To Obey and Serve

by V L Perry

  Madge took it as though afraid it might burst into flame. The queen resumed her seat, and said calmly, “I beg your pardon, Mary—please continue.”

  What it must cost her, I thought as I watched her slender stalk of a neck bend again over her gold-embossed psalter. Was the thought genuine Christian charity or bitter gladness that the wheel of fortune had turned on her at last? I feared both.

  Throughout the episode, only Jane had not looked up, her hands idle on the embroidery hoop in her lap.

  The week before, at his father’s estate in Buckinghamshire, Will Dormer had married Lady Mary Sidney in a ceremony that more resembled a prayer-meeting.

  I did not ask, then or ever, why the betrothal had been broken. Perhaps it was the usual tangled skein of family and political alliances, or perhaps the king interfered even then. But somehow word of the Seymours’ checkered past had reached young Dormer’s ear. I could imagine it: the Seymours were an ancient family, and the sons were placed to rise in the world, and that was all very well. But the father…well, old scandals never truly died, and a man who would take such advantage of a daughter-in-law, who knew if the rest of the women in his household were safe. Any man with a care for his reputation would think twice before joining himself with such a clan. Or taking another man’s unnatural leavings.

  I sat with her a long afternoon in the gallery the day it happened. He’d written to her a fortnight before, so the shock had not been as great as it might.

  “His mother’s been pressing her on him for ages,” Jane said. Her outward appearance was one of perfect calm, though she was tearing at the skin around her fingernails; the smallest one started to bleed as a shred came away. It worried me more than tears or rage would have done. “But that was not the reason.”

  “It wasn’t? “ I blinked, not sure what to say.

  “He asked if it was true, but then said it didn’t matter to him, that he wanted me anyway. I told him he may as well take her because I wasn’t going to wait for a household servant to rise through the ranks. Especially not one who gains his fortune by losing his soul.”

  So Dormer must be involved with helping his master’s “investigations” somehow. If she had spoken so of cutting off a finger or an ear, it could hardly have been more disturbing. “Did you really end it? But you loved him! I still don’t see why…it suddenly reached him now.”

  “’Tis but a short distance from the queen’s lips to Cromwell’s ear,”

  “The queen?” What had she to do with this?

  “I know it was her,” she said simply. “The king came to me before he went to Madge. And she knows he did. Somehow she knows.”

  I needed a moment to take this in. The king and Jane. The king had asked Jane Seymour to be his mistress.

  I did a terrible thing then, one I have always regretted, though for which I suspect I’ve paid again and again.

  I laughed. It bubbled out of me like a stream and would not stop, try as I might to stuff the giggles with both hands. I could not help it. It was as if different humors possessed me from hour to hour, so that I was now deep in melancholy and now trying to keep from dissolving with mirth at the idea she had described to me. Jane as a royal mistress! Really, there were some things too ridiculous to take seriously.

  She frowned at me and drew herself up a little higher in the window-seat. After a moment I found some measure of control.

  “I’m sorry,” I hiccupped. Then, an afterthought: “Did you?”

  She looked out over the courtyard, filled with dirty slush. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because now he’ll come back.”

  The last of the laughter died away with a gulp.

  But Jane’s optimism seemed doomed to a short life. The queen’s pregnancy progressed apace, the life within her waxing stronger as her spirits and appetite grew.

  “The king will want to name him Edward,” Lady Rochford said one frosty morning as we watched a game of tennis in the enclosed court at Hampton. The queen was sitting some ways off with Cromwell, deep in some earnest conversation. From the looks of them, you might have thought them the closest of conspirators. I thought of my summons some months back, the way he had not seemed to blink at all.

  “She spoke of asking Marguerite of Navarre to stand as godmother,” Meg added. “T’would be a scandal, having it be a foreigner, but not too bad if she also chooses a peer of the realm.”

