The Queen's Mistake (54 page)

If only she could see Henry, make him look into her eyes so he
could see that, while she had made a foolish, adolescent mistake with Francis, and perhaps kissed Thomas after their marriage, she had never done anything more. She had never been unfaithful to him. She was so overwrought and fearful, she failed to attend to the warning in Thomas’s desperately sent message, the one that would now cost him so much.

“It was a youthful folly, a horrid mistake!” Catherine confessed, weeping as she gazed up at Wriothesley with doleful, pleading eyes. “There must be something I can do! Please tell me, my lord, what am I to do?”

“Dereham has been arrested, so I know not what you may do now. The wheels are in motion already. Perhaps be thankful that, for the time being, you are only under house arrest.” He turned to leave, then paused and turned back. The silver baldric across his shoulders glittered in the sunshine through the paned windows. The glacial stare had not left his face. “Ah, there is one thing.”

“Anything,” Catherine said desperately.

“Pray that His Majesty has developed a more forgiving heart over the last years when it comes to the fidelity of his queen,” he said.

Thomas found a broken hulk of a man hunched over a polished oak table as he walked into the king’s drafty bedchamber the next morning. At first, Henry had not acknowledged any of his gentlemen, and the light meal before him had gone untouched. The ewer of wine beside it was still full. But suddenly, as if sensing a friendly soul, Henry glanced up. His eyes were glazed, bloodshot and unfocused, and his face was blotched red.

“Ah, Tom, my old friend. Please.”

Thomas advanced cautiously as Henry turned to gaze out the window
at the cold winter landscape. “You, of all the men at my court, know about women. Once, I might have asked Brandon what to do, but he is too old now to be of help to me in a matter like this.”

Thomas felt guilty for his role in the king’s pain. But he kept his demeanor calm.

“I shall do what I can, sire.”

“Can you make lies into truths for me, Tom? Or make the past insignificant to a man’s heart?”

“Would that I could,” he answered honestly. “It does seem to me, though, that no one is ever completely what they seem. Not even the two of us.”

Henry looked back up at him again, and it took all of Thomas’s strength not to look away. “You knew about the queen?”

“Only the court gossip. Not the story.”

Henry’s eyes brightened with another flurry of tears. “She was not what she seemed. Not an innocent. She had a lover.”

Thomas could sympathize with the king. He had felt the same way when he had found out about Dereham. “I would like to believe we all have the power to change, that a great love can alter each of us, that none of us are the sum total of our past. I know that, in my life, I have been permanently changed by the love of a woman.”

Tears ran down Henry’s bloated cheeks in a steady stream, catching in his beard as his chin quivered. “But I am the King of England.”

“Are you not a man first, sire? Will you not regret it for the rest of your days if you do not give Her Grace the opportunity to prove that the boy who came into her life before you ceased to matter once she met you?”

Their eyes locked and Thomas felt a shiver of guilt, but he shoved it aside and maintained his confident exterior. Everything in the world depended on it.

“You risk a great deal speaking to me this way,” the king warned.

“Have you not always urged me to do so?” Thomas countered.

“I have.”

“Then I urge you to give Her Grace a chance to prove she is the woman you believed her to be. You had planned to reunite with your wife at Hampton Court. Go ahead with your plan. See her, speak with her. Then decide. That, at least, is what I would do—if she were my wife.”

He was tormented by his last words, which only reminded him of what Catherine could never be. But if he could save her through his unlikely and enduring friendship with the king, he would do it.

Henry ran a hand behind his neck and let out a great sigh. “You’re right, as always, Tom. I will see her once the anger in my heart fades.” He looked up now, tears still in his blue eyes. “She really is my rose with no thorns. Perhaps a childish indiscretion long ago is not so horrendous. Perhaps allowances could be made for that. Since there was a betrothal, it is likely that my marriage to her will be declared null after Dereham confirms the story. But things with the princess of Cleves ended well enough. Perhaps this, too, will be the case for Catherine and me.”

Finally, a smile turned up the corners of Henry’s small mouth. And, for the first time in a long while, Thomas dared to allow himself a spark of hope that, by some miracle, they might be together after all.

“Your Majesty is a benevolent man,” Thomas said, bowing to the king.

“You know very well that I am nothing of the sort. They call me a butcher now, wild and unpredictable in my old age.”

“Your Majesty is still full of enough youth and vigor to prove them all wrong.”

“If that is what I decide to do about her,” the king added.

“Of course, sire,” Thomas said. “If that is what you decide to do.”

