It is hard for Exeter to call him ‘my lord’. It sticks in the Courtenay craw. Four years back, he thinks, I salvaged you and Gertrude your wife, and now the king suspects me of too much forbearance; he thinks I am trying to make friends of you people. You and Lord Montague, you are sprinting to the end of your silken rope. One more step, then see if I favour you.
That night he prays and goes to bed early. I am not ill, he says to Christophe, do not fret. He needs a space in which he can watch the future shaping itself, as dusk steals over the river and the park, smudges the forms of ancient trees: there are nightingales in the copses, but we will not hear them again this year. Tomorrow, all eyes will turn, not to the Garter stall he fills, but to the vacancy, where a prince as yet unborn reaches for the statute book, and bows his blind head in its caul. Why does the future feel so much like the past, the uncanny clammy touch of it, the rustle of bridal sheet or shroud, the crackle of fire in a shuttered room? Like breath misting glass, like the nightingale’s trace on the air, like a wreath of incense, like vapour, like water, like scampering feet and laughter in the dark … furiously, he wills himself into sleep. But he is tired of trying to wake up different. In stories there are folk who, observed at dawn or dusk in some open, watery space, are seen to flit and twist in the air like spirits, or fledge leather wings through their flesh. Yet he is no such wizard. He is not a snake who can slip his skin. He is what the mirror makes, when it assembles him each day: Jolly Tom from Putney. Unless you have a better idea?
The morning of his installation he is awake early. He should lie rigid, he thinks, like an effigy on a tomb, waiting for the ritual to commence. But instead he climbs out of bed. He needs a candle, till he doesn’t; when he lowers the shutter a wan light filters through. A knight of the Garter begins his day as any other man – pissing, stretching, rubbing his blue chin. If you are alert to the workings of the household it is hard to go back to sleep after dawn. The noise only ceases in the darkest hours; hemmed in by the town below, the castle is supplied by wagons that rumble constantly over the cobbles and in at the great gate. And as you make your way about those precincts, point to point, the ages joust and clash: as if armoured monarchs were colliding, a wall built by a Henry driving into a wall built by an Edward who is long ago dust. All these holy kings gone to their rest: time is battering their works like siege engines, and when you descend a step you are walking on another layer of the past.
He wants a walk, perhaps to exchange a good morning with some fellow creature who will dissipate his dreams. The kitchens, the larder, are stirring, ready for goods inward. Men rub their eyes and sleepwalk past each other as if swimming in a grey sea: no one speaks, they merely blink and swerve him as if they were skimming through his dreams, or he through theirs. When he hears footsteps, purposive, descending, he follows them. Down and down, to a stone-floored room, where a deep gutter runs with brown water, burbling like a running stream.
When he was a child at Lambeth he saw the coupage, as the dead animals were carried in, beef and sheep and pig. He learned to stand still as blades sang in the air and whistled past his ears. He grew to relish the company of men who feel a cleaver fit their hands, who plunge skewers into shy flesh, who split and spit and haul great joints with flesh-hooks. He saw beasts disassembled, becoming dinner; witnessed the household officers shovel up their perquisites and portions, neck and scrag-end, forelegs, feet, trotters and tripes, the calf’s head, the sheep’s heart. He learned to sweep out the sawdust clogged with blood and swab down the slabs where lung and liver clump, to chase the jelly particles stained with gore. He learned to do it all without a contraction of the gut: to do it calmly, to do it without feeling. Twilight coupage or dawn, the light is the same, grey-streaked, wine-dark: the butchers pass without seeing him, eyes front, their burdens hoisted on their shoulders.
Get out of their way: he moves back against the wall. They ignore him, in the dimness taking him perhaps for some inventory clerk. Still they tread, with their cadavers the size of men, eyes on their feet, their heads bent and hooded, silent, undeterred, squishing the gore from their bloody boots, around the winding stair and, guided by the sound of rushing waters, down into the dark.
III
Broken on the Body
London, Autumn 1537
What is a woman’s life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth.
She knows she may not come alive out of that bloody chamber. Before her lying-in, if she is prudent, she settles her affairs. If she dies, she will be lamented and forgotten. If the child dies, she will be blamed. If she lives, she must hide her wounds. Her injuries are secret, and her sisters talk about them behind the hand. It is Eve’s sin, the long continuing punishment it incurred, that tears at her from the inside and shreds her. Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth. If she seems so injured that she can have no more children, we commiserate with her husband.
In the long summer days, before her seclusion begins, Jane walks in the queen’s privy garden. All traces of Anne Boleyn, who occupied her rooms before her, have been erased, and a new gallery, with a view of the river, built to connect Jane’s rooms to the royal nursery. Her condition can in no wise be compared to Lady Lisle’s. The creature inside her is alive and kicking. It stirs and flutters, you can almost hear it complain: here I am stifled beneath my dam’s skirts, while the trees are in full leaf and the living stroll across the lawns.
As her time of delivery approaches, a woman will lay out a fortune for a thread of Mary’s girdle. In labour she will pin prayers to her smock, prayers tested by her foremothers. When the smock is bloodied, the midwife will plaster the parchment against the skin of her domed belly, or tie it to her wrist. The perspiring woman will sip water from a jug over which her friends have recited the litany of the saints. The Mother of God will help her, when the midwives cannot. Eve undid us, but Mary by her joys and sorrows helps us to salvation: the pearl without price, the rose without a thorn.
When Mary gave birth to her Saviour and ours, did she suffer as other mothers do? The divines have sundry opinions, but women think she did. They think she shared their queasy, trembling hours, even though she was a virgin when she conceived, a virgin when she carried: even a virgin when redemption burst out of her, in an unholy gush of fluids. Afterwards, Mary was sealed up again, caulked tight against man’s incursions. And yet she became the fountain from which the whole world drinks. She protects against plague, and teaches the hard-hearted how to feel, the dry-eyed to drop a tear. She pities the sailor tossed on the salt wave, and saves even thieves and fornicators from punishment. She comes to us when we have only an hour to live, to warn us to say our prayers.
But all over England virgins are crumbling. Our Lady of Ipswich must go down. Our Lady of Walsingham, which we call Falsingham, must be taken away in a cart. Our Lady of Worcester is stripped of her coat and her silver shoes. The vessels containing her breast-milk are smashed, and found to contain chalk. And where her eyes move, and weep tears of blood, we know now that the blood is animal blood and her eyes are worked on wires.
There is a great book that tells you what to do when a royal birth is pending. It is in a clerk’s hand but the marginal notes were made by Margaret Beaufort, the old king’s mother. Having been at court in the reign of King Edward, and witnessing the birth of his ten children, she was clear that the Tudors should adopt the same protocol.