Her slender fingers played the tune upon the table, deftly, like spiders’ legs. She was looking all around at the greatness of her queen’s palace and those black eyes, they capered all around that chamber. They just couldn’t get enough of everything they saw. Neither could mine.
Colours were everywhere from the floor to the ceiling. Everything that could be painted, woven or embroidered was full of bright detail: the carpet on the table, the stone fireplace, the leafy design on the musician’s keyboard. Even the window bars were painted scarlet. Busy tapestries where great white horses reared and little dogs ran about amongst leaves and flowers, glistered with gold and silver thread.
After a while, I began to fret that if the Queen didn’t ask me to do what I had come for soon I would be too mesmerised by the music and the tapestries to do it properly.
She must have noticed my discomfort because she asked the musician to play quietly and came to sit beside me on one of the stools.
‘So, you are the little cunning wench who has the sight.’
A foreigner’s voice with an unfamiliar lilt; a singer’s voice, like a mellow lute playing for lovers in evening candlelight.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer.
‘I have heard about your special gift,’ she said lightly, with a little laugh that faded almost as soon as it began.
Teasingly, her lips pursed and moved into a hint of a smile, but a real smile nevertheless, one that showed in those lively eyes and I understood how the King had fallen in love with her and thought that I could almost fall in love with her myself.
‘Come, come, little maid, I think you have something to tell me.’
I studied her hands, now calmly resting in her lap. She caught the little finger of the right hand with her thumb so that it was hidden. Was it true, what the kitchen folk whispered, about her sixth finger, the sign of a witch?
She patted her bodice in rhythm to the music. A mother in waiting, like any other mother. I was calmer now. I was ready for her question.
Yet still I could not speak.
The gentleman by the fireplace laughed. ‘You’ve put a spell on her Nan,’ he said.
‘Be silent brother, she snapped. ‘These are women’s matters.’
I had guessed that they were brother and sister. They had the same zealous black eyes and proud stance but his hair was lighter, the colour of chestnuts, new and shiny from the shell. I thought that he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen, but I didn’t like him.
She turned to me, speaking softly as if to a little child.
‘Your name is Avis?’
I nodded, suddenly aware that I had no idea how I should address the King’s new wife. She was always the whore to Mmotheother.
‘Your mother is a servant in the kitchens I understand?’
‘In the confectionery, Your Grace. She helps the wife who makes the puddings for the King’s banquets. ‘
‘And very fine puddings they are too,’ the man broke in.
I blushed at the mocking tone of his flattery and scolded myself for the pride which had stopped me from telling the Queen of my father’s humbler position in the bakery.
The Queen spoke to her brother in a foreign language as if she chastised him. He glared in my direction.
‘She won’t talk if you frighten her,’ the Queen said and smiled at me.
I stroked the wheaten-coloured cloth on the stool beside me and found it as coarse as my father’s working smock.
‘Are these the King’s shirts?’ I blurted out.
‘My ladies and I sew shirts for the poor. It is done in kindness, where we see a need.’ She leaned towards me with sudden intensity. ‘We do not seek salvation from our charity. We know that God will judge us by faith alone. Thus do the scriptures tell and thus should you understand, Avis.’
I thought it might be dangerous to talk about religion now that King Henry had broken from the Pope in Rome, which had made father so very angry and sad. I decided to stick with the needlework.
‘Your Grace, don’t you sew the King’s shirts?’
There was a loud bellow and the slap, slap, slap of her brother’s hands upon his thighs.
‘The wench mistakes you for Katherine.’
The music stopped.
‘No, I don’t, sire. I’m not a fool.’
I knew the King had divorced his first queen, Spanish Katherine of Aragon, because she was too old to bear a child. The kitchen folk had gossiped for years about how Anne Boleyn had used sorcery to seduce the King. We heard of their secret marriage with disbelief. How was it possible for the King to have two wives for the Pope had not permitted the divorce? In private, Mother would spit if I spoke Anne Boleyn’s name.
