The Confession of Katherine Howard Read online

  Later that morning, on our way into Hall for dinner, the new girl’s eyes trailed the imposing figure of Mr Wolfe, the caterer, and–again–to no one in particular, matter-of-fact, she remarked, ‘That one looks a lot like one of my sister’s ex-lovers.’ This time, no one responded. Little Maggie bit her lip. That one was a disturbingly casual way to refer to Mr Wolfe, who held considerable respect in the household. And lover? Not a word we used, probably not a word we’d ever heard. Ex-, too, which made clear that there’d been others. And, anyway, even to think of our respectable–indeed, married–Mr Wolfe in that way…

  When we were leaving Hall, though, and passed Jay-jay, one of the page boys, just as he spat copiously on to the cobblestones, Katherine muttered, ‘You’re nice,’ for us to hear but for him to fail to catch, and it was this snipe of hers–pointless but pointed–that had us smiling among ourselves. The page boys were a wily trio and we’d never have admitted it but we were in awe of them, so it was good, for once, to feel superior.

  Sewing, that afternoon, Katherine had barely clapped eyes on Mrs Scully’s stepdaughter before coming up with ‘Oddbod’, and nothing could’ve been more apt. Skin and bone, with birthmark-red hair and venous-blue eyes, Trudie was a girl of sudden revelations: a moth from the palm of her hand, a milk-tooth dredged from her pocket, a shrew’s skeleton shrouded in her handkerchief. ‘Oddbod,’ decreed Katherine, her tone neutral, just as it was safe to do so, just as Trudie flitted away over the threshold ahead of her stepmother, and in that instant, it was done: Trudie became–affectionately, and only among us–Oddbod. As for Mrs Scully herself: later that afternoon, having asked us to fetch cheeses for the Lady’s Day supper and rushing into the dairy to supervise us, she slipped but managed to correct it before it had properly happened, perhaps even before she’d consciously registered it. Respectfully averting my gaze, I came up against Katherine’s, which showed no such compunction. That evening, Katherine relayed a message to me with, ‘“Skid” Scully’s asking for you,’ and by bedtime, Mrs Scully was, to all of us, without discussion, as if she had never been anything else, simply ‘Skid’.

  Despite myself, I began listening for Katherine’s asides, anticipating them. We all did. Desultory though they were, they drew us in, they drew us to her in our efforts to catch them. I don’t think it had ever occurred to us to pass judgement on anyone, but in the new girl’s eyes everyone was fair game. I saw how adults took the light in those eyes as evidence of keenness and interest. Little did they know she was on the lookout, and that the smallest detail was up for comment: for speculation, or dismissal, or ridicule. The smaller, the better: the bigger the prize. People’s appearance, their behaviour, their relationships, and what she saw–accurately–as their pretensions. Sometimes she was cutting, unkind, petty; sometimes, droll; often intriguing. Of the duchess’s maid, Mrs Barber: She needs one, and a single tap of a fingertip to her top lip (which, later, had me surreptitiously and anxiously dabbing my fingertip to my own). Of Mr Wolfe and his wife: No love lost there, bet the last time they did it was their wedding night. Did what? Danced together? Of the bad-tempered farrier’s wife, sometimes: Probably due her monthly. Monthly what? Confession? Of our chaplains, whispered in their wake: a flat-eyed, derisory, God loves you, Fathers, for which, I worried, we’d all be struck down.

  I began catching myself thinking in asides, but mine were merely reflex, nothing but tics: Nice one, Mr Scully; Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Barber; Is that really necessary, Mr Wolfe? With the exception of Mary, who could never reign herself in, we girls began talking together in asides, too–our girlish exuberance dampened down. Within a week, we’d become watchers, turning self-conscious, guarded, judgemental. What had happened to the ready smile that my mother had insisted was so important? What had happened to Be respectful?

