But it was not her virtue she was guarding, he was sure. Reports of her behavior at the French court were widely gossiped about, and he’d seen her with young Percy with his own eyes—admittedly not making the beast with two backs, but close enough. Yet for all her cleverness, the vixen had no idea what chaos she had wrought. If Henry could treat the most powerful man in England in such an abominable fashion, and set aside a beloved queen, did she think herself invincible? The king would tire of her soon enough. But he feared he would not be around to see her get what she deserved.
The warder returned with a pitcher of fresh water and, wrinkling his nose, picked up the chamber pot.
“I thank you, good sir,” Wolsey said, affecting a rare, humble demeanor.
Imagine the hands that touched such filth handling the Holy Scriptures, he thought as he crossed himself and murmured, “Benedicte,” in the warder’s direction.
The warder returned a few minutes later to find him on the floor doubled over in pain and, moved with compassion, went in search of a pallet and a doctor, thinking as he went that it would not be good for such a famous man to die on his watch.
On Anne Boleyn’s first night back at Hampton Court, dinner was an intimate affair, served not in the great hall but in the watching chamber leading to the presence room and the royal apartments. Only the senior courtiers were present. Anne had a moment of anxiety as she took her seat beside the king, remembering New Year’s, the last time she was in the royal apartments, and how some of these same courtiers had witnessed her humiliation. But if any remembered, they wisely made no reference to it. Only Brandon had the gall to mention—under the pretent of welcoming her back—her absence at court.
As she toyed with her pigeon pie and honeyed neats’ tongues, she commented that Henry had not chosen to replace the tapestries in this room. The renovations at Hampton Court since Wolsey’s departure had not stopped with the commissioning of the Abraham tapestries but had extended to every nook and cranny, as though the king were out to prove that the once-reputed great palace of the cardinal was not so great after all. The wood carvers and carpenters could be heard hammering the great vaulted ceiling of the Royal Chapel day and night. Already the gilding of some of the beams was in progress. In the chapel, more than any place in the palace, Anne felt the pull of her Lutheran sentiments. She hated the gaudiness of it, preferring the simplicity of the altar in her bedchamber, could not imagine saying her prayers in the queen’s seat that bowed out from the balcony overhanging the main chapel. She imagined Katherine sitting in that exalted place, murmuring prayers that fell sodden with tears upon the ornate altar behind the rood screen.
“I keep the tapestries in here because they remind me of the cardinal,” Henry said. “Especially one of the Petrarch Triumphs: The Triumph of Fame over Death. Wolsey is about to see if that is true.”
“Is the cardinal ill?”
“I do not know about the current health of the cardinal, but he is at this very hour being placed under arrest for treason.”
“Treason! Wolsey? The mighty cardinal who mocked all England with his arrogance?” She wanted to add “mocked even the king,” but she bit back the words.
“I doubt that he is in a mocking mood now,” Henry said.
“What is the charge?”
“Praemunire.”
Anne had no love for the cardinal. Indeed, she celebrated his downfall; as long as Wolsey lived she would not feel safe at court. But there was something chilling about how quickly Henry turned on favorites: first his queen of many years and now his trusted friend and advisor. And the charge itself, praemunire, had that nebulous trumped-up feeling. It was a spurious charge; of course the former chancellor had ties to Rome. He was a cardinal. That was why Henry had chosen him—because he had influence with the pope, and now to turn that seeming strength against him seemed unjust.
“Will such a charge not be difficult to prove to Parliament?” she asked.
“We have intercepted certain papers . . . documents from a papal legate . . . this wine has turned sour . . .” He spat it back into the cup, spraying the white linen cloth with little red drops. “Bring me another, throw that cask out,” he shouted to the cupbearer. “Wolsey was brokering a separate peace between the pope and the French. It will cost him his head. Now we shall see if fame truly triumphs over death.”
How easily he dismisses Wolsey, she thought. As if there had never been a relationship between them. But what was that to her? Her enemy had fallen, and that had to be a good thing.
