by Deryn Lake
‘If it makes you content, Giles, then you may stay up. But promise me that you will take rest if you feel like it.’
‘I give you my word, my Lady.’
Their eyes met fully and each knew that the other was aware of the truth but was afraid to speak, nicety and convention standing in the way, though Anne, as a staunch Catholic realized that it was her duty at some point soon to suggest that Giles saw a priest, whilst rather dreading the reaction.
‘Then all is well,’ she said.
‘Is it, my Lady?’
So here it was. He was going to come out with it. He was too close to the earth and life’s secrets to be fooled. He had probably known months before Dr Burton. Poor, brave little Giles.
‘Please, my Lady, can we deal straightly?’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
‘The physician — good man though he is — can do nothing for me. There is a growth inside me that is eating my life away. So, my Lady, I am asking you — as a kind mistress and a friend — to do two things for me so that I may leave in peace.’
‘And they are?’
‘To let me see Mistress Catherine again. She has not been in Sutton Place since she ran away with Sir John and I have grieved for her that Sir Richard’s anger still rages.’
‘And the other?’
‘I would like, before the end, to see that mighty sorcerer Dr Zachary. Master Francis told me that he is spoken of as having Romany blood and that he is supposedly the greatest astrologer in the land. How much I would like to meet him.’
Anne sat silently. To call Dr Zachary from Court presented little difficulty — but to go against Richard’s orders and write to Catherine! And yet what a wonderful excuse. And then she felt sickened with herself for looking on a man’s death as an ‘excuse’ and ‘wonderful’ at that. Yet how she longed to see her daughter again. What a bitter three years during which Catherine’s pleading letters had grown less and less frequent and had eventually stopped. Naturally, there had been great pleasure in visiting Margaret and Walter, though this happiness had been slightly marred by the loss in January of Margaret’s longed-for first child after a pregnancy of only three months. Yet for all she knew she could be a grandmother. Perhaps Catherine had produced a living child and had not even told her. Anne Weston made up her mind.
‘I shall write to Catherine today, Giles,’ she said.
‘And what about Sir Richard’s anger, my Lady?’
‘Sir Richard will have to bear it like a man. To be alienated from his own flesh is ridiculous. He will have to bend with the wind — something at which he is most adept.’
‘Aye, when it suits him, my Lady.’
Normally she would have reprimanded him for criticizing his Master but in the circumstances she let the remark pass.
‘And I will try to contact Dr Zachary for you.’
Giles kissed her hand and then held it against his crinkled cheek for a moment. She felt the warmth of his tears and it was too much for her. Abandoning all convention she put her arms round him and wept.
*
It was 23 July and the Legatine Court in Blackfriars was packed to the doors. Looking round him carefully, Richard Weston’s apparently unconcerned eyes took in and made a mental list of all those who had turned out to hear the judgement on the annulment of the King’s marriage. For this was to be the day. As soon as the King arrived Cardinal Campeggio would announce the verdict.
In the centre of the room was the now empty high seat in which the King would shortly take his place and below it was a great chair for the Italian Cardinal. Next to it was Wolsey’s place. Richard thought how uneasy his patron, already seated, looked. Folds of skin hung where the face had once been full and fleshy and the body that had been so proudly stout now seemed swamped by its great red robe. Just behind him, his thick lips whispering constantly in Wolsey’s ear while his eyes darted round the room non-stop, sat the man who had always appeared to Weston the epitome of the word commonplace, Wolsey’s secretary Dr Stephen Gardiner. But today he seemed to have a new vigour about him — as if he was drawing life from his wilting master.
‘A man to be watched,’ thought Richard.
He turned his attention from the clerics to the peers of the realm. Those to be noted were surely the ones absent, for nearly every coronet in the land had turned out on this, the day of all days, when history would be made, when the King of England’s marriage might be declared null and void in the eyes of all-powerful, ever-present Rome.
