Usually, I enjoyed being alone in this luxurious apartment. The other maids-of-honour usually only had one chamber but my mistress, being a cousin of the Queen, was allocated a double lodging at every palace. I would walk around both chambers gazing at tapestries where ladies in old fashioned, high-waisted, flowing gowns and high conical headdresses held posies of flowers, whilst timid, startled deer faltered in forest clearings. Tonight, in my mistress’s bedchamber I combed my hair and saw a sulky young girl’s reflection in her looking glass. I had wanted to see the King dance but most of all I had wanted to see for myself the beautiful mistress whom he served who was so much gossiped about. Also, secretly, I had hoped that Constantine would step out with me to dance. My mistress would not have minded. The maids’ mother was busy fussing over the Queen’s maids-of-honour. Who would have noticed me? Mistress Madge was having fun, why shouldn’t I?
Mistress Madge’s boy returned breathless with an usher wearing the Queen’s purple and blue livery.
‘You must come now. I’ve to take you,’ the usher said.
‘Take me where? Where is Mistress Shelton?’
‘Make haste, come at once.’
‘You have to go with him now, Avis,’ the boy said.
‘Mistress Shelton told me to wait here.’
The Queen’s usher grabbed my arm, ‘Mistress Shelton commands me to bring you now.’
‘I cannot go about the palace in my hair and my shift, if you please,’ I cried, pulling away. ‘Let me dress. Wait outside the door if you please.’
I had to lace my kirtle and tie my coif while I ran to follow the usher up the same grand staircase where my mistress had led me earlier and through the great watching chamber. The guards seemed heedless of a maidservant running between them behind the Queen’s light-footed servant. Once inside the Queen’s presence chamber he commanded me to walk behind the arras towards the privy chamber where Mistress Shelton waited. The music had ceased. I heard someone laugh and, stopping to peek between the arras, I saw that the big chamber was almost empty. Only a cluster of ladies and gentlemen remained. Weary pages yawned and stood around waiting for them to leave so that they could bid the servants tidy up and snuff out the candles for the night.
From a little closet outside the Queen’s privy chamber Mistress Madge pounced upon me.
‘What took you so long. Come to the Queen.’
I stood stock still. Ahead of me through the doorway two gentlemen stared in my direction.
‘What is she doing here, this cunning maid with her sorcery,’ an angry voice demanded. It was Lord Rochford, the Queen’s brother.
‘She knows midwifery and, what is more, cousin George, she knows how to keep her mouth shut,’ my mistress told him calmly.
‘Any maid of yours would need to.’
‘And your servants do not, George? Come Avis, the Queen has asked for you.’
‘Can she do something, with her sorcery? Can she save it?’ the other gentleman asked. There was anger, or was it fear, in his tone. He was older than the Queen’s brother, grey hairs streaked his dark hair and his red beard.
‘How should I know, uncle,’ Mistress Madge answered in her soft, gentle manner. She would make a good nurse, I thought. Nothing ruffles her temper.
Lord Rochford grabbed my mistress by her arm. ‘If it is a boy stillborn tell the wench to get rid of it before anyone else sees it and tells the King.’
In a bedchamber beyond, the Queen lay on her bed in her shift and cap with her knees drawn up. On one side of the bed stood a young gentlewoman wearing an elegant court gown. She was looking all around the room, everywhere except at the sobbing Queen on the bed. An older gentlewoman wearing a gable hood sat by the Queen’s side and wiped her brow.
‘Are you sure of your dates, Anne? Maybe you are mistaken. There may well be a happy outcome from this night,’ she said gently.’
‘I bled in December, Mother. This is barely a seven-month child.’
The Queen’s mother waved me to the bedside. ‘Do whatever you can for the Queen and her child,’ she said and the younger lady left the room murmuring, ‘I will wait with Madge and my husband.’
‘Do you all desert me in my pain and sorrow?’ Queen Anne protested between her pains. ‘Where is my friend, Lady Lee, the poet’s sister? Bring her to me.’
‘She is not at court, Anne,’ her mother said sadly.
Child-bed is the loneliest place. There is the mother and there is her pain. All else is distant.
