The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [183]
“Then send William Petre to join WotThat was also a form of mourning. So now I was reduced to just a few items that still fit me.
Yes, I had remained stout—even, truth to tell, grown stouter, which I had vowed would never happen. I cared, but I did not care. That is, part of me, whatever old part of me was left, cared; the rest, the hollow-shell Henry, did not.
Now, suddenly, I was anxious to acquire new trappings ... just as I had eagerly refurbished Father’s royal apartments so long ago. The tailor had called, and I prepared to be measured and choose fabrics, all in a high good humour.
What brilliant scarlet silks! From Flanders? A new dye process? What depth of satin—like a rich topaz! And now the measurements ... he laughed nervously ... the thin tape measure whipped out, a pale snake. Waist: fifty-one inches.
All gaiety gone for an instant. Fifty-one inches? Had I gained fourteen inches in my waist? In only four years?
I confronted the mirror set up to one side of me, and looked—truly looked—at myself for the first time since Jane’s death. My first impression was of a great white whale. No! And the ripples in the figure—were they entirely of fat or merely the uneven surface of the metal? I was so stunned I was able to put it just this baldly to myself.
A red thing appeared behind the whale, its surface equally wavy. So it was the fault of the mirror after all.
I turned to see Thomas Culpepper standing behind me, a greedy look on his face. “Ah, Thomas,” I said. “I should have known you could scent expensive fabric all the way through the door of the King’s inner chamber. Yes, you may choose something.”
I was fond of the lad, and since he had replaced Henry Norris as the man who attended upon me in my Retiring Chamber, I was not embarrassed to have him see me thus undressed. I knew all his secrets—yes, even the sordid business about his meddling with the gamekeeper’s wife, and his attack on her rescuers. Shameful!
“Oh?” A grin spread across his handsome face. He never refused favours.
“An early present to one of my groomsmen,” I said. “I am being measured for my wedding clothes.”
“The wedding will be a public one?” He looked surprised. “I thought—”
“Why ever not?”
“Just that your previous marriage to Queen Jane was so private, quiet.”
And the one to Anne Boleyn even more so! I knew what he meant: with your matrimonial history, Sire, is it seemly to make a public show for the fourth?
“I shall do as I please!” I roared, reading his mind and answering it. “So you think people will laugh at me? They’ll think me an old fool, is that it?”
He looked annoyed, not frightened. But then, his problem lay in lack of prudence, not lack of courage. “No, Your Grace.”
“You think I can’t afford it?” I couldn’t, not very well. Where had that monastic money gone, so quickly? On the coastal defences, much of it.
He smiled his dazzling smile. “Only that it will take place in deep winter —hardly a fitting time for great outdoor rejever lad. As nimble with his tongue as with his sword ... and his member. The latter two got him into trouble, and the former rescued him time and again.
“Oh, go choose something.” I cuffed him on the back of the head, and put back on my dressing robe. “Make the waist forty-nine inches,” I told the tailor. No need to yield to the inevitable yet. A wedding doublet of fifty-one inches? Not for King Henry VIII!
Culpepper held up a garnet-coloured velvet, as rich as a gem of King Solomon’s. But it did not suit his colouring. It made him look consumptive and too long indoors. “No,” I said.
Still he persisted in studying it. “There is one it would well become,” he finally said.
“A lady?”
“Aye. My cousin Catherine. She is orphaned and has little.”
Culpepper was not noted for his charitable spirit, so I suspected he meant to seduce her, using the velvet as a bait. “How touching.” I did not offer the luscious stuff