Secrets of the Tudor Court (4 page)

I kneel in the hay, not caring about the state of my dress. Both Henrys kneel beside me.

"Do you think she'll let us pet them?"

"I should say," says Harry with the authoritative tone of an expert. "Do you think so, Surrey?"

My brother nods and I reach out a tentative hand, first to the mother, whose elongated snout I stroke while cooing soft endearments about her ability to breed. Once I am certain she is comfortable with me I reach out to pet one of her pups; the fur is silky soft under my hand and I purr with pleasure. I gather the little creature against my breast.

"It's so dear," I say, kissing its downy head. "Oh, if holding a pup is this wonderful imagine how grand it will be to hold my own babies!" I breathe before I can help myself.

Neither boy says anything; I imagine they don't fantasize about holding babies very often.

"Do you want to keep it, Mary?" Harry asks.

I glow at the prospect. "Do you think it's ready? I couldn't bear the thought of separating it from its mother too early."

"It's fine," reassures my brother, whom I decide to refer to as Surrey as well, just to differentiate him from all the other Henrys running about court.

I meet the gaze of the mother, as though seeking a glint of permission in the great brown orbs. I wonder what it is like to have a child taken away. Nobles give their children up for fostering most of the time and do not see their children but for a handful of times a year. Some don't see their children for years at a time.

If I take this pup, its mother will never see it again.

Something about the thought brings a lump to my throat. I blink back tears.

"Mary..." My brother rubs my shoulder. "Don't you want the nice pup Harry's offered?"

I nod. "Oh, yes, to be sure. But to separate it from the mother..."

"Mary's so sensitive!" Surrey laughs. "You have a poet's heart--like me." He wraps his arm about my shoulders and kisses my cheek.

"Do you want it or not?" Harry asks, but his tone is good-natured. "I have a mind to withdraw the offer--you know it will fare much better with you than out here."

This is true enough. I pat the mother's head in a gesture of gratitude, then rise with the pup in my arms. "Thank you, Harry."

He offers a courtly bow and I return a curtsy. We erupt into laughter at our sport as we return to the tiltyard to watch the jousting.

As I reach the stands to show the girls my new pup I see Anne watching me, a grin of amusement lifting the corner of her pretty mouth.

It is a perfect day; the sun shines off the armor of the knights and I am blinded at times as they ride past. We are treated to a superb show of sportsmanship and my throat is raw from screaming for the various champions.

King Henry takes the day, of course. Madge Shelton whispers to me that everyone lets him win else the consequences are dire. I giggle before I can help myself. He is a spoiled child! Yet I suppose he did not choose to be. He is a king and kings were first princes, spoiled and petted just for the sake of being born to the right folk.

He wouldn't even have become king had his sickly brother Arthur not passed on. In fact, he would not have married Catherine of Aragon, Arthur's own widow, at enormous inconvenience to a great many people, including the Church he rails against now, had it not been for that fact.

Yes, King Henry is very accustomed to getting what he wants. So accustomed that he does not even know there is another way to live. That is why he raises friends up only to cast them down at a whim, because no one has curbed him thus far. He will keep pushing and testing his limits and still he will not be curbed.

I wonder if his son, so close to being a prince himself, will take after him. I squeeze the puppy to my chest. I hope not.

That night as I report to Norfolk I am ecstatic. It has been a wonderful day, a day etched in memory and emblazoned in my heart. It is a day of innocence and perfection that will sustain me through the days that follow.

I am playing a prank on Norfolk tonight. The day and company of my brother have put me in a mischievous mood. I dress in my nightgown and wrap, concealing the puppy within as I bounce into his chambers.

"Wasn't it a wonderful day, Father?" I ask, beaming as I clutch my wrap tight about the warm, wriggling pup.

He says nothing. He looks down at the eternal display of papers scattered across his desk.

I tell him the things I imagine he wants to hear, verbatim conversations that have no consequence or relevance that I can see, but are the best I can come up with.

"I think Anne is smart, Father," I venture.

At this he looks up. "As smart as a woman can be, I suppose," he says. "But she is greedy and headstrong. That same temper that so charms His Majesty now could someday prove her ruin."

