understand all this. I will tell your people to let him in. You look as if you need fresh air. Go down the stair into the privy garden. You will not be disturbed.’
‘But I have not seen Jane,’ Henry says. ‘I want to look at her. We can bring her here?’
‘Not yet, sir. Wait till the business is more forward. There are rumours on the streets, and crowds who want to see her, and ballads made, deriding her.’
‘Ballads?’ Henry is shocked. ‘Find out the authors. They must be straitly punished. No, you are right, we must not bring Jane here until the air is pure. So you go to her, Cromwell. I want you to carry a certain token.’ He produces from among his papers a tiny, jewelled book: the kind a woman keeps at her girdle, looped on a gold chain. ‘It was my wife’s,’ he says. Then he checks himself and looks away in shame. ‘I mean to say, it was Katherine’s.’
He does not want to take the time to go down to Surrey to Carew’s house, but it seems he must. It is a well- proportioned house put up some thirty years ago, its great hall especially splendid and much copied by gentlemen building their own houses. He has been there before, with the cardinal in his time. It looks as though since then Carew has brought Italians in to replan the gardens. The gardeners doff their straw hats to him. The walks are coming into their early summer glory. Birds twitter from an aviary. The grass is shorn as close as velvet pile. Nymphs watch him with stone eyes.
Now that the business is tending one way and one way only, the Seymours have begun teaching Jane how to be a queen. ‘This business you get up to with doors,’ Edward Seymour says. Jane blinks at him. ‘The way you hold the door still and slide yourself around it.’
‘You told me to be discreet.’ Jane lowers her eyes, to show him what discretion means.
‘Now. Go out of the room,’ Edward says. ‘Come back in. Like a queen, Jane.’
Jane sneaks out. The door creaks behind her. In the hiatus, they look at each other. The door swings open. There is a long pause – as it might be, a regal pause. The doorway stands empty. Then Jane appears, inching around the corner. ‘Is that better?’
‘Do you know what I think?’ he says. ‘I think that from now on Jane won’t be opening her own doors, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘My belief is,’ Edward says, ‘this modesty could pall. Look up at me, Jane. I want to see your expression.’
‘But what makes you think,’ Jane murmurs, ‘that I want to see yours?’
In the gallery the whole family is assembled. The two brothers, prudent Edward and hasty Tom. Worthy Sir John, the old goat. Lady Margery, the noted beauty of her day, about whom John Skelton once penned a line: ‘benign, courteous and meek’, he called her. The meekness is not evident today: she looks grimly triumphant, like a woman who has squeezed success from life, though it’s taken her nearly sixty years to do it.
Bess Seymour, the widowed sister, sails in. She has a parcel wrapped in linen in her hands. ‘Master Secretary,’ she says, with a reverence. She says to her brother, ‘Here, Tom, hold this. Sit down, sister.’
Jane sits on a stool. You expect someone to hand her a slate and begin her on A.B.C. ‘Now,’ Bess says. ‘Off with this.’ For a moment, she looks as if she is attacking her sister: with a vigorous double-handed tug, she rips off her half-moon headdress, flips up its veil and bundles the whole into the waiting hands of her mother.
Jane in her white cap looks naked and pained, her face as small and wan as a face on a sickbed. ‘Cap off too, and start again,’ Bess orders. She drags at the knotted string under her sister’s chin. ‘What have you done with this, Jane? It looks as if you’ve been sucking it.’ Lady Margery produces a pair of embroidery scissors. With a snip, Jane is freed. Her sister whisks the cap off and Jane’s pale hair, a thin ribbon of light, streaks over her shoulder. Sir John ahems and looks away, the old hypocrite: as if he’d seen something beyond the male remit. The hair has a moment’s freedom before Lady Margery plucks it up and wraps it around her hand, as unfeeling as if it were a hank of wool; Jane frowns as it is whipped up from her nape, coiled, and crammed under a newer, stiffer cap. ‘We’re going to pin this,’ Bess says. She works, absorbed. ‘More elegant, if you can stand it.’
‘Never liked strings myself,’ Lady Margery says.
‘Thank you, Tom,’ Bess says, and takes her parcel. She casts aside the wrappings. ‘Cap tighter,’ she decrees. Her mother pinches as directed, repins. The next moment a fabric box is crammed on Jane’s head. Her eyes turn up, as if for help, and she utters one little bleat, as the wire frame bites into her scalp. ‘Well, I am surprised,’ Lady Margery says. ‘You’ve got a bigger head than I thought, Jane.’ Bess applies herself to bending the wire. Jane sits mute. ‘That’ll do,’ Lady Margery says. ‘It’s got a bit of give in it. Push it down. Turn up the lappets. About chin level, Bess. That’s how the old queen used to like it.’ She stands back to assess her daughter, now imprisoned in an old- fashioned gable hood, the kind that hasn’t been seen since Anne came up. Lady Margery sucks in her lips and studies her daughter. ‘Tilting,’ she pronounces.
‘That’s Jane, I think,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘Sit up straight, sister.’
Jane puts her hands to her head, gingerly, as if the construction might be hot. ‘Leave it alone,’ her mother snaps. ‘You wore it before. You’ll get used to it.’
From somewhere Bess produces a length of fine black veiling. ‘Sit still.’ She begins to pin it to the back of the box, her face absorbed. Ouch, that was my neck, Jane says, and Tom Seymour gives a heartless laugh; some private joke of his, too unseemly to share, but one can guess. ‘I’m sorry to keep you, Master Secretary,’ Bess says, ‘but she has to get this right. We cannot have her reminding the king of, you know.’
Just take care, he thinks, uneasy: it is only four months since Katherine died, perhaps the king does not want to be reminded of her either.
‘We have several more frames at our command,’ Bess tells her sister, ‘so if you really can’t balance it, we can take the whole thing down and try again.’
Jane closed her eyes. ‘I’m sure it will do.’
‘How did you get them so quickly?’ he asks.
‘They have been put away,’ Lady Margery says. ‘In chests. By women like myself who knew they would be needed again. We shall not see the French fashions now, not for many a year, please God.’
Old Sir John says, ‘The king has sent her jewels.’
‘Things La Ana had no use for,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘But they will all come to her soon.’
