The Mirror and the Light полностью

He tells her, ‘I am sure your cousin the queen knew all about Meg and Tom Truth. So was she pleased, when she knew another of her Howard kin was rising in the world?’

‘No. But she was entertained.’

‘She didn’t think to give Lady Meg a warning?’

‘Why would she?’

He concedes that. Why would one woman help another? Mary Shelton says, ‘It is all my cousin Anne’s fault, I agree. It was she who taught us to be selfish, and to reach for our desires. Amor omnia vincit, she said.’

‘Perhaps for a season it did.’

‘Love conquers all?’ Poor gentle creature, she bends her head. ‘With respect, my lord, love couldn’t conquer a gosling. It couldn’t knock a cripple down. It couldn’t beat an egg.’

Shelton was going to be married to Harry Norris; at least, she thought so, until Anne told her, ‘If the king dies, Norris will marry me.’ She had built a little house for love, and it was flattened by one remark: now she lives in the wreckage. He asks, ‘What about Norfolk’s daughter? I know she was the lookout for Meg. She does not live with Richmond as his wife, does she? She has never been permitted. So does she not have a lover of her own?’

Shelton shakes her head. ‘Too frightened of her father. Wouldn’t you be?’

‘Insofar as I can think myself into her place,’ he says, laughing, ‘yes, I would. Where was Jane Rochford in all this?’

‘She’s on her way, isn’t she? Ask her yourself.’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘I will not say she was in the room on Meg’s wedding night. But I will say that she brought fresh linen.’

He holds up a hand. ‘No talk of linen. Meg Douglas is a maid. Intact, like Norfolk’s daughter. Clean as from her mother’s womb.’

‘I see,’ Mary Shelton says. ‘Be sure to apprise Jane Rochford. Tell her to rinse her memory clean.’

He thinks, why must you bed on white linen? God gives you a whole realm for your pleasures: you would be safer in the park against a tree.

Ahead of her return to court, the relict of George Boleyn has stated her demands. She specifies which rooms she would like, asks for stabling for two horses, and bed and board for herself, two maids, and a manservant. He sends a message to the royal household: give Lady Rochford what she wants. But as soon as she arrives, send her to me.

‘What do you hear from Beth Worcester?’ she says, settling herself to conversation as if the last weeks had never been. There is a gleam in her eye. ‘Beth must be in her seventh month now. I wonder if the earl has decided whose child it is?’

‘The king wants to know about Meg Douglas,’ he says.

‘No, he doesn’t. Why would he want to know his niece is ruined? What he wants is to show that all her friends have been questioned, so he can claim he has pursued every road to the truth. One must pity him. He will think he is held of little account these days – his friends cuckolding him, his daughter defying him, his niece contracting herself in marriage. And you yourself, using him so roughly.’

‘How, roughly?’

‘“Set me free,” Henry said. And so you did. He meant, free like a prince – not free like a beggar. You knocked down his palace of dreams and left him stark in the ruins. You showed him his wife was false, that his friendships were feigned. Of course, the treachery of a wife, it is only what you men expect; it is the sin of Eve, you say, betrayal is her nature. But the treachery of Norris – of Weston, whom he nursed in his bosom –’

‘I gave the king what he asked for.’ He thinks, she agrees with Chapuys: she believes Henry will never forgive me for it.

‘But did he know how he would be laughed at?’ Lady Rochford asks. ‘His clothes, his verses, his manhood? He must live with his shame now, and you must live with him. You will have to build him up again, as you can. You and the Seymours.’

‘Build him up? He is King of England.’

‘But is he a man?’ She laughs. ‘I suppose he can do the deed with pasty Jane. She will not expect too much of him. I do not envy her, these nights. Anne said it was like being slobbered over by a mastiff pup.’

He closes his eyes.

‘I hear the coronation is postponed,’ she says.

‘Get the hot weather over. Michaelmas, perhaps.’

He thinks, I hope for notice: time to paint out the dark-eyed goddesses I ordered for Anne, and replace them with Englishwomen dancing in a bower, with rounded bellies and rosy uplifted arms. Lady Rochford says, ‘I think he will not crown Jane till she can satisfy him she has an heir inside her.’

‘Satisfy him? You think she might lie about it?’

‘It has been known.’

We’ll let that pass, he thinks; she wants to draw him where he will not go, into the thickets of the past.

‘Seymour will know how to play her hand,’ she says. ‘Because Seymour has watched and waited. And God knows she has no conscience. I have been in the country and had to endure the prating of my neighbours – “Our lord king will be happy now, England is happy, this is a blessed marriage.” But how can it be blessed? A wedding dress made from a shroud?’

‘Who sewed it, my lady?’