The Confession of Katherine Howard Read online

  She considered: ‘No, actually.’ Then a rush, ‘Oh God, no, no, not at all,’ concluding, ‘I think I must be made for it.’

  At that point, Skid reappeared in the far, bough-wreathed doorway, flanked by her corpulent husband and lean, hungry-eyed Mr Wolfe; and there, surveying the tables, they held a brief, earnest discussion. We waited until they’d gone before Kate resumed, ‘What about you and Ed? When will you start doing it?’

  I didn’t know how to answer that. The answer was that I didn’t want to do it with Ed.

  A table away, Mary sneezed and, reminded of her presence and of–more distantly–Alice and Maggie, we turned cautious again. Then, from Kate, ‘Are you worried it’ll hurt? I know Ed’s a big bloke, but it doesn’t work that way. Izzy said the biggest she ever had–’ she straightened up a handful of irises–‘well, my father’s master of the horse was really quite a small man, but Izzy said he had far the biggest.’

  Which had me laughing again.

  ‘What?’ She, too, though. ‘What?’

  ‘You.’ Was there no end to her knowledge and the seriousness with which she took it all?

  Discarding some wilted primroses, she said, ‘But you could not, of course. You could refuse.’

  Unbeknown to her, I was in no position to refuse anything because nothing had been asked of me. Good news, though, that–if and when the time came–refusal would be an option.

  ‘Some ladies do,’ and suddenly she sounded keen to give them the respect they were due. ‘Honor Baynton did: Izzy told me. Honor was always very definite–’ and she raised her own hand–‘“Not until the ring’s on my finger.”’ She dried her hands on her apron. ‘I mean, there are other things to do, aren’t there.’

  It took me a moment to realise that she was referring to bed: other things to do in bed, not other things to do with one’s time in general such as flower-arranging. I hoped she just meant kissing. Please don’t mention the back passage again.

  She lifted an impressively flower-filled pitcher for taking over to the buffet. ‘Izzy always said that once men get their way, that’s all they ever want to do. I wouldn’t say that was completely true of Francis, but I do know what she means.’ She smiled across at Alice, raised the pitcher to her: See? Then, to me, speaking sideways as she turned away, ‘I mean, ideally you’d just have them lick you all the time, wouldn’t you,’ and then, even more baffling, ‘just as long as you didn’t have to do it back very often.’

  All this talk of hers had made me realise that, although I liked Ed’s company, I wanted no more from him: no ring on the finger and certainly no licking. Once I’d acknowledged it, the kissing, even, became a bore, a chore. I couldn’t explain it to myself, such a profound change, but it was a fact. Ed knew it, too. The way that he looked at me, with questions in his eyes that I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t feel obliged or beholden to him. I knew very well that I owed him nothing. And all the conversation that I’d always so much enjoyed: I was beginning to realise that I’d heard it all before–if not word for word, then in kind, and I didn’t want to have to sit there listening to more of it for years to come.

  So, one day I made up my mind and asked him to meet me later, before supper, on the riverside steps. It was a creamy evening and when he arrived we stood side by side for a while to savour it, spotting a heron hunched in flight, before I braved myself to break it to him that I needed to be on my own. I didn’t know how else to put it. He didn’t look at me. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll back off. Have as much time as you need.’

  So, unfortunately, I had to spell it out for him: ‘For good,’ I clarified, doing my best to sound suitably apologetic.

  He didn’t like that. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said, frowning at me. ‘Because how can you know? Take a break,’ he said: ‘I’ve offered you that.’

  Offered: that rankled, and only hardened my resolve.

  ‘I do know,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t,’ he countered. ‘How can you?’ He was angry, but what had me flinch was the note of disgust. A chasm had opened between what he’d thought or hoped I was, and what he now saw I was. Stupidly–stupidly–I’d assumed he’d be understanding. I’d assumed that he’d rise to it, for my sake. And the shock of it: he’d always been kind and fun, but here suddenly was someone else quite different. I’d been stupid not to see it. I was having a narrow escape, it seemed. Suddenly it was imperative that I go for it, that escape.

