To Obey and Serve Read online

  Note

  In the autumn of 1534, the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys reported that King Henry VIII had taken as his mistress “a very handsome young lady of the court.” Her name is not recorded, though she was probably one of the ladies-in-waiting to Queen Anne Boleyn. This unknown woman was said to be sympathetic to the Princess Mary, and to have sent her several encouraging messages hinting at a plan to supplant Queen Anne and restore England to the Church. She then vanishes from the pages of history as mysteriously as she steps into them.

  This is her story.

  “…mine offence being so lawfully proved, your grace may be at liberty…to follow your affection already settled on that party for whose sake I am now as I am, whose name some good while since I could have pointed unto - your grace being not ignorant of my suspicions therein.”

  From Anne Boleyn’s last letter to Henry VIII, 6 May 1536

  PROLOGUE

  She was only a knight’s daughter, but she had ambition.

  And why should she not? She had the pedigree: a father who’d fought beside the king on the French campaigns, and been rewarded with a position at court; a mother who could boast the trace of royal blood from Edward I, fit to mingle with a king’s. By the time she was twenty-five she had served as maid of honor to two queens, and learned that manners could work a stronger kind of magic than beauty alone. Not that she was beautiful—most who saw her agreed on that. But beauty fades, like a portrait in direct sun; an ambitious woman must have more to offer. I should know.

  I think I knew, from the first time I saw her, that she was a woman who would stop at nothing. In a way I admired her for it, even envied her. She was far more ambitious than the courtiers or the other royal mistresses, with their smaller hungers for titles and lands. It wasn’t the king she wanted; he was simply a means to an end. The queen at his side, once so firmly enthroned, had outworn her usefulness and appeal. The price of power was binding herself to him, as simple as sewing: cut one thread, tighten another.

  She was canny enough to resist for a long time, protesting her virtue in that way she knew would madden him further. And her gamble paid off: a private wedding ceremony at Whitehall Palace; queen at last. Consummatum est. Had she known she would end up paying with her life, I doubt it would have stopped her.

  And all the while she trod this dangerous line on small, delicate feet, balancing between gaiety and piety, temptation and innocence, the way the Gypsy lads walk a stretched rope at fairs. A woman of great appetites and small conscience, was Mistress Jane Seymour.

  I knew her better than anyone else, even her own sister, and not even I could have imagined that she could do what she did. But they sing praises of her virtue now, and so it remains my secret: I never trusted that bitch at all.

  They said later that she sprang out of obscurity, her many quiet years at the English court unremarked and unrecorded. Yet the years we served together in the queen’s household were very real to us: the smell of the long gallery on spring evenings, dust and velvet drapery, laughing at the silliness of the other maids of honor. The silken feel of polished wood, hiding in the window-seat from our duties and talking of the Church, books, the new Flemish-style paintings. The sharp taste of grief when her betrothal to the man she loved was broken. Our shared fears, our quarrels and peacemakings, our longings for happiness. We kept each other’s secrets, and keep them still.

  Until tonight. I sit with the pen she gave me, book open and candle guttering, the ink drying on the nib between dippings.

  I don’t want to tell her story; this is my book. No one remembers, now, that the king once loved me. This is my chance for an epitaph. Yet she creeps in around the edges of the creamy vellum pages. Even now, her hand guides this quill she gave to me.

  I could simply write this, over and over, like a schoolgirl copying in a hornbook: Every human life is a story, and every one ends badly.

  There is no such thing as sin; we do what we must. Nicholas says the worst punishment the ancients inflicted on their enemies was to destroy their likenesses and monuments, strike their lives and even their names from the written record. I tell him he reads too much.

