Mannox taught her other tricks as well, such as how to make him explode. It was all very interesting and so much fun.
Katherine, her brothers and sisters and cousins, as well as children who had been sent to the Duchess by other noble families, slept in two large dormitories, one for the boys and one for the girls. After prayers, and after the candles had been extinguished for the night, the fun began. Katherine had been surprised to learn that many of her companions already knew about exploding. They practiced on each other long into the night. Even the servants got in on the games, coming to the girls dormitory after their evening chores, armed with jugs of wine, strawberries, and sweet cakes from the kitchen. Their orgies became legendary. It was true that some were loath to join in, but most did, and what fun they had!
When Katherine was fourteen, her sister pulled her aside and told her a very interesting thing. It seemed that until recently, there had been no danger of Katherine producing a child as the result of her nighttime romps. But with the onset of womanhood, this had changed, and Margaret told her of ways to make sure that she did not disgrace herself. She did try to do as her sister suggested, but in the heat of the moment it all felt so good; she rarely remembered to ask anyone she was with to stop in time. After a while, older and perhaps a little wiser, she decided that she must be barren.
So much the better! She had no desire to become the brood mare that most of the women she knew of had become. Her grandfather had sired eighteen children on two wives, and she was one of ten children. She had no desire to marry, and she had no desire to bear even one child. Of course, she durst tell her Uncle Norfolk of her suspicions, or he would not have chosen her to serve the New Queen. Uncle had explained that it was her task to charm the king so he would marry her and make her queen, and she suspected that neither of them would have wanted her if they knew of her suspicions. So she wisely stayed silent.
The children in the duchess’s care came and went over time. There was a time when there were no boys that interested her. It was during this time that she discovered that it was possible to make one’s self explode. While that was satisfying to a certain extent, it was ever so much nicer when someone else performed the task. Her bedmate at the time, for none of the children slept alone, was Joan Bulmer. Joan was of the same mind as Katherine, and when no boys could be found to make them explode, they helped each other until there were.
And then Francis Dereham had come to Lambeth, the Howard’s sprawling London estate. He was a very distant cousin, and one of her Uncle Norfolk’s henchmen. He was handsome and charming, and Katherine immediately set her sights on him. Their affair had been breathtaking for a while, and the jealousy of Mannox at the transfer of her affections had been gratifying. But soon Francis had become uncomfortably possessive, so much so that he demanded that she plight her troth with him. This she refused to do, to his annoyance. They had, he said, consummated their marriage, and he insisted on calling her his wife. To avoid further unpleasantness, she did as he bid her and called him husband. But as far as she was concerned, she was no man’s wife, and was relieved when he finally went away.
Life slipped back into the old pattern, in which she amused herself by day with Mannox, and at night with her choice of partners.
Her uncle had returned a few months later, and it was with some relief that she discovered that the persistent Master Dereham was not among his entourage. One evening shortly after Norfolk’s arrival, all of the Howard girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty were called into the hall. There Uncle Norfolk had walked up and down, up and down, eyeing them all and occasionally asking one of them to turn to the side, turn around, show him her hands. Katherine wondered why he didn’t ask them to open their mouths that he might inspect their teeth, as if they were so many mares that he wished to buy.
After several minutes of this intriguing behavior, the girls were dismissed, but Katherine was asked to stay. And that was when the Duchess and her uncle laid before her their plan to catch a king.
She knew all about the king; he was old, lame, grumpy and short-tempered. The gossip at court said that he did not like his New Queen. So there must be another new queen…and Uncle Norfolk wanted her to be that queen. She was to be maid of honor to the New Queen, and use her place as an opportunity to charm the king as the situation allowed. If successful, she should enjoy the fruits of power and position. She was not to fear; Uncle would tell her what to do.
