Boleyn Traitor, page 33
I scrutinise him; I don’t fear his ill temper now that my future is secure. I am a wealthy woman in my own right, I am indispensable to a favoured queen, and if she becomes a regent queen, I shall be her chief advisor. Her inexperience and ignorance are my advantage. No queen before her had so poor an education; no queen before her had nothing to fill the empty days. English-born, she cannot serve as an ambassador like Katherine of Aragon. She has no interest in Catholicism like the first devout queen, nor reform like the second. She has not a thought in her head about the running of the country, no interest in the poor, nor in rescuing those who have nowhere to go now that the monasteries are closed. She has no clever brothers like the Seymours to support her authority. She was raised as a pillion wife, who sits sideways behind her husband on a special saddle and cannot even see where she is going. If the king makes her queen regent at his death, I will rule England through her.
Hampton Court, February
1541
IN FEBRUARY, THE king, tiring of a lack of evidence, goes to London with his advisors to speed the execution of his friends Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop. My father meets them there; but does not come upriver to Hampton Court to visit me. From this, I understand that he is content with my progress from queen to queen. The Duke of Norfolk goes north, alert to the threat of the Scots on the borders. The court, suddenly free of old lords and the old king, makes every day a May Day at Hampton Court. The weather turns icy, and Katheryn, a snow princess from a fairytale, in bright blue with swansdown at her wrists and neck, leads her ladies at a scampering run through the formal gardens, jumping over the herb hedges and scuffing the coloured gravels in a wild battle of snowball fights. The king’s young men – unemployed and unsupervised while the king persecutes old friends in London – see us from the windows and come whooping and hollering out of doors, throwing handfuls of fresh snow.
We run away laughing and order pages and chamberers to roll up a store of snowballs, and we set up an ambush beside one of the yew-tree allées. As they dash down the tunnel, with brown needles underfoot, we storm snowballs down on them and jump out of the yew trees to surround them. Trapped under the green boughs on dry ground, they have no snow to make more ammunition: it is our victory. They surrender, holding up their hands and demanding a parlay.
Thomas Culpeper steps out of the laughing crowd of young men and faces Katheryn, her hair tumbling down, her cheeks rosy as a child.
‘Mercy,’ he pleads, kneeling at her feet, but his brown eyes looking up into her face say: kiss me!
‘Are you very, very sorry?’ she asks him. She is panting from the running and the play-battle, but I think she is breathless with desire.
He pulls off his red cap from his thick brown hair. ‘I lie beneath your feet,’ he says. ‘You can do what you want with me.’
‘You are beneath my feet,’ she agrees. ‘I shall hold you to that.’
They don’t move, and all of us are frozen, captured by this tableau of sudden desire, under the dark-green shadow of the trees, surrounded by the bright whiteness of the sunshine outside. We are hidden with them in a private world, in the secrecy of the greenwood tree, breathing the peppery scent of the fallen fronds crushed under Culpeper’s knees as he sits back on his heels, as if he would stay all day looking up at her, as if time has frozen like the dripping icicles, as if she is a snow princess who will melt into his mouth.
Slowly, as if she is skating on thin ice, Katheryn glides forward and extends her hand to him. The white swansdown on her sleeve flutters under his warm breath as he takes her fingers and drops his curly dark head over her hand. In one fluid movement, he rises to his feet, lifts her hand to his mouth, turns it over, and puts a kiss on the inner softness of her wrist, where the blue veins run direct to her heart.
Everyone sees this gesture of courtly love; it means nothing to them – but it means something to me. For a moment, I see the two of them, illuminated in the darkness by a bright shaft of winter-white sunshine; I think I see a heart in a heartless world: love among the loveless. Nobody watching Thomas’ lips on her wrist and the colour rising from her swansdown collar can blame the pretty queen for giving her fingertips to him. No young man would blame him for taking the soft palm on his cheek. All of us are spellbound in the moment, as if there is such a thing as true love. As if, in this grinding exchequer that is the court, there can be desire: freely offered and lovingly taken.
