Young Bess (5 page)

Aloud, she told the younger child to come and look at the Christmas present Mary had given her – five yards of yellow satin to make a skirt, and Mary was keeping it to have it made up. ‘It cost seven and sixpence a yard,’ said Bess proudly, and then winced at the sound of her own words; would Jane recognise in them the tang of the Bullens’ draper grandfather?

But Jane was far too nice a little girl to do anything of the sort; she smiled with unenvious pleasure, while her younger sister Catherine, hugging a doll almost as big as herself that Mary had given her, uttered rapturous squeaks at sight of the shining stuff.

But the person it gave most pleasure to was Mary as she showed it off to the children; she loved children, and fine clothes, and she loved giving presents; nearly all her
allowance
went in these three things. Her room was strewn with patterns of glowing carnation silk and blue and green brocades for yet more dresses, and a roll of some spangled Eastern stuff to which she had already treated herself, and a dozen pairs of fine Spanish gloves. ‘When
will
she wear them all?’ Bess wondered, and wondered more that at thirty years old a woman should care what she wore.

‘I have something pretty for you too,’ Mary said to Jane,
pleased that the little girl had evidently not expected anything for herself; and she stooped to put a gold and pearl necklace round the thin childish neck. ‘It’s a very little neck,’ said Mary as she fastened the ponderous clasp, and Bess repressed a faint shudder, for wasn’t that what her mother had said in the Tower, when she put her hands round her slender throat and laughed that the executioner would have an easy job?

She turned her attention hastily to the present moment; it was her chance now to feel envious, and she promptly took it. Why should Mary give anything so gorgeous, and worth far more than five yards of satin even at seven and six a yard, to their small cousin, who did not at all appreciate it? She was too young and too much of a bookworm to care about clothes and jewels, and was even rather critical of Mary’s doing so. She had said Mary overdressed; probably she had heard her mother say so, but anyway it was a foolish thing to say.

‘Anything might happen,’ Bess’s governess had said, warning her to keep friends with Mary. But the ‘anything’ might be Jane marrying Edward and becoming Queen of England; in which case it was sensible and far-sighted of Mary to give her the necklace, so Bess finally excused her – though indeed she could not believe in Mary being sensible and
far-sighted
.

But she forgave her even this lack when Mary paid up the forfeit Bess had won from her at ‘Bonjour, Philippine’ last week. A gold pomander ball with a tiny watch dial in it was a fascinating prize, as curious as it was magnificent. All Bess’s careful respect to her elderly half-sister exploded at the sight of it, and she flung her arms round her neck.

‘My ball, my golden ball! I will carry it always at my girdle
and never be late. I could never have got anything half so beautiful for you if you had won. But you will win next time, won’t you?’

‘Oh no,’ said Mary with a rather bitter little laugh, ‘you will always win.’

There was a moment’s uncomfortable pause. Why
did
Mary say these things? There was no answer one could make to them.

But Queen Catherine, looking in to tell them to come and play Blind Man’s Buff, made everything seem happy and smiling again, as her dear Pussy-Cat Purr always did. She discussed Mary’s patterns and advised the goose-turd green rather than the brilliant new colour, popinjay blue, that Mary hankered after. ‘The goose-turd would be far more becoming to your delicate fair skin,’ she said tactfully, and they all giggled when Mary wrinkled up her round button of a nose and objected that it had a stinking name!

Catherine took her arm as they left her room and chaffed her about all those gloves. Had the King of Poland sent them? He was the latest suitor for Mary’s hand; King Henry was encouraging him, and the Queen was really hopeful.

But not Mary. There had been too many suitors ever since her early childhood: the Emperor Charles; James V of Scotland; François I, who had gallantly preferred her to the Princess of Portugal ‘with all her father’s spices’; even her own half-brother, the illegitimate Duke of Richmond, suggested by the ‘advanced’ Pope Clement as a means of securing the Succession – but found Henry less broad-minded. And now there was the danger that a foreign Papist husband would press her claim as the Papist heir to England: but still her
father used her as bait. ‘A bride in the hand is worth two in the bed,’ he said.

‘As long as he lives,’ she broke out, ‘I shall be only the Lady Mary, the most unhappy lady in the world.’

