No Will But His (4 page)

"Oh," Kathryn said, feeling as though there were a reproof behind the words. "An' I didn't mean that. I meant Queen Anne's parents. Force, her mother might be a Howard, but her father must have been some great personage, the ruler of some kingdom."

This made Mary titter, and her titter was echoed by one or two of the ladies who stood by. "Hear you that?" Mary Tilney said. "Thomas Boleyn a king . . ."

"King of the merchants of London," another girl said.

"But . . ." Kathryn had never learned much of history—or indeed of anything formal that people might be taught. She was not a slow girl, but she had realized, from living as she did with these other ladies, that other women got an education quite different from hers. Why, even her Leigh sisters had masters hired for them, and were sent away, when much younger than Kathryn, to learn deportment and other accomplishments from some great house. But there never had been any money for masters for Kathryn.

She had learned her letters from her mother and was easier reading than writing. Writing and the forming of letters had never been enforced, so she wrote in the sprawling childish hand that she'd first tried upon the paper. And, too, she found when she tried to write, every word deserted her, so that her language came out ill-formed and twisted, more concerned with how she'd form the letters than with what she was trying to say.

As such she had not learned much, but she had read the few books available at her mother's house, and then at her first stepmother's house. Most of them were lists of peerage, or else long stories of someone or other who had gone to war.

However, with all that, of one thing Kathryn was sure. Kings married queens, not just anyone that they found wandering about their palace, save only, mayhap—and she was not sure on this, but thought it only happened in fantastical stories—as her nurse had told her about a king who had found a naked maiden sitting on a branch in the forest and married her. But this was not in the peerage books, and Kathryn thought it might be a lie. So kings married women who were already princesses, themselves, the daughters of kings. In fact, she remembered when people spoke of Queen Catherine that they said she was the daughter of the Spanish king.

So how was it possible that Queen Anne should be her cousin on her mother's side, and yet her father not a king?

"She was just a maid of honor to the queen," Mary Tilney said. "The daughter of a gentleman, like the rest of us, perhaps lower born than you, Kathryn Howard, for her father does have merchant blood."

"But how did she then become the queen?" Kathryn asked.

"Ah, that, little one, is because she captured the king's mind and heart that nothing would do for him but to marry her. Remember we told you how she caused him to love her and write her poems! Why, he even said that she has a soul worthy of a crown."

One of the girls said something that sounded to Kathryn's ears like "Faith, it's not her soul—" but quieted as Mary rounded on her.

Kathryn didn't mind. She had become used to the sometimes coarse jests of these girls who, like her, had come from their homes to serve the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk in the hopes, if Kathryn well understood, that they would either learn graces, which would enable them to aspire to a higher post, or that they would meet someone who would marry them and . . .

Kathryn's mind stopped on that. Surely they couldn't all become queen. No. Despite the confusion there seemed to be in the land, with the now divorced Queen Catherine and the newly married Queen Anne, and those that said Queen Catherine was not divorced and that Queen Anne was but the king's concubine, yet she knew well enough that only one person could be queen at once.

But that did not mean that all these ladies could not aspire to very grand marriages. Dukes and earls, perhaps. And Kathryn, who was now the cousin of the queen herself, might even aspire to marry some foreign prince.

She stayed up late, watching from the window as the sparkling lights shone and blinked on the river. The others promised her many delights tomorrow.

Unlike the duchess, none of them would get near enough to watch the coronation itself, nor the royal supper or other festivities, but there were better things for them. "Faith," they said. "Wine will flow from fountains, so that it runs down the gutters and every guild in the town will stage a pageant or a tableau for the queen. Ah, such things you'll see!"

And Kathryn, nodding dutifully along with it, fell asleep. She did not remember being taken to her bed or lying down to sleep. But the night long she dreamed—and that she remembered—of pageants and tableaus, of fairies and angels.

And amid all of them there was a grown up Kathryn—herself, not Queen Anne—who had found a prince who would take her away and make her queen of her own land.

