No Will But His

by Hoyt, Sarah A.

  “If they be villains, then it tells against Your Majesty,” Cramner said. “For both men claim knowledge of Your Majesty, and Manox knows of a mark on your body, which the king’s majesty confirms is so.”

  The king’s majesty! They’d talked to the king. The king knew. Well did Kathryn know how Harry with the crown would react to this revelation.

  She didn’t think any more than she had thought about the words she’d heard herself say. She just felt her own body spring forward, instinctively ducking under the arms the guards reached out to holder, as if this were a game with Charles and Henry when they were children and she were running to stay ahead of them.

  And stay ahead of them she did, down the long corridor of Hampton Court, between her quarters and the chapel, where—at this hour—Harry would be listening to mass.

  Halfway through the running, as she panted and her heart beat hard, her thought caught up with her actions. She realized that her body was doing exactly the right thing. If she could get to Harry, then Harry without the crown would surely forgive her. But she had to get to him.

  The doors of the chapel were closed. She pulled at the handles, but the doors wouldn’t open. Locked.

  She pounded with her small fists, hard, insistently, demanding the door open and screaming for Harry. But nothing happened. The door remained closed.

  And then the guards were there, their hands grasping her fast and pulling her backward, toward her chamber, where they threw her and locked the door.Kathryn collapsed to the floor, crying. And all the time, as her body cried and screamed, her mind was working fast. No more time to dance now. Now the die had been rolled, the last stakes placed. Now was the time to fight for her life.

  Section Six

  Fallen Rose

  Chapter Fifty-two

  She stayed at Hampton Court with her ladies. She knew not what to do or what would befall her. She gave up all interests and all pastimes, and day and night she walked, like the caged lion, the confines of her meager enclosure.

  She touched her neck now and then, as she remembered Anne Boleyn’s fate. What Anne Boleyn had proven, and proven well, was that adultery by a queen was treason.

  But they spoke of Manox and of Dereham. And neither of those were adultery. She had slept with Dereham naked in bed. She had allowed his member within her. A sin that might be, but it was not adultery, for neither of them had been married at the time. And she’d allowed Manox to touch her and enjoy her body, behind the stairs and in the chapel. And, force, that had been shameless, and perhaps it made her less than a proper and clean maiden. But adultery it was not.

  And if they thought her promises to Dereham were a pre-contract, well then, they were married. And that means she might have broken faith with the king by failing to tell His Majesty that she was contracted to another. But again, that would make their marriage null. And whatever she had done, not adultery.

  The more she thought of this, turning every idea in her mind, the more she liked the last because if she was pre-contracted to Dereham, and all but effectively married to him, then she’d never been married to the king. Let things take their course, and let him send her to some country place, and then, in time, release her, shamed and forgotten.

  Then could she get the duchess to help her divorce Dereham—she felt sure that even with Kathryn’s reputation broken, the duchess would never want a Howard daughter pledged to Mr. Dereham. Let her divorce Dereham, and she could marry Thomas Culpepper.

  They would retire to the country and furnish a castle as they’d meant to, and they would have beautiful children, whom they’d teach to stay away from court and its snares.

  She spent many days, sitting, dreaming of this. Her state of mind, alternating between aimless sitting and passionate crying, made people look at her oddly, and they started removing from her reach such things as she might use to do harm to herself.

  But Kathryn still had hope; Kathryn thought the roll of the die might still turn out all right.

  Above all she must keep from mentioning Culpepper. She must forebear to even think of him, lest someone divine her thoughts. Even if she had to fall, let him go on living.

  In this she found that she was very different from Lady Rochefort, who was her very constant and faithful companion now. She thought that if she must die, then let it be so, but let Thomas Culpepper go on living. She felt only a little pang at the thought that he would marry someone else, then, and have children with her, but it was nothing like the pain she felt at the thought of Thomas dead. Thomas forever gone. And all because of her.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  At first it all seemed right. At first they sent her to Syon, and there she stayed, with only three ladies and three chamberers. One of the ladies was Lady Rochefort, and it seemed to Kathryn that the poor lady was more distant from reality than ever she had been.

  She talked daylong to walls. But all the same, sometimes she would see Kathryn thinking or dreaming, and she would touch her arm and said, “Oh, love is a great misfortune, madam.”

  Just knowing that someone knew, even if the name must never be pronounced, was a balm to Kathryn.

  By some means, though Kathryn never found out how and was afraid to ask in case she should be told that Jane got it from the spirit of the departed George Boleyn, Lord Rochefort, Jane always knew what was happening in the outside world. Her statements on this were always proven true, and Kathryn had learned to ask her and to listen to her on the subject.

  When Jane told her that the investigators were pressing Dereham close because they were sure his affair with the queen had continued after her marriage, she could only snort.

  The more they asked Dereham, the more they’d only get that the queen had told him to obey Mr. Johns and stop saying foolishness. Aye, and no less than Lady Rutland to attest to that.

