Young Bess (18 page)

But she would survive it; she would survive him; she would live to be nearly a hundred, and marry again and make others as wretched as himself. He knew it all. He could not escape. He could only agree to all her terms of unconditional surrender.

‘You will make my son your heir?’

‘Yes,’ he said faintly.

‘You will never give in to the odious woman and her demands for Fasterne?’

‘No,’ he said fretfully.

‘Nor for her – for the King’s jewels?’

‘No.’ It was almost a whisper by now. He added after a hesitant pause, ‘Not even – don’t you think we might send back her wedding ring?’

‘Most certainly not. It’s the principle that counts. Admit that she has the right to one thing, then she has it to all.’

He saw the conclusion only too well. He even agreed to it. But not aloud.

The voice continued: ‘You will look into those extraordinary practices of the Admiral – piracy – false coinage – his quite open working up of a party against you? And his seduction of the Princess Elizabeth.’

‘What!’ The exhausted voice was startled into life again.

Oh yes, the Duchess had had it on the best authority from her maid. Or, at least, if the Admiral had not already seduced the Princess, he soon would. An offence not merely against morals but against the throne.

Her tongue darted hither and thither. If he could see it (but he had put out the light) it surely would be forked. It hissed the word ‘treason’.

‘Do you understand what you are demanding of me?’ he said. ‘You are wishing me to prove my own brother guilty of high treason. To condemn him to the block.’

‘It would not be you. It would be the law.’

‘Which you have already asked me to twist to your purposes.’

He did not hear her answer. He felt he was suffocating. And it was now near morning, and if he got no sleep, how could he work tomorrow? He promised to do all she had asked, and at last her tongue was still, and they lay still, the woman still within the man’s arms, taut, wide-awake, staring with hot eyes into the dark.

A consuming envy seemed to burn away her vitals; envy of her hosts this evening, who had been so much in love that they could not wait to marry at the prudent time; of the Princess Elizabeth sitting upright and bright-eyed beside her
brother at the banquet, so very young; of the way she had looked across the table at the Admiral’s genial jokes, meeting his quick glances, startled yet unaware, her eager childish hands stretched out so greedily to life, all unknowing what they might take.

So she herself had been – once.

What had happened since to make everything so different? If she had had a man in love with her like the Admiral, scoundrel as he might be, would she not be different now? But he hated her, as she hated him, hated, hated.

Her life was nothing. She too had clutched at it with both hands, and it had crumbled in them to dust and ashes. All her beauty, her radiant strength of will and purpose, strength to love or hate (it was the same thing really) all wasted on this man beside her, a fine figure, but only a figure, a figurehead rather, dry as dust, cold as ashes; while his youngest brother glowed and vibrated with the warmth and splendour of life. And she had wasted herself on this poor weak creature, whom she could twist round her little finger.

Yet in her despair she turned and clung to him like a thing drowning.

He had fallen into an uneasy dream, and felt she was dragging him down, down, into the uttermost depths of what black and icy sea?

He floundered this way and that in those dreadful waters, dragged down, down, down by his frantic burden, floundered and floundered. A huge fish floated towards him and stared at him with gaping mouth and eyes.

‘Flounder, flounder in the sea,’ he heard his mother say, and through the black engulfing water all round him he could see
her perched by his little carved wood bed in the old nursery at Wolf Hall, telling a bed-time story to him alone; when he was still the only boy, and no interloping baby brothers as yet, only docile, adoring sisters. He could see his mother’s peaked cap, her small hands gesturing as she told the story; he tried to reach her through the choking waves, to call to her to save him. ‘Come to me,’ he shrieked. ‘Come and save me.’

But she never saw nor turned her head; only her voice went on inexorably:

The light burnt all night in Lambeth Palace, where Archbishop Cranmer sat, writing the new English Prayer Book that was to make a new land of saints from this old sinful England.

He wrote in his window, never seeing the soft spring night outside, but only the balancing phrases that took shape on the blank paper beneath his fingers, phrases that responded to each other, built themselves up like the rungs of a ladder up to heaven, into the most perfect prose ever yet written in English.

