The Confession of Katherine Howard Read online

  Not such an odd answer, actually, because we all knew that she’d recently had some doings with Lord William.

  A month or so beforehand, she and I had been returning from a Skid-errand at the laundry when Lord William had come hopping into the courtyard, supported by a pair of his men. We’d slowed up, unsure how to behave: we were mere girls of the household, and here, clearly indisposed, was the duchess’s son.

  ‘It’s my ankle,’ he’d blurted, crossly.

  ‘His lordship fell,’ snapped one of the men, ‘on the steps,’ the riverside steps. Not a plea for help; rather, an explanation to put a stop to our gawping and see us on our way. Lord William’s pride had taken at least as hard a knock as his ankle; he was shaken and hadn’t yet righted himself. Nevertheless, Alice was there before I knew it–perhaps even before she knew it–kneeling at his feet and only then asking a perfunctory, ‘May I?’ She acted with such authority that he gave himself over to her without another word, only a nod at one of his men to get down there and remove his boot.

  I was flabbergasted, glancing around for someone to come to our aid, but there was no one, no help forthcoming: it was just us and them, and this odd little encounter would have to go to its conclusion. The wool-clad ducal foot was presented to Alice and she examined it, unselfconsciously uttering commands: Can you push against me? There? Does that–? How about there? A little harder? That’s right, against my palm.

  He grumbled and exclaimed but his breathing was coming under control.

  I stood there, useless but attentive, focusing on the foot to avoid looking the wretched Lord William in the face. Eventually Alice gestured for the attending man to replace the boot. ‘It’s a twist, my lord,’ she confirmed, standing up, ‘not a break.’ Then, ‘My advice is to keep it raised. We’ll go and get some cold cloths to wrap it in.’

  Would we?

  ‘Where,’ she asked the attending men, ‘shall we bring them?’

  The duchess’s day room, we were told.

  Lord William was still awkward, but also grateful. ‘Thank you,’ he said to her, unsmiling, grave; and called after her, ‘thank you.’

  We didn’t catch each other’s eye until we were out of their sight. I was surprised to find that I was shaking. ‘How do you know about ankles?’

  ‘Five brothers,’ was the answer.

  ‘That’s a lot of ankles.’

  ‘Ten,’ she confirmed, with no glimmer of humour.

  As good as her word, she did take those cool cloths to the day room where, to my relief, they were taken from us at the door. And that, I’d assumed, was the end of it, except for her taking delivery, days later, of a token of Lord William’s gratitude–a drawstring purse embroidered with foxgloves–and enlisting Skid’s help to write back with her own thanks.

  Was she now saying that something had been going on ever since?

  ‘Lord William?’ Kate queried. ‘What did he want with you?’

  ‘Just–’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘To talk,’ and, to my surprise, she unleashed on Kate a defiant glare: Satisfied?

  Far from it. ‘Talk?’ As if that were preposterous, which, I suppose, it was: Howard men weren’t known for their conversation, and certainly not with girls. ‘What about?’

  Evasive, again: a shrug.

  Kate persisted: ‘He wants to talk to you?’

  Uncalled for, and I cringed, busied myself with a jar of nutmegs.

  Alice, though, shrugged it off, at which point Kate had the sense to leave it.

  Whatever was going on, it continued apace, Alice often gone. Hard to imagine from the look of him, but Lord William obviously had a fair bit to say. He’d picked well: Alice was no talker, which, by default, must’ve made her a listener of a kind. Kate continued to be cynical, but behind Alice’s back. Off for a good bout of talk, she’d say; Off for a talking-to. I couldn’t fathom her displeasure. Was it because this involved her own uncle? Step-uncle, though, and anyway they had no relationship whatsoever–I’d never witnessed them exchange so much as a glance. Frankly, Lord William was embarrassing: that rattled-looking, pinch-mouthed man. So, I didn’t think her gripe came from any sense of trespass. Was it, then, because Alice–plain, boring, unassuming Alice–had been singled out? Was that somehow an affront to Kate?

  Once, disparaging, she put it to me: ‘Do men ever just talk?’

  Well, certainly she and Francis didn’t seem to; but I’d not have said she appeared to miss it.

