The story so far…
Week 6: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)
“Plain and pale”, she is half-hidden at York Place, in the court of Anne Boleyn. When she comes out to get Mary Boleyn, “she speaks their names as if she is making introductions between two cockroaches.” She catches Cromwell’s glace as he leaves, raising her own eyes to Heaven.
Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)
She was on duty the night they found a drawing of Anne sans tête in Anne’s bed. Did the “sickly milk-faced creeper” put it there? “That is not possible”, thinks Cromwell. She asks him for more orange tarts and asks for him to speak in English so she may spy all the better.
‘Who are you spying for?’
‘My brothers.’
Edward and Tom Seymour of Wolf Hall.
Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the future, and not all his money is on Anne.
Week 8: The Dead Complain of Their Burial / Arrange Your Face (Part 1)
“Pastyface”, “Milksop”, no one will ever want her, says Anne. Cromwell has given her a present of needlework patterns. “I feel sorry for her.”
Week 11: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 2) / Early Mass
She is flashing her kingfisher sleaves, made from silk gifted by Thomas Cromwell. “Cromwell’s sleaves,” she tells people and no one knows what she means. She suggests Cromwell pay a visit to Wolf Hall, where Edward is angry, Tom is restless, and Sir John is “always very well.”
She would like to go to the queen, up-country. But Cromwell says she should serve Lady Anne. “Of course, it is good to be humble. She makes sure we are.”
Week 12: Anna Regina (Part 1)
‘Do you think it’s already decided, what it will be, or does God decide later? Do you think it knows itself, what it is? Do you think if we could see inside you, we would be able to tell?’
“Jane, I wish you were still down in Wiltshire,” Mary Shelton says.
Jane would like a baby.
Week 13: Anna Regina (Part 2)
Jane is waiting on Queen Anne. “He turns to her and sees something surprising: she has grown up.”
Week 14: Devil's Spit / A Painter’s Eye
Jane’s sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governor of Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen’s. Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister’s are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.
Lady Rochford believes Cromwell is in love with her. “You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have young gentlemen in my house, I have wards, their marriages are my business.”
Lady Rochford thinks Jane Seymour has the wit of a sheep. “Sheep are maligned in that way. Shepherds say they can recognise each other. They answer to their names. They make friends for life.”
Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Jane tells him that no one has ever written her a sonnet. “Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain?”
Cromwell lets slip that he calls Thomas Howard, Uncle Norfolk. “I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?”
He assumes she has a husband in prospect, down in the country.
Week 18: Falcons
She is a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.
Her father calls her a great hunter, a goddess Diana. She says she is learning French from Mary Shelton. “We have gossip enough to occupy a whole town of women,” she says. The only man who penetrates this secret town is Mark Smeaton. “We barely count him a man. If you want to know our secrets, ask Mark.”
Jane apparently does not believe in ghosts. Neither does Thomas Cromwell.
When the king falls asleep, it is Jane who leans “over the king’s chair and taps the back of his hand: briskly, as if she were testing a cheese.”
The next day, the king asks whether she will walk in the garden with him.
Henry and Jane are walking below. Henry is a massive figure and Jane is like a little jointed puppet, her hand not up to the king’s shoulders.
The king is saying something to Jane. And when she comes in, her womenfolk carry her away to get it out of her.
The next day, she is up early in her “stiff finery” gazing out into England.
Jane hardly seems to breathe. No rise and fall discernible, of that flat bosom. He feels he should walk backwards, withdraw, fade back into the night, and leave her here in the moment she occupies: looking out into England.
Week 19: Crows (Part 1)
Cromwell tells Jane Seymour to come to Elvetham. He now knows that “silent Jane in his bed, pale and speechless Jane, that is what Henry dreams of now… No harm if he, Cromwell, helps ease the king’s way towards her.”
At Elvetham jane was like a flower, head drooping, modest as a drift of green-white hellebore. In her brother’s house, the king had praised her to her family’s face: ‘A tender, modest, shame-faced maid, such as few be in our day.’
Tom Seymour says sleeping with Jane would be like “kissing a stone. Rolling her about from one side of the mattress to the other, and your parts growing numb from cold.”
Jane seems oblivious to why she is here. Or perhaps, only appears to be oblivious.
A fleeting smile and she vanishes, leaving him looking after her. We could be married at that, he thinks; it would keep my mind agile, wondering how she might misconstrue me. Does she do it on purpose?
He will advise the Seymours on how to present her to the king to their advantage.
But what will Anne the queen do, if Henry takes as mistress a young woman she has laughed at since ever Jane waited upon her: whom she calls pasty-face and milksop? How will Anne counter meekness, and silence?