‘My lady, will you stay?’ I asked Lady Wiltshire, for I had never attended a birth alone.
‘Pray, do not leave me, Lady Mother,’ the Queen pleaded.
It was all over very quickly. The pregnancy just slipped away. The Queen lay empty, holding her mother’s hand, while a bloody mess lay between her legs like an oversized leech. Her father strode into the bedchamber. Immediately her screams of pain turned to wailing for her dead son.
‘Get rid of it now, wench,’ he told me. He had the same lively black eyes as his daughter but his were small and fierce.
‘My lord, whatever are you thinking,’ the Queen’s mother cried. ‘Be gone, my lord, the birthing chamber is no place for a man.’
‘Tell the King it was a maid child,’ he charged his daughter. ‘Speak prettily to him and promise that the next will be a boy; and when you are up, consult with doctors and wise women who know of these matters. You must ask them what you did to cause the King’s boy to be untimely expelled from your womb. Your sister managed to give the king a son although he will not own it.’
‘Not a son, my lord, just the one daughter, Katherine,’ Lady Wiltshire whispered. ‘Pray do not talk of such matters now. Show kindness to your daughter in her grief.’
Lord Wiltshire wasn’t listening to his wife. He stood beside the bed glowering at the Queen.
‘You, Anne, with your high spirits and your temper, you have too much mettle to keep a tender man-child in your womb,’ he said. ‘It must not happen again.
‘Will someone find a way to rid the court of the King’s mistress,’ he hissed to his son and daughter-in-law as he strode through the doorway into the outer chamber. ‘He cannot be allowed to waste his seed. He has enough bastards.’
‘I will do my best, sire,’ Lady Rochford said.
‘You’re a good girl, Jane,’ I heard him say with surprising kindness.
‘When you are alone with the King in his bedchamber, George,’ he bawled to his son, ‘when it is your turn to put the King to bed, tell him he has to fuck his wife to get an heir, not his mistress. And you might heed that advice yourself.’
‘My lord,’ Lady Wiltshire chided her husband in a whisper, ‘poor Jane will be crimson with shame, standing beside you, her father-in -law, listening to this.’
I wrapped the tiny stillborn boy in the Queen’s sheet. Then I had to wash the Queen and make her comfortable. I could not expect the ladies to do these things in their rich clothing. Mistress Madge had brought clean sheets from another chamber. Lady Wiltshire told me I must be rid of everything very soon before the King might know of it.
‘He must never know that it had been a boy.’
‘Where shall I take the child, my lady?’
She made no answer. Mistress Madge shrugged her shoulders at my pleading look. Oh, how I wished we were at Greenwich Palace. Aunt Bess would know what to do.
‘I want my son to be blessed,’ the Queen said.
‘Shall I take him to a priest?’ I asked.
‘It never lived. Just get rid of it,’ the Queen’s brother barked from the doorway.
‘Who will tell the King?’ the Queen asked and began to weep again.
‘Norris, of course,’ her brother answered. ‘Who else? Go to him tonight, Madge. The guards and pages on duty will not bat an eyelid to see Mistress Shelton heading for Norris’s apartments. Tell him the Queen has miscarried a girl. Ask of him where the King sleeps tonight.’
‘With luck,’ Lord Wiltshire added, ‘the King will be
occupied in his bedchamber with madam all night. Norris will have no opportunity to tell him until morning by which time the thing will be got rid of.’
How? Where should I take a seven-month foetus? If I took it to a priest, he would ask for the mother and father’s names. I could not bury it secretly in the gardens or the King’s parkland without someone seeing. It was summer. Servants and courtiers were everywhere.
‘Will someone fetch Elizabeth,’ the Queen pleaded. ‘I want so much to hold my daughter.’
‘Tomorrow. The princess sleeps as you must,’ Lady Wiltshire told her gently. ‘Be comforted Anne for you know that the good Lord gave me a child for every year of my marriage when I was a young wife. Now, I have only two daughters and one son. You must not expect every child you conceive to be strong and to live, whatever your father might say. Better to lose a weak boy now than later when he is grown and you have had years of loving him. No one knows more than I what heartbreak it is to a mother to bury her sons. You are right to take comfort from your living child, Anne, as I did. With God’s grace, other sons will follow.’
