Page 94 of Boleyn Traitor
‘He didn’t see you; he didn’t see any of us, because he’s in so much pain and he’s so—’
‘But it wasn’t just the king! Everyone walked straight past me!’
I think: oh, this is Culpeper. But she has to learn that the king comes first. To a courtier, the king must always come first.
‘Nobody matters more than the king,’ I tell her firmly. ‘We all put him first. Thomas Culpeper has to put him first. You too.’
‘Why, what can I do?’ she demands, opening her hazel eyes wide at her own reflection.
‘You have to smile as much as you did as when you were happy with his gifts. You have to be pretty even when no one is watching. Even if he – or anyone else – fails in their manners, you never fail in yours. You are always as beautiful and as beautifully behaved as when you first popped up before him.’
This, she understands. She was raised to be a Howard girl: the most charming, the most beautiful, the most desirable. This court – an illusion – has a fitting queen at last: one who only cares how things look, not how they are.
‘I’ll wear my dark-green gown and my emeralds to dinner,’ she says as a solution to unhappiness.
‘Yes. I’ll send them in to get you dressed, and I’ll find out if the king wants to dine in his presence chamber or wants to come here.’
‘And order the musicians to come—’
‘There won’t be dancing,’ I warn her. ‘He won’t want dancing when his leg hurts.’
‘I’m not going to dance! But I want to refuse to dance with—’
‘There won’t be dancing.’
THE KING ISin too much pain to dine with the court; he does not even want to dine privately with his bride. He only wants the company of a couple of his most favoured friends: Thomas Culpeper must stay at his side, sitting with him all day and sleeping in his bedchamber at night. No visitors are allowed: hundreds of plaintiffs come to court, and there is no one to hear their requests. Noblemen and their ladies – elegant beggars themselves – get no closer to the king than the presence chamber, and he never comes out there. Only the doctor is admitted to his privy chamber by the guards on the door, and Dr Butts comes out grim-faced, saying – as he is legally bound to say – that the king is healthy and strong.
A week goes by; the court freezes into stillness and quietness in the dark days of February. It snows silently, most days, thick heavy flakes, and the river starts to freeze, crackling among the reeds, and it is dark by early afternoon. No one dares to raise their voice or run with their heels tapping on the wooden floorboards, for fear of disturbing the king’s sleep. The doors of the king’s room are barred, and blank-faced guards stand before them, pikes crossed, to block anyone from even approaching. Nobody can linger outside to see the doctor enter and leave.
One afternoon, the snowflakes are a soft pattering swirl of grey against the windows, the sky so dark that we have candles lit at midday, and everyone is bored of card games and riddles bymid-afternoon. The queen looks longingly at the white gardens where we played at snowball fighting, where we danced on the archery lawns; but she knows better than to run out in the snow while the king keeps to his shuttered rooms like a sleeping beast, like a mole deep underground in darkness. She is imprisoned in the blizzard, and there will be no tracks of her little boots in the drifts, running away.
‘But what’s wrong with him?’ she whispers to me.
‘His doctor says he’s very well.’
PEOPLE START TOwhisper that the huge trays of food are a deception, and he is not in there at all. I wonder if there is another greater deception: if he has died in there and the Seymours are concealing his death until they have made alliances strong enough to announce a Seymour regency to govern for their little prince. But I cannot see the Seymours; they are locked up like an enclosed silent order with the king. I cannot write to warn my uncle. I have to practise patience and hold Kitty in readiness for whatever is to come.
Dr Butts calls in other physicians from London, as if he has lost his famous certainty, and they come upriver in the royal barge, the ice cracking under the bow wave as the icy water washes down. I remember Dr Butts telling George to take off the king’s helmet after the jousting accident – and all of us wondering if the head would come off, too. He was alone then; he did not need another opinion to bring the king to life. Can it be that the king is closer to death now than when his great horse rolled on him? Is Dr Butts more fearful now – is the king worse than when he lay like a dead man?
I walk, wrapped against the cold in my dark cape, hidden by the dusk, along the riverbank path, past the pier as the doctors board the barge back to London. One of them says quietly that cupping will never bring down a tertian fever as hot as this one. He lowers his voice: ‘His heart can’t stand it...’
NOW EVERYONE KNOWSthat the king has a tertian fever and that recurs and recurs till it kills the patient. Someone says that he was delirious with fever; they had to hold him to the bed to stop him throwing himself from the window, and now he has collapsed into a tranced silence, his glassy eyes on the ceiling, his mouth gaping in a silent scream of pain, while the poison in his leg runs through his body; and when it reaches his brain, he will die. His favourites never leave his rooms, as if they are to be buried with him, like pagan companions in a king’s grave.
Once again, the court catches the king’s terror of death. If he dies tonight, he has only a frail little boy to succeed him and a country divided against him. I should alert my uncle that his niece Kitty might be widowed; but he is travelling in the wild lands between England and Scotland. He has no messenger network as my spymaster did; we have no code, and in any case I cannot write that the king is dying – that is treason. I am the only person who can position Kitty for her future widowed state. I catch Thomas Seymour, as he runs up the stone stairs from the stables.
‘Lady Rochford.’ He bows.
‘Sir Thomas,’ I reply. ‘Can you tell me: how is the king today?’
‘Better,’ he says, immediately deceitful. ‘Better every day, I think.’
‘I thank God for it,’ I say, as dishonest as he. ‘The queen will be happy to hear. And our prince, the queen’s stepson, is well also at Hertford Castle?’
A sideways glance from his dark eyes tells me he has noted that I claim the little boy as Kitty’s stepson. ‘Yes, praise God.’
‘The king always used to read the nursery reports to Queen Katheryn,’ I remark. ‘She has missed hearing of him. She’s a very devoted stepmother.’
His smile tells me that he knows this is a lie. ‘She is a young woman herself,’ he says, as if to excuse her indifference.
