The Taming of the Queen (11 page)

There is a rap on the door and the guard swings it open. William Herbert, Nan’s husband, comes into the room and smiles to see us all surrounded by jewels like children amazed in the pastry kitchen, spoiled for choice. ‘His Majesty sent this,’ he says. ‘It was overlooked. He says I am to put it on your beloved head.’

As I rise to my feet and come towards my brother-in-law, I see he cannot meet my eyes. He looks at the window behind me, at the sky scudding with clouds; he does not look at the treasures at my feet as I step carefully around Katherine of Aragon’s hoods, Katherine Howard’s glossy black sables. In his hand is a small heavy box.

‘What’s this?’ I ask him. I think at once – I don’t want it.

In reply he bows, and unlocks the metal hasp. He lifts the lid and it falls back on its bronze hinges. There is a small ugly crown inside. The ladies behind me gasp. I see Nan make a little movement as if she would prevent what must come next.

William puts down the box and lifts out the elaborately worked crown, encrusted with pearls and sapphires. Mounted at the pinnacle, as if it were a domed church, is a plain gold cross.

‘The king wants you to try it on.’

Obediently, I bend my head for Nan to remove my hood, and her husband gives her the crown. It is the right size, it settles on my forehead like a headache.

‘Is it new?’ I ask faintly. I long for it to be newly made for me.

He shakes his head. ‘Whose was it?’

Nan makes a little gesture with her hand as if to warn him to be silent.

‘It was Anne Boleyn’s crown,’ he tells me. I feel it pressing down on my head as if I might sink beneath the weight of it.

‘Surely he doesn’t want me to wear it today,’ I say awkwardly. ‘He’ll tell you when,’ he says. ‘Important feast days or when you are meeting foreign ambassadors.’

I nod, my neck stiff, and Nan takes it off for me and puts it back in the box. She closes the lid as if she does not want to see it. Anne Boleyn’s crown? How can it be anything but cursed?

‘But I’m to take back the pearls,’ William says, embarrassed. ‘They were brought in error.’

‘Which pearls?’ Nan asks her husband.

He looks at her, still carefully not looking at me. ‘The Seymour pearls,’ he says quietly. ‘They’re to be kept in the treasure room.’

Nan bends down and picks up the ropes and ropes of pearls, milky and glowing in her hands, and piles them back in their long box, the strands running up and down the length of it like a quiescent snake. She hands them to William and smiles at me. ‘It’s not as if we didn’t have a fortune in pearls already,’ she says, trying to cover the awkward moment.

I walk with William to the doorway. ‘Why is he taking them back?’ I ask him in an undertone.

‘For remembrance of her,’ William tells me. ‘She gave him his son. He wants to keep them for the prince’s future wife. He doesn’t want anyone else wearing them.’

‘Of course, of course,’ I say quickly. ‘Tell him how pleased I am with everything else. I know that her pearls were special.’

‘He is at prayer,’ my brother-in-law says. ‘He is hearing a Mass for her now.’

Carefully, I maintain my expression of sympathy and interest. The belief that God will shorten the days that a soul waits to enter heaven if He is offered a hundred Masses, a thousand prayers, bonfires of incense, was dismissed by this king, and the chantries closed. Even the chapel that he dedicated to pray for Jane’s soul was abolished; I didn’t know that he still clung to a belief that he has forbidden to the rest of us – the hope of praying someone out of purgatory.

‘Stephen Gardiner is holding a special Mass for Queen Jane,’ William tells me. ‘In Latin.’

Surely it’s a little odd to be praying for the dead queen on the first day of the king’s honeymoon? ‘God bless her,’ I say awkwardly, knowing that William will report this to his royal master. ‘Take her pearls and keep them safe. I will pray for her soul myself.’

Just as the king promised, the word goes out that the new queen has a liking for pretty birds. One of the rooms off my presence chamber is emptied of furniture and filled with perches and cages. At the windows are little aviaries for the singing birds from the Canary Islands. When the sun pours in through the thick glass they chirp and preen and flutter their little wings. I keep them according to colour, the golds and yellows together, the greens next door to them, while the blues flit their little wings against a sky that mirrors their colour. I hope that they will breed true. Every morning, after chapel, I visit my bird room and feed them all by hand, loving the feeling of their scratchy light little feet as they perch and peck for seed.

To my delight one day, a dark-skinned lascar sailor with a silver ring in his ear and his face tattooed, more like a painted devil than a man, comes to my presence chamber with a huge bird, as blue as indigo and as big as a buzzard, sitting on his clenched fist. He sells it to me for a ridiculously high price and now I am the very proud owner of a parrot with black knowing eyes. I name him Don Pepe, since he speaks nothing but the most obscene Spanish. I will have to put a cover over his cage when the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, comes to pay his respects, but Nan assures me that he’s a hard man to shock: after years at the court he has heard far worse.

The king gives me a new horse for riding, a beautiful bay mare, and a puppy, an adorable spaniel with a shining tan coat. I take him with me everywhere and he sits at my feet even when I go to chapel in the morning. I’ve never owned a dog that was not a working dog before, only the hounds for hunting in the stables at Snape, or the sheepdogs with their quick dashes here and there.

