Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (206 page)

He laughs again, but now he is quiet, his anger spent. “She is a lost cause,” he says. “The king has finished with her. I have finished
with her. I can save myself, and I will. You will go down with the slut. You cannot get off twice.”

“I shall tell the archbishop about Culpepper,” I threaten. “I shall tell him that you meant them to be lovers. That you told me to throw them together.”

“You can say what you like,” he replies easily. “You will have no proof. There is only one person who was seen carrying messages and letting him into her rooms. That would be you. Everything you say to incriminate me will point to your guilt. You will die for it, and God knows, I don’t care one way or another.”

I scream then, I scream and fall to my knees and clasp him around the legs. “Don’t say that! I have served you, I have served you for years; I have been your most faithful servant, and I have had next to no reward. Get me out of here, and she can die and Culpepper can die, but I shall be safe with you.”

Slowly the duke leans down and detaches my hands as if I were some kind of sticky weed that has tangled unpleasantly around his legs. “No, no,” he says, as if he has lost all interest in the conversation. “No. She cannot be saved, and I wouldn’t lift a finger to save you. The world will be a better place when you are dead, Jane Boleyn. You will not be missed.”

“I am yours.” I look up at him, but I dare not grab him again, and so he walks away from me, to tap on the door to the outside world, where the sentries, who used to stand on the outside to keep everyone out, are now keeping us locked in. “I am yours,” I shout. “Heart and soul. I love you.”

“I don’t want you,” he remarks. “Nobody wants you. And the last man you promised to love died because of your testament. You are a foul thing, Jane Boleyn; the axeman can finish what the devil has started, for all I care.” He pauses with his hand on the door, as a thought strikes him. “I should think you will be beheaded on Tower Green, where they killed Anne,” he says. “There’s an irony for you. I should think she and her brother are laughing in hell, waiting for you.”

Anne, Richmond Palace, November 1541

They have moved Kitty Howard to Syon Abbey, and she is kept as a prisoner, with only a few of her ladies. They have arrested two young men from her grandmother’s household, and they will be tortured until they confess what they know; then they will be tortured until they confess what they are required to say. Her ladies who were in her confidence are taken to the Tower for questioning, too. His Grace the king has returned from his private musing at Oatlands Palace and has come back to Hampton Court. He is said to be very quiet, very grieved, but not angry. We must thank God that he is not angry. If he does not fly into one of his vindictive rages, then he might sink into self-pity and banish her. He is going to annul his marriage to the queen on the grounds of her abominable behavior—those are the very words he has put to parliament. Please God that they will agree with him that she is not fit to be queen, and the poor child can be released, and her friends go home.

She could go to France; she would be a delight to that court, who would find her vanity and her prettiness a pleasure to watch. Or perhaps she could be persuaded to live in the country as I do, and call herself another sister to the king. She might even come to live with me, and we could be friends as we used to be in the old days when I was the queen he did not want, and she was the maid he did. She could be sent away to a thousand different places where
she could do the king no harm and where her folly might make people laugh, and where she might grow into a sensible woman. Surely, everyone agrees that she cannot be executed. She is simply too young to be executed. This is not an Anne Boleyn, who schemed and contrived her way to the throne over six years of striving, and was then thrown down by her own ambition. This is a girl with no more judgment than one of her kittens. Nobody could be so harsh as to send a child like this to the block. Thank God, the king is sad and not angry. Please God, the parliament will advise him that the marriage can be annulled, and pray heaven that Archbishop Cranmer is satisfied with the disgrace of the queen on the basis of her childhood amours, and does not start to investigate her follies since her marriage.

I don’t know what goes on at court these days, but I saw her at Christmas and the New Year, and I thought then that she was ready for a lover, and hoping for love. And how could she stop herself? She is a girl coming into womanhood with a man old enough to be her father as her husband, a sickly man, an impotent man, perhaps even a madman. Even a sensible young woman in those circumstances would turn for friendship and comfort to one of the young men who gather round her. And Katherine is a flirt.

Dr. Harst comes riding out from London to see me, and the moment that he arrives, he sends my ladies away so that we can talk alone. I know from this that it is grave news from the court.

“What news of the queen?” I ask him as soon as they have gone from the room and we are seated, side by side, like conspirators before the fire.

“She is still being questioned,” he says. “If there is any more to be had, they will get it out of her. She is kept close in her apartments at Syon; she is allowed to see no one. She is not even allowed out to walk in the garden. Her uncle has abandoned her, and she has no friends. Four of her ladies are locked up with her; they would leave if they could. Her closest friends are under arrest and being
questioned in the Tower. They say she cries all the time and begs them to forgive her. She is too distressed to eat or sleep. She is said to be starving herself to death.”

“God help her, poor little Kitty,” I say. “God help her. But surely they have evidence for the annulment of her marriage to the king? He has enough to divorce her and let her go?”

“No, now they are seeking evidence for worse,” he says shortly.

We are both silent. We both know what he means by that, and we both fear that there may be worse to discover.

“I have come to see you for something even more grave than this,” he says.

“Good God, what worse could there be?”

