“And he is not entirely wrong,” Cat admitted. “There has been wrongdoing and vice among the monks and nuns, assuredly. But the religious houses have always done much good as well. I have seen it, and am now part of a community of sisters that carry out their charitable mission with great diligence. The convent of St. Agnes’s has been a refuge for hungry villagers when crops failed. A shelter for frightened serfs when their overlords were fighting. This house has stood, a bastion of mercy, a symbol of God’s love amid human want and cruelty, for nearly three centuries. And a miracle-working shrine. If the king orders it sold, and the new owners tear it down—as they surely will—what will take its place? Where will the villagers go for help and shelter? And for healing? For there is healing within these walls, Jane. I have witnessed it.”
“I will try to be as eloquent with my husband as you have been,” I told Cat. “I will do my best.”
* * *
We returned to the room where Anne Cavecant lay inert on her pallet. We knelt together to say our prayers, and afterward Cat left and I stayed on, lost in quiet meditation, savoring once again the atmosphere in the room, the serenity and absence of worldly concerns. When evening came I was offered hospitality for the night and slept on a hard bed under a light blanket, though the night air held a chill.
On the following morning I went to Anne and saw, to my delight, that she had a faint hint of color in her cheeks. She opened her eyes and seemed to welcome the ministrations of my servants who bathed and dressed her and offered her food. Hour by hour she seemed to grow stronger before my eyes as she was laid once again on her pallet before the reliquary and I resumed my vigil nearby. I was all but unaware of the passage of time, so happily intent was I on watching her grow stronger, her eyes brighter, her body beginning to quiver with renewed animation.
On the following day she sat up and tried to walk, no longer hampered by severe pain, and I saw a strength in her halting movements that I had not seen in a very long time. And beyond this—wonder of wonders—when she let me touch her side, I could feel that the tumor was no longer as large as it had been, nor as tender. In the privacy of my sleeping room she opened her bodice and showed me, quite unashamedly, the place where the large swelling had been. All that was left was a reddened pustule the size of a walnut.
“Thanks be to God!” I cried out, disturbing the nuns’ silence. But I was happily forgiven and Cat brought her sisters in to witness the remarkable healing Anne had undergone.
The following morning we left to rejoin the royal party on progress, feeling what I can only describe as a holy joy. I was certain that the power of the divine had enveloped us, a power that resided in the place where the Nun of Kent had lived, and seemed still to reside there. I prayed for the fortitude to convince the king to preserve that holy place, so that others might honor it and receive the blessings of healing in generations to come.
* * *
When, shortly afterward, we rejoined the traveling court I lost no time in taking Anne Cavecant to see the king. I found him sitting by a window surrounded by his dogs and his fewterers, watching the rain pour down and spoil his day’s hunting. Anne was full of smiles and glowing with health. The contrast between her former torpor and her present vigor could not have been more startling, and the king had to acknowledge it.
“I am truly glad to see you looking so well,” he said to Anne, doing his best to adopt a courteous tone, “and I hope your recovery continues. I only wish there was a cure for my damnable leg!” he added darkly.
“You must go to St. Agnes’s, sire,” Anne blurted out. “The shrine will do you good.”
The look he gave her was full of irritation.
“Faith needs no shrine, girl,” he said sharply. “It is your faith that has restored you. The Lord and your faith. Not some dead nun.”
Anne left us then, at a signal from me, and slipped quietly out of the room. I should probably have left with her, given my husband’s frame of mind and the nervous edginess he always displayed when his leg pained him, but I was still overflowing with amazement and happiness at Anne’s healing. I felt an urgency to open my heart and mind to Henry about it. I allowed my exuberance to overcome my good sense.
“With your permission, sire,” I said to my husband, indicating that I wanted to sit opposite him. He gave a slight nod.
Though it was not easy to contain myself, I was silent for a time, waiting for the right moment to speak. Henry sat looking out at the rain, his hand idly stroking the heads of his big dogs, who came up to be petted, tongues lolling.