And it was he who was writing it, he who was creating this great work, imperfect, tremulous man that he was, an arrant coward, as he had always known whenever he had entered the presence of that Sun of Man, that majestic, rollicking, bewildering, baffling Master, who had passed away only a little over a year ago, though it seemed like three or four centuries, and left the world this tired dim place, peopled by shadows.

He fingered the two grey prongs of straggling beard that were growing as long as a gnome’s in a German fairy-tale.

He had never cut nor trimmed it since King Henry died. His Gretchen did not like it. She did not see why he should look
like an old goat as a protest against shaven priests – nor as a token of affection to his late master. Women had no sense of loyalty. They had no sense of proportion. She was mistress of Lambeth Palace, she was wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a thing no woman had ever been before.

Yet she could worry about his beard. Was it, after all, a mistake to combine the clerical office with matrimony? He had never intended to do so himself; in fact, he had intended neither.

He had been frightened from women as a young man when he had been tricked and bullied into marrying the bouncing black-eyed niece of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn at Cambridge, and had therefore had to resign his new-won Fellowship. It had been a bitter pill to swallow along with the ‘raw, small and windy ale’ that Erasmus had so complained of as they sat and drank together at the Dolphin.

Lucky for him, said his friends, that his Black Joan died in childbed within the year, and he was promptly re-elected as Fellow. He also took Orders, a safeguard against further assaults. And ever after at Cambridge he frequented only the White Horse, where there were no dangerous women though plenty of dangerous talk; for the inn was so well known as a meeting-place for Lutheran reformers that it was nicknamed Little Germany.

But when much later he visited their headquarters in Germany itself, he fell in love, at forty-five, with the daughter of a scholar at Nuremberg, a maiden as fair, pliable and docile, as devoted to himself, as Joan had been dark and flashy and shrilly intent on her own way. He felt safe with Margarete Hosmer – Gretchen she liked him to call her – who
was young enough to be his daughter, but cared and cooked and sewed for him as though she were his mother. After more than twenty years the widower remarried, intending never to settle permanently again in England, certainly never to hold office there.

But no sooner had he acquired a wife than King Henry required him to help get rid of his; no sooner had he resolved to slip quietly into retirement than King Henry ordered him to become Archbishop of Canterbury. He was plunged into action for the first time in his life, and in middle life. His friends showered congratulations on him; he would be the King’s greatest servant, as Wolsey had been, now cast away. But Cranmer did not want honours and preferment and riches; he wanted peace and quiet.

Henry promised it to him; he even liked to share it; often he would come to visit him at Lambeth, look at his books, ask to see what he was writing now, and walk with him in the garden, even in winter, where as he said he could find rest as nowhere else, in its ‘singular quiet.’

The Archbishop’s hand paused in its writing as the rhythmic thumping click of rowlocks floated up through his open window at this late hour. He went to the window and his eyes absently followed the dark form of a barge gliding past; then turned and rested on the moon-washed spaces of the lawns directly below him, the black shapes of trees, the ghostly bushes of white may that wafted their scent out on the cool air.

It had not always known peace. He could see the sharp shadow cast by the little shed where Sir Thomas More had sat and awaited the verdict of the Commissioners that was to be
his doom; while at a little distance ‘boisterous Latimer’ had walked up and down with various doctors and chaplains, joking and jollying them, flinging his arms about their necks.

And there was the pretty summer-house that Cranmer himself had built, now turned to a glimmering temple by the magic rays of the moon. He used to love to sit there, sometimes dozing a little in the sun; until that night in May before Nan Bullen’s execution. Then he could find no sleep in his bed, and wandered out into the garden, up and down, up and down, remembering how More had prophesied this very thing: ‘her sporting and dancing will spurn our heads off like footballs, yet it will not be long before hers will dance the same dance.’

It had not been long. Just a year after the King beheaded More to secure the legality of his marriage to Nan, he ordered Cranmer to prove the marriage illegal: and struck off the lovely head for which he had spurned the wisest and noblest in England.

‘Is there in good faith no more difference between you and me,’ More had asked her, ‘but that I shall die today, and you tomorrow?’

The question had echoed in Cranmer’s heart ever since, but addressed to himself.

Never since that night had he been able to find rest in the little summer-house where at last, worn out by wandering aimlessly up and down, he had sat breathing in the scent of the white may, while the birds began their first faint songs and the dawnlight turned the river pale as a corpse; and he knew that his love for his great master was full of horror and fear.

