He makes an exaggerated comical start as if he has seen me for the first time, a great Fool’s leap of surprise that sends him bounding from his seat to tumble to the floor. If I were not so afraid, I would have laughed out loud.
‘Will . . .’ I whisper urgently. ‘Don’t fool now.’
‘Is that you? I thought you were a ghost,’ he exclaims quietly. ‘A ghost of a queen.’
‘I was listening for plans. I am afraid for the Princess Mary,’ I say quickly. ‘I fear that she will be married against her will . . .’
He shakes his head, choosing to ignore the lie. ‘I have seen too many queens,’ he says. ‘And too many of them are ghosts now. I don’t want to see a queen in danger; I don’t want to see another ghost. Indeed, I swear that I won’t see one. Not even one.’
‘You did not see me?’ I ask, catching his meaning.
‘I did not see you, nor Kitty Howard creeping down the stairs in her nightgown, nor Anne of Cleves, pretty as her portrait, crying at her bedroom door. I am a Fool, not a guard. I don’t have to see things, and I am forbidden to understand them. There’s no point in me reporting them. Who would listen to a Fool? And so God bless.’
‘God bless you, Will,’ I say fervently, and melt through the doorway into the king’s bedroom and through the private corridor to the safety of my own rooms.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545
The cold wet days of this early spring seem to last for ever, as if there never will be warm days of summer. The light gets brighter in the mornings and the daffodils flower coldly on the banks of the river, but the gardens are wet, and the city outside the great walls of the palace is awash: the ill-drained streets flooded with cold, dirty water. When we ride there is no pleasure in it, for the horses labour in the mud, and the frozen rain comes in scuds into our faces. We come home early, hunched in the saddle, chilled and bedraggled.
Trapped indoors by days of rain, my ladies and I continue our studies, reading texts from the Bible and translating them, both as practice for our Latin and as a stimulus to thoughtful discussions on the meanings of the words. I notice that I have become more and more aware of the sonorous beauty of the Bible, the music of the language, the rhythm of the punctuation. I set myself the task of trying to write better English, so the beauty of my translation matches the importance of the words. Before I write a sentence, I listen to the sound in my head before I put it on the page. I start to think that words can be pitch-perfect just as a musical note can be, that there is a beat in prose, just as there is in poetry. I realise that I am undertaking an apprenticeship in writing and reading, and I am my own master and my own student. And I realise that I love the work.
We are studying one morning when there is a little knock at the narrow door that leads down a stone stair to the stable yard. My maid puts her head into the room. ‘The preacher is here,’ she says quietly.
She has waited at one of the many gates to bring the man directly to my rooms. It is not that they are instructed to come in secret – the king himself knows that I have preachers from his own chapel, from Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and from the other churches. But I don’t see why the court in general – those who do not attend our sermons and readings, others who criticise my interest – should know what we study and who we meet. If they want to learn, they can come and sit with us. If they simply want to know for the sake of gossip, they can do without. I don’t need the Lord Chancellor to look down his long nose at me, or his household to whisper the names of the serious pious men who come to talk to me and my ladies, as if we were meeting gallants. I don’t need Stephen Gardiner’s men to keep a list of the names of everyone who comes to talk to me, and then send his clerks to follow them to their homes and question their neighbours.
‘There’s an odd thing, Your Majesty,’ the maid says tentatively.
I look up. ‘What odd thing?’
‘The person who claims to be your preacher is a woman, Your Majesty. I didn’t know if it was all right?’
I can feel a giggle starting, and I dare not look at Nan. ‘Why should it not be all right, Miss Mary?’
The girl shrugs. ‘I didn’t know that a good woman could preach, Your Majesty. I thought a good woman had to be silent. It’s what my father always told me.’
‘Your father thought, no doubt, that he was telling the truth,’ I say carefully, conscious of Nan’s bright eyes and hidden smile. ‘But we know that God’s Word comes equally to men and women and so men and women can equally speak of it.’
She does not understand. I can see by her glazed eyes that she only wants to know if she should let this odd being – a woman preacher – into my rooms; or have the stable boys throw her back into the cobbled streets that circle the palace.
‘Can you speak, Miss Mary?’ I ask her.
She dips a curtsey. ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’
‘Can you read?’
‘I can read a little, if it is writ plain.’
‘Then if the Bible is writ plain you could read God’s Word. And then you could tell others of it.’
She drops her head. We make out from her embarrassed mutter that the Bible is not for the likes of her, she knows only what the priest tells her, and he only speaks loud enough for them to hear at the back at Christmas and Easter.
‘It is for you,’ I insist. ‘The Bible is written into English for you to read. And Our Saviour came from heaven for you and for everyone, as He makes it plain in the Bible that He gave us.’
Slowly her head comes up. ‘I could read the Bible?’ she asks me directly.
‘You could,’ I promise her. ‘You should.’
‘And a woman could understand it?’
‘She can.’
‘And so this woman can preach?’
‘Why not?’
This silences her again. Centuries of male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers, have told her and me – told every woman in England – that a woman cannot preach. But under my hand I have the Bible in English, given by my husband to the people of England, which says that Jesus came for everyone – not just for male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers.
‘Yes, she can,’ I say to conclude the lesson. ‘And you can show her in. What is her name?’
‘Mistress Anne Askew.’
She comes in and curtseys as low as if I am an empress, then she shoots a little smile at Catherine Brandon and curtseys again to the ladies. I see at once why Mary hesitated to allow her into my chamber. She is an outstandingly pretty young woman, dressed like a country lady, the young wife of a wealthy farmer or town merchant. She’s not nobility, but one of those on the rise who probably have an old name and have used it to get a new fortune. Her white cap on her glossy brown hair is trimmed with expensive white lace. It frames an exquisite heart-shaped face with bright brown eyes and a ready smile. She is wearing a plain gown of wool in brown with a kirtle of red silk. Her sleeves are plain brown too, and round her neck she has a filet of good linen. She looks like a young woman that we might meet on a progress, voted as Queen of the May for her pure beauty, shining among the other girls of the village. We might see her in a tableau, chosen to play the princess to a painted dragon in a prosperous town. She is so lovely that any mother would get her married young, any father would see that she married extremely well.
She is certainly not how I imagine a woman inspired by God. I was expecting someone older, with a scrubbed, plain face, engraved with benevolent lines. Someone more like one of the abbesses of my childhood, certainly someone more austere than this little beauty.