The Queen of Subtleties Page 16

  So, there I was in the Presence Chamber, staring everyone down without even glancing at them. Is this what you bargained for? Well, this is what you’ve got, so make sure you take a good, long look. But they were nothing, really, all those pairs of eyes. Mere irritations, with their doubts and quibbles. What mattered was Henry. My own eyes were on Henry, in Henry’s; and his focused on mine with an intensity that was almost savage. That morning, at the mirror, Annie had moved to pin up my hair, but I’d said no, I’d go to him with my black hair a pelt on the ermine-froth of my shoulders. I’d go to him like a bride. A crimson-clad, mad kind of bride.

  The morning we were due to leave for France was dew-rinsed, sparkling. I found it hard to turn away from the blazing, last-chance blue of that sky. Idling at a window, I slid my fingertip through the condensation: two swoops, joined top and bottom to make a heart. My own heart couldn’t have felt more different from that flat, frosted one. It’d been so long since I’d felt real, physical excitement. Now I felt as if my life was just about to begin. And what a perfect place for its beginning: France. So close, that morning, that I could almost smell it: the fragrance of its beams and timbers; different, I remembered, from England’s. A sweeter sap. The herbs, too, hung with clothes and swirled into baths: spicier.

  There were problems, though, from the very beginning of that French trip; from before the beginning. First, the Spanish dog-in-a-manger had decided to sit tight on the queen’s jewels. They weren’t hers; they were the queen’s, they belonged to the queen of England, to whoever was queen. Not her. Both Henry and I were determined that I should conduct my first state visit in the crown jewels. But when Catherine refused Henry’s request to hand them over, he had to order her. And then, of course, everyone raised their eyebrows at the unseemly tussle.

  Then, suddenly, it all seemed to have been for nothing. I was ready to go, but we were sent word that no one would receive me. A queen should be received by a queen. Well, we hadn’t needed telling that the French queen wouldn’t oblige: Francis’ wife was Catherine’s niece. But even Francis’ sister, the Queen of Navarre—and my old friend, from my French days—was also mysteriously unavailable. Then Francis had the gall to suggest his mistress, and Henry had to make it clear: I don’t think you quite understand…

  We worked our way around it. It wasn’t as if we were unused to hitches. I’d stay in Calais, and Henry would go alone on to French soil to Francis. But before we could even reach Dover, something else cropped up. We’d stopped at Canterbury for the night. Before dinner, Henry and I met up alone in the Abbot’s walled garden for a little time to ourselves. The air, silting up with dusk, smelled deliciously of old coins. We gossiped about our travelling companions and had a giggle about the old Abbot. Suddenly, ahead, from rosehip-tasselled bushes, stepped a plainly-dressed woman. God knows where she’d come from, or how much she’d overheard. She approached us with considerable purpose: no stray gardener, this. Henry stopped; and I, on his arm, had to do the same. My heart made its unease felt. The young woman swept low before Henry. Nothing, for me. She was blonde, broad-faced, and expressionless except for a shine in her small, pale blue eyes.

  Henry surprised me by saying, ‘Elizabeth.’ He turned to me with deliberate calmness. ‘Anne, this is Elizabeth Barton.’ Then he actually introduced me to her, as if we were equals at a social engagement. I didn’t notice how he introduced me—Lady Anne? The Marquess? My soon-to-be-wife?—because inside my head was a thudding realization: here she was, the so-called Holy Maid of Kent. The woman of whom I’d heard so much. Of whom there was so much to hear. The woman who spoke publicly, loudly, of God’s displeasure—confessed to her, in her trances—at the king’s impending mistake over me, and the calamity it would bring. The woman otherwise known as The Mad Nun of Kent.

  I must have been the very last person to have the dubious pleasure of meeting her. As a matter of necessity, she’d already been granted audiences with Henry and Tom. She’d been welcomed, of course, by Catherine and that waste-of-space daughter. And Bishop Fisher was glad to admit to being impressed. She’d managed, within a couple of months, to make quite a name for herself. As to which name, you could, as I say, take your pick: Holy Maid, or Mad Nun.

