Page 103 of Boleyn Traitor
‘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 AWAKENEDby 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 yearand smell of new hay, every old one wants to get indoors, out of the chill.
Our Easter masque is the story ofAphrodite, the goddess of love. Of course, Kitty is desperate to beAphroditein a diaphanous robe, and the king asHephaestuswill rest his sore leg on an anvil and watch her dance. The story – thatAphroditeis unfaithful toHephaestuswith dozens of lovers – is tactfully ignored. OurAphroditeis 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 ASthe 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 COMESback 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 shewill 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.’
