I flush deeply at this and say nothing. She takes a glance at my face and waits until we have gone up the stairs, through my presence chamber, through my privy chamber, and to my little withdrawing chamber, where nobody comes without invitation. I close the door on the curious faces of my ladies and we are alone.
“There is a difficulty?” she says with careful tact.
“Not of my making.”
She nods, but neither of us wants to say more. We are both virgins in our mid-twenties, old for spinsters, afraid of the mystery of male desire, afraid of the power of the king, both living on the edge of his acceptance.
“You know, I hate May Day,” she says suddenly.
“I thought it was one of the greatest days of celebration of the year?”
“Oh, yes, but it is a savage celebration, pagan: not a Christian one.”
This is part of her Papist superstition, and I am going to laugh for a moment, but the gravity of her face stops me.
“It’s just to welcome the coming of spring,” I say. “There is no harm in it.”
“It is the time for putting off the old and taking on the new,” she says. “That’s the tradition, and the king lives it to the full, like a savage. He rode in a May Day tournament with a love message to Anne Boleyn on his standard, and then he put my mother aside for the Lady Anne on a May Day. Less than five years later, it was her turn: the Lady Anne was the new Queen of the Joust, with her champions fighting for her honor before her royal box. But the knights were arrested that afternoon, and the king rode away from her without even saying good-bye. That was the end of the Lady Anne, and the last time she saw him.”
“He didn’t say good-bye?” For some reason, this seems to me the worst thing of all. No one had told me this before.
She shakes her head. “He never says good-bye. When his favor has gone, then he goes swiftly, too. He never said good-bye to my mother either, he rode away from her and she had to send her servants after him to wish him Godspeed. He never told her that he would not return. He just rode out one day and never came back. He never said good-bye to the Lady Anne. He rode away from the May Day tournament and sent his men to arrest her. Actually, he never even said good-bye to Queen Jane, who died in giving him his son. He knew she was fighting for her life, but he did not go to her. He let her die alone. He is hard-hearted, but he is not hard-faced; he cannot stand women crying, he cannot stand good-byes. He finds it easier to turn his heart, and turn his face, and then he just leaves.”
I give a little shudder, and I go to the windows to check that they are tight shut. I have to stop myself from closing the shutters against the hard light. There is a cold wind coming off the river; I can almost feel it chilling me as I stand here. I want to go out to the presence chamber and surround myself with my silly girls, with a page boy playing the lute, with the women laughing. I want the comfort of the queen’s rooms around me, even though I know that three other women have needed their comfort before, and they are all dead.
“If he turn against me, as he turn against the Lady Anne, I would have no warning,” I say quietly. “Nobody at this court is my friend; no one even tell me that danger is coming.”
Princess Mary does not attempt to reassure me.
“It could be, like for the Lady Anne, a sunny day, a tournament, and then the men at arms come and there is no escape?”
Her face is pale. She nods. “He sent the Duke of Norfolk against me to order my obedience. The good duke, who had known me from childhood and served my mother loyally, with love, said to my face that if he were my father, he would swing me by the heels and split my head open against the wall,” she says. “A man I had known from childhood, a man who knew me to be a Princess of the Blood, who had loved my mother as her most loyal servant. He came with my father’s goodwill, under his orders, and he was ready to take me to the Tower. The king sent his executioner against me and let him do what he would.”
I take a handful of priceless tapestry, as if the touch of it can comfort me. “But I am innocent of offense,” I say. “I have done nothing.”
“Neither had I,” she replies. “Neither had my mother. Neither had Queen Jane. Perhaps even the Lady Anne was innocent, too. We all saw the king’s love turn to spite.”
“And I have never had it,” I say quietly to myself in my own language. “If he could abandon his wife of sixteen years, a woman he had loved, how readily, how easily can he dispose of me, a woman he has never even liked?”
She looks at me. “What will become of you?”
