Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“Good gracious, no!” she says, and she flushes up quite scarlet. “Everyone knows I’m not allowed even to think about a man. Ask anyone! The king would not allow it.”

“You do like him!” I say delightedly. “Lady Margaret, you sly thing! You are in love with my brother.”

She hides her face in her hands, and she peeps at me through the fingers. “Don’t say a word,” she begs me.

“Oh, all right. But has he promised marriage?”

She nods shyly. “We are so much in love. I hope you will speak for us to the king? He is so strict! But we are so very much in love.”

I smile down the hall at my brother. “Well, I think that’s lovely,” I say kindly. I so like being gracious to the king’s niece. “And what a wonderful wedding we can plan.”

I have had a letter from my brother, an utterly mad letter; it distresses me as much as it angers me. He complains of the king in the wildest of terms, and he commands me to return home, insist on my marriage, or never more be a sister to him. He offers me no advice as to how I am to insist on my marriage – clearly he does not even know that the king has remarried already – nor any help if I want to return home. I imagine, as he knew well enough when he gave me these impossible choices, that I am left with the single option of never more being a sister to him.

Little loss to me! When he left me here without a word, gave me an ambassador who was almost unpaid, failed to send adequate proof of the renunciation of the Lorraine betrothal, he was no good brother to me then. He is no good brother now. Least of all is he my good brother when the Duke of Norfolk and half the Privy Council come thundering down to Richmond in a rage, since they have, of course, picked up his letter almost from the moment it left his hand, copied it, translated it, and read it before it ever came to me. Now they want to know if I think my brother will incite the Holy Roman Emperor to war against England and Henry on my behalf?

As calmly as I can, I point out to them that the Holy Roman Emperor is not likely to make war at my brother’s behest and that (emphatically) I do not ask my brother to make war at my behest.

“I warn the king that I cannot rule my brother,” I say, speaking slowly and directly to the Duke of Norfolk. “William will do as he wishes. He does not take my advice.”

The duke looks doubtful. I turn to Richard Beard and speak in German. “Please point out to His Grace that if I could make my brother obey me, then I would have told him to send the document which showed that the betrothal to Lorraine was renounced,” I say.

He turns and translates, and the duke’s dark eyes gleam at my mistake. “Except it was not renounced,” he reminds me.

I nod. “I forgot.”

He shows me a wintry smile. “I know you cannot command your brother,” he concedes.

I turn to Richard Beard again. “Please point out to His Grace that this letter from my brother actually proves that I have honored the king, since it makes clear that he has so little faith in me that he threatens me with being cut off from my family forever.” Richard Beard translates, and the duke’s cold smile widens slightly.

“What he thinks and what he does, how he blusters and threatens me, is clearly not of my choosing,” I conclude.

Thank God. They may be the king’s council, but they do not share his unreasonable terrors; they do not see plots where there are none – except when it suits them, of course. Only when it suits them to be rid of an enemy like Thomas Cromwell, or a rival like poor Lord Lisle, do they exaggerate the king’s fears and assure him that they are real. The king is in perpetual anxiety about one conspiracy or another, and the council play on his fears like a master might tune a lute. Provided that I am neither threat nor rival to any one of them, they will not alert any royal fears about me. So the frail peace between the king and me is not broken by my brother’s intemperate speech. I wonder, did he even stop for a moment to think if his letter would put me in such danger? Worse still, I wonder, did he intend to put me in such danger?

“Do you think your brother will make trouble for us?” Norfolk asks me simply.

I answer him in German. “Not for my sake, sir. He would do nothing for me. He has never done anything for my benefit, except to let me go. He might use me as the excuse, but I am not his cause. And even if he meant to make trouble, I doubt very much that the Holy Roman Emperor would go to war with the King of England over a fourth wife, when the king has already helped himself to his fifth.”

Richard Beard translates this, and both he and Norfolk have to hide their amusement. “I have your word then,” the duke says shortly.

I nod. “You do. And I never break my word. I shall make no trouble for the king. I wish to live here alone, in peace.”

He looks around. He is something of a connoisseur of beautiful buildings. He has built his own great house, and he has torn down some fine abbeys. “You are happy here?”

“I am,” I say, and I am telling the truth. “I am happy here.”

I should have warned Lady Margaret Douglas not to meddle with a man who was certain to land her in trouble, but I was so absorbed with trying to keep Katherine Howard steady in her first days of marriage that I did not watch the ladies as I should have done. Besides, Lady Margaret is the king’s own niece, daughter of his sister. Who would have thought that his hard, suspicious gaze would fall on her? In the first days of his marriage? When he told us all that for the first time in his long life he had found happiness? Why, in those honeymoon weeks, should I have thought that he would plot his own niece’s arrest?

Because this is Henry – that is why. Because I have been in his court for long enough to know that things he may overlook when he is chasing a woman will be reckoned up the moment that he has her. Nothing distracts the king from his suspicious terrors for very long. As soon as he was up and out of bed from his fever he was looking around the court to see who had misbehaved in his absence. I was so desperate that he should not suspect the queen and her silly friends that I forgot to look to her ladies. In any case, Lady Margaret Douglas would never have listened to me, given her complete inability to see any sense at all. All the Tudors follow their hearts and make up their reasons after, and Lady Margaret is just like her mother before her, Queen Margaret of Scotland, who fell in love with a man with nothing to recommend him, and now her daughter has done the same. Only a few years ago Lady Margaret married Thomas Howard, my kinsman, in secret and had the pleasure of enjoying him for no more than days before the king discovered the couple and sent the young man to the Tower for his impertinence. He was dead within months, and she was in disgrace. Of course! Of course! Where is the surprise in this? You cannot have the king’s niece marrying where she pleases and her fancy lighting on a Howard! You cannot have one of the greatest families in England, close to the throne on their own account, coming closer yet because a girl likes a dark glance and a merry smile and a certain devil-may-care approach to life. The king swore he would teach her the respect her position deserves, and for months she was a widow with a broken heart.

Well, it’s mended now.

I knew that something was going on, and within weeks everyone knew of it, too. When the king took to his bed with his fever, the young couple gave up all attempts to conceal their love affair. Anyone with eyes could see that the king’s niece was wholly in love