No Will But His (32 page)

"What? What has he been doing?" For all this time, and though he'd arrived at court days ago, she had not seen him yet. "What does he wish?"

"He's been quarreling with Mr. Johns," Lady Rutland said. "One of your gentlemen ushers. You know what men are, very full of their privilege and clinging to their rights."

Kathryn didn't feel equal to judging disputes over privilege or rights, and certainly she didn't feel equal to considering anything that might involve Dereham. But she knew that she must, and she might as well do it now as ever. "What has been happening?"

"Well, as you know, Your Majesty," Lady Rutland said, probably knowing full well that Kathryn knew nothing of the kind, "lingering over their suppers is a privilege of those who are in the queen's council. Everyone else, all your servants and ladies must eat speedily, and leave the place, so the next set of servants and ladies can eat. As doubtless—"

"I remember well. I do. So pray go on."

"Well, my lady," Lady Rutland went on. "You know how Francis Dereham came to join your household while you were . . . while you were . . ."

"Recovering, yes."

"Yes, while you were recovering. And Francis Dereham, being what he is, well, you know . . . I don't mean to criticize your having chosen him for one of your secretaries, but . . ."

"He was chosen because he's a protégé of my grandmother's," she said. "And my grandmother and the lady my aunt, the wife of the uncle who helped raise me, asked me most particularly. He was hired as a favor to them and not of my own accord."

"Yes, Your Majesty." Lady Rutland sighed. "I don't know if when those ladies knew him before he was the same sort of roguish kind of man he is now. I heard that he's been a privateer off  the coasts of Ireland, and faith, that is a wild occupation and bound to change a man. But at any rate, he is not what I would call a polished gentleman, and as he was lingering over his supper, Mr. Johns, he got quite upset, and sent him a message demanding to know whether he was of the queen's council that gave him the right to linger over his supper in that way."

Kathryn heard herself moaning, and Lady Rutland nodded. "That is how I feel about it, too, Your Majesty. For what good is there to confront that kind of rogue in that way. When a man has no notion of his place in the world, not all the talk or the sermons will make him have it. But Mr. Johns would have his way. And Master Dereham answered just in the way I would have expected. He sent a messenger to tell Mr. Johns that he was part of the queen's council before Mr. Johns knew Your Majesty, and that he would be part of your council after he's forgotten you."

"What can he mean by that?" Kathryn asked, well understanding the implications of the sentence, but honestly wondering what Dereham meant. Could he mean to put her head on the block, even if he had to lay his alongside hers?

"Well, ma'am. And I don't understand it. We were hoping that you understood it. Was he then your friend and adviser at the Duchess of Norfolk's?"

"No, no," Kathryn said. "Or if yes, only in the way that children are in council. There was a group of us, all together, and we often took rides, and . . . and employed our games together . . . Nothing more than children games. We might have consulted him—we maidens—about what lace looked better in a bonnet. No more than that."

Lady Rutland nodded. "And I told Mr. Johns that was all it would be. Young men of Master Dereham's stamp are like that, always trying to make their wild boasts sound far more important they are. I told Mr. Johns how it would be . . ." She hesitated. "But perhaps Your Majesty will receive him, with myself a distance away, so that if you need to give him a right proper dressing down, you will not be embarrassed by my hearing you, but so that I can testify you were chaperoned, and everything done all right and proper, so that no one needs think that the queen was alone with this rogue."

"Yes, Lady Rutland," Kathryn said, meekly, glad the woman had suggested it, else she would have had to try to find a time to be alone with Dereham, which, considering his mood, looked like a dangerous game. "I will see him, if you would call him in."

She received him in her antechamber, with Lady Rutland standing a little ways away.

At first she didn't recognize him and wondered how a little more than a year could have wrought such a change in him. Dereham, who had been considered by all the ladies at Horsham a very handsome man, looked smaller, as though he had shrunk in on himself.

That he was very thin couldn't be denied. Gaunt almost, his face showed sharp angles of bones through the stretched skin.

