Boleyn traitor, p.45
Boleyn Traitor, page 45
ALICE RESTWOLD DOES not come back, and Catherine Tilney sends no word from wherever she is. I think I can safely send a note complaining of their rudeness to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. It will alert her to their disappearance, and maybe she will reply and tell me that she needed them for some reason, so urgently that they had no time to tell me they were leaving.
It is a sign of how anxious I am becoming that I am relieved to see the red flag with the white crosses of the Howard standard at the head of an armed troop clattering into the yard.
I run down the stairs to the inner court and greet my uncle as he is dismounting.
‘What the hell is happening here?’ he demands.
‘Why have you come?’
He scowls at me. ‘Summoned. Urgent. No idea.’
He throws his reins to his groom and strips off his leather gloves.
‘I don’t know what’s happening. Something’s wrong,’ I tell him. ‘But I don’t know what.’
‘Must be very secret if you’ve not managed to stick your nose in it,’ he says rudely.
I break into a half-run to keep up with him as he strides towards the archway towards the main hall. ‘Have you ever heard of a rogue called Francis Dereham?’ he stops and suddenly demands.
My face is expressionless. ‘Francis Dereham?’
‘Some kind of usher or rogue or pimp at Norfolk House.’
‘I’ve never been to Norfolk House.’
‘A madhouse,’ he says bitterly. ‘Anyway, he’s been arrested.’
‘What for?’ my mouth is dry with fear.
‘Piracy,’ he says. ‘In Ireland. Months ago. They say he was bedding half the girls at Lambeth.’
‘Surely not,’ I say. ‘Not under the dowager duchess’ supervision.’
‘Aye that’s what we’ll say,’ he strides towards the stair leading to the privy chamber.
‘I’ll come to the Howard rooms later,’ I say to his retreating back.
WHEN I GET back to the queen’s rooms, they are empty of company. None of the young men are visiting us. Isabel Baynton, seated with her back to the window with the light on her work, is frantically sewing, setting stitches at random. She looks up when I come in, her mouth pinched and her eyes darting to the guard on the door behind me. The women sit beside her, all of them heads down, bending over their work. It is shirts for the poor, always a bad sign. Isabel nods towards the closed door of Kitty’s bedchamber. I tap on the door and go in.
She is very still in the window seat, looking down into the garden where she played at a snowball fight and the yew-tree allée where Thomas Culpeper kissed her wrist nearly a year ago.
When she hears the door, she slowly turns her head, as if she does not want to see who is entering. When she sees it is me, she barely moves. ‘I thought you were gone, too!’
I come slowly into the room. ‘No. I’m here. What’s happened?’
‘I’ve been told to stay in my rooms. The privy council sent a message asking me to stay here. No company. No music. No dancing. Just wait. They didn’t say why. They just said stay indoors. No company. No music. No dancing.’
I’m thinking furiously. ‘They can’t know anything,’ I say. ‘If they knew anything for sure, they’d be making arrests. They always make arrests quickly. So, they can’t know anything for sure.’
‘What could they know?’ Her eyes are tragic. ‘I’ve done nothing.’
In her loving heart, of course, she has done nothing. Over and over again, she has looked away from the man she adores; she has avoided his company. She has danced attendance on a man old enough to be her grandfather and never given him the slightest moment of unease. She has lived her life to please him; she has never said a word to contradict him. Since that one day of the snowball fight, she has been completely discreet, never showing her passionate longing for another man. She has laid with him only once, and that was in complete secrecy. She was praised in church as the comfort of the king’s life, just last week.
‘Is Thomas safe?’ she whispers.
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘Nobody’s missing from the king’s rooms. But Francis Dereham’s been arrested for piracy.’
‘Piracy?’
‘From when he was in Ireland,’ I say.
‘That’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I know, I know. But suppose he talks about the money he left with you, about his promises to return?’
She shakes her head violently. ‘No, no, no, no, no, the money was for safekeeping – it was not a dower. There were no promises to marry. I just held some money for a friend.’