I know my face is bleak. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I don’t know. If the king allies with France and takes Kitty Howard as his lover, then I suppose he will send me home.”
“If not worse,” she says very softly.
I give a rueful smile. “I don’t know what could be worse than my home.”
“The Tower,” she says simply. “The Tower would be worse. And then the scaffold.”
The silence that follows those words seems to last a long time. Without speaking I rise up from my chair and go to the door that leads out to my public rooms; the princess steps back to let me precede her. We go through the withdrawing room in silence, both of us haunted by our own thoughts, and enter through the small door of my rooms to a great bustle and fuss. Servants are running from gallery to chamber carrying goods. A dining table is being set up in my presence chamber, and it is laid with the gold and silver plate of the royal treasury.
“What is happening now?” I ask, bewildered.
“His Majesty the king has announced that he will dine in your rooms.” Lady Rochford bustles forward and curtsies to tell me.
“Good.” I try to sound as if I am very pleased, but I am still filled with dread at the thought of the king’s spite and the Tower and the scaffold. “I am honored to invite His Grace by my rooms.”
“To my rooms,” Princess Mary corrects me quietly.
“To my rooms,” I repeat.
“Shall you change your gown for dinner?”
“Yes.” I see that my ladies-in-waiting have already put on their best; Kitty Howard’s cap is so far back on her head she might as well dispense with it altogether, and she is loaded with chains of gold strung with little seed pearls. She has diamonds dancing in her ears and pearls wound round and round her neck. She must have come into some money from somewhere. I have never seen her wear more than a little chain of thin gold before. She sees me looking at her, and she sweeps me a curtsy and then spins on the spot so I can admire the effect of a new gown of rose silk with an underskirt of deep pink.
“Pretty,” I say. “New?”
“Yes,” she says, and then her eyes slide away like a child caught out in thieving, and I know at once that all this finery has come from the king.
“Shall I come and help you dress?” she asks, almost apologetically.
I nod, and she and two of the other maids-in-waiting follow me into my inner privy chamber. My gown for dinner is already laid out, and Katherine runs to the chest and takes out my linen.
“So fine,” she says approvingly, smoothing the white-on-white embroidery on my shifts.
I slip on the shift and sit before the mirror so that Katherine can brush my hair. Her touch is gentle as she twists my hair up into a gold-encrusted net, and we disagree only when she puts my hood far back on my head. I put it right, and she laughs at me. I see our faces side by side in the mirror, and her eyes meet mine, as innocent as a child, without any shadow of deceit. I turn and speak to the other girls. “Leave us,” I say.
From the glances they exchange as they go, I see that her new riches are common knowledge and that everyone knows where those pearls came from. They are expecting a jealous storm to break on Kitty Howard’s little head.
“The king likes you,” I say to her bluntly.
The smile has faded from her eyes. She shifts from one little pink-slippered foot to the other. “Your Grace…” she whispers.
“He does not like me,” I say. I know
I am too blunt, but I have not the words to dress this up like a lying Englishwoman.
Her color rises up from her low-cut neckline to burn in her cheeks. “Your Grace…”
“Do you desire him?” I ask. I don’t have the words to disguise the question in a lengthy conversation.
“No!” she says instantly, but then she bows her head. “He is the king… and my uncle says, indeed, my uncle orders me…”
“You are not free?” I suggest.
Her gray eyes meet mine. “I am a girl,” she says. “I am only a young girl; I am not free.”
“Can you refuse to do what they want?”
“No.”
There is a silence between us, as we both come to realize the simple truth that is being spoken. We are two women who have recognized that we cannot control the world. We are players in this game, but we do not choose our own moves. The men will play us for their own desires. All we can do is try to survive whatever happens next.
“What will happen to me, if the king wants you for his wife?” I know, as the words come awkwardly into my mouth, that this is the central, unsayable question.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows that.”
“Would he have me killed?” I whisper.
