The Queen of Subtleties

by Suzannah Dunn

  In the meantime, though, there was Mark, waiting for my advice. I had to come up with some advice. Good advice. Because he deserved good advice, didn’t he? Because—be fair, Lucy, be fair—none of this was his fault. He’d been true to his feelings. He’d been discreet. He’d been brave. I couldn’t fault him. The misunderstanding was mine. How had it happened? How had I managed to make such a stupid mistake? How had I—supposedly sane and sensible—come to believe he could have such feelings for me? Why would he? Me: an ageing woman who’s never looked further than the four walls of her kitchens, who knows nothing and has nothing to say for herself.

  To him, though, I was his confidante. And it occurred to me, suddenly, that to be his confidante was better than nothing. As his confidante, I could still have his respect or fondness or whatever it was that he felt for me. I could hang on to that. I had to hang on to that. It was that or nothing.

  If I was to hang on to that, then everything should seem to be exactly as it had been. Nothing else should show. If I didn’t want my pain to show, then I couldn’t feel it. At least not until I was alone. So, I slammed it down into a nub of surprise and there it settled, a hard and heavy presence but somehow also nothing, a bubble, as if I were in a cart bumping over the brow of a hill. It sang like a numbness, but, inside, I sang louder, to drown it out: You’re doing it, Lucy; see? You’re already doing it. It’s do-able. You’re surviving. This is survivable. At least for now.

  And then, unexpectedly, surfaced one small hope: it was Mark who was making the mistake; it was Mark who was making the mistake. Or a mistake, certainly: a different one from mine, but a mistake nonetheless. Because he’s nothing to her, is he. Not really. He’s had his head turned. It’s understandable: she’s dazzling, and he’s favoured. But surely he’s no one, to her. And he’ll realize, soon enough. And then what? Where will he turn? Perhaps he’ll realize, then, what love is or can be, and where it’s been, all along.

  And for me? Would it be so very hard to be second-best to a queen? Will it be so very hard to wait and see? It’s not as if I’m any stranger to waiting. It’ll happen sooner or later that he’ll realize. Sooner, probably. Sooner would be better.

  He’d asked me: should he tell her? ‘Yes,’ was what I decided to say. ‘Yes, of course. You should. You should declare yourself to her. And better still,’ I reached around to a shelf for the rose, muslin-wrapped, that was ready for me to give to him, ‘give her this.’ And there it was, suddenly, at last: my rose in the palm of his hand. I nodded—Unwrap it— and watched as white folds dropped away from fiercely red blades. He touched a fingertip to one petal-edge and his breath came back in a rush, close to a laugh, incredulous and delighted.

  Then, looking at me, he was serious. ‘I can’t,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I can’t give her this.’

  ‘Oh yes you can,’ I said.

  Richard said it as he came into the doorway and saw me: ‘You don’t know, do you.’ He spoke quickly and quietly, not really to me. Buying time, if only a heartbeat of it. Steeling himself. Expressionless—lips, white; hair, flat like a child’s—he lacked composure, and I’d never seen him like that. His eyes flickered, took in that Kit and Stephen were in the room. He came in, pulled me by the arm. I was holding a spoon; sugar fluttered, streaked my skirt, sparkled on the floor.

  Outside, at the top of the stairs, we faced each other. His eyes, on mine, were so wide they were animal. He said, ‘Smeaton’s been arrested.’

  ‘Arrested?’ As if it were a foreign word; I couldn’t think what it might mean, not in relation to Mark. I didn’t even ask what for; there was nothing that Mark could be arrested for. This was nothing to do with him in particular but a natural, arbitrary calamity, a lightning strike.

  ‘And not just him. All of them.’

  All of whom? The musicians? Even less to do with Mark, then. Some kind of crackdown. Debts, or a fight, or something.

  ‘Norris, Brereton, and—God, Jesus—even her own brother.’ Even though he was whispering, it came as a kind of shout: ‘It’s for adultery, Lucy, with the queen.’

  ‘But you said, her brother. You can’t…with a brother.’

  He was staring at me.

  ‘Can you?’ Then I remembered: this was about Mark. Her brother was irrelevant: forget the brother. This was about Mark. ‘Mark?’

  He didn’t flinch.

