Hampton Court, November, 1541
Hampton Court, November
SOMETHING IS WRONG at court. I can feel the heavy air of a coming thunderstorm.
It is not something in Scotland, nor far away on the northern borders.
But there is something very wrong at court.
I have lived my life here, and I can smell it, like the first hint of smoke in a burning building.
I wonder: did Lady Mary use the progress to meet with northern Papists, and are the king’s advisors following a trail that will lead to her door?
Archbishop Cranmer is seen going in and out of the king’s privy chamber – would he lead an investigation against the king’s own daughter?
Or is she so determined against the marriage with France that she was planning to run away again, and have they sighted a Spanish ship riding at anchor off the north coast?
Or now that his sister is dead, is the king planning a war with Scotland to teach King James greater respect for his uncle?
But none of these plans would send the old lords away from court; they would come together with the king, to plan an invasion or a new plot or a cruel punishment; they would not go individually, one by one, to wherever it is that they have gone. And where have they gone? And why does nobody know?
Only I am uneasy. Everyone else continues as usual, which makes me think that I am mistaken; I have been thrown back to the time when I held a vigil for my missing husband, going round and round a quiet palace, opening doors on empty rooms.
I use my traitor skills, I see what horses are in the stable-yard, what lords have places set at dinner.
I walk slowly past Dr Butts’ chamber hoping to see visiting doctors, come to consult with him.
I watch for royal messengers riding north with muster papers – but there is nothing that I can see out of the ordinary – but that the king will not eat or be merry with the queen he called his ‘rose’.
I persuade myself I am worrying about nothing, but then, Lady Isabel Baynton, Kitty’s sister, comes on the fifth day of November to complain that Francis Dereham has disappeared.
‘Just left as rudely as he arrived,’ she complains.
‘Gone?’ I ask her. ‘Or just drunk in a whorehouse somewhere?’
‘All his things are gone from his room,’ she says. ‘My husband says he took his pay for the quarter on Michaelmas Day so ungraciously that he half-thought he would leave then. He’s not made himself popular.’ She lowers her voice. ‘It’s not as if we’ll miss him.’
‘I’ll tell the queen,’ I say.
‘I doubt she’ll care,’ Isabel observes.
I fold my lips on an angry retort. Is the woman so stupid that she has forgotten how he got his place, why we endure his company?
Does she not remember that her own family forced him into Kitty’s service, introduced as an old friend, because he had a cache of secret letters in the keeping of the dowager duchess?
Where would he go which is a better place than this?
Where else could he use the currency of indiscreet letters?
Francis Dereham’s absence is barely noticed by anyone but me, but then Catherine Tilney and her friend Alice Restwold leave court suddenly, without notice to anyone.
I stand in the doorway of their shared bedchamber, as if a precipice has opened up under my feet, I have such a vertiginous sense of the past. I open the chest for their gowns.
It is empty but for a little scrap of ribbon.
I smell the sandalwood of the chest, and I recognise this feeling of falling.
This is the feeling of being powerless, of things coming undone, of a bobbin rolling along the floor, unspooling.
This is the tug of a single thread that unravels the whole picture of a tapestry.
I dare not say anything to Kitty. There is no one I can speak to; there is no one I can trust with my fear that something is happening at court, something is happening again.
I would talk with Thomas Culpeper, but I don’t want to be seen on the king’s side, where messengers come and go and the privy council seems to be meeting daily, at odd times of day, with the king attending as if it is a matter if great importance to him.
Every day, one of the old lords rides into the beautiful stables at Hampton Court and goes straight to the king’s rooms without speaking to anyone else, without calling in courtesy to the queen.
Every day, another man rides out. Thomas Wriothesley, who served under my Lord Cromwell and knows how to interrogate a suspect, is still absent, but Archbishop Cranmer, Edward Seymour, and William Fitzwilliam come and then go again.
ALICE RESTWOLD DOES not come back, and Catherine Tilney sends no word from wherever she is.
I think I can safely send a note complaining of their rudeness to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.
It will alert her to their disappearance, and maybe she will reply and tell me that she needed them for some reason, so urgently that they had no time to tell me they were leaving.
It is a sign of how anxious I am becoming that I am relieved to see the red flag with the white crosses of the Howard standard at the head of an armed troop clattering into the yard.
