by Deryn Lake
‘We have been away too long,’ he said to Sapphira, who tapped her own sign language into the palm of his hand, meaning, ‘But happily returned’.
The boys, meanwhile — Sylvanus, sturdy and rosy and staring with round, forget-me-not eyes at the strange shore and Jasper, dark and youthfully saturnine — together answered, ‘Never mind!’ They were growing close as twins, these two Howard sons with different mothers, though physically more and more unlike.
‘It’s the Kent coast ahead,’ said the fisherman. ‘The Lady Anna is putting down at Deal. Will that suit you too?’
Zachary nodded. ‘One harbour is as good as another. I’m headed for London. Unless …’
‘Unless?’
‘Unless His Grace the Duke of Norfolk be on hand somewhere about to greet the bride.’ He stroked his chin and said no more, staring thoughtfully at the white cliffs which grew nearer with every rolling wave.
To come ashore within the wake of the Lady of Cleves was excitement itself for the children, who ran about scooping up the paper flower petals which had been thrown in lack of the real thing. Sir Thomas Cheyney, Lord Warden of the port, had greeted Anna on her arrival with a company of horsemen, so there were other things lying on the ground of a less prepossessing nature, as Zachary was swift to point out to his sons. But they only grinned and looked as if they would have indulged in dreadful games had he not clipped an ear of each and kept a watchful eye on them as he negotiated the purchase of two horses for the next stage of their journey.
Though only country creatures were paraded out before him, both took Zachary’s fancy; one being a broad beast, an extra-ordinary pewter colour, with a beady eye which it fastened on the astrologer, for better or worse. The other appeared docile, a small neat mare of the type known as strawberry roan, though this was complimentary.
‘They’ll do,’ said the astrologer and, without argument, gave the stabler the money he asked for.
‘They’ll get you far as London tonight, Master. And they’ll ride well all their lives.’
‘Umm!’ Zachary raised a quizzical brow. ‘Enough of that. Is the Lord of Norfolk expected here to greet the Lady Anna?’
‘She’s only resting in Deal for an hour or so, Master. Then the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk will conduct her to Dover. I know nothing of any plans for the Lord of Norfolk.’
‘Then he probably keeps his Christmas at Greenwich, attending His Grace,’ said Zachary, but to himself. The stableman had turned away and Sylvanus, far stronger and more capable than his age would admit, had already helped his sister mount the mare and had scrambled up the blocks behind her.
‘I think,’ said Zachary, calling them to attention, ‘that we should make for Canterbury and spend the night at a tavern, the monastery guest hall no doubt now being closed down. Tomorrow we can ride to Greenwich and home.’
‘I can’t remember it,’ said Jasper, but Sapphira gave a smile and nodded and her father knew that she could recollect all the things that had taken place before they sailed for France.
‘It will be a home again,’ said Zachary, just to her. ‘We shall have a warm comfortable house just as we had when your mother was alive.’
Again she smiled, a little wistfully, and his heart wrenched for her that such a beautiful doll of a creature, all fine and fair, should have lost her speech attempting to ward off dark forces.
‘Then lead the way, Sir,’ said Sylvanus, ‘and I’ll follow sharp behind you.’
His father lost his grin in the hood of his cloak which he pulled up over his hat to ward off the cold crisp evening.
‘Sylvanus, all of you, pull your caps well down. I think the new moon will bring us frost.’
And having obeyed him, the gallant little party set off, wondering as did everyone who had arrived in Deal that day, just what change in fortune the year of 1540 — ahead of them by only four days — would bring. But none wondered more so than the jolly, kindly lady upon whom every eye was turned, and who wept a little as she changed her clothes in the tower apartments of Walmer Castle, wondering how, with her lack of both looks and talent, she would ever win the heart of her monstrous bridegroom, the King of England.
Chapter Eighteen
The sun, which by tradition always shone on a May Day tournament, at last came out from behind a cloud and instantly the tilt yard at Westminster was transformed. The flowers, hanging in garlands round the canopied stand in which the audience perched on rows of tiered seats, took on their full colour, as did the rich materials of the courtiers’ clothes, while the armour and weapons of the contestants instantly glistened in the brightness. Nearly everyone present felt their spirits lift. It was going to be a sunlit jousting after all.