I had not known that Princess Elizabeth had come to court. Immediately, I knew what I must do. I would have to swallow my pride and I would have to trust someone who had betrayed me. The Queen’s sheet with its honeysuckle and acorn embroidery, a symbol of the love between the King and Queen Anne, would be recognised. I needed to wrap the child in one of my own plain linen sheets and I needed money, I told Mistress Madge, not for myself. I needed help from another and she would have to be bribed.
*
It helped that the smell of soap and steam had always enticed me. Clean laundry bespeaks care and love. I had passed the lonely, sleepless night sitting on the edge of my mistress’s bed with the curtains drawn aside, waiting for dawn. Mistress Madge had not returned. I had not expected her to. She would distance herself from what I had to do; return blithe and merry when all was done. She would find another maid to tend to her needs in the meantime. When I heard the boys about their morning duties I knew it was time for me to leave. The sad bundle seemed heavier this morning, stiffer, harder to disguise as a bag of washing than I had thought.
The laundress ignored me. She turned away and remonstrated loudly with Anice and Bridget about the washing of Princess Elizabeth’s clothes with too much soap. She would have to deduct two pence from their pay. Bridget hung her head guiltily and Anice pouted and stamped her foot behind the washing tub where the laundress couldn’t see. Their faces were ruddy and wet with steam and sweat; little puppy laundresses waiting to grow up. I placed my bundle in a corner, walked slowly to where the laundress stood by the buck tub and held out a silver sovereign.
‘Send the girls away,’ I said quietly, so that they couldn’t hear.
After she had examined the coin she asked where I had got it.
‘You don’t need to know,’ I said. I was not afraid of her, only fearful that she would refuse what I wanted her to do. It was not my secret that I needed to hide. She knew this when she saw the sovereign.
She slipped the coin into the pocket that dangled beneath her damp apron and began to fold Princess Elizabeth’s wet sheets into a basket.
‘Shall we take them to the fields to dry?’ Bridget asked, when they were all done.
‘In a while.’
The laundress made such a great play of inspecting the palm of her hand that Bridget brought her a pot of ointment. ‘Foolish girl. Would you have me smear the princess’s linen with grease. I’ll soften my hands and face in good time when the washing’s done.’
‘There is another to follow the first,’ I whispered. ‘For the Guild of Secret-Keepers.’
After the girls had lugged away the washing, I placed a second silver sovereign into the laundress’s blistered hand.
‘The washing is in the corner over there,’ I told her. I was gloating. Of course I was. I wished so much that I could tell her that my own purse carried two golden coins of far more worth than her silver. Good for you, Tom, I said to myself.
‘I’ll just get a little phial of oil that the priest has blessed,’ she said, ‘before I see to it. Now don’t you look so surprised, Avis. You insult me if you think I would not do this business properly in a Christian manner.’
Queen Anne had got her wish. I had to run out of the laundry. I did not want the laundress to see me crying.
*
The gentleman was middle-aged, proud and angry. A peer of the blood royal, he wore crimson silk and ermine. The lady was very young, around my age and dressed like royalty.
‘Mistress Shelton is sleeping in her bedchamber, my lord,’ I told him when I rose from my curtsey.
‘Get her dressed. Tell her the Duke of Norfolk and the Duchess of Richmond await.’
Such a deep, penetrating voice for a man so thin and small with his face sinking inside his white furs and the little black eyes peeping out like a maggot.
‘Not now, Avis,’ Mistress Madge moaned sleepily. ‘Tell him I’ll see him after dinner.’
I reminded her that this was the man who had threatened to have the King’s daughter lifted bodily into her litter when she refused to join Princess Elizabeth’s household.
‘Do you think he will stride into my bedchamber and drag me from my bed? And with his little daughter present?’
‘He is the Queen’s uncle, my lady, and he is in a bad humour.’
‘So? She does not like him nor he her. She has to suffer his mistress, Bessie Holland, in her privy chambers to keep him sweet. Tell them to go away.’
‘My lady, I dare not. Perhaps if you just wear your new nightgown and let me comb your hair.’