  It came from me as a wail: ‘But Mark never—’

  He waved it away, didn’t want to hear it. ‘It’s treason.’ That’s what he wanted me to understand.

  Treason. Tyburn. Oh, no: no, this is ridiculous; someone needs to take control, here. ‘Richard,’ We must keep calm, ‘this isn’t true. Someone’s having you on.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Think,’ he urged, ‘of the enemies they have.’

  ‘Mark doesn’t—’

  ‘Mark’s nothing, it’s not about Mark, he’s just there to make it worse.’

  Worse? It needs to be worse than her own brother? I could only stare at him, incredulous. Those animal eyes. He was making me face it, all of it.

  But surely the charge won’t stick. ‘He’ll just say…she’ll just say—’

  ‘He’s admitted it.’

  In a flash I saw Mark going from here to the queen and the queen kissing him, leading him into her bedroom, closing the door. No. No chance. ‘It’s not true. Why would he admit it?’

  Richard’s lips parted but he realized his mistake and held his breath.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, lightly, as the implication became clear: under torture. Then, a crack in my chest. ‘Oh no, no, no. Richard, no. Richard, no.’ Mark’s perfect fingers, the knuckles like pearls. His long back, its nubs of angel’s-wings. His silvery skin. He’s squeamish, I remembered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Richard whispered, uneasy. ‘I don’t know that they’d dare.’

  ‘If they dared with anyone, it’d be Mark. There’s no one to speak up for him.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I was already several stairs down. ‘Cromwell.’

  He actually laughed, or squealed; slapped a hand over his mouth. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Kill him.’ My own laugh was a furious, hot breath. Then I was serious: ‘Reason with him.’

  ‘Lucy, this is all reason; it’s nothing but. That’s the problem.’

  ‘Well, then,’ I shouted up the stairwell, suddenly feeling quite sure of myself, ‘I’ll plead.’

  I had an idea of where to aim, and a trail of Cromwell-liveried servants to follow. And I walked as if I knew the way, avoiding everyone’s eyes. A lot of eyes. I didn’t think: not at all. Just walked, fast. Passageways, stairways, doors. And soon, I was there: a corridor lined with Cromwell-liveried yeomen. I strode down the middle, my skirt beating a rhythm around my legs.

  A man stepped in front of the closed door. ‘You have an appointment?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ And before he could ask, ‘Mrs Cornwallis, the king’s confectioner.’

  He was back in the time it took me to look down at my clogs and remember the sugar I’d trodden on. Wordless, he opened the door for me. Inside, was a man at a desk. Cromwell. Heavy-featured. He, in return, looked at me. I was aproned, capped, besplattered and sticky. He didn’t look so good himself, for all his finery. Plum-dark shadows beneath his eyes.

  He said, ‘We have an appointment?’ Meaning that we didn’t. Curiosity, though, had got the better of him, hadn’t it.

  I said, ‘Mark Smeaton, the musician, is innocent—’

  ‘I can’t discuss this.’ He raised a meaty hand. Nodded to an attendant.

  ‘No, wait,’ I barked at the attendant, and, of course, it worked. I said to Cromwell, ‘What if I told you something?’

  He didn’t respond immediately. ‘Well, that would depend on what it is.’

  Quite. I didn’t know. I went for, ‘He’s spent every night with me, in—I don’t know how long—months, nearly a year. Ask my servant. Ask my assistan
t.’ My insides turned cold: I was asking them to perjure themselves. ‘Ask the Sergeant Proctor.’ I could almost hear what the Sergeant Proctor would say: Oh, him? he was always there. ‘Every night,’ I said again, to make sure; tilted my chin, to look sure. ‘We never missed a night.’

  Cromwell stared at me, no doubt thinking, So, this is the woman who makes my sugar plate when she manages to cover herself up and drag herself away from being pleasured. Comes to the kitchen every morning soaked in a man’s juices and puts her sticky fingers into my gingerbread.

  Looking away, I caught the glitter of an attendant’s interested gaze. The dimple of another’s clamped-down smirk. What had I done? My reputation: it was gone, irretrievably. Slashed from me, by my own doing. Word would travel. It would travel, too, to Mark: We hear you’ve a taste for sugar.

  That’s if they believed me. I was asking these men to believe that a boy like Mark would love a woman like me.

