Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“That’s better,” she says.

“What was the duke doing in France, anyway?” I ask.

“You are taking an interest in affairs of the world?” she asks quizzically.

“I am not a complete fool,” I say.

“Your uncle is a great man in the favor of the king. He went to France to secure the friendship of the French king so that our country is not faced with the danger of the Holy Fa – I mean the Pope, the emperor, and the King of France all in alliance against us.”

I smile that Jane Boleyn herself should nearly say “Holy Father,” which we can’t say anymore. “Oh, I know about that,” I say cleverly. “Because they want to put Cardinal Pole on our own throne, out of wickedness.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t speak of it,” she warns me.

“They do,” I insist. “And that is why his poor old mother and all the Poles are in the Tower. For the cardinal would call on the Papists of England to come against the king, just as they did before.”

“They won’t come against the king anymore,” she says dryly.

“Because they know they are wrong now?”

“Because most of them are dead,” she says shortly. “And that was your uncle’s doing, too.”

I was told the court would observe the period of Lent with great solemnity. I was assured that we would eat no red meat at all. I was expecting to dine on fish for the whole of the forty days, but I discover, the very first night at dinner, that English consciences are easy. The king is tender to his own needs. Despite the fast of Lent there is an enormous range of dishes marching into the hall held high above the heads of the servers, and they come first to the royal table and the king and I take a little from each, as is the custom, and send them out to our friends and favorites around the hall. I make sure I send them to my ladies’ table and to the great ladies of court. I make no mistake about this, and I never send my favorite dish to any man. This is no empty politeness; the king watches me. Every word I speak at dinner, everything I do, his bright little eyes almost hidden by his fat cheeks follow everything, as if he would like to catch me out.

To my surprise there is chicken, in pies and fricassees, roasted with mouth-watering herbs, carved from the bone; but in this season of Lent it is not called meat. For the purposes of the Lenten fast, the king has ruled that chicken counts as fish. There are all the game birds (also not meat, according to God and the king) beautifully presented, enfolded one within another for the flavor and tenderness. There are rich dishes of eggs (which are not meat), and there is indeed fish: trout from the ponds and wonderful fish dishes from the Thames and deep-sea fish, brought by the fishermen who go far out to sea to feed this greedy court. There are freshwater cray-fish and stargazy pies with little tasty whitebait heads all peeping out through a thick pastry crust. And there are great dishes of spring vegetables that are rarely served at court, and I am glad to have them on my plate in this season. I shall eat lightly now, and anything that I especially enjoy will be brought to me again for a private dinner in my chamber later. I have never been fed so richly or so well in my life. My Cleves maid has had to let out the stomacher of my gown, and there was much arch comment about my growing and blooming, as if to suggest that it is a baby making me fatter. I cannot contradict them without exposing myself, and the king my husband, to even worse comment, so I had to smile and listen to them tease me as if I were a wife wedded and bedded and hoping to be with child, and not a virgin untouched by her husband.

Little Katherine Howard came in and said that they were all ridiculous and that the good butter of England had made me gain a little weight and they were blind if they did not see how well it suits me. I was so grateful to her for that. She is a foolish, frivolous little thing, but she has the cleverness of a stupid girl, since, like any stupid girl, she thinks about only one thing, and so she has become very expert in that. And the one thing that she thinks about? All the time, every moment of every day, Kitty Howard thinks about Kitty Howard.

We surrender other pleasures for the time of Lent. There are no court entertainments of the merry kind, though there are readings of holy texts after dinner, and the singing of psalms. There are no masquings nor mumming and no jousts of course. I am greatly relieved by this because, best of all, it means that there is no possibility of the king coming in disguised. The memory of our first disastrous meeting still lingers with me, and I fear it stays with him, too. It was not that I did not recognize him that was so offensive; it was the blatant fact that at first sight I was utterly repelled by him. Never since that day, by word, deed, or even look, have I let him know that I find him so unpleasant: fat, very old, and the stink of him turns my stomach. But however much I hold my breath and smile, it is too late to make amends. My face, when he tried to kiss me, told him everything in that moment. The way I pushed him off me, the way I spat the taste of him from my mouth! I still bow my head and flush hot at the terrible embarrassment. All this has left an impression with him that no later good manners can erase. He saw the truth of my view of him in that one swift glimpse, and – what is worse – he saw himself through my eyes: fat, old, disgusting. Sometimes I fear his vanity will never recover from this blow. And since his vanity is damaged I think his potency has gone with it. I am certain that his manhood was destroyed by my spit on the floor, and there is nothing I can do to recall it.

And that is another thing we give up for Lent. Thank God. I shall look forward to this time every year. For various blessed feast days and forty wonderful days every year of my married life, there will be forty nights when the king will not come to my chamber; when I will not smile at his entrance, and try to arrange myself in such a way that it is easy for him to lever his great bulk above me, and try to show my willingness but not wantonness in a bed that stinks of the festering wound of his leg, in half-darkness, with a man who cannot do the task.

