The Girl in the Glass Tower (34 page)

‘You can’t what? Did you not hear him when he said, “a little time”?’

‘You’ve misunderstood his meaning, Belle.’

‘No! You are wrong. You didn’t see the look in his eye.’ But as I said it I began to question whether I had imagined that look, imagined the sympathy in my cousin’s tone.

‘I can’t do as my grandfather did. Look what happened to Katherine Grey. I will not let the same thing happen to you.’

‘I am
not
Katherine Grey. I am different; this is different. The King has two male heirs, two sons of his body; Elizabeth had none. It’s not the same.’

‘My family has lived in the wilderness for three generations …’ His eyes were glossy with distress. ‘I can’t.’

‘Have you forgotten your father was
desperate
to get us to the altar, at any cost?’

‘But my grandfather –’

‘Since when were you in Hertford’s pocket?’ I touched his hand but he pulled it away, a brutal gesture.

‘I will not jeopardize your safety.’ He sounded strong then, and stalwart.

He waited several moments for my response.

‘Go, then,’ is what I said.

What was I supposed to do, get on my knees and beg as women do in plays? Weep and wail, prostrate myself, threaten to take my own life?

Despair taunted me as I watched him descend the steps in silence. When he had turned the corner at the bottom, I whispered, ‘But I love you,’ understanding only then the preposterousness of such an emotion. Love was God’s great joke on humanity, a means to reduce us to lunacy, chasing our own tails in its name.

It was that Seymour cousin, Mister Rodney, who came to my rooms later that evening, begging to see me. I refused him, told Dodderidge to say I was suffering from a headache, which I was – flares of pain and zigzags of light dancing before my eyes which necessitated lying in the dark.

‘He comes with a message from Seymour,’ said Dodderidge. ‘Insists that he has been instructed to deliver it in person directly to you.’

I jumped on the possibility that William had had a change of heart and felt a twinge of optimism.

I heard Rodney enter. ‘Do you mind the dark?’ I said, assuming Dodderidge had explained.

I pulled myself up but the throbbing in my head intensified. Dodderidge, as if reading my mind, placed a large pillow behind me, which I sank back into, closing my eyes and pressing my fingers to my temples. ‘Show me the letter, then.’ I imagined Will’s familiar handwriting:
I regret my earlier harshness, dearest one …

‘It is not a letter, as such, but something to read out to you.’ My optimism began to eke away.

‘Would you like me to leave?’ asked Dodderidge.

‘For God’s sake, no.’

I heard Rodney’s footsteps traverse the chamber, the rustle of paper, and opened my eyes to see his dark outline tight by the window against a chink of light, where he had opened a crack in the hangings to read.

He cleared his throat and began –
Mister William Seymour has tasked me with conveying his thoughts …
I could take in only fragments:
prejudicial to your contentment … extremely dangerous to his safety … he humbly desires your ladyship to desist from your intended resolution concerning him
.

There was nothing familiar about the tone, nothing I recognized of Will. ‘These are not his words. This is Hertford. Tell me I am right, Mister Rodney.’

‘I fear, My Lady, you are not. I watched Mister Seymour write them himself.’ He sounded apologetic and I understood that the task he had been set was distasteful to him. There was pity in his voice. I didn’t want pity. ‘May I continue?’ he asked.

I wanted to say I had heard enough but I suppose I held a forlorn hope that there might be some note of tenderness in his message. The sliver of brightness from the window seared into my head, like a hot knife. I shut my eyes once more but the flicker of light and jabbing pain persisted. ‘Go on.’

He resolves on his part to no longer trouble you with this matter and has no doubt that your ladyship will find someone more fitting to your station
– I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and hum to shut him out –
whilst he will seek a meaner match
.

‘More fitting to my station,’ I whispered, not intending to say it out loud. ‘I wonder who that would be, given my station is so elevated.’ I was grateful for Dodderidge’s reassuring presence but nothing, no one, could prevent my inner collapse.

Mister Rodney carefully folded up the paper, slid it out of sight in his doublet and stood waiting for my response. ‘You may go,’ I said. My voice was small.

‘Is there nothing you wish me to convey to Mister Seymour, My Lady?’ There it was again, the pity, making me prickle with anger.