It was not two hours since I had undressed her. It would take far too long to lace her into her stiffened body petticoat and farthingale, put on her stockings, garters and slippers, choose a gown, forepart and sleeves, pin her bodice and her cuffs, tie her sleeves and, finally, comb her hair and wind it with needle ribbon ready for her cap and hood. And she would not appear, even in her own chamber, without reddening her lips and putting drops of belladonna into her sleepy eyes.
‘Tell him I will get up with as much haste as I can muster, but take heed,’ Mistress Madge warned. ‘You do know who the little duchess is? She is the King’s daughter-in-law. The dutiful little wife will relay everything we say to her husband, Fitzroy, whom the King loves more than either of his daughters. There are no secrets between Fitzroy and the King. Norfolk must be given no opportunity to trouble you about what happened last night. You know too much.’
Demure, smiling and dimpled, Mistress Madge presented herself to the duke with apologies for her simple attire as if she were unaware of how beautiful she looked in her plain cap with her hair flowing carelessly below the waist of her fashionable brocade nightgown.
‘This is a sorry day for the Boleyns,’ the duke said sourly. ‘Why was I not told?’
Mistress Madge only smiled. ‘Avis, why has the boy not brought wine? See to it if you please.’
My mistress was sitting on the settle with the duchess when I returned. Their heads were bent over a piece of embroidery. The duke was pacing the room and shouting but only the timid deer in the tapestries appeared to be paying attention.
‘Wiltshire has disappeared. God knows where. Gone to earth in Hever, I suppose. Rochford has departed for the English Channel. Diplomats can always find reasons to disappear when they need to. Their wives are hiding away with the Queen. What happened, Mistress Shelton? You were with the Queen last night.’
‘I think cousin George has gone to see the Queen of Navarre upon the King’s instructions, to postpone the summit meeting with the King of France.’ My mistress smiled her most beguiling smile and pouted prettily.
The duke turned to the tapestry ladies and heaved a great angry sigh. ‘I am inquiring about my niece, the Queen.’
‘I am as yet unmarried, as you know, my lord, so of course, I was not in the bedchamber with the Queen when she was untimely brought into labour.’
/> ‘Who told the King?’
‘Norris of course, my lord, who else?’
‘What did he say?’
‘Who, Norris or the King? These little knots are exquisitely wrought don’t you think, Mary?’
Norfolk snatched the embroidery from Mistress Madge’s hand. I had to fetch a towel to wipe away the blood where the needle had scratched her palm.
‘Norris told the King that the Queen had delivered a stillborn child during the night,’ she told the duke calmly in her own time.
‘And the King...?
‘“So, my son is dead,” the King said, and went hunting with Norris.’
‘Only after he had shed his tears upon my husband’s chest, mourning for his lost boy,’ the young duchess interrupted.
‘So, it was indeed a male child that the Queen miscarried?’ the duke asked.
‘It was a maid,’ my mistress replied steadily after a little pause. ‘The king was so determined that the child was his long awaited legitimate boy,’ she stared straight into the duke’s eyes, when she said that word, ‘he would not allow Norris to tell him otherwise. Perhaps, my lord, you will put the matter right for the King.’
‘My husband indeed,’ my mistress scoffed after they had departed, mimicking the duchess in a childish high pitched tone. ‘Her husband in name only. She speaks as if the marriage has been consummated. The King will not have Fitzroy do anything strenuous under the sheets until he is older. He is mindful of his older brother’s untimely death in his youth shortly after he was wed to Katherine of Aragon.’
*
It was a quiet, uneasy summer. The King travelled to Guildford with his friends and continued his progress to the Midlands, hunting and parading himself to his people in his big ostrich feathered bonnet, giving to the poor the sheets and shirts that Queen Anne’s ladies and their maids had stitched. The Queen hid away from the court with her mother and sister-in-law. Even the servants in her privy kitchen and her mistress of the wardrobe were not told that she was no longer pregnant so, of course, I could not tell Mother and Father. Then came the news that Lady Anne Hussey, one of the Lady Mary’s attendants had been sent to the Tower for addressing Lady Mary as ‘princess’.
Mayflowers for November Page 15