by Deryn Lake
He paused and looked sternly at the upturned faces, listening to his every word.
‘It is His Grace the King’s wish that you are made aware that the charges against the Queen are very grave. Therefore if any one of you know anything that should be brought to light in the way of evidence it should be reported to me forthwith. Failure to do so will be a punishable offence. Now, to the rest. Anne Bassett, to stay with friends as arranged; the Duchess of Richmond and Lady Margaret Douglas to leave for Kenninghall immediately. The Lady Mary to choose several to serve in the household of her brother, Prince Edward; Sir Thomas Seymour to remain at Hampton Court to guard the jewels and other valuables of the Queen, now forfeit to the Crown. Then, when she be gone, to bring them to the King’s Highness at Westminster.’
Chancellor Audley stopped dramatically, then said, ‘The Queen’s Court is hereby formally dissolved. Those of you not required to go to Syon House are dismissed as of now. You may take your leave and return to your families.’
There was a stunned silence and then a babble of voices as everyone turned disbelievingly to their neighbour. The end had come so suddenly that no one could credit it. The grandeur of the recent progress, the fun of having a young and lively Queen was all over. A joyful year had turned to dust.
‘So,’ said a voice at Katherine Latymer’s elbow, ‘your wish has been granted. You may return to your duty.’
She had no need to look up, the very tone of voice told her that Sir Thomas Seymour had come to mock her. Very coolly, Katherine made a small curtsey.
‘Yes, Sir Thomas. I shall be glad to see my step-children again.’
‘I’m sure. In fact I now realise that you prefer their company to that of anyone else.’
‘Why do you say so?’
‘Because you spent the entire progress avoiding me. Wherever we went, wherever I looked for you, you were most pointedly standing with turned back or averted gaze. I thought you wanted to be my friend, Katherine. I had no idea that you found my company objectionable.’
A pair of icy emerald eyes stared Thomas Seymour out. ‘I would rather you did not raise your voice here, Sir. We are in a crowd.’
‘Then prick ’em,’ said Tom exploding and, grabbing her elbow, he led Katherine, volubly protesting, out of the great hall and into an empty ante-chamber put aside for refreshment.
‘I’m tired of your excuses and rudeness,’ he said angrily. ‘I wanted to do nothing but help a stranger. I am not used to women such as you.’
‘I’m sure of that,’ she retorted stingingly. ‘I expect that most of them fall at your feet or into your bed.’
‘Yes, some do, not all. But that does not mean I cannot admire a woman sincerely. As I do you, Katherine.’
Lady Latymer stood silently, obviously choosing her words. Eventually she said, ‘Sir Thomas, I am a married woman. I also believe in God. I cannot enter into a friendship with you.’
He caught her arm, bending it up roughly. ‘Is that what your religion breeds? The confusion of friendship with lust? Then if that is so I am well shot of you. Good day, Lady Latymer, I shall not bother you again.’
He smouldered with rage, his eyes blue volcanoes, his lips drawn and white. Katherine Latymer almost felt afraid.
‘Please, Sir Thomas …’
‘There is no please about it. You are a cruel bitch, Madam. And I wish I had never met you.’
‘But why? I am nothing to you.’
‘On the contrary, you mean a great deal. I have been drawn to you since the moment I first saw you. Believe me, if it had not been for your elderly husband, upon whom you so obviously dote, I would have won the wager I made long ago with my cousin Bryan.’
‘Which was?’
‘To take you to bed before last year was out.’
Katherine’s snow-like skin turned to frost. ‘How dare you, Sir? How dare you equate me with your cheap common harlots? You go too far.’
She raised her hand furiously, perhaps to strike him, neither of them ever afterwards knew. Thomas, catching it savagely, was beyond discretion or reasonable behaviour. Instead he acted out of instinct and pulled the furious woman towards him. Then he kissed her, hard and without love, while she struggled in his embrace, longing to be released.
