Boleyn Traitor, page 36
‘Oh, don’t be so dull, Jane! I’ve bought a cap for him, and I want to give it to him, and he’ll think of me as he wears it.’
‘This is nonsense,’ I say.
‘But there’s no harm in it,’ she pleads. ‘I’m with child. I can’t do wrong. Nobody could say anything against me, after all?’
‘I don’t even know where you could meet.’
‘I’ve thought of that! Just outside my bedroom door! In the gallery. I could be coming out of my rooms with you. Catherine Tilney can walk past with him, and we meet by accident. Just for a moment.’
‘What if someone else comes by?’ I ask.
‘Then I’ll pass him with a bow,’ she says. ‘And you can give it to him later, instead. Go on, Jane – there’s no harm in it.’
‘There’s no good either,’ I say, unconvinced.
‘Yes; but I want to!’ she says, like the child she is. ‘And I won’t wash disgusting old feet unless you agree, and I won’t even get up in the morning unless you agree.’
CATHERINE TILNEY HAS no objection to playing the part of Bialacoil – the welcoming friend in the stories of courtly love. Henry Webb, the queen’s usher, fetches Thomas Culpeper to Catherine Tilney, who walks down the gallery arm in arm with him and then steps back as the queen comes out of her bedroom.
He stops still as he realises this is planned. He waits, like an experienced flirt, to see what she wants of him, how much she wants of him. Henry Webb goes to the other end of the gallery, looking down the stairs, ready to cough loudly if anyone comes up the staircase.
An accidental meeting between a queen and a courtier does not need guards. An Easter gift between queen and courtier does not need secrecy. But, equally, a secret meeting of lovers does not happen before three witnesses. This event is indefinable – on a border between one world and another, in a gateway. Culpeper may become known as the champion of the queen, her publicly acknowledged favourite, the king’s deputy at dancing and hunting. His prestige will rise, and her reputation will be undamaged. Their hidden fascination might turn into public devotion of loyal courtier to beloved queen. Culpeper knows the rules of courtly love as well as Kitty. I am hoping this meeting – on the border of indiscretion – will move them both into the safe roles of humble lover and distant mistress. But it is all over in a moment.
I see her speak to him briefly and pass him something small, folded in her hands. He takes it and, obeying her hurried gesture, tucks it out of sight, under his cloak. He says something that he thinks is funny – I see the cock of his head and his laughing smile – but she takes it badly. She steps back, turns, looks at him sharply over her shoulder, says a few words, and comes away with a cross little swish of her gown.
I am hugely relieved. This is far better than him swearing a lover’s fealty. He has offended her again, and she is no longer a half-lovesick girl, the youngest maid-of-honour, looking after him as he dances with his preferred flirt. Now, she is fully aware of her importance. Master Culpeper will discover that he cannot joke with Katheryn the queen as he did with Kitty the maid-of-honour; she will not forgive impertinence.
She says nothing until I am plaiting her hair for the night. ‘That’s a very stupid young man,’ she remarks.
‘I thought so,’ I reply agreeably. ‘He has facile charm.’
‘He does!’ she exclaims. ‘That’s just what he has.’ She hesitates. ‘What is that?’
‘Easy,’ I say. ‘Light.’ Now I am thinking of George and the cock of his head and his laugh. ‘Easy,’ I repeat, thinking of his smile. ‘Light,’ thinking George was always light-hearted, even in the worst of danger. ‘Courtly love – all surface, no depth.’ She catches my sadness. I meet her eyes in the mirror. ‘Not lasting,’ I say. ‘Not real.’
‘Yes,’ she breathes. ‘Courtly love, not real. D’you know? I gave him a cap of velvet with a gold brooch and a chain and gold-tipped laces – and he barely glanced at it! He laughed and said I should have been kind to him when I was a maid. As if I could have afforded such a thing then! After I had sent Webb for him and Catherine Tilney, and made you allow me, and gone out into the gallery to see him alone.’
‘He’s no lovesick troubadour,’ I say, with quiet satisfaction. ‘Not like a lover in a poem at all. Not worthy of the favour of a queen. Not good enough for you.’