She burst into tears, dragged her arm away from her stepmother’s, ran back into her room and slammed the door.

‘Poor woman!’ said the Queen, and turned to Jane and her small sister Catherine, who were looking profoundly shocked. ‘I pray you will never know such unhappiness as your cousin’s,’ she said. Something told her that it was no use saying anything of the sort to Bess, whose little pointed face had shut itself up in an inscrutable expression. ‘Come,’ she cried gaily, ‘we mustn’t miss the Blind Man’s Buff. The Lady Mary will join us at the banquet.’

The Blind Man’s Buff had already begun, and Tom Seymour was Blind Man. Staggering and groping absurdly, his black sleeveless coat, lined with cloth of gold, swinging in a wild circular movement from his shoulders, he swooped and swirled and spun round on his heel, round and round like a gorgeous spinning-top, and the men thumped him on the back and then dodged away, and the girls pulled his coat and then fled shrieking as he darted on them. Bess flung herself into the game, plucked at his sleeve, then, more daring, pinched his hand and ran away, but he was after her; so directly that he must be cheating; she nearly called ‘A Cheat! A Cheat!’ but why should she? She wanted him to catch her, and in spite of her dodging he did. Now he had to guess who it was in three guesses; his hands stroked her face, her hair, her thin bare shoulders; he was an unconscionable time in guessing.

‘The Lady Mary,’ he said, and there was a shout of
laughter, but it was not too absurd, for Mary was short and Bess was already the same height. ‘The Dowager Lady Dorset!’ he said, to a louder yell of laughter, for the Dowager was past seventy. He must make very sure now or he would lose his guess. He pinched her ear, and gave a tweak to her nose. ‘The Lady Elizabeth!’ he said. ‘I’d know that nose in a thousand.’

And he pulled off his bandage and tied it round her eyes while she said low, ‘You are a poor Blind Man not to have caught anyone before.’

‘Ah, but you see I didn’t want to – before.’

Now it was her turn to clutch at the air, and swing round and run while hands pulled and touched her and voices called and tittered all round her.

The King sat in his great chair with the new seat embroidered by his daughter Mary for his Christmas present. The seats of Henry’s chairs were apt to wear out; this one was so ample that the materials had cost Mary
£
20. He was spread over every stitch of that labour of filial love as he sat staring at all those glittering young figures prancing, dancing, running here and there. Usually he chuckled and cheered them on, but now he stared without seeming to notice them; only, once or twice, his poached eyes rolled round between the folds of his cheeks to follow the antics of the pretty young widow of his old friend Charles Brandon who ran with tittering shrieks to escape the blindfolded pursuer.

Would she be his seventh wife? It had been whispered. But there was another whisper that said the King would never have a seventh wife.

Now came the real importance of the evening, and his flat
eyes opened with the gleam of a hawk’s as a host of silver-clad pages carried in long tables and set them up on trestles in the hall; roasted Peacocks in their Pride with spread tails and swans re-invested in their snowy plumage were perched on them, waiting to be carved, and a few of the lately discovered turkeys brought to breed in Europe from the New World by a Spanish adventurer, Pedro Nino. ‘But it will take more than Nine Pedros to make us English take to such poultry, tasteless as wood,’ proclaimed King Henry, who, however, liked to show these novelties among the old Christmas dishes; mince pies in the form of the Christ Child’s manger, boars’ heads whose jellied eyes glared between their tusks as fierce as in life, shepherds and their flocks made of sweetmeats, and flagons of cock ale, a mixture of ale and sack in which an old cock braised with raisins and cloves had been steeped for nine days and the liquid then strained and matured.

Henry was hoisted by four men out of his chair and into one that fitted his stomach more accommodatingly against the table.

The buzz of talking and guzzling rose higher and higher as the wine circulated; when it had soared almost an octave, music took up the note, and the voices of choristers clear and piercing sweet. They sang a song that Henry himself had composed, words and music, when he had just come to the throne, a youth of eighteen, in the full flush of his cherubic beauty and athletic vigour, ‘rejoicing as a giant to run his course.’

