VIII

by H. M. Castor

  I watch, growl, swipe the air with my arm. Then I hurry to Edward, haltingly; I have jettisoned my stick.

  “Look. With a sword like this, a thrust is safer than a chop.” I grasp his hand, the one holding the sword, and guide it, demonstrating. “It inflicts more damage, and puts you in less danger. See – your body’s less exposed. But once you’ve dealt the blow you must move out of range quickly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Show me again.”

  I hobble back and sit down.

  Kathryn says, “He is nervous in front of you.”

  “So he should be.” I shrug. “And you think he wouldn’t be nervous in battle?”

  Edward’s second attempt with the sword is a little better. After that, still panting, he puts on his helmet and demonstrates, with his Master of Defence, the moves he has learned with the two-handed sword and the quarterstaff.

  Kathryn applauds him readily, and smiles as fondly as if the boy were her own son. She leans towards me. “He’s skilful for his age, don’t you think?”

  “I want to see him ride at the ring.”

  “Have pity on him, sir. He is young; he has done enough.”

  “The horses are already here.” I clap my hands to get the servants’ attention. “Anyway, this is nothing. The lances I’ve had made for him are very light.”

  There is a flurry of activity among the servants. The target is set up: a wooden frame, placed beside the long wooden barrier running down the centre of the tiltyard. From a high cross-beam of the frame a small ring is hung. The lance must be aimed at the ring’s centre; if this is done accurately, the thread the ring hangs on will break, and the rider will carry the ring away on his lance.

  A white palfrey is brought and Edward mounts smartly. He is given a lance.

  “He sits well in the saddle, at least,” I say.

  “He is trying very hard to be perfect,” Kathryn says quietly.

  Edward takes his horse to the far end of the yard, steadies his aim and gallops in. He misses the ring, and his efforts at the last minute to swing the lance towards it make him lose control. The lance dips wildly. He loses his balance in the saddle and slides. He tries to hang on, dropping the lance and clutching at the saddle. The horse, feeling a painful drag on the reins, jumps and kicks. Edward hits the ground as the horse speeds on; he rolls over in the dust.

  In an instant, I’m on my feet. His attendants are running in.

  I yell, “Again! Do it again! Get up!” My voice echoes across the yard. I am hurrying, limping fast. “Get-up-get-upget-up!”

  He is huddled – to the extent his armour allows – against the barrier, his back to me. His head is angled forward; beneath the rim of his helmet, his fair hair curls over his metal collar. As I reach him, I see he is making small shuddering movements – as if he is whimpering.

  I am seized by something like panic. “Get up, you pathetic little insect!” My hands are on the barrier now; I am bending over him, bellowing. “Get up! Get up! Get up! Get up!”

  He scrambles out from under me and stands. Wrenching off his helmet, he stares at me, shocked, breathing hard – as I am. He looks sick.

  Grooms and gentlemen, approaching from all directions, have stopped short of us in a ragged semicircle. I glance around; they look appalled. Kathryn emerges through their ranks – she has hurried to us from the pavilion.

  With an arm raised as if she would put it round Edward, she makes a move towards him, then stops herself. She clasps her hands together; she says gently, “Are you hurt?”

  Edward can only shake his head and bow to her – it seems he cannot trust himself to speak.

  I pass a hand over my face; it is slick with sweat. I say, “You have done enough, sir.” I reach forward and see my son conquer his instinct to flinch. My clammy hand slides off his shoulder. “You need more strength.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  The hurry, the bending, the yelling – I pay for it now with a spasm of pain. For a moment I cannot move – can do nothing but grip Edward’s arm. Even in armour the limb feels fragile.

  When the pain subsides I release him. The horse has been subdued now – a groom is leading it back to the far end of the yard. I see Edward’s eyes darting to it with something like dread. He fears I will make him run again. I am uncomfortable, aware of wanting to make amends.

  “You like hunting?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Good, good. I will take you hunting, when… when this – I have a slight…” I wave a hand towards my bad leg. “I will take you hunting soon. I’d like to see you kill a buck. Have you been blooded yet?” I look round at the men. “Has he been blooded?”