“I hear that the king is thinking of taking you back as his wife.”

For a moment I am so stunned that I cannot say anything, then I grip the carved arms of my chair and watch my fingertips go white. “You cannot mean this.”

“I do. King Francis of France is keen that the two of you shall remarry and that your brother and the king join with him in a war against Spain.”

“The king wants another alliance with my brother?”

“Against Spain.”

“They can do that without me! They can make an alliance without me!”

“The King of France and your brother want you restored, and the king wants to rid himself of the memory of Katherine. It is to be just as it was. It is to be as if she never existed. As if you have just arrived in England, and everything can go as planned.”

“He is Henry of England, but not even he can turn back the clock!” I cry out, and I push myself up from my chair and stride across the room. “I won’t do it. I daren’t do it. He will have me killed within a year. He is a wife killer. He takes a woman and destroys her. It has become his habit. This will be my death!”

“If he were to deal with you honorably—”

“Dr. Harst, I have escaped him once; I am the only wife of his to come out from the marriage alive! I can’t go back to put my head on the block.”

“I am advised that he would offer you guarantees—”

“This is Henry of England!” I round on the ambassador. “This is a man who has been the death of three wives and is now building the scaffold for a fourth! There are no guarantees. He is a murderer. If you put me in his bed, I am a dead woman.”

“He will divorce Queen Katherine, I am certain of it. He has laid it before parliament. They know that she was no virgin when she married him. The news of her scandalous behavior has been released to the ambassadors at the European courts for them to announce. She is publicly named as a whore. He will put her aside. He will not kill her.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“There is no reason for him to kill her,” he says gently. “You are overwrought; you are not thinking clearly. She married him under false pretenses; that is a sin, and she is wrong. He has announced that. But since they were not married, she has not cuckolded him; he has no reason to do anything other than let her go.”

“Then why is he seeking more evidence against her?” I ask. “Since he has enough against her to name her as a whore, since he has enough against her to bring her into shame and divorce her? Why does he need more evidence?”

“To punish the men,” he replies.

Our eyes meet; neither of us knows what we dare to believe.

“I fear him,” I say miserably.

“And so you should; he is a fearsome king. But he divorced you, and he kept his word to you. He made a fair settlement on you, and he has kept you in peace and prosperity. Perhaps he will divorce her and make a settlement on her; perhaps this is his way now. Then he may want to marry you again.”

“I cannot,” I say quietly. “Believe me, Dr. Harst, even if you are
right and he treats Katherine with forgiveness, even with generosity, I would not dare to marry him. I cannot bear to be married to him again. I still thank God on my knees every morning for my good fortune in escaping last time. When the councillors ask you, or my brother asks you, or the French ambassador asks you, then you must tell them that I am settled to the single state—I believe myself to be precontracted as the king himself said. Just as he said: I am not free to marry. Persuade them that it cannot be done. I swear I cannot do it. I will not put my head back on the block and wait to hear the whistle of the falling axe.”

Katherine, Syon Abbey, November 1541

Now, let me see, what do I have now?

I have to say, I’m not doing very well at all.

I have six French hoods edged with gold. I have six pairs of sleeves, six plain kirtles, six gowns; they are in navy blue, black, dark green, and gray. I have no jewels, I have no toys. I don’t even have my kitten. Everything that the king gave me has been taken from my rooms by Sir Thomas Seymour—a Seymour! taking a Howard’s goods! Think how we shall resent that!—to be returned to the king. So, as it turns out, all the things I counted before were never really mine. They were loans and not gifts at all.

I have three rooms with very poor tapestries. My servants live in one, and I live in the other two with my half sister Isabel, Lady Baynton, and two other ladies. None of them speaks to me for resentment at the position they find themselves in through my wickedness, except Isabel, who has been told to bring me to a sense of my sin. I have to say that this makes for very poor company in a confined space. My confessor is ready for my call should I be such a fool as to wish to hang myself by confessing to him what I have denied to everyone else, and twice a day Isabel scolds me as if I were her servant. I have some books of prayers and the Bible. I have some sewing to do, shirts for the poor; but surely they must have enough shirts by now? I have no page boys, or courtiers, or jesters, or musicians,
or singers. Even my little dogs have been taken away, and I know they will pine for me.

My friends are all gone. My uncle has disappeared like the mist in the morning, and they tell me that most of my household—Lady Rochford and Francis Dereham, Katherine Tylney and Joan Bulmer, Margaret Morton and Agnes Restwold—are in the Tower being questioned about me.

But even worse than all of this, I heard today that they have taken Thomas Culpepper to the Tower also. My poor, beautiful Thomas! The thought of his being arrested by some ugly man at arms is a horror, but the thought of my Thomas being questioned makes me fall to my knees and lay my face against the rough cloth of my bed and weep. If only we had run away when we first knew that we were in love. If only he had come for me before I even went to court, when I was still a girl at Lambeth. If only I had told him that I was his, only his, when I first came to court, before all of this went wrong.

“Do you want your confessor?” Lady Baynton says coldly as she finds me weeping. They will have told her to say this; they are eager for me to break down and tell everything.