No Will But His (28 page)

"What is it, then?" Kathryn said. "For I have traveled before," she said, as if all her trips between Horsham and Lambeth made her a world-weary traveler. "And I have never seen such dun fields, so many dead cattle, or people so dispirited. Do they dislike me for their queen then?"

"Oh, no, Your Majesty." Lady Douglas said, while helping rinse dust from Kathryn's long auburn hair. "There are, maybe," she said, "some as do but not that many. The ones who resent you at all do so because they loved Lady Anne excessively and wished her to be queen. But she herself, having accepted the divorce so mildly ,gives them no force to pursue her rights for her." She shook her head. "No, milady. What ails the kingdom is this long, hot, dry summer, the lack of rain. The crops die in the field and the cattle for lack of fodder."

What an omen! Kathryn shivered, afraid that this would be held to her account, but Lady Douglas, as though reading her thoughts, shook her head. "No, milady, I don't think we can hold it to your account. It has happened before in this kingdom, and it will again. My grandfather always said there was no accounting for the weather or for the rage of princes." And as though realizing how her words could be taken, she laughed a little. "You see," she said, "he had lived through the Wars of the Roses with all their shifting alliances, and he thought that princes could not be trusted not to make war at will and with no regard."

She dried Kathryn's hair upon a linen towel and commenced brushing it. Normally this was the work of other experienced, specialized attendants, but Lady Douglas seemed to wish to talk to Kathryn in semiprivacy—there were only two women standing near the fireplace—and, therefore, undertook this work herself.

"I thank God everyday," she said, "that I was born in this time and not my grandfather's, and that I grew up under the rule of such a good king as our King Henry, because he's kept us from having war in the kingdom, everyone's hand against everyone's else's till it seemed it would be the end days, just as the Bible foretold."

She brushed Kathryn's hair carefully. "There is a letter, Your Majesty, from the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk."

Kathryn stiffened a little but tried not to look alarmed. "My grandmother? Is aught wrong? You said that there is plague in London, and Lambeth is not that far away. I know the king has physicians. Should I—" As she spoke, she started to rise from her seat.

"Nothing is wrong with your grandmother, Your Majesty," Lady Douglas said. "Only she writes to you to ask you a favor for someone she said was an old friend."

Kathryn looked puzzled. Lady Douglas continued, "She has heard from a man called Francis Dereham."

"Francis!" Kathryn said, surprised. The name came to her as the name of one dead, no more to be pronounced between the living.

"You know him, then, Your Majesty?"

"He was . . . He was one of the gentlemen of honor at the house of my grandmother," she said. "And I have spoken to him in the past. He was, I heard, gone to Ireland to make his fortune in some enterprise of privateering."

"It seems," Lady Douglas said. "That his enterprise prospers not, and that he's determined to come to court and has applied for a post in your household."

"In my household?" Kathryn asked. "But why cannot my grandmother give him a place in her house?"

Lady Douglas shrugged. "I know not. Save that your grandmother said that he would make you a good secretary and that she's sure that he would be a comfort to you to have so near."

Kathryn did not know what her grandmother could be about, nor yet why Lady Douglas looked so pensive. She shook her head. "And yet, he is not in our country, yet," she said. "And I do not wish to make a decision or to think overmuch on this. When he comes onto our land and is ready to make a proper application to my household, I'll see how I feel about it. Why my grandmother thought this one thing—of all things—would give me comfort, I know not."

The look of Lady Douglas's face, which had been closed and grave, seemed to ease up of its own accord. "Ah, my lady," she said at last. "Elderly people have such odd fancies, do they not? Who knows what she can have been thinking."

"Indeed, who knows?" Kathryn said. "Perhaps she was thinking of her own youth and how much pleasure it would give her, now, to see someone from that time. But I'm not so old that my time at Horsham makes me misty eyed."

Lady Douglas smiled and shook her head. "Your Majesty is not old at all." Then she bowed. "If you please, I will now call your maids to help dress you, that you may not be late to dinner with His Majesty, the king."

