‘Anne Boleyn,’ I say at random.
‘The Most Happy,’ Nan says with a harsh laugh.
‘Anne of Cleves?’
‘God Send Me Well to Keep.’
‘Katherine Howard?’
Nan makes a face as if the memory is a bitter one: ‘No Other Will but His, poor little liar,’ she says.
‘Katherine of Aragon?’ We both know this one. Katherine was my mother’s beloved friend, a martyr to her faith and to her husband’s terrible infidelity.
‘Humble and Loyal, God bless her. Never was a woman more humbled. Never was one more loyal.’
‘What was Jane’s?’ Jane Seymour will always be the favourite wife, whatever I say or do. She gave him his son and she died before he tired of her. Now he remembers a perfect woman, more saint than wife, and even manages to squeeze out a few hot little tears for her. But my sister, Nan, remembers that Jane died terrified and alone, asking for her husband, and nobody had the courage to tell her that he had ridden away.
‘Bound to Obey and Serve,’ Nan says. ‘Bound hand and foot, if the truth be told.’
‘Bound? Who bound her?’
‘Like a dog, like a slave. Those brothers of hers sold her to him as if she were a trussed chicken. Drove her to market, put her on sale right under Queen Anne’s nose. Trussed her and stuffed her and put her into the oven heat of the queen’s rooms, certain that the king would want a taste.’
‘Don’t.’
Both of my former husbands lived far from court, far from the gossip of London. When I got any London news it was weeks late and through the rosy glow of distance, as told by the travelling pedlars, or in a rare hurried note from Nan. The rumours of royal wives that came and went over the years were like fairy stories told of imaginary beings: the pretty young whore, the fat German duchess, the angelic mother dead in childbirth. I don’t have Nan’s clear-eyed cynicism about the king and his court, I don’t know half what she knows. Nobody knows all the secrets that she has heard. I only came to court in the last months of my husband Latimer’s life to find a complete wall of silence around any mention of the last queen, and no happy recollections of any of them.
‘Your motto had better be a promise of loyalty and humility,’ Nan says. ‘He is raising you to a great position. You have to declare publicly that you’re grateful, that you will serve him.’
‘I’m not naturally a humble woman,’ I say with a little smile.
‘You have to be grateful.’
‘I want something about grace,’ I agree. ‘Knowing that this is the will of God is the only thing that will carry me through.’
‘No, you can’t say anything like that,’ she cautions me. ‘It has to be God in your husband, God in the king.’
‘I want God to use me. He has to help me. I want something like All that I Do Is for God.’
‘All that I Do Is for Him?’ she suggests. ‘Then it sounds as if you’re thinking only of the king.’
‘But it’s a lie,’ I say flatly. ‘I don’t want to use clever words to mean two things at once, like a courtier or a crooked priest. I want my motto to be something clear and truthful.’
‘Oh, don’t be all blunt and Northern!’
‘Just honest, Nan. I just want to be true.’
‘What about: To Be Useful in All that I Do? It doesn’t say useful to who – you know that it’s for God and for the reformed religion, but you don’t have to say that.’
‘To Be Useful in All that I Do,’ I repeat without much enthusiasm. ‘It’s not very inspiring.’
‘The Most Happy was dead in three and a half years,’ Nan says harshly. ‘No Other Will but His had her lover in the jakes. These are mottoes: they aren’t predictions.’
Lady Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, is brought from her little court at Hatfield to be presented to me, her new stepmother – her fourth in seven years – and the king decides that this meeting shall be formal and public, so the nine-year-old child has to walk into the huge presence chamber at Hampton Court, the place crowded with hundreds of people, her back like a poker, her face as white as the muslin at the top of her gown. She looks like a player’s brat, born to walk on a stage made from carts, lonely in a crowd, all show and no solid ground. Anxiety makes her plain, poor little thing, her copper hair scraped back under her hood, mouth pinched, her dark eyes goggling. She walks as her governess has taught her, back stiff, her head rigidly high. As soon as I see her I feel such pity for her, poor little child – her mother beheaded on her father’s orders before she was three years old, her own safety always uncertain as she tumbled overnight from royal heir to royal bastard. Her very name was changed from Princess Elizabeth to Lady Elizabeth and nobody curtseyed any more when they served her bread and milk.
I don’t see a threat in this little mite. I see instead a little girl who never knew her mother, who was not even sure of her name, who rarely saw her father, and has been loved only by servants who cling to their posts by luck and work for nothing when the royal exchequer forgets to pay them.
She hides her terror behind a rigid formality – she has a veneer of royalty like a shell – but I am sure that inside, the soft little creature is cringing like a Whitstable oyster squirted with lemon juice. She curtseys low to her father and then she turns and curtseys to me. She speaks to us in French, expressing her gratitude that her father should allow her into his presence, and her joy in greeting her new honoured mother. I find I am watching her almost as if she is a poor little beast from the menagerie at the Tower, ordered by the king to do tricks.
Then I see a swift glance between Elizabeth and Lady Mary and I realise that they are sisters indeed, both of them afraid of their father, completely dependent on his whim, uncertain of their position in the world and instructed never to put a foot wrong on a most uncertain path. Lady Mary was forced to wait on Elizabeth when she was a baby princess, but this failed to breed enmity. Lady Mary came to love her half-sister, and now she nods encouragingly as the little voice trembles over the French words.
I rise from my seat and step quickly down from the dais. I take Elizabeth’s cold hands and I kiss her forehead. ‘You’re very welcome to court,’ I say to her in English – for who speaks a foreign language to their daughter? ‘And I shall be very glad to be your mother and care for you, Elizabeth. I hope you will see me as a mother indeed, and that we will be a family together. I hope that you will learn to love me and trust that I will love you as my own.’
The colour floods into her pale cheeks, up to her sandy eyebrows, her thin lips tremble. She has no words for a natural act of affection though she had speeches prepared in French.
I turn to the king. ‘Your Majesty, of all the treasures that you have given me, this – your daughter – is the one that gives me most delight.’ I glance at Lady Mary, who is blanched with shock at my sudden informality. ‘Lady Mary I love already,’ I say. ‘And now I will love Lady Elizabeth. When I meet your son my joy will be complete.’