Never had anything been so easy. The king had singled her out almost immediately. In fact, it was absolutely uncanny. She had done nothing except attend the queen as expected, but it was not long before His Grace asked her to attend upon him on the pretext that he needed advice about some matter to do with the queen’s jewels. He had treated her remarkably like Mannox did; sitting very close to her and pretending, while he spoke, that he wasn’t running his hands over her. She responded in kind, answering his questions and ignoring his wandering hands.
This situation repeated itself three times before he kissed her. But when he finally did make so bold, she allowed him to take the liberty. She must act completely innocent, but she must not refuse the king anything he asked of her. Her grandmother had pierced her with a gimlet eye when imparting these instructions; the boys had been caught more than once in the girls dormitory, but Lady Agnes had never punished them; she had simply waved her stick, called them names, and told them not to disobey her again. But they always did.
Over the course of several weeks, the king had taken more liberties, but he always gave her gifts; in payment, she supposed, for her complaisance. At first his gifts were little things, a ring, a jeweled wine cup, some fine quilted sarcenet; then he had surprised her one day with a scroll. She was barely literate, and the writing was so crabbed that she had to ask him to read it to her, which he had taken great pleasure in doing; it was a grant of the lands belonging to a convicted felon who had been attainted and sent to the Tower. With those lands came an income of three hundred pounds a year. She was so flabbergasted that she couldn’t even thank him. But instead of being annoyed by her silence, somehow he knew that he had astonished her, and this seemed to make him very happy.
That was the first time she had ever made him explode.
It started innocently enough; she was speechless at the king’s generosity, but she spontaneously put her arms around his neck and hugged him. She had never made advances to him before; she simply let him take his liberties whilst she admired whatever trinket he had presented her with. The effect of her action on the king was startling. He scooped her up and laid her on the window seat in which they had been sitting. It did not take him long to explode. Afterwards, he looked at her sheepishly and apologized, but she simply smiled and fondled her scroll.
She would have good news to report to her Uncle Norfolk, and glad she was, because he was formidable, and she was loath to disappoint him. He had told her all about her cousin Anne, and how that lady had said no to the king for so long that when she finally said yes, he didn’t want her anymore. This time the tack was different. She was to make no move of her own, but encourage any attention; allow the king any liberty he asked. The king was vulnerable because of the Cleves disaster, and would be on the rebound. No man wanted to be a laughingstock; he would, Norfolk guessed, wish to marry again as soon as possible.
And Uncle had been right!
The king did not regard Katherine as a light o’ love, which was a very real risk associated with Norfolk’s plan. Instead, all of the old chivalric instincts, so long dead, came uppermost, and the king insisted on doing the right thing. He had taken the girl, he ought to marry her. She was young, beautiful, so pleasing to look at, and not only was she of even temper, she was absolutely delightful. She was perfect. They would marry, and she would bear him sons.
And so here she was in the king’s bed, and she was the queen. Everything was going according to Norfolk’s plan. The only thing that made her slightly uneasy was that she would be expected to give the king sons. If what sh
e suspected were true, she never would, and if she did not, he might chop off her head.
And then she discovered that her cousin Thomas was at court.
She had known that the king was old, perhaps not as vigorous as a younger man might be, but one thing about him perplexed her. For a man who had been married four times…well, three, one could not count the New Queen, from what she had heard…either the king was remarkably ignorant of women or exceedingly selfish and lazy. Or, perhaps a little of both. But whatever was behind his failure to make her explode, she wasn’t having it. And then she conceived a brilliant plan. She lusted after her cousin Thomas; she would get her explosions from him.
She sighed and rolled over, pulling a pillow over her ears. The Royal Progress had been amusing, but it was over now and the king was exhausted, his leg a festering mass of pustules and sores. She was bored. It was time to show Master Thomas Culpeper that she was the queen now and she would not take no for an answer.
Tittenhanger, November 1540
Mary threw back the counterpane and tossed onto her left side. As she did so, she felt something beneath her, and heard the distinctive sound of a crack. It was the hard, unyielding vellum of her father’s letter. Letter! It was nothing less than a royal summons. She seized the offending document and threw it from her.
