After about an hour of this quiet petting, there is a knock at the door, and it is Archbishop Cranmer again.
I try to refuse him, saying she is too distressed, but he insists on coming in, and Sir Edward Baynton is nowhere to be found to refuse him. So Kitty emerges from her bedroom, her hair tumbled down, still weeping, and Cranmer sits beside her, at the fireside in her privy chamber, and whispers in her ear.
I try to intercept, but he looks mildly at me with his gentle smile and says: ‘I will not distress your royal mistress again, Lady Rochford. I am come to bring her comfort and promise that His Majesty will be graciously kind to her if she confesses the truth. Please leave us.’
With no support from her sister and no senior ladies-in-waiting to refuse him, I have to wait with her ladies in her presence chamber, hearing sounds of comfort and reassurance. But I think: nobody could accuse her; nobody who sees her in this despair could doubt her innocence. Even I believe in her innocence, and I held the purse that Dereham gave her in my safekeeping!
They stay together for the rest of the day, though the archbishop goes to the great hall for his dinner, and Kitty takes a little meat and some wine in her bedroom and lets us wash her face and hands and change her gown.
‘You’re doing very well,’ I whisper to her, plaiting her hair and putting on her hood.
A sudden chill clutches me when I meet her gaze in her looking-glass and see the despair in her eyes. They really are going to kill this child if they continue hounding her. I warned them not to distress her, and I spoke more truly than I knew. She is too young and too fearful of the infinite power of the king to be able to bear this interrogation from his archbishop. She feels that she is under the eye of God and Man. She is not on a rack, but they are pulling her apart all the same.
Cranmer returns with a fresh ream of papers in his arms and a pot of ink and a sharpened quill and sealing wax and a candle. Surely, he cannot hope that she can speak coherently enough for a statement of innocence? And then I think: of course he does not! He will have it already composed in his own mind. This is him, wrapping it up neatly: a confession of small sins in girlhood and a general plea for mercy. I am so happy that I help him with the ink and the candle, and settle the two of them at the table in the privy chamber and order the ladies to bed, except for Isabel and I, who wait in the presence chamber.
It goes very quiet behind the great doors to the privy chamber, and I know, as surely as if I were a spy at the keyhole, that he is writing down an account, a completely fictional version of Kitty’s petty misdeeds at Norfolk House, Lambeth, forgivingly transcribed.
At midnight, the archbishop comes out with a sheaf of papers, heavy with seals.
‘Watch her,’ he says to me, as if it was not him who drove her to hysterical crying. ‘She is much distressed; but she will feel better for her confession.’
I dare not say: she has confessed to nothing but what you have named to her – this is aquaesita– an inquiry by torture. My spymaster Thomas Cromwell would have had every scrap of evidence from everyone else before he even spoke to her; and then he would only have allowed her to confirm what the king wanted to know. Thomas Cromwell knew every word of evidence that he wantedbefore he looked for it. But you – prurient as any old midwife – will have been raking through her linen and asking her about privy marks and hot breaths and dirty sheets, and now she is crying for shame at your disrespect in naming such things to her. You are a fool as my spymaster was not: you don’t know what you want to know, and you don’t know what to do with what you’ve found.
THE NEXT MORNING,the archbishop comes to our rooms and says that although she may not meet with the king today, she may write him a letter. She is to explain all that she has done and explain everything that has been said against her. This will serve as confession, vindication, and plea for pardon, and her husband the king will read it and forgive her.
Of course, she should have a clerk or secretary to write for her, and she ought to have a lawyer to warn her what not to say. But I remember Sir Thomas More warning Bishop Fisher to write nothing, to say nothing, and then Sir Thomas More was executed for saying nothing and the bishop was executed, too. So it makes little difference what she writes, as the archbishop has already heard the confession, set a penance, and is about to deliver the king’s pardon. I carry sharpened quills and pots of ink behind the two of them, and I lay them on the table before her, as tidily as I used to prepare the writing table in my father’s library.
I rest a hand on her trembling shoulder, and I say to Archbishop Cranmer: ‘Would you like me to write for the queen, as her secretary, Your Grace?’
And the old fraud says: ‘No, no, she shall write it herself.’
I think of her misspelled love letter to Culpeper and how she told him that she had taken such pains to write in her own hand. She is incapable of assembling her distress into coherent sentences; she cannot even form legible letters. If a fluent statement of confession comes out of this morning’s work, we will all know that the author is the Cambridge University educated archbishop and not thegirl who was taught nothing more than flirtation and dancing at Norfolk House.
It takes him the full day, but in the dusk of the early evening, the father of the church comes out smiling, with three pages of beautifully written narrative, and says to me: ‘She will be easier in her mind now that she has made a full confession and asked the king for pardon.’
One glance at her anguished exhaustion tells me that she is not easier in her mind, and I am very sure she has not made a full confession; but I curtsey very low, bowing my head, and he gives me his signet ring to kiss.
‘God’s will be done,’ I whisper, knowing that it is the king’s will that is done and that Kitty’s confession is whatever Cranmer thinks that the king wants to hear. He has the pages in his hand; I can see the writing as I curtsey. It is a work of art in thecursive antiquior– court hand – of official documents, elaborate and complicated.
I glimpse a sentence:My sorrow I can by no writing express. Nevertheless, I trust your most benign nature will have some respect unto my youth . ..
I could almost laugh. Kitty Howard never used a word like ‘benign’ in her life and would have no idea of how to spell it; she would make many attempts and certainly never imagine a ‘g’. But the main thing – really the only thing – is that the Archbishop of Canterbury has turned this farrago of tears and confessions and downright lies into a plea of pardon to an old husband quite besotted with his younger wife. She can say that she is a sinner; she can say that she was misled and misguided; she can say that she was ignorant of the glorious destiny before her. She can even admit to a pretend betrothal, while he was marrying his third wife before this very archbishop; she can humble herself and say she is worthy of the most extreme punishment – and he will forgive her.
Francis Dereham has done the only good act in all his worthless life: diverted everyone from Culpeper. Since everyone has been looking at the windy braggart Dereham, with his loud assertions ofintimacy with the queen when she was a girl, nobody has noticed the infinitely more desirable Thomas Culpeper who is her lover now she is a wife and a queen. The girl will not be blamed for being coerced by a rogue whose greatest ambition was to be a pirate. She will be accused of childhood folly, and they will completely miss the great love of her life.
I put her to bed with a bowl of soup and a glass of wine, and I tell her that it is all over. Tomorrow, she will be restored, and everything will be well. I speak to her gently, reassuring her as if she were a little girl frightened by a nightmare. In truth, we are all frightened by a nightmare, and none of us have the courage to name the monster that comes after us in our dreams. But tonight, I tell her that we are through the worst of it and that we will survive and be happy. I am certain that if we can only get through the next six months, it will be May Day and the king – the monster in the maze – will be long dead and gone.
She is paler than her fine linen sheets, the shadows under her eyes as dark as if they were bruises from a husband’s fists. ‘It’s over?’ she whispers.
‘I think so. Two signed confessions – and best of all: no mention of Lincoln or Pontefract or York.’
She reaches up and puts her cold little hands over my mouth. ‘We never speak of it.’
‘Never,’ I assure her.
‘Is he all right?’ she asks. ‘No one has questioned him?’
‘He won’t speak of it, and no one is even thinking of him.’
