The Queen of Subtleties Read online

  ‘Queen Catherine’s died.’

  I’m up; cold air on me like a splash. ‘What d’you mean?’

  Hettie crosses herself; there’s a sound and I know it’s Hettie crossing herself.

  ‘A messenger came, apparently, this afternoon.’

  ‘She’s dead? How?’

  He shakes his head slowly, as if considering. ‘I don’t know. She was ill.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was old.’

  ‘She wasn’t that old, Richard.’ How old was she? Fifty?

  He bends to pick up the tallow, transforming himself back into shadow-face.

  No, ‘Wait.’

  ‘I don’t know anything else.’ He’s defensive.

  But, ‘They should be told, shouldn’t they; over there, those partying people. Someone should tell them; they need to know.’

  He faces me, full-square, lit up, and frowning. ‘They do know. That’s why they’re partying.’

  But that makes no sense; all I can do is repeat what he’s just told me: ‘The queen is dead.’

  ‘The old queen,’ he says as if he’s correcting me: the emphatic gentleness of it.

  ‘The queen,’ I insist, because it’s true. I’m sick of all this pretence. No, furious: that’s what I am; two fistfuls of blanket at my chest, my throat. Queen Catherine was crowned queen and she didn’t stop being queen because she didn’t die.

  Until now.

  She’s gone.

  Now there’s only Anne Boleyn.

  Uneasily, Richard tries to explain: ‘People are pleased, I suppose. Because she was in the way.’

  Which actually makes me laugh: ‘Oh, no, she wasn’t.’ Quite the opposite. ‘She was shut away.’

  ‘She was still…in the way. I mean, listen to you: “the queen”. You and a lot of others.’

  ‘But it didn’t make any difference, did it.’

  ‘But it might have done,’ he whispers. ‘Could have done. At any time.’

  ‘But it didn’t. And now she’s dead, and you’re telling me that people are actually celebrating her death? A lady who did no one any harm—only ever did a lot of good—and ended up abandoned, imprisoned, banned from seeing her daughter?’ I see him take a deep breath. ‘Yes, come on, you tell me: why would—how could—anyone do that?’

  His eyes are either lowered or closed; I can’t see which. ‘Because the king says so.’

  Oh, really, Richard. ‘Of course he doesn’t.’

  His eyes, turned towards the window, are coins. ‘The king is over there, and he’s partying. And she is dancing.’ Slowly, he gets to his feet. ‘And will be, too, for a good many more hours, if Silvester’s to be believed.’

  I didn’t try to stop him leaving; and now, across the landing, there’s the cough of his own door settling into its frame. I’m at my window; I’m solidly blanket-wrapped but my bare feet have begun to ache. Hettie wants to say something—I can sense it—but I don’t want to have to respond. There’s no sign of life in the courtyard below, or any of the windows, doorways. This could be the end of the earth: black walls and, somewhere behind them, a vast, restless river.

  Just before Christmas of my first year in the household, I was called before the queen. Twelve years ago. I was Richard’s age. The queen was the age I am now; which seemed old, to me, then. Her husband had turned thirty, that year. No one knew it, but she—queen for almost two decades—was in her last few trouble-free years.

  Her daughter was the reason for my summons: the five-year-old princess was too young to attend the season’s feasts, and the queen wanted her to have a preview of the promised highlights, the subtleties made by the newly-appointed confectioner. I was to bring a couple of pieces that were easy to carry; or, rather, bring someone who would carry them. Geoffrey, my then-groom, walked behind me with a box containing two sugar-cast ladies buried for their own safety in flour. I’d become so nervous by the prospect of my first-ever audience with royalty that, oddly, I was angry. I suppose I felt put-upon, cornered. Tricked, even: I was a confectioner; I’d come here to do confectionery; why couldn’t they just leave me alone to get on with it? I took it out on Geoffrey, giving him the occasional black look. Poor Geoffrey, I doubt he was feeling any better, and he was struggling with that box.

