Instead she shook her head. “Maybe you should speak with Mother Lowe about this,” she said. Mother Lowe was the chief of the German ladies-in-waiting, who had come with Queen Anne from her native land. If Mother Lowe could not contrive to explain the facts of life to her mistress, then, faith, no one could.
But the queen only smiled the bewildered smile that she had in common with those very young or very deaf—the smile of complete lack of understanding—and shook her head. “Nay, I am contented as it is. I know no more.”
“Still,” Lady Rutland said. “I think you must tell Mother Lowe that the king has neglected you, madam, and not performed his conjugal duties!”
But all the queen would do was incline her head and say with that internal steel that belied her exterior mildness, “But I receive quite as much of His Majesty’s attention as I wish.”
Kathryn understood this to mean the conversation was over, and wondered if the poor woman at all understood what had happened and how precarious her position was.
But at the very moment she was trying to frame her mind to put words to it, she felt a hand pluck at her sleeve. Turning she saw a young boy, of the sort who belonged to the king’s household and served as a page, sent here and there in the palace to take messages or packages.
“If you please, madam, are you Mistress Kathryn Howard?”
Kathryn looked at him and nodded once. Wild ideas went through her mind. That Dereham had found her and wanted back his hundred pounds, which she’d stupidly left at its hideout at Horsham. Or perhaps that her marriage with Thomas Culpepper had finally been arranged, and she was being called now to make her promises.
Instead, when she followed the page out to the hall, the page bowed to her. “If you are Mistress Kathryn Howard, the king’s majesty would like you to come and play the virginal for him, for he is troubled in his mind and would like to calm himself down before he sleeps.”
Kathryn took a step to follow the page, and then remembered what her grandmother had said about the king, the king’s appetites, and what he was likely to try if he were not restrained. Trembling, because she knew not obeying royal orders could bring about the king’s wrath as much as anything else, she said, “Wait … please. Please, wait a moment.”
Back in the royal chamber, she touched Jane Boleyn’s arm, and when the lady looked in her direction, Kathryn whispered, “Please, come with me.”
That Jane followed her without asking why was either a measure of her confidence in Kathryn or how few friends she had and how much she’d come to trust in Kathryn.
She followed Kathryn all the way to where the page led them. The page opened the door, and they went in, to find the king sitting upon a chair, next to a very lovely, ornate virginal. He looked startled at them. “I sent for a song bird,” he said, and forced a smile over what seemed to be a peevish expression. “And I got two. Lady Rochefort, I didn’t know you sang.”
Kathryn sank to her knees in her curtsey and stayed that. “I beg Your Majesty’s pardon,” she said, “if I have done wrong. But I know Your Majesty did not intend to injure a poor maiden’s reputation by having me alone with Your Majesty in here. While I am sure this, the least of your subjects, could trust her virtue to you as she could to her own father, I will recall to you that my father, that Edmund Howard who bled in Flodden Fields in the service of Your Majesty’s honor, is now gone. I have no one but myself, and no protector. Your Majesty would wish the wicked tongues at court to speak ill of one so young as I?”
For a moment it hung in the balance. Henry’s mouth moved in and out, in a sort of a moue, as though it could not decide whether or not to show displeasure. And then he sighed, like a child denied a treat. He shifted his leg. He frowned. “No. You are correct.” He looked at her. “Oh, stop looking so scared, child. Am I then, to you, such a terrible dragon that you should fear me so much?”
“Not afraid,” Kathryn said. “But overwhelmed. It is strange to think that I am here, in this room with Your Majesty. That the power and might of England, the head of the Church itself, is here with me, and I so insignificant.”