For once, there is no one to remind us that nothing is free: everything is bought and paid for. Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk is far away, guarding the north gate of the kingdom like a bad-tempered old dog. The other older lords are in London with the king, sifting evidence against one of their own. The queen’s older sister Isabel Baynton is warm indoors; her husband Sir Edward with her. The queen’s uncle, Lord William Howard, is packing his bags to go to Paris as the ambassador, newly promoted into dead man’s shoes. The whole young court is like a pleasure garden where the hard lord and schoolmaster have gone away. They have not conspired to be free, suddenly they are.
We go hunting with the king’s hounds, but nobody cares about the kill; we are riding for the joy and excitement, recklessly following the hounds wherever they lead, half-hoping to be lost in snowy woods, finding our way to the warm dining tents for dinner, drinking too much hot wine, and riding home singing love songs. Mary Norris rides hand in hand with her new husband George Carew, Catherine Carey is inseparable from her husband Francis Knollys, Charles Howard and Margaret Douglas are always together, and the queen herself and Thomas Culpeper are like the point and the pencil of a drawing compass: wherever she sits, he seems to circle her, always staying out of reach but never too far. Wherever he is, she looks up as if to measure the distance from him. They are never again as close as they were at the snowball fight, and strangely, this careful distancing is more hauntingly erotic than any embrace. They are like two beautiful wild creatures circling each other, alert only to each other and blind to anyone else.
When we dance in a circle, and she can see his place, two girls away from her, and then one and then the next step will bring him to her – she steps back and excuses herself from the dance and waves a maid-of-honour forward, so that she does not go handfast with him or step into his arms. I would praise her for her discretion, but then I see the triumphant smile she throws at him as she avoids him, and I realise that she is only playing at retreat to bring him on, closer and closer. He watches her go, turns the bright heat of his charm on the girl she has put in her place, and waits, without looking, until she comes back to him.
I speak to her; a queen of England, especially the fourth wife, should be beyond suspicion. ‘Like Caesar’s wife,’ I tell her.
‘Who’s Caesar’s wife?’ she asks.
‘I’m saying that no one can speak slander against you.’
‘They can’t,’ she says simply. ‘Thomas Culpeper has never done more than kiss my hand once, and we were in front of all the court. You saw it yourself. Only once.’
‘I saw it,’ I say – and I think: it is my fault not theirs that I keep seeing it in my mind, that I keep seeing her hand against his face, his mouth on her wrist as a moment of quite extraordinary beauty.
ONE FROSTY DAY at noon before dinner, Kitty takes a fancy to dance on the frozen grass of the archery lawns, and we summon musicians and choristers to play and sing country dances and gallops, changing partners at every chorus. As we fall on cushions and carpets, hot and laughing after romping through a circle dance, we hear a drumbeat, ominous as a roll of distant thunder on the bright day. They are the drums of the king’s barges coming steadily upriver, insistent as drums of war. Then we hear the sharp blare of trumpets as the king’s barge draws up at the pier.
At once, we grab the capes and hats and muffs that we had thrown down while dancing and hurry down to the pier. Nobody needs to be told to tie their capes and straighten their hats: none of us want to look tousled by play. The older people come more slowly out of the palace, eyeing us with quick suspicious glances to see that we don’t betray their lack of supervision.
We knew the king would arrive today or tomorrow, but we still feel caught out. The king’s companions dash ahead to line up in the correct order of precedence, stiffly waiting to greet the king, as if we had not been rioting as dancing shepherds and milkmaids just moments ago.
I look from the flushed young faces turned to the cold river, to the heavy barges of the old men waiting to land, a sluggish armada of wealth and age, and I think: if the king ever comes to know himself as one of the old, bad-tempered men, cold and distant, and his court as young and playful and hot-blooded; then he will hate us. Katheryn and her maids-of-honour look like runaway schoolgirls recalled by a strict teacher. They press their cold hands to their rosy cheeks and try to pretend they are not heated by dancing and flirtation. Kitty looks as guilty as a child with a smear of jam on her smock.
