Greenwich Palace, Easter Sunday, 1541
Greenwich Palace, Easter Sunday
WE ARE AWAKENED by a choir singing hymns to the risen lord, and we get up at once and go to chapel.
The place is blazing with light and colour again.
All the painted saints are bright with new gilding; the holy statues are unveiled and have wax candles burning before them.
The king is on his throne wearing cloth of gold; he beams at Katheryn as she takes a lower chair beside him.
There is a great Easter feast after the long church service and then walking in the garden, the birds are singing and singing, the Lenten lilies bobbing their heads in the cold wind.
There is a sweet slight scent in the air from the tumbled mass of primrose banks.
Every young courtier wants to stay out of doors and dance on the lawns which have been scythed for the first cut of the year and smell of new hay, every old one wants to get indoors, out of the chill.
Our Easter masque is the story of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
Of course, Kitty is desperate to be Aphrodite in a diaphanous robe, and the king as Hephaestus will rest his sore leg on an anvil and watch her dance.
The story – that Aphrodite is unfaithful to Hephaestus with dozens of lovers – is tactfully ignored.
Our Aphrodite is strewed with roses, and she loves her husband – and nobody else.
‘It’ll be just as it was,’ Kitty says delightedly choosing the diamonds to pin in her hair. ‘I look just the same. You’d never know I was with child. Perhaps I’ll be perfect all the way through?’
‘You had better hope that your looks change,’ I say drily. ‘Everyone wants to see you with a good belly.’
She makes a little face in the mirror. ‘Well, at least there’s to be an Easter joust,’ she says. ‘And I shall give my master of horse my favour and nothing to anybody else, even if someone goes down on his knees for it.’
Thomas Culpeper, unaware he has been snubbed, rides in the Easter joust, with Thomas Seymour, Gregory Cromwell, and the queen’s brother George.
But it is a lacklustre event, overshadowed by the memory of the great joust organised by Lord Lisle, who is still in the Tower.
The king’s great chair is placed in his viewing tower, but he does not watch; only a few of the old lords bother to attend, and we ladies walk through our parts at half-volume.
‘I don’t see the point of watching if nobody’s watching me,’ Kitty says disconsolately.