“Speaking of chancellors,” Anne said, reminding herself not to celebrate the downfall of one enemy when she had so many, “I see that Master More is absent.”
“His father was taken ill suddenly.” Henry motioned to the sewer. “Take this great mound of grapes away. They said Sir John More fell ill from a ‘surfeit of grapes.’ ”
“Then he should recover,” Anne said, eyeing the grapes, wishing she had taken a bunch before the king commanded them to be taken away. She looked at the disappearing platter. “I never heard of anybody dying from a surfeit of grapes,” she said, “perhaps it was a surfeit of grape.”
Henry laughed at this uproariously. The courtiers closest followed suit. She noticed Brandon did not laugh.
“Sir John More is known to be a man of strong discipline and not inclined to excess of any kind. A man of sterling character and sound judgment,” Brandon said archly.
“Like father, like son? Would you not agree, my lord Suffolk?” Anne asked.
“Exactly so.”
Henry scowled. “I know little of the father’s, but the judgment of the son might be called to question,” he muttered, but he did not say it loudly enough for the others to hear. Anne wisely did not remark upon it. But might it just be that the new chancellor was following the same path as the old? That was a thought that gave Anne considerable satisfaction.
The king signaled for the court musicians to begin playing, but as the pipers’ and harpists’ notes floated through the room, he remained silent, not singing along as he sometimes did. He seemed preoccupied. When the performance was ended and the last elaborate confection removed, he announced loudly enough for all to hear, “The groom will show you to your rooms, Lady Anne. Your ladies are already there. From now on, when you are at Hampton Court you will sleep in the queen’s royal apartments.”
Then he looked out over the assembled courtiers, no more than a dozen or so of the favorites, and his eyes held a direct challenge. Nobody was brave enough or foolish enough to pick up the gauntlet, not even the Duke of Suffolk.
Anne was unprepared for the grandeur she found as she entered the royal bedchamber and closet reserved for the queen at Hampton Court. The rich tapestries and silver sconces on the wall, the damask bed hangings, the golden candlebra and elaborately carved writing table in the queen’s closet, the bathing chamber with its great stone tub lined with linen, rivaled even what she had seen at the French court. As lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine, Anne had once assisted the queen out of a similar tub at Richmond Palace, had been often in her well-appointed apartments, but nothing at Richmond was as grand as what the cardinal had built. No wonder Henry had coveted it.
As she entered the room, two women standing at each side of the door curtsied. “Welcome, my lady. The king has asked us to serve as your ladies during the queen’s absence. I am Lady Margaret Lee, I am Lady of the Privy Chamber, and this is Lady Jane Seymour.”
Anne noted Margaret’s careful words, “during the queen’s absence.” You’re not the queen and we all know it. You are just another of the king’s favorites. But just in case, we will serve you willingly and well.
Anne did not resent Lady Margaret’s caution. How could she? The woman was just being prudent. Anne had seen both ladies before at court. Of Margaret Lee she approved. She was an older woman with a cheerful demeanor and married to a respectable knight: a good choice, Henry must have thought, to guide and guard a young queen. But about Jane Seymour, Anne was less pl
eased. She was Anne’s exact opposite: pale and blond, and not very well educated, preferring embroidery over discourse or gaming. Anne doubted she could even write her name. She had been hoping for a better-suited companion.
“May we help you prepare for bed, my lady?” And without waiting for an answer Margaret began to remove Anne’s bandeau and snood, letting her hair fall to her waist. As Lady Margaret brushed her hair, Anne watched Jane lay out a chemise of finest lawn so diaphanous that it left little to modesty. Anne had seen Katherine’s nightdress. This was not Katherine’s nightdress.
“I hope there is a goose-down counterpane to keep me from chilblains,” she said.
Lady Margaret smiled. “There is a velvet dressing gown if my lady desires it.”