  “Not Norfolk’s mother,” Eliza said. “She’s already godmother to Elizabeth. And not Lady Exeter.” She didn’t need to say why. “I daresay her face will be the one most worth watching at the christening.”

  “There are two faces I’d want to see there,” Ann said, smiling. “The old Dowager will be forced to give up her pretense at last. And her high and mighty daughter must needs confess herself a bastard. She may well prefer to take her own life, it would save a lot of trouble.”

  “Shame,” someone said. At first I thought it sounded like Jane’s voice, but when they all turned I realized it had been me. “Shame, Ann Saville. All of you.”

  They looked like characters in a folktale when one of the dumb animals suddenly begins speaking to them. “What has she done to you that you hate her so? To delight in another’s suffering, to gloat over a human creature’s pain…you think yourselves Christians, but He would have nothing to do with any of you.”

  I went on, though I do not remember all I said; it was not only for the Princess Mary, but everything I should have said for Jane, for the queen, for Katharine of Aragon, Eliza Browne, Elizabeth Barton, myself.

  And then I fainted.

  So here was the abyss at last. I’d struggled so long not to fall through the cracks in my own mind that to finally lie there and rest was a relief.

  Now the peasants rumbled across the continent, hungry for blood. Now Maria laughed, beckoning me to join her at last. Now I was standing before my mother in the solar, asking her blessing to come to court. Her embroidery needle wavered in the air and lengthened into a sword; now I was riding in the nightmare journey from Vienna, the city besieged and the Turks only a few miles behind us.

  Gentle hands turned me over, smoothed my hair. Of the many nobles scattered across the German countryside that had given us shelter on our way back to England, only the house of Cleves had shown us kindness. The Duke himself, like everyone else, was too busy receiving dispatches and preparing reinforcements to pay much heed to our plight, but his younger daughter ministered to us along with her attendants. Her sweet, broad face floated above me now, reassuring me that all was well, the danger past. But she was speaking English, not German; as I watched, her pockmarked visage shimmered and dissolved into another face I knew, narrower and with one hazel-green eye looking just slightly off.

  As close as I was able to reckon afterwards, I was ill not more than three nights and not less than five. Time stretched and shrank as I lay there, but Jane seemed always nearby, hovering near me when I woke to press a cool cloth to my head, or hold a cup to my lips.

  “Don’t sit up,” she warned. She could not know how the red pain seared through me at any movement. Or perhaps she did when she changed the linens.

  My body was both a prison and a fortress: no one could penetrate it, nor could I escape. For long hours I did naught but listen to the rush of my breath in and out, of my own pulse still beating a determined march I could not rally to.

  Slowly I recognized the little room as the supper closet off the queen’s banqueting chamber. The queen and the others had been ready enough to believe Jane’s tale of a fever, no doubt brought on by one of my fits. She asked for my seclusion, and to be excused from her regular duties to tend to me. Neither of us was greatly missed, she reported drily.

  Tears spilled weakly from the corners of my eyes, trickling toward my ears. I had been wrong about her. But I had been wrong about so much, what did it matter?

  Do I still have your blessing, mother? Is this what you would really have hoped for me?

  “What
did you use?’ she once asked in between some meaningless talk of the court’s plans to move to Richmond.

  So I told her. I had no strength to deny or pretend. Let her be shocked, let her judge me and leave me to my fate. She only nodded. “At least it wasn’t Bird’s Nest. You’d never have survived that.”

  As it turned out, it would have been better if I had not told her, if I had died in that bed rather than speak a word to her at all.

  It was a month before I was able to go shakily about my daily tasks, longer before my body returned to a state that resembled normal. The rest of that spring and early summer passed by in a blur; there were entire days when I spoke to no one, and the favor was returned.

  Jane kept an eye on me, but honored my wish to be left alone. She was very thick these days with Nan Cobham, Carew, and Bryan. On the surface you might have mistaken it for flirtation. Of course both men were old enough to be her father, but what matter?