In the dream, Kathryn could not see the boy's face, save for knowing he was tall and fair, with auburn hair running toward red, and that he treated her as though she were the most important thing in all creation.

For a moment she woke up to a great noise, like thunder, and through her sleepiness was conscious of Mary Tilney telling her not to be a goose "for it is only the thousand guns being fired in salute at the Tower."

Kathryn had fallen again into her dream-prince's arms. As he twirled her in a delightful dance, she could see herself as Queen Kathryn, on a throne, receiving her vassals, and she sighed, impatient at her youth, longing to be grown up. After all, Kathryn had never been the center of anyone's love—not her father's, not her mother's, certainly not either stepmothers'.

How excellent it must be, how wonderful, to be the center of everyone's love and have a whole kingdom worship her beauty and excellence. Faith, she would not even mind if they were foreigners and spoke an odd language.

In her dream, she felt the crown upon her head, and it seemed as though it belonged there by right.

Chapter Four

Kathryn was lost. She thought it was her own fault, but that didn't seem to matter. What mattered was that she was lost, and she must find her way back to the group with the other ladies-in-waiting to the duchess.

They'd been on a barge. She'd been awakened early to be dressed in her best, and to have her hair dressed and adorned all over with flowers. All of which took much too long because the duchess kept calling to her ladies to come bring her now this and now that, and to make sure she had everything ready for her own appearance that night.

By the time—after a late dinner—that they'd set out upon the barge reserved for them, Kathryn was already sleepy. The barge glided smoothly on the Thames, as though the river were a sheet of glass and the barge a toy with its bottom lined with fabric. The air was mild, the river lighted by so many candles as to make the evening look like mid afternoon. The barge of the attendants of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk displayed flowers in banks and beds, leaving the young women barely enough space to sit or stand in, amid the fragrant, colorful blooms.

Kathryn sat on a long bench, amid the flowers, leaning right against Mary Tilney's velvety sleeve. She felt a curious mixture of excitement and tiredness that reminded her of when her brother Charles had exchanged the very small ale drunk by the children with a pitcher of father's best ale. She remembered then—as now—her heart had beat very fast, but her mind had been clouded as if already half in a dream.

She remembered only vaguely, as if in a dream, asking Mary, "Where is the queen?"

Mary had shaken her a little, as if to wake her, and said, "The queen is going out on the road, goose." Which confused Kathryn as to why they were in a barge and why so many barges all around were so lavishly decorated, if the queen were not among them and not to see them. But then she half slept, and when she roused again to seeing her surroundings, they were at a dock and gentlemen were surrounding them, helping them out.

Out through a throng of common people—the ladies escorted by gentlemen in the livery of the duchess. Though she'd never seen the gentlemen before, she noticed that they seemed too well behaved to be mere servants—in fact they were the gentleman equivalent of the ladies among whom Kathryn had been included. They spoke fair, and they treated the women most gently, and it seemed to Kathryn that the ladies did not dislike it, either. In truth, from the smiles on some of their faces, Kathryn judged that they had known the gentlemen all along and were greeting them as old friends.

Her own hand was grasped by a gentleman with a leonine mane of blond hair and bold, smiling green eyes. "Hello, there, milady," he said, with just that little hint of amusement to their voices that quite grown-up gentlemen felt toward girls who weren't quite ladies enough, but thought they hid. "Who might you be?"

Mary Tilney, laughing leaned forward, "How, now, Manox. Her name is Kathryn Howard. Mistress Kathryn Howard, daughter of Edmund Howard, the hero of Flodden Field, and don't you be getting fancy dreams now, because for sure if you attempted anything, her family would be the end of you."

Kathryn only understood half of that, but she understood the replying smile in Manox's eyes. "Very well, then I shall not attempt to ingratiate myself with the lady, though, faith, the temptation is great."

