I, Jane: In The Court of Henry VIII (20 page)

“’Twill be better if I present it, and the sentiment, fully.”

He took her hand then and casually kissed the back of it in the French manner since he had spent much time this past year in France as one of the king’s ambassadors. She had noticed it was one of his little endearing affectations. Each of the king’s good friends had one. But Jane was enormously grateful to Francis for having brought her away from the embarrassment of spinsterhood at Wolf Hall, so there was little he could have done to displease her.

Certainly nothing he might tell her could endanger that.

“Ride well, good cousin,” she said brightly, to which he then made a great bow.

It was not until she was seated in the stands in the very center of the queen’s ladies, gowns touching like rose petals, that Jane saw the king in the stands in front of her. Once again he was flanked by the queen on one side and Anne Boleyn on the other. As a warm breeze blew, Jane turned to Elizabeth Carew beside her. “I thought your brother was to ride against the king,” she dared to whisper as everyone else around her was chattering and gossiping excitedly. She knew no one would care enough to listen to her.

“That was true, until His Majesty danced the night away with Mistress Boleyn and turned his ankle rather sharply trying to impress her. My husband, who attends him each morning, said his foot is the color of a summer plum and as fat as a tree stump.”

Elizabeth’s tone was harsh, but it made sense if she had been disposed of by the king, as the gossip claimed. Jane’s sense that Henry VIII was a shallow, selfish man redoubled inside her, and she resolved to keep as well out of his way as possible. Not that she was capable of catching his eye anyway, or that of any man, for that matter. William Dormer had certainly made that clear enough years ago.

“Who shall be Sir Francis’s challenger, then?”

“My husband.” Elizabeth smiled.

“Your husband versus your brother?”

“They are well matched in all things: whoring, drinking,
and
fighting.”

Jane looked more closely at her then. Skin like ivory, a perfect chin, and a tiny nose, yet such jaded callousness. It changed her a bit in Jane’s eyes.
Was that all the king’s doing?
she wondered as she tried to imagine what Elizabeth must have been like before.

“Are you not supporting your brother, then?”

Elizabeth looked at her with a perplexed expression as the riders cantered proudly out onto the field to thunderous applause and trumpeted fanfare. “Of course I am. He is my brother. But this is court, little mouse. Is that not what he and my good husband so endearingly call you?”

Jane did not answer as her glance again caught on the king and Anne Boleyn. The spectacle they were making of themselves seemed particularly vulgar. Yet it was also difficult to turn away from. The king barely noticed the pageantry or contest before him as he laughed with Anne and slapped his knee like a young boy. The encounter reminded Jane of a spider casting its web around a big, colorful bug, the bug being entirely unaware it was about to be devoured.

How much better it was, Jane thought again, to be removed, to be merely part of the backdrop to such a spectacle and not a true piece of it.

Down on the field, Francis looked so dashing and lordly in his gleaming silver, the green plume of his helmet fluttering in the breeze, that Jane completely turned her attention to him. She felt a strange burst of familial pride knowing they were cousins, however distant. He was far more kind than her mother’s cousin, the great Duke of Norfolk, who had yet even to acknowledge Jane.

Back in the stands, she noticed her brother Edward a few rows closer to the king. Like Norfolk, Edward acted as if he and Jane were virtual strangers, as if speaking to someone so ordinary would ruin his reputation. His fortunes and his status had increased greatly this past year, which seemed at the heart of the matter.

Jane was happy to spot her other brother, Thomas, standing on the corner of the field in the green and white uniform that marked him as Sir Francis Bryan’s attendant. They had recently been in France together, and Jane could hardly wait to embrace him heartily and badger him for gossip and news from the French court.

She was so distracted by her thoughts and the lively group of courtiers that she did not see it happen. But she heard the great thud, then the snap of wood. A great collective gasp from the crowd and the clattering of armor brought Jane and the other ladies quickly to their feet. Francis was on the ground, writhing in agony, and Nicholas Carew was off his mount and at his side in a matter of moments. Both long jousting poles lay on the ground, and Thomas was sprinting toward the courtiers.

“God in his mercy!” Jane heard herself cry out as a hush fell upon the crowd, which had fallen swiftly into fearful silence.

