VIII

darkening sky and feeling the rain on my skin and my open eyes, stinging like pinpricks.
    I will have to go back soon – they’ll be looking for me. Compton will be agitated, afraid for my safety and his own position.
    But it is a luxury to have no one here to see me cry. My back is stiff and aching – hurting more now than it did straight after the beating. I stretch out on my front in the sodden grass.
    I think: It is a lie that I am unimportant. I feel it in my gut. I feel it in the ground and the sky and the rain. A long time ago I heard a prophecy – and I have not forgotten it .
    My hands close into fists and I cling to the grass angrily, as if the ground would like to throw me off.

 
♦  ♦  ♦  V   ♦  ♦  ♦
     
     
    “Three shillings says she has a wart.”
    “Where?” says Compton. Behind me Charles Brandon laughs.
    My horse is jittery. I let it walk forward a little way and then I turn it again, saying, “I thought we were sticking to facial disfigurements.”
    Beneath the leaden skies of a November morning we are waiting on horseback in St George’s Fields, an open space on the south bank of the Thames, not far from London Bridge. We’re preparing – along with numerous bishops, an archbishop and a crowd of earls and lords – to line up as a welcoming party for Princess Catherine of Aragon, Arthur’s Spanish bride.
    It’s been drizzling for the last ten minutes. The surface of my cloak is covered with a fine mist of droplets, my legs are beginning to feel distinctly damp, and my nose is so cold I’ve lost all sense of whether it’s still there or not. The only thing cheering me is the possibility that Princess Catherine will be ugly.
    “How about smallpox scars?” suggests Francis Bryan, beside me. Bryan is one of the well-born boys I spend my lessons and my leisure-time with – his father is a trusted servant of the King.
    “Harry Guildford’s put money on that already,” says Compton.
    “All right, a moustache. Two shillings. And no quibbling, Compton: any dark hair visible on the upper lip and you pay out.”
    “I thought she was fair-haired,” says Thomas Boleyn.
    Of the friends and attendants who serve me, some are boys like me, and others are older: grown-up young men who advance their careers by working in my service. Boleyn, an ambitious knight’s son, aged twenty-four, is in this last group. Francis Bryan is my own age. Harry Guildford, whose father is a royal councillor, is a couple of years older. Compton, who is nineteen, and Brandon, seventeen, are somewhere in between. But age does not decide seniority: I am the master here, and I am ten.
    “Fair-haired?” Bryan echoes Boleyn’s words. “And Spanish? Is that possible?”
    “If she’s really awful,” cuts in Brandon, “is Arthur allowed to refuse to marry her?”
    “No,” I say, grinning. And that’s why, of course, my hopes are running so high. Since this marriage, as my father has explained so clearly to me, turns me into a nobody – the backup son who’s not needed any more – I want it to make Arthur suffer too. As much as possible. And I think a hideous bride would be an excellent start.
    Now a scout brings news that the Spanish party is close by, approaching over the open land that lies between here and Lambeth. We form an order. Being, of course, the senior duke present, I position myself at the front.
    Coming into view, a strange sight: a collection of oddly dressed figures, making towards us not on horses, but on mules. In the centre there’s a girl, her face hidden by the broad brim of her hat. She’s sitting very upright on a saddle no less foreign-looking than the rest of her outfit: it has a cross-brace that lies like a stepladder on the mule’s back. She is perched on top, swaying as the beast walks.
    The Spanish party halts, leaving a stretch of damp, marshy grass standing empty between us. It’s my job to make the first communication.
    I walk my horse forward, somewhat squelchily.
    Dear God, please let her be ugly…
    The girl – Princess Catherine – looks up. Beneath the hat her face is softly rounded, with a pink and white complexion and a pretty dimpled chin. Her long auburn hair is loose, and blowing sideways in the wind.
    Damn .
    I have prepared a greeting in Spanish – I’ve learned it by rote. I declaim it, thinking, All right, then, pretty but ill-natured …
    Hearing the Spanish, Catherine breaks into a delighted, grateful smile. She nods encouragingly