No Will But His

by Hoyt, Sarah A.

  Kathryn nodded again, dismayed. It seemed to her the more she heard, the more pity she felt for King Henry. Everyone trembled at him, and everyone was scared of his might. And well might they bed. The duchess also reminded her that, “Even now, it is said, that Cromwell is in the Tower, waiting to be parted from his head tomorrow. Pay heed, child. The man you are marrying is very powerful and can raise you high above the rank of all mortals. But he also can rain death on you. As he told your poor, illfated cousin, he makes you and he can unmake you just as fast, and your unmaking will be stronger than your making, and will take everyone who supports you down with it.

  “Be you meek and clean, properly behaved and gentle. Show him never a frowning face. Defer to him in all things, for Harry is a man who likes being tended to. The motto you chose—no other wish but his—is a good beginning. Hold you fast by it, and you will come out well and have a good roll at becoming the most powerful woman this kingdom has ever seen.”

  While the duchess lost herself in dreams that included, “Oh, Kathryn, his other wives will be as nothing to you in your power,” Kathryn’s mind went on.

  It was a sad thing not to be able to tell one’s mind be quiet, or bid it be still and not think about the things people said and the feelings behind what they said or what other people must feel and suffer in consequence. Kathryn didn’t know when she’d become aware that her mind was more unquiet than most. She thought it must have been when she heard the other ladies in the dormitory talk about their beaus and their suitors.

  It was always what great conquest they’d made, and what great gifts they could get. Kathryn understood this to a point. She had felt very proud when she held Dereham’s affections. In a way, she thought, deep inside, she’d thought of it as a game, in that he’d been the most desirable of all the men sniffing around the maid’s chambers. With his dark, flashing eyes, his dark hair, his expression that could look as though it would consume you with his hunger, he’d been desired by all the women. Often, Kathryn would see another of the maids look at him or else do something to attract his attention, and she would smile for she knew how secure he was and that never would he stray or look at another woman.

  But then there was the other side of it. She’d worried about what he felt, even at the end when he’d threatened her and she’d realized he was not the man she thought he was. And even as repulsed as she was by Manox and his attempt to besmirch her name, she remembered him, that time she’d seen him in the yard, thin looking and haggard, as if he’d not been sleeping.

  And she remembered Jane Boleyn telling her how it hurt her to love her husband and love him madly and yet to not have that love returned. It occurred to Kathryn that she was very fortunate indeed not to know what love was. Oh, she’d thought she had known, but now that she looked back, she could see that all she’d felt for Dereham was a strong liking. She couldn’t imagine loving him like Lady Rochefort loved her late husband—a love that even now would not leave her, and drove her mind to madness, making her, in a way, enamored with the grave. Nor could she imagine loving him as Manox had seemed to love her—craving more and more of her every time and never satisfied with what he got. She could not imagine loving someone so much she’d destroy him—or herself—rather than let them go.

  As though reading her mind, the duchess, who’d been watching her, said, tartly, “It is a good thing you are not in love with him. I think Anne was by the time she married him, and that’s what made her so shrewish. The same with his wife, the first Catherine. Look you how long she dragged the divorce and how painful she made it when, had she agreed to it, we’d have none of this nonsense of breaking from Rome and no turmoil in the land.” The duchess was strongly Catholic, though these days she spoke not of her loyalties. “What could she expect to get from opposing him? Men never give in when you’re arguing with them and reminding them they have treated you badly. But Catherine was in love with him, and love is grasping and irrational. She tried to hold him when he would flee. And Anne noticed his affair with Jane Seymour, and was jealous and treated him badly. Learn from their mistakes. If she had continued being sweet with him, forgiving all, likely he would not have moved against her, or if he had, he’d have divorced her, not had her killed. This Queen Anne, too, mark how sensible she was, because she loved him not. And she did very well by it, and is her own mistress for the first time in her life and, I doubt not, vastly pleased with it all. So, be you happy you’re not in love with him. Treat him always with equal kindness and even gentleness, and he will hark to you above all others. And if he has affairs—something I doubt me, considering his age and infirmity—do you as others have done and pretend to see nothing.”

