The Queen of Subtleties. Suzannah Dunn
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nightly, of sleeping in Henry’s room, on hand in case of an emergency. ‘And he smelt vile,’ he added, ‘from Mr Blackden’s potions.’
Hever, in contrast, was entirely as normal—until Dad and I became ill. People say of sweating sickness, Fine at lunch, dead by supper. On the day concerned, Dad and I were fine at lunch, but by mid-afternoon it was clear that we wouldn’t be showing up for supper. Not that I knew anything about Dad; I knew nothing but the ball in my throat and the fire in my joints. I now know that Mum sent one of our servants at speed to Henry, but all I knew at the time was the momentary relief of water-soaked linen strips to my forehead. She’d sent Annie from my room and was nursing me—and Dad. She’d learned from her stepmother, who had a reputation for being able to beat ‘the sweat’ (and indeed everything and everyone else that didn’t meet with her approval; not for nothing was she the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk). Bed, my grandmother reckoned, for a day and a night; no food for a day, a night and a day; no visitors for a week; and as many spoonfuls of some herbal, treacly concoction of hers that a delirious person could be tricked into taking.
By the time that Henry’s trusted Dr Butts arrived on our drawbridge, both Dad and I had survived into the ‘no visitors’ stage. An exception was made for one of the king’s doctors, of course, and I made the most of it. He and I ended up talking about the new ideas, the changes in what we believed and how we believed. No morbid priest-lover, Dr Butts; instead, a gently sensible man with a sense of humour. It’s not that I was starved of like-minded company when I was home. Quite the opposite. Nor back at court, where my brother’s radical friends had become mine and I was no longer in Catherine’s service. But after those few days of wild sickness and my mother’s ministrations, I felt stunningly isolated. Dr Butts did me the favour of staying for I don’t know how long on a stool by my bed, talking about the future while the June rain sloshed into the moat and the day’s light thinned.
As it happened, Uncle Norfolk, at Kenning Hall, had also had the illness, and had also survived. Did it surprise us, our survival? Nothing much surprises a Boleyn or Norfolk; least of all, survival. None of us was surprised, though, when my sister’s husband William succumbed. Except her. None of us was surprised that he’d made no provisions and, worse, had run up some nasty debts. Except her. She wrote to Dad from Richmond, desperate and destitute with her two small children. But he was in no mood for Mary. ‘I said she shouldn’t have married him,’ was his view.
‘But she did, dear,’ Mum reasoned.
He’d always despised Mary; she embarrassed him, unmistakably Boleyn in her looks but easy-going, easily pleased. He refused to help her. Wouldn’t even allow her home. She should be at Leeds Castle, he said, asking Wolsey for her due. William had been employed in the Privy Chamber by the king; so, according to my father, it was up to Wolsey to make suitable arrangements for ‘the widow’, as he called her. We’d had word that Wolsey was besieged by people demanding debts be repaid from the estates of deceased, and vying for their now-vacant jobs (cousin Francis getting William’s).
‘She should be there in the middle of it all,’ Dad said, ‘making a case, telling a few lies if needs be; whatever it takes to get whatever she can. Instead of acting the baby and wailing for me to do it. She didn’t want my advice, before, when I offered it.’
‘That’s because she was in love,’ my mother said. ‘She has two small children, she can’t be gadding to Leeds Castle. We don’t even know that she has any way of getting there. She has no money, Thomas; just the coins in her purse.’
But he wouldn’t budge, and I suspected that he was still far from normal after his fever. Because otherwise, I couldn’t fathom it. He’s a hard man, yes, a cold man, but he’s a pragmatist; and his rejection of Mary seemed self-defeating, to me. I could understand that he might be more than usually sensitive to how people saw us, now that we Boleyns were so much in the public eye, but this was entirely the wrong tactic. Mary’s a fact, I told him; she isn’t going away because you won’t see her.
‘Everyone else will see her,’ I assured him, ‘rattling around the country, threadbare. Is that how you want them to see a Boleyn?’ He knew I was right, but he wouldn’t hear it from me. I knew someone whom he would take it from, though. I wrote to Henry; he’d written me the most wonderful long letter as soon as he knew that I’d survived. You do know, don’t you, that I’ll do anything, anything, anything for you.
Well, this one’s easy enough, I wrote back. Tell my father to stop being so stupid about Mary.
Sure enough, a letter came, and my father’s attitude seemed to change. Mary’d better come home, he told my mother, although she’d better keep out of my way.
I hadn’t long been back at court with Henry before word came that the Pope’s cardinal—Campeggio—was at last in Calais. He’d certainly taken his time. Gout, apparently, was his bug-bear, had slowed him up. The future of England had hung in the balance while some fat old Italian had vacationed in various European cities. Worse: now that he was well and truly on his way to us, I had to go back home to Hever. This was so that Henry could look respectable, again, and properly conscience-racked. I accepted it for a few days, until I came to my senses, and then I returned to London. If they were to decide my future, I wasn’t going to sit demurely in Kent while they did it.
Henry kept me at a discreet distance, offering me the use of Durham House on the Strand. A move there would give the wrong signals, I told him. It was a nice enough London house, but hardly the abode of a queen-in-waiting; and home not long ago to Betsy and Fitz, whereas I was no mistress and I’d be having no bastard. So he moved me to the Suffolk’s house in Southwark—one of wet-fish Brandon’s places. ‘Have you seen it?’ I complained. No doubt grand, once, it hadn’t been decorated for decades and was particularly unappealing in a dark, damp October. Henry agreed to renovations. So, for months I had to live with the thumps and whistling of workmen as rooms were re-panelled, ceilings re-painted, windows re-glazed, tapestries hung, a gallery built and the kitchen enlarged. I had distractions enough, though, because all the boys came, most days, to keep me company. They loved it that we had a place of our own and could do as we pleased. I kept odd hours and bad company: my definition of a good time. I knew what the people of London were saying; they were saying what people love to say in such a situation: how dare he leave his dear old wife for a little tart. It rankled that I couldn’t put the record straight—he’d left her long ago, she was a wily old bird, and I wasn’t little nor a tart—but you can’t live your life by what people think.
There was one person whose thoughts did matter. One visitor I did need. The cardinal himself. Let him come and meet me, I said to Henry; give me enough notice and he’ll find someone gracious, practical, educated and well-informed.
‘I’m sure he will,’ Henry laughed. ‘But for now he’s laid up with gout.’
Again?
Again.
And when he was back on his less-gouty feet, it was Fat Cath he went to see. ‘He has to,’ Henry said. ‘He has some options to put to her, to try to sort this out before it gets to trial.’
‘Options? Such as?’
‘Such as, why not do what she does best? Take up the religious life, full-time, by going into a nunnery.’
I liked it; and, better still, surely so would she. ‘But that’s only one,’ I said; ‘one option. What are the others?’
Henry looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, they were for me.’
‘And?’
‘And I’ve already said no.’
‘But they were…?’
They were that the Pope could give a fresh, unambiguous dispensation, in retrospect, for Henry’s existing ‘marriage’ to his dead brother’s wife—in other words, excuse it—or that the problem of his having no heir could be solved by the marriage of his weasel-faced daughter to his bastard son.
‘They’re suggesting that?’ Naturally, I was aghast. ‘They’re