King's Fool (17 page)

“I suppose you have been weeping because Oakham Skevington was a party to these trumpery objections. Do you still want to marry him?” he asked brusquely. Either he was hurt because she had not embraced him or he was an extraordinarily angry man.

Joanna shook her head, unable to speak.

“But all the preparations are made—the meats cooked, the guests invited,” faltered Emotte, trying to warn her, as I had done, of the foolishness a woman must inevitably feel returning home unwed. “Even that lovely bridal gown with the satin specially fetched from France—”

“It will keep,” said the man who had paid for it, shortly. “You have always been a dutiful daughter, Joanna, trusting me to do what I think best for you. You would have been entirely happy, I believe, in that first union I arranged for you with the Browns’ young cousin—God rest his soul! You had the same background.As adventurous young men his father and I had fought together in the wars. But now with this Skevington match I am not sure.…” He crossed the room and lifted Joanna’s unhappy face towards his own. “For your dead mother’s sake as well as yours I must know. Are you hurt only in your pride, or in your heart? If I stop this marriage, as I have a mind to do, do I strike a blow at you, or only for my own stubborn Fermor pride? Do you want to marry the man?”

She looked straight back into his searching eyes, and was able to do so, thank God, without shame. “No, Sir. And now less than ever,” she said, yet withholding from him the whole reason.

“Then you do not have to,” he said. “Stay here, both of you, while I deal with them.”

Without so much as stopping to kiss her he strode downstairs again and, not having been included in his command, I followed him at a discreet distance. I suppose the Reverend Thaddeus Morton, tired of waiting, must have left shortly before he came. But by the great carved newel post at the bottom his brother-in-law, John Brown, awaited him. “That all this unpleasant tarradiddle should have happened in my home, which is ever yours and hers, Richard!” he was saying, in a low voice.

Their hands and arms met in a warm clasp of understanding friendship. “I only regret that you should have been so harassed, John. But if you will allow me still further to abuse your hospitality by letting me use your street door as if it were indeed my own, I promise you we shall soon be well rid of them.”

They went together into the great hall and, unnoticed, I flattened myself just inside against the serving screen. What went on there mattered more to me than to any other man. Brief as it was, I would not, for all my hopes of Heaven, have missed the scene that followed. For sheer surprise drama John Thurgood and I could never have touched it. But to me, with half my heart upstairs with Joanna, it was more than impersonal showmanship. It was the future of the woman I loved.

Richard Fermor went and stood with his back to the roaring fire, hands thrust beneath his short, swinging cloak. Firelight flickered on the plain richness of his travel-stained clothes and on the jewelled dagger at his Florentine leather belt. I recognised the familiar stance which he adopted when other merchants tried to get the better of him with some nefarious deal. The little lawyer chose that moment to clear his throat and start shuffling his papers, but Fermor waved him aside. “I thought, Skevington, that we had gone carefully into this matter of our children’s betrothal months ago when it was first mooted?” he said.

“Quite, quite, my dear Fermor,” agreed his new shipping partner propitiatingly. “But in the warning light thrown upon these matters by the royal divorce I thought perhaps we should be well advised to—to—”

“To discuss the close connection there would be between Joanna and myself through my sister’s marriage into the Brown family—” concluded Oakham, a shade too eagerly.

While the younger Fermor hovered indecisively on the edge of the group, his uncle ranged himself quietly beside the older Fermor. And I thought, “This is where the real wordy battle begins.” But there was really no argument at all. In fact, no one really spoke except the bride’s father. No one had much chance to.

“Being neither a philanderer nor a weather-vane myself, I have no desire for further discussion,” he said. “Northamptonshire is full of promising young men who want to marry my daughter, and whose fathers’ manors are more conveniently near my home. And it seems,” he added, rounding on the reluctant bridegroom, “you never were much to Joanna’s taste.”

“But our shared contracts—our ships—and that new Venetian deal—” spluttered the older Skevington, realising too late perhaps how much was bound up in this marriage and how the goodwill of his foreign markets had improved since his new business partnership.

