Page 126 of Boleyn Traitor
‘Piracy,’ he says. ‘In Ireland. Months ago. They say he was bedding half the girls at Lambeth.’
‘Surely not,’ I say. ‘Not under the dowager duchess’ supervision.’
‘Aye that’s what we’ll say,’ he strides towards the stair leading to the privy chamber.
‘I’ll come to the Howard rooms later,’ I say to his retreating back.
WHENIGETback to the queen’s rooms, they are empty of company. None of the young men are visiting us. Isabel Baynton, seated with her back to the window with the light on her work, is frantically sewing, setting stitches at random. She looks up when I come in, her mouth pinched and her eyes darting to the guard on the door behind me. The women sit beside her, all of them heads down, bending over their work. It is shirts for the poor, always a bad sign. Isabel nods towards the closed door of Kitty’s bedchamber. I tap on the door and go in.
She is very still in the window seat, looking down into the garden where she played at a snowball fight and the yew-tree allée where Thomas Culpeper kissed her wrist nearly a year ago.
When she hears the door, she slowly turns her head, as if she does not want to see who is entering. When she sees it is me, she barely moves. ‘I thought you were gone, too!’
I come slowly into the room. ‘No. I’m here. What’s happened?’
‘I’ve been told to stay in my rooms. The privy council sent a message asking me to stay here. No company. No music. No dancing. Just wait. They didn’t say why. They just said stay indoors. No company. No music. No dancing.’
I’m thinking furiously. ‘They can’t know anything,’ I say. ‘If they knew anything for sure, they’d be making arrests. They always make arrests quickly. So, they can’t know anything for sure.’
‘What could they know?’ Her eyes are tragic. ‘I’ve done nothing.’
In her loving heart, of course, she has done nothing. Over and over again, she has looked away from the man she adores; she has avoided his company. She has danced attendance on a man old enough to be her grandfather and never given him the slightest moment of unease. She has lived her life to please him; she has never said a word to contradict him. Since that one day of the snowball fight, she has been completely discreet, never showing her passionate longing for another man. She has laid with him only once, and that was in complete secrecy. She was praised in church as the comfort of the king’s life, just last week.
‘Is Thomas safe?’ she whispers.
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘Nobody’s missing from the king’s rooms. But Francis Dereham’s been arrested for piracy.’
‘Piracy?’
‘From when he was in Ireland,’ I say.
‘That’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I know, I know. But suppose he talks about the money he left with you, about his promises to return?’
She shakes her head violently. ‘No, no, no, no, no, the money was for safekeeping – it was not a dower. There were no promises to marry. I just held some money for a friend.’
‘Not a dower?’ I demand. I cross the rooms so we can whisper, head to head. ‘Dower? Francis Dereham’s money? You never said it was a dower before?’
‘He asked me to marry him; but I never said yes,’ she says quickly. ‘We courted – I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so young! It wasn’t love – I know that now. It was nothing. When he went away, he asked me to wait for him and marry him properly when he came back.’
‘Marry him properly?’ I would scream if I had not locked myself to a whisper.
‘In church. We weren’t in church the first time.’
‘But you made a promise? You were betrothed?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it was nothing. It was love-talk. Lies.’
‘Did the dowager duchess know that you were courting? That you promised?’
‘Yes,’ she says miserably. ‘But she slapped my face and told me to forget all about it, so I did.’
I think furiously: whatever she says now, there’s evidence enough here to prove a precontract. Any fool could get Dereham to say that they spoke of marriage, they were courting, he gave her his savings to keep for him while he went to win his fortune, and he expected to come back to marry her. Enough there – plenty there – if the king wants evidence of a precontract to say that Kitty was handfasted and married. If the king wants the marriage annulled, he can put her aside and say she was married before, and this time, it will be true. You don’t need to be a Cromwell to turn this into an annulment.
She’s no duchess; she won’t get a palace to buy her off, but it need not be a complete disaster. Kitty could come out of this quite well. She’ll have to return her queen’s fortune to the king, but she’ll get a nice little house in the country; she could live secretly with Culpeper in half-disgrace until the king dies, and then they could marry. Nobody would care if they married then; she could even come back to court as Prince Edward’s former stepmother with her new husband.
I won’t even have to retire with her. The scandal took place before I was her lady-in-waiting, and I did nothing but keep Dereham’s purse until they gave it back to him. If the king lives long enough to get this marriage annulled and marries another woman, he will ask me to be her chief lady-in-waiting. Who knows what he likes better than me? Who better to train a sixth wife?
