The Confession of Katherine Howard Read online

  Plaiting her hair, she glanced over, amused. ‘Yes, actually.’ Sounding surprised. ‘She’s nice.’ No more details. She crossed the two plaits over the top of her head for fastening.

  ‘And is she…“plain”?’ Plain-plain.

  ‘She certainly is.’ But there was no smirk, none of the sniggering that I’d have expected from her, no derision. It was offered as a statement of fact, and had the ring of a fair appraisal. She didn’t elaborate.

  ‘So, how is the king, around her?’

  ‘He’s not.’ A flash of a smile in her eyes. ‘He’s still at Greenwich. We haven’t seen him.’ With a lift of her eyebrows, she said, ‘He’s putting off the inevitable.’

  After that, she did open up a little, telling me about the various ladies alongside whom she was in attendance. What, I wondered, did those ladies make of her? Ladies who, according to her, read books, spoke French and Italian, and had complicated marital histories. What did they make of a small seventeen-year-old swamped by her notably new clothes? The new girl with no languages except English, no accomplishments, and no marriage plans.

  Another couple of days went by before I dared say it: ‘Francis has missed you.’ The pair of us had claimed for ourselves a far, quiet corner of the kitchens, where we were gilding gingerbread medallions. I’d taken care to sound as if I were making the remark in passing; it was no challenge and she didn’t even have to respond, she could let it go, she could just mirror my rueful expression and leave it with me. I’d had to voice it, though; I couldn’t not. He and I were friends and I wanted to do my best for him. And unlike him, I still had her ear. And perhaps there was more to it: I wanted to dig my heels in, stop her in her tracks and bring her up against the truth of the matter because she seemed to want to pretend that nothing important had happened, that this was no stroke of luck for her but how life had always been intended to be, that she’d always been destined to go to the royal household and leave her friend and her lover behind. Not that the pair of us weren’t fine in her absence. But still. Anyway, maybe–just maybe–her response would make it easier for him. Maybe I’d have something to take to him that might alleviate the despair which, I suspected, persisted.

  It’s all new for her, it’s a lot for her and she’s finding it hard.

  Or, of course, She’s still our friend. Although that, upon reflection, would’ve been consolation only for me.

  All she said, though, without raising her eyes from her work, was a quiet, moderately regretful, ‘I can’t help that.’ I was assuming there’d be more, but there was nothing. Nothing other than the slightest opening of my eyes and the slightest hardening of my heart, which surprised me because it wasn’t as if I’d ever had any hopes of her.

  Francis’s presence around her was never pressing, but he was always at her side in case of a thaw in her attitude towards him. I knew no better than he did: even I was wondering if she’d come round. Was she simply putting him in his place, first–showing him that there’d been changes, or that she wanted changes? Or was her mind really made up against him? I could see that he didn’t quite believe that their affair was over, for the good reason–I suspected–that she hadn’t told him so. I doubted she’d ever do that, however far she distanced herself. She’d make it clear, but then leave it for him to give up on her. I had to watch the ebbing of his hope. Once, in the privacy of our room, I did ask her, directly: ‘Is it over between you and Francis, d’you think?’

  She shrugged, unhappily, a reluctant little chuck of her shoulders which I took to mean that she wasn’t quite sure or perhaps that it seemed to be going that way and she felt powerless to resist but, well, if circumstances changed…

  And then the two weeks were over and she was gone, back on shift at the palace.

  And Francis was gone again, even more resolutely than before, back among the duke’s men. I missed him, which had the unfortunate effect of making me snappy with those who remained: Maggie, Skid and Oddbod. I’d be gone, too, sometime soon, I supposed: called home, girlhood over. This was how it’d be, soon, I realised: all of us gone.

  But then one day it happened again: Francis, back again; and this time I bumped into him–literally–rounding a corner.

  I laughed with the shock. ‘Oh! I thought–’ you’d gone.

  He looked as if he loved being able to confound me merely by standing there: the tiny, unlooked-for triumph of it. He grinned–a glimpse of the old Francis–and performed a cheeky bow: But here I am.

  ‘But here you are,’ I agreed.