  Ed was a talker–even if there was nothing to say, he always managed to come up with something and to make it entertaining, too–but, of course, he didn’t just talk. He kissed, too. Whereas Lord William: he couldn’t do anything but talk to Alice, because he was married and she was in the care of his mother.

  Once, Kate said to me, ‘He’s probably trying to get her to lend him some money,’ which, I have to admit, did make me laugh.

  Sometimes, she’d veer to being defensive on Alice’s behalf: He really shouldn’t be behaving like this towards her; she’s worth more than this, she deserves more than being strung along. I wondered, though: what was ‘this’ that she deserved more than? And was she really being strung along? Then she’d be back to finding Alice at fault: He’ll be behaving like this with all his women-servants, so if she thinks she’s going to get something out of this, she’s mistaken.

  I didn’t think that Alice was planning on getting anything out of it. I didn’t know her well, despite all the years that we’d lived alongside each other, but I did know that much, and Kate’s diatribes had the effect of making me feel sorry not for Alice but for Kate.

  One day when we leaving the Oratory after Mass, Kate whispered to me, ‘Come to the kitchens.’

  Kitchens? But didn’t we usually steer clear of the kitchens? Go too close and there was the danger of being enlisted: the dreaded call of cook or steward–Ah!–and a tray handed over (Could you…? To Mrs Scully?) or a basketful of something needing to be trimmed or topped and tailed. In the kitchens, a person–any person, even passing–was no more than a pair of hands.

  There was a shine to her eyes. ‘Lemon-hunting.’

  It took me a moment. Then I laughed.

  She laughed, too, but, ‘I’m serious,’ and her fingers closed on my forearm.

  I tried and failed to shake her off. ‘You can’t,’ although I wasn’t clear myself whether I was referring simply to stealing from the kitchens.

  She raised her eyebrows: Just watch me.

  Which was exactly what everyone was doing, I felt, as we made our way there. Two girls heading for the kitchens? Two girls, one full of purpose, leading with that determined chin of hers; the other, skulking. Oh, a lemon, definitely: half each. There were sidelong glances from the duke’s men, I was sure of it. So, leave her, I told myself, drop away behind her. Trooping along in her wake, though, I persuaded myself that when the time came, she’d grapple with the half-lemon, find it impossible–unwieldy–and give up. No harm done, and then that would be that. If she wanted to mess about with fruit, who was I to stop her? Be it on your own head. Or, indeed, wherever.

  When we stopped at one of the lesser-used doors to the kitchens, I looked to her to know where fresh lemons would be kept. We’d had no dealings with lemons, we’d never been let loose on imported fruit. Reading my look, she shrugged, wide-eyed, clearly enjoying being clueless, the challenge of it, then took a guess, the obvious one: ‘Fruit store?’

  Down the stairs and third door along from the wine cellar.

  Inside the fruit store, apples on racks soured the darkness like tiny severed heads.

  ‘Stand guard,’ she hissed, then urged herself amid the racks and along the shelves, ‘Lemons, lemons, lemons…’ before, ‘Oranges!’ with a trace of a laugh in it.

  Come on, I willed her, come on.

  And after what felt like ages: ‘Lemons!’

  ‘Quick,’ I sent back behind me.

  ‘All right, all right.’ She emerged and shoved me, unnecessaril
y, in the direction of the stairs.

  Not until we were outside and across the yard did she open her hand to reveal it to me: such an imperfect-looking little thing, lumpy-skinned. She glossed it with her thumbpad. ‘They were in sawdust,’ she said, ‘in a box.’

  Inexplicably, I shivered.

  ‘Do you think it’s the right size?’ She was serious. ‘There were six or seven in there and they were all different sizes; I just went for a middle-sized one–’

  And suddenly we were laughing at the absurdity of the discussion. Catching my breath, I asked her, ‘Are you really, really going to do this?’

  She didn’t respond, and her silence said loud and clear, Are we going to have to go through all that again?

