VIII (28 page)

“I like her not.” Absently, I line up the purses
on the trestle table: orange velvet, pink satin, white leather, cloth of gold. I don’t see them; I see only that long-nosed face. I say, “She is ugly. She looks like a horse. I can tell you now, I will not be able to get sons on that… that
woman
.” I turn to Cromwell and smile – but not pleasantly. “So, Thomas. What remedy?”

Cromwell is standing by the cupboard displaying the gilt cups and plates. We’re in the Presence Chamber at Greenwich, where my New Year’s gifts are on display. Against all those burnished surfaces he’s looking clammy and pale. And edgy. He says, “I know none, sir. But I am very sorry for it.”

“Really? That’s odd. You’ve never told me before that there is no remedy.” I pick up a pair of spurs, test the spikes, put them down. “In fact, I seem to remember you saying once – I don’t remember the occasion but I remember the words quite clearly – ‘Anything can be done.’
Anything
. So. I want you to get me out of this marriage.”

“But…” Cromwell begins, and checks himself; runs a hand through his hair; starts again. “Sir, as you know, this is not simply a marriage, this is an alliance. With Cleves. To strengthen us against our enemies, who are every day threatening to invade.” He spreads his meaty hands. “And… look, sir, the lady is
here
. She has completed a long and arduous journey from her homeland. To reject her now would be a very public humiliation, both for the lady and for her brother, the Duke. And if the Duke is pushed into the arms of the Emperor—”

“He will join the long list of rulers working to deprive me of my throne. And no doubt my life.”

Cromwell rubs his fingers over his mouth and chin. His shoulders give the ghost of a shrug: he can’t bring himself to nod, but it’s clear I’ve hit the nail on the head.

“Well, what a marvellous situation you have brought me to. Let me see. I am forced into a marriage with a hateful woman. I have rulers queuing up to depose me. Tell me. You’re not working for one of them by any chance, are you?”

Cromwell says, “The Duke of Norfolk would like you to think so.”

The comment is accompanied by a rueful grin: he has enemies at Court and he’s making a joke of it. But I asked if he is betraying me; who dares brush away that question? In two strides I’m across the room with a fistful of Cromwell’s fur-trimmed black gown in my hand. His grin has vanished.

“I am prey to no man’s influence,” I say, my spittle flecking his pasty face. “Not Norfolk’s, not yours. Do not imagine that you know what is in my mind. If I thought my cap knew my counsel I would throw it on the fire. It would delight me to watch it burn.”

A slash of colour appears across my vision, like
a horizontal door opening. I am in darkness; out there, blurred figures move. They loom and swing away. I seem to be lying down. Have I fallen from my horse?

Someone bends near. Who is it? The face is lit from one side only; the other side melts into shadow. It looks sinister. The mouth is moving, but I can’t hear the words. Only the blood rushing in my ears. It sounds like the sea. Am I on a ship?

All is dark again. The pain is bad. My leg is on fire.

I have to move. Have to turn onto my side.

Gingerly, I shift my position a fraction. It’s agony. I stop. I daren’t breathe.

“The sore must be kept running.” The words swim to me from somewhere. I can’t see who’s speaking.

“Cut it open, then.”

No. No one is to cut anything. I open my eyes – try to speak.
No one responds. Patches of candlelight show black-robed figures moving at the end of the bed. I am seized with fear.

How long have I been here? Hours – days? Weeks?

What’s the last thing I remember?

I try to think… and then the light is different. Paler, washing in from high up on my right. Time has passed. Did I sleep? I am clutching a hand. Someone is gibbering and whimpering. It’s a disgusting sound: pitiful moaning.

Pain.
Pain pain pain pain
.

Figures tower over me – a line of them along each side, like coffin-bearers. But they are not lifting me, they are pressing on me. I am being held down.

I try to mash the hand I’m holding – crush it. The knuckles roll against each other as I squeeze. A face is near: Culpeper’s, wincing. I have never been so grateful to see him in my life.

That sound comes again, the whimpering. It’s me.

At the height of the pain nothing else exists. I need every ounce of energy just to get from one moment to the next.

Then, when there’s a lull, I rest, panting. I feel the pleasure of just lying. The lightness of no longer being held down. The softness of the pillows. I attempt to speak. I manage: “They… poison… me. Fetch Cromwell.” I swallow drily, and try again. Culpeper is leaning in to catch the words. I say, “Don’t tell. Fetch him. Quickly.”