  Only some days later, Jane said that Dereham had named Thomas Culpepper as the person with whom Kathryn’s affections now lay and that Culpepper had been taken.

  Now Kathryn could not sleep, for in sleep she saw the beloved body being tortured, the face broken, the mouth distorted by the choke pear. If perchance she slept, the dreams came, and then she trembled and woke screaming, only to sleep again, such was her exhaustion.

  To keep herself awake, she would play. In the middle of the night, she’d rouse all her ladies and make them dance with her, to keep away the images of Thomas suffering, of Thomas being broken.

  She wrote the king two letters accusing herself, trying to stop the investigation into her further wrong deeds. She told him she’d been pre-contracted. She told him that it was all her fault. She prayed that he would probe no further. That he would put her away—or kill her even—but cease looking for more signs of adultery. That he would let Thomas go.

  She was half mad with lack of sleep and half blind with uncried tears when Jane Boleyn told her that Bess Harvey, a sometime shadow of the ladies of the queen—a member of Anne Boleyn’s house who had lingered on at court and served even Kathryn, though Kathryn never appointed her—had told all that she had seen Kathryn and Thomas Culpepper meeting late at night and often. She clearly had been spying for she knew of when the door was locked and it couldn’t be opened, and also of the other times she and Culpepper met.

  Kathryn laughed, for she could not help it, and when Jane Boleyn asked her why she laughed—for once the sober companion to one acting madly—Kathryn had told her. In one of their conversations, Thomas had told her of Bess Harvey, who had been Thomas’s lover before he ever saw Kathryn. He told her he’d dropped the lady quite suddenly, not even giving her the customary gift he usually gave his lovers.

  And Kathryn thinking it all a jest and thinking that Bess Harvey, like so many ladies at court, had merely been trysting to pass the time, had sent Bess Harvey a gift, herself: a costly brocade gown. She now saw how this present might have galled Bess if she’d been in true love with Thomas. “How marvelously rich this game is,” Kathryn told Jane. “That we must all play blindfolded and
never know the importance of each roll until it is well done.

  And Jane, mad Jane Boleyn, had looked at Kathryn as though Kathryn were mad.

  It was all gone, now, Kathryn thought, and nothing could save her. And with this certainty came a calm and a great exhaustion.

  When everything is lost, there is nothing to fight for. When the game is over, it is time to rest, for you cannot retrieve the hand you lost.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  And so the Tower it was, through Traitor’s Gate. The Tower, where she’d been so afraid of seeing Anne confined, back when she was a mere child and had confused the ceremonies of coronation with imprisonment.

  But it did not matter, for perhaps her soul divined even then that Anne would also enter that gate, and then Kathryn also.

  She took residence in the Tower as though these apartments had been waiting for her, her whole life.

  If she cried sometimes, it was only a little, as she thought of Thomas, whom she was sure was now doomed. Was there a paradise, she wondered, where they would meet and hold each other again? She couldn’t think of one, because the paradise they told you about in church was too much like an earthly kingdom, and if it were so, then the king of all would not take kindly to someone who had betrayed his brother on Earth.

  Though she still had three ladies to attend her, Jane Boleyn was her only companion most of the time, the one who would sit with her and talk to her.

  Of course, Jane spent most of the time talking to the dead she had wronged and seemed to see as present as life. Kathryn wondered if Thomas was already dead. And if he was, would he appear to her as George and Anne appeared to Jane, who now seemed at long last reconciled with the long departed and talked to them as with friends or family.

  In fact there was some excitement to Jane, as though she were preparing to go on a long trip, and George and Anne were helping plan it. It was all, “Yes, yes.” And sometimes “I will meet you, then.”

  This was perhaps because Jane had been condemned for aiding and abetting the queen’s adultery and, as such, had been sentenced to die with her.

  The slow-thinking Kathryn at the back of Kathryn’s eyes, the one who tallied the world without fear or favor, thought that perhaps this had been what Jane had wanted all along, to die in the same way her husband had died and thus expiate her crime.

  On the twelth of February, a Sunday, Jane told Kathryn that George had said they were to prepare to die on the morrow.

  It was no surprise then, when Kathryn’s gaolers repeated the message. Kathryn was then sure that Thomas was long dead, and only one thing occupied her—to finish as well as she could.

  For after the game is done and you have lost, it is best to leave as cleanly as possible and to show that you are not a poor loser.

  She asked that the block on which she was to rest her neck for the fatal blow be brought to her cell so she could practice laying her head on it, so her neck was supported. Thereby, when the ax fell, it would sever her head with one clean blow.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  The morning of her death was very cold. Kathryn had her hair arranged so as to leave her neck free for the blow. She looked out the window of her tower prison, at the sun covered up as though there were cheesecloth in front of it, and she sighed. She would have liked to have seen the sun once more.