‘This will be our secret, Avis,’ Queen Anne said while I perched myself on the edge of my stool with my hands in my lap. ‘Tell me what you know. Come now, you may trust me. ‘
‘I know what women are carrying, Your Grace. Be it gentlewomen or servants, I’ve never been wrong.’
‘Tell me, my little maid. Do I carry a prince?’
I wished I was back in the outer courtyard with Mother and my friend Tom who caught the rats.
‘Perhaps you should ask your physician or a midwife,’ I said in a small voice.
‘I have spoken to the King’s physicians. And astrologers too. All but one foretell a boy.’
‘Then it is settled,’ the man at the fireside interrupted. ‘It’s a boy for sure. Why ask this wench?’
‘She is guileless. It is no matter to her what I carry and thus she speaks the truth.’
‘I’ve never done it for a queen before,’ I muttered.
Her brother wasn’t laughing now. I didn’t like the way he stared at me with those deep, accusing eyes.
‘We’re all women, whether we be queens or beggars. I will have your prediction,’ the Queen said.
‘I’m just a simple maid. I’m not learned. I can’t read nor write.’
‘By your own admission you have never been wrong.’
I thought then that I would just tell her what she wanted to hear. That’s what humble people usually do for gentlefolk. And I wasn’t the only person in the room having second thoughts.
‘Nan, dismiss the child,’ her brother said. ‘This is witchcraft. If the King should hear of this …’
‘And who would tell him?’ she snapped, looking towards the musician. ‘I will dismiss you, George, if you will not be quiet.’
She reached towards me and I felt a touch on my hand, light as a stroke from a quill but a touch nevertheless and it bound me to her. I couldn’t lie.
‘How can you tell, Avis?’
‘I don’t do anything, Your Grace. I just know.’
‘The child?’
I took a deep breath and held my voice steady. ‘A bonny child, Your Grace.’
‘Ah, my prince will be strong.’
‘I see a child born a little before term. A child with fair, auburn hair.’
The Queen smiled.
‘The image of His Grace, the King.’
She frowned. ‘Born early you say?’
‘A week or two, no more.’
‘A child in good health?’
‘A fine, strong child, Your Grace.’
The Queen turned to her brother. ‘This is good news, is it not, George?’
When her brother answered his voice was heavy and dull like the thud of a blunt axe upon wet wood.
‘She says nothing of a prince.’
‘I cannot say what I do not see sire,’ I pleaded, in a voice I had never heard before; a sword sharpened on stone. ‘A daughter …’
‘A plague on your daughters.’
‘You curse my issue, brother? In the name of God, be quiet.’
‘Surely, you cannot believe what the wench says. The King’s astrologers have gazed at the stars and consulted their almanacs before casting their figures.’
Again she scolded him with words I couldn’t understand, French, I supposed. Mothe
r had told me that my ladies at court coveted the fashionable clothes and bejewelled hoods that Anne Boleyn had brought from France, where she had been at court for many years.
‘It is God’s will that I give Henry his long-awaited boy,’ Queen Anne told her brother more calmly. ‘Yet, I see there is an honesty about this girl.’
She walked towards the musician and stood by him listening to the music while her hand rested on his shoulder and afterwards, whenever I remembered this day, I could swear that her finger stroked one of his dark curls.
‘I will have those around me that I trust,’ she said.
The musician played a little jolly phrase that he repeated twice or thrice in different ways bobbing his curly head from side to side.
Queen Anne came towards me with a smile.
‘Now then, Avis,’ she said sweetly, ‘I trust this secret meeting into your safekeeping. If our conversation remains privy to these people here present then your honesty is proven and, in due course, I promise that your station will improve.’ Then she whispered how this would come about.
When I returned to Mother she looked at the hem of my kirtle and lifted it to reveal red stains on my white, linen shift.
‘You are not a child any more,’ she said sadly.
