Born in London, Valerie Anand knew at the age of six she wanted to be an author. At the age of fifteen, she saw MGM’s film Ivanhoe and walked out of the cinema knowing that historical novels were the kind she most wanted to write.

Over the course of her long and distinguished writing career, Valerie has written many works of historical fiction, most recently The House of Lanyon.

Still living in London, Valerie frequently visits Exmoor, the setting featured in The House of Allerbrook.

THE HOUSE OF ALLERBROOK

VALERIE ANAND

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated, with grateful thanks, to the

Lamacraft family in Somerset, from whom, in bygone years,

I many times hired horses to ride on and around Exmoor.

Without them, this book would probably

never have been written.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would be hard put to list all the books, pamphlets and people I have consulted while preparing this novel.

Books concerning the Tudor age include Elizabeth Jenkins’s excellent work Elizabeth the Great, as well as books by Jane Dunn, Lady Antonia Fraser, Wallace MacCaffrey, Alison Plowden, Jasper Ridley, Anne Somerset and Alison Weir. I must also give special mention to Elizabeth’s Spymaster by Robert Hutchinson and Big Chief Elizabeth by Giles Milton.

Books concerning Exmoor include Living on Exmoor by Hope Bourne, The Old Farm by Robin Stanes, Yesterday’s Exmoor by Hazel Eardley-Wilmot, Devon Families by Rosemary Lauder and Somerset Families by Dr Robert Dunning.

Dr Dunning (County editor for Somerset), David Holt of North Molton, the Reverend Peter Attwood of All Saints Church, North Molton, David Bromwich (Somerset Studies Librarian) and the members of the Exmoor Society also gave me much help in my research.

V.A.

Part One

THE RELUCTANT MAID OF
HONOUR
1535–1540

CHAPTER ONE

New Gowns For Court 1535

Allerbrook House is a charming and unusual manorhouse in the Exmoor district of Somerset. The charm lies in the pleasant pro portions, in the three gables looking out from the slate roof, echoed by the smaller, matching gable over the porch, and the two wings stretching back toward the hillside that sweeps up to the moorland ridge above.

In front, the land drops away gently, but to the west there is a steep plunge into the wooded combe where the Allerbrook River flows noisily down from its moorland source toward the village of Clicket in the valley, a mile or so away.

There is no other house of its type actually on Exmoor. It has other uncommon features, too. These include the beautiful Tudor roses (these days they are painted red and white just as they were originally) carved into the panels and window seats of the great hall, and the striking portrait of Jane Allerbrook which hangs upstairs in the east wing.

The portrait is signed “Spenlove” and is the only known work by this artist. Jane looks as though she is in her early forties. She is sturdily built, clear skinned and firm of feature—not a great beauty, but, like the house, possessed of charm. She is dressed in the Elizabethan style, though without excess, her ruff and farthingale modest in size. Her hair, still brown, is gathered under a silver net. Her gown is of tawny damask, open in front to reveal a cream damask kirtle, and her brown eyes are gentle and smiling.

But the painter knew his business and recorded his sitter’s face in detail. There is a guarded look in those smiling eyes, as though their owner has secrets to keep, and there are little lines of worry around them, too. Well, Jane in her forties already knew the meaning of trouble.

Her original name was Jane Sweetwater. The household didn’t adopt the name of Allerbrook until the 1540s. She was sixteen years of age on that day in 1535, when the family was preparing to send her elder sister, Sybil, to court to serve Queen Anne Boleyn as a maid of honour, and with only a week to go before Sybil’s departure and a celebration dinner planned for the very next day, there was much anxiety in the household, because the new gowns that had been made for her had not yet been delivered.

“Eleanor,” said Jane Sweetwater to her sister-in-law, “Madame La Plage is coming. I’ve just seen her from the parlour window.”

“Thank God,” said Eleanor, brushing back the strand of hair that had escaped from her coif. “I know she sent word that she’d come without fail today, but I was beginning to think that Sybil would have to attend her celebration dinner in one of her old gowns.”

She wiped her forehead, which was damp. The March day was chilly enough, but she had been pulling extra benches around the table in the great hall, and the whole house seemed to be full of the steam from the kitchen. Preparations were under way for the feast tomorrow, when notable guests would gather to congratulate Sybil on her appointment to court, a great honour for the daughter of a Somerset yeoman.

Now everything that could possibly be prepared in advance was being so prepared, with much rolling and whisking and chopping by energetic maidservants, and pots and cauldrons simmering over a lively fire.

“Let me help you,” said Jane contritely, looking at her harassed sister-in-law. “I should have come down before. I was doing some mending. Where are we going to seat people?”

“There’ll be Sir William Carew and Lady Joan just here…and Master Thomas Stone and Mary Stone had better go opposite and they’ll want their daughter, Dorothy, beside them, I expect. Then there’s Ralph Palmer. He’ll probably have his father with him. Now, they’re family, though I’ve never got the relationship clear….”

“Distant cousins. I’ve never quite worked it out myself,” Jane remarked.

“Well, we’ll seat them on that side,” said Eleanor, pointing. “Then there’s the Lanyons from Lynmouth….”

“They’re distant relations, too,” Jane said.

“Yes. All from Francis’s side. I’m almost relieved that my own family can’t come, but my father’s not in good health…. If I put Owen and Katherine Lanyon here, they can talk to the Carews and the Stones quite easily and…”

Outside in the courtyard, dogs were barking and geese had begun a noisy cackling.

“That’s surely Madame La Plage at last,” said Jane. “I’d better go and tell Sybil.”

“I bring my most sincere regrets for the delay,” Madame La Plage said, leading her laden pack mule into the yard and descending from her pony into the midst of the cackling geese and barking dogs, just as Eleanor hastened out to greet her. “But I will do any needful adjustments immédiatement.”

Madame La Plage affected a French name and a French accent, but she was actually a local woman who had married one Will Beach of Porlock, a few miles west of the port of Minehead. After his death she had taken over his tailoring and dressmaking business. However, since Anne Boleyn, who’d spent many years in France, had captivated King Henry VIII, French food and styles of dress were in fashion. Mistress Beach had therefore moved herself and her business to Minehead and, with an appropriate accent, made a new start as Madame La Plage.

Most of her customers knew perfectly well that she was no more French than they were, but her work was good and she had prospered, acquiring clientele not only in Minehead but in the nearby port of Dunster, at the mouth of the River Avill, and even in Dunster Castle itself. Later she had become known more widely, even as far as Dulverton, in the very centre of the moor, and other places deep in the moorland, such as Allerbrook House, the home of the Sweetwater family, and the village of Clicket, which belonged to them.

The commission to make Sybil’s new gowns was a very good one, and she had worried because she had been too busy hitherto to ride the fourteen miles (as the crow flew; ponies had to take a longer route) from Minehead. She dismounted now with a flustered air, flapping her cloak at the livestock. “I…go away, you brute…cease flapping your wings! Be quiet, you noisy barking animals! Mistress Sweetwater, can you not…?”

Eleanor seized the two dogs by their respective collars and said “Shoo!” loudly to the geese just as two grooms appeared from the stable to take charge of pony and mule and unload the hampers. She sighed a little as she did so. Eleanor’s family in Dorset were dignified folk who lived in an elegant manorhouse, and she was often pained by the way her husband’s home had never quite shaken off its humble farming history.

Only a few generations ago it had been a simple farm, rented from a local landowner. Nowadays the Sweetwaters owned it as well as other land and had a family tomb in the church of St. Anne’s in Clicket, and neither Eleanor nor her husband’s two sisters had ever been asked to help spread muck on the fields or make black pudding from pig’s blood and innards or go out at harvest time to stock corn behind the reapers.

But the old atmosphere still lingered. The front windows of the otherwise beautiful house overlooked a farmyard surrounded by a confused array of stables, byres, poultry houses and sheds, and infested by aggressive geese, led by a gander with such a savage peck that even the huge black tomcat, Claws, who kept the mice in order, was terrified of him.

Peggy Ames, the chief cook and housekeeper, came out in her stained working apron, brandishing a rolling pin and laughing all over her plain, cheery face, to help chase the geese away, and Madame La Plage, along with her hampers, was taken into the hall. Eleanor sent Jane to call her sister, and offered refreshments which Madame said she would welcome after her long ride. The wind had been chilly, she said. She kept her mind on her business, though, and while sipping wine, began to talk of Sybil and the new gowns.

“You will like the tawny especially, I think. It will look charming over the pale yellow kirtle. It is ideal for a girl with fair hair. Ah, she is such a pretty girl, your sister-in-law Sybil. The fashion now is all for dark ladies, of course, but such blond hair is rare, above all with brown eyes.”

“Sybil is pretty enough,” conceded Eleanor, just a little sourly. Her own hair was mousy and her eyes an indeterminate grey. She had never been handsome. Her dowry had got her safely married and Francis had grown fond of her, but she didn’t have the looks to turn anyone’s head, and she knew it. Sybil, at court, would probably have every young man in sight dedicating sonnets to her. One could only hope that she would behave herself. “She’s a little greedy, I fear,” Eleanor said. “She eats too much cream. I have warned her that she will grow fat, but she takes no notice.”

“Perhaps her brother Master Francis should tell her, and maybe she will take notice of him. He is not here just now?”

“No, he’s out exercising his horse and riding round the farms. He takes good care of his estate,” Eleanor said.

Madame La Plage beamed. “Ah, his horse! He is known for his love of fine horses. He has good taste in all ways, has he not? I hope he will approve my work. Well, Mistress Sweetwater, shall we call Mistress Sybil and fit the gowns? Where is she? Most young ladies come running when new clothes are delivered!”

She and Eleanor both turned as a door opened at the end of the hall, but it was only Jane, on her own.

“Where has Sybil got to? I asked you to fetch her,” said Eleanor.

“She’s in her bedchamber,” said Jane, sounding puzzled. “She seems upset about something.”

“She’s been very quiet for a while now,” Eleanor said. “Can she be nervous about going to court? It’s not like Sybil to be nervous. She isn’t ill, is she?”

“I don’t think so,” said Jane. “But I think she has been crying.”

“Well,” said Madame La Plage, “let us see what pretty new gowns can do for her, shall we?”

“May I come, too?” asked Jane.

“Yes, of course.” Eleanor had dutifully tried to love and be a mother to both her husband’s young sisters, but she had never quite managed to become really fond of Sybil. Sturdy brown-haired kindhearted Jane, on the other hand, who always had a smile in her eyes, was easy to love. Sybil was affectionate enough, but she was careless. If you sent her to fetch something from another room, she’d probably bring you the wrong thing or get distracted on the way and forget her errand altogether. Now she had apparently found a new way of being difficult. What on earth was she crying about? “We’ll all go,” said Eleanor. “Come along.”

They found Sybil reading on the window seat in her chamber. She put down her book of poems when they entered, slipped from the seat and curtsied politely to the older women. Her little pointed face was very pale, however, and her eyes were certainly red. She looked at the hampers, which Jane and Madame La Plage were carrying between them, as though they were instruments of torture, or possibly execution.

“Now, why this sad face?” said Eleanor briskly. “Come. It’s an adventure, to be going to court to wait on the queen of England! Jane will help you off with what you’re wearing and we will see how these fit. Madame, shall we start with the tawny gown?”

“Has the young lady no tirewoman?” Madame La Plage enquired. “Surely, at court…”

“Yes, we have found a maid for her, but she lives in Taunton. We shall pass through Taunton on the way to London and the woman will join us there. We live simply here at Allerbrook, and assist each other instead of employing tiring maids,” said Eleanor with regret. She had had a maid in Dorset, but Francis had seen no need for one here. He had a parsimonious streak, except when it came to buying the fine horses he so loved.

“I’ll help you,” said Jane, going to her sister.

“No. No, I can do it myself,” said Sybil.

At Allerbrook they mostly wore clothes of simple design except on feast days. Sybil’s light yellow gown was loose and comfortable and she could draw it over her head without aid. Slowly, and it seemed with reluctance, she pulled it off and removed her kirtle and undergarments, leaving only her stays.

“Stays, too,” said Madame La Plage. “New stays are included in the price and I have them here. You must have strong new stays to wear under the gowns I have made for you.”

Miserably Sybil removed her stays, as well.

“But…that is not the result of too much cream!” gasped Madame La Plage.

Jane said, “Oh, Sybil, Sybil!”

Eleanor said, “Oh, my God!” and then clapped her hands to her mouth and burst into tears.

CHAPTER TWO

Breaking the News 1535

Afterward, what Jane remembered most vividly about that dreadful day was the fear: fear on behalf of Sybil, and another, more amorphous dread that this awful discovery heralded awful changes; that nothing in their lives would ever be the same again.

It was near dusk before Francis rode in on his handsome dark chestnut horse Copper. He had been pleased with the condition of his land and stock and he came into the farmyard whistling. In the kitchen, Peggy Ames looked at the other maids, Beth and Susie, and said grimly, “Just listen to ’un! He won’t be that merry for long!”

Up in the parlour in the little tower above the family chapel, Jane and Eleanor, who had been watching for Francis and had also heard the whistling, looked at each other in anguish.

“I can’t imagine what he’ll say!” said Eleanor. She was a cool, sensible woman as a rule, but just now she looked terrified. “He’ll be so angry, and he has all the Lanyon temperament! Will he think it was my fault? That I haven’t watched over the two of you as I ought?”

“But you have,” said Jane unhappily. “You can’t be everywhere, all the time.”

“No, I can’t! God’s teeth, Sybil is the silliest little girl in Christendom! I’ll go down and meet him…oh, I don’t know how to tell him!”

Pale with anxiety, she descended the spiral stairs to the hall. Madame La Plage had long since left to go back to Minehead, and Sybil had been locked in her chamber. Francis, stepping into the hall, pulling off his red velvet hat and stripping off his gloves, greeted her and asked if his sister’s gowns had come. “I’ll have something to say to Madame La Plage if they haven’t!”

“They’re here,” said Eleanor, “but…”

“Good. I hope they’re suitable,” Francis said. “Where’s Sybil now? I want to see her in her new finery.” Then he saw Peggy looking at him from the kitchen door, and must have recognized the fear in her face and Eleanor’s. “God’s death, what’s the matter?”

“Please come up to the parlour, Francis,” Eleanor said. “I have terrible news. Peggy, bring wine. Your master will need it.”

“For the love of heaven, what’s happened? Is Sybil all right?”

“It’s worse than that. We must be private when I explain. Not that we can keep it secret for long—well, it isn’t now. All the household knows, and Madame La Plage. Jane is in the parlour, but she knows, too. She was there when…”

“Will you stop dithering, woman!” shouted Francis as Eleanor turned and led the way back up the staircase. “Tell me!”

In the parlour she turned to face him, and while Jane sat shivering in her seat by the window, Eleanor said the words that had to be said. “Sybil can’t go to court. She is expecting a child. Probably in August.”

Francis collapsed onto the nearest settle. “What was that? Repeat it, if you please.”

“Sybil can’t take up her post at court. She’s with child.”

Francis bore the name of Sweetwater, but another family, the Cornish Lanyons, also formed part of his ancestry. His blue eyes were inherited from his mother but otherwise he was a Lanyon—tall, handsome, strongly made and dark haired. He also possessed what was known as the Lanyon temperament. This was thoroughly Celtic, as passionate and explosive as gunpowder. Eleanor and Jane, observing Francis now, could almost hear the fuse fizzing toward the barrel, almost see the travelling flame.

The explosion came. Francis shot to his feet and crashed a fist on the back of the settle. “This is beyond belief! Who’s the man? Who did it? And where’s Sybil now?”

“She’s locked in her chamber. I have the key,” said Eleanor. “The man is Andrew Shearer.”

“Andrew Shearer? Of Shearers Farm? My tenant? He’s married!”

“Yes. We all went to the christening of his little son last November, if you recall,” said Eleanor, keeping her voice steady with an effort. “That’s when it happened, it seems. We went to Shearers for the celebration dinner, and stayed on after dark—do you remember? There was dancing, by candlelight. Sybil and Andrew danced together. I never noticed that they disappeared for a while, but it seems that they did. He somehow enticed her into another part of the house and…she says she hasn’t seen him since, but that he’d paid her compliments before, when they met during the harvesting. We sent her out with cider for the harvesters. She says she didn’t mind when he…I mean, she wasn’t forced. She admits that.”

“He’s married. I can’t make him wed her. I can order the Shearers off my land, of course, though they’ll only get a tenancy somewhere else, and thumb their noses at me, I suppose. I can think of three Exmoor farms straightaway in need of new tenants, since we had that outbreak of smallpox last year. The trouble that brought us! Killed our chaplain and two of our farmhands! But it’ll no doubt make life easier for the Shearers. I’ll be throwing them out on principle, that’s all. But…dear God!” shouted Francis. “Sybil’s farewell dinner is tomorrow! It’s too late to cancel it! The Carews have probably set off from Devon already!”

The fury in his voice was so intense that Eleanor visibly trembled and Jane began to cry. Francis swept on.

“The Stones from Clicket Hall are coming, and bringing their girl Dorothy—they want to get her to court in a year or two, when she’s older! Owen Lanyon and his wife from Lynmouth, they’re coming…”

His voice faded somewhat. The one branch of the family that still bore the name of Lanyon wasn’t actually entitled to it. Many years ago there had been another unsanctioned baby in the clan. That child’s descendants, though, still called themselves Lanyons. Francis resumed, however, as the enormity of the present situation grew larger and larger in his mind.

“Luke and Ralph Palmer are coming! They’re very likely on their way by now, too. Bideford’s only twenty-five miles off, but Luke’s at least sixty and they’ll have to take it slowly.” Francis was literally clutching at his hair. “They’re only distant connections but, God’s elbow, it was their wealthy London cousin who pulled the strings to get Sybil her place at court! And now this! What am I to say to them? I…we’ll say Sybil’s ill! And I’ll give her such a beating that with luck she’ll miscarry and then she can go to court after all! Yes, that’s the best thing to do. I’ll—”

“No!” sobbed Jane. “No, you can’t! Francis, you mustn’t! It could kill her. She’s past four months gone.”

“And no one noticed anything?” Francis spluttered. “She never told anyone?”

“She said—” Eleanor gulped “—that she kept hoping it wasn’t true. She’s just gone on from day to day, hoping …there are so many women in this house, Sybil and Jane and me, and the maids…no one noticed that she hasn’t been using her usual cloths. She didn’t have much sickness, it seems. Oh, Sybil can be so silly!”

“She certainly can,” said Francis. “A fault I propose to cure. Give me her key, Eleanor. At once!”

“Francis, no, you mustn’t.” Jane was frightened but determined. “If you hurt Sybil too much, yes, she might lose the child, but if that happened she really could die! You can’t want that!”

“I don’t need to be told my business by a little girl of sixteen!”

“She might not lose the child,” Eleanor pointed out. “And if she did, and survived and went to court, how could we trust her, after this! She might create a scandal there, and what good would that do us?”

“It’s a complete disaster!” Francis groaned. “It’s been trouble enough, planning for portions for my sisters. We were well-off when I was a boy, but that was before Father sold our stone quarry so as to rebuild the east wing. We’ve lost income without it. Letting Clicket Hall doesn’t make up for it. I’ve worried! Getting one of the girls to court would help—there’d be all sorts of opportunities. Good contacts are worth having in a dozen ways and they can smooth the path to marriage even for a girl with a modest dowry.”

“We have good contacts already,” said Eleanor weakly.

“I want to do better! But now…! We can’t keep it secret. You said yourself, the whole household knows—Peggy, the maidservants… Susie’s courting Tim Snowe and I saw them as I came in, talking in the yard. By tomorrow all the farmhands will know and the whole lot of them have families roundabout. And Madame La Plage will have taken the news back to Minehead!”

“Yes,” agreed Eleanor dismally.

There was a dreadful silence.

“Well,” said Eleanor, “all we can do is face it out, and I’m sorry, Francis, but even if she is only sixteen, Jane is right. You can’t beat a young girl while she’s carrying.”

