‘This could be worse,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a pity that it comes out now.’ I don’t have to say: the secret nearly outlived the king. ‘But it’s still your word against Francis Dereham’s. At the very worse, you canadmit you were handfasted and accept an annulment. It’s what Anne of Cleves had to do.’
‘No!’ She gives a little scream. ‘I was not married to that... that... stock fish! I will not have people say that I married him! He was never of my quality, and I won’t go from being Queen of England to Kitty Dereham!’
‘You wouldn’t have to live as his wife...’ I start to explain but she can hear nothing.
‘We weren’t lovers!’ she shrieks. ‘Anyone who says it is a liar. Let me see the king! Let me go to the king! I will tell him there was nothing! It was nothing! I was a child playing at weddings. It was nothing!’
I grab her hands. ‘Quiet,’ I say sternly. ‘Quiet, Kitty. You can’t go to the king like this. You can’t go out of your rooms like this. We’ll get through this, and we’ll get clean away with the other... we’ll get away with everything; but you have to be quiet and clever and calm.’
‘I’m not!’ She shakes her head wildly. ‘I’m not clever and quiet!’
‘No. Not clever. But you can be steady and queenly. You know how to act queenly. You do it beautifully. Be a queen who has been insulted. A little bit hurt and a little bit proud and very dignified.’
I can feel the hammering pulse in her wrists slow to the forceful rhythm of my words. ‘You will see the king,’ I promise. ‘You’re right. You need to see him to explain. But not like this. He hates a scene when someone else does the talking. Just wait. Dry your eyes and wash your face and wait. When you look beautiful, when you can kneel in front of him and ask for a pardon; you can wear your hair down and ask for pardon. He loves you – it’s not like getting rid of Anne of Cleves. He wants you as his wife. He loves you as much as he can love anyone. If everyone stays very calm and says nothing, then it might be that nothing is proved and we can go on as we are.’
I think: I calculate like a philosopher working on a theorem. This may work. Kitty will not face an investigation organised by my spymaster; it will be the slower wits of the old lords: Audley, Southampton, Russell, and the gentle archbishop Thomas Cranmer.Someone like Thomas Wriothesley will invent whatever evidence the king wants, but the king will want evidence of innocence – he will have told them to disprove the allegations against his rose of England, the love of his life. We can trust to his hounds not to riot; they are well-schooled, they will follow the line of what he wants to hunt. They’re not going to dig up something he doesn’t want to see. All Kitty has to do is wait quietly, and this will blow over, like the fright we had last Lent that blew over by Easter, that the king would go back to Anne of Cleves.
‘Where is my brother Charles? Is he with the king?’ she demands. ‘And has my uncle come? He’ll speak for me!’
‘Yes, he’s here,’ I say. ‘Your family are all in the right place.’
‘Tell him we will deny everything.’
I nod and leave her in her window seat.
I walk through the silent presence chamber. The yeoman on the door lets me pass without comment, and I stroll down to the stable-yard to see what horses are in the stalls.
‘Where’s Charles Howard’s horse?’ I ask one of the Howard grooms.
‘Gone to Lambeth,’ the man says.
Charles must have ridden home to tell the dowager duchess what is happening here at the palace.
I don’t dare ask more. I look around; the stables are half empty.
‘Where is everyone?’ I gesture to the empty horse stalls.
‘They’ve all gone to Lambeth,’ he says helpfully.
My face does not change, but my heart skips a beat. ‘To Norfolk House?’ This can only be an inquiry into Kitty’s childhood and a search of her grandmother’s papers. I only pray that the dowager duchess had the sense to burn them.
‘Nay – Lambeth Palace. Privy council is meeting there.’
I breathe again; I want to laugh and clap him on the back and give him a shilling. The privy council can meet at the archbishop’s home and discuss anything they like. It makes no difference to me.
I nod and I walk round the empty yard and pat my own horse,idle in his stable, and I think I will just stay here for a moment, to see if anyone else is coming or going. I have sunk to being the sort of spy that lingers in kitchens and stable-yards and eavesdrops: a common sort of gossip. I no longer have a patron to tell me which way the light breeze of royal favour might blow today; I no longer have the greatest lawyer in England to ask me to find the evidence he wants. I have to sieve the grist for any goodness and scan the midden for worthwhile scraps.
I can hear the wolfhounds baying with excitement and the huntsmen blowing their horns. A royal groom leads the king’s horse out of the stable, and I step back into the shadow of the doorway as the king himself comes out, leaning on his master of horse, Anthony Browne. His great, broad-chested, big-boned warhorse comes up to the mounting block, and the king hangs on to the saddle and swings his good leg over his horse, Anthony Browne and a page pushing him upwards.
He is going hunting, but there is none of the usual bluster and boasting of men ready to enjoy a day’s sport, and they’re going out late in the day. Hardly anyone is riding with him, though the hounds are here, the huntsman here, the bugle for the hounds rings out in the cold air; but there is no bustle and excitement, no courtiers jockeying for precedence, no flirtations as ladies are lifted into the saddle.
The king is certainly not going out after deer; he can’t ride to hounds as he used to do, he is using his hounds as cover for something else: a secret meeting in the woods. This can be nothing to do with the queen; it must be something else altogether. An inquiry about Kitty would be made by the privy council, in a formal meeting with a clerk taking notes. So something else is drawing the king out into the woods of Hampton Chase. Is he meeting the Spanish ambassador, pleading for Lady Mary to be spared marriage to France, or the Scots ambassador, pleading for forgiveness for his king, or some other secret that I can’t even imagine? Kitty and her trivial childhood errors might be quite forgotten, we could be home anddry, while the king goes out into the drizzling rain to hunt other prey.
Sir Anthony goes ahead to the gateway to give the signal to the hounds. I watch the king follow them out of the yard, remembering him riding away from the May Day joust with his greatest friend Henry Norris at his side, and my husband George racing after them to his own death, Anne telling him to say she was innocent, innocent of everything, and I think: no, this is different. It is odd, but it is different. I must not panic; I must not let myself be haunted; I must not frighten myself with memories. These are different times; the king loves Kitty, and no one would care about a whispered promise to a fool like Dereham. They will hang him for piracy and forget him. The king does not want to expose anything about his young wife, and these are not the men to uncover well-hidden kitchen gossip. It is a different queen. These are different times, and I am different, too.
I go back indoors to tell Kitty the good news that the king has gone hunting for the day, that nothing is serious enough to keep him home. But as I climb the great stairs, I hear a bubbling cry and the noise of running feet. It is Kitty, crying and running along the gallery, hair down over her shoulders, blinded with tears, hands holding her gown out of the way, feet pounding. Isabel and a couple of fools are dashing after her and the guard on her door starting after them, uncertain what he should do.
I step out and catch her, as if we were playing a game.