This brought a little cackle from the king. He patted his leg in a movement that would probably have been a slap had he been fully overcome by amusement. “Well, well,” he said. “You are a pretty child, and you may rise. One doesn’t wish always to be … Harry with the crown. Sometimes one just wants to be Harry the man. And for now, we’ll be Harry the man, who has a headache and hopes your pretty playing can soothe it.” He spared a look at Jane Boleyn, who was kneeling on the other side of him, still staring at the floor. “And you also, Lady Rochefort, rise. You are welcome here. Take a seat. You can make sure this pretty child is quite secure in my presence, and that I’m not tempted to play the seducer.” He seemed to think this very funny and laughed a great deal at his own joke.
Kathryn perceived the sadness behind the joke, and all of a sudden she understood that this powerful man, so large, so ungainly, was suffering from sadness at the loss of youth, which he could never recover. She’d heard about him in the palace. How he had once been considered the most handsome, the most beautiful prince in all Christendom.
Now his youth was gone, and he was still king, but he wished—as he had told her—that Harry himself without the crown were still capable of seducing her, or any maiden he set his eye on.
She felt his sadness, and though she’d tried to follow the duchess’s instructions and not attempt to carry all the weight of other’s sorrows upon her shoulders, still she could not help trying to alleviate the very great sorrow of this man who was so big and so great, and yet so lost and so helpless in face of his own desires. Of her own impulse, she rose from her curtsey and neared him, and kissed him—a peck on the side of the face—and said, quickly, for fear that if she lingered her voice would betray her lie. “I am afraid,” she said, “that I somewhat deceive Your Majesty. Lady Jane Rochefort is here not to ensure that you don’t try to seduce me, but to ensure I don’t lose my head and succumb to your considerable charm.”
She knew she had done well when she saw his mouth turn up at the corners. For a moment, very brief, she was afraid that it was an ironical smile and that he would expose her striving to impress him. But instead, the smile became fuller, and his eyes shone. “Is that so, then?” he asked. “You find Harry the man someone who might seduce you without trying?”
She inclined her head, hiding the flame in her cheeks. “Your Majesty won’t be so ungallant as to tempt me out of my modesty and make me repeat what I said. Oh, I should never have said it. But there is it. Harry with the crown is too great, too strong, too much for me, a poor maiden, and he would wholly overpower me. Harry the man, now … Harry the man …” She stepped back. “He can still overwhelm but in another way.” She forced herself to smile at him.
He grinned at her. “Bless you, my child. What a pretty child you are. For all that, I’ll sleep better tonight, I’m sure, after your playing. Sit you at the virginal and show me what you can do, for I have heard all over the palace that there is not any other musician at court to equal you.”
“Your Majesty does me great honor,” Kathryn said, and sat down. She took a deep breath and she played. It wasn’t difficult at all. As always, once she found herself in front of the virginal, the music just flowed as though it came from deep wellsprings within her.
“Bless you, my dear,” the king said. “How prettily you blush. Like a rose. A rose without a thorn.”
As she rose from the virginal, he took both her hands and kissed them with his moist, hot lips. “Bless you, my dear, for being kind to Harry himself, Harry without the crown.” He turned to Lady Rochefort. “And thank you, Lady Rochefort. Bring me this child again, will you? Tomorrow? That she might play me her fair lullabies ,and I may sleep.”
Chapter Thirty-two
“Come, my dear, and play for me,” the king said, and Kathryn came. It was the tenth time she’d been called to the king’s chambers in as many nights. She played, and Lad
y Rochefort watched her play and nodded off now and then.
Kathryn didn’t mind that the lady should nod off, for she imagined the pain and the guilt the woman lived with during the day were quite enough to exhaust her. Her being there was enough to grant Kathryn some protection from the tongues that wagged in her direction.
Already, she noticed something strange happening, in that she saw people give her odd looks, but at the same time other people approached her. Ladies-in-waiting of far higher rank, who had never paid any attention to Kathryn, now gave her jewels or gifts of fabric, or simply complimented her on her taste, her looks, her smile.
It seemed to Kathryn that each day brought a new surprise.
She was not stupid. Well she understood the treatment she received came from these people’s belief that she was either the king’s mistress and therefore had his ear, or that she was the woman the king loved and therefore she had his ear.