“I’m entitled, and the whole world would say so.”

“Not if you killed her, and you might. That’s true.”

“But what are we to do?” demanded Francis. He sat down on the settle again, his head in his hands. “What are we to do?”

“I suggest,” said Eleanor, “that we hold the dinner—without Sybil, of course—and tell our guests the truth and ask their advice. Andrew Shearer can’t marry her, but perhaps they know of someone who will. Let’s be candid. Then the truth can’t creep up behind us years in the future and do any harm. These things…well, they do happen. Owen Lanyon’s father was a love child, after all. But everyone respects Owen well enough. He won’t refuse to know us, and nor will any of the others. I’m sure they won’t. They’re all our friends and some are kinsfolk. They’ll want to help.”

After a very long pause, Francis said, “Very well. Very well. I’ll get rid of the Shearers—that I will do. Sybil must stay in her chamber. I will neither see her nor speak to her. And we will tell the truth to our friends and family.”

Eleanor said reassuringly, “We will find a way through, my dear. Somehow. You’ll see.”

CHAPTER THREE

A Remarkable Occasion 1535

The four families who attended that remarkable gathering at Allerbrook House on 16 March 1535 all arrived in good time, in happy expectation of a festive dinner and the pleasure of congratulating young Sybil Sweetwater on her appointment to the court.

They were startled to discover that Sybil, who should have been the centre of attention, was nowhere to be seen, while their hostess, Eleanor Sweetwater, looked harassed and her husband, Francis, their host, had a distracted expression, a bruise on his jaw and a spectacular black eye.

The first to ride in, though their home at Mohuns Ottery in Devon was the farthest away, were Sir William Carew and his wife, Lady Joan. Lady Joan was a picture of elegance, but Sir William, though he represented a leading Devonshire family, was an earthy and outspoken individual with a broad Devon accent.

Having dismounted, aimed a kick at the gander and helped his wife to alight, Sir William came up the steps to where Eleanor and Francis were waiting to welcome them, looked in candid amazement at Francis’s face and said, “God save us, who’ve you been a’vightin’, then?”

“It’s a sorry story,” said Francis, leading the way indoors. “I’ll tell it in full when everyone’s here.”

“Ah, well, you’m still in your twenties—suppose you can still give an account of yourself. Wait till you get to your forties, like me.” Sir William actually looked older than that, his face too flushed to be healthy and his hair and moustache already turning grey. “What’s the other man look like?” he demanded.

Eleanor, who had been taught by her parents that a lady should always retain her composure, no matter what the circumstances, carried the situation off as best she could and tried to satisfy at least some of Sir William’s curiosity.

“My husband had occasion this morning to order one of our tenants, Andrew Shearer, who has—well, had—a farm of ours, on the other side of the combe, to surrender his tenancy. Master Shearer took exception and there was a fight. The Shearers will be gone by tomorrow, however.”

“Shearer looks worse than I do,” said Francis, with a certain amount of grim humour. “But not entirely because of my fists. His wife joined in. With a frying pan. Applied to him, I mean, not to me.”

“Good God! Reckon the story behind this must be interestin’, sorry or not,” said Carew and his wife said, “My dear Eleanor, how tiresome to have this happen just now. But where is your sweet Sybil?”

“The tale concerns her,” said Francis, “and that’s why I want to wait until the other guests are here before I explain in full. Meanwhile, my sister Jane will show Lady Joan to a bedchamber—ah, there you are, Jane. Look after the Lady Joan, please. But no gossiping!”

The next to arrive was Francis’s distant cousin, Ralph Palmer, who rode in alone. “Your father is not with you?” Francis asked, forestalling any comments on his battered face.

Ralph, who was young and good-looking, dark haired and dark eyed, was studying his host’s appearance with evident amazement, but took the social hint, restrained his curiosity and said, “No. Father is having an attack of gout and couldn’t make the journey from Bideford.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” said Francis gravely. “Please convey our sympathy when you go home, and wish him a quick recovery.”

“Certainly, Cousin,” said Ralph, equally gravely. He added in a low voice, “It may be as well that he can’t be here. I am sorry for him, but he is still very interested in the Lutheran teachings and it can be, well, uncomfortable when he insists on talking about them to people he doesn’t know well.”

Ralph himself was a merry soul with a flirtatious reputation, but his father, Luke Palmer, at sixty, was a known blight on even the happiest occasions. Luke’s principal interest in life was religion and being what he called godly and most other people called tediously righteous. He disapproved of dancing and he hardly ever smiled.

His interest in the new Lutheran heresy which was beginning to be called Protestantism was also a worry to his relatives. It was an unsafe point of view, since some prominent Protestants had been put unpleasantly to death. Conversation with Luke Palmer could be embarrassing at the best of times, which this certainly was not. Francis Sweetwater would not have dreamed of saying so aloud, but he was not sorry to be spared both Luke’s tendency to heretical remarks and his probable comments on Sybil.

The next party to arrive was the Stone family, consisting of Master Thomas Stone, his wife, Mary, and their daughter, Dorothy. The Stones had just taken on the lease of Clicket Hall after the previous tenant’s death.

Clicket Hall, which stood on a knoll overlooking Clicket, a mile away down Allerbrook Combe, had once been called Sweetwater House and had been the home of the Sweetwaters until they decided that they liked Allerbrook House better. Francis had changed the name to Clicket Hall because first-time visitors were often confused into turning up there instead of riding on up the combe. The Stones had leased the hall because Mistress Mary Stone had cousins in the district and wished to see them sometimes. Thomas Stone, however, was actually the owner of extensive property in Kent and was better educated, better connected and a great deal better off than Francis.

Since the Stones were new to Clicket and had not hitherto met any of Francis’s womenfolk, the first thing Master Stone did was to assume that Jane was Sybil, and greet her with kind congratulations.

“I’m afraid this is my younger sister, Jane,” said Francis. “You will not after all meet Sybil today. A most unfortunate thing has occurred—involving Sybil and also involving me in a fight this morning, hence my half-closed eye. This is my wife, Eleanor…”

“Isn’t Sybil going to court after all, then?” asked Dorothy. She was sixteen, short and pale and somewhat overplump. She was dressed in crimson, which was too bright for her complexion. Her tone, regrettably, suggested pleasure in the girl’s trouble, rather than friendly concern for another’s disappointment.

Her mother and father frowned her into silence and Dorothy subsided, looking sulky. Francis, however, said, “Well, to my regret, Mistress Dorothy is right. Our plans for Sybil have had to change. Do please come into the hall. Seat yourselves around the hearth.”

Hard on the heels of the Stone family came the last arrivals, the dignified, bearded merchant Master Owen Lanyon, whose father had been the illegitimate Lanyon of bygone years. He had journeyed from the Exmoor port of Lynmouth, bringing his equally dignified wife, Katherine, and their fifteen-year-old son, Idwal. Both Owen and Idwal had red hair, and if Owen’s was fading now, Idwal’s looked vivid enough to set a house on fire. They civilly ignored Francis’s face but spoke approvingly of the pleasant aroma of roast mutton which was drifting out of the kitchen.

“One of my tenants, Harry Hudd, donated a haunch and shoulder of mutton for the occasion,” Francis said. “Very generous of him.”

“Will he be with us today?” Mistress Stone enquired.

“No, not today,” said Francis, thinking of Master Hudd’s rough accent and florid, gap-toothed face. “It wouldn’t be suitable.”

To begin with, however, although the dinner table waited in the centre of the hall, set with white napery and silver plate, Francis assembled everyone around the hearth, where a good fire was crackling. Peggy came bustling out of the kitchen with Beth and Susie, and handed around wine, cider and small pewter dishes full of sweetmeats.

“We have a good dinner for you,” Francis told the guests. “But what I have to tell you won’t fit in with chitchat across the roast. I only hope you don’t all walk out in horror when you’ve heard what I have to say, and leave the meal uneaten!”

“It sounds,” said Owen in his deep, slow voice, “as if you’re going to tell us of a scandal.”

Ralph, whose good looks included excellent teeth, grinned and said, “Are any of us likely to walk out in a pet? We all know the world. And we’re all agog with interest, aren’t we? Is it scandal?”

“Well, let’s hear what Francis has to say,” said Thomas Stone in a practical voice. “Should Dorothy be here?” he added, glancing at his daughter. “She’s only sixteen.”

Dorothy glowered but held her tongue. Francis nodded to where Jane had seated herself apart, on a window seat. “So is my sister Jane and she knows all about it,” he said.

“Very well.” Thomas exchanged looks with his wife and then shrugged. “Dorothy may stay.”

Dorothy’s expression changed from sullen to pleased. Francis took up a position with his back to the fire, cleared his throat and embarked on the unhappy business of explaining.

Jane sat quietly listening, hands clasped on her lap. She had been presented with the tawny gown and yellow kirtle originally meant for Sybil. Though younger, Jane was the same height as her sister, and the clothes fitted her quite well. Madame La Plage had had to make only very minor adjustments before she went home.

“Please, I don’t want Sybil’s gown,” Jane had said, while Sybil wept forlornly, out of fear for her future and grief at her lost hopes. Eleanor would not listen and so here Jane was, whether she liked it or not, at what should have been Sybil’s farewell dinner, dressed in what should have been Sybil’s gown, uneasy in the first farthingale she had ever worn, and miserably embarrassed. Originally these important guests, landowners, a prosperous merchant, even a knight and his lady, had been invited to do honour to Sybil. Now it felt as though they had become her judges.

Francis finished his speech and then looked gravely at Ralph Palmer. “I feel especially bad about you, Ralph, since it was your cousin Edmund, a kinsman to me just as you are, who so kindly used his influence at court to obtain Sybil’s appointment for her. She has failed you both. I feel that in some way I, too, have failed you both. I am sorry.”

Ralph shook his head. “I can’t see that you’re responsible, Francis. I was going to London as part of Sybil’s escort. I will see my cousin Edmund there and if you wish, I’ll tell him that the girl isn’t strong enough for court life. Maybe,” he added, with a smiling glance toward Jane, “I could say that there’s a younger sister coming along, who’ll be ready for court in a year or two.”

“That is kind indeed, Ralph,” said Eleanor. “We all appreciate it.”

Oh, no. As the eyes of the company turned to her, Jane shrank back into her window seat. The eyes were friendly, but they frightened her. She didn’t want to be taken away from the dark moors and the green combes of home, which she loved. Sending a girl to court, with the necessary gowns and jewellery, was expensive. Hitherto, the plan had concerned only Sybil. But now…inside her heavy skirts and the unfamiliar farthingale, she shivered.

Still, for the moment, the danger wasn’t immediate. Francis smiled at her, too, but then said, “We will think about that later. Meanwhile, I want to ask you all for your advice. What am I to do with Sybil? Some provision must be made for her, but I can’t condone what she has done.”

There was a pause. Owen and Katherine whispered together, but said nothing aloud. Mary Stone was the first to speak.

“I agree with Master Sweetwater.” Mary was fat and pallid, with a voice full of phlegm. Her amethyst-coloured damask was expensive but stretched so tightly around her ample form that it formed deep creases across her stomach. She offered a depressing suggestion of what Dorothy might turn into eventually. The sweetmeats had been passing unobtrusively around throughout the whole business and Mary’s plump white fingers had helped themselves liberally. She licked sugar off her fingertips and said, “If she were our girl, she’d find herself turned out and depending on the parish. Isn’t that so, Thomas?”

“I might not go that far,” said Stone, “but I’d not keep her at home.”

“Nor me,” said William Carew. “Young folk can be the devil and all. What my youngest boy put us through—I swear it’s why my hair’s goin’ badger-grey afore its time. Pert, forward brat, Peter was. Played truant when I put ’un to school—I was sent for to deal with ’un more than once. Got him a post as a page at the French court later on, and he behaved so bad, he ended up demoted to stable boy.”

“Peter’s doing well now, though,” said Lady Joan mildly, also licking sugar off her fingers but with more delicacy than Mary Stone. “He’s in England, at the royal court. He went into the French army when he was old enough and we heard nothing of him for so long, we thought he was dead, and then he just came home one day! What a surprise!”

“If he’s made good, it’s because I stood no nonsense and nor did the Frenchies,” said Sir William. “And you can’t stand for this, Sweetwater. I don’t say throw her on the parish, but you can’t keep her at home. We wouldn’t. We might take the child in if one of our men sires a bastard, we support it or give it a home—our blood, after all. But the woman has to shift for herself. That’s how the world is.”

“Marry her off, that’s the best thing,” said Stone.

“Yes,” Francis said. “We’d thought of that. The only problem is, who can we find to marry her? Andrew Shearer obviously can’t.”

“What was that you said about his wife hitting ’un with a frypan?” enquired Sir William Carew with interest. “Just what happened when you went to see the Shearers, Francis?”

“I told Shearer what I thought of him, seducing a young girl—and his landlord’s sister at that—at the christening of his own son,” said Francis. “He started denying it and suggesting that maybe he hadn’t been the only one…you know the sort of thing…”

There were nods and murmurs of Aye, we know, we’ve all heard that one.

“That I knew wasn’t true,” Francis continued. “Oh, Sybil’s a silly girl, too easily impressed. We think now that it’s as well she isn’t going to court—too many temptations there! But I watch over my sisters and she’s had little chance to play the fool, and in any case, she’s not a liar. And the timing’s right, if she’s to have the babe in August, as she says. Eleanor here says that by the look of her, August is very likely right.”

“Yes. That christening party fits in,” Eleanor said.

“So I told Shearer I believed her and not him and aimed a punch at him. He hit back and we were fighting in the kitchen when his wife came charging in—and I do mean charging.” For a moment, despite the unhappy situation, Francis grinned. “In she came, like a whole squadron of cavalry. I’ve been a-listening! So you’ve been at it again, have you, you lecherous hound! That’s what she said. Then she grabbed a frying pan off a hook on the wall and landed him a beauty on top of his head. He sat down on the floor looking dazed and I said to her, sorry, but the two of them had to pack up and be off the farm double-quick. I want new, decent tenants. She cried and he sat there rubbing his head and cursing but I wouldn’t give in. They’ve kin in Barnstaple and that’s where they’re going. The stock’s theirs. I settled to sell the animals and send them the money. I never want to see or hear of them again after that. I gathered from a few more remarks his wife threw at him that he’s left other by-blows scattered around.”

“Lively goings-on,” remarked Ralph. “But as for finding the girl a husband…”

“Got an unmarried tenant that might do?” Sir William enquired.

“Harry Hudd’s a widower,” said Eleanor. “He rents Rixons, down the hill from here. He’s looking for another wife. Only…”

“I know Harry,” Francis said. “He’s a rough type but he’s respectable. As his landlord, I could order him—or pay him—but he wouldn’t like the kind of talk there’d be if he married a girl in Sybil’s condition. There’d be folk saying it must be his, for one thing, and for another, he’s not the sort to want to rear another man’s child. No, I can’t offer Sybil to Hudd. It’s not fair on him.”

Neither of the Lanyons had so far commented, though they had gone on whispering to each other. Owen Lanyon now spoke up.

“I’ve a suggestion. Not about marriage—I don’t know anyone suitable and I’m not offering Idwal here.” Idwal, who had been looking worried, passed a hand over his fiery hair in a gesture of relief. “But we live at Lynmouth, a good way off—nigh on twelve miles if you’re a crow and farther on a horse. No one there’ll know who Sybil is. She can come to us.”

“Are you sure? That’s a very generous offer,” Francis said.

“She’s old enough to have been married.” Katherine, straight of back and stout of midriff, though not as massively so as Mary Stone, nodded in agreement. “We could say that she’s a distant kinswoman, which she is, and that she’s a young widow. That smallpox last year took a lot of lives.”

“We’ll not make a pet of her—don’t think that,” Owen said. “What she’s done was wrong and she has to realize it. But we won’t ill-treat her either, or her baby. They’ll have a home with us. Katherine can always use another pair of hands about the house. What about it?”

Jane cleared her throat and they all turned. “You want to say something, Jane?” said Francis.

“Need Sybil go away forever?” Jane asked. “If…if Master and Mistress Lanyon could look after her until the baby’s born, and if, maybe, we can find someone who’d like to foster the child, couldn’t Sybil come back then? She’s my sister. I’ll miss her so much and she’ll feel so unhappy, cast out from her home.”

“You’d have missed her if she went to court, and as for being unhappy, she’s brought that on herself,” said Francis. “No, Jane. Sybil must leave this house, and for good. Your affection for your sister is creditable, of course, but I shall not change my mind. What our parents would have said to her behaviour, I shudder to think.”

“We have an answer now, at least,” said Eleanor. “We are grateful, Master Lanyon.” Looking around, she saw Peggy hovering restively at the door to the kitchen. “I think,” she said, “that the feast is ready.”

* * *

Dinner had been served at half past two. It was not as prolonged as it would have been in more cheerful circumstances. The meal was over inside two hours. However, the March darkness still fell quite early and most of the guests were to stay overnight and leave in the morning. Only the Stones went home that evening, since they had to go only a mile down the combe to Clicket. After they had gone, Francis discovered that Jane had slipped out of the house. He found her leaning on the gate of the field where the Sweetwaters grazed their horses.

“So here you are. I was afraid you’d gone roaming up to the ridge, and it’s too late in the day for that.”

“I just wanted to be by myself for a while,” Jane said. Against the background of tussocky grass and grazing horses and soaring moorland, her damask finery was incongruous.

The narrow path from the rear of the house led past the small mews where Francis kept his two hawks and on past the field to join the track that ran up the side of the combe to the ridge. There the Allerbrook River had its springs in a spongy bog, and there were ring ouzels and curlews, and occasionally an adder slipping away through the grass from the sound of hooves or footfalls. Sybil, who was lazy, never walked up to the ridge, but Jane sometimes did, liking the solitude.

“I wanted to tell you,” said Francis, “that when the Lanyons leave tomorrow, taking Sybil with them, I will allow you to say goodbye to her if you wish.”

“I do wish!” said Jane. She turned to him. “Of course I want to say goodbye to her. I can’t bear it that you’re sending her away forever!”

“If she had gone to court and then married someone from the other side of the country, you might never have seen her again. You may make your farewells, but once Sybil goes, she is out of our lives for good. Remember that! Now, come indoors. After supper I want you to play your lute for us.”

“Francis…”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Today someone suggested I might go to court instead. I don’t want to, one little bit.”

“Listen to me, Jane. You and Sybil were born into a good family, into a comfortable life in a house where you have had fine clothes and no hard work—every indulgence. Do you think you can have all that and not give something back? Sybil has thrown away her chance to be of use to her family. I trust you don’t want to throw yours away, as well!” He laughed. “You’re still very young. When you’re older, you’ll feel differently, I promise. If Palmer’s cousin finds a post for you later on, believe me, you’ll be delighted with it.”

Jane was silent, still leaning on the gate. The sun had come out as evening approached, and as it set, it shed a softness over everything, so that the green meadow was tinged with gold and faintly dappled with the shadows of the tussocks.

There were things she knew Francis would not understand. Their father would have done, but Johnny Sweetwater had died two years ago, struck down by a fever after getting soaked and frozen while bringing sheep in to safety from an unexpected snowstorm. Her mother had gone two years earlier, from some internal malady that no physician could explain. Since then, Jane and Sybil had been in the care of their elder brother and his wife, and no one could say that Francis or Eleanor had been anything but conscientious and kind, but they were not like Father.

He had loved Allerbrook, loved the racing waters in the combe, and the moor with its varying moods, and the yearly cycle of the farm. And so did Jane. She did not want to go away to court, and her father would have known. He would have been less harsh with Sybil, too. Angry, yes, but perhaps —not so unforgiving. There would have been hope for Sybil in the end.

Francis had a hardness in him which their father had lacked. If he wanted her to go to court, then go she would. And if she cried for Sybil, she had better do it secretly, in bed. “I’ll be glad to play my lute after supper,” she said, and followed Francis obediently indoors.