‘You are the most idle thing,’ I tell him. ‘How can you live with yourself when all you have to be is ornamental?’

‘He’s very sweet,’ Nan agrees.

‘Purkoy was a darling,’ Catherine Brandon remarks.

‘Oh, what was Purkoy?’ I ask.

‘Anne Boleyn’s dog,’ Nan frowns at Catherine. ‘Nothing like little Rig, here.’

‘Is there anything new?’ I ask irritably. ‘Is there anything that I do that one of them hasn’t already done?’

Catherine looks embarrassed.

‘Your clocks,’ Nan says with a small smile at me. ‘You’re the first queen to love clocks. All the goldsmiths and clockmakers in London are in heaven.’

The court is to go on progress, as it does every summer. I cannot imagine how we are to pack up everything and move, every week, sometimes after only a few days, from one house to another, where all our servants will be expected to unload furniture, tapestries and silverware and make a court in a new house. How am I to know what clothes to pack? How am I to know what jewels I should take? I don’t even know how they take enough linen for the beds.

‘It’s nothing for you to trouble yourself about,’ Nan says. ‘Really, nothing. All the servants have moved the queen’s household a score of times, a hundred times. All you have to do is to ride beside the king and look happy.’

‘But all the bedding! And all the clothes!’ I exclaim.

‘Everyone knows their part,’ she repeats. ‘You need do nothing but go where you are sent.’

‘My birds?’

‘The falconers will take care of them. They’ll go in their own cart behind the falcons and hawks.’

‘My jewels?’ I ask.

‘I take care of them,’ she says. ‘I’ve done this for years, Kat, honestly. All you have to do is to ride beside the king if he wants you there, and look beautiful.’

‘And if he doesn’t want me?’

‘Then you ride with your companions and your master of horse.’

‘I don’t even have a master of horse yet, I haven’t filled all my household posts.’

‘We’ll appoint them as we travel. It’s not for lack of applicants! All the clerks will travel with us, and most of the court. The Privy Council meets wherever the king happens to be, it’s not like we are leaving court, we take everything with us.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Oatlands first,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘I think it is one of the best palaces, on the river, newly built, as beautiful as any of them. You’ll love it there, and the bedrooms aren’t haunted!’

Nan is completely right: the court breaks itself up and reforms with practised ease, and I love my rooms in Oatlands Palace. It was built on the river near Weybridge to be a honeymoon palace for Anne of Cleves, so Nan cannot truly claim that it is not haunted. Anne of Cleves’ sorrow and disappointment are in every courtyard. Her maid-in-waiting Katherine Howard was triumphantly married to the king, here in the chapel; I imagine he chased her, panting endearments, limping as fast as he could go through the beautiful gardens.

The palace was built with the stone of the abbey at Chertsey, every beautiful sandstone block pulled down from where it was dedicated to God to stand forever. The tears of the faithful must have fallen in the mortar; but nobody thinks of that now. It is a huge sunny palace, near to the river, designed like a castle with a tower at each corner and a huge courtyard inside. My rooms look towards the south and they are sunny and light. The king’s rooms adjoin them, and he warns me that he can walk in at any time to see what I am doing.

Over the next few days Nan and I draw up the list of posts in my household and start to fill them with the king’s choices, with our friends and family and then, when we have satisfied everyone who has a claim on me, with those whose careers we want to advance. I look at the list prepared by Nan and her friends who support the religious reforms. Giving them a place as my household officials at court and in my rooms as my companions strengthens their numbers at the very moment that they are losing the king’s support.

He has approved the publication of a statement of doctrine called
The King’s Book
, which tells people that they have to make confession and believe in the miracle of the Mass. The wine becomes blood, the bread becomes flesh – the king says it is so, and everyone must believe. He has taken away the great English Bible from every church in every parish and only the rich and the noble are allowed to read the Bible in English, and they can only do so at home. The poor and the uneducated are as far from the Word of God as if they were in Ethiop.

‘I want some scholarly ladies,’ I say to Nan, almost shyly. ‘I always felt that I should have read more and studied more. I want to improve my French and Latin. I want to have companions who will study with me.’

‘Certainly you can hire tutors,’ she says. ‘They’re as easy to get as parakeets. And you could have an afternoon sermon preached every day, Katherine of Aragon did. You have a range of opinion in your rooms already. Catherine Brandon is a reformer, while Lady Mary is probably secretly faithful to Rome. Of course she would never deny that her father is Supreme Head of the church,’ Nan lifts a warning finger to me, ‘everyone has to be very, very careful what they say. But now that the king is restoring the rituals that he banned, and taking away the English Bible that he gave to his people, Lady Mary hopes that he will go further and reconcile with the pope.’

‘I have to understand this,’ I say. ‘We lived so far from London, we heard almost nothing, and I couldn’t get hold of books. And anyway, my husband Lord Latimer believed in the old ways.’