The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (69 page)

Read The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers Online

Authors: Margaret George

BOOK: The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
12.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Culpepper’s wounds were slight. He had been pricked by a lance-tip that somehow found its way between the overlapping thigh-plates of his armour. The surgeon had cleansed his wound and bound it with pink satin.
“Her
colours,” said Culpepper with a wink, as he reported back to my sleeping chamber for duty. He unwound the satin carefully and placed it reverently on his night-table.
“Whose?” I forced myself to ask, casuallyours.
“—turnips.”
They crowed with pleased laughter. I enjoyed hearing Anne’s delight. Without the shadow of my presence, she seemed a lighthearted person, altogether at odds with her leaden appearance.
“Very good, sweetheart,” I said, strolling into the room. The laughter ceased. That hurt me.
“Come, come,” I chided. “Do not interrupt yourselves for my sake. What else is in the market? A fat hog, perhaps?”
But they would not resume. Feeling let down, both in my original intention of seeing Mistress Catherine and, unaccountably, in having intruded on Anne and being excluded, I made my way back to my own chamber. This was the time when I would gladly have saddled a horse, gone hunting, left the palace and my feelings behind. But I was not now capable of riding. Lately my leg-ulcer caused me such pain from being rubbed on a saddle that I no longer could endure it. Moping about my chamber on this bleak February day, I called for one of the few pleasures left to me—Will.
Will worked, still, when wine failed and company palled. Almost imperceptibly he had passed from being an entertainer for my private moments, witty and full of scabrous gossip, to being a listener and a wise commentator—especially after Jane had died and I simply could not abide fools about me, I mean
true
fools, not professional jesters. Fools who murmured unctuous platitudes about how “time will heal all” and “you will rejoin her in heaven,” and “she would not want you to grieve overmuch.” It was Will alone who was honest and brave enough to say, “I know that you would trade the remainder of your life to speak to her for just a quarter of an hour on the most trivial subject.” And I could answer, “Yes.”
Now I relied on him more and more, telling myself that I must not, as to place so much trust and need on a single person was to court Fate overmuch. I had only to remember Wolsey, More, and Jane herself.
He stood before me in the work chamber, in his ordinary clothes. He seldom wore cap and bells anymore, as the costume offended his sensibilities and was necessary only if he performed in public. Before me, at eleven in the morning, it would have been absurd.
“Will,” I muttered, “I am utterly lost, forlorn.”
His dark quick eyes searched mine. “No, Hal”—he preferred to call me Hal, as no one else ever did—“you are
bored.
Call it by its proper name.”
“What is boredom, then? Define it for me.” Already boredom had flown, at Will’s magic touch.
“Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine—that is, activity—which could resolve it, is seen as odious. Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw. Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on. Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most un-manning. Eventually it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing—a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.”
“You make it sound romantic, and doomed.”
He shrugged. “It can be. The odd thing about it is that it is so easily cured. One need only force himself to perform the ‘boring’ acti wood pattern that one had stared at when at a certain hurtful juncture at one’s life. Without these, ghosts were flown. Katherine had been here; Anne, too. Jane as maid of honour. Each of them had made the place so different, in her own time, that it seemed surrounded by different bricks; it seemed the windows should give out on different views.
I glanced out the east window from the Queen’s Privy Chamber. The same Thames flowed by, rushing now and swollen with the spring waters. I looked about me, rejoicing in the bare boards and open rooms. I always became excited at new beginnings, and that was what empty rooms meant to me.
Within my mind I heard music—vanished music from other rooms, other times. Such was my mood that morning that I did not question it but stood and listened. Slow, long, plaintive ... things that once had been, but were no more ... it had a sad beauty all its own.
They were real notes, though. A false one was struck, whereas a false one was never struck in memory....