To my horror, she does not start back in terror and exclaim a denial. She looks at me very steadily. “I don’t know what he will do,” she says again. “Your Grace, I don’t know what he wants or what he can do. I don’t know the law. I don’t know what he is able to do.”
“He will command you to his side,” I say through cold lips. “I see that. Wife or whore. But will he send me to the Tower? Will he have me killed?”
“I don’t know,” she says. She looks like a frightened child. “I can’t tell. Nobody tells me anything except that I have to please him. And I have to do that.”
Jane Boleyn, Westminster Palace,
May 1540
The queen is in the royal box high above the jousting lists, and though she is pale with anxiety she carries herself like a queen indeed. She has a smile for the hundreds of Londoners who have flocked to the palace to see the royal family and the nobles, the mock battles, the pageants, and the jousts. There are to be six challengers and six defenders, and they circle the arena with their entourages and their shields and their banners. The trumpets scream out the fanfare, and the crowd shouts their bets, and it is like a dream with the noise and the heat and the glare of the sun beating off the golden sand in the arena.
If I stand at the rear of the royal box and half close my eyes, I can see ghosts today. I can see Queen Katherine leaning forward and waving her hand to her young husband; I can even see his shield with this motto: Sir Loyal Heart.
Sir Loyal Heart! I would laugh if the king’s changeable heart had not been the death of so many. Loyal only to its own desires is the king’s heart, and this day, this May Day, it has changed again, like the spring wind, and is blowing another way.
I step to one side, and a ray of sunshine peeping through a gap in the awning dazzles me; for a moment I see Anne at the front of the box, my Anne, Anne Boleyn with her head flung back in laughter and the white line of her throat exposed. It was a hot May Day that year, Anne’s last year, and she blamed the sun when she was sweating with fear. She knew that she was in trouble, but she had no idea of her danger. How should she have known? We none of us knew. We none of us dreamed that he would put that long, lovely neck down on a block of wood and hire a French swordsman to hack it off. How should anyone dream that a man would do that to the wife he had adored? He broke the faith of his kingdom to have her. Why would he then break her?
If we had known… but it is pointless to say: if we had known.
Perhaps we would have run away. Me, and George my husband, and Anne his sister, and Elizabeth her daughter. Perhaps we might have run away and been free of this terror and this ambition and this lust for this life that is the English court. But we did not run. We sat like hares, cowering in the long grass at the sound of the hounds, hoping that the hunt would pass by; but that very day the soldiers came for my husband and for my beloved sister-in-law Anne. And I? I sat mum and let them go, and I never said one word to save them.
But this new young queen is no fool. We were afraid, all three of us; but we did not know how very afraid we should have been. But Anne of Cleves knows. She has spoken with her ambassador, and she knows there is to be no coronation. She has spoken with the Princess Mary and knows that the king can destroy a blameless wife by sending her far away from court, to a castle where the cold and damp will kill her if the poison does not. She has even spoken to little Katherine Howard, and now she knows that the king is in love. She knows that ahead of her there must be shame and divorce at the least, execution at the worst.
Yet here she sits, in the royal box, with her head held high, dropping her handkerchief to signify the start of a charge, smiling with her usual politeness on the victor, leaning forward to put the circlet of bay leaves on his helmet, to give him a purse of gold as his prize. Pale under her modest, ugly hood, doing her duty as Queen of the Joust as she has done her duty every day since she set foot in this country. She must be sick to her belly with terror, but her hands on the front of the box are gently clasped and do not even tremble. When the king salutes her, she rises up from her chair and curtsies respectfully to him; when the crowd calls her name, she turns and smiles and raises her hand when a lesser woman would scream for rescue. She is utterly composed.
“She knows?” asks a quiet voice in my ear, and I turn to the Duke of Norfolk. “Can she possibly know?”
“She knows everything but what is going to become of her,” I say.
He looks at her. “She cannot know. She cannot have understood. She must be too stupid to understand what is going to happen to her.”
