The Queen of Subtleties Read online

  ‘This is stupid, probably, but it’s you I’ve come to see. I’ve been at the king’s banquets and feasts, and I’ve seen…’ He stops, shuts his eyes briefly but emphatically; a lavish blink. ‘You remember the Saint Anne you made?’

  Well, of course I do; it took me long enough. This man, this boy, has been at the king’s banquets and feasts? He’s a server, that’s what he is. Must be. A privileged young man putting in his time at the tables before moving on to better things. But presumably not in those clogs.

  ‘And that leopard? It’s just that they’re so…’ He looks upwards, skyward.

  So…?

  ‘Lovely.’ His gaze back to mine. ‘Detailed. Perfect. And I wanted to meet the person who made them. Everyone talks about you. The king—’ He leaves it there: enough said.

  ‘The king’s very kind.’ And it’s true.

  ‘I just wanted to meet you, and to see how you do it.’

  What a strange request: everyone’s very interested in the finished articles, but I’ve never come across anyone who cares how they’re made. ‘Well, I’m afraid, as you can see, it’s not really happening today. Today is comfits.’

  A wince of a smile from him, as if it’s his fault. He glances appreciatively around the room, making the best of it now that he’s here.

  ‘If you come back on Friday, I’ll be sculpting.’

  ‘Right.’ He snaps to attention. ‘See you on Friday.’

  I’m saying, ‘Well, only if you want to,’ but he’s already gone.

  This next time, funnily enough, they pass each other in the doorway. When he’s shut the door, Richard asks me, ‘What was Smeaton doing here?’

  ‘Smeaton?’

  He comes over to look at what I’ve been doing.

  ‘His name’s Mark.’

  ‘Yep. Mark Smeaton.’

  ‘How do you know who he is?’

  He saunters away with a smirk. ‘I know anyone who’s anyone, Lulabel.’

  ‘But he’s a musician.’ That’s what he’s just told me.

  He stops, turns back to me. ‘A musician?’ He looks amused. ‘Is that what he told you?’

  My heart flounders: what does he mean? what’s going on?

  ‘He’s the musician, more like. The up-and-coming musician. In the king’s opinion.’ He ties his apron around his waist.

  ‘Mark?’ The Mark who was in here, just now?

  ‘Smeaton. Otherwise known as Angel-voice.’

  Angel-voice? ‘Is he?’

  ‘Well, no, but he could be.’ He’s washing his hands. ‘His voice is what he’s famous for.’

  ‘Famous?’

  ‘Well, kind of. Known for.’ Slant-eyes sideways. ‘Let’s face it, it isn’t for his dress sense, is it.’

  Sometimes Richard is so shallow. He has a lot to learn about what matters in life.

  ‘Anyway,’ he dries his hands on his apron, ‘what was he doing in here? Ol’ Angel-face.’

  Angel-face. Angel-voice, Angel-face. Which is it? I don’t seem able to see him, hear him, now, in my memory, as if Richard’s names for him have brought me up too close. ‘He wanted to see me.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Nothing. He wanted to…see what we do. How we do it.’ It sounds ridiculous. Spoken, it’s become ridiculous.

  Richard is craning along a shelf of moulds. ‘Thinking of becoming a confectioner, is he? Nice little sideline for when his voice breaks.’

  Right, that’s enough. I reach around him, on tip-toe, and swipe a tiger from the shelf: ‘This one.’

  He whips around, his weird eyes on mine. Amused, again. ‘What do you get up to when I leave you in here? Do Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber usually drop by?’

  And now he’s getting carried away. ‘No, but he’s not a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, is he. He’s a musician.’ As if any musicians ever come in here. As if anyone at all ever comes in here, when Richard’s not around.

  ‘Yes, and, Lulatrix, he’s a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.’

  But this is absurd: what does Richard take me for? ‘He’s a musician. You just said so. Which means he works. Doesn’t joust, all day long. And he’s…he’s nice.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Lucy. You, of all people, should know that our dear good king can be…unconventional, shall we say, when it comes to staffing. He likes talented people. Recognizes talented people. Likes them around. And he loves music. Is there anything he loves more than music? Well, except…well, except a lot of things.’

  ‘Mark’s really a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber?’

