“I don’t know.”
There is a great bellow from behind the closed door, a terrible roar, like a bull will give when a mastiff has fastened on his throat and he drops to his knees. It is the noise of a man mortally wounded. “No! No! No!”
Jane whirls around at the cry, jumps to her feet, and sways indecisively. The court falls completely silent, and watches her, as she sits back down on her throne and then rises up again. Her brother speaks quickly to her and she obediently goes to the door to the privy chamber, but then she steps back and makes a little gesture with her hand, stopping the guards from opening it. “I can’t,” she says.
She looks across at me, and I go to her side. “What should I do?” she asks.
There is a single loud sob from inside the room. Jane looks quite terrified. “Should I go to him? Thomas says I must go to him. What’s happening?”
Before I can answer Thomas Seymour is at his sister’s side, his hand in the small of her back, literally thrusting her towards the closed door. “Go in,” he says through his teeth.
She digs in her heels, she rolls her eyes towards me. “Shouldn’t Lord Cromwell go in?” she whispers.
“Not even he can raise the dead!” Thomas snaps. “You’ve got to go in.”
“Come with me.” Jane reaches out and grabs my hand as the guard swings the door open. The messenger stumbles out and Thomas Seymour pushes us both in and slams the door behind us.
Henry is on his knees, on the floor, hunched over a richly padded footstool, his face buried in the thick embroidery. He is sobbing convulsively like a child, hoarse-voiced as if his grief is tearing out his heart. “No!” he says when he catches his breath, and then he gives a great groan.
Cautiously, like someone approaching a wounded beast, Jane goes towards him. She pauses and bends down, her hand hovering above his heaving shoulders. She looks at me, I nod, and she pats his back so lightly that he will not feel it through the wadding of his jacket.
He rubs his face one way and another against the knots of gold and sequins on the footstool; his clenched fist thumps the stool and then the wooden planks of the floor. “No! No! No!”
Jane jumps back at this violence, and looks at me. Henry gives a little scream of distress and pushes the footstool away and flings himself facedown on the floor, rolling from one side to the other in the strewing herbs and the straw. “My son! My son! My only son!”
Jane shrinks back from his flailing arms and kicking legs, but I go forward and kneel at his head. “God bless him and keep him, and take him into eternal life,” I say quietly.
“No!” Henry rears up, his hair stuck with herbs and straw, and screams into my face. “No! Not into eternal life. This is my boy! He is my heir! I need him here.”
He is terrifying in his red-faced frustrated rage, but then I see where the footstool cover has scratched his face, torn his eyelid, so blood and tears are running down his face, I see the desperate child that he was when his brother died, when his mother died only a year later. I see Henry the child who had been sheltered from life and now had it breaking into his nursery, into his world. A child who had rarely been refused and now suddenly had everything he loved snatched from him.
“Oh, Harry,” I say, and my voice is filled with pity.
He wails and pitches himself into my lap. He grips around my waist as if he would crush me. “I can’t . . .” he says. “I can’t . . .”
“I know,” I say, I think of all the times that I have had to come to this young man and tell him a son has died, and now he is as old as I was then, and once again I have to tell him that he has lost a son.
“My boy!”
I grip him as tightly as he is holding me, I rock him and we move together as if he were a great baby, crying in his mother’s lap with the heartbreak of childhood.
“He was my heir,” he wails. “He was my heir. He was the very spit of me. Everyone said it.”
“He was,” I say gently.
“He was handsome as I was!”
“He was.”
“It was as if I would never die . . .”
“I know.”
A new burst of sobbing follows, and I hold him as he weeps heartbrokenly. I look over his heaving shoulders to Jane. She is simply aghast. She stares at the king, hunched on the floor, crying like a child, as if he is some strange monster from a fairy story, nothing to do with her at all. Her eyes slide to the door; she is wishing herself far away from this.
“There is a curse,” Henry says suddenly, sitting up and scrutinizing my face. His eyelids are puffed and red, his face blotchy and scratched, his hair standing up, his cap in the ashes of the fire. “There must be a curse against me. Why else would I lose everyone I love? Why else am I wretched? How can I be king and the most miserable man in the world?”
Even now, with this bereaved father clinging to my hands, I will not say anything. “How did Bessie Blount offend God that He strikes at me?” Henry demands of me. “What did Richmond ever do wrong? Why would God take him away from me if there is not a curse on them?”
“Was he ill?” I ask quietly.
“So fast,” Henry whispers. “I knew he wasn’t well, but it wasn’t serious. I sent my physician, I did everything that a father should do . . .” He catches his breath on a little sob. “I have failed in nothing,” he says more strongly. “It cannot be anything I have done. It has to be the will of God that he was taken from me. It must be something Bessie has done. There must be some sin.”
He breaks off and takes my hand and puts it to his sore, burning cheek. “I can’t bear it,” he says simply. “I can’t believe it. Say it isn’t so.”
The tears are pouring down my own face. Silently, I shake my head.
“I won’t have it said,” Henry says. “Say it’s not so.”
“I can’t deny it,” I say steadily. “I am sorry. I am sorry, Henry. I am so sorry. But he has gone.”
His mouth gapes and he drools, his eyes raw and filled with tears. He can hardly make a sound. “I can’t bear it,” he whispers. “What about me?”
I pick myself up from the floor, sit on the footstool, and hold out my arms to him as if he were the little boy in the royal nursery once again. He crawls towards me and lays his head in my lap and gives himself up to his tears. I stroke his thinning hair, and I wipe his sore cheeks with the linen sleeve of my gown, and I let him cry and cry while the room goes golden with sunset and gray with dusk, and Jane Seymour sits like a little statue at the opposite end of the room, too horrified to move.
As the dusk turns darker and becomes night, the king’s sobs gradually turn to whimpers and then shudders until I think he has fallen asleep, but then he stirs again and his shoulders heave. When it is time for dinner, he does not move and Jane keeps her strange silent vigil with me, as we witness his heartbreak. Then when the bells in the town toll for Compline, the door opens a crack and Thomas Cromwell slips into the room, and takes in everything in one shrewd glance.
“Oh,” Jane exclaims with relief, rises to her feet and makes a little distracted flapping gesture with her hands as if to show the Lord Secretary that the king has collapsed with grief, and the Lord Secretary had better take charge.
“Would you like to go to dinner, Your Grace?” Cromwell asks her with a bow. “You can tell the court that the king is dining in his rooms, privately.”
Jane gives a little mew of assent and slips from the room, and Cromwell turns to me with the king in my arms, as if I pose a knottier problem.
“Countess,” he says to me, bowing.
I incline my head but I don’t speak. It is as if I am holding a sleeping child whom I don’t want to wake.
“Shall I get the grooms of the bedchamber to put him to bed?” he asks me.
“And his physician with a sleeping draft?” I suggest in a whisper.
The physician comes, and the king raises his head and obediently drinks the measure. He keeps his eyes closed, as if he cannot bear to see the looks, curious, sympathetic or, worst of all, amused, of the grooms of the bedchamber who turn down the bed, pierce it with a sword to prevent assassins, warm it with the hot coals in the pan, and then stand at his head and his feet, waiting for instruction.