  Kathryn inclined her head again. And all the while, she felt sorry for the king. What must it be like to have the power of life and death over his subjects—to be able to raise them or sink them with a word and, with another, send them to the block or the gallows, and yet not be loved.

  Oh, she knew that in churches throughout the land and even in the far away lands, people prayed for the king’s health and that he was seemingly loved, but yet she doubted it. At least she doubted they loved the man beneath the crown.

  She’d seen the pageants to Queen Anne of Cleves, where people looked at Henry and flinched a little. The older people talked about the beautiful king they’d know—the young man who was vigorous and athletic and whom, one day, his own humble subjects had undressed in a fit of adoration. She couldn’t imagine it now.

  The dowager duchess herself elderly and often, like today, dressed in the ridiculous attire of a much younger woman—her face painted in a way that highlighted her wrinkles, her dress all red velvets and strong golds, which made the faded skin of age look yet older—spoke of King Henry with distaste. Kathryn wondered if, given a chance, the duchess would marry the king herself and somehow doubted it. But, of course, the king commanded, and you did not say no.

  As she was thinking this, she realized that if she was going to be queen, and if she had no way of avoiding it, she might at any rate attempt to make the king feel better about himself and more loved. Perhaps, she told herself, if he didn’t feel that most people despised him, he would be more contented, and the kingdom happier withal.

  The carriage had stopped, and the duchess said, “Are you sleeping, girl?” even as the door was thrown open.

  Kathryn looked out the door at two gentlemen who were holding the door open. Her uncle was extending his hand to her to help her down, and what seemed like a sea of ladies and gentlemen were bowing to her. She covered her mouth. For just a moment the greatest desire to laugh overcame her. How ridiculous it all was. These people had known her for months, some of them for years, and never had they felt like doing so much as nodding to her. But now because the king loved her, they would bow to her and prostrate themselves, their faces in the dirt to welcome her.

  A quick pang that this must be what King Henry experienced, this reverence empty of true love, made her lose all desire to laugh, and she set her hand in her uncle’s and stepped out of the carriage while the duchess helped carry her short train.

  She was dressed in a gown that the king had himself sent her—a fair gold and red brocade figured all over with ripe, open roses. Around her neck, she wore a necklace she had last seen upon Anne of Cleve’s—a tablet of gold with hanging pearls.

  The duchess had exclaimed when she saw it, and had told Kathryn that it had once been Anne Boleyn’s and that a B used to hang at the bottom of it among the pearls, but Kathryn refused to believe it was ill omened. After all, all the other queens had worn it since her late cousin, so it was more of a jewel of power, like the crown, than something she’d got from the illfated queen.

  Kathryn followed a gravel path, while the ladies who lined it fell on their knees and bowed. Most of them she knew from her own time as a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves, and she tried to smile at them, but they all looked down and pressed their faces to the ground.

  The palace itself was the most
handsome that Kathryn had ever seen. She was led through a bewildering succession of rooms, each more magnificent than the last, all gold and painted walls, all columns and hangings, till she was, at last, in the queen’s room. She marked with a frown that the initials for the king and the queen in gold upon the wall seemed to have been changed hastily. It seemed to Kathryn, if she squinted, she could see an A under the C that was the Latinized version of her name, and under that a J.

  But most of all she was overawed by the beauty and riches all around. How had come she, Kathryn Howard—youngest daughter of the youngest son of the Duke of Norfolk, the son who had only ever been able to keep his family in penury and want—to this estate? What did it all mean? Was it just the ability to catch the king’s eye?

  It seemed like a dream, as people bowed her through an open door, past the bed, and then down a flight of steps, to the queen’s closet.

