Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

We are all of us guarded in our speech and retiring in our behavior. The bad times have come to King Henry’s court once more, and everyone is afraid, everyone is under suspicion. It is like living in a nightmare: every man, every woman knows that every word they say, every gesture they make, might be used in evidence against them. An enemy might work up an indiscretion into a crime; a friend might trade a confidence for a guarantee of safety. We are a court of cowards and tale bearers. Nobody walks anymore; we all tiptoe. Nobody even breathes; we are all holding our breath. The king has turned suspicious of his friends, and nobody can be sure that they are safe.

I creep to my lord duke’s rooms, walking in the shadows, and I open the door and slip in, in silence. My lord duke is standing by the window, the shutters open to the warm night air, the candles on his desk bobbing their flames in the draft. He looks up and smiles when I enter the room; I could almost think that he is fond of me.

“Ah, Jane, my niece. The queen is to go to Richmond with a much-reduced court. I want you to go with her.”

“Richmond?” I hear the quaver of fear in my own voice, and I take a breath. This means house arrest while they inquire into the allegations against her. But why are they sending me in with her? Am I to be charged, too?

“Yes. You will stay with her and keep a careful note of who comes and goes, and anything she says. In particular, you are to be alert for Ambassador Harst. We think he can do nothing, but you would oblige me by seeing that she has no plans to escape, sends no messages, that sort of thing.”

“Please…” I stop myself, my voice has come out weak. I know this is not the way to deal with him.

“What?” He is still smiling, but his dark eyes are intent.

“I cannot prevent her escaping. I am one woman, alone.”

He shakes his head. “The ports are closed from tonight. Her ambassador has discovered that there is not a horse to buy or hire in the whole of England. Her own stables are barred. Her rooms closed. She won’t be able to escape or send for help. Everyone in her service is her jailer. You just have to watch her.”

“Please let me go and serve Katherine,” I take a breath to say. “She will need advice if she is to be a good queen.”

The duke pauses for thought. “She will,” he says. “She is an idiot, that girl. But she can come to no harm with her grandmother.”

He taps his thumbnail against his tooth, considering.

“She will need to learn to be a queen,” I say.

He hesitates. We two have known Queens of England who were queens indeed. Little Katherine is not fit to touch their shoes, let alone walk in them; years of training would not make her regal. “No, she won’t,” he says. “The king doesn’t want a great queen beside him anymore. He wants a girl to pet, a little filly, a young broodmare for his seed. Katherine need be nothing more than obedient.”

“Then let me say the truth: I don’t want to go to Richmond with Queen Anne. I don’t want to bear witness against this queen.”

His sharp, dark eyes look up quickly at me. “Witness of what?” he demands.

I am too weary to fence. “Witness of whatever you want me to see,” I say. “Whatever the king wants me to say, I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to bear witness against her.”

“Why not?” he asks, as if he did not know.

“I am sick of trials,” I say from the heart. “I am afraid of the king’s desires now. I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know how far he will go. I don’t want to give evidence at a queen’s trial – not ever again.”

“I am sorry,” he says without regret. “But we need someone to swear that she had a conversation with the queen in which the queen made it clear that she was a virgin untouched, absolutely untouched, and moreover quite ignorant of any doings between a man and a maid.”

“She has been in bed with him night after night,” I say impatiently. “We all put her to bed the first night. You were there; the Archbishop of Canterbury was there. She was raised to conceive a son and bear an heir; she was married for that single purpose. She could hardly be ignorant of the doings of a man and a maid. No woman in the world has endured more unsuccessful attempts.”

“That is why we need a lady of unimpeachable reputation to swear it,” he says smoothly. “Such an unlikely lie needs a plausible witness: you.”

“Any of the others can do that for you,” I protest. “Since the conversation never happened, since it is an impossible conversation, surely it does not matter who says that it took place?”

“I should like our name entered as witness,” the duke says. “The king would be pleased to see our service. It would do us good.”

“Is it to prove her a witch?” I ask bluntly. I am too weary of my work and sick of myself to pick my way around my ducal uncle tonight. “Is it, in fact, to prove her a witch and have her sent to her death?”

