The Confession of Katherine Howard Read online

  Squeals from Maggie and Dottie, amid which Alice sounded caution: ‘But you won’t be living with him,’ she checked. Not for a few years yet, she meant.

  Jo turned to her, eyes wide for emphasis. ‘But that’s just it!–I will.’ And then she looked around to garner the admiration and good-hearted envy that she was due, because anyone could get married at our age, but to be mistress of a household: that was really something.

  Not that I’d have wanted it for myself. I was thanking my lucky stars that it wasn’t me. It might well have suited Jo Bulmer but I wouldn’t have wanted it: to be taken from the duchess’s, from my friends, to assume sole charge of a houseful of servants.

  ‘Will you share his bed?’ This came from Kate, and there she stood, hands loosely clasped, head inclined, a picture of polite interest.

  Share his bed. Bed was where married couples made babies: that much, we knew. Marriage beds were blessed with babies. As for how those babies were made: the house was full of dogs and we lived close to a farmyard, so we couldn’t help but know how it was for animals. Not that we ever discussed it: just averted our eyes and contrived knowing smiles at comments made by the labourers or the pages. Sometimes their comments held suggestion of malign intent on behalf of the dog or stallion, as if the animal were enjoying what it was driven to do, which, to me–having witnessed the exertion and desperation–was puzzling. Not as puzzling, though, as the occasional remark implying that the bitch or mare had been looking forward to it.

  From what little we’d glimpsed of animals mating, it was hard to imagine what married couples were doing to get babies. Skid was almost always pregnant but she and Mr Scully wouldn’t be behaving like dogs. Whatever it was that the Scullies were doing, I knew it would have to be done. Their godly duty was to make babies, and the Scullies were godly people. No doubt it was done under cover of darkness, slowly, with the utmost consideration for Skid. No doubt they kept firmly in mind the end result: the gift from God, the baby.

  I was surprised that Kate had dared mention the bed-aspect of marriage, and Jo was similarly taken aback. We all mirrored her grimace, apart from Alice, who couldn’t shift the expression of concern, and Kate, with that look of mild interest.

  ‘Four children?’ Jo checked with us. ‘Four, d’you think? Is four enough? Four times, then,’ she proclaimed, to our nervous hilarity. ‘I’m deciding now: four times is all we’re doing it.’ Wife: she’d tell him, she’d make herself absolutely clear.

  Kate knew more about such matters than she’d let on, as I was soon to find out. One afternoon later that week, the two of us found ourselves alone in each other’s company. Mary was visiting home, Jo was having a fitting with the tailor, Dottie and Maggie were ill–nothing particularly serious but requiring Skid’s ministrations–and Alice, having had it and recovered, was accompanying the duchess on a visit to a bereaved neighbour. Only Kate and I were in the duchess’s day room. While I attempted to stitch whitework stars–splayed, knobbly blobs–around a pillowcase, Kate was creating a blackwork border of a fern-leaf motif on a bedcoverlet for the baby that her sister Isabel was expecting. In her time, Isabel had lived at the duchess’s. We chatted for a while about Izzy and the coming baby, her first. When we’d said all there was to say, we settled into a companionable-enough silence, which, eventually, Kate broke with, ‘After Henry’d gone–’ The pause was ostensibly for a troublesome stitch, which she made a show of scrutinising, but it also enabled me to catch up. I did have to think: Henry? Did she mean Henry Manox? As far as I was aware, no one had mentioned him since he’d gone. I’d forgotten him.

  ‘After Henry’d gone,’ she resumed, ‘I thought I was going to have a baby.’

  This must’ve been the very last thing I’d been expecting her to say. I wondered if she had said it–if I’d heard correctly. But, then, it wasn’t something about which I was likely to make a mistake. We all knew what you had to do to have a baby, though, unless you were the Virgin Mary. You had to do whatever it was that married couples did, and Kate and Henry Manox hadn’t been married. Had she been thinking she’d be having a virgin birth? Despite my utter confusion, I was careful to sit with my head bowed over my stitching as if this were an everyday revelation. Wary of jeopardising it, I was careful to take it exactly as it was being given.

