by V L Perry
“We’ve already packed,” said Lady Zouche in despair, and gestured to the iron-banded trunks spread across the room. “What reason for the delay?”
“I only bring a message from Master Secretary,” he answered. Over his shoulder he added, “Don’t be too quick to unpack. His Majesty may change his mind again.”
Lady Zouche heaved an angry sigh. “We’ll have to open this one.” She indicated one of the smaller trunks. “Her Grace’s smocks and toilet things are in there. The rest can stay for now.” In the firelight I could see beads of sweat under her hairline; the night was cool but damp, and it has been hard work lifting and folding the velvet and damask and satins, sitting on the heavy lids to fasten them. Now we needn’t have hurried, or been so thorough. All the books, games and musical instruments were packed carefully in nailed crates. It would be a dull week without them.
The May Day joust was the usual farce: courtiers pretending to be gallant knights ladies offering scarves and sleeves to their champions. It was a white-sky day, overcast yet warm, and we stood pretending to be the queen’s devoted ladies. Waiting.
I stood beside the queen’s chair in the royal box. Jane stood on the opposite side, next to the king’s chair, just under the cloth of estate. She should be outside it.
The queen gave Henry Norris a green silk handkerchief. He looked distinctly uncomfortable as he bowed in thanks; Madge looked straight ahead, her lovely face like stone. Small pinpricks of vengeances do not hurt as much as deep cuts, but they tend to fester.
The king rose, knocking a few of the flower garlands from the edge of the box as he groped his way out of the box. The queen snapped her head to watch him cross the lawn, her green veil blowing against my arm. She did not rise, though; she would preside over the rest of the tournament by herself. Giving chase would be a breach of decorum only for lowborn waiting-maids, like Jane Seymour.
She was not watching him; her eyes were fixed, more or less, on mine. Then she turned her narrow back to me—to both of us—and left to follow him. She held herself gracefully and did not hurry, already every inch a queen.
You know what happened next, of course. Everyone does, or thinks they do. Yet before it grew to a roar it began as a whisper, like the hissing that warns too late of a snake in the garden just before you step on it. Some of what you have heard is true. But some of it is lies. And some was muddled, and some was, as I’m sure Cromwell would say, overlooked.
We were with the queen the next morning watching Brereton and Weston play tennis when Meg brought whispered word that Norris had been arrested the day before.
“Arrested? Surely you have not heard aright,” the queen replied, watching the ball fly back and forth, back and forth. The smell of sweat mingled with the sweetish honeysuckle and brewed to a cloying perfume.
“He is in the Tower,” Meg insisted, her voice growing harsh as it ever did when she was frightened or anxious. “And my queen, there is more…you brother…your brother…”
She could not finish, and it was almost a mercy that the messenger came in then with a summons for the queen to report to the Privy Council. The queen laid her hand on Meg’s hair. “I will see you at dinner, Meg,” she said, as if this happened every single day.
But Meg was not at dinner. Nor was half the household: Nan, Eliza, Lady Rochford, Lady Exeter, Mary Howard, Ann Saville…it was a skeleton crew that served her midday meal in silence. She sat at table in her outer chamber, the golden dishes spread around her, picking but not eating.
“Norris and George,” she murmured once, almost as if amused. “Norris and George.”
They were both in the Tower. The charges were ugly, terrifying. Criminal intercourse and liberties with the queen’s person. Cromwell meant business, then. He would see to it that there were no impediments to a third marriage. “And the musician,” she said, as if to herself. “They may as well have thrown in the cooks and scullery boys. Perhaps they will.”
“My dear,” Lady Zouche said, then stopped. What was there to say? I’m sure you did not have connection with your brother, I’m sure the king’s charges are as false as his pretensions to chivalry? “Try to eat something,” she finished lamely.
“Ah yes, I shall need my strength, for I am to travel. And here comes my escort,” as the sound of boots tramping in the outside corridor came close and Norfolk entered, ducking through the doorway as usual. Behind him came Cromwell and the Lord Chancellor. Men who, you might argue, owed much of their careers to her. I remembered the last time Norfolk had entered this chamber, back in January, and my whole body shivered with loathing at the man.
“You are to conduct yourself to the Tower, at the king’s command,” Norfolk pronounced. He’d rehearsed it, you could tell. No Your Grace or any niceties this time, maybe none from now on.
She rose. “If it be His Majesty’s pleasure, I am ready to obey,” she said, without a hint of irony.
Norfolk shook his head and tutted. Behind him Cromwell noticed me staring, and gave me a measuring look, an infinitesimal nod. I understood then where the other women were, why those of us left had not been summoned: he wanted only those who might be able to tell him what he could use. I had already been tested, and found lacking.
Behind him another figure shifted into view: my uncle. He’d had to admit them, of course, but had not needed to do so with quite such a look of satisfaction.
Jane was nowhere to be found. I knew where to look, of course: her brother’s rooms. I passed the guards with some story of bringing a message from Lady Seymour, and went in to find the sunny outer chamber empty. Faint sounds came from within—splashing? I went further and found her, looking as if she’d expected me.