At Richmond Palace, by the River Thames a little to the west of London, the atmosphere was fraught. Queen Anne Boleyn was the cause. Her high-pitched voice and shrill laughter had been heard less than usual that day, but she gave the impression of being like a wound crossbow, which might at any moment release a bolt, and who knew which one of them would be the target?

King Henry, who was planning improvements to the private rooms at Greenwich Palace, miles downstream to the east, was engaged all day with architects and did not see the queen until he joined her for supper. Most of the conversation then concerned the choice of wall hangings for the refurbished rooms and Queen Anne took part amiably enough though those who knew her well sensed that her apparent good humour had much in common with a set of gilded bars on a cage containing an irascible tigress.

When the meal was over, in her most gracious and persuasive tones Anne invited Henry to join a game of cards with her and some other friends.

As the darkness closed in, the group settled in a snug, tapestried chamber, lit by firelight, candles and lamps, scented by sweet lamp-oils, and the rosemary in the rushes on the floor.

There, in the flickering half-light, as the cards were dealt, Anne employed them to send a secret message to Henry.

It was one of their private games, this exchange of signals that only they could read. To hold the cards in one’s right hand and pensively flick the leftmost card with the other hand was to say, I love you. For him to run a forefinger slowly and sensually across the edge of the fan of cards was to say, I desire you. I will come tonight. For her to do the same was an invitation. Please come tonight. I will be awake and waiting. For either of them to flick the face of each card in turn with the nail of a forefinger was to reply, You will be welcome or I will come.

In the course of the evening’s play she fingered the edge of her cards four times, lingeringly, invitingly. But at no point did the king’s small greenish-grey eyes meet her dark ones; at no point did the square bearded face above the slashed velvet doublet show any awareness of her except as a fellow player in the game. Nor did his thick forefinger ever flick the face of any card at all.

What am I to do? I have borne him one daughter and lost one male infant. He is turning away from me. He had a mistress last year, I know he did, and she wasn’t the first. I will only win him back if I give him a son, and how can I give him a son if he will not make love to me? Or if he can’t?

The previous night Henry had failed her. She had used every art she could think of to help him, without success. Now it seemed he was refusing even to try. Perhaps he was ashamed. But she was afraid, because she knew he would blame her both for his failure and her own. Her dreadful failure, in his eyes, to produce a prince to follow him.

He had blamed her openly last night. He had said, “If only you were a real woman. If only you could have a healthy child every year, and half of them sons, like other women! If you were a real woman, I’d be a real man!”

“I am a real woman!” she had shouted. “What else could I be?”

“A witch,” said King Henry nastily. “Or a whore.”

Oh, God, make him come to me tonight and make him able. Let us make a sturdy son. Because if we don’t…

If we don’t make a son, I shall be blamed and blamed and blamed. I’ve given him a sweet red-haired Tudor daughter, but what use is a daughter? Elizabeth can’t be his heir, any more than her sister Mary can. He told his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, that for a king to have only daughters was the same as being childless altogether. But how can a woman choose whether her babies are boys or girls? Unjust, unjust! I could kill him! Or I could kill God, for denying me this one thing that I need, that he needs, so badly.

Henry was thinking, Candlelight doesn’t suit her. It suits most women, but it makes her look weird. Like a sorceress. Maybe she is a sorceress. I wanted her so much. I’ve turned the church upside down for her, broken away from the Pope, changed the ritual, started closing down monasteries…not that the monks don’t deserve it, fat, luxurious layabouts that most of them are. But how did she make me want her to that point, just the same? Was it witchery? If she doesn’t stop fingering those cards, I’ll get up and walk out of this room. We need another signal. One that says No, stop it.

I’m getting tired of her, and my other queen is still alive. Two unwanted queens and no son. Was ever a man so accursed?

CHAPTER FOUR

A Port in a Storm 1535

“There’s no room here for idle hands,” Katherine said to Sybil a matter of minutes after their arrival in Lynmouth.

Sybil had made the journey on a pillion behind a groom and they had travelled slowly, but she was tired. By the time they were on the steep track down into the little harbour village of Lynmouth at the base of its towering cliffs, she was longing for a quiet bedchamber with a cup of wine to restore her.

At the door of the house, just before the foot of the hill, they dismounted and servants came out to deal with panniers and horses. The main door opened straight into a big panelled parlour. Sybil had seen it before. When her parents were alive, the Allerbrooks had once or twice attended Christmas revels at the Lanyons’ home. Now, however, she paused uncertainly, wondering where to go, until Katherine tapped her arm and said, “Follow me.”

The house was old and creaky and tall. Katherine led the way up a steep and somewhat rickety staircase to an attic room. There were no luxuries here, no hearth or bed-hangings. There was a clothespress, a window seat that lifted to reveal a chest below, one small shelf with a candlestick on it and a plain truckle bed with no bedding.

“Your things will be fetched up presently and I’ll have the bed made up,” Katherine said. “For now, just take off your cloak and hat and leave them here, and then come down to the dining parlour. Do you remember where it is?”

No rest, then. Not even a wash! She went down to the dining parlour, which led out of the main parlour, and found that food was being set out. She was not, however, to eat anything yet.

“You can serve us while we eat and leave the other maids free to get on with other things,” Katherine said. Sybil stared at her and that was the moment when Katherine said, “There’s no room here for idle hands. Everyone’s always busy,” she added. “You can eat when we’ve finished.”

She was presented to the servants as Mistress Sybil Waters, a young widow, a relative, but without means. “We’ve never known anyone called Waters, so as a name it won’t cause confusion,” Owen said.

Sybil was willing enough to acquiesce, but the groom who had accompanied the party to Allerbrook certainly knew the truth, and she had no doubt that he would soon tell the three maids and the manservant Perkins all about it. If this was a port in a storm, it also promised to be a port in a hostile country.

The days that followed were harsh. Katherine, however well-bred in society, was less fastidious in private, where she raised her voice whenever she pleased. Only Owen was exempt. His wife shouted at everyone else and handed out frequent slaps, and Sybil was sure that she received more than her fair share. At Allerbrook such things were rare. At Allerbrook, too, people often smiled. If only, in Lynmouth, someone now and then would smile at her. But no one ever did and on top of that, there was the work.

Rooms must be dusted, clothes mended, onions peeled, loaves shaped, pots stirred, fish gutted, stores counted, floors swept, dishes washed, guests waited on, and Sybil was called upon to perform these tasks, for all the world as though she were a maidservant instead of a kinswoman.

Owen belonged to a consortium of merchants, but he had a ship of his own and often sailed abroad to buy dyes and spices and bales of silk in person, rather than leave it to agents. He and Idwal were often away from home on trading expeditions, and the first time the two of them set off, Sybil hoped that there might be less to do. She was wrong. Left in command, Katherine became not so much a conscientious housewife as a slave driver.

When the men were away, she said, that was the time to get some real work done. New shirts must be made for husband and son, and a spell of spring sunshine inspired her to have all the linen in the house, both bed linen and undergarments, thoroughly washed and put out to dry.

Never before had Sybil been asked to work so long or so hard. At home she sometimes helped in the kitchen and dairy, but she had had time to herself to enjoy books—poetry, travel and devotional works. In the evenings they would all take turns with the lute and there might be dancing or cards or backgammon.

She had realized that life at court would be different, but there she had hoped to find glamour, to wear fashionable clothes, to attend masques and tournaments. There was no glamour and precious little merriment in her life now. There wasn’t even time to read. She had pushed two books into her panniers, but she had not had a moment to open either of them.

At times she was so tired that she could scarcely force her feet to walk, and she would stumble off to bed as soon as she could after supper had been eaten and she had helped to wash the platters. And oh, the aching, desperate need for somebody to smile at her.

She was not asked to do heavy tasks like carrying full buckets about, but it seemed to her that the Lanyons were still, stealthily, creating conditions which might bring on a miscarriage. And that Francis had probably instructed them to do so.

Her back ached constantly and the calling of the gulls as they wheeled and soared above Lynmouth, free as the wind and gliding on it with outspread wings, was like mocking laughter. Now, lying on her pallet at the end of another dreadful day in which one menial task had followed another in pitiless procession, Sybil tossed unhappily, unable to find a position which would accommodate her swelling abdomen in comfort.

“All this,” she said aloud, “all this just because that Andrew Shearer got me giggly at his son’s christening party, plying me with cider, and then said, come and see how the red calf ’s grown, that was born so late this year. I don’t even like Andrew Shearer!”

Not that Shearer was ugly. He had flint-coloured eyes but they could glint with amusement, and he had a knack of fixing his gaze on someone in a way that made the someone feel as though they were the only person in his world. His narrow face was shapely enough, and on the night of the celebration his black hair, though overlong as usual, wasn’t untidy as it normally was, but carefully combed.

He had been persuasive, refilling her tankard with cider and looking at her, watching her, with those bright, flinty eyes. Then, before she knew what was happening, he’d put an arm around her, steered her out of the room where the others were dancing, across the central passage and into the adjoining byre, dark except for a glimmer of starlight through a gap under the eaves and full of the warm, pungent smell of cattle and horses.

There’d been no more talk of the red calf then—not that they could have seen it in the gloom, anyway. Instead, Andrew Shearer had put his mouth over hers and gripped her tightly and somehow slid them both down onto a pile of straw in a vacant stall.

She’d been fuddled and silly. The Shearers’ home-brewed cider was very strong and she knew she had drunk too much of it. She managed a feeble protest, of which he took no notice. He murmured soothingly and told her that she was adorable and petted her in a way which made her feel very strange, as though she wanted him to go on doing it, and then she’d been squashed beneath him and something rather painful but also rather exciting was happening….

And then it was all over, and he was kissing her and saying Thank you, sweeting. Now we’d better get back to the others before you’re missed, and a moment later they were back in the main room on the other side of the passageway.

At once Harry Hudd, that awful old man from Rixons, who smelt and had gaps in his teeth and a wind-reddened face that went all shiny when he drank cider and almost purple when anything annoyed him, was asking her to dance and Andrew was laughing and pushing her at him, and there she was, dancing, though she felt very peculiar, slightly sore and oddly wet. And that was that. Except that it wasn’t because the next time she should have started a course, she didn’t.

Such a little thing. A few foolish moments in the dark byre with its animal smell and the rustle of shifting hoofs, and the gleam now and then of an incurious equine or bovine eye. And now she’d lost both her home and her chance of a thrilling life at court, and come to this.

She had been given a pillow, stuffed with crackly straw but at least covered in smooth linen because that was the only kind of linen ever found in the Lanyon household. She drew it to her, put her arms around it as though it were a dear friend, pressed her nose into it and cried.

At Allerbrook Jane, too, had found her daily life subject to change. Eleanor had suddenly begun to discourage her from spending too much time in the open air. “If you’re going to court one day, we don’t want you having a sunburnt complexion. You’ll need to look like a lady. Ladies have pale skin and soft hands and keep their hair tidy. You should be practising your embroidery and music. The standard will be high at court.”

However, on the July day when Francis went out early with the young groom Tim Snowe and wouldn’t tell Jane where he was going (though Eleanor knew, to judge from her secretive smile), no one seemed to mind what Jane was doing. Eleanor was asking Peggy and the maids to help her move stools and tables about in one of the downstairs rooms off the hall, but she didn’t seem to want her young sister-in-law at all.

Jane promptly seized the chance to be out of doors, tossing grain to the chickens and geese and searching for eggs, and stealing a walk up to the ridge.

She was outside again, giving the poultry their evening meal and wondering whether Francis would be back for supper, when he came riding up from the combe on Copper, followed by a surprising procession.

Just behind him was an elderly man she had never seen before, on a stout, mealynosed Exmoor pony. Next came Tim Snowe, on the Allerbrook pony he usually used and leading a strange pack mule. Behind the mule came two packhorses, each carrying a large package done up in hides and rope. The horses were led by a groom apiece, trudging along on foot and checking every now and then that the package in his care wasn’t slipping.

“What in the world…?” said Jane, going to the gate, her grain basket on her arm.

“Oh, there you are, Francis! I was beginning to be anxious, but I see you had to take it slowly,” said Eleanor, appearing from the house. “And is this Master Corby? Welcome, sir. I take it that the packhorses are carrying the new virginals?”

“Yes, madam,” said the elderly man. “All in good order, we hope and trust. I will assemble the instrument myself.”

“Please come in. And here is your pupil,” said Eleanor. “This is my sister-in-law, Jane Sweetwater. Make your curtsy, Jane. This gentleman is a musician by profession and he has come to teach you to play the virginals. Proficiency in music is something that you’ll need when you go to court.”

So it was going to happen, and Francis was so determined to make it happen that he was willing to spend money on virginals and a tutor. Jane, who liked music, didn’t mind learning a new instrument, and Master Corby turned out to be a patient and agreeable instructor. It was the purpose behind the lessons that frightened her.

Just once she made a further attempt to protest. After she had practised daily on the virginals for a month, Master Corby invited Francis and Eleanor to listen while she played a simple melody. “I think you will be pleased,” he said to them. “A little polishing, and she’ll be an ornament to the court when she gets there.”

“But,” said Jane, seating herself, gathering up her courage and addressing the keyboard rather than her relatives, “I have no real wish to go to court. I would be so very happy to play music here at home, when anyone wants to dance, or to play at our Christmas and harvest revels. I am not…not eager for advancement in society.”

“Well,” said Francis, “let us hear how well you perform. Then we will talk privately.”

Afterward, when Master Corby, with a tactful smile, had left the room, Francis said, “My dear sister, it is time you accustomed yourself to the idea of going to court. Sybil has failed us and you are her natural replacement.”

“We have been in touch with Ralph Palmer’s cousin, Sir Edmund Flaxton,” said Eleanor. “He has sent commiserations for Sybil’s ill health and he is willing to obtain an appointment for you if he can.”

Francis nodded. “Do well, attract the right kind of notice, make worthwhile friends and you could become the route by which influence and wealth are drawn toward us all, and you might even find yourself a titled bridegroom!”

It was no use arguing. Francis could be severe when he was angry. Her duty was being made clear to her. There would be no escape.

“Broth,” said Katherine Lanyon shortly, putting her head into the kitchen where a pot was bubbling on the trivet over the fire and giving off an appetizing aroma. “Take her some mutton broth, and some hot milk, as well.”

Withdrawing from the kitchen, she marched into the parlour, stripping off her stained apron as she went. Owen, who was sitting by the window, shirtsleeved in a shaft of sunlight and playing chess against himself, got to his feet. “Is it over already?”

“Didn’t you hear it squalling? Yes, it’s over,” said Katherine, sitting down on the nearest settle. “Where’s Idwal?”

“I sent him to the jetty to see that consignment of ironware loaded properly. Well, Sybil hasn’t taken long.”

“No, she hasn’t! Oh, it’s so unfair!” Katherine cried. “I almost died bringing Idwal into the world. Three days and nights of agony and I’ve never conceived since. Yet I was a decent, honest young wife, bearing her husband’s son. While this little hussy…!”

“I wouldn’t call her that,” said Owen mildly. “I fancy she only made the one mistake.”

“That kind of mistake is the same whether it’s once or twenty times!” snapped Katherine. “She deserved what I went through, but does it happen to her? No, it does not. She abandons the dinner table, saying she has a stomachache, and before supper she’s slipped a great big bawling boy into the world as easily as though it were nothing at all, and now she’s sitting up and asking for something to eat, and I’m waiting on her!”

“What does she want to call him?” Owen asked.

“Stephen,” she said. “There was a Stephen in the family years ago, it seems, and she likes the name.”

“Well, if he thrives, he could be an asset to the business one day,” said Owen.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Blemished Queen 1535

The court rarely stayed in one place long. It took only a few weeks for a palace’s privies and cesspits to start stinking and then, to escape the smell, King Henry and his six-hundred-strong entourage would be off.

In a flurry of dismantling, they would pack up their goods, their clothes and ornaments and toiletries and workboxes, their books, their chess and backgammon sets, and in the case of the more important folk, their favourite tapestries, bed-coverings and items of furniture, including beds complete with their hangings, and depart, generally by water, since most of the palaces were along the River Thames or not far from it. Horses were sent by land, and there were wagons and pack animals to convey goods by land when this was required.

Everyone in the royal retinue was used to its gypsying habits, but the same problems appeared every time. Anne Boleyn, who had been at court long before she became queen, was well accustomed to them. Early in her reign she remarked to a newly appointed young lady-in-waiting called Jane Seymour that never, never had the court managed a move without somebody’s precious Florentine tapestry or sandalwood workbox or priceless ivory chess set or irreplaceable illuminated prayer book falling into the river or off a pack saddle.

“And when we go on the summer progress, it’s worse,” the queen had said irritably. “We move once a week and sometimes oftener. It’s hell.”

But the progress in the summer of 1535, through some of the southwest counties, was not hell for Jane Seymour because it included her family home, Wolf Hall. For the few days they spent there, she could be with her parents, at ease in what, to her, was a happy and informal world.

Not that Wolf Hall was so very informal. It stood amid farmland, but the fields did not press close to the house, which was surrounded instead by parkland and formal gardens. Sir John Seymour had a solid, gentlemanly background and Lady Margery was descended from King Edward III. They were well aware of their status. The brief stay made by King Henry that late summer should have been a very pleasant one. Unfortunately…

“My dear child, what in the world is the matter?” Sir John, strolling through the beautifully shaped yews of the topiary garden, was horrified to come upon his daughter, sitting alone on a bench and sobbing, her fists balled into her eyes as though she were an infant.

Jane lowered her hands unwillingly and he sat down beside her, taking them in his. “What is it?”

Jane gulped and said, “The king and queen are shut in their bedchamber and they’re quarrelling.”

“But, my dear daughter, why should you cry about it? I daresay it’s embarrassing, but it’s their business.”

“They’re quarrelling,” said Jane wretchedly, “about me.”

“I saw you!” said Anne Boleyn furiously, for the fourth time that morning. “I saw you with my own eyes!” She knew that she was doing herself no good by all these histrionics, but she couldn’t help herself. The anger and—yes—the fear had been building up inside her for so long. Now it had broken loose and she couldn’t stop it. “I was in the gallery and I looked out over the knot garden and there you were…”

“It’s a very pretty garden!” Henry snapped. “Even this late in the summer. I was admiring it. Mistress Seymour was walking there as well and I stopped and remarked upon the flowers. Is there anything wrong in that?”

“There is when you take her hand and lead her to a seat and sit beside her, smiling at her!”

“Would you expect me to scowl at her? She is one of your ladies and she is also the daughter of our hosts! And a very sweet, modest little thing she is! I did nothing more than sit and make conversation with her!”

“And you held her hand throughout!” shrieked Anne.

“Oh, for the love of God, will you have done?”

Across the width of the spacious bedchamber the two of them glared at each other—King Henry with feet apart and hands on hips, Queen Anne twisting her hands together and trying not to burst into tears.

And to think I was once out of my mind for love of her! Henry said to himself, staring at the termagant in front of him.

So short a time ago, she had been his one desire. He had adored her, lusted for her. He had written love letters to her, created songs and poems for her; in the gardens of Hever, her family home in Kent, he had knelt at her feet to plead with her. What on earth had possessed him? Look at her! Thin as a broom handle, her face drawn into lines of discontent, black hair escaping untidily from its expensive jewelled cap, dark eyes hard with rage.

Listening to her was no better than looking at her. Had he really ever raved about the beauty of her voice? She was as shrill as a bad-tempered cat. And look at those twisting hands! There was a tiny outgrowth at the base of one little finger, a little extra fingertip, even to the miniature nail. She was ashamed of it and wore long sleeves to conceal it. Once, in their courting days, when he caught sight of it, she had cried and said she hated it, and he had kissed it and called it sweet. Now he thought it an ugly blemish and recoiled from it. Suddenly he lost his temper.

“I have had enough! Half the morning I have been in here with you, listening while you screech at me! All because yesterday afternoon I spoke pleasantly to a shy young girl. She is timid. She was nervous of being alone with her king and I wished to make her mind easy. I will not be accused of…well, what are you accusing me of, if anything?”

