I, Jane: In The Court of Henry VIII Read online

  “Have you eaten at all today, young Mistress Seymour?”

  Jane shook her head that she had not. She had been far too nervous, having arrived late to the shore with Edward, who had been angry and shouting that he would not be made to miss this opportunity for anything, even if he had to leave her and their suddenly lame horse behind at Maidstone.

  “Let us at least fetch you a draught of ale below, then, shall we? Good for whatever ails a belly. And there are windows to be opened down there. You can sit near one and catch the breeze. Something has got to bring a bit of color to those pale cheeks of yours, after all. ’Tis my hope, at least.”

  Sir Francis seemed a kind enough man, in a formal sort of way, Jane thought as she joined him, and she desperately needed someone she could trust in this frightening new world. Even if he was a stranger, he was still Father’s cousin, so she made up her mind to join him.

  The swaying rhythm of the drawn litter, in which she rode toward Abbeville with five other young maids of honor, was so steady that Jane fought to keep her heavy eyes open in the mellow light of the setting French sun. It was late when the ship docked at Calais because the farewells between the princess and her brother King Henry had been so prolonged at Dover and everything had been set back from there. From her place in the back of the enormous crowd, Jane had caught only a glimpse of the royal siblings, but it was clear they were both young and fit and elegant beyond measure. As Princess Mary had moved quickly past the crowd, Jane had seen so much glittering beadwork on her gown that, as it caught the sun, Jane was reminded of the shooting stars in the night sky out behind Wolf Hall. How far she was from there, she thought, pushing away the deep longing for home. Even if these two places did share the same sky, they could not be farther apart in her mind.

  After he had brought her the ale and her stomach had settled, Sir Francis had disappeared, as mysteriously as he had come, back into the crowd milling about the massive ship. She had not seen him again. Jane thought now, as she fought hard to stay awake, how entirely different he was from her father. Sir Francis had a sense of grandeur and an air of mystery about him, which she was sure life at court had cultivated. Her father had said Francis Bryan was a dear friend of the king. To Jane, that was almost like being friends with Almighty God himself, since no one was actually friends with a king.

  For some reason, plain Jane from Wiltshire had been invited to accompany this god’s sister to the mysterious land of France.

  She looked then at the young red-haired girl perched on the bench beside her. She was a few years older than Jane and silently clutched an embroidered handkerchief and continually pressed it to her cheek in a self-soothing way. There were tears in her eyes. Jane was not certain why that surprised her, but it did. That any other girl should feel the same fear or hesitation she did was an odd comfort to her.

  “I am Jane Seymour of Wiltshire,” she hesitantly offered.

  “Mary Boleyn of Kent,” the girl said, sniffling in return and drying her eyes on the handkerchief, then wiping her nose, as a much younger child would do. “I have not seen my family in such a long time. My father will say I have grown quite fat when he sees me.”

  “You’re not,” Jane assured her sweetly.

  The girl with full cheeks and a pink nose turned her small mouth down in a sad expression. “He shall think it. He can be terribly partial when it comes to his daughters, as he believes his fortunes are tied up with ours. My younger sister is actually quite remarkably pretty.”

  “Mine as well,” Jane revealed sympathetically, remembering Elizabeth.

  “Anne is young like you, but people already say she has the dark-eyed beauty of Cleopatra. At least they were saying that the last time I saw her. She has been educated in Antwerp this past year, since our father has great hopes for her at court one day.”

  “Are you to see them both here in France?”

  “My father is a diplomat in Paris. He saw to it through his connections that Anne and I both were named maids of honor here. Although my mother is convinced I shall be sent home once Father sees how I have changed. Believe me, Jane, I am not the girl I was a year ago. Their worst fear is that a Boleyn daughter should be mocked.”

  “Nor am I the same, honestly. If you could see what is beneath this hood right now, everyone would have a good laugh at me,” Jane revealed, feeling less self-pity than she had since her own mother had taken the pair of scissors to her hair.