  And so we fell into step–the whispers of my skirts, the jingling of his spurs–and from then onwards, for that week or so before Kate returned, we hung around together whenever we could, finding each other at the beginnings and ends of days. Just as before, the times when there were no other claims on us, we claimed as our own. He was busy training his new falcon, and I helped him. Of course I knew he wasn’t very happy but, I felt, he might be getting closer to being happy enough. Certainly I was. He was such good company, but his physical presence alone could make me laugh, a mere glance at him could make me laugh: those few, endearing little imperfections of his, such as the gap between his two front teeth into which you could, perhaps, if you were careful, slip a thumbnail; and that fluffy, boy-blond hair, most unsuitable for one of the duke’s men. It did cross my mind that he was lovely. But he was Kate’s–he’d been so from the very beginning–even if, in the end, she didn’t want him.

  Then one night when I’d just bedded down and was dozing in the glow of the wick that burned for Maggie’s return from Compline, a knock came at the door. It was on me like a shot; I’d heard no one on the stairs. A voice, too: ‘Cat!’

  It was Francis, speaking low yet also loud. Francis, at my door during the night. My blood thundered scalding into my recesses and extremities–ears, throat, scalp, fingertips–and pounded for escape. Something of the room seemed to have taken flight, too–its solidity–because the heavy oak door couldn’t even keep a mere whisper at bay.

  ‘It’s me,’ he was confessing, unnecessarily, ‘Francis.’

  ‘What is it?’ my own voice sounded embarrassingly querulous.

  ‘Shooting stars, loads of them!’ A rasp again but this time leavened with wonder. ‘Quick, go and look!’

  I scrambled from beneath my bedcovers to be assaulted by the cold. Grabbing my cloak, I threw it over my shoulders, whipping the candlelight around the walls. Across the room, behind the curtain, was the window, ready to yield a square of sky beyond. I dashed to the door instead, slipping my bare feet into my shoes, and opened it. His turn to jump, now, taking a step backwards into the shadowed stairwell. I could see very little of him, just the graininess in the darkness that was his hair, but even so I registered the lack of his own cloak. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ It sounded like an accusation and he didn’t respond. ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said, passing him and pattering ahead down the steps.

  The chill down in the courtyard was dense, my breaths noisy and visible on it, and the silence so thorough as to seem intent, like a live presence, stealthy. But every one of the courtyard’s many windows turned a blind eye, leaving us to it. Fiercely starred though the moonless sky was, nothing in it was moving. I scanned this way and that, as if it were finite and I could search its corners. Yet, for all my craning, it was Francis’s presence of which I was acutely aware–not because he was any closer to me than usual, but because in so much darkness and emptiness we were so definitely together. I half-expected to see an outline, as white as our breath, drawn in the air around us.

  ‘Keep watching,’ he promised me, ‘and you’ll see: keep watching and there’ll be one,’ as if my vigilance alone could summon it.

  Then–‘Oh, there!’–a soundless pop, a graceful little droop.

  ‘Shhh!’ But he was laughing.

  ‘Did you see it, though? Did you see?’ With my head tipped back, I had to flail at my side for his arm, to grab him and wring the acknowledgement from him.

  ‘I did
, I did.’

  ‘Oh, and look!’

  ‘I’m looking, I’m looking,’ and his laughter billowed into the blackness.

  Suddenly, though, my exhilaration shrank into the pit of my stomach because what, really, had I seen? A pinprick of light dropping down a finger’s-width, then extinguished. No more than a blink, a twitch on the vastness.

  And now–whole minutes passed–there was nothing at all: just the stubborn sky. And I was getting cold, really very cold: conscious, now, of how much bigger than me was the cold, of how it was bearing down on me. My breaths were being wrenched from me.

  ‘Come here,’ he chivvied, looping an arm around me, drawing me in and rubbing my shoulder, vigorous and business-like. I reeled and had to right myself but then still felt precarious, startled by new aspects of him: the hollow made by his extended, raised arm; his ribs, their tangible resilience; the nudging of his chin against my temple.

  The sky stared back at us and eventually we had to accept that the show was over. His grip softened and I extricated myself, wary of overstaying my welcome. Our farewells were determinedly brisk, to dispel any sense that we’d been too close for comfort.