  The closet wasn’t one, or not precisely. It was part of the Queen’s apartments, but it overlooked the chapel at Hampton Court. from it’s depths. Through a screen, you could see the altar with its candles lit.

  A mass started almost as soon as Kathryn came into the closet, even though Henry joined her only some minutes later. It was a solemn mass of thanks, with the Te Deum sang by a choir that made the music more beautiful and soaring than Kathryn had ever heard it. Lost in it, she almost forgot until she heard the priest pray for the king and his lady, Kathryn, that God send them issue and plentiful.

  Then it was time to say the vows, which were quick and simple, and just as any couple on the street might say them: With this ring, I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, with half my worldly goods, I thee endow.

  The king said them eagerly, and Kathryn said hers carefully, unwilling to make a mistake. She thought how ridiculous it was that she should be endowing the king with goods. What would they be? Her gowns? Or perhaps the hundred pounds from Francis Dereham that were left, forgotten, under the lose board of the dormitory at Horsham.

  She smiled at the thought and in smiling, caused the king to smile at her. He leaned over to kiss her and whispered, “I am glad you are happy, sweetheart. I await anxiously the time to go to bed and take you, fully and well, as my wife.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  During the dinner that followed, while entertainers came to play, Kathryn caught people giving her curious and pitying looks. They were so clear, she could almost read them.

  They wondered how she would take to the king’s person, gross and immense as he had grown; what she would think of his bandaged leg; and if perhaps she wouldn’t run screaming from the deformed, aging monarch.

  Kathryn smiled at the looks, because she thought it was all very much beside the point. She already knew she could endure physical intercourse where she was not very much interested, and besides, in this she found herself in full agreement with the dowager duchess. Her interest here, and all her care, was to see that the king was satisfied and made happy. He had given her so much. How could she but help give him what she had.

  At length it was decent enough for her to retire to bed. She said her good-byes to the courtiers who had come to the celebratory banquet. She curtseyed to the duke, her uncle, and embraced the dowager duchess, who pressed into her hand a soaked handkerchief, which turned out to be full of rose water.

  Part of Kathryn disdained it and wanted to fling it away. But part of her knew that she didn’t realize the full extent of the king’s malady, and that she might in fact find herself flinching from the odor. With this in mind—and knowing the duchess, in this at least, had Kathryn’s best interests at heart—Kathryn smelled the kerchief deeply, then left it on her bedside table while her chamberers undressed her and helped her prepare for bed.

  The bed was already, as Kathryn had seen it made so many times, prepared for the queen, all properly tidy and clean. She wondered which heavyset woman they’d got to roll on it and test it for hidden daggers now that the German ladies had left with Anne of Cleves for her retreat at Richmond.

  But she was more concerned with being undressed, then attired in a chemise of simple cut but covered all over in exquisite embroidery, all lover’s knots with hers and the king’s initials intertwined.

  And then her maids retreated and she waited. She did not wait long. A moment later the king arrived, already undressed for bed, and wearing a chemise, himself, of cloth as fine as hers and covered all over with as much embroidery.

  Either in vanity or because his feelings on the occasion overcame the infirmities of his body, he did not have his walking stick with him, but walked in under his own power, talking and joking with his entourage.

  It seemed to her he might have drunk a little to much, as though to give himself courage, and she realized in that moment that even the king himself expected her to be repulsed by him and to flinch from his size, his girth, his smell.

  She resolved, right there, not to do that. It would have been, she thought, like kicking a cowering dog or torturing a friendly cat. It would be adding pain where only good had been received.

  Forcing a smile onto her face, she watched her husband sit on the side of the bed. Henry. It had been this Henry all along. How odd it was, and how she would have laughed all those years ago if anyone had told her the king was to whom the divination referred.

  She shook her head at her own foolishness and smiled at him. The king smiled back her, looking somewhat surprised. Then he turned around and told his entourage in a happy manner that Kathryn had never heard from him, “What, you laggards? What do you, lingering about in my room where I mean to take my rest with my wife? Think ye to stop us from conceiving a Duke of York?”

