Hampton Court, November, 1541 #3
‘He’s fine,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing wrong. Hush, Kitty. He’s gone out hunting.’
Wildly, she turns to me. ‘Gone hunting?’
‘Yes! So, see, there’s nothing wrong! He went with just a few friends and his master of horse. He looked well. There’s no need for you to be distressed, Kitty. He wouldn’t have gone hunting if he was upset.’
She stumbles. ‘He’s going!’ she screams at me.
‘Not hunting! He’s going! He’s left me like he left her – Anne!
Like he left Jane! Like he sent Queen Anne away!
Like he left Queen Katherine! He’s going, and I have to catch him before he leaves, or I’ll never see him again! Like them! Like all of them!’
I feel an icy sweat prickle in my armpits and down my back. ‘Hunting,’ I repeat faintly.
Isabel Baynton shakes her head at me. ‘Gone to Whitehall,’ she mouths.
I wish I could think quicker. I know that my face is as blank as my mind when I look from Isabel’s hopeless face to the distraught young woman. ‘Well, anyway,’ I say, ‘you wouldn’t want to be seen like this. No hood, and your hair a mess.’
‘I have to ask for pardon.’ It comes out as a sob. ‘I let my hair down to ask for pardon. That’s how it’s done.’
‘Yes, but not like this. And you’ve done nothing that needs a pardon. Let’s go back, get properly dressed, and when he comes home after hunting or back from Whitehall, if that’s where he’s gone, you can see him.’
Isabel and I walk Kitty slowly back to her rooms, between us like our prisoner.
I think that those in service to a tyrant are called to strange and dark work.
I want to think that I am a master courtier, steering her through a crisis in her marriage, and this will all blow over.
But right now, I don’t feel like a master courtier at all; I feel like her gaoler, and I think that when you enter the service of a tyrant, you never know what work you will sink to.
We consider her gowns for the day ahead. I braid her hair into a neat coiled plait under her hood. She chooses a dark-blue gown with dark-blue sleeves and an overdress of bright blue: saints’ colours. She wears her French hood of blue pulled forward to hide her hair, as modest as a maid.
As she is fitting the hood, I go out to the gallery where the windows face towards Hampton Chase.
I see my uncle’s standard, and he at the head of his men, riding out, as if they are going hunting, riding out after the king, and I think: there he goes, the old rat, saving his own skin, whatever else he is doing.
BUT WHAT IS the king doing? He does not come back that afternoon, and his horse is not in the stable next day, when Sir Edward Baynton, now silently regretting his marriage to Kitty’s sister, tells me that the lords of the privy council are coming to see her at noon.
‘I thought they were at Lambeth?’
‘Their lordships meet where they please,’ he tells me pompously, as if being a Baynton and not a Howard will save him from disaster if the king has turned against us.
‘What am I to do?’ Kitty asks me. ‘What should I wear?’
‘You’ll wear your dark-blue gown with the sleeves,’ I say. ‘And you’ll sit on your chair in your presence chamber.’
‘I’ll have all my ladies there,’ she says. ‘Standing behind me.’
‘There are one or two missing,’ I warn her. ‘Lady Mary has gone to join the household of Prince Edward.’
She looks aghast. ‘She’s run away from me?’
‘Just a visit to her brother,’ I say. ‘And it’s not as if you like her.
You wouldn’t have wanted her in your rooms, with the privy council coming in.
And she’d be no use – she’d be scared to death of them.
Remember, they nearly arrested her for not signing the oath, and your uncle said he would bang her head against the wall. ’
She brightens. ‘Oh, did he? How funny! My uncle will come with them?’
I think of him, bent over his hunter’s neck, riding out to meet the king somewhere in the forest. ‘I don’t know exactly who’s coming,’ I say cautiously.
‘Do I curtsey?’
‘They bow to you; you don’t get up.’
She nods her head repeatedly, like it is on a spring: nod, nod, nod. ‘I don’t get up,’ she repeats.
As soon as I have Kitty on her throne in her presence chamber, I glance out of the window.
There is no black barge without a standard on the flagpole, waiting in silence, with the gangplank run ashore.
It is different this time. They are not going to tell me to fetch Kitty’s cape as she will feel the cold on the water.
