No Will But His

by Hoyt, Sarah A.

  But describing him meant nothing. He was all that, yes, but he was so much more. The effect of him compassed his presence, something that could not be described, nor seen, but could surely be felt. And he moved like a cat, with ease and naturalness.

  Her hands clenched upon her skirt, her throat closed. She was aware of Anne of Cleves’ giving her an odd look and her brother Charles, a knowing one. After which Charles drew Anne of Cleves into conversation, probably, Kathryn thought, to save her from seeing how stricken Kathryn was.

  Knowing she was stricken allowed her to conquer it, though. She drew herself up proudly. “My lord,” she said, though her voice might be a croak.

  He gave her a very deep bow, and she thought that the bow was as much out of respect as to hide a smile of the deepest mischief, a trace of which remained upon his lips as he straightened.

  “My lady queen,” he said. “I am your cousin, Thomas Culpepper, and I believe we’ve met once before.”

  Now she felt her color come up in waves upon her face, but she had an excuse, and seized upon it. She laughed, a shaky, unsteady laughter. “We have indeed,” she said. “How well I remember. And I was seized with embarrassment remembering how that young Kathryn must have annoyed you and kept you from the natural entertainments of a gentleman on a coronation night.”

  He laughed easily. “I don’t think you kept me from anything,” he said. “Save only perhaps getting very drunk on the free wine flowing from all the fountains.”

  “I am sure you would not have gotten drunk,” she said, and turned to Charles, so blinded by her confusion that she seemed to see him as through a mist. Even through the mist, she realized how concerned her brother looked and how much she must sound unlike herself, but she tried to force herself to be normal and said, “Charles, I met Thomas at the coronation of our cousin Anne. I’m afraid I’d got quite lost, separated from our grandmother’s ladies, and he found me wandering about in a most disreputable manner.”

  “Not disreputable,” he said. “Only lost.”

  “Disreputable. And he devoted the rest of the night to playing squire to a little girl. Though it will shock you to learn that when he left me at our grandmother’s, he promised me he would be back to visit me and give me oranges, and he never did.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” Charles said, hiding his alarm well beneath a veil of amusement, but not so well that Kathryn didn’t perceive it. “Thomas is well known for disappointing ladies’ expectations.” He smiled brightly at both Kathryn and Anne of Cleves. “And now, my ladies, shall we dance?”

  They’d danced, all four of them a very long time. First the traditional dances and then more modern ones and finally some dances from her country that Anne of Cleves taught them. She’d never got to dance them in her country, she said, since her brother was so strict, but she had seen them danced and now that she was her own mistress, she’d been learning them alone in her room.

  After Kathryn got used to Thomas Culpepper’s presence, some of her awkwardness vanished. Not the odd sensation that looking at him gave her. She still felt as though one look at him made her unable to breathe, caused her heart to clench in her chest, and made her quite unable to think clearly.

  But as with wine or strong beer, more exposure lent some immunity. She could look at him without showing her interest and treat him like the cousin he was without causing Charles to give her odd looks.

  “It is amazing I’ve never seen you before at court,” she said between dances, while Anne tried to get clear in her mind the steps she meant to teach them. “For sure I would have remembered our former acquaintance earlier.”

  “Not so amazing,” he said. “I did not go on the progress. And before that, I never got to accompany the king’s majesty when he went to visit you.” He smiled a little. “Truth be told, I have a great fear of the dowager duchess and her walking stick.”

  She’d laughed and talked about how the dowager used her walking stick on unsuspecting heads, and sometimes suspecting ones, all without referring to her own past adventures.

  Toward the end of the night, Culpepper excused himself from the room for a few minutes. When next he partnered Kathryn for a dance, in the middle of a twirl and disguised by it, he slipped something into her bosom.

  She felt it, papery, against her breasts and looked up at him to find his expression such a mixture of amusement, hope, and fear, that she said nothing.

  It wasn’t till she was in her room—for once the king was not spending the night with her, having retired to bed long before the dances were done—that she had time to pull the object from her bosom and examine it.

  It was a long folded paper, sealed with red wax and a seal she didn’t know. Breaking the seal, she found pointy, exact handwriting, which was not hard to read, not even to her inexperienced eyes.

  Your Majesty, My Queen, the letter read.

  How odd it is to have to refer to you in this way, when the minute my eyes saw you I realized you were my own true love and the one I was born to marry. How odd that we are to be divided in this way by my own feckless neglect and the desire of a king.

  My fecklessness lies not only in having forgotten my promise to visit you and bring you oranges, but also in my not having gone along when the matter of our possible marriage was bruited. You see, I mistrusted the dowager and was afraid she meant to shackle me to someone no one else wanted. So I took myself to the country and made myself scarce, to my great chagrin now that I have met you.

  The moment I saw you, I fell instantly in love. I cannot explain it, as I’ve never loved in the past and, in fact, have always made much sport of those who claimed to love at first sight. But your look, your voice, will always be in my heart, and I’ll always be the fool who failed to seize upon the most wonderful love that could have been on this Earth.