Chapter Thirty-nine

The long, hot, dry summer continued. They moved from Windsor to Ampthill in Bedfordshire. The king talked of taking Kathryn to London and having a reception in her honor, but it seemed the plague lingered there and the king—for all his renewed vigor—retained a great fear of any illness he might catch.

Instead, they had banquets and parties; he went hunting and sometimes took the queen.

Kathryn was vaguely aware that foreign ambassadors were kept waiting, that ministers grew impatient with documents to be signed in the king's chambers. She knew that the business of the kingdom seemed to have come to a standstill while the king took his ease and enjoyed his honeymoon.

But everyone in her household smiled, and said how renewed the king was and how he seemed to have got his joy in life back. And none accounted it an ill if the business of ruling had to wait yet awhile. So Kathryn determined to enjoy herself.

She had a dim, vague idea that there would be more serious business in her future. She knew that once she went into London there would be delegations and petitions, people wishing for favors from her, and people wishing her to intercede with the king for them. Already some local nobles had attempted this, but she had told them—and truthfully, too—that for all the king's kindness and love toward her, she had very little influence over his decisions. Well she minded the example of Jane Seymour, who had only come close to losing her lord's favor when she'd tried to ask him to spare the lives of the northern rebels. Kathryn, younger than Jane and not carrying the heir to the throne, thought it best not to attempt any such thing.

Instead, she immersed herself in the whirlwind of celebrations. She arranged to have new clothes in the French fashion, having noticed that those were the king's favorites. She accompanied him in the hunt but made quite sure not to out ride him. She let him lead just as she let him win his card games with her.

At night, she sometimes played for him before they went to bed. And the bed itself, though it would never be the same as the passion she'd at first experienced with Dereham, was pleasant enough. She didn't, at least, suffer from the fear of being caught that she'd lived through with Manox.

It was at Ampthill that Kathryn noticed that Margaret Douglas was acting very oddly. She blushed and smiled and seemed at once ten years older and far sillier than she'd ever been.

To her amazement, by dint of much observation, at banquets and dances—where the king danced but little, yet enjoyed watching his wife amuse herself—she realized that Margaret Douglas' eyes, and often her whole attention, fell upon Kathryn's own brother Charles.

Charles and Tom—Henry had, after all, died—as well as Mary had come to join Kathryn's household as soon as it was formed. She liked them well enough but had found them so different from the brothers and sister she remembered as a girl that she could not fully give up on her mourning for the siblings she had known nor rejoice, like Joseph in Egypt, at the recovery of her errant family. Instead, she'd arranged for them to have places at court—as she should have, since they were her own blood—as she had for some of her Leigh brothers and sisters and left them to their own devices otherwise.

But though Charles had grown tall and strong, a black-browed man who was quick with his words and quicker at the dance, she was still used to thinking of him as that over-stretched, russet-haired young man to whom she'd bid good-bye when she'd been the one chosen to live with the duchess at Horsham. Or at least, she saw nothing attractive about him.

If she had been looking before, she realized, she'd have been aware that many of the ladies in court were making plays for Charles and that he, either out of genuine love or calculation, was playing for the highest born of them all, the king's niece herself.

Kathryn remembered how the lady's last marriage had happened, and she trembled for her brother. But Lady Margaret Douglas seemed so happy and her brother seemed to be treating her so kindly that she dared not say anything.

Month long, she watched the lovers. She was aware—how could she not be—when Lady Margaret Douglas was late to attend her and suspected sometimes from Lady Margaret's panting and disheveled state that she came from Charles's bed. And she feared for Charles' life and his position, but she couldn't find it in her heart to blight their love. Well she remembered being caught at her own loves, and the shock and horror of it, even when she hadn't been in love with Manox.

She watched in a growing sense of fear, and then woke one morning to a voice like thunder outside the curtains in her room. It was screaming so loudly that she could not make out what it said. After putting on her chemise, she wrapped a blanket about her shoulders and opened the curtains.