I run down the stairs to the inner court and greet my uncle as he is dismounting.
‘What the hell is happening here?’ he demands.
‘Why have you come?’
He scowls at me. ‘Summoned. Urgent. No idea.’
He throws his reins to his groom and strips off his leather gloves.
‘I don’t know what’s happening. Something’s wrong,’ I tell him. ‘But I don’t know what.’
‘Must be very secret if you’ve not managed to stick your nose in it,’ he says rudely.
I break into a half-run to keep up with him as he strides towards the archway towards the main hall. ‘Have you ever heard of a rogue called Francis Dereham?’ he stops and suddenly demands.
My face is expressionless. ‘Francis Dereham?’
‘Some kind of usher or rogue or pimp at Norfolk House.’
‘I’ve never been to Norfolk House.’
‘A madhouse,’ he says bitterly. ‘Anyway, he’s been arrested.’
‘What for?’ my mouth is dry with fear.
‘Piracy,’ he says. ‘In Ireland. Months ago. They say he was bedding half the girls at Lambeth.’
‘Surely not,’ I say. ‘Not under the dowager duchess’ supervision.’
‘Aye that’s what we’ll say,’ he strides towards the stair leading to the privy chamber.
‘I’ll come to the Howard rooms later,’ I say to his retreating back.
WHEN I GET back to the queen’s rooms, they are empty of company.
None of the young men are visiting us. Isabel Baynton, seated with her back to the window with the light on her work, is frantically sewing, setting stitches at random.
She looks up when I come in, her mouth pinched and her eyes darting to the guard on the door behind me.
The women sit beside her, all of them heads down, bending over their work.
It is shirts for the poor, always a bad sign.
Isabel nods towards the closed door of Kitty’s bedchamber. I tap on the door and go in.
She is very still in the window seat, looking down into the garden where she played at a snowball fight and the yew-tree allée where Thomas Culpeper kissed her wrist nearly a year ago.
When she hears the door, she slowly turns her head, as if she does not want to see who is entering. When she sees it is me, she barely moves. ‘I thought you were gone, too!’
I come slowly into the room. ‘No. I’m here. What’s happened?’
‘I’ve been told to stay in my rooms. The privy council sent a message asking me to stay here. No company. No music. No dancing. Just wait. They didn’t say why. They just said stay indoors. No company. No music. No dancing.’
I’m thinking furiously. ‘They can’t know anything,’ I say. ‘If they knew anything for sure, they’d be making arrests. They always make arrests quickly. So, they can’t know anything for sure.’
‘What could they know?’ Her eyes are tragic. ‘I’ve done nothing.’
In her loving heart, of course, she has done nothing.
Over and over again, she has looked away from the man she adores; she has avoided his company.
She has danced attendance on a man old enough to be her grandfather and never given him the slightest moment of unease.
She has lived her life to please him; she has never said a word to contradict him.
Since that one day of the snowball fight, she has been completely discreet, never showing her passionate longing for another man.
She has laid with him only once, and that was in complete secrecy.
She was praised in church as the comfort of the king’s life, just last week.
‘Is Thomas safe?’ she whispers.
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘Nobody’s missing from the king’s rooms. But Francis Dereham’s been arrested for piracy.’
‘Piracy?’
‘From when he was in Ireland,’ I say.
‘That’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I know, I know. But suppose he talks about the money he left with you, about his promises to return?’
She shakes her head violently. ‘No, no, no, no, no, the money was for safekeeping – it was not a dower. There were no promises to marry. I just held some money for a friend.’
‘Not a dower?’ I demand. I cross the rooms so we can whisper, head to head. ‘Dower? Francis Dereham’s money? You never said it was a dower before?’
‘He asked me to marry him; but I never said yes,’ she says quickly. ‘We courted – I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so young! It wasn’t love – I know that now. It was nothing. When he went away, he asked me to wait for him and marry him properly when he came back.’
‘Marry him properly?’ I would scream if I had not locked myself to a whisper.
‘In church. We weren’t in church the first time.’
‘But you made a promise? You were betrothed?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it was nothing. It was love-talk. Lies.’
‘Did the dowager duchess know that you were courting? That you promised?’
‘Yes,’ she says miserably. ‘But she slapped my face and told me to forget all about it, so I did.’