The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [211]
I scarce was able to look up. “Yes. I need you.” I had never spoken those words before to any man.
“I am here. What troubles you?”
I told him, then. How death had me and those I loved by the throat. How I felt his very fingers on my windpipe, until I scarce could breathe. I named those he had already claimed, and those he was even now in the process of possessing.
“I feel him, too,” admitted Will. “Of late I have had to note that there is something chronically wrong with my body. I never have the whole functioning of it any longer. There is always something I must favour, some part I am waiting to have healed. It is disheartening. We are not what once we were. But that is not a signal that death is at hand. Merely that we are being granted a long life. Deaths of those we love en route are also signs we are being spared. Philosophers who discuss the possibility of long life always say that old people long to die, because they are so lonely, having outlived everyone they have had links with. Why is that? Why are they lonely? There are as many people about as in their youth. But the ability to form strong links apparently ceases after a certain age. Affinity arises in youth, and, if we are lucky, endures through to old age.”
I nodded. Brandon. More. My sister Mary. Bessie. Will himself. But Catherine, my sweet Catherine ... her I loved, and that was a new thing. I was still capable of forming bonds. I was not past that stage.
Just as suddenly my unhappy mood was gone, and this melancholy talk annoyed me. I did not think, then, to trace the source of my reactions. I had grieved because Bessie, the love of my youth, was dying, but became indignant when Will suggested that my capacity for loving and being loved was being exhausted. You see, there was the problem of Catherine Howard, and fitting her into all this.
CI
Only a few hours later I lay on the silken sheets of the great royal bed, toying with Catherine. I had drawn the embroidered gold-threaded curtains about us, until we could play at being in a tent on the plains of France. Candlelight leapt up and down in the errant drafts of air seeping under the bed-drapes, but that made it all the more eerie and otherworldly, a playhouse for adults....
Catherine giggled as I touched her throat. I traced its curves and hollows, finding the skin slippery and moist. How was that possible in the dry days of winter?
“For New Year’s I was given a cream from Syria,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “It was compounded of substances we have not here in England.”
From Syria? “Who has been to Syria?” I could not help enquiring. No one traded openly with the Infidels these days.
“Francis Dereham,” she laughed. “He was a pirate in the Irish Sea for a time. Pirates ‘trade’ with everyone.”
I frowned.
“My cousin,” she whispered, tickling my ear with her tongue. “You rsickbed in January; lingered, hacking, through February and March; died in April.
Suddenly it was very important that I talk to someone. I called.
No sound came.
My throat was swollen, blocked up from disuse. I cleared it, rattling all the membranes. Now! I called.
Silence.
I was dumb! God had taken away my speech.
I strained all my muscles. Still, silence.
I was so stunned there was nothing for it but to fall back limply onto the pillows.
It could not be permanent. It must be some laggard part of my healing. When first I had fallen, I could not move my hands. Now I could. This dumbness, too, must fade. It must.
The fire exploded with sparks and hissing. Then it subsided into sighing. Like a woman, I thought.
But what had happened? There had been the morning, getting dressed. Then the seizure, the paralysis, the fall. My nose crunching. I put out a hand and touched my nose. It was heavily bandaged, with two wooden supports down each side. I had broken it, then.
Why had I pitched forward? What malady had seized me? I threw all my will and might behind my throat, and called again. Silence.
I had been struck dumb. Like John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias. Why? God never acted without