I, Jane: In The Court of Henry VIII Page 18

  “Yet still it makes me angry. I have so much boiling inside of me that never quite escapes.”

  “’Tis only because it has not been boiling long enough,” Mary explained calmly.

  “How can you remain here and watch them like that?”

  “I was not given a choice in the matter, nor in any other matter. I was told to attract the king, seduce him, and bear his son quietly. Then I was swiftly moved out of the way when he developed a fondness for Lady Carew. After that, I was told to say nothing when His Majesty acknowledged Mistress Blount’s son and not mine, since my own sister was to be next in his bed. Compliance is a state to which one grows accustomed, I suppose, when duty is the thing.”

  Mary’s expression went very sad then, although there were no tears in her eyes. “I have absolutely nowhere else to go, no money of my own if I make a fuss, no real hold over my own children if he should desire them. So I smile and blankly nod if his gaze happens to turn to me, as if I have no idea what it feels like to be touched by him, to caress his cheek, kiss his lips, or accept his passionate body over mine.”

  Anne and Henry were both laughing a little too loudly then, as if neither had a care in the world. What a bittersweet contrast to Mary, Jane thought, unable to imagine herself the object of the attentions of the self-absorbed sovereign, who cast women and their hearts away like playthings.

  Jane felt awkward being in the queen’s withdrawing chamber that evening, but it had become her custom to sit with the group of other ladies-in-waiting and join Katherine in sewing as they were entertained by a light, soulful chant sung by two angel-voiced children hired to entertain her. The duo stood beside the fireplace hearth in white robes as the warming blaze crackled and glowed.

  How different were these two women’s worlds in tone and character. Sober versus gay, elegant versus jolly. Jane still did not like being part of Anne Boleyn’s circle, but as her family had taught her, loyalty first, last, and always. All the members of each household felt the strain. It was the same for the Seymours as it was for the Boleyns as they advanced in the tumultuous court of Henry VIII.

  “So tell us, Mistress Seymour,” the queen suddenly bid her as she held fast to a piece of lace in one hand and a sharp needle in the other. Jane’s eyes were focused on the sewing, but her mind was not. “How did you find the river today? Was the weather fair and the water calm enough for a barge ride?”

  Jane felt their eyes root upon her, then cut away. While the queen’s tone was not accusatory, the implication of duplicity hung heavy in the grand room, where the queen was joined by the Spanish ambassador, Caroz, the imperial ambassador, Chapuys, Maria de Salinas, and a number of other women and girls who long had attended her. There were clearly spies among them.

  “I have always been quite prone to seasickness, Your Highness. I rarely enjoy the water.”

  “A pity,” she replied, still without looking up from her piece of lace. “I have always found the sea quite calming and the rest of the world tumultuous by comparison.”

  “Would that I found the sea calming for all of the incessant bobbing,” Jane countered.

  “Ah, sí. I am told Mistress Boleyn does not enjoy that sensation either, even on the river. I hear she was as green as Tudor livery earlier today.”

  At her own remark, the queen suddenly smiled. Her grin was slim lipped and reserved as she raised her dark eyes from her sewing.

  “I am afraid I could not see her personally to offer an assessment, Your Highness. My seat was a fair distance from hers.”

  “Well, how did you find Mistress Boleyn’s choice of entertainment compared to our own offerings provided here in these rooms? I am told His Majesty had the ensemble brought in from the French court to please her.”

  Unexpectedly then, the king appeared at the chamber door, hands on his hips, as if her words had summoned him. As usual, he was a formidable presence, and everyone stiffened in fear, then rose swiftly only to fall into bows and curtsies.

  “Perhaps your spies are not earning back your investment in them,” he said with a jolly little sneer and then nodded to her. “Good evening, my dear.”

  The children had stopped singing as he moved toward Katherine. Women, ambassadors, and guardsmen shot to their feet, only to fall into deep bows and curtsies amid the sound of rustling silk, layered velvet, and the click of his shoe heels across the inlaid tile floor. The queen curtsied to him as well, albeit in a slight, more perfunctory way than the others. He then lifted her up by the arm and pressed a kiss lightly on her cheek.