  I returned to my room with the physical sensation of him haunting me like a bruise, and sank cloak-swaddled on to my mattress to ponder it. Something wasn’t as I’d assumed. Something had until now managed to escape me–me, who prided myself on missing nothing–and now I’d stumbled across it, I’d been tripped up and I didn’t know how I felt about it.

  What I did know, though, was my place. And that, I didn’t resent. I could live with this development in how I felt about Francis and tell no one. It was mine, and mine alone: that was the consolation. The fact remained that he wasn’t for me, he was for Kate, and what I probably liked best of all about him–a kind of consolation, too, in a way–was how he was true to her.

  When she next came home, Francis absented himself. I wondered if they’d had an altercation. Anyway, he seemed to have realised, at last, that it was over between them, or at least for the time that she’d be in the queen’s service. As for Kate, not once during those two weeks did she mention him to me. I suppose I could’ve asked her if she’d seen him at all, or if she’d written to him, or he to her; I could’ve asked her, again, if it was over between them. But I didn’t want to dwell on it, as well as being wary, now, of showing too close an interest; and, in any case, I knew very well that direct questions would get me nowhere. She’d merely have shrugged and I’d have been none the wiser.

  What she did want to talk about, her first evening home, as we played cards together in the duchess’s day room, was that she’d finally met the king. ‘He’s immense,’ she told me, thrilled, unable to stress it enough. ‘He’s absolutely huge, he’s a giant!’ And an uncharacteristically big smile showed her delighted surrender to this extraordinary state of affairs. ‘All those little men running around him,’ she derided, having lowered her voice and glanced across the room at the duchess, who was deep in conversation with Skid. ‘Men like my horrid weedy uncle.’ And back to the king: ‘It’s as if he’s not quite human, it’s as if he truly is different.’ She surprised me with, ‘Are they, d’you think? Princes and kings–are they really different, somehow, underneath?’

  She was serious, I saw, although I couldn’t quite believe it, so I simply said, ‘Well, I don’t know about kings, it’s Lord William who foxes me–what’s that made of?’

  But she was already on to the subject of the king’s jewels and goldwork: ropes of pearls, walnut-sized diamonds, and the ring-set ruby as big as a baby’s fist that he’d had chipped from Thomas à Becket’s shrine when it was demolished and the saint’s body chucked on to a dungheap. ‘I wouldn’t even be able to stand up in it all.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I doubt you’ll have to, any time soon.’

  ‘Sometimes I’m kneeling,’ she rushed on, ‘and, as he comes near, the floor sags, it’s dipping from beneath my knees towards him and I’m terrified–’ she was loving it–‘that I might just slide down it, that I might just end up there, sprawled across the floor at his feet.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the idea.’

  ‘He likes me, I think,’ she mused. ‘He spoke to me: he said, “So, you’re the little Howard girl, are you?”’ She raised her eyebrows: ‘Well, I’m one of them.’

  ‘You said that?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. But “little”!’ She snorted, and I realised with a flush of tenderness that she didn’t consider herself small.

  ‘Well, you know,’ I broke it to her, ‘compared to him, you are little.’

  ‘Actually,’ she rushed onwards, regardless, ‘he’s good fun.’

  ‘“A laugh”?’ I teased.

  She frowned at me but I shrugged it back at her: your word.

  ‘He likes a lot of fun, and it’s our job to provide it. Well, there’s a man to plan it all, the Master of Revels–imagine having that job! I tell you, he’s in a permanent panic–but it’s us who have to do it, all the dancing and so on. And we have to stay the course.’ She raised her eyebrows to imply that this was taxing. The king, himself, didn’t dance, she went on to tell me; he had a bad leg, an old injury that had never much improved, so he’d sit and watch his ladies and gentlemen.

  I asked her if the queen was up to all this.

  ‘Oh, she’s game for anything, after what she’s come from. She didn’t even know how to dance–but we’re remedying that, of course: we’re teaching her, and she’s really taking to it.’

  Then I asked if the king liked his new queen any better, and, after another wary glance at the duchess, she muttered that a couple of the senior ladies who had their suspicions had broached it, asking the queen outright what happened whenever the king came to the shared bedchamber. The queen had replied that the king would kiss her goodnight and turn over, go to sleep. ‘So,’ Kate’s eyes were lowered, she was making a show of carefully selecting a card, ‘they said to her, “There’ll have to be more than that if there’s to be another heir.” But they said that it was quite clear she had no idea what they meant.’