“What has happened to him?”

“Sir Francis was flirting so boldly with Lady Hastings that he neglected to close his visor before he began,” Elizabeth Carew murmured, both hands on her mouth in shock at the blood that now seemed to blanket everything.

“At least he is moving, so he is not dead,” Margaret Shelton exclaimed with a hand to her lips.

“But look at all that blood,” Anne Stanhope cried.

Grooms, guards, equerries, and physicians dashed onto the field then.
Yes, by the Lord, at least he was not dead!
Jane thought, stricken
with fear for him and unable to stop trembling as they knelt around him, drew off his plumed helmet, and began to cover his blood-soaked face with cloths.

A litter was swiftly brought to carry him off the field.

“Should you not go to your brother?” Jane asked Elizabeth. Francis had no wife, and Jane knew that their mother was not at court, but attending Princess Mary at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, where she had been consigned by the king.

“I am not at all good at these sorts of things,” Elizabeth replied desperately and began to weep as Jane took her hand and gently squeezed it in support. Elizabeth Carew, whom she had not known long, held fast to her.

“Would you like me to go with you?” Jane asked.

“Would you do that?” Elizabeth sniffled.

Jane did not answer but in response led the way down the steps of the stands and back toward the palace, feeling suddenly that they could almost be friends. It was an odd thing to feel under the circumstances, Jane thought, but she still really had no idea what it felt like to have a true friend.

Then she thought of Lucy Hill and how they were very nearly friends. Yes, nearly.

“He’s lost his eye, I’m afraid.”

Thomas Seymour reluctantly made the announcement, then took his sister into a tender embrace. “Thank heavens you’re here,” she murmured to him in the shadow-drenched corridor outside of Sir Francis Bryan’s apartments, where the king’s physicians were still attending him. Hearing the news, Elizabeth collapsed against the lime-wash corridor wall and folded in on herself, her face blanched, as she pressed her hands over her mouth.

“His beautiful eyes…,” she wept. “He was always so proud of his eyes.”

Jane went to Elizabeth then and sat on the floor against the wall beside her with an arm wrapped tightly around her shoulder in support. “An eye patch will make him terribly distinguished looking.” She tried to offer up a smile for Elizabeth’s sake, but it was a struggle when the situation seemed so grave, and when she loved him so dearly for how good and honest he had been with her.

“Could
you
ever care for a man with such a blighted visage, Jane?”

“By my troth, I could care for a man with a tender heart and devotion enough to overlook my own shortcomings,” she replied truthfully.

Elizabeth looked at her through tear-brightened eyes. “I am grateful for your words, Jane.” She then turned to Thomas, who stood over them. “How is his condition otherwise, Master Seymour?” Elizabeth asked as she glanced up at Jane’s brother, who remained standing over them.

“Your husband is still with his friend, and he gave me leave, my lady, to tell you that the doctors do not fear for his life. Your brother is strong and healthy and he shall recover from this.”

“Yet without an eye.”

“Surely it is preferable to dying,”

“I am not so certain since, at this court, nothing is prized so highly as beauty.”

“From what I have seen, my lady, wit and charm do beauty a fair battle, and there are few so witty or charming as your brother,” said Thomas.

“Except perhaps the king.” Elizabeth sniffled, trying to rein in her tears.

“I have not yet had the honor of being able to agree or disagree, since I have yet to actually meet His Majesty,” Thomas replied, gazing down with a helpless expression at the two women still sitting on the cold tile floor.

“Pray, do not be too anxious for
that
experience, Master Seymour,” Elizabeth countered in her trembling voice, which held a kind of warning. “Being impressed with our good sovereign can have a whole host of disadvantages and complications, the range of which, I fear, would quite surprise you.”

That evening, Jane sat by firelight in the queen’s company, along with Maria de Salinas; their friend the Spanish ambassador, Don Luis Caroz; the imperial ambassador, Eustase Chapuys; the queen’s confessor, the Bishop of Rochester; and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. They each took turns reading to the queen from the Book of Common Prayer, and the mood was somber.

