Page 131 of Boleyn Traitor
Her eyes warm at the thought of him. ‘As long as he’s all right,’ she says. ‘As long as he’s safe, I don’t fear anything.’
IN THE MORNING,she is weeping again, asking why the king went to Whitehall without a word to her, and when will he return? I put her back to bed after mass in her chapel and breakfast and use this new burst of weeping as proof that they aredriving her too hard. I tell Isabel Baynton that her feeble husband must do his duty as the queen’s vice chamberlain and protect her. He must take sharp knives out of the presence chamber where we dine; he must keep her away from the high windows; someone must sit with her in the day and sleep with her at night. When they tell king of this, it will turn him to forgiveness at once. He will like to hear that she is losing her mind with grief, it gives him a wonderful part in a drama. He can come and forgive her when she is dying for his forgiveness in the greatest masque we have ever staged – this isCleopatraandAriadneandDidobut with a happy ending. I also remember Thomas Cromwell telling me when Lady Margaret Douglas was questioned: a woman cannot be questioned or even arrested if she is out of her wits.
‘Everyone is saying that the king believes the marriage is not blessed by God,’ Isabel says – reliably repeating and embroidering the most damaging thing for us. ‘Invalid from the start, and will never be blessed with children. They say that Anne of Cleves should be restored as queen.’
‘How invalid?’ I ask Isabel, gambling that not even her sister knows if Kitty went through a betrothal with the fool Francis Dereham.
‘How should I know?’ she says irritably. ‘I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even home at the time... and she wasn’t under my control... or anyone’s really.’ Her voice dies away. ‘I was only telling you a silly rumour. Of course, Anne of Cleves would never come back as queen.’ She pauses. ‘Would she?’
EVEN THOUGHKITTYhas now made two written confessions and been promised forgiveness, we still are all but confined to the queen’s side. We attend mass in her chapel, and we dine in her presence chamber and sit in the privy chamber. The yeomen are guarding the door as usual, but it feels that they are keeping us in. Nobody wants to test this and I use the fire boys’ stairs to the stable-yard, which has been left unguarded.
I am hidden in the little doorway, hoping to see the king’s big hunter nodding over his door, and everything back to normal, when I see Thomas Culpeper, high on his beautiful horse with a couple of the king’s companions mounted and ready for hawking. He has his saker falcon on his glove: a beautiful creature with her breast mottled in pure black and white, her back as sleek and dark as black velvet. She wears a black hood of best leather, with a red feather on top, and the bells on her jesses ring softly as she shifts her bright yellow feet to grip tightly. His happy smile, the casual tilt of his cap on his curly head, his ringing laugh at something someone says to him, the bright colours of the autumn trees of the chase make the scene look like a tapestry of happiness named:The Lover Goes a-Hawking.
Nobody seeing Thomas Culpeper could think of him as anything but blithely light-hearted. His casual pleasure is a greater witness to his innocence than any evidence could be. As he rides out, he gives a casual greeting to the incoming horseman, Thomas Wriothesley, riding in with his clerk and groom. Wriothesley dismounts, throws his reins to his groom, and goes heavily up the stone stairs to the great hall.
I whisk around and up the fire boys’ stairs, and I am seated in the queen’s rooms, sewing in the presence chamber with the other ladies, before we hear his tread on the wooden floor outside the double doors. I rise and curtsey with the others when he is announced.
Thomas Wriothesley tells us he has come to speak with the queen alone, but I stay beside her and say very respectfully: ‘Oh no, my lord.’
He checks. ‘The archbishop met with Her Grace alone?’
So he knows about the archbishop’s interrogation, so he may have read the first confession and then the second, which was half retraction and throwing all the blame on Dereham. He may have seen the letter to the king, begging for mercy, and he may know about the hysterical tears.
I smile at him as I curtsey, and I think – you’ve always been the vanguard, never in the front of the charge. You were the clerk my Lord Cromwell would send to double-check – never a leadinquisitor, but useful in support. Heavy-handed, a bully, the very man for the day after a confession, to make a guilty person vomit the rest, just when they think it has finished. Well, you’re not doing that now.
‘The archbishop is the queen’s confessor...’ I point out.
Kitty takes the hint. ‘The ladies can wait in the presence chamber, but Jane will stay with me.’
I see by his quick surrender that he is not authorised to bully her. I guess from this that he thinks she could reconcile with the king and punish anyone who offends her now. He bows obedience, he smiles tentatively. Inwardly, I laugh inside at his cowardice as Kitty leads the way into her privy chamber and sits in the chair.
‘Yes?’ she says. The tears are in her eyes already. I hand her a handkerchief; she dabs at her eyelashes.
‘I am tasked by the privy council with an unpleasant duty,’ he says, falling into pomposity as men do when they are on weak ground.
‘Yes?’ she says, her face hidden in the fine linen.
‘It is to inquire into your, er – your – er – it is to inquire, in short, into Thomas Culpeper?’
Thomas Culpeper, who just rode out hawking, as happy as his falcon?
I see the pearls on Kitty’s hood tremble slightly as she flinches. ‘Yes?’
‘You know Thomas Culpeper?’
‘Of course.’
‘You and he were courting when you were a maid-of-honour to the former... to the king’s sister Lady Anne of Cleves?’
‘No.’
‘People said that you were going to marry?’
‘Who said?’ she demands coming out of the handkerchief with sudden irritation. ‘Because if it is Bess Harvey, it is because she was in love with him herself, and if you listen to gossip, you will hear no good of yourself.’
He is shaken by her burst of temper.
‘Of course, it is the duty of the maids-of-honour and the king’s companions to create good company,’ I explain, as if he is so new to court and so ill-bred and ill-educated that he does not know this.
