Love, Remember Me (53 page)

"Do you know where she went?" Suffolk said, and his companions on the Privy Council leaned forward to hear what the young woman would say.

"Lady Rochford had rooms two flights up from the queen's own apartments. The first time the queen left, she took Margaret Morton and me with her. When she reached Lady Rochford's chambers, she sent us away and then entered. I heard the door's bolt thrown. The second time she went, she only asked me to come with her. I was required to sit outside of Lady Rochford's chamber with Lady Rochford's servant that time. Again we did not return until five o'clock in the morning. I was most uncomfortable, for the hallway was quite damp."

"Was Lady Rochford in the room with the queen?" Bishop Gardiner asked Mistress Tylney.

"I do not know, my lord. The queen liked me, and so I think she trusted me more than some of the others. I was always taking odd messages to Lady Rochford, and returning with odder messages. It was not that the words were funny, it was just that I could make no sense of them at all."

"Was it possible that the queen was with Master Dereham?" Suffolk wondered aloud.

"Master Dereham did not join the progress until Pontefract, my lords," Katherine Tylney said. "That would have been impossible."

"Why did you not speak with someone about the queen's strange behavior, Mistress Tylney?" the Duke of Norfolk asked her.

Katherine Tylney looked at Duke Thomas as if he were mad. "Who was I to go to, my lord? The king perhaps? And what was I to say, sir? That his wife's behavior was odd, and secretive? I am a simple chamberer in the queen's household. I am a servant, not gentry. I had not the right to criticize the queen, and had I done so, neither the king, nor even you, my lord, would have believed me," she said.

"Thank you, Mistress Tylney, for your cooperation," Suffolk answered. "You are now dismissed, but we may ask to speak with you again."

She curtsied to the Privy Council and was escorted from the hearing room back to her confinement.

"Well, gentlemen," Suffolk said, "what think you?"

"It would appear that the queen was engaged in some sort of nefarious conduct," the Earl of Southampton replied.

"Aye, but exactly what, and with whom?" Lord Russell wondered.

"I do not think there is any doubt as to what she was doing," Lord Audley answered him. "The question is, with whom?"

"I may have the answer to that question, my lords," the archbishop told them. "I believe Thomas Culpeper is our miscreant, but I have not yet the proof I need. The queen seems very fond of him. He was on the summer progress for the entire four months. He would know her schedule as well as the king would know it, since he is a king's man."

"My God, Cranmer!" Duke Thomas said. "Culpeper was practically raised in the king's chambers. He came to court as a little lad to be a page. The king is deeply attached to him. It cannot be."

The archbishop shrugged. "My suspicions have been aroused."

"
By whom
?" demanded Norfolk.

"Your niece herself, I fear," Thomas Cranmer answered.

"I think," Suffolk said, "that we had best continue our questioning. We are next to speak with Margaret Morton, another chamberer." The duke signaled to the guardsman by the door. "Bring in Mistress Morton."

She entered, plump, and plainer than Katherine Tylney, if such a thing was possible. She was very excited to be testifying, and filled with self-importance. She curtsied to the Privy Council.

"How may I serve you, my lords?" she asked, without waiting to be invited to speak. She seemed not to realize her error.

"Mistress Tylney has testified to the queen's odd behavior on the progress, her nocturnal wanderings and such. Did you notice anything you wish to tell the council about?"

"Oh, aye," Mistress Morton said. "Her grace and the Rochford woman were up to something all right, 'tis certain. All those whispered conversations, the messages back and forth, and not one of them intelligible. Then there was the letters that Rochford was always getting from the queen and running off with, as well as those she brought back to her grace."

"You went out late with the queen, in secret, at Lincoln," the Duke of Suffolk encouraged the witness.

"Aye, and at York, and Pontefract too, my lords. We serving women are always used to running in and out of the queen's chamber, but at Pontefract her grace got into a shouting match with Mistress Lufflyn for coming into her bedchamber without knocking. She chased her right out, and forbade any of us to enter her bedchamber ever again without her express permission. Later that night the queen locked herself in the room with only Rochford in attendance. That in itself was very odd, my lords," she said with heavy meaning. "The door was not only locked, 'twere bolted from the inside to boot! Well, my lords, didn't the king himself come to visit his wife? He obviously expected to spend the night in her bed. There he was, no disrespect intended, sirs, in his dressing gown, his nightshirt, and his nightcap, and the door was barred to him." She looked about to see what effect her story was having, and obviously satisfied by what she saw, continued.