  Richard’s busy checking that the mould is clean, dry, undamaged. ‘The king likes him; I mean, really likes him. God knows why, but he does.’

  ‘What d’you mean, God knows why?’

  ‘Well, he’s hardly Privy Chamber material, is he.’

  And isn’t that good? Perhaps not in Richard’s view, but certainly in mine. I lose track of who’s in the Privy Chamber, but anyway they’re all the same in that merry band: top-heavy with titles, too handsome to be true, too clever for their own good and a law unto themselves.

  I ask him, ‘How do you know all this?’

  He grins. ‘I have friends in high places.’

  For once, I’m not going to let him get away with his usual flippancy. ‘Who?’

  He seems genuinely surprised; he puts the mould aside. ‘In particular? At the moment?’ He means it: it’s a proper question.

  I nod.

  ‘Silvester Parry. One of Sir Henry Norris’s pages.’

  ‘Silvester.’ Unusual name.

  ‘Silvester,’ he agrees, as if I’m a clever child.

  ‘Well, you’re going up in the world.’

  Something amuses him; he’s about to say, but seems to think better of it.

  Sir Henry Norris, I’m thinking. Isn’t he the king’s best friend? A Gentleman of the Privy Chamber; I do know that. And the one who is indeed a gentleman, by all accounts. Or perhaps by Richard’s account; I don’t remember where I heard it. Isn’t he the widower? With the little boy? ‘Is he a recent friend? Silvester?’

  ‘Very recent. But very good.’ Richard, gathering ingredients, laughs even as he’s turning his nose up at the remains of my gum tragacanth mix.

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good.’ And I made a friend, today.

  He’d hesitated—Mark—as before, in the doorway, and said, ‘Well, here I am.’

  Presumably it seemed just as odd to him as to me that we’d made the arrangement. If ‘Friday’ could be said to be an arrangement. It seemed to have worked as one, though, because—as he said—here he was. And early. Calling to him to come in, I tried to make it sound as if I did this all the time: welcomed spectators. As he crossed the threshold, he took a deep, slow breath.

  ‘The smell in here…’ He sounded appreciative, and full of wonder.

  I confided my suspicion that I can’t smell it, any more; not really, not how it smells to an outsider.

  He looked stricken, on my behalf. ‘You need a stronger dose. You’ll have to stroll through some sugar-and-spices orchards; perhaps that’d do the trick.’

  ‘Yes, but first I’d have to go to sea for weeks on end.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ He made a show of shuddering.

  That, we were agreed on. I indicated for him to draw up a stool, and he settled beside me. The scent of him was of outside: his lodgings’ woodsmoke and the incense of chapel; and, below all that, was…birdsong. Birdsong? Morning air. He smells alive, I thought, and presumably I smell preserved. Even when I do manage to get outside, I’m usually only crossing the yard between my lodgings and here. The air in the yard throbs with baking bread, brewing and roasting. ‘And I’m not sure about those “orchards”,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that sugar, when it’s growing…well, that it’s anything like what turns up at Southampton. Unless it grows in blue paper wrappers.’

  ‘Oh.’ He glanced around, expectantly, presumably looking for them, our conical sugar loaves. I broke it to him that he wouldn’
t find any, here. They’re locked in a trunk in the spicery. Even I have to apply to the Chief Clerk for my requirements. Then he asked me about spices, about whether they grow. ‘I just can’t imagine them growing,’ he said.

  I explained that they’re seeds, mostly.

  ‘Yes, but that’s it: I can’t imagine the plants.’

  I considered this. Reaching into a bowl, I took a rose-petal. With it on my palm, I said, ‘I wonder, if you’d never seen a rosebush, whether you could imagine where this came from.’ I passed it to him.

  He held it and then rubbed it slowly between forefinger and thumb. It kept its shape, bounced back from every fold; effectively remained untouched. ‘I’d never thought of them as tough,’ he said, and he was as surprised as I’d known he would be. ‘They’re not really delicate at all, are they.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I agreed. ‘But nor is a rose-bush.’

  It wasn’t until then that we exchanged names: ‘I’m Mark, by the way,’ he said.

  ‘Lucy,’ I said. Well, why not? Richard calls me Lucy.