For five long days after he arrived at Hampton Court, Henry did not see Catherine nor speak to her. She was, however, given a daily report on the parade of women he invited to dine with him or stroll with him in the gardens. She was being advised by his counselors to acknowledge her precontract with Francis Dereham and allow an annulment to move forward. Several members suggested that the queen be sent quietly to a convent. It could be much worse, Jane observed, reminding her of how things had ended for Anne Boleyn.

As if Catherine needed the reminder.

Perhaps, after a time, once things had died down and Henry had replaced her, she could petition him for a situation like Anne of Cleves’s, and even seek out a second marriage. But she must be patient, Jane said, and they both must pray.

As much as Catherine longed to go and plead for his understanding and mercy, her greatest hope was in remaining silent and out of sight to allow his rage to cool.

As light snowflakes fluttered past her leaded windowpanes, she at last received a visitor. Hearing Jane go to the door, Catherine sprang from her chair, full of renewed hope.
At last
, she thought.
At last, I am saved!

Her visitor, however, was not the king. . . .

Chapter Twenty-two

 

 

I
n his severe black cape and hat with lappets over his ears, his craggy face devoid of emotion, Archbishop Cranmer stalked forward, pushing past Catherine as if she were of little consequence. Behind him was his personal secretary, who sat down at the queen’s writing desk. He drew forth a sheet of vellum, a pen and a pot of ink from the walnut-and-leather writing box he had brought along.

“Master Dereham has confessed to everything, madam. Now it is your turn, so you might as well take a seat. It is going to be a long afternoon.”

Panic coursed through Catherine like a white-hot wave, and for a moment she could not move. She knew instantly that whatever she said could be used against her.

“I said sit down, Lady Catherine,” Cranmer demanded.

The alteration in title was a direct hit. Still, as a new flurry of bitter tears flooded her face, she could not prevent a show of pride. “I am your queen, my lord archbishop.”

“That is incorrect. You forfeited your honor, so you have surrendered your rights as queen.”

His tone was cruel, exacting. She felt Jane hovering behind her,
and if she had turned around to look at her, she would have seen her panic mirrored in her friend’s expression. The secretary at the desk lowered his head and began to scratch swirls of ink onto the open sheet of vellum.

“During his questioning, my lady, Master Dereham confessed many interesting things,” Cranmer began.

“Perhaps he made them up under duress,” Catherine said quickly.

“There was proof shown of your marital precontract—a scarf you made for him with your initials entwined. The only hope you have is to confess the truth.”

“Do not do it,” Jane urged in a whisper from behind her, suddenly overwhelmed by fear. “I am not certain that we can trust in the king’s mercy. His fury and wounded heart could overtake everything else, as it did with your cousin Anne Boleyn.”

“Confess everything, my lady Catherine, and there may be mercy for you. Say nothing, and there is a well-worn block on Tower Green at the ready.”

She gasped, fingers splayed across her mouth. “Hal would not dare. He loves me.”

“A man betrayed is not a man to be trusted,” Cranmer said with a sneer.

“I have been a loyal wife,” she cried, hearing her own frantic tone rise.

“And what were you before?”

“A foolish girl!”

“You told him you were a maiden.”

“I said no such thing.”

“Then you allowed him to believe it, at least. Your guilt is the same.”

“Omission is the same as lying?”

“His Majesty believes so. And not a soul in your family did anything to alter the perception, so great was the ambition of the Howards.”

“I love the king!” Catherine wailed.

“You bedded your secretary.”

“Before I was queen!”

There was a small silence. Cranmer bit his lip to stifle his victorious smile. “Thank you, my lady, for confirming what we already knew.”

“You do not understand.” She lurched forward, tumbling out of her chair, eyes shining with desperate tears. “Let me speak with the king! Please let me make him understand!”

He shook his head slowly in a show of feigned pity. “I am sorry, my lady. The king was most specific when I came here. He does not wish to see you.”

She stiffened. “What does he wish?”

“Only for the truth. All of it.”

The truth. That was a hornet’s nest she could never explain, and one Henry would never understand. Frustration welled within her, choking her until she could not breathe. This was all a horrendous mistake. She had been a good wife. A faithful queen. She had never rebuffed him, never made him feel like anything but the youthful prince he had been once. Catherine needed to see him. If she could look into his eyes, she could make him understand, and he would forgive her.

But she needed a chance, a moment only.

Suddenly Catherine bolted for the door, her chair clattering behind her. Skirts gathered up in her hands, she sprinted out into the open gallery. One chance. That was all she had.

“Hal! Hal, please! Where are you?”

The cadence of footsteps behind her was heavy. Ominous. The
king’s guard and the archbishop were advancing. She stopped, spun around, her eyes wide with panic. Tears slid down her face as she cried out in pure terror.

The hand on her shoulder was icy through the velvet.