To Obey and Serve

by V L Perry

  “I have seen what fear can do.” The ravaged streets of Vienna, the smell of spent powder and burning flesh…a head spiked on London Bridge. Harsh laughter, a withholding of kindness. Sins of commission and omission.

  “Yes, some effects be more obvious,” he replied. “But you have also observed the noblest traits of our being. Courage. Loyalty. Love. As long as those burn bright in the human soul, there is no danger the weaker ones will ever extinguish them. For only if we love are we truly alive, and only dead once we are unloved and forgotten.

  “I did not cast off my wife,” he added in the same weary, flat tone. He was looking out the window again; I saw for the first time how much grey had crept into his hair. “The sweat carried her off seven summers ago. But even before that, she chose the convent over me.”

  What had I sought in coming here? The comfort of something that no longer existed, of

  having someone I could trust and rely on in time of trouble. Maria was lost to me, as was my mother. Jane and I were losing each other, spending more days apart and exchanging meaningless words. And now Kratzer, gone too. No, not gone. But grieving so over his lost friend that there was no way I could reach down into that pain. It went too deep.

  “We leave on progress tomorrow.” I meant to say that I would not see him again, that the state of affairs in the queen’s household was driving me near to madness. But I did not. You gave me learning, I thought of saying. You gave me knowledge, ambition, a glimpse of a world different than this. What did you expect me to do with it?

  “Kratzer,” I finally managed. “Nicholas. I’m sorry.”

  “No, you should not feel so,” he said, and he might have been discussing Plato, or explaining one of his instruments. “It does no good to regret the past. I have hoped you would come to me. Yet now that you are here you find a man without direction, who rambles on about nonsense, who may as well be absent. Proof both that God answers prayers, and that He does not, yes?”

  He did not turn from the window to watch me go.

  The progress that summer was a nightmare that even now I cannot recall clearly: a blur of heat and mud and pain, thin hands outstretched for alms. The miles of roads stretched on and on, leading only to temporary relief: a crowded, hurried meal in damp clothes, where the host usually grudged every mouthful. Hosting a royal stay could be ruinously expensive, and the lesser members of the household were often served with far less than reached the high table.

  There was a stop at Acton House, Poyntz’s manor, which he had fitted up with new Venetian glass and garderobes specially for this visit. Most of us still had to use the privies out back, though, which is nearly all I remember about the place. On my way back to the house one evening, I sat to rest a moment in the garden and detected that one of the building-stones had writing on it. It wasn’t a stone at all, but a sundial; I could just detect the initials N.K.. I remembered the evening of the Advent banquet years ago, Kratzer joking that no mistake was without salvage. And I was so overcome by melancholy that I could not move; Jane had to come looking for me, taking me in by the hand without a word.

  I remember the brief blessed coolness of Syon Abbey, propping myself against the stone walls while the queen scolded the prioress about worshipping idols. Her voice spiraled up and up, like the smoke from a candle. So many of her enemies had at one time been within this place—Barton, More, Peto—that to shriek and threaten must have been a kind of exorcism for her. The king looked on, not interfering.

  She did give them a copy of Tyndale’s Bible. The thin-faced prioress took it as though it were a dead bat. No more parroting of Latin phrases no one understood; from now on they would have to pray with their minds as well as their mouths.

  I do not remember the other monasteries, or where Jane was much of the time, or how my mind passed the time each day between rising in the summer dawn and collapsing between two other women on a palatte each evening.

  The only time I really remember clearly is that dreadful visit to Wulfhall.

  Sir John Seymour was clever enough not to try to emulate the magnificence or protocol of Acton Court. Instead he threw open his house with the manner of a country squire indulging his city relations, and it worked. Nothing ever delighted the king so much as bluff, jolly camaraderie with those beneath him, everyone pretending to an equality that no one felt

  Such informality sat less well with the queen. When she requested French wine at supper the first night, and was told there was none, she grew peevish. The king told her—too loudly-- that English ale would be quite good enough. The bedroom given her, too, was plainly-fitted; it had been Jane’s in childhood. She made us unpack her most splendid hanging and bedclothes to make up for it.

  The food too was plentiful yet plain, a welcome change from the overelaborate dishes of the court. There were smoked haunches of venison, and wild boar from Savernake forest, fish from the river each noon and evening. Berries, gathered by the bucketful on the southern slopes of the Seymour estate, were served with cream fresh from the barnyards. The supplies of cheese and bread and homebrewed ale gave out on the third day, forcing Sir John to send for fresh supplies from nearby Bedwyn Magna.

  Jane’s mother, Margery Wentworth, did not eat. She sat beside her husband, hands folded, eyes down. Not once did she raise them or move to speak.