  He’d forced her, I realised: that must be what she was telling me. Henry Manox had sprung himself upon her. Staying outwardly composed, I flared with fury on her behalf. She was so small and demure across the room from me: I simply couldn’t believe she could’ve been subjected to such an act. And Henry Manox!–he hadn’t seemed the type. But, then, what did I know of men? Perhaps they were more like dogs and bulls than I had realised. It occurred to me that there’d been a discordant note of admiration in those comments made by the labourers and the pages, as if they’d do what the ram was up to if given half the chance. And I’d seen Henry Manox pursuing her, that time in the garden: I’d seen his impatience and his persistence.

  ‘No one knew,’ she was saying, focused on a fern-leaf. ‘No one knows.’

  She’d told no one, until now, until me. But why now and why me? We weren’t friends, but nor did we enjoy indifference. Did that make us enemies? Rivals?

  ‘Three months,’ she was saying, ‘of no monthlies.’

  ‘Three months?’ No one knew–for three whole months? A lady’s monthlies stopped when she was expecting a baby: that, I knew. So, for three whole months Kate had lived with the fear that a baby was on the way. I was trying to recall the months–which three?–that had seemed unexceptional to me but in fact had been extraordinary. She’d passed them off as ordinary when, right under my nose, they’d been anything but. How had she done it? I’d never credited her with anything much, but suddenly I was impressed.

  And I couldn’t help but ask, ‘Weren’t you scared?’

  She looked up, and her answer was an exasperated half-laugh: What do you think? Then, ‘But we hadn’t actually…’ She stopped short with a pointed look.

  Oh, so they hadn’t. But–

  ‘I just didn’t know, though, did I?’ And she was back, diligent, at the sewing. ‘Because: three months? Nothing for three months? I wondered if perhaps–well, you know–while we were…’ She glanced back up but then her eyes slid sideways on a half-smile and dipped away. Something private, then: something to do with their romance. ‘Well, perhaps one time, when we were in that little summer-house, there’d been some stuff on his fingers and then, you know, when his fingers went inside me…’

  She frowned down at a stitch, as if it were guilty of insolence.

  My banqueting house? And fingers, inside her? I had no idea what she was talking about. Where would his fingers be inside? Her mouth? There was an inside, I knew, that was specifically to do with babies, but that was no place for anyone’s fingers and certainly not when kissing. Was that what she meant? But how on earth would he have done that? Wouldn’t she have noticed? And ‘stuff’? What stuff? Just any old stuff–dirt?–or some specific stuff? It sounded bizarre, distressing. And in my banqueting house. ‘I thought he was so nice,’ I blurted.

  ‘Me, too,’ she smirked. ‘And he was.’

  I almost laughed in disbelief. ‘But he made you–’

  Dropping the sewing into her lap, she levelled with me. ‘He never made me do anything.’ It was important, clearly, for her to establish that; unusually, her eyes held mine. ‘If anything–’ she shrugged, releasing me–‘it was the other way round, because he was always so scared of Aggs.’

  Aggs: the duchess, Agnes. That was how Kate referred to her, to amuse us–that dignified old lady, Aggs–and here she was, doing so even though there was nothing in the least amusing about what she was telling me.

  Unable to follow, I leapt ahead: ‘But didn’t you try to tell him, to track him down and tell him, that there might be a baby?’

  She’d returned to her methodical stitching. ‘No.’

  ‘But wouldn’t he have come back to marry you?’ If the
re had been a baby on the way, they’d have needed to be married.

  She huffed, derisive. ‘You think my family would’ve let me marry Henry Manox?’

  But how could they not–if he was the father of the baby? They would’ve had to get married.

  ‘I’m a Howard–’ but she loaded the words with scepticism and weariness–‘which means I’m worth more than Henry Manox. Anyway–’ the flash of an upwards glance–‘I didn’t want to marry him. I’d never wanted to marry him.’ And I heard from the tone–nothing defensive in it–that she was telling the truth.

  I was perplexed. Kissing in the banqueting house and the business of the fingers, yet she hadn’t wanted to marry him? ‘But if there had been a baby, and you hadn’t married him, what would’ve happened?’

  She didn’t even bother to look up. ‘I’d’ve been delivered of the baby and sent to a nunnery for the rest of my days.’

