No Will But His (22 page)

"Is she not? And there's something about her of . . . you know . . . my other niece."

"Indeed, there is. I wonder how long until she catches his eye."

The words made a monstrous meaning in Kathryn's mind, a meaning that she was loathe to credit or believe. She was going to marry Thomas Culpepper. She'd been brought to court to marry Thomas Culpepper. She'd not think ought else. She'd not let aught else come into her mind. She was going to marry Thomas Culpepper.

She started running before she realized she was doing it. Running toward the queen's chambers.

Without thinking or listening for whom might be in the rooms, she threw the door open into the antechamber. And stopped.

Chapter Thirty

In the room there were two men. One of them was tall and thin, with dark hair and the sort of features that made him look as though he'd grown careworn before his time. Broken to harness the dowager duchess called that look, where the features collapsed around the bare, supporting bones and left in their place only a firm, zeal burned certainty that the possessor of the face would do his best and work his hardest and would, by all that that was right and meet, die on his post rather than default.

Kathryn knew that as the face of Sir Anthony Browne from when they'd been received into the guesthouse. She'd thought of him rather as a saint of old in a painting, his face longer than broad and framed in dark, dark hair and beard, with the eyes too large and too full of intention. He'd looked worried then. Now he looked scared.

The reason he looked scared, Kathryn thought, was the other man in the room. Kathryn had seen him once or twice, glimpsing him from a distance while she was in Greenwich Palace. Sometimes she saw him in the gardens. Sometimes she saw him across the hallways. He always had a number of men with him, and always Kathryn froze in place and came no nearer for it was no part of her duties to disturb His Majesty, the king of England.

Now she saw him up close, his presence overwhelming in the crowded room.

He wore a suit of gilded cloth and over it a cape made of furs. His hair had white amid its auburn glory, and he'd grown stout with years—so she heard. In the palace she'd heard that he never jousted nor hunted anymore.

But he was also a head taller than any other man and, standing there, sparkling in his golden suit, it seemed to Kathryn that he filled the whole room.

She said "oh" under her breath and froze in place. Neither man saw her, as they were both well away in a confrontation of their own.

The king paced back and forth in the narrow room that was but a receiving area to the queen's chambers. Behind it was the place where the ladies-in-waiting had greeted their new sovereign, and behind that still the dining room where they had served her dinner. Anne of Cleves was now at the other end of the apartments, where she would be getting undressed and washed and ready for bed.

Doubtless it was his knowing that he couldn't be heard that allowed His Majesty to give full vent to his temper. He was pacing from one end of the room to the other, yelling as he did so. "I have never been so struck with consternation as when I was shown this woman who is supposed to be my queen, I tell you!" He scowled and frowned and added, "I see nothing to this woman as men report of her," he said, and paced some more.

Sir Anthony Browne cowered and muttered something that could not readily be understood, and the king shook his head at him. Standing next to the hapless Lord Browne, the King seemed yet more a giant of a man or perhaps—as Kathryn had heard tell in stories—like those gods who, in Greek and Roman times, descending from their mountain top fastness to fulminate mortals for errors they did not know they were committing.

"Tell me, sir," the king said. "Do you see anything of her as men report? Is she then so beautiful as to dazzle the eye? Think you, sir, that many other men, many potentates, have vied for her hand?"

Lord Browne shrugged. "I think, Sire," he said, "that she wears very unbecoming clothes in the German style, and that wearing them masks her true figure, making her seem not to Your Majesty's liking.

"And why wears she these clothes?" the king said. "Surely she had some idea what would be worn in England. And surely, having this idea, she would have done something about it? Made sure to make her clothes in the style of gowns that she knows I like. It betrays very little liking for or interest in my taste and opinion," he said.

"I think, Sire, if I might venture to say, that she is so unschooled . . ."

"If by unschooled, you mean dull, I've already perceived that myself," he said. "Why, she can't even speak English, but can only make those guttural sounds from her own country. And I can't find that she speaks French, either."

