He shakes his head. ‘Not him! He’s got a heart of stone, that man. But Anne and I love you. We’ll bring you back.’
‘He said I have to study silence.’
‘Well, you’re going to the right place for that,’ he says cheerfully.
‘Beaulieu? I’ll have a hundred things to do.’
‘You’re not going to Beaulieu.’
I stare down at him from the height of the mounting block. ‘Not going home? Then where am I going?’ I can hear the sharp note of panic in my voice. ‘I’m not going to Hever with Mary Boleyn!’
‘No, you’re going home to your father.’
I am as cold as if I were entering the Tower by the water gate. ‘George, are you divorcing me? Putting me aside like Queen Katherine? Putting me out of my house like our uncle did to his wife?’
‘No! No! Not I!’ He laughs at my consternation. ‘We’re not to be parted forever! But if the king commands you leave court – what can I do?’ His charming smile is so like Anne’s. ‘We’re too finely balanced. We can’t carry the weight of the king’s dislike. The Spanish party have got Agnes in his bed. She whispers their words in his ear; she’s turned him against us. And we’re blaming all that on you. If the king doesn’t want you here, then you’re no use to us. We’ve dropped you.’
Morley Hallingbury, Norfolk, Winter
1534
IHAVE NEARLY Ayear, a long year, to learn what my husband means when he says that they have dropped me. It is a fall; it is a fall so terrible that I lose all sense of who I am. It is like the steep fall from the gates of paradise down to earth: the fall of the angel from heaven to a hell of nothingness. I was a star of the morning at court, and now I am eclipsed. From childhood, I have been a courtier, raised and schooled to be indispensable in the complex dance of a royal court, to know the masks on show and the faces hidden beneath them. Now, there are no false smiles, no pretend compliments, and my mother and father share the same look of shuttered disappointment.
I have no spymaster and nothing to spy on, no work but the drudgery of a spinster-daughter in a manor house: sewing, polishing, work in the still room, in the spice room, and in the herb garden, duty to the poor, and service to the church. I make ink for my father from oak galls boiled in wine and stirred with gum arabica. I order the gamekeeper to trap crows, and pluck feathers from their left wings, for me to trim into quills, so the curve of the feather suits my father’s right hand.
I cling to my name and insist on being addressed as Lady Rochford, but here, I have no parade of husband, royal sister-in-law, no panoply of cousins, no uncle the duke. My homes, my childhood homes, are lost to me: royal palaces of Greenwich, of Westminster, of Windsor Castle or Hampton Court. I am confined to a house which is grand in Norfolk but is little more than a new-built manor. Everything seems impossibly small, and I am a nobody, wondering at my father’s pride in his house at Morley Hallingbury that I left at eleven years old, thinking I would never return.
I look around the empty nursery and wonder where that child has gone, and what has she become? She was a serious little girl with her hair in a plait, indifferent to her mother but adoring her father, the scholar. He encouraged her learning, letting her waste expensive paper scribbling Latin and French verbs. He taught her to shelve his books, hundreds of books, some inherited from his patron, the king’s grandmother, some sent to him by scholarly friends, some written by himself and richly bound for him by the nuns of Syon Abbey. He taught his little girl languages: Italian, so she could read the great writers of Florence; Greek and Latin, so she could transcribe classical authors.
I thought there was no higher calling than to be his clerk. I wanted to stay home all my life – his little shadow. I was the only one of his children allowed to study with him. My brother cared only for hunting, my sister was too young and noisy for the library. But I might be the equal to the clever daughters of Sir Thomas More in faraway London.
But now Sir Thomas is in the Tower – and all Margaret More’s famous education cannot save him, and I am dropped. My father must think a woman’s education is of no use: an experiment that has failed. My mother once told him that my tender heart would betray my clever head, and now he thinks she is proved right.
They never ask me what happened at court. My mother imagines me sobbing the heartbroken reproaches of a jealous wife and offers me the silent sympathy of a fellow weakling in damp glances. I ignoreher. I don’t know what my father thinks. I feel his measuring gaze on me, silently reviewing me, as if I am an essay returned from a fellow scholar, half unread. He is confident that I was not dismissed from court for a failure of manly intelligence – he taught me too well – so it must be the fault of womanly weaknesses, the curse of Eve: oversensitivity, imaginary ailments, hysteria.
I cannot bring myself to tell my father that it was not my weakness that caused my exile – but George’s. It was George who lacked decision, firmness of will, strength of purpose and manly loyalty. But I will not betray George. I will never betray George.
My father spends his days in his study, but I am not invited to write his letters. I don’t even ask to read his books: they have been no help to me. I studied his translations of Niccolò Machiavelli and Baldassare Castiglione, and I understood their cold calculations on how a king usurps power from his lords, as courtiers steal power from other courtiers. But this was no help when courtier work was degraded into slavish charm for only one man.
