Page 92 of Boleyn Traitor
‘He’s too clever by half,’ my uncle says crossly.
‘It’s not an offence to be too clever, is it?’
‘It’s an offence to flaunt your learning, to say that none of us old lords can muster more than one wit between all of us, to suggest that England cannot be ruled without a Wolsey or a Cromwell and that the king’s poems don’t scan or rhyme or have enough words to a line or whatever,’ he says irritably.
I scrutinise him; I don’t fear his ill temper now that my future is secure. I am a wealthy woman in my own right, I am indispensable to a favoured queen, and if she becomes a regent queen, I shall be her chief advisor. Her inexperience and ignorance are my advantage. No queen before her had so poor an education; no queen before her had nothing to fill the empty days. English-born, she cannot serve as an ambassador like Katherine of Aragon. She has no interest inCatholicism like the first devout queen, nor reform like the second. She has not a thought in her head about the running of the country, no interest in the poor, nor in rescuing those who have nowhere to go now that the monasteries are closed. She has no clever brothers like the Seymours to support her authority. She was raised as a pillion wife, who sits sideways behind her husband on a special saddle and cannot even see where she is going. If the king makes her queen regent at his death, I will rule England through her.
Hampton Court, February
1541
INFEBRUARY, THEking, tiring of a lack of evidence, goes to London with his advisors to speed the execution of his friends Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop. My father meets them there; but does not come upriver to Hampton Court to visit me. From this, I understand that he is content with my progress from queen to queen. The Duke of Norfolk goes north, alert to the threat of the Scots on the borders. The court, suddenly free of old lords and the old king, makes every day a May Day at Hampton Court. The weather turns icy, and Katheryn, a snow princess from a fairytale, in bright blue with swansdown at her wrists and neck, leads her ladies at a scampering run through the formal gardens, jumping over the herb hedges and scuffing the coloured gravels in a wild battle of snowball fights. The king’s young men – unemployed and unsupervised while the king persecutes old friends in London – see us from the windows and come whooping and hollering out of doors, throwing handfuls of fresh snow.
We run away laughing and order pages and chamberers to roll up a store of snowballs, and we set up an ambush beside one of theyew-tree allées. As they dash down the tunnel, with brown needles underfoot, we storm snowballs down on them and jump out of the yew trees to surround them. Trapped under the green boughs on dry ground, they have no snow to make more ammunition: it is our victory. They surrender, holding up their hands and demanding a parlay.
Thomas Culpeper steps out of the laughing crowd of young men and faces Katheryn, her hair tumbling down, her cheeks rosy as a child.
‘Mercy,’ he pleads, kneeling at her feet, but his brown eyes looking up into her face say:kiss me!
‘Are you very, very sorry?’ she asks him. She is panting from the running and the play-battle, but I think she is breathless with desire.
He pulls off his red cap from his thick brown hair. ‘I lie beneath your feet,’ he says. ‘You can do what you want with me.’
‘You are beneath my feet,’ she agrees. ‘I shall hold you to that.’
They don’t move, and all of us are frozen, captured by this tableau of sudden desire, under the dark-green shadow of the trees, surrounded by the bright whiteness of the sunshine outside. We are hidden with them in a private world, in the secrecy of the greenwood tree, breathing the peppery scent of the fallen fronds crushed under Culpeper’s knees as he sits back on his heels, as if he would stay all day looking up at her, as if time has frozen like the dripping icicles, as if she is a snow princess who will melt into his mouth.
Slowly, as if she is skating on thin ice, Katheryn glides forward and extends her hand to him. The white swansdown on her sleeve flutters under his warm breath as he takes her fingers and drops his curly dark head over her hand. In one fluid movement, he rises to his feet, lifts her hand to his mouth, turns it over, and puts a kiss on the inner softness of her wrist, where the blue veins run direct to her heart.
Everyone sees this gesture of courtly love; it means nothing to them – but it means something to me. For a moment, I seethe two of them, illuminated in the darkness by a bright shaft of winter-white sunshine; I think I see a heart in a heartless world: love among the loveless. Nobody watching Thomas’ lips on her wrist and the colour rising from her swansdown collar can blame the pretty queen for giving her fingertips to him. No young man would blame him for taking the soft palm on his cheek. All of us are spellbound in the moment, as if there is such a thing as true love. As if, in this grinding exchequer that is the court, there can be desire: freely offered and lovingly taken.