‘Not at all!’ she says indignantly. ‘And he can be very sure that if I had been dallying with him and given him a cap when I was a maid, it would have been no laughing matter for him. I would have made him fall in love with me and left him broken-hearted. But I’m queen now, and I have no time for vain young men. He can keep the stupid cap. He can wear it all the time, and I won’t notice. I shan’t bother about him again.’
I tie the ribbons of her white embroidered nightcap under her chin. She looks at her reflection with satisfaction. ‘It’s so lovely being with child, so the king doesn’t come to bed me. My room smells so nice. You can sleep here tonight, Jane. We don’t need men at all, not even young ones!’
Greenwich Palace, Good Friday
1541
WE CELEBRATE GOOD Friday in the old way. The reforms that my spymaster Cromwell won might never have been. He might as well never have been. The king goes on his knees around the stations of the cross in the royal chapel, praying and weeping at each point, in an orgy of holiness. He crawls to the altar, his huge arse moving ponderously and unevenly as he tries to keep his weight off his injured leg and then prostrates himself, arms outstretched, on the stone floor.
Kitty glances anxiously at me through her veil. ‘Is he all right?’ she mouths.
The king lies as still as a dead man in an ecstasy of religious fervour; Kitty fidgets on her prie-dieu, alarmed at first and then bored. Only after a good hour of lying on the cold stone floor, with all eyes upon him, does the king make a waving gesture with his outspread hands like a beached seal. His back has seized up, and now he can’t get up. Thomas Culpeper, Thomas Seymour, and Gregory Cromwell haul him first to his knees, where he slumps like a dummy in the tiltyard. He is so heavy that they have to get Culpeper behind him, grasping him around the enormous belly, and Seymour and Gregory on either side, their shoulders under his arms. They have to count one-two-three before they can lever him to his feet. Astoundingly, he manages this with dignity, as if he is still rapt in prayer, his eyes tight shut, one hand clenching the Bible, the other a rosary. Only I see his grimace of pain as he has to bear weight on his bad leg. Only I guess this is a holy masque – a pretend saintly trance.
Katheryn’s expression is hidden by her veil as she watches the three young men stagger under the weight of her husband and heave him back to his seat. The choir starts a low solemn chant; the service continues.
I think: God send us all eternal life – the king looks half-dead, and I’ve not yet got Kitty confirmed as regent queen. We’re in no place for him to die yet.
Greenwich Palace, Easter Saturday
1541
ON SATURDAY, WE all go to chapel again to make our individual confessions to the priest in preparation for Easter Sunday. The king is at the altar again, in black velvet, a dark shapeless hulk in the dark chapel, blessing gold and silver rings at the altar, each one dipped in holy water from the font. Each ring goes on the tip of a fat finger and then into a tray as gifts for favourites as cramp rings: blessed by the king, they will ward off falling sickness and fits.
Katheryn is to make her confession first; even God listens in order of precedence. I kneel beside her as she buries her face in her hands to pray, preparing to sit beside the priest and whisper her sins into his ear.
‘No need to say anything about Culpeper,’ I say quietly.
She turns a pale face towards me. ‘Isn’t he a venial sin?’
‘No need to mention him at all,’ I tell her. ‘Just say the sin of vanity.’
I see her lips tremble. ‘It isn’t vanity,’ she whispers. ‘It’s not, Jane. It’s not a little sin. It’s a pain. I can’t forget it.’
‘It’s not queenly,’ I whisper urgently. ‘Don’t tell the priest that you’re not a true queen. Don’t tell God that. Not now!’
‘God will forgive me,’ she says certainly.
‘You don’t want the king to hear of it.’
This shakes her. She raises up her missal before her face, so we can whisper in the shelter of the prayer book. ‘How would he know? If I say it in confession, only the priest and God hear?’
The priest will be in the pay of someone. Bishop Gardiner, a hard-bitten churchman, would give much to know that the new queen, a Howard queen, has met a young courtier in secret. Archbishop Cranmer, a reformer and friend of the Howards, would take an interest.
