To Obey and Serve

by V L Perry

That first night of their arrival, the king sent word to her Privy chamber that he would arrive within half an hour. We dutifully prepared, lighting the wax tapers, putting out musical instruments and bowls of sugared cherries, his favorite. But when he entered, looking puffier and more tired up close than he had at dinner, he greeted us with little ceremony and repaired straight to the queen’s bedchamber. There was business to be done there.

  At night I went to Nicholas. It was something I craved—not the act itself, but the refuge it offered. The last words I’d exchanged with Jane haunted me, as did Queen Anne’s pallid oval face, the image of Jane hovering over her bed like a carrion-bird. I woke from dreams in which I could not scream, and lay rigid as he tightened his arms around me.

  He never asked me any questions, but told me stories: about his boyhood, about the stars. He spoke German, close to my ear; sometimes I answered him, and I understood almost everything we said to one another. Each time he let me go without asking whether I loved him or would come to him again, or any of that nonsense.

  I could not bear the ugliness all around me during the day without the promise of those nights. Others saw it, and doubtless wondered why the queen said nothing. I was now among the things she wished not to see. I stayed later with Nicholas in the mornings, left without asking her leave, wore my old hood with only silkwork and no pearls just to see what would happen.

  What happened, time and again, was nothing. The new ladies thought it was testament to the queen’s great love for me. The other turned aside.

  And so my days and nights were divided between duty that felt like betrayal and sin that felt like absolution. It was a strange kind strange kind of mourning that also healed, a simultaneous tearing down and rebuilding. For Jane, I felt only loss; the Jane I had known, debated and joked with, confided in as a partner in fate had perhaps never existed at all. Either that or she had been consumed by the flames of ambition, replaced by the cold, fanatical queen who had risen from her ashes.

  On Whitsun, the court processed up the river to Westminster, her first state entry into London as queen. I was not on the royal barge with them, but on a smaller one some ways back where I could see them waving. The noise of gunshot from the boats on the river and the thunder of the canon salute as we passed the Tower made conversation impossible. I remember it was very lonely. And hot, even on the water; the sunlight dancing on the river’s brown surface hurt my eyes.

  Another thing had changed: Chapuys was not only invited to witness the procession, but did so from his own tent hung on the riverbank, emblazoned with the Imperial arms borne by the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs. Looking at it, I remembered the same badge on the roof of St. Stephan’s cathedral in Vienna; when I shut my eyes I could see the Stephansplatz itself, its paving-stones torn up and gun-trenches gouging the space where the market stalls usually stood, the Archduke’s forces braced to repel the Infidel’s siege. When anther gunshot sounded, I jumped and opened my eyes.

  The king and queen were smiling at each other under the June sun. There were no Turks, no rumble of an invading army. We were passing by the Tower now, its walls draped with banners and crests. Neither of them so much as turned their faces toward it.

  There were yet more additions to the queen’s household; the maids’ chamber was full to bursting, and new pallets had to be added. Either she would have to slow her acquisition of serving-women, or marry some of us off.

  Two girls stood in the outer chamber, staring straight ahead as Queen Jane walked round and round them. Their muddy skirts trailed the floor, and their eyes were red; the smaller one kept sniffling, though she fought hard not to, giving a little guilty duck of her eyes each time she did. The queen had agreed to select one of Lady Lisle’s daughters for a place in the royal household, and she meant to keep that promise literally. They had been given neither rest nor refreshment since arriving from Calais. The taller one, a dark-haired girl of about fifteen, swallowed a yawn.

  “You, girl,” the queen beckoned to the yawning girl, so that she stopped in mid-gulp. “You may stay among my women. Your sister can return…”

  The smaller girl began to cry, exhaustion and shame wringing miserable tears out of her. Her sniffling became a composition of sobs and coughs.

  “Control yourself!” the queen snapped, then seemed to regret her harshness. “The Duchess of Suffolk may have a place in her household; we will speak to her ourselves. You may consider yourself honored to serve one whose title was once held by His Majesty’s own sister.”

