‘Are you mad? Fssst!’ I wave him to the doorway, and unwillingly, he goes towards it. ‘Don’t go down the stair!’ I hiss. ‘There may be someone at the bottom, guarding the parlour door!’ I close the door on him, and turn to Kitty. ‘Ready?’
She is blanched with shock. Wordlessly, she nods. I go to the main door that leads to the hall.
‘Who is it?’
‘Anthony Denny. Is that you, Lady Rochford? Is the queen still awake? Will she receive His Majesty?’
I don’t need to glance back at Katheryn to see that she cannot be forced into bed with the king tonight. She is shaking from head to foot as if she has the ague. Even he would notice.
I press her into a chair so that she does not fall to the stone floor in a faint.
‘Her Majesty is asleep,’ I call. ‘Shall I wake her?’
Anthony Denny, outside the door with a couple of companions, pauses for a moment. He will be thinking, as we all think, what an ordeal this marriage is for the queen. He may be thinking that the king is drunk and probably incapable.
‘No, don’t wake her,’ he decides. ‘I’ll tell the king she is already abed. It’s all right, Lady Rochford. Let her have her sleep.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Goodnight.’
Kitty and I freeze, listening to the steps of half a dozen men going back across the stone-floored hall to the king’s side. The little staircase door swings open, and Culpeper comes out, as pale as if he were still sick.
‘I’d better go,’ he says shortly. ‘If he’s staying up, he’ll ask for me.’
Slowly, they reach for each other, as if they are wading through deep water. She slides into his arms; she lifts her face for his kiss. She clings to him as he wraps his arms around her and kisses her deeply, passionately, wordlessly. She takes a cramp ring off her finger; he holds out his hand, and she puts it on the wedding-ring finger of his left hand. He bends his head and kisses it and her lips. Then he steps back and plunges through the door and down the little staircase, and we hear the door shut at the bottom, and he is gone.
THE WORK GOESon wearily. We are step-perfect in our masque, and all the costumes have been made, and the elaborate machinery of pretend cannon and walls and miniature siege engines is ready. New buildings in the city are topped off by the exhausted workmen with a branch of a tree in the chimney and an allowance of ale, but as soon as they are finished on one building, they are sent to another site. The tents and pavilions arrive on lumbering wagons drawn by oxen up the ruined road from London, and the ground is cleared in the scythed meadows; but still, we wait to hear from King James.
One of the English border lords writes to say that he has heardthat James of Scotland has not left Falkland Palace and has no intention of coming south. My uncle the Duke of Norfolk, who urged this meeting as the only way to tame these warring lands, has to face the king with the news that the king of Scots does not trust our guarantees; he will not risk himself so far into English lands. He does not even decline the honour of our invitation; he claims that he never accepted it in the first place. He pretends that he did not promise to attend; he pretends he said nothing. It hardly matters what he says to add insult – he is not coming.
He makes all of us look like fools – all our rehearsals and rebuilding, and the lumbering wagons clogging the roads with our ostentatious treasure. To prepare so richly for a visit and have a guest simply snub us, is worse than if he had refused at the start. By claiming he is unsafe in English lands, he accuses the king of dishonour: putting a fellow monarch at risk, offering a safe passage that he is too weak to deliver.
The worst thing for the king’s men is that they know that James’ belief that the king is dishonourable, and these lands are unsafe, is true. Even though the king did not plan an entrapment he would have been amused if James had been jeered and jostled in the English border lands, and would not have protected him from angry borderers. The entertainments – our masque – were deliberately choreographed to insult James as the weaker king of a smaller kingdom. The grand hospitality was to humiliate him as a poorer king of a poor kingdom. There would have been nothing for him to enjoy, and every agreement – peace on the border or safe passage for merchants – would have come at a high price. King James was wise to refuse, his wife was right to avoid her former suitor, and their insulting absence shows King Henry not only that he cannot command his nephew, but that many believe he has lost control of the north of England, too.
