The King's Pleasure, page 32
“She got a name, you know. And if you’re scared to call her by it there’s no need to say prisoner…as though she’d done something bad. The bad’s been done to her.” She had not been angry in quite this way since she found her husband in the hay with the serving wench. She turned and began to flounce away. There were times, Chapuys noted, when a starched petticoat or apron or whatever it was could rustle and crackle like the stiffest silk.
“That is a matter of opinion,” Chapuys said.
“Oh, is it?” Jennie said, turning again. “No wonder you couldn’t get in. She won’t speak or look at anybody that can’t give her her name. And I don’t blame her. When I married Tom Turnbull I took his name and anybody that couldn’t call me Jennie Turnbull after that I wouldn’t talk to neither.” Often enough, when she thought of Katharine, Jennie equated her case with her own. If, when that young slut had her claws on him, Tom could have got rid of his rightful wife just by saying so, he was fool enough to have done it. Pity the poor Queen couldn’t have snatched up a pitchfork and clouted Nan Bullen with the handle and broke her nose so no man’d ever want to look at her again. That was what Jennie had done to her rival; and given Tom one for good measure.
“You misjudge me,” Chapuys said. “It is because I am prepared to give her her rightful title that I am not permitted to see her.”
That needed thinking over; Jennie did not move in circles where attitudes changed from one minute to the next; in and around The Goat and Compasses you knew what a man would say minutes before he said it.
“You mean you’re on her side?”
“I am. And so, I think, are you.”
That could be a trick. Foreigners were full of tricks. And this one, coming in here and first making her angry so she let her tongue loose, and now changing his tune. And all those men outside, waiting. Arrest? More unlikely things were said to have happened. The red faded from her neck, and even from her face.
“And how do you make that out? All I said, was she got a name and like to be called by it, like any woman would. And I said that under my own roof. And nobody heard but you. It’ll by your word against mine.”
“I rather think,” Chapuys said, “that in you I have found what I was looking for. I am not allowed to see Her Grace or to communicate with her. I understand that one of her friends comes here from time to time.” He waited; the woman said nothing. “If I found a way of sending a verbal message, or even a letter here, would you be willing to pass it on?” He looked outside the window. “Perhaps inside a duck or a dove. Fresh food is hard come by in winter; and nine women out of ten in England would wish to send the Queen a tasty morsel, if it were within their power to do so.”
He then made his first mistake; he opened his pouch.
“I’m not taking your money,” she said. “And I’m making no promises.”
He would not have been surer of her had she sworn on the Cross.
“Any messenger I send,” he said, “will carry one of these buttons about him. And now, let my company come in. They are mainly Spaniards and will choose wine, thereby depriving themselves of the best ale in England.”
In Kimbolton Katharine and Maria forced open the casket which was locked, but had no key and Katharine read the letter which had taken Chapuys a long time to write since every word must be set down with double intent—to enlighten and confuse. He praised the English virtue of sympathizing with the oppressed; he said that it was embarrassing for him to have no real news of her because wherever he went the first question everybody asked was how was her health; of mind and body; and had there been any change of late? The Princess Mary was in good health and good heart so far as he knew. Then there followed a passage of peevishness; in all his life Chapuys had never known people so boastful as the English; one could understand the Lords Darcy and Dacre, far to the North, with the border in their keeping, saying boastful things about their power, but surely it was a national mania for grandeur that made a tannery owner count his retainers! He said that he hoped to have some real news of her before he sent his next letter to the Emperor who was greatly concerned about her. And so, and on…It was a letter which, falling into the wrong hands, would have done Chapuys little harm, and Katharine none at all.
Out of the deliberate obfuscation the message rung clearly, and was answered, in her mind, even as she read it; there was no need for her to think about it even. She would never encourage war. But what of Mary? Were seductive whispers about Darcy and Dacre and armed tanyard workers reaching her? Were there people, meaning well, who would perhaps suggest to Mary now that it was her duty to head any kind of rising that would set her mother free? She must, somehow, communicate with Mary. But how?