The pageants and ceremonies of introducing Anne of Cleves as queen to the Englishmen went on, but every day another person would approach Kathryn and say, “They say the king likes her not.” Or “They say she is still a maiden.” Or yet “They say that he is trying to get a divorce.”
Cromwell, the architect of the Cleves marriage was in the Tower and people said he had been ordered to find a way out of this marriage for the king. They wondered whether it would save his head, or if it would fall like the heads of other favorites before him and be exposed on London Bridge for the horror of passersby.
That night after she played the king looked down for a long time. When he rose, Kathryn looked toward Lady Rochefort, but the lady was asleep and snoring.
The king must have seen her look, for he smiled. “Ah, Kathryn, fear me not. I was attracted to your cleanliness, your maidenly modesty. I would neither seduce you nor allow you to be seduced by me.”
He walked slowly and limped a little. She had heard he had a wound on his leg, sustained in a joust, which made him hurt and which ran continuously with some foul humors. Sometimes, she’d heard, the wound closed, and then the king would lay in great pain until all of him, even his face, turned black with the pent up humors. No one had told her but it was implicit that one day he would die of that foul wound.
Only right now, it did not seem so very bad. He had a silver-plated stick with its head an elaborate Tudor Rose, and Kathryn thought that it was of very little more import than the walking stick of the duchess that was more used to hit others than to support her.
As if to prove her point, he left his walking stick against the chair as he limped to her. He smelled of perfume, and his beard tickled the side of her face as he leaned over and said, “Kathryn, I would like to know—if by some miracle I were free of this sham of a marriage … would you have me?”
Her breath stopped, and it would not come. In her head, as if in a dream, futures clashed. Her small self lost at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. Thomas Culpepper, whom she had not seen since that day but was to marry her, or so the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk said. Unless, of course, it were all a trap designed to catch the king and to make the family powerful again, as it had been in the days of Anne. Thomas, who had never brought her oranges. And then there was Harry. Harry with the crown. Harry without the crown … well, she felt sorry for him. At least as sorry as she had felt for Manox when he was her teacher.
In Henry’s eyes she read the same hunger for her, the same desire, only this was not some man, some private Englishman who might have his way with a maiden in the dark space behind the stairs of some anonymous chapel and never suffer for it, or it never be known. No. This was the king and master of England, and every eye on him.
And yet for all his power, he had been married against his will, and now he bent over her, breathing hard. “Would you have me, pretty Kathryn, if I were free?”
Kathryn saw herself with the crown. She thought of her dream long ago, when she’d first come to Lambeth, that she’d marry some foreign king and be the center of everyone’s attention. She thought of the game in the dormitory so many years ago. The bit of lace hitting the dusty ground, forming incomprehensible scrolls, and Alice’s voice calling out, “There, it’s Henry. You’ll marry a Henry.”
Henry with the crown. Henry whose wound would close one of these days and carry him off. And then the woman he left, if she had a son by him, that woman would be the regent. She would be as good as a king in her own right.
Behind her mind, this went on. It was like a grand procession going down the street of a city, but in the building in front of which the procession passes, the real business goes forward.
And the real business was that Kathryn, looking up, read eagerness and sorrow in the king’s eyes. Desire. And, though he be the king, half a certainty that he would be rejected.
She could not stand it. She dropped from the stool on which she’d sat while playing and laid herself prostrate upon the ground, her face against the floorboards. “Your Majesty,” she said. “Your Majesty, how can you offer me this? Can you not know that I am not worthy of the king?”
From above came a big gasp, as though Henry had tried to sigh but were overwhelmed, and then his voice very softly, “I am not asking you to be the king’s wife, my dear. To the king you can be his dear queen and sit beside him in the throne room and bring forth, if God be willing, a Duke of York to our majesty’s joy.
“But to Harry without the crown will you be his wife? And be his rose without a thorn for all your days and play your pretty music for him and laugh your pretty laugh and bring a ray of light into his dark, dark days, my dear? Will you be the youth he sees fleeing before him?”