Worse for me, for Kitty, for all of us on the queen’s side, is that there will be no coronation if it does not distress Mary of Guise. Sweating with offence, the king cancels everything. He demandsthat we go home, and it is as if York’s reconciliation, the peace talks with Scotland, even the queen’s coronation, are of no more value than the painted canvas Aurelian walls, which are torn down and burned.
WE HAVE Aweek of rain, and although nobody wants to travel for long days, soaking wet on muddy roads, we might as well go back to London as sulk in York. The king sinks into an angry torpor, and no one can please him: not even Kitty; not even his fool, who has too many topics to avoid; not even my uncle, who is given the impossible task of expelling every single Scotsman from English lands – however valuable his trade, however long his family has settled with us. The king will do anything, however petty, to revenge himself on his nephew, and he only speaks to my uncle to sponsor vindictive raids by English reivers on Scots lands. The young men of the court, Thomas Culpeper among them, are mustered to make an army for surprise attack on isolated Scots’ castles. My uncle advises against deploying jousters against fortifications, so the king now thinks his young companions are of no more threat than painted cannon, and he is furious with them too.
It is not until late September that we turn the weary cavalcade and ride down the roads we took before. It was raining when we left, and it is raining now, and the king is in a worse mood than ever. Nothing is well done, nobody can speak without offending him, nothing is organised as Thomas Cromwell would have done it, and nobody understands the pain that he is in. He sends Kitty from dinner to her rooms as if she were a daughter, not a wife; and he stops coming to her bed. He keeps his young men up all night to gamble with him, and they all learn to lose as he cannot tolerate anyone else winning. Night after night, Thomas cannot get to Kitty’s rooms as he has to play with the king, lose a small fortune, and then sit with him late into the night as he complains of perfidy, and smoulders, like a wet peat fire banked down with hatred.
Collyweston Palace, Autumn
1541
THE KING WAKESlater and later every day, as he stays up all night gambling and drinking and he rarely comes out of his rooms before midday. So on our first morning at Collyweston Palace, Thomas Culpeper and half a dozen of the young companions come on their own to sing under the windows of the queen’s ladies, and the girls and Kitty throw on gowns and run down into the garden for the sunrise as if it were a May Day for young lovers. Unnoticed by the ladies and young companions, Culpeper wraps a cape around Kitty’s shoulders. For just a moment, he holds her, and then stands beside her to face east, where a rosy sun is rising through wispy clouds. They stand quite still, the sunlight on their rapt faces, as if this moment of stillness and silence at sunrise is a spell which will hold them entranced all through the rest of the day.
Someone laughs and makes a joke, and the magic is broken, and I sweep the ladies back up the stairs and bundle Kitty back into bed and stoke the fire in her bedroom.
‘That’s the last time you’ll be able to run out this season,’ I warn her. ‘You’ll have to take more care when we get home. Has he said anything?’
Her eyes are shining green with happiness at being with Culpeper for one moment. ‘No? What should he say?’
He must know as well as I that they cannot meet at Windsor Castle or Hampton Court or Westminster Palace as they have done on progress. The routines are too fixed, the king more regular in his habits. He will come to Kitty’s bedroom once or twice a week, but always without notice, and we cannot turn his groom of the chamber from her bedroom door ever again. Besides, there are more ladies at court when we are near London; the great ladies ofthe kingdom who have served other queens expect entrance to the queen’s bedroom. The wives of the lords have nothing to do but watch and gossip. The spy networks of ambassadors, the council, the churches and the advisors have been absent on progress but they will all be watching in London. Kitty cannot meet Thomas in her bedroom in any of the royal palaces, there is nowhere that they can meet secretly and they cannot even speak together for very long.
‘Thomas says the ulcer on the king’s leg is getting worse,’ she whispers. She glances to the door, which is shut and locked; she glances at the curtained windows. ‘He says it’s down to the bone, like a dog bite, and running wet as if it was a rabid dog that bit. Dr Butts has warned the king that he can’t eat and drink as he does. He says he is gambling with his health. He says he might...’ She breaks off.
‘He’s an old man,’ I say cautiously.
‘Thomas says the Seymours are preparing a regency for next spring,’ she says. She puts her hand half over her mouth, as if her pillows cannot be trusted with these treasonous words.