I shudder at the words. I do not like to hear anything bad said against my mistress, for I consider Anne more my mistress than Queen Catherine for all my interactions with the latter. I decide now is the perfect time to unleash my little joke. Norfolk seems in as good a humor as possible for him, so it may as well be now.

I clutch my wrap around me and double over. "Oh, Father, I have the worst stomach pains. Perhaps something disagreed with me today!"

"Go to bed," he says in his taciturn manner.

At once I open my wrap and out springs my new puppy. He runs around the room to investigate everything.

"Isn't he wonderful?" My cheeks hurt from smiling. "Harry Fitzroy gave him to me so I call him Fitz, after him."

"Sounds like a seizure," says Norfolk as he watches the dog relieve himself on the leg of his desk. After a slight pause he asks, "Are you a complete idiot?"

I gather the pup in my arms, chastising it in gentle tones. I do not respond to Norfolk's query, as I am not quite sure. I may be a complete idiot. I did think it would be funny to see a dog jump out of my robes, but Anne has told me countless times that my sense of humor is rather quaint. God knows Will Somers, the king's fool, could make me laugh till I begged him to cease in his antics for the pangs in my sides, and his sense of humor is none too sophisticated.

"I'm sorry, Father," I say as I right myself. I bow my head.

"Clean it up," he orders.

"Do you have some rags...?"

"Use your wrap, foolish girl," he says. "You want a dog, you deal with its unpleasantness with the accoutrements at your present dispensation."

I am horrified at this. Not only because I have to sacrifice my favorite red velvet wrap from Mary Carey, but because I will have to walk through the halls of the palace in nothing but my nightclothes, and though I am still considered a child, I feel too old to prance about thus.

After a moment of staring at my father without effect, I remove my wrap and wipe up the offensive reminder of my puppy's less attractive habits. I call for a ewer filled with rose water to make certain the scent does not remain behind. The servant who brings it casts a strange look at my father and I am both angered and embarrassed. I do not want anyone looking down at him for my foolishness, nor do I want anyone seeing me stooped to this level of humility.

"You'll have to varnish the leg if any is stripped off," Norfolk says.

I nod, praying this isn't the case. I right myself, shivering. His rooms are cold.

"So you were with your brother today," Norfolk says in a lighter voice, as though nothing had happened. "Did he tell you he is betrothed?"

"Betrothed?" I am aghast. Henry married? "To who?"

"Anne had hoped to the Princess Mary, but that is not to be," he continues with a slight scowl. "Which is for the best. We do not want to be accused of placing ourselves too close to the throne. As it is..." He cuts himself short. There is no doubt he is thinking of Anne. "It is Lady Frances de Vere, the Earl of Oxford's daughter. They will not marry for quite some time, but the suit is a good one."

"Yes," I say for lack of anything else. I cannot imagine Henry married. This means I am not far behind. A thrill of excitement surges through me. "I wish it were me," I blurt.

"Getting married? Whatever for?" Norfolk's tone leaves its monotony to become incredulous. "Marriage is a tedious thing."

"Maybe not for everyone," I tell him, stroking my pup's silky ear. "I heard that the king's own sister has married for love before."

"And has been repaid by nothing but misery for it," Norfolk says. "One doesn't marry for love, Mary. One marries for advantage. There are only two kinds of people in this world: the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Everything you do, every choice you make, is to ensure that you remain in the former group. Getting caught up in love and lust and such nonsense are distractions the advantaged cannot afford if they want to retain their position."

"But King Henry loves Anne," I say in a small voice.

Norfolk is silent a long moment. "Go to bed, Mary." I turn and trudge out, carrying my soiled wrap balled up under one arm and my puppy wriggling under the other. "And don't bring that
creature
in here again," he adds.

I keep my head down as I walk through the halls, hoping not to run into anyone I know. All I want to do is snuggle under the covers with my new puppy, who is worthy of being called more than a
creature
. I want to think about love and marriage and my brother Surrey.

I want to believe that love can exist, even for the advantaged.

