by Karen Harper
Father looked stoic and sullen, just as he did when he used to argue with my mother. But he shouted, “She’s going! You two sort out when. There’s even to be a horse for her to ride and an escort for her from the Hall.”
Did everyone dance so easily to Cromwell’s tune? I was in utter awe.
“I never should have listened to your wild schemes!” Maud shrieked and threw a candlestick on the hearthstones while Simon and Amelia cowered in the corner. “She has to help birth this child you’ve planted in my belly! You know about bees, don’t you, Hugh? By hell’s gates, I’m the queen bee here, and you’re going to see more sting than honey if you let her go, bec—”
My father went out and slammed the door.
She turned to me, leveling her hand, pointing her finger like the Barlows’ tutor when he was angry. “I don’t give a fig how many bribes that king’s man sends, you’re not going anywhere to learn to be a gentlewoman, not the likes of you.”
I was more angry and desperate than I’d ever been, though that predicament was naught compare to the tight places I got in once I really began to serve Cromwell and the Tudors, once I started to “pay my dues,” as he reminded me once when I rebelled.
“Learn to be a lady?” I said, hands thrust on my hips as I faced her down. “Yes, that would be lovely, and I shall wear green ribbons in my hair like this one. I shall amble about and ape you,” I taunted, producing from my bodice the ribbon I’d found years ago and was about to discard since I was going to be quit of her for good. “I do regret, though, it is a bit soiled from the hearth—from a strange, sudden fire there once that caught my mother’s skirts, when not a thing was spitted over it that might have caused her to get too close. And then, I warrant,” I added, as I dangled the ribbon before her, “it is a bit burned because it was dropped in some sort of scuffle right here on the hearth when you claimed you were not even inside with her that day, the day I believe someone hit my mother hard on the back of her head. How fortunate that you were coming to visit then, especially since you’d already been here earlier to deliver the two beehives you left out back.”
She stared aghast at me, then at her sniveling children—perhaps to assure herself they had not taken my meaning. Wide-eyed, gasping air like a beached fish, she turned to gaze at me again.
“If I were you,” I went on, “I’d be pleased to be rid of someone who can produce other proofs about what really happened that day. As you yourself put it, ‘I’ve done a lot for you, Hugh.’ Mayhap since you’ve turned to such a shrew, if he sees I can prove what I can prove, he’ll give evidence against you too.”
She looked so frightened I almost felt guilty, for I had no other proofs but only festering suspicions from long-smothered resentment. Evidently fearful of saying another word to me, she flounced off to her room, leaving me to tend her children for the last time. Maud was so distraught that she went into labor that night, and I helped deliver her of a puny baby girl, one she named Katherine after me, as if to mollify or bribe me. I cuddled and kissed the little mite that was my namesake, but nothing was keeping me there. Two days later, I turned my face to the south toward another, richer, more powerful family of Champernownes.
I didn’t realize until years later, working first for Cromwell and then the Tudors, that the lies, the bluffs, the innuendos, the screws I had put to the woman who had been the bane of my existence, were the best practice I could have had for later life in London.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
BIGBURY-ON-SEA, DEVON
July 19, 1526
I cannot believe you have never seen the sea!” Joan cried as, holding hands, we ran toward the waves across the wide beach. We were barefoot and had our skirts belted up, baring our legs below the knee. Though we could not take big strides, the sand and surf felt delightful on bare skin. Seagulls strutting on the sands screeched and took flight before us as we ran as fast as our tied thighs, holding up our skirt hems, would allow.
Joan spoke true, I thought. I am twenty years of age and have never seen water wider than the Dart. But after eight months in Modbury, I had seen so much and—if Master Cromwell did not forget me—I will see much more than even this wonder of vast, rolling water.
“Wait until you see the tides come in and out!” Joan told me. I thanked the Lord that she had been my special guide and friend in my new life. “We shall walk the tidal causeway to that island out there, see?” she cried, pointing, her voice so excited it was shrill. “But we must return across the sand straits by a certain time or water will devour us like a sea monster!”