‘Not a dower?’ I demand. I cross the rooms so we can whisper, head to head. ‘Dower? Francis Dereham’s money? You never said it was a dower before?’
‘He asked me to marry him; but I never said yes,’ she says quickly. ‘We courted – I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so young! It wasn’t love – I know that now. It was nothing. When he went away, he asked me to wait for him and marry him properly when he came back.’
‘Marry him properly?’ I would scream if I had not locked myself to a whisper.
‘In church. We weren’t in church the first time.’
‘But you made a promise? You were betrothed?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it was nothing. It was love-talk. Lies.’
‘Did the dowager duchess know that you were courting? That you promised?’
‘Yes,’ she says miserably. ‘But she slapped my face and told me to forget all about it, so I did.’
I think furiously: whatever she says now, there’s evidence enough here to prove a precontract. Any fool could get Dereham to say that they spoke of marriage, they were courting, he gave her his savings to keep for him while he went to win his fortune, and he expected to come back to marry her. Enough there – plenty there – if the king wants evidence of a precontract to say that Kitty was handfasted and married. If the king wants the marriage annulled, he can put her aside and say she was married before, and this time, it will be true. You don’t need to be a Cromwell to turn this into an annulment.
She’s no duchess; she won’t get a palace to buy her off, but it need not be a complete disaster. Kitty could come out of this quite well. She’ll have to return her queen’s fortune to the king, but she’ll get a nice little house in the country; she could live secretly with Culpeper in half-disgrace until the king dies, and then they could marry. Nobody would care if they married then; she could even come back to court as Prince Edward’s former stepmother with her new husband.
I won’t even have to retire with her. The scandal took place before I was her lady-in-waiting, and I did nothing but keep Dereham’s purse until they gave it back to him. If the king lives long enough to get this marriage annulled and marries another woman, he will ask me to be her chief lady-in-waiting. Who knows what he likes better than me? Who better to train a sixth wife?
‘This could be worse,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a pity that it comes out now.’ I don’t have to say: the secret nearly outlived the king. ‘But it’s still your word against Francis Dereham’s. At the very worse, you can admit you were handfasted and accept an annulment. It’s what Anne of Cleves had to do.’
‘No!’ She gives a little scream. ‘I was not married to that … that … stock fish! I will not have people say that I married him! He was never of my quality, and I won’t go from being Queen of England to Kitty Dereham!’
‘You wouldn’t have to live as his wife …’ I start to explain but she can hear nothing.
‘We weren’t lovers!’ she shrieks. ‘Anyone who says it is a liar. Let me see the king! Let me go to the king! I will tell him there was nothing! It was nothing! I was a child playing at weddings. It was nothing!’
I grab her hands. ‘Quiet,’ I say sternly. ‘Quiet, Kitty. You can’t go to the king like this. You can’t go out of your rooms like this. We’ll get through this, and we’ll get clean away with the other … we’ll get away with everything; but you have to be quiet and clever and calm.’
‘I’m not!’ She shakes her head wildly. ‘I’m not clever and quiet!’
‘No. Not clever. But you can be steady and queenly. You know how to act queenly. You do it beautifully. Be a queen who has been insulted. A little bit hurt and a little bit proud and very dignified.’
I can feel the hammering pulse in her wrists slow to the forceful rhythm of my words. ‘You will see the king,’ I promise. ‘You’re right. You need to see him to explain. But not like this. He hates a scene when someone else does the talking. Just wait. Dry your eyes and wash your face and wait. When you look beautiful, when you can kneel in front of him and ask for a pardon; you can wear your hair down and ask for pardon. He loves you – it’s not like getting rid of Anne of Cleves. He wants you as his wife. He loves you as much as he can love anyone. If everyone stays very calm and says nothing, then it might be that nothing is proved and we can go on as we are.’