  The talk that summer was about Edward Seymour’s wedding to Anne Stanhope, a woman whose loyalties were difficult to determine, since she seemed to hate everyone equally. Edward returned to Wulfhall to marry her privately; it was said that she refused to have her nuptials in any building that had blessed the queen’s marriage. I tried to imagine a woman, any woman, ordering Edward Seymour about as the gossips said she did. It seemed unlikely. The Seymours were ever masters of dissimulating their true natures behind artifice. Except Tom. And more trouble it caused him in the end, poor man.

  And of course there were Fisher and More, always Fisher and More. When we heard the new Pope Paul III created Fisher a cardinal, the king shouted in the middle of dinner, “Is that so? Then I shall send his head to Rome to receive the hat!” There were nervous titters, but it sounded like no idle threat.

  Fisher was dragged through a trial that (so they said) was a mockery, and condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. The day this verdict was read out, the Londoners turned over vegetable carts and market stalls, put placards at crossroads that depicted Fisher as John the Baptist and the king as Herod. Even if they could not write, they made their views known all the same.

  “This is what comes of letting them read Scripture,” the queen said with a toss of her head when Cromwell told her the news. It was meant to be a joke, but for the first time, I saw a small frown crease his forehead.

  The king commuted Fisher’s sentence to beheading the day before St. John’s Eve, but still no one could believe he could do it. The king of England could not execute a cardinal, one appointed to holy office by the Pope himself, for his allegiance to Rome. Not so publicly, not so coldly. More likely Fisher would take a sudden chill in his cell, or his soup would turn up poisoned again as it had in 1531; the king had ordered the cook boiled alive, to express his outrage at an attempt on a holy life. He would not commit such an atrocity now, such sacrilege. Would he?

  He did.

  I thought of the hand that had signed the warrant, and shuddered. It had touched my skin, brushed across my lips. And more than that: it had written words of tender love and seduction to the Lady, promised eternal devotion to his first wife, vowed love and loyalty to his daughters. Words undid other words, as easily as scratching out or adding “ss” to change a prince to a princess, as he’d done with Elizabeth’s birth announcement.

  It was perhaps the worst possible time for the queen to lose her child. But lose it she did, blood soaking into a new satin coverlet and down mattress, her cries more terrible than any she had given in childbirth. It was St. John’s Day, and the bells tolled mourning.

  So we could not believe it when, only a week later, she ordered her household to prepare for the summer progress.

  No one wanted to go. Jane would rather risk the summer plague in London than spend six nights under her father’s roof, where the royal party was scheduled to stay. Mary Howard was half-sick with grief at Fitzroy’s decline, and at his other shadowy dealings that he would not speak to her of. He would not accompany us on progress, having “business” in the North.

  As for the queen…how could she think of going? Even I was not completely recovered, and it had been months ago.

  “She must go,” Ann Saville said. “She cannot afford not to.”

  For the king had not come to comfort and reassure her, as he had the last time, that they were both young and would conceive again soon. His absence from her chambers thundered more loudly than any expression of displeasure could have done.

  Bess Holland imprudently repeated a rumor that Cromwell was urging Francois to recognize Mary as the king’s heir. The queen docked her a pound for it, and forced her to repeat it in front of Cromwell, who smoothly assured the queen there was no substance to it.

  “Think you that I have not done all I could to aid your cause, Madame?” Cromwell said, a bit impatiently for one addressing his sovereign. Bess scuttled off, no doubt to complain to Norfolk. “The Lady Mary is no threat to you; she is far from His Majesty’s person or thoughts. You yourself keep her ever present with talking of her.”

  Her eyes were wild. “I tell you, Thomas, I have been shown it in a dream: God will not permit me to bear the king a child while she lives. I am her death, as she is mine!”

  So the queen of England had taken a page from the Holy Maid of Kent’s book: now it was not only her own animosity toward the girl, but God’s as well. Visions and dreams were less substantial than actual threats, harder for the law to object to. I had to stifle a laugh, and turned it into a choking sneeze.