  So, for her sins and mine, I will try to restore her here: I can tell you that she sewed well, and sang beautifully; that she giggled at bawdy jokes, and was overfond of fine clothes and jewels, and did not shy from belching or breaking wind (peculiar to many English women, I have found). That I alone knew, from our whispered confidences in the gallery, that she was no virgin on her wedding night. That she disliked lapdogs, and was fond of hypocras wine. She knew my worst fears were of cannon and slaughter, and I knew she feared growing old above all things - except perhaps her father.

  They are only words. They take shape on the page, but they cannot resurrect her; she does not rise from my ash-and-walnut-ink scribblings. Most of the portraits that survive now were painted after her death, and look nothing like her.

  Would it make her live again if I told you she was virtuous yet proud, kind yet ruthless? That she had flaws—picking at the skin around her nails until they bled, an eye that looked ever so slightly askance—which she hid well? More than once I saw her torment someone in misery. More than once she was haughty with me, the other maids, her own servants, even her own mistress. She did not shrink from causing bloodshed, or turning the king against those he loved, or stepping lightly to the throne after the death of the queen she had once served, a death she hastened.

  You have heard the story many times. Even now they tell it as though it ends with the fall of the ax on Tower Green, as if the birth of the heir and savior England had awaited for twenty-eight years, the plunder of the monasteries, the terrible fury from the North were things to be glossed over quickly. To have your whole life reduced to a postscript, to be remembered as a walking womb…Jane Seymour deserved both a better fate, and a worse. I will give her both.

  WINDSOR CASTLE, JULY 1537

  There’s a knock at the outer door of the queen’s apartments. I open it, take the tray from the page; the covered dishes are still warm. The ovens in the privy kitchen belowstairs are never cool now, even on summer nights like this one. Everyone makes a special effort to please her these days. Almost everyone, that is.

  She truly eats like a queen: quail from Calais and cherries from the royal orchards. It’s not good for a woman with child to have whatever her fancy craves. I carry the tray through the gallery past each silent chamber, where candlelight from the wall sconces flickers on the newly carved paneling. Finished in record time, last summer.

  It’s the quiet that’s the worst. Not so long ago, these chambers were never quiet. Just after midnight would have been the merriest of all, with dicing and cards and poetry and laughter.

  She’s dismissed the others for a few hours, given them rare leave to scamper off. It’s the time of year when the night air is heavy and sticky, like walking in seawater, when couples who know the grounds well lose their way for an hour during evening walks in the garden. Yet tonight she has requested me here. The babe isn’t due for another two months at least; her conscience cannot be pressing her so close to the grave that she must confess her sins. And anyway, she would confess them to a priest, not to me.

  How long since I’ve been alone with her? Still, one must obey a command from the queen. If she has anything to say, I’d rather not hear it. But I of course have no choice.

  The furthest door in--her bedchamber—is shut. I knock and call: “Your Majesty.”

  The door opens and a tall, lanky figure blocks my way. Though I cannot make out his face right away, I know the form of Tom Seymour. He slouches ever so little to his right, as though he’s bored with everything, or drunk. Perhaps he is both. The smells of musk and bergamot are strong; he drenches his
clothes and even his beard with the stuff.

  “Good evening, mistress,” he says, and moves closer to me. As always he manages to make it sound just short of obscene, as if he’s made a clever double entendre that no one else is quite witty enough to grasp. A grin shows yellow in his beard.

  “Thank you, Thomas,” she says from within. I can’t pass while this oaf is blocking my way. As he stands aside to let me pass, I feel something brush the back of my skirt. It makes no difference that my hands are full. I jerk away, so sharply that some of the wine in its heated silver ewer spills over the rim and slaps onto the tiled floor.

  Once no one would have thought anything of it, for the queen to be closeted alone with her brother. These days it could be dangerous.

  “Remember what I have told you, dear sister,” he says.

  “When I need your counsel, Thomas, I will ask for it. Shut the door on your way out.”

  She sits, almost slumps, in the window seat and does not acknowledge me. Her face is long; her small hands clutch her enormous velveted stomach. Is she in pain, is it the child? No, it’s the same blank look we’ve all seen more and more on her lately. Melancholia. I set the tray down and drop a curtsey so small you’d have to be watching carefully to see it, which she isn’t.