  And he didn’t, did he.

  I shut my eyes. Anticipating Cromwell’s laughter. There was merely a smile in his voice, though, when he said, ‘He’s been a very busy man, hasn’t he, our Smeaton.’

  I opened my eyes and there it was, that smile, faint and small-eyed.

  You pig.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to break it to you, Mrs Cornwallis, but it’s possible—if one has the energy—to commit adultery in the daytime.’

  So, I wouldn’t be enough, in his opinion. Me: red-nosed, sugar-caked. Her: book-clean hands, bodice rough with jewels. I said, ‘Tell me the days.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Tell me which days—I’m sure you have them documented—’ I nodded at the papers on his oh-so-important desk, ‘and I’ll tell you where we were.’

  He said, ‘You are a member of the king’s household, and he is—or certainly has been, latterly—a member of the queen’s. I don’t need to tell you that the two households have, recently, spent considerable time apart.’

  I said, ‘There’s a river out there.’

  He frowned, lost.

  ‘People travel. It’s not impossible. People who—’ say it—‘are in love, they travel. To be together.’

  He raised his voice: ‘And they also spend time in the queen’s bedchamber. Now, I don’t need to discuss any of this with you, but I will tell you something in the hope that we can put paid to all this. Your young man was overheard declaring his—’ he sighed—‘passion for the queen.’

  It shot through me: I’d sent him to do that, hadn’t I. ‘Overheard?’

  ‘Servants,’ he said, ‘they get everywhere, don’t they.’

  ‘I told him to do it. To declare himself to her.’

  For the first time, Cromwell looked surprised. ‘You told him to do that?’ The smile crept back. ‘What strange arrangements you young people have, these days.’

  ‘“Passion”,’ I said, ‘isn’t adultery.’

  ‘Mrs Cornwallis,’ he was acting bored, now, ‘he has confessed to everything.’

  ‘Under torture.’

  He reached casually for some papers. ‘That’s a very serious allegation. Torture is, as I’m sure you’re aware, illegal.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘I’m aware of that.’

  His gaze snapped up. ‘You must think we live back in the dark ages. You probably think so, don’t you,’ kitchen maid. ‘Smeaton seemed convinced enough of his own guilt. There will be trials, Mrs Cornwallis, properly conducted in accordance with the law. Open to the public—you’re welcome to attend. In the meantime, it only remains for me to thank you for your help: I shall make sure that the jury is informed of Mr Smeaton’s considerable appetites and dubious moral character.’

  I stepped forward; he jerked back. ‘Take the confession,’ I urged, ‘take whatever you need from him, then let him go. Banish him. He’s nothing, to you. He’s nothing.’ Suddenly both my hands—fists—were at my mouth, one around the other, holding down my broken, noisy breaths. ‘Listen. You listen to me. We were going to go away. Move away. Marry, have children. If you can believe that.’

  He hadn’t moved, not a muscle, not even to blink.

  ‘When you’ve finished with him, whatever state he’s in, give him back to me, let me take him away.’

  He opened his mouth, and then he spoke. ‘Pleas should go to the king—’

  ‘I’ll go to the king.’

  ‘No—’ He was up, and around the desk. Stopping in front of me, he glanced down at his shoes; looking up again, he seemed even more tired than when I’d first seen him. He spoke gently. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. It’s important that you listen. Can you do that?’ He paused until I nodded. ‘All this, that you planned with Smeaton: it’s not going to happen, and you’ll have to accept that, but…there is something I can do.’ It was he who nodded, now, a couple of times, to himself. ‘Don’t go to the king: that’s my honest advice. The king is a very, very angry man. He doesn’t want anything to do with any of this; he doesn’t want even to have to think about it. He certainly doesn’t want to think of these men…having lives. Having wives. Not after what they did to his. That’d make him even angrier.’

  ‘He believes it?’ My voice sounded small.

  ‘Of course he believes it. But what I can do for you—all I can do for you, but believe you me it’s worth something—is get Smeaton a commuted sentence. Not a traitor’s death. For the others, that’ll happen anyway: they’re nobles; they won’t be hung, drawn, quartered, will they; it’ll be the axe. Smeaton, though…’ He shrugged with his mouth. ‘But I can get the sentence commuted. The king won’t let him live, I’m telling you that for certain. The commuted sentence is the best you’ll get. But I can get it. I promise.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  I was determined not to cry until I was alone but, somewhere back down that long line of yeomen, I began to fail in spectacular fashion. At least they hadn’t yet heard the story.