  They both looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was there: one curious, the other hating. I wondered if she even remembered sending me to Krater’s rooms years ago. As far as she was concerned I had turned out to be worse than useless. Now I do think of it, that was the last time I ever saw the two of them in conversation together.

  I could not go on this progress: I could not face the endless wearying travel, the daily hours of hard riding, the eyes constantly upon me, the lonely company of my own thoughts.

  “Your Grace,” I said one afternoon in her privy chamber, and swallowed hard. “I pray you excuse me from the progress; I am not well.”

  “That I will not. Every member of my household is to accompany us; a queen must have a retinue befitting her rank. I expect you to be among them.”

  The bitch. I hoped she would rupture, bleed to death in the saddle. Let her martyr herself, not me as well. Whether she had not noticed my sufferings, or whether she had, I could not decide which was worse. I still can’t.

  St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain,

  Full forty days, it will remain;

  St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair,

  For forty days, t'will rain no more.

  The rhyme from my childhood pounded in my head as steadily as the ceaseless, driving rain. When I was a child my mother had sung it to me every July 15. But this year the rain had begun even earlier: the skies had darkened after Sir Thomas More’s execution yesterday. It seemed impossible that they would ever be clear again.

  They said St. Swithin wept on this day when monks tried to move his grave. Indeed the sky itself seemed to weep; the summer rain which should have been welcomed as refreshing nourishment instead brought with it a torrent of decay. Shoes, books, anything made of leather rotted if not kept near the fire, which made them brittle. Wood warped, papers curled up and carpets sprouted dark stains. The flowers lately planted in the privy garden would drown, along with England’s crops. The queen would be blamed personally if the harvest failed. Further proof of God’s displeasure.

  As she bore popular blame for More’s execution. Even now his head was stuck on a pike on London Bridge—parboiled, to keep the features recognizable. So oppressive was the atmosphere in the queen’s apartments--the close stench of mildew and damp, unbrushed fabrics mingling with the odors of suspicion and fear—that I slipped out one afternoon, through the long gallery where I still hoped to see Jane but never did.

  That same smell was everywhere throughout the palace, I
thought: even the corridors had that whiff of danger and rot, like a lion’s hot breath.

  Except in Kratzer’s rooms. They smelled only cold, like a tomb. The astronomer was seated at his instrument table, though not working; his hands lay in his lap.

  I had not spoken alone with him since the night of the wedding banquet. I’d seen him from afar at the coronation, or across the room at one of the endless card- and poetry-gatherings in the queen’s apartments, two summers ago now. So much had changed since then, both within me and in the world beyond this little rain-dark chamber. His single window looked out onto the courtyard, where the paving stones shone dully. The red bricks of Hampton were the color of dried blood.

  “I fear you have found me idle, mistress.” The words themselves were Kratzer, but the tone of them was horribly wrong, delivered like a poor player struggling to remember his lines. His stubbled cheeks made him look gaunt and old. Back in May the king had suddenly ordered all men at court to wear their hair short and grow beards, setting an example by doing so himself. Kratzer’s hair was cut to just under his ears. It gave him (and everyone who wore the style) a look of mourning.

  “No one can do any work today, Master Kratzer,” I said. If I sat in the chair I would never be able to get up again. So I remained standing.

  “Aye.” His gaze was not on me, but on the astrolabe on the wall behind me. He had made several for More, given them as presents. “’Tis a sad day.”

  “More was…” I swallowed. “He died for what he believed in. I could not do as much.”

  “You believe in nothing.”

  “That’s not true,” I blurted. “I believe in what I know to be real.” Yet so much of what I knew was shifting, vanishing. Perhaps it would be easier to vanish along with it. .

  “Then you do not believe in any of the intangibles,” he said, looking at me at last. “Anger, or fear. Or guilt.”