Culpeper’s hand slides out of mine as he stands up. He moves away; I see him talking to a figure. Not in a black robe – a red figure. I want to shout:
I told you not to tell them—

Terror, now. Like a wave crashing over me; I’m gasping for breath. Is Culpeper in on it? Is this slow murder? Where is my son Edward? Do they have Edward too?

The red figure expands; it wears a courtier’s doublet; it has a face. Anthony Browne’s neat fringe and dark eyes hang in a moon-white disc. The mouth says, “Cromwell is dead, sir.
He has been dead these last six months.”

I turn a little; curl up slightly. He cannot be gone. He was so solid. Where have they hidden him?

And yet they all leave me, eventually.

My pillow is wet. I whisper, “What was it – plague? The sweat?”

It’s a moment before Browne answers. “You commanded his execution, sir.”

The light is soft, tinged green by the leaves of
the climbing rose that has spread across half the window. It is like being in a summer glade.

I’m sitting in a chair and my eyes are half-closed. There’s a gentle hum of conversation in the room behind me; a chink of glass as drinks are poured; a few rippling notes of the virginals as someone begins to play; a snatch of singing, broken by laughter. Mesmerised, I watch the flickering pattern of light and shade on the sill before me as the wind stirs the leaves.

A rustling sounds close by. Silken arms slide around my neck and a kiss brushes my cheek.

“Sweetheart.” I draw her onto my lap. She is only nineteen: the Duke of Norfolk’s niece and a dainty little thing, with velvet eyes and the softest skin. Her name is Kate Howard.

She says, “Join us. Tom proposes a game.”

“Does he?”

“And you know how I like games.” She traces a finger along my jawline; looks at me: a secret look, just for the two of us.

This is my new world: Cromwell is dead and this beautiful creature is my wife. The marriage to that German woman, the Lady Anna, happened – as it had to… but I made sure it was annulled as soon as possible. My lawyers studied the documents, and found their reasons – did she not have a precontract to marry the Duke of Lorraine’s son? And besides, witnesses heard me say I could not bring myself to take the woman in my arms, let alone put a son in her belly. Without physical union, there is no union in God’s eyes.

Chief among those witnesses was Cromwell. I kept him alive long enough to see that the annulment was achieved. He died the same day I married Kate. There was a certain neatness in it.

Now I kiss Kate lingeringly and haul myself up to stand. “See – I can’t resist you,” I say, and she laughs. One of the men moves my chair to a place in a loose circle they are creating in the centre of the room, made of stools and benches and cushions.

There, I sit again, with Kate beside me, her plump hand resting in mine. As the others settle themselves in the circle, I lose myself in gazing at her: at the way the light falls on her; at the way she smiles; at the way a pearl that hangs from her ear catches on the soft frill of fine linen at her neck, swings, and catches again as she turns her head. She is covered in jewels. She asks for them as a child asks for sweetmeats and toys. She looks so pretty in them, and so pleased; I can deny her nothing.

Our young companions are settled now: the men with their bright-coloured legs stuck out in front of them, slashed and jewelled arms slung languidly over the backs of chairs or
propped on knees; the women with their skirts arranged, the pomanders and trinkets hanging from their girdles gathered into their laps.

“Take a slip of paper and read it out,” says Anthony Denny, one of my gentleman-servants, passing round a basket. It stops at Kate first. She dips her hand in and unfolds a paper, eager and excited. She says, “It’s a question. ‘What quality would you most like the person you love to possess? And, since everyone must have some defect, what fault would you choose they should have?’”

“Sir?” Her eyes are on me. “What would you say?”

“Beauty, sweetness of nature.”

“And a fault?”

I smile. “Only that she is too innocent.”

Culpeper, sitting on Kate’s other side, says, “That she is already married.” Oh, roguish boy; he cannot resist playing the gallant.

It makes Kate laugh. “How can that be a fault?” she says, turning to him. “It would be the fault of the other, to have fixed his affections on a lady who is beyond his reach.”

I say, “Quite so, my love, but how can anyone help it?” I smile at her again, and she smiles in return, and I see that her eyes are lit with adoration.

As the discussion continues round the circle, my thoughts drift again. I think: she will give me sons, that’s certain. Look at her: her flesh seems edible – it has a sugary sheen. She’s like one of those marzipan goddesses the confectory makes for banquets. The sons she gives me will be ruddy and healthy. Edward is only three years old, and too pale. Whey-faced, like his mother. Someone said that once. Who was it?

Now Tom Culpeper is reaching into the basket.