  If I wanted to be kind, I’d leave her alone now, or perhaps offer to call Dr. Butts or bin Rahmat to purge her of the black bile that makes her sluggish with misery. I could call the page to clean up the spilled wine. Instead I stand with hands clasped. Waiting. It’s what well-bred ladies do best.

  When you must wait, it helps to occupy your mind. I describe her to myself, and

  not as the ambassadors do, with all their flattery and praise of her modest demeanor, her excellent character and so on. If you ever hear a woman’s modesty and virtue praised above her accomplishments or gowns or complexion, you’re probably hearing about someone’s ugly sister:

  Our queen is not pretty, no matter how many courtiers and painters and diplomats would like her to be. No one’s ever described her as such; when Ambassador Chapuys wrote to the Emperor about the beautiful woman who caught the king’s eye a few years ago, he wasn’t talking about her. He meant me. Only a foreigner could make such a mistake. You would never confuse us to look at us, though we have much in common.

  Her mouth is small, her skin too pale, even by English standards. The ladies at Archduke Ferdinand’s court were not above helping their complexions with a powder of pearls, chalk and lead, even tracing faint outlines of veins with a blue paint wrung from violets. But Queen Jane’s skin is the flat, shiny pallor of an invalid. It’s nothing to do with the child she carries; she always looks like this. Her fingers are short and pudgy, the nails bitten down, the skin around them raw. Her eyes would be her best feature—for they are a lovely shade of hazel flecked with amber—if only she didn’t keep them lowered most of the time. Everyone mistakes it for modesty. Her one real beauty is her hair: a surprisingly lustrous golden-red, much like the king’s, that ripples and waves halfway down her back. She keeps every strand of it under that gable hood, with those ridiculous lappets folded up—whelk-shell, they call it. I say who wants to look like a creature that lives in the mud?

  The French hoods, now, they perched delicately on the back of the head, gave a teasing glimpse of the hair, had long, lovely veils of precious shimmering stuff hanging down behind. But I haven’t seen a French hood in a long time. No one wears them anymore.

  “You can stop staring at me,” she says.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” I reply, and starting busying myself about the room, making sure the casements are closed. In the bottom corner of one, the queen’s initials are set into the leaded pane: IS. Underneath them, so faint you’d have to run your finger over the glass to be certain, is the faded outline of AB.

  I’m glad we’re not in London. Windsor is one of the healthiest spots in the kingdom, saving only Hampton, where we’ll move in time for the child to be born. It’s far from the plague raging in the city, and Tower Bridge with its fresh crop of heads spiked up. They’ll already have begun to ripen; by the time the court moves back to London for the winter, they’ll be unrecognizable lumps of flesh. But hopefully by then they’ll be gone, despite the decree of a year, taken by the faithful as relics of martyrs. Under cover of night, of course.

  I can tell she’s thinking of them too, of the grisly trophies that will be among the first sights that greet her child as she carries him in triumphant procession through the capital. She’s thinking too that it was her fault, and she is right. The king granted Robert Aske’s wish to be hanged before being cut down and disemboweled, and had him hanged in chains over the gates of York. He lasted six days. Agony even to think of it. He counted on her to intercede for him. She did try.

  “It’s stifling in here,” she says.

  “But Your Grace, the foul humors in the night air will go straight to your stomach.” If she’s forgotten my sworn duty to her, I have not.

  “Please,” she says, but it’s hard and icy, unmistakably a command. If only she would shriek, if only she would give way under the strain, I could think of her as more human. But she’s never been like that. I open one casement a bit, letting in soft air perfumed with green from the park surrounding the castle.