“I’m not accusing you!” There was a point past which Anne dared not go. She did not know quite what she feared, except that it was the sense of power that emanated from King Henry. He couldn’t divorce her as he had her predecessor, Catherine of Aragon. He’d never get away with that twice. Catherine was still alive, after all. They’d laugh at him in the streets if he tried to take a third bride while he still had two wives living. Anne knew the people of England had no love for her. She’d heard the names they called her. That witch, Nan Bullen, they said, giving her surname the old English pronunciation rather than the French one, which she preferred. Another name they had for her was The Concubine.

All the same, she couldn’t imagine them letting Henry, their leader under God, play with the sacrament of marriage as though it were a tennis ball. If she couldn’t mend this breach between them, if he wanted to be rid of her and marry again…what would he do?

What, indeed? That was the cause of the fear. It lay deep in her mind, like a dark, frightening well that she didn’t want to look into. The only thing that would release him from her would be her death. And when a man had as much power as Henry had, and such a very great determination to get himself a son, one way or another…

The tears spilled over despite all her efforts to restrain them. She went to the great bed and threw herself down on it, weeping. Henry found himself moved by pity against his will. He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Her unblemished hand came up to cover his.

“I want to give you a son,” Anne sobbed. “I want to give you a son, so very, very much.”

Her despair, her defencelessness, stirred him as he had not been stirred for a long time, or not by her. He lifted her, and her thin form felt birdlike. He could have cracked those slender bones in his two hands. He forgot the aversion which had overwhelmed him only a few moments ago. His loins awoke. “Well, there’s only one way to go about that,” he said.

“The one thing none of us must do,” said Sir John Seymour firmly to his daughter, “is offend the king.” He was tired. His sixtieth birthday was behind him and he was feeling his years. “We should have got you married before this, I suppose,” he said. “You are already in your mid-twenties. Only, your mother hoped you would stand a better chance of a really fine match if you were at court. We didn’t expect this.”

“There isn’t really any this,” said Jane Seymour unhappily. “But the queen thinks there is.”

“Let us hope she is wrong, just a jealous woman seeing what isn’t really there. But if it is there…well, my dear, neither I nor your mother would want you to be anything but modest and virtuous. But in the last resort, if the only alternative is to make the king angry—well, don’t. That would be unwise. To annoy the king,” said Sir John warningly, “could be dangerous.”

CHAPTER SIX

Terrifying Ambition 1536

It was the month of May, 1536, and out of doors the world was burgeoning. Now was the time when cows were milked three times a day and on the moor the ponies were dropping their foals. The skies were full of singing skylarks, and in Allerbrook combe the woods echoed with birdsong and the soft call of the wood pigeons. Every part of Jane’s being wanted to be out there, among it all, but these days she rarely had the chance. Life now seemed to be all fine sewing, music and dancing.

She was being relentlessly groomed for court life. The day was coming nearer and nearer when she would be exiled from Allerbrook, perhaps forever. She knew very well that Francis and Eleanor hoped that once at court, she would take the eye of some suitable young man, and marry him. Then she would live wherever his family home might be, even if it was at the other end of England.

It was in her nature to be compliant, and certainly it was in her interests. Both Francis and Eleanor could make themselves unpleasant if crossed. But inside, she was afraid and rebellious and longed to find a way of escape. Except that there didn’t seem to be one.

Master Corby was pleased with her progress on the virginals, except that he said she put a little too much passion into her fingers. The passion came from anger and unhappiness, but it was no use telling him that. At the close of yet another music lesson, she went as she had been bidden to do, to join Eleanor, who was sewing in the parlour above the family chapel, settled in a window seat for the sake of the daylight, her workbox open on a table in front of her.

Eleanor looked a trifle wan and was putting in her stitches in an unusually languid fashion. Jane looked at her pale face and slow movements with some concern and said, “Eleanor, are you well?”

Eleanor, however, glanced up with a smile and said, “I had a restless night, that’s all. I’ve started on a new altar cloth. Come and help. You can embroider at the other end.”

“Where’s Francis today?” Jane asked. “I saw him ride off this morning. From the path he took, I thought he might be going to Dulverton.”

“Yes, he was,” Eleanor said. “To talk to a possible replacement for our poor chaplain. I like to have proper family prayers on weekdays—it keeps a household together in my opinion. I hope Francis brings someone back with him. Listen! The dogs are barking. Is he coming now?”

The window beside Eleanor didn’t overlook the yard. Jane went to one that did, throwing it open in order to look out. “Yes, it is. He’s on his own, though. And Eleanor, the horse is lathered! He never brings a horse in sweating as a rule. Something must have happened! I’ll just run down…”

“No, you won’t. Sit down,” said Eleanor. “No doubt he’ll appear in a moment and tell us all about it. A young lady shouldn’t rush about, asking questions. Come and sew with me.”

Reluctantly Jane seated herself and threaded her needle. Down in the yard, Francis was speaking to someone, probably Tim Snowe. A door slammed, however, as he came indoors and then they heard him call to Peggy, asking where his wife and sister were. A moment later he came racing up the stairs to the parlour. He flung the door open dramatically and stood in the doorway, breathless, so that both of them paused, needles poised, and looked at him in astonishment.

“It’s the queen!” he said.

“The queen?” Eleanor asked. On the stairs behind Francis, Peggy and the maids appeared, eyes wide.

“She’s been arrested,” said Francis. “Dulverton’s buzzing with it. There’s been a King’s Messenger with a proclamation. Queen Anne’s in the Tower of London, charged with treason. For taking lovers. She’s going to be tried. It’s a capital charge. It…it’s…”

“But that’s incredible!” said Eleanor, shocked, her languor quite vanished. “She’s…the queen!”

“The king’s wanted to get rid of her ever since she lost that last pregnancy, the one she must have started last summer, on progress. Ralph Palmer knows all the gossip. He went to London again in February to see his cousin Flaxton and he told me the rumours when he visited us last month. I doubt if anyone will ever know the truth, but I wouldn’t place any heavy bets on her being found innocent,” said Francis. “Even if she is.”

There was a silence. Then Eleanor said, “What about our chaplain?”

“Dr. Amyas Spenlove will join us in a few days. He was chaplain to a man who recently died and made him the executor of his will. He has business to finish before he leaves Dulverton. You’ll like him, I think.”

“We’ll be glad to see him. But this news about the queen,” said Eleanor. “It’s dreadful!”

For the rest of her life Jane was ashamed of the thoughts that went through her head as she sat listening.

If there is no queen of England, then there’ll be no need for ladies-in-waiting or maids of honour. I can stay here.

In the days that followed, news came in successive waves, like a swiftly rising tide.

King Henry, determined now to rid himself forever of the harpy into which his once-adored Anne had turned, wanted his subjects to understand why he was ridding himself of her and how, and wanted them to know, too, that the new marriage he had in mind was lawful. King’s Messengers and town criers were kept busy. Vicars, too, took up the task, repeating the latest announcements from their pulpits. Even the Gypsies who wandered the roads and the charcoal burners who often spent weeks deep in the forests encountered the news before many days had passed.

Yes, the queen was in the Tower. She had been tried, along with her so-called lovers. One of them was her personal musician, whose name was Mark Smeaton. Another was her own brother George. She had been accused of incest as well as adultery. They had all been sentenced to death. The men had been executed but the queen was still alive.

Queen Anne, the last to die, went to the block on Tower Green on May 19. She was executed with a sword, wielded by a professional headsman brought from France for the purpose on Henry’s orders. There was no professional headsman in England accustomed to use the sword, and executions by axe could be very butcherly. Sometimes it took several blows to finish the victim off. The sword, properly handled, was instantaneous.

Cynical people remarked that King Henry evidently wished to be as merciful as he could—as long as he wasn’t left with a living ex-wife whose existence might call the legality of a new marriage into question.

He had enough of that with Queen Catherine, said the knowing voices in the taverns and marketplaces. Well, Catherine of Aragon is dead now, poor soul, and so is Nan Bullen. Never cared for the Bullen witch myself, but I don’t think she got justice.

Nor me. Can’t believe she ever went with her brother, or played the fool with some court minstrel. I mean, I ask you, five of them! If it were just one, well, a fellow might believe it, but five—and her the queen, and adultery for a queen is high treason! She’d have to be out of her mind.

Ah. You’re right there. Whatever next, that’s what we’re all wondering.

Jane heard of the queen’s death from Father Anthony Drew, the vicar of Clicket, on the Sunday following, and shuddered. That Sunday was a particularly lovely May day, more beautiful even than the day when Francis had brought home the news of the queen’s arrest. Rain in the night had been followed at daybreak by drifting early mist and then sudden, lavish sunshine. The tree-hung ride down the combe to Clicket was dappled with it, as though by a scattering of gold coins, and vegetation was growing almost while one watched. Long grass and cow parsley and red valerian overhung the edges of the lanes and the meadowsweet had come out early. May was no month for dying.

Whatever next? Everyone was asking that, and the answer came soon enough. On May 20, the day after Queen Anne’s head had rolled into the straw, King Henry had been betrothed to her former lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour.

On May 30, he married her.

Francis and Jane heard the wedding announced by the Dulverton town crier. Eleanor was not with them. She had of late seemed more and more out of sorts and now they knew why. She had been with child, but something had gone amiss and she had miscarried. She was in bed, with Peggy looking after her, while the new chaplain, Dr. Spenlove, took charge of the house. He was cheerful and competent and had very quickly established himself as someone who could deputize for Francis when required.

“It’s a relief to have him,” Francis said to Jane. “I feel easy about going to Dulverton, and I really must. I’ve half a dozen things to do there. Come with me.” And with that, they set off on the seven-mile ride to the little town, among other things to order supplies of wine from a vintner there, and buy linen to make new shirts for Francis.

On arrival, they heard the loud bell and the stentorian voice of the crier and went toward the sound. They sat on their mounts in the midst of a crowd, listening. When the crier ended his announcement of King Henry’s new marriage, Francis, turning to Jane, said something that terrified her.

“So the new queen’s one of the old one’s ladies-in-waiting. It’s a thousand pities Sybil didn’t behave herself better, or you weren’t a bit older. If one of you had been at court, why, the next queen could have been you!”

He wasn’t joking. Jane knew it at once. He meant what he said. He was harbouring hair-raising ambitions. He was seriously imagining himself as the brother-in-law of King Henry, with one of his sisters on a throne.

“It might be dangerous,” she said, and knew that her voice was trembling. “Look what happened to Queen Anne!”

“Well, I don’t believe it would ever happen to you, though I can’t say the same of Sybil,” Francis said. “Everyone says there was no truth in the charges, but who can really know? Maybe there was.”

“Even with her own brother?” said Jane.

“Yes. I grant you that’s hard to believe,” Francis agreed. “But all the same, I feel that perhaps Queen Anne was…shall we say, not quite trustworthy. What happened to her isn’t likely to happen to anyone else.”

They rode slowly homeward, their various purchases stowed in saddlebags. The moorland tracks were narrow, but when Jane saw a chance to edge her pony up alongside Francis, she seized it.

“Francis, I want to ask you something.”

“Of course. What is it?”

“Please can you tell me how Sybil is? I haven’t seen her or heard a word about her since she went away. The Lanyons haven’t visited us, but I know you’ve seen Master Owen, more than once. I heard you tell Eleanor you’d seen him last year at a fair somewhere….”

“Dunster,” said Francis. “Where the castle is. During the fair, Owen and Katherine dined at Dunster Castle as guests of the Luttrell family. Owen’s a successful man these days.”

“He must have mentioned Sybil, or you must have asked after her, surely! How is she? Did she have the baby safely? I want to know.”

“Sybil is nothing to do with you, Jane. Not anymore.”

“But she is! She’s my sister, whatever she’s done, and if there’s a child, it’s my niece or my nephew. And yours, too!”

Francis relented a little. “Sybil had a boy child last August. He has been named Stephen. They are still with the Lanyons. They are perfectly safe and there’s no need for you to worry about them.”

“I’d like to visit them. I’d like to see Sybil again.”

“No, Jane. I can’t allow that.” Francis spoke sharply. “Your life is going to take a very different course from hers, believe me. With a new queen on the throne, there may well be a need for new maids of honour. I’d like to see you become one of them. I want to bring our family up in the world, Jane. And it’s a hard world. Life was cosier, perhaps, for our forebears. The world is wider now, and colder. You want to stay at Allerbrook, I know, but sometimes, my sister, sacrifices must be made.”

No, prayed Jane, silently but passionately, to God in the sky above, to fate, to Providence—if necessary, to the ancient gods who had been worshipped by the long-departed people who had left their strange marks upon the moor in the form of upright stones and the barrow mounds where they buried their chieftains. There was a barrow on top of the ridge. When she had been free to take walks, she had liked standing on top of it. The view from there was so immense. No, and no and no. I don’t want to go. Don’t make me go. Stop Francis from sending me. Please!

* * *

Her prayers were apparently answered. Word came from London that there were no vacancies for maids of honour or ladies-in-waiting. Queen Jane Seymour had all the ladies and maids that she required.

“Well, the queen’s little namesake is still young,” said Thomas Stone, arriving for the Christmas revel at Allerbrook and greeting Jane with a kiss. “Plenty of time. Maids of honour marry, ladies-in-waiting go home to produce children. Vacancies will arise sooner or later. I fully intend to get Dorothy a place at court one day.”

He and his family had been away on their principal estate in Kent, but had come to Somerset for Christmas so that Mistress Mary Stone could visit her cousins in Porlock, though not stay with them.

“We get on their nerves if we stay long,” Thomas confided, “and there are no girls there of Dorothy’s age. Still, family is family and besides, here in Somerset we can stay at Clicket Hall, which we like very much, and Dorothy can have Jane for company sometimes. Isn’t that so, Dorothy?”

“Yes, of course,” said Dorothy dutifully. Jane tried not to sigh. She did not enjoy spending time with Dorothy Stone, who seemed to her very dull and was inclined to take offence easily. She longed for Sybil instead.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Avenue of Escape 1536–1537

Sybil, at that very moment, was longing with all her heart for Jane.

She had been missing her sister more and more. Jane had been the one person at home who hadn’t condemned her, who had kissed her goodbye and wished her well. Dear, dear Jane. Vaguely, as she rode away with her new guardians, she had hoped that one day, somehow, she and her sister would be together again, but it hadn’t happened. It seemed that her presence in the Lanyon house had changed the relationship between the two families. She knew from overhearing talk between Master Owen and Mistress Katherine that Owen often met Francis, out in the world, frequently at fairs where goods and animals were bought and sold. But it seemed that they had decided to keep their womenfolk apart.

In Lynmouth, Katherine and Owen had duly presented Sybil to their neighbours as a young widow and Stephen had been correctly baptized in the church at Lynmouth. But there had been no celebration to follow. Sybil, it seemed, was to be kept out of the public eye. One of the maidservants told her, spitefully, that Katherine had put it about that she had no dowry because her husband had been poor, and was in any case devoted to his memory and did not intend to remarry.

Sometimes Sybil wished she were really a servant. They were paid and they had time off now and then. She did not.

She was permitted to look after Stephen, but she was encouraged to begin weaning him as soon as possible.

“Children should not be nursed for too long,” Katherine said. “Life is too busy for that.”

Sybil’s constant busyness was Katherine’s fault, but Sybil was afraid to say so.

By the time her second Christmas at Lynmouth arrived, he was nearly seventeen months old, toddling energetically, and making his opinions felt in loud, indignant roars every time he fell down—which was fairly often—or was denied something to which he had taken a fancy, such as a shiny knife or a gold coin carelessly left on a table.

Both Katherine and Owen repeatedly told Sybil to make him behave and she tried, anxiously, but with little success. She had originally hoped that Idwal, who though younger than Sybil was certainly nearer to her in age than his parents were, might be a friend, but he frankly disliked both her and Stephen and if he could get either of them into trouble, he would.

When that second Christmas came, she wondered wistfully if this time there would be some contact with her own family, but there was not, although the weather was good and there was no bar to travelling. The Lanyons stayed in Lynmouth for their Yuletide revels. They let her share in them, but in a limited fashion. It was taken for granted that she would help to wait on the other guests and though Owen, rendered genial by Christmas good cheer, gave her permission to dance, Katherine watched to make sure that no unmarried man danced with her more than once.

The following spring, it was given out one Sunday in church that Queen Jane Seymour was with child, and the congregation were asked to pray for the birth of a healthy prince to be the heir to the kingdom. The Lanyons seemed pleased to hear the news and when they went home, Owen declared that they must have a special dinner to celebrate. “Kate, send someone out to buy a good haunch of something, and we’ll make an occasion of it.”

If Queen Jane did have a boy, Sybil thought, church bells would ring throughout the land. A boy child born to a queen was a marvel, a joy. A boy child born to Sybil Sweetwater might well be stronger, more handsome, cleverer, but he would never be regarded as anything but a mistake and was condemned as a nuisance when he bellowed. That night she cried herself to sleep.

She had done that before, of course, but this time her misery came from a new and greater depth. In the morning she brushed the best of her plain brown gowns, combed her fair hair back, put on a clean coif and went to speak to Master Owen.

Owen Lanyon was preparing for another foreign voyage, and his packed belongings were piled just inside the street door. Idwal was down at the ship, making sure that all was ready. They were to sail to Bristol and then leave for Venice in company with other ships, as a safeguard against pirates. Owen himself was in the small room he used as an office, writing, which he continued to do even after he had answered her timid knock with the call to enter.

Sybil closed the door behind her and stood hesitating, until at length he glanced around and said, “Sit down. I won’t be long. I’m writing to your brother, as it happens.”

“Is there any chance of…of me seeing him? I never have, not since I came here.” Sybil sat down nervously on the nearest stool.

“No, Sybil. There is not.” Owen sanded the letter and blew the sand off. “I’m just giving him some information, in haste, before I set off for Venice. I was in Dunster the other day and I heard some news that may interest your brother. Cleeve Abbey, near Washford, is going to be dissolved after all.”

“Oh,” said Sybil a little blankly.

“Come, now. You know, surely, that the English church has broken free from the Pope and that it has meant retribution at last for the monasteries which for so long have been places of scandal, as well as much too rich.” His sardonic tone suggested that he didn’t entirely sympathize with King Henry’s reforming zeal, or believe that its roots lay in a genuine desire for piety and morality.

Sybil said, “Oh, yes. Father Anthony Drew explained it to us. It was so the king could be free to marry Queen Anne. Only, she didn’t have a son and so…”

“Hush,” said Owen. “His Majesty has for many years been more and more shocked by the mismanagement of the church by Rome, and the sad laxity in the monasteries of England. Any other reason would be unthinkable. Anyway, it’s wiser not to comment on the king’s affairs, even in private, to members of one’s own family. It’s said that he has informers in many houses and who knows which? Never mind that now. The point is that the monks of Cleeve…you know where Cleeve and Washford are?”

“Yes, up the coast, to the east of Minehead. The monks are Cistercians.”

“Quite. They keep sheep and the abbot has a house in Dunster, where he stays when he’s there doing business in the wool trade. When the king’s receiver disposes of the abbey, the sheep will come up for sale along with everything else. It will be proclaimed, of course, but since your brother runs a big flock, I thought he might like to know in advance. Those monks are clever shepherds. Their sheep are some of the best in the county. Francis might want to buy some of them and I’m giving him a chance to get in first.”

“Yes, I see,” said Sybil bleakly, understanding but not able to summon up any great excitement about extra sheep for Allerbrook.

As though he had read her thoughts, Owen said quite gently, “You have just asked if you can visit your brother, or if he wishes to visit you. Perhaps I should explain why the answer is no. Francis has handed you into our care and—I am sorry, Sybil—but to him, you are as one who is dead. You are not badly off, living here, you know.”

“That isn’t all that I came to ask,” said Sybil. “I…I just wondered…if there were any chance…that you and Mistress Lanyon might…might arrange a marriage for me. With someone who wouldn’t mind Stephen, who would be a father to him, of course.”

There. It was out.

