Pour The Dark Wine

  Pour the Dark Wine

  Deryn Lake

  © Deryn Lake 1989

  Deryn Lake has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1989 by Michael Joseph Ltd.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Antony White — in friendship and gratitude for taking that first gamble …

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: The Wishes

  Part One: The Primrose Bride

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two: The Ardent Swain

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Part Three: The Lord Protector

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Prologue: The Wishes

  At noon the river burst into flames. Or that was how it seemed to the four children who stood solemnly staring down at the fast flowing Kennet, watching as it suddenly became suffused with every golden light in Christendom, dancing and shimmering with an almost blinding sparkle.

  The youngest — a scrap of a thing with eyes that looked bigger than she — cried out, ‘It’s a sword, a jewelled sword!’ while the other girl exclaimed, ‘No, it’s not. I think it is a ring, a golden wedding ring.’

  The eldest — a boy of sixteen, already a young adult — ruffled their hair and laughed. ‘What strange creatures you are. All I see is the sun on water. What about you, Tom?’

  The fourth turned his head to look at his brother. Even at ten years of age his face was spectacular: lively bright eyes dancing above a strong shapely nose, and lips that would tease women when he grew older.

  ‘I see the ruins of a castle amidst its moat. I see the town of Marlborough but most of all I see a damsel walking out of her cottage. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice her Edward!’

  ‘For shame!’ answered his brother with a smile. ‘Try to concentrate on the scenery.’

  ‘Is she not part of it?’ Tom asked innocently.

  Edward ignored him. ‘I promised to bring you to the top of Merlin’s Mound,’ he said to the girls, ‘so now you are here, tell me what you find. Jane first.’

  The elder gazed down at the small round hill on which they stood, thinking that it looked like an inverted green basin. ‘I had expected more,’ she said. ‘It merely seems part of the castle to me.’

  ‘No, it is the wrong shape for that.’

  Tom said, ‘So you really believe there is a burial vault within?’

  The youngest child, who had been listening carefully, gazed at him from the enormous eyes which had given rise to her nickname, for they were the purplish blue of summer clover. ‘It is true,’ she said earnestly, ‘Merlin is in there!’

  Tom smiled lazily. ‘Who told you that, Cloverella? Your Romany grandam?’

  But even while Edward and Jane said ‘Shush’, the little scrap answered seriously, ‘Oh yes. She brought me here once. She spoke to him, asked for his help. I know. I saw her.’

  Jane stared amazed. ‘You saw her speak to Merlin? He was here?’

  The child blushed. ‘Not exactly. She put me to sit beneath that ruin’ — she pointed a grubby finger at some crumbling stones, once the castle’s massive keep — ‘then went off to seek his help. And it wasn’t long afterwards that she left me at Wolff Hall and Dame Margery took me in. So, you see, he did work magic, for that is what my grandmother asked Merlin to do.’

  They all stared at her in silence, differing expressions upon their faces: Edward, amused and tolerant; Tom appraisingly, as if he could see the beauty that would one day bloom in her; Jane nervously, half believing what she had just heard.

  Eventually, Tom said, ‘So you are telling us that if you make a wish at this spot it comes true?’

  ‘That is what she said to me. That Merlin, who sleeps in a crystal cave at the heart of the mound, will hear your voice in his slumbers.’

  The boy laughed, the sun picking up the reddish glints in his hair as he threw a stone skimmingly towards the moat. ‘Then in that case I shall do so.’

  The other three stared at him, envious of his exuberance. ‘What will you wish?’ Jane asked.

  Tom smiled at her. ‘That I shall know and love many beautiful women and end by marrying the highest in the land.’

  His sister pulled a face. ‘What a thing to say.’

  ‘Then what would you ask for?’

  The girl hesitated. ‘To defy the fact I am the ugliest girl in the world and marry a king. Then I could turn the tables on those who call me plain Jane.’

  ‘You are not ugly,’ answered Cloverella gallantly, flinging her small body against her cousin’s and throwing her arms about her neck. ‘I think your eyes beautiful, for whoever saw three colours in one?’

  And she was right. In Jane’s lily-pale face, in which for a fact there were few redeeming features, lay a pair of light blue eyes which held a trace of green and yet were circled by a rim of deep and vivid indigo.

  Jane hugged her fondly. ‘Sweet Cloverella! What would you wish, my little dear heart?’

  ‘For wisdom,’ said the child solemnly. ‘For wisdom to sing to the earth and the stars and let them yield up their secrets. My Romany grandam knew some of those things but I would like to learn even more. I wish for a quarter of Merlin’s knowledge.’

  The other three laughed not only at her words but at the child’s earnest face, for she was the skeleton in the Seymour family’s cupboard; the bastard they had adopted; the child of Dame Margery’s sister who had sinned with a gypsy servant and died in childbed for her crime, left at their kitchen door for them to take or reject. Dame Margery, however, had known at a glance that the changeling was indeed her sister Elizabeth’s very own flesh and blood.

