The Queen of Subtleties Page 19

  The next day was the big one, and this time I was on foot, walking from Westminster Hall to the Abbey in the company of a different crowd: England’s abbots, Greenwich’s monks, and the choir of the Chapel Royal. The smallest boys were the most grave, and I noticed Mark Smeaton keeping an anxious eye on them. Following me, this time, was just one elderly lady: my grandmother carried my crimson train. Yes, the doughty Dowager Duchess herself stepped forward from what was becoming a fragmented family to show England just what the Norfolks could be made of. Her stepson, my uncle, had claimed he had to be in France on business; and, as ever, his ex-wife, Liz, was somewhere else, stewing in her own bitter juices. (That woman will refuse to attend her own funeral.) But their wonderful son came: Hal, back from Paris, especially. I’m not sure it wasn’t the best moment of my day: catching sight of a so very grown-up Hal, blowing him a kiss and getting a gorgeous shy smile in return.

  Pregnant and velvet-heavy, I was thankful for Grandma’s slow pace. I even turned quite dreamy in the warmth and glow of our cloth-of-gold canopy. We followed the red carpet into the Abbey and all the way up to the ceremonial chair where dutiful Thomas held the crown. And then, with that too-big crown on my head—my bespoke one wasn’t ready—I had to concentrate on sitting straight and stock-still through the Te Deum.

  The celebratory banquet was back at Westminster Hall. No fun for me, alone at a table on a dais with a good view of everyone else enjoying themselves. I watched my brother begin telling jokes: mischievously conspiratorial, then basking in the boys’ appreciative roars. Meg Shelton looked sweetly uncertain how to respond, flushed with a daring that she couldn’t quite indulge. Harry Norris swooped to her rescue, drawing her into conversation. I was without my own Henry, because a king never attends his queen’s coronation. Because it’s hers. But I knew he’d be watching—probably with Tom Cromwell—from above, in one of the hall’s screened galleries. The two of them surveying us and congratulating themselves on their hard-won success. Granted: this victory was theirs at least as much as it was mine.

  I did my duty, did my best to sample most of the dishes, swallowing into heartburn. Eventually, I wanted nothing but to rest my elbows on the table and my head in my hands. I’d never been so glad to detect the final flourish, the bringing out of the subtleties. That was, until I saw them. The problem was that, for the briefest moment, I didn’t know what to make of them. They were ships, and there were so many of them. In my exhausted but heightened state, I was baffled as to what the confectioner might mean by it. How would the coming reign of Anna Regina—which was to be prosperous and stable—be associated with any such fleet, with such a show of nautical strength? Did those ships represent Catherine’s threatened Armada?

  No one else seemed worried. Everyone looked enchanted by the vast, glittering display. All the more glittering because the confectioner had left them uncoloured. Unmanned, too, despite being fabulously detailed. Their ghostly pallor and the vacancy of them somehow made them more breathtaking than if they had been perfect replicas. People reached to touch them, to test them. I glimpsed a tiny white barrel rolling beneath Meg’s fingertip along an iced deck. A lattice of rigging rang to the tapping fingernail of the French Ambassador.

  Having suffered through the formal ceremonies, I made sure of plenty of my own-style celebrations. This was to be my summer, before my confinement in August. So, in June and July, at Whitehall and Greenwich, we partied. Strictly no clergy. One day came news which threatened to spoil our fun. Henry’s sister had died. It wasn’t entirely unexpected news: she’d been ill for quite some time, no one being able to fathom the cause. Charlie had agreed to do the honours at my coronation, acting as High Constable of England for the day and heading the procession, but that very evening he’d returned to Suffolk, to her bedside, and we hadn’t seen him or heard from him since.

  We sent our respects by return, but then it wasn’t hard for me to persuade Henry that there was nothing to be gained from cancelling our picnic. No one else demurred. Henry’s sister, not much older than me, had become someone in her latter years who belonged to a previous era.