  It’s St. Thomas’s Day. Or used to be. They say the Archbishop of Canterbury ate meat at the banquet today, no more fasting. It was two years ago exactly that Thomas More went to his maker on his saint-day, hairshirt and all. Her brother Tom does not yet ride as high as More, or Beckett, but give him time; the Seymours are nothing if not ambitious.

  The breeze brings the sound of bells tolling faintly in St. George’s Chapel. Although church sounds usually soothe her, this seems to add to her anxiety. Skittish, jumping at shadows. She’ll lose the baby if she isn’t careful.

  “Would Your Grace like anything else?”

  She looks up, one eye off to the wall, the other fixed firmly on me. The mark of witches.

  “Stay with me,” she says. “Stay and get rid of anyone else who comes. I don’t care who it is. Tell them I’m ill, tell them I can’t be disturbed. Or tell them I’m dead. What will it matter?” All the while her hands keep roaming like living things, across the counterpane, over her belly. This is a plea, not a command. I’ve only heard her plead once before, but I recognize it.

  Side by side we sit, as we used to do when we were two maids of honor. Back then we were neither of us innocent, but at least we thought the worst that could happen to us had already happened. Now we know better. Now the breeze shifts the curtains and the wine on the floor dries to a sticky stain and the world outside grows more hellish by the hour and a thousand unspoken thoughts race through our minds. There is nothing to say.

  What has she to look forward to? Another year of heaviness and sickness and pain, and another, until the royal nurseries are full. I can’t bear to watch. Once there was a time when I did not think I would ever be able to look on her again without that surge of hot pain. Now it’s faded to a dull, throbbing scar. The most terrible part is, I care for her still. Though she must never, on any condition, know this. I am all she has. After all, she and I are not so very unalike.

  AUTUMN 1531

  Jane and I were born the same year, 1508-- a year with an extra day in the tail of cold, grey February, which is held to be unlucky. The pagan Scots, so the English say, will shun a child born on such a day. In England, no marriages could ever be performed, no court cases heard, no business done; most folk stayed in and used up their meager stock of extra firewood. It was a day when the world held its breath. And it was on this day that she was born, a weak yet healthy child who did not cry.

  She grew up in her father’s timbered stone house in Wiltshire--a place thick with forests and dark magic, where stone faerie-rings dotted the land like graves. Later, when we talked of our childhoods, I used to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in a family full of brothers and sisters, a gentle mother, a father who had come ba
ck from the French wars as mine had not. Later still I knew not to envy her. I understood what could go on in the silences; my own mother never spoke of the boy born before me, who died before his first birthday. To the end of her life she bought masses for his soul. I did not remember my father, save what my mother had told me of him. He sent us a relic from France, a piece of St. Theresa’s bed, and it lay in the altar in the chapel at our house in Kent.

  My mother set great store by such things, though she put no faith in the country folk who claimed the power to heal and see visions. Our village was rife with them. God was perfectly capable of working miracles on His own, she said, and did not need to speak through the likes of Elizabeth Barton, who everyone else called the Holy Maid of Kent. We never went to hear her prophecies or see the miracle workers, though of course I heard about them in the chatter after Mass on Sundays at the church in Aldington; sometimes our parish priest gave a careful sermon about them.

  My mother went less and less to worship there; instead she kept her own devotions in the solar with her Book of Hours. She could not read it, but the Latin script and the tiny illuminations pictures gave her comfort. And she had heard the chaplain speak the words so many times before that her lips used to move in silent rhythm as she turned each thick page. The cloister would have suited her, had not the tales of corruption within the nunneries made her suspicious of taking holy orders.

  She laid aside her book one morning—it was near Michaelmas, and the days and nights were balanced almost evenly, so that reading light was becoming precious—to tell me that she’d had a letter from my uncle, and I was expected at court. Just like that.

  “When?” was all I could say. What I meant was, Why?

  “By Martinmas,” she replied. Then she rose, one finger still marking her page, and shut herself in her private chapel. I did not see her for the rest of the morning.