  And still none of the adults seemed to notice; on the contrary, they regarded Katherine as the very model of diligence. Something to do with how high she held her head, perhaps; her meeting of their eyes with her own, and the confident half-smile. She hoodwinked everyone. See that it’s done, please, Katherine: they were addressing everything to her, as if she were in charge of us. And thus she became so. Certainly my friends seemed to concur: there was a seriousness to their gathering around her, a respect in it–even from Mary, sometimes, in the early days–as if something important were to be gleaned from her very presence.

  One morning, heading along the gallery towards the household office with a letter to my mother, I glanced down through a linen-screened window to see my friends following Katherine across the courtyard. Not that she was actually leading them, nor even walking in front of them: her pace was too stately for that, her swaying hips partnered by her swirling of a lavender head by its long stem. She was in the middle of them and it was Alice who was ahead, although turned around and pacing backwards. Still, I knew that whatever they were doing had been Katherine’s idea–perhaps a casually thrown Let’s go to the gardens–and even from a distance, and through that thick cloth, my friends’ readiness was palpable. To my mind, everyone was being taken in, as I might so easily have been when I’d first set eyes on her. What pained me particularly was that Dottie was falling for those superior-sounding asides. I could understand it of Maggie, because she was young and thereby could be said to be impressionable, although actually she wasn’t; and Alice because, as far as I could tell, despite her seriousness she was–frankly–empty-headed; and, well, anything could be expected of Mary. But Dottie: I was angry at Katherine for taking advantage of Dottie’s readiness, and disappointed with Dottie for being naïve. For no reason that I could fathom, I’d expected more of Dottie. I, alone, was standing my ground. My mother was wrong again, and this time spectacularly so: Be the girl who warms hearts. Well, despite her cold eyes and cutting comments, it was Katherine whom everyone wanted.

  My mother had claimed that character was what distinguished a girl: she’d said not to pay attention to mere appearances. Yet Katherine did and everyone was in thrall to it. Each day, there was something different in how she dressed, so minor as to escape notice and censor by busy adults but for that reason looming large in our little world. A plaited ribbon slung around her wrist. Her sleeves rolled back as if she’d just finished doing something, which she hadn’t. Her hood worn further and further back, and a loose knot in its veil which could’ve been there by mistake except that she didn’t make mistakes. For me, it rankled: she’d given thought to how she dressed, as if it mattered, when–I knew, I just knew–that it didn’t. Because how could it? Clothes were just cloth. Yet we looked for them, found ourselves looking for them, these additions and adaptations: I saw my friends sneaking looks, even as I did. Her own studied lack of regard, by contrast, implied they were nothing much, a momentary diversion: it was we who were in thrall to them, said her indifference, not she. Even noticing them–let alone commenting on them–should be beneath us, said that indifference of hers. So, we were reduced to a surreptitious keeping track of them, which was how they established their hold.

  One morning, Dottie fixed a band of red cloth across her forehead, under the front of her hood, covering the parted hair that would usually be visible. She looked lovely–but, then, she always did; she didn’t need a piece of cloth to make her so. Presumably she’d taken it from the basket of scraps. It was what Katherine had done earlier in the week–hers had been black satin–but Dottie wasn’t wearing hers with Katherine’s insouciance. Instead, adjusting her hood, she shone with shy pride. Seeing this, my heart sank in anticipation of her exposure, and sure enough: ‘What’s that?’ asked Katherine, as we left for the duchess’s closet. Caught off-guard, Dottie stammered, ‘A piece of chamlet.’ Reduced to being spelt out as such, that little red sash lost any magic that it might possibly have possessed. A scrap of chamlet: why wear it? Katherine appraised it with those almost-smiling eyes of hers, before pronouncing, unconvincingly and damningly, ‘It’s nice.’ By dinner-time, it was gone and Dottie never again attempted anything similar.


  My instinct, from the very first day, had been to resist Katherine, coupled in time by a stinging realisation that I’d be going it alone. She must’ve sensed my truculence, but never during that difficult first year when we lived alongside each other did she try to win me over. Nor, though, did she make any move to exclude me. It simply became accepted that I’d go for my walk in the gardens before supper while she and Dottie gossiped in our room, and that I’d loll on my mattress while, last thing, in their nightshirts, she, Dottie and Maggie practised their dance steps. I sensed that Katherine was keeping her distance from me: glittering back at me over the space that had opened up between us. But I didn’t feel any freer. In fact, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I remained my own person only because she was allowing it.