She squatted naked in an empty wooden tub, wiping her arms with a cloth dipped in the bowl of rosewater beside her. Her hair was tied in a towel about her head, a few damp strands trailing over her shoulders.
“Jane,” I began, “the queen has been arrested.”
She knew already, I could tell. She regarded me calmly, with none of the wariness that I had wished to see since the night of the cup in the queen’s chamber. It was as if she knew she had nothing to fear from me.
“I am bathing,” she said simply.
“I can see that. For the king?” I laughed and folded my arms. It all seemed like a grand joke. “Why not go up on the roof?”
For an answer she wrung the cloth over her neck and shoulders. I looked at the body before me, white flesh and dark places, coveted by a king. One body was very like another. One body must be got rid of before another could replace it.
“He won’t divorce her,” I said, giving weight to each word. “Not this time.”
“No,” she replied, “I don’t think he will.”
I turned my back to her for the last time. “Close the door when you go,” she said.
“There’s some French jasmine oil in her chambers,” I said over my shoulder. “Put some on your quim. He likes that.”
Jane’s sister Elizabeth, who was betrothed to Cromwell’s son, supplied us with what crumbs of information we got after that. When the queen cried that she would open her body to prove her innocence, Kingston was bewildered, especially when she moved to fling open the flaps of her overskirt before Meg seized her wrists. He thought—and reported—that she was out of her mind with panic. But we grew cold when we heard it, we who knew her body better than we knew our own: a physical examination would have saved her. It was a time-honored law: all female prisoners were examined to determine whether they could plead their bellies at trial. All except her.
It wouldn’t have mattered. I think later, at the trial, she saw how desperate they were to get rid of her, and knew it would be useless to fight. But each time I’ve tried to tell myself that, another thought follows hard upon it, like a hound after a hare: the queen I knew would no more have given up and rolled over than a lion would beg for scraps. Especially with her precious red-haired cub’s inheritance at stake. She may well have miscarried in the Tower. What with the shock. That wou
ld go far toward solving the king’s problem. But there was no report of it, and thus it had not happened.
Elizabeth told us all this as we huddled, frightened, in the queen’s apartments that were no longer the queen’s: a household without a head. Those of us who had their own husbands and homes to flee to had gone already. Cromwell’s agents
She did think of us, or rather of Eliza, of all people: “I fear for Lady Worcester’s sake, and pray they do not handle her ill.” In her mind it must have been a kind of spirit-magic: their babes were begotten and due at the same time, and she may have imagined their fates were somehow linked. But Eliza had been among those taken early in the evening on the day of the queen’s arrest. None of us could imagine what Cromwell might do – or have done – to a pregnant woman.
Some of the missing ones returned quickly: Mary Howard was red-eyed and shaken after a long interrogation by her uncle, but insisted she had never seen or heard bit of scandal in the queen’s conduct. No, she did not know who else Cromwell’s agents had talked to, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. Nan Cobham went about with a hard gleam in her eye, and when once she made reference to “the kings’ justice being served,” gentle Lady Zouche finally pulled back and slapped her.
Madge was brainlessly terrified, though she did not need to be; they could hardly expect her to inform against her husband, Norris, and anyway her mother, Lady Shelton, was already aiding Cromwell’s cause, being set to keep watch over the prisoner and report her every word.
Meg was with her. That was something; she would not be alone, without friends. But how many did she have left, inside her prison or without?
Not many, it seemed: reports now flew fast and thick, and women who had either exchanged fewer than a dozen words directly with her or not borne her some grudge now held her life in their hands. Ann Saville, who had been witness on her secret wedding morning, gave testimony of hearing one of the musicians profess his love for her. And Lady Wingfield’s accusation of conspiracy was trotted out once again, though that lady now lay cold in her grave.
Eliza came up into the maid’s chamber after being gone for a day and a half. We crowded round her, weak with relief, asking questions to drive away our fearful imaginings: was she all right? Was the child safe? Had Cromwell’s agents gotten her too? What happened?
“Yes, they did.” Eliza was as calm as if she’d just come from polishing the mirrors. “And I told them of that filthy whore’s malice, her vile plans. I thank God for the chance to see His justice done; if there’s any good in England, she’ll not be released from hell even on judgment day.”
We stared at her, and Bess Holland actually took a step back, as if from a cold draft or foul smell. I remembered the helpless, retching girl of five years ago, remembered her shame, her wide-eyed smile at being welcomed back into the fold, and knew she’d been waiting for this day longer than anyone else.
You are wondering where Jane was during all of this.
No one knew for certain. One report had her at Bryan’s house in the Strand, another at Carew’s house in Beddington; another claimed the king kept her secretly at Whitehall, that she had returned to Wulfhall, or awaited the king at Hampton, where the queen’s apartments had already begun to be refitted for her. Safer to believe none of it. But what was the truth?
Every hour of silence brought a more terrible surety. Despite the hope some had that the queen would be exiled, placed in a convent, or both, I knew already how this masque would play out. No, I didn’t say anything to them; what would have been the point?
There were more interrogations, more accusations, slanders, and lies: I will not repeat them here. To put them is paper is to give them life again. But it was as if they were determined to convict her of all seven deadly sins; she must be made a monster of lust, an English Messalina driven to her own destruction. Only a satyr could have dreamed up such charges, and only a fool could have believed them.