  Then he came at me with, ‘What’s this about?’ Suspicious, accusatory.

  I didn’t follow: it was about what I’d said it was about.

  ‘Is there something you’re scared of?’ Unpleasant, insinuating, and I guessed what he was referring to. Unbeknown to me, he’d had plans for us–we were going to be doing what Kate and Francis were doing–and he didn’t like that I wasn’t going to go along with them. I didn’t rise to that; did my best to ignore it and merely reiterated: ‘Ed, I want to be on my own.’ I didn’t care about explaining it, I didn’t care what he understood of it, because, clearly, he didn’t care; he simply wanted something of me and was annoyed that he’d now be denied it.

  From then onwards he kept out of my way, which was easy because the hunting season was at its peak and he was out with the duke all day every day and, in the evenings, like all the men, he was exhausted. He’d have had to make a special effort to come and find me, and he didn’t.

  I was thankful for being left alone but I didn’t experience the relief that I’d anticipated, probably because I was dogged by a sense of having been cheated. I had no grounds, I was being unfair, because I’d never asked anything of him, nor even expected anything, so how could he have failed me? What I couldn’t shake, though, was the feeling that he hadn’t been true. Perhaps it was that he hadn’t been all that he could’ve been, that there was a fundamental laziness to him.

  The very opposite struck me as being the case with Francis, who always appeared so wonderfully gallant towards Kate. I left it for Kate to come to me about what had happened between Ed and me; I couldn’t face trying to explain it. A whole week passed before she noticed, or, more likely, before Ed admitted it–something of it, some version–to Francis, and Francis passed the news on to her. We were in the herb room, tying up bunches of herbs for hanging to dry, when she broached it with me. Mary had been drawn away by some Scully children playing in the courtyard; Maggie was at Sext, and Alice had gone to fetch more twine for us. Kate asked, ‘Has something happened between you and Ed?’

  ‘It’s over,’ I said, quickly and lightly, as if it were nothing much, which, unfortunately, had something of the truth to it.

  ‘Oh.’

  I felt obliged to offer something more, and anyway I wanted to deflect any further questions. ‘I just didn’t–’ But then it occurred to me I had no intention of explaining myself to her, even if I could. So I shrugged, letting it go.

  ‘Really over?’

  I confirmed it.

  Where did that leave us? Well, it left us: there was a lengthy pause. Then, ‘Are you…all right about it?’ A direct–if imprecise–question, which was something unusual from her.

  ‘Yes,’ was all I had to say, and, ‘Thank you.’

  She placed a thyme-scented hand on my shoulder, momentarily, and I appreciated it.

  That summer, Kate and Francis became public about their romance: there was less subterfuge until, it seemed to me, there was none. Often they held hands in Hall, sometimes even exchanged little kisses. He teased her as Wifey, Wifelet, in earshot of all and sundry. Eventually, there couldn’t have been anyone who was unaware that Kate was spoken for. Not even, surely, the duchess.

  Midsummer, Mary was called home for good–for no particular reason of which we were aware–and Alice transferred to Lord William’s household. The first we heard of Alice’s impending move was from Skid, one evening: a mere passing remark, ‘…when you get to Lord William’s…’ but which had Alice darting a furtive glance at Kate.

  Kate
made her wait until the very end of the day for the inevitable interrogation, ambushing her with it when she was down to her shift.

  ‘Off to Lord William’s, are you?’

  Alice jumped as if she’d been pinched. ‘Nurserymaid,’ she said, so fast that she had to backtrack, to make clearer: ‘I’m going to be a nurserymaid.’ And she began combing her hair, hard.

  Pointedly, Kate said nothing; just glittered at her, for so long that Alice not only had to look away but, eventually, move away, down on to her mattress and under her blanket. Only then did Kate mutter, ‘Oh, I bet you are.’

  And later, through the darkness, from Kate’s mattress: ‘Laundry maid,’ full of disdain.

  ‘Nursery,’ I whispered back, having first listened and judged Alice to have fallen asleep. ‘Nurserymaid,’ I corrected.

  She was dismissive: ‘Usual Howard-family practice.’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘The duke,’ she prompted, ‘and Bess Holland.’