Time does not pass at court as it would in what I now refer to as "the outside world." Out there, time ebbs and flows like the tides--it surges, it slows. Here it is always surging, forging ahead, constant. If you slow your pace you are drowned. I am caught up, carried along by the current of the other ladies, of Anne, of my father.

We go on progress to visit the many great castles and palaces in the realm. We go on hunts. We have masques, and King Henry leaps out at us in disguise. Norfolk instructs Anne that she is under no circumstances to ever admit that she knows it is Henry--he loves believing he is fooling everyone. I laugh, but I think it is a little ridiculous. How could a grown man, and one as distinctive in manner and height as he, ever believe he can be shrouded in anonymity? I decide that he needs to believe it the way I need to believe in the faerie folk and love matches: anything to take you away.

Poor old Cardinal Wolsey, whose obesity and pomposity had been the source of much amusement, dies that November. He keeled over on the road on his progress to London for his execution for treason, so I felt a little better. I am certain he would rather have died on the road than by the axe. I can only imagine how many times it would have taken to strike through that thick neck. I cringe at the thought.

Anne cheers when she hears the news. "Rid of the old fool at last!" she cries.

At my obvious puzzlement regarding her joy over what I consider tragic and pathetic, Madge Shelton, ever the informer, pulls me aside.

"He was one of the parties responsible for breaking her betrothal to Lord Henry Percy," she explains.

"She was betrothed?" I ask, incredulous. Betrothal was as good as marriage; many took to the pleasures of the bed as soon as their troth was pledged.

Madge nods, eager to be the deliverer of this gossip. "How could you not know? Your father helped dispel the match with the zeal he'd exert in putting down a Scottish rebellion!" She shrugs then. "But I forget how young you are. You were at Kenninghall when all that happened." She casts a sidelong look at our tempestuous cousin. "But our Anne never forgot Wolsey's part in it all, and some think it was her more than anyone who pushed the king to have Wolsey executed. I think King Henry was just as content to have him left where he was."

My heart sinks to hear such news of my pretty cousin. I am too young to understand what heartbreak does to a person, how it embitters and twists them. I can only think with sympathy of poor fat Wolsey, dying on a muddy road.

"It's a good thing he passed," Anne herself chimes in from where she sits at the window seat of her grand apartments. She had been tuning her lute, but we should have known she didn't care a fig whether it was in tune; she was too attuned to our conversation. "That man was after the pope's tiara and nothing more. He would have tried to hold us back as long as he lived."

I shudder at the venom in her tone.

"And as far as Henry Percy is concerned, I'd prefer if you did not mention his name again!" she cries. "Let him rot in misery up in Northumberland with his pasty-faced wife." She tosses back her head and laughs, that chilling, immoderate laughter that causes me to avert my head as though I am witnessing someone's private insanity. She glares at Madge and me with wild eyes. "I am assured he is miserable," she says, breathless. "Which serves him well. He was weak and God curse weak men!"

That curse must not be entirely sincere, I think to myself. She must prefer her current Henry to be weak, else she wouldn't have been able to manipulate him into authorizing the execution of Wolsey. Wisely, I do not give voice to this theory.

Time, that raging river, keeps surging. Thomas More, another close friend of the king and a man quite unyielding in his convictions, becomes lord chancellor. My gut immediately lurches with fear for the quiet man; friends this close to the king do not seem to fare well.

In 1531 Parliament makes King Henry supreme head of the Church of England; now we are an island in more ways than geography. We are like a separate entity. We are accused of Lutheranism, but that is not the king's intent. He wishes to uphold Catholic ideology: he just does not want to acknowledge papal authority. He truly believes it is his divine right to rule over Church and state. I wonder if this is so. All my life I have been told that the king's authority is second to God, but there is something about His Majesty...something that does not seem altogether godlike to me. I dare think that neither he nor the pope is fit to assume such a heady role. But I never say so; the consequences of such opinions are grave.

That year two people are banished from court. The first is my mother, a figure I saw so rarely she may as well have not been there to begin with. Her crime was offending Anne by playing go-between for Queen Catherine and her ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, hiding messages in baskets of oranges. The king, displeased that Mother caused such a ruckus, sends her home to Kenninghall.