To this, Lord Browne made no comment, but the king reacted yet as if the nobleman had objected and said. "Anne Boleyn, my wife, could speak French and German as well as English."

This seemed to be too much for the gentleman, because he said something under his breath, from which the words, "is dead" could be distinguished.

"Aye, dead she is. And I am constrained to marry this woman . . ." He opened his arms on either side. "I like her not."

"I perceive that, Sire," Sir Anthony Browne said, his eyes intent, his cheeks flushed.

"Why did you not tell me she would not be to my taste?"

"How could I, Sire? My own commission was to receive her and do her honor, and I did that knowing full well I was receiving my future queen. Would you expect me to do her insult, or to insult Your Majesty's taste with it? If she were good enough to please other men, I think she might have pleased Your Majesty, and that my saying then that she was too brown or that her features were not to my taste would only have compounded insult to yourself."

The king nodded. "Perhaps you have reason, in this. Yes, yes, I can see the fault is not with you. But I like her not. I am ashamed that men have praised her as they have done, and I love her not."

He covered his face with his hands. "I must be gotten out of this contract, Lord Browne. I must."

"Well," Lord Browne said, his voice even, as though this royal plight were perfectly normal. "Well, then, Your Majesty has clever lawyers and bright jurists. They should be able to find, among themselves, some way you can get out of the contract."

The king stared at Sir Anthony a moment, and then nodded. "Very well, Lord Browne, very well. And so they will. Cromwell had best find . . ." He shook his head.

It was apparent to Kathryn the interview was at an end, and she realized at any minute, one or both of the men might realize she had overheard them. She could not stand the idea. She might not get punished for eavesdropping—for how could she be, when they'd been speaking so loudly in an unlocked room—but her presence would not be welcomed.

She backed from the room slowly and out to the hallway and then paused. She should hide, so she wouldn't be in the hallway when the king came this way. From inside the room, she heard the king say, "I was so distracted that I forgot to give her the furs I brought for her as a New Year's gift. Would you please—"

Kathryn had just decided that she would knit herself by the door, so the king would not remark her presence, when the king came out of the chamber.

She froze in the middle of the hallway. He frowned at her, distracted, then started to go the other way. At the same time, she had decided she must go that way to avoid him. As she realized he was going that way, she stepped the other way, at the same time he stepped that way also, and she found herself staring at the expanse of royal gold cloth doublet.

"Madam!" the king said, sounding much put out.

Kathryn did the only thing she knew how to do, the thing she had been taught to do and prepared to do for all these long months. She sank to the floor in a deep curtsey, then bowed her head low.

"Your Majesty," she said. "I beg your pardon. I am so addled with your glory that I—"

This brought a chuckle from the king's majesty, which, in the way of such things, grew into a guffaw. "Rise, rise, then," he said. His hands on Kathryn's shoulders pulled her up, and she rose to look at him.

He looked at her a long time, his eyes narrowing, then widening, as if he found something new in her features, or something else that he wished explained. He looked—Kathryn thought—caught somewhere between surprise and anger, between recognition and pleasure.

At long last he spoke, "You're one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, I suppose?" he said.

"Yes, and it please Your Majesty."

"It pleases my majesty very much," he answered, his voice suddenly soft and velvety. "And you have been at court much? You seem like a very little girl."

She shook her head. "I've only just come to court," she said. "I was brought," she said, "to be part of the queen's  establishment."

The king made a face. "Ah, the queen. I like her not."

Kathryn, thinking that it was no business of hers to criticize the queen, merely bowed at his words.

"And that smell about her . . . It quite overpowers me."

"It is her gowns," Kathryn said. "They have not been aired, and they smell musty. Her land must be very cold and not sunny, and clothes must be kept at the bottom of trunks with a lot of camphor."

The king visibly shuddered. "I like it not," he said again, and getting no answer from Kathryn, he sighed. "She's not a clean, pleasant thing as you are, my dear. As . . . as English maids are." He nodded and seemed about to walk around her, but turned around, "What is your name, my dear?"

