Hilary Mantel Collection: Six of Her Best Novels. Hilary MantelЧитать онлайн книгу.
ploys.’
‘Lucky I see through Lady Carey's.’
‘It was you who detected her?’ Who else, he thinks? With her husband George away she has no one to spy on.
Mary's bed is strewn with silks – flame, orange, carnation – as if a fire has broken out in the mattress. Across stools and a window seat trail lawn smocks, entangled ribbons and unpaired gloves. Are those the same green stockings she once revealed to the knee, running full-tilt towards him on the day she proposed marriage?
He stands in the doorway. ‘William Stafford, eh?’
She straightens up, her cheeks flushed, a velvet slipper in her hand. Now the secret is out, she has loosened her bodice. Her eyes slide past him. ‘Good girl, Jane, bring that here.’
‘Excuse me, Master.’ It is Jane Seymour, tiptoeing past him with an armful of folded laundry. Then a boy after her, bumping a yellow leather chest. ‘Just here, Mark.’
‘Behold me, Master Secretary,’ Smeaton says. ‘I'm making myself useful.’
Jane kneels before the chest and swings it opens. ‘Cambric to line it?’
‘Never mind cambric. Where's my other shoe?’
‘Best be gone,’ Lady Rochford warns. ‘If Uncle Norfolk sees you he'll take a stick to you. Your royal sister thinks the king has fathered your child. She says, why would it be William Stafford?’
Mary snorts. ‘So much does she know. What would Anne know of taking a man for himself? You can tell her he loves me. You can tell her he cares for me and no one else does. No one else in this world.’
He leans down and whispers, ‘Mistress Seymour, I did not think you were a friend of Lady Carey.’
‘No one else will help her.’ She keeps her head down; the nape of her neck flushes pink.
‘Those bed hangings are mine,’ Mary says. ‘Pull them down.’ Embroidered on them, he sees, are the arms of her husband Will Carey, dead what – seven years now? ‘I can unpick the badges.’ Of course: what use are a dead man and his devices? ‘Where's my gilt basin, Rochford, have you got it?’ She gives the yellow chest a kick; it is stamped all over with Anne's falcon badge. ‘If they see me with this, they'll take it off me and tip my stuff in the road.’
‘If you can wait an hour,’ he says, ‘I'll send someone with a chest for you.’
‘Will it be stamped Thomas Cromwell? God save me, I haven't an hour. I know what!’ She begins to haul the sheets off the bed. ‘Make bundles!’
‘For shame,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘And run off like a servant who's stolen the silver? Besides, you won't need these things down in Kent. Stafford has a farm or something, hasn't he? Some little manor? Still, you can sell them. You'll have to, I suppose.’
‘My sweet brother will help me when he returns from France. He will not see me cut off.’
‘I beg to differ. Lord Rochford will be sensible, as I am, that you have disgraced all your kin.’
Mary turns on her, arm sweeping out like a cat flashing claws. ‘This is better than your wedding day, Rochford. It's like getting a houseful of presents. You can't love, you don't know what love is, and all you can do is envy those who do know, and rejoice in their troubles. You are a wretched unhappy woman whose husband loathes her, and I pity you, and I pity my sister Anne, I would not change places with her, I had rather be in the bed of an honest poor gentleman who cares only for me than be like the queen and only able to keep her man with old whore's tricks – yes, I know it is so, he has told Norris what she offers him, and it doesn't conduce to getting a child, I can tell you. And now she is afraid of every woman at court – have you looked at her, have you looked at her lately? Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers. She thought it would be like her coronation every day.’ Mary, breathless, reaches into the mill of her possessions and throws Jane Seymour a pair of sleeves. ‘Take these, sweetheart, with my blessing. You have the only kind heart at court.’
Jane Rochford, in departing, slams the door.
‘Let her go,’ Jane Seymour murmurs. ‘Forget her.’
‘Good riddance!’ Mary snaps. ‘I must be glad she didn't pick my things over, and offer me a price.’ In the silence, her words go crash, flap, rattling around the room like trapped birds who panic and shit down the walls: he has told Norris what she offers him. By night, her ingenious proceedings. He is rephrasing it: as, surely, one must? I'll bet Norris is all ears. Christ alive, these people! The boy Mark is standing, gapey-faced, behind the door. ‘Mark, if you stand there like a landed fish I shall have you filleted and fried.’ The boy flees.
When Mistress Seymour has tied the bundles they look like birds with broken wings. He takes them from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. ‘Do you always carry string, Master Secretary?’
Mary says, ‘Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.’ She pitches from the room.
‘She'll need that,’ he says. ‘No poems down in Kent.’
‘Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don't keep you warm. Not,’ Jane says, ‘that I've ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn't really know.’
Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. ‘Jane –’
‘Master Secretary?’ She dips her knees and rolls sideways on to the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.
‘Come down! I'll do that. I'll send a wagon after Mistress Stafford. She can't carry all she owns.’
‘I can do it. Master Secretary doesn't deal with bed hangings.’
‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I'm surprised I don't make the king's shirts.’
Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers. ‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’
‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down.’
She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel last week.’
‘I thought the king had forbidden her.’
‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he doesn't like the word “jakes”.’
‘No more does he.’ The king deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’
‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know that. You have observed.’
‘But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains.’
‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn't see it. She wanted to send Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it. Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’
‘It's all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’
Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child's hand, with tiny gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?’
‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view: some country husband.
‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be released.’
Mary rips into the room, snarling.