  The short walk to Tower Hill seemed like a never ending trip—like those she had taken with the king on progress. When you know the end is near, each breath counts, and each of them seems to last forever.

  It seemed to Kathryn there were days that had passed more heedless—years to which she’d paid less attention—than those few minutes. By her side Jane was very quiet.

  Kathryn climbed the stand where the block stood, her old friend the block, which she had laid her head upon last night in her cell. It seemed like years before.

  It was very cold, and there were very few people in attendance. She searched in vain but did not see her uncle or her grandmother. She suspected anyone else she might have cared to see had long been parted from his head, and she shivered at the thought of that head rotting upon the bridge’s spikes.

  She started her speech in a fainting voice, asking the good people to take note of her just and fair punishment, and she thought that was right for it was fair to die for trying to avoid the death that fate has laid in store for you. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the lace falling upon the floor of the dormitory. She could still hear Alice Restwold’s voice tell her she would marry a Henry. It had all been preordained, and folly it was to try to avoid it.

  “I beg of the king’s majesty only two favors,” she said. “That he will not prosecute my family and kin for the crimes that are only my own, and that he will allow my gowns to be divided among my ladies, for I have now no other way to reward them for their excellent care of me.”

  She took two steps toward the block, having now said what she planned to say. She looked down at its bloodstained, ax-scarred surface. Had Anne Boleyn also died on this block? Kathryn felt sure she had. She felt sure she had been preordained to follow her elder cousin’s fate.

  But this would not do, and she was not done yet. Kathryn might have to die as had been prescribed, perhaps before she had first drawn breath. She might have to disappear into some afterlife in which she couldn’t very clearly believe. And it was possible she was damned for eternity, if she were in the hands of a heavenly king who would feel keenly the offense to His earthly counterpart.

  She stopped and stood straighter, instead of laying her head upon the block. She could see shifting among those who had come to watch this done, as though they were afraid of what she might do next. The executioner, beside her, spoke from behind his hood, “It is time, now, my lady. I will make it swift.” From the tension in his body and the way he spoke, she could tell he was afraid that she would resist it and would have to be forced to the block. Others had had to be forced in the past, Kathryn knew, and she imagined the executioner would be reluctant to have to wrestle with someone so much smaller than himself. Afraid of how it would look.

  And now she stared at the crowd and imagined they perhaps were uncomfortable, too. Perhaps that was why there were so few of them. She was so small and so young, and anyone who saw her death would be unable to imagine but that they were brutes, putting a period to such a brief existence.

  Well, let them feel it then.

  It is time now, my lady, her mind said. No more time to dance.

  But she would not go without speaking. She straightened her shoulders and she threw her head back. She looked at the meager crowd, the pale sun—even itself hiding as though embarrassed for the work he must witness—and at the tendrils of the fog on Tower Hill. Beyond it, the city of London would be waking, and on the bridge the head of Thomas Culpepper would be rotting.

  Kathryn took a deep breath and spoke, not so much to the assembly or to the sun or even to London. She spoke to fate or perhaps that heavenly king whom she now saw as a slightly larger version of Harry with his crown. That king, too, must hear sometimes, and learn that though He had the power of life and death over His subjects, He could not make them thank Him for His unjust treatment of them. And He could not force His subjects to love Him.

  Her voice rose, small and young sounding, into the cold morning, “I want you to know that though today I die a queen of England, I would much rather have lived the wife of Thomas Culpepper.”

  And then she was done.

  Author’s Note

  In 2003, at the grocery store, I got a phone call from my editor at Berkley. There between the tomatoes and the radishes, I heard they were contemplating a collection of the lives of Henry VIII’s Queens, and the editor wanted me to write two of them. Which ones did I want.

  I immediately said “Anne Boleyn” and “Kathryn Howard.” The editor said she’d do what she could.

  Nothing in publishing ever goes as planned. Months passed and when I asked, they said they were doing a collection under a house
name, and the one I could have was Jane Seymour. I said sure, and the result was Plain Jane by Laurien Gardner, written as work for hire.

  Years passed and I’d given up all thought of continuing this series, but apparently the Tudors series caused a revival of sales, and they asked if I would do Kathryn Howard under my own name.

  The result was No Will But His, which is now being reissued by Goldport Press which has also asked me to do a series of all the queens from the beginning with Lady from Spain, the story of Catherine of Aragon scheduled for 2014.

  I’ve been fascinated with the tale of Henry VIII and his six wives since I was 14 and watched a BBC mini-series. Also, I often claim I live part time in Elizabethan/Tudor England because I’ve written several stories and three novels around Shakespeare. So, of course, I jumped at the chance to do this whole series and am looking forward to it.

  Meanwhile, enjoy No Will But His, the bittersweet story of a young woman lost in the confusion and noise of the Tudor Court.

  Sarah A. Hoyt, Colorado, 2013

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