  Mary tipped her head. “Have you an injury under there?”

  “Only to my dignity, as my brother said before we left.”

  “You’ve a sibling here with us?”

  “My brother Edward. Like your sister, Anne, he is my family’s great hope.”

  Suddenly, and for the first time, Mary Boleyn smiled as the horse litter began to slow as it rocked over the smooth cobbled stones, arriving finally at the great stone palace at Abbeville.

  Everything was different here in France. Jane felt that the moment she stepped out of the litter and into the buzz and hum of a new and lyrical language swirling around her. Jane had tried to study French at Wolf Hall, but she realized now that books were a very different thing from hearing French spoken in a conversational way. She pressed back the growing sense of panic that was threatening to seize her again.

  As the massive English assemblage gathered in the courtyard, Jane, as usual, was pushed steadily to the back of the group. It quickly became a crushing wave, as the girls and women subtly vied for a place near enough to witness the Princess Mary’s entrance onto French soil for her first meeting with her new husband, France’s aged king.

  “He doesn’t look so old and awful as they are saying,” Jane murmured to Mary, who was beside her, pushed and pulled as well.

  She was speaking of the tall, broad-shouldered, athletically built man who emerged regally from the grand chateau, elegantly draped in crimson velvet bordered with ermine. He had a kind of insolent grace that was both attractive, Jane thought, and a little frightening.

  “That is the king’s cousin, the Duke of Valois, and if Louis has no son, he shall be the next king.”

  Just then, a beautiful woman came within sight, and Jane knew it was the king’s sister. She was elegantly clothed in a gold gown, and an egg-shaped ruby framed in diamonds glittered at her throat, with matching earrings dangling from her lobes. Jane thought the princess was the most exquisite person she had ever seen. With brief glimpses between the fashionable bell-shaped sleeves and intricate headdresses blocking the path before her, Jane took in the princess’s beauty. Spurring Jane’s youthful sense of fantasy, the princess glided as if on a cloud toward a magnificent destiny that Jane could not quite fathom at her young age.

  “There he is! There is the king!” Mary Boleyn exclaimed with youthful excitement.

  Jane stood on her toes, straining to see, but others were still pushing her back and pressing forward at the same time. It felt like the sea between England and France that had battered her about. Suddenly, there was a break between padded shoulders and headdresses and Jane caught a glimpse of a diminutive man, elderly and fragile, descending the same flight of stairs down which the dashing young duke had so effortlessly stepped moments before. This man’s hair was thin and patchy, the color of a springtime snow after the first thaw. His face was drawn and bloodless, the color of parchment. As he moved forward toward the magically beautiful English princess, who was legally already his bride, Jane saw a shimmer of spittle drip from the corner of his mouth, a punctuation mark to a thought that seemed almost incomprehensible in her mind—that these two unlikely souls were joined before God as man and wife.

  Her child’s stomach rejected the vision faster than her heart did, and Jane placed a finger across her lips to push back a little spark of nausea at the disagreeable thought. The princess held her head up as the two at last came face-to-face. A woman in front of Jane with a wide, pearl-lined, gabled hood moved again so she had to strain to see, but the moment of the royal meeting ended quickly and was
lost to her.

  “I would rather die than marry an old man like that,” declared Mary Boleyn, who was still standing beside her, her rosy face now mottled red with shock. “We were told he was not a young man, but I do not recall ‘ancient’ being part of the description.”

  “Our princess really is quite beautiful, though,” Jane said as they were ushered forward.

  “She is already a queen, you know. There would have been no turning back for her no matter what he looked like after their proxy marriage back in England.”

  Jane knew nothing about that, but Mary spoke with such authority, being older and potentially wiser, that she automatically believed the Boleyn girl.

  The palace at Abbeville was different from anything Jane had ever seen. The tall walls were lime washed and bare of ornamentation, the floor cool marble. There were no carpets to warm them, so there was the constant echo of shoe heels as courtiers crossed the halls. Jane shivered as much from the newness as from the cold. She had been gone from Wolf Hall for only a few days and already she was dreadfully homesick. To make matters worse, it seemed the pages of honor, of which Edward was one, were sequestered from the girls, so that she still had not seen her brother since before they boarded the massive English ship. When Jane felt her lower lip begin to quiver at the thought, she bit it.