“Mistress Seymour, tell us, how fares your good cousin?” the queen suddenly asked, her question full of true compassion.

Chapuys, a small man with a receding hairline and dark, hollow eyes, stopped reading midsentence and looked up at Jane with the others.

“I am told he shall recover, Your Highness. Praise be to God,” Jane answered shyly. It was rare that she was called to speak aloud before so many assembled nobles, including the cardinal in his forbidding crimson. She heard her own voice break.

“Indeed a blessing. You take strength from your faith, Mistress Seymour,” said the queen. “I like that.”

“I do, Your Highness. You are a model for us all in that regard.” Jane could hear her own voice quiver still, and she struggled in vain against it.

“Am I?” She arched her dark brows appraisingly, and her heavy chin doubled.

“Certainly.”

“Well, as long as I stand in stark contrast to Mistress Boleyn, who follows another woman’s husband about with open lust in those coal black eyes of hers, may God forgive me.” Katherine made the sign of the cross piously then. “As you might suppose, I have little more patience for infidelity than I do faithlessness. I do pray daily for forbearance in all things. Should not we
all
do that?” The queen asked the question rhetorically and did so as she cast a censuring glance on lovely Lady Anne Stafford, who for some time had been having an affair with the king’s married Groom of the Stool, Sir William Compton. And, as everyone knew, the king himself before that. But everyone at court was so intricately woven together, bound tightly by family, or loyalty, or lust—sometimes all three. Certainly much was tolerated or overlooked. It was like a strange, grand, flawed family, Jane had decided, and she continued to be glad she was only an observer of it all, since she had no earthly idea how she might cope if she were ever pulled into the midst of any of it.

“Mistress Seymour, would you be the one to next read to us for a while?” the queen then asked.

In response, the fat-faced Cardinal Wolsey glowered at her, his wet lower lip jutting out as his brows merged. Or perhaps she was imagining it. He did not seem to Jane a kind man. Rather he appeared a porcine opportunist who sat and laughed with Anne Boleyn with as much sincerity as he brought to his counseling of the queen.

Reading aloud before this important group now went well beyond Jane’s area of comfort, since she had yet to learn what to do and what to avoid in their presence. She felt her stomach twist into a hard knot at the prospect. Her heart was racing and she knew what
little color she had had certainly gone out of her face.
Speak, you must speak!

“It would be an honor, Your Highness. Where shall I begin?” she forced herself to ask as she began to leaf through her own small volume of the book at hand.

“Ah, we’ve had enough of this for now. My Lord Bishop of Rochester here has spoken with your brother, and he tells me you are well versed in
The Imitation of Christ
.”

“Verily, ’tis my favorite work, Your Highness, particularly the fourth book translated by the king’s mother.”

Katherine smiled and cast a glance at the black-and-white-garbed Rochester. The queen’s approval was a rare thing these days, and Jane felt her racing heart slow by one small degree. “Most here have no use for such pious work. How lovely to see that I have company in my appreciation of it.”

Jane lowered her eyes, suddenly feeling the weight from the envious stares around her. They apparently favored her position in the background as much as she did.

“I have only ever read silently, however, so I dare not vouch for how I would sound aloud to your learned royal ear.”

There were muffled chuckles in response to her awkward flattery, and Jane felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment at their reaction.

“Oh nonsense, Mistress Seymour. Surely you were taught to recite aloud by your tutor. In Wiltshire, was it?”

“We had not a proper tutor, Your Highness, only our priest, who taught us our lessons.”

The chuckles deepened then to rude outright laughter, and if Jane could have crawled beneath the covered table, she would have. The sensation of ridicule stirred old wounds, and she instantly felt
thrown. Her throat had gone miserably dry and she knew her voice would crack if she spoke aloud again now.

It was the most curious thing in the world that she thought of William Dormer at that precise moment. He came into her mind almost like a phantom. But the ghost did not speak; it only shimmered there before her supportively, and after a moment, she felt an odd strength from it.

Jane’s father used to tell her when she was a little girl that sometimes after people died an image of them came back to those who had loved them. She desperately hoped William had not died. In that moment, her anger and disappointment in him ceased completely. Right now, William and Wolf Hall felt very far away.