  And now here was Henry, after a long day and in our only few quiet moments, keen to do his duty and give the visionary a kingly ear. Presumably she’d been slipped the all-important key to the garden by one of her merry band of priestly believers. Henry and I should have walked away. It was uncalled-for, this ambush. If she had something to say to us, she should have requested an audience. And if people weren’t so curious or afraid to stand up and be sceptical, and those requests of hers were refused, she’d disappear soon enough.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Henry was saying, ‘it’s good to see you again.’

  I marvelled, as always, at his careful good-naturedness with the least-deserving. But not as much as I marvelled at her confidence.

  Her refusal to look at me left me free to get a good look at her. For a tormented mystic, she was quite pretty in a well-scrubbed way. Thanks, probably, to all the baths that were being heated for her by bowled-over priests. It was clear to me that she was nothing special: just a girl who’d been sharp enough to realize that the way to a good living was to talk more mumbo-jumbo than the clerics. Once someone’s servant, she now had Canterbury fawning over her. Men who were supposed to be learned and scrupulous.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ she said, surprisingly business-like, ‘I have to tell you that if you go ahead with this supposed marriage, you’ll be off your throne within a month.’

  Where was the staggering and falling down? Why were we being denied the famed spectacle? Perhaps she saved that for the impressionable.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Henry started, ‘a lot of people listen to you—’

  ‘I don’t care about “a lot of people”,’ she said, quick off the mark, ‘Just you. It’s you who should be listening to me.’

  Despite my unease, I almost laughed, because surely only I talked to Henry like that.

  Henry merely said, ‘Well, yes, thank you. And I have. As you know, I always listen to what you have to say. But I’m afraid this isn’t a good time, and you’ll have to excuse us…’

  She didn’t follow; just raised her voice to reach us. ‘In God’s eyes,’ she specified, ‘you’ll stop being king from the very moment you make your vows.’

  Henry sighed.

  ‘And—’ back to sounding business-like, ‘you’ll die a terrible death.’

  ‘No, you will,’ I muttered. And let me tell you, it didn’t take a visionary to foresee that.

  For a while, we were free of the Mad Nun. We put the incident behind us, reached France and, from then onwards, away from English soil, everything was fine. In France, Francis obliged us and came back with Henry to Calais. I was ready for him in a gown of gold slashed with crimson, and he took me straight onto the dancefloor. He ended up dancing with me for most of the week.

  When he’d gone, we stayed on for a couple more weeks. There, in Calais, I could breathe. We were with friends—only friends, for once—and the best of my family, my brother and sister. No Uncle Norfolk; and my father’s faintly disapproving gaze was a sea’s distance away. On Calais’ shore, autumn was being swept away and winter swept in. Each day made a splash, whether with a sky-load of over-ripe sunshine or lances of rain. And everywhere to the horizon was the sea, flexing, bearing us up on the continent and keeping England at bay.

  All those days, I was suffused with the feeling that I’d had at my window the morning of our departure from London. Our long, difficult past was over and miraculously shrunk to nothing, as if it’d never been. My future was made of the love of the one man who mattered. The house where we were staying was perfect for us, not least because our bedchambers were directly connected and no one knew what we were or weren’t doing after dark. We, ourselves, hardly knew, dizzy as we were with holiday high-spiritedness and our success with the all-important Francis. We only weren’t mar
ried, by that time, because I’d declined Henry’s offer of a wedding in France. I’d only declined because I was determined to celebrate my victory where I’d fought so long and hard for it: on English soil.

  We arrived back in England as king and queen in all but the most official and—to us—irrelevant sense: only the gloss of the official ceremonies to come. We both felt it, this sea-change. And that very first night back, we slept together as husband and wife. No discussion. I didn’t stop him, and I didn’t stop myself. I almost didn’t notice, perhaps because what had always been noticeable was the stopping, the refraining; it was the curtailing that had always taken the effort. Consummation, by contrast, was, of course, effortless.

  Elizabeth, I should have known much earlier—could have known—that I was pregnant with you. You probably began your steady unfolding within days of our coming home from France, when we were still sea-legged. You’d been waiting seven years to get started, and now you wasted no time.

