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I.
When she is angry with you, she will pinch you, Lady Carey tells her when she enters Anne's service, and she demonstrates, lightly seizing the thin skin across the back of her, Jane's, wrist and nipping it between her fingertips. Lady Carey, Mary Boleyn formerly, Lady Anne's sister, is full of advice. Keep your eyes down, do not talk back, do not repeat gossip, take your sewing with you when you leave the room or put it away safe, or she may rip the stitches out of spite when she is in a dark mood, and her moods are rarely light these days.
It is advice given not out of kindness, she thinks; it is the way someone tells you to have a care around a temperamental horse that kicks. They don't want to have to clean up the mess when you make a wrong move and get your head broken for your trouble.
When she arrived at York Place, her eyes were still pink around the edges from weeping at having had to leave Queen Katherine. There are times in Anne's service when she feels that she has done nothing but weep for days on end—silent and alone if she can manage it, but all too often she finds herself trembling, her throat closing, while all the other ladies look on, their sneers barely hidden. She is an albino rook, forever beaten and tormented by the other rooks for being weak, for being different, for being mild and quiet and never quite seeming to get the joke. What joke? Any joke. They always seem to be at her expense. When she finds the drawing in Anne's bed, the drawing of the lady without a head, it seems that half her acquaintance are certain she would never have done it, while the other half are sure that she did—though many of them swear she must have done so at someone else's behest, without understanding what she was doing.
(She had nothing to do with it. But it doesn't matter what she knows, she realises; it only matters what other people think. It only matters what the Lady Anne thinks.)
Jane knows what they call her—what Anne calls her. Whey-face. Milksop. Milk-faced creeper. She knows that this is an insult, that it is a way of calling her pale, mild, inoffensive. Pathetic. But isn't it true that we are all reared on milk? she thinks, as she bends over her sewing and tries to ignore the talk around her. No baby would survive infancy without milk, and without milk, there would be no cheese, no butter ... Someone calls her name now and she leaves off her rumination; she cannot quite find her way to the truth that she is trying to articulate to herself, and there is no one to whom she can tell it.
II.
It is almost a relief to be sent away, on the occasion of her father's disgrace. Wolf Hall is a pot on the boil, but none of it is directed at her, and at last she feels she may take the measure of herself—and she is surprised, pleasantly so, to realise that she has grown since she was last home. Not in height—she shall never be a woman of much stature—but she sees others more clearly, and in doing so, is able to find greater clarity in herself.
So far as her father is concerned, she is the quiet, biddable one who goes where she is sent, her mere existence keeping the Seymour family in circulation. First to the queen, then to Lady Anne, and now home to Wiltshire, but soon again to—where? The queen? Lady Anne and her black looks, her pinching fingers? She would like to see the queen again, and her frail daughter, but Anne is ascendant. If the shadow of Sir John's scandal will ever pass, she thinks, I shall be married off, and sent into the household of greatest advantage. Or perhaps the other way around.
She hears now how her brothers speak to her—really hears it, and understands the thinking behind it. They think she is a simpleton. They think she understands nothing. Well, perhaps she is simple, for she knows she lacks cunning and guile—but she sees, she hears, and sometimes she accidentally speaks more truth than she knows. Or is it an accident? Even she, Jane, isn't always certain. What she knows is that when people think you are simple, they will say things to you that they think are opaque to you. And they assume that you will not remember it. They cannot imagine that you would ever repeat it to anyone, in detail, with seeming innocence. If they think me simple, she decides, then I shall be as simple as they wish me to be, and keep my own counsel. It is the closest thing to defiance that she can imagine.
A messenger from London, bearing a gift. For her? From who? She cannot imagine that the Lady Anne has sent her anything, except perhaps a poisonous serpent or a toad. No, it is from Master Cromwell, the cardinal's man that was, now one of the king's own councillors. He has sent a book of needlework patterns, wrapped in silk of bird-wing blue that makes her gasp at the beauty of it.
She uses it to edge the sleeves that she wears to court when Lady Anne is made a Marquess. Master Cromwell will see them, she thinks, and this is somehow very important. She remembers the first time she saw him, when he came to speak with Anne on the cardinal's behalf. After he left, Anne raged quietly, completely annihilating the sprig of rosemary she was tearing at when he arrived, and Mary followed him out. What they said remains a mystery, but when Mary laughed—a loud, startling sound—Anne flung down the last shred of rosemary and snapped at Jane—get her back here. So she went, and after Lady Carey whirled and whisked herself back in for her sister's wrath, Jane lingered a moment—just long enough to take in this cardinal's man, his black clothes, his flinty, impenetrable gaze; she liked him immediately, for he stood up to Anne—and when his sharp eyes met hers, she couldn't help it; raised her eyes to Heaven, saying without saying, can you believe them?
Master Thomas Cromwell is on my side, she thinks as she stitches, and thank God and the Virgin for that, for I do not think I should ever wish it otherwise. If I must listen to the counsel of any man, it will be his.
III.
When the king begins to pay attention to her, her brothers become a pack of eager hounds, sniffing and baying and howling at the moon in their eagerness to run down quarry. It is a little shocking; what Christian man would be so eager to get his unwed sister into a man's bed, even if that man is the king? And the king is not unhandsome, but he is so large: so tall, so broad, and though he is always gentle with her, there are times when she comes away from one of their garden walks and must shut herself away to tremble and weep alone. How can she resist a king?
Thomas Cromwell tells her how: he tells her what gifts she must and must not accept, and how she may best respond to his entreaties. Pray if you must, aloud, with sincerity; send back money but not a poem. And one day, without his having said so, the knowledge blooms in her mind: Cromwell has set his sights for her far higher than her brothers have done, higher than even she has done. It can't be simply because he feels sorry for me, she wonders, and fingers the blue silk of her sleeves. When the king, sporting, seizes her one day and sits her on his knee, she thinks of Cromwell's stillness, his watchfulness, and does not move until she is released, and when she is released, she does not run.
Anne looks daggers at her but as long as her belly grows, she says nothing, does nothing—not to her, at least, but there are words behind closed doors. She hears when she is not meant to hear—or perhaps she is—how the king will use and discard her the moment she gives way, how she will be sent to a convent then by her brothers. A convent would not be so bad, nor so different from the life she lives now, in a clutch of women who watch and whisper.
Sometimes when Anne thinks no one is watching, she, Jane, can see her expression change; the queen's eyes seem hollow, then, her mouth drawn—she is afraid. She is a queen, and she is afraid, just as all women are, she thinks. However we may rise, a man may make us fall in an instant, and then where are we? Married in haste. A convent. Or dead.
IV.
The king is her fifth cousin, but that is not enough to stop the marriage. Ten days have passed since Anne fell beneath the French executioner's blade, and she is not spoken of, as if to invoke her name would be to raise some curse from beyond the grave.
No grand procession for this wedding, and she is not so secretly relieved by this; she thinks she would stumble and fall under the weight of royal finery, be swallowed whole by whatever robes or gowns they would swaddle her in for such an occasion. With all those eyes on her, she imagines she would melt away, like a dream in daylight. Even as the vows are spoken, she thinks of the chest under her bed, with the coins that she refuses to spend. Even now, even at this last moment, it could all be over.
The vows are spoken, the marriage pronounced; the king kisses her. As they turn to face the witnesses, the attendants, she catches Cromwell's eye and it is all she can do to not raise her eyes to Heaven again, the way she did when they first almost-met—can you believe this? Ah, but he can—it is as if he knew it all along, a chess gambit he planned a dozen moves back come to fruition; she can see it in his carefully arranged face, and she understands why, despite the king's hand holding hers, she feels as if she has lost.