No Will But His

by Hoyt, Sarah A.

  “You are right, you will not,” the duchess said, her voice full of grim satisfaction as she continued to belabor him with her stick. “For from this day forward you are not to be left alone with my granddaughter at any time. And what is more, my fine cockerel, you are not to darken my threshold nor come sauntering your fine ways over my household. You are a serpent in the garden, young man, and you will not be allowed to tempt the innocents in my house.”

  At last the duchess stopped, either because her arm had grown tired or because the sight of Manox, beaten and sniveling, tears dripping from his nose and chin, a big scrape on his forehead and both eyes blackened, filled her with a sense of satiated revenge and, perhaps, with just a little bit of pity. “Do yourself up, you wretch, and get out of my sight.”

  Kathryn, whom Mary Lassells had stopped beating, at least after that first, halfhearted attempt to slap her, had only the chamberer’s hand still grasping her hair to remind her that she was not well out of this.

  She watched, with half pity and half apprehension as Manox limped from the chapel, his hands fumbling at his crotch. He failed even to throw her a single look as he left.

  For a moment the only loud sound in the chapel was the duchess’s labored, fast breathing. As that calmed down, she turned to Kathryn and said, waspish, “As for you, my fine lady, you will come to my chambers, so I may speak with you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The duchess stormed into her rooms ahead of Kathryn and disposed herself in the largest chair, staring at her errant granddaughter with a frown that indicated she was considering a line of sufficiently horrible punishments and finding them all insufficient.

  Kathryn, facing the all-seeing eyes dared not move, till the duchess said, “Sit you down, girl.”

  Kathryn skittered sideways to fall upon a tambour which happened to be just lower than the chair, making her feel even smaller than her natural short stature, as she looked up at her grandmother. And was surprised. She’d been so shocked in the—at any rate dim—chapel, that she’d not paid any attention to how her grandmother looked. Now she realized there were dark marks under the duchess’s eyes, and a look as though she had been crying or were deeply perturbed. Had Kathryn put those marks there?

  The duchess stared at her a good long time, dispassionately. “Are you still a maiden, Kathryn?” she asked at last. She might as well have been asking if Kathryn had made a good dinner the night before.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” Kathryn said, and ducked her head. “I know what it might seem like to you, milady, but …”

  The duchess snorted. “What it seems like is like a young girl too full of her own affairs and a silly infatuation for a virginal player. Is that what it is, Kathryn?”

  Kathryn sighed, then shook her head. “It was him who wanted to touch me,” she said. She looked up at the duchess. “He said it hurt him to love me so much and to be gratified, not to have … not to have a token of my esteem.”

  The duchess frowned. “Do you esteem him then?”

  “Only as a teacher,” Kathryn said “And … and as a friend. But it was, you see, that he seemed to suffer so much, and I didn’t want him to suffer, and he said if I met him under the stairs of the chapel, where it’s full dark and where he could kiss me and hold me, he would be well.”

  The duchess covered her face with her hand. Kathryn did not know what this meant, but she watched the gnarled, old, but still slim fingers clench tight, then let go, then clench again, as though behind the protective screen of her hand the duchess were rationalizing some violent passion. “Mea culpa,” she murmured at last and, lowering her hand looked up at Kathryn. “I should have taught you better. I should have realized how tenderhearted you are. Your mother …” She inclined her head and paused, as though considering what best to say next. “Your mother was tenderhearted, too. Soft. I didn’t know her well, but what I heard of her led me to believe so. Beware, Kathryn. Better a hard-hearted wench than a soft one. Your mother’s soft heart saw her married to your father, who spent her money and wore her out in bearing child after child.”

  “But he was never made happier, not when I let him hold me, not when I let him feel my privy place beneath my clothes, not even when I let him kiss it.”

  “And that is as far as it goes?” the duchess asked. “It went no further than that?”