Already mounted but waiting patiently by the combatants’ tents, Thomas Seymour, one of the forty-six challengers due to enter the lists that day, felt a smile broaden his face. It had not escaped his attention that the stands were packed with a great many ladies and he felt a surge of confidence in his ability to shine in their eyes. After all, these days was he not considered to be the most handsome man in England, the only other contender for the title having gone to the block accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn? Thomas felt at that moment, with the reluctant sun finally shining on him, that there was very little he would not dare, and very few women he could not win.
Despite the fact that he was now thirty-two and his elder brother Edward constantly urged him to marry, Thomas Seymour preferred to remain a bachelor, to love and then leave his ladies. For his childhood wish to marry the highest in the land had never gone away, having magnified, rather than diminished, with the passing of time. Two years ago he had cast his eyes on the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter, Mary, the neat and pretty Duchess of Richmond, widow of the King’s bastard Henry Fitzroy. They had had a short idyllic affair, kept most secret from Thomas Howard but guessed at by Norfolk’s son, Mary’s brother the Earl of Surrey.
After discovery their white-hot passion had cooled to lukewarm, partly because Thomas had lost interest and partly, he suspected, because Surrey had poured poison into his sister’s ear.
‘Bastard!’ murmured Thomas now, and looked over to where Henry Howard, in full armour, was being helped onto his horse. ‘I’ll see you flat on your back, and hard, before the end of the day,’ he added.
The sound of his muttering echoed most satisfyingly in his helmet so Thomas whispered, ‘Bastard’ again, listening and laughing, before turning his attention to a further minute inspection of the stands.
Right in the centre, directly in his line of vision, sat the King and the new Queen, now known as Anne of Cleves, Anna being considered too foreign sounding.
And what a farce that marriage! thought Thomas, grimly remembering the course of events since the poor woman had landed on English soil from Calais.
Last New Year’s Day, before their first official meeting, the King, eager to set eyes on his new wife, had ridden incognito with eight gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, Thomas being one of his merry crew, to where Anne stayed in Rochester in Kent. All had been disguised in identical cloaks and hoods and it had been Henry’s romantic idea that he would woo her as if he were a mere nobody. Now, recalling the scene, Thomas shuddered. One look at that sallow little face with its crown of patently false yellow curls and the King had lost his good manners. Anne’s New Year present of furs had remained in his hands and Henry had barely been able to give the blushing woman the time of day. As soon as he had withdrawn from her presence he declared her ugly and old and not what he had expected at all. The reign of Anne of Cleves as Queen had even then looked precarious. Indeed, Henry Tudor had made strenuous efforts to disentangle himself and had it not been for the political situation in Europe would have done so.
The wedding and bedding had been the most strained occasion Thomas had ever lived through. The long and tedious marriage ceremony done, Henry had stood by the nuptial bed in his nightclothes and robe, surrounded by his gentlemen, awaiting the moment when the royal bride should come
through the door. Thomas had been in an agony, longing to bellow with laughter, controlling a great guffaw until his eyes watered, watching Henry’s face as the Lady Anne, devoid of blonde wig and showing herself in all her dark and swarthy glory, had appeared surrounded by her simpering maidservants.
‘By Christ,’ Henry had muttered audibly, ‘I’ve no stomach for this,’ and he had held out his hand to Thomas as if he were a condemned man parting from his greatest friend. Seymour, who in his most secret heart had no feelings for his ex-brother-in-law than those of a wary respect, almost felt sorry for him.
And that night had seen the beginning of a wedded partnership that could only be described as an unmitigated disaster. From that time on Henry had constantly regaled his gentlemen with full details as to why the marriage remained unconsummated.
‘I can never be provoked and steered to know her carnally,’ he had whimpered into his wine cup. ‘For by her breasts and belly she should be no maid; which when I felt them, struck me so to the heart that I had neither will nor courage to the rest.’