  Her choice was very clear: both of Lady Lisle’s daughters were fair, but the smaller girl was by far the prettier of the two, with a tumble of honey-blonde locks that curled prettily even when soaked from the rain. The girl she had chosen, Anne Bassett, would be sworn in on the morrow.

  “But you must needs attire yourself properly in my presence,” she said, fingering the girl’s gown. “You may wear this…French thing for now, but see that you put a proper English frontlet on your bonnet. And sufficient pearl to cover the whole.” Seeing the look of alarm on the girl’s face, she added, “We will advance you the cost on your salary. Your mother will be told what to provide.”

  I could not feel pity for Mistress Bassett, either; she had chosen her fate, run to it.

  The only flicker of feeling that summer came when Fitzroy died: relief for his sake, sorrow for Mary Howard’s virgin widowhood. Before the jellies were finished making she returned from Richmond to Queen Jane’s service.

  I was strolling with her and Anne Bassett along the walkway surrounding the inner courtyard when the king came upon us, Cromwell and Chapuys on either side of him. Cromwell was in mid-sentence when he saw us, but nodded politely before continuing.

  The king cut him off. “When came such handsome ladies to my court?” He made some gesture toward us, which I could not fully see with my head bowed. He seemed not to be talking to any of us. “What pity I saw them not before I was married; I would fain have been a bachelor two months longer!”

  Cromwell laughed, treating it as a joke, and Chapuys joined him before a heartbeat had passed. But the same realization must have flashed through all of us, frozen in that horrible sunny moment: the king did not recognize his son’s wife, or his own former mistress. His grasp of reality was slipping. When had it started? After his fall, or even before?

  The queen made no mention of that afternoon’s encounter, though after that she forbade Anne her French apparel altogether and gave her a gabled hood, which was slightly too large for her, so that she looked like a birdhouse. Mary began to be fined for loose threads on her hood, for buttons and precious stones that had been “lost” under her care. And the queen set her the task of checking to see that the chamberers had scrubbed the garderobes well, putting her own face to them. As usual, she ignored me.

  She waited until all three of us were present the next time the king was in her chambers to begin sighing loudly.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” He’d given no sign of recognizing either of us or remembering the scene in the courtyard. He was bluff, hearty King Hal now, ready to grant whatever small boon his beloved queen might ask of him. A lapdog, perhaps? Or a fool to entertain her? They could be got at a few hours’ notice from the lunatic asylum.

  “I enjoy it so when Your Grace is here with me,” she said in a voice half an octave higher than her regular one. “But it makes me sad to think that soon other business must needs take Your Grace away from me. Here I have none but my inferiors to keep me company.” She stressed inferiors for our sake. As if she had never scraped the mud off her own shoes or stood in line for the privy like the rest of us.

  “What would make you happy, duckling?”

  “If it should please Your Grace, that I might have the Lady Mary here at the court, to make merry withal,” she said, meeting his eyes.

  Mary had finally taken the Oath a few weeks earlier, acknowledging the king’s supremacy over the church in England, and written her father a groveling letter admitting her
parents’ marriage had been “incestuous and unlawful.” Those of the old faith, even Chapuys, had urged her to do so to save herself from Anne Boleyn’s fate on Tower Green. Secretly they still backed her cause; the Reformers knew it, and trusted Mary not at all. Tucked away in the country at Hatfield, she was a dangerous rallying point for a rebellion. Best to keep her here under the watchful eye of the central government, now that the greater danger of her mother was removed.

  She could have said all that plainly, of course. But the king took her meaning well enough. It was a little game they played, her sweet suggestions and his hearty granting of her whims: “We shall have her here, darling, if it shall make thee merry. She shall even be appointed among your household if you wish it.”

  “No!” she said quickly. Then, recovering: “No, Your Grace, I would not want to presume such from you. Let her have her own household here, that she may keep company with me.

