the next best thing.

  The queen was convinced that a prince was her best hope, as concerned the king (who would magically rediscover his great love and faithfulness), the English people (who would suddenly give her their unequivocal allegiance, cheer her as their patron saint), the Princess Dowager and Mary (who would of course be glad to give up their own claims), the Emperor (who would immediately withdraw his support from Katharine and Mary’s cause), and the Pope (who would change his mind overnight abut the legitimacy of their marriage). She could not afford to believe otherwise.

  One thing I knew clearly: an England with a Prince of Wales would be no place for another cast-off royal mistress. The ranks of unwanted women and would-be heirs were becoming crowded.

  FEBRUARY 1535

  “Read back what you put down last, Meg,” the queen said.

  "`And, madam, though at all times I have not showed the love that I bear you as much as it was, yet now I trust…’”

  “…that you shall know that I loved you a great deal more than I made feign for,” she went on smoothly. “And, assuredly, next to my own mother, I know no woman alive that I love better..."

  She could have written it herself, or dictated it privately. We were meant to hear her publicly mend the quarrel with Lady Exeter, which she had started. Bitter as gall though it may have been to her, her feelings were sincere, and it was essentially a kind gesture. But it was not an apology.

  It was a queer month. The snow melted and we even had a few days of mild breezes that pushed one’s headdress back and made it wonderful to escape from the close, overheated chambers into the privy garden. The grass had not even turned brown, but stayed a soft green-grey, and was dry enough in places to sit and watch the thin clouds. A spell of good weather was bound to be followed by more snow and ice and shrieking winds. The older folk murmured that the weather was becoming stranger and stranger; it hadn’t been so cold in their youth. Perhaps God was punishing the world for its sins a second time with ice, not the promised fire. Dante claimed the lowest circle of hell was entirely frozen.

  A false spring, a cheerful lie. A promise not to be trusted.

  I was too dizzy to stand for very long. Jane hurried to take my place behind the queen’s chair, drawing the ivory comb through that dark silken mane. It was strange to see them both together, for Jane did not usually minister to the queen’s bodily tasks. But then, neither did I. She knew, I was sure, that the king no longer sent for me. And her sharp black eyes lingered on my waist, so that Jane had to lace me tighter each morning.

  At yet another banquet (they long since blurred together for me), the French ambassador’s secretary had again failed to bring a reply from Francois about little Elizabeth’s betrothal. Her long face fell, and she seemed nearly on the verge of tears. I heard and saw it all, again being forced to stand just behind her chair for hours.

  As the king was absorbed in the antics of his fool, she leaned close to the man: “I think King Francois wishes to drive me to madness,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. Sometimes a low voice can carry underneath a loud din. Also I was straining to listen. “For I find myself lost without his help, and in more pain and trouble than ever I was before I was wed.”

  “Madame, I assure you His Highness King Francois wishes nothing but a speedy arrangement of the marriage treaty. You must give His Highness time; you forget he is preparing his troops for Savoy, and has the reformers to deal with as well…”

  “He ignores me, as does his sister,” she shrieked in a whisper. “Marguerite is not so absorbed with putting down the Reformation! She urges tolerance of them, but has none such for me. I am abandoned and lost, and it puts many strange thoughts into the head of my husband the king to see me so treated by those I love so.”

  “Your Grace, surely…”

  She babbled on, seeming to forget herself: “I cannot speak, I cannot say. I am watched here; I may not even write to you of my great concern.” And she turned to look not at me, as I’d expected, but a little further down where Jane Seymour sat beside Nick Carew, both seemingly absorbed in the antics of Will Somers, the king’s fool.

  Somers, capered and jibed before the high table like a monkey. I never could stomach the man; his cropped head and pushed-out features made him appear less than human. And his jokes were terrible.

  He leaned in to catch a coin Carew tossed him, then danced a little jig before pointing toward the high table: “Queen Anne is a ribald, no queen but a quean. And the child is a bastard, born of practice obscene!”

  “By God, I will kill him!” the king roared, and it was as if one of the lions in the Tower had broken loose. “Get the villain from my sight!”

  The terror of a man that large, that loud, one moment laughing and enjoying the performance and the next within an inch of losing all control, was like a sudden fall through ice into black water. The secretary himself slopped some wine from his cup, he jumped so. The queen’s face was white, though not with rage; indeed, she looked as frightened as Sommers, who slunk off as the musicians struck up in the middle of a ballad and confused two of the verses.

  Carew, I noted, could not quite hide his look of satisfaction. He should take lessons from Jane; her face remained blank as paper. It did not occur to me until later to wonder which child he had meant.

  No one was happy.

  The queen went about with lines between her brows and around her mouth. For a breeding woman, even at six weeks, she looked rather pinched. There was more silver in her hair, too, and more of a sword edge in her voice when she spoke to any of us. She alternated this snappishness with kind words or small tokens, as if paying for indulgences.

  The weight of my mind and body were too much to bear most days; I did my best to distance myself from both, send out my spirit as they say witches do. But I still found myself weighted in this cramped, woman-smelling chamber as if by an anchor.

  Only Madge Shelton seemed cheerful as the false spring itself. Her water-blue skirts cascaded around her as she perched on her stool for our afternoon devotions, prayer-bo
ok held open in her dimpled hands. She was trying her best to wear the look of a serious scholar, which sat ill upon her and fooled no one.

  For Madge was the latest to find a place in the king’s affections, and in his bed. Some thought the queen had given her blessing: Madge, at least, was family. But nothing could have been more absurd. Pandering was for the likes of Norfolk or Lady Rochford, not for queens.

  Mary Howard, fast on the road to becoming a widow as Richmond lay coughing his life into bloody handkerchiefs, was reading aloud a psalm in her honeyed voice when the queen leaned her long neck to look at Madge’s book, and rose to yank it out of her hand.

  “Is this how you use God’s Word, madam? For shame!”

  She pushed it in front of Madge’s flushed face, and I could see squiggled lines of writing at the bottom of the page. She had also drawn hearts around the margins and filled in some of the letters.

  A mother superior who discovered one of her novices committing such a sacrilege could not have been more outraged. In a convent Madge might even be strapped tight and punished with stripes to her feet or back; such things went on. But a convent was the last place you’d find Madge Shelton. She blinked, her pink lips trembled, but she stayed silent. There was nothing she could say, anyway, no excuse she can make for using a prayer-book as blank parchment. Or for her other crime, the one everyone knew about and no one would say aloud.

  There wasn’t much doubt about who those love-verses were intended for; long ago, in their courtship, the queen had once delighted the king with her poetry too. Something about the prayer-book bothered me as well, and a memory rose before me: Madge Shelton making an X on the paper bearing the oath of loyalty, the night I had arrived at court. Had she been able to write then, and feigned otherwise? Or had someone taught her?

  The queen made a visible effort to bring her breathing under control, held out the prayer-book as though it were a dead rat. “I will not take this from you, Mistress Shelton. I dare say you have need of it.”