  I knew from Ed and Francis that the duke lived with Bess Holland, who wasn’t his wife, for whom he had put aside his wife, but where did laundry come into it?

  ‘That’s his wife’s complaint,’ Kate explained: ‘“my laundrymaid”, although really she was their steward’s wife.’

  I rose on to an elbow, amazed. ‘You think Lord William is going to put aside his wife for Alice?’

  She breathed a laugh at my naïveté. ‘No. He can’t afford to. Needs to keep in their favour. They’re the ones with the money. They fund that household.’

  After Alice had gone, I began spending a lot more time with Kate and Francis because Maggie, I now noticed, was so often in the Oratory. Whenever Kate and Francis weren’t making themselves scarce, they seemed happy enough for me to hang around them. Ed’s absence seemed to make no odds; in fact, it was the three of us in a way that, when Ed had been around, it’d never been the four of us.

  It was a long, hot summer and we laid low, doing the bare minimum and drifting through the days. The sun was solid in the sky for weeks on end and we turned careless beneath it, Kate becoming freckled: My ladylike complexion gone to blazes. Kate’s freckles and Francis’s smiles are what I remember of that summer: Francis had always been perfectly pleasant to me, but those smiles of his for me were new. I’d never considered him to be lacking in confidence–far from it–but that summer he gained a certain ease around me. I liked, too, how he conducted himself around Kate. Up close to the pair of them, I could see what was in his eyes whenever he looked at her, and it wasn’t what I’d assumed and was accustomed to seeing in the eyes of others: there was no adoration or awe. More often than not, it was an affectionate mock-exasperation, and sometimes not even wholly mock. That was how he regarded her whenever she turned up with a fussy alteration to her dress or whenever she made one of her asides. And she took it; she seemed to expect it from him, perhaps even courted it. I realised that he knew as well as I did that she didn’t take herself half as seriously as everyone else assumed she did.

  Can I remember what we three talked about, during all those long, heavy days? I don’t think we did talk, on the whole. It was too hot, even, for talking. Living through those weeks was like dragging one’s fingertips through silt: engrossing and pleasurable, yet nothing much at all. We coexisted comfortably, and there was something in those days of the earliest times that we’d spent together–although those times had been evenings, of course, and cold, and there’d been a crowd of us, and we’d done nothing but talk. But still, there was something, I felt, of that time: the sheer, easy pleasure taken in others’ company.

  Only one occasion stands clear in my memory: a river pageant. In retrospect, I doubt the duchess had any interest in waterborne horseplay, especially not a mock-joust between the king’s barge and a rival one designated–disparagingly, would’ve been her view–as belonging to ‘the Bishop of Rome’. But we’d have had to be seen to be appreciative of the king’s fun, so a canopy had been hauled out of storage and hastily erected over the riverside steps. Beneath it, on cushions, we sweltered as sunlight struck at us from every surface: the oiled hulls and the sails, the flat of each oar held above a flounce of silvered droplets, and the river-ripples; the boil-washed linen of the spectators, their buffed buttons and badges, their embroidered silks and gemstones and the pearly vein of every feather in every cap. Dutifully, we craned to watch the two barges parry among a flotilla of smaller vessels, some of which were carrying musicians–the efforts of whom we couldn’t hear–and others whose purpose was a mystery until ‘the Bishop of Rome’ was capsized by the king’s barge and its occupants swam to them for rescue. On the opposite bank, a little further downstream and at an angle and thus only faintly discernible–from the flickering of a canopy, its pulsing in the breeze–were the king and his party and I was amazed that we were so close to the monarch: close enough, almost, to see him. Never did I think that we’d ever come any closer.

  One day that autumn, though, Kate rushed with it to the gallery, where I’d gone to idle on the virginals when the duchess had sent for her. Whirling in, slamming the door and dropping back against it, she clearly had big news: she was brimful of it, her breath held, cheeks burning, eyes popping.

  ‘What?’ Whatever it was, this news would be of someone else because nothing ever happened to us.

  ‘I’m off to the new queen’s household.’ Delivered with a hitch of her eyebrows, a tilt of her chin.