Richard Fermor’s anger was a heart-warming thing to see. “By St. Blaise!” he cried, using the oath of the wool-combers’ saint, “you can keep your ships and I will keep my daughter,” and his voice must have carried to the listening women upstairs. “Not for all the gold in the Indies would I let your dithering son have her now. When she marries it will be with a man who wants her beyond all doubt, and who is prepared to outface royal fashion to keep her. And now, with my brother-in-law’s leave, I will wish you good-night, Sirs. And you, you quibbling quill scratcher, get out, too,” he added to the unfortunate lawyer. “I am tired from my journey, but my own legal man will see you in the morning about all matters resulting from my broken partnership.”

Young John Fermor went with them courteously to the outer door, but I would willingly have taken upon myself that office and shown them out more brusquely into the murky night.

“I am sorry so to have disturbed your home for nothing, and you must let me recompense all your people who have helped,”apologised Richard Fermor, throwing himself wearily into a chair as soon as they were gone.

“Let us drink and forget it,” said John Brown, calling for the servants. Had they noticed me in the sudden bustle of men laden with fresh logs and flagons I am sure they would have called me to join them, and hospitable Master Brown might have offered me a bed.But the day had already brought too much clamour to my heart. I must be alone to think, or not sober enough to remember. I waited only to see them comfortably established around the fire and my former master resting in a homely haze of fire and candlelight.

“I fear this will do your trade no good, Sir,” said his son, coming back in time to hand him a beaker of the best Bordeaux.

“But it has done my spleen against that pair a great deal of good,” retorted his father, stretching his feet to the blaze while a willing servant pulled off his mud-caked boots. “Have I frightened your lady wife away?”

“She has gone upstairs to be with Joanna, I think. But now that you are all in London we both hope you will stay with us awhile when Uncle John can spare you. Stay at least for the Coronation.”

“Coronation?” repeated his father and his uncle in unison. “What Coronation?”

“Queen Anne’s, of course,” said that up-to-the-minute purveyor of Court news. “If a King’s mistress becomes a wife and mother all in one amazingly short matter of months surely she must be crowned. At Westminster, some time early this summer, is my guess.”

He was certainly one move ahead of me, who but a few hours ago had been with them both. And that reminded me of the excuse upon which I had come. I slipped out from the shadowed end of the hall to the accompaniment of Richard Fermor’s indignant protest that he knew of only one Queen, and her name was Katherine.

I walked unseeingly past the dreamlike grandeur of the Guildhall and down through Milk Street, where I encountered Father Morton, lantern in hand, locking the door of his church. “Has the bride’s father come safely home?” he enquired, as I stepped into the wavering circle of light.

“Yes, but neither he nor Master Brown will be troubling you. There is to be no wedding,” I told him.

“Now God help you, my son,” he exclaimed. “I am truly sorry.” He gripped my arm with a fervour which changed to shocked amazement when I burst out laughing.

“I thank you, reverend Sir, but I am not the bridegroom,” I explained in contrition. “I am but Will Somers, the King’s jester.”

“Then God help you, just the same, for the people of London say you have persuaded his Grace to many a kindness.” He wrung my hand as if truly pleased to meet me, and added with a twinkle, “And perhaps, if you have not already a wife, I may have the pleasure of officiating at
your
wedding some other time?”

“I am not married, nor ever like to be,” I said bitterly. But in spite of my churlishness he raised a hand in blessing. And I carried away in my mind a comforting picture of him standing against the arched darkness of St. Magdalen’s door, illuminated like a rosy beacon of warm humanity.

From the quiet of Milk Street I came into the chaffer of Cheap-side. Traders’ torches flared in the wind, and there seemed to be lights in every window of the tall, gabled houses. It was just that time when market folk were taking down their stalls, and ’prentices were shouting the last of their wares at reduced prices before the closing of their masters’ shops.

“What d’ye lack? The last lady’s pomander left, and going cheap!” one impudent lad yelled at sight of me. “Or an embroidered wedding shift, fit for the Kentish whore.”

Men’s minds seemed to harp on weddings that day. Marriages made, marriages broken and marriages never to be.

I pushed the persistent young devil aside and, thrusting open the door of the Mitre tavern, called for the drink I so badly needed.All was warmth and cosy commonness inside, flavoured with the smell of hot spiced wine and dregs and dogs and sweaty humans.I wedged my thin body among a crowd of hilarious citizens upon a fireside settle, and with a buxom doxy warm on my knee and a frothing tankard in my hand, I heard the latest Court news hot from London city.

