The Confession of Katherine Howard Read online

  Kate was subdued all that day, but careful not to be sullen, making efforts to meet the eyes of the ladies who weren’t family or friends and even encountering some sympathy there because of her humiliation by the duke, whom no one liked or trusted. All morning and into the afternoon she embroidered, working on a design of peacock eyes, each oval blur of royal blue and earthy pink rendered in her intricate stitches. She conducted herself as if biding her time until the situation would be resolved. Sitting beside her, making a pig’s ear of a red rose, my concern was elsewhere: I never ceased thinking of Francis. What was happening to him, and how long could they keep him in the Tower? Could he perhaps already have been released, and be making his way back?

  Mid-afternoon, Lady Margaret was called to the door and returned to whisper in Kate’s ear. Catching no one’s eye–not even mine–Kate rose, calm and dignified. She was off somewhere, to see someone, and although apprehensive, she looked glad of the opportunity to get the situation cleared up.

  When she’d gone, I left for my room, deflecting Alice and Maggie’s quiet, anxious offers of company, but I was no further than the yeoman-guarded corridor when a Howard-liveried man intercepted me, come to fetch me for the Duke of Norfolk. I supposed the duchess had tipped him off–There’s that Tilney girl, she might be able to shed some light–but what, exactly, did he want of me? I was shaking so much on my way to his rooms that I could hardly walk.

  In his office, he was sitting behind a desk, dwarfed by it, hunched in furs and frowning over papers; sparing me a glance as I was ushered into a chair. Flames were fractious in the grate and the walls dense with tapestries hauled from ancient Howard-houses, harbouring decades of woodsmoke, rushes-chaff and tallow-reek. He sniffed: a hard scooping back into the beaky bridge of his nose. His attendant withdrew: the door closed behind me, and gone was the snipping of shoe-leather at flagstones, the man stepping outside to loll against a wall, eyes skyward, and drink down the fresh air.

  The duke’s small eyes were puddled greys and white, having the look of a substance unset. ‘Miss Tilney,’ that surprisingly light voice, like a boy’s, although he hadn’t been a boy for sixty years. Easy to imagine him as a boy, tearing feathers from a trapped bird or dragging a scrabbling cat by its tail. I wondered what he knew of me. Only as much as he needed, certainly, which was probably almost nothing, no more than my name.

  ‘Look–’ he sounded rattled, plonked his elbows on to the desk–‘this business of pre-contract.’

  ‘There wasn’t one,’ and just in time I added, ‘Your Grace.’

  But he didn’t seem to have heard. ‘And now she’s even claiming that he forced her, but what she–’

  ‘Into pre-contract?’ I’d spoken before I realised. ‘Your Grace?’ Forced her to get pre-contracted? It made no sense. How on earth would he have done that?

  ‘No–to…to…’ his sigh was harsh like a bark ‘…let him have his way.’ Contemptuous of the euphemism. ‘But the point–’

  ‘No,’ I hadn’t intended to interrupt, but he’d been misinformed. ‘No–Your Grace–she’s not said that.’

  He snapped shut his thin lips to signal how little he appreciated an interruption. Then, ‘Yes, actually, she has, but–’

  ‘Rape?’ My breath delivered something like a laugh at the very idea.

  He echoed with an exhalation of his own; his, though, I suspected, at the notion of Kate ever having to be forced.

  ‘When?’ I was forgetting myself, I forgot Your Grace.

  Clearly he didn’t appreciate the insubordination but he had business to do, so he pressed onwards. ‘Yesterday, to the archbishop. Then in a letter to the king.’ He scratched behind an ear. ‘Shameful handwriting, I have to say, and the duchess employed a tutor, didn’t she?’ Tut, tut. Waste of money for girls, as I always told her. ‘But what my niece fails to understand–’

  ‘Francis wouldn’t rape anyone,’ I said, because, incredibly, it seemed that I was actually going to have to spell it out to him. How peculiar, to be saying the words ‘Francis’ and ‘rape’ in the same breath.

  The duke turned still-eyed, lost–Francis?–then blinked and resumed: ‘Of course it’s understandable that she’d make such a claim, under the circumstances, but what she’s failing to grasp is that it’ll make no difference.’

  What she’d be failing to understand would be that Francis could die for it. That, though, she’d never have failed to have grasped, so she’d never have said it and the duke was mistaken or–it occurred to me–looking to stir up trouble. ‘The archbishop,’ he was explaining, ‘will want to see this through. Doesn’t matter to him who pulled what up or down for whom; what matters is that she’s been around.’

