“Above all he wants security for the succession. For Arthur and Arthur’s sons.”
“But how can he be afraid when he’s so brave?”
My mother smiles. “A brave man still feels fear, my love,” she says. “Everyone does. Unless they are stupid – or lying to themselves.” She picks up a linen towel to dry her hands. “It’s just that a brave man knows how to turn his fear into energy – for battle. And that’s a skill worth learning, don’t you think?”
Later, when she is long gone, and the view from my window is turning blue and grey in the twilight, I slip out. Compton and my other attendants are busy preparing for my supper and the night ahead. Only a pageboy sees me go; I pass a coin to him – a penny for his silence.
My rooms are on the side of the palace furthest from the river – the side that looks out, instead, onto WestminsterAbbey and its precincts. Prickly with pinnacles, the impressive bulk of the abbey is a dark shape now, with just a flicker of colour, here and there, where candlelight illuminates stained glass.
Standing in its shadow, inside the palace wall, is an orchard, where the grass is left to grow long. I walk there now, getting wet, turning my face to the darkening sky and feeling the rain on my skin and my open eyes, stinging like pinpricks.
I will have to go back soon – they’ll be looking for me. Compton will be agitated, afraid for my safety and his own position.
But it is a luxury to have no one here to see me cry. My back is stiff and aching – hurting more now than it did straight after the beating. I stretch out on my front in the sodden grass.
I think: It is a lie that I am unimportant. I feel it in my gut. I feel it in the ground and the sky and the rain. A long time ago I heard a prophecy – and I have not forgotten it .
My hands close into fists and I cling to the grass angrily, as if the ground would like to throw me off.
V
♦ ♦ ♦ V ♦ ♦ ♦
“Three shillings says she has a wart.”
“Where?” says Compton. Behind me Charles Brandon laughs.
My horse is jittery. I let it walk forward a little way and then I turn it again, saying, “I thought we were sticking to facial disfigurements.”
Beneath the leaden skies of a November morning we are waiting on horseback in St George’s Fields, an open space on the south bank of the Thames, not far from London Bridge. We’re preparing – along with numerous bishops, an archbishop and a crowd of earls and lords – to line up as a welcoming party for Princess Catherine of Aragon, Arthur’s Spanish bride.
It’s been drizzling for the last ten minutes. The surface of my cloak is covered with a fine mist of droplets, my legs are beginning to feel distinctly damp, and my nose is so cold I’ve lost all sense of whether it’s still there or not. The only thing cheering me is the possibility that Princess Catherine willbe ugly.
“How about smallpox scars?” suggests Francis Bryan, beside me. Bryan is one of the well-born boys I spend my lessons and my leisure-time with – his father is a trusted servant of the King.
“Harry Guildford’s put money on that already,” says Compton.
“All right, a moustache. Two shillings. And no quibbling, Compton: any dark hair visible on the upper lip and you pay out.”
“I thought she was fair-haired,” says Thomas Boleyn.
Of the friends and attendants who serve me, some are boys like me, and others are older: grown-up young men who advance their careers by working in my service. Boleyn, an ambitious knight’s son, aged twenty-four, is in this last group. Francis Bryan is my own age. Harry Guildford, whose father is a royal councillor, is a couple of years older. Compton, who is nineteen, and Brandon, seventeen, are somewhere in between. But age does not decide seniority: I am the master here, and I am ten.
“Fair-haired?” Bryan echoes Boleyn’s words. “And Spanish? Is that possible?”
“If she’s really awful,” cuts in
Jean-Marie Blas de Robles