In their private sanctum, well away from spying ears and prying eyes, Thomas and Francis Bryan had laughed until they became hysterical.
‘He’s all worm and no snake,’ screamed Seymour, and in his very derision had felt twice the man himself.
‘Then God send a new Queen soon,’ Bryan had answered, suddenly straight-faced, his eyes expressionless.
‘You know something?’ Thomas had asked, but Francis had refused to reply.
But now it was common knowledge. The King, fearing impotency above all, had cast his eyes about and at Easter time they had landed on a quivering little cat of a creature, a girl whose teasing little bosom and neat, high buttocks spoke blatantly of sexual ecstasy. Whether she had submitted to Henry Tudor yet nobody was certain but of one thing they were sure. Norfolk’s niece, Catherine Howard, had an ageing and fearful king wound securely round her finger and he, with a wife he did not love and a marriage that had never been consummated, was already thinking of divorce.
Thomas narrowed his eyes. Two rows behind the King and Queen sat the little girl in question amongst the other maids of honour, her pretty features composed demurely, only the fact that her curving lids lowered then raised again to show her saucy eyes a clue to all the mischief that bubbled in her.
‘Umm!’ said Thomas reflectively.
His gaze returned to the first row. Beside the royal couple sat the two princesses, Mary, older than the King’s new light-of-love by some years, as unhappy and bitter looking as ever. Thomas, yet again, found his mind wandering over the idea that a good session in a bedchamber with a man of substance like himself might be the very thing to bring a much-needed sparkle into her eye.
Next to Anne of Cleves, her foxy hair flaming in the sun, sat Elizabeth, thin as a wire, turning this way and that, trying to see everything at once. Even at this age she was an attractive little nymph, a flame of a girl very much as her mother had been. Thomas found himself smiling as he watched her.
He was about to turn away, to concentrate on the tourney shortly to begin, when once more his attention was attracted. Four rows behind Elizabeth sat a couple that were new to him, people he had never seen at court before. The man was unappetising, bloated, with bullfrog eyes, an elderly wretch, but the woman, surely not his wife, was superb. Thomas Seymour found himself gazing in frank admiration at a very pretty female, years younger than the frog, whose mass of burnished hair glinted and gleamed as she moved her head. And though her complexion might be pale, roses on snow, her eyes were vividly green, the colour of wild gooseberries, or so they seemed over the distance.
‘Well, well,’ said Thomas appreciatively and then felt a sensation which he thought had passed with boyhood. Suddenly and pleasurably his heart began to quicken its beat.
But there was no more time to look at the stranger or anyone else. The call to arms had come and with it the signal for the joust royal with Sir Thomas Seymour and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the Duke of Norfolk’s only surviving legitimate son, to commence.
To score a victory over Surrey, the sneering young noble who wrote poetry yet who declared the Seymour family to be upstarts, parvenu, was glorious indeed. And it was even more glorious to ride before the stands and see the King get to his feet to applaud the victors, of which Thomas was most certainly one, and at this watch the others rise too. They were all standing; Edward, now Earl of Hertford and a member of the Privy Council; Anne, his wife, every inch a peeress; the impudent Catherine Howard, widening her eyes; the bullfrog and his beautiful lady. As he passed beneath the place where they sat, Thomas looked straight up at her and gave an almost imperceptible bow of his head, and was rewarded by the wild roses that suddenly bloomed in her cheeks and the flash of her green eyes as they swept over him before hastily looking away.
After that she haunted him, filled his mind, until Thomas could have either sworn or laughed, both at himself for being such a fool. Yet nobody could have been more relieved than he when, at the grand and elaborate banquet, given in the great hall of Durham Place by the victorious challengers for the King and Queen, the unknown lady and her husband appeared at the exact moment Francis Bryan hovered at Thomas’s elbow.
‘Who is the beautiful stranger?’ he asked his cousin, seizing Bryan’s arm hard to secure his full attention, and nodding in the woman’s direction.
The cold face flickered into a smile. ‘I have no idea. Do you want me to find out?’
Thomas looked at him gratefully. ‘It would be a great service.’