“Marriage,” said Owen thoughtfully. “A husband and home of your own. A father for Stephen and a lawful father for any other children you might produce. Yes, a very natural wish and not impossible, for although, I’m sorry to say, most of Lynmouth knows or guesses by now that you are not a widow, there are men who would be happy to take you on, since you have proved yourself able to bear children, and that’s something to be valued. But…”

“But?”

“Your brother absolutely forbade it, and one thing that I value is my friendship with him. He and I meet quite often. His orders were that you were to remain in our care and that since you would be perfectly safe under our roof, he had after due consideration decided that you should not marry because—” his voice hardened “—once a girl turns wanton, she is likely to remain so and is not, therefore, fit to be a wife.”

“But…”

“No buts. Whether I fully agree with your brother or not isn’t the point. I will do nothing to jeopardize my friendship with him. Be glad that you and your child have a home here. Now, please leave me. I have much to do before I sail. Ask Perkins to come here. I need him to take this letter to Allerbrook.”

“Couldn’t I even…?”

“Write a letter of your own and send it with mine? No, Sybil. And that’s final.”

So that was that. Sybil, ignoring the fact that she had a whole string of domestic tasks awaiting her, went up to the room where Stephen was playing with some little painted bricks which had once belonged to Idwal. She stood looking at him.

She didn’t love him. She had attended to his needs, obeying ancient instinct, but it wasn’t love. There were times when she almost hated him. But for him, she would have gone to court. But for him, no one would ever have known that she and Andrew Shearer had coupled in the straw at that christening party. But for Stephen…

He would be all right here. Katherine would look after him. She didn’t like him much, but she was a responsible woman, and she’d reared one son; she ought to know how to manage.

Sybil had had enough. Maidservants were paid and had days off, and if they got a chance to marry, they took it. She’d rather be a maidservant than live like this.

It was a busy time of year on farms, with the extra milking to do, more eggs to collect and weeds capable of choking a vegetable bed almost overnight. Next month there would be shearing and haymaking, too. It ought to be possible to find employment.

She thought about the locality. Above Lynmouth towered the cliffs; she must begin by climbing up to Lynton, the little town at the top. Beyond that, if one went on, inland and uphill, lay the open moor and there were few farms there, but there were some in the combes around the edges. If she turned east and followed the East Lyn River, surely she would come to farmsteads, to places where extra hands might be needed.

They could have Sybil’s hands, and pay for them. She was leaving. First thing tomorrow morning.

“Gone?” said Eleanor after she and Jane had listened in horror to Francis as he stood in the hall and read them the contents of the second letter in two days to come from Lynmouth.

Perkins, the Lanyons’ hardworking manservant, had on returning to Lynmouth after delivering Owen Lanyon’s news about the sale of Cleeve Abbey, found himself obliged to go back to Allerbrook again the very next morning, bearing a further missive, penned by Katherine in frantic haste. Owen and Idwal had left for Bristol and would probably have sailed for Venice before the news could catch up with them but Sybil’s family at least could be informed. “She can’t have gone!” Eleanor protested. “Where would she go? What happened?”

“Aye, what? It’s not right, a young girl like that, wanderin’ on the moor all alone!” Peggy gasped. She and the maids were also present and listening with scandalized expressions. “It’s dangerous, that sort of thing,” Peggy added.

Perkins, standing deferentially to one side, spoke up. “The mistress thinks that the girl ran off early today. She was in the house last night, right enough. But today the little boy Stephen started calling out for his mother, and we found Mistress Sybil wasn’t there. Her things were gone from her room and some food from the kitchen and a water flask.”

“Someone must search for her!” Jane cried. “Somebody will have seen her. She shouldn’t be hard to find, surely?”

“Yes. She must be found, before something happens to her!” agreed Eleanor anxiously.

“Mistress Katherine is getting a few folk together and sending them to enquire up in Lynton and round about,” Perkins said.

“Quite.” Francis nodded. “I certainly hope she will be found and brought back. But there’s nothing we can do from here. There never is anyone to spare at this time of year. We’ll pray for her, naturally. She is even more foolish than I thought. First she throws away her chances of going to court. Now she throws away the only home and shelter that she has. However did I come to be saddled with such a ridiculous sister?”

“Oh, how can you be so unkind!” wailed Jane.

Francis looked at her coldly. “There is no unkindness. On the contrary, she has always been treated more gently than she ever deserved and see how she repays it. Peggy, take Perkins to the kitchen and see that he has refreshment. His horse must have some rest, as well.”

“You care more for the horse than for Sybil!” Jane shouted.

“Mind your manners, sister,” said Francis. “And yes, an honest horse is to my mind worth more than a silly, lightskirt wench.”

At Stonecrop Farm, just above Porlock, the days at this time of year began at cockcrow. Bess and Ambrose Reeve rose as usual shortly after the sun, splashed their faces and dressed quickly. Bess dragged a comb through her greying hair and bundled it under a cap. Downstairs, their daughter Alison and the maidservant Marian were already astir, waking up the banked fire in the kitchen, while the farmhands were pulling on their boots, about to go and feed the plough oxen and the pigs. Ambrose went to help them.

The morning was fine, the grass asparkle with dew. Bess and Alison collected pails and set off for the field where the cows were grazing, to milk them out of doors. Two of the dogs went with them, not barking loudly, because they had been trained to be quiet when near the sheep and cattle, but sometimes woofing softly, running here and there with noses to the ground.

Until, as they passed the haybarn, one of the dogs stiffened, pointed his pewter-coloured nose at the barn, and in defiance of all his careful training, started to bark very noisily indeed.

“Now, what’s amiss with you? Be quiet!” Alison seized his collar.

“He never does this as a rule. Now Brindle’s started! There’s something wrong in that barn,” said Bess. “Be a vagabond or something in there, if it b’ain’t a fox. Put thy pail down, Alison, and come along.”

“But Mother, if there’s a wild man in there…an outlaw…”

“We’ve got the dogs. Go and fetch a hayfork! That’ll be enough.”

Sybil, curled miserably in the hay, had barely slipped beneath the surface of sleep, because her empty stomach wouldn’t let her. She woke suddenly, to find two women, both in brown working gowns and white aprons, standing over her. The younger of the pair was grasping a two-pronged hayfork. The second one was middle-aged and standing with arms akimbo. A grey lurcher and a brown-and-white sheepdog stood beside them, growling. Sybil sat up, pulling herself farther away from the threatening points of the hayfork.

“It’s all right, Alison. It’s just a lass,” said the older woman. “Quiet! Down!” she added to the dogs.

They stopped growling and lay down, but Alison continued to hold her hayfork at the ready and demanded, “What be you a-doin’ yur?”

“I just…I just wanted somewhere to sleep. I was cold and it was so late. I meant to come to the house this morning.” Sybil was trembling.

“What be you at, wandering about and sleepin’ in barns?” Bess asked, though not roughly. The sunlight slanting in behind her through the open door had shown her how young Sybil was, and how white her face.

“I…I ran away,” said Sybil. “I took food with me but I’d eaten it all by yesterday morning. I’ve been looking for work, but I couldn’t even find a farm till last night. I saw candlelight…from one of your windows, but it went out before I got close. The barn wasn’t locked. I’m sorry. Oh,” said Sybil, bursting into tears, “I’m so hungry!”

“Well,” said Bess, “young wenches dyin’ of starvation in one of our barns, that’s somethin’ we wouldn’t care for. ’Ee’d better come in for some breakfast. Then we’ll hear thy story. But it had better be the truth, now. Liars b’ain’t welcome at Stonecrop.”

In the kitchen Bess despatched Marian with Alison to see to the milking, telling them to send Ambrose back indoors while they were about it. She then fried a piece of bread and an egg, filled a beaker with ale and handed it to Sybil. “But eat slowly, or thy guts’ll complain,” she warned.

Ambrose, large, gaitered and puzzled, appeared while Sybil was in the midst of eating and Bess did the basic explaining while he listened, pulling off his cap and scratching his thin white hair. At the end, by which time Sybil had finished, he, like Bess, asked for her story.

Sybil was too tired and frightened to lie, and didn’t, except that she begged them not to ask where her original home had been, and clung to the name of Sybil Waters, which the Lanyons had given her. “I walked and walked,” she said, coming to the end of her account. “Miles from Lynmouth, miles up the East Lyn, trying to find somewhere. All day I walked and then when it got dark, I tried to sleep in a patch of trees, but there were things rustling, and I saw eyes….”

“Fox or weasel, no doubt,” said Ambrose with a snort. “Christ, girl, you were a fool to run off like that. And leavin’ thy babby!”

“No one’ll hurt Stephen. They’ll look after him in Lynmouth,” said Sybil. “But I can’t go back. I won’t go back! I’d rather walk into the sea and finish it all. I was used as a slave, just a slave, not a penny in wages and nothing was going to change, ever, for the rest of my life!”

“All right, be calm,” said Ambrose.

“We don’t need help in the house,” Bess said. “Wouldn’t mind help with the milkin’ and the dairy. You any good at that?”

“I can milk and make butter,” offered Sybil, who had occasionally done so at Allerbrook. “But can I have a proper job? With a wage, and if anyone wants to marry me, can I say yes?”

“What do you think this here place is?” Ambrose enquired. “It b’ain’t no dungeon. From what ’ee’s told us and the way thee speaks, our farmhands won’t be thy kind of bridegroom. But work, and ’ee’ll be paid, only there’s to be no more gettin’ thyself into trouble. We don’t stand for that here. Decent folk, we are. Today ’ee’d better take some rest. Got any clothes apart from that grubby lot ’ee’s wearin’?”

“I had some in a bundle….” Sybil looked confused.

“I’ve got it here,” said Bess. “The bundle, I mean. It wur with her in the hay.”

“Then ’ee’d best change, take a bit of rest and wash all them messy clothes,” said Ambrose. “Tomorrow, we’ll see.”

“She’s at a farm called Stonecrop, just above Porlock, on the west side,” said Francis, coming into the dairy where Jane and Eleanor were skimming cream. He was holding yet another letter from Katherine in his hand. “She got herself taken on as a dairymaid there, it seems. She told them that Katherine treated her like a slave. She’s still calling herself Sybil Waters.”

“The mistress is furious,” said Perkins from the doorway behind Francis. “Says she won’t have Mistress Sybil back, that she never used her as a slave. She says she cared for Sybil like a daughter and she can hardly believe in such ingratitude. She’ll keep the boy, Stephen. Seems Master Owen thinks he might be trained up as a sailor….”

“I wouldn’t agree to have him back here in any case,” said Francis.

“Well, it doesn’t arise,” said Perkins. “But the mistress says she’ll have naught to do with Mistress Sybil and the Stonecrop people are welcome to her.”

“How was she found?” Jane asked.

“I found her, mistress. I’d been riding out each day, first this direction, then that, and eventually I came across the place. It’s in Culbone parish—there’s a tiny little hamlet and a little church, both called Culbone, not far away, down in the woods toward the sea. The farm’s up on the edge of the moors, though, away from the woods. Bleak kind of place. She looked tired,” he said with some compassion, “and I reckon she works as hard there as she ever did with us, but she told me she was happy and that she was being paid. I suppose that’s a point. She can go to Porlock now and again and buy herself the sort of gewgaws women like.”

“Francis,” pleaded Jane, “couldn’t Sybil come home?”

Francis flushed an angry red and Eleanor said, “Better not. At least we know that Sybil is safe with respectable people.”

“Quite. I’ve said I won’t have her back and I keep my word,” Francis said coldly. “As for you, Jane, you should put your mind to your own future. And if you don’t like it, blame Sybil. If she had behaved herself, I wouldn’t be sending you to court. One sister there is an investment, but two would be an extravagance. However, as things are, it’s your duty to me.”

Jane, also recognizing the signs of Francis’s temper, said no more, but that night she knelt by her bed and once more prayed that no court vacancy would ever arise.

For some time, it seemed that her prayers were still being heard, for no vacancy came about and in late October the news reached them that the queen had borne the king the son he wanted, and had then died. There was no queen at court now, needing ladies to attend her.

Jane, mindful of the health of her soul, did not this time let herself feel glad that another young woman had lost her life. But the sense of freedom, of safety, of knowing for certain that she could not now be sent to the court, was immense.

Until the January of 1540, when King Henry, for the fourth time, got married.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Icy Welcome 1540

“There’s Greenwich Palace,” said Ralph Palmer to Jane, standing in the bows of the hired barge which was bringing the party to the court. “See—those towers and turrets—against the sky, to the right.”

“So we’re nearly there,” said Jane bleakly.

“I wonder what this new Queen Anna is like,” said Dorothy Stone, emerging from the little covered cabin amidships, pulling her furred cloak around her more tightly and thrusting herself determinedly into the conversation, as she had been doing whenever she saw Jane and Ralph in anything like private talk. Jane glanced at her with irritation.

She had known Ralph all her life, as a kinsman, albeit a distant one. She understood now that their common ancestor had been Ralph’s great-grandfather and Jane’s great-great-grandfather. Their cousinship was therefore remote and Ralph was certainly handsome, but the simple fact that they had known each other since childhood was enough to make Jane regard him as a brother rather than a possible suitor.

She knew, too, that his family, especially his stern father, Luke, and the wealthy London cousin, Sir Edmund Flaxton, to whom she owed her appointment to court, intended him to make a grand marriage or at least a moneyed one, and Ralph would not cross his family’s wishes. The Sweetwaters were not as wealthy as they used to be and certainly were nowhere near as rich as the Stones. Ralph’s father was acquainted with Thomas Stone and Francis had told her, before she left home, that there was talk of betrothing Ralph to Dorothy.

“Once Dorothy has had a little court burnish, of course,” Francis said. “She’s a pallid little thing and hardly ever has a word to say for herself. You and she will travel there together.”

“Very well,” said Jane without enthusiasm.

“I can’t escort you,” Francis said. “I have too much to see to here, but Dr. Spenlove and Eleanor will accompany you. Dorothy’s father is going with her and Ralph is going to court, too, and will also be in the party. Now, Jane, make sure you don’t—er—upset the plans for Ralph and Dorothy in any way. You know what I mean.”

She knew perfectly well what he meant, but could not see that merely talking to Ralph, as she had talked to him a thousand times already, was going to upset anything. Dorothy’s attitude was embarrassing and a nuisance. Well, it was cold out here on the river anyway. Quietly she withdrew to the cabin in Dorothy’s stead.

It was January, a terrible month for travelling. They should have set out sooner but their departure had been delayed by storms, and the journey had been slow. Floods after heavy rain had repeatedly forced them out of their way, and then the weather had turned bitter, with winds that penetrated the sturdiest riding cloaks as though they were made of tissue paper.

When they left their horses at Kingston and hired barges instead, Jane hoped the Thames would be warmer, but it was worse, with a leaden sky reflected in the water, and sleet on the wind. She had wondered at times if this arctic journey would ever end. Not that I wanted to start out on it in the first place, she said to herself, sitting down disconsolately in the cabin.

She was not alone in it, since Eleanor was there, and so was Dr. Amyas Spenlove, the chaplain who for the past three years or so had led daily prayers at Allerbrook. He was by nature rubicund and jolly, but didn’t seem so just now. On the contrary, he looked pinched and unhappy. Dr. Spenlove was an indoor man. In a world where printing had turned the making of illuminated manuscripts into a dying art, there were still people who loved them, and creating the colourful pages was Spenlove’s hobby. Over the years he had become quite well known. At the moment he was preparing a set of the four Gospels for a Taunton gentleman.

In his room at Allerbrook he had a cupboard full of pigments and fixatives and a locked drawer containing gold and silver leaf, and a smeary table to work on. He hated being separated from his hobby and he hated cold weather. He was also, as Jane knew, sorry for her. She had admitted to him, as they rode, that she loved Allerbrook and did not want to leave it to go to court, and although he had said all the expected things, such as “You’ll enjoy yourself once you’re there,” she had seen sympathy in his eyes. He wasn’t liking this journey at all, either on her behalf or his own.

Also in the cabin were the two middle-aged tirewomen Thomas Stone and Francis had found in Taunton.

“Maid of honour is a dignified post. You must have your own woman servant,” Francis had told Jane. “Thomas Stone is looking for one for Dorothy, as well. We’ll choose sensible women, skilled at their work and not too young.”

Eleanor and the two sensible women were talking together just now and they all smiled at Jane as she stooped her head under the cabin door, but although she smiled back, she sat down as far apart from them as the cramped conditions would allow. Eleanor glanced at her thoughtfully, but let her be, for which Jane was grateful.

At home there would be a roaring fire in the hall on a day like this, the sheep and cattle would be in the shippon, and the moors above the house would be dark and brooding and yet beautiful in their stern way. The trees in Allerbrook combe would be leafless, so that the sound of the swift Allerbrook would come up clearly, especially after the recent rain. She had not dared to protest when the news came that a place in the new queen’s entourage was hers. But now, less than a fortnight after leaving home, she was so homesick that she didn’t know how to endure it, and they hadn’t even landed at Greenwich yet!

They were arriving now. The plash of the oars had ceased and the barge was gliding silently onward under its own momentum. Ralph appeared. “Time to go ashore,” he said.

Jane obeyed, followed by the other three women and the chaplain. Dorothy was already stepping ashore on her father’s arm. Through stinging sleet they all beheld the palace frontage, stretching left and right, full of windows, adorned with the towers and turrets that Ralph had pointed out. Straight ahead was a doorway, reached by a broad flight of steps. Heads bowed against the sleet, the party ran for shelter. There were guards at the top of the steps, but a large, impressive gentleman with a blond beard stepped out to greet them and led them quickly inside, into a wide vestibule.

“I’ve had someone looking out for new arrivals. When he said a barge was approaching, I hoped it would be you,” he said.

He had a heavy mantle edged with beaver fur and a thick gold chain across the chest of his black velvet doublet, and though he was not old, he had considerable presence. Jane, concluding that he was a senior court official, promptly curtsied with cheerful informality. Ralph, however, gave a perfunctory bow and said, “Hallo, Edmund!”

“Ralph! At last!”

“This is Sir Edmund Flaxton,” said Ralph, turning to the others. “My cousin—and yours as well, Jane. You’re related to him in exactly the same way as you’re related to me. He’s younger than me, believe it or not. It’s the mantle and the gold chain that give him all that gravitas.”

“You’re a cheeky puppy,” said Sir Edmund amiably. “Behave.”

“Edmund, we all want to thank you.” Ralph spoke seriously and then once more addressed the new arrivals. “He’s worked himself ragged to arrange your appointment here, Mistress Sweetwater, and yours, too, Mistress Stone, when your fathers and I requested it.”

“We are all very grateful for your endeavours,” said Thomas Stone gravely and Eleanor, who had also sunk into a deep curtsy, echoed, “Yes, most grateful” in heartfelt tones.

Ralph performed further introductions and Sir Edmund told them all to come with him. “I’ve an apartment in the palace and I’ve already bespoken some wine and hot pasties. My wife isn’t here—she’s at home in Kent with our little boy, Giles—but I’ve good servants with me. You must all be perished after travelling on water in this weather. Where did you leave your horses?”

“Kingston, to be collected on the way home,” said Dr. Spenlove glumly. “We understood that stabling couldn’t be provided here, and by the time we got to Kingston, the poor beasts had had enough, anyway. The journey was difficult. I fear we’ve arrived much later than we expected.”

“Yes. You’ve missed the wedding, as a matter of fact. This way,” said Sir Edmund.

The route to his rooms was lengthy, across courtyards through long passageways with ornate ceilings, but finally he stopped, put a key into the lock of an unobtrusive door and showed them into a well-furnished parlour with a bedchamber visible beyond a wide archway in the farther wall. A fire sent out blessed waves of heat.

“Please sit down, everyone,” Sir Edmund said. “Yes, all of you. You all look frozen.” The two tirewomen had been hanging back, but accepted the invitation thankfully. “It’s no wonder that you’re late,” their host said as they settled themselves. “Winter travelling is so difficult. But it’s a pity you took so long.”