  Kathryn shook her head. She told the duchess what had passed in the music room that day. The duchess made a face. “Well, I know, for I heard most of it from outside the room,” she said. “And it both appalled me and filled me with pride for you, since it didn’t seem to be your desire, and sure it was not you begging. Kathryn, your liaison with Manox is the talk of the kitchen maids, Lassells tells me. They have often seen you and Manox secreting around to your hiding place, and they wondered what was toward. The talk was that you had pledged your troth to him, and indeed that was my fear. That and that things had gone too far.”

  “No, madam, I know that removing my maidenhead would hurt, and I was not about to let someone like Manox, for whom I don’t care much, do it.”

  Again the duchess’s hand went to cover her face, and again it clenched over her eyes, as though she were trying to control thoughts she didn’t wish to admit to. “Where do you get your morality, girl? From what you hear in the kitchen?”

  “No, madam, only Mary said that it is our duty to get our happiness and our love before we are consigned to our husbands, who will then be to us as God to the Earth, and whom we’ll never be able to escape or disobey. And so I thought …”

  “You know what the Church says. Surely, Kathryn, before you came to me, were you not given religious instruction?”

  “The Church …” Kathryn said, but then, her mind reviving. “But the Church says so many things that we do anyway. That we should not kill, and yet, how many prisoners go from the Tower to the block?” It seemed to her the duchess flinched. “And it says we should not covet, but don’t all of us covet something? And it says—”

  “Enough,” the duchess said, with a tone of finality. “If piety doesn’t move you, then we shall try practical matters.” She was quiet a moment, then spoke in a harsh tone, seeming to move her mouth only the minimum to get the words out. “Yesterday your cousin went to the block.”

  It was like a bucket of freezing water thrown over Kathryn. Like icy water, the words stopped all her thoughts, and caused her to shiver and blink in confusion, as though she’d been asleep or walking in some dream up till then and had only now been brought fully awake. “My cousin … The queen?”

  She had known, of course, that the king had stopped loving Anne. That much was obvious even a year ago. And for the last few months there had been talk that she was accused of treason, of witchcraft, and of other foul but never explained things. There were rumors too that the king’s affections had turned to another woman—whom the duchess called only a whey-faced wench—and even that this woman was already pregnant.

  But all along the duchess had also been getting letters and reports from her friends in the capital, and there had been indications that the queen would perhaps be offered a way out of the country, perhaps to a foreign convent. And there had been stories that she would be spared, and even other stories that were the king but to see her, he would love her again.

  Kathryn hadn’t wanted to believe that the beautiful cousin she’d seen but once, the glittering queen on whom all of Kathryn’s hopes for elevation rested, now lay dead. She realized that her eyes had filled with tears when she felt one tear drop down her chin. “How … how… .”

  The Duchess shrugged. “The how is simple enough, if you mean the physical means of her death. Her head was cut by a sword, wielded by a headsman sent for from France, for she feared that the ax would not take it off swiftly enough and that she should suffer. The king loved her enough to grant her that mercy still …”

  It didn’t seem like a great mercy to her. “But she was so beautiful,” Kathryn said. “And her daughter is the princess …”
<
br />   “Who knows for how long?” the duchess said. “For I doubt me not as soon as the whey-faced wench should give the king a son—and capable of it, too, she is, coming from a family that breeds like hares in the fields—Elizabeth shall be declared a bastard, just like Mary, Catherine’s daughter.” She looked up. “But perhaps you should understand more about this. Your cousin Anne fell not of adultery—” She glared at Kathryn, as though daring her to disagree with this assessment. “No matter how many swear to it, or how many confessions were extracted under torture, I shall never believe that Anne Boleyn was stupid enough to play false on the king of England. Even if she didn’t love him. Even if she didn’t care for him at all.”

  “No. Your cousin Anne fell from treating the king as just a man.” She grimaced, the grimace resembling a smile. “Which might be well, since she rose also by those means. She rose to the heights of a crown because the king knew she loved in him as a man and not merely as the king of England or for the king’s power. But then, once she’d ascended, she continued treating the king as a man, and there was her grave error.

