A Love Most Dangerous (12 page)

I had been confused by this for I could not understand
how anyone could not love Anne Boleyn, least of all her husband.

One morning I broached the subject with Jane Seymour.

To my surprise she looked uncomfortable at my words.

'Whatever's the matter, Jane?' I asked.

She looked away as if pondering something deeply
troubling. Then she turned back to me and her face seemed changed. It was as if
she had finished calculating something very complex and had come to a difficult
decision.

'I will tell you,' she said, taking my hands in hers.
'But you must not tell anybody.'

'Not even Eleanor?'

She paused and in that pause I grew confused. It was
as if she was calculating again, moving the beads upon the abacus once more in
order to get the answer that she wanted.

'Eleanor has left the court,' she said.

'Why?' I asked.

'Because I did not wish her to remain. She had become
too close to Anne Boleyn. And to the King.'

I shook my head at this. How could Jane's wishes have
any bearing on whether maids remained at court or not?

And then I found out.

Jane reached inside her bodice and pulled out a
miniature locket. She opened it up and showed it to me. I gasped. Contained
within the locket was a picture of the King.

'Where did you get that from?' I asked.

'Henry gave it to me.'

'Who?'

'Henry.'

I shook my head in confusion. 'Henry who? I don't know
any Henry.'

'Henry Tudor,' said Jane. And she smirked.

My heart seemed to stall and then began to race like a
hare fleeing hounds.

'I don't understand,' I said.

Jane gave me a condescending look. 'King Henry is my
lover, Alice. He is my bed-fellow.'

I blinked and shook my head. I could not believe it.

'But you?' I said.

Jane grew suddenly cold. 'What do you mean by that?'
She leaned forward and clutched my hand so tightly it hurt. 'Do you mean I am
not as desirable as that witch Boleyn?'

'She's not a witch,' I said, aghast.

'You'll find out soon enough what she is, dear Alice. Witch, adulterer, traitor and a whore who sleeps with her own brother.'

I shook my head, refusing to believe what Jane was
telling me.

'It's me that Henry loves,' Jane continued. 'Not Anne.
Not any longer. And it will be me who gives him an heir. A son; not a bastard
girl to shame and disgrace him.'

'You're lying,' I said. 'You're wrong or you're
lying.'

Jane laughed at me then. It was a cold and cruel laugh
which made the tears start in my eyes.

'You'll find I'm right, dear Alice. And let me warn you now. It were best for you if you did nothing to displease me. I shall
forgive this little outburst as childish temper. But I will not forgive any
further disloyalty.'

I ran from the room weeping.

Two days later there was a masque in the Great Hall. I
had kept well away from Jane Seymour since we had spoken. I could not
understand what was happening. I did not like what was happening.

The King and Queen were sitting on their thrones,
watching the masque with great pleasure. To one side of them stood Jane
Seymour. She seemed tense, as if waiting for something dire to happen.

At that moment Philippa Wicks appeared at my shoulder.

'Look Alice,' she whispered. 'Watch what Jane is
doing.'

I turned to look at Jane. And then I saw it. She
opened her miniature locket quite deliberately, sighed visibly and closed it
again. A moment later she repeated the movement.

The King was engrossed by the Masque and did not
notice. Not so the Queen. Her eyes locked onto Jane Seymour and her action.
When Jane repeated the performance a third time, Anne leapt from the throne and
grabbed her by the arm. She tore at the locket. Jane cried out and tried to
keep hold. But Anne was the stronger and wrenched the locket from her hands,
making Jane scream in pain. Blood oozed from her fingers as the chain sliced
into them.

'You've hurt me,' she cried at the Queen.

Anne did not answer. She was looking at the locket,
her eyes wide in horror, her head shaking as if she could not believe the
evidence of her own eyes.

She turned to look at the King. He must have heard the
furore but he steadfastly refused to look towards them. His eyes remained glued
to the Masque but I thought he no longer saw any of it. Not really.

'See how the gauntlet is thrown down,' Philippa
whispered. 'See how Jane pushes the witch onto the slippery slope which will
prove her doom.'

'I turned to look at Philippa. I could not believe
what she was telling me. And then a seed of doubt opened in my heart. And that
doubt grew stronger with every passing day. For every day she seemed to gloat
over how Jane's star was rising and Anne's falling.'

Even as I said those words I realised how often I had
denied this doubt, told myself it was a fancy and nothing more. Philippa was a
friend of mine, I would tell myself, and surely a friend could not be so
different from me. I realised now how I had been deluded.

I passed my hand over my eyes, kept them closed for a
moment while I steadied myself. When I opened them I saw that Susan was looking
at me with deep concern.

'I always suspected something amiss with you and
Wicks,'she said.

'I wish I'd realised it sooner,' I said. 'But I know
now; for certain.'

Susan patted my hand. She pulled her collar further up
her neck and shivered. 'But I had not realised about Jane.'

I shook my head. 'Few people do. But it was Jane
Seymour as much as anybody who caused Anne Boleyn's death. And maybe one day
she will pay for her treachery. Or so I think.'

Susan reached out and took my hand. 'I think so too,'
she said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Death of a Queen.

24th October 1537

Twelve days after she gave birth Queen Jane gave up
the ghost. That's what Susan said at any rate. Cruel, I know, but witty. Susan
never had much time for Jane Seymour. 

It was not news for anybody in the Court if truth be
told. Jane had never recovered from the rigours of childbirth. Her strength of
body, unlike that of her ambition, had never been noteworthy.