  “One thing more, my lord,” she said as he left. “If the Lady Mary is to join my household, will not Elizabeth’s household be reduced? It would be a great saving of the expense of removing Lady Mary here.”

  The king frowned. Either he had forgotten he had a younger daughter, or did not wish to be reminded of it. “Aye,” he said dismissively. “You may see to it yourself.”

  When Lady Mary arrived in September, the court gathered in the king’s great audience chamber to watch him receive her. Jane sat by his side, under the cloth of estate.

  Lady Mary was announced, and entered. It was the first time I had seen her this close; the only thing I recognized from the shining little princess all those years ago was her hair, which had grown a shade darker but was no less lovely. This was the girl they talked about, rallied round, feared, hoped to destroy. The one Anne Boleyn had called “her death.” In a way that had been true, though not as she had prophesied.

  There was the usual ceremony of greeting and kneeling and kissing, the predictable words. As if she had merely been away on a journey, as if her mother had not been dishonored and died abandoned, as if she herself had never stood in the shadow of the axe, as if the bond between them had not been renewed with blood.

  The king did not rise to greet her; it was Jane who moved forward to embrace the girl. They had this rehearsed. He was sweating overmuch even for this warm September day, and his sky-blue satin coat was far too long and heavy for the weather. What was it concealing?

  Suddenly he stepped forward to take her hand. Even from where I stood, I could tell he was putting more weight on one leg than the other. “Some of you desired that I have this jewel put to death,” he intoned, glaring round at the nervous assembly. I saw Tom Seymour grin; the man had not sense enough to keep his thoughts hidden. Beside him Cromwell’s expression was smoothly blank.

  Jane whipped her head around to look at the king; he was deviating from the script, you could tell. “That were a pity, to have lost your chiefest jewel in England,” she said, coming dangerously close to scolding.

  But he did not seem to notice. Something was definitely wrong. “Nay, nay sweetheart!” he said too loudly, and right there in front of everyone patted her gold-embroidered stomacher. “Edward!”

  There were sideways glances and more faces wiped blank: there was no Edward, and everyone from the laundresses on up knew it.

  It was Lady Mary who relieved the tension by sliding to the floor in a dead faint. I do not know how real it was; she was her father’s daughter, after all.

  “Well,” the king said, looking puzzled. He did not seem to quite know what to do.

  “Come,” Jane said, and led him away by the hand, leaving his daughter to the doctors’ care. To go work on Edward, no doubt.

  High summer is a time of blossoming and decay. The stench of fermenting treason did not disappear at the end of the summer, but grew ranker, like the bloated dog corpses covered with flies in the city streets. A sure sign that the season had turned.

  It was Nicholas who first told me, one misty October dawn, that there was word of an uprising near Yorkshire.

  He sat on the bed, already dressed. No doubt he expected me to come slowly awake and struggle to grasp the news, for I startled him when I sat up so fast.

  Rebellious peasants had been gathering in Lincolnshire, although that itself was no surprise; for centuries the North had been a hotbed of unrest and discontent. The Normans had never gotten round to taming the wild men who prowled the forests and moors like beasts. Even King Arthur had had trouble with them.

  I was still trying to convince myself it was a nightmare, hoping in vain to wake up at any moment. “What do they want?”

  “Difficult to say; even they don’t seem to know. Protection from the landlords, their noblemen back on the Council, the halt of heresy. And they want the monasteries restored, and England to return to Rome.”

  “Is that all?” My laugh stuck in my throat.

  “They’re coming down through Lincolnshire, gathering more forces by the thousands. The Council is deliberating now. The king thinks to send Norfolk to deal with them.” Deal with them. Not make a treaty, or grant them a hearing; no tricks such as Richard II’s promise to fulfill all his subjects’ demands, with never a finger lifted to action. Norfolk was no diplomat in any case, was eager to reingratiate himself with the king after the disastrous Boleyn affair. He would smash them.

