Read Online King's Fool by Margaret Campbell Barnes - Free Book Online

to see the King and remembering Mistress Joanna’s instructions, I followed at a respectful distance and mingled with a crowd of citizens and minor Court officials who appeared to be perfectly free to watch their sovereign and his gentlemen at play. And a fine sight it was with the verdure of the smoothly clipped grass and the bright silks and velvets of the players and the nimble, bright-faced pages retrieving and handing the woods. I saw Master Fermor join some spectators at the far end of the green, and quite close to me at the nearer end was the King himself. A man who towered over them all, fair skinned and ruddy, with the good looks of an athletic man in his prime. He was so close that I could even see the beads of sweat on his forehead and the sandy hairs on his strong hands.
    Bowling was a game for the gentry. By his new law it was forbidden to most of us in order that we should spend much of our leisure at the butts and so be ready in the defence of our country, and no one grumbled because the Tudors kept no standing army, relying, since Crécy and Agincourt, upon the fact that the marksmanship of England was feared throughout the world. But I had watched my master bowling with his friends often enough to follow the finer points of the game. “It is almost the last end, and his Grace’s and milord of Suffolk’s team score almost even,” a London craftsman told me with the camaraderie engendered by sport. And by the tenseness of players and spectators alike one might have guessed it. There was one fat, grey-haired little gentleman upon the Duke of Suffolk’s side who kept muttering “Too short!” or “Too wide!” and urging his wood along with gestures of tragic despair, and a tall, lean nobleman in purple who never made a cast but what he pranced sideways after it, following its bias down the rink like an anxious crab. Their unconscious antics enthralled me, and it was all I could do to restrain my own limbs from imitating them.
    The last end was excitingly close, with all the woods clustered in a bunch, and when the King himself scattered the lot of them with a final firing shot which carried the jack the tension finished in a deal of back-slapping and a burst of applause. Men threw their caps in the air and, for the benefit of the good-natured fellows about me—or for sheer joie de vivre —I stepped out on the grass in front of them and began imitating the players, particularly the tall, important-looking crab-like gentleman. For how was I to know that he was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Hereditary Earl Marshal of England?
    Everyone about me laughed or tittered, but the noise they made so spontaneously and tried to stifle so swiftly was drowned by a great guffaw of laughter from behind me. I swung round, and there was King Henry himself, leading the players off the green. A page was handing him his feathered velvet cap, and he was standing there within a few yards of me, bare bronze head thrown back, convulsed with mirth. “Beshrew me, cousin of Norfolk, if he hasn’t got you to the life,” he spluttered, seeming to relish the discomfiture of a powerful relative who probably had quite as much Plantagenet blood as he himself. “What is your name, young man?”
    “William Somers, in the service of Master Richard Fermor of Easton Neston in Northamptonshire,” I answered, snatching the cap from my own head, and trying to seize so auspiciously good-humoured a moment to draw his attention to my waiting master.
    I knew that my quick seizing of the situation had been successful. I saw Lord Vaux step forward to present him. I saw my master bow, as fine a looking man as any of them in his brown velvet, and the King made a gracious gesture to them both to accompany him back to the palace. But his florid, laughing face was still turned towards me.
    “By the Holy Rood, Will Somers, I like you for a witty, impudent knave! And by your master’s leave, who brought you here,”
    he said, to my utter