‘No,’ I said, but then just as Rodney was at the door I added, ‘Tell him that as long as he is Hertford’s mouthpiece, his words fall on deaf ears.’

When he was gone I took my betrothal ring from my finger and gave it to Dodderidge. ‘Take this to Cheapside and see what it fetches.’

Three months crept by with interminable sloth and it had become increasingly hard to wear a public face of forced jollity, when my inner world was in smithereens. I had expected the sense of loss to lessen in time but my devastation, rather than diminishing, seemed to burgeon as the days went by and all I had to shore myself up were the hunger pangs that I had once more befriended.

My health was suffering and I carried round an almost permanent feeling of nausea and faintness. Bridget was concerned. She tried to hide it but it was etched all over her and much to her frustration I refused to let her call for Doctor Moundford. She had started to pilfer cuts of white meat and manchet bread from the Queen’s kitchens and pitchers of light broth, which she would try to persuade me to sip in small spoonfuls. I could bear none of it.

‘Your costume for the masque has arrived,’ said Bridget as I returned from a wearisome afternoon in the Queen’s chambers. My heart guttered at the thought of parading myself before the entire court wearing the hideous garment lying on the bed. Every surface of it was cluttered with embroidery, rattling with pearls and shells and fingers of coral, layered with gossamer flounces, tailed with floating ribbons. It had cost what I paid Bridget for a year’s service. ‘You’d better try it on,’ she added. ‘In case it needs altering.’

‘If only I could find a way to avoid participating.’ I imagined all the eyes of the court on me, boring into me, mocking the King’s spinster cousin in her gaudy outfit.
Mutton dressed as lamb
, they would whisper behind their hands,
Without mate and without estate
.

‘It will only be for an hour, My Lady.’ Bridget began to help me out of my clothes.

‘It’s never only an hour. There will be an eternity of feasting and dancing in its wake.’

‘Could you claim illness?’ She held up the costume for me to step into and began to fasten the skirts. ‘It would not be a lie.’

‘I must be there for the Prince’s sake.’ On the previous day Henry had been invested as Prince of Wales, the first in a hundred years. The crowds had been jubilant but the King had found it hard to hide his displeasure at his son’s popularity. I’d
seen it in the tight set of his mouth. There had been a scuffle with some Catholic recusants after the ceremony – the old fear had returned a few weeks prior when a papist assassinated the French king, causing an invisible vapour of paranoia to seep once more through the corridors of England’s royal palaces. But the masque was to be in the Prince’s honour and to please that dear boy I would wear my costume, however ridiculous it made me.

‘I don’t understand,’ Bridget said, behind me. ‘This thing will not do up.’ She was tugging the panels of my bodice. ‘I gave the tailor your measurements, he can’t have got it so wrong.’

‘He must have muddled them with those of someone else.’

All of a sudden she gasped; I turned. She had both hands clapped over her face, only a pair of eyes, round with shock, peeping out above.

‘What is it?’

‘Mary, Mother of God.’ She crossed herself and then repeated it, as if to be sure, and slumped on to the corner of the bed.

‘Be careful,’ I whispered. ‘You don’t want to advertise your faith at present. You never know who might have an ear to the door.’

‘But, My Lady, you have missed your courses.’

‘I don’t know why that is of consequence.’ I wriggled out of the costume, annoyed by her excessive response to a badly cut dress. ‘I rarely bleed. You are well aware of that.’

‘But the nausea and now this …’ She pointed to me, standing there in nothing but my shift. ‘How could I have been so daft; I should have realized …’

‘You think I’m …’ A little snort of derisive laughter escaped from my mouth. I’d always suspected the conception of children might be difficult for someone like me. I
didn’t bleed like other women, my body was different, sharp and formless, a hostile place to incubate an infant.

But slowly, as the first cup of wine brings a feeling of giddiness only after the second has been drunk, I began to see the truth of what she was thinking. All at once I became aware of my body, heavy through my feet into the floor as if the boards might bend under its weight, my breasts aching and swollen, my belly no longer that familiar convex landscape with its jutting escarpments but gently undulating. ‘Oh God.’ Harshly and silently I berated myself for my wilful ignorance and sunk down beside her on the bed. ‘What will I do?’