  She’d already told me that not only had her sister had sex with her husband before their marriage, but there’d been a handful of boys and men before him. And the same had been true, she’d insisted, of some of Izzy’s companions at the duchess’s, and of friends Izzy had made since her marriage. Kate had even named the ladies to me, to substantiate her claims. She said that men might well want their spinster-brides to be virgins, but they knew and accepted that they often weren’t. And of course they knew it, she said, because–think about it–who are those spinsters doing it with? Men know very well what girls are up to, she’d said, because they’re up to it with them. Some of them, she’d claimed, even liked the idea of it: they liked a lady with a bit of experience. That was how it’d been for her sister’s husband: it’d quite excited him, he’d liked her to tell him all about what she’d done, he’d liked to think about it and she’d even ended up making bits up for him.

  Now she closed her hand over the lemon.

  I was worried. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’

  We set off back towards our room. ‘It can’t not, can it? It just–’ and again she cupped her free hand as when she’d first told me–‘catches everything.’ Then, genuinely, ‘Could it not work, d’you think?’

  Don’t ask me. And something else had been puzzling me: ‘How do you get it back down again?’ At a push, I could accept that it could be got up there–but down?

  ‘Well, it must be possible,’ she said, ‘because Izzy did it and she didn’t say it was difficult.’ One of her half-smiles: ‘What–’

  ‘–goes up… I know, I know.’

  ‘I mean, it’s not endless, up there, is it? It’s not some cavern.’

  How did she know? I had absolutely no idea what was ‘up there’.

  ‘Unless–’ a sideways glint–‘you’re the endlessly baby-laying Skid, that is. I doubt there’s a fruit on God’s earth that can help Skid.’

  Later, when everyone else was busy filing into Hall for dinner, I kept watch as Kate slipped into the duchess’s day room and secreted the two halves of rind on a jutting stone high up in the fireplace so that it could dry out. ‘It’ll just bring us closer, Francis and me,’ she said to me as we began our dash to Hall, ‘and how can that be bad? It’s just the next stage for us. And if I do get pregnant, then so what? Just happens sooner than it might’ve done. It’ll serve to focus the duke’s mind.’

  That’d be a huge favour, though, from the duke–to allow her to marry as she wished–and I doubted that any forcing of his hand was the way to win him over.

  From its hidey-hole there, it haunted me, that eviscerated, toughening lemon. I suspected that boys and girls had always met up after dark and hung around together–if not in their rooms then in stairwells or stables or orchards–and while the duchess wouldn’t be best pleased if she came to know of it, the worst we’d suffer would be a thorough ticking off. Boys in our room of an evening was one thing, though; intimacies involving half a lemon were something else. Even if Kate was right and men knew and accepted that not every spinster-bride was a virgin, there was a façade to be kept and, knowing about the lemon, I was behind that façade. And the duchess wouldn’t want me there. That wasn’t my place.

  From then onwards, I tried not to listen at night, I tried so hard–as if it were me rather than the pair of them who should be lying dead still and stealthy. I didn’t seriously think they’d do it there, in our room, on the mattress next to mine–but in the darkness, late, their leave-taking definitely became more protracted.

  A week later, on May Day, when the household gathered in and around the arbour that had been built from lopped boughs in the garden for the festivities, there was a touch of Kate’s fingertips to my arm and her breath in my ear: ‘We’re going to slip off, this evening.’ We: her and Francis. She was business-like as she let me in on it: no smile. Serious business, this: time for the lemon. Don’t you ever go through anything like that again on your own… Well, here I was, being told; but, then, she’d be needing someone–one of us–to know, to be able, if necessary, to cover for her.

  Slip off where?

  I didn’t ask, but she told me anyway: ‘Our room, while everyone’s busy.’ The household was being treated to a masque, after the feast, and, after that, dancing: for once, we were all going to be very busy until late. ‘I want a bed, Cat,’ she made clear. ‘I want it to be special.’

  ‘Yes,’ I heard myself agreeing with her. ‘Of course.’ Then, ‘What should I say?’ When anyone asks.

  She shrugged. ‘You can say whatever you like.’