  We reached her rooms and, as soon as we were announced, my apprehension dissolved into surprise: the queen was tiny; full-figured, but at least a head shorter than every other woman in the room. And yet when I rose from my curtsey it was as if she were still looking down on me. Kindly, with considerable interest. Perhaps it was the slight incline of her head, or something in her smile. It was quite a smile: despite the matronly figure, she was girlish. The princess was a miniature and slender version, from the same incline of the head down to the relaxed clasp of her hands. Nothing baby-like about her; barely child-like. Girlish, though, yes: that same lively smile. Mother and daughter, like a pair of girls. Could have been sisters. The queen spoke to her little girl in rapid but heavily-accented English—all about sugar, and feasts—but somehow simultaneously there was an undertow of something else, presumably Spanish. Speaking to her daughter in her mother-tongue, she called her Maria. I took a while—because of the accent—to recognize it: the ‘r’ lifted deftly on the tongue as if nicked by a knife. She was Mary and Maria, and her eyes switched diligently back and forth between her mother’s and the subtleties. They were the same as her mother’s, those eyes: the colour of an English sky.

  It’s strange to recall the two dancing ladies that they were admiring; how simple they were. Queen Catherine never saw subtleties of the new type of sugar paste, shining as if built from fresh snow. They belong to the reign of Anne Boleyn. Shining, and built: layers and details, gilded and gaudily-coloured. The modest figures that Queen Catherine showed her daughter had the look of frozen water and had been cast whole, small enough to hold in cupped hands.

  What do I know of Spain? Oranges and lemons: the brilliant skins of soft, gnarled leather; a flare of scent from the first fingernail-puncture. Pomegranates: burnt-looking and packed with jewels. And Queen Catherine: colourless eyes, milky skin, golden hair. Quizzical smile. How strange that she was the Spaniard; not Anne Boleyn, dark as an Arab and as sharp as a boxload of lemons. How strange that our queen is Anne Boleyn, angry-looking daughter of a jumped-up noble; not the princess of Christendom’s most royal family. I do know a bit more about Spain than the oranges, lemons, pomegranates; and what I know, I know from Signor Scappi, the cardinal’s cook who spent all those months with us while the cardinal investigated the king’s claim for a divorce. I very much liked Signor Scappi (‘Bartolommeo, please.’): he always had a lot to say that was interesting, despite his English initially being poor. He was an endearing mix of gravity and twinkle. Greying temples and nut-brown eyes.

  When I first met him—he came to the kitchen to introduce himself to Richard and me—he said with obvious interest, ‘You do not like the queen.’

  I was aghast: ‘I do, Signor Scappi!’

  He shook his head. ‘You, yes. But the English.’

  ‘I am English. The English do.’

  He nodded, gravely. ‘But the others, no.’

  I tried to explain. ‘Everyone…likes her, Signor. It’s just that they—these people, these others—they…want…’ How to describe it? I didn’t know, myself, let alone how to put it into basic English. They want favours. Or changes. Or both. For those people—those others—Anne Boleyn means favours, changes. That’s all.

  He said, ‘The queen, she cannot—’ he raised a hand, palm down, then lowered it a little: lie low, give in. ‘You know why? Her mother. Her mother is a queen who marries a king. Together: “the Catholic kings”. Together, Aragon and Castile is Spain. Her mother—’ the hand again, but this time a swiping motion—‘the Arabs, from Granada.’ He raised his eyebrows, looked pleased. ‘Her mother. Again and again.’ More swipings, and some approving nods. ‘Strong.’ A grin. ‘Strong with the husband, also.’ A shrug
: ‘You know—men.’

  Richard gave me an amused glance.

  Signor Scappi said, ‘The queen knows of husbands. It is nothing. Some girl? Nothing. But a marriage? Everything. A country: everything.’

  In time, I learned the whole story according to Signor Scappi. The queen’s royal upbringing as youngest in a big, happy family. Her achievements and accomplishments: scripture, languages, music. How she was sent from her family at sixteen to England to be married; and widowed six months later. Widowed in a sleet-sodden castle on the border with Wales. Not taken back, nor taken in. No money: her father claiming he’d sent it, her father-in-law claiming it as dues. Seven years in an old house on an overgrown bank of the Thames. Strongly-worded begging letters—My ladies are hungry—and food parcels. And in all that time, a single new dress; black, said Signor Scappi, being all she could afford.

  What Signor Scappi didn’t have to tell me was how she must have felt when her dashing, eighteen-year-old brother-in-law’s first act as king was to ask her to be his queen. All happy, all good, Signor Scappi might have said in his days of tentative English. The phrase that comes to my mind is, Knight in shining armour.