  What? Did she mean there were girls in nunneries who’d had babies? And did the nuns think those babies were from virgin births? I had so many questions, but no idea where or how to start, so there we were, stitching onwards in silence. Something, though, thrummed loud and clear inside me: Don’t you ever go through anything like that again on your own. That was what I wanted to say. You tell me, next time. I didn’t say it, but that was only because I knew, somehow, that it was already understood.

  It was a surprise, Jo Bulmer being the first of us to be getting married, and perhaps even a little awkward because we’d all assumed that Kate would be first. Kate had always said that as soon as a Howard girl was fourteen, she was considered ready for marrying off. The delay in her own case was due to the sudden uncertainty of the Howard family’s prospects, of which we’d known nothing before Jo Bulmer had arrived back from a second marriage-preparation trip home. She kept the news until we retired to our room; then, ‘Listen, girls,’ as soon as the door was closing behind us, ‘listen: the queen’s in the Tower.’

  That stopped us in our tracks.

  ‘How can she be?’ Little Maggie spoke for all of us: it was impossible, because the queen was the queen, so who on earth was there above her to be able to send her to the Tower?

  Mary was more blunt. ‘Don’t be wicked!’

  Tiresome, more like: yet again, I suspected, Jo Bulmer was repeating some nonsense of her mother’s.

  Pointedly, she turned from Mary to address the rest of us: ‘The king put her there.’

  Mary wasn’t having it: ‘But he loves her!’

  Back then, we didn’t even know how much: not for years would we learn how he’d exiled his long-faithful, much-loved first wife for her and damned himself and his country.

  ‘She has displeased him.’ Jo Bulmer whirled to counter Mary with her own considerable displeasure. The emphasis was to make clear to all of us that she was repeating what she’d been told; for once, she was making no attempt to claim it as her own.

  ‘How?’ Alice wanted to know. What could the queen have done? Stolen from him? Plotted to kill him?

  Jo Bulmer floundered but didn’t try to hide it from us. ‘That,’ she admitted, ‘I don’t know.’ An expression of uncertainty from her was such a rarity that this could only be the truth. ‘Either my mother doesn’t know,’ she elaborated, ‘or she won’t tell me.’ Rueful, she stepped to Kate to lay a hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ and she sounded genuinely so, ‘but she is: she is in the Tower.’

  Kate shrugged, quickly, as if to say Nothing to do with me. Which was when I remembered that this relatively new queen was her cousin. Of course: that was why we’d heard nothing of this, because we–in a Howard household–were too close for comfort. The duchess had no business with this new, religion-reforming queen, but unfortunately she was family nonetheless. The best the duchess could do now would be to maintain a dignified silence, and she’d have anticipated that a houseful of girl-bright speculation would be distinctly unhelpful.

  ‘And,’ Jo Bulmer said, grimly, ‘there’s going to be a trial.’

  A trial?

  Kate raised her eyes, guardedly watchful.

  A trial. This was serious, then. No lovers’ tiff. No shoving of the queen into the Tower to teach her a lesson. She’d done something seriously wrong, which was going be made public at a trial. Who, though, would conduct such a spectacle? Who would dare to stand there, voicing allegations and questioning her?

  Jo Bulmer answered before anyone could ask; to Kate, she said, ‘Your uncle’s in charge of it.’

  Kate lowered her gaze. Surely it’d fool no one, her uncle’s attempt to salvage what he could of the king’s favour for the Howards? Surely everyone–even the king–would see such naked self-interest for what it was? I pictured the duke addressing the jury of peers, strutting and choleric, nursing his cough, peering rheumy-eyed from balding furs, his distaste for the world unconcealed.

  Jo Bulmer conjectured, ‘People did used to say she was a witch–’

  ‘Witches aren’t true!’ Mary was outraged; and simultaneously from Alice a derisive, ‘Oh, Jo, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘“People”,’ I quoted back at Jo Bulmer. ‘Not courtiers, not the king.’ Because perhaps there were people in the depths of the countryside who believed or half-believed in witches, but no one else did. That could be no explanation for what was happening to the queen.

  She was indignant: ‘I’m just saying!’

