Greenwich Palace, April, 1541
Greenwich Palace, April
AS SOON AS the joust and masque are finished, the king goes to Dover to inspect the defences, complaining bitterly that no one is capable of planning or building any more.
He misses the masque for spring. Katheryn plays the part of incoming spring, in a green gown embroidered with daisies, who wakens all the ladies from their winter sleep by drawing off a white veil that stands for snow.
Jane Seymour had the gown and the part before her; we all know our places, and it needs little practice and no scenery.
The ladies choose their partners, and the whole court dances; Kitty goes down the line of bowing courtiers, and there is a moment – just a brief moment – when she and Thomas Culpeper are hand to hand and face to face, and everything seems to go very still and very quiet.
They look at each other, as if seeing each other for the first time.
They look wonderingly, as if recognising something in the other’s awakened face – and then the musicians resume, and the dancers move on, and they are parted again.
THE KING COMES back from Dover, exhausted by the journey and furious that the defences – thrown up in a hurry in terror of Spanish invasion – are already crumbling. Only Cromwell could have seen that they were properly built, the king declares. Only Cromwell could keep the kingdom safe.
Our safety is threatened from the north as well; my uncle the Duke of Norfolk bows his head beneath a storm from the king, who says that Cromwell would have held the north down as a Howard cannot.
My uncle grits his teeth and endures the king’s rage, secure in the knowledge that his niece is carrying a Tudor heir and she will be crowned, proud as a Seymour, as pregnant as a Seymour, at Whitsun.
It is not to be. That evening, when I go to her bedroom, she exclaims suddenly while the maids are undressing her and sends the maids and chamberers from the room. ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ she demands. ‘Look!’
She shows me her white linen petticoat, stained with a scarlet ribbon of blood. ‘My course! It’s started again.’
She is astounded not to get her own way, but this is a drearily familiar scene for me.
She bundles up the petticoat and stuffs it under her bed.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she decides. ‘We’ll pretend it hasn’t happened.
You’ll take away my clouts every morning and undress me at night.
I’m always light. There won’t be much to do; you can wash everything, and we can pretend it’s all going on as it should be. ’
For a moment, I calculate how many days until a Whitsun coronation and if we dare get the crown on her head and the oil on her breast, and tell the king afterwards.
But then I remember his terrible coldness to Anne, after we had combed her hair and arranged her on pillows and she swore that next time she would have a boy and he would be stronger.
‘No, we can’t pretend. It makes it worse when you have to tell him.’
‘After I’m crowned!’ It comes out as a shriek, and she claps her hand over her mouth.
I shake my head. ‘He’d think you’d lied from the very beginning. He’s quick to see an enemy. He can turn in a moment. You can’t risk it.’
She cries then, poor little queen, cries like a child with unstoppable tears and rushing choking sobs. ‘But what can I do? What can I do? Jane, you have to help me! What can I do?’
I take her hands; I force her into a chair. I wipe the tears from her face. ‘Be calm,’ I tell her. ‘It’s too early. It wasn’t a baby; it hardly started.’
‘I don’t care about a baby!’ she hisses at me, in a whispered scream. ‘Why would I want a baby to ruin my looks? I want my coronation!’
‘I know. I know. But a baby’s the only thing that’ll get you a coronation.
You have to tell him the truth this evening, tonight – you’ll say it was a genuine mistake.
As it was. The king’s been married before—’ I could laugh at this bitter truth.
‘He knows that babies don’t come easily.
He knows you’re only young, and you’ve never been with child before. He’ll believe that you made a mistake.’
Inwardly, I think: can he even make a baby now? If he can do the act, is his seed not watery and weak? ‘Flatter him. Tell him that you missed a course, and you thought it must be a baby, because he’s so strong and potent that you’re sure his lovemaking will give you a child at once.’
Her face convulses in a grimace of distaste. ‘He hurts,’ she says, in a tiny voice. ‘And it takes ages. I don’t believe you can get a baby like that.’
I hesitate. ‘You have to pretend to pleasure,’ I tell her. ‘You have to tell him you love it.’
She sets her mouth in an ugly line. ‘Larding it on like a spit boy,’ she says resentfully.
‘Larding it on,’ I agree. ‘You tell him that you were so eager to make him happy, to give him good news, you were too eager. Because all you want is his happiness.’
‘I cry?’ she suggests.
‘You cry. But not like this. Not enough to spoil your face. And he loves you so much now that he’s certain to be tender with you this time, this first time.
You ask him for his favour; you get him back into bed, and next time, or the time after, it’ll really happen.
But never, never say that you were with child but you couldn’t keep it. Never say “miscarry”.’
‘Another word he’s not to hear? He’s not to hear the word “death”? And now not “miscarry”?’
‘Some words we never say in his hearing. You made a mistake with counting your courses, that’s all.’
‘Silly me,’ she says bitterly. ‘Stupid, stupid me.’
SHE HOPES THAT the king is so doting that he will crown her anyway.
But he’s not going to spend a fortune on a wife who has not earned her place as queen.
Even in love, he guards his power. He comes to her bed every third night or so, and he asks me, quietly, one evening, when her next course is due.
‘And how did you come to make such a mistake, even if she did?’ he demands. ‘You’re not a silly girl, Jane. You’re not a pretty fool.’
I scatter a treasury of words at his feet: her distress at his illness, her fears for him interrupted her courses, as can quite often happen. But her happiness at his returned health will make her fertile again, and his potency must make a child.
‘How many in her family?’ he asks. ‘How many babies did her mother bear?’
‘About ten,’ I say, as if we are in a stable discussing a broodmare.
‘Anne of Cleves was only one of four,’ he says thoughtfully.
I catch my breath. ‘The duchess, your sister?’
He gives me a sly little smile. ‘Jane, you know I’ve got to have a second son and a third if I can.
And six miles upriver, there is a beautiful, fertile, royal woman, eating up a fortune in my royal palace, while her brother befriends the French and marries into their royal family.
She’s more useful than ever, and she’s costing me as much as a sister as she would as a wife. ’
‘Except that you love the queen so much,’ I remind him. ‘And she adores you. Nobody loves you more than she does. And she’s so pretty. I think she could have married any king in Europe, but she only has eyes for you.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I do.’ It is as if I have reminded him of a detail which had slipped from his mind. ‘And she’s very young, and from fertile stock.’