But there was more to it than that. He looked haggard, too, as though he'd been running from something for far too long. But more than that, he looked tawdry and tainted.

She couldn't really explain it any better than that. His eyes were as dark and sparkling as they'd been when he'd first fascinated her. His hair remained dark. There were, it is true, two vicious scars across his cheek on the left side, but Kathryn felt, in some obscure way, that this should have added to his charm rather than deterring from it. Why then did she feel as though he were not the real Francis Dereham? As if he were not nearly as important or handsome as in her memory?

He wore more expensive clothes than he had then—a beautiful doublet of green brocade that Kathryn would guess had been the duchess's gift—but they only made him look more like he was out of place. As though he were wearing the clothes of a more important man.

The way he walked into the room was just the way she remembered, too, head held high, his step long. But it had a way of looking, now, as though he were only trying to look confident, as though it weren't his true self, as if inwardly he were slinking and sliding into the room.

He approached her, smiling broadly, his hands extended to meet hers.

"Master Dereham," she said, sharply.

Something to her voice, she was not sure what, had the effect of bringing him to a standstill. "Kathryn?" he said hesitantly.

"Master Dereham," she said, again. "One doesn't address the queen in such a way unless one happens to be the king."

Dereham looked like he was about to speak, but the look on Kathryn's face—probably, Kathryn felt, made sterner by the fact that she was very tired and felt as though she were holding on to the very edge of sanity—must have quelled his ideas before they came to his lips. He bowed to her.

"It has come to our attention," Kathryn said, before he had time to think of something else to say, "that you have been causing trouble in my household, Master Dereham. It appears you have had a dispute with Mr. Johns."

"Mr. Johns, Mr. Johns, Mr. Johns," Francis Dereham said, mimicking her voice. "Everyone is so willing to lecture me about Mr. Johns that you'd think he was the king himself."

Kathryn made an effort to speak but lost, as she was seeing Francis for what he was—a shoddy, overconfident young man with a mocking voice and little else. This had seemed like maturity and manhood to her when she was at Horsham. How foolish she had been. Even Harry without the crown, with his clumsy hands, his hesitant ways, was much preferable to Dereham. And to Dereham she'd pledged her hand. Oh, she'd been very ill used when no one had given her a better knowledge of the world.

But beyond the shock of realizing that everything she'd once believed had in fact been wrong, ridiculously wrong, there was a deep tiredness from her not-yet-fully-healed body. When she spoke, she spoke in few words, afraid she could not command the breath or the ability to speak in longer sentences. "Master Dereham, Mr. Johns is one of the men who run my very large and very complex household. Every time you disrespect him, or cause him to have to enforce his perfectly right and legal rules upon you, you make my household run a little worse.

"I'll have you know that before, when my vice steward got drunk, the king himself took a particular interest in the case, scolded him, and told him he would not be drunk before me again and also that certain rules of sobriety and cleanliness would be observed in my household."

"I was never drunk," Dereham protested, his fine dark eyes flashing at her.

"No, Master Dereham, and that makes it worse, since you said nonsense about having been in my council before I married my lord the king. Nonsense that, badly interpreted, could cause my lord to think that I was less than honest with him or less than a pure maiden when I married him. Know you that the king had a friar arrested, for speaking against my reputation? Why would you then wish to risk it?"

Dereham was looking at her, his mouth half open, as though he meant to protest but had been stopped by the very idea that he'd put his own life in risk when he'd spoken. And that was the worst of it. Kathryn realized that he had never loved her. He'd loved his own pride. He'd loved what he thought was his prowess in attaching the daughter of the Howards. Nothing more.

Had he loved her, he might have been maddened enough with jealousy to be willing to die to get his revenge. But the truth was that he hadn't known he was at any risk. He'd only thought to do her a bad turn because she had preferred the king to him.

In Master Dereham's own mind there was one person he loved, and that was himself. No one else even appeared to him as another person, much less as someone he could love.

