No Will But His (21 page)

At the palace without a queen, life had fallen into an easy rhythm. The ladies-in-waiting were trained in how to serve the queen when she was in. For the Christmas holidays, they had fun in a quiet way.

Kathryn found herself a great favorite, as the ladies asked her to sing and play for them in the evenings while they were at their work. Her voice was praised, as was her skill with the music. If she had any sorrow at all, it was that, so far, she had not yet seen Thomas Culpepper.

His being in the king's household, and there being not a queen, there were no amusements that joined men and women. She had heard from the other ladies that he was fair and nimble in the dance, and that he had a good voice, but there the knowledge ended.

Kathryn had come to accept that, unlike her memories of him in youth, he was not a very tall man nor endowed with particular strength. And there her hearing about Culpepper must rest till the queen arrived, a fact that made Kathryn very anxious for the queen to arrive.

Every day she would walk in the gardens and climb a small hillock from the top of which she would look out at the sky and hope that fair weather in London foretold fair weather at sea.

It was one day as she was doing that, that she heard an exclamation behind her, and turning around, she saw a dark woman standing stock-still with her hand to her face. As Kathryn turned around, she realized the woman was very pale, as though she had lost all strength or perhaps as though she were about to lose consciousness.

Kathryn started down the hillock toward her saying, "Are you well? You look so ill."

At the sound of her voice and seeing her close, the woman lowered her hand from her face, revealing a mouth puckered in what seemed to be a permanent frown of worry. Then her mouth opened, and she said. "Oh, I am sorry. It is only that as I approached you from the back, you looked like her . . ."

"Her?" Kathryn said.

"My . . . my name is Jane Boleyn," the lady said. "Lady Rochefort."

"Oh." Kathryn said and curtseyed, then realized which "her" it had to be that Lady Rochefort had confused Kathryn with. "Oh, you mean I look like my cousin Anne!"

"I see her sometimes," Lady Rochefort said, looking at the sky over Kathryn's head. "But never so clear and never so . . . so present. When I saw you there, I thought that she . . ."

She looked at Kathryn, and Kathryn thought she saw shadows march behind the unremarkable brown of Jane Boleyn's eyes. There was pain there, a pain that she could not quite understand. Jane Boleyn looked back at Kathryn for a moment and then sighed, "Do you think," she said. "That the dead can pardon the living? Do you think they do? That they . . . that they can pardon and . . . and come to love the living?"

"I don't know," Kathryn said, simply. "My mother died, but . . . I barely remember what she looked like. And my father . . ." She tried to remember whether she wanted her father to forgive her for anything, but she couldn't find anything in her mind to reproach herself with. After all, she'd done the best she could while she lived with him. And he was the one who had sent her off. "I am Kathryn Howard," she said. "And people have told me before that I have a turn of my cousin's . . . Nothing . . . nothing like her, but I give an air of her."

"Like the note that lingers in the air after a song," Jane said. "You know, she used to sing all the time. Even when she was in the tower she composed songs. He loved her so much."

"The king?"

"No." Lady Rochefort shook her head. "No, my husband." She nodded, as though confirming suspicions that Kathryn should have held. "George Boleyn. They were very close."

Kathryn remembered something from way back about how there were some accusations against Anne Boleyn that couldn't be repeated. And she remembered the duchess saying, "George? I don't believe it."

Now Kathryn could say, also, "I heard that she and . . . but . . . but we didn't believe it."

"You shouldn't have believed it," Lady Rochefort said, and she scanned the sky above her head, as if she expected at any moment to see the sky open and the multitudes of the dead ride out, whether in anger or forgiveness, Kathryn couldn't tell. "It was all in my mind. He didn't notice me . . . and I loved him so much."

She looked back at Kathryn and now her eyes were just suffering—pure suffering distilled and given form. "I thought if she were dead . . ." Lady Rochefort said. "And then I realized if she were dead, he would never notice me still. So then I thought if he were dead, he would let me go. But he would not. An' I could not. I still dream about him, every night. He comes and looks at me, with those sad, sad eyes. And then he undoes his collar and shows me the red mark at his neck." She shivered.