  There were protests from the entourage, some of them accompanied by half laughter, as though they reacted to the king’s playful tone more than to his words.

  “Well, fie with you, then, and be off, for bright and early in the morning, I mean to go hunting for the deer in my thickets.” He grinned. “Tonight I have other thickets to plunder.”

  The men filed out, all too quickly, taking their lighted tapers with them. She could tell from the looks they exchanged that none of them expected to actually go hunting with the king in the morning. She knew that the king hadn’t gone hunting in many years, not since the pain in his leg had grown such as to stop his enjoyment in the sport.

  But she had other concerns, as the king gave her a very soft kiss and said, “Hello, sweetheart. Did I make you wait long?”

  “It seemed a very long time,” she said. “Me thought perhaps Your Majesty had changed your mind and realized you did not want me, after all.”

  “No want you!” he said, and laughed. “Never.”

  He undid her chemise, and quested about with his hands, shocking her a little with his clumsy touches, his awkward explorations. It seemed to her that Dereham, and even Manox, much younger than the king and, for sure, much less experienced had a care and a manner about them that the king seemed to lack.

  How could he not have learned it with his four wives, his mistresses?

  And then she realized it was because Dereham, and even Manox, had had to learn to please the woman or else she would not let them continue. But the king of England had no such concerns. He could do as he pleased him and shame the devil. Which woman would be foolish enough to tell him nay?

  He kissed her again and again, and he felt her body all over, but she could tell—his breath didn’t quicken, and he gave no signs of nearing that point of madness that Dereham reached before he took her—that his body had not responded as it should have.

  Also his touch was maddening her and not in the way that Dereham’s touch had inflamed her. It was not a pleasurable touch, but it seemed to stop just short of anything that could lead to her pleasure.

  His large, clumsy hands, very dry and cold, felt now her sides, then squeezed her breasts, touched her thigh, then squeezed her belly, all of it in haphazard manner. It was—Kathryn thought—like the efforts of an untutored and tune-deaf girl when first faced
with a virginal, pounding the keys at random and hoping, somehow that from the discord music would emerge.

  She surprised herself with the thought that if this marriage were to work at all, she was going to have to teach the king to play her body as it should be played. But she understood enough of men to know that she couldn’t seem to teach him. And certainly not tonight.

  Well she minded the duchess’s injunction that the man she married should think he was the first, if not the only, and thinking he was the first, he could not be shown that his wife knew more than he did.

  No, she would have to teach him little by little with small touches, smaller gestures, and most of all with the expression of her pleasure. Only if she did that, would she be able to teach him without hurting his pride.

  As for tonight, something else must be done, and the something else she elected to do was to let her own hands roam over the king’s body, from his face—lingering on the red beard that was starting to show traces of grey—down his strong neck to caress his shoulders, then his chest, then trace their path down to his member.

  It was smaller than Dereham’s but not by much, and when she touched it, it was just as soft and velvety as Dereham’s had been. She felt it hardening under her hands and made sure not to grip it in such a way that would betray her experience, but to touch it again and again, over and over, just like she’d done to Dereham when, perhaps, he’d drunk too much or perhaps was too tired for his manhood to spring to life instantly.

  Leaning close to the king, she kissed his cheek, again and again and again. “How strong you are, my lord,” she said, making sure that her eyes and her voice and everything confirmed her admiration. “How wonderful your body is, so virile, so manly, compared to me who am so slight and so weak.”

  Her words did it, and his manhood sprang to full life under her hands.

  He took her upon the soft feather mattress and the feather bed. It seemed to her that it lasted very little—as little as her first joining with Dereham. And yet the king looked satiated and satisfied, as he leaned over to kiss her. “My rose without a thorn,” he said. “In your arms I feel young again.