The burden of this insulting misery night after night is utterly defeating me; it is humbling me to dust. I wake every morning in despair; I feel humiliated, though the failure is all his. I lie awake in the night and hear him fart and groan with the pain of his swollen belly, and I wish myself away, almost anywhere rather than in his bed. I shall be so glad to be spared, for these forty days, the terrible ordeal of his attempt and his failing and my lying awake and knowing that tomorrow night he will try again, but still he will not be able to do it, and that each time he fails he blames me a little more and likes me even less.

At least we can have this time when we are allowed a little peace. I need not worry how I should help him. He need not work above me like a great heaving boar. He will not come to my room; I can sleep in sheets that smell of lavender instead of pus.

But I know that this time will end. Easter will come with the celebrations; my coronation, which was planned for February and put off for our grand entrance into London, will now take place in May. I must take this time as a welcome rest from the presence of my husband, but I must use this time to make sure that when he comes back to my chamber we can deal better together. I must find a way to help him to come to my bed, and for me to help him to do the act.

Thomas Cromwell must be the man to help me. Kitty Howard’s advice is what I should have expected of her: the seductive skills of a naughty girl. How she must have behaved before she was taken into my rooms I dare not imagine. When I am a little more settled myself, I shall have to talk to her. A girl – a child – such as her should not know how to drop a shift and smile over a naked shoulder. She must have been very badly guarded and very ill advised. The ladies of my court must be as above criticism as myself. I shall have to tell her that whatever flirtatious tricks she knows she must put them aside. And she cannot teach them to me. I cannot have a shadow of suspicion over my behavior. A queen has died in this country for less.

I wait for the dinner to end and for the king to leave his place and walk between the tables, greeting men and women as he goes. He is affable tonight, his leg must be less painful. It is often hard to tell what ails him, for he is bad-tempered for so many different reasons, and if I inquire after the wrong cause, that can give offense, too.

As I see him walk away I look down the hall and catch Thomas Cromwell’s eye. I crook my finger and he comes to me, and I rise and take his arm and let him lead me away from the dining table and to a window overlooking the river, as if we are admiring the view and the icy night with a dozen sparkling stars.

“I need help, Master Secretary,” I say.

“Anything,” he says. He is smiling, but his face is strained.

“I cannot please the king,” I say in the words I have rehearsed. “Help me.”

At once, he looks quite sick with discomfort. He glances around him as if he would shout for help for himself. I am ashamed to be speaking so to a man, but I have to get good advice from somewhere. I cannot trust my women, and to speak to my advisors from Cleves, even Lotte, would be to alert my mother and brother whose servants they are. But this is not a true marriage; this is not a marriage in deeds as well as words. And if it is not a marriage, then I have failed in my duty to the king, to the people of England, and to myself. I have to make this marriage a real one. I have to do it. And if this man can tell me what is wrong, then he must do so.

“These are… private matters,” he says, his hand half covering his mouth as if to stop any words coming out. He is pulling at his lip.

“No. This is the king,” I say. “This is England. Duty, not private.”

“You should be advised by your women, by your Mistress of Maids.”

“You made the wedding,” I say, groping for words. “Help me make it true.”

“I am not responsible…”

“Be my friend.”

He glances around as if he would like to run away, but I will not release him.

“These are early days.”

I shake my head. “Fifty-two days.” Who has counted the days more carefully than me?

“Has he explained his dislike of you?” he demands suddenly. The English is too fast for me, and I don’t understand the words.

“Explained?”

Cromwell makes a little noise of irritation at my stupidity and glances around as if he would summon one of my countrymen to translate. Then he checks himself as he remembers that this must be a complete secret.

“What is wrong with you?” he says very simply and very quietly, his mouth to my ear.

I realize that my face is stunned, and quickly I turn to the window before the court can see my shock and distress.

“It is me?” I demand. “He says it is me?”

His little dark eyes are anguished. He cannot answer me for shame, and that is how I know. It is not that the king is old or tired or sick. It is that he does not like me, that he does not desire me, perhaps even that I disgust him. And I guess from Thomas Cromwell’s scrunched-up, worried little face that the king has already discussed his repulsion with this nasty little man.

“He tell you he hate me?” bursts out of me.

His agonized grimace tells me that yes, the king has told this man that he cannot force himself to be my lover. Perhaps the king has told others, perhaps all his friends. Perhaps all this time the court has been laughing behind their white hands at the ugly girl from Cleves who came to marry the king and now repels him.

The humiliation of this makes me give a little shudder and turn away from Cromwell, and I do not see his bow and his swift retreat as he rushes to get away from me as you would avoid a person with poisonous bad luck.

I spend the rest of the evening in a daze of misery; I cannot put words to my shame. If I had not served such a hard apprenticeship at my brother’s court of Cleves I should have fled to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep. But I long ago learned to be stubborn, and long ago learned to be strong, and I have faced the dangerous dislike of a powerful ruler before, and survived.

I keep myself alert, like a wakened frightened falcon. I do not droop, and I do not let my pleasant smile slip from my face. When it is time for the ladies to retire, I curtsy to the king my husband without betraying for a moment my anguish that he finds me so disgusting that he cannot do to me what men can do to beasts of the field.