A harvest supper is laid out in the great hall, and we eat country style – no French forks, no elegant napkins, no silver salters, just great loaves of bread on the table, whole roasted hams and chickens, and the servers bring in great mugs of ale and cider. Anne is queen of the feast at the foot of the table; but Mary Shelton as queen of the harvest is seated beside the king at the head. The king has captured Jane Seymour and forced her to sit, blushing, on his left. Her brother Edward sits beside her to monitor any word she might dare to whisper. Lady-harvesters and pretend-peasants sit side by side at the same table, without precedence in a celebration of misrule: the world turned upside-down.
The old lords and their wives are nowhere to be seen – they knew it would be the sort of romp that they despise but cannot condemn while the king is in the heart of the fun, fooling like a man half his age. It could not be more successful in creating light-hearted laughter in the queen’s court and showing the old guard that they are out of time and out of place and that the king is like us – young and daring and merry.
Anne has George on one side of her, making her laugh and drawing all eyes away from the king and Mary Shelton, and Henry Norris is on her left, whispering in her ear and giving her the best cuts of meat. I see her toss her head at some impertinent whisper and she glances down the table to see if the king is watching her. Margaret Douglas is beside the baby-faced Lord Thom and Anne Parr beside William Herbert.
Thomas Cromwell should make a map of this table like his maps of church lands, showing the family connections and the secrets that join one place to another. He would have acarteof the courtlyloves that he pretends to find so bemusing, and he could judge if they, like the church houses, are also corrupt.
‘You’re new,’ says a voice at my elbow, and the king’s fool, still dressed in a white smock like a harvester, shows me his empty hands, palms and then the backs of his hands.
‘I’ve been at court since I was a little girl,’ I tell him. ‘It’s you who are new.’
‘No, I’ve been a fool since I was born,’ he replies. ‘I was a fool in my cradle.’
‘I think everyone is a fool in the cradle,’ I say.
‘D’you think we are fools to be born?’ he asks, as if he is interested in my opinion. He turns both his palms upwards, and now he has a cherry in each hand.
I clap my hands at the trick. ‘Are the cherries for me?’
‘Can you make them disappear?’
I take them from his hand, and I put them in my mouth.
He claps his hands just as I did, with the same insincere smile. ‘See? You can be a fool like me.’
‘I’m the king’s sister-in-law, a Boleyn,’ I tell him, thinking he does not know me. ‘I’m no fool.’
‘Bless you!’ he says with his friendly grin. ‘The Boleyns are the greatest fools of all.’
The king’s eyes are on us; he nods to me to come towards him. My belly sinks with fear as I rise to my feet, step away from my stool, and curtsey to him. ‘Your Majesty,’ I say – using the new title, knowing he prefers it.
‘Majesty’ suits him: he is no longer the informal prince that they called the handsomest in Christendom; he has aged in the year I have been away, thickened, lost his hair. His neck, his shoulders, his chest have grown bullish, the skin on his face coarsened by weather and hard drinking. His thick neck and chin are hidden by the beard, his forehead broadened by the new hair cut. But he is still the greatest man in England, one of the richest men in the world, the brightest star in my childhood skies. I think I will die of shame if he says oneword against me or refuses my return in front of everyone. He has become majestic, to suit his new title.
His smile is like sunshine breaking through thunderclouds. He beckons me towards him. ‘Why it’s pretty Jane come back to us!’ he exclaims. ‘Why have you been so long away, Jane, my sweetheart?’
There’s no time to glance at Anne for a prompt; George is blandly smiling.
I give my courtier laugh and declare: ‘Madness, Your Majesty. I must have been mad to be away from you for so long!’
And he gives a great bellow of laughter, throws open his arms, and wraps me in a hug like a bear, like a baited bear in a pit will crush a silly little bitch in his great arms.
Eltham Palace, Christmas
1535
IREMEMBER THAT THEfool called the Boleyns fools like himself when the head of our house, my uncle Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, brings his daughter Mary to court for Christmas hoping that she will finally be allowed to bed the king’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy. Surely, this year, at sixteen years old, Fitzroy must be thought strong enough to be a husband? He’s strong enough to ride all day with his kinsman Lord Thom; they’re strong enough to forever hang around the ladies at court, both of them poets, both of them courtly lovers, exchanging sonnets with Mary Shelton and the king’s niece, Margaret Douglas – brimming with youthful lust and rhymes.
My uncle the duke has been grinding his yellow teeth for two years, waiting for the king to allow his precious only son to confirm the marriage. Without a bedding, the wedding can be cancelledand denied, and my uncle’s hopes for a Tudor-Howard grandson destroyed. But Thomas Howard is the only one in a hurry for this consummation, not the king – whose favour to the duke is always half-hearted, unless he needs him to kill somebody – and not Anne, who regrets agreeing to the marriage.
Thomas Howard would not know ahypothetical syllogismif it curtseyed to him, but he must be haunted by the one that runs:if, if, then...IfAnne fails to get a son,ifPrincess Elizabeth is disqualified from the throne for her sex,ifLady Mary – both woman and named bastard – is disqualified too,ifthe bastard Fitzroy gets a boy on Mary Howard,thenthere is a Tudor-Howard baby son and royal heir!
But the young couple are in no hurry to serve the Howard ambition. Young Henry Fitzroy is in love with a different girl every time he walks into the queen’s rooms. He does not need a wife to slake his thirst; there are plenty of girls at the riverside inns where the young men go in the evening. Mary Howard, the bride, does nothing to encourage the husband she married at her father’s command. She is a cold-hearted young woman, coolly obedient to her father, and completely estranged from her mother since the woman was locked up on my information.
She’s no great friend to me for that. She probably knows I betrayed her mother for plotting with the Spanish party, and she barely smiles at me when I greet her and my uncle in the huge Eltham Palace presence chamber. The duke kisses me on the forehead as if I had never been disgraced and sent away from court. He acts as if he has forgotten that he failed me; but I have not forgotten.
‘Ah, my dear friend Jane! You’re welcome back to court,’ he tells me. ‘Your sister-in-law will need you in her confinement. When does she go into confinement?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say unhelpfully. ‘She has not announced a date.’