Yet this love was somehow enhanced by it. The King had
never been cruel to
him
, so that his adoration had in it something of the pride of a favourite pupil. He needed that, for his schooldays had been tortured by a savage bully of a master who, as Cranmer frequently explained, had ‘dulled and daunted the fine wits of his scholars.’ Every time he forgot anything he said this, lamenting that he had lost ‘both memory and audacity’ from his cruel treatment and could never recover from it. Every time he did so he knew his old complaint was boring his friends, who thought it high time to outgrow his childish troubles; and what was there to complain of anyway, since More himself had been astounded by the subtlety of Cranmer’s mind?

Surprisingly, it was a master still more savage who restored his self-respect by making him his friend. And absorbing the singular quiet that Henry had loved like himself, Cranmer felt that he alone knew what it was to miss the King.

‘I love you. You think I am a child, that I don’t know what that means, but I do, I
do
. I want to be yours, now, wholly and for ever.’

‘Bess, you’re mad, we’re both mad I think—’

‘Does my Lord Admiral preach sanity, safety to me now? Will you of all men trim your sails to the wind?’

‘You devil’s brat! You’ve bewitched me clean out of my senses.’

‘But I want you too. I am longing – oh, for what? I do not know, and if you do not give it me, I shall never know.’

‘Child!’ he cried, but it was no child he held in his arms.

The wind outside the little arbour in the pleached alley was tearing the clouds and the fruit trees and flowering shrubs to pieces; long strips of white scudded across the brilliant sky, clouds of blossom blew up in the air, separated into pink and white snowflakes to be tossed here and there over the prim walks; butterflies were blown as helplessly as the flying petals, and a pair of blackbirds went fluttering up, this way and that, as light as scraps of burnt paper in the wind, screaming and chattering because their nest had been blown over and their silly fat fledgelings were now each opening a squawking orange beak and rolling an indignant eye in so many different
parts of the garden. The boatmen were shouting to each other on the river beyond the garden walls as their slight craft drove headlong before the half-gale; from their cockney, jeering cries one could not guess what danger they were in, but certainly they were trimming their sails to the wind.

Which the Admiral, of all men, could not do. He looked down at this young witch that had flung herself across his knees, a thin scrap of a girl whose arms felt brittle enough to break in his grasp.

How on earth, or in hell rather, had she come to get this hold on him? He had thought he was amusing himself with a little girl, crude, yet sharp as a small stiletto, and sure enough she had stabbed him to the heart.

Her face looked up at him, all the lines immature, yet a white flame in the red of her hair; he bent his head to quench it, and kissed her.

There came another sound among all the crying noises in the wind, a crunching sound on the gravel of short
high-heeled
steps that kept hurrying and then checking, steps that were accustomed to be faster and lighter than they now had to go. Catherine came down the pleached alley, stopped dead, turned round as if to go back, then turned again, and came slowly on to them.

Quickly the Admiral gave Bess a shake, told her jokingly to get to her feet for a brazen hussy, told Catherine he’d been scolding her, for he’d looked through the window and seen her kissing some man, but now all was forgiven.

Bess babbled nervously. ‘It’s not true. What man could I have kissed? I never see any man alone but my tutor, and
would
I kiss Mr Grindal?’ She finished on a frightened giggle.

But neither of them was listening; nor looked at her, and Catherine’s face staring up at her husband was grey and pinched. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out; she was twisting her hands together and suddenly she flung them open as though throwing something away, and turned and ran back down the pleached alley, ran blindly, clumsily, heavily, so differently from her usual light dancing step that Bess saw for the first time what it must be to her to be carrying the burden of a child.

The Admiral brushed straight past her and ran after Catherine.

She was left standing alone in the flickering pale green light under the leaves. She felt that she would now be alone for ever.

‘You must go away,’ said Catherine. ‘What else can I do? I am responsible for you, and if any harm comes to you while under my charge, I should have betrayed my trust.’

‘Madam—’ began Bess, but Catherine put up her hand.

‘I know what you would say, and I too, that my lord intends you no harm. But we have to think of harm in other terms than those of actual fact. The harm done you by gossip and slander might endanger not only your reputation but your whole position in the country, perhaps even your life. And I am certain that, if no bad twist should happen to your fate, you will one day be Queen of England.’

