Page 68 of Boleyn Traitor
I laugh with everyone, as if this is the best joke in the world, and Sir Anthony takes me to the back of the hall and gives me a little silvered looking-glass to hold, as he swirls a marbled cape around my shoulders and turns up the collar.
‘I have to go to her...’ I say urgently.
‘First swop your hood for a bonnet,’ he says, and with a strangely intimate gesture, he unpins my hood and replaces it with a man’s hat, pulled down over my eyes like his own. He ties the brightly coloured mask on my face and pulls up the hood of the cape so that my face is in shadow.
I look at myself in the mirror and see that my anxiety does not show behind a smiling face, which is hidden by the mask, and concealed by a hood.
‘I wouldn’t know myself,’ I say.
‘We all have many faces,’ he replies. ‘Come on – we’re going in.’
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I have to—’
But he takes me by the hand and makes me follow the others up the broad stone stairs.
‘Where’s Lord Cromwell?’ I demand desperately as the noise from the courtyard below swells to tumult and I guess the bull has been loosed and they are throwing dogs into the yard for him to gore.
Sir Anthony laughs recklessly. ‘Left behind in London! This is courtier work! Not for an old counting-house clerk!’ He pulls me by my hand up the staircase. ‘Tonight’s our night! The king and his comrades! King goes in first, we come behind, musicians follow us! King greets her, gives her a gift, steals a kiss, musicians strike up, we all dance. Usual. Dance is a gavotte.’
‘But she won’t know him,’ I say urgently. ‘Sir Anthony, let me go and tell her. She won’t know that she’s supposed to recognise him only after he unmasks. She doesn’t know to pretend not to knowhim before unmasking. She doesn’t know how it’s done...’
He laughs. I think he’s too drunk to understand that this is going to go terribly wrong; but in any case, it’s too late. The door before us opens, and we pour into the queen’s great chamber.
She’s at the window, looking down at the bull baiting below. She looks up when we come in, and her smile of welcome dies as she sees the troop of drunk men, strangely masked, with musicians coming in behind them. For a moment, she looks at bay, like the bull in the courtyard below, facing the dogs running in to torment her.
Sir Anthony has tight hold of my hand and is readying me for the dance.
‘Let me go!’ I wrench my hand from his. ‘I have to warn her—’
The king lurches at the still figure at the window, and, horrifyingly, he pulls her into his arms and plants a hearty kiss on her lips. She recoils immediately, jumping back, shoving him away from her, looking around for her guards. She shouts something at him in German. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve, and terribly, she spits on the floor. She whirls around to turn her back to him, snapping an order at her servants that they throw him and all the half-drunken minions out of her rooms.
The musicians shudder to silence; everyone is frozen with horror. The king stands alone, his mask pulled half-off; he looks completely stricken. He has kissed his bride, and she spat his kiss out of her mouth. He looks nothing like the most handsome prince in Europe – he looks like an overweight man of nearly fifty who has been knocked back hard. He looks around, as if for help. He looks around for someone to laugh it off. He looks around as if his legs are weak and he wants to sit down, to sit on a throne, so everyone knows he is king.
Nobody moves. Nobody says a word.
And then little Katheryn Howard, the newest arrival, the most junior of all the maids, trips forward. ‘The king!’ she coos. ‘So handsome! I would know him anywhere. See, my lady! It is our handsome king!’
She breaks the spell that holds us frozen. Catherine Brandon darts forward and tells the queen that this is King Henry and not – as she thought – a drunk fool with a band of mummers. Anne turns back to him, sinks into a curtsey, scarlet with mortification, and Henry laughs it off with a harsh, ragged laugh.
Everyone laughs with him, wide-mouthed, as if they were shouting. The musicians bravely strike up the gavotte again but straggle off into silence when nobody takes a partner, nobody moves. Nobody wants to dance a gavotte with its climax of a kiss, seeing how the last kiss was received.
I look at Sir Anthony. ‘You should’ve let me prepare her.’
He is beaming. ‘Better that the king sees Lord Cromwell’s choice as she truly is.’
Something is happening here that I don’t understand. ‘She was the king’s choice—’
‘From a short list of two Lutheran duchesses.’ He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘She’s Cromwell’s choice. His lordship picked her for his own good reasons. Now he’ll have to answer for them. And if the king doesn’t like her – Lord Cromwell will have to answer for that, too.’
I realise that this is not a masque that has gone wrong; this has all gone exactly right. The king’s first meeting with Cromwell’s bride is a disaster; but the Howard girl saves the day. I have just witnessed the first move in the Howards’ brilliant bid for the throne, and another Howard girl is in play.
I send a letterlocked note that night by one of Lord Cromwell’s messengers. I mark ithaste, and know that the man will ride all night.
Greenwich Palace, January
1540
LORDCROMWELL’S RESPONSEis a magnificent reception for the queen at Blackheath, with all the theatrical extravagance that the king loves. The king, escorted by hundreds of noble courtiers, wearing imperial purple velvet, with a cloth of gold jacket, rides on a great horse as Anne of Cleves emerges from a tented pavilion like a princess in a tapestry, mounts a white horse, and rides forward to greet him.