  The men shake their heads; Edward says, “No, sir.”

  “I will do it myself, eh?” I say and, reaching out, I rub my thumb across his forehead and cheeks, as if smearing the animal’s blood there right now. He still looks sick. I turn to search for Kathryn’s arm; turn to go. “That’s right,” I say, patting him one last time. “That’s right.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦ IX ♦ ♦ ♦

  I often dream about a forest. I am on horseback – hunting.

  There is a dark-haired girl riding ahead. She looks back – the wind has blown a strand of hair across her mouth. She pulls it aside with her fingers – pale fingers, ungloved – and laughs. She laughs because she wants to be caught, but she won’t let me catch her.

  The forest seems important – the relief is intense, as if I have ridden into the cool shade out of glaring sun (though the time in the sun is never in my dream).

  Then I wake, and at first I don’t know where or who I am. The room around me takes shape slowly – the clutter, the hangings, the drifts of documents spilling out of my desk – but still the damp, brackeny smells of the forest are in my nostrils and I can feel the breeze on my cheek. I want to hold on, but I have learned that the dream disappears more quickly that way, so instead I try to still everything – just let the sinking-out-of-it happen as slowly as possible.

  I feel more at home in the dream than here. I belong there. It is like a trick of the light, except it is a trick of the years. One moment I am a young man, fit and healthy, able to ride for so long that I can get through eight horses in a day – the next I am young, still (aren’t I? It feels that way), but trapped in a body that no longer works. And there is a different girl beside me. Always a different girl.

  I turn my head. This girl today has hair that spills across the pillow like rich brown syrup. She has a gentle, grave face – even in sleep she frowns a little. How did I come by her? For a moment I cannot remember. Has she borne any dead children yet? They all do, sooner or later.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I have been dreaming. I open my eyes. The head beside me on the pillows is alarming. My vision is blurred. But the head is grey – that is wrong. And odd-shaped.

  I try to turn over. Figures are moving, speaking in an indistinct murmur so that I cannot hear them. They have strapped something around my ribs to hamper my breath. I am desperate to raise my head – I could breathe better if only I could raise my head. Or sit up. God, yes – someone help me to sit up! There is a weight on my chest as if a devil is crouching there.

  My eyes have shut again. Colours pop and swim against the darkness. Voices float and mingle on the air.

  “I have told the King he must prepare for his final agony.”

  “Did he hear you?”

  “I can’t say.”

  I drift. The dark is liquid; the current pulls me under. I don’t know for how long. And then, without warning, I surface – I can see light. The thing beside me on the pillows is not a head. It is a basin. Metal. Dull reflections move on its surface. They take all my attention, but they make no sense.

  After a time, I see something beyond the basin: a small, blurred shape. It is further away than the basin. It is a person. It is my son – standing against the wall.

  Thank God. Thank God he is here. He will watch what they are doing, the sinister figures tha
t move and whisper about me. If they are poisoning me, he will see it.

  “The Archbishop has arrived – to hear His Majesty’s confession.”

  “I fear you are too late, my lord. The doctors say he is beyond speaking.”

  I say – or perhaps think, I cannot tell which:

  Edward.

  I never did take him hunting.

  Someone close by says, “Perhaps he can hear me still?”

  “Perhaps.”

  The small figure starts forward towards me. He has heard me. The black and white robes of the archbishop, bending at my side, block him from my view for a moment.

  “Your Majesty.” The Archbishop has put his face close to mine. “If you cannot confess your sins, it will be enough if you give me some sign, sir, either with your eyes or your hand, that you trust in the Lord. It will be enough for your salvation.”

  Has it come so soon?

  A hand swims into focus: thin, clawlike fingers extended. My hand is lifted.

  I say: You.

  It is him. Not my son, the boy. That thing. He looks like a corpse now: the contours of his sharp bones are visible under a thin layer of greyish skin. His ragged clothes are stained with mould or old blood. Something tiny wriggles at the corner of his mouth; a dark tongue darts out and licks it away. He says:

  Get up. Up. Up.