  The king’s eyes followed her as she moved about the hall, directing the servants. And what did he see? A woman whose beauty and manners had once been celebrated at his father’s court, and who had mellowed into the great lady of a country estate. Her hair (what was visible of it) was a light silver, her complexion still fair, though traced by many little lines. She had been fruitful, producing both sons and daughters, and in her advancing years had devoted herself to making Wulfhall into a paradise for men: the grounds were always stocked with game, and fires roared in the grates to welcome weary hunters back each evening, where they could relax and talk before sitting down to a hearty country dinner. She was as the poet Skelton had written all those years ago: courteous, meek, gentle--the picture of womanly virtue. It must have pleased him.

  The queen too looked at her, and I could tell she saw something very different: a woman whose body was worn out with birthing nine children in a dozen years, whose youthful spirit and wit had guttered out like a candle before a steady breath. A woman who, for all her wealth and charm and cleverness, had married beneath her. She kept her eyes lowered so as not to see his excesses, his debauches with his eldest son’s wife, and who knew what other crimes? Or else she did see them, and said nothing as they tore her heart in silent anguish. Either way, she may have read a portent of her own future there. It must have frightened her.

  Perhaps this was why, the next night, the queen proposed a Scripture-quoting contest. It started innocently enough.

  The rules were thus: the king would start by reciting a verse, and each player in turn would say the next one until the chapter was completed. Each player who forfeited a verse had to pay a French crown, with the final winner collecting. If one could not remember the next verse when it was their turn, one could choose an alternate verse instead, and as long as no one else in the company was able to follow it, there would be no penalty.

  It was a game only a very few could play, and put the Lutherans at an advantage. Nevertheless, Bryan and Carew were able to keep up very well, as were Cromwell, Tom and Edward Seymour, his wife Anne, and even Sir John. His wife could not excuse herself from the king’s presence, and so sat and inwardly twisted as she listened to the Holy Word bandied about in a wagering contest. But she’d had a lifetime to practice suffering in silence; perhaps she simply focused her thoughts elsewhere, or prayed.

  The game went on a long time—we were a well-educated company, after all—but at last it was down to a final round between the king and queen. As she’d planned.

  “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil,” the king began. “But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edg
ed sword.”

  The room went still. Heads that had been nodding toward sleep now jerked upright, and you could almost scent the eagerness in the air.

  “An excellent wife, who can find?” the queen replied gaily. “For her worth is far above rubies.”

  I was fairly sure this was cheating; the verses did not follow upon one another. But evidently both of them were ready to take liberties with the text to accuse and defend, parry and thrust, all the while keeping the pretense of the game:

  “She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house.”

  “To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids.” The Seymours all looked uncomfortable, Sir John shifting on his bench. I dared not look at Jane.

  The king shot back: “These things doth the Lord hate: a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood…”

  “…an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren,” she finished.

  They looked at each other.

  “Whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul,” she said softly. “Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.”

  There was a long pause. It was impossible that King Henry of England, Defender of the Faith, had forgotten his Scripture. He had to have grasped her true intent by now.

  She went on: “Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.”

  “Deliver thyself as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand of the fowler.” The king seemed to be speaking to himself, as one in a trance. The incense-perfumed summer night seemed to hold its breath, waiting with the rest of the company to see what would follow.

  “I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon,” she murmured, as if they were the only two in the room. “Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves.”

  Right there in front of everyone she caressed his face, turned and walked out of the hall. Her skirts skimmed the polished stone floor loudly in the silence. As she passed Jane, she arched her neck and fixed her black eyes on her so that she could not fail to stare back into them. I never asked Jane what she saw there, but I did not need to.

  She did not look back at the king. Any other woman would have beckoned him with one more inviting glance, to be sure of her conquest. But because she did not, he rose and followed after her.

  And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,

  For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have been slain by her.

  Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.

  Nothing else mattered to her that autumn, not the ruined harvest or the king’s continued absence from her chambers, or Princess Mary’s continued defiance of the Oath. When she missed her courses for the second month in a row, she was sure.

  The babe in her belly was a secret to all but herself and those who tended her body, but the hard, smiling glint in her eyes was there to read for any who looked. In fact she was far pleasanter to be around, almost as she had been in earlier days.

  The king did not seem to delight in the queen’s pregnancy this time, as he had the others. He came to visit seldom, and usually kept to the poetry and dicing in the outer rooms.

  We could not yet sew garments or linens for the child, so she kept us busy making clothes for the poor, usually accompanied by Scripture readings. We got some Roman history now and again, and tales of wifely virtue. In the version of her life unfolding in her mind, she played Enid to the king’s Geraint, proving her fidelity to her husband in the face of his mistreatment of her. “He does it to test me,” she’d say, sometimes she said it three or four times in a row.

  “Are you not pleased, Jane?” Elizabeth Seymour asked her one day in the garden, louder than necessary. It was one of the last mild autumn days, and we had brought our sewing to the apple bower; the heavy smell of warm fruit hung sweetly on the air. I wondered then, not for the first time, whether the two sisters were truly as friendly as they appeared.