  That was Smeaton’s lay, you know.

  If you can believe it.

  I cried all the way through the palace, and couldn’t care less. The louder, the better. Because people should know. They should know this is a Godless place.

  I went to my step and stayed there; stayed there all day and all night. I didn’t mean to; just didn’t move. Over the hours, the palace settled and its rhythms became mine. A slam of a door, the stroke of blood in my ears. A trip of footsteps, a flurry of stomach juices. The slosh of a pot, a sigh. At sunrise, I was so stiff that I wondered if I’d ever move again.

  I did, though, of course.

  I headed for the kitchen.

  Anne Boleyn

  What with your departure to Hatfield, Elizabeth, and the continuing mess with Catherine and Mary as well as the strains of early pregnancy, I badly needed cheering up in the earliest and darkest days of January. Unexpectedly, salvation came via my cousin Francis. I was surprised to see him: he’d been in France for a while, and, anyway, I didn’t seem to see much of him any more. Typically, he made a big entrance, kicking open my door, although on this occasion it was because he was carrying a box. He gave me the usual roguish smile, but I spotted a double-take, and in that instant, I saw myself in his one uncovered eye as not, quite, myself. Older, I suppose. Wearier, perhaps. We exclaimed our greetings, and he deposited the box at my feet, gesturing for me to lift the lid. ‘From Lady Lisle,’ he said.

  I half-laughed, half-groaned: not more. Honor Lisle, over in Calais, was very keen to secure places with me for her daughters, but crate-loads of gifts couldn’t change the fact that there were no vacancies.

  I crouched beside the box; and, opening it, suffered a stab of shock. Cowering in a corner was a furry little creature, no bigger than a man’s fist.

  ‘It’s actually a dog,’ Francis said, over my shoulder, both helpful and derisive.

  ‘A dog?’ It was nothing like any dog I’d ever had.

  A collective intake of breath from my ladies.

  I extended a finger, touched the silky brown fur.
It quivered. And so did I. ‘Oh, Francis, you should have carried him.’ I checked: ‘Him?’

  He nodded.

  ‘He’s terrified, in here.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll get over it.’

  I lifted him as gently as I could, to a low chorus of sighs, and he braved a look at me, shiny-conker eyes in a tiny face. ‘Pixie-face,’ I said to him. ‘Pixie.’

  Spring dispelled the stagnancy of winter in more than the natural sense. Tom hadn’t been hibernating, he’d been busy, and now his capable hands delivered us the Act of Succession. Our children—Henry’s and mine—were to be the heirs to the throne. No mention of Mary: a touch I loved. Something else that I appreciated: a coda to the effect that any denial of the Act—anything said or written anything against it—was high treason. Truly a laying down of the law.

  First of all, it was the end for the Mad Nun: Tom had the go-ahead, now, to take action against her. A bit of frothing at the mouth had had to be seen to be respected, at least until we knew what we were—or weren’t—dealing with. But she’d gone on to make friends in high places, and then, in prison, had admitted the ‘visions’ were fabrications. Presumably she’d guessed the game was up. Something else she must have known: she’d have to die as she’d lived. She’d made herself notorious. That’d been her aim. I was assured her death was suitably spectacular. She and the four clerics who’d been her mainstays were dragged behind horses to Tyburn and hanged before being cut down, rope-strafed and retching, eyes blood-burst, for their beheadings. I can’t say I felt for her. She’d revolted me: the cynicism of her preying on people’s fears and peddling them lies. She might have looked milky-sweet, but she’d had about her the foetid air of the old, superstitious England.

  Was a mad nun one thing, but a respected bishop another? Fisher was open about his opinion of the Act of Succession, but was merely dispatched to the Tower to occupy a suite of rooms and reflect on his foolishness. The surprise for me was that he was still alive. Tough old gristle, Fisher. The Pope made a little stand on his behalf, declaring him a cardinal and sending the requisite red hat. ‘If he’s not careful,’ Henry said to me, ‘he won’t have anywhere to wear it.’