  Around: so judged by this man, who had taken his laundrymaid as his mistress and, rumour had it, kicked his wife to the ground when she objected, and kept kicking until she bled from her ears.

  ‘And if she’s been around, then the king will get rid of her and we conservative old Howards will fall from favour, which will please our forward-thinking archbishop no end.’ A twitch of his extravagantly attired shoulders: water off a duck’s back; all in a good day’s Howard-work, being disliked by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  I could see why someone might say it; of course I could. Kate might’ve been tempted to say it, to save her skin, if she didn’t give a damn about Francis. Or me: if she didn’t care about me. The duke was saying, ‘The only hope, now, is if she admits to pre-contract.’

  He’d startled me: hope.

  ‘That’s my hunch, anyway,’ he continued. ‘Because if she was pre-contracted elsewhere, then she was never properly married to the king, and he can just forget it. No need for a trial.’

  Trial?

  ‘Just put her away. Better for his wounded pride, and, of course–’ that nasty smile–‘better for us.’

  Oh, yes, because one queen-niece to the scaffold was bad enough–but two, in the last five years? Well, that would be bad for business, for Howard-business, the business of being a Howard, which was, as far as I understood it, their only business.

  He said, ‘She just can’t seem to see it, though. Won’t take it from me. But you: you seem like a sensible girl. See what you can do. Talk her round.’

  Dismissed. That was why I’d been summoned–Talk her round–and now he was back to the papers with a flourishing of his quill.

  Nothing had been said about the actual truth of the matter. I stood up, then made myself ask, ‘What does Francis Dereham say?’ I knew to say ‘Francis Dereham’ if I’d just said ‘Francis’, I’d have had the blank look again–Francis?–and there was no time for that.

  ‘Oh–Dereham’s quite clear,’ he didn’t even glance up. ‘Pre-contract.’

  My throat closed, stinging.

  ‘Oh–’ an afterthought–‘and talking of fuss: there’s nothing else, is there?’ He cocked his head. ‘No more little surprises?’

  And then I remembered what it was that he didn’t know: what Kate had been doing with Thomas Culpeper. For all the duke’s spies and his machinations, he didn’t know about that. His Howard-girl, made queen, had been slipping off the throne whenever the king’s back was turned, to pull one of his most trusted gentlemen into her bed. My heart was racing, pushing a laugh up into my throat because how glorious that the duke didn’t know but I did, and Francis did. We knew: we two nobodies knew enough to bring his whole house of Norfolk to its knees and quite probably even lower.

  But then again, perhaps not. Because who knew what the duke could do? Not me, I realised: I didn’t know what he could do. If he ever got wind of it, he might be able to see it off. A word in an ear here and there, some chummy appeals to reason and reminders of loyalties owing, all with his affected world-weariness, all in the name of saving the Howards. Was it feasible? If anyone could get it played down, keep it contained, he could. Perhaps he’d take the risk of not fighting shy but proclaiming it instead as jolly japes, as good old-fashioned courtly love gone mad. And–who knew?–he mig
ht just get away with it. I really didn’t know. Thomas Culpeper might walk away with a slap on the wrist, even a slap on the back.

  I answered his question with one of my own: was there any news of Francis? Francis: hear his name.

  ‘Francis?’ Then, ‘Cranmer’s your man,’ and back to those papers, interview over.

  Well, perhaps he was. Certainly the archbishop wouldn’t have any interest in playing down what Kate was doing with Thomas Culpeper, if he knew. And he’d realise that he had the wrong man in the Tower. But he didn’t know, and I couldn’t tell him: I couldn’t send a man–not even Thomas Culpeper–to his death. All I could do was hope that the king’s men would see sense, soon, over Francis, and release him.

  I didn’t go to my room as I’d originally intended; instead, I returned to the Presence Chamber, where I walked in on a spectacle that had me transfixed. Kate was sitting on the floor, flanked by five or six ladies: heaps of satins and silks, at the heart of which nestled the richest, darkest velvet in the colour of a fresh bruise. Tears had reeked havoc on her face, it was as raw as an exposed nailbed. Something had happened, she had the look of a child in disgrace: humiliated and aggrieved, devastated but defiant. Brazen, her defiance–If you’re not with me, you’re against me–and tiny though she was among the ladies, she was bolstered by them and shining with the drama.

  No Maggie or Alice. The ladies turned their baleful faces to me as if I’d kept them waiting. I was late in on it but now that I was here, they were thinking, I’d fall into line. Panic kicked my stomach: outnumbered.

