Never one to let anything deter his appetite for food, Henry grunted as he beheld the plate containing the smoked eels, and stabbed several of the brownish slabs with his knife. He shoved them into his mouth and began to chew thoughtfully. He swallowed and then regarded the bowl of creamed congers with some interest. He fished around in the bowl with a spoon, and then slurped some of the highly flavored cream sauce.
Apropos of nothing, he said abruptly, “I spoke with Chapuys today. I told him I despaired of ever having a son.”
Jane dropped her knife onto her platter with a clang and felt the last bite of food she had taken turn into what felt like a lump of hot coal in her stomach. So it was to be a tongue-lashing again.
Henry regarded her coldly. “Have you nothing to say for yourself?”
In barely a whisper Jane replied, “We are trying our best, Henry. Such things are in God’s hands, are they not?”
Henry threw his knife to the table with a clatter, soiling the spotless white cloth. “By the rood, you sound just like Katharine!”
The walls of the castle were solid stone and very thick; despite the warmth of the breeze wafting in through the wind-eye, the small chamber suddenly struck chill. She had been taught that comparisons were odious, but it was hard to object to being compared with such a virtuous, beloved queen as Katharine had been. Had it been this way with her, she wondered? Henry had been younger then, not so disillusioned by life, and from what she had observed in her time as one of Katharine’s ladies, a loving, indulgent husband, until Anne had worked her spell and turned him away from her.
He had at first been patient with her; she had to admit that. Now she knew of what he had been thinking as he gazed disconsolately out of the window. It was the last day of the month but one, and marked the end of the third month of their marriage. His patience was wearing thin. He kept a brave face on it in public, but for the past two weeks he had been decidedly unpleasant to her in private, and she knew why. It surprised her that he had had such a conversation with Chapuys, though; as Imperial ambassador, Henry must know that anything he said to the man went straight back to the emperor. But when Henry became morose, as he was wont to do more and more often these days, he seemed not to care about such things.
Jane was beginning to feel as if she were a rat in a trap. She recalled her father’s words that she was risking too much for what she was getting in return. For she knew, and Henry knew, that it was likely that the delay in conceiving was more to do with himself than with her. It was not a subject which could be acknowledged, discussed, or even alluded to. But the fact remained that more often than not, their love-making ended in a frustrated king who could not produce the precious royal seed so necessary to the ultimate alleviation of the burden that had been laid squarely on Jane’s shoulders: the production of a male heir to the throne.
In the first flush of his triumph at defeating Anne and her faction, Henry had been fully potent. But as the weeks dragged on and there was no result, his ability, indeed, his very desire, flagged. Perhaps what George Boleyn had said at his trial was true and mayhap Anne, in desperation, had sought an alternative. Jane could have done so herself, if she had the nerve; Henry would never know. His efforts were sporadically successful. And lately he had taken to slipping off back to his own bed after his labors, successful or not. His love-making had become mechanical, and he seemed to treat it as a chore, as if it were a rote exercise set a reluctant schoolboy.
Jane knew enough to realize that the fault lay with her husband and not with her. She never refused an opportunity, she was as responsive as was seemly in a well-born woman past her first youth, and she never remarked upon his failed efforts, never even acknowledged that such had occurred. She was faultless and blameless, but the knowledge of it yielded her little consolation.
So had she made a grave error after all? Henry would never own up to the real issue; he would blame her both publicly and privately should she fail to conceive. That much was already evident. The veneer of his happiness in his new marriage was wearing thin indeed, and it would not be long before he began to show his displeasure beyond the privacy of the royal apartments.
“And what is this?” Henry asked, pushing at the dish of salet.
Jane regarded him with a puzzled expression; he knew very well what it was. But one must humor him. Making an effort to brighten despite her sagging frame of mind, she replied, “It is a salet made of exotic lettuces from Flanders, carrots, and cucumbers from the Lady Mary’s own garden at Hunsdon. Is it not to your liking?” The carrots were an especial coup d’ etat; they were very fat, deliciously orange in color, and each no bigger than one of Henry’s small fingers. They looked like innocent little jewels, arranged so carefully on the platter alongside the wafer-thin cucumber slices.
“I might have known,” he said. Salet had been one of Katharine’s favorite dishes. Another reminder of that which he had no desire to be reminded! Katharine had craved salet all through the pregnancy that had resulted in the New Year’s boy, his only legitimate son. Henry the Ninth he was to have been, but he had died before his navel was healed. He pushed the dish away in disgust.
Jane looked sadly at the offending dish, so colorful, so precise in its arrangement, now upset and haphazard after the king’s cruel rejection of it.
Jane tried a half smile. “You make the provision of salet sound like a grave offense instead of the kind gesture of a loving wife.” When he did not reply, she said, in barely a whisper, “I sought only to please you, Henry.”
Henry regarded her coldly. “There is only one way you can please me,” he said. “It appears that once again I have tied myself to one who cannot produce a son.”
Jane raised tormented eyes and said, “You don’t know that. You must give me a chance, Henry. It is not my fault. It has only been…”
“Too long!” he roared, finishing her sentence for her. “Too long, I say! I have already proved myself capable of a son, Madam!”