  Jane’s reply carried clearly above the crisp breeze that blew back her veil: “Indeed, we are all pleased for His Majesty. Though we must not tempt fate by rejoicing too soon; it is in God’s hands.”

  As she resumed her stitching, I saw with a kind of cold fear that there was ink on her fingers.

  The last time I ever went to spend an afternoon alone in the gallery, early that winter, I found someone else there instead. Madge Shelton, of all people, was hunched over in a window-seat, her pen scratching busily. As soon as she saw me she folded the sheaf of papers over, and I was surprised at how guilty she looked. What new conspiracy was this?

  “’Tis naught but poems,” she said, her eyes wary.

  I could still see some of the writing, half-covered: all in different hands, snatches of verse here and there. A few lines were from the Chaucer we’d heard in the queen’s chambers, others the usually silly court stuff about love and chivalry and other things that did not exist.

  “Your own? I’d have thought ”

  “Not just mine.” She twisted as thought she sat on a pin. “We pass it round, and each writes a verse. There’s no harm in it. We would have…”

  “Does everyone write in it?” I pressed her.

  She thought I was scolding her for keeping it from me. “Aye, all the queen’s household and the king’s gentlemen. Wyatt started it. But I keep it,” she added with a hint of pride.

  So Madge Shelton, who had not been able to write her name when I arrived at court, was now the keeper of a volume of poems. Everyone in the queen’s household knew of this, except me. And everyone had written in it. Except me. There were things in this world that I would never understand.

  When I reached the maids’ chamber, I pulled Jane’s trunk from under our bed and knelt to open it, not caring if she came in to find me. There, crumpled at the very bottom under the linens, was a single blotched sheet on which she had practiced her hand. The same words repeated over and over, like an incantation, clearer and stronger each time:

  Jane the queene.

  Jane the Quene.

  Jane the Queen.

  I sat frozen with horror, a single thought pushing its way into my numbed mind: how different her handwriting was from her true character. Small and demure, the letters almost hesitant to touch one another in places. No sign of the ravenous ambition behind them, or of the hours of squinting, straining labor it had taken her to teach herself.

  “Jane,” I said abruptly when she came up later for bed, “what are you doing?”

  She did not bother to pretend ignorance. “Saving His Grace and the kingdom from mortal peril.” She sounded like Elizabeth Barton; she looked a bit like her too, as she shut her eyes. “I have prayed to the Virgin for this.”

  It was no use pointing out that this was the sort of thing of which the Virgin was very unlikely to approve. “What you plan is a most grievous sin,” I finally said. It wasn’t enough, but it was all I could think of.

  I expected a stinging retort—how-sour-are-the-grapes-today or something like that. But when she spoke it was with conviction that was all the more alarming for being unfeigned:

  “If it be so, I shall answer to God for it.”

  “A very Lutheran answer,” I snapped.

  “We all answer to Him,” she said. “Men fight with words, and on the battlefield. Women’s battlefield has ever been the bedchamber: it’s where alliances are made, strategies planned, victories won and defeats suffered. She knows it, too.”

  “Jane.” To shout or shake her would only add to her co
nviction; martyrs thrive on the idea that they are persecuted. “Listen, and learn from me! The king’s mistress no longer has that kind of power.”

  “No,” she said, “but the king’s wife might.”

  I had to grab the world by a bedpost to keep it from spinning away. “So that’s the game you will play? Have you noticed,” I dropped my voice (for Cromwell had spies everywhere) (though the chief one was before me now), “that being the king’s wife is not the coveted position it once was?”

  She looked pityingly at me. “You tried,” she said, and she might have been a mother consoling her child. “You did your best. I understand it won’t be easy. But you cannot stand in my way.”

  No, I could not. In fact I would not stand near her ever again.

  Later that day, when a hard-riding courier brought news of Katharine of Aragon’s death at Kimbolton, the queen shut herself in her closet and wept. Many who were not there to see it refused to believe it. Others counted it as artifice, or simply did not understand why. But we did.

  Her brother remarked in the midst of a game of Noddy, “’Tis a pity the daughter does not follow the mother,” and earned himself a fierce scolding. If the king’s daughter could follow Katharine into permanent exile or death, so too could the king’s wife. But she dared not say so much aloud, even to him.

  Jane asked Mrs. Margery, the mistress of the wardrobe, to get her a yellow veil. It would please His Majesty, she said, and it was only proper to wear the Spanish color of mourning for the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. She must have known that nothing would escape the queens ears, had counted on it.

  And what an uproar there was when the king came to the queen’s apartments the next day to find her in lemon-colored satin from her hood to her shoes, how bewildered she was when he contorted with rage.

  “What mockery is this, madam? You dare rejoice at the death of one who was worth ten of you!”