Chapter 3
May 1558
‘And so it was, White Boy, that I came to be in the court of King Henry VIII for those three years when all the colours changed to white and red: the Tudor rose. The colours of fear and danger.’
‘What happened to Tudor green?’ White Boy asks.
‘Green is the colour of spring, of new life, hopes and promises. By the autumn of 1534 summer rains had washed it away.’
I look back to that summer of 1533 and I remember thinking that even if Queen Anne had not bade me be silent, still, I would never have spoken a word of it, not even to Mother. I hardly dared to believe that she had made such a promise to me. I can see now that my behaviour at that time must have appeared strange to Min churchother. I would be skipping around in circles hardly able to contain my excitement one moment and in the next brooding that the Queen might forget her promise. I would stroke my hand where she had touched me and wonder what it meant for me, a gardening maid, to be touched by a queen. In church with Mother and Father and the other outer courtyard servants, I gazed at the stained glass window of St Anne with her two babes and I imagined myself passing through the bright glass into that other glistening world of courtiers and colour.
‘It is hard to be patient and wait with good grace when you are young,’ White Boy says, shaking his silvery-white head like an ancient cleric in a pulpit. He is silent for a while, not being a wordy man. Suddenly, he rises from the settle and cries out,’On Sundays, when sunlight shines at the church windows, if I peek through my clout I can see the colours glimmering. And that is how it was, you say, mistress, inside the royal apartments at Greenwich?’
‘Ay, White Boy, bright and light and everywhere glistering with gold.’
‘And music, mistress? Surely there was music?’
‘What I remember most is the music. With the passing of the years memories fade. We forget what our eyes have seen but what we have heard stays true in our memory.’
‘Aye, mistress. music is faithful no matter the course of time and may be brought to mind at our pleasure.’
‘Bygone music has its own accompaniments: fragments of hopes, regrets, yearnings for what is gone,’ I sigh.
‘You speak true, mistress, but never forget that however wretched we may be, music has the power to make the present joyful.’
White Boy plays while I step out as if in a stately pavane. Backwards and forwards across the small kitchen I glide, with my head held high and heavy, as if I wear a bejewelled hood and my velvet train were swishing across the rushes.
Chapter 4
May 1533
It felt strange to be back in the outer courtyard. Had the great kitchen always been as smoky and noisy as it was today?
Tom was darting between cooks and servants, under trestles and over forms, cracking his whip and jingling shrill bells. He slithered into a corner and emerged dangling a rat by its tail.
‘This one wasn’t fast enough.’ He untied a wriggling sack and dropped it in.
‘How many rats you got in that bag there, Tom?’ asked a brawny boy who was turning a spit at one of the six vast fireplaces where a sheep was roasting.
‘Just two.’
‘What do ye do with ‘em?’
‘Feed them, keep them for a while.’
‘That other sack stinks.’
‘It will do, it’s full of dead rats.’
‘What do ye want them for?’
‘To show the cooks how well I do my job. They don’t see the ones I scare away.’ Tom’s slow, country accent was at odds with his frantic thrashing of the whip. He came to where I sat at the trestle with my herb basket.
‘I was looking for you this afternoon, Avis. Where were you?’ Sweat poured down his face and soaked his shirt.
‘Women’s matters don’t concern the rat boy,’ I said, remembering my newly acquired status of womanhood.
Tom sat beside me for a while, his whip limp, his bells still. He stared at me as if I was someone he had met before, but he couldn’t quite remember who I was.
‘What did you want of me?’ I asked, while I tied the mint into bunches.
‘Nothing that won’t wait. It can be a secret for a while longer.’
He looked at the floor and drew circles with his foot. His shoes wouldn’t last much longer. They were well worn when one of the serving boys had passed them on to him. There were holes in the toes and gaps at the sides where the stitching had broken.
‘Hush, Peter. It must have been important,’ I pestered, ‘for you to have to stop chasing rats to look for me.’
