Page 93 of Boleyn Traitor
‘No need for you to look as if you should be in the Tower.’
She turns her lips up in a smile; but as soon as I see the king rise heavily from his throne at the stern of the barge, I know that we are all in grave trouble. I can read his resentment in the set of his padded shoulders, the way he scowls at the heavy snow clouds overhead.
The barge spins expertly, the rowers leaning on their oars, to bring it parallel to the pier. The king is unsteady on the rocking deck; his hand tightens on the bargemaster’s shoulder, his fat face is furrowed with lines of pain. His eyes are squinting against the bright winter light, dazzling on the sparkling river.
He cannot get down the gangplank without leaning on thebargemaster, and at the foot, he snaps his fingers for Thomas Culpeper, who pulls off his cap and springs forward to kneel.
‘Get up, fool – I need your arm,’ the king says, pulling him close and putting all his weight on the young man.
Culpeper staggers for a moment and then bears up. They start to walk, the king as unsteady as a drunken man. Culpeper hesitates as they go past the queen. Katheryn sinks into a deep curtsey, exquisitely graceful, and comes up with a radiant smile.
The king makes a noise as if he is hawking up phlegm and says: ‘Keep going, you damn fool. Every moment on my leg is like a year of pain.’
Culpeper can do nothing but heave the king past Katheryn as if she were not there.
John Dudley ducks around the two of them to arrive on the other side. ‘Would Your Majesty take my arm as well?’ he offers.
‘You think I can’t walk?’ the king demands, shuddering to a standstill. ‘You think I can’t walk through my own garden into my own palace? From my own damned barge?’
‘A wound that would have killed another man,’ John Dudley exclaims.
‘It’s killing me,’ the king says dourly. ‘Give me your arm and take me to my rooms.’
The younger men of the court trail behind the king, watching for their chance to help, wondering how they are going to get him up the huge flight of stairs. We ladies are left completely rejected on the riverbank. The playful spring day has come to a sudden wintry dusk.
The noblemen’s barges, following the king, line up to dock like heavy-laden trows, one after another, and the old lords stamp down the gangplanks and into the palace without a courteous word to anyone, except a token bow to the queen and a nod to summon their young kinsmen or their spies.
‘Shall we go in, Your Grace?’ I prompt Katheryn.
She is staring after the king with John Dudley holding up one side and Thomas Culpeper bearing up the other. She looks quite appalled,as if she had never before realised that the king is a bad-tempered old invalid, thirty-two years her senior, who can only get older and sicker; and that all her youth and joy and prettiness are wasted on him.
Her lower lip trembles. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she demands. ‘Did he not see me? Did he not see me curtsey?’
Ever since that day at Rochester, when she stole his gaze from his rightful bride, he has not been able to look away from her.
‘What’s wrong with him? He’s so old – all of a sudden! Has he gone blind?’
‘Shut up,’ I spit. ‘Shut your mouth.’
She gasps at my rudeness; she is stunned into silence, long enough for me to bundle her indoors, out of earshot of anyone, into her bedroom.
‘How... how dare you?’ she whimpers, as soon as the door is closed behind us.
‘You could die for those words,’ I rejoin. ‘Don’t ever say them.’
She sinks onto a chair and blindly feels for her hand mirror as if she has to see herself, as if she has to make sure that she is as beautiful as ever. ‘But what’s the matter with him?’ she demands, never taking her gaze from the portrait of young sorrow reflected back at her.
‘He’s an old man with a terrible old wound from jousting,’ I tell her bleakly. ‘He’s nearly fifty. Most men die before his age. And he’s been working hard in London while we’ve been merrymaking here. He’s been hearing evidence against a boyhood friend – a man he’s known all his life, a man he pardoned once before. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be surrounded by friends that you can’t trust – but the king has lived like that ever since... ever since...’ I think: it was before the death of Thomas Cromwell, before Anne, before even Thomas More – even before Cardinal Wolsey who guided him so faithfully, even before Queen Katherine. He has been untrusting and untrustworthy from the moment he secretly exulted at his brother’s death and jumped into his shoes.
‘He’s terribly alone,’ I say. ‘Grief and anger keep him from sleep,so he’s always tired, and he’s always in pain – he’s terrified of loss, and yet he executes his friends. He wants to be loved, and yet he has no heart. I’ve seen him like this before...’ But never so bad, I think to myself. ‘The important thing, the thing you must remember, is that you can never, never say one word, not a single word, that suggests he is old or ill or...’ I break off; I don’t think I can say the word ‘impotent’ to this child, watching herself in her mirror as a single tear rolls down her face.
‘You can’t say anything but praise. It’s against the law to say that he is old or unwell. It is illegal to say he might die. It’s against the law, Katheryn.’
‘But that’s a stupid law,’ she observes. ‘Everyone dies.’
‘Still the law,’ I tell her. ‘You can be tried for treason and beheaded for saying – as you did at the pier – that the king is looking old or sick. You must never say it.’
‘He walked right past me as if he didn’t see me.’