Thrusting well to the fore, of course, was the master of self-advancement Thomas Boleyn, Lord Rochford. Today his broad face bore a strained expression and his large dark eyes — so similar to those of the skinny chit who was at the very core of this whole charade — stared ahead of him broodingly. Richard was secretly delighted. He hoped that within minutes the smug fool’s hopes would be sent packing, and those of his daughter with him.
Slightly to Boleyn’s right and studiously ignoring him sat his kinsman the Duke of Norfolk. He seemed to be one of the few people in the hall not overawed with the magnitude of the occasion for he sat back in his seat, one leg crossed over the other, his face all smiles as he talked to his coterie of followers. One in particular caught Richard’s eye for he had not seen him at Court before. A man of about thirty-five with dark, curly hair and unusually brilliant eyes that seemed to shine like crystal. Richard watched him murmuring something into Norfolk’s ear and then, to his astonishment, they both looked directly at him. Without revealing any surprise Richard bowed his head to them and they responded, though neither of them smiled at all.
At the witness table, just in front of the stall where the Court were crammed in like sheep, sat Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and the King’s brother-in-law. Bearded and powerful he looked now like a smouldering lion. A King’s man to the last, he had given evidence some days previously that on the morning after Queen Katharine’s marriage to Prince Arthur he had seen the bridal sheets stained with virgin’s blood; that she had been the Prince’s true wife in every consummated sense, a fact that Katharine vehemently and on oath had denied. Which was lying, Richard wondered. Could a good and pious woman like the Queen be forced into deception to save her daughter the stigma of being called bastard? Or was Brandon’s memory conveniently at fault? Or could the blood have been from a scratch or caused by Katharine’s moon cycle? Richard fairly and squarely put his money on Brandon as the liar. He was so deep in the King’s pocket that he would sell his grandmother to infidels to help him.
Weston’s gaze moved on to the Marquess of Exeter, poised like a bird of prey on the edge of his chair and doing precisely the same as Richard. Taking stock of everyone present and, no doubt, making mental notes of any misbehaviour among the younger courtiers; dark eyes observing everything and closed face revealing nothing. The man was a veritable night stalker!
Following Exeter’s look Richard found himself staring straight at Francis.
‘God’s life,’ he thought, ‘that boy will die owing money to tailors.’ For his son stood out amongst his cronies in a beautifully cut and made doublet of emerald green with golden stitchery.
‘And they’re little better,’ Richard thought. ‘Like a bunch of prancing peacocks all of them.’
Though he had to admit, with a grim sort of half-pride, that Francis was far and away the best looking and best dressed of all. He scrutinized the little gang closely. The obvious leader — as brother of the King’s light-of-love — was George Boleyn. He, too, seemed under a strain for if the verdict should go against Anne his family’s ambitions would be dealt a severe blow.
‘Though they would wriggle back,’ thought Richard. ‘That girl’s hold on the King is quite extraordinary, unnatural almost.’
On George’s left sat his cousin Thomas Wyatt and on his right another cousin, Francis Bryan.
‘The clan is out in force,’ thought Richard humourlessly. But it was Francis’s obvious intimacy with them all that set him thinking. He had forgotten how
long ago he had learned never to ally himself to a shooting star but to wait until it blazed into a comet. His father, Edmund Weston, had taken a calculated risk by backing Henry Tudor against Richard III, a gamble that had paid off handsomely. But to back the house of Boleyn, at this stage of the political game, seemed to him stupid in the extreme. They were very far from out of the wood.
But there was his son laughing and joking with them and beside him young William Brereton — probably about a year older than Francis — was holding forth in a manner more suitable for a Court masque than a Court of Law. Richard moved his gaze round and his eyes alighted on Sir Henry Norris looking unusually stern and set-faced sitting apart from the younger set and staring straight in front of him. He put Norris’s gloom down to the atmosphere of general tension and would never have guessed that the man was racked by his usual agony of spirit, half of him praying that Campeggio would find against the King so that the glorious inhabitant of the woods of Hever might never be able to marry His Grace; the other half cursing his jealousy and wishing that his royal master, who had always been so good to him, might have his way.