  That evening, they saved their disappearing act for the dance and then, suddenly, there it was, done: I looked around the crowded Hall for them and they’d gone. I both knew what was happening and didn’t know, which was the oddest feeling. Maggie was first of the others to notice Kate’s absence, perhaps a quarter of an hour later: ‘Where’s Kate?’ Then, ‘Oh–’ a glance around, ‘Francis, too,’ Silly me. She was assuming, though, I knew, that they were outside somewhere, kissing amid heart-shaped lilac leaves under a sky crackling with starlight. Then Skid came across the dance floor: ‘Where’s Kate?’ Concerned that she was missing the fun. She didn’t know to look for Francis, for his absence.

  ‘Headache,’ I said, hoping hard that Kate didn’t burst back into Hall in glowing health.

  Skid was pained on her behalf–‘Oh dear!’–and my heart gave little kicks of protest: Liar, it said; Liar, liar, liar.

  Ed and I danced together many times, that evening, but there was, I felt, an awkwardness between us. Neither of us knew for certain that the other knew what was happening between Kate and Francis. I didn’t like how Ed looked uncomfortable. Francis, in his place, I suspected, wouldn’t have looked like that; he’d have carried it off with aplomb.

  I wondered if Kate and Francis would reappear but they didn’t and, by the end of the evening, I was dreading the scene into which we girls would stumble when we reached our room. What we found there, though, was Kate alone on her mattress, asleep or at least feigning sleep. We disturbed her by turning up, but she turned away with a harsh sigh of exasperation which the others didn’t heed. They were over-excited and over-tired. I was mindful of her, though. Her presence there posed so many questions, but even if I’d known what to ask her, and even if she’d answered me, I didn’t know that I’d have understood.

  The following day, nothing was mentioned; she gave no indication of anything having happened. Perhaps it hadn’t. Either way, she seemed to want to keep it to herself, and fair enough; and I was relieved, in a way, because nothing was expected of me. I’d find out sooner or later, I knew, and I was in no rush. Then again, I couldn’t quite relax: I was forever watching my back, fearing that I’d turn around and there she’d be, springing some revelation on me.

  She and Francis made three further discreet disappearances, that week; it was a busy time for the household and they made the most of it, slipping away under cover of the various picnics and river-trips. She didn’t bother to warn me any more: I’d turn to say something to her but she wouldn’t be there, and it was like falling off a step, a tiny misjudgement that reverberated through me. I understood that I’d been called upon–wordlessly–to cover for her, should the need arise, and I didn’t resent it
; if anything, I was flattered. I was the one, I felt, who enabled those disappearances to happen.

  As for Ed and me: that May week when we should’ve been in high, playful spirits, we were merely going through the motions. We didn’t spend any time together, anyway, except in the company of others. There was so much company, that week, that we’d have had to make a conscious effort to avoid it and, notably, neither of us did.

  Towards the end of the week, when we girls were freshening the flower arrangements in the Hall and Kate and I had drifted together to the top table, she paused emphatically–sprig of blossom aloft–to give me a very deliberate look. Softened, though: none of the usual deflective glare and tilted chin, and her eyes were widened rather than narrowed. She’d paused as if she’d been called to account, which she hadn’t: I’d said nothing. It became clear, though, that for all this pose of hers, this apparent teetering on the brink, I was the one who was going to have to actually raise the subject. Tentatively, I whispered, ‘Are you all right?’ She’d know what that meant, but she could take it however she wished. She gave me a grateful little smile, ‘Very all right, thank you,’ before treating me to a very different kind of smile, a real one, the biggest I’d ever seen from her, the shock and thrill of it flaring beneath my breastbone. ‘D’you know,’ she confided, ‘I think I’m going to need a whole lemon tree of my own.’

  I was shocked anew, but so pleasurably that a laugh bubbled up; and then there we were, flowers laid aside on the table, both laughing.

  ‘An orchard,’ I whispered back.

  ‘An estate.’ But then she drew in her lower lip and I knew that something different was coming. A question: ‘Cat, listen–could I be harming myself? I mean, is it possible–’ she was clearly anxious–‘to do it too much? Could you–’ a shrug, I don’t know–‘wear yourself away?’ Understandably, she grimaced at the prospect.

  I had absolutely no idea, but she certainly had me worried. ‘Well…’ I don’t know, ‘does it feel like you’re…being…worn away?’ Could I even ask that? Well, I just had. And anyway, she was the one who’d started it.