“We made what speed we could,” said Thomas Stone anxiously. “The appointments are sound, are they not? I mean…”

“Yes, yes, perfectly sound.” Sir Edmund paused as two manservants came in with the wine and pasties he had mentioned. “Here—you probably need this. You’ve had an icy welcome.” He waited until they had been served and the servants had gone and then said, “Presently I’ll call someone to show the young ladies to their quarters and introduce them to Queen Anna and the rest of her household. But I think I had better explain the situation. If you’d been here earlier, you’d have seen it develop, but as things are…”

They looked at him in surprise, waiting for him to go on. “It’s very difficult,” he said, “and confidential. The wedding was three days ago, on the sixth of January. Since then, alas… Oh, how hard it is to explain! I must warn you. It’s no secret within the court, and if I don’t tell you, you’ll soon hear everything, but all the same, it must not be bruited about outside. The king is not pleased with his bargain. I must also tell you that Queen Anna herself seems unaware of this. She is, I think, a very decent and…and innocent lady.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Thomas. “You’re not making yourself clear.”

Sir Edmund looked at him and turned red.

“You mean,” said Ralph shrewdly, “that the marriage is no marriage and may not hold?”

“King Henry tried his best to get out of it before the vows were taken,” said Sir Edmund. “There was some talk of a precontract. But Queen Anna took an oath that it was untrue and that she was free to marry, and so that way of escape was blocked. You young ladies are coming into a delicate situation. You must walk carefully and watch your tongues, and how long there will be a queen in need of maids of honour or ladies-in-waiting, I wouldn’t like to guess.”

“But he can’t…he wouldn’t…!” gasped Eleanor.

“If there has been no carnal knowledge,” said Thomas, “he won’t need to do anything drastic. There could be an annulment. He certainly can’t behead the daughter of a noble European house, even if he manages to…er…invent…”

“Hmm,” said Ralph. “I’d heard that when His Majesty first began seeking a bride to replace Jane Seymour, Christina, the daughter of the Duchess of Milan, said she’d only marry him if she had two heads and therefore a neck to spare.”

“No one’s hiding behind any of my tapestries,” said Sir Edmund, “but there are things it isn’t advisable to say out loud. Tread carefully, cousin Ralph.”

He looked at Jane and Dorothy. “And be kind to Queen Anna. Protect her as long as you can. She, too, has had an icy welcome and she doesn’t deserve it. As a matter of fact, she is winning hearts at court and elsewhere. She is kind to her household and charitable to the poor. The only heart she can’t win, apparently, is King Henry’s!”

CHAPTER NINE

Strange New World 1540

Jane’s first impressions of life at court were blurred by bewilderment and loneliness. Of those who had come with her, Dorothy was soon the only one left and she had never been close to Dorothy. Thomas Stone, Dr. Spenlove and Eleanor left for home almost at once. Ralph stayed for two weeks, but was then taken away by Sir Edmund to a house party in Kent. After that, to all intents and purposes, Jane was alone.

She liked the new queen, though. Anna of Cleves was not beautiful, since her complexion was lustreless and her eyes heavy lidded, but she had a sweet smile and gracious manners. When Dorothy remarked to Jane that the new queen was ugly and had hardly any English, she received a sharp answer.

“She’s in a foreign country, trying to find her feet, and I think she’s got a lovely smile,” snapped Jane. “If you had to go and live in Germany, I wonder how fast you’d learn the language?”

And if there had ever been the faintest hope that because they, too, were finding their feet in a strange new world, Dorothy and Jane would draw together and make friends, it died at that moment.

Mistress Lowe, the stately matron in charge of the maids of honour, was more than a little intimidating. One of the first things that she impressed on the new arrivals was how much there was to learn. There was a routine to get used to, protocol to study and crowds of people whose identities had to be memorized just like the details of the routine.

Mistress Lowe undertook the introductions, to the court officials, the other ladies and maids of honour. There were so many that they made Jane feel dizzy.

“Mistress Sweetwater, Mistress Stone, these ladies have come from Cleves, to serve Queen Anna. This is Gertrude, this is Hanna, this is Eva…”

Of the German women, only Hanna had any English to speak of, and to Jane, they all looked alike—heavily built and dowdy. But the English women at the queen’s side were nearly as confusing. How will I ever remember all these names? Jane wondered in a panic as she and Dorothy were introduced to Mary, to Elizabeth, to another Mary, to Susanna and Elise. “And this is Madam Elizabeth, the king’s daughter.”

Madam Elizabeth was a small, solemn, redheaded girl, and she at least would be easy to remember, though in the event, Jane saw little of her, since she had her own apartments and rarely came into the presence of either the queen or the king. Another who was easy to remember, however, and was very much part of the queen’s entourage, was “Kate Howard, our youngest maid of honour.”

Kate Howard looked no more than fifteen and was as pretty as a rose, with winning manners. “You are a good girl,” Mistress Lowe said to her once when she had managed to soothe the hurt feelings of Hanna, who was sensitive. “You are like oil in a stiff lock.”

The maids of honour were supposed always to be near their mistress and ready to run errands. Jane found this hair-raising at first, as she was never sure where she was supposed to go or how to recognize whoever it was she was supposed to speak to. The principal officials, who carried white sticks as a sign of office and were actually called White Staves, all looked as dignified as emperors, while their supporting staff, who worked in a perfect warren of rooms, seemed as numerous as an army.

There was a huge department called Greencloth Accounting—because of the green-covered table at which daily conferences were held—which was entirely devoted to ordering food supplies, paying the suppliers, planning menus and dispensing the ingredients to the kitchens. Queen Anna sometimes wished for dishes not familiar to the English cooks, and Jane’s first errand was to the Greencloth Department, armed with a recipe, written out in English by the bilingual Hanna.

She lost her way three times and when she did find the right place, though people were polite and accepted the recipe she presented to them, she felt presumptuous, like a small child trying to give instruction to adults.

Other errands took her outside the palace. Sometimes, with other ladies, Jane went by river into London to look at merchants’ goods and place orders. It was not a pleasure. The court was crowded enough and at times smelly with a distasteful mingling of body odours and cloying perfumes, but London streets were worse. They were a chaos of thronging people and lofty horsemen who seemed prepared to ride down anyone who got in their way; the streets were littered with horse droppings and human ordure flung from windows, and the stench was like a hand clutching at her throat.

But there were more and worse unpleasantnesses to come, as Jane discovered, and oddly enough, her carefully acquired skill at music was responsible. Queen Anna quite soon learned from someone, probably Sir Edmund Flaxton, that young Mistress Sweetwater played the virginals well. There came an evening when, in the queen’s private rooms, which contained musical instruments, the queen, with gestures and halting phrases, asked Jane to perform for her.

The queen took supper apart, with a select group of attendants and courtiers. But the day after Jane’s debut as a musician she was told that she and pretty little Kate Howard had been invited to join the inner circle that evening, as guests. Dorothy was not included, which made her glower.

Jane was instructed to dress with care, and her tirewoman Lisa helped her put on a tawny damask very like the one which had once been meant for Sybil. “The colour suits you well, madam,” Lisa said.

A page showed her to the dining chamber, which proved to be a small but luxurious hall, hung with glowing tapestries and lit by innumerable candles. And this evening the king was present, seated beside his wife. For the first time, Jane beheld King Henry VIII of England.

She was near enough to see and hear him clearly. He was broad chested and strong voiced, jewelled and befurred, a powerfully dominant presence even when he was doing nothing more remarkable than saying good evening to his table companions. He was also, as far as Jane was concerned, heavily jowled and overweight. He reminded her of a bear she had once seen at a fair in Minehead, a lumbering thing with the same small, angry eyes. She pitied the poor queen, if Anna had to endure that hulking body on top of her at night. If Sir Edmund were correct, of course, perhaps she was spared it. In her place, Jane would have been thankful.

“You are new to the court, are you not?” said a voice in her ear, and she turned to find that her right-hand neighbour was addressing her. It was a man, and to her surprise his voice held a trace of the familiar west country accent. She looked at him with interest. He was not unlike Ralph, except that his hair was dark brown rather than black and he had a beard, which Ralph had not, and a more aquiline nose. He seemed older, too. He was smiling pleasantly at her and she smiled back.

“Yes, sir, very new. Everything is still very strange. I know hardly anyone yet.”

“My name is Peter Carew. And you are…?”

“Jane. Jane Sweetwater. Master Carew, was Sir William Carew of Mohuns Ottery in Devon a relative of yours? He was a friend of my family.”

“He was indeed, and I know who you are now, though we haven’t met before. My father spoke of the Sweetwaters sometimes. I am Sir William’s youngest son and was one of his biggest problems, until I went off with the French army and vanished,” said Peter Carew cheerfully, and chuckled.

Across the table Kate Howard called out, “What’s the joke?”

“My family history,” said Carew, grinning. “I was sent abroad when I was young and eventually disappeared so thoroughly that my parents thought I was dead. When I came back to England and went to see them before joining the court, I gave my mother such a shock that she fainted. Peter, she said, you’re dead! You’ve come back from the grave! And then she sat down on the nearest seat and rolled up her eyes and passed out. You cause trouble even by walking through a door! my father said to me.”

Jane was working it out. At that dreadful dinner that should have been for Sybil, Sir William Carew had mentioned a son, Peter, and had described him as a pert, forward brat who, when sent out in the world, had got himself demoted from page to stable boy because of misbehaviour. This must be the same Peter Carew. He seemed to be a sufficiently dignified and responsible young gentleman now. He couldn’t really be much older than Ralph. Was it the beard that made him seem so? No, it was something in the man himself. He had gone adventuring; he had seen the world and acquired experience. That was the difference.

Kate Howard was still listening. “I’m sure,” she said wickedly, “that you could cause all sorts of trouble if you wanted to.”

“Minx,” said Carew amiably, but kept his attention on Jane. “You haven’t been here long enough to realize, I suppose, but the court’s a strange place just now.”

“I know,” said Jane in a low voice.

“I like Queen Anna,” Carew said. “I was with the escort that went to meet her at Calais. But then…” He shook his head and ceased talking, because servants were coming around with dishes and could have overheard. Before supper, Mistress Lowe had warned Jane that some of the deferential persons now recommending a spicy mutton stew were paid to report questionable remarks and opinions to Thomas Cromwell, the king’s most trusted aide.

As the servers withdrew, Carew, as though he knew what Jane was thinking, remarked, “The man who has gone up to the king and is speaking to him now is Thomas Cromwell. He is a great power in the land.”

“The heavyset man in the dark clothes?”

“Yes. Not a fellow to cross, believe me,” said Carew.

“And the tall man three seats along from the king,” said Kate Howard, leaning across to interrupt, “the one with the long face and the long nose, is my uncle, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. I don’t like him.”

“Pert, that’s what you are,” said Carew. Turning back to Jane, he said quietly, “Cromwell isn’t as much in favour as he was. He did more than anyone to organize the marriage, and, well…”

“Perhaps it will be better when the queen has learned English,” said Jane. “It must be difficult when husband and wife can’t talk to each other properly.” The queen’s lady, Hanna, was seated near her mistress, probably so that she could act as interpreter. She seemed to be doing so now. Somewhat to Jane’s discomfort, she also kept glancing toward Jane herself.

Carew, who had not noticed, recalled Jane’s attention. “It’s not just that. There are feelings no one can command. As I was saying, I was in the escort that brought Queen Anna from Calais. We got her as far as Rochester, in Kent, and then King Henry arrived, galloping on horseback, dressed as a gentleman but not as a king. He wanted to surprise her, to play the passionate lover. He was as eager as a boy,” said Carew, still speaking low, though no one, surely, thought Jane, could think it treasonable to say that King Henry had romantic leanings.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Cromwell was with him, but the king was shown to her rooms on his own, as though he were just another noble visitor. When he came out… Well, I saw his face, and then I heard him say to Cromwell, I like her not. He didn’t mean her lack of English, Jane. He meant something—much more earthy. I suppose he did his best. He changed into more royal-looking clothes, had himself announced again, this time as the king, and went through the motions of being delighted with her.”

“I see,” said Jane, remembering what Sir Edmund had told them when she and her companions first arrived.

“He had to go through with it,” Carew said. “You can’t fetch the daughter of a powerful foreign duke over to England, then turn up your nose and send her back as though she were goods supplied on approval, and didn’t meet your standards. It could cause all kinds of diplomatic repercussions—even destroy alliances. Every king needs his allies, just in case. Besides, it would have been rude and unkind. King Henry can be chivalrous. Well, I think he tried to be,” said Carew, his voice now very cautious. “But not, I fancy, successfully, and however well she learns English—well, I fear he will end up risking the diplomatic upheavals. And, of course, there are all these absurd religious problems.”

He glanced at her face and laughed again. “Oh, what is it?” cried Kate Howard, abruptly interrupting her own right-hand neighbour, who had been trying to talk to her about an entertainment which was scheduled for the next day. “Do share the joke!”

“It’s no joke,” said Carew brusquely, and kept his eyes on Jane’s face. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? The point is that though the king has broken away from Rome, so that we have prayers in English instead of Latin and no more worshipping of idols in what we all now call the popish style, nevertheless, the church in England is still much what it was in other ways. The heresies of Martin Luther are still heresies. The queen has been docile in religious matters and worships just as the king does, but she comes from a Lutheran country. There are people who fear that her influence, if she were ever to acquire any, would be pernicious.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jane, who didn’t. Ralph’s father, Luke, was said to admire the teachings of a German called Martin Luther, but she had never been clear about what they were.

“Shhh!” said the man on Peter’s other side. “The king wants to say something.”

They looked toward the top table, whereupon Jane discovered that she and Kate Howard were the object of the royal attention. King Henry, in fact, was raising a goblet to them both.

“We have two young ladies here this evening who have not supped in our company before! Welcome, Mistress Kate Howard, Mistress Jane Sweetwater!”

“Stand up! Stand straight!” hissed Thomas Cromwell, suddenly appearing beside the lower table and making get up at once gestures at Kate and Jane.

“A toast!” boomed the genial monster in the seat of honour. “A toast to youth and beauty and gracious womanly charm. To Kate Howard, to Jane Sweetwater. Health and long life!”

Glasses and goblets were raised. The toast was drunk. “Sit down,” muttered Cromwell.

They sat, but His Majesty hadn’t finished. “Which one of you is Jane Sweetwater?” he demanded, and a prod from Cromwell brought Jane to her feet once more.

“My queen tells me that you play the virginals well,” rumbled King Henry. “This evening, dear Mistress Sweetwater, you must play once more, for both of us.”

Kate Howard, in her frivolous way, laughed again. It was a pretty and natural sound, different from the carefully cultivated laughter of many of the court ladies, who used mirth, as often as not, as a way of expressing polite scorn.

But three seats away from Henry, Kate’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, turned what his niece, accurately enough, had described as his long face and his long nose toward Jane, stared at her with cold dark eyes, and without either speaking or moving, exuded toward her the information that he at least did not wish her well.

It was an interminable evening. There was dancing immediately after supper, but the king danced only once with his wife. Jane, on the contrary, and to her alarm, was twice led onto the floor by King Henry. He smelt of rancid sweat and sandalwood soap—no doubt meant to disguise the sweat, which it hadn’t—and his big beefy hands were hot. Once more she saw Norfolk looking at her with dislike, although Kate Howard, too, was invited to dance twice. After that, both of them were bidden to accompany the queen to her quarters, where Henry presently joined them, and with Kate to turn the pages of the music for her, Jane was commanded to play.

Both king and queen applauded and asked for more. It was late before she reached her bed. She found poor Lisa drooping in a seat in the dormitory.

“I’m sorry, madam,” Lisa said, helping her to undress. “I’m supposed to be a tirewoman but just now a tired woman is what I feel like.”

“So do I. I hope we can both rest a little tomorrow,” said Jane, much concerned.

“I heard that the king was there tonight. Did you dance with him?”

“Yes,” said Jane gloomily. “And played music for him and the queen afterward.”

A pattern which was to be repeated time after time throughout the weeks that followed, with Henry’s beefy hands growing, it seemed, hotter and more embarrassingly enquiring during every dance, and Henry’s compliments, on her footwork, her music and her appearance, more lavish and disquieting. Until the second of May, when King Henry kissed her.

I’ve been the biggest fool in Christendom, Sybil told herself as she scrambled out of bed and into her clothes and down the stairs of Stonecrop farmhouse, in order to plunge out into the cold and dark of a February morning to feed the sow and the poultry before breakfast.

She had thought she was to be a dairymaid, but Stonecrop was short of hands and everyone seemed to do everything, as required. After breakfast she and Alison must muck out the stable and byre, and pile the steamy result on the enormous midden. Every kind of bodily waste, animal or human, went onto that midden, and before very long, Alison had said, they’d be taking the stinking stuff to the fields in baskets on their backs, and spreading it to fertilize the earth before the spring ploughing.

She seemed to be permanently wet, cold and filthy. At Lynmouth she had worked but indoors, at least. And what was happening to Stephen all this time? She’d thought she didn’t care about him, but now she was constantly wondering how he was, whether he missed her, was looking for her, crying for her…

I don’t wish he’d never been born, said Sybil to herself, shovelling horse dung. I just wish that I hadn’t.

CHAPTER TEN

Fearful Majesty 1540

Court life did of course have its good moments. Jane attended a tournament and marvelled at the immense horses and heavily armoured riders as they charged each other, separated by a brightly coloured barrier but reaching across it with lethal-looking lances. She also liked walking in the grounds with the Queen and enjoyed dancing when King Henry wasn’t there. When he was, he never failed to partner her at least once.

Peter Carew sometimes danced with her, which was much more agreeable, or strolled beside her when queen and courtiers went walking. It was from Peter that she learned that she was not imagining the unfriendly looks she kept receiving from the Duke of Norfolk.

“He saw before the wedding that this marriage was going to be a catastrophe,” Carew said. “And straightaway he started getting notions about his niece. The gossip is that he’d put her into Henry’s bed himself if he got the chance. As a mistress or even a wife, if Henry manages to get out of this toil he’s in—and he might, from all I hear.”

Jane had heard the same thing, mainly from Hanna, who sometimes, worriedly, talked to the English ladies.

“The king sometimes sleeps in her chamber,” Hanna had said, “but all he does is kiss her good-night, and then kiss her good-morning and leave her. On the first night he fumbled about in a way she did not like, but from what she says, it came to naught and he doesn’t do even that now. She says she hopes for children, but, poor soul, she does not know how children are made. We do not tell her, for that is for the King to do. Besides, it is no use for her to know—things—if he will not do his part. We are anxious for her.”

It seemed to Jane that the few happy occasions would always be overshadowed by things that were not happy at all. The miserable royal marriage was one of these. Her homesickness was another and she was made uncomfortable by Dorothy’s obvious resentment because the king never solicited her hand in dancing. Carew didn’t either. Dorothy, in fact, was a wallflower.

Matters worsened rapidly when the court moved upstream to London and Whitehall Palace for the May Day celebrations.

It was Jane’s first experience of the strange mixture of order and chaos which was King Henry’s court on the move. Instructions were exact. All personal belongings must be clearly labelled. Porters would take everything to the barges that were to transport baggage to Whitehall. Only the most important people could take furniture and bedding and hangings; the rest must accept what they found awaiting them at the other end.

Jane made sure that her goods were carefully labelled, but Lisa panicked slightly at the idea of their things being borne away to be piled up in the barge with other hampers and bundles, and prayed aloud that nothing would get lost or broken. However, the journey, though chilly, was accomplished without incident. But when the maids of honour had been shown to their new dormitory and the baggage was brought in, Jane’s biggest hamper wasn’t there.

“Oh, madam, I knew something would go wrong with your things. I knew it!” wailed Lisa.

“Well, it isn’t your fault,” Jane said soothingly. “Or mine, either,” she added, frowning. “My brother painted my name on all my hampers and boxes before I left home and I stuck two labels on each piece of luggage, as well. I begged some glue from the Greencloth room. They keep it so that the kitchen staff can mend pots and pans and so on. Look, you can see them on the other things. I can’t understand it.”