  There was the same carelessness in his movements as there was in hers.

  “I do believe you would have enjoyed the music,” he said to her in response to the question posed to Jane. As she sat again, a chair was swiftly brought so that he might sit beside her.

  “I favor nothing from France these days,” she replied icily.

  “That is a shame since it produces such great culture and richness.”

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Katherine countered blandly as she picked up her lace and needle once again, then gazed down at it, but the unmistakable wound to her heart flashed in her eyes before she could look away.

  “You cannot deny that France has great treasures to share with the world.”

  “Since even speaking the name of the place produces a rancid taste in my mouth, I find it impossible to respond to that,” Katherine returned.

  “Perhaps one day you shall see it as I do.”

  “There are some things, good husband, by God’s grace, that I shall never see as you do.”

  Everyone in the room knew they were no longer speaking of music.

  Angry at her daring, the king then sprang to his feet in a huff and a swirl of his cloak. His exasperation was clear. He had come to visit his wife out of duty. He was leaving so soon now out of spite.

  He nodded to Katherine, and as he turned from her, his gaze suddenly slid to Jane, who stood in his path to the door. Their eyes settled on each other for only a heartbeat, but Jane thought his expression seemed to say, I am trapped, unhappy. Can no one understand that? But before she could be certain it was not only in her mind, he charged past her, his footsteps thundering down the hall, disrupting the awkward silence. When she looked back at the queen, Jane saw a mist of tears glistening in her dark Spanish eyes. Then Her Highness returned to her sewing as if nothing at all had happened.

  In those next days, Jane began to exist fully between the two worlds that had been drawing her for some time—the one to which she was regularly summoned by Anne, and the queen’s world, where the die seemed indelibly cast. Anne Boleyn had a way with the king that was almost mystical. Of course, no one dared speak such heresy, yet the change in the king’s behavior as he moved between his queen and his paramour was remarkable, especially to Jane, who was witness to both.

  Two days after the barge ride, Jane stood in a group of Anne’s ladies out on the bowls field. The king and his friends were in the middle of a rousing game, the object of which was to pitch a small ball down a very long brick lane toward a nut. The victor was the one who rolled his ball closest to the nut. On Henry’s embroidered costume, Jane could clearly see four French words sewn in gold thread. While her spoken French was only passable, Jane had studied enough to know that Declarer, Je n’ose pas meant “Declare, I dare not.” For a married man, it was a great and obvious professing of his own inner turmoil over the two women in his life.

  The sky was gray this early afternoon and slightly chilly. A gentle mist had begun to fall as they played. Jane slipped her hands into the velvet pockets of her dress and lowered her chin into her standing collar. The movement was as much protection from being noticed or drawn into something as it was a comfort against the weather.

  Though she had seen them together on many occasions, this afternoon she sensed a new, palpable tension on the bowls court between the king and Thomas Wyatt. Jane was sure that the new embroidered declaration slashed across the king’s chest was only one examp
le of the royal response to it. The rivalry for Anne Boleyn had taken a bitter turn, and Anne played the king’s declared refusal to choose her over the queen like a champion, openly flirting with both of them until the king’s face was white with rage.

  As the two men seemingly argued now over the score, the king began gesturing boldly, stabbing the air with his forefinger, which bore a large onyx ring stamped in gold with the letter B. It was obvious to everyone that it was worn in Anne’s honor.

  “Humbly, sire,” Wyatt declared as the pendant around his neck glistened in a sudden pale ray of sunlight through the clouds. “’Twas my ball which struck the closest to the nut; therefore, I retain the victory.”

  “You are as blind as you are arrogant,” Henry countered, clearly only half joking as the two men hovered over the two balls and the nut at the end of the court.