‘It’s important to me.’ He sighed. ‘I doubt now that it would be important to you.’
I looked at Tom: at his soggy shirt neither white nor grey, his frayed breeches of unrecognisable cloth, his friendly eyes of no particular colour.
‘I have a secret too,’ I said and piled a big heap of rosemary on to the trestle.
‘You have to tell me your secret first,’ I coaxed. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you my secret today. It won’t be a secret for long, very soon everyone will know.’
‘Then it’s not worth knowing.’ Tom made the whip slink through the rushes in little eddies like an adder. ‘This morning I had resolved to ask you something. It was to be a secret we both could share. Now, I think not.’
I snatched the bells from his hand and dropped them into my basket. ‘You won’t have your bells until you tell me your secret.’
Intent upon the wriggling whip at his feet, he ignored me.
‘If you tell me your secret, Tom,’ I said, as sweetly as I could, ‘I’ll tell you mine soon, before anyone else knows.’
He dropped his whip and helped me tie the rosemary into sprigs. It was a long while before he spoke.
‘This morning when I awoke, I decided that today is the day that I will ask you something.’
He took a deep breath, blushed to the roots of his hair, and said, all in a rush, ‘Shall we be married? When we are grown older, of course. We do not need to tell anyone else yet. It can be our secret.’
I jumped up and threw the bells at Tom’s feet. ‘I can’t marry a rat boy. I need to marry a man who can provide well for me.’
‘I’m fifteen and you are thirteen,’ he said, in a voice like my father’s, both scalding and gentle alike. ‘I won’t always be a rat boy. I intend to learn a trade.’ He looked around the kitchen where servant boys, younger than himself, turned spits, stuffed poultry and stirred pots of gruel while ruddy faced cooks bellowed orders and cursed. ‘I have spoken to your father. He’s going to find work for me in the bakery.’
‘You would have me take a baker for a husband?’
‘As has your mother. Is a baker not good enough for you now, my lady? Wha
tever has happened to you today to turn your head away from your good parents and your friend.’
‘There is no harm in wanting to better myself,’ I muttered, ashamed that he would think I judged ill of my parents. I heard the sullen tone I hadn’t meant and saw Tom frown. He took my hand and I allowed him to lead me outside into the courtyard and beyond into the herb gardens where we sat upon a stone bench out of the hearing of the straw-bonneted weeding girls kneeling at the herb beds.
‘I will make you a promise,’ Tom said.
‘That will be the second promise made to me within a day.’
‘Aye, that’s no surprise to me. Someone has turned your head to make you think above your station and I doubt any good will come of it. Nay, don’t run away, stay, stay and hear my pledge to you,’ he called, for I was running off with my basket to join the other girls.
I returned to him although I pushed away the hand that reached to hold mine. ‘Don’t think that I will agree to any hand-fasting. I’m not your betrothed.’
‘You’ve made that very clear. But prithee stay and listen. Let me make my pledge to you.’
I said nothing and Tom knelt at my feet and I let him take my hands in his own. After all, a girl’s first marriage proposal should be savoured.
‘Hear me, Avis, and take heed, for this is my vow. Five angel nobles I pledge to you.’
‘Five angel nobles? How can a rat boy like you get such wealth unless you turn cut-purse and steal it? An angel is a golden coin worth more than seven shillings. People like us will never see one, even if we live to be ancient.’
‘It’s not such a large amount of money given time and hard work. I don’t crave fancy chattels for myself. A bowl of gruel and the ashy lower crust of poor man’s bread is all the victuals I need. You will have your angel nobles for sure and the first will come to you sooner than you expect for it will be to seal my pledge. The second angel will come to you later. It will be for constancy. For I will never forget you, Avis, even if you forget me.’
‘How can I forget you? You’re always around, chasing rats in the great kitchen or the chandlery or the bakery. We meet each day. Are you leaving us Tom?’
Mayflowers for November Page 2