Appealed to, Mistress Lowe said there was a room where unlabelled baggage was put until it was claimed, but when Jane and Lisa followed her directions, with difficulty, since Whitehall was a tangled maze of courtyards and separate buildings, they found that the room was now part of an extended Greencloth office and no one seemed to know where mislaid baggage had been stowed. A little later Peter Carew, finding Lisa and Jane down on the landing stage distractedly peering around, asked what they were about.

“I wondered if a hamper of mine had been left here by mistake,” Jane said. “It hasn’t been brought to our dormitory.”

“There’s a room where unidentified luggage is put,” said Carew comfortingly. “Come. I’ll show you.”

“We’ve been there,” said Jane. “But it’s being used for something else—there are clerks in it.”

“I don’t mean that one, I mean the new one. It’s been changed. No one ever remembers to tell anyone anything in this court! Details are always going wrong. Come with me.”

He led them to the right place, and the missing hamper was there. “The labels must have been torn off by accident, madam,” Lisa said. “I saw the way the porters just toss things about. Disgraceful, it is.”

“But both labels have come off—and they’ve been ripped off,” said Jane, examining the hamper. “There are just scraps of them left, and look! Someone’s splashed something over the place where Francis painted my name. It’s been covered over by—well, it looks like ink.”

“Is there someone at court who doesn’t like you, Mistress Sweetwater?” Carew asked, quite seriously.

“It’s a woman, if so,” said Lisa. “This is what spiteful women do. And I can put a name to the hussy, as well!”

“Leave it,” said Jane. “Let’s just take the hamper to the dormitory and not speak of this. I’ve got my property back. Master Carew, I must thank you for your help.”

“I’m always willing to assist a young lady in distress,” Carew said. He added suddenly and cryptically, “Remember that. Especially if there is spitefulness about.”

He left them before Jane could ask him what he meant. She asked Lisa instead, as they were carrying the hamper into the empty dormitory. “I don’t understand,” she said in puzzlement.

“I do,” said Lisa. “And I can put a name to the girl who did it.”

“Who?”

Lisa opened her mouth to reply, but closed it as the door opened and Dorothy came in with her tirewoman Madge. “So you found your things after all,” said Dorothy rudely. “You ought to take more care with your labels. Fancy gluing them on so feebly that they just fall off.”

Madge, who was very partisan as far as her young mistress was concerned, turned away quickly, but not quickly enough to hide a sly, smug smile. Jane looked at Lisa, who nodded.

“Start the unpacking,” said Jane, and turned grimly to face Dorothy.

“I took every care. Most people tie their labels on, so how did you know I used glue? I didn’t announce it and you weren’t in the room when I was sticking them on. They were wrenched off deliberately and where my name was painted on the wicker, someone has blanked it out with ink. Now, I wonder who did that?”

Dorothy coloured but tossed her head. “It wasn’t me, if that’s what you mean.”

“No?”

“Oh, don’t put on such righteous, haughty airs! Just because the king and Master Carew both dance with you…”

“Dorothy, what in the world is the matter with you? You surely don’t care whether you dance with the king or not.” It was incredible to Jane that anyone could actually wish to be physically close to the malodorous Henry. “And you have a handsome man of your own. Aren’t you going to marry Ralph Palmer?”

“There’s an understanding. We’re not formally betrothed yet and if we ever do marry, Ralph Palmer will be marrying my dowry, not me,” Dorothy retorted. “If yours were bigger, he’d take you instead and he’d probably rather. I saw him looking at you sometimes on the way here.”

“Oh, Dorothy!” said Jane helplessly.

She worried about it all through the May Day celebrations, with their tournaments and masques. On the following day Queen Anna said to her, in her slow English, “Hanna has written…how to make a dish I like. It is like a cake made with rice and covered in…bread in tiny bits….”

“Crumbs?” said Jane.

“Yes, so. Crumbs. And fried and served with cold, sharp stewed apples. Very good. Hanna does not like talking…to English officials. Take this to the kitchen and explain. I wish it tomorrow at supper.”

I don’t like giving orders to officials, either, Jane thought, but orders from the queen must be obeyed. However, the White Stave she spoke to in the Greencloth room was not one of the overdignified ones and was kind enough to tell her a quicker way back to the queen’s apartments.

“Whitehall is confusing, I know. But—” he pointed through a window “—you can cut through that building there. It has a small council chamber downstairs and the king is in conference there now, but there is a staircase just inside the door and no one will mind if you go up one floor and walk through the upstairs gallery. At the far end is another staircase and you can go down to a courtyard. The side door to the queen’s lodging is just a few steps to your left.”

Jane was glad of the guidance, since the good May Day weather had now given way to rain. She found the building the White Stave had pointed out and went up to the gallery, a wide and handsome place with a long row of windows. Settles with arm-ends shaped like lions’ heads and crimson cushions with gold fringes strewn on the seats, stood here and there, and oak chests with gold-inlaid carvings were placed between the windows. Rain blew against the diamond-leaded panes and she was glad to be on the indoor side of them.

Then, as she was walking through the gallery, a figure she decidedly did not want to meet entered through a small door near the far end. The conference, presumably, was over. At any rate, King Henry had left it.

He had seen her. There was nothing to do but stand aside and curtsy. He seemed to be on his own and he looked angry. She kept her eyes down as he approached, hoping he would just walk past, but instead he stopped, stretched one of those beefy hands down, slipped it under her elbow and raised her.

“Mistress Jane! You’re a healing sight for a harassed man. My nobles! All hummings and hawings and protocol and…ah well, never mind. Come and cheer me for a little.” He led her to the nearest settle and she found herself obliged to sit on it beside him. His thick, powerful arm went around her.

“There is something you must know,” he said. “Something that I suspect all you ladies have guessed anyway. Queen Anna and I…are not more than friends. I am seeking a way to dissolve the union, without harming her. I wish her to be respected and provided for and treated as my sister—but we cannot go on pretending to be man and wife. Cromwell is making every possible difficulty, damn the man. Others, not you, will have the task of telling the queen, but I want you to know. Can you guess why?”

With that, the powerful arm tightened and turned her to face him, and the big square countenance came close and his mouth clamped itself over hers. She dared not struggle, but the feel of his fat tongue forcing its way into her own mouth made her want to retch. She controlled the urge with a gigantic effort as he nuzzled and sucked. He had been drinking wine and the taste was on his tongue. Secondhand wine, thought Jane wildly, was horrible. There were tears in her eyes. The whole ghastly business seemed to go on forever.

He let her go at last, but put a thick forefinger on one of her eyebrows and said, “Dear little Jane. Are these tears? Have I moved you so much?”

“I…I am overwhelmed,” Jane found herself stammering. She blurted out something else, about fearful majesty, and he laughed and began to fumble at her clothes. “Please,” said Jane. “Please…sir…Your Majesty…”

Rescue came, but not in an agreeable form. She had been longing for it, but would have preferred it not to come in the shape either of the Duke of Norfolk or Thomas Cromwell. They, however, were both in the group of men who now followed Henry into the gallery and came striding toward them. Norfolk’s expression as he looked at her was that of a bird of prey eyeing a mouse.

Henry freed her and stood up. “Well, gentlemen. I left you to further deliberations. I hope you have some sensible suggestions to make to me now.” He smiled at Jane. “Go back to Queen Anna, but…” His voice dropped. “No word of this happy encounter. You understand? We will talk more in due time. Yes, Sir Thomas? What have you to tell me?”

Jane was dismissed. She was obliged to pass Norfolk and his companions, which shouldn’t have been difficult because the gallery was so wide. But Cromwell had instantly engaged the king in earnest conversation and Henry had turned away from her. He did not see Norfolk shoot out a hand and grip her shoulder, spinning her around to look at him.

“Slut,” said Norfolk softly. Then he let her go and she was on her way again, with tears once more in her eyes.

She found the stair at the end of the gallery and ran down it, thrusting open the door at the foot and fleeing out into the rain. The side door to the queen’s lodgings was only a few yards away and she hastened to it, with mingled rain and tears almost blinding her.

Just inside the door she stopped short, leaning against the wall. She felt breathless and her heart was hammering. Never had she wished more ardently that she could be back at home, sewing with Eleanor in the parlour with its view of the brown and purple moorlands, or riding down green-shadowed Allerbrook combe.

Inside her, something seemed to have snapped. I can’t stay here. I can’t stay at this court, said Jane to herself. The door through which she had just come opened again and Peter Carew came striding in.

“Jane! I saw you running in here as if you were in a panic and, well, here you are, propped against a wall and…” He came toward her, looking at her keenly. “You’re crying. Jane, what’s amiss?”

“King Henry,” said Jane miserably. Peter looked bewildered.

“I met him in a gallery and he kissed me. And he wants to divorce Queen Anna. Did you know?”

“Most of the court knows, except for the queen herself.”

“I can’t bear it. I daren’t stay here. I’m going home. I’ll take Lisa with me. Where’s the best place to hire horses from, to start us on our way?”

“Good God, you can’t go off with only Lisa as an escort!”

“I must. After what happened in that gallery, I must! I don’t suppose I’ll be granted permission, so I’ll just go.”

“No, you won’t…no, listen! You’re right to want to get away, unless you’re prepared to end up as another concubine, in wedlock or out of it, living in luxury and the target of spite and not only from the other girls. The Duke of Norfolk wouldn’t be your friend either. I told you I’m always willing to help a young lady in distress. And I’ve always had a liking,” he added with a grin, “for doing lawless things, especially in a good cause. As it happens, I’m leaving the court myself tomorrow—with permission—to visit my mother in Devon. She’s been lonely since my father died.”

“But how…what…?”

“Listen. Let me think. Yes, I know. I’m good at getting into trouble and getting out of it as well, but there’s no need to ask for it. Here’s what you must do…”

“I’d better leave word of some sort,” Jane said as his instructions ended. “I’m part of the queen’s household. She’ll feel responsible. She might send after me! Maybe King Henry will, too!”

“King Henry,” said Peter, though he kept his voice down, “is still officially a married man, and—this is treason, of course, kindly don’t repeat it—what with putting Queen Catherine aside, beheading Queen Anne and now planning to annul his present consort, he’s getting a reputation. If he goes chasing, either personally or by proxy, after an errant maid of honour, there’ll be talk and even laughter. He won’t want that! Leave a note for the queen. Don’t mention the king. Say you were homesick. Say you’re going home with a reliable escort. That should reduce the chance of any pursuit. Can you trust your tirewoman?”

“Lisa? Yes.”

“Does she need to travel by pillion or can she ride?”

“Lisa rides very well. You won’t fail me?”

“I won’t fail you. I love an adventure,” said Peter, laughing. “Oh, and don’t worry. You will travel as my sister and I shall not treat you as anything else. I’ll bring you home unharmed, I promise.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Wrong Response 1540

Afterward, Jane marvelled at how smoothly it went. The following evening, as Peter had suggested, she pretended to feel unwell. In the morning the other maids of honour went to the chapel with their tirewomen, but Jane, still complaining of illness, stayed behind with Lisa to look after her. Once everyone else was out of sight, she rose and prepared a note while Lisa packed a hamper with essentials. Then she put the note half under her pillow. It would be found, but with luck, not for some time.

Because the hamper was heavy, she helped Lisa carry it outside and down to the landing stage. They were stopped only once, by a White Stave who was not for some reason in the chapel, and who called to them, quite jovially, to ask where they were going. Jane had planned for this sort of thing and answered unflinchingly that they were on a char itable errand for the queen.

“What’s in the hamper, then? Clothes for the poor?”

“Yes,” said Jane, and opened the lid to show the respectable but dull cloak she had deliberately put on top. Queen Anna collected plain and hard-wearing items of clothing to be sent to the people responsible for distributing charity: the vicars, mayors, parish overseers in charge of housing orphans and apprenticing them to trades. The White Stave nodded, smiled and stepped back to let them pass.

“Come, Lisa,” said Jane briskly. “We should hurry. We mustn’t be late back.” Whereupon the White Stave escorted them to the landing stage in person and hailed a boatman for them.

Jane gave the boatman his instructions while Lisa, who had grasped her conspirator’s role very well, busily thanked the White Stave and prevented him from hearing the words White Bull Inn. They boarded and waved goodbye to him and then they were off on time, making for the inn three miles upstream. Peter Carew was there, as he had said he would be. He introduced them to the landlord as his sister and her woman servant, and since neither of them had breakfasted, ordered refreshments. After that, the two grooms who were with him saddled the horses he had hired and they set out again, by road.

Jane was still afraid of possible pursuit, but Carew was not. There was something very resolute about him, Jane thought.

“The court’s like a rabbit warren,” he said, “especially at Whitehall. Everyone will think you’re just somewhere else. By the time your note is found, we’ll be leagues away. Don’t be anxious.”

He added, as they rode on, “That landlord thinks you’re my sister, but the grooms know who you are and that you’re escaping from the court to protect your good name. They approve. Have no fear of any of us.”

It took eight days of steady riding, but there were no alarms and Peter never seemed uncertain of the road. “How is it that you know your way about so thoroughly? I thought you’d been abroad for years!” Jane asked him once.

“I was, but since I’ve been back, I’ve travelled with the court on royal progresses and besides, I always make sure I understand the world I’m living in and how to get from here to there. You never know when it may come in useful.”

He grinned at her, a bold, adventurer’s grin. Combined with his air of experience and maturity, it created a heady attraction. Jane, looking at his strong brown face with its aquiline nose and shapely chin, experienced a curious physical sensation, as though a warm and powerful hand had gripped her guts and jerked.

This would never do. She must not indulge such feelings. She had no business to have them. She must not fall in love with Peter Carew! He came, and she knew it, from a family even more in the habit of making wealthy marriages than Ralph’s. A Sweetwater wouldn’t qualify. That was the way of the world.

Peter showed no sign of falling in love in return. Both he and his grooms showed Jane and Lisa the utmost respect. Jane knew she must be grateful for this and quelled the regrettable part of her that seemed, mysteriously, to be wishing the contrary. She kept Lisa always by her side and guarded her tongue, to the point, she sometimes thought, of seeming dull and prim. On the morning of the ninth day, she came home.

When she was once more within sight of the Exmoor hills, she felt a relief so great that she could almost have fallen from the saddle to kiss the ground beneath. It was raining, but the soft drizzle of Somerset felt like a caress. The very village seemed to welcome her. She looked with delight at the tower of St. Anne’s church, built of pale Caen stone, imported for the purpose long ago by one of Jane’s own forebears. And there on its knoll stood Clicket Hall, which was similar to Allerbrook House but older, the battlements of its small tower more genuine looking and less ornamental than Allerbrook’s.

Even the thatched houses of the village seemed to smile at her. This was home. She would never go back to the court. The king would probably turn his attention to poor little Kate Howard now and she pitied the girl, but Kate must look after herself. Jane Sweetwater had escaped, and forever.

They started up the combe under the dripping trees, the pinkish mud of the track squelching beneath the horses’ hooves and splashing up their legs. The main track to Allerbrook House led off to the left about two-thirds of the way up to the ridge. Then the house was in sight, with smoke drifting from the chimneys. “Home!” said Jane ecstatically. Peter, who had a bigger horse, looked down at her and laughed.

“You would never survive years abroad, would you? You’re no wanderer. Not like me.”

The thought shot through her mind that if she had Peter Carew for company, perhaps she could bear to travel; perhaps, with him, everything would seem different. But she mustn’t say that, or even let her eyes betray it. “Here we are,” he was saying. “Your very own gate.”

“Our very own dogs and geese, as well!” said Jane as the usual cacophony broke out to welcome them.

It brought Francis out of the house at once. He came across the yard at a run, holding a coat over his head.

“God’s teeth! Jane! What are you doing here? And who is this?” He stared inimically at Carew.

“I’m Peter, the youngest son of your old friend Sir William Carew. I have escorted Mistress Jane all the way from Whitehall Palace. She has come home of her own free will and for a good and honourable reason. She’ll tell you all about it herself. Master Sweetwater, I don’t want to impose on you, but we’ve been on the road since early this morning. The horses need rest and fodder and both I and my grooms would welcome something to eat. I’m not inviting myself to dine, but…”

“You’d better dine,” said Francis shortly. “And of course we’ll take care of the horses. Get down and come inside.”

His voice was brusque, and as he helped Jane to alight she looked into his face and saw no friendly welcome there. His blue eyes were cold. He turned away as soon as she was safely down and led the way indoors without looking back. The maids came out to meet her, but their welcome seemed muted and the house felt curiously empty.

Master Corby, she knew, had left his post and gone away, but neither Dr. Spenlove nor Eleanor appeared from anywhere to greet her, and why was there a goshawk in the hall? Francis had set up a perch for her; clearly keeping her there was now a regular thing. There were mutes splashed on the floor amid the rushes. Eleanor would hate that! Where was Eleanor? Timidly, as she pulled her drenched cloak off, she addressed Francis’s back and asked.

For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he turned and she saw that his jaw was clenched and that his eyes had tears in them. “She’s in the family tomb in St. Anne’s, my dear. She died a week ago. Dr. Spenlove is down in Clicket now, talking to the mason about extra wording to go on the side of the tomb. I meant to write to you today.”

It had been a chill, nothing more. Over dinner, which Peggy had hastily enlarged for the visitors by frying a lot of sausages and onions and cutting extra bread, Francis explained. They had been buying goods in Dulverton. The weather had turned suddenly treacherous and Eleanor had been both wet and cold when she came home.

“She’d had a cold just before. She still had a cough. We set out in sunshine—it should have done her good. Instead—she relapsed. She was dead inside a week,” said Francis shortly. It was as though he were angry as well as grieving.

With obvious sincerity Carew expressed condolences. Jane, both grief-stricken and shocked, shed tears and exclaimed, “Oh, Francis!”

Francis, however, merely nodded coldly. The hall was warm and the food welcome, but there was a stiff atmosphere around the table which didn’t seem to be connected to Eleanor’s death. When Jane caught Peter Carew’s eye, she saw that he had noticed the awkwardness, as well. In an attempt to lighten the air, she said, “It’s as well I’m here. I can take charge of the house and look after you, Francis.”

“I was managing very well, thank you,” said Francis, still in a voice which seemed to hold fury as much as sorrow.

Peter Carew glanced at him thoughtfully, but maintained a tactful silence. After the meal, having been assured that the horses had been groomed and given food, he took his leave and with the grooms, rode off on the last stage of his own journey home to Devon. His home in Mohuns Ottery was still a long way off.

“He was very kind,” said Jane as she and Francis stood at the door to watch them go. She wished Peter could have stayed. He had felt like a bulwark against whatever it was that was so angering Francis. “He took every care of Lisa and myself and behaved…behaved in a very gentlemanly way. I haven’t told you yet why I’ve come home.”

“No,” Francis agreed. “And now, my dear sister, send your woman to unpack your belongings and let us sit by the hall fire, and then you can do your explaining. And by all the saints, your excuse had better be good.”

“You complete fool,” said Francis when he had heard her story. “You unmitigated wantwit! I don’t suppose it will be any use to send you back. Very likely the court wouldn’t have you! I suppose I’ll have to send to Taunton to hire a messenger to let Queen Anna know you’ve reached your home safely. Thank you so much, Jane, for putting me to so much trouble, and for ruining your chances and mine.”

“Francis, what are you talking about?”

“You had a unique opportunity, my girl. Rumours get around. They reach us here, far from London though we are. Ralph Palmer is back in the west country now and he brought a tale or two. And there have been others. I went to a fair at Dunster just before Eleanor died. The Luttrells seem to be basing themselves at East Quantoxhead mostly now, but I came across the steward they’ve left at Dunster Castle. He hears from them and they hear plenty of news from the court. He says that the king hasn’t taken to his new queen. And now you tell me he’s had his eyes on you! By the sound of it, you could have become his mistress if you’d gone about it the right way.”

