The Queen of Subtleties

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘And More?’ Because that had surprised me: Henry following Fisher with Thomas More.

  ‘Oh,’ he looked downcast, with something like embarrassment, ‘that’s just to frighten him.’ Then he looked up and made an effort to smile. ‘He’ll come round.’

  Rumour had had it that Catherine was forever begging the Pope not to carry out his threat to excommunicate Henry, just as she was forever begging Spain not to declare war on England. Well, I could believe that. Rumour had also had it that whenever anyone said a word against me in her presence, she’d ask them to pray for me instead. She claimed I’d need their prayers, one day. Two years ago, the Pope finally stopped heeding her: he excommunicated Henry. And ordered him to abandon his new wife and child and to return to the old ones. And ordered him to pay costs for the hearing of the case. I won’t need to describe Henry’s response. Catherine, though…Apparently, she believed he’d do as he was told. She packed up her rooms and waited for his arrival to reclaim her. That, I can’t begin to understand. At least I know when something’s over, when someone’s decision is made. You won’t find my bags by the door tonight.

  My second baby was due in September; a second consecutive September baby. One day in early July, I began having contractions. Faint, and infrequent. It was a quiet day, nothing in particular going on: easy for me to plead a headache and retreat with Annie to my rooms. I told no one the truth. It’ll pass, was my reasoning; it has to pass. I paced, sat, lay; sat, paced, lay. Finding it hard to keep Pixie with me. Usually he’d be curled in my lap or next to me on my bed, but I couldn’t stay still. Picking him up, putting him down; reaching for him, putting him aside. I was grateful for his presence, though; for that steady, sympathetic gaze, and warm fur. As the day went on, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining an increase in the frequency and strength of the contractions. Perhaps, I reasoned, it’s reaching a peak before it can settle down. Sit it out, I told myself. Stay in there, I told the baby; pocketed away, where you’re safe. Before long, Annie was having to ask me if I was all right. ‘Mmmm,’ I’d manage. Obviously I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to speak it because that’d make it real, something to be dealt with. If I could just sit it out…

  By evening, it was clear that I was in trouble. Not only was my bump pulled tight, but my bedroom door, too. Annie had summoned my mother, my sister, and Meg (and not, thank God, my sister-in-law). To everyone else, including the midwife, I was firmly unavailable. My mother said to me, ‘It might be nothing. It might still be nothing.’ And that’s what I felt, too. I was wondering: could I have my dates wrong? Because why else would the baby be coming? I talked it over with Meg, but I don’t remember what we concluded. Privately, I was wondering: could a baby be born at seven months—eight, perhaps—and survive? Could it be ready, early? Because why else would it be coming? Perhaps healthy baby princes were exceptional, ready early; perhaps that was it.

  It wasn’t ‘nothing’: by midnight, it was labour. My feeling, then, was of disbelief. Genuine disbelief, holding no place for anger. I was a wide-eyed spectator: could this really be happening? To me? Much the same with despair: there was no time for it. I had something, now, to deal with; something big. I had something to survive, and I could sense myself—my body—rising to it, determined to be a match for it.

  Henry, though, I did feel for; or there were moments when I did. Into my pain-dark mind would come a sense of him, like a sunburst: glorious colours—his hair, face—and the heat of his optimism, his good faith, his delight at the prospect of another baby. It was appalling to think of that being extinguished.

  In a different way, I was bothered by Pixie’s absence. Not that I wanted him there; of course I didn’t. But his absence was…well, it was there. Sometimes I meant to ask where he was, where they’d put him, if anyone was with him; but the questions slipped away from me as if in water. Labour was taking me over, as it does; I gave myself up to it, marvelled at the pain. There was no baby-cry when they finally got the body free from me and took it from the bed. Only creaks of the floorboards as my sister—something in her arms—turned and moved away.

  It—she—was a girl: my mother told me, after I’d asked and asked. Something else my mother said, when I pressed her: the little girl looked—would have been—perfect.