“No, this man Cranmer wouldn’t do it hisself…. Some monk or other, they say. A friend of mine in the halberdiers seen ’im slipping away in a boat at Whitehall stairs….” Ribald laughter and scraps of shrill conversation came from the direction of a redheaded troll sitting on a table to entertain a group of travelling players with the latest London news. “After all, they’d had their sport in France them two, and the King was in such a hurry he wed her afore it was light….”

“An’ not an hour too soon,” cackled her friend from my knee.“I had it from that pock-marked wench who cleans house for the tailor at the corner of Mercers’ Lane. One of them proud pieces from the palace came in last week with a pattern to be matched.Wanted another width o’ peacock green damask so the Bullen could let out her skirt!”

Both women rocked with coarse laughter, and the whole parlour of the Mitre rocked with laughter, too. There were no discreet undertones or polite evasions in Cheapside.

I do not remember much of that night, but by the time I returned to Whitehall next day I had a head that would scarcely pass in at the gates, and enough Court news scraped from decent houses and the stews and streets of London to persuade King Henry that his heralds might as well blazon all his future intentions from the steeple of St. Paul’s.

JOHN FERMOR’S GUESS ABOUT a Coronation proved right, and although his father absolutely refused to stay for it, he and Joanna remained long enough for me to see them sometimes. I tried to let nothing spoil our mutual pleasure in being together, for although Joanna must soon go back to Neston where some other marriage would inevitably be arranged for her, at least I no longer had the present torment of picturing her in Oakham Skevington’s arms.

During that spring I was often at the Browns’ house in Alder-manbury, and so heard of the City’s preparations for Anne Boleyn’s triumph. While Thurgood and I were busy planning masques and merriment for the palace, Master Peacock, the Lord Mayor, had been ordered by the King to provide a splendid water pageant on the Thames. He and the sheriffs and aldermen were to fetch Anne from Greenwich to the Tower for her crowning at Westminster on Whit Sunday. They were to turn out the artillery, to arrange a barge for a bunch of serenading bachelors, to provide a wherry mounted with cannon lent by the Lieutenant of the Tower, and I know not what. “And I hope those obsolete old demi-falcons explode and they all sink to the bottom of the Thames!” I heard him mutter among his trusty merchant friends. And although both banks and London bridge were black with spectators, and anyone who could afford a place in a boat helped to crowd the shining surface of the river to see the lavish spectacle, most Londoners seemed to be of much the same opinion.

“Stuffed in our scarlet robes and civic chains on a sweltering May day!” grumbled his worshipful the Lord Mayor, reviving himself with a stoup of Master Brown’s best French wine.

“And look at the motto she has chosen—‘Me and Mine,’” exclaimed his host, to whose lot it had fallen, as Master of the Mercers’ Company, to decorate the bachelors’ barge.

“Different indeed from the motto ‘I serve’ which our real Queen used, and lived up to, when she was Princess of Wales!” said Richard Fermor.

“And now her daughter will be called upon to serve, but in a very different capacity,” I prophesied, having recently heard the boastful conversation of the new Queen’s ladies.

The three prosperous merchants turned from watching the final work of one of their journeymen carpenters on a huge model of the Boleyn falcon to survey me dubiously. “You mean her Grace will have to wait on this new brat? Well, you should know, Will, coming from Court,” admitted my former master sadly. “But has not our Princess suffered enough? God forbid that this jumped-up woman should try to humiliate her still further!”

“Jumped-up is the word,” agreed his brother-in-law, John Brown, turning his attention again to his carpenter’s unwelcome task. “Save that her mother was a Howard this new Queen of ours comes from no better stock than my own. Like my own father and uncle, her grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn, was but a plain merchant before he became Mayor of London.”

“The people do not like her, with her presumptuous ‘Me and Mine,’” growled the greying carpenter, purposely letting his chisel slip a little so that the falcon developed a foolish smirk.