“But…you wouldn’t want me to do that! Francis, you couldn’t!” It was the last kind of welcome she had expected. It was altogether the wrong response. “You were so angry with Sybil when…”

“Sybil played the whore with one of my tenants! A man of no importance! You could have had the favour of the king! Think what rewards he might have given you, and your family! In fact, if the Luttrells’ steward was right, the king means to get out of that marriage. Maybe you’d have had a chance to be something more than a mistress, and think what that could do for us!”

“Yes, I could end up headless!”

“Nonsense. You would have more sense. I told you that before.”

“I don’t believe poor Anne Boleyn ever did the things they said she did. She just didn’t have a son, that’s all. No woman can guarantee that!”

“And many women do have sons! Why shouldn’t you? But you had to panic like a silly milkmaid and run away!”

“I can’t believe this,” said Jane despairingly. “Francis, you can’t have wanted me to…to…”

“It could have sent our fortunes soaring. I grieve for Eleanor. I miss her every day and I’ll mourn her decently. But in time I’ll look for another wife, and with you at the king’s side, I might have looked high. I might have been given a valuable appointment, a title! We live in a harsh world, full of competition—didn’t I say something like that to you before? But now, thanks to you, in King Henry’s eyes I’ll be just the brother of the girl who said no. What am I going to do with you?”

There was a silence, furious and disappointed on Francis’s side, furious and frightened on Jane’s. It went on until the sound of honking and barking outside announced that a new visitor had come. Francis got up and went to the window.

“Ah. It’s Harry Hudd. He had an errand to Exford and I asked him, while he was about it, to look at a young horse I’d heard of, a very uncommon colour, apparently. Copper’s getting old. I told Harry to buy on my behalf if the animal was sound. Why, yes.” Francis, for the first time since Jane’s return, sounded pleased. “Come and look. There’s a man in Exford who breeds unusual-looking horses. He bought a stallion from Iceland—not a large animal, but he’s been crossing him with bigger mares and this is one of the results. Look at that.”

Jane joined him at the window. Harry Hudd, as red faced and gap-toothed as ever, was in the farmyard, swearing at the gander while simultaneously dismounting from his Exmoor gelding and grasping the halter of a striking young horse, nearly sixteen hands tall and gleaming black, except for its mane and tail which were silvery white.

“Harry’s a good reliable man,” Francis said, “though I grant you he’s no beauty.” He paused, and then, as one to whom an interesting new idea has occurred, he said, “He’s been talking for a couple of years of getting married again but the trouble is, he hasn’t been able to find a young woman willing to take him. He wants a young wife. He’s a bit like the king—feels the need of a son.”

At which moment, Jane became sickeningly aware of two things.

One was that she wished wholeheartedly that she had journeyed on to Mohuns Ottery with Peter Carew. She had tried not to fall in love with him, but at some point on the ride to Somerset she had given him her heart and he had ridden away with it. She was in love with Peter Carew and more than that; she loved him, which was not the same thing at all, but much bigger. It was the for better for worse love that could hold for a lifetime and face, with sorrow but not dismay, the inevitable end of life, in illness and old age. There was nothing to be done about it. Weirdly, it could well have been easier for her to marry the king than a Carew.

Marriage to Peter was a dream that could not be realized. It was also a dream that would not die until she did.

The other was that Francis was very angry with her indeed and that he had seen a way, a most appalling way, of getting his revenge.

Part Two

THE SILENT OATH 1540–1541

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bad Dreams Can Come True 1540

It had been a bad dream. Just a bad dream, nothing more. Opening her eyes on a September dawn, Jane wondered how she could possibly have dreamed that she was married to Harry Hudd and living at Rixons Farm, no longer a Sweetwater lady entitled to spend all day on fine embroidery if she chose, but working from daybreak to nightfall and spending the night in the bed of an unprepossessing middle-aged farmer. What a silly fantasy! Of all the absurd…

She woke up fully and, not for the first time, discovered that the bad dream was real. She really was in Harry Hudd’s lumpy bed and beside her, Harry was just waking up. He opened first one watery blue eye and then the other and grinned his gap-toothed grin. “Ah. Me liddle darling. Just time afore the milkin’, eh?” he said in a throaty tone that she recognized all too well.

He rolled on top of her, groping beneath the covers. She tried, as she had often tried before, to close her eyes and pretend that this wasn’t Harry but Peter Carew, but her bedfellow, with his animal odour and his pawing and thrusting and complete absence of anything that could be described as tenderness, could not be anyone but Harry.

She could only lie there and resign herself. Fortunately, he never seemed to expect any kind of response from her, which was just as well, for she couldn’t imagine giving it.

Francis had arranged it, as she had feared he would, but all the same, Francis was not the only one to blame. Her crime was no crime in most people’s eyes, and at heart he knew it. He might never have gone through with this had it not been for Dorothy. Jane was not cruel by nature, but if Dorothy were ever arrested and taken into the depths of the Tower of London and racked, and Jane had the power to rescue her, she didn’t think she’d use it. Dorothy had blocked her way of escape. Dorothy, as much as—or perhaps more than—Francis, was responsible for this.

The shock of Dorothy’s behaviour had been all the worse because at first Francis, angry as he was, had refrained from criticizing Jane in front of other members of the household, and she had begun to think that after all, life might settle down.

She tried to be useful. She missed Eleanor badly, but at least Lisa was allowed to stay as her maid and companion, and otherwise the household was almost as it had been before she left for court. Susie, now married to the groom Tim Snowe and expecting a child, was rearing poultry at his cottage, and had been replaced by Letty, from Clicket. Letty was thin, wiry, hardworking and unlikely to marry. She had had an understanding with a lad in Clicket but he had backed out after smallpox marked her face.

“I’m the same girl now as I was afore I got pockmarked, but he were too daft to know it. I’ll never give another man the time of day as long as I live,” Letty had said when she first came to Allerbrook. Pockmarked or not, she was a good cook and as handy with a hoe or a pitchfork as any man. Jane and Letty liked each other and worked well together.

Dr. Spenlove, who had always been Jane’s friend, was still there. Spenlove openly congratulated her on her good sense in fleeing the king’s advances. Spenlove, more than anyone, might have helped to reconcile Francis to his sister’s return home.

But then Thomas and Mary Stone, who had been away in Kent, reappeared, opened Clicket Hall, announced that Dorothy was coming home from court to be formally betrothed to Ralph Palmer and issued invitations to a celebration dinner in June.

That betrothal dinner also featured from time to time in Jane’s dreams, or rather nightmares. With the Stones as with his own household, Francis kept up the pretence that all was well between himself and his sister, and when they both received invitations, he accepted them. Jane set off for the party in good spirits.

They found a houseful of guests at Clicket Hall. Thomas, the host, was well dressed and genial; Mary, though fatter than ever and bulging out of her silk dress, glowed with pride at her daughter’s catch. It promised to be a most happy occasion.

Except that this time Luke Palmer had been well enough to accompany his son Ralph. Ralph, dark and debonair, was very much the dutiful son, helping his elderly father out of the saddle and offering him an arm into the house. Not that Luke Palmer seemed to need help. He had taken a physician’s advice, adopted a rigorous diet and overcome his gout. He had ridden all the way from Bideford. He clearly approved of Dorothy. But it was Luke Palmer who caused the atmosphere to deteriorate, when he rose to his feet halfway through the feast and made a startling speech.

In it, he expressed conventional good wishes to the couple, but then declared roundly that if Ralph were ever unfaithful to his charming bride he, Luke, would spread the news of this behaviour from one side of the country to the other and right through the royal court.

“And that won’t be all, either,” he had added, looking as grimly at his son as though Ralph had already assembled a harem and declared that he meant to install it under his marital roof. “I’ve driven the old Adam out of him before and I will again if I have to. Mistress Dorothy, if you ever need a champion, come to me.”

Ralph turned beetroot and Dorothy’s face almost matched the crimson damask in which she was once more most unsuitably dressed. Everyone else took refuge in a shattered silence. Such remarks, people commented afterward, were in extremely bad taste and typical of Luke Palmer.

The normal atmosphere of a betrothal feast did presently show signs of recovery, with Dorothy, now smiling again, as the centre of attention, but there was more embarrassment to come. Triumphant at being betrothed to so handsome a fellow as Ralph, and full of her recent sojourn at court, Dorothy, who had once had so little to say for herself, became talkative.

There had been plague in London, she said. Her tirewoman Madge had fallen victim to it, though fortunately while she was off duty for a few days, visiting relatives in London. “The outbreak was mainly in the town,” Dorothy said. “But I was glad to come home, though in fact, King Henry has sent the queen and her women to Richmond Palace. To be out of harm’s way, he said,” she added with a knowing smile. “But it’s really to get her out of his way. He’s courting Kate Howard nowadays.”

“You were privy to what the king was thinking, then?” Ralph said, amused, and winked wickedly at Jane. “Didn’t have his eye on you, did he?”

Luke didn’t see the wink, but Dorothy did and shot a resentful glance at Jane. Jane, at that moment, felt sorry for her and could almost understand Luke Palmer’s anxiety on his future daughter-in-law’s behalf. To Ralph, clearly, she was no more than the accompaniment to a valuable dowry, which he would sequester for his own use.

And then Thomas Stone said, “It’s natural for a king to flirt a little. It may not be serious. He tried to flirt with your sister, didn’t he, Francis, which is why she’s with us now. She ran away from him.”

“Oh, Jane,” said Dorothy, and laughed in that carefully modulated way that court ladies used for putting each other down. Jane felt herself bristling.

“What do you mean, Dorothy?” her mother asked.

“I’m sorry. I won’t say any more,” Dorothy replied, holding out her goblet for some more wine.

“No, come along,” said Francis. “What’s in your mind, Dorothy?”

Dorothy shook her head, but her eyes gleamed with malice, and Mary Stone, with maddening obtuseness, chose to be persistent. “Dorothy, you can’t say just a little and then stop. You must tell us what you mean.”

Dorothy looked at Jane. “Well, the king did dance with you once or twice, but he danced with most of the ladies at times. That wasn’t really why you left the court, was it?”

“Yes, it was,” said Jane, and heard the defensiveness in her own voice. It was she, not Dorothy, who sounded unconvincing.

“Oh, Jane! You know you kept losing things, and arriving late for this or that occasion and you often said how homesick you were. In the end, Queen Anna decided you’d never be a successful maid of honour and kindly arranged for you to go home. I understood, though,” said Dorothy with spurious sympathy. “I missed my home, too. No one blames you. But it wasn’t anything to do with the king.”

“I’m afraid it was,” said Jane, as coolly as she could. “I did indeed miss my home but I came back, of my own choice, for the reason I have given. My maid Lisa will bear me out.”

“Oh, no doubt. I’m sure Lisa is loyal to you, and so she should be. No one would criticize her for that,” said Dorothy sweetly.

It was clever, Jane thought bitterly. It was fiendishly clever, couched in terms that sounded kind, even though the intention behind it was as unkind as it could possibly get.

“Well, well,” said Francis calmly. “I daresay, Jane, that you did miss your home, though you’d have got over that if you’d given yourself time. And maybe you were a little overwhelmed by a few compliments from King Henry or invitations to dance. It’s all in the past now. Let us not talk of this anymore. Has anyone else had trouble lately with foxes trying to get at their poultry? There was a dogfox prowling after mine last week, though the dogs and the gander saw him off….”

They were home again and Jane had retired to her chamber to sit on a stool in her loose bedgown and over-robe while Lisa brushed her hair, when Francis tapped on the door and was admitted. He gave Lisa a dismissive glance and she left them together. Francis sat down on the side of the bed. “So, now we know.”

“Now we know what?” Jane asked, brushing her long brown hair herself. It gave her hands something to do and stopped them from shaking. Francis looked so very forbidding.

“The real reason why you left the court. You weren’t afraid of the king! You were ordered home for idleness and incompetence. You seem to have added lies to foolishness.”

“You believe Dorothy, then?”

“Why should Dorothy lie? You often said you didn’t want to go to court. I suspect that you simply gave way to your absurd pining for home, failed to do your duties properly and got yourself dismissed—half if not entirely deliberately.”

“Dorothy lied because she doesn’t like me,” said Jane tiredly.

“That’s absurd. Why ever shouldn’t she?”

“I have no interest in Ralph Palmer,” said Jane, deciding on candour. “But Dorothy believes he only cares for her dowry and that if mine were bigger, he’d prefer me to her. She was also jealous of the attention the king paid me! She hates me for it.”

“If you have no interest in Ralph Palmer,” said Francis unexpectedly, “then I’m surprised at you. He’s personable enough, I would have said! Though I saw your face when Peter Carew rode away. I suppose he’s the one you’d like. You can forget that, my girl. The Carews, even more than the Palmers, go in for advantageous marriages. What am I to do with you?”

“I wish you’d just try believing me, Francis! It’s true I didn’t really want to go to court, but I fled from it for the reasons I told you. I was not dismissed. Can’t I be useful to you here?”

“I don’t need you here, Jane. Peggy manages very well with the maids.” Francis rose to his feet. “I don’t know for sure whether the liar is Dorothy or you, but I’m inclined to think it’s you. I don’t mind keeping Lisa on, if she’s willing to stay. She must be a good seamstress—tirewomen usually are. There is always work for a skilled needle in a house like this. But as for you…”

“Francis, what are you saying?”

“Harry Hudd is still looking for a young wife and you don’t want to go far from home. He’s a decent, honest man, Jane. He’s older than you, but he’s still under fifty, and he lives just down the hill. Your dowry will be more than enough for him! I shall talk to him tomorrow.”

“Francis, no!” Jane could hardly believe her ears. She stared blankly at her brother. Memories flooded back—of their parents’ deaths, of how Francis had hugged his sisters and they had hugged him back and they had all cried together. Now Sybil was exiled and Jane was to be thrown to—Harry Hudd and Rixons.

“Please!” Jane said to her brother’s implacable eyes. “He’s…he’s old and Rixons farmhouse is awful, so cramped and dirty and…”

“The roof is sound. I’ve seen to that, and you can clean the house. Don’t argue, Jane. I don’t suppose he will. I wouldn’t have foisted Sybil on to him, carrying another man’s love child, but you’re a different matter. Determinedly virtuous, according to you,” said Francis with a kind of grim humour. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s settled.”

He left the room. That night Jane did not sleep. In the morning he went out early, riding his new horse Silvertail. He didn’t return until after dinner and Peggy expressed anxiety. “Saw that new animal of his bucking as the master rode off. The master’s good in the saddle, but I’d say that horse has a vicious streak.”

Francis, however, reappeared at suppertime, looking pleased with himself. Over the meal, he said, “Jane, tomorrow morning you will have a caller. Wait in the courtyard at the back if the weather’s fine, in the parlour if not. Don’t wear brocade or damask, but look clean and tidy.”

“Why? Who is the caller?”

“Wait and see,” said Francis, and withdrew to his chamber before she could ask any further. Not that she needed to ask. She already knew. Ahead of her lay another sleepless night.

Next day it was sunny. Shortly after breakfast the caller duly arrived and Francis brought him to the rear courtyard, where Jane was miserably sitting on a stone bench. Harry Hudd, his cap in his hand, his wind-reddened face carefully shaved and his square body encased in the brown fustian doublet and hose which were his nearest approach to a formal suit, had come to ask Jane Sweetwater to marry him.

“I’ve your brother’s consent. There’s no need to worry about that, maid.”

Worry about it? Could even Harry Hudd imagine that she would worry if Francis forbade the banns?

“I’ve not that much to offer, but I’ve got summat. Good health I’ve got. I’m all in workin’ order and likely there’ll be little ones. I reckon ’ee’d like that. Most women want childer. House b’ain’t much, but I’ll leave ’ee free to do whatever’s best. There’ll be money enough—thy dowry and a bit I’ve got put by, only bein’ just a man, I’ve never known how to make a house pretty. My old wife long ago, she knew, but that’s long in the past. She were sickly, that’s why we had no babbies. That were her, not me. I’ve a good flock of sheep, all my own, and half a dozen cows in milk and I hear ’ee’s handy in the dairy. Hear ’ee’s good with poultry, too. We don’t keep geese, but there’s a duck pond….”

He went on and on, reciting the virtues of Rixons, as if she didn’t know them already and as if they could possibly compensate for the shortcomings of their proprietor. At the end, she said that she must have time to think and he seemed to approve of that. Maidenly and very proper were the words he used to describe it. He’d come back the next day for her answer, he said, and bowed himself out.

“The answer will be no,” said Jane to Francis when he came out to her after saying goodbye to Harry. “You can’t really believe that I’ll agree to this!” But she said it with fear in her voice. There were ways, and everyone knew it, of inducing unwilling daughters or sisters to marry where their families wished. Plenty of ways.

“If you don’t agree,” said Francis, “then you must shift for yourself. This will no longer be your home. Go to the Lanyons and ask if they’ll take in another ill-behaved girl who’s been ejected from Allerbrook House. Pity there aren’t any nunneries left now where I could send you. But I won’t have you here. Smile and do as you’re bid, and I’ll see it’s a good wedding and I’ll say it’s what you want, what you’ve chosen. I’ll add to your dowry—you’ll be able to put your new home well and truly to rights. It won’t be a bad bargain.”

“Francis, please don’t do this! What have I done that’s so terrible? Refuse to become someone’s mistress? Even if the man was the king, does it make any difference? Oh, what can I say to make you understand? Ask Dr. Spenlove what he thinks! He won’t approve of this, you know he won’t….”

“Spenlove will mind his tongue or else leave my employment.”

“Francis, please…!”

She burst into tears, but Francis merely seized hold of her, clapped a hand over her mouth and marched her indoors. He took her to her bedchamber, pushed her in and locked the door after her. She lay on the bed for most of the day, alternately crying and trying in vain to think of a way out. She had always known that Francis had a hard streak in him. He had taken on the duty of caring for his sisters, but in Francis’s mind this was balanced by their duty to obey him. He had abandoned Sybil for failing him. He would abandon Jane as easily.

She had another dreadful night, visualizing herself turned out, wandering, seeking for shelter, perhaps being taken in by the Lanyons out of charity, perhaps ending up as Sybil apparently had—a servant on a farm.

At Rixons she would at least be mistress of some kind of house, however ill-kempt; she would be a wife; and yes, there might be children. The thought of going to bed with Harry Hudd made her feel ill, but in the dark she wouldn’t be able to see him. For the first time she felt real sympathy for King Henry. When confronted with Anna of Cleves, his feelings had probably been similar to Jane’s now.

Harry came back the following morning for his answer. Jane, her eyes heavy and her face pale from lack of sleep, once more greeted him in the courtyard. She wore the same dress as on the previous day, a plain brown affair, opening over a green linen underskirt. It was respectable but not luxurious, nothing like the gown of a court lady.

Harry Hudd bowed, and smiled his unlovely smile and asked for his answer and Jane, trying to smile back, said yes. The wedding took place one month later, early in July, at St. Anne’s in Clicket. Father Drew conducted the service. Both he and Dr. Spenlove had been astonished by her choice, as indeed had everyone else. Jane was obliged to parry astounded protests and questions from Lisa, Peggy, the maids, the grooms, neighbours and friends alike. It was pride as much as fear of Francis that made her hold up her chin and declare that this was what she wanted.

And now it was done, and here she was in the Rixons farmhouse, which had one untidy living room, a kitchen with an earth floor, and two spartan bedchambers upstairs under the thatch, and she would be Mistress Harry Hudd for as long as they both should live.

Harry, having finished what he was about, rolled out of bed and said, “Well, now. Milkin’. Can’t go lazin’ around here all the day long. I can hear they cows lowin’ now. Up thee comes, maid,” and held out a hand to her. Another day at Rixons had begun.

She tried to make the best of it. She was probably better off than little Kate Howard, who was now married to the king. There had been proclamations everywhere, announcing that Queen Anna was henceforth to be known as Lady Anna of Cleves, the king’s dear sister, and would live in state but away from the court. Jane wondered if Lady Anna felt relieved, but it must have been a comedown, to be deprived of a crown. Thomas Cromwell, whom the king held responsible for the whole disaster of the Cleves marriage, had been beheaded. No, there were certainly ways in which Mistress Jane Hudd had blessings worth counting.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.