  I can’t.

  You can.

  His hand looks skeletal but is of preternatural strength. Holding it, I am able to rise from the bed, stepping out of that great, fetid carcass as if discarding a too-heavy coat. No one around me turns; none of the figures bending over the bed see me go.

  Behind me, the Archbishop says, “He pressed my fingers; he did give a sign.”

  The boy leads me to the window and pulls aside the hangings. Outside there is bright, cold sunshine – harsh and beautiful.

  Is this the end?

  Oh yes.

  But it can’t be you that has come for me! Why are you here – some final test? Oh Lord God, hear me: I have endured all Your tests; I am Your chosen; I am a warrior of light. Where are Your angels? Where are Your handmaidens?

  The boy turns from me, unconcerned. He leans on his forearm and stares through the window.

  Coming from beneath me, such heat: waves of hot air fan upwards from some invisible source.

  The prophecy, says the boy, without turning his head. The ‘blessed ruler’, the ‘glory down the ages’. God’s Chosen. His tone is scornful. It wasn’t you. It never was.

  I am reeling; I want to tug at his sleeve, to slap his face. Yes. It is me. It is. I know – I have known all my life…

  It is as if an abyss has opened at my feet; limitless space yawns below me, though I am standing too, somehow, on the floor. The wall is in front of me still, the panes of the window set into it – but I know that if I fall I will meet with no resistance. I am trembling.

  The boy does turn his head now; he looks at me with such pleasure – with triumph – and as he does so images flash into my mind with dizzying speed: a burned-out candle by my father’s bed; a door opening with thin fingers gripping it; a boat crossing dark water; a dark-eyed woman turning to laugh in my face; the boy’s own face crying; those dark, dark shadow-eyes; a sense of falling. Something comes to hit me like a speeding slamming lance, and it is horror. White-hot horror.

  The boy grips the window mullions – hard, as if there is an earth tremor and he is steadying himself; or as if he will break them apart. He stares out at the world, drinking it in urgently, drinking it in as though he will never see it again. No, it is not the boy: it is me. It is him in me and me in him – it is us. We are gripping the stone; we are staring through the window. Outside, the winter sunshine slants into the courtyard below, slicing it diagonally in half – half brilliant, blinding light, half deep shadow.

  Quickly, desperately, I blurt, If the blessed ruler of the prophecy is not me, then it must be my son, Edward—

  No, you fool, interrupts the boy’s voice, a voice in my mind. Look there…

  A figure is crossing the courtyard below me, emerging at that very moment from the murky shadow. A girl – no, a young woman, slight but tall, with red-gold hair. At first I do not recognise her – then with a jolt I realise that it is my younger daughter, Elizabeth. Anne’s daughter.

  Her? A girl?

  She stops as if she has heard and, turning, looks up. At that moment, birds take off from the roof above me; I hear their hoarse croaking. She lifts her head and watches as their large black shapes wheel against the sky. Then her gaze slides down to the window. For an instant her eyes – her mother’s dark eyes – look directly into mine.

  A slight frown crosses the girl’s face, as if she is puzzled; as if she thinks she sees something at the window. A shadow, the smudge of a pale face moving? There is the tiniest shake of her head: no, nothing. But a small smile flickers at the corners of her mouth as she turns back into the sunlight and continues on her way.

  Q & A with H. M. Castor

  • Where did your inspiration for VIII come from?

  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with Tudor history. It started when I was at primary school – back then it was the outfits and the executions that intrigued me most! For years I skirted round Henry himself – if you’d asked me, I would have said I was more interested in his wives, his children… but Henry was like the spider at the middle of the web: once I’d looked at everyone around him, I came to be fascinated by what was going on at the centre. And I began to feel that my impression of Henry was not really the same as any of the other versions out there.

  • How did you find your way into this well-known story?