Everyone around them laughed, and Kathryn frowned, certain she was being laughed at but not quite sure how or why. What she disliked most about her new position was that no one was willing to tell her anything that would make the world around her less bewildering. It was almost as though they liked that she be kept ignorant and the power this gave them over her. She misliked it much, and let her little frowning face glare at Manox, even as he bent a melting look on her. "Oh, I've displeased you, Mistress Howard. And when I particularly wished you to love me well, too. I'm such a clumsy brute, then. What am I to do?"

His expression of woebegone confusion was such that Kathryn couldn't help but smile back. "And there you go, Mistress Howard," he said. "Keep that smile on your lips. An' pretty lips they are." He patted her hand, resting wholly in his, which was much larger than hers. "They will be your fortune. And now let us go, for the queen approaches."

Where they went, through the throngs that jostled and pushed at them, was to the side of a road. In the distance, Kathryn could hear music being played and a great voice declaiming something in the tone of a priest making a sermon. And then along the road, slowly, came a cortege which resolved itself. There was Queen Anne—Manox pointed her out to Kathryn—under a rich canopy of gold cloth, in a robe of purple velvet decorated with ermine over that, and a rich coronet with a cap of pearls and precious stones on her head.

Behind her, the duchess carried her train. The duchess wore a robe of scarlet with a coronet of gold on her cap and looked, oddly, as though she'd wakened and donned her clothes while she was young and had grown old in them without noticing. The coronet of gold on her cap spoke of her high station, and though Kathryn knew it was a great honor to carry the queen's train, she wondered if the duchess could have carried it—as great and heavy with pearls as it was—if there were not a gentleman also supporting it in the middle. She wondered if he was a duke.

As the queen passed, the ladies and gentlemen around Anne sang out "Long Live Queen Anne," but it seemed to Kathryn that around them some of the ruder people had shouted insults and said the queen was a whore, which made no sense at all.

After the queen came ten ladies in robes of scarlet trimmed with ermine and round coronets of gold on their head. Next came the queen's maids in gowns of scarlet edged in fur, too many of them, it seemed, to count.

Kathryn's mouth dropped open as she stared, and she did not know if she'd have been able to imagine such grandeur had she not seen it. She'd just realized the importance of being the cousin of the queen of England—she, little Kathryn Howard, to whom no one had ever paid much attention. Even her dreams of how the queen would look had fallen short. Queen Anne looked just short of the angels in glory. If the queen could command such finery! Well . . . what could she not do for her little cousin?

In Kathryn's mind there was the story from the Bible, in which someone tells the Lord that the slightest word would suffice to heal him. Kathryn felt like that, too. Like a glance from the queen or the slightest notice of Kathryn would make the girl from the most wretched creatures into that great lady of her dreams, the one who had foreign princes at her beck and call.

And just as she thought this, a troop of men coming after the queen started flinging coins about at the crowd, as calls of "Long Live Queen Anne" redoubled and the other calls that said ugly, had-to-be-false things were all but silenced.

Kathryn noticed Manox catching coins in the air and pocketing them, as did the other ladies and gentlemen.

Kathryn was small, even for her age. The coins flew over her head, and she could not reach them. In frustration, she leapt about, trying to pick a glittering coin out of the evening air, but someone taller always got it.

She ran toward the front of the crowd, and ahead, along with the procession, to stay with the throwers of coins, and she leapt, her hand extended.

A gold coin hit her palm, and she closed her fingers about it and turned to show Mary her coin. But there was no Mary nearby, or none of the familiar faces.

A coarse man pushed at Kathryn as he grabbed a coin from next to her face—quite accidentally backhanding her.

Kathryn put her hand to her cheek and fell to sitting on the muddy ground. She cried out, but no one came. She was quite lost.

Chapter Five

She traced her steps back, but could not find the rest of her party. She imagined them concerned, worried about what the duchess would say if they lost Kathryn.

Holding her pretty new skirt up from the muck on the streets, she trace her route all backward but couldn't find the docks where their barge had landed. She couldn't even find the river, though she knew that it could not be that far from the road.