"Well, my lords, we banged upon the door, and Lady Rochford's voice finally asks us what we want. The king is here to see the queen, we told her. Then, for I was nearest to the door, I could hear a fierce scuffling going on inside, and Rochford saying she was having trouble with the lock, and the king getting more impatient by the minute. Finally, at long last the door is opened a crack, and Rochford's face pops out. The queen, she says, is suffering with a tremendous headache, and begs the king's leave to continue her rest alone that she might be well enough to join the hunt the next day. Of course, his grace acquiesces, being the kind gentleman that he is. God forgive me for saying it, my lords, but I thought to myself at the time, there's a man in there with her."

The room was very still. Here was the thing they sought, yet had feared, finally voiced aloud.

"Did your suspicions, Mistress Morton, perhaps give you an idea of who might have been with the queen?" Suffolk asked her.

"I would stake my life that 'twas young Tom Culpeper, my lords," she told them frankly. "It could be no one else."

"Not Dereham?"

"What, that bad-tempered, crude blowhard? Nay! 'Twas Tom Culpeper if it was anyone, my lords. I knew last spring, April, it was, that she was drawn to him. At Hatfield she stood in her window and cast loving looks upon him standing below. He too looked with love upon her, and blew kisses to her with his fingertips. Once, at Hatfield, she was alone with Master Culpeper for some six hours, locked in her privy chamber. When they emerged, they each looked like the cat who had swallowed the canary. You did not have to guess to know what they had both been about," Margaret Morton concluded archly.

"
And you told no one
?" Norfolk growled, as he had with Tylney.

"I am a chamberer," Margaret Morton said. " 'Twas not my place to inform upon my mistress. If I did such a thing, I should never be able to get a good place in a decent household again."

"Thank you, Mistress Morton," Suffolk said smoothly. "You are dismissed. Your testimony has been most helpful to us."

She bustled from the room under guard, and when the door closed behind her, the Duke of Suffolk said, "That was most enlightening, my lords, was it not? It seems, my lord archbishop, that your hunch is about to pay off quite handsomely."

"This is a great tragedy, my lords," the archbishop said quietly. "I take no joy in any of this. The queen is barely eighteen. If these charges are proved further, then she will end her days shortly on Tower Green as did her relative, Anne Boleyn, God assoil her soul." Thomas Cranmer had greatly admired Anne Boleyn, and tried to save her.

"Why should you care?" Norfolk snapped at him. "If my niece is convicted, then you can find a good reformed churchwoman to place by the king's side. Is not that what you and your allies really want, sir?"

"If you had not been in such a hurry to get your niece married off to the king so the Howards might be all-powerful, Thomas Howard," the archbishop thundered, "the king should not have been joined with such an unsuitable wife. None of this would have happened but for your ambition. This girl's death will be on your conscience forever."

"You would believe chamberers over a Howard?"

"Do you think it, then, a plot by the queen's chamberers to discredit her, and why would they do such a thing?" Cranmer asked.

"Women are difficult creatures at best," Norfolk muttered. "Who knows why they do any of the things that they do?"

"My lords, this bickering is getting us nowhere," the Duke of Suffolk interposed. "We have other witnesses to hear today."

Mistress Alice Restwold was brought in, and she was followed by Joan Bulmer. Both of them said essentially the same thing that Katherine Tylney and Margaret Morton had said. Each added small details that the others had perhaps forgotten, overlooked, or not been privy to, but basically their testimony was identical. They were thanked and dismissed to go back to their confinement in the Tower.

The final piece of evidence that day was a letter found among Tom Culpeper's possessions. It had been written in the spring of the year in the queen's own hand. It was dreadfully composed, badly spelt, and ended with the tender words,
Yours as long as life endures, Catherine
.