“Oh, good, you’re awake!” The missile landed at Lady Frances’s feet where she had been sitting beside the bed. She arose and pulled the bed curtain aside, fastening it to the post with a thick, braided tie.
Mary sat up in the bed, rubbed her face and ran both hands through her tangled hair. “I cannot do it, Frances,” she said.
“Oh, dear,” Frances replied. “I am afraid you shall have to.” Frances peered worriedly at her cousin; looking at her now, she regretted her glib recital that Mary suffered from nothing more damaging than melancholia.
Mary had taken to her bed on the day of their walk on the downs and, sunk in depression, had refused to leave it. For months she had alternately been fevered, and then suffered ague. No one and nothing had been able to induce her to rise and resume her normal life. She worried constantly about Mother Pole, who had not, despite Mary’s earlier hopes, been released from the Tower.
And despite herself, Cromwell’s death had upset Mary more than she realized. The man had been base-born and common, and she would never be able to forgive him for the damage he had done to the monasteries in England, but he had helped her in the dark days of Anne Boleyn’s ascendancy, when she was so out of favor with her father, and he may even have saved her life.
But it was not solely because of Cromwell’s death that she lay now in the grip of grief and despair. Her father’s rejection of Anne of Cleves had disturbed her, and his subsequent marriage to a flibbertigibbet, half-witted girl some thirty years his junior was distressing and disappointing; but hard on the heels of that, timed almost so that one might have thought it was part of the wedding celebrations, had followed the grisly executions of two men she knew and loved and had called her friends.
The spark of the king’s anger had caught and flared, to her mind at least, on the most unlikely of tinder. In the minds of many of his subjects, the king needed a dispensation to marry Katherine Howard, because she was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin. While it was true that many had welcomed the break with Rome, and knew that it was treasonous to deny the Royal Supremacy, there were still some people who clung to the old ways. As self-proclaimed Supreme Head of the Church, Henry had ignored this, glibly dispensed himself, and tripped blithely to the altar. This did not sit well with some and the opposition to the act had been vocal in some quarters.
The backlash had at first surprised and then angered the king. In his black rage he had ordered the executions of Thomas Abell and Richard Fetherstone. Both men had been in the Tower since the days when her father had been laboring to oust her mother as Queen of England and supplant her with Anne Boleyn. As the queen’s chaplain, Abell had staunchly defended Katharine of Aragon. Fetherstone had been Mary’s tutor when she was a young girl, and she was very fond of him; he also had defended the Spanish queen’s cause most vehemently. Both men had refused absolutely to take the Oath of Supremacy.
But why execute them now, after six long years in the Tower? In order to vindicate his marriage to a girl who was nothing more than the object of an aging king’s lust? It was disgusting. Along with Abell and Fetherstone, Edward Powell, another of Queen Katharine’s advisors in the Boleyn marriage crisis, had suffered the traitor’s death of hanging, drawing and quartering.
But what was even more disturbing was that the king wasn’t only murdering recalcitrant Catholics. The king had ordered six executions that day; three hurdles had trundled to Tyburn on that bloody day, a Catholic and a Protestant side by side on each one. While the Catholics had endured the horror of their ordeal, the three Protestants had been tied to the same stake and burned alive. The killing of members of both religious factions was symbolic; it was meant to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that no one was safe from the king’s wrath, Catholic and Protestant alike.
And all in the name of a silly, giggling, foolish girl! To such had the august position of Queen of England, a role, a destiny, that her mother had fulfilled with such distinction, dignity and pride, been reduced. It only rubbed salt into the wound that of all the silly, foolish girls the king could have chosen, he had chosen another Howard!
“I cannot do it,” she repeated. Her father’s letter was a summons to court to pay homage and swear her fealty to the new queen.