But at the time the Court was more than usually a
hotbed of rumour and gossip.

The night the prince was born, rumour had it that the
child had only come into the world after the Queen's legs had been stretched so
wide her hips were almost dislocated. Nobody could say whether or no this was
true. There had been no midwife in her chamber for the Royal physicians had
attended her. These venerable old men were learned in the words of ancient
doctors, herbs and astrology. But not one of them had ever before helped a
woman give birth. They probably had many Latin and Greek authorities to support
the racking of limbs.

Darker rumours whispered that the Queen had been cut
open while still alive and relatively hale. That she had lingered on her bed,
in agony, her life ebbing from her, screaming curses on the King for valuing an
heir more than her life.

I doubted Jane would ever have cursed in such a
fashion. Her motto had always been, 'Bound to obey and serve.' She was, despite
her fierce ambition, a simpleton, and I thought she would hold to her motto
even to her death.

Others said that Jane was very much alive days after
the birth of the child. She was said to be strong enough to see the boy
immediately after his Christening when he was three days old. However, her weak
constitution meant that she was not allowed to leave her chamber. Her
non-appearance served only to fuel the more lurid rumours.

At any rate, a week after the Christening, whether
from the rigours of natural childbirth, dislocated hips or the cut from the
surgeon's knife, the Queen had died.

I received the news with a horror which surprised me.

Jane and I had been friends when I first came to
Court, two Maids of Honour to the newly crowned Anne Boleyn. I may have grown
to dislike her but there was still that early tie between us. I prayed that her
death had been the first one rumoured, a natural one of gentle sleep and
drifting to her end, her mind made easy at having given birth to the King's
heir.

I feared that it might have been the second. That the
King had, indeed, valued his dynasty more than his wife and had ordered that
the child be ripped from her belly. That the gash had never healed and the life
had been bled from her as if she were a traitor to the Crown, tortured and left
to die a lingering and agonising death. Yet, all the while she had continued to
send her love to her murderer, rejoicing in her self-sacrifice.

I pressed my forehead to the window to cool it.
Rumours spread faster than the plague. Any of them might be true, none of them
might. Child birth was a chancy thing at the best of times. It was even more so
when the mother was nearing thirty.

I stared out of the window. Whichever of the rumours
was true there was one thing for certain now. Henry was a widower once again.
Three Queens gone. All lying in their cold, cold graves.

A chill hand seemed to clutch my stomach at the
thought.

The Queen's funeral took place on 12th November, the
first day after Martinmas. It was an appropriate day for a funeral, the first
of St Martin's Fast.  Not that anyone took much notice of this particular Fast
in modern times. Certainly not the King.

Or at least not usually. This year, the period of
mourning and of Fast coincided most happily and the King commanded that all of
his Palaces should become places of sackcloth and ashes for the forty days of
the Fast. It seemed that the King had been traumatised by the death of his wife
and was genuinely grieving for her.

This surprised almost everyone at court. He had cast
off his two previous wives without a backward glance. His marriage to Anne
Boleyn had taken place before his marriage to Catherine had even been annulled.
He got engaged to Seymour the day after Anne's execution and walked his new
bride down the aisle ten days later. He never allowed a sense of propriety to
hinder his hunger to get all that he wanted.

This time it appeared that things might be different.

I had last been with the King two hours before the
death of Jane Seymour. Naturally, upon hearing the news of her imminent
departure he had been quick to order me back to my own bedroom.

I assumed there would be a period where he played the
grieving husband but fully expected that after a few days he would summon me
back to his chamber. No summons came.

For fourteen days I waited for the call, for the
appearance of Page Humphrey with all his cheek and lack of respect. I waited in
vain.

At last I began to abandon the idea of ever seeing the
King again. I came to realise that I had been merely a casual relationship;
indeed a very casual one. In his grief he had cast me aside. The death of Jane
Seymour had put paid to my advancement more than if she'd remained alive and
discovered our liaison.

Or maybe I was fooling myself in this. If she had
stayed alive things may have played out very differently.

Jane Seymour had been as shrewd and opportunistic as
she was ambitious. Witness her part in the downfall of Anne Boleyn to realise
this. She was adept at cloaking her desires behind a facade of demure primness.
She was, I believed, even more devious than Thomas Cromwell, implausible though
that notion may be.

If she had survived and discovered my relationship
with the King she would have manoeuvred as silkily and subtle as a swan and
then turned on me with a ferocity which knew no bounds. I would have fallen,
like Anne Boleyn, to her lust for power. And my head, like Anne's, may well
have fallen from my shoulders and rolled, pitter-patter, across the timbers of
the stage.

I shivered at the notion and reached up for the little
necklace which the King had given me. It was hardly more than a trinket, a poor
thing of little value. But at least I still had a neck to wear it on.

On the fourteenth day of waiting, the twenty sixth of
November if I recall right, Page Humphrey appeared at my chamber once again. I
stood in some agitation, wary of what cheek he would offer me but excited at
the thought of returning to the King's favour.

He held out a book for me. Wondering, I took it from
his hand. It was my book of Sir Thomas Wyatt's verse.

'Henry told me to bring you this,' Humphrey said.
'Hard luck, Miss. A pity really, you seemed like quite a girl.'

He blew a kiss at me and hurried back down the
corridor.

I stared blankly at the volume.

So this was it. Flung away, like meat he had gnawed to
the bone. I glanced around warily, as if searching for hounds racing to fight
over me and gnaw off what little flesh the King had left behind.