  Now Jane hugged her cousin even more tightly and said, ‘Then I hope your wish is granted for if so, you will be able to guide the lives of us all.’

  Tom turned to Edward. ‘And what of you, brother? You are very quiet. Are you now too old and studious for such childish things as wishes?’

  His brother smiled wryly. He had been at Oxford for two years, studying grammar, rhetoric and logic. He was Sir John Seymour’s second son and the most serious of all the children.

  ‘Yes, I believe I am,’ he said.

  ‘Oh do wish, please,’ begged Jane.

  She moved closer to him and Edward thought that despite her lack of attraction h
is sister had a pleasing way with her when she so wished.

  ‘Oh, very well. What shall I ask for?’

  Tom smiled his lazy smile. ‘There must be something you want. Even if it is only a goodly woman.’

  Edward shot him a dark look. He had no intention of discussing the secrets of his heart with anyone, not even his brother. ‘I’ll think,’ he answered slowly.

  From where he stood on the top of Merlin’s Mound there was an incredible view: the majestic Wiltshire countryside spread out before him, dark with forests and light with sweeping hills; a country-side mysterious as death itself, with strange standing stones and a fantastic white horse carved into the very face of the earth.

  ‘I wish I could own all this,’ he said impulsively.

  ‘But to do that you would have to be King,’ Tom answered. ‘And that could never be.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Edward. His eyes swept over the distant views. ‘Nonetheless, it would give me pleasure to feel that everything I could see was mine.’

  Jane turned to Cloverella. ‘I believe our wishes are too ambitious. Could Merlin possibly grant them?’

  ‘Oh, he could,’ answered the child in whom flowed both royal and Romany blood. ‘But as to whether he will or not we can only wait and see.’

  ‘Time we went home,’ said Edward. ‘The shadows are beginning to lengthen.’ He hitched Cloverella onto his back and started to descend the steep sides of the strangely shaped green mound that had given the town of Marlborough its name.

  Thomas and Jane followed more slowly, a touch of their destiny laying its finger upon them.

  ‘Does he really sleep in there?’ asked the girl quietly.

  ‘You know the town’s motto.’

  ‘Ubi nunc sapientis ossa Merlini.’

  ‘Where now are the bones of wise Merlin,’ translated Tom. He patted the grass slope of the Mound. ‘Make my women beautiful, old man,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t tempt fate, Tom,’ answered Jane.

  But she was laughing as she walked with her brother into the fine clear light of an early springtime evening.

  Part One: The Primrose Bride

  Chapter One

  At any time a glimpse of the King’s Fool could be a little frightening but this night he was grotesque. On his head Will Somers wore a bronze helmet which completely obliterated his face, only the glint of a snapping brown eye behind those already painted on bore witness to the fact that there was a man inside it at all. From the side of this terrible headpiece two twisting horns reared up, while the mouth was set in a permanent grin of cruel metal teeth. The effect was monstrous, unreal, and as Will jumped across the great hall to where sat the ladies of the Queen’s household there was not one who did not consider him a hobgoblin and draw back slightly, even though they laughed.

  Cackling hollowly from within the mask, Will dropped on one knee before one of them and snatched her hand to the grinning mouth, his hunched shoulder even more apparent in that position.

  ‘Will you marry me, fair maiden?’ he whispered.

  The girl pursed her thin lips and did not reply.

  ‘What! Won’t you be my sweetheart?’

  She took her hand away and said clearly, ‘And be wife to base metal? No, I think a brighter coin would be more amusing.’

  There was a roar of laughter and Will Somers loped off to find another victim while Jane Seymour, pleased with herself but letting no expression cross her pale face, turned her attention once more to the food set before her. It was Christmas, it was 1529, and for this great occasion King Henry and Queen Katharine were dining formally together before the whole court, everything being merry to celebrate the twelve days.

  Or so it would seem. But beneath the splendour seethed a tension to which, these days, every man, woman and child attached to the glittering court of King Henry VIII was subjected. And on this particular occasion the threat to them all — dark and mysterious and quite the most dangerous woman in the kingdom — was near at hand. For Anne Boleyn had left her beautiful mansion of York Place, even now being renovated and enlarged to suit the Lady’s tastes, and taken up residence at Greenwich, to be near her sovereign at Christmas time.

  Jane, surreptitiously raising her eyes from her plate again, wondered whether Anne might yet put in an appearance, swarm into the banquet and beg forgiveness for lateness, cast her dark eyes over the assembled company and smile, as if she knew something that nobody could guess, and then take her place at a discreet distance from the King, as though she had no care in the world.