Jane kept her face carefully expressionless and said, “Have you?”
The implication was staggering; Bessie Blount was a slut and Fitzroy could have been anyone’s; Katharine and Anne’s boys had all died.
Very quietly she said, “I am not the one, Henry, who is destroying the church in England brick by brick. Perhaps God withholds a son from you because he is dissatisfied with one who is destroying abbeys, nunneries and their sacred shrines, and who throws monks and nuns out onto the road to fend for themselves.”
For a moment Henry was too stunned to speak; had he, once again, for all her mealy-mouthed ways, put his neck into the yoke of another meddlesome shrew? God forefend! He gazed at her incredulously for a long moment that seemed to have no measure in time.
And then suddenly her serene expression changed subtly, the planes of her face shifted, and the light gray eyes, so light that they were almost colorless, filled and swam with tears. Her face became as pale and white as a corpse candle and the tears spilled over and ran down cheeks that looked as if they had been carved from alabaster. She neither moved nor spoke; for a moment it seemed as if she had died and was saved from falling to the floor only by the support of the green brocade chair in which she was sitting.
Had Henry simply stalked from the room or ignored her tears and raged on despite them, all might well have been lost in that moment. But instead he knelt before her, lifted her tiny hands in his beefy ones and said earnestly, “Sweetheart, I am sorry.”
Women’s tears had always moved him. They recalled to him the helpless feeling of being able to do nothing substantive to assuage his mother’s slow, quiet sobs when she was distressed. His sister Mary’s weeping had always made him feel clumsy and awkward, and once the tears started, and truth to tell, he was usually the cause of them, he would have promised her the moon to make them stop. Katharine’s tears had scalded him to the bone, even though he had refused steadfastly to let her see how they affected him in the last days when Anne had soured their relationship. Anne’s tears had
always been shed in hysterical rage, and she was the only weeping woman who had ever failed to make him feel ashamed if he were the cause of them.
In that moment, he realized how much he loved his sweet, gentle queen. She had her faults; everyone did. He was aware of her calculating, ambitious nature. But he had never for a moment doubted that she loved him, and the fact that she also apparently feared him left him horrified. Was he never to know complete peace with a woman?
Jane’s sobs gradually subsided into an intermittent hiccoughing, but the tears still ran in steady rivulets down her ashen face, a fresh deposit overflowing her lids with every quivering blink.
Abruptly, a revelatory thought entered his mind at that moment. Perhaps if he wanted to know peace he had to give it first, before he could expect to get it back. There were things that even the Supreme Head of the Church in England could not command. He also remembered hearing someone say, one of his tutors, perhaps, when he was a boy, that like begets like. Striding around in an ill-done-by manner and terrorizing his wife for not conceiving was unlikely to result in anything positive, if one believed the old saw. And what about Anne! He could see that Jane was giving her best; he must try to give his. And in the back of his mind was also a thought from months earlier, that a breeding animal must be kept calm and safe. Incredulously, he realized that Jane had become much more to him since he had first had that thought.
“Sweetheart,” he said, cupping both of her hands in one of his and using the index finger of the other to wipe away her tears. “I am sorry. You are right. I have behaved badly. I will put Cromwell to work immediately planning your coronation. We will have it at…Michaelmas! No, that is too soon. There is too much to arrange. We will have it on the Sunday before All Hallow’s. Will that suit you?” He lifted both her hands and kissed them, left, right, then left again. Without waiting for a reply, he went on. “And I will bring Mary back to court to stay, to be your especial friend. I had no idea you were so lonely. It is very remiss of me not to have done so sooner. She always seems to be a step behind us, back at Hunsdon, or seeing to Elizabeth at Hatfield.” He should thank his lucky stars, he thought, that Jane was not like Anne, who had surrounded herself with completely inappropriate people. Jane had held herself, as queen, aloof from intimacy with her staff, as was proper. But the result was that she had no one of her own rank to make merry with. Who better than his own daughter, to fill this emptiness in Jane’s life? Even if she was a bastard, Mary was still a royal bastard, and fit company for any queen.
The tears began to slow at last, and Henry said, lifting her chin with a finger, “There now. Better?”
Jane smiled through her tears and nodded her head. The relief was so enormous that she was weak with it; she could not have stood or spoken at that moment. She had vast experience at court and in the serving of queens, but she had never been present in the private moments that must have taken place between Henry and his wives. She had had no idea of the effect that a beloved wife’s tears would have upon him. And she did not doubt that he loved her. She was as sure of it as she was of her own life. Henry needed to be in love; it was the only way one of his romantic and sentimental nature could manage his life. He was a musician, a poet, a knight; the very ideals on which his existence was founded demanded that his life be based in love. Love of God, love of country, love of a woman. She had no illusions that he would not always justify his own desires in any way convenient to himself; that was how he could hurt so many people, even people even he professed to love, and still square the results with his conscience. But this need for love, to be in love, could be exploited if one knew that it existed; and in knowing this about the man came the power to manipulate the king.