  She must not disappoint her family.

  The tears of a child would most certainly do that.

  Jane and Mary Boleyn were pressed along with the others up a wide, curved stone staircase with a wrought-iron railing. When they arrived at what seemed like the front of a long line of silk-and-velvet-clad girls, they came to a round-faced woman with a steely, determined gaze. She was dressed in a forest green gabled hood and heavily embroidered dress with a pearl and gold chain at her waist. When Mary curtsied to the woman, Jane did the same.

  “Mother Guildford,” Mary said in deferential greeting.

  The woman arched a thick, graying brow. “Why, Mistress Boleyn, I see you were included after all. Your father must have pulled a great many strings to see both you and your younger sister among Her Majesty’s new train here in France.”

  “Is Anne already here, then?”

  “I am told young Mistress Anne was brought from Antwerp last week. I know not what favors are called in to bring about these postings, but ’tis not mine to question.”

  Jane took in the kaleidoscope of velvet, silk, pearls, beads, and elegant, full, bell-shaped sleeves around them.

  “Who have we here, then?” Mother Guildford said as her appraising gaze fell upon Jane.

  “This is Mistress Jane Seymour.”

  “Ah, so you are Jane,” Mother Guildford remarked with an indecipherable, thin-lipped smile. “You are Sir Francis’s choice.”

  “I am honored to be so.”

  “You are awfully young. Too young, ’twould seem.” She touched Jane’s chin with a discerning pinch.

  “I am nearly nine years old, mistress,” Jane tried to respond with a note of pride, but it dissolved almost before it left her lips. They began to quiver again in the face of such a bold-looking woman with so deep and steady a voice.

  “Yes, well, all of these other girls you see are at least twelve. Mary here is fourteen. Aren’t you, Mary?”

  Mary Boleyn nodded. “Yes, Mother Guildford.”

  “So what, then, I wonder, did Sir Francis have in mind in bringing you here?”

  “I was told only to accompany my brother Edward to France, mistress, not why I was to do so.”

  “First of all, child, you must address me as Mother Guildford, as the French queen herself does. I was in Her Majesty’s service before she was old enough to speak, and I am in charge of her girls. I am to organize you all and keep you in line. You would do well not to question authority, particularly the sort here at court, English or French. You shall go much further that way. Or at least have fewer problems. Mistress Seymour, you shall be in the dormitory with Mistress Boleyn and her sister, who is closer in age to you. That might be some comfort to you, at least in a strange land. This is your first time away from home, I gather?”

  Jane bit her lip even harder now and lowered her eyes to force away the tears pressing forward. “It is, Mother Guildford.”

  “Then you would do well to make friends. Mary here is a respectable start.”

  The older woman bobbed her head like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence, then turned her attention to the two giggling girls behind them. The encounter was over. But not Jane’s fear and longing. No matter how they dressed her up, or what she managed to endure without weeping, she was still a little girl in a faraway place.

  “She does look a bit young,” remarked Sir Thomas Boleyn, standing in the shadows of the second-floor landing as the fresh crop of English girls presented themselves to Mother Guildford in the room just beyond him.

  Boleyn was a slim, dark-haired, elegant man, accustomed to court ways. He had a slightly crooked nose and eyes a little too deeply set, but his thick glossy waves of ebony-colored hair, along with a slightly wicked smile, helped label him one of the most desirable English courtiers.

  “She was the best I could do on short notice, and for the price,” Francis Bryan responded on a note of irritation. “And Jane shall do quite handsomely to make your two daughters appear old enough for your purposes, as you requested. Perhaps Mary and Anne will even look worldly now.”

  “That might be stretching it,” Boleyn replied snidely.

