The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [154]
I was a liar, then, a hypocrite. No, I was a doubter. There was a difference. One was honest and human, the other was not. Even Peter had doubted.
God, most almighty and everlasting, please remove these doubts that burn and torment me far worse than my leg. Remove them, or I cannot go on.
Somewhere I heard a stirring. There was someone else in the chapel, down below. I decided to go. I felt more oppressed and troubled than when I had first sought the silence and darkness. Perhaps it would do for another what it had failed to do for me.
I was halfway down the long gallery when I heard the door open and turned to see a figure stealing away from the chapel. It was Jane Seymour, and she was rubbing her eyes. She walked slowly until she came to a window seat, then sat down. She stared, blinking, at the floor.
I approached her carefully. She looked up at my approach, and her eyes and the tip of her nose were red. She attempted to smile, as if that would render them invisible.
“Mistress Seymour,” I said, settling down—uninvited—beside her. “Can I be of help? Are you troubled?”
“I am troubled,” she admitted. “But you cannot be of help.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.
“Only give me the chance,” I offered, glad of the opportunity to take my mind off Katherine.
“I would leave court,” she blurted out. “As soon as the roads are passable, if Your Majesty would so graciously permit me.”
“But why?”
“I am not mtention the Princess Dowager has received for her ‘good end,’ ” said Anne, loudly. “There is talk of little else but her saintly departing. Already people are directing prayers to her, asking for her intercession. Can you afford to have created another saint? First Fisher, then More—now Katherine?”
I signalled for the musicians to take up their playing again, to drown out this conversation.
“You push me too far,” I said. I wished to choke her for her taunting words.
“It is true,” she answered. “The people have canonized Fisher and More, in their hearts—never mind what Rome pronounces—and they are well on their way to doing it with Katherine. You should be dancing with us, to counteract it, not leading them in honouring her! Your own security demands it, regardless of your feelings.”
“Fie! You dress your own evil gloating in political wrappings. Dance, my love, all you wish. Soon the time for your dancing will cease.”
I turned and left her in yellow, as I had first beheld her.
The embalmer at Kimbolton, who performed an autopsy on Katherine, submitted a secret report to me. He had found all the internal organs as healthy and normal as possible, “with the exception of the heart, which was quite black and hideous to look at.” He washed it, but it did not change colour; then he cut it open, and inside it was the same.
“Poison,” I said softly. I had known it all along. Anne’s poison. It was that triumph she celebrated at her Yellow Ball. I wondered if the particular poison she had chosen was, indeed, yellow. How like her if it were.
Now only Fitzroy, Mary, and I were left to dispatch. Emboldened by her success, she was foolhardly enough to commit her plans for Mary in a letter to Mrs. Shelton, Mary’s “keeper”: “Go no further. When I shall have a son, as I soon look to have, I know what then will come to her.”
Go no further. No more poison for now? Mary was safe, then, for the present.
LXX
A tournament had long been scheduled for the end of the month. I did not wish to cancel it now, as it would indeed seem as though England were mourning a Queen rather than a Princess Dowager if I did so. Holding the tournament would signal that the time for observing the death was past. In addition, it was necessary that I quench the rumours and questions beginning to circulate about my health. If I rode in this tournament, it would be proof that there was nothing wrong with me.
I was forty-four now, well past the age when most men participated in tournaments. Brandon had retired