Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“She says nothing.” I hesitate. “You cannot prevent it, Your Grace. Whatever comes of it.”

She bows her head, and to my surprise I see a tear fall onto the pommel of her saddle. She covers it quickly with her gloved finger. “Yes, I can do nothing,” she whispers.

We have been settled in our apartments at Westminster for only a few days when I am summoned to the rooms of my kinsman the Duke of Norfolk. I go at midday, before we dine, and I find him pacing about his rooms, not his usual contained self at all. It is so unusual to see him disturbed that I am at once alert to danger. I do not enter the room but stay by the wall, as I would if I had opened the wrong door in the Tower and found myself among the king’s lions. I stay by the door and my hand rests on the doorknob.

“Sir?”

“Have you heard? Did you know? Cromwell is to be an earl? A damned earl?”

“He is?”

“Did I not just say so? Earl of Essex. Earl of bloody Essex! What do you think of that, madam?”

“I think nothing, sir.”

“Have they consummated the marriage?”

“No!”

“Do you swear? Are you certain? They must have done. He’s got it up at last, and he’s paying his bawd. He must be pleased with Cromwell for something!”

“I am utterly certain. I know they have not. And she is unhappy; she knows he is attracted to Katherine, and she is anxious about that. She spoke to me of it.”

“But he is rewarding the minister who gave him the queen. He must be pleased with the marriage; something must have pleased him. He must have learned something; he must be turning from us for some reason. He is rewarding Cromwell, and Cromwell brought him the queen.”

“I swear to you, my lord, I have held nothing back from you. The king has been coming to her bed almost every night since the end of Lent, but it is no better than it was before. The sheets are clean, her hair is still in plaits, her nightcap straight every morning. She cries sometimes, during the day, when she thinks no one is watching. This is not a well-loved woman; this is a hurt girl. I swear she is a virgin still.”

The duke rounds on me in his rage. “Then why would he make Cromwell Earl of Essex?”

“It must be for some other reason.”

“What other reason? This is Cromwell’s great triumph: this alliance with the Protestant dukes and the king, this alliance against France and Spain, sealed with this marriage with the Flanders girl. I have an alliance with the King of France at my fingertips. I have filled the king’s head with suspicions against Cromwell. Lord Lisle has told him that Cromwell favors reformers, has hidden heretics away in Calais. Cromwell’s favorite preacher is to be accused of heresy. Everything is piling up against him, but then he gets an earldom. Why is that? The earldom is his reward. Why would the king reward him if he is not pleased with him?”

I shrug my shoulders. “My lord uncle. How should I know?”

“Because you are here to know!” he shouts at me. “You are put at court and kept at court and dressed and fed at court so that you shall know everything, and so that you shall tell me! If you know nothing, what is the point of your being here? What was the point of sparing you from the scaffold?”

I feel my face grow stiff with fear at his anger. “I know what goes on in the queen’s rooms,” I say softly. “I cannot know what happens in the Privy Council.”

“You dare to say that I should know? That I am remiss?”

Mutely, I shake my head.

“How should anybody know what the king thinks when he keeps his own counsel and rewards the man whose face he has been slapping in public for the past three months? How should anyone know what is happening when Cromwell is blamed for the worst marriage the king has ever made and is now to lord it around us as earl, as damned Earl of damned-to-hell Essex?”

I find that I am pressed back against the wall and the silky feel of the tapestry is behind my outspread hands. I can feel the fabric grow damp with my cold sweat.

“How is anybody to know what the hell is in the king’s mind when he is by turns as cunning as a crow and as mad as a hare?”

I shake my head in silence. That he should name the king in the same breath as madness is as good as treason. I will not repeat it even here, safe in Howard rooms.

“At any rate, you are sure that he still likes Katherine?” the duke says more quietly.

“Hotly. There is no doubt in my mind.”

“Well, tell her to keep him at arm’s length. We gain nothing if she becomes his whore but he stays married to the queen.”

“There can be no doubt-”

“I doubt everything,” he says flatly. “And if he beds her and then beds the queen and gets a son on her and thanks Cromwell for the addition to his nursery, then we are ruined, along with the little slut.”