  I didn’t have to find my way in: rather, the feeling of having something I needed to say grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. And this was despite a lot of resistance – in me! After all, you could line shelves and shelves with the books written about Henry VIII, there are so many – and many of them are utterly fascinating and brilliantly written. How could I possibly dare to add to them? But I became convinced I had something new to say. That was immensely exciting. The urgency of it really took me over – sometimes I couldn’t sleep.

  • What was it that felt so new?

  The more I read about Henry, the more forcefully it struck me that I hadn’t ever found a satisfactory explanation of why he did what he did. And some of the things he did are so incredible – so apparently contradictory – that the question just nagged at me.

  Though in a way the story is well known, the well-known part is, in fact, only that: a part. Yes, he was that famous image: the fleshy, powerful-looking bearded king who had six wives. But just look at him earlier on… he’s an extraordinary boy: hugely talented, with astonishing warrior skills, and he’s said to be a model of virtue. What went wrong? How did that boy become one of the most villainous kings in British history?

  • How did you find it inhabiting Henry VIII’s head?

  I had to try and sweep all the baggage out of the way, all the pre-conceived ideas I – and other people – had about Henry. One trick that helped was to use the name Hal rather than Henry – because as soon as the name Henry even sounded in my head the iconic image from the Holbein portraits came to mind. I couldn’t climb inside that icon.

  At first it was daunting, but in the end it became amazing – intoxicating and intense. Always difficult to get myself there, mentally, but once I was there… well, I felt as if I’d created a whole world, a place to go to in my head – and now I’m reluctant to let go of it!

  • Why did you choose to tell the story in the first person?

  Two reasons. I absolutely didn’t want there to be a distance between the reader and Henry. I didn’t want anyone to open the book and think, ‘Oh, this is someone who lived hundreds of years ago; he’s nothing like me’. Because of course Henry lived in a world that was in many ways very different from ours, but he still felt fear and rage and love and frustration like we do. He still got the hiccups, you know
, he still tripped over. He was a human being, waking up in the morning, not knowing what was going to happen next in his life.

  Secondly, I didn’t want to look at Henry from the outside; I knew that being on the inside and looking out at the world through his eyes would change the story entirely. I wanted to get a vivid sense of the particular world Henry inhabits in his mind – the claustrophobia of it, if you like, and the extent to which his thoughts shape what he perceives to be reality.

  • How much research did you do before writing?

  I never stopped; I didn’t shut a book and think – OK, that’s the research done, now I start writing. In a sense I’ve been researching VIII almost my whole life (I’ve been reading about the Tudors since childhood, and I studied the sixteenth century at A level and then again at university) – but still, as the book developed, the story showed me how much more I needed to find out. For example, when Hal and his mother ride through London in the first chapter, I had to know their exact route and what they would see as they went along, so I needed to find sixteenth-century maps of London. For the sword fighting, I read as much on the subject as I could find – there’s a wonderful book called English Martial Arts by Terry Brown that was especially helpful. But I also wanted to know what it felt like to face up to a real opponent – so I started martial arts lessons.

  I spent many hours glued to a website called British History Online (www.british-history.ac.uk) – it has fantastic quantities of original documents; you can read letters, accounts, ambassadors’ reports (some of them deliciously gossipy!) and dispatches. But even so, my book list was enormous: I read psychology books, biographies of Henry, books on his palaces, his clothes, his government, his army manoeuvres in France, plus the wonderful huge inventory that survives of all his possessions at his death – it’s utterly fascinating stuff. It’s especially fascinating to see from the inventory that, in his palaces, there were cupboards stuffed with old, worn-out and broken things, not just the new and the sumptuous. He still had belongings confiscated from old friends he’d had executed. He still had a robe that was his brother Arthur’s. No doubt he kept some things for sentimental reasons, as most of us do. And many of the items set me thinking – the cap-badge bearing the words Tristis Victima that appears in Part Four, Chapter XVII, for example, was prominent in this list of possessions at his death. It gave me a shiver; it seemed to me so apt for one aspect of his self-image.