  He thanked me for allowing him in to watch, and I asked, ‘Didn’t you ever watch anyone making confectionery, when you were little?’ His mother, if he had a mother. If she lived until he could remember her. Few women are so grand that they don’t cook, and all of them aspire to confectionery.

  ‘I didn’t have that kind of childhood,’ was his cheerful answer. ‘I was a choirboy.’

  Oh. So, another orphan of a kind.

  ‘Here, usually.’

  ‘Hampton Court?’ And then it sank in.

  But he said it anyway: ‘I was in Cardinal Wolsey’s choir.’

  I was careful to echo his even tone when I said, ‘How things change.’ Which could, of course, be taken to refer to the palace itself and not the cardinal’s demise. And it partly did, because what is Hampton Court other than endless building-work? It’s been five or six years, now, since the king took it over, and will he ever stop? Wine cellars are the latest addition to our kitchens; massive, vaulted wine cellars. It’s said that the palace was colossal in the cardinal’s time. What’s the word for it now that it’s twice the size?

  He said, ‘Some things change, others don’t: I’m still singing.’ He smiled. ‘Rather lower, though.’

  He’s a chorister, still. Then I’ll have heard him, in Chapel. His is one of the voices making that shining wall of sound. It’s a strange feeling that those voices cause in me; coolheaded, everyday me. As if the coping that I’ve been doing is nothing; as if everything I am and everything I do is nothing, a sham. And isn’t that wonderful, in a way? Isn’t it a kind of relief?

  When he’d gone, I decided to take a break, a stroll. I don’t get enough air. I walked past the chapel, but it was silent. Walked on into the rose gardens, and, there, savoured the fragrance. It’s the faintest of scents, but steady. No muskiness, no headiness to it. Just a single, clean, high note.

  Rose shapes, though, are anything but simple. Here in the kitchen we have stamps and flat moulds of roses that are regularly-petalled. Tudor roses. And we have one old mould of a rosebud which yields a rosebud-shaped pebble of sugar. But real roses have intricate whorls of petals as individual as fingerprints. If I were to try to make a faithful reproduction of a rose, I’d have to build it petal by petal, modelling each petal by hand; each one bowed and tapered between fingertip and thumb.

  ‘By the way,’ Richard says, ‘if you want the latest royal gossip, it’s that Henri fait l’amour avec Meg Shelston.’

  ‘Thank you, Richard. I don’t.’ And I wish he wouldn’t be so disrespectful. Someone will hear him, one day; someone other than me. And his ridiculous attempts at code: I should feign ignorance. He’s persuaded someone to teach him a little French, over the last year or so. Regrettably, not to broaden his mind. He’s aware that I know some French, but not how much. And in fact it isn’t much. I trained with a French cook, and I know what people say about the French but he really didn’t have much time or use for expressions like fait l’amour. I can work it out, though. What I don’t know is, who’s Meg Shelston?

  ‘And Le Corbeau isn’t best pleased about, to put it very, very mildly indeed.’

  Initially, Le Corbeau stumped me. He had to tell me that it’s a translation of a name for her that’s been in use for a while. According to some people, he says, it was Cardinal Wolsey’s own name for her, in his time; except that the cardinal’s name was The Midnight Crow, and although Richard can manage minuit, it makes it a bit much. I’m surprised to hear Richard using such a name at all; because, until recently, he was all for her. ‘Richard, sometimes I think you like to make something out of nothing.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I know that’s what you think.’ He’s offended that I’ve rejected this titbit that I never asked for.

  Which annoys me. ‘Richard, why would he? Think about it: he turned this country upside-down and re-wrote all the rules, two years ago, just two years ago, so that he could marry—’ What do I call her? I don’t like calling her the queen. ‘So that he could marry. He went through all that—took us all through that—and now they have the lovely little princess—’ Say what you like, she’s a treasure; born under a waning moon, so the next one’s bound to be a boy. ‘Why would he bother with any…Meg?’ I do honestly think, sometimes, that Richard lives in fairyland.

  ‘Well…’ He stops, seems to abandon whatever point he was about to make, and merely says, pleasantly, ‘You don’t understand men at all, do you, Lucy.’