For once, there is no one to remind us that nothing is free: everything is bought and paid for. Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk is far away, guarding the north gate of the kingdom like a bad-tempered old dog. The other older lords are in London with the king, sifting evidence against one of their own. The queen’s older sister Isabel Baynton is warm indoors; her husband Sir Edward with her. The queen’s uncle, Lord William Howard, is packing his bags to go to Paris as the ambassador, newly promoted into dead man’s shoes. The whole young court is like a pleasure garden where the hard lord and schoolmaster have gone away. They have not conspired to be free, suddenly they are.
We go hunting with the king’s hounds, but nobody cares about the kill; we are riding for the joy and excitement, recklessly following the hounds wherever they lead, half-hoping to be lost in snowy woods, finding our way to the warm dining tents for dinner, drinking too much hot wine, and riding home singing love songs. Mary Norris rides hand in hand with her new husband George Carew, Catherine Carey is inseparable from her husband Francis Knollys, Charles Howard and Margaret Douglas are always together, and the queen herself and Thomas Culpeper are like the point and the pencil of a drawing compass: wherever she sits, he seems to circle her, always staying out of reach but never too far. Wherever he is, she looks up as if to measure the distance from him. They are never again as close as they were at the snowball fight, and strangely, this careful distancing is more hauntingly erotic than any embrace.They are like two beautiful wild creatures circling each other, alert only to each other and blind to anyone else.
When we dance in a circle, and she can see his place, two girls away from her, and then one and then the next step will bring him to her – she steps back and excuses herself from the dance and waves a maid-of-honour forward, so that she does not go handfast with him or step into his arms. I would praise her for her discretion, but then I see the triumphant smile she throws at him as she avoids him, and I realise that she is only playing at retreat to bring him on, closer and closer. He watches her go, turns the bright heat of his charm on the girl she has put in her place, and waits, without looking, until she comes back to him.
I speak to her; a queen of England, especially the fourth wife, should be beyond suspicion. ‘Like Caesar’s wife,’ I tell her.
‘Who’s Caesar’s wife?’ she asks.
‘I’m saying that no one can speak slander against you.’
‘They can’t,’ she says simply. ‘Thomas Culpeper has never done more than kiss my hand once, and we were in front of all the court. You saw it yourself. Only once.’
‘I saw it,’ I say – and I think: it is my fault not theirs that I keep seeing it in my mind, that I keep seeing her hand against his face, his mouth on her wrist as a moment of quite extraordinary beauty.
ONE FROSTY DAYat noon before dinner, Kitty takes a fancy to dance on the frozen grass of the archery lawns, and we summon musicians and choristers to play and sing country dances and gallops, changing partners at every chorus. As we fall on cushions and carpets, hot and laughing after romping through a circle dance, we hear a drumbeat, ominous as a roll of distant thunder on the bright day. They are the drums of the king’s barges coming steadily upriver, insistent as drums of war. Then we hear the sharp blare of trumpets as the king’s barge draws up at the pier.
At once, we grab the capes and hats and muffs that we had throwndown while dancing and hurry down to the pier. Nobody needs to be told to tie their capes and straighten their hats: none of us want to look tousled by play. The older people come more slowly out of the palace, eyeing us with quick suspicious glances to see that we don’t betray their lack of supervision.
We knew the king would arrive today or tomorrow, but we still feel caught out. The king’s companions dash ahead to line up in the correct order of precedence, stiffly waiting to greet the king, as if we had not been rioting as dancing shepherds and milkmaids just moments ago.
I look from the flushed young faces turned to the cold river, to the heavy barges of the old men waiting to land, a sluggish armada of wealth and age, and I think: if the king ever comes to know himself as one of the old, bad-tempered men, cold and distant, and his court as young and playful and hot-blooded; then he will hate us. Katheryn and her maids-of-honour look like runaway schoolgirls recalled by a strict teacher. They press their cold hands to their rosy cheeks and try to pretend they are not heated by dancing and flirtation. Kitty looks as guilty as a child with a smear of jam on her smock.
‘Smile, Your Grace,’ I whisper urgently. ‘The king will want to see a pretty face to welcome him.’
‘But he’s been in London executing people!’