"Do not say things of that kind again, Master Dereham," she said, tiredly. "The palace is large, there are many people in it, and some are bound to put quite the wrong construction upon your words. In memory of the carefree children we once were, I would fain not see your head separated from your body."

He pushed his lower lip forward in a petulant gesture, and tried for a come back. "There are things I could say," he said, ‘if I wanted to."

"There are things all of us could say," Kathryn said, "if we wanted to. But the truth is, do we really want it? When it comes right to it, Master Dereham, think about whom it would hurt. We would fain not see you hurt."

He opened his mouth, then closed it, and finally pivoted on his foot and left, still walking in his broad stride, with his head held high.

"A very upstart sort of young man," Lady Rutland said. "Riffraff, as Mr. Johns said."

"And Mr. Johns was right," Kathryn said.

Chapter Forty-six

"Sweetheart," Henry told her one night, after making his clumsy love to her and while he lay beside her, his great hand resting on her stomach. "Do you think you are now well enough to go on progress with me? I've been meaning to do it for years, you know, but first there was Jane's death and then . . . well, there have been a lot of reasons I haven't done it." He paused. "But I think that the country needs to see her king, and the North Country most of all."

"I will go wherever you command me, my lord," Kathryn said.

He patted her. "You see, there have been rebellions in the north, and now we need to go and show them our majesty and our power. It will be a very big progress," he said. "We'll assemble the whole court, and as soon as the road is dry enough—for you must know it has been unseasonably wet—we'll progress to the north with carts and baggage. I meant to do it when you fell so ill, and we had to wait until you recovered. But now we will go. There will be tents and carriages, and I will try to make it as grand and great for you as I can manage. Would you like that, Kathryn?"

Kathryn said yes, partly because she wanted to get away from the confined palace, where she had been so ill, and partly because she thought the king himself was longing to go, and she should join him.

In a few days they left, progressing north to Collyweston, the great country palace of Henry's grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort. After four or five days, they crossed into Lincolnshire.

"The progress will stop resentments," the king said. "It will knit me and my subjects as a whole once more."

It seemed that way. They went into Stamford and Boston in procession.

For Henry and Kathryn it was a sort of honeymoon combined with a pageant—an extended coronation trip for her.

At night they slept together in whatever beds the local gentry made available—and those were often at least as good, if not better, than the one they had at home—and during the day the king often rode, or if his leg troubled him, he would sit in the litter with Kathryn. Together they would doze, or she would play the lute for him. Sometimes he told her he should compose songs anew—that he would compose her such songs as would amaze her.

And sometimes he told her about the country ahead—the loyal gentry and those that were not so loyal.

At other times, she taught her ladies new dances, which they displayed for the king when the progress was stopped long enough. Or she and her ladies would plan new and elaborate gowns.

All should have been well—it all would have been well. But Kathryn, though she tried very hard, could not forget Thomas Culpepper. In her mind and heart, he kept returning, like a dream from which she never fully woke and wasn't quite sure she wished to. Day and night she thought of him and imagined what he was doing.

During the progress, sometimes she leaned out and would catch sight of him, riding beside the litter. The thing was that whenever she looked at him, always, she would see him looking back at her.

This is foolish, she told herself. Queens don't develop passions for young men of the court like silly young girls do for men in their grandmother's household. I am the queen. And, force, Thomas Culpepper has caught my fantasy but I trow he's no great thing. At heart, he is no better than Dereham. Riffraff.

No matter how often she told it, she could not believe it. She would catch sight of him, and always he was as he should be—a gentleman of manner and of fact, riding his horse or playing at dice; practicing his sword or perhaps dancing in the evening with one of her ladies.

One of the evenings, the king saw her looking and patted her hand. "Thomas Culpepper is a good dancer, is he not? I vow he is the most graceful of my gentlemen. He's been my page ever since he was old enough to toddle about court." He grinned. "When he was very young, sometimes he would get scared and crawl into bed with me during the night. Now I hear he crawls into the beds of half your ladies, the scoundrel. But perhaps I shouldn't say that to you, my dear. I see you're shocked."