  I did as my mother told me, and slept. There was no point in being awake. I don’t know who broke the news to Henry, but, when I woke, he was there, sitting beside my bed. His expression didn’t change when he saw that I was awake; but it was no expression at all. Like that, we looked at each other. Eventually, he spoke; he said, ‘It happens.’ Well, yes, he’d know all about that, wouldn’t he. It had happened to her. I wanted to say, Not to me, it doesn’t. But it had, hadn’t it. It had happened to her and it had happened to me. England’s two unlucky queens: in the same boat, under the same curse.

  No announcement was ever made. People had to draw their own conclusions, and I looked them straight in the eyes as they did so. I had no obligation to explain myself. I’d come back into court life as soon as I could—a week or so later—and although I was hardly cheerful, my sense of doom was beginning to disperse. Disasters happen, I reminded myself. They were as likely to happen to me as to her. They happened to all kinds of women. One disaster means nothing. It was the future that mattered. That’d always been my view.

  Henry’s view, I didn’t know; I didn’t see much of him. He was considerate and jovial whenever we were in each other’s company; but, as if I were still heavily pregnant or had just had a baby, I was left with the women while he sought the company of others. Not merely of the boys, though, this time. As the summer wore on, it became apparent—not only to me, probably to me last of all—that the close company of a certain girl was particularly dear to him. One of the girls in my household, she was nothing special. A watchful seventeen-year-old; nothing much to say for herself. I can’t even guess at what attracted him to her; but attracted, he did seem to be. Stupid man. They spent days riding alone together, I heard; and I saw for myself how they spent the evenings. ‘You rest, Angel,’ he’d say to me, smiling, getting up from the table and heading across the dancefloor, making a beeline for her. What was I to do? Get up and clamber after him, tap him on the shoulder and tell him I was fine after all and fancied a dance?

  I couldn’t believe it, I simply couldn’t believe any of it. I couldn’t believe it was her, a nothing seventeen-year-old. And I couldn’t believe he’d behave in such a way. He had me as his wife; he had his lover, now, as his wife. Wasn’t that what the past seven years had been about? Didn’t he have what he wanted, now? Why, suddenly, would he need someone else? Especially a colourless little nobody. Actually, we weren’t lovers, Henry and I, at the time: that’s true. We were sleeping separately, but only because I was tired.

  With this girl, he was like a silly boy. Full of himself, pleased with himself. With me, he was dismissive: ‘I’m not discussing it with you,’ or, ‘Can’t you let a man have some fun?’ Fun? We’d just lost a child. This silly overgrown boy was someone I didn’t know. And not only didn’t I know him, but I couldn’t bear him. I wanted to hit him, to knock away this pretender, to knock back into place the man I knew, the man I was missing so much.

  Once, he even said, ‘Catherine never complained.’

  ‘Which is why,’ I yelled back at him, ‘she’s locked up at Kimbolton.’

  No one else took it seriously, either; everyone looked put-upon when I raised it. The usual response was barely a response at all: ‘…Anne…’ Usually accompanied by a shrug. Meaning, I presume, That’s how it is. And this, not only from the old ones but my friends, too, and family, even my brother. ‘It’s nothing,’ George said to me, ‘it’s the life of Henry’s queen.’ Adding, ‘And it’s the life of a woman, really, isn’t it.’

  Not this queen. Not this woman.

  Then, help came from an unexpected corner. It was unexpected that I took it; not unexpected that it was offered. Think about it: who would take the opportunity to sidle up
to me and coo, I understand? My sister-in-law, Jane Parker. She was the only person who did, though, and I took what sympathy I could. She listened, wide-eyed, nodding vigorously, then said all the right things to bolster my case, before feeding me titbits of the minx’s indiscretions, which I lapped up to stoke my outrage. She once said something like, ‘I’ve a good mind to tell her what I think of her,’ and my response was something like, ‘Well, don’t let me stop you.’

  Exactly what she did say to that vacant seventeen-year-old, in the end, I don’t know; but whatever it was, it got back to Henry. His little girl had gone running to him with her tale of woe. And he dropped his infuriating off-handness to come and blast me about Jane having dared to say anything at all. Progress: Henry talking to me, even if it was at quite a volume.