  In a way Jane hoped that the Lady would come. Mistress Seymour had been at Court three months now, having ridden through a Savernake Forest crimsoned by autumn, to London; leaving behind the peace of Wolff Hall to be a Maid of Honour to Queen Katharine — a post to which she had been introduced by her cousin Francis Bryan — and so far she had not set her eyes on that creature whose name was on everyone’s lips. It was a situation designed, at the very least, to arouse curiosity in a young woman who liked to make up her own mind about events.

  For there were those who whispered that the old Queen had had her day, that Katharine was a worn-out drudge, incapable of bearing a living child, while others said that Anne Boleyn was an evil whore, so fired by ambition that she was prepared to subject the King to almost any ordeal in order to gain the throne.

  Jane found a small smile forming on her careful lips. How intriguing it was! She and Edward — who treated her as grown-up these days — had laid a wager on the outcome of it all. He had maintained that the Queen would hold out, that the King would never get an annulment of his marriage, and would, in the end, tire of the Kentish knight’s daughter. But Jane had declared that a clever woman could win the world if she so desired, and had put her money on Anne as future Queen of England.

  ‘And what then?’ Edward had said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Jane’s brother had turned to look out of the window of the long gallery of Wolff Hall to the great paled garden that lay below.

  ‘Surely Anne Boleyn is like a forest deer to the King. The faster she runs the hotter he goes in pursuit. But when he catches her up the game will be over. And that will be the end of her.’

  With a frankness that only country children know, Jane had said, ‘So the King has not taken her into his bed?’

  Still with his back turned, Edward had answered, ‘I doubt he has. But not for any strong principle on her part. No, she’s too clever to give him the one thing he desires most. She’ll resist as long as she can. She’s no silly slattern.’

  His tone was bitter and Jane had crossed over to him and given him a hug. Edward — head of the Seymour children since his brother, the sickly John, had died in 1520 — had married young and lived to regret it. While he had been fighting in France with the Duke of Suffolk, for which escapade he had received a knighthood, his wife, Katherine Filliol, had taken a lover and Edward had never acknowledged her sons as his. Nor would his Catholic principles allow him divorce and now he was at stalemate; Katherine languished in a convent while he loved nobody, all his energies taken up with the countryside pursuits he enjoyed so much.

  Thinking about him now made Jane stare down the length of the great table to where Edward sat, come to Court for Christmas, dark, intense and clever. For a moment she envied the vivid looks of her brothers and sisters — and then she remembered her promise to herself. That, despite all odds, plain Jane would shine at everything and so dazzle with her wit and intelligence that some great match would fall into her hands. Her mind dwelled briefly on Sir Robert Dormer’s son and their whispered words of affection before his mother snatched him away, declaring Mistress Seymour too lowly and ordinary for her priceless boy.

  Jane steeled herself not to think of it. Crying made her nose and eyes swell and this was not the occasion for even the most surreptitious of tears. With an enviable strength of will, she turned to her cousin Francis Bryan who sat beside her. ‘What will happen if the Lady comes?’ she whispered.
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  ‘The Queen will be acutely distressed; the King less so; Anne herself, not at all.’

  ‘Is she so hard?’

  Francis Bryan’s lips curled into a smile but his unblinking grey eyes did not move. ‘Not hard, merely disciplined.’

  ‘Disciplined,’ repeated Jane wonderingly. ‘I would like to be thought of as that.’

  ‘Why?’ asked her cousin, slightly amused.

  Jane remained silent, pondering her answer. She had no intention of revealing her private thoughts to her enigmatical cousin. ‘Because it sounds well,’ she said eventually.

  He was going to question her further, she knew it. And indeed Sir Francis was opening his mouth to speak when a loud blast from the King’s musicians, who had been playing throughout the banquet, heralded that the King would lead the way to the masqued dancing which would continue well into the early hours of next day.

  Relieved, Jane stood up. ‘I must talk to Edward before the revels. Will you excuse me, cousin?’

  ‘Gladly, cousin,’ he replied, his cold grey eyes appraising her neat and well-rounded figure without emotion. ‘If only she had another head on it!’ he muttered unkindly as she vanished. Then his attention was distracted elsewhere and he thought no more of his unattractive kinswoman from Wiltshire. But her brother, seeing her breathless approach, thought Jane looked well that evening, her cheeks unusually pink and her eyes sparkling.

  ‘You are radiant. I hope you have not had too much wine!’ he said, half joking.

  She stopped short. ‘I declare you are becoming a killjoy, Edward.’

  He smiled. ‘Now, now. Such anger could disguise a guilty conscience.’

  She paused, her unusual eyes dark, struggling between laughter and wrath. ‘Have a care. I am a grown woman of twenty years. Not some chitling to be ordered about.’

  ‘Then in that case I concede. Come, spare a dance for your poor brother fresh from the country and knowing nothing of courtly ways.’

  Jane smiled. ‘Then put on your disguise and come with me.’