‘Smile, Your Grace,’ I whisper urgently. ‘The king will want to see a pretty face to welcome him.’
‘But he’s been in London executing people!’
‘No need for you to look as if you should be in the Tower.’
She turns her lips up in a smile; but as soon as I see the king rise heavily from his throne at the stern of the barge, I know that we are all in grave trouble. I can read his resentment in the set of his padded shoulders, the way he scowls at the heavy snow clouds overhead.
The barge spins expertly, the rowers leaning on their oars, to bring it parallel to the pier. The king is unsteady on the rocking deck; his hand tightens on the bargemaster’s shoulder, his fat face is furrowed with lines of pain. His eyes are squinting against the bright winter light, dazzling on the sparkling river.
He cannot get down the gangplank without leaning on the bargemaster, and at the foot, he snaps his fingers for Thomas Culpeper, who pulls off his cap and springs forward to kneel.
‘Get up, fool – I need your arm,’ the king says, pulling him close and putting all his weight on the young man.
Culpeper staggers for a moment and then bears up. They start to walk, the king as unsteady as a drunken man. Culpeper hesitates as they go past the queen. Katheryn sinks into a deep curtsey, exquisitely graceful, and comes up with a radiant smile.
The king makes a noise as if he is hawking up phlegm and says: ‘Keep going, you damn fool. Every moment on my leg is like a year of pain.’
Culpeper can do nothing but heave the king past Katheryn as if she were not there.
John Dudley ducks around the two of them to arrive on the other side. ‘Would Your Majesty take my arm as well?’ he offers.
‘You think I can’t walk?’ the king demands, shuddering to a standstill. ‘You think I can’t walk through my own garden into my own palace? From my own damned barge?’
‘A wound that would have killed another man,’ John Dudley exclaims.
‘It’s killing me,’ the king says dourly. ‘Give me your arm and take me to my rooms.’
The younger men of the court trail behind the king, watching for their chance to help, wondering how they are going to get him up the huge flight of stairs. We ladies are left completely rejected on the riverbank. The playful spring day has come to a sudden wintry dusk.
The noblemen’s barges, following the king, line up to dock like heavy-laden trows, one after another, and the old lords stamp down the gangplanks and into the palace without a courteous word to anyone, except a token bow to the queen and a nod to summon their young kinsmen or their spies.
‘Shall we go in, Your Grace?’ I prompt Katheryn.
She is staring after the king with John Dudley holding up one side and Thomas Culpeper bearing up the other. She looks quite appalled, as if she had never before realised that the king is a bad-tempered old invalid, thirty-two years her senior, who can only get older and sicker; and that all her youth and joy and prettiness are wasted on him.
Her lower lip trembles. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she demands. ‘Did he not see me? Did he not see me curtsey?’
Ever since that day at Rochester, when she stole his gaze from his rightful bride, he has not been able to look away from her.
‘What’s wrong with him? He’s so old – all of a sudden! Has he gone blind?’
‘Shut up,’ I spit. ‘Shut your mouth.’
She gasps at my rudeness; she is stunned into silence, long enough for me to bundle her indoors, out of earshot of anyone, into her bedroom.
‘How … how dare you?’ she whimpers, as soon as the door is closed behind us.
‘You could die for those words,’ I rejoin. ‘Don’t ever say them.’
She sinks onto a chair and blindly feels for her hand mirror as if she has to see herself, as if she has to make sure that she is as beautiful as ever. ‘But what’s the matter with him?’ she demands, never taking her gaze from the portrait of young sorrow reflected back at her.
‘He’s an old man with a terrible old wound from jousting,’ I tell her bleakly. ‘He’s nearly fifty. Most men die before his age. And he’s been working hard in London while we’ve been merrymaking here. He’s been hearing evidence against a boyhood friend – a man he’s known all his life, a man he pardoned once before. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be surrounded by friends that you can’t trust – but the king has lived like that ever since … ever since …’ I think: it was before the death of Thomas Cromwell, before Anne, before even Thomas More – even before Cardinal Wolsey who guided him so faithfully, even before Queen Katherine. He has been untrusting and untrustworthy from the moment he secretly exulted at his brother’s death and jumped into his shoes.