“My lady desires it,” Anne said flatly.
Her attendants retired to their ladies’ chamber shortly after seeing her to bed, whereupon she’d promptly got out of bed. Wrapping herself in the blue velvet dressing gown, a deep, pure blue, the color of the Virgin’s robe in the stained-glass window in the Royal Chapel, Anne considered where to say her prayers. A cursory glance told her there was no altar, but she was not inclined to go tripping down the gallery in her nightdress to the royal pew above the papist chapel. She would ask Henry on the morrow if she could fashion a simple altar in one corner of the room. In the meantime she would have to make do. Her English Bible told her to “go into her closet” but she figured that was just a way of saying that a pious Christian did not make a public show of her prayers, so in the end she just knelt beside the canopied and curtained bed, pulling the rich velvet of the robe between her knees and the cold, stone floor. Anne was not a great believer in the mortification of the flesh.
She had just finished her prayers and was reciting the “Our Father” when she heard a noise coming from the queen’s closet. Maybe she should have chosen that room after all; maybe the words were to be taken literally and the Spirit was here to admonish her.
But it was no spirit, holy or otherwise, that stepped from behind the paneled wall. It was a man of very solid flesh.
“Your Majesty, I did not expect you tonight. I mean, the hour is late. My ladies are sleeping. What if they should waken and—”
“Then we shall have to be very quiet,” he said, and began to remove his doublet.
He had stripped down to his long shirt and hose before she could find the words, “Your Majesty, I must protest.”
“Then you must protest quietly if you do not wish to wake your ladies.”
Anne felt a moment of panic. She knew that it was not just her virginity at stake, which she had protected thus far through divers methods, but her future. She backed away from him.
For a moment the expression on his face almost frightened her. “My lady, I have given you gifts that would beggar a prince, surrounded you with heretical priests of your choosing against the wishes of my counselors and advisors, and are you not at this very moment ensconced in the queen’s own chambers? Have I not made my intentions clear? God’s Wounds, woman, will you not lie with your king in the queen’s own bed?”
She took a step back and inhaled deeply. If she refused him now, might she be going too far? But had not her sister Mary been thus rewarded? Before she was cast aside? And she had even borne the king a bastard. That thought gave her courage.
“But I am not the queen, Your Majesty. And until I am, I will not lie with the king.”
He reached out then and roughly pulled her to him. He kissed her hard, his breath coming fast, and groped beneath her robe, his hand hot on her breast through the thin film of her chemise. Her body wanted to give in. She had not felt such temptation since Percy was sent away. Sweet Percy. That thought steeled her will.
“Your Majesty, I cannot. It would be a sin—”
His breath in her ear was as hot as his hand on her breast, as hot as her skin felt beneath the too warm velvet robe.
“Then at least,” he said huskily, “give your king a hand.”
“That much I can do,” she said, and her fingers began to work, practicing a skill she had learned at the French court, a skill that she had perfected with Percy. “That much, and no more, I will do,” she whispered as the king’s seed spilled into her hand.
TWENTY-SEVEN
[Thomas More] never offended nor contradicted him [his father, Sir John More] in anie the least worde or action.
—CRESACRE MORE, THE LIFE AND
DEATH OF SIR THOMAS MORE, 1631
By mid-autumn the translators were well into the Pentateuch, translating directly from the Hebrew that looked to Kate more like dancing lines than real words. What must it feel like to know that your work was so important that lives would be changed because of it? At times it was hard not to envy her husband his brilliance and sense of purpose. She dared to wonder if she could have learned to read the Hebrew, or at least the Greek, if she’d had his teachers, even daring to think that he might teach her the classical languages as her brother had taught her to read English. But once when she had peered over his shoulder and inquired about the dancing squiggles, he had answered impatiently. “It’s really not an alphabet, Kate. It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“But the Greek letters that William translated the New Testament from, that’s an alphabet, right? Alpha for the letter A?”