  I knew he’d come again. Somehow, though, I’m still surprised to see him. A shock: that’s how it feels; a jolt. This time, Richard’s here; but absorbed, sculpting. Hungover. Choosing not to respond to the knock at the door, but now glancing up, apparently goodnatured and almost smiling. ‘Morning, Mr Smeaton.’ So casual, yet somehow making everything so awkward. Well, that’s a Richard-speciality, and I must rise above it.

  ‘Richard.’ I indicate him to Mark: an introduction. A flicker of amusement between us: Richard seems to have become our private joke; Ah, Richard, at last.

  ‘…Cornwallis,’ Richard adds, with the same goodnatured near-smile that isn’t either goodnatured or a smile. Never mind: no one else knows the difference.

  ‘Mr Cornwallis.’ Mark nods.

  I’d like to say, He’s not my son; I’m not his mother. I don’t know how to address Mark, now; after all the Mister this and Mister that. Did I imagine that he ever introduced himself as Mark?

  He’s saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind; you must have a lot on your hands, this time of year.’

  ‘You, too.’

  He agrees. ‘We do have a bit of a rush on, around Easter.’

  I only realize we’ve giggled when Richard gives us an irritated flick of a glance. I indicate for Mark to sit.

  He says, ‘This is the warmest place I know. Chapel’s freezing, and we were in there for hours.’

  It is cold outside, and we’ve candles lit. His hair is catching the shine of them; he’s brightening the room. ‘It went well, though?’ I wish I knew how to talk about his work.

  ‘Could be better.’ Cheerful, though. ‘Will be better.’

  We smile at each other. ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good.’

  He says, ‘It’s just that it’s so comforting, in here. The royal apartments haven’t been a comfortable place to be, lately.’

  He could mean physically, because of all the building-works, but his demeanour suggests otherwise: he’s tense, tentative. I recall what Richard said: Le Corbeau isn’t best pleased about it, to put it very, very mildly. It’s true, then? I don’t look at Richard; resolutely, I don’t. Not that he’s looking at me: what I can feel is him listening. Perhaps this is how he does it: not jubilant, ribald exchanges of gossip, but stealth. Taking what he can, when he can. And now here’s me doing the same.

  Mark almost whispers, ‘It’s a gift, isn’t it, to be so full of life. To be so sure. So sure of yourself.’

  Ah, yes, but that’s the life of a king, isn’t it.r />
  ‘She’s—’ he frowns, thinking, ‘true to herself.’

  She? ‘Who?’

  ‘The queen. True to herself. In this place, where everyone’s saying one thing and thinking another. Where everyone’s saying something to one person, and something else to the next. Which means, though, that she’s very alone.’

  Alone? Anne Boleyn? Whenever I’ve seen her, she’s been the centre of attention: the king’s attention, indulgent and lavish; the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, playing up to her. Her family: that brother, father, uncle. It’s Queen Catherine who’s alone. Banished to some old castle. Forbidden, even, to see her own daughter. And she’s never had family, here: shipped, at sixteen, a thousand miles from her happy childhood home. Imagine: to be told, over the years, of the deaths; her mother, first, then father, big sister, little brother. Friends, though, she does have; and has always had. Proper friends. There was no playing up to Queen Catherine; no need for it. By all accounts, she made friends and kept them: a few came with her on that galleon and are locked away with her now in that castle.

  Mark sighs. ‘I can’t understand why he’s doing it.’

  The king, he means. The mistress. Well, yes: that, we can agree on.

  ‘He married for love,’ he says. ‘Married a fascinating woman: a clever and stunning woman. Had—has—a child by her.’

  ‘Beautiful kid,’ it has to be said.

  ‘So, why should he need to do this? If I were him, I’d never look at another woman.’

  He is so serious that, oddly, I can’t help but smile. He’s looking tired, too, though. ‘Listen, Mark, I’m going to mix you a tonic.’ Perhaps even risk passing him a manus christi, one of the amber roses I was making when I first saw him, one of the few to which I added rosewater and later gilded. Let’s see if sugar, rosewater and gold can’t work their powers to wash away that lavender tint around his eyes.

  His gloom vanishes. ‘Really? A potion? Later, though. I have to go.’

  ‘Go? Already?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be here. Things to do. I only dropped by. Just wanted to—’ He shrugs. ‘Lucy, you’re so…’