I moved forward, turning my head. The sound was stronger in my left ear. It was coming from the rooms deeper within the Queen’s suite. I passed through the audience chamber, through the outer council chamber. The sound was richer. I stood in the entranceway that branched to both the left and the right, and I could not discern from whence the sound came. I waited some moments, holding my breath. My ears did not decide for me, but my intellect. I knew (being one, myself) that musicians always preferred natural light to artificial. Windows lined the left side of the Queen’s apartments, letting in God’s light. Therefore I went to the left, and—
Stopped absolutely, my breath frozen, movements arrested, while my mind recorded for all time the sight of a great, ivory-keyed virginal, all naked in a stripped room, with Mistress Catherine Howard leaning against it, picking out notes. I watched her labouring, alone in the room, an expression of pure delight on her face. I knew what it meant to be left alone for a whole day to play a new instrument, to learn and master it with no one listening. It surpassed sensuality, it surpassed almost all other experiences.
Each note sounded out loud and clear, flinging itself jubilantly into the spring air. I stood, hidden, as long as I dared. Then I felt it was deceitful, so to intrude and spy on an artist’s solitude, and I stepped out boldly.
“Mistress Howard,” I said simply, making my way across the worn floorboards toward her, “I see that you, too, delight in a well-tuned virginal.”
She gasped and drew back, like a child caught at something naughty. “Your—Your Majesty—” She stumbled up and grasped at her skirts. The pushed-back virginal bench fell with a crash behind her.
“Nay, nay.” I hated it when, in a private situation, I evoked embarrassment and fear. Officially, of course, it was different. “I myself enjoy practising in deserted rooms, where no one can possibly overhear.”
She bent over and pulled up the fallen bench.
“Pray you,” I said in what I hoped was my most soothing voice, “continue your playing. I always enjoyed hearing the Lady Mary play the virginals, and—”
Not Anne Boleyn. I shut out that horrible memory, of . I 221;
The lass smiled and smoothed her skirts. “At my grandmother’s. I had a tutor.”
“When did you begin? You must have studied for many years.” I seated myself beside her on the narrow bench.
“No. I”—she thought swiftly—“it was for one year only, when I was thirteen. Yet I studied diligently then. And continued to practise after my tutor had departed.”
“You enjoy music, then?”
“I love it.” She smiled. I was struck by her composure; but then, when artists come together, it often happens that their calling overcomes shyness, differences in station, everything. We speak a common language, and everything else is hushed. It happened, even, that my love and desire for her were set aside for a moment in the glow of her music, where we became equals.
I reached out and fingered the keyboard, remembering old melodies; she listened. Then she played, and I listened. Midway she laughed, and I glanced at her glowing skin and deep black lashes and was overcome with love, desire, all blended and heightened by the music and even, absurdly, by the virginal before us with its chipped old keys.
She turned to look at me, not averting her eyes, as proper maidens do, but looking me full in the face. Her eyes were ice-blue and rimmed in some darker colour, which only made her appear all the more remote and untouched, waiting for me.
“Catherine,” I finally said, astounded at how calm and unwavering my voice was, “I love to hear you play, and I fain would play beside you all my life. There is much of me that has been lost, misplaced—not irretrievably, as I had feared-but for a time. I would share that person with you, and in return I would give you—I would give you—whatever your heart longs for,” I finished weakly.
“A new virginal?” she asked. “The keys of this—”
She did not understand! “Certainly, that. But, my dear, what I am asking you—”
What I am asking you is this: Can you love an old man of near fifty? Can you be wife to him?
“—is whether you would be my—”
Whether you would consent to be Queen? One does not beg someone to accept a high state office! It is its own reward!
“—whether you would wed me?”
She stared at me as if I were mad. Then she said, slowly, “I cannot ... no ... it cannot be ... you have a wife already.”
Anne Boleyn’s words! I felt flung into a vortex of time, where nothing had changed, and we were condemned to repeat the same mistakes and words forever and ever.... Your wife I cannot be, for you have a wife already; and your mistress I will not be....
“I have no wife!” Those words, too, were the same. “I have the power to put her aside.” Different words, now. Words earned through six long years of testing.
“You mean—I would be Queen?”
“If you consent to become my wife, yes.”