‘You must wed.’

Panic began to buffet me. I lay back and tried to fix my gaze on the button into which the bed canopy was gathered at its centre, as if it would hold me steady. ‘If only –’ I began but stopped. If only what? If only I had been a different person, had a different life, was not raised behind glass, was not that wooden puppet in the hands of a dead queen.

I could not regret giving myself to him, for those were some of the few moments in my life that rang true. I stared at the button, seeking an answer. ‘The King said, “give it time”. What do you think he meant by that?’ I don’t know what use I thought asking her would be, for I already knew he hadn’t meant three months when he’d said ‘time’. Indeed, what he probably hoped for was that with time my intentions would turn to another. He was not to know that I had already given myself to Will, all of me, body and soul, that I had let loose my bestial other, that it was too late. The watching part of me said:
I told you so
.

‘I suppose that means he is not entirely against it.’

‘Yes, Bridget!’ I sat bolt upright. ‘That’s right – not entirely against it.’ I reached over her for my writing box, took out a sheet of paper and uncorked the ink. Its vinegar whiff sent
my stomach into a roll. I straightened the quill tip, dipped it and scrawled a note:
Come to me at once. It is a matter of the utmost importance, a matter that will change the course of both our lives
.

‘Find Crompton or Dodderidge and ask that they deliver this in person to Mister Seymour.’

Bridget bustled off on her mission. I went to the window, opened it and took several deep breaths to calm my queasiness, surprised to see that everything was as normal out there when my whole world was in chaos. A man in a crumpled hat pulled a handcart piled with dung, a milkmaid balanced two buckets on a yoke, a party of young men, courtiers judging by their clothes, ambled by, stopping to watch the milkmaid pass. She blew a frond of hair away from her face out of the side of her mouth. One of the boys whistled. She walked on. The boy began to follow her, his friends geeing him up. She turned, milk swilling over the lip of her bucket, leaving a dark patch in the dust. ‘Leave me be.’

‘Just a kiss,’ he said.

‘My pa’ll butter his knife in you.’

The boys laughed and walked away.

As I waited I was surprised to be visited by a tentative sense of hope. I could not be denied my marriage; it was God’s will. If an infant had been planted in the hostile regions
of my body then God’s will was at work and my cousin would recognize such a blessing. Surely, he was more concerned with the fear of Catholic plots, of assassinations, than of his spinster cousin getting wed.

I thought of the infant sprouting deep inside, a miraculous thing –
a royal thing
, whispered the watching part of me. I understood fully then the power generated by two bloodlines commingling, and the danger of it, like saltpetre and flame. It was as if my life was opening up, offering a vista of my future and the future of the seed germinating in the core of my body. I imagined telling Will, the joy blossoming over his face, feeling his arms about me, his whisper in my ear,
My darling, Belle, I could never love you more than I do in this moment
.

I was beset, suddenly, by an all-consuming hunger. Bridget had left me a plate of bread and cheese. I fell on it, stuffing great mouthfuls into my maw, washing it down with small beer, swigged back straight from the pitcher, munching, chomping, relishing the tang of the cheese, my taste buds enflamed then soothed by the plain yeasty calm of the bread. The plate clanged to the floor, scattering remains, which I gathered on my hands and knees, ramming them into my mouth until every last crumb was gone. I was brought so low, I might have licked the matting and still hankered for more, looking in the anteroom to see if there were any leftovers waiting to be cleared away, ransacking the place, finding only a few sugar comfits forgotten in the bottom of a paper cone. They stuck to my teeth, cloyed in my mouth, filling my senses with a glorious sweetness.

I collapsed into a chair and succumbed once more to the familiar roiling nausea, which came in waves, regretting my rash episode of gluttony as each one crashed against me. I closed my eyes, taking slow, deep breaths.

The latch jerked me out of my torpor. And there he was, entering the room wearing the look, in his sad grey eyes, of a condemned man. I heaved myself out of the chair, wanting to meet him on a level.

‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he said. His voice was hoarse. ‘What is it?’ He was trying to sound firm but I sensed the tenderness beneath his surface and knew I would not have to dig far to get to it.