‘The king’s Head of the Church, isn’t he?’ I demand. ‘So the priest works for him, doesn’t he?’
She blanches white. ‘I’ll never confess another sin!’ she swears. ‘Not until I am on my deathbed and by the time anybody knows what I said I’d be dead.’
‘You’ve got nothing serious to confess,’ I assure her. ‘Stick to vanity and gossip.’
She looks as if she might cry. ‘I don’t love my husband.’ Her voice is a thread of sound, almost inaudible. ‘Jane, I don’t love my husband as I should.’
‘That’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘You obey him, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes!’
All childish rebellion was beaten out of her long ago.
‘That’s all that matters,’ I tell her. ‘Love isn’t for queens.’
Greenwich Palace, Easter Sunday
1541
WE ARE AWAKENED by a choir singing hymns to the risen lord, and we get up at once and go to chapel. The place is blazing with light and colour again. All the painted saints are bright with new gilding; the holy statues are unveiled and have wax candles burning before them. The king is on his throne wearing cloth of gold; he beams at Katheryn as she takes a lower chair beside him.
There is a great Easter feast after the long church service and then walking in the garden, the birds are singing and singing, the Lenten lilies bobbing their heads in the cold wind. There is a sweet slight scent in the air from the tumbled mass of primrose banks. Every young courtier wants to stay out of doors and dance on the lawns which have been scythed for the first cut of the year and smell of new hay, every old one wants to get indoors, out of the chill.
Our Easter masque is the story of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Of course, Kitty is desperate to be Aphrodite in a diaphanous robe, and the king as Hephaestus will rest his sore leg on an anvil and watch her dance. The story – that Aphrodite is unfaithful to Hephaestus with dozens of lovers – is tactfully ignored. Our Aphrodite is strewed with roses, and she loves her husband – and nobody else.
‘It’ll be just as it was,’ Kitty says delightedly choosing the diamonds to pin in her hair. ‘I look just the same. You’d never know I was with child. Perhaps I’ll be perfect all the way through?’
‘You had better hope that your looks change,’ I say drily. ‘Everyone wants to see you with a good belly.’
She makes a little face in the mirror. ‘Well, at least there’s to be an Easter joust,’ she says. ‘And I shall give my master of horse my favour and nothing to anybody else, even if someone goes down on his knees for it.’
Thomas Culpeper, unaware he has been snubbed, rides in the Easter joust, with Thomas Seymour, Gregory Cromwell, and the queen’s brother George. But it is a lacklustre event, overshadowed by the memory of the great joust organised by Lord Lisle, who is still in the Tower. The king’s great chair is placed in his viewing tower, but he does not watch; only a few of the old lords bother to attend, and we ladies walk through our parts at half-volume.
‘I don’t see the point of watching if nobody’s watching me,’ Kitty says disconsolately.
Greenwich Palace, April
1541
AS SOON AS the joust and masque are finished, the king goes to Dover to inspect the defences, complaining bitterly that no one is capable of planning or building any more. He misses the masque for spring. Katheryn plays the part of incoming spring, in a green gown embroidered with daisies, who wakens all the ladies from their winter sleep by drawing off a white veil that stands for snow. Jane Seymour had the gown and the part before her; we all know our places, and it needs little practice and no scenery. The ladies choose their partners, and the whole court dances; Kitty goes down the line of bowing courtiers, and there is a moment – just a brief moment – when she and Thomas Culpeper are hand to hand and face to face, and everything seems to go very still and very quiet. They look at each other, as if seeing each other for the first time. They look wonderingly, as if recognising something in the other’s awakened face – and then the musicians resume, and the dancers move on, and they are parted again.
THE KING COMES back from Dover, exhausted by the journey and furious that the defences – thrown up in a hurry in terror of Spanish invasion – are already crumbling. Only Cromwell could have seen that they were properly built, the king declares. Only Cromwell could keep the kingdom safe.
Our safety is threatened from the north as well; my uncle the Duke of Norfolk bows his head beneath a storm from the king, who says that Cromwell would have held the north down as a Howard cannot. My uncle grits his teeth and endures the king’s rage, secure in the knowledge that his niece is carrying a Tudor heir and she will be crowned, proud as a Seymour, as pregnant as a Seymour, at Whitsun.