  “A husband, no matter whether he’s king of mucksman in the nearest pigsty, should believe he is the king of his wife’s affections. This is why it is said that the woman should obey her husband as the Earth obeys God. While Anne might not have been adulterous, she gave the king to understand that her heart didn’t rest, entire, in his command, and by doing that she made him insecure. And by making him insecure, alas, she made him suspect her of having other loves and other lovers. And because her husband was in fact the king, he could get those suspicions confirmed no matter how outrageous. Now, my dear, what does that tell you about how you should behave yourself and why it is important to me that you haven’t lost your maidenhead?”

  Kathryn blinked. The tears were still falling down her face, leaving cold trails. It seemed to her that she must have fallen asleep in the chapel, over the grave of that long-dead Howard, and be dreaming all of this. The duchess could not have come upon her and Manox and interrupted them thus. And having come upon them, the duchess wouldn’t show the worst of her wrath to Manox. And if she did so, she wouldn’t afterward take Kathryn to her room and there spend time instructing her on the value of a maidenhead. “I don’t know,” she said miserably.

  The walking stick rose, and Kathryn cringed, but it only came down in front of her feet and tapped out, insistently, as if to call her attention. “Don’t be more stupid than you can help,” the duchess said. “And listen to me. It matters because your husband will want to believe, even if you have never met him before your wedding day, that he is the king of your heart from the moment you take vows. And believing that is easier if he thinks the fortress of your body has not been broached.”

  “Oh,” Kathryn said. She did not know what else to say or do, save that she had never thought of it that way.

  “As a girl and—” the duchess reached over, her hand touched Kathryn under the chin and forced her to put it up, to show her face. “A not uncomely girl, you belong more than to yourself. You belong to your family. And to God, of course,” she added, as though not so much acknowledging the Almighty’s claim as dismissing it by stating it. “Your beauty will serve to attract a husband—one who can make a strong alliance with our family and help all the Howards grow strong. And your affection, given to your husband, your careful treatment of him so that he believes himself a god in your eyes, will convince him to give every advantage to our family.” She nodded. “And you will give him lusty children that will augment the family. Do you understand?”

  Seen like that, it seemed to Kathryn that her entire future was already decided from this moment until she should rest, quietly, under a stone. “Yes,” she said softly, not sure that she felt very happy about this idea. When she was little, she and her brothers—and sometimes her sisters, too—had played at being pirates and robbers, at fighting in the highways or in wild cavalcades in the moonlight.

  Now she thought that all she’d ever get to see, all she’d ever get to do, would be life as she lived now, only in a house that would be her own, a house where she would be kept and have children—lusty children, at that—to enrich her husband’s and her family’s network of connections.

  “Oh, don’t be so sad,” the duchess said. “It is not a bad lot …”

  Kathryn thought that the duchess could say that for she had been widowed any number of years and did exactly as she pleased with her household and with all those around her. “And … a marriage for me, Your Grace?” She said at last. “What are … how are the chances that there shall be one?“The Duchess sighed. “Lower now, of course. With your cousin dead and that wench in her place, all the benefices and all the gifts will be going to the Seymours. But there’s nothing so sure in the world but that things will turn. In a year or so, we’ll look and find you a match. You’re what? Between thirteen and fifteen, we thought? Well, you can wait yet, young Kathryn. But until then, remember the best gift you can give your husband is the gift of your maidenhead and, with it, the certainty that he’s the first and most important person in your life. Guard it well, until you find the one you’re going to marry.”

  Section Three

  The Open Rose

  Chapter Fifteen

  “There is no reason that you shouldn’t have riding lessons,” the duchess had said. She’d said it after the house had been shuttered to mourn Anne’s death—a convenient way, the duchess said, of avoiding the visits of locals bearing more venom than sympathy for the family—then unshuttered again, and after a mild spring had given way to a mild summer. “There are several gentlemen as came from the court to join my household, and one of them ought to be good enough to teach you to ride. As for hunting … well, we’ll see to that afterward, for surely you must know how to hunt as well, even if the best husband we can procure you in the future is a country squire.”