Then she noticed in Chapuys’ letter the strange assumption that it would be answered. Yet he knew her circumstances.
She sent for Filipez.
“Can you get out tomorrow, or next day? One of my letters is very important.”
“I can always lame a horse,” Filipez said.
In the morning it was Sir Edmund’s favorite mount which limped and was restive. It was at best an ill-tempered animal and pain had not improved it. Filipez’s offer to try it out was gladly accepted.
Once he was well out of sight of the Castle, Filipez dismounted and pried out the bean that was the cause of the trouble and the horse ran smoothly and swiftly to The Goat and Compasses, where, watching his moment, he took two letters from inside his doublet and offered them to Jennie who said:
“Letters are useless to me; I can’t read.”
“May I leave them with you, Madam?” What she had liked about him from the first was his mannerliness. Francisco would have been surprised to know how often, lying on the fat featherbed, beside her snoring Tom, she thought, even dreamed of him; not as he was now, old and growing decrepit, but as he had been once, when she also had been very different.
“What people leave here is their business,” she said. “A man once left a goat. I fed it for a fortnight before it was called for.”
“You have a heart of gold, as I have said before.”
“I’ve got sense enough to know that if these are left to lay about they’ll get dirty. I’ll put them in my lockfast place.” That repository of sweet things gone sour: the first fairing Tom had ever brought her, a curl from a dead child’s head, a corn-dolly made by another child who had lived longer but not long enough; her grandmother’s charm against toothache, a chicken’s wishbone, broken and put together in the form of a crooked cross. It had not worked, despite the connection between chickens and teeth—a chicken having none—and the old woman’s muttered incantations. Every time Jennie Turnbull opened her lockfast place to add a coin, sometimes two, to the hoard which Tom knew nothing about, she wondered why she kept such a lot of old, sad things.
Francisco had hardly gone when a pedlar came in. He was a poor one; the kind who if he earned two pence in a day, spent three. She knew his kind. And today he was plainly short of money; she could have anything that he carried in return for a mug of ale. He carried nothing that she needed or fancied and she told him so, bluntly.
“I have some learning, mistress. I could write a letter, or read one.” He stood humbly, cap in hand, as so many had stood; too many of them thought that taverns could give ale away. But in his ragged greasy hat, a silver button shone.
That was quick work, she thought, not realizing that in Annecy, if you were the eldest and wished to help your overburdened mother…if you were a student at Turin, with your own work to do and the work of other, luckier, lazier young men to help with, in order to eat, you learned to be quick. And the habit stayed.
She went, for the second time in less than an hour, to the haunted lockfast place; she took the two letters, and a mug of ale and placed them before the pedlar, saying no word.
He was a quick worker too. She turned the pig meat that was to be ham in its bath of brine and honey and came out. The man and the letters had gone. The mug was drained and beside it lay a knot of red ribbon and a length of lace, wound about a spool. Twenty years earlier, eager to attract Tom Turnbull’s attention, she would, God forgive her!—have given her soul for such trimmings. As it was she picked them up quickly and added them to her collection of sorry little things, best forgotten.
But Chapuys had made contact with Katharine. He proceeded to find a way of communicating secretly with Mary.
XXIII
When Chapuys received Katharine’s letter he was agonized. He had imagined that the months in Kimbolton would have induced a different state of mind. She must realize how things were trending and that her passive attitude could not be maintained forever. He wrote to his master: “She is so scrupulous and has such great respect for the King that she would consider herself damned without remission if she took any way tending to war.” But even as he wrote he considered the scruples excessive and the respect misplaced; and he could think such things without any diminution of respect.
The letter to the Princess had been addressed to her, but sent to him so that he might find means of delivering it and as he stared at it, he faced one of the major temptations of his life. He could guess its tone. Expediency, commonsense, worldly wisdom, even his loyalty to Katharine herself, urged that the letter should be destroyed and Mary left to make her own decisions. Mary, torn between her understanding for the need of immediate action and her mother’s urge towards inaction, could only take refuge in delay, and delay would be fatal to the cause.
