Holding his writing desk, asking for no help from his spy, my maid, he kicks his booted heel to hammer against the door, and the guard throws it open. I think I have never seen him so flustered. I laugh out loud; it is something to see Thomas Wriothesley running from my room like a scolded girl. I cannot think what is wrong with him.
I turn to my maid, the spy, and I see she has the same look as Wriothesley. She is terrified. She is terrified of being alone with me.
Then it comes to me. I give a littletutat my slowness and stupidity. Wriothesley thinks that they have driven me mad, that I am mad. This girl thinks I am mad, and she is locked up with a madwoman who might turn violent. And I – fool that I am – should have played mad as my last great performance the moment I arrived. A madman cannot be interrogated; a madman cannot be accused; a madman cannot be executed. How could I have forgotten this? I should have told Kitty, who is half-mad with natural silliness anyway. But I shall be mad until the king dies, and no one will accuse me of anything, and they will send me somewhere pleasant to stay, and I will slowly – very slowly – recover my senses.
I wear the mask ofDionysus– god of ecstasy and madness – and slowly, I let myself slide into fantasy. At once, my appetite returns, and I drink wine, mulled ale, and twice-brewed beer. I honourDionysusby being drunk from the moment that I rise to loudly say my prayers in the morning until bedtime, when I sometimes forget to get undressed.
I feel my own imagination spinning loose, and for the first time in my life, I am not a courtier. I do not say what the king wants to hear – I speak for my own ears – I say what I like. Inside this prison, I am free for the first time. My room gets brighter and darker through the day; it is the only way I know the passing of time, because I cannot seem to keep up with the chimes of the Tower bells. Facing north, overlooking the green, it is always cold. I insist that the fire is lit in the grate before I will get up in the morning. ‘I’m cold,’ I say. ‘Cold.’ It is dark. Sometimes, I see a sunset in the evening sky, but it is dark when I wake in the morning. ‘I’m dark,’ I say. ‘Dark.’
I am not quite sure who lives here with me and who is passing through as a visitor. No one is ever properly announced. George, my husband, is here most evenings; he’s always looking out of the window for someone to come with a pardon. ‘I will come,’ I tell him. ‘I will see the king. I will tell Jane Seymour to take off her hood and let down her hair and ask for pardon, for you and for Anne.’
Sir Thomas More usually comes around dawn and wakes me tothe cold room and the striking of the clock at six or nine, or it might be midnight – I can’t count the chimes all the way through. ‘How come you’re so clever and yet you didn’t say “no” to the king?’ I ask him. ‘Why does nobody ever say “no” to him?’ That defeats him. ‘Silence won’t save you,’ I tell him. ‘I am silence.’
Dr Butts comes, as someone promised me he would. He asks me very dull questions about the date, as if I would know, living here in dark and light as I do! He asks me the name of my father and where is my house? I say: if he does not know that, he must be as mad as I am. Surely he knows I have no father? I am an orphan. Who has ever come to court to see me for fatherly love? My father only ever comes to behead someone. As for my house – I tell him the little joke that this must be my house, since my family vault is across the green, and my family crest on the wall; but he does not laugh. He looks at me very gravely, and when I go, he presses my hand. ‘I will say you are unfit to testify,’ he promises. ‘But take care of yourself, Lady Rochford. Do not melt into your mask.’
He is not my only visitor. My Lord Cromwell never comes, and yet I would like to see him. I don’t like to meet the others. So many others troop through my rooms and through my dreams at night: the Carthusians, Bishop Fisher, Geoffrey Pole with a bread knife in his fat chest, his mother Lady Margaret Pole, with her old neck hacked to pieces. No one said ‘no’ for her, and we all should have ‘no’ when they came for Lady Margaret.
‘I’m not “no”,’ I tell my maid. ‘I am silence. But silence doesn’t save you, either.’
I catch her writing down declensions of Latin verbs, which I recite to show I remember everything. She mistakes Latin for the raving of a madwoman – she is such a fool.
‘I am mad,’ I say, to reassure her. ‘Quite mad.’
Of course I am mad. I cannot comprehend that I am here, in my dead husband’s bedroom, wrongly accused as he was, threatened with execution as he was, hoping for mercy from a merciless tyrant, as he did. Of course I am mad. Nobody could be at the court ofthis king unless they were out of their wits. We are all far from our humble beginnings; we are all out of our sphere; we are all masked, disguised, tutored, and tortured into insane shapes to make him look handsome, powerful, loveable. We all practise carols of praise to him, telling him over and over again, repeating like madmen and madwomen: what a great king he is, how wise, how gifted, how loveable.
Dawns come and go with Sir Thomas More. Two of them? Perhaps three?
‘Who is the King of England?’ my maid asks me. ‘Who is the King of France?’
‘Don’t say he’s been arrested, too?’ I am staggered. ‘On what charge?’
She shakes her head, angry with me as a keeper is angry with his madman, and she goes out of the room to tell someone that I am no better, that it is as Dr Butts says, that I cannot be questioned and I cannot be accused.
THIS MORNING– I know it is morning, because Anne walked under my window out to the scaffold on Tower Green at nine of the clock – the girl comes to me and says very loudly, as if I am deaf: ‘Get your cape on. Put on your boots. Pull up the hood.’
‘Am I going home?’ I ask, in my new courtier voice, very high and pleasing. ‘To Blickling?’
‘Yes, yes,’ she says, so readily that I know that she is lying.
She pushes my two gowns and my linen into a sack with my Bible and my hoods and my shoes. All jumbled, and the gowns will crease.
‘I don’t want to go without George,’ I say.
‘Oh, he’ll come later,’ she assures me. ‘You come now, and he’ll be along later.’
It is comical how courtiers will agree with anything. George my husband has been dead for five and a half years. I laugh at her folly, and she looks at me oddly.
I say: ‘You know, when you see a madman, you should just say“no”,’ and she hustles me out of the door, where a guard leads the way, and one comes behind. I don’t really want to walk past Tower Green, but there is no scaffold built for any execution, and there are no ghosts, just the grass growing, winter sere.
We go down the stone steps to the water gate; the tide is low, slack, and the plain barge without a standard bobs at its mooring. The maid hurries me on board, and the guard comes with us. I pull up the hood of my cape; it is bitterly cold, and the mist lies along the river like a wraith. I think it is very remiss of them not to send the Howard barge.
‘Very discourteous,’ I say to the girl, and she says ‘Yes, m’lady,’ and takes a stool beside my chair.
The water gate rolls up, creaking on its green wet chains and dripping from its points. The barge pushes off, and the rowers take us out into the river, where the tide is turning to take us upstream. They close the shutters so that no one can see me, but there is no need for them to take such care. It’s not as if I am Lady Margaret Pole. She was of the old royal family, and governess to Lady Mary, mother to a cardinal – and still nobody said ‘no’ to her shipping and arrest and death. Nobody will say ‘no’ for me.
‘Nobody ever says “no”,’ I tell the girl.
I think we are going upstream to Windsor Castle or perhaps Hampton Court. Perhaps the court is spending Christmas at Hampton Court, and they need me to plan the masquing. I am not sure how my mask ofDionysus-madness will fit a Christmas masque, but then I realise that everyone is mad at court anyway. The mask they wear is one of sanity, so that no one can ever mirror to the king his own mad face, his own mad will.