  I was aghast. ‘What will happen?’

  She didn’t look up. ‘I don’t know. No one knows. What can happen?’

  ‘Will he take a mistress?’

  ‘He needs a second heir,’ she reminded me with a quick look. ‘It’s a wife that he needs.’

  One morning later that week, Kate had a visitor, although the first she knew of it was when we emerged into the main courtyard. ‘Christ!’ she snapped backwards into the passageway and on to my foot. ‘Jesus!’ She flattened herself–stricken–against the wall.

  My panic soared with hers. ‘What? What is it?’ I could no longer see past her, but before her hasty retreat I’d glimpsed a man on horseback: an impressive animal and a rider so important as to have been allowed to ride into the courtyard. ‘Who is it?’

  She didn’t answer me; just a frantic, furious, ‘Do I look all right?’ as she clamped her hands to her cheeks to cool a flush.

  Of course she looked all right; she always looked all right. ‘Who is it? You don’t like him?’

  She countered with a hard-eyed blank look: the opposite, the look informed me, was true.

  This was new, though: I’d never seen her lose her composure over someone she liked. ‘Who is he?’ And why hadn’t I known? Shouldn’t I have known?

  Still she didn’t answer; just, ‘What’s he doing here?’ Fiercely indignant–I understood, now–that she’d been cheated of an opportunity to prepare herself. Then a savage yank of my arm, ‘Come on.’

  He’d dismounted: an expensively dressed, conventionally good-looking man in his twenties. I could’ve sworn that from somewhere over by the stables came a muted, mocking wolf-whistle, but if the visitor heard it, he didn’t let on. His smile was supercilious as he sauntered towards us and performed an unnecessarily low bow. ‘Katherine,’ and he had it sounding like a taunt.

  He didn’t look at me, not a glance, which wa
s quite an achievement given how close I was to Kate; she still had me held by the arm. I was glad, though: relieved that she was bearing the brunt of that look.

  She didn’t return his greeting; asked, instead, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Passing.’ He answered deliberately flatly: a provocation; no attempt to make it credible.

  Mimicking his tone, she came back with, ‘This is a dead end.’

  He broke into the threatened smile. ‘But it has its compensations.’ Then he turned to follow the servant who’d been waiting to take him to the obligatory refreshments, but called over his shoulder, ‘Join me.’

  Clearly the invitation was for her alone, but she gave me no choice, tugging on me and imploring me with her eyes.

  And that was how I ended up sitting with them at a table in Hall. The two of them talked desultorily, almost in code, about people I didn’t know. Sitting there, elbow on table and chin in hand, I gazed around and pretended to half-listen to a conversation that in fact I couldn’t follow at all for perhaps as long as half an hour before the bell began calling us to prayers and he took his leave. He and I hadn’t been introduced, nor had he even acknowledged me.

  ‘So, who is he?’ I demanded as Kate and I hurried to the Oratory.

  ‘One of the Culpeper brothers.’ Her voice retained that edge of anger. ‘Thomas.’ Then, as if quoting: ‘Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and favourite of the king.’ She sighed, even as she ran along. ‘And doesn’t he know it,’ she added, somehow both scathing and admiring.

  Francis returned to the duchess’s when Kate returned to court, and he knew all about Thomas Culpeper: ‘Kate’s got herself involved with a gentleman of the Privy Chamber,’ he said, bitterly, the very first morning he was back. I’d contrived to accompany him in the direction of the stables: I needed saddlesoap for a leather-upholstered stool, I said. It was a blinder of a day, frost-vapour billowing from roofs and dripping from everywhere else. If Francis was to be believed, he knew more about this Culpeper than I did. I was surprised enough that he could bring himself to mention Kate, let alone admit that he’d been replaced in her affections and by a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. I felt for him. Wondered, too, how he knew what Kate was up to. But, then, he was so often at court in the duke’s entourage that he probably couldn’t avoid knowing. Teetering alongside him over the slippery cobbles, I dithered over whether to play ignorant–whether that’d spare his feelings–but my instinct was that I should own up. ‘I know,’ I admitted. ‘He dropped by.’