"Kathryn Howard, Your Majesty," she said, and curtseyed deep again.

When she looked up once more, the king was quite gone. And Kathryn thought that her uncle, if indeed he had any foolish plans of using her to attract the king, had been quite wrong. The king cared not for her charms or for her beauty. He cared only to tell someone—anyone—how much he disliked his queen.

Feeling sorry for the lonely foreigner with the lovely smile, Kathryn walked into the chambers to perform her duty to the one who was, for now, her rightful mistress.

Chapter Thirty-One

Kathryn had been surprised that the king married the queen after all, but perhaps she shouldn't have been, she thought.

After all she'd heard—even then, the marriage had been arranged among countries. It wasn't like a man jilting his betrothed to whom he'd promised the world in the woods by the river. The king had entered into a contract with another country as much as in an engagement with this woman, Anne of Cleves.

It was clear the king didn't like it. He complained to all he could find. Kathryn didn't see him again after that day in Canterbury, so she did not hear him complain to her, but she could well imagine that he would, given a chance, because everyone else reported it to Anne.

That day, Kathryn found herself listening to the wild confidences of Lady Rochefort, as she came from the garden into the house. Jane Boleyn had caught up with her and accompanied her, talking. "They say," she said. "That he said she cannot be a maiden. That he felt her breasts and her stomach and they are not those of a maiden." Jane was pale and excited, her eyes shining as they did when she was moved by some internal impulse that—Kathryn had come to know—had very little to do with what was happening externally around her, and far more with what was happening internally, in Jane's own mind.

In the rising and falling tides of her own madness, her guilt, the remaining hopeless love for her long dead husband, Jane moved and talked, and often needed but little encouragement from reality to latch onto something that was passing around her and talk about it with burning passion.

"What think you it means, Kathryn?"

Kathryn shrugged. "Ah, but what can it mean?" she said. "Nothing at all, Jane, save that the king doesn't like her."

Jane had seized Kathryn's arm and drawn closer. "They say," she said, "that the king went to her in Canterbury, you know, without announcement, hoping that she would recognize him, even in his plain form, which would show him that their love was true."

Kathryn had heard the same and had wondered at the king who could imagine that there would be love between himself and this woman he'd never met. Oh, Kathryn had heard all the legends and stories, where children who had never known their parents instantly recognized them from something natural in the blood. And she'd heard the stories where lovers who were meant to be fell upon each other on first meeting as though they'd known each other from birth and craved each other above all.

Having lived in the world a number of years, though she was unfortunately not sure whether that number be fifteen or seventeen Kathryn thought this was all nonsense. How could people feel anything for someone they'd never seen? "If the king thought that . . ." Kathryn said, and then had the good sense to keep her mouth shut, because what went on in her mind was that for a man so much older than her, and far more experienced in life and love, to believe in such tales showed a credulity almost bordering on childishness.

She didn't say it, but Jane Boleyn must have guessed it, because she laughed. "Isn't it just like a man?" she said. "They live like that, from tales of youth, and they understand themselves and others very little. For all women are more dependent on love and the fruition of the heart, they believe it more . . ." She was silent a moment. "If I had known what was in George's mind . . ." But she said no more, nor did Kathryn pursue the subject.

Instead they walked in through the side door and up to the queen's chambers. It was their duty to be present at the making of the queen's bed, though they weren't quite of enough rank to make her bed themselves.

When Kathryn got in, the mattress had been unrolled over the bed. The heaviest of the ladies-in-waiting, a stout German who had come with Anne from her homeland, took the duty of rolling upon the mattress to test it for hidden daggers or other traps. Next the feather bed was laid upon the mattress and the ritual repeated.

Then came the linen sheets, examined for the presence of some cunning hidden poison. Finally the ladies who had made the bed kissed the places where their hands had touched, and just at that moment, Anne of Cleves came into the room to retire.