“Does it really matter, sire, how Anne’s cure came about?” I said quietly. “All I know is that she was put before the shrine, near death, and now she is thriving. Who can say what divine alchemy was at work? Do you not believe that holy relics gather spiritual force?”
“So do demons. So do witches.” He was gruff. He did not look at me, but continued to scratch the dogs’ ears and glare out at the rain. Suddenly he stood, shakily, and wincing from pain. He began to walk out of the room, then turned back to me.
“It matters not, in any case,” he snapped. “St. Agnes’s has been sold to Sir Henry Bedingfield. It will be torn down within the month.”
“No! It must not be!” I rose to my feet and quickly knelt before Henry, my hands clasped in supplication.
“The convent is a holy place. Unlike any other. Hundreds of people have been cured there. I have felt the healing power of the Lord there. I saw with my own eyes how Anne was restored. It is wondrous. It is—like a resurrection. A holy resurrection. A miracle—you must not destroy the miracle—” I was beginning to babble in my earnestness.
“No more!” the king roared. “Do not provoke me, Jane! I have no stomach for an argument!” His color rising, he looked around the room. “Where is my damned walking stick?”
One of the grooms ran out of the room.
“Get up!”
I got to my feet. My face was wet with tears, my heart pounding. I could feel that my headdress was askew.
“You and your prie-dieu! You and your pious prayers!” He spat, and the dogs, alarmed, scattered. “Don’t you know anything? Have you lived at court all these years and been so blind? Can’t you understand that the money that comes into my treasury from the sale of these criminous houses, these fonts of evil, where sin and lechery have gone on unchecked for centuries—can’t you understand that this wealth is keeping the armies of the emperor from overrunning our realm? How do you imagine our soldiers are equipped and our fortresses repaired? Do you think the coins just fall from the sky, like manna from heaven?
“If you must pray, Jane, then get down on your knees and pray for guns, and ships, and arms for the trained bands, and mercenaries from over the sea! That’s the only kind of miracle England requires! The monks and nuns with their precious relics can go to the bottom of the ocean for all I care!”
The groom who had run out came rushing back, short of breath, carrying the king’s gold walking stick and handing it to his master, who grasped it roughly.
I moved aside to let my furious husband pass, thrusting his stick into the rushes as if the imperial enemy were underfoot.
“Damned meddling!” I heard him mutter as he went out the door. “You can forget about a coronation. I have no taste for it now!”
TWENTY-FOUR
In the middle of a dark night that summer, while we were staying at the manor of Colehill, we heard the creaking and trundling of a cart being pulled into the courtyard.
Henry awakened me, full of apprehension. We heard the voices of guardsmen in the courtyard, went to the window and saw torches being lit and the household being roused. The crescent moon hung low in the sky and I could tell it would not be dawn for some hours.
One of the privy chamber gentlemen knocked quietly on our chamber door and told the king he was needed urgently in the stables. Waving away the other servants, the king in his nightshirt and I in my robe, bedclothes wrapped around us for warmth, we made our way outside
and across the courtyard to where the rough-looking cart, filled with straw, lay half hidden under the eaves.
As we watched, the straw was lifted to reveal a long leaden cylinder, unadorned and unmarked.
“It is the prince,” the chamber gentleman said in a low voice. “Your instructions have been followed. The body will be taken to Thetford and buried there.”
“Was there a priest with him, at the end?”
“I do not know, sire. He was very ill. I was told there was almost nothing left of him.”
I saw my husband’s shoulders droop at those somber words.
“Get on then,” he said after a time. “No ceremony, no headstone. Put him in the crypt. It is consecrated ground.” He turned aside, without pausing to watch, as the straw was replaced atop the plain leaden form and the cart was driven away.