Joan was eleven that first summer I lived in Modbury with Sir Philip Champernowne’s family; she was already betrothed to a landed neighbor, Robert Gamage, but at least she knew and liked him. An almost mirror image of her mother and two sisters, Joan was dark-haired with beautiful green eyes, eyebrows arched like ravens’ wings, and an oval face with milky skin. To protect our complexions, we had our heads covered with floppy, woven hats tied with gay colored ribbons fluttering in the salty breeze.
Behind us, trying to keep up, came Elizabeth, called Bess, of thirteen years, pulling her sister Katherine, called Kate, eight years, the youngest of the Champernowne brood. Ahead of us raced the lads, John, the heir, just turned eighteen, and Arthur but a year younger, both tall and lanky. Arthur, as ever, kept turning back to look at me, his avid gaze on my heaving breasts beneath my tight bodice, but today also ogling my legs. That subtle feeling of unease set in, but, in faith, it was a day for freedom, a day not to fret about Arthur’s smothered, forbidden feelings for me.
At a slower pace behind us all came Sir Philip and Lady Katherine, arm in arm, followed by servants with baskets of food. My mentors also looked excited on this day of their annual family visit to the southern shore, but a few hours ahorse from their manor house on the fringe of busy Modbury. Already, just last month, I had learned to swim with the girls in the four-foot-deep pond behind the house, though I’d hated it when minnows nibbled on my legs. I could not fathom what great sea creatures must live in the green-gray depths before us.
Even when the boys began to splash us, I looked about to try to take it all in, as if I could press this memory in my treasure box with dried roses from the gardens behind Modbury Manor. Here were dark cliffs half-hidden by humps of hills and the broad, pale sand shore studded by random clusters of black rocks as if a huge hand had strewn them amidst the sea grasses of Sedgewell Cove.
“Just think!” Joan cried, finally loosing my hand. “This is the very spot where smugglers bring their goods ashore at night, fineries maybe clear from France!”
John doused us with another flung handful of water, but she just squealed and laughed. Had she been home, most likely she would have tat-taled on him to the girls’ governess, Gertrude.
“Cutthroat pirates from the Scilly Isles put in here,” John said, trying to scare us as usual. “Heard tell they abduct fair maids for ransom, so beware! I’d not pay a farthing for either of you, always picking at me to keep my nose in a book when the whole world waits out here!”
He rampaged off through the cresting waves, kicking up spray, but Arthur lingered a moment. “I’d raise the ransom somehow,” he said, turning red as a pippin. Poor Arthur, I thought, ever brooding over the fact he was the second son. He’d told me privily he would have been sent to be a priest in the old days before the new religious learning the family espoused and I eagerly studied. But Arthur had told me, too, that his sire had vowed to buy him a fine manor somewhere in Devon, so he would someday have even better prospects to wed well.
I shuddered, even as Arthur turned tail and chased after his brother. The last thing I needed was to have Sir Philip or Lady Katherine mistrusting me for leading Arthur on—which I had not—when I wanted a good report to Cromwell and no strings to hold me here when he summoned me to London. Besides, had I cared for Arthur that way, I was under no illusions that one of Sir Philip’s sons would be allowed to wed a woman without lands or dowry.
“Let’
s find some pretty shells!” I cried, eager for something tangible to keep in my treasure box to mark this day. “Oh, look at this!” I produced a corkscrew-shaped one from the sand at my feet. “But I’ll bet you can all find even better ones!”
Since I was older than the children, I tried to watch over them and bring out the best in Joan, Bess and little Kate. It was instinct in me from my earlier days, I guess, and the gratitude I owed my hosts, Sir Philip and Lady Katherine, for in bed and board and education, they treated me as one of their own.
“I can tell you are a green girl here!” Bess replied with a little shake of her head as she shouted into the wind. “Newcomers always want to pick up shells, but I want to throw them in the waves and make them skip and skip until they disappear!”
Skip and skip until they disappear . . . That was the way my days and months with the Champernownes flew past, however much I chafed that I did not hear from Thomas Cromwell.