  A week or so later began the dreams that nowadays would tell me I was in the earliest stage of one of my pregnancies. Undreamlike in their coherence and their focus on real places, but dreamily unpeopled. Instantly recognizable scenes from my childhood, but no Mary, no George. Not a glimpse, even, of Mary’s eggshell eyelids as she blanked Dad’s displeasure. Certainly none of the whirlwind of George and our dogs on the drawbridge. In all other respects, though, the deserted dream-Hever was accurate, and seemed to make a point of its accuracy: everything homed-in on; Look! This was here, wasn’t it, but you never noticed. Of course I hadn’t. Life at the real Hever had been for living, not looking at. And who could have remembered all the odds and ends, nooks and crannies, that filled these dreams? A loose thread on the cushion of a neglected windowseat. A hairline crack down a shutter in my parents’ bedroom. The commonplace of my childhood, now somehow revealed as wondrous. All of it there, in the hours of sleep, for the taking.

  Your father and I married in January, as soon as we knew about you. And I do mean as soon as. ‘Let’s get married tomorrow,’ was what Henry said when I told him. We’d just woken and were sitting up in bed.

  ‘No, really,’ he insisted, although he was laughing. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, well, now, let’s see…There’s…’ I ditched the sarcastic breeziness and gave him a look: Catherine.

  He was ready with an answer. ‘Null and void. That was no marriage. I’m not married. I’m free.’

  News to me. ‘So why the seven years I’ve had to endure?’

  ‘Because it does need to be done, the divorce; I’m not saying it doesn’t. Has to be seen to be done. Properly. On paper. But for us two…’ He shrugged: it’s irrelevant, isn’t it? ‘So, anyway, tomorrow?’

  ‘Henry, I hate to be…well, to be a woman about this, but I’ve nothing to wear.’ Only a man would assume a wedding could be whipped up in a day.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ I think I’d know if I’d been fitted for a wedding gown.

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  He cupped my face. ‘Listen: you know what I’ve always wanted? A crimson bride.’

  And so that was what I was, the very next day. My wedding did take place on English soil, but was far from a victory parade. The secrecy, though, proved as useful as Henry had envisaged. Sometimes we claimed we were married on that very first day home from France; so, you were conceived in wedlock. Other times we cited March, which was when Catherine was officially over and done with. Only those who were there at our little ceremony know the truth: one of Henry’s chaplains, Dr Lee; Harry Norris, who was best man, and my maid, Annie; and our two witnesses, George and Billy. George knew in advance, of course, as did Harry and Annie. We told them the day before, not long after we’d sat there in bed and made the decision. We stipulated that the ceremony should happen before dawn. I think George and Harry stayed up all night, that night. Just before five, Harry went to wake an unsuspecting Dr Lee, while George came to me.

  I was only dozing, and Annie was quick to the hearth. So George said he’d get going, to wake Billy.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘What for?’

  I didn’t really know. Perhaps it was that if I was going to have a pre-dawn wedding in a crimson dress, I might as well go the whole hog and be hovering at an unsuspecting witness’s bedside as he woke. In other words, if I wasn’t going to have my victory parade, I’d make something else, something fun of this strange non-event. Or was it because it was Billy? Perhaps it was too tempting to pass up, an opportunity to have him sweetly at my mercy. I settled on, ‘To surprise him.’

  ‘Well, you’ll certainly do that.’ This wasn’t in his plans.

  I checked, ‘He’s alone?’

  ‘Yep.’ He’d had made sure of it.

  He waited the few moments it took me to be helped into my linen shift and gown, and for Annie to bring the shine to my hair which, the previous evening, we’d rinsed in rosemary. Then off we stole, the two of us, into Whitehall’s passageways. Somehow, George had a key to Billy’s rooms. Maybe the boys all kept copies of each other’s keys. Once inside, he successfully shushed a dazed, wide-eyed groom; a couple of others remained oblivious. Together, we crept up on Billy’s bed, before George conceded with a reluctant flourish: Go on, then, if you’re so keen. With a twinge of trepidation, I parted the hangings and half-tucked myself inside. George stayed close, holding our candle above me. Light from the flame beat around the enclosed space. There was a smell: something like mud or hay, a stable. As my vision adjusted, I couldn’t distinguish much of Billy. He was laying on his side, facing away. There was that hair, though: his gold-spun hair. Irresistibly touchable. I ran a feather of it between my fingertips. ‘Billy,’ I whispered. The ends of my own hair skimmed his bedclothes. He turned slightly, looking over his shoulder, paused, then turned sharply.