  With her death, the ranks of my enemies were reduced by one, which is never a bad thing. She’d been the least of my troubles, though. She hadn’t liked me, was all. There’d been no rallying of troops behind her. Unlike, if rumours were to be believed, the Mad Nun. Not ‘troops’, exactly, in the Mad Nun’s case, either, but the Exeters. And who knew where the Exeters might lead. They’d been conspicuously absent from my coronation. For the Mad Nun to froth at the mouth in Canterbury was one thing. It was quite another for her to pal up with the Exeters, who were suspected with good reason of traitorous views as to their place in the line of succession. That first glorious summer when I was queen, I had a feeling that wasn’t so much unease as irritation. I meant to start as I wanted to go on: with attention to detail. I didn’t want to slip up.

  So, I had a conversation with Tom Cromwell about the Mad Nun. Caught up with him one day in the Privy Gallery and asked him if I should be worried about her. I should have known better, because his response was typical, verging on the smug. ‘If anyone does need to worry about her, it’ll be me.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ I quelled my impatience, ‘but do you? Are you?’

  A vigorous shake of that big head, jowls a-quiver. ‘No.’ Dismissive, again. Amused.

  I recounted what I’d heard.

  He was almost bursting with his own weird kind of pleasure, his eyes and lips shiny. ‘You think I haven’t heard all that? That, and a lot more, besides.’

  Well, what?

  He flapped a hand. ‘It’s all under control.’ Then more bonhomie: ‘What d’you think I do all day?’ From his pile of papers, he drew a pamphlet. ‘See this?’

  ‘What is it?’ He knew very well that I wouldn’t be able to read the Latin.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is our own dear Father Peto, now in Amsterdam, preaching the validity of the king’s first marriage.’ He raised a finger, to halt me. ‘No need to get outraged. You’ve already heard the man call you Jezebel.’ Remembering himself, he added, ‘If you don’t mind me bringing it up.’

  Which, for some reason, made me laugh.

  ‘We know what the man thinks, and we know we won’t change his mind. You’re not going to tell me that terror over what Father Peto is saying is keeping you awake at night?’

  Again, it was ridiculous, and I had to laugh.

  ‘The man’s a lunatic, agreed? What is interesting, though, is who’s funding him. Who’s putting the money where Peto’s mouth is.’ He flicked at the pamphlet. ‘Who, in other words, paid for this?’

  ‘Well, who did?’

  Now it was as if I’d said something funny. ‘Give me time,’ he said, sliding the pamphlet back into the pile. ‘This only came this morning.’ Then, just when I’d assumed he’d finished, he added, ‘It might be Thomas More.’

  ‘More?’ It made sense. His views were well-known, of course, despite his reticence, and then there’d been his absence from my coronation.

  Tom raised the finger again. ‘Might be, I said. Whoever it turns out to be, what’s important is that it isn’t ever about just one person: one mad woman, or one principled man. You, Anne, take things personally. But it’s never about just one person. They all have their place in a network. It’s the whole network I want.’ And then he was on his way again.

  Elizabeth, little Virgo, you were born just two weeks into my confinement. You and I denied them the satisfaction of keeping us weighed down, cooped up, in that Greenwich room for a month. You, like me, I suspect, aren’t one to sit back while life goes on elsewhere. I imagine their intentions were fair enough, to make a place where I’d feel rested and safe. And perhaps other women do feel like that about their confinements; but, then, I’m not other women, am I. Despite its luxury, I hated it: the heavy curtains, remaining drawn on midwives’ orders; the ever-burning brazier, again on midwives’ orders. But what I hated most about it was who was in it w
ith me. Women. Only women. I don’t enjoy the unmitigated company of women. And especially not of one woman in particular: my brother’s wife. I was denied my brother’s presence, but Jane Parker was there, all day every day. The wife he didn’t want, a woman no one much wanted, yet I—at my most vulnerable—was lumped with her. And didn’t she know it. Forever sitting herself down on my bed. Presumptuous and insinuating, muscling in and laying claim to her supposed privilege: sister-in-law. She was all eyes: whenever I opened or moved mine, there were hers, pooled with whatever little light there was in that gloomy room. It was such a thrill to her: our enforced proximity and intimacy, and the coming drama in which she couldn’t fail to snatch a part. Worse, she wouldn’t stop trying to be chummy with me about George, adopting the manner of the exasperated wife: raised eyebrows and rolled eyes; we two girls against him. Well, I wasn’t against him. Never had been and never would be.