But then everything changed as the butterfly within, the other Katherine who longed so much for passion, for beauty, for love, fought Lady Latymer off, and for Thomas, too, there was a metamorphosis. Brash, boastful, arrogant Tom Seymour was pulled up short by the fact that the woman in his arms was so soft, so pliant, so ready for love of every kind.
Releasing her mouth for a moment, he bent to kiss it once more but this time with genuine affection. Now his lips were gentle, kind, leading her to passion slowly, lingering on her mouth with such joyful deliberation, as if he had all the time in the world to make her his own dear mistress. They kissed again and again until at last Katherine and Thomas drew apart, knowing that either they must stop or else go on to consummation.
‘I can’t,’ she said, leaning against him with her eyes closed. ‘I could not live with myself. It would be against everything I stand for.’
Thomas found himself understanding and was amazed at his own goodness.
‘I know, sweetheart, I know. Don’t distress yourself. Time is on our side.’
She looked at him a little sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That Lord Latymer is old, and you and I are young.’
‘Do you speak of dead men’s shoes?’
‘No,’ said Tom soothingly, ‘not that. I merely speak logically. If all things are equal, then your husband will die before either of us. If that happens and neither your heart nor mine are engaged elsewhere, will you come to me?’
‘You know I will,’ she breathed.
They kissed their promise to each other, a promise that one day they would be lovers, that nothing could separate them when the tide finally turned in their favour.
‘Now we must part,’ said Thomas, for in this matter of love he was by far the wiser of the two. ‘Go to your apartments, pack your things. Tomorrow, when the Queen is gone, I shall leave for London and you for Yorkshire.’
‘And after that?’
‘We are in the hands of God.’
‘I believe that,’ said Katherine fervently.
‘So do I,’ echoed Thomas to please her.
They walked from the room, from their sweet idyll, to find people hurrying about, the truth finally having dawned that the Court was dismissed, that everyone must collect their belongings and start their journey home.
‘What a fluster,’ said Chancellor Audley, coming up to them. ‘I am sorry you have to go like this, Lady Latymer.’
She shot Thomas a loving glance, the first of her life. ‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ she said.
Then she curtsied and was gone, leaving Tom staring after her, suddenly bereft.
‘A fine looking woman that,’ said Audley absently. ‘Now you have the jewels ready and catalogued, Seymour?’
‘Yes, my Lord. Except for those that are still about the Queen’s person.’
‘They will be removed tonight. She will have nothing left of the past.’
Thomas shook his head. ‘What a fool, to risk all that, in view of what happened to her cousin Boleyn.’
Audley looked severe. ‘The case is sub judice and the Queen is innocent until she is proved guilty.’
‘Indeed,’ said Thomas, ‘indeed. Nonetheless, if the lady is found wanting she is the most monstrous idiot in the world.’
‘Perhaps,’ answered Audley, ‘she thought it all worth it.’
‘What?’
‘To risk everything for passion. There are people like that, Sir Thomas. Romantic people who believe that love is more important than life.’
Thomas turned to look at him and gave a slow smile. ‘You surprise me.’
‘You are not one of them?’
‘I believe not, my Lord.’
Audley laughed and clapped him on th
e shoulder. ‘I think you too sensible, Seymour. I cannot imagine Sir Tom getting his fingers burnt.’
Thomas smiled crookedly. ‘I hope you are right, my Lord, but one can never tell. Even the most unlikely people do extraordinary things.’
And with that he and the Chancellor went together to check, yet again, that the Queen’s jewels were safely stowed, while upstairs the girl who had so recently worn them cried, for her lover and all she had lost, in the gathering autumn dusk.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A bleak Christmas, and an old king in his castle, weeping as the nights grew dark and he was alone. In the Tower the aged Duchess of Norfolk, complaining of the cold; her daughter Lady Bridgewater, her mother’s child, tight-lipped and straight-faced; her son, Lord William Howard, also there, stiff as a board and speaking to no one. There were more of them too, together with servants. The Howard clan filled the Tower and overflowed into the royal apartments. Only the Duke, leaving London at speed, had managed to escape imprisonment.