  There were new dresses, suddenly, for her; lots of them. New palaces for both of them. They’d both grown up in the shadow of that wily, miserly old king; but now they were free, together. This was their new England, and it sparkled.

  Signor Scappi once said of them to me. ‘They are good friends.’

  ‘Were,’ I had to say…

  He was foxed: ‘“War”?’

  ‘Were.’ I explained: ‘Not now.’

  He did understand; smiled sadly and revised, ‘She is a good friend.’

  They were good friends, it’s said, in the old days: giggling and gossiping, and talking things over until all hours. And then, when it was all over, even though she was angry with him (furious on behalf of their daughter), and even though she defied him (wouldn’t send her jewels—he had to send someone to take them—nor the royal christening gown which had come with her from Spain), she did remain his friend, never stopping loving him or fearing for him. So people say. Well, she certainly had cause to fear for him when he fell in with hard-faced, hard-hearted Anne Boleyn, her disreputable brother and their boisterous male friends.

  I simply can’t imagine how she must have felt when her knight in shining armour turned tail, sending her back to a castle with no family and few comforts. Richard heard from Mr Hill, Sergeant of the cellars, that she’d requested some wine—she was back to having to write begging letters again, but this time to the man she loved—and the instruction from the king to Mr Hill was to send new wine. Not no wine. The wine would indeed arrive, but would be unpalatable.

  I wanted to know, ‘Why would he do that?’

  Richard said, ‘Because she’s making it difficult for him.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you?’

  He laughed. ‘Of course I would.’ Then he said, ‘I do wonder, though, if she hasn’t made her point. Now might be the time to give in gracefully and go for the nunnery.’

  ‘She’s a wife,’ I said; not a nun. ‘She’s a queen.’ Like her mother: wife and queen. And like her mother, a fighter. I should have said, This isn’t about making a point, Richard; she’s fighting for her life.

  And now it’s all over. All over, just like that, on a dreary thirteenth night. I wish Mark were here. Why aren’t you here? You’re so nearly here; mere walls away. Walls, doors, gates. A whole palace away. I won’t see you until tomorrow. You’re hours and hours away. But who’s to say that this silence isn’t coming from one of your fingerpads pressed to a length of catgut? I can tell myself that’s what I’m hearing: you, not playing. I need to talk to him, but he won’t talk to me. ‘I’ve come to apologize,’ was what he said, the day after his outburst. He didn’t look at Richard. Richard looked at me.

  ‘I’ve come to apologize,’ Mark announced again.

  Richard dropped his rabbit’s-tail brush onto the workbench and walked from the room.

  ‘There’s no need,’ I said to Mark. I didn’t need an apology. For what?

  He lowered his gaze and stepped up to my bench; rested a hand on it, between us. ‘There’s every need,’ he said, quietly. ‘Lucy, I swore at you.’

  Christ, Lucy.

  I kept my spatula moving in my bowl. ‘I pushed you.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not making excuses…Well, I am—’ a quick, helpless smile, absurdly lovely—‘but I haven’t been sleeping. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.’

  ‘What’s there to think about?’ Don’t think, Mark. Just do.

  ‘The fool I’m making of myself: that’s mostly what I end up thinking about.’

  ‘You’re not. Making a fool of yourself I paused the spatula.

  ‘You’re no fool, Mark.’

  He stepped away, began pacing the room. ‘It’s generous of you to say so.’

  His politeness gets me down, sometimes. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s the truth.’

  That was when he put it to me: ‘You remember how I used to come here and we’d just talk about nothing?’

  Did we? I suppose we did.

  ‘Well, this might sound strange,’ a ghost of that smile, ‘but I long for that; at the moment, I long for it. Not that I’d…go back. To where we were.’ He leaned against the wall, folded his arms. He looked thin, and tired. ‘But I long to be here and just…well, just to be here.’

  Oh, Mark, it’s all I want—

  And yet it was exactly what I didn’t want: us, facing each other across the kitchen; him, thin and tired; me, late with some marchepane, my own rose still unfinished, unassembled in its box. And Richard, probably, outside on the staircase.