“He will not bed the queen,” I say, returning to my only certainty.

“You don’t know anything,” he says rudely. “All you know is what can be gleaned from keyholes and privy chamber whispers, out of the chamber sweepings and the midden. You know everything that can be found in the dirt of life; you know nothing of policy. I tell you, he is rewarding Cromwell with rank beyond his dreams for bringing him the Cleves queen; and your plans and my plans are all thrown down. And you are a fool.”

There is nothing I can say to this, so I wait for him to tell me to leave, but he turns to the window and pauses, looking out and gnawing his thumbnail. After a little while a page comes to tell him that he is required at the House of Lords, and he goes out without another word to me. I curtsy, but I don’t think he even sees me.

When he is gone, I should go, too, but I do not leave. I walk around his room. When the room is quiet and no one comes to the door, I draw back the chair. Then I sit behind his table in his big carved chair with the crest of the Howards, hard and uncomfortable behind my head. I wonder what it would have been like if George had lived and his uncle had died and George had been the great man of this family; I might have sat here, beside him, in my own right. We might have had matching chairs at this great table, and hatched our own plans, our own schemes. We might have made a great house of our own and raised our own children in it. We would have been brother and sister-in-law to the queen, our children would have been cousins to the next king. George would have been a duke for sure; I would have been a duchess. We would have been wealthy, the greatest family in the kingdom. We might have grown old together. He would have prized me for my advice and my fierce loyalty; I would have loved him for his passion and his good looks and his wit. He would have turned to me; in the end he would surely have turned to me. He would have tired of Anne and her temper. He would have learned that a steady love, a faithful love, a wife’s love is the best.

But George died, and so did Anne – both of them dead before they could learn to value me. And all that is left of the three of us is me, the only survivor, wishing for the Boleyn inheritance, perching in the Howard chair, dreaming that they are still alive and that there is greatness before us, instead of loneliness and old age, petty plots and disgrace and death.

I am on my way to the queen’s rooms just before dinner when I feel a gentle hand on my sleeve. I think at once that it is John Beresby or Tom Culpepper, and I turn with a laugh, to tell him to let me go. When I see that it is the king, I swoop into a curtsy.

He says, “You know me then,” and I see that he is wearing a big hat and a big cape and thinks himself quite unrecognizable. I don’t say: you are the fattest man at court, of course I know you. You must be the only man who is six feet tall and more than four feet round. You are the only man who stinks like moldy meat. I say: “Your Grace, oh, Your Grace, I think I would know you at any time, anywhere.”

He steps forward, out of the shadows, and there is no one else with him, which is extraordinary. Usually he has half a dozen men with him wherever he is, whatever he is doing. “How do you know me?” he asks.

I have a little trick now, which is, whenever he speaks to me like this, I imagine it is Thomas Culpepper, the utterly delicious Thomas Culpepper, and I think how I would answer him to enchant him. I smile as I would for Thomas, and I say the words I would use to him to the king. So I say easily: “Your Grace, I dare not tell you,” thinking: Thomas, I dare not tell you.

And he says: “Tell me.”

And I say: “I cannot.”

And he says: “Tell me, pretty Katherine.”

This could go on all day, so I change the tune and say: “I feel so ashamed.”

And he says: “There’s no need to feel ashamed, sweetheart. Tell me how you know me.”

And I say, thinking of Thomas: “It is a scent, Your Grace. It is a scent like a perfume, a goodly smell that I love, like a flower like jasmine or roses. And then there is a deeper smell, like the sweat of a good horse when it is hot from hunting, then there is a smell like leather, and then a sort of tang like the sea.”

“I smell like this?” he asks, and there is wonder in his voice, and I realize, with a little shock, that of course this will hit home since in truth he smells of pus from his leg, poor man, and often of farting since he is so costive, and this stink goes with him everywhere so that he has to carry a pomader all the time to block it out from his own nose, but he must know that to everyone he smells of decay.

“You do to me,” I say faithfully, thinking hard of Thomas Culpepper and the clean smell of his brown curly hair. “There is a scent of jasmine and sweat and leather and salt.” I look down and lick my lips, just lightly, nothing bawdy. “I always know you by this.”