 Her heart was racing madly, and her head was spinning in all directions at once. Had the king found out about Manox and Dereham? Perhaps Joan Bulmer, whom she still took care to see as little as possible, had told. Or perhaps it had been that luckless creature Dereham himself.

But instead, when she opened the curtains, she found the king screaming at a man and a woman who were surrounded by the king's gentlemen.

"Impudent, disobedient wretch," he said to the woman in whose disheveled, crying-marred countenance, Kathryn could only with great difficulty recognize the features of the king's niece, Lady Margaret Douglas. "Twice you seek to play this trick on me." He glared at Charles, who was being held by two men, next to his lover. "As for you, sir, I should send you to the Tower and let you rot there, as another Howard has before you!"

He wheeled around, as though sensing that Kathryn had opened the curtains. He could not have heard her, he was shouting so loudly. As he turned to her, Kathryn almost didn't recognize him. He was red faced and seemed to have swollen, causing his eyes to become tiny, hard pits on his face. He looked more like a devil of the pantomime than like her bridegroom. "Do not interfere, madam," he said. "For I will not be moved in this."

Kathryn looked at her brother's desperate expression, his eyes fixed upon her face in a mute appeal for her intercession. But what did he think she could do, except perhaps end up arrested beside him? Did he not know the king and the king's wrath, which could be death?

She looked at her husband and at her brother, and the king thundered, "They were caught, if you please, in the wretch's chamber in full and complete intercourse, as though they were married."

Kathryn didn't even know which of the wretch's chambers the king meant nor, she realized, did it matter. Instead, she inclined her head to his wrath. "Then Your Majesty should deal with them as your heart commands," she said, even as she felt a stab of fear that this would end with Charles dead in the Tower. They'd been children together. True, since she'd been left at Horsham, he'd not written her, but he'd never been one to write much to anyone. But he was her brother, and they'd loved each other when they were little, in their innocence—even living out of boarding houses and in utter penury. But what could she do for him? Her pleading was more likely to hurt him more and destroy her. "For you are the king," she said, submissively, "and you know better than anyone how to govern your kingdom. I am only a small, weak woman, and though he be my brother, he is first your subject."

The effect of her words surprised her. They caused the king's face to calm down on the instant, as it was said that the waters of the Sea of Galilee had calmed at the voice of the Christ. Like that, the red blotches were smoothed, and his face resumed its normal appearance, though it still looked stern.

He said, "You are, as always, the most excellent of women," then turned to his niece. "As for you, madam, you are to be taken to the old Abbey at Syon and there be kept, in seclusion, while you meditate upon your sins. You are to consider whether your continuous rebellion is what is due of my majesty and the excessive kindness with which I have treated you." Then he turned to Charles, and it seemed to Kathryn that she saw fear clench tight at the bottom of Charles's eyes, making his pupils into tight, dark pinpoints. "You will not contact my niece in any way. Not through letter and not through messenger, and never go yourself and speak to her. She is to be for you, from this day forward, as one dead. For now, in love of my dear wife, your sister, I am holding myself in forbearance and not sending you to the Tower or to that well-deserved traitor's death that comes to those who court my near relatives without my consent. But my hand will not be stayed again should you sin once more. Is that clear?"

Charles, clearly still unquiet in his mind, had given his babbling assent that he indeed would never see Margaret again, and he thanked the king's majesty more than he could express and marked well the goodness of His Majesty toward the wretch that he was.

It seemed to Kathryn that, as he spoke, she saw a look of disdain on Margaret's face. It was sure that her feelings had been true and that she felt betrayed by the lover who so quickly disavowed them. But she didn't know yet how authentic her brother's feelings had been, and she didn't have a chance to talk to him for some weeks.

The chance came when both of them stepped out of a crowded room during a dance, and found themselves alone in a little place in the garden, between two statues. Kathryn had smiled and he had nodded, and she didn't know from where her question came. "Do you miss her terribly, Charles?" she asked.

He had looked at her in full surprise, then had spoken very softly, "Margaret, you mean?"