In Syon House, listless and bored, eating too much and not exercising, the Queen of England awaited her fate, knowing that the heads of Dereham and Culpepper, the two men who had loved her, were already impaled on spikes on London Bridge. Archbishop Cranmer had been more than good to her, begging Catherine to say that she had been pre-contracted to marry Francis Dereham and her marriage to the King was therefore null and void. But there he had misjudged the girl. Silly and flirtatious she might have been but Catherine Howard wanted to be remembered as a Queen. She denied that she and Dereham had been betrothed and in so doing chose death: a strange twist in the tale of an apparently young and foolish girl.
As soon as Christmas was done, a grisly festival that year, the weather changed. At night the sky was one whirling mass of flakes, the wind raw and cutting, the ways too treacherous to pass for deepening drifts. By day the snow threw an eerie light so that it was never truly bright; the world transformed into an unending sea of white in which unrecognisable buildings loomed like islands, then vanished again.
The bitter weather went on through January of the year 1542 and a fierce February followed. Shivering, the Queen — against whom a bill of attainder had been brought which she had never answered — went down the water steps of Syon House and entered a closed barge. She was taken straight to the Tower and did not look up to see her lovers’ rotting heads as she passed beneath them.
Now Catherine knew that the end had finally come for her and on the night before her execution asked that the block be brought to her room that she might practice how best to place her head. Then she spent the rest of the hours left with her confessor, the Bishop of Lincoln, who departed shortly before dawn, leaving her no task but to put up her hair and dress soberly.
At seven o’clock in the morning the King’s Council assembled at the place of execution, with the exception of the Duke of Suffolk who had coughed and sneezed his way out of attending. Standing grimly amongst the others, black as a rook, his dark features matching his clothes, was Edward Seymour. Sworn to the Privy Council four years ago, he was obliged, of necessity, to attend certain beheadings but today Edward felt wretched, squeamish, ill-at-ease. For tough men who plotted plots and knew the risks, the axe was all that could be expected. But for this girl, highly sexed and enormously foolish that she might be, it seemed too brutal. She was eighteen and beautiful; surely divorce could have been forced upon her.
With his mind working in this manner, Edward did not know how he could tolerate what he must. And yet he was obliged to remain there, awaiting the moment he dreaded, the moment when the blood of a girl was spilled because she had fallen in love.
Uncannily, as if he could read Seymour’s thoughts, Chancellor Audley murmured, ‘A raw morning and a raw act. And yet she could have avoided it.’
‘By admitting pre-contract?’
‘Of course. Dereham swore they were betrothed; it was she who refuted it, and in so doing left herself no defence. She denied sleeping with Culpepper, admitted Dereham and Mannox. God’s passion, she was a silly girl.’
‘You speak as if she is dead.’
‘She will be in a moment. Here she comes.’ Audley must have seen Edward flinch for he added in an undertone, ‘Remember she wanted it. She could have escaped.’
But nothing, thought Edward, nothing at all can ever justify this.
Though he had heard reports that Catherine had got fat in prison she had obviously not eaten since her arrival at the Tower, for now she was hollow-cheeked and so feeble that one of the four ladies who walked with her had to help her up the scaffold.
Oh God, give her strength, Edward found himself praying.
It was customary for eloquent speeches to be made at the end but this poor thing was obviously too weak to speak and nobody could tell whether her violent shivering was from fear or cold. Like a lamb in the slaughterhouse she stood, meek and terrified, while her eyes were bandaged.
Oh Christ, thought Edward, I’m going to disgrace myself.
He stared fixedly at the toes of his boots, past caring if others noticed, and if he could have blocked his ears he would have done so. But that was not possible, thus he heard her pathetic and exhausted whispers.
‘God have mercy on my soul. Spare my poor family. I die a Queen but would rather die the wife of Culpepper.’
There was a vile swish, the cause of which Edward knew only too well, and two bright spots of blood appeared on his shoes. Knowing that he was facially white, Edward turned away and thus saw what was happening amongst his fellow Councillors. Cranmer was deep in prayer; Bishop Stephen Gardiner, who had deserted his protégée Catherine when she had fallen out of favour, was not. In fact he seemed almost to gloat as did Wriothesley, who had found out so many sordid and unsavoury facts about the Queen and made a great vicarious meal of them.