“His Grace is no fool,” Lady Zouche whispered to me. Her eyes were red. “That’s why they must be so monstrous.”
On the evening of the day Norris and the others were condemned, four grim-faced men in the king’s livery entered the audience chamber unannounced. Cromwell’s agents. At the thought of more interrogation, Madge went weak, and I had to hold her up. She was soft and white, like flour dough, with no strength to her.
They paid us no more attention than if we were furniture. Actually it was the furniture they were here to inventory, and the contents of the trunks, the ornaments throughout the rooms. Surely they could need no more evidence. It could only mean they did not expect her to return.
“She has not yet been tried,” I blurted. “When she returns, she will be most displeased to have her property so disrespected.”
“Most of it’s Crown property,” one grunted at me as the others pushed past. “And she has committed gross indecency against the king. The others received a fair trial, and were condemned. What other justice can there be for her?”
A fair trial: a single confession, wrung by torture, and four of the king’s closest friends drawn down into the mire. Any possible relics must be confiscated. And the new queen would want her apartments decorated to her own taste.
In the inner chamber I found Lady Zouche and Elizabeth Seymour, moving like clockwork and expressionless in their grief. Elizabeth, red-eyed, shot me a warning glance as she bent over a trunk and jerked her head toward the guard, who was scratching away with his pen at a list. The silver casket lay with its lid flipped open on her inlaid writing-table, the letters still tied with their blue ribbon. All her papers would be collected and examined. Then burned.
Lady Zouche saw me looking at it and met my eyes, then dropped a lead-crystal ointment jar on the marble tabletop, where it shattered.
“Fie, look what you have done, clumsy!” shrieked Elizabeth. “You’ve no business here if you can take no better care than that!”
“I’d have more care if you were not always in my way!” When the guard moved to quiet them, they both quarreled even louder with him, and I lifted the sheaf of letters out of the casket and tucked them down the front of my busk, against my skin. Then I went out.
I did not stop to catch my breath or smooth my hood and dress before I knocked at the door to Kratzer’s rooms. The page looked startled and stepped back as I went in past him and pushed open the inner door.
It was small, and surprisingly dark. There was a cot, a wine jug on a small table, and a few framed pictures nailed to the paneling. Startled, he turned from the fire that burned merrily in the grate, for the spring evenings were still cool. On the edge of the cot sat a young woman, her hair spilling about her loosened bodice, her mouth a surprised O.
“Out,” I said, and she scurried from the chamber like a mouse, so that I never knew who she was.
He said nothing, for he saw the state I was in. Instead he went to the table and poured wine into a goblet, handing it to me. I took it with both hands and drained it while he filled one for himself. He took a swallow and put it down on the table, took my face in his hands and kissed me.
The room was starting to spin, and seemed too close. I would not let him unlace my dress until I had removed the bundle of letters, and clutched them tightly in one fist as he laid me down and moved his mouth over my body. And after that I sank into something like the wine-stupor, darker and warmer, though not nearly as safe.
The king sent word from Whitehall that the queen’s household was to be disbanded; we were released from our oath of allegiance to her. It was a bit late, in light of Nan’s and Eliza’s testimony, but also too early: her trial was not until the day after tomorrow.
I knew I should not risk Nicholas’s rooms again. But I needed a place to take refuge from the horror all around me.
That evening as I was perfunctorily removing my clothes, he caught my hands in his.
“You do not have to do this. His eyes were as green as the new grass in Greenwich Park. “You will be welcome here anytime, under any circumsta
nces. Whatever you do, I hope you will do because you desire it, not because you feel you must.”
The man was either truly good or a fool. I buried my face against his chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth. Gentle, calm, safe: an island in a storm.
I stayed there all the next day, and the next. The page brought food and emptied the chamber pot, and once there was a clean shift folded in with some linens from the laundry. I did not move from his chamber even when he urged me to take refuge in the relative safety of London.
“I have a house in Holborn,” he said one night as we lay together, our bodies touching at every swell, every curve. “You could be safe there.”
It was not something I could explain, and he did not press me, but I was bound to see this drama play out to the end.
He found me one afternoon reading the king’s letters, the ones I had taken from her apartments. So many years I’d wanted to see them for myself, and now they seemed so unbearably depressing, so ominous: …The ennui of absence is already too much for me: and when I think of the increase of what I must needs suffer it would be well nigh unbearable for me were it not for the firm hope I have… How passion and devotion could warp into something else in so short a time, like an infant born decayed. Words on paper meant nothing, promised nothing.
“Give them to me,” he said, the only order he ever gave me. He tucked them away in the front room; I do not know what became of them.
It was from that little room that I heard the guns boom their dreadful announcement from the Tower that bright mid-May morning. The queen was dead.
NOVEMBER 1537
With her eyes closed she looks almost pretty. That wandering, restless eye is no longer a detraction. Her pale hair spreads lustrously across the pillow, and at last she wears a crown, an openworked, delicate thing studded with gems that glitter in the candlelight. The king can deny his queen nothing, even in death.