  ‘More,’ Kate announced to me, pitching it between keening and a rallying cry. Something had indeed happened, there was something more for me to know, something bad, and my heart thrashed around and my breath fled because, whatever it was, she was going to drop it on to me in front of everyone.

  ‘Two hours with the archbishop–’

  She didn’t ask where I’d been; that was irrelevant, which was suddenly and liberatingly how it felt: forget the duke and his brief, dismissive dealings with me, his stupid misinterpretation.

  ‘–and more and more of the same.’ She was stoked up on outrage, but my heart plummeted because there was in fact nothing new and we were as trapped as we’d ever been.

  I squatted down in front of her; I couldn’t stay standing over her. Her eyes were slippery with tears, their rims and her nostrils inflamed; I didn’t like to look, but she held my gaze, made me do it: See what they’re doing to me. Quoting the archbishop through gritted teeth, she tipped her head from side to side to parody his concern: ‘“Could we perhaps go over this again?…You met…you felt…”’ Then, furious, ‘Over and over and over again, and I’ve told him, I’ve told him. What more can I say? I’ve told him every- thing.’

  And more, too, in the duke’s mistaken view: the duke, that sly-eyed, mealy-mouthed, begrudging, calculating duke with his old man’s warped view of the world. But this girl, here, my oldest friend, wide open to me and blaring her grief: I didn’t doubt her. And I felt for her, I felt so badly for her, for what she’d had to go through: in my mind’s eye I glimpsed her sitting stunned and dismayed in front of the archbishop while he pondered and agonised; and for a second, in my mind’s eye, I found myself there with her and just as stunned.

  ‘What he wants–’ a cry at the injustice of it–‘is for me to say that I was pre-contracted. That’s what he wants, Cat,’ she appealed for me to acknowledge the absurdity of it.

  Jane Rochford gripped her hand, We’re with you. Anne Parr wiped her own eyes. I knew I should get on with relaying her uncle’s advice, I should be telling her that it’d be easier for her if she’d agree to say that she’d been pre-contracted. Then she could walk free and there was every chance that Francis would follow her.

  But she was racing ahead: ‘Because then I can be got rid of. Cranmer wants me to be Mrs Francis Dereham–that’s who I am, as far as he’s concerned. That’s who I’ll be.’ In theory, she meant, not practice. Just for the archbishop’s purposes, that’s who she’d be.

  And away from here, I should’ve been saying, by then: Just think, that’s what you could be: away from here, alive.

  ‘Not queen,’ she whined. ‘And’–worse–‘never queen.’ Scrubbed from official history, a mere missing year or so in the hectic matrimonial history of the king. To those in the know, she’d have been a wrong turning taken by a man newly adrift in an arranged marriage, a man who’d had his head turned but had come to see her for what she was.

  How, though, really, it struck me, had she ever been a proper queen? A little over a year running around in some lovely dresses: that’s all it had been, her queenship. It hadn’t ever been serious, she hadn’t ever been in the least like a queen. A private wedding in a tiny chapel. No coronation. She was a nineteen-year-old girl who’d produced no heirs, promoted no one, inspired no reforms or counter-reforms, and made no alliances.

  ‘But I am queen.’ She gave a tear-sodden, hysterical laugh: ‘I am.’

  And that, of course, was just as true.

  ‘He can’t–’ Sobs wrenched her ribs and she moaned with the pain of it. Twisting up on to her knees, she grabbed my wrists: Do something. ‘If I could just get to the king! Where is he?’ she demanded of all of us, of no one in particular. ‘Why is he allowing this? They’ve poisoned his mind against me! If I could just see him! Just for one minute, just for a word–’ And she was up on her feet before anyone had realised, all of us scrambling in her wake. She paced, hugging herself, holding herself together while we stood in attendance, eyes dutifully lowered.

  ‘I was never pre-contracted to Francis Dereham–’ and his name was sing-song, as if not only the notion of pre-contract to him was ridiculous but he himself, too.

  But let her, I told myself. She was distressed, furious, terrified. Let her do this. Take no notice of anyone else, catch no one’s eye. I was unaware that I’d turned from her until she spun me back around–‘Never!’–as if I’d voiced a contradiction. And then to everyone else: ‘I’d never have even considered it! Why would I? Why on earth would I?’ And viciously, ‘Marry Francis Dereham?!’