* * *
The sickly Henry Fitzroy had finally died, his sudden death casting a pall over our traveling household. My husband had given orders that there be no official acknowledgment of his passing; it would not do, he said, to alert his enemies to the fact that he had no male heir, legitimate or otherwise, and that both twenty-year-old Mary and three-year-old Elizabeth had been declared bastards by Parliament.
All eyes were turned to me. Why wasn’t I carrying the king’s child? Was there something wrong with me? Were the sovereign and the realm to be disappointed yet again?
We had been married only a short time, I wanted to say to those who cast furtive looks at my belly. Soon. It will happen soon. I knelt on Catherine’s prie-dieu and prayed for the grace to give my husband a son.
For he was suddenly full of dread. The death of Henry Fitzroy had quickened his everpresent superstitious fears, making him believe that the curse of the Nun of Kent had not been lifted by her execution, even as the blessing of her healing power continued to flow through her relics.
“I should never have sold it, should I Jane,” he said as we dined together. On the previous night Henry Fitzroy’s body had been brought to the manor where we were staying, and although we had been prepared to move on to our next destination Henry had decided not to go. He needed to rest, he said. He needed to recover for a day or two from hearing the grave news of his son’s passing. So we stayed on, and at midday we sat down to eat.
“I am right, am I not? It was a terrible mistake to sell that convent.”
I saw that the food set before my husband on silver platters had hardly been touched, the meat still in a juicy mound, the loaf of fine white manchet still whole, the goblet of wine nearly full. His usually rosy face was grey, as grey as the skies that had remained cloudy for many days on end during our lengthy progress. The lines around his eyes and mouth seemed to have deepened in the wake of his bereavement, his whole face sagged with the weight of his grief and loss.
“Are you listening to me, Jane?” he snapped. “How can you eat? Why aren’t you in mourning for the lost prince? Why aren’t you dressed in black?”
I put down my knife and my morsel of bread. I wiped my hands and mouth with my napkin, then smoothed the skirt of my tawny gown.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty, but you said you did not want any of us to wear mourning for the prince, or hold any funeral or even say prayers over his grave at Thetford.”
“I know what I said! Put on a black gown at once! That tawny one offends me.”
I did as he asked, hoping that in the time it took me to dress he might recover his composure. But when I returned to the table clothed in black velvet and resumed my seat, it was evident that his foul mood persisted. He glared at me.
“Well? Have you nothing to say?”
“I have done as you asked, sire. As you see. I have put on mourning.”
“But have you nothing to say about the convent?”
“Only that I wish it had not been sold.”
The king rose from the heavy oak table, grasping it by the edges as he did so and making the table shake. My wine goblet tipped over.
“Why didn’t you say so before!” It was a demand, not a question. Knowing that no matter what I said or did, my husband’s anger would not abate, I rose to go.
“If Your Majesty will give me leave,” I began.
“Sit down, Jane, and answer me.”
Praying inwardly for patience, I sat down again. To my relief, the king did too.
“I did try to convince you that St. Agnes’s should not be sold. But you paid no attention. In fact you were angry with me, as you are now.”
“You should have tried harder,” he grumbled—but his tone was less harsh. He filled a goblet with wine and drank it off. “Don’t you see what you have done? By failing to convince me you have allowed the very thing to happen that I most feared. You have caused the wrath of the nun to fall on me. You may have caused the royal line of the house of Tudor to come to an end.”
This was more than I could endure. More than any wife should have had to endure. I stiffened.
“I failed! I allowed your son to die! I think, sire, that you are the one who has failed! You failed to listen to my pleas. You failed to heed the warnings of the Nun of Kent! Or to respect the divine power she possessed. I did nothing but be your loving and obedient wife. You cannot blame me!”
As I spoke the king looked at me, at first quizzically, then with growing surprise and interest.
“Jane! Such fire! I have never seen you so aroused. But it matters not whether you are tart or meek; all that matters now is that I have disturbed the shrine of that vengeful, hateful woman Elizabeth Barton, and she has punished me by cursing my son and killing him.”