  It could be worse, I suppose. Could be even colder. Windy. Pouring. As it is, the boar hides lying over our luggage are slick but the moisture’s settled in the air, not falling. And a mere breeze raises the river’s hackles. Nevertheless, February’s no time of year to be heading onto water. I’m curling my toes to keep them awake but they’re so frozen that they feel breakable. Not that a journey by road would be any more comfortable. If this move were from Whitehall to Hampton Court, not Greenwich to Whitehall, we’d have the haul through London and then along the King’s Road: mud and mobs, as Richard says, although surely even he wouldn’t joke after this year-solid of rain that we’ve had. No joke, now, the mobs that are out there in that mud.

  Why move at all? Why move, now, at this time of year? What’s wrong with Greenwich? Beautiful Greenwich: even on a hopeless day like today, this brickwork is jewel-red and the big bay windows velvety. The same age as I am, this palace, but, unlike me, still new. Not as magical, perhaps, as the old palace at Richmond with its twirls of turrets and weathervanes. More elegant, though, than brash Hampton Court, and more stylish than sprawling Whitehall.

  Whitehall.

  If we do have to go—if we really do have to—can’t we get moving? This isn’t the weather for sitting around in a barge.

  Richard, where ARE you? How long can it take you? All these men on the riverbank, and none of them, as far as I can see, is Richard. Nor a musician; any musician: that’s my guess. Not that I’d know what a musician looks like, I don’t suppose. Not an off-duty one, dressed for Thames-travel. Certainly none of them looks in the least like Mark. But, then, who does?

  I can already feel the feeling that I’ll have when I see him, if I see him. It’s here, in bud, in my stomach.

  Mr Browne, pacing our barge, claps and blows on his hands, gives me a pained look. I like him, our heraldic painter. A smile of recognition, from me, albeit fleeting and rueful, for his hand-blowing. His response is to halt and look at the throng on the bank; and his looking is pointed, so that unless I turn away, I have to join him in it. Together, we take it all in. One of the king’s dogs has escaped from the kennels—again; don’t I recognize this one? And streaks through the crowds, grinning. Mr Browne resumes his pacing. ‘Still no Richard?’ He’s cheerful, making conversation; we
’re obviously nowhere near leaving, Richard’s in no danger of missing us.

  I feign a helpless look. ‘Busy. Such short notice, this time.’ My turn to be pointed: I want him to agree with me; I want it recognized, this shortage of time for preparation; I’m cross about it.

  He raises his eyebrows, allows it. But only just. ‘Joseph’s done a good job for you.’ He nods at Joseph, who’s sitting morosely in front of Hettie and me, his back to us; job done. Well, yes. ‘Yes.’ My precious rose is just one more subtlety, to Joseph. A tiny one, at that; untroublesome. Eased in amongst the others, somewhere in these trunks. A ruffle of blood-red petals waiting for its finishing touch, a final petal or two.

  Mr Browne nods at Hettie. ‘Young ’un, here: not too good, today.’

  ‘No.’

  Poor Hettie, she should be in bed, she’s choked with a cold. Look at you: all nose; swollen, leaky nose. Her face is white where it should be pink and red where it should be pale. Not a day for being stared at. But stared at, we are. Any Royal Waterman new to the job is baffled by us: two women who aren’t ladies but aren’t the other kind, either; the hangers-on plying trade until the Sergeant Porter catches on and resorts to strong-arm tactics. That’s definitely not us, with our downcast eyes and drab cloaks.

  The swans have bustled away into the fog, most of them; put-upon. Just a few keeping watch, disdainful of all the activity, their beaks in the air and a nasty gleam in their eyes. Even swans look stooped and dull, this morning. Come on, Richard. How much longer? We’re to travel ahead of the king; we’re supposed to be at work before he arrives. And it’s not as if we don’t have work to do: Shrovetide, soon. Behind us, moored empty at the Privy Steps, is the king’s gorgeous painted barge. Up on the steps, the flourish of stone beasts standing guard, mid-snarl, have raindrops hanging from their muzzles. Winter is everywhere like smoke. I wonder who, if anyone, is peering from the royal apartments at us settling ourselves down, wrapping ourselves up.

  Richard: a flash of finery in the crowd. Hurrying towards us, but somehow also sauntering. How does he do that? Carefree, that’s it, that’s what he is; takes my breath away to see it, that carefreeness, and also the fact that he’s not wearing a cloak. And I can see that brooch on him. Let’s just hope no one else notices. He clomps onto the barge, sweeps past Hettie and me; sits down on the other side of me.