  Yours, in hope of paradise,

  Thomas Culpepper

  In the bottom of the letter, hastily written, a line begged her to burn the letter, since “neither you nor I can withstand His Majesty’s wrath.”

  It hurt her to burn the letter, as much as it gratified her to know that his thoughts and reactions had been the same as her thoughts and reactions—instant, unavoidable love, as though their hearts had knit together in the one instant.

  She shed a tear as she put the letter in the fire, and it had just gone up in flames when the king came in through the door. “I could not sleep without you,” he said, then, marking her tears, “Cry you, sweetheart. Cry no more. Your Henry is here.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  Things could never be the same, though she tried. It vexed her because there was no sense in it. Why should she be so drawn to Thomas Culpepper, with whom she’d talked a bare two times, with whom she’d danced one evening.

  She could not explain it. And she hated not being able to explain it. The thought kept returning to her that this must have been how Manox felt about her, how Jane Boleyn felt about her late husband. She tried to imagine what it would be like—what form of horrible suffering it would be—to endure this attraction without its being returned. She could not. And then she doubted that it was a worse suffering than enduring the attraction, knowing it returned and not being able to express it.

  Early in the morning she woke up thinking of Thomas Culpepper, wondering how he was doing and what occupied his mind. She thought of him all day long. At night, while she lay in bed with the king of England or while the king made his still-clumsy love to her, she imagined what Thomas Culpepper might be doing, and with whom.

  Without knowing if he were sleeping with the maidens of the court, she imagined that, of course, he was, such were the morals and manners of the royal court, and in retaliation, she hated all of her maids. She imagined each of them kissing Thomas Culpepper or sighing in his arms or lost in pleasure with him in bed, and she grew waspish and demanding with them all.

  She overheard them say it was because she was so indulged by the king and how her power had gone to her head, and sh
e couldn’t tell them it was none of that but only that she was afraid each and every one of them was her rival for the love of Thomas Culpepper. The love she could not have.

  The king smiled at her short temper—always short-lived, as she remembered the king’s own temper could be lethal—and gave her dainties and land, jewelry and clothes. It took Kathryn some time to understand that the king hoped her temper meant that she was with child. And for all she knew, she might be, as the normal flux of her cycles had stopped. There were whispers at court, and her ladies cast her hopeful glances.

  And days slid, one into the other. And nothing changed. There was the hunt and the banquets, the dancing, the king’s indulgent love—and Kathryn’s desperate, hopeless longing for Thomas Culpepper.

  She started changing her route so that she crossed paths with him, or else saw him cross the corridor ahead of her. She learned when he practiced jousting in the yard and would go to a window to watch him below.

  Sometimes he caught her looking and smiled up at her.

  Of these moments her days were woven.

  In the middle of all this, she received a letter from the dowager. Francis Dereham was back in England, penniless and scarred. She asked Kathryn to make him her secretary.

  Kathryn demurred. Oh, she understood Francis’ plight and now, now that she understood love, she felt guilty about the way she’d treated him. She’d not toyed with him on purpose, rather she’d not understood her own emotions. But all the same, she feared that Francis Dereham had reason to be resentful of her and to think she’d broken her promise, and it wasn’t just the money she’d taken from him and so blithely forgotten under a loose floorboard at Horsham.

  But she thought—remembering Dereham’s temper and his quick retorts—that it would be better if he were not at court, and his temper were not tried by seeing her married to the king and grown great beyond his reach. More important, she was afraid that his quick gaze would discern how she felt about Culpepper and would make some move to avenge himself. What that was, she did not know, but she was sure he would do something that would injure her and possibly put Thomas in jeopardy.

  Diffidently, and not daring to commit her true reasons to paper, she wrote a letter to the duchess, telling her that she did not think Francis should come to court.

  The next day she got a letter from Lady Bridgewater, her aunt Elizabeth Howard, who was married to the Duke of Norfolk, and another letter from the duchess, begging her to take Francis Dereham—that poor boy, so beaten by fate and his adventures—into her household.

  This time, not daring write to her grandmother, she had herself rowed across the Thames to Lambeth to speak to Her Grace.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “But why will you not have him?” the dowager asked.

  Kathryn had entered the duchess’s apartments and closed the door behind herself, as well as making sure there was no one about, not even in the chambers leading up to the one in which they were.

  The duchess obviously knew what this was about, but looked utterly baffled, all the same. “But I thought you were such good friends.”

  “Good friends we were,” Kathryn said. “And perhaps it would be better if the king never heard aught about this friendship.”

  “But …” The Dowager looked puzzled. “I thought you loved Master Dereham.”

  “By honor, madam, and by my vows, I am bound to love the king, my master, and no other.” She kept her voice low, all the while wondering how she could possibly have misunderstood the duchess. After all, she had always thought the old lady was as shrewd as any and far more shrewd than most. How could she have so misunderstood her that the duchess seemed innocent about the dangers of forcing Dereham upon Kathryn?

  Now the duchess sighed, and she sat upon her chair—paying no heed to the fact that she was not supposed to sit in the front of the queen without permission. Well she knew that Kathryn was far too kindhearted to demand she stand.