I think: I calculate like a philosopher working on a theorem. This may work. Kitty will not face an investigation organised by my spymaster; it will be the slower wits of the old lords: Audley, Southampton, Russell, and the gentle archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Someone like Thomas Wriothesley will invent whatever evidence the king wants, but the king will want evidence of innocence – he will have told them to disprove the allegations against his rose of England, the love of his life. We can trust to his hounds not to riot; they are well-schooled, they will follow the line of what he wants to hunt. They’re not going to dig up something he doesn’t want to see. All Kitty has to do is wait quietly, and this will blow over, like the fright we had last Lent that blew over by Easter, that the king would go back to Anne of Cleves.
‘Where is my brother Charles? Is he with the king?’ she demands. ‘And has my uncle come? He’ll speak for me!’
‘Yes, he’s here,’ I say. ‘Your family are all in the right place.’
‘Tell him we will deny everything.’
I nod and leave her in her window seat.
I walk through the silent presence chamber. The yeoman on the door lets me pass without comment, and I stroll down to the stable-yard to see what horses are in the stalls.
‘Where’s Charles Howard’s horse?’ I ask one of the Howard grooms.
‘Gone to Lambeth,’ the man says.
Charles must have ridden home to tell the dowager duchess what is happening here at the palace.
I don’t dare ask more. I look around; the stables are half empty.
‘Where is everyone?’ I gesture to the empty horse stalls.
‘They’ve all gone to Lambeth,’ he says helpfully.
My face does not change, but my heart skips a beat. ‘To Norfolk House?’ This can only be an inquiry into Kitty’s childhood and a search of her grandmother’s papers. I only pray that the dowager duchess had the sense to burn them.
‘Nay – Lambeth Palace. Privy council is meeting there.’
I breathe again; I want to laugh and clap him on the back and give him a shilling. The privy council can meet at the archbishop’s home and discuss anything they like. It makes no difference to me.
I nod and I walk round the empty yard and pat my own horse, idle in his stable, and I think I will just stay here for a moment, to see if anyone else is coming or going. I have sunk to being the sort of spy that lingers in kitchens and stable-yards and eavesdrops: a common sort of gossip. I no longer have a patron to tell me which way the light breeze of royal favour might blow today; I no longer have the greatest lawyer in England to ask me to find the evidence he wants. I have to sieve the grist for any goodness and scan the midden for worthwhile scraps.
I can hear the wolfhounds baying with excitement and the huntsmen blowing their horns. A royal groom leads the king’s horse out of the stable, and I step back into the shadow of the doorway as the king himself comes out, leaning on his master of horse, Anthony Browne. His great, broad-chested, big-boned warhorse comes up to the mounting block, and the king hangs on to the saddle and swings his good leg over his horse, Anthony Browne and a page pushing him upwards.
He is going hunting, but there is none of the usual bluster and boasting of men ready to enjoy a day’s sport, and they’re going out late in the day. Hardly anyone is riding with him, though the hounds are here, the huntsman here, the bugle for the hounds rings out in the cold air; but there is no bustle and excitement, no courtiers jockeying for precedence, no flirtations as ladies are lifted into the saddle.
The king is certainly not going out after deer; he can’t ride to hounds as he used to do, he is using his hounds as cover for something else: a secret meeting in the woods. This can be nothing to do with the queen; it must be something else altogether. An inquiry about Kitty would be made by the privy council, in a formal meeting with a clerk taking notes. So something else is drawing the king out into the woods of Hampton Chase. Is he meeting the Spanish ambassador, pleading for Lady Mary to be spared marriage to France, or the Scots ambassador, pleading for forgiveness for his king, or some other secret that I can’t even imagine? Kitty and her trivial childhood errors might be quite forgotten, we could be home and dry, while the king goes out into the drizzling rain to hunt other prey.