  She’d looked Kathryn over. Kathryn had just come back from a walk in the orchard, and was flushed with the exertion and feeling rather happy. “Though it seems a waste,” the duchess said. “If we can reach no higher for you, but there it is. We shall hope for the best. And meanwhile, we shall teach you to dance and to ride, to hunt and to behave like a lady should.” Her gaze fell to Kathryn’s ankles, and she frowned. “Why are your ankles showing, girl?”

  “If Your Grace pardon, but I grew …”

  The Duchess sighed. “I shall give orders,” she said, “to have two new gowns made for you. None too expensive, as we’re not likely to leave the country soon. Perhaps ever. But decent enough to cover you and allow you to look like you belong to your station. Do you believe you’ll grow more this season?”

  “An’ it please, Your Grace, I do not know.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” the duchess said making it sound as though the ignorance were a perverse quirk on Kathryn’s part. “Very well, I shall arrange for you—and I suppose the other maids are in need of it as well—to have dancing and riding lessons.”

  And so the lessons started. They didn’t seem to Kathryn to tend to very much and, truth be told, they weren’t much more exciting than the riding lessons that she’d had as a little girl. While the duchess kept a goodly stable—it was said that in her youth, which Kathryn believed had been at the time of the Wars of the Roses, the duchess had been a good horsewoman—the two men who had recently joined the duchess’s household and been deputized to help the maids at their riding lessons were clearly fearful that they might damage such delicate pupils.

  The horse chosen for the lessons was at least as old and as docile as the one she’d ridden in her mother’s house, and though the other girls delighted in pinching it and slapping it in a vain effort at making it go faster, Kathryn couldn’t bear to make a creature suffer for her present amusement, and so she endured with good grace, or at least not too bad, the glacial pace and the hesitant ways of the old horse. Sometimes she was conscious that around her, the other girls were flirting with the gentlemen supposed to teach them, and that
they all made fun of her for going so slow and not minding.

  But Kathryn was suffering under the twin dampening blows of her affair with Manox being found out and of Anne’s execution. She dreamed sometimes that she was Anne, walking from the Tower, shadowy in the background, to a barren square, where she laid her head upon a block. She dreamed of the ax whistling down. And she wished she could forget, but she could never. Instead, awake or asleep, she remembered how her hopes had been blighted by Anne’s death. Who now would want to allay themselves to a family in disgrace?

  She knew that the duchess still got news from the court, but she did not talk about it. And Kathryn, mindful that they’d hope for the best but knew she might have to be wasted on a country squire, took her turns around the riding paths in the garden upon a horse so old that he might be dead on his feet and no one have noticed yet.

  A week or so later, dance lessons were started, this with a proper dancing master and no gentlemen at all in sight, but only the girls, partnering each other, as they were led with strict formality through the exacting dances.

  Kathryn found she rather liked to dance, and her mood improved. It stayed higher, though not high, till a few days later when she approached the yard for her riding lesson and found two different and much younger gentlemen waiting with three horses. Their horses were something very beautiful in horseflesh, nervous, long legged, looking spirited and attired in the best dressings a horse could wear, all with inlaid silver. The horse waiting Kathryn looked not at all like the old, moribund creature she had importuned with her riding for the last several days. Instead, it was lower in the saddle than the boys, but—from what Kathryn could tell from the horses she’d seen in the past—well furnished of bone and flesh, and with glossy smooth skin.

  It was white, with a dark mark upon its head, and it had eyes as deep and velvety soft as a young child’s. More important than that, though, it seemed smart and alert. And it was outfitted with a sidesaddle, so there could be no doubt at all that it was intended for Kathryn.