  I launched an equally noisy defence, claiming that Jane Parker—as he knew full well—was nothing to do with me. I couldn’t resist adding, though, that I was impressed she’d had the courage to say what everyone else was thinking. I’d barely paused for breath, and already he was back at the door. Which wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Later, it occurred to me: perhaps I didn’t look quite so good, nowadays, when I was yelling. I’d used to; I’d used to look my best, blazing. Perhaps I didn’t look too good in any circumstances, now, being older and having just had two pregnancies in two years. I was permanently flushed, and my hair seemed to have lost its shine, no longer dropping around me like silk.

  And so I understood that I was going to have to do as everybody said: sit it out. Like so much else that had happened, that year. It was more than Jane Parker got to do, though: Henry sent her from court. I could have been very angry—he’d sent one of my women from court—but of course he’d done me a favour. My brother told me that she was blaming me. She was bitter that I’d let him send her away, when she’d only been speaking up on my behalf. George smirked when he said, ‘I don’t think you’ll be over-burdened with offers of sisterly friendship from her again. I suspect we’re both free of her.’ He looked relieved yet still tense when he said, ‘One less thing to worry about.’

  Only a year and a half before, I’d chosen as my motto, ‘The Happiest’. And now here I was, grateful for one less thing to worry about. Concentrate, I chided myself, on what matters. I had a job to do—one job, as queen—and I’d found, to my dismay, that I wasn’t all that good at it. Not bad—two pregnancies in two years, one lovely child—but not as good as I would have to be. My health had taken a knock-back, and I was no longer young. I made a decision: I’d rest. No getting myself upset over Henry. And as it happened, that minx had indeed been a summer’s distraction for him. When autumn came, she faded.

  Henry was busy. In October, on his orders and Tom’s instructions, the Observant Friars were dissolved. Yes: Catherine’s favourite friars, dismissed. The chapel in which the royal heir had been christened, just a year beforehand, was turned into a mill. When I looked from my windows, whenever I glanced over the gardens and saw that covered walkway leading nowhere, I’d feel disoriented, as if waking from a long sleep into a changed world. Two pregnancies in the two years since my marriage: I’d been weighed down, my attention turned inwards; one confinement, then one convalescence. I’d been missing what was going on.

  Something else I seemed to have missed: the Admiral of France’s visit to London, in November, was referred to by Tom as a patching up of Anglo-French relations. I didn’t say so, but I was quite unaware that any patching up was necessary. My uncle and Charlie were the hosts, along the river at Bridewell. They enjoyed it; I heard it was going well. What troubled me was that de Brion hadn’t come to see me. Hadn’t come to pay his respects. Then—worse—Chapuys, I heard, had been invited over there for an evening. Chapuys? Not so much a changed world, then, as a world going mad.

  There was worse to come. Henry turned up at my rooms, late one afternoon, pre-dinner, which was unusual enough, at that time, to get me wondering. He looked sheepish, too.

  ‘What?’ I wanted to know, immediately.

  He frowned, ‘Nothing,’ but he took me by the arm, guided me to privacy, to a window seat.

  I stayed standing. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, no,’ he glanced, unseeing, through the window, ‘it’s just that…’

  And it was just that de Brion was seeking a betrothal between the pasty-faced bastard-child, Mary, and the Dauphin.

  I said, ‘It’s a joke.’

  I said, ‘Isn’t it?’

  He didn’t answer; said that if Mary were unavailable, France’s second choice was the emperor’s daughter. And the Spanish had intimated that they’d be pleased to accept.

  What on earth was going on? Henry was affecting helplessness, which I hated. He was always doing it, I’d had nearly a decade of it: helplessness about the divorce, about Catherine, about how people were treating me. Helpless: the most powerful man in England, if not the world.

  Me, I was stubborn. No affectation about it. I couldn’t win an argument with France if France was refusing to have an argument with me; but I could refuse to think about Mary, let alone discuss her. More of a stand had to be made, though. This was a snub too important to leave be.

  I said to Henry, ‘Suggest a betrothal between Elizabeth and their little one, Charles.’

  He went to speak: But what about Mary?

  I put up a hand, turned and walked away: No discussion.