Twice he carried the letter to Mary towards the fire, and each time he held his hand. The Queen had trusted him and if he—even in her own interest—betrayed that trust, he would rank with the others who, in large matters or small, had betrayed her in the past. So he sent on the letter by Lady Jane Rochford, the wife of George Boleyn who was one of the Concubine’s ladies, her sister-in-law and deadliest enemy.
Chapuys’ experience had taught him that apart from a few exceptional cases, hatred, malice and grudge-bearing were fully as powerful and slightly more reliable than love and devotion. The pedlar who had so soon appeared at The Goat and Compasses was actually a respectable young wool-buyer who had hoped to marry one of Katharine’s English maids, taken from Buckden by Suffolk. So long as his resentment lasted—that is until he fell in love anew—he could be trusted to use his legs and his wits in order to do the King an injury and therefore the Queen a service. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, was a sound and workable principle upon which Chapuys relied.
Jane Rochford’s motive for hating Anne, Chapuys had never fathomed; but she did hate her so much that when, shortly after the birth of Elizabeth scandal about Anne had been circulating, her accusation was most disgusting of all; she said that her marriage was ruined because of her husband’s unnatural passion for his sister. It had not been said openly and what Chapuys called “the filth campaign” had been withdrawn; but a woman who would say that about Anne would be the friend of the Queen and of the Princess.
Jane Rochford was useful because she had access to Mary. Anne went to visit her daughter and her ladies went with her.
Mary, reading her mother’s letter, was dismayed. “Dear daughter, I urge and command you, stay still and do nothing, remain in obedience to your father in all things save those of conscience. To those who advise otherwise, be deaf. Of violence no good ever came, or will; patience and time sort all things. It is by tribulation in this world that we reach happiness in the next…”
It was the letter of an aging woman, resigned, to a young one, unresigned. It was the letter of a woman, never very politically astute, and now shut away behind walls, to a girl who, faced by insecurity too early, tended to confuse, and always would, politics with personalities, and who for some time now had lived, if not at the very center of events, on the immediate periphery. Mary’s world, except for one small space, was occupied by people good or bad, by notions right or wrong. Black, white, friend, enemy. The exception was the child Elizabeth, too young and too enchanting to be dismissed from or included within any narrow category.
Mary spent a good deal of time in the ordinary, eventless days, in trying to make Elizabeth walk. She was a sharp, knowing little thing, with an astonishing vocabulary and a will of her own, but so many people were anxious for the honor of carrying her—and thus taking precedence of all, when the cry came, “Make way for the Princess Elizabeth”—that she was extremely lazy. And what would happen to her, Mary wondered, when the time came when nobody craved the honor of carrying her?
That time could come by two roads. A rising in England which would restore Katharine to the throne and Mary to the position this child now occupied: or Father, tiring of the Concubine—there was a good deal of talk about this—might put her away, and in that case as Mary put it to herself—we shall both be in the same case. Either way it was advisable that Elizabeth should learn to walk well and strongly, against the day when there would be no eager arms.
So she would set Elizabeth against some solid object, take some steps backwards and squat on her heels, “Liz, come to me. Come to Mary. Come!” “Mary carry!”
“No. Liz come to Mary.”
Eventually Liz would totter forward and fall into Mary’s welcoming arms saying, “Here I am!”
“Here you are, safe and sound.” Then Mary would repeat the process. Nobody else could persuade Elizabeth to take more than two steps. And because her father whom she had loved could no longer be regarded even with respect, and her mother whom she loved was immured in Kimbolton, and Reginald Pole whom she could have loved was still on the continent, Mary loved Elizabeth.
No sign of that love showed on the days when Anne came to visit her daughter. Most often then the Lady Mary was absent, keeping to her room with a cough, a cold in the head, a stiff neck, a headache, a pain between the shoulders. The little ailments were genuine enough; it was by the grace of God, she thought, that they coincided with the visits of the usurper. When, in a sunless January, they came all together, for apparently no cause at all, and continued, accompanied by high fever and moments of delirium, she took to her bed willing to die rather than face again the torture of indecision, the knowing that every message which Chapuys sent her urged one course of action, the one she longed to take, while Katharine said, “be still,” “be deaf.”