“Hmm.” But he had just kept on writing without looking up. “There,” she said, pointing to a bit of Greek text among the papers scattered on the writing table. “That’s beta, right?”
He looked up then and kissed the hand pointing to the Greek text. “Are you thinking of teaching your young scholars Greek?” He laughed.
“I might,” she said, bristling a little. “Or maybe you could drop in some Friday and give us the benefit of your brilliance.”
“I just might,” he said. “But for now could you fetch your thirsty husband a cup of cider?”
She brought him the cider, thinking that at least he had stopped protesting her involvement with the Bible women. Of course, he didn’t really think of them as Bible women, she thought and felt a little guilty that she had deceived him. She didn’t talk much about the reading of the Scriptures, the serious discussions or the fervent prayers. Or how they held hands and sang their closing hymn. Instead, whenever he asked her how her meeting went, she distracted him with tales about the frivolous things they chattered about, the gossip they exchanged before their worship began: some witty remark that Hulda had made about the baker’s pious wife, or Caroline’s complaints about her husband’s wandering eyes. It was less than open disclosure. And she felt a little guilty about it. Sometimes. But not now. Not when he was asking her to fetch and carry for him. Not when he was humoring her like a child.
By All Saints’ Day, Kate had the English House accounts in good enough order to pass inspection at the Hansa Countinghouse, so Kate returned to punishing the ragged donkey-unicorn beast. But the thing had become an embarrassment. Even kindly Mistress Poyntz had suggested maybe she should start another, now that she had practiced so much on this one, but still Kate was determined to persevere—until the incident with the needle.
She was brushing her hair getting ready for bed and trying to count in her head the days from her last bleeding. She’d a letter from her brother John, just yesterday, informing her that their house was finished, he and Mary and little Pipkin were doing well. He had enough business as a scribe to keep them in the victuals they couldn’t raise, and she might be happy to know that he’d not abandoned the reform movement but had been inspired by her to start his own small yeoman Bible study. He was teaching the local populace to read and had set up a rudimentary printing press to print sheets of English Scripture as a text.
Then one more bit of happy news he’d added at the end, she was to be aunt again—along with a question, when was he to be uncle?
When indeed? It had been months since she’d lost the child. Why had she not conceived again? Since that time on the boat, it had certainly not been for lack of trying. T
he old midwife she’d consulted had said a woman was more fertile on certain days, but alas she could not remember which days she had said. Stupid, Kate, stupid as a cow, You can’t remember something that important, and you think you could learn Greek.
John’s exclamation of pain interrupted both her self-recrimination and her hair brushing.
“By all the gods on Mount Olympus, Kate, are you trying to kill me?”
It was the closest she’d ever heard John come to swearing—at least in English. The brush clattered to the floor and Kate whirled around to determine the cause of his abrupt invocation of pagan gods.
He was pulling her needle out of the heel of his left hand—thank God and all the angels, it was not the one that held his pen.
“Let me see it.” And then upon close examination, “It’s only a pinprick,” she said, relieved. “It went in and came out clean, see,” she said, holding up the needle, “not even a smear of blood.”
“Well, it hurt like—”
“I’m sorry. It was careless of me to leave it in the chair,” she said in a tone that one would use to placate a pouting child, and she kissed the almost invisible wound.
But five minutes later he was still sucking on the tiny red spot where the needle went in as though it were a mortal wound. This from a man who’d endured the horror of the fish cellar prison for months and come back from the jaws of death, never saying a word about his pain or his fever or even the danger, and now carrying on about the prick of a needle! Nevertheless she clucked and fussed, washing it with a little vinegar and dabbing it with honey as her mother used to do her scrapes and cuts when she was a child.
When she had finished and apologized yet again, he’d held up the little tapestry that had been balled around the offending needle and glared at it. “What is this thing, anyway?”
“Thing? What do you mean, thing? Isn’t it clear? It’s a . . . a unicorn.”
The Heretic’s Wife Page 32