  “We must find a way to decide the victory,” Wyatt pronounced with a competitive little sneer that was common to the king and all of his friends when they were together. Jane held her breath, guessing then, as everyone else did, what was going to happen next.

  Either Wyatt was very brave, she thought, or very stupid.

  “This chain seems a perfect length by which to measure the distance,” he said boastfully, as he drew the pendant from around his neck and held it up.

  Jane’s gaze slid cautiously to the king in the momentary silence that followed. His expression hardened and became very tense. His lips were tightly pursed, and there was a muscle moving in the back of his jaw that she was close enough to see. Yet his mouth was turned up in just the faintest hint of a competitive smile. Jane saw a strange and indulgent little smile pass between Anne and Wyatt then as she took notice of the pendant.

  “Very well,” the king at last agreed, to a collective, audible sigh. The pendant had escaped the king’s notice. “But we must have someone fair to judge, someone wholly impartial.”

  He glanced through the assemblage, raised his onyx-ornamented finger, and let it land directly upon Jane.

  “Mistress Seymour shall do to tell us who has won. Come forward, my girl.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Hal,” Anne droned as the king smiled at the plain and insufferably quiet girl who always seemed to be there.

  If Jane could have melted into the brick pathway beneath her feet, she would have. Everyone, including the king and Anne, was suddenly looking at her. Henry’s expression was one of smiling expectation. The others wore frowns of disbelief. No matter how they tried to hide their judgmental stares with small, polite smiles, their lifted brows and rolling eyes made the reality of their feelings clear.

  She walked the few steps on trembling legs as one of the king’s young liveried grooms laid the chain and pendant on the bricks between the two balls.

  “Very well.” The king smiled at her. “So, Mistress Seymour, as a valued member of our little party, you shall reveal to us all whose ball has landed closest to the nut.”

  The horror she felt, with their collective gazes heavy upon her, could be matched only by her sense of impending doom. It was clear that Wyatt’s ball was closer. A deluge of thoughts pelted her like little stones. Eyes were daggers. Her heart slammed against her rib cage.

  “I am no expert at bowls, sire,” she forced herself to say, “yet I say that you are the victor.”

  “You can say it, but that does not make it so,” Wyatt grunted angrily, snapping up the chain.

  “Now, now. We’ve had our good bit of fun, Master Wyatt, but ’tis time to surrender all things that do not belong to you and give up the game.”

  “Surrender them all to Your Majesty, even if you are not at liberty to fully take them?”

  “You can surrender them, or I can seize them. But either way, Wyatt, your time is at an end.”

  Jane thought the tone in his voice was frightening. The voice she heard now was the frosty one the king used with the queen, not the mirth-filled tenor with which he always greeted Anne. There were great murmurs through the group as the king and Wyatt faced each other like two great lions fighting for dominance. But of course, there was no question.

  A moment later, Wyatt bowed deeply to the sovereign and took a step back in symbolic surrender. As he did, he handed the chain to Anne, whose flirtatious smile had dimmed as she gazed at the splashing fountain nearby with a statue of David and Goliath at its center. There was no longer an option. No real comparison between them.

  Her choice had been made for her.

  “My thanks, Mistress Seymour, for seeing the truth as the rest of us see it, and for being brave enough to declare it. I would not have expected that of you,” the king said crisply, cutting through the tension.

  “I serve Your Majesty first and foremost,” she heard herself reply shyly, yet she was unable to force herself to look directly at him as she did.

  It was still too much for Jane, as if she were looking at the sun. But as Anne swept past her, the fabric of their skirts touching, the two women exchanged a little glance. Jane was very certain that behind Anne’s smile she saw a flash of something extraordinary. She did not realize it until later, but in that moment, Jane was envied by the most influential woman in all of England.

  By January, Thomas Wyatt had been sent from court on a diplomatic mission bound for France. Everyone knew it was because he had lost the competition for Anne Boleyn. Jane could not quite fathom the hold that the strange dark-haired beauty maintained over the king for how malevolent it seemed.