She spoke so quietly, casually almost, that Bess wondered for a moment if she had indeed heard her, or if it were her own voice that had at last uttered this thing that she had said to herself so long: ‘You will one day be Queen of England.’

She had never believed that she would ever hear anyone else say it, and now here was the Queen herself saying it, at the very moment when her pain and humiliation were so acute that she could not believe she would ever outlive it; all her life she would be standing in front of her stepmother, staring down at the black and white marble tiles, unable ever again to lift her eyes and look Catherine in the face.

Yet Catherine had not spoken harshly; there was a distressed, almost an apologetic note in her ‘I
must
send you away,’ as though wondering whether she were wrong in doing so, whether there were anything else she could possibly do, or have done in the past. ‘I have thought of you as a child,’ she said, ‘but you are that no longer. You have great responsibilities and dangers ahead of you, and I should only add to them if I kept you here. What are you thinking?’ she added suddenly, for there had been no change in the masked face since she began to speak to her. But now at last Bess raised those long white lids that veiled her eyes, and looked full at her.

‘That you said, Madam, I should one day be Queen of England.’

She must hear her say it again. Not till then could she believe that she had already heard her say it. Elizabeth of England – how impossible it was that she should ever be called that! Why, there had never been a Queen of England in her own right before, except that one unfortunate example, four and a half centuries ago, of Queen Matilda (enough reason in herself why there had never been another), and even she had to share her title with her enemy cousin King Stephen.

Yet Catherine’s quiet voice was considering the matter as
coolly as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

‘I think it very likely. Your brother is delicate, more so than those now in charge of him trouble to consider. Your sister would never hold the people as you could do. For, remember, that is the whole crux of the matter. Kings here in England do not rule by divine right but by the will of the people. It was the people who put your grandfather on the throne when he defeated and killed Richard Crookback. Your father never forgot that, not even after thirty-eight years of such power and popularity as an English King has not known for centuries. “Would I be such a fool as to kick away the ladder that mounted my family to the throne?” Yes, he said that to me. But now it is the third generation, and neither your brother nor sister will, I think, keep that same sense of what the goodwill of the people has done for their family; or of what it may cease to do, if they are not careful of it.’

‘I thought my father ruled more absolutely than any King has dared do here for generations.’ Bess spoke eagerly, snatching at this generous chance that Catherine had given to get both their minds away from her present disgrace.

Catherine was indeed determined she should think of the future rather than the present. Her conviction of what that future would be had come to her long since. ‘But don’t you be the little fool I was when my future was told me as a child,’ she said, with a gallant effort at her old gaiety. ‘For when a
fortune-teller
told me I should one day sit on a throne and wear a crown, I refused to do any more sewing, for my hands, I said, were reserved for royal actions – and well slapped I got for it.’

‘But it came true,’ said Bess. ‘The future is already written for those who can read it in the stars.’ She yearned to consult
an astrologer, but even in this unguarded moment of relief knew she would be scolded for saying so. But Catherine saw her wish clear enough; she leant forward and took her hands, speaking again with an urgency that sounded rather desperate even to herself, for why should she have to say everything now at this moment, as though there would never be another chance to do so? And suddenly it came into her mind that there might never be one, and that she loved as her own child this girl who had given her more bitter agony of heart than ever her cruel father had done; and that that love mattered more to both of them, and would last when the agony had long since passed away.

‘The future is written,’ she said, ‘but it’s in our hands to blot it if we will. The future is for you to make, as you will. The people of England will never keep a wanton for their Queen. They hated your mother as one; it may have been unjustly, but whether so or not, that hate brought her downfall. Their love will bring you greater strength than any army. Treasure it as you would your life, for it will be your life. Why do you cry?’

‘You speak so strangely – it’s as though we were never to meet again.’

‘I did not mean to frighten you. We shall meet again – yes, of course we shall. But how can one count on anything as certain among “the changes and chances of this mortal life” – have you heard that phrase of the Archbishop’s? He should be one of our famous poets, yet no man will know what share was his in this Book of Common Prayer – common to all England, its writers unnamed, with all the holy beauty of their words in common.’