  The ladies’ confusion was palpable: desperate to gawp at me–the girl whom, they knew, lived for the chance to marry Francis Dereham–and just as desperate to shrink away in embarrassment. I’d have to get through it: one difficult moment was all this was, in a day full of them. It’d pass before I knew it and she’d be retracting what she’d said, apologising, explaining it away, begging my forgiveness. She was a blur in the corner of my averted gaze, a whirl of embossed velvets in the late-afternoon gloom as I stood there in her cast-offs–a kirtle lengthened by a border, a bodice shorn of fur, and sleeves unpicked of pearls–allowing the terrible moment to pass.

  ‘I was never even that interested in him,’ she protested to the room. ‘I was never that keen. It was all his idea. I wish I’d never listened! Why did I? What was wrong with me? That’s where I was stupid, but I was so young. I should’ve stood up to him, I should’ve refused, I should never have let myself be persuaded,’ she bawled, ‘but I was just a girl.’

  Francis was just a boy.

  I didn’t know I was crying until Kate’s sister handed me a handkerchief. Taking it, I glimpsed Izzy’s eyes: loaded with sympathy but also the clear assumption that we’d stand firm together behind Kate. With that handkerchief of hers at my own eyes, I hid my despair.

  Master Culpeper…I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak with you. It makes my heart to die to think what fortune I have that I cannot be always in your company…Yours as long as life endures, Katherine

  At the end of the awful summer that I’d had to spend at home, a letter had at last arrived for me, written in Kate’s own hand but formal in tone, informing me that I was required to come into her service. As soon as you’re back, she’d added.

  I resolved to be back as soon as possible, plague or no plague, although fortunately the epidemic was well on the wane by then. Natura
lly, my parents were amazed and thrilled, but I detected trepidation on their part–with which, privately, I felt considerable impatience. Not that I didn’t understand it: this opportunity for me was so very much more than they had ever hoped for, but would take me into a world of which they knew nothing. I had no such qualms, though. My best friend was queen–how could life, at court, be anything other than easy for me?

  The only immediate hitch was that I was ill-equipped. The clothes I’d worn at the duchess’s Lambeth house were better than those in which I’d kicked around at the Horsham house, but they’d never do for the palace. That, we knew, even though we had little idea of what would be acceptable. For that, we needed expert advice, which took time to secure. Recommendations were sought, and a busy tailor had to be prevailed upon to make the trip down from London. Then, though, it was going to take him time to make the clothes. And time for my father to sell some land in order to be able to pay the bill. Meanwhile, the tailor made some inspired adaptations to my existing, serviceable summer gown, and, after he’d returned to London, sent back various stylish accessories such as a pair of beautifully decorated sleeves and a sleek French hood. Then I was ready to go–or as ready as I could be, on a limited budget and in just ten days.

  Someone had done a fantastic job of dressing Kate. I first saw her as queen from the doorway of the Presence Chamber and she was the centrepiece in that fabulous room, wearing cloth-of-gold: cloth woven from real gold that had been thinned to thread. The expense and expertise that had gone into the design and making of that gown–which was clear even to my inexperienced eye and at first glimpse from across the room–was to proclaim the presence of the Queen of England. Despite its perfect fit on her, that golden gown belonged to the Queen’s Wardrobe. I wish I’d been better able to heed what I was seeing: that Kate Howard didn’t exist any more. Kate Tudor, the king’s wife, spun from gold, was someone else entirely. Or she should’ve been.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ was what she first said to me–or whispered–as if I’d been the one who’d been incommunicado, and she took me aside, guiding me ahead of her into a gallery where the panelling was so intricately carved that my fingertips had an urge of their own to explore it. Closing the door behind us to ensure we were unaccompanied, she insisted, ‘I need you here,’ as if she’d been denied me. Pacing, she was giving little kicks of kirtle, the colour of which–stunning though it was–was elusive, like that of an eye of a peacock feather. She was complaining that Lady Margaret had been appointed by the king as head of her ladies and had chosen her team. ‘Don’t leave me with them, Cat!’ She said it jovially, but when I looked into her eyes there was no trace of humour. Them: the likes of the Parr sisters, I’d soon learn, and the Lizzies Cromwell, Fitzgerald and Seymour, all so much more practised at being in the queen’s household than the new queen herself. I’d learn, too, though, that she was being disingenuous, because in fact she was far from isolated among Lady Margaret’s ladies. Izzy’s husband–Sir Edward Baynton, ‘Bay’–was running her household, and she’d appointed Izzy and their stepmother as ladies-in-waiting, as well as an aunt and cousin. The king, too, was busy making favourites of her two closest brothers, George and Charlie.