The courtroom rose to its feet as Cardinal Campeggio tottered in. The little Italian, with his long white hair and beard contrasting wildly with his scarlet robes, looked like a grotesque. The limping, caused by his terrible affliction from gout, ridiculed what should have been a majestic figure. Richard had wondered at first if the ailment was diplomatic; yet another ploy to delay the Court proceedings — for he was convinced that Campeggio’s agonizingly slow journey to England and the subsequent seven-month delay before the Court was convened were all part of a deliberate plan being masterminded by Rome. But after seeing the Cardinal near to and looking for himself at the swollen joints and the afflicted eyes, he had come to the conclusion that the condition was genuine but a useful adjunct to the general delaying process. Was it a stroke of genius on the part of the Pope to send a Cardinal whose health was so frail?
The King must have been watching from the back of the Court because the second that Campeggio had gasped his way into his place, the trumpets rang out and Henry — striding as if his very walk was a veiled insult to the Legate — was crossing the courtroom and taking his seat in the high chair. There was a general hubbub of people seating themselves but the King, looking more anxious than Richard ever remembered him, was already flashing a jewelled hand at his Proctor as a signal for the proceedings to begin.
Rising to his feet the Proctor said loudly, ‘My Lord Legate, all the evidence in the case has now been heard. What is your verdict?’
He sat down and from every man present there was total quiet as with painful slowness the Cardinal hauled himself from his chair.
‘Your Grace, my Lords, gentlemen,’ he said in measured and deliberate English, ‘today begins the vacation in Rome, therefore I am unable to continue with the hearing. I adjourn this case until the first day of October. Thank you,’ and he fell back into his seat amidst a totally stunned silence. Richard Weston himself did not believe what he had just heard and it was obvious that nobody else in the packed and over-hot hall did either.
Then came the reaction. White lipped, the King rose from his chair and just for a second Richard wondered whether he might be about to smite the Cardinal; but, without even looking at him and speaking to no one, Henry thrust his way out of the courtroom and vanished from view. With his exit the storm broke. From everywhere came cries of ‘No, no!’ and ‘Give us the verdict.’
And above them all roared the Duke of Suffolk’s voice as he crunched his fist down on the table before him, ‘By the Mass, now I see that the old saw is true, that never a Cardinal or Legate did good in England.’ And he was off on the heels of his brother-in-law the King.
Oblivious of the commotion all round Campeggio busied himself with collecting his papers and tidying up his things. But beside him, Richard noticed, Cardinal Wolsey had taken on a ghastly grey pallor and his head had slumped forward on to his chest. Despite the chaos, Richard was able to get a glimpse of Rochford — or Boleyn as he still thought of him. The man was white to the gills. Just for once Weston allowed himself the luxury of a display of public emotion. He grinned.
Francis’s clique were all crowded round George Boleyn, presumably offering their condolences in the face of this monumental defeat. Sir Henry Norris and the Marquess of Exeter were already leaving to attend upon the King. But Richard, in no particular hurry to be gone, let his eyes wander once more over the gouty little man who had caused this violent reaction. Was that a hint of a smile on the lips or was he merely wincing in pain? Richard admired nothing more than coolness and at this the Cardinal was obviously the master for he hobbled off clumsily yet with a deliberation which suggested nothing had happened at all. One would never have thought that he had just won a triumphant — and immensely insolent — victory for the Church of Rome.
Richard caught himself thinking, ‘Counter move that, upstart’ as Thomas Boleyn, trembling with rage, went to join his son.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he did not see the Duke of Norfolk approaching and was startled when a voice at his elbow said, ‘A round to the Pope, was it not? The vacation in Rome! God’s life, one must almost admire the impudence. But how are you, Weston? You seem to have resided in Calais these three years past.’
Richard rose and bowed and then noticed the brilliant-eyed stranger who had obviously been talking of him was standing by Norfolk’s side. The two men were bowing formally to each other as the Duke said, ‘Sir Richard, I would like to present a kinsman of mine — Sir John Rogers of Bryanston. He tells me that he is most anxious to meet you.’