  She looked up at Kathryn with a cool, speculative gaze that looked all the more intimidating for coming from within a nest of wrinkles that Kathryn didn’t remember being there the last time she’d seen the dowager. “Child, child! Far be it from me to tell you to neglect your duty or to not fulfill your obligations to your husband, but have you thought of what will happen should the king die and you without issue?”

  “Why …” Kathryn said. “The same that will happen have I issue, is it not? I will be the regent until the prince attains majority.”

  The Duchess sighed again. “You might be,” she said. “But think you on this: the king leaves behind an infant son and two daughters that he has made illegitimate. Your family is neither meek nor mild, and I avow your uncle and I will give you what support we can, but, child, we are only one of the great families in this land. The Seymours stride the land yet, and try to get back to their prior position of power. If you are left as our queen dowager, they can do that by either marrying you—you’ll become the spoil of the strongest man—or by accusing you of some heinous crime and having you killed.”

  Kathryn swallowed. Until this moment she hadn’t thought of it that way, but she supposed that it was always indicated. “I suppose,” she said, slowly. “That I am more like my father than I had thought.”

  The dowager gave her a quizzical look, and Kathryn laughed. “Remember, madam, how you asked me once if I were likely to grow my father’s fondness for the gaming tables, and I told you I didn’t believe so. But I guess I have the same attraction for the danger and the glory that gaming gives. It is a game, is it not, madam. All or nothing? Now I think about it, you, too, and my uncle, must have the same attraction to gaming, since you must admit you used me as your pawn.”

  The duchess sighed. “All of life is a gamble,” she said. “And there is no such thing as a sure bet.”

  “But I still do not understand, madam,” Kathryn said, “what this can have to do with Francis Dereham that makes it so urgent for you to make him my secretary.”

  The duchess was quiet a long time. “Well, madam?”

  “Tell me this, chit. Does Harry … that is, how does he perform the office?”

  It took Kathryn a moment to realize of what the duchess spoke, and in the end she thought of it only because of the sly look in the duchess’s eyes. Her first thought was that she was being asked how Harry attended mass. It was only on second thought that she realized she was being asked how Harry performed in bed. “Every night and eagerly,” she said, and got an odd look.

  The duchess raised her eyebrows. “Are you with child? There are rumors.”

  “My flow has stopped two months ago.”

  “Is it Harry’s?”

  Kathryn should have been offended but wasn’t. It was said simply in the way of a reasonable enquiry. She nodded. “It could be no one else’s.”

  “Well then, I congratulate you, and I hope for your sake that it takes, they rarely do, you know, Harry’s children. All his wives have lost more than they keep. If this should happen to you …”

  Kathryn finally understood what the duchess was tapping around. “Madam,” she said. “Do you mean that I should have children by Dereham and pretend they were Henry’s?”

  The duchess shook her head. “Some things, my dear, should never be said aloud, even if one is sure no one but our friends are listening. But you know, my dear, if you should need help, you’ll have a friend at your right hand.”

  “Madam,” Kathryn said, drawing herself up, aware that in her case the height to which she could draw herself was inconsequential. “Surely you don’t think I would to that.”

  “An’ that’s the spirit,” she said. “And so you shouldn’t. But you will take him as your secretary, will you not?”

  “What? To perform the office for me? No, I will not, madam, and I am shocked, in fact, that all these women in my family, all these ladies that wish me well, should want me to have Dereham so close. What if he talks?”

  The duchess gave her a long, wise look. “What is more like
ly, child? That he will do you a bad turn if he depends on you for his advancement and his support—he’s fairly on the rocks after his adventures in Ireland—or if he is outside, cast about, knowing you no longer care what becomes of him? In which case do you believe he will seek to do you a bad turn.”

  A bad turn. Kathryn remembered Dereham boasting of what he would do if anyone replaced him in her affections. What would he not do if he thought she had cast him entirely out?

  Oh, she hated this, and there was no way out of this. “Very well, madam, if it must be so, send Dereham to me. Before he comes, though, pray remind him that he is to be my secretary and nothing more. One foot wrong. One word in the wrong ear, madam, and we’re both lost, he and I. Pray tell him that it’s not just my life he’d destroy.”

  But all the while in the boat, back to the palace, she wondered if it would make any difference to Dereham. She wondered if he were not rotten with the sort of love that Jane Boleyn had nurtured for her late husband. The sort of love that would rather kill than allow the beloved one to go on and be happy with someone else.

  She felt as though a chill had come upon her and closed her eyes, listening to the water beating against the boat beneath her.

  She would have to pray and hope, just like the gambler between casting the die and watching them land.

  Kathryn had turned out just like her father.

  Chapter Forty-three

  That night Kathryn lay awake till late, waiting for the king, but the king did not come. She wondered if someone had her heard her talk with the duchess, and woke up feeling battered and bruised and weakened inside in a way she couldn’t describe.

  It was as though, she thought, something inside her were speeding up—something that wasn’t her heart or, indeed, any organ she could name, but something that was part of her, nonetheless. Speeding, speeding, rushing, until it presently would go so fast that she would lose consciousness or perhaps go all to pieces, like all those gods in Rome and Greece who got taken to pieces and thrown all over the sky.