She shook her head, dazed. “Little Catherine Howard size="3">And the chance to speak has gone to yours, I thought. Call Cromwell what you like, you fool, he never lets himself be flattered, and he never lets down his guard. He would never betray his mind so. I looked at Surrey contemptuously. “They come from good stock. It is upon such honest, decent Englishmen that the future of the realm depends.”
“Aye, aye,” he quickly agreed, eager to be as beguiling as he imagined himself. “Certainly they are not made of the same material as
Cromwell,
no—for they
are
honest, and have no secret plans of any sort, beyond recognition for themselves. But Cromwell, well, we don’t know his desires, do we? He does not seem to want any of the things any normal man would want. There’s talk” —he smiled a puzzled smile—“that he’s the Devil.”
I wanted to laugh, but it never came.
“There are those who, I’m told, can actually strike a bargain with Satan. They sit down and work out a contract with him, just as you do with the money-lenders of Antwerp. ‘So-and-so much interest to be paid on the loan of twenty thousand pounds, due on Whitsun of 1542,’ you say, and it is done. ‘My soul in exchange for such-and-such,’ they say, and it is done. Cromwell appears to have—I mean, there are so many signs—”
He meant it. All the playfulness and deceit was gone from his face.
“My dear son, you—”
“Catherine!” said Surrey, as if a spell were being broken. Catherine had seen us deep in talk, and come over. She tugged playfully at her cousin’s arm.
“They are taking seats,” she chided him, “and you will not be able to see.”
Her presence took us out of that dangerous realm where we had entered, just for a moment. She grinned up at Surrey. They were cousins, first cousins. I could see little resemblance between them. Surrey was slender and blonde, Catherine small and auburn-haired. Both had pale skin, that was all.
I reached out my arm to her, and together we found seats and prepared to listen to a series of compositions performed on a reed instrument by a young man from Cornwall.
He was small and dark, like all his people. The melodies were haunting, dreamlike, unlike anything I had heard before. They spoke to a soft, lost side of myself.
Afterwards I talked to him. I had a bit of trouble understanding his accent, as his mother tongue was Cornish. I complimented him on his musicianship and enquired after the sources of his melodies.
“I modelled them on native melodies, Your Grace,” he said. “There are similar tunes across the sea in Brittany,” he added. “Often my father and I cross there, and while he does his business, I do mine.”
“And what is his business?”
“He is a fisherman, Your Grace.”
“And yours?”
“A musician.”
“And only that?”
“Aye. It’s what I’m called to.”
“But what of your father’s trade?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps somewhere a musician/div>
She reached out and slid her hand along my cheek. The faint light from the boatmen’s torches lit the left side of her face—a half-mask.
“You are a half moon,” I murmured, leaning over to kiss her. She returned that kiss heartily, hungrily, sweetly. I quivered, shuddered, erupted with desire.
“Nay, nay—” she was whispering, her voice rising in urgency. “My Lord!”
I was ashamed. I had frightened her, threatened her chastity. “Forgive me,” I said. My breath was still coming in short gasps.
She drew her cloak around her. Jesu, how could I have insulted her so? She was crying.
“Catherine, I meant no harm. But this—this is unnatural.” At that moment I knew it, felt it. “We must be wed straightway. It is meant to be. No more standing before the Thames, alive with longing.” Even the slap-slap-slap of the water against the riverbank sounded sexual to me. “I will speak to Cromwell tomorrow.”
Still she kept her face buried in her cloak, her shoulders hunched. I reached out a steadying hand. “Hush now.” I soothed her. When she had done crying, I put one arm around her and led her back to her waiting barge. She leaned against me all the way, and yet when the time came to play her part to her waiting uncle Norfolk, she smiled gaily and threw off the hood of the cloak as she joined him in the Howard barge.
Her cousin Surrey, the Lady Norris, Mary, widow of my lost son Fitzroy: all the Howard youngsters awaited her in the barge, and she outshone them all. As the rowers pulled away from the riverbanks, and the sound of music and the faint lantern light echoed and reflected on the water, I wondered what it was to belong to such a great tribal family, and how it felt.

Other books

SEAL Survival Guide by Courtley, Cade
151 Days by John Goode
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
Absolution by LJ DeLeon
The Green Red Green by Red Green
Blow by Sarah T. Ashley
Beckoned (The Brazil Werewolf Series) by Amanda K. Dudley-Penn