And even Anne herself, being rowed in state up their river or riding through their streets, must have seen very plainly that they did not. “Why did they stand and stare in silence, as if they cared only for the getting of a free show? Why did they not suddenly cheer enough to wake the dead as they used to from the moment your first wife appeared? Why were no caps thrown in air?” she demanded afterwards, beating furiously on her royal husband’s massive breast. And, seeing that the King knew not how to answer, and that this was something which for all his commands and his spending he could not remedy, I took the opportunity of creeping up to her, cap in hand, as if to whisper the reason, all very serious and secret in her ear—yet taking good care that all about us should be a party to it. “Have you not heard, my gracious lady, that since your return from France the men of London are suffering from the scurvy? It hurts to uncover their heads and is, I fear, a complaint which will take a long time to heal.”

There was a hastily suppressed titter from some of the grooms and pages, and if looks could kill I should have fallen dead at the lady’s slender, ermine-clad feet. Nor would I have greatly cared, my love Joanna having gone back to Neston. But Anne disliked me anyway, almost as much as Wolsey had done. And now that the King had broken with Rome, and Cranmer, our new Archbishop, had called together some sort of an assembly and passed sentence that the King was free to marry her, she must have felt that she had climbed as high as any Cardinal. She was born under a lucky star, the astrologers and soothsayers said. Yet when her child was born, in September, it was a girl.

And we were all spitefully glad, or sorry for her, according to our loyalties or our natures. And while the Princess Mary, as heir presumptive, and many of the important noblemen and bishops were crowded into the lying-in chamber as witnesses, most of the rest of us hung about passages and ante-rooms waiting to hear how the King had taken his disappointment.

“His Grace was remarkably forbearing—at least in his wife’s hearing,” Hal Norris told us hurriedly, coming out on some errand. “He went within the bed-curtains. ‘Sweetheart, we are yet both young,’ I heard him say, which must have made her pluck up heart.”

“And the child?” asked Thurgood, who was standing near me.

“‘Frail-looking, yet the spit of her father,’ the midwife says. He is naming her Elizabeth.”

“After his adored mother, Elizabeth of York,” I said softly.

And almost immediately the busy gentleman of the King’s bedchamber had passed through our midst.

“Well, let us hope the poor creature will be worth all the fuss and pother of getting her legitimately born!” snorted a clerk of John Fisher of Rochester, who was like to lose his bishopric over it.

Remembering those entertaining hours when Anne Boleyn had shone so gaily among her friends, I was glad that Henry had been kind to her. Yet almost the first favour she asked of him was that Queen Katherine’s daughter might be made to wait on her new half-sister—or so Lord Hussey, the Princess’s chamberlain, told me a few days afterwards.

Although I myself had foretold this, I was shocked and distressed. “You are sure that this is true, Milord?” I asked, forgetting my own troubles for a time.

“His Grace is still so bewitched by her that he will give her her way. You may be sure, my good Will, that as soon as this nursery Court is set up at Hunsdon or wherever it may be my own lady will be sent for from her present home at Beaulieu, and I shall lose my position.”

“Will she be disinherited, do you think?”

“Not immediately. This new man Cromwell is far too wily to take chances. If they cannot rear the child his Grace would be left without any legitimate heir at all. For although he has been careful to marry young Fitzroy to Norfolk’s blue-blooded daughter, he must know that this country would never accept a bastard king. And since Bosworth every living Plantagenet looms like a threatening shadow over the Tudor mind.”

I looked over my shoulder to make sure that no one overheard such dangerous words. The poor man must have been sorely tried, having had to bring the Princess hurriedly and unwillingly to such an unwelcome duty. But it always amazed me in those tortuous days at Court how people of various opinions and factions trusted me. I suppose he must have known that while, like many others, I conformed ignominiously for my keep, my sympathies were wholly with his young mistress. And perhaps I was less ignominious in this than some, because, for his personal kindness and much that we enjoyed in common, I loved the King. When we are young we love our idealization of people, I suppose, and only as we grow older do we love them as they really are.

In the general excitement and confusion of the whole palace it was easy enough to slip away from my duties and wait upon the Princess Mary before she left again for Beaulieu. There was no press of people about her doors these days, and the apartments allotted to her were in an old wing once used by Cardinal Wolsey’s pupils.Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, was resting. When Mary Tudor gave immediate orders for me to be admitted only two ladies were with her, and at a sign from her they moved away with their needlework to a window seat at the far end of the room.