But what was the use of her going on about old
yellow-faced
Mumpsy-mouse and his precious book, when she had spoken as though they might never meet again, as though she might die? ‘I cannot bear it,’ sobbed Bess, crying as Catherine had never seen her do, ‘to go away, and you ill, and it is all my own fault.’

‘Not all,’ said Catherine sadly.

That obscure and sudden disease, the sweating sickness, was killing off people within a few days of their getting it. Edward’s tutor, Mr Cheke, had recovered, but Bess’s tutor, Mr Grindal, had caught it and died, and there was all the question of a new tutor for her. Her repentant mood did not lead her to any meek acceptance of her guardians’ choice; she flatly refused to learn from the Oxford scholar whom both Catherine and the Admiral wished to appoint. Oxford was old-fashioned, behind the times; all the Princess Mary’s tutors had come from Oxford; and Bess insisted on a Cambridge man.

Mr Roger Ascham had been Greek reader at St John’s, had set all Cambridge reading and acting Greek plays; he had been Mr Cheke’s favourite pupil and supported his theory of modern Greek pronunciation, which was denounced at Oxford as rabidly as heresy. Greek was in itself a kind of heresy; religious reformers based their authority on the newly discovered Greek texts and manuscripts; and this rage for the New Learning had all the excitement of revolt against the tedious old Latin that the monks had used and everyone was tired of.

If you read Greek you were not only clever, you were
modern, you were advanced, you were in the fashion.

And Bess was as determined to flaunt the New Learning as new clothes; she would have this coming Cambridge man, and nobody else. She had already started a correspondence with him, in Latin of course. He was as eager for the post of her tutor as herself. He pulled wires, he wrote charming
letters
to Mrs Ashley and sent her a silver pen of exquisite Italian workmanship. In the end, as usual, Bess got her way.

This triumph gave a fillip to her departure and took away a little from the uncomfortable sense of being sent off in disgrace. Catherine had done her best to avoid that; but she was deep in love, ill, and frightened, and could not always control her temper. It would flash out at moments in little
subacid
remarks, and then she would be sorry and try to make up for it, and that made it worse.

And Tom had gone off on one of his frequent sudden expeditions to some island or other – Wight or Lundy or the Scillies – murmuring mysterious boasts in his beard: ‘Easy to run down the office of Lord Admiral as a show-title, but I tell you it means something. I’ve now got the rule over a good sort of ships and men. It’s a good thing to have the rule of men,’ he had added, glowering rather belligerently at his household of women and little girls, and off he had gone without even saying goodbye to Bess. But it was certainly easier with Catherine when he had gone.

Before he came back, Bess too was gone, in the week after Whitsun, riding off down the sun-baked rutted white lanes with the dust rising in clouds under her pony’s hoofs and powdering the round pink faces of the campion on the hedges,
swirling up over the white clusters of heavy-scented may, up, up, as though to chase the larks that soared, shrilling their songs into the blue sky.

It was good to be riding away from disgrace and scoldings, however gentle; yes, and even from the Admiral and the storms he brewed. All her life lay before her on this springtime journey. Anything might happen. She might run away with Barney, and Edward would make him Lord of Ireland, and she would wear a green kirtle and coat of cloth of gold, such as her mother had so nearly done, in a painted palace built of clay and timber where on winter nights one could hear the howling of wolves on the wind.

She might run even further westward, sailing for months towards the sunset, towards the strange lands that had lain there undiscovered since the beginning of time and now were newly opened to them. The Admiral sometimes spoke in his wild half-joking way of ousting the Spaniards there and founding an empire of his own – and then his eyes had rested on her, and she knew now that when he saw himself as its King he had thought of her as its Queen. Why hadn’t she known it at the time? Not even when he told her once that she wore the sunset in her hair and the barbaric gold of the Incas!

She drew in her breath sharply at the memory, then jerked herself awake from her daydreams. Anything might happen, but these things would not happen.

But no, what might really happen was that she would be Queen of England.

She had flatly refused to sit in the stuffy coach with Cat Ashley, declaring its jolting made her sick. But there was another reason beside her enjoyment in the ride, and that was
the strange new pride thrilling up in her, that she was riding through the country, showing herself to the people,
her
people – so she had believed, and now Catherine had said they might be one day.