  Mary was faring less well. Katherine took everything in her stately stride with the exception of Mary. Mary was her stumbling block. I’d seen it on her very first evening and it had only worsened. I’d once overheard Skid sighing to her husband that Mary would try the patience of a saint but, before Katherine’s arrival, our own tolerance of Mary had been less to do with saintliness than with being at an utter loss. Whenever she’d blundered in on us, bursting with greetings and expecting fulsome reciprocation, forgetting an appalling scene that she’d created a mere hour before, we’d find ourselves offering the required response just because she was impossible to ignore. Not for Katherine, though, and she showed us how easy it was. She simply didn’t look at her. She’d continue doing whatever she was doing, or talking or listening to whomever had been talking to her, fixing her companion with a stare so that there was a clear obligation to continue. Pausing and turning to Mary would have been to drop Katherine: a choice between Mary and Katherine, which, for anyone, even me, was no choice at all because Mary would give you no thanks and would be likely to give you grief. So, Mary had to weather her rejection and sit disgruntled, fuming, learning her place.

  One evening at supper, that first spring of ours at the duchess’s, Katherine dipped a fingertip into the residue of sauce on her plate and began a sinuous sliding, rarely broken and then only with precision. She was writing. When finished, she looked momentarily pleased with it–head cocked, appreciative–before paying it no further mind. Quite a display in itself, her abandonment of it, as if this–writing in her sauce–was something she did all the time. And so there it was, the word, the name, staring up at us, staring us down: OTIS, and, framing it, the twin lobes of a heart.

  Otis: charcoal-burner and–taking advantage of being out there in the woods–beekeeper. Long eyelashes and cowslick hair, and missing his two front teeth, which–happily–didn’t make him any less ready to smile. Otis was nice enough. But too old–perhaps as old as twenty–and anyway he was a charcoal-burner. Charcoal-burning was a skilled job, and there was the added attraction of his honey, but he’d never have been parcelled out, previously, in our negotiations because he was a labourer, which was a step too far.

  Katherine and Otis: from then on, we were spectators, whether we liked it or not. And there was plenty to watch, even if it was Katherine, in turn, watching. This was something to see, though: Katherine, previously so purposeful, now lingering at windows and doorways. As she looked for him, I noticed, her eyes changed. Before, they’d been how she’d faced down the world, they’d been reflective; but now that she was preoccupied, they had a darkness to them.

  She didn’t merely watch but began searching for him, too, covering a lot of ground even at her unhurried pace: making sure she was everywhere, taking the long way around buildings and courtyards in the hope of coming across him as he delivered fuel to the kitchen or smoke-house, bakery or wash-house. She’d go to places she’d previously tended to avoid, going more often to the dreaded jakes and volunteering for such unglamorous errands as taking wilted flower-arrangements to the compost heaps, even braving returning pitchers to the brewhouse where, once, it was said, a brewer’s boy had fallen into a vat of boiling liquid and died. Never far behind her were Alice, Dottie and Maggie, slaves to this passion of hers; but whereas she held her head high, they looked flustered and fluttery.

  Whenever she did come across Otis, all I ever saw her do was smile at him, if you could even call it a smile: a rueful twist to her lips, as if she and he were in something together, as if something had befallen them. He was always surrounded by the men with whom he worked, and these woodcutters showed no such reserve: they’d halt, startled to see her there–and to see that smile of hers–before acknowledging her presence with their own big, broad, congratulatory smiles. And there would be Otis himself in his filthy buffin doublet or perhaps just his rough buckram shirt, receiving the unsought attention with good humour–shrugs, smiles–in recognition of the absurdity of it. Before Katherine had singled him out, I’d have considered him nice enough if I’d considered him at all. Now, I found myself giving him some thought, intrigued as to what she saw in him. Try as I might, though, I just couldn’t see it; and, worse, any of my encounters with him, however perfunctory, now suffered from a regrettable unease and I was left pining for the old lack of self-consciousness of which, I felt, I’d been robbed by Katherine.