She had borne for months the conflict of loyalties. Was Fisher to die; and More and Abell and more than two score others while she sat with folded hands? With the whole of the North, and the East, ready to rise and the Emperor willing—so Chapuys said—to come to the aid of any party that declared for the Pope and the Queen. It needed only the word which Katharine, at Kimbolton, was unwilling to give, but which Mary could, and perhaps should.
She saw, quite clearly, where one duty lay, the stemming of heresy; but there again, all was confused. Father had dipped a toe into Lutheran waters, just long enough to justify his defiance of the Pope and to take, with English connivance, permission to make this bigamous marriage. Then he had retreated and taken up the untenable double position of Head of the Church in England and Defender of the Faith. Even he could not long hold the balance between the old and the new. And if Anne gave England the needed prince, the slide into heresy would be certain.
Her indisposition offered a respite; she was now unable to do anything but to stay still; too sick to ride northwards and rouse Darcy and Dacre; too weak to be responsible for anything. So she lay in bed sometimes thinking that perhaps this was God’s will being made plain to her, and at other times thinking that it was a test of her resolution; sometimes, blessedly, not thinking at all, back at Ludlow, back at Greenwich, or here, at Hatfield, teaching Elizabeth to walk.
Chapuys was assiduous in his enquiries and expressions of sympathy whenever he came into the presence of the King.
“I sent my own physician, Dr. Butts, who reports that he can find nothing that would account for the trouble. But she is ill; and I am worried.”
He was worried; he still had no son.
“I wonder,” Chapuys said, “whether Your Grace would consider calling upon Dr. de La Sa?” He said it gently, almost humbly, but the memory of another conversation hung heavily between them.
“If he can be spared and if his presence would give any reassurance,” Henry said, answering the implication rather than the words, “we will send for him.”
Chapuys’ message to Katharine went by devious ways; the King’s order was carried direct, so the first Katharine heard of Mary’s illness was a message from Sir Edmund requesting that Dr. de La Sa should leave at once to attend upon the Lady Mary. January days were short; the courier anxious to reach Huntingdon before dark. There was not even time to send a letter, “Give her my love, my dearest love. Tell her to banish troublesome thoughts and think only of recovering her health. And Dr. de La Sa, let me know. I must know. Inform the Spanish Ambassador…”
There followed an endless time. Chapuys’ letter came at last, but it was the one he had written before Dr. de La Sa was sent for, so it told nothing new and it contained an ominous sentence. “Illness can be of mind as well as of body; indecision can destroy and forced inaction can drive men mad.” For her own sake Katharine must be prodded and made to understand—as Chapuys was sure she did not—that Mary’s position was worse than her own.
Katharine felt the prod and moved in a direction opposite to the one Chapuys had planned.
“I must write a letter,” she said to Maria, and went into the small, cold, north-facing little room. It was a letter which must go openly and fast.
Filipez had brought back from his outing, as well as Chapuys’ delayed letter, one of Jennie’s goodwill offerings, a tender little pullet which Maria was about to cook over the fire in the big outer room. She had no spit, a string, hung from a nail served. A youth of privation had made her resourceful and lately she had plied every poverty-inspired trick, things she had thought to be done with forever when she embarked at Corunna, one of the ladies of the Princess of Wales. Presumably Concepcion and Manuella had known poverty, too, but of a different brand, a brainless acceptance of circumstance. Maria did not accept, she combated; she had even solved the business of getting a fairly bright fire. One day, when the daily allowance of logs, most of them damp and green, was delivered, she raised a great fuss because no fuel had come. A second lot, after some commotion, was sent over, and all that day while half the double allowance smouldered and smoked, the other half stood on end, drying out, turned every now and again. Next day, and ever after, the fire was considerably brighter.