Sir Anthony goes ahead to the gateway to give the signal to the hounds. I watch the king follow them out of the yard, remembering him riding away from the May Day joust with his greatest friend Henry Norris at his side, and my husband George racing after them to his own death, Anne telling him to say she was innocent, innocent of everything, and I think: no, this is different. It is odd, but it is different. I must not panic; I must not let myself be haunted; I must not frighten myself with memories. These are different times; the king loves Kitty, and no one would care about a whispered promise to a fool like Dereham. They will hang him for piracy and forget him. The king does not want to expose anything about his young wife, and these are not the men to uncover well-hidden kitchen gossip. It is a different queen. These are different times, and I am different, too.
I go back indoors to tell Kitty the good news that the king has gone hunting for the day, that nothing is serious enough to keep him home. But as I climb the great stairs, I hear a bubbling cry and the noise of running feet. It is Kitty, crying and running along the gallery, hair down over her shoulders, blinded with tears, hands holding her gown out of the way, feet pounding. Isabel and a couple of fools are dashing after her and the guard on her door starting after them, uncertain what he should do.
I step out and catch her, as if we were playing a game.
She pulls away from me. ‘No! You shan’t stop me! I must see him! I must see him! He can’t go! I can make it all right if I can see him.’
‘He’s fine,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing wrong. Hush, Kitty. He’s gone out hunting.’
Wildly, she turns to me. ‘Gone hunting?’
‘Yes! So, see, there’s nothing wrong! He went with just a few friends and his master of horse. He looked well. There’s no need for you to be distressed, Kitty. He wouldn’t have gone hunting if he was upset.’
She stumbles. ‘He’s going!’ she screams at me. ‘Not hunting! He’s going! He’s left me like he left her – Anne! Like he left Jane! Like he sent Queen Anne away! Like he left Queen Katherine! He’s going, and I have to catch him before he leaves, or I’ll never see him again! Like them! Like all of them!’
I feel an icy sweat prickle in my armpits and down my back. ‘Hunting,’ I repeat faintly.
Isabel Baynton shakes her head at me. ‘Gone to Whitehall,’ she mouths.
I wish I could think quicker. I know that my face is as blank as my mind when I look from Isabel’s hopeless face to the distraught young woman. ‘Well, anyway,’ I say, ‘you wouldn’t want to be seen like this. No hood, and your hair a mess.’
‘I have to ask for pardon.’ It comes out as a sob. ‘I let my hair down to ask for pardon. That’s how it’s done.’
‘Yes, but not like this. And you’ve done nothing that needs a pardon. Let’s go back, get properly dressed, and when he comes home after hunting or back from Whitehall, if that’s where he’s gone, you can see him.’
Isabel and I walk Kitty slowly back to her rooms, between us like our prisoner. I think that those in service to a tyrant are called to strange and dark work. I want to think that I am a master courtier, steering her through a crisis in her marriage, and this will all blow over. But right now, I don’t feel like a master courtier at all; I feel like her gaoler, and I think that when you enter the service of a tyrant, you never know what work you will sink to.
We consider her gowns for the day ahead. I braid her hair into a neat coiled plait under her hood. She chooses a dark-blue gown with dark-blue sleeves and an overdress of bright blue: saints’ colours. She wears her French hood of blue pulled forward to hide her hair, as modest as a maid.
As she is fitting the hood, I go out to the gallery where the windows face towards Hampton Chase. I see my uncle’s standard, and he at the head of his men, riding out, as if they are going hunting, riding out after the king, and I think: there he goes, the old rat, saving his own skin, whatever else he is doing.
BUT WHAT IS the king doing? He does not come back that afternoon, and his horse is not in the stable next day, when Sir Edward Baynton, now silently regretting his marriage to Kitty’s sister, tells me that the lords of the privy council are coming to see her at noon.
‘I thought they were at Lambeth?’
‘Their lordships meet where they please,’ he tells me pompously, as if being a Baynton and not a Howard will save him from disaster if the king has turned against us.
‘What am I to do?’ Kitty asks me. ‘What should I wear?’
‘You’ll wear your dark-blue gown with the sleeves,’ I say. ‘And you’ll sit on your chair in your presence chamber.’
‘I’ll have all my ladies there,’ she says. ‘Standing behind me.’