  Adding to my dismay, Dottie was soon following Katherine’s lead with a crush of her own: hers for Harry, the wheelwright’s assistant. She was vocal about her longing, unlike Katherine who said nothing of hers. He’s so lovely, she’d sigh, although I didn’t how she’d know, because we never saw him when he wasn’t prone beneath a cart. Dottie couldn’t keep her cool, she floundered whenever she spotted him, involuntarily holding her breath and blushing. There was none of Katherine’s parading around the house and grounds; no slow smile. It didn’t seem to give her pleasure, her fixation, but terror.

  With hindsight, it was no coincidence that my own first-ever falling for someone was at this time, although, incredibly, I didn’t make the connection, experiencing it instead as a bolt from the blue. Back in the days before Katherine, the linking of my name with Rufus–the doctor’s son–had been nothing personal. This, though–my swooning over Stephen, kitchen-clerk, caterer’s assistant–I kept very much to myself. Determined that my head shouldn’t be turned–It’s a silly girl who gets her head turned, Catheryn–I resisted even looking at him, but that was no escape because whenever I closed my eyes, there he was, waiting for me. It was his reserve that drew me: he was above and beyond all that was going on–that’s what I told myself–and I alone would be able to reach him. His was a deliciously melancholy air–coming, actually, from his longish, oval face, his dark, heavy-lidded eyes–and I dreamed of his quiet, considered words in my ear. I didn’t aim to turn his head but, to my surprise, my body went ahead and did it, walking around as if I were going somewhere and someone there had an interest in my arrival. That was all it was, but it worked, and on people other than Stephen, too: people followed me with their eyes, which were lit with approval. A new sensation, that: people’s eyes on me, and the approval. This is easy, I’d think, and the ease itself was pleasurable. No wonder Katherine did as she did, I realised: this was how she lived her whole life, swanning around like this, garnering people’s interest.

  My little, unreciprocated romance kept going for several months, before succumbing to a suspicion that I’d mistaken Stephen’s diffidence for depth. My attentions had lingered, perhaps, from a misguided sense of duty: I’d taken him up so, I felt, I shouldn’t simply drop him. Katherine’s obsession with Otis had ended, but–because she’d never spoken of it–we’d taken a while to notice. Eventually, we realised that she’d stopped walking around the grounds or writing his name in dust or condensation, and we turned our attention away because there was no longer anything for us to watch. He, too, turned away, just as accepting. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. He’d had his time; ordinary life resumed and perhaps there was even some relief for him in that. He was off the hook.

  Later that spring, on the last day of May, came news of another romance. We were sewing in the duchess’s day room to t
he rhythmic trundle of runners, Skid rocking her sleeping newborn’s cradle with her foot, when, suddenly, she laid aside her voluminous sewing–an old gown that she was turning into a kirtle–and, flashing us a smile, made an extraordinary announcement: ‘Girls, we have a new queen.’ She spoke brightly, but, I detected, falsely, making an effort towards enthusiasm. My world lurched. A glance around–Dottie, Alice–showed me that they assumed as I did: Queen Catherine had died. She’d died and been replaced and I hadn’t known it. I hadn’t known it because I’d been shut away here: my friends and me, we’d been shut away here. I almost cried out with frustration. If I’d been at home, my mother would’ve told me, she would’ve made sure I knew, she would never have let this happen: my not-knowing, my unconscious neglect of the lovely Queen Catherine. We’d often talked about the queen, my mother and me: how gentle and godly she was, and charitable and motherly, and how lucky we were to have her as our queen. From my mother I’d learned that she’d come many years ago from abroad–Spain–but we, the English people, had taken her as our own. Suddenly, I missed my mother, painfully.

  Dottie was aghast: ‘The queen’s died?’

  ‘No–’ Skid answered readily, she was prepared, ‘but she can’t be queen any more.’ Gently, breaking it to us.