Page 102 of Boleyn Traitor
‘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 affordedsuch 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 CELEBRATEGOODFriday 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
ONSATURDAY, WEall 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.’