MODBURY, DEVON
To tell true, Cromwell was only mentioned twice in my hearing, if I don’t count the time I overheard the lord and lady discussing “the troubles in London,” but I will record that in a bit. The first day I arrived at Modbury, Sir Philip had said, “Master Cromwell holds out much hope for your future with our family or another in London someday.”
Someday—that seemed so vague, so far away, though his words lifted my heart.
“Will your family be going to London?” I had asked.
“I believe someday my daughters and their husbands will all serve the royal family there in some capacity. Perhaps you will go to court in one of their households. Time will tell.”
I was sad that he spoke not of such things after, though I thought perhaps Master Cromwell was testing me through Sir Philip. After all, Cromwell had told me, “Time will tell,” so was that a coded message to me? He had said he valued one who could keep a confidence, and his final words to me were to learn not to tell things, not without his permission.
The other time I heard Cromwell’s name was the day Sir Philip and Lady Katherine took me on horseback to see Modbury. I was learning to sit a horse sidesaddle quite well and reveled in the lofty view of things it gave me, I who had walked everywhere in the earlier years of my life. Also, that day I came to realize that these kin of mine were indeed the premier family of the area. Laborers doffed their hats and stood aside, sometimes with heads bowed a bit. Mothers pointed us out to their children. More than one woman on the street curtsied, a custom to honor one’s betters, a skill I had recently learned from the family’s dancing instructor, Master Martin. He had not only lived in London—I questioned him about that whenever I could manage—but had seen Her Grace Mary Tudor, Princess of Wales, pass by on the road with her huge entourage not once but twice on her way to Ludlow Castle in Wales. Hundreds of horses and carts, so he told me, and the princess herself riding in a fine litter.
Oh, yes, with Joan and Bess, for Kate was deemed yet too young, I had learned what Master Martin called “court dances”: the stately pavane; the quick coranto; and my favorite, the charming, five-step galliard the French called the cinquepace. Because of our heights, I sometimes partnered John, but more often he danced with lanky Joan and I was with Arthur. That was the beginning of my troubles with him, I supposed, for he fell over his big feet in my presence, when I knew he wanted to please Master Martin and me too.
But on my introduction to Modbury by my mentors, I was in awe, and not just from seeing the high regard which they enjoyed among the local citizenry. That day, again, Master Cromwell was mentioned. His name came up in this wise. Modbury was a booming wool town with mills producing cloth, especially felt. All about, weavers’ cottages had long windows to let the light in on their looms. Along the river stood fulling mills where huge mallets pounded the wetted wool into flat, smooth felt called “tuckey,” to sell at home and abroad.
As we walked through one such mill Sir Philip owned, with the sounds of the rushing river and stamping of the mallets, Lady Katherine said to her husband, “I hear Secretary Cromwell owns a fulling mill at Putney near London. Indeed, there is not much the man hasn’t done.”
“A jack-of-all-trades but a master of one,” Sir Philip put in. “His ultimate skill is not secretarial but managerial. He may manage his own business, but his genius lies in handling other, powerful people.”
“Quite a past but an even brighter future,” she said, turning to me with a little half smile that was so characteristic of her, as if she wanted to break into a grin but something always held her back. “Tell Kat a bit about her patron, then,” she urged her husband as we walked outside to where two men held our horses.
“Though he comes from common stock and wed the daughter of a shearman, he’s worked his way up with his wit and talents,” Sir Philip said. “He tells me he had a rough beginning, was once a common soldier in Italy, and later saw how corrupt Pope Julius II and his lackeys were selling indulgences and such.”
I had more than once heard Sir Philip bemoaning the corruption of the Catholic Church, both in Rome and England. So had he imbibed that attitude from Cromwell? But I did not want to hear of the new religion, but more of Master Cromwell.
“So,” I dared to prompt him, “he finally came back to England with new ideas?”
“Aye, and became a moneylender, lawyer and solicitor. You’ve seen his captivating manner and, I tell you, he has a memory like a trap of Spanish steel for names, numbers and faces—”
“And favors,” Lady Katherine added pointedly, so I hope she didn’t mean that Cromwell owed them something because of me.