She felt her heart beat upon her throat. What choice did she have, truly? What choice? Oh, it was very easy to say, and many would say it, that she could say no. That she could walk out of here and marry Thomas Culpepper and live the life of a country gentlewoman. Praying, working, and praying again, and bringing up children to be fair and strong. Obeying her husband. Her country squire husband.
But it was not like that. She couldn’t put it in words so much, but she was sure as she was sure one day of dying and meeting her maker, that it wasn’t that simple. She had talked to many people since she’d come to Greenwich, and she had heard the story of the king’s pursuing of Anne Boleyn.
It was said, though Kathryn was not sure how much truth there might be in it, that Anne had in her youth been in love with the Duke of Suffolk. Only the king had been in love with Anne, and he had made sure that Suffolk was married to someone else, speedily. A woman who had plagued his days into an early grave.
And meanwhile, the king had laid siege to Anne, going round and round like a hungry wolf around a farmhouse in the dead of winter, pursuing and pursuing and pursuing, until Anne had nowhere else left to go and nothing else left to do, but marry him.
Perhaps there, too, had lain the seeds of her destruction, for by the time that Anne had married him, the seeds of resentment had been sown, and the seeds of hatred and the seeds of sorrow. Perhaps by that time he resented her so much that all he could do was turn on her.
It was a small balance, Kathryn thought, between Harry with the crown and Harry without. Harry without the crown, faith, wanted to be loved for who he was. But he would not forget Harry with the crown, and that Harry might come out at any minute and demand his royal rights.
She could not say no. And when she looked up and saw his worried look, she did not want to. “Aye, Sire. Aye, if you were free, I would be yours. And gladly, too. I think”—she smiled a little—“that your youth not be fled as far as you think, Your Majesty. It seems to me that I would bring back your youth, and together we’d rejoice in it, aye, and have a Duke of York, yes, and many other fair and strong brothers and sisters for him.”
He reached down and lifted her, laughing all the while. And he held her close, her face pressed against his heavy brocaded doublet. “You are my rose without a thorn,” he said. “My rose without a thorn. After so many years, I have at last deserved you.�
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Kathryn felt some moisture on her head, and looking up, she realized that the king was crying upon her. Confused, she reached up. She tried to stop the royal tears, which horrified her. “No, Your Majesty, no. This must not be. You must not be unhappy.”
“I am not unhappy,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “And you must call me Harry, my dear, when we’re alone. Even if I must be Harry with the crown and do many a foolish thing as king’s must do—things you don’t understand nor care about, setting about armies to put down rebellion, closing down dissolute monasteries, and caring about the doings of other kings the world over—for you, my dear, I would always be your husband, Harry.”
“My Lord Harry,” she said.
He leaned down and kissed her softly. Her forehead. Her eyes. Her lips. His great big hands held her close. He murmured things she didn’t readily understand about roses and thorns and a perfect love.
She was afraid that next he would drop to his knees and raise her skirts, this was so much like what Manox had done. But before anything so unfortunate could happen, there was a scream, and the king sprang away from her, fumbling.
He must have put all his weight upon his lame leg, for he screamed and tripped and finally fell heavily upon his chair.
Kathryn stood there, her hair disheveled and her coif askew. The scream stopped and was followed by a heavy panting, and then Lady Rochefort’s voice, seeming to come from somewhere quite far away. “There was blood. There was blood all over. It was the Tower.”
The king’s hand clasped tight on the silver rose above his stick. Kathryn had the idea that were it not for his fear that he would scare her, he would have taken the stick and possibly broken it across Jane’s head. Instead, he spoke, slowly, “Aye, Jane. Aye, the Tower and the blood, but that’s all in the past now.”
He looked at Kathryn then and smiled. “Mistress Howard, it would please me greatly if you would retire from the palace for a few weeks.”
No Will But His Page 18