The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [194]
She gasped and drew back, like a child caught at something naughty. “Your—Your Majesty—” She stumbled up and grasped at her skirts. The pushed-back virginal bench fell with a crash behind her.
“Nay, nay.” I hated it when, in a private situation, I evoked embarrassment and fear. Officially, of course, it was different. “I myself enjoy practising in deserted rooms, where no one can possibly overhear.”
She bent over and pulled up the fallen bench.
“Pray you,” I said in what I hoped was my most soothing voice, “continue your playing. I always enjoyed hearing the Lady Mary play the virginals, and—”
Not Anne Boleyn. I shut out that horrible memory, of . I 221;
The lass smiled and smoothed her skirts. “At my grandmother’s. I had a tutor.”
“When did you begin? You must have studied for many years.” I seated myself beside her on the narrow bench.
“No. I”—she thought swiftly—“it was for one year only, when I was thirteen. Yet I studied diligently then. And continued to practise after my tutor had departed.”
“You enjoy music, then?”
“I love it.” She smiled. I was struck by her composure; but then, when artists come together, it often happens that their calling overcomes shyness, differences in station, everything. We speak a common language, and everything else is hushed. It happened, even, that my love and desire for her were set aside for a moment in the glow of her music, where we became equals.
I reached out and fingered the keyboard, remembering old melodies; she listened. Then she played, and I listened. Midway she laughed, and I glanced at her glowing skin and deep black lashes and was overcome with love, desire, all blended and heightened by the music and even, absurdly, by the virginal before us with its chipped old keys.
She turned to look at me, not averting her eyes, as proper maidens do, but looking me full in the face. Her eyes were ice-blue and rimmed in some darker colour, which only made her appear all the more remote and untouched, waiting for me.
“Catherine,” I finally said, astounded at how calm and unwavering my voice was, “I love to hear you play, and I fain would play beside you all my life. There is much of me that has been lost, misplaced—not irretrievably, as I had feared-but for a time. I would share that person with you, and in return I would give you—I would give you—whatever your heart longs for,” I finished weakly.
“A new virginal?” she asked. “The keys of this—”
She did not understand! “Certainly, that. But, my dear, what I am asking you—”
What I am asking you is this: Can you love an old man of near fifty? Can you be wife to him?
“—is whether you would be my—”
Whether you would consent to be Queen? One does not beg someone to accept a high state office! It is its own reward!
“—whether you would wed me?”
She stared at me as if I were mad. Then she said, slowly, “I cannot ... no ... it cannot be ... you have a wife already.”
Anne Boleyn’s words! I felt flung into a vortex of time, where nothing had changed, and we were condemned to repeat the same mistakes and words forever and ever.... Your wife I cannot be, for you have a wife already; and your mistress I will not be....
“I have no wife!” Those words, too, were the same. “I have the power to put her aside.” Different words, now. Words earned through six long years of testing.
“You mean—I would be Queen?”
“If you consent to become my wife, yes.”
She shook her head, dazed. “Little Catherine Howard size="3">And the chance to speak has gone to yours, I thought. Call Cromwell what you like, you fool, he never lets himself be flattered, and he never lets down his guard. He would never betray his mind so. I looked at Surrey contemptuously. “They come from good stock. It is upon such honest, decent Englishmen that the future of the realm depends.”
“Aye, aye,” he quickly agreed, eager to be as beguiling as he imagined himself. “Certainly they are not made of the same material as Cromwell, no—for they are honest, and have no secret plans of any