She is not going to be taken from her palace. It is different this time.
When they come, our uncle is among them, and I think this will help our case: the last thing the old duke wants is another Howard girl accused of unchastity – especially lovemaking under the beaky nose of his own stepmother in the family home.
And Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk has married a young woman who was betrothed to his son: he is predisposed to dismiss scandal, having been alongside it all his life.
Bishop Gardiner, the churchman who hates reform, will be in favour of Kitty, who has no interest in religion; Thomas Audley, the lord chancellor, is a clever lawyer who will argue whatever the king wants as if it was Bible truth; and Archbishop Cranmer is a gentle reformer who would have saved Anne if he could.
No one here can be thought of as a friend, but none of them are our enemies.
Kitty sits in her chair under the canopy with us ladies on either side, in her blue gown, looking very young and small but on her dignity. Always conscious of her appearance, she has taken my hint to be queenly, and her head is poised under her jewelled hood.
Thomas Cranmer speaks to her gently, respectfully. He says that Francis Dereham has made allegations which suggest that he behaved to her as a husband – did they exchange promises and court, when she was a girl?
‘No,’ Kitty says, widening her eyes. ‘No. That’s not true.’
Cranmer ignores this flat denial, so he must have evidence against her word.
I am standing in frozen silence; but I listen intently to Cranmer’s questions, like a scholar tracing the source of a quotation.
I am the daughter of a translator: I think about sources, I am a spy; I can hear a voice behind the words, and identify him.
Clearly, they have interviewed Dereham himself, but also, I think I hear the echo of gossip from some maid in the old duchess’ household.
I am sure it is a woman who has told them the detail of kissing and late-night parties in the maids’ rooms. Francis Dereham, boasting or fearful, would have forgotten strawberries and midnight feasts, but this girl remembers it vividly.
They say nothing about the damning evidence of the purse of a hundred pounds, and – absurdly, incompetently – they don’t seem to realise that Dereham has been working in the queen’s household under their noble noses, for the last month.
This sounds like an old song, half-forgotten, that someone has sung to the archbishop in late-blooming autumn malice.
He says nothing about Kitty’s behaviour as queen.
There’s nothing against Dereham after he left for Ireland; there’s nothing against Kitty since her marriage.
Best of all, there is no suggestion of adultery against the king.
Standing impassively at her shoulder, I keep an expression of attentive concern on my face; but inwardly, I am grinning like a mask of Thalia.
All they have is spiteful old gossip, nothing to set in the scale against the king’s massive vanity.
He will have told them to make a proper inquiry and clear Kitty’s name.
This is what they are doing. We are safe. This is going to be all right.
‘None of this is true at all,’ Kitty says clearly. ‘And besides, my grandmother is very strict, and she agreed to my marriage to the king. How could such a thing be true?’
I note my uncle grimace as Kitty invokes the dowager duchess and drags in our family dignity; but none of them have any appetite to pursue the question or answer it.
‘And where is my husband?’ Kitty demands indignantly. ‘Is he back from hunting? Does he know that you are asking these questions of me?’
‘His Majesty has gone to Whitehall,’ Thomas Cranmer says gently. ‘He asked us to inquire.’
‘He will have asked you to inquire into the wicked people who are making up these lies!’ Kitty says, brilliant in her indignation.
‘He would never have asked you to say them as true! What d’you think he will say when I tell him that you have brought these lies to me, said them to my face, in front of my ladies-in-waiting?
That you have upset me? That you made me cry? Don’t you think he will be angry?’
I see from the hidden anguish on Thomas Cranmer’s face that he is very sure that the king will be angry, and whether or not they find any mud that sticks, the king won’t thank them for this work.
He has not told them – as he twice told Lord Cromwell – to get a marriage dissolved at any price and get rid of the unwanted wife.
I imagine they’ve had very ambivalent instructions: he will have told them to leave no stone unturned to find the truth; but they know well enough that the only truth the king wants to hear, is the one he believes already.
Their task is to find out what he believes, and prove it as incontrovertible fact.
They mutter urgently among themselves, and then they apologise to the queen for disturbing her in her rooms, and they bow themselves out.
Kitty, flushed with triumph, turns to her ladies. ‘They’re shitting themselves,’ she says, and the young maids scream with laughter.