“If you had to be openly mad,” he reads, “what kind of foolishness would you be thought most likely to display?”

“Lovesickness,” Kate says, and blushes deeply.

At that moment I am suddenly aware that, on the other side of the room, there is an interested spectator.

The boy – the thing, the spectre – is standing against one of the curtains, staring at me. As exact and real as every other person here. He is ragged as a tramp, his skin yellow and seemingly patched with sores; he looks young and old at once, alive and dead. His hands are held, dangling, slightly away from his sides. He’s wearing glossy red gloves. Intermittently, the gloves drip.

“Sir?” says a voice – Denny’s. Miles away.

Those are no gloves. The boy’s hands are the red of a butcher’s hands, a surgeon’s hands. The hands of an executioner who has delved deep into the belly of his victim. The spots of red on the floor are merging into small pools.

My heart is pounding. I struggle to rise – the boy watches the attempt.

“I thought I was rid of you,” I say to him. “You showed me the evil and I destroyed it. I have my son now.” At last I’m on my feet, twisted awkwardly to keep the weight off my maimed leg, one hand gripping the chair-back. “Why the—” I point to his hands. “Why the blood?”

“Sir, what is it?” “Sir?” Kate and Denny’s voices now, together.

The boy says nothing. His pose is tranquil, as if he has stood there for an hour, and intends to remain there an hour more. But there is something horrifying in his look: his stare has such intensity – a kind of fury of interest.

“Speak, damn you!” I start forward across the circle. “You were right. She was the Devil’s creature. So I destroyed her and I got my son. What evil are you here to show me now? Will there be a death? Surely not Edward, please! God would not allow it… Or is it evil in someone’s heart? I am constantly
watchful. I continue to do God’s work. But now your… your appearance frightens me – the blood…”

He does not blink; I cannot bear that he does not blink. His hair is moving a little, as if in a draught I cannot feel.

Panic constricts my throat. I croak, “What do you want from me?
Who are you
?”

I’m aware of a shifting at the edges of my vision. In the circle around me there is fear – and embarrassment. Behind me Denny says, “The King is tired. He has overexerted himself today.” There’s a clatter and shuffle as people rise, eager to leave.

“Stay!” I put out my hand, still staring at the boy. They sit again.

No movement but the stirring of his hair. No reaction but the continued ferocious determination of his gaze.

And then his voice speaks, as if whispering in my ear.

Whom do I resemble?

Hair the colour of straw. Hollow, haunted eyes. A livid pallor on the young-old face. I say, “No one. Evil. Death.”

Now there’s movement in the face at last. He smiles, and his greyish teeth seem longer and sharper than before.

Try again. Whom do I resemble?

I stare at him. I am loath to admit what I am thinking. “My family. My
mother
’s family. One of her brothers? I said once before I thought you were a ghost. But what does it matter? A devil can take any shape.”

No. You are close. But not close enough.

I am close indeed. An arm’s reach away, now. He looks so real. I can see every pore of his sallow skin, every strand of hair against the blue of the curtain behind him. I cannot bear it. I stagger forward, yelling, “Who is it this time? What evil stalks me?
Tell me!
”

I reach out, grabbing for his scrawny neck. My hand closes
on something too soft – fine blue taffeta. The curtain. I wrench it aside.

I find myself looking into the boy’s eyes: amused, savage, triumphant.

But the eyes are in my face. It is a mirror.

My forehead crashes into the glass. With a crack the mirror splinters into a fan of jagged pieces. Sections of a queasy, jarred room. Sections of a face – my own – that do not fit together. The eyes are mine again, but one is closer than the other, grotesquely unaligned.

“Call the King’s physician.”

“Get off me!”

“Sir, you are bleeding.”

Slowly, I lumber round to face the room. Since when did my body become a ship that is so hard to turn? I am breathing heavily. Terror has opened like a pit at my feet. I sway and stagger back to catch my balance.

A circle of faces, staring at me – afraid. Among them, Kate’s. I see that in her alarm she has clutched Culpeper’s hand. Her fear is so innocent, like a child’s in a thunderstorm.

There is blood trickling into my left eye. I wipe it with the back of my hand and hold the hand out to her. Almost reluctantly, she rises and comes to me.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” I murmur. “It’s those damned medicines they give me. They bring strange daydreams. But, as you see, the dreams pass in a moment.” She’s looking at the floor now. I tilt her chin up; I manage to smile. For a brief moment I have the strange sensation that something else is looking out through my eyes, smiling at her too. I say, “There is nothing to fear.”