And Kathryn, who could not see suffering but wish to ameliorate it, and who did not know how to console a woman who carried the kind of grief now crushing Jane, did the only thing she knew how to do. She stretched her hand to the other woman, "Come, Lady Rochefort. You are shivering. Me thinketh you are cold. Perhaps we should walk toward the house."

They walked along the path for a moment and presently Kathryn said, "Do you think the queen will be able to sail soon? I so hope she'll be here for the Christmas celebrations! It would grieve me beyond speaking if we were robbed of our celebrations because of the weather at Calais."

"I think that one cannot count upon the weather at the channel," Lady Rochefort said. "I've heard of boats stopped there for many months together. And you cannot be more impatient than the king, but neither will the king let such precious cargo make a perilous crossing."

After that the two spoke perfectly sensibly together. And many times, in the coming days, Kathryn sought out Jane Boleyn for walks or talks in the evenings. It wasn't so much that she appreciated the lady's company—for in truth their conversation rarely went beyond the merest platitudes and the sort of talk that Kathryn could have with anyone at all. It was because when Jane was left too long alone, Kathryn could see her eyes darting about, looking here and there, as though she could see things that no one else saw. Kathryn could not stand the idea of the woman suffering so greatly among people who paid her little mind.

"Do you know who the woman is to whom you talk so much?" Elizabeth Basset asked Kathryn the next day, catching her between the dormitory and the gardens.

"Lady Rochefort?"

"Indeed. Do you know who she is?"

"The widow of George Boleyn, is she not?" Kathryn asked.

"The wido . . . And quite responsible for his death. Her deposition got him beheaded, along with your cousin Anne Boleyn."

"I know that," Kathryn said. "Or rather, no one has ever told it to me, but I suspected it from things I heard at the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk's."

"And yet you talk to her!"

Kathryn had done a lot of thinking since first starting to talk to Jane Boleyn. She thought of her own sins, most of all. After all she'd pledged troth with Francis Dereham, but then she'd let him go as though he were nothing at all when her grandmother had ordered her to do so. And though she didn't think Francis was dead, his expedition to Ireland entailed great danger, and it might very well mean he was dead now, in which case his death was upon her conscience as sure as George Boleyn's death was upon Jane Boleyn's.

For though Kathryn had never felt the kind of love that Jane had felt for her husband, she could imagine what that would be like. She had seen that kind of pained, distorted love in Henry Manox's eyes. And Henry Manox, just like Jane Boleyn had done to her husband, would do Kathryn a bad turn if he could. She tried to imagine that kind of love. Painful love, she thought. Love that bit deep into the heart and would not let go. And she was awash in pity for those who felt it.

"I don't presume to judge," she said at last. "Have you never made any mistakes, Mistress Basset, that you feel heartily sorry for?"

Elizabeth Basset sniffed and shook her head. "Mistakes perhaps," she said. "But I have never committed so monstrous a crime."

And on that, she walked ahead of Kathryn, leaving her behind.

It seemed to Kathryn that she had made an enemy there, but she did not care. There was always any number of people who would mislike her, but there was a very large number of people who liked her, as well. She was quick of understanding and always willing to help, and that meant she soon became a great favorite with the ladies around her.

Still it was a surprise to her to be chosen among the fifty English ladies who were to receive the queen—who was sailing to England at last—at Canterbury. The other ladies chosen were older than her and of much greater stature at court, but Kathryn was the only one who showed her pleasure by doing a little dance, bringing a smile to Lady Rutland's face. "Mark ye," she said. "How proud and happy Kathryn Howard is to do her duty by king and queen. Ye should all be so happy."

Only on the day proper, Kathryn was not sure she was so happy. It was sleeting hard and bitterly cold. They traveled in carriages, well wrapped in blankets, but it was so cold that there was no opportunity for merrymaking or even for singing, as she usually did to while the time away. Only for wrapping yourself tight in furs and hoping you wouldn't catch a mortal chill before meeting the queen. And in Kathryn's case, hoping as well that she would not die of some dread disease before she even got to meet her intended, Thomas Culpepper.