“He’s now a member of Parliament,” Sir Philip said as he gave the horse boys each a groat and we mounted with their help. I hardly understood what Parliament was then, but I did not interrupt. “He’s a fine speaker there, became a member of Grey’s Inn recently,” he added as we turned our mounts toward the manor and rode past the shambles where meat was sold and the Roofed Round House where both corn and yarn were bargained for. My horse must have sensed my mood, for she tossed her head and snorted. I was champing at my own bit to hear more, for I knew naught of Grey’s Inn or any other in London.
Finally, I could not hold my tongue. I was desirous of any hint, however obscure, of when Secretary Cromwell might send for me. “But he still works for Cardinal Wolsey, does he not?” I ventured.
With a sneer at the mere mention of the cardinal’s name, Sir Philip nodded brusquely. “Of course. He cares for all of Wolsey’s affairs, for that corrupt prelate cares for all the king’s affairs. That is where the power should lie, with our sovereign, not with one who owes obedience to the Pope in Rome.”
I had a hundred other questions, but I forced myself to silence. I had told Secretary Cromwell I could hold my tongue, so I would strive to do so. But it did warm me to hear the Champernownes praise the man they had called my patron and who I prayed would be my deliverer from Devon, however beautiful it was here.
My home to the north had seemed so isolated and hemmed in by Dartmoor’s hedges and tall, stunted oaks; ancient stone walls; high, turf-topped banks and deep-cut lanes. By comparison, this area of Devon, called the South Hams, lay more welcoming. Though Modbury was sheltered by three hills, the land opened to wide vistas with fertile farms and pinkish soil producing barley, wheat and rye. It was a far cry from the tough plowing through turf and thick grass at home. Like the southern sea, it was a new, rich world in many ways, and, as my patron had commanded me, I soaked up every bit of it I could.
I was dismayed one winter night when chill crept up the staircase and I hurried down it, to find my way blocked by Arthur. “Oh, you gave me a fright!” I told him, and gathered my skirts tighter to go around him. The family was roasting chestnuts downstairs, and all of us had been reciting parts from our lessons in geography and mathematics and displaying examples of our prayers in our best handwriting. They were prayers addressed directly to the Lord Jesus, not to the Virgin Mary or the saints, since the new religion did not accept such mediators
to our Lord. My flowing, steady script had been especially praised; I knew I wrote a good hand, one I hoped a busy secretary would appreciate should I ever have an opportunity to write to him. For some reason, had Cromwell decided to leave me here?
“Wait—I pray you,” Arthur said, putting out a long arm to block my way downstairs. “I—I’ve been sent up to fetch my astronomy drawings, but I—Father says my written hand is dreadful, and I beg you to help me with it.”
“Oh,” I said, not looking directly in his wide eyes, soft and pleading like those of a deer in the manor’s small hunt park. “If we have permission from your parents and Master Martin, then all right.”
He snatched my hand and planted a wet kiss on my palm, not a steady, assured touch of the lips as Cromwell had done nigh on two years before. Of course, I liked the feeling of power over this young man. I was glad to prove Maud wrong, that I was not fetching enough to fetch attention from a lad worth the while. But I could not afford to displease his parents. Yet if they and Master Martin gave their permission, I would gladly help.
A few days later, as we huddled at a schoolroom table over a single piece of parchment, Arthur asked, “Can you not place your hand over mine to guide it when I form my letters?”
“I believe it best you watch and copy my movements.”
We were briefly alone, but I could hear Master Martin’s voice droning on to someone in the hall. Arthur pressed his thigh tighter against my skirts and shifted his foot against mine. I moved farther away.
“I do watch your movements, all of them,” Arthur whispered, his eyes narrowed. He breathed through his mouth, which made it seem he was panting. “Please, dear Kat, I adore—”
“No, I cannot adore your handwriting unless you improve it greatly,” I cut him off, and bounced up to move my stool farther yet from his.