Hampton Court, February 1541 #2
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.
‘But what’s wrong with him?’ she whispers to me.
‘His doctor says he’s very well.’
PEOPLE START TO whisper that the huge trays of food are a deception, and he is not in there at all.
I wonder if there is another greater deception: if he has died in there and the Seymours are concealing his death until they have made alliances strong enough to announce a Seymour regency to govern for their little prince.
But I cannot see the Seymours; they are locked up like an enclosed silent order with the king.
I cannot write to warn my uncle. I have to practise patience and hold Kitty in readiness for whatever is to come.
Dr Butts calls in other physicians from London, as if he has lost his famous certainty, and they come upriver in the royal barge, the ice cracking under the bow wave as the icy water washes down.
I remember Dr Butts telling George to take off the king’s helmet after the jousting accident – and all of us wondering if the head would come off, too.
He was alone then; he did not need another opinion to bring the king to life.
Can it be that the king is closer to death now than when his great horse rolled on him?
Is Dr Butts more fearful now – is the king worse than when he lay like a dead man?
I walk, wrapped against the cold in my dark cape, hidden by the dusk, along the riverbank path, past the pier as the doctors board the barge back to London.
One of them says quietly that cupping will never bring down a tertian fever as hot as this one.
He lowers his voice: ‘His heart can’t stand it . . .’