“She isn’t stupid,” I say. “She is incredibly courageous. She knows everything. She has more courage than we know.”
“She’ll need it,” he says unsympathetically. “I am taking Katherine away from court.”
“Taking her away from the king?”
“Yes.”
“Is that not a risk? Will you deprive the king of the girl of his choice?”
The duke shakes his head. He cannot hide his triumph. “The king himself has told me to take her from court. He will marry Katherine as soon as he is rid of Anne. It is he who wants Katherine taken away. He wants her away from court so that she is not exposed to gossip while this false queen is ended.” He bites down on a smile; he is almost laughing. “He wants no shadow of gossip attached to Katherine’s unsullied name.”
“The false queen?” I pick out the strange new title.
“She was not free to marry. The marriage was never valid; it has not been consummated. God guided his conscience, and he did not fulfill his vows. God prevented him from consummating the marriage. The marriage is false. The queen is false. It is probably treason to make a false declaration to the king.”
I blink. It is the king’s right, as God’s representative on earth, to rule on such matters, but sometimes we mortals are a little slow to follow the whimsical changes of God. “It is over for her?” I make a little gesture to the girl at the front of the box who stands now to acknowledge the salute of the champion, and raises her hand and smiles at the crowd who shouts her name.
“She is finished,” the duke says.
“Finished?”
“Finished.”
I nod. I suppose this means that they will kill her.
Anne, Westminster Palace,
June 1540
My brother has finally sent the documents that show that indeed I was never married before I came to England, that my marriage to the king was my first wedding, and it is valid, as I know, as everybody knows. The documents arrived by messenger today, but my ambassador cannot present them. The king’s Privy Council is in almost constant meeting, and we cannot find out what they are discussing. Having insisted on having this document, they now cannot be t
roubled even to see it; and what this new indifference means I cannot guess.
God knows what they are planning to do with me; my horror is that they will accuse me of something shameful and I will die in this distant land, and my mother will believe that her daughter died a whore.
I know that terrible trouble is brewing because of the danger that has come to my friends. Lord Lisle, who welcomed me so kindly to Calais, has been arrested and no one can tell me the charges he faces. His wife has disappeared from my rooms, without saying good-bye. She did not come to ask me to intercede for him. This must mean either that he is to die without trial – dear God, perhaps he is dead already – or that she knows I have no influence with the king. Either way this is a disaster for him and for me. Nobody can tell me where Lady Lisle is hiding, and, in truth, I am afraid to ask. If her husband is charged with treason, then any suggestion that he was a friend of mine will count against me.
Their daughter, Anne Bassett, is still in my service, but she claims that she is ill and has taken to her bed. I wanted to see her, but Lady Rochford says that it is safer for the girl if she is allowed to be alone. So her bedroom door is shut, and the shutters in her room are closed. Whether she is a danger to me or I am to her, I dare not ask.
I have sent for Thomas Cromwell who, at least, is blessed with the king’s favor since he was made Earl of Essex only a few weeks ago. Thomas Cromwell at least must stand my friend while my women whisper behind their hands and everyone at court is poised for disaster. But my lord Cromwell has, so far, sent me no reply. Someone surely must tell me what is happening.
I wish we were back at Hampton Court. It is hot today, and I feel cooped up, like a gyrfalcon in a crowded mews, a white falcon, hardly of this world: a bird as white as the winter snows and born to be free in the cold, wild places. I could wish myself back at Calais or even Dover when the road ahead of me lay to London and to my future as Queen of England, and I was full of hope. I could wish myself almost anywhere but here, looking through the little leaded window panes to a bright blue sky, wondering why my friend Lord Lisle is in the Tower of London, and why my supporter Thomas Cromwell does not reply to my urgent request that he come to me at once. Surely he can come and tell me why the council has been meeting in all but secret for days? Surely he will come and tell me why Lady Lisle has disappeared and why her husband is under arrest? Surely he will come soon?