Please, please don’t let Jane Parker be idling about.
“So what next?” I asked.
“Henry Percy will declare his love for me and my love for him and convince his father that we should be married.”
“And if not?”
She shook her head. She never considered the possibility of losing. “I know how Percy loves me, and I believe that will give him the strength to do what needs to be done.”
Shortly thereafter Anne had me deliver a letter to Henry Percy. She could not be seen with him, but I knew by her determined look that she had not given up. I knocked lightly on the door to his chamber and he opened it himself. His face was a bit crestfallen when he saw who it was—I suspected he’d hoped it would be Anne—but then recovered his graciousness and invited me in. I stepped in, to be polite, but had no intention of staying.
His chambers were large, the largest of any gentleman’s chambers I’d been in, and richly appointed. We moved to the back of the large greeting room, toward a window, and I withdrew the letter from inside my deep French sleeve. “I’m to wait for a response, if you like,” I said. He nodded, then left me standing by the window while he retired to his desk to read the letter and, I presumed, respond. I wandered to a further window, and then another, looking outside as I did. A large barge, one I didn’t recognize, had been moored on the riverside alongside the palace grounds. It rivaled the king’s for its ornamentation, though mayhap not Wolsey’s.
I idled, but within a few minutes there was a sharp knock at the door. Percy’s manservant answered and like a cloud clap a large man, emanating power, burst into the room.
“My Lord Northumberland,” the servant stammered. The Earl of Northumberland approached his son, who had blanched.
“Sir!” he said in a menacing voice.
His son, who looked nothing so much as a just-weaned whelp, cowered as he turned before his father. I, tucked into a dark corner in the room, went unnoticed.
“I’ve always considered you an unthrifty wastrel, proud, disdainful, and certainly you should have been the runt of my pack rather than one of your nobler brothers. Now you’ve proved it to me and to all assembled. We shall discuss this, and the prospect of your disinheritance, with the cardinal’s attorneys.”
His father turned and as he did, Percy followed him out of the room and down the hall. Forgotten, I waited a moment and then took my leave. As I did, I knew Percy would never be the champion Anne hoped him to be.
Two days later Anne and I watched as our laden trunks were loaded into fine carts. She was banished to Kent to get her out of Percy’s field of vision till his marriage to Mary Talbot, which had been ponderously negotiated for years, could be quickly consummated. I tried to make good conversation. “I will be glad to judge my mother’s health on my own.”
Anne remained silent as we rode our steeds.
“Was it the man or the title?” I finally asked what only the closest friend could.
“The title was important, of course. But I loved the man too.” I’d never seen her defeated in position and in heart. A tear slid down her cheek and she abruptly brushed it away.
I picked at a sliver that lay just below the skin covering my own heart. “Through Wolsey, God has taken away both of our loves,” I said.
She looked up. “No, that’s where we disagree. You blame God for the deeds of men, I blame the men themselves. Mark me, this will return to Cardinal Wolsey. He’s a gluttonous climber who has become a wolf in shepherd’s cloth of gold. As a man sows, so shall he reap.”
I was not sure if she was vowing revenge on Wolsey herself or quoting Scripture to remind God what should next follow.
“How can anyone truly respect a weak man?” she asked. I had no answer, because the truth was, you couldn’t, and we both knew she didn’t mean Wolsey.
“I do know this,” Anne said after some miles of silence. “I will never again pledge myself to a weak man.”
I remained silent, pretending not to hear the word “pledge” in relation to Henry Percy. It was a dangerous, even perilous, word.
SIX
Year of Our Lord 1526
Allington Castle, Kent, England
I was an educated woman, not susceptible to superstition, so when old ladies waggled that bad things happened in sets of three I’d dismissed it as easily as one dismisses a gossipy servant. You can always look back on events past and find patterns in them, like seeing a tapestry after it’s woven. And sometimes, by happenstance, bad did come in threes. Of course some events seemed bounteous at first sight but upon later reflection were clearly catastrophic.
“Mother is not well and will not be joining us for dinner,” I announced to my father one evening as the whole family gathered for the evening meal. “I will remain with her, if it’s agreeable to you.”
He nodded, solemn. We all knew her time drew near and were reluctant to leave her alone. I had forgone joining my sister, Alice, for much of the past year, and my father had delayed my marriage negotiations so that my mother might have what comfort could be afforded her last days. I left Father, Thomas and his wife, and Edmund to the meal whilst I rejoined my mother.
“Flora, that will be all for now. I shall call upon you if the need arises.” I dismissed my mother’s servant and approached my mother in her bed. I brushed back her hair. “’Tis unbound, as a bride’s,” I teased her lightly.
“I am a bride, the bride of Christ, shortly to join mine husband,” she said. Her voice was lighter than it had sounded for some time, which concerned me.
“And you shall shortly be a bride too,” she continued. “Your father will complete your negotiations with Lord Blackston, for certes, when I am gone.”
“Hush, now,” I said, not wanting the conversation to turn down that narrow path. We’d avoided it thus far and I feared that we would not find our way back once it was taken.
“In that trunk”—she pointed—“there is a portrait. I would have you bring it to me.” I walked over to my mother’s marriage trunk and opened the lid. There were folds of cloth and some of her fine gowns. I wondered if it had been with joy or trepidation that she had packed this as a girl, and unpacked it as a young woman come to Allington to take the bed of a dead woman. It was a fate that now, seemingly, was my own.
I lifted out what seemed to be a small wrapped portrait and my mother nodded her approval ere coughing into her linen. I brought the portrait to her bed and handed it to her.
She unwrapped it and handed it back to me. “’Tis me!” I exclaimed.
She laughed, a beautiful sound, and I thanked God reflexively, begrudgingly, for the small gift of it, because I knew it would echo in my heart long after my mother had taken His hand. “’Tis not you, darling, ’tis me.”
Now that I looked harder at it, I could see there were some differences. She had not the dimple cleft in her chin as I did, and her brows were thicker than mine. But it was close.
“My father had this painted for me just before I left home to marry Sir Henry. He wanted me to remember my home and you can see, it’s my girlhood chamber in the background.”
I nodded.
“There I kept my treasures. My few jewels, my book of hours, hairpins my mother had given me. And my butterfly jar.”
I looked up at her. “A butterfly jar? What is that, Madam?”
“Oh, I was a free-willed girl, the only girl in my family, as you know, indulged and overloved, perhaps, and I think your father would agree. I had very little responsibility so I ran among the fields—to the distress of my nurses and my lady mother, I fear. One favorite pastime was to catch butterflies in a netting, then let them go. I got an idea—I would catch the butterfly in a net and keep him in one of the physic jars in which leeches had been brought to help my ailing father. I waited till I caught the one I wanted most to keep—he would live with me, we would share secrets. He was beautiful and would adorn my chamber and fly out when I commanded and then return in like manner.”