Frances walked around the bed, pulling the rest of the curtains and tying them back. Then she walked to the windows and threw open the shutters, revealing a gray autumn day as bleak as Mary’s mood. When she was finished, she turned and faced her cousin. Their eyes met and locked.
Mary drew a ragged breath, almost like a sob, and wordlessly she swung her feet over the side of the bed.
Frances nodded and strode to the door. She opened it and said, “Bring water for Her Grace to bathe, and bring a tray.”
There was no escaping such a command from her father. She knew that she must go and do as she was bid.
Woking, Surrey, December 1540
Dish after dish, course after course, came and went from the banquet table, and the king ate heartily of all of them. Salet had been a favorite of Katharine of Aragon, who had introduced it to the court of England. Her tenure as queen had lasted almost twenty years, and in that time, artichokes, damsons, cucumbers and lettuces of all sorts became de rigueur at the royal table. After dozens of salet dishes had come a second course of cold meat pasties of fish and game. This course was followed by a hot course consisting of a variety of cooked meats. The meal ended with dish after dish of fruits, nuts, and concoctions of blancmange, marchpane, pies of all sorts and cheeses. All was washed down with Hippocras, a rich, sweet red wine that was fast becoming Mary’s only solace at a court she could no longer understand or enjoy.
Her father seemed obviously happy with his new bride, but to Mary’s trained eye, he did not look well. His color was red and blotchy, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had gained weight he could ill afford.
All through the endless meal her father had been unable to keep his hands from constantly touching Katherine. Even while he stuffed his mouth with one hand, the other was always roaming; roaming over her hair, across her face, up her arm, down her back, stroking her slim neck. And when he wasn’t openly caressing her, he held her hand and brought it up to his mouth to kiss it in between bites of food. Occasionally he stabbed a tit-bit with his knife and navigated it to Katherine's waiting mouth. But sometimes he picked up a morsel with his fingers and held it to her lips, which were red, full, sensuous; and after he had slipped into her mouth whatever bit he had chosen for her, he would take a beefy index finger and rub its tip lightly over her lips. When he did this, her eyes would half-close and the tip of her little pink tongue would dart out and lick the finger. The king’s mouth would then slacken and his eyes would sm
older.
Mary had to look away; there weren’t words to describe how this display sickened her.
Katherine had insisted upon Elizabeth accompanying Mary to court to pay their respects to the new queen. Such a request had elated Elizabeth; at seven years of age, already she craved the excitement of the court, preferring it to the quiet life she led with Mary away from it. And deep in her heart, Mary knew that Elizabeth was searching for a mother to replace the one she had lost, and could not now remember except as a shadowy image that spoke softly to her and smelt of lavender. Elizabeth had cherished great hopes that Anne of Cleves was to be that substitute mother, but her dream had been shattered by the king’s immediate and baffling aversion to his fourth wife. Anne had been forbidden the company of her royal stepchildren for reasons that no one save the king could comprehend; but as soon as the annulment had been accomplished he had just as inexplicably lifted the ban. Elizabeth loved Anne, but their households were separate and they did not have occasion to see each other very often.
And then, miracle of miracles, her father had married again within days of the annulment and this time her new stepmother was a member of her own family, her mother’s cousin. Elizabeth had been desperate for an opportunity to meet the new queen, but had been continually prevented from doing so by Mary’s prolonged illness.
Katherine had sent several times for Mary since the wedding in July, but Mary’s answer had always been the same; she was too ill to attend Her Grace. Katherine was usually even-tempered and tolerant; it seemed as if nothing much bothered her. Mary thought she knew why; what could there possibly be between those pretty ears but a head as empty as a rain-barrel in August? But Mary’s constant rebuffs had eventually angered Katherine who, although easy-going for the most part, was sensitive to perceived slights upon her dubious royalty. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Katherine did not believe that Mary was ill, and complained to the king of Mary’s reluctance to attend her. This resulted in the letter from her father that had been delivered by Lady Frances’s hand, with orders to bring Mary to Woking.
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