The Other Henry VIII

Midsummer Madness

Elizabeth Tudor had never liked silence. Silence, with its skeletal claws and putrid breath, filling a room faster than smoke. Silence, clogging her throat, polluting her mind. Asphyxiating her.

Growing up in Westhorpe, she and Esther could not sleep until Clara came with a smile on her lips and a tune in her throat. A gentle hummed melody to serenade their slumber. She would stay well past her bedtime, till the sky filled with ink and the candles were hot wax stumps, waiting for her sisters to fall fast asleep. Often Esther would scamper out of bed and slip into Lizzie's, so they could cling to one another as Clara's tune danced through the air. Heads together. Ginger and black curls against white pillows.
Sometimes Clara would visit still, late on a quiet night when the one remaining sister could not sleep alone. She would sit by the fire, humming like she used to, and sometimes Lizzie would join in. Lying on her back. Ginger alone against white. The melody as clear in her head as her own name. Their hums soared like turtle doves, higher and faster than silence ever could.

But never had Lizzie heard a silence more deafening than the one that followed her question: "Where is Papa?" This silence had the rickety wings of a bat, gleaming serpent's fangs, and eyes darker than a wolf's mouth. This silence smothered her before she even noticed its presence. Because no answer could possibly prepare the King's second daughter, a motherless princess with starlight in her soul, for what she would soon behold: the broken body of her once illustrious father.

He was not dead. That was what she had feared at first, no doubt what everyone had feared. No, he sat upright in bed with numerous supporting pillows stacked at his back, injured leg elevated so Lumley could tend to it. Scratches speckled all over his pallid face, raw pink pulp oozing from the wound, but not dead. Lizzie's heart turned a somersault in her chest. Relief washed over her like rain. In those few, agonisingly silent, minutes between the entrance hall and her father's bedchamber, she had experienced true terror; unadulterated, bloodcurdling terror. The sort of terror she, a girl of nearly thirteen, ought to have outgrown.

From the mother-shaped hole in the soil of her girlhood, her father's imposing shape had sprouted fresh and hardy. He became a constant in Lizzie's life of grief and turmoil. He may not have been attentive or affectionate, but he had always been there. Others died: her mother, Diana, of the black curls and half smiles; her uncle, John, whom she had been told not to miss; dear Esther, with her skinny freckled arms and cold little feet. They had all left Lizzie, one by one. But her father never had. Never could. He was as much a part of England as the earth and the wind, the trees and the sky. If he fell, then so did all of England.

Court returned to Hampton Court shortly afterwards, progress cut short. Summer became torrid and oppressive. The sun haemorrhaged scarlet like an open wound to match the King's. Breezes were few and far between, so much so that they were treated like blessings by those who felt their soothing kiss. The King of England's body was born back to London, still very much not dead, but nonetheless the sky fell like a shroud around him and enclosed the entire city in stifling heat.

It took Lizzie less than a day to detect that all was not well at court. As if the world had shattered like a mirror and God had tried to put the shards back together, only to find that they did not fit as well as they once had. Some of the pieces had already turned to dust. Glass dust. Diamonds. The mirror would never be smooth and intact again. Yet it became painfully clear what had taken place, that day in the woods.

The King and Queen had quarrelled. That much, Lizzie was certain. Before then, nothing had been remotely amiss between the couple. They exchanged cheerful quips as always, never swooning over one another but always seeming to finish conversations with suppressed smiles on their lips. They were not in love — at least, she did not think so — but they shared a kind of playful coexistence that Lizzie greatly admired. But that had all gone. Peeled away like shed skin. They slept in separate rooms now, she had once overheard a servant whisper. Dined apart, danced apart, slept apart. Even their strolls in the garden and horse rides around the grounds were carefully planned so as to avoid coinciding with one another. It was as though each was trying to forget the other's existence.