  One of the English king’s diplomats, Thomas had been posted this past year, by order of Henry VIII, to the Netherlands, where he had taken his younger daughter, Anne. His elder daughter, Mary, had grown a bit fat before they departed from Hever Castle in Kent, Francis recalled, so it was decided Anne would be the daughter capable of more quickly ingratiating herself, and to eventually move up the court ladder. The ultimate good would be to make an important enough marriage that it would benefit the entire Boleyn family. So far, little Anne Boleyn had not disappointed her father. Thomas was eventually able to bring her successfully into the house of Archduchess Margaret of Austria, where Anne was invited to remain with him until the invitation to France had come.

  It was in that heady and prideful moment that he had decided to bring both of his daughters to the court of France and to see if either of them could find a more permanent post. Anne was young, so placing someone young like Jane Seymour beside her was a calculation to enhance his daughter’s place.

  Fortunately, Francis Bryan had never been above bribery.

  Thomas Boleyn drew the small coin-stuffed black velvet pouch from his doublet and handed it to Francis, who tucked it away in the same fluid movement as both men glanced around, ensuring the exchange had not been witnessed.

  “You might have found one a bit prettier, though,” Thomas Boleyn could not resist saying. “In addition to being so young, your little charge there is really quite stunningly common about the face.”

  “Perhaps she will grow into her looks,” Francis weakly defended.

  “’Twould be more likely for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” Thomas Boleyn said unkindly, before he turned and melted back into the swirling crowd, leaving Francis Bryan wondering if he had not just made a very grand error in judgment by bringing his cousin’s plain little daughter to France.

  The bed was cold but the dormitory room was colder, filled with an icy draft, shadows, and the whispering voices of strange girls.

  “Quiet, or she shall hear you!” Mary bid her younger sister in the darkness infused with pale moonlight streaming through the bank of uncurtained leaded windows. Jane, Mary, and Anne were in small beds next to one another beneath the windows.

  “I understand not why you talk to her, or what she is even doing here. She is not like any of the rest of us. And she is as awkward as she is homely,” Anne whispered back.

  “Shh! She is bound to hear you, and she has been very nice to me.”

  “Well, I am not going to be nice to her,” Anne pron
ounced cruelly from beneath her downy bedcovers. “There is far too much at stake here for both of us. Father said so.”

  Jane might be young, but she knew well enough that she was the present topic of conversation. She pressed the pillow over her head, trying to drown out the voices as another wave of homesickness descended on her.

  There was no going back. This was her reality now, and she must somehow rise to the occasion and make a place for herself. At least she tried to tell herself that without bursting into tears so that the others would hear.

  That whole week after Mary Tudor’s wedding to the King of France, Edward Seymour avoided his little sister. At first, Jane told herself it was a coincidence when he walked the other way whenever he saw her. There were so many banquets, pageants, revels, and even a fireworks display, so many people to meet, that he could not be expected to come and reassure her, or to introduce her to the other pages of honor.

  That was the story her heart allowed her to believe.

  But as time went on, Edward’s intentional avoidance of her became clear. Jane struggled not to feel hurt, but that had become unavoidable. As Mary Boleyn spent much of her time now with her sister, Anne, with whom she had been reunited, Jane was set adrift in a sea of other young women who knew precisely how to be seen and heard in the busy, high-stakes French court. Jane did not. She tried to stay quiet, to watch and learn, but the pace was heady and mistakes were likely. More than one of the well-heeled young girls was reduced to tears each day by Mother Guildford’s condemnation of something said or a step taken out of turn. With her experiences at Wolf Hall as her primer, Jane vowed to avoid that indignity if she could.

  As Sir Francis had predicted, she was made for the background, in order to add dimension, not distinction, to the English ensemble supporting the new young French queen. At large events, Jane receded into the crowd, never attracting the least bit of attention.

  The same could not be said for Mary and her sister, Anne.

  The Boleyn girls were always prominently placed in the front, always full of confidence, and in the case of Anne, she always found subtle ways to draw attention to herself.