Page 128 of Boleyn Traitor
She pulls away from me. ‘No! You shan’t stop me! I must see him! I must see him! He can’t go! I can make it all right if I can see him.’
‘He’s fine,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing wrong. Hush, Kitty. He’s gone out hunting.’
Wildly, she turns to me. ‘Gone hunting?’
‘Yes! So, see, there’s nothing wrong! He went with just a few friends and his master of horse. He looked well. There’s no need for you to be distressed, Kitty. He wouldn’t have gone hunting if he was upset.’
She stumbles. ‘He’s going!’ she screams at me. ‘Not hunting! He’s going! He’s left me like he left her – Anne! Like he left Jane!Like he sent Queen Anne away! Like he left Queen Katherine! He’s going, and I have to catch him before he leaves, or I’ll never see him again! Like them! Like all of them!’
I feel an icy sweat prickle in my armpits and down my back. ‘Hunting,’ I repeat faintly.
Isabel Baynton shakes her head at me. ‘Gone to Whitehall,’ she mouths.
I wish I could think quicker. I know that my face is as blank as my mind when I look from Isabel’s hopeless face to the distraught young woman. ‘Well, anyway,’ I say, ‘you wouldn’t want to be seen like this. No hood, and your hair a mess.’
‘I have to ask for pardon.’ It comes out as a sob. ‘I let my hair down to ask for pardon. That’s how it’s done.’
‘Yes, but not like this. And you’ve done nothing that needs a pardon. Let’s go back, get properly dressed, and when he comes home after hunting or back from Whitehall, if that’s where he’s gone, you can see him.’
Isabel and I walk Kitty slowly back to her rooms, between us like our prisoner. I think that those in service to a tyrant are called to strange and dark work. I want to think that I am a master courtier, steering her through a crisis in her marriage, and this will all blow over. But right now, I don’t feel like a master courtier at all; I feel like her gaoler, and I think that when you enter the service of a tyrant, you never know what work you will sink to.
We consider her gowns for the day ahead. I braid her hair into a neat coiled plait under her hood. She chooses a dark-blue gown with dark-blue sleeves and an overdress of bright blue: saints’ colours. She wears her French hood of blue pulled forward to hide her hair, as modest as a maid.
As she is fitting the hood, I go out to the gallery where the windows face towards Hampton Chase. I see my uncle’s standard, and he at the head of his men, riding out, as if they are going hunting, riding out after the king, and I think: there he goes, the old rat, saving his own skin, whatever else he is doing.
BUT WHAT ISthe king doing? He does not come back that afternoon, and his horse is not in the stable next day, when Sir Edward Baynton, now silently regretting his marriage to Kitty’s sister, tells me that the lords of the privy council are coming to see her at noon.
‘I thought they were at Lambeth?’
‘Their lordships meet where they please,’ he tells me pompously, as if being a Baynton and not a Howard will save him from disaster if the king has turned against us.
‘What am I to do?’ Kitty asks me. ‘What should I wear?’
‘You’ll wear your dark-blue gown with the sleeves,’ I say. ‘And you’ll sit on your chair in your presence chamber.’
‘I’ll have all my ladies there,’ she says. ‘Standing behind me.’
‘There are one or two missing,’ I warn her. ‘Lady Mary has gone to join the household of Prince Edward.’
She looks aghast. ‘She’s run away from me?’
‘Just a visit to her brother,’ I say. ‘And it’s not as if you like her. You wouldn’t have wanted her in your rooms, with the privy council coming in. And she’d be no use – she’d be scared to death of them. Remember, they nearly arrested her for not signing the oath, and your uncle said he would bang her head against the wall.’
She brightens. ‘Oh, did he? How funny! My uncle will come with them?’
I think of him, bent over his hunter’s neck, riding out to meet the king somewhere in the forest. ‘I don’t know exactly who’s coming,’ I say cautiously.
‘Do I curtsey?’
‘They bow to you; you don’t get up.’
She nods her head repeatedly, like it is on a spring: nod, nod, nod. ‘I don’t get up,’ she repeats.
As soon as I have Kitty on her throne in her presence chamber, I glance out of the window. There is no black barge without a standard on the flagpole, waiting in silence, with the gangplank run ashore. Itis different this time. They are not going to tell me to fetch Kitty’s cape as she will feel the cold on the water. She is not going to be taken from her palace. It is different this time.
When they come, our uncle is among them, and I think this will help our case: the last thing the old duke wants is another Howard girl accused of unchastity – especially lovemaking under the beaky nose of his own stepmother in the family home. And Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk has married a young woman who was betrothed to his son: he is predisposed to dismiss scandal, having been alongside it all his life. Bishop Gardiner, the churchman who hates reform, will be in favour of Kitty, who has no interest in religion; Thomas Audley, the lord chancellor, is a clever lawyer who will argue whatever the king wants as if it was Bible truth; and Archbishop Cranmer is a gentle reformer who would have saved Anne if he could. No one here can be thought of as a friend, but none of them are our enemies.
Kitty sits in her chair under the canopy with us ladies on either side, in her blue gown, looking very young and small but on her dignity. Always conscious of her appearance, she has taken my hint to be queenly, and her head is poised under her jewelled hood.