It is not to be. That evening, when I go to her bedroom, she exclaims suddenly while the maids are undressing her and sends the maids and chamberers from the room. ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ she demands. ‘Look!’
She shows me her white linen petticoat, stained with a scarlet ribbon of blood. ‘My course! It’s started again.’
She is astounded not to get her own way, but this is a drearily familiar scene for me. She bundles up the petticoat and stuffs it under her bed. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she decides. ‘We’ll pretend it hasn’t happened. You’ll take away my clouts every morning and undress me at night. I’m always light. There won’t be much to do; you can wash everything, and we can pretend it’s all going on as it should be.’
For a moment, I calculate how many days until a Whitsun coronation and if we dare get the crown on her head and the oil on her breast, and tell the king afterwards. But then I remember his terrible coldness to Anne, after we had combed her hair and arranged her on pillows and she swore that next time she would have a boy and he would be stronger.
‘No, we can’t pretend. It makes it worse when you have to tell him.’
‘After I’m crowned!’ It comes out as a shriek, and she claps her hand over her mouth.
I shake my head. ‘He’d think you’d lied from the very beginning. He’s quick to see an enemy. He can turn in a moment. You can’t risk it.’
She cries then, poor little queen, cries like a child with unstoppable tears and rushing choking sobs. ‘But what can I do? What can I do? Jane, you have to help me! What can I do?’
I take her hands; I force her into a chair. I wipe the tears from her face. ‘Be calm,’ I tell her. ‘It’s too early. It wasn’t a baby; it hardly started.’
‘I don’t care about a baby!’ she hisses at me, in a whispered scream. ‘Why would I want a baby to ruin my looks? I want my coronation!’
‘I know. I know. But a baby’s the only thing that’ll get you a coronation. You have to tell him the truth this evening, tonight – you’ll say it was a genuine mistake. As it was. The king’s been married before—’ I could laugh at this bitter truth. ‘He knows that babies don’t come easily. He knows you’re only young, and you’ve never been with child before. He’ll believe that you made a mistake.’
Inwardly, I think: can he even make a baby now? If he can do the act, is his seed not watery and weak? ‘Flatter him. Tell him that you missed a course, and you thought it must be a baby, because he’s so strong and potent that you’re sure his lovemaking will give you a child at once.’
Her face convulses in a grimace of distaste. ‘He hurts,’ she says, in a tiny voice. ‘And it takes ages. I don’t believe you can get a baby like that.’
I hesitate. ‘You have to pretend to pleasure,’ I tell her. ‘You have to tell him you love it.’
She sets her mouth in an ugly line. ‘Larding it on like a spit boy,’ she says resentfully.
‘Larding it on,’ I agree. ‘You tell him that you were so eager to make him happy, to give him good news, you were too eager. Because all you want is his happiness.’
‘I cry?’ she suggests.
‘You cry. But not like this. Not enough to spoil your face. And he loves you so much now that he’s certain to be tender with you this time, this first time. You ask him for his favour; you get him back into bed, and next time, or the time after, it’ll really happen. But never, never say that you were with child but you couldn’t keep it. Never say “miscarry”.’
‘Another word he’s not to hear? He’s not to hear the word “death”? And now not “miscarry”?’
‘Some words we never say in his hearing. You made a mistake with counting your courses, that’s all.’
‘Silly me,’ she says bitterly. ‘Stupid, stupid me.’
SHE HOPES THAT the king is so doting that he will crown her anyway. But he’s not going to spend a fortune on a wife who has not earned her place as queen. Even in love, he guards his power. He comes to her bed every third night or so, and he asks me, quietly, one evening, when her next course is due.
‘And how did you come to make such a mistake, even if she did?’ he demands. ‘You’re not a silly girl, Jane. You’re not a pretty fool.’
I scatter a treasury of words at his feet: her distress at his illness, her fears for him interrupted her courses, as can quite often happen. But her happiness at his returned health will make her fertile again, and his potency must make a child.