There was now no doubt in any of the Privy Council's minds that Catherine Howard was involved in an adulterous relationship with Thomas Culpeper. No one wanted to tell the king, but Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, knew that the duty would fall to him. He was not only the king's best friend, but Lord President of the Privy as well.

The king was wild with anger over the discovery of his wife's infidelity. Suffolk tempered the blow as best he could, but there was really no gentle way in which to impart such news.

"Give me a sword!" Henry shouted. "I will go to Syon and kill her myself, Charles! Ahh, the false bitch, and I loved her!
Never again!
Catherine! Catherine!" Then he began to weep.

The council took it upon themselves to issue communiques to their ambassadors in key courts in Europe explaining the latest events in the king's ongoing marital woes. The queen's behavior was referred to as
abominable
.

François I, France's king, and a renowned lecher, sent his dear brother Henry a most sympathetic letter of condolence.

I am sorry to hear of the displeasure and trouble which has been caused by the lewd and naughty behavior of the Queen. Albeit, knowing my good brother to be a prince of prudence, virtue and honor, I do require him to shift off the said displeasure and wisely, temperately, like myself, not reputing his honor to rest in the lightness of a woman, but to thank God of all, comforting himself in God's goodness. The lightness of women cannot bend the honor of men
.

Privately François I said to the English ambassador, Sir William Paulet, of Catherine Howard, "She hath done wondrous naughty," and then he chuckled with a great appreciation of the queen's sexual behavior.

On the twenty-second day of November the Privy Council voted to take away Catherine Howard's title of queen. She was now simply Mistress Howard again. Two days later she was indicted for "having led an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous, and vicious life before marriage, like a common harlot with divers persons, maintaining however the outward appearance of chastity and honesty." She was further accused of having led the king on, and having married him under false pretenses, and for having imperiled the crown with the possibility of bastards.

The indictment, read to the former queen at Syon House, elicited far less response than the knowledge that she was no longer queen. When the members of the council had gone, Cat looked to Nyssa and asked, "Will they kill me?"

Lady Baynton looked startled by the young woman's frankness, while Kate and Bessie began to cry.

"If you are found guilty," Nyssa said, "aye, I think they will. For a queen to cuckold her king is treason."

"Oh," Cat replied, then she grew more cheerful. "They have but the word of my chamberers," she said. "Surely they will not believe them if I deny it? I am a Howard."

"They have others to question, Cat. There is Lady Rochford, and Masters Dereham and Culpeper as well. How could you trust old Lady Ferretface, Cat? Particularly after what she did to your cousin Anne. I never understood why Duke Thomas tolerated her after that."

"Because she was vulnerable, and he could use her," Cat said bluntly. "Lady Ferretface." She giggled. "Is that what you called her? She does look rather like a ferret, doesn't she?"

"My brothers called her that," Nyssa said.

"Is that adorable cherub Giles still with the lady Anne?" Cat was once again turning the subject away from the unpleasant.

"Aye, he is," Nyssa told her.

"We must really begin to think of Christmas," Cat said. "There is a most marvelous stand of trees just beyond the house to the north. Lady Baynton, do you think we will be allowed to gather branches? And we must have candles, and a Yule log as well."

The subject of death, of treason, of all things unpleasant, was now closed. And why not? thought Nyssa. She understands even if she will not admit to it. This may be her last Christmas, and she wants to make it merry. Why shouldn't she? "We must have a wassail bowl, and roasted apples too," Nyssa told Cat. "We always have them at
RiversEdge
."

"Do you think we will have a boar with an apple in its mouth?" Kate Carey wondered aloud. "I always love it when the boar is brought in!"

"And will there be music, do you think?" Bessie asked.

"Oh, I hope so!" Cat said.

"She is mad to be planning for a festive Christmas," Lady Baynton told Nyssa softly. "Does she not care that her reputation is gone? That her marriage will be dissolved? That she is ruined?"

"She cares, but she will never allow you to see her innermost thoughts and feelings. She is too proud," Nyssa answered. "Besides, it is all unpleasant, and Cat has never been one to bravely face that which displeases her. She will not change now. So she plans for Christmas. Who knows what will lie beyond Christmas?"