‘Pricks!’ said Edward, very quietly, and rubbed his boots clean on the frozen grass.
At last he looked at the scaffold. A cloth had been thrown over the body but already a dark red patch was forming at its neck. The head, very humble somehow with its plain white cap and bandaged eyes, was just being thrust into a wooden box.
Where is she now? thought Edward. Where is she? Gone, finished? Or has her soul flown like a bird’s?
A sudden fear gripped him, a terrible sense of disaster, and as he gazed at the looming scaffold he found himself drenched in sweat despite the morning’s chill.
Oh Christ’s sweet blood, he prayed. Never let me end like this. Let me depart in my bed like a Christian soul.
‘My Lord Hertford, are you ill?’ said a voice at his elbow and Edward turned to see the unattractive face of Sir Richard Rich staring shrewdly into his.
‘I have a fever,’ Edward answered quickly. ‘If I had been sensible I would have stayed away.’
Rich grimaced. ‘But would not miss doing your duty, eh, Lord Hertford?’
He was one of those terrible men who seemed to be constructed about his teeth, which were large and slimy, pinioning his lower lip and leaving permanent marks on it. His face was detestable, big and florid, with loose cheeks that swung when he talked. Edward’s overwhelming urge to scream obscenities into his ear was overcome only by the sound of another small procession approaching the scaffold. The moment had come for Jane Rochford’s life to end.
On this occasion, queasy though he was, Edward had to agree that the agent provocateur who had aided the Queen in her torrid and fatal affair deserved her fate. Nonetheless he looked away at the moment when the axe fell.
‘Not up to it,’ he heard Rich mutter to Wriothesley.
Edward flicked them a cool glance as the wretched corpse of Catherine’s Lady Roe was swept up to go with that of her royal mistress, feeling, foolishly, that he did not care if he made enemies. But even while he stared at them, Edward felt Audley clap him on the shoulder.
‘So there’s an end of it,’ said the Lord Chancellor briskly. ‘Not much hope for the Howards now, I think.’
‘You never know
,’ said Edward, turning to him. ‘His Grace is fond of Henry Howard and the old fox Duke volubly disowned his niece and her lovers before he fled home.’
Audley’s lined face creased as he grinned. ‘You may well be right. We shall just have to wait and see.’ He looked closely at Edward. ‘You’re white, man. Come within and drink something. God’s mercy but it’s a cold day.’
The members of the Council were breaking into groups, heading towards the Tower’s private apartments where refreshments awaited. As he left with the Chancellor, Edward took one last look round. Someone was sweeping the straw off the scaffold, releasing as he did so a little pool of blood which fell like a waterfall on to the frozen grass below.
Catherine’s rubies, he thought, as the sickly sun picked up their colour for a moment before disappearing behind the blankness of a snow-filled sky.
*
The bleak winter was particularly severe in the Fens and the Duke of Norfolk’s home, Kenninghall, was cut off by huge drifts and frozen brooks. Every evening a few crisp flakes would be seen floating gently in the air, only to become blizzards as darkness fell and the bitter wind rose. By morning the landscape would have changed and the red sun, peering out of leaden greyness, did nothing to melt the ice. At night there was nothing for it but to survive in a world that had become a wasteland of snow, and every creature, from the humblest hare to the noble Duke himself, huddled in its lair for warmth.
As if in sympathy with the blood sacrifice of the little Queen, the worst days of all were in the middle of February but, at last, there came a morning when the sun came out in majesty and breathed upon the earth. Rivers which had frozen into hard pathways for horses split into spiders’ webs as the ice cracked; the drifts became pools, then lakes, and finally floods. Buds burst through the snow encasing them, and hidden flowers came out defiantly. Knowing that the winter was finally behind him, Thomas Howard went to his stables and ordered that his horse and two others beside should be ready for a journey on the following day. Then he had his first bath of the year, removing every stitch he wore for the first time in weeks.