  If only Fitzroy…Fitzroy could not help. Fitzroy was dead. And he’d had a strongly loyal party in Lincolnshire. Was this the afterbirth of a plan never come to fruition, an aborted coup to place the bastard on the throne? A young Tudor prince, even a sickly one interrupted by constantly coughing, might have been a more popular choice than the devil we knew, so to speak. It was a usurpation come too late, the rebellion itself yet another headless body haunting the countryside.

  Without warning I vomited over the side of the bed, narrowly missing Nicholas’s leather shoes.

  So it was here, the thing I’d dreaded most since the day I’d fled Vienna, the day my mother had prayed against, in vain. With no comets or portents to warn of its arrival, the Peasants’ Revolt had come to England. The words echoed in my pounding head: an uprising, heading south, it is here, it is here… I would leave court this very day, and to Hell with anyone who might try to stop me.

  I would rush into the privy chamber right now, unannounced, where she would be kneeling in prayer with her head bowed, her velvet back to me; I would beg for my release from her service. Only as she turned would I see that her head was not bowed but gone, the smooth skin and jeweled fabric wet with still-warm blood from the severed neck. The head on the ground beside her would move its lips in the ghost of a whisper: “But you are already released from my service. Why do you stay?”

  Lady Zouche had to slap me, she said later; I was making no sense.

  I came back to my senses in a bed I did not recognize. The gilt Tudor rose above my bed stared down at me like an eye. The light streaming from the window had a familiar slant to it, but it was not until I sat up that I recognized where I was: the queen’s closet, just off her bedchamber.

  Jane stood at the side of my bed. The queen of England herself, ministering to a lowly maid of honor. I am ashamed to admit that, in that terrible instant before I remembered everything, I was truly glad to see her.

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  “You had a fit,” she said. “It is Dr. bin Rahmat you have to thank; he ordered the cot, and tended to you while you were…ill.”

  Never before had my memory abandoned me during a fit. “Here?” I looked around, and there he was, smiling on my other side in his long Eastern gown. The thought that he had touched me, had power over me while I was insensible, was not a comforting one.

  “You should be grateful he was nigh to hand,” she said severely, with a touch of her old impatience. I always was able to bring it out in her. “He gave you that syrup which brought you back to your senses.”

  I could hardly bring myself to look at his face. Instead I focused on his hand, dark b
rown with moon-pale fingernails, which held up the small vial of pale yellow liquid.

  “This is something used in my country for a sickness like yours.” He put emphasis on his words in all the wrong places, but his voice was gentle. “How long have you suffered in this way?”

  “Since I was a child,” I replied after a moment. She would order me to answer if I refused.

  “And does great strain bring it on? Either of the body or mind?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  He asked my age, felt my wrists, looked in my eyes. I tried to hold my breath when he was so close, but after a moment was too dizzy to try. He smelled not unpleasant, like a sweet gum. Even his beard was clean and combed, unlike many of the gentlemen at court.

  “I think you should carry a supply of this about you from now on,” he said, indicating the vial. “It is an extract of oil from a bean that grows in the Orient, mixed with herbs. It is different for each person; no two patients require the same recipe. I can make a more effective dose later. For now, take this.” It was the color of new butter, but did not solidify. I swirled it around in its glass bottle. The bottle alone was valuable.

  “Do not exhaust yourself,” he admonished as I made to get up. “These fits come upon you when you are overtired or excited, yes? I think, Your Grace, you might excuse her from hard tasks or long standing.”

  “What of prayer?” she asked. “Which saints must she ask to help her recovery? What shrines are best to visit?”

  He smiled politely. “All of God’s holy men and women serve Him equally, Your Grace. I can see no harm in praying to all of them.” He bowed his way out.

  “Impudent creature,” she said, but without real force; I wasn’t entirely sure whether she meant him or me. “You can get up now.”

  I did, steadying myself against a table. “Your Grace, I was coming to you about…”