I curtsey. ‘Like yourself. For you were a Tilney before you were a second wife.’
Grandly, she ignores the impertinence. ‘It’s that fool Francis Dereham,’ she says abruptly. ‘My purveyor. Went to Ireland to make his fortune and came home without it. Now he wants a place at court. In your service.’
‘He can’t,’ Katheryn says instantly.
‘Better that you give him a place and a small fee to make him happy than he chatters away in the London alehouses,’ Lord William Howard points out. ‘All you young people were as wild as each other, though I know you were warned more than once...’
‘We did nothing.’
‘Nothing that matters,’ the dowager duchess corrects her. ‘I’ve taken a handful of letters and poems and nonsense from half a dozen girls off him. I’ve not looked at them, but I take it you were as bad as the rest?’
Kitty gives a little moan. ‘Nothing.’
‘Well, anyway, I’ve got them locked up safe, so he has no evidence. But he’s running around saying that you two were beloved and betrothed and God knows what else. He says he gave you a hundred pounds before he went away, and that now you’re queen, there must be some good to come to him.’
‘I’ll give him his money back; I haven’t even spent it,’ Katheryn says crossly. She looks at me. ‘It’s that purse you have, Jane.’
The dowager duchess turns a sharp gaze on me. ‘You have it, do you? You’re in her confidence?’
‘I know nothing about it,’ I say quickly. ‘I just held the purse. I will return it to you today to give to him. I thought it better that Her Grace did not hold money that belonged to a young man, even before she was queen.’
‘Excellent.’ Lord William Howard clasps his fat hands together, and his wife Margaret repeats his gesture, as if she is following him in a dance, copying the steps, one beat behind. ‘Then all that’s needed is to find a place for him in your household.’
‘We don’t need a purveyor,’ I remark quietly.
‘He can be her secretary!’ the old lady tells me. ‘He can write.’
‘It’s not enough to write,’ I point out quietly. ‘The queen’s secretary is a post for a man with money to pay the entry fee, a family to ask for it, an education to match it. And faultlessly discreet.’
‘Dereham is distantly related to us Howards,’ the dowager duchess says, as if that is a connection good enough for any post. ‘And who cares about his education?’
‘The queen’s vice chamberlain would care.’
‘My step-grandson-in-law! He’ll do what I say!’
‘No!’ Katheryn interrupts. ‘Not secretary. Couldn’t he do something else?’
‘I’m sure we can find some kind of post,’ I offer glacially. ‘If you insist, Your Grace?’
‘Why can’t you keep him at yours?’ Katheryn asks plaintively. ‘He was always your favourite?’
There’s a brief, awkward silence. Only the Countess of Bridgewater, who has seen worse and survived far worse, breaks it. ‘He’s a little shit,’ she says crudely. ‘Better for you, Your Grace, if he is shitting in your stool house than shitting over us all with the enemies of our family and a bunch of reformer preachers. If he says anything at court that you don’t like, then you’ll be first to hear it, and you can have him beaten at the first word and arrested at the second.’
‘It’s treason to speak against me,’ Katheryn whispers, so pale that I can see blue veins at her temples that match the looped chains of sapphires on her neck.
‘Then hang him,’ the countess says simply. ‘But don’t leave him gabbling and scrabbling around St Paul’s and telling dirty Lutherans that the queen – a Howard queen – is a whore as bad as her cousin Anne.’
Katheryn gives a little scream and jumps up. ‘How dare you!’
Everyone has to rise as she is standing; but her grandmother takes her time getting to her feet.
‘My Lady Bridgewater...’ I say furiously to the countess. ‘You forget the respect that you owe...’
She shoots a hard look at me. ‘Oh, aye – I forgot you were her sister-in-law. But am I right? Or not?’
‘You’re right,’ I say unwillingly. ‘We don’t want gossip in London.’
‘Lord William’ll bring him to court and introduce him. He can be a groom of your chamber,’ the dowager duchess rules.