The little eyes blinked and closed; the vast padded figure in the chair sat like a dummy, apparently insensible, as he listened to what he once had sung. It was still true, he told himself, it always would be; pastime – good company – none had had better. Odd that of all that brilliant company it was only those that he had enjoyed long ago who now stood out vividly in his mind, so much more vividly than all these scattering, chattering young apes he had just been watching, even that brisk young widow of Charles Brandon’s – the half-Spanish girl – what was her name? He could not trouble himself to remember. The notes that he had once plucked out for the first time on his lute were teasing him with older memories.

Charles Brandon himself seemed nearer now than his widow, so did all those other vigorous young men with whom he had once played games and practical jokes and exchanged low stories with roars of laughter and thumps on the back: that young rascal Bryan whom he had nicknamed the Vicar of Hell – Buckingham – Compton – Bullen – all dead; some, it is true, by his orders, but that didn’t make it the less pitiful for him that there were now so few of the old faces round him, so few to remember him as he once had been.

There was that tough old ruffian Norfolk, of course, he’d always been there from the beginning of time – where
was
Norfolk? He stared at all these new young upstart whippersnappers, seeking Norfolk’s grizzled peaked beard and wiry hair, still black, somewhere among them. ‘Where—’ he began aloud, then checked; he had remembered, just in time, that Norfolk was in the Tower, awaiting sentence of death. He had already signed the death-warrant for Norfolk’s
son, the Earl of Surrey; in a day or two now the insolent conceited lad would lay on the block the handsome head that had dared compose verses against his King.

Was it possible young Surrey had intended that for his Dread Sovereign? But anything was possible with these Howards. Two nieces Norfolk had wedded to him, and both had to be beheaded. Now Cranmer and Ned Seymour said that he had conspired to put his son on the throne. He denied it, of course. ‘When I deserve to be in the Tower,’ he had exclaimed, ‘Tottenham will turn French!’

Just like old Norfolk! Told George Lawson once that he was as good a knight as ever spurred a cow! Useful fellow, Norfolk, always ready to run and pull down whoever he was set on; how he’d chased Wolsey from town, swearing he’d ‘tear the butcher’s cur with his teeth if he didn’t shog off!’ Pity you couldn’t tell with the best wolf-hound when it mightn’t turn and bite its master.

He took a deep drink, with a glance at his watchful physician. ‘Let every man have his own doctor,’ he wheezed. ‘This is mine.’

This was a good song of his. Surrey, the lazy cub, was writing verse without rhyme and calling it a new invention, blank verse. Blank it was. His own was the real thing.

sang the choristers.

His youth had had all that youth ever dreamt of, once his dreary lonely boyhood had passed, and his stingy old father in the shabby fur cloak had died, and young Prince Hal found himself one of the richest kings in Europe. He had turned everything to gold with his Midas touch; the foreign visitors could not believe their eyes, they had to finger all the tassels and cups and jugs and horses’ bits, to be convinced that they were solid gold. He had been the most splendidly dressed king in Europe. What feasting there had been, unequalled by Cleopatra or Caligula, the ambassadors said; what spiced game and venison cooked in sour cream, what flowing of fulsome wines.

It was the same now, but it had tasted better then, after his father’s diet of porridge and small beer; and with the zest of youth, an appetite as voracious for fun as for food, that pie he had carved, full of live frogs that leapt out over the table and floor, making the girls scream and jump on the benches, lifting their skirts above their knees – what a roar of laughter from him and all the other young fellows had volleyed and tumbled round the hall, echoing back to him now after all these years.

The lids of those lowered eyes just lifted; the grey lips moved. ‘Another cup of wine,’ they mumbled.

sang the choristers from Henry’s early song.

What masquerades there had been then, what pranks and dressing-up as Muscovites or Saracen robbers, surprising the Queen and her ladies into delicious alarm and then laughter! What dancing, he himself leaping higher than any, and long,
long into the night, and then after he had played a hard game of tennis, wrestled in bout after bout, run races and leapt with the long pole, or been in the saddle all day riding at the gallop after hounds, riding in the lists and unhorsing all his opponents. There was no one could beat ‘Sir Loyal Heart’, the name he always took in those tournaments of his youth, when he cantered up on his great war-horse with his wife’s Spanish colours on his sleeve in defiance of the fashion (for a knight should wear some other lady’s), into the pavilion that was all spangled with gold Tudor roses and the pomegranates of Aragon, and H.K. intertwined.