  My heart faltered. Big news, indeed: much more so than a forthcoming marriage, which was the biggest news that I could ever hope to announce. Not entirely unexpected, though, I reflected, as she began gabbling about the new clothes she’d need. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She was a Howard, after all; I’d forgotten she was a Howard. Bottom of the pile of Howards but, as far as the duke was concerned, if there was an opportunity at court, any eligible Howard would do. His little niece could be dusted off. And she probably hadn’t forgotten who she was and what she was due because, for all her excitement, she looked as if this were news for which she’d been waiting: she looked ready for it. And that surprised me. Perhaps all our time here, and in particular this last lovely summer, had been a mere interlude for her, a bit of fun: time off from the often irksome but potentially profitable business of being a Howard. Perhaps she’d been biding her time, it occurred to me, and only playing at being one of us.

  Us.

  Francis. Did Francis know? I had to interrupt her–‘…at least three gowns…’–to ask. ‘Not yet,’ she confirmed, carefully expressionless, before continuing: ‘…and three’s the very least because…’

  I wondered what he’d make of it, how he’d take it. What would this mean for the pair of them? Could they keep their romance going, with her at court? I turned to the window, it had a river-view and across the water was the palace wall: miles of it, immensely tall. She stepped up behind me, the scratch of a glass-studded pomander audible on the damask of her gown.

  ‘See?’ she reassured me. ‘It’s only over there–’ The king’s most favoured palace, where she’d most often be. ‘I’ll be back over here all the time.’

  I asked her, ‘Aren’t you scared?’ Because I would be. That vast palace…the new queen, a foreigner…We knew so little of anything, here. We’d been running wild, here: in so many ways our lives were scarcely different from how they’d been back in Sussex. Because, wherever it was, the duchess’s household was a backwater, even bang opposite the biggest palace in Christendom. What did we girls know, really, about anything? About anything other than stitching and table-laying. But I was forgetting: Kate was a Howard, a nobody-Howard but still a Howard. Perhaps that made the crucial difference, perhaps she couldn’t help but know more than I did: either born knowing more about life in palaces, or at least learning it in the cradle. My unanswered question–Aren’t you scared?–turned into a statement, instead, of my own inadequacy. But then she did answer. ‘No,’ she said, and what was odd was the wistful tone in which she said it: ‘I don’t thi
nk I’m scared of anything.’

  When I next saw her and Francis together–later that day–it was obvious that he’d had the news broken to him. However she’d done it, he’d taken it as a blow: he was physically diminished, his head low and a lack of focus in his eyes. Perhaps I’d been naïve, but I’d been trusting to her to find a way to break the news that could’ve been taken better. Hoping, too, though, that he’d have found a way to be pleased for her; or, at the very least, to be able to look it. She looked no less cross with him than he did with her. There they stood, together yet not together, side by side but the space between them obvious and ominous.

  From then onwards, what I’d regarded as my little alliance with Francis–the exchanged glances, the mock-exasperation–began to suffer. His exasperation, once so charmingly mock, turned real enough, and no doubt he regarded it as his alone. I’d not have disputed it–it was, after all, his lover who was leaving–but I was disappointed that he didn’t confide in me. Over the following weeks, he withdrew from me as he did from her, as if I were merely an extension of her. What I’d come to consider as a friendship of a kind–albeit a small, quiet kind–must have been, I realised, an illusion. The glances that he’d appeared to exchange with me had probably, actually, been for her benefit.

  Only once did I make the mistake of addressing our mutual loss. Kate had been whisked away at the end of dinner for one of her pep talks with the duke. Leaving the Hall on my own, I came across Francis just outside the door, looking at a loss in the courtyard under the blue-dimpled moon that haunted the afternoon sky. Joining him, I said, ‘She’ll only be across the water,’ but heard it for the embarrassing and infuriating platitude that it was, because she’d be in a different world and we both knew it. Worse, it was a world to which she’d always belonged, in which she’d always had one foot even if we’d been guileless enough to allow her to blind us to it. She was returning home, in a sense, and it was faintly shaming for both of us that we’d ever assumed that she was really ours.