  But if I missed George and our friends—and oh I did—my separation from Henry was unbearable. We’d not been apart since our marriage, but suddenly, when I needed him most, we couldn’t see each other for a month. Yet I knew he was there, close by, in the same building. How odd it was, to have to settle for news of him. News of what he and the boys were up to. Nothing much, but so much more than I was managing. News, perhaps, of a particular meal or tennis game: something quite incidental, but it was detail that I thirsted for. I drank it down, both elated and stung.

  And so the boys’ lives spun on in lazy but elegant circles as they marked time, waiting for the moment when someone would arrive with the answers to their questions: a live child, or not; a live queen, or not; a prince, or not. That was all they had to do: play, and wait. But me, I was stuck, breathless and swollen, knowing that I’d suddenly be called upon to climb a mountain.

  Did Henry miss me? As I missed him? Did he have this faint ache behind his eyes? This weight in his chest? Or was his life busy enough to distract him, in all but the quietest moments? But in those quietest moments, then what? Did he miss me? All my moments were quiet, now, despite my women-friends’ best efforts. For me, women’s chatter was no substitute for George’s hard-edged jokes or Harry’s wry attentiveness. Even my women-friends’ music-making: it was competent, but that was all it was. They’d exercise themselves on the lute and the virginals, make an effort for me; but I’d find myself thinking of Mark Smeaton’s singing, the ease and yet the perfection of it, how it would slip inside my mind and take me somewhere with it before I’d realized. My curtained retreat rang mostly, though, with the rasps of my comb: there was little that could be done for me, at this stage, apart from tidying my hair. ‘Oh, let me,’ was my sister-in-law’s refrain.

  I had even quieter moments, of course, when I feigned dozing or was in fact falling asleep or waking; and then, with the room silenced, I could feel close to Henry. I’d talk to him, under my breath. Take him wandering through conversations. One day, I asked Annie to get me one of his shirts, worn. Later that same afternoon, in it came: one of his tennis shirts, silky-thin linen heavy with his scent. When I held it to my face, it was as if a key turned somewhere inside my head: the instant twin sensations of fit and give. For that instant, everything was all right. The women laughed at me, I know; I couldn’t fail to know, because they made so much of it. It was far from secret, that fond laughter of theirs; on the contrary, a kind of celebration: I was human, after all.

  Elizabeth, about you not being a boy: don’t believe what people might tell you. It’s easy to assume that your father and I were devastated. That the birth of a girl was a great disgrace, a tremendous blow. Not at all. We were disappointed, yes, but only because if you’d been a boy, you’d have solved a lot of our problems. Your being a girl didn’t create any.

  So, the news for the country was: not a prince, this time; but a healthy girl. Nothing had gone wrong, and the future remained…well, remained the future, close by and no less bright than it had ever been. In the meantime, Henry couldn’t help himself: he was stupid over you, his pearlnosed piece of perfection. It was he who chose your name: his mother’s, which also happened to be my mother’s.

  And me? I was aware of everyone’s surprise at how I was, but theirs was nothing compared to mine. I’d never considered myself maternal, and had feared myself the opposite. But there I was, smitten. You drew me into your dense blue searches of my face. Touching you was like skimming a fingertip over warm milk. Your trust in me was spellbinding as you slept curled towards my heartbeat. You slept for me like you’d sleep for no one else; none of those know-it-all busybodies. They were nothing to you; you wanted your mother. You knew me.

  I didn’t want you wet-nursed: yes, me, for whom pregnancy had been tedious and repugnant. But above all, I’m practical, and I had milk. No one would hear of it. They didn’t say, at the time—how could they, to a woman who’d just gone through her first labour? But, I suppose, their minds were already on the next pregnancy, the possible prince. In their eyes, my job with you was done.

  At three days old, you were taken in your great-grandmother’s arms to your christening. Bundled in ermine and purple velvet, you went through the garden down the gallery once so beloved of Catherine to the Observant Friars. And there, especially for you, was a font of solid silver. I’d been distracted, fussing no end, as you were taken; so it’s your return that I remember. My grandmother is a woman who knows how to make an entrance. Her presence is undiminished—perhaps enhanced—by age. I’d have liked to have lived as long as she has, to have had the chance to continue her legacy of fearless, fearsome Norfolk women. Now it’s down to you, alone, little one. It didn’t matter in the least to Grandma that you were a girl: that’s what I saw, in her face, when she handed you back to me. Well, she’d been a girl, hadn’t she? Hers is a face that’ll disappear when she dies; there are no portraits of her. It’s her weaselly-faced stepson, my uncle, who’ll stare grimly down the generations, representative of the Norfolks. But she’s the one who’s made this family. Looking into her eyes, I could see that we were agreed: a tough woman is worth several men. And even then, you looked likely to be a tough woman. Yes, her expression said to me, boys had to be had; but they’d come.

