Free Young Bess by Margaret Irwin Page A

instability’ might let him soften to her.
    Once – it was on an autumn morning and all the fields and trees were gold under the wide still sky – Mary had met him by chance walking in the open country, and he stopped and spoke kindly to her, telling her he hoped he would soon be able to see her more often, and then, abruptly, he moved away, and she saw it was because two of Nan’s servants were sidling up to overhear.
    Mary knew that her desperate loathing and jealousy of Nan was not only on her mother’s account; it ran like a withering fire through her veins. The image of Nan had burntinto her eyelids so that whenever she closed them she saw the slight supple figure enthroned in the amazing black dress that her daring French taste had dictated. It had cost more than five times the amount of Mary’s dress allowance for the whole year; thirty-two yards of black satin and velvet, and the King’s jewels gleaming out of all the blackness; and framed in it a thin white face, bold forehead and scarlet lips and black eyes that sparkled and, the ambassadors said discreetly, ‘invited conversation.’ ‘The Night Crow,’ Wolsey had called her; the She-Devil, Mary called her, as did all decent women, knowing the danger of her and her like to safe, ordered matrimony; she had been chased by a mob of women several thousand strong who yelled their curses on ‘the goggle-eyed whore,’ – and Nan had told of that herself, with shrill shameless laughter.
    Would Mary ever forget her laugh? Never, never, never, she told herself in agony when she woke in the night to hear it ringing in her ears, hearing that laugh alone, and everywhere else the night-long silence. No more the sweet familiar sound of bells from the chapels where the monks had prayed for men’s souls at their appointed hours, the bells that had always comforted her childhood when she woke afraid of the dark. That laugh, ringing down through the years, had silenced them, it seemed for ever.
    It was on an evening in early spring that it had sounded their doom; when the wind and slanting sunlight were sharp as thin steel and all the little thrusting flames of the crocuses in the garden at Hampton Court were tossed this way and that with the light shining through them, and out swept ‘the Lady’ (not wife yet, nor Queen) from the Palace, into the bowing, curtsying company on the terrace, out she swept allin one flashing movement, chattering and calling, greeting first one and then another, and cried to Sir Thomas Wyatt, whom all the world knew to be mad for love of her, ‘Lord, how I wish I had an apple! Have you such a thing about you, my sweet Tom? For three days now I have had such an incredible fierce desire to eat apples. Do you know what the King says? He says it means I am with child. But I tell him “No!” No, it couldn’t be, no, no, no!’
    And then out rang her laughter, sharper, wilder than the early March wind; and her thin nervous hands flew up like fluttering white birds to peck and clutch at the King’s pearls round her throat, pearls bigger than chick-peas, and she stared at all the shocked dismayed faces, and suddenly turned and fled from them, still laughing, back into the Palace, leaving only a ringing, mocking, frightened echo in the appalled hush she had created.
    Now everyone knew. The six-year siege that the King had laid to Nan had been raised at last, the fortress yielded, which she had held through all his furious importunings while living under the same roof, his showers of gifts and titles, even through the general belief that she had long since been his mistress. It had been yielded at the exact moment when, his patience strained to snapping point and his resentment mounting to fury at the way she treated him, it had become necessary to apply the final spur.
    Now Henry and his new servant Cranmer would have to stir themselves in good earnest to get Nan’s child born in wedlock. They did.
    On the last day of that March of 1533