  ‘Anne?’

  ‘Billy,’ my fingertips on his lips, now, ‘it’s my wedding day and I want you as my witness.’

  Lucy Cornwallis

  WINTER 1535–6

  My name, hissed.

  And again.

  It’s Richard.

  How long have I been sleeping through this?

  A Hettie-sound: scritch of a blanket; she’s stirring.

  ‘Lucy?’ again, from behind the door.

  And nearer, from Hettie-darkness: ‘’s Mr Cornwallis.’

  Yes, I know. Why does she always call him ‘Mr Cornwallis’?

  I must have made some sound of assent, because the door separates from its frame; the gap turning the pale, fluid gold of tallow-light. A figure looms and sits—thud— on my bed, his face recognizable when he places the flame by his feet. Less recognizable is the man-scent: I know it from Kit and Stephen, but from Richard, and up close, in my own room, at night, it’s a small shock. ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘Stone-cold sober.’ He sounds it, too.

  I’ve been jammed up against sleep, and now I’m falling away. ‘What time is this?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  The embers are dead. The air beyond my blankets is freezing; it’s pinging tight on my skin. Greenwich, I tell myself. This is my Greenwich room: that, there, is my Greenwich-room window. Is this night or nearly morning? A dead-of-winter morning, faint-hearted, rousing itself at the last minute. I remember, now, coming to bed exhausted. The day after Twelfth Night, the busiest of our twelve busiest nights of the year. Thirteenth night, this would be. All we did, all day, was clear up. ‘Richard—’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. We’re all very tired, aren’t we.’ He’s hunched.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘And they’re still partying.’

  ‘Who is? Where?’ I can’t hear anything. What I hear, when I listen hard, is a nothing made of trees and the river.

  ‘The great and the good,’ he says. ‘And the less good.’ His sigh, despite its heaviness, sounds distant. ‘It’s such a busy old world, here, isn’t it.’


  ‘Yes, and you like that.’ So, stop bothering me and go away. I turn over, shut him out.

  He says, ‘I did like it.’

  I keep my eyes closed. ‘Richard, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ it’s coming, now, in a rush, ‘when you haven’t seen someone properly for a while and you’re really looking forward to seeing them again—just for half an hour at the end of the evening—but then they’re busy. Suddenly there’s a party, and they’re going to be kept busy all night.’ He adds, ‘But of course you don’t know, do you,’ and in his voice there’s a smile that’s no smile at all. ‘Cool-headed Lucy, untroubled by matters of the heart.’

  Oh, go away. ‘I might surprise you, one day.’

  ‘Why, what you gonna do? Marry Kit, or something?’ Immediately, he’s contrite: ‘I’m sorry. You’re beautiful and wonderful and you’re wasted. And that makes two of us.’

  He’s being impossible; it’s best to keep to practicalities—to deal with him; to get this over with—which is why I roll back and ask him, ‘Do you need to sleep in here?’ Because this might just be what he’s after. He did share my room for years, until he was allocated his own, and he was never beyond an occasional nightmare.

  ‘Thank you, but no. I’m all grown-up, now.’ A glint in his eyes. ‘Unfortunately.’

  A glint, too, on his doublet: a brooch, silvery. I reach out and touch it as a kind of question.

  ‘Present,’ he answers.

  ‘You can’t wear it, Richard. You know you can’t.’ Silver: for gentlemen. I despair of him; he’s heading for a comeuppance.

  ‘Oh, it’s only—’ he shrugs—‘only sometimes.’ And grins. ‘Discreetly.’

  I give up, turn away.

  ‘No—’ his hand on my shoulder, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Said to my pillow.

  ‘The old queen’s dead.’

  Which old queen? We don’t have an old queen.