Page 136 of Boleyn Traitor
‘It’s about the queen meeting Culpeper,’ my uncle says abruptly. ‘You’d better tell us what happened. And tell us the truth. Everything you know.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I start. ‘Of course, she met him in the ordinary way.’
‘We’re way beyond that,’ my uncle spits. ‘You can tell us about the cramp rings, about the cap and the backstairs and the secret meetings on progress. And you can tell us if you saw them swive in the stool room, for God’s sake!’
I am stunned with shock at this terrible list. It takes me a moment to realise that there is too much detail for it to have come from malicious gossips such as Catherine Tilney or Alice Restwold. These aremeetings that only Thomas, Kitty, and I know about. Nobody was there but us three in the stool room. Nobody but me saw her put her cramp ring on his finger like a wedding ring, I saw him kiss it.
My uncle must see these thoughts on my face; my courtier mask has slipped.
‘Yes, we know it all,’ he says coldly. ‘Both of them have confessed – sung like blinded thrushes. You’re the last one to hold out. Bit of a forlorn hope, Jane. Both of them have blamed you, for it all. They blamed you before each other. They both say that it was you who made the meetings, found the backstairs, urged Culpeper to come, and persuaded her to love him.’
‘No!’ I say, shocked out of silence. ‘No, it was not like that.’
‘So, what was it like?’ Wriothesley asks me. ‘Because it sounds very like treason, and it sounds very like adultery, and it sounds like you were pimping her out, the Queen of England in the royal stool room! So, if you want to get out of this, with your head on your shoulders, you’d better tell us what it was like.’ He lifts the pen and dips it in the ink and bares his teeth in a smile at me.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jane,’ my uncle says quietly. ‘Let this start and stop with the queen and Culpeper. None of the rest of us need to be blamed for their mistake. Your loyalty is first to your family.’
‘Kitty is family.’
‘Not any more.’
I take a breath. I turn to Wriothesley, knowing that he will grasp this quicker than my angry uncle. ‘If she is precontracted to Francis Dereham, as you have proved, then as his wife, as Mistress Dereham, she’s not the wife of the king. Whatever she did with Culpeper –whatevershe has confessed – it’s not adultery against the king.’
His smile never wavers. ‘Oh, we’re not bothering with the precontract now,’ he says. ‘Why should we try to get her off? We won’t even try to get you off. You’ll have to save yourself.’ He gestures to the blank sheet of paper. ‘Save yourself,’ he recommends to me. ‘When did the queen first tell you to fetch Thomas Culpeper to her?’
I speak slowly, so that he can write it down word by word, and when I hesitate, once I am choked with tears, my uncle turns on me and says: ‘Get on, get on,’ as if I were an unwilling horse checking and shying away, a warhorse tearing up the tiltyard ground, backing away from a joust.
I get on. I tell them of the snow princess; I tell them of the little gifts. I tell them how she sent dinners to Thomas Culpeper when he was ill, how he came to her when he was well again. I tell them how we all three found ways around the court and ways around the palaces on the progress north and back again, so that they could meet, so that he could kiss her hand, so that she could tell him that she loved him.
‘And did he swive her?’ my uncle demands. ‘Yes or no?’
‘I sat at a distance,’ I say. ‘I had my back to them. One night, I fell asleep. I can’t say.’
‘Are you telling me that the young sod picked a lock, climbed the stair, got into her stool room, and then spent the night talking?’ he jeers.
I can’t say it; I can’t bear for him to speak of it. I think of it as it was: love, true love, the ideal of courtly love. Culpeper loved the young queen, asLancelotlovedGuinevere, with a passion that took them outside the normal rules, with a love that few people ever know. But they had it – they risked their lives to be together. I risked my life to see them together. It was love. It was true love.
‘Shall I put down that they fucked or not?’ Wriothesley asks, bored.
I nod. Put it down. It doesn’t seem to matter.
ICAN SEE FROMmy window the royal barge that is to take Kitty to Syon Abbey. They have shuttered the sides so that no one can see her, so whatever gown she has chosen is wasted. I hear the slam of the guard presenting arms and the opening of the garden door, and then I see her. From my window, high above, I know it is her. They hurry her down the path and down the pierunder a muffling cape so that I cannot see what she is wearing. But despite their hurry, she is doing her queenly walk – I have seen her practise it a dozen times. I imagine she has practised this exact walk: from the garden stairs, through the garden where she played at snowball fights only last winter, to the pier where she took the barge for her triumphant entry to London in the spring.
They try to rush her on board, but she does her queenly walk all the way up the gangplank, and then they cast off, and I can hear, even through the window, the beat of the drummer making the time for the rowers, and they lean on their oars and pull the barge into the centre of the river, where the current picks up and takes them downstream, and she has gone.
The wake from the barge ripples away to nothingness among the swaying reeds of the bank; the waters close over her passing. A heron flaps on broad wings across the river and lands, knee deep in still water and looks down at its own reflection.
An hour or so passes. I find a book on heraldry – my uncle’s library of books are all about his own importance – and I am seated in the window, turning the pages, when I see that the Howard barge has come to the pier and swung round, to face downstream.
The double doors of the room are thrown open, and my uncle comes in. ‘Get your cape,’ he says. ‘They’ll send your things on.’
I rise to my feet. ‘Am I going to Syon with Kitty?’ I ask. I think: now that we have both confessed, we will live in disgrace together, and I can write the script of our recovery.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Hurry up.’
We will have to hurry, for it must be near slack water now. I get my cape and draw it around me because it is a cold November day and I can see the surface of the river is ruffled by wintry winds.
He gives me his arm, and we walk side by side through the garden, the dead leaves skittering away from our feet. We reach the pier, and he walks me up the gangplank to the back of the barge. The gangplank is run ashore, the lines cast off. The rowers raise theirblades in salute, and then the bargemaster pushes us off and steps on board, and the rowers dip their oars.