He thought a moment. “And no doubt she has cast one of her spells on you, Jane, to make you barren.”
“I am not barren!” I insisted loudly. “The midwives have assured me that I can have children. Surely it is only a matter of time. We have been married only a few months.”
“Prize cows are in calf as soon as they are bred.”
“And prize bulls do not breed sickly heifers who die before their time!”
I spoke without thinking. As soon as I heard the words come from my mouth I clamped my hand over my lips. I could feel my face growing hot. How could I have allowed such bitter words to pass my lips? And with the king in pain and mourning his son.
“Never mind, Jane,” Henry said presently, his tone bleak. “I am being punished. What are a few unkind words compared to my grieving—and my dread of our future?”
* * *
Sad as the prince’s death was, and alarming as my own failure to conceive seemed, there was worse to come, and darker threats to follow. For in the fall, after we had returned to the capital and the weather began to turn cold, messengers arrived with the alarming news that Lincolnshire had risen in revolt, and the nearby counties were smoldering into rebellion as well.
There were protests and marches, armed assaults and angry demonstrations by those who called themselves pilgrims but were no better, the king said angrily, than rebels and traitors who deserved to be hanged. Day after day the reports came in, of banner-carrying pilgrims—their protests encouraged by Ambassador Chapuys and his sinister ally Father Bartolome—who condemned the destruction of the monasteries and wanted a return to the old religious ways. Mythic prophecies about the end of time, stories about King Henry and his wickedness were spread, along with tales of new taxes and harsher laws. And as the unrest grew, there were assaults, tax collectors and royal officials were murdered, towns and villages laid under siege.
It was feared that the entire north of England, and possibly Scotland too, would soon become a lawless wilderness where the king’s authority had no weight and misrule prevailed.
Henry fumed and shouted and even threatened to go to the north himself at the head of an army, but the rebellion continued to grow—and to grow increasingly dangerous to the security of the realm. Ned warned that the peril was greater than Henry realized, cautioning him that an imperial army was gathering in Flanders and that the Scots might soon come down in force to jo
in the rebels.
Meanwhile there was no legitimate heir to the throne, and I could feel the eyes watching me, waiting for the grace of motherhood to descend on me—or, as the more vulgar among my husband’s subjects said, for the king himself to descend on me and make me pregnant.
As the deep snows arrived to blanket the north and make the roads impassable, the rebels retreated, placated by false assurances that Parliament would settle their grievances. I was by this time beside myself with worry. I was all but convinced that my husband, for all his efforts in bed—efforts which left him winded and red-faced, panting from his exertions, while I still did not conceive—was lacking in virility. Anne had been right all along in saying that he had no force or strength. Either that, or the curse of the nun fell across our bed and made it impossible for me to bear a child.
Ice began to form along the edges of the Thames, and day by day its thin crust spread inward toward the onrushing center of the river, the ice thickening faster than the tides could sweep it away. Vendors set up booths on the frozen waterway, and Londoners, diverted by the rare sight, forgot the danger of the cold to ears, toes and fingers and slid and danced across the slick cold surface.
For weeks there was no fresh fish to be had and the capital’s grain stores were depleted. Beggars froze in the streets and the crowds at the palace gates, waiting to receive my abundant alms plus bread and bones, the outscourings of pots from the kitchens and the scrapings from plates, had never been larger. Still, there was a sense of merrymaking in that Christmas season, and I rejoiced most of all, for it was then that my prayers were answered at last and I conceived a child.
A child! A growing life within me, the hope of the realm, as Bridget said happily. (“And about time too,” as Ned remarked, though I saw a hint of a smile at the corners of his thin lips.) All my ladies were happy for me, the astrologers were greatly relieved. The birth chamber was made ready and the midwives prepared to move into the palace as soon as my quickening was confirmed.
The Favored Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife Page 24