‘He’s terribly alone,’ I say. ‘Grief and anger keep him from sleep, so he’s always tired, and he’s always in pain – he’s terrified of loss, and yet he executes his friends. He wants to be loved, and yet he has no heart. I’ve seen him like this before …’ But never so bad, I think to myself. ‘The important thing, the thing you must remember, is that you can never, never say one word, not a single word, that suggests he is old or ill or …’ I break off; I don’t think I can say the word ‘impotent’ to this child, watching herself in her mirror as a single tear rolls down her face.
‘You can’t say anything but praise. It’s against the law to say that he is old or unwell. It is illegal to say he might die. It’s against the law, Katheryn.’
‘But that’s a stupid law,’ she observes. ‘Everyone dies.’
‘Still the law,’ I tell her. ‘You can be tried for treason and beheaded for saying – as you did at the pier – that the king is looking old or sick. You must never say it.’
‘He walked right past me as if he didn’t see me.’
‘He didn’t see you; he didn’t see any of us, because he’s in so much pain and he’s so—’
‘But it wasn’t just the king! Everyone walked straight past me!’
I think: oh, this is Culpeper. But she has to learn that the king comes first. To a courtier, the king must always come first.
‘Nobody matters more than the king,’ I tell her firmly. ‘We all put him first. Thomas Culpeper has to put him first. You too.’
‘Why, what can I do?’ she demands, opening her hazel eyes wide at her own reflection.
‘You have to smile as much as you did as when you were happy with his gifts. You have to be pretty even when no one is watching. Even if he – or anyone else – fails in their manners, you never fail in yours. You are always as beautiful and as beautifully behaved as when you first popped up before him.’
This, she understands. She was raised to be a Howard girl: the most charming, the most beautiful, the most desirable. This court – an illusion – has a fitting queen at last: one who only cares how things look, not how they are.
‘I’ll wear my dark-green gown and my emeralds to dinner,’ she says as a solution to unhappiness.
‘Yes. I’ll send them in to get you dressed, and I’ll find out if the king wants to dine in his presence chamber or wants to come here.’
‘And order the musicians to come—’
‘There won’t be dancing,’ I warn her. ‘He won’t want dancing when his leg hurts.’
‘I’m not going to dance! But I want to refuse to dance with—’
‘There won’t be dancing.’
THE KING IS in too much pain to dine with the court; he does not even want to dine privately with his bride. He only wants the company of a couple of his most favoured friends: Thomas Culpeper must stay at his side, sitting with him all day and sleeping in his bedchamber at night. No visitors are allowed: hundreds of plaintiffs come to court, and there is no one to hear their requests. Noblemen and their ladies – elegant beggars themselves – get no closer to the king than the presence chamber, and he never comes out there. Only the doctor is admitted to his privy chamber by the guards on the door, and Dr Butts comes out grim-faced, saying – as he is legally bound to say – that the king is healthy and strong.
A week goes by; the court freezes into stillness and quietness in the dark days of February. It snows silently, most days, thick heavy flakes, and the river starts to freeze, crackling among the reeds, and it is dark by early afternoon. No one dares to raise their voice or run with their heels tapping on the wooden floorboards, for fear of disturbing the king’s sleep. The doors of the king’s room are barred, and blank-faced guards stand before them, pikes crossed, to block anyone from even approaching. Nobody can linger outside to see the doctor enter and leave.
One afternoon, the snowflakes are a soft pattering swirl of grey against the windows, the sky so dark that we have candles lit at midday, and everyone is bored of card games and riddles by mid-afternoon. The queen looks longingly at the white gardens where we played at snowball fighting, where we danced on the archery lawns; but she knows better than to run out in the snow while the king keeps to his shuttered rooms like a sleeping beast, like a mole deep underground in darkness. She is imprisoned in the blizzard, and there will be no tracks of her little boots in the drifts, running away.