  I did come round to the idea of another baby, and quickly. If it’d mean a brother for you, I’d do it. You’d be more secure. In December, in the lull before Christmas, the lovely cradleful of you was whisked away from me, in Margaret Bryan’s experienced hands. To Hatfield, into your own household. Time for you to stop being my baby and start being England’s princess. Henry sent your half-sister along to learn her place, which was behind you, looking after you. I made sure to send someone to look after her: My aunt, Anne Shelton, who loathed her, and whom she loathed. By Christmas, I was Hever-dreaming again, which I put down to the lurch of separation from my firstborn and perhaps to the eddies of festivities. But, in fact, just three months after you’d been born, I was already pregnant again.

  It would’ve been nice to be able to take it easy; but the old Spanish sow, with her instinct for bad timing, chose to start making life difficult again. Heaven forbid that Henry should forget her during the coming festive season. She sent word that Buckden—damp, chilly Buckden—was doing her health no good at all; and now that winter was slamming in, she needed to be moved. She wouldn’t have guessed that Buckden was meant to be doing her health no good at all. Henry read her letter aloud, as I’d asked. He remained expressionless as he read. With a feeling somewhere between sinking and flaring, I assumed I’d have to do it yet again: cajole him to be tough with her. But as soon as he’d finished, he crumpled it and said, ‘Well, she’s asked to move; so, move, she shall.’ There was almost no consideration before he decided, ‘Somersham.’ Even I was surprised. I’ve never visited Somersham Castle—why on earth would I? But I know where it is. Near Ely. Soaking up the North Sea. Henry was certainly getting the idea.

  Problem was, Chapuys got it, too. Somehow—as ever—he heard very quickly of the plan, and requested an audience with Henry. Henry alone,
was his idea of an audience; but that wasn’t part of the deal. Henry and I were partners, and especially in this matter. We were talking about a woman who was claiming my queenship. Nevertheless, I decided that dignified silence from me would be appropriate. Intimidating, even. So, I sat there, and he—as ever—ignored me.

  ‘No,’ he said, as soon as Henry confirmed for him the Somersham plan. ‘She’s ill, she’s frail, and that place is worse than Buckden. If you do go ahead with this latest proposed banishment, we’ll look upon it very, very badly.’ A dark look, from him; a hilariously Spanish look.

  I wanted to slap him, to bring him to his senses. What business of his, of Spain’s, was it? The woman hadn’t been in Spain since she was a child, and now she was an old woman. She was England’s problem, and required the English solution of a freezing, dripping castle. To my amazement, Henry didn’t sigh, didn’t sulk or bluster, but gave the impression that Chapuys’ objection was nothing to him. He shrugged, unconcerned. ‘Fotheringhay, then.’ He hadn’t skipped a beat.

  I held my breath, and fixed on Chapuys.

  Chapuys, head cocked; Chapuys—foreigner—disoriented. ‘Where it is?’

  ‘Northamptonshire,’ Henry breezed, and I marvelled at how he’d managed to make the word sound warm, comforting.

  Chapuys wouldn’t know, couldn’t know what that place was like; because how could a Spaniard even begin to imagine?

  Catherine, though, had lived here long enough and travelled here sufficiently to know that the offer of Northamptonshire wasn’t the helping hand she’d hoped for, but a nasty twist of the forearm. And she responded how she always responded: refusal. You’d have thought I’d have been used to it—and, of course, in a way, I was—but I had less and less patience for it. We were years and years on, now, and I’d become Henry’s wife, England’s queen, the mother of the heir and mother-to-be of another. The Catherine situation was supposed to be over. Everything that could be done—and plenty that couldn’t—had been done, to resolve it. And yet there she was, trying to hold back or even turn back time. And she was taking others with her. There were people—many, many of them—who still called her queen; people who believed that England had another queen, another princess. It was as if there was a separate, second kingdom.