There is no subtle work of politics and persuasion at Henry’s court; it has become nothing more than pleasing a difficult man in a court of weakened men. Anne and the Howards and the reformers whistled the king to their side, as you might train a dog: they petted him, they seduced him, they lulled him, and they inflamed him, until he abandoned both Church and wife.
Then, I thought we had won a great victory for reform and for Anne. Now, I see that it was just as Machiavelli describes – as one power rises, another falls, and as soon as a power falls, it will try to rise again. Nothing ever changes: there is rise and fall, flood tide and ebb, but it is the same river. We beat the queen and the Spanish party by stealing the king away with Anne. Now, they hope to steal him back with Agnes.
I only see my father once a day when we dine in the great hall, and by the silence that falls on the household as I walk past the servants’ tables, I know that everyone thinks me shamed to be returned to Morley Hallingbury from my palace of Beaulieu. Exiled from myfather’s library, I sit beside the fire in my mother’s private room in the evening, and we sew by candlelight, and sometimes I read aloud to her – Romances in English or lives of saints.
There is nothing of interest in her room; she has no papers on the reform of the Church or books on the new learning. Her confessor, the priest who served in our chapel, silently moved to the parish church in the village when the Church reformed and the pope was dishonoured. Now, the chapel in our house is cold and quiet and closed, and the priest preaches from the pulpit in the village church that the king is Supreme Head of the Church. His theology is a mash of old faith and reform. He omits all prayers for the Holy Father, but still serves the mass in the old way, drones on in Latin, and absent-mindedly keeps all the feasts and holy days as if they are not forbidden. My mother does not notice, and since my father is the owner of the church and pays the priest, no one will know, unless there is an inspection from the bishop. I don’t even care. The heated discussions about the reform of religion that I had with Anne and George seem far away and pointless. I can barely remember them. Perhaps I will never argue with George again; perhaps I will never agree with him again. I am dropped – I don’t know if I will ever be picked up.
When I hear nothing from any of them, not from Thomas Howard my patron, not from my mother-in-law, not from Anne, not even from the husband who promised to cleave to me until death parted us, I realise that the Boleyns, Anne and George, and the Howards are like Machiavelli’s courtiers, only true to themselves. All their talk is courtier-talk: the glazed smile, the false face, the sweet word – always a means to an end. George writes love poetry for its wit – not for love. He is master of the buckhounds – not to hunt but so he can ride beside the king. He married me – not for love; but because our lands ran alongside each other, because my dowry was good, because my father was an influential scholar in the days when the king prized scholarship. He told me that he was glad to be my husband, because anything else would havebeen impolite, and George has beautiful manners. But none of the Boleyns or Howards or the royal court itself ever cared for me – for myself. I was dear to them when I served them well. When I failed: they dropped me.
I know this – but I have to repeat it over and over again in order to fix it in my mind. My father did not love me more than any lord cares for his children in their distant nursery. It amused him that a little girl would run from her mother to be his clerk in his library, and then he was proud to claim his daughter was as clever as Margaret More.
Thomas Howard did not love me; I was his spy in miniature, a weapon hidden by childhood. My innocence, my trust in him, made me a powerful tool. Nobody has ever wanted my happiness, nobody has ever thought of it.
As the days go on, I walk through the woods and in the meadows of the park, now enclosed in a huge wall to preserve the game: nothing can run free in Tudor England, not even deer. As I kick the fallen leaves in a swirl of colour around my feet, I mutter like a madwoman, speaking hard truths to myself. I have to teach the little girl I once was, that to be used is not the same as to be loved. When I know that, when it is clear to me, like a theorem becomes clear on the page, I think I have completed my education in heartbreak.
Then I have another thought. I did not come to George as a bride wanting love, to Anne as a girl wanting a sister. By then, I was a knowing child. I had worked as a courtier and a spy in a suspicious court for years. My love for them was a mixture of need and ambition. What I really wanted from Anne, from George, from the duke, was to be one of them, inside the Howard family and a viscountess by marriage. I was not so much married into their family as recruited into a faction, protected from the Spanish party; but when we were in trouble, I was faithless to them as they were to me.
I walk on muddy paths that grow hard with winter frost and think that I am not an innocent victim. I, too, spoke words of lovebut preferred secrets. I said that I loved them, but I sold them out: my aunt the duchess to my uncle, Anne’s dead baby to him, Anne’s inability to seduce the king to George, the king’s impotency to my uncle. I have never been true to any one of them. For a moment, I pride myself that I have never betrayed George; but then I realise that in the ten years of marriage, he has never trusted me with any secret. But even so... even so... still, it gives me a small comfort to think that I have never been a traitor to George.