*
It was twenty days since Anne had written to Catherine — twenty days of waiting anxiously for a rider bearing a reply and twenty evenings of disappointment as the sun set and nothing had happened. Dr Zachary, on the other hand, had responded quickly and there had been high hopes when the horseman carrying his letter had come to the Gate House. Giles had made his way there across the quadrangle meeting Anne, who had come through the house, in the porter’s lodge. But one look at the seal had been enough.
‘This is not from Catherine, Giles,’ she had said.
His face, through which the bones of his skull were now showing clearly, had seemed more gaunt than ever but had cheered slightly when she said, ‘But ’tis from Dr Zachary. He will attend upon us within the next three weeks.’
After twelve days had elapsed her fears for Will the rider had grown. Every road was riddled with cut-throats and she felt it possible that he might never have reached Dorset. On the other hand he could be there and attempting to persuade Catherine to reply. Anne dithered round Sutton Place unable to decide whether to write again, to despatch a search party to look for Will, or to do nothing. Each day caught her saying, ‘Shall we wait one more day? Perhaps tomorrow there will be an answer.’
And then, just as she was growing desperate and was on the point of writing and sending the new letter with four men for safety’s sake, Joan had come running to her saying, ‘Giles is wild with joy, my Lady. He says that Mistress Catherine — I mean Lady Rogers — will be here as the sun goes down tonight.’
‘Has Will returned without my knowing?’
‘Nay, madam. He says he has had a dream.’
Standing before her, Giles looked embarrassed and rubbed one of his shoes against the calf of the other leg. He appeared greatly like a child asked to sing before assembled company.
‘Now what is this about a dream, Giles?’ asked Anne.
‘It was a prophecy, my Lady. I saw — as I slept — Mistress Catherine’s cavalcade come to the Gate House with the setting sun behind them. And I knew it would be today.’
Anne looked at him uncertainly. He was a dying man and should be humoured and yet she did not wish him to build up his hopes for naught.
‘Then I will order the cooks to prepare some extra food for tonight but Giles ...’
‘Yes, my Lady?’
‘ ... it shall not be too much for it was ...’
‘Only a dream. Aye, my Lady, I know. But I shall be content with that.’
And he had walked off in a more sprightly fashion than she had seen for weeks. By six o’clock that evening she doubted whether an iron bar would have held him down. He loitered round the porter’s lodge to such an extent that eventually he got in the way and was asked rather curtly if he would leave. Presenting himself before Anne, wearing the doublet that Richard had brought him back from Calais and which Giles considered to be high fashion par excellence because it had been stitched in France, he looked at her like a whipped spaniel.
‘Roger has sent me forth from his lodge, madam. He says he tripped over me at every turn.’
‘Then Giles, watch from the Long Gallery. Or from the Gate House tower. You’ll not be underfoot there.’
He smiled, his funny face almost back to the look it had borne before the disease gripped him.
‘I’ll to the tower, my Lady.’
Despite all Anne found her own footsteps taking her towards the far windows of the Long Gallery from whence one could see for such a good distance. And though she pretended to be embroidering and though Joan and Meg, who came to join her, pretended as well all three of them kept shooting little glances at the window until eventually they all three caught each other looking simultaneously and burst out laughing.
‘What three fools we are,’ said Anne, ‘to sit here because of a dream.’
‘Ah, but it was a Romany’s dream,’ answered Meg, ‘and they do count for more than the dreams of ordinary folk.’
Anne smiled at her.
‘So they do, so they do,’ she said.
‘My Lady, quick. Oh, my Lady.’
It was Joan kneeling up on the window seat, her stitching dropped to the floor, her back an arc of concentration. In a second the other two women were beside her and there could be no doubting what she had seen. The sun was setting over Sutton Place and a cavalcade of riders with a litter — which indicated beyond doubt the presence of a woman — was coming out of the trees.