  While the proposal was on its way to France’s Francis, via his Admiral, I had to more or less forget about it, distracted as I was by a more immediate, domestic crisis. One dank December afternoon, on which Hal, Fitz and Maria had dropped by, George slipped into my room. It was definitely a slipping in: he leaned back against the door, closing it softly behind him, making no move to step further into the room. His eyes were on mine. Something was up. My heart rate, for one thing. Was I so easily shaken? Weary: that was what I was. I felt unable to rise to it, whatever it was.

  But rise, I did—at least, physically—and, excusing myself, leaving the little circle to close behind me, I went to George. His half-smile was mere reflex, a greeting. Under cover of Mark Smeaton’s singing strings, he whispered, ‘It’s Mary.’ Our sister, he meant. It’s Mary, said ominously, always meant our sister. ‘She’s back.’

  ‘And?’ True, it didn’t sound good—she’d come to court for the birth of my second baby, and was supposed to be gone again—but Mary has always been a law unto herself. I couldn’t guess at the reason for this unscheduled return.

  ‘Married,’ he said, ‘and pregnant.’

  Pregnant. My happy-go-lucky sister, in no need of more children. In need of no more children. My own sister. ‘Married?’ I said, quickly. She was a widow. I’d heard of no plans-making; and I’d have heard. There would be a marriage to be made for Mary, at some time in the future; but it hadn’t been, yet.

  ‘To William Stafford,’ George said from the corner of a smile that he sent across the room. The recipient of the smile was Maria. Her anxious little face lit up in return.

  ‘A Stafford?’ I couldn’t fail to recognize the name, of course, although I wished I had. The family name of the Duke of Buckingham: well over a decade dead, but his disgrace still raw. Henry didn’t execute nobles, he simply wouldn’t do that; but Stafford had been a pretender, and it’d had to be done. ‘Who is this William Stafford?’

  ‘Some soldier.’

  Some nobody. ‘But she’s the queen’s sister!’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’ His smile flicked over Mark Smeaton, to keep the peace.

  ‘She can’t be married to him.’ Surely she couldn’t have done this. Why did she do these things? Did she do them on purpose, or was it all as blithe as it looked?

  The smile was still stuck there when he said to me, ‘Well, I hope she is, because she’s very pregnant.’

  The eldest Boleyn child flouncing into court, confirming everyone’s suspicions of the Boleyns: that we were out of control, unable or unwilling to control our appetites; which, to put it bluntly, were bas
e. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘With Mum.’

  ‘How’s Mum taking it?’

  ‘She’s got her hands full, keeping Dad at bay.’

  Dad and his temper. And how furious he’d be: we children and our dubious marriages. Mary, left destitute by her first husband; then my own, protracted mess, still continuing; and George’s nasty little wife banished by the king. Now this: Mary rolling up, having made her own marriage to a commoner, as if nothing mattered; as if she’d never learned anything. Mary—I could see it—laughing at everything and everyone, as she does. And then crying, as she does. But Dad, with his temper, would only make more of a spectacle of us.

  I said, ‘We need to get her away from here. What does she want?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think she knows.’

  No, of course not: that wasn’t the way Mary worked. ‘We have to get rid of her. Preferably before Dad gets his hands on her. Get rid of her, George. Give her whatever it takes.’ And I added, just to make it clear, ‘I won’t see her.’

  I assumed Mary was the reason for Henry turning up at my apartment a couple of evenings later. I was getting ready for bed. Annie showed him in to my bedroom. I stayed sitting on the bed; he stopped by the door. It was instantly clear that this had nothing to do with my sister: Henry’s face looked small. Panic leapt into my throat. ‘Is it Elizabeth?’

  He shook his head, but his expression didn’t change and he didn’t say, It’s nothing. ‘Anne…’

  My scalp tightened.

  ‘It’s Pixie.’

  Pixie’s absence slammed up against me. I wanted to say, But he’s here, even though I knew, I knew he wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him for an hour or so. I’d known he wasn’t here. Without knowing it, I’d known. What had I been thinking? Nothing, in my tiredness. Or, perhaps, that Annie would bring him in, later. Henry stayed there by the door, looking utterly miserable, while he told me: earlier, outside my rooms, Pixie had got under someone’s feet—a groom’s—and then fallen from a gallery.