1541
SOMETHING IS WRONGat court. I can feel the heavy air of a coming thunderstorm. It is not something in Scotland, nor far away on the northern borders. But there is something very wrong at court. I have lived my life here, and I can smell it, like the first hint of smoke in a burning building. I wonder: did Lady Mary use the progress to meet with northern Papists, and are the king’s advisors following a trail that will lead to her door? Archbishop Cranmer is seen going in and out of the king’s privy chamber – would he lead an investigation against the king’s own daughter? Or is she so determined against the marriage with France that she was planning to run away again, and have they sighted a Spanish ship riding at anchor off the north coast? Or now that his sister is dead, is the king planning a war with Scotland to teach King James greater respect for his uncle?
But none of these plans would send the old lords away from court; they would come together with the king, to plan an invasion or a new plot or a cruel punishment; they would not go individually, one by one, to wherever it is that they have gone. And where have they gone? And why does nobody know?
Only I am uneasy. Everyone else continues as usual, which makes me think that I am mistaken; I have been thrown back to the time when I held a vigil for my missing husband, going round and round a quiet palace, opening doors on empty rooms.
I use my traitor skills, I see what horses are in the stable-yard, what lords have places set at dinner. I walk slowly past Dr Butts’ chamber hoping to see visiting doctors, come to consult with him. I watch for royal messengers riding north with muster papers – but there is nothing that I can see out of the ordinary – but that the king will not eat or be merry with the queen he called his ‘rose’.
I persuade myself I am worrying about nothing, but then, Lady Isabel Baynton, Kitty’s sister, comes on the fifth day of November to complain that Francis Dereham has disappeared.
‘Just left as rudely as he arrived,’ she complains.
‘Gone?’ I ask her. ‘Or just drunk in a whorehouse somewhere?’
‘All his things are gone from his room,’ she says. ‘My husband says he took his pay for the quarter on Michaelmas Day so ungraciously that he half-thought he would leave then. He’s not made himself popular.’ She lowers her voice. ‘It’s not as if we’ll miss him.’
‘I’ll tell the queen,’ I say.
‘I doubt she’ll care,’ Isabel observes.
I fold my lips on an angry retort. Is the woman so stupid that she has forgotten how he got his place, why we endure his company? Does she not remember that her own family forced him into Kitty’s service, introduced as an old friend, because he had a cache of secret letters in the keeping of the dowager duchess? Where would he go which is a better place than this? Where else could he use the currency of indiscreet letters?
Francis Dereham’s absence is barely noticed by anyone but me, but then Catherine Tilney and her friend Alice Restwold leave court suddenly, without notice to anyone. I stand in the doorway of their shared bedchamber, as if a precipice has opened up under my feet, I have such a vertiginous sense of the past. I open the chest for their gowns. It is empty but for a little scrap of ribbon. I smell the sandalwood of the chest, and I recognise this feeling of falling. This is the feeling of being powerless, of things coming undone, of a bobbin rolling along the floor, unspooling. This is the tug of a single thread that unravels the whole picture of a tapestry.
I dare not say anything to Kitty. There is no one I can speak to; there is no one I can trust with my fear that something is happening at court, something is happening again. I would talk with Thomas Culpeper, but I don’t want to be seen on the king’s side, where messengers come and go and the privy council seems to be meetingdaily, at odd times of day, with the king attending as if it is a matter if great importance to him.
Every day, one of the old lords rides into the beautiful stables at Hampton Court and goes straight to the king’s rooms without speaking to anyone else, without calling in courtesy to the queen. Every day, another man rides out. Thomas Wriothesley, who served under my Lord Cromwell and knows how to interrogate a suspect, is still absent, but Archbishop Cranmer, Edward Seymour, and William Fitzwilliam come and then go again.
ALICERESTWOLD DOESnot come back, and Catherine Tilney sends no word from wherever she is. I think I can safely send a note complaining of their rudeness to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. It will alert her to their disappearance, and maybe she will reply and tell me that she needed them for some reason, so urgently that they had no time to tell me they were leaving.
It is a sign of how anxious I am becoming that I am relieved to see the red flag with the white crosses of the Howard standard at the head of an armed troop clattering into the yard.
I run down the stairs to the inner court and greet my uncle as he is dismounting.
‘What the hell is happening here?’ he demands.
‘Why have you come?’
He scowls at me. ‘Summoned. Urgent. No idea.’
He throws his reins to his groom and strips off his leather gloves.
‘I don’t know what’s happening. Something’s wrong,’ I tell him. ‘But I don’t know what.’
‘Must be very secret if you’ve not managed to stick your nose in it,’ he says rudely.
I break into a half-run to keep up with him as he strides towards the archway towards the main hall. ‘Have you ever heard of a rogue called Francis Dereham?’ he stops and suddenly demands.
My face is expressionless. ‘Francis Dereham?’
‘Some kind of usher or rogue or pimp at Norfolk House.’
‘I’ve never been to Norfolk House.’
‘A madhouse,’ he says bitterly. ‘Anyway, he’s been arrested.’
‘What for?’ my mouth is dry with fear.