  After Wyatt’s departure, Anne and the king became even more inseparable.

  Along with George Boleyn; his wife, Jane Parker; Anne Stanhope; and Elizabeth Carew, Jane was regularly called upon now to accompany their newly formed little band. She still hated betraying the queen and did her best to avoid each summons. But in such matters, Edward was absolutely firm. Katherine of Aragon’s star was swiftly fading as Anne Boleyn’s was shining more brightly by the day. For the good of the family, they must acknowledge that and do what they could to stay near the center of power.

  Jane tried not to think of how guilty she felt as she took a stroll with her brother Thomas early one afternoon when the court had settled in to rest and prepare for the evening of revelry ahead. It was that delicious hour of the day when the queen was at her desk or meeting with her Spanish attendants, the Spanish and Venetian ambassadors and the all-important imperial ambassador, Chapuys, who seemed always at her side these days. Anne and the king were likewise closeted, although their agenda on these lazy afternoons did not concern affairs of state. Or so the gossip went.

  “I know not how much longer I can endure this,” Jane unburdened herself, murmuring quietly to her brother as they walked along the cool, calming river’s edge beneath another gray day of light English drizzle. “She is a dreadful and demanding harlot who sits pointing and doling out directions as though she were queen.”

  “I fear she soon shall be,” Thomas said as they lingered at a little inlet where the grass was tall and a flock of geese passed overhead.

  “Bite your tongue, brother. The king will never be able to gain an annulment from the queen. What on earth would be the grounds? They have had children together!”

  “’Tis all quite complicated, but in listening to Sir Francis with Sir Nicholas Carew, apparently Cardinal Wolsey is nearing a conclusion to the secret negotiations he is carrying on with the pope over that very issue.”

  “How could that ever work when the queen’s own nephew is the emperor, who has complete control over the pope?”

  “Cardinal Wolsey is a master at negotiation. Carew says he has gone to closet with both of them clandestinely and will do so again. Sir Francis has asked me to accompany him this time,” he proudly revealed. Jane was stunned.

  “A journey designed to run the poor queen through with the final blow? You cannot!”

  “I cannot refuse them, Jane. Edward is the one who suggested me in the first place, and he would have my head if I refused now.”

  “Better you lose your head
than your dignity.”

  “You sound awfully haughty for one who dines with the queen and hunts with the whore,” he snapped uncharacteristically at her.

  Thomas then stiffened his spine and shot her a defensive scowl. It was that same pursed-mouth expression their mother used when she felt cornered. Jane shuddered; mother and son did look so alike.

  “I haven’t any choice.”

  “Nor do I. Edward is right, Jane. She will be queen somehow. She is not giving herself up to him and she is driving him mad in the meantime, just to make certain she achieves her goal. Everyone here says they have never seen anything like it with his other mistresses. It is as if she is guided by some powerful dark art.”

  “Well, it certainly does not seem light and sunny to me. She has the most evil little extra finger, or at least some sort of growth at the end of her hand, and her voice is so low it sounds like a man’s. But she is really more like a siren, tempting him with an illusion that only he can fully see,” said Jane, unable to stop herself from talking for the first time.

  “Well, I may never have seen anything like it either, but in this case I know the evil that it suggests,” Thomas said.

  “I just feel such pity for the queen. There is nothing worse, I fear, than loving someone you cannot have. I wish there was something I could do for her.”

  “There is nothing any of us can do for her but figure out how to saddle up and ride along on the journey without falling from the horse, or from grace. Fortunately for you, she is convinced of your favor,” Thomas said.

  “Yet I serve her greatest enemy, which makes me no better now than anyone else in this place.”

  “We all must do what we can to survive here. We have been taught to prepare for that all of our lives,” he reminded her.

  They smiled grimly at each other then, and Jane was glad her favorite sibling was here with her. She was not the same. This place had changed her. Thomas knew it because he knew her. And Jane knew it, too. But no one else but the two of them knew how different they were from those two naive little children at Wolf Hall.