Katharine had not known it; she had always relied upon her royalty. Anne had not known it; she had gone after what she wanted with all the subtlety of a charging bull. But Jane knew, and knowing, would use the knowledge to keep herself safe. Because this evening’s business, to her horror, had revealed that safety was the best she would ever be able to hope for in the situation into which she had walked with her eyes wide open, and her hand stretched out.
Henry regarded her warily; he hoped that his promises would be enough to stay her tears and her fears. He desperately wanted a son, and if the only way to get one was to mind one’s manners, then he was prepared to do so. But it was not lost on him that for all Jane’s bleatings about tearing the church down brick by brick, it did not seem to bother his queen, standing so firmly on her dignity as only one raised from far down could do so effectively, that her grand coronation would be paid for with the very money that he would gain from dissolving the monasteries that she seemed to care so much about.
Richmond Palace, October 1536
“Oh!” gasped Mary, as her father looked at her from under his thin, red eyebrows. Even as her eyes quickly travelled from the king’s hand to his face, with a flick of the wrist he toppled her king. It fell with a dull thud onto the chessboard. The set was made of a rare, mottled red and white marble from Italy, and the shiny black of mysterious obsidian, a gift to the king from Wolsey, in better days.
“You are not concentrating,” he admonished her, but his tone was friendly and teasing.
Mary blushed. “On the contrary,” she said, arching a set of thin, red eyebrows that were an exact replica of her father’s in all but size, “I have been attending to such an extent that my head aches from it. And this,” she waved a hand at the disappointed black king, “is the best I can do. I fear me that I shall never be the chess player Your Majesty is.”
The use of that particular form of address startled him; few beside Wolsey had ever called him Your Majesty. Mary, having spent much time in her godfather’s company as a child, of course called him as she had always heard him called. It also reminded Henry that he had been apart from this precious child of his for five long years. And all on account of Anne Boleyn! What a waste!
Henry sighed. “Well, set them up again. Unless your head truly aches…?”
Mary regarded her father dispassionately. Outwardly, she smiled and was the good daughter. A part of her even wanted to put the past behind her and just carry on as best she could. But the Mary hidden deep inside, who watched the gay, smiling Mary play chess and enjoy her father’s company, recoiled. She must not be fooled. She must not forget. This was the old Bluff Hal, the jovial, back-slapping, fun-loving king, but he was also the brute who had broken her mother’s heart for a common trollop and disowned his daughter that he might bed a whore…
“Tis true,” said Henry, shaking his head. “You are not attending at all!”
The thing behind Mary’s eyes retreated and the happy, loving Mary yawned and said, “I confess it to be so. I fear me that I am too tired to play. I expect it is the excitement of being back at court.”
It was subtle, but not quite subtle enough. Jane revealed not a flicker of comprehension, but Henry perceived that his daughter was rebuking him. There wasn’t enough to put one’s finger on, to call out into the open, as it were. He eyed Mary speculatively. He would have to teach her who was the cat and who the mouse in this relationship.
But it was not altogether a rebuke; Mary was dazzled to be back at court. Her days were full, and she often played at cards until well into the wee hours. Her losses were all cheerfully covered by her father in the form of a generous allowance. She checked her accounts personally and signed the ledger at the end of each month. She was appalled at the sums she had lost compared with those she had won.
It was particularly gratifying to be so close to the new queen. Jane did not possess that indefinable thing that Mary had observed in Elizabeth, but she was able to hide her lack of true royalty behind a quiet demeanor which passed for dignity. Jane could never be truly dignified, because it was obvious to Mary that she was always afraid. Of what she was afraid was no concern of Mary’s; the list must be long. But in comparison with Anne, it was hard not to like Jane. The two girls were of an age and despite all the things that co
uld have conspired to keep them at arm’s length from each other, they had formed a fast friendship.
Mary yawned and stretched again, and prepared to rise.
Henry moved the chessboard aside and faced Mary across the small gilt table. “Stay a while,” he said. “I would speak with you.”
Instantly Mary’s guard went up. She lifted her chin and assumed an attentive posture. “Yes, My Lord?”
She saw Jane glance up very briefly, then look back down at her sewing. The swiftly darting needle had never stopped, and now it flashed and winked like a captive star in the firelight.
So Jane knows what he is about to say, she thought. That was well. Her newly close relationship with the queen did not extend to the exchanging of confidences, but Mary’s perceptive eye told her that Jane seemed serene now, whereas in the first months of her marriage she had seemed…Mary wasn’t quite sure how to describe it…as tightly wound as a pulled bowstring. She had seemed calm, but one sensed a certain underlying tension, a wariness, perhaps, about her. Now she seemed genuinely happy. Whatever it was that had happened to cause this change in Jane, Mary was glad for it.
The king regarded her over the width of the table with an almost assessing look. “Daughter,” he said. “Mary, tell me. Now that it is all in the past, did you truly mean it?”
The urge to cross herself and say a quick prayer of thanks to St. Mary, her patron saint, was almost irresistible. Chapuys; thank God and St. Mary for Chapuys. He had warned her that this day would come. Now it was here, and in a way, she was glad, because not until this moment had she realized what a cloud of dread she had been living under.
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