  ‘Well, don’t.’ She was always ‘just saying’ and I was sick of having to listen to it.

  ‘All I mean is, people did used to say she turned him from his wife.’

  Kate was the one who brought it to a close, and as only she could do: turning from us with a world-weary, ‘You don’t need witchcraft for that.’

  The following morning, at the first opportunity, Mary confronted Skid, darting across the courtyard to her as if breaking free of us, lips a-quiver to give the impression that we’d been thwarting her quest for the truth. ‘Is the queen in the Tower?’ Poor Skid hadn’t even had the chance to empty her chamber pot; she had to stand there with it, toddlers whining around her knees while Oddbod, instead of placating them, cradled Beezer, the household’s prime ratter. I could hardly bear to see Skid put so mercilessly on the spot, but I did notice how she took time to consider her response. ‘I don’t know, lovey,’ was what she decided upon, and it came as little more than a whisper. ‘I don’t know anything about all that.’ All that: an admission, surely, that something was up; and lots of it, too. Her gaze studiously avoided ours; she dealt solely with Mary, heading her off with, ‘When there is any news, I will tell you,’ and a hand on her shoulder, a squeeze, to close the encounter: Enough, now. Mary resented it, of course, and stormed off, which gave the rest of us the advantage of looking admirably calm. I, for one, though, was beginning to lose patience with how little we were being told, always having to make do instead with half-rumour from Jo Bulmer.

  Later that same day, though, I did learn the truth of the matter, although at the time I could make scant sense of it. We girls had been sent to the flower and fruit gardens to help weed. Mrs Jenkins, the farrier’s wife, earned extra for her family by being responsible for weeding, and she had Mary and Maggie busy among the lilies, Dottie and Alice amid the irises, and Kate, Jo and me in the strawberries. When Jo suffered a nettle-sting and rushed into the meadow in search of a dock leaf, Kate took the opportunity to whisper, ‘I know what they’re saying the queen did.’ She hadn’t paused in her weeding, hadn’t so much as raised her eyes, and she’d barely been audible.

  I was careful to do exactly as she did: keep weeding.

  ‘I asked Aggs,’ she confided.

  How–when–had she done that? I was surprised that she’d dared. But, then, this matter–whatever it was–concerned her family and her future, so perhaps it was expected, perhaps even admirable in the duchess’s eyes, that she’d take an active interest in her prospects. The duchess had avoided divulging anything of it to us, but perhaps she’d been more forthcoming to a family member.
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  ‘It was men.’

  ‘Men?’ Men mustered against the king, I took her to mean: insurrection. That was how I understood ‘men’, in those days: as in, ‘the duke’s men’.

  The queen’s men.

  I’d misunderstood her, though, which she spotted. ‘No–’ was all she said, sliding me a look which, to my surprise, I understood. Men: romance with men. I was sure that was what she was implying with her look, but I was just as sure that it was impossible. Because the queen was married to the king, who was the most that any man could be. She already had the most to which any woman could aspire: what on earth would she need of lesser men? ‘But–’

  A slight shake of her head: there was something I’d failed to grasp. ‘Lots of men.’

  And again I understood even as I didn’t: although I was definitely on the right track, this had nothing to do with romance because a lady could only love one man–romantically–at a time.

  ‘Lots of them,’ Kate hissed. ‘That’s what they’re saying. Behind the king’s back, for ages, but now she’s been discovered.’ She searched methodically around leafy clumps. ‘Even the king’s best friend. Even her own brother.’

  I assumed she’d be going on to say more: Even her own brother says…

  But nothing.

  Even her own brother.

  I sat back on my heels and looked at her, drawing her eyes up to mine; and at that, she lost her composure, broke it with an uncertain gasp, attempting to laugh it off but falling short. ‘God, can you imagine?’ Still the forced humour. ‘I mean: my brothers!–ugh!’ and a little shudder to try to make light of it.

  I couldn’t respond in kind, I just couldn’t: it was too much. ‘D’you think it’s true?’

  She shrugged, but there was nothing carefree in it: a savage chuck of her shoulders. The truth was irrelevant, she seemed to be indicating. I was going to press her, but suddenly Jo Bulmer was bustling back towards us.