Francis raised a hard dark brow. ‘Not smitten, surely?’
Thomas managed a lazy smile. ‘And if I were?’
‘She’s another man’s property.’
Thomas laughed aloud. ‘That’s never stopped me before. Besides he looks fit to drop any second.’
‘They are the sort who always last,’ answered Bryan with great acuity. ‘The young woman with an eye to a fortune who takes on one of those, invariably ends up as nurse and arse wiper.’
‘Please,’ said Thomas firmly, ‘spare us the details.’
‘It’s true and you know it.’ He dropped his voice to a mere rumble, his light eyes fastening on Catherine Howard. ‘And there’s another pert child who might yet bite off more than she can chew.’
‘Quiet for God’s sake,’ answered Thomas. ‘Your neck is not inviolate.’
‘Nor yours,’ said Bryan acidly as they parted company.
The evening was memorable, in some respects probably for the fact that it was the last time Henry and Anne of Cleves were seen publicly together as King and Queen. But yet there were other things that lingered long in Thomas Seymour’s mind when he thought back. How Elizabeth had laughed as her mother once did, putting back her head so that the long white neck gleamed like a swan’s; how Catherine Howard smiled at the King sometimes as she took a mouthful, eating as if she were consuming a man’s soul; how Francis Bryan had come to him and revealed the identity of the stranger.
‘She is Katherine, Lady Latymer, born Parr. It would appear that her mother makes a speciality of marrying her off to elderly noblemen. Her first husband was Lord Borough of Gainsborough, old enough to have been her grandfather. He left her a widow when she was fifteen and she married her present old beast while she was still under twenty.’
Thomas groaned. ‘What’s her age now?’
‘Twenty-seven. She’s his third wife and he’s in excellent health. They live in Snape Hall in Yorkshire, by the way.’
‘Then my suit seems hopeless.’
Francis looked at him curiously. ‘You are genuinely interested? You?’
‘What do you mean? Why shouldn’t I be? I’m no pretty boy, Bryan.’
His cousin laughed, a cold sound. ‘I know that. It is just that I am privy to your life-long ambition. To marry a princess — or a prince’s widow. Surely you are not interested in the wife of a petty northern nobleman?’
‘Only to bed her. But I suppose she is as vir
tuous as she is beautiful.’ Thomas sighed. ‘The attractive ones always are.’
Bryan smiled. ‘My dear friend, she is an animal born in captivity, or a child that has never tasted marchpane. Katherine Latymer would not know what to do with a man of her own age if one lay beside her.’
‘What a challenge,’ said Thomas, grinning once more.
‘Tom,’ answered Bryan, putting his arm round his cousin’s shoulders, ‘how is it that though you contrive to look and dress like a gentleman, you have the morals of a peasant?’
‘Because everything about me,’ replied Thomas rudely, ‘is as strong as a ploughman’s.’
‘Boast, boast, boast! I think you are all talk and no action.’
‘Wait and see, Bryan. I’ll wager that I take Katherine Latymer to bed before this year is out.’
‘Done,’ said Francis, and they shook hands.
‘Then for a start I must meet her.’
And with that Thomas, whistling confidently, strode away from his gaping cousin and passing before the King and Queen, who sat at the high table and to whom Sir Thomas gave a very fanciful salute, he went straight to where the Latymers sat side by side, a little country mouseish in their attitude, and bowed deeply.
Bryan watched in amazement, admiring his cousin’s blatant gall, as a conversation was struck up and the man sitting on Katherine Latymer’s right actually rose and gave Thomas his place. Lord Latymer, the bullfrog, seemed pleased with this attention from one of the famous Seymour brothers, uncles to the heir apparent and, indeed, obviously invited him to sit with them during the banquet. Francis saw Thomas graciously decline and take his pre-ordained place on the King’s table but afterwards, when most rose to dance, he returned to the couple and sought Lord Latymer’s permission to lead his wife out. Bryan observed the lady colour as Thomas gave her his hand.
For sure, he is pressing her fingers, he thought, but then his attention was turned elsewhere as he himself was summoned to the King’s table in Thomas’s place.