He draws himself up to his full height and looks down his nose at me. “It is not for us to predict what the king’s commissioners might find,” he says. “They will sift the evidence, and give the verdict. All you will provide is a sworn statement, sworn on your faith before God.”

“I don’t want her death on my conscience.” I can hear the desperation in my voice. “Please. Let someone else swear to it. I don’t want to go with her to Richmond and then swear a lie against her. I don’t want to stand by while they take her to the Tower. I don’t want her to die on the basis of my false evidence. I have been her friend; I don’t want to be her assassin.”

He waits in silence till my torrent of refusals is finished, then he looks at me and smiles again, but now there is no warmth in his face at all. “Certainly,” he says. “You will swear only to the statement that we will have prepared for you, and your betters will decide what is to be done for the queen. You will keep me informed of whom she sees and what she does in the usual way. My man will go with you to Richmond. You will watch her with care. She is not to escape. And when it is over, you will be Katherine’s lady-in-waiting, you will have your place at court, you will be lady-in-waiting to the new Queen of England. That will be your reward. You will be the first lady at the new queen’s court. I promise it. You will be head of her privy chamber.”

He thinks he has bought me with this promise, but I am sick of this life. “I can’t go on doing this,” I say simply. I am thinking of Anne Boleyn, and of my husband, and of the two of them going into the Tower with all the evidence against them, and none of it true. I am thinking of them going to their deaths knowing that their family had borne witness against them, and their uncle passed the death sentence. I am thinking of them, trusting in me, waiting for me to come to give evidence for their defense, confident in my love for them, certain that I would save them. “I cannot go on doing this.”

“I should hope not,” he says primly. “Please God that you will never do it again. In my niece Katherine, the king has at last found a true and honorable wife. She is a rose without a thorn.”

“A what?”

“A rose without a thorn,” the duke repeats. He keeps his face perfectly straight. “That is what we are to call her. That is what he wants us to call her.”

Now, let me see, what do I have? I have the murderers’ houses that the king first gave me, and their lands. I have the jewels I earned by a quick squeeze in a quiet gallery. I have half a dozen gowns, paid for by my uncle, most of them new, and hoods to match. I have a bedchamber of my own at my grandmother’s house and my own presence chamber, too, and a few maids-in-waiting but no ladies as yet. I buy dresses almost every day; the merchants come across the river with bolts of silk as if I were a dressmaker on my own account. They fit me with gowns, and they mutter with their mouths filled with pins that I am the most beautiful, the most exquisite girl ever to be stitched into a too-tight stomacher. They bend to the floor to hem up my gown and say that they have never seen such a pretty girl, a very queen among girls.

I love it. If I were more thoughtful, or a graver soul, then I know I would be troubled by the thought of my poor mistress the queen and what will become of her, and the disagreeable thought that soon I shall marry a man who has buried three wives and maybe will bury his fourth, and is old enough to be my grandfather, as well as very smelly… but I cannot be troubled with such worries. The other wives did as they had to do, and their lives ended as God and the king willed; it is really nothing to me. Even my cousin Anne Boleyn shall be nothing to me. I shall not think of her, nor of our uncle pushing her onto the throne and then pushing her onto the scaffold. She had her gowns and her court and her jewels. She had her time of being the finest young woman at court; she had her time of being the favorite of her family and the pride of us all. Now I shall have mine.

I will have my time. I will be merry. I am as hungry as she was, for the color and the wealth, for the diamonds and the flirting, for the horses and the dancing. I want my life, I want the very, very best of everything; and by luck, and by the whim of the king (whom God preserve), I am to have the very, very best. I had hoped to be spotted by one of the great men of the court and chosen for his kinswoman and given in marriage to a young nobleman who might rise through the court. That was the very pinnacle of my hopes. But instead, everything is to be different. Much better. The king himself has seen me, the King of England desires me; the man who is God on earth, who is the father of his people, who is the law and the word, desires me. I have been chosen by God’s own representative on earth. No one can stand in his way, and no one would dare deny him. This is no ordinary man who has seen me and desired me; this is not even a mortal. This is a half god who has seen me. He desires me, and my uncle tells me it is my duty and my honor to accept his proposal. I will be Queen of England – think of that! I will be Queen of England. Then we shall see what I, little Kitty Howard, can count as my own!