“Will! Will! It is good to see you again!” she cried, her sad face lighting up with pleasure. She was dressed as always in quiet good taste, but I thought too sombrely for her age. She was only seventeen, but most of the spontaneous fun and open-hearted warmth seemed to have been already drained out of her. The ordeal of waiting in that stuffy bedchamber for her rival to be born had told on her. And it was weeks since she had seen her ill-used mother.

“They say the Queen is really ill,” she said, refusing to acknowledge any other. Yet she turned her head aside as she spoke; shamed, perhaps, by having to ask such news of me, the King’s fool. But though I might be no better informed than she, at least she knew that I would not lie to her.

“I enquired of a messenger who came from Buckden—”

“To bring some of my mother’s jewels. I saw them in the Boleyn woman’s room,” she interrupted sharply.

“It may well have been. He said her Grace had taken to her bed.But is it any wonder?” I said. “Have not you yourself been ill of late?”

“My father was good enough to send Doctor Bartelot, and now I am better. But I wish it could have been Doctor Butts who always treated me when I was small.”

“This new physician is said to be very clever.”

“Alas, it takes more than medical cleverness to cure some deep-seated sicknesses. I have just been translating something from Plato in which he says that the ills of the body sometimes stem from the sorrows of the soul.”

She was so well equipped intellectually, yet so completely vulnerable, having never until now had need of sharp worldly wisdom. “At least you still have Lady Salisbury,” I said to comfort her.

“You say ‘still.’” She turned to me with a small echo of her old laughter. “Do not, I entreat you, dear Will, begin suggesting that
she
, too, may be taken from me! I do not know how I should face life without her. Though it is true that she grows old,” she added more soberly, “and God may mean me to prepare for even that possibility.”

“By then you will have a husband,” I said, squatting companionably on a stool beside her.

“My cousin, James the Fifth of Scotland, has asked for me. But my father has refused. Lest I, too, become a Queen, perhaps,” she added bitterly. “Though one would expect that they would be only too glad to be rid of me.”

“He may not want you to leave England until he has a son. There is no doubt, your Grace, that your father loves you,” I said, recognising the crux of her hurt and seeking for some means of explaining it to her. “This union of his with a younger woman is in no way the same as marriage with your mother. He is as some men are in middle age—bewitched beyond normal reason. Beyond consideration of others, or more enduring loves…. But God knows it is treason for me to talk to you like this—Will, the buffoon—a man of no family….”

She laid a hand on my shoulder. “But you
have
a family. You have us, the Tudors,” she said, and there were tears of sincerity in her beautiful, short-sighted brown eyes. And I knew that what she said was in a sense true, for did they not all three talk to me frankly, and had not the King had me painted with him in his room while we made music—he and I alone together?

“Then you will understand how I must go on serving the King and caring for him even when he sends your mother away, or makes you wretched?”

She nodded and, withdrawing her little hand, sat for a while in thought. “Although I should hate to leave England, unless it were to go to Spain, perhaps it would be a good thing if I were to marry,”she said slowly.

“And have children,” I added, watching for the tender smile that curved the too straight line of her lips.

“Ah, that would be worth everything! But it is hard and bewildering to have this and that prince suggested as my husband—ever since I was small—not really caring for any of them, and always, always having them snatched away.”

“Oh, my poor child!” I whispered compassionately, because of all the Tudors I loved her best. “But it is harder—infinitely harder—as I believe you may already know—to care desperately for one whom you cannot have.”

She did not pretend to miss my allusion to Lady Salisbury’s son, Reginald Pole. “Perhaps I was too young to care
desperately
,” she said, with her usual frankness. “But my mother told me there was such a one in
your
life. And yet you play the fool and keep us all merry. Is she some fine lady about the Court?”

“No. My love and constancy go back farther than that. But I have recently seen her in London.”

“And does she return your love?”

“I believe so, now, to my humble amazement.”

“If ever it should be in my power to help you—” she began, with an unconscious assumption of her mother’s graciously regal manner, which sat quaintly upon her. “Promise you will tell me, Will.”

“I promise. But the matter lies in our own consciences.”

“Then at least give me her name, that I may remember her in my prayers.”