But at long last, they arrived at Canterbury and there, in the guest house of the great monastery of St. Augustine, the ladies were served a light supper by a great warming fire, and then outfitted in matching velvet hoods and disposed in the queen's chambers to await Anne of Cleve's arrival.

It was some hours before the queen—or she who was to be queen, though they always called her queen to each other, in their conversations—arrived, and when she did, she looked nothing like Kathryn expected. She'd seen the portrait. Indeed, all of them had. And there was a faint—very faint—resemblance between the portrait and the woman. Only the queen's features were not nearly so regular as they'd been painted, and they were thinner and bonier—though perhaps she'd lost weight during her months of exile in Calais, waiting for the sea to allow her crossing. And she had a long nose, not visible in the portrait that showed her frontally. Her eyes were hooded and nowhere near as open or expressive as they'd been in the portrait.

The result was that she looked older than she'd seemed, and also more imperious and less gentle.

She spoke no English, and when she spoke, it was in a harsh tongue, which went with her harsher features. She gave vent to that tongue now, while the women all stared at her, in various expressions of surprise.

"Her Majesty says," a thin woman said, when the queen was done, advancing and speaking volubly in a terrible accent, "she says that she's very glad to be here, but that of everything that's been done for her in England, from gun salutes to great gifts, this is the best thing yet, for it shows that her subjects are as anxious to be acquainted with her as she is to be acquainted with them, and of that she's glad."

The queen smiled, and her thin features were quite transformed, of a sudden, seeming younger and happier than she'd been before, and in that moment Kathryn could not help liking her. What must it be like, she wondered, to be cast adrift like that, far from one's home and everything she knows? For if she looks strange to us, for certain we look strange to her. And if her tongue sounds odd to us, surely our tongue . . . She shook her head. What a terrible thing this was. She could not but feel pity for the woman, despite her ungainly features and the horrible gown she was wearing, a German thing with far too much fabric that showed off her figure as much as a tent would.

Kathryn rushed forward to help the queen get ready for dinner, by washing her hands and face and changing her gown—for another gown that looked just as bad. Her gowns all had a strange musty smell, as though she'd been keeping them in trunks too long in the damp climate of Calais and no one had told her to air them. Fine gowns they were, too, and very beautiful, but in a style that could make no woman—or indeed anything—look well.

And yet, the two or three times that Kathryn became the recipient of a dazzling royal smile, she thought that Queen Anne was really not that bad looking.

Which was why she was shocked—as she came back from a lengthy errand to the kitchen to tell the cook to prepare warmed bricks for the queen's bed, where the bricks could not be found and the cook could not seem to understand what she was supposed to do to warm them—by hearing words harshly pronounced from somewhere ahead of her. "The king likes her not, milord. You mark my words. Of all the attributes of women that he likes, she has none. And of those he dislikes, she has them all."

"Think you that it is quite that bad?" a man's voice answered.

Now, looking closer, Kathryn could tell that the voices came from a room ahead, where the door was open only the barest crack, just enough to allow sound to escape.

The first voice spoke again, and she recognized in it the voice of Lady Browne, though she'd heard it only once, welcoming them to this guesthouse. "I think it is perhaps worse," she said slowly. "Not only will the king not like it, but because she's not his subject and is the sister of a powerful prince herself . . . well, I ask you." She shook her head. "You mark my words, someone is going to lose his head for this."

"The painter Hans Holbein," the male voice said, and now Kathryn realized it was the voice of her uncle.

"Perhaps, but I believe not. Because Holbein is an artist, and the king knows that and will know that Holbein's way of seeing things is different. Influenced by his artistic eye. He'll probably forgive him. Cromwell now . . . This marriage is Cromwell's devising."

There was a long silence. And then the Duke of Norfolk said, his voice heavy with thought. "I wonder if the king will go on with it. If he will marry her at all, if she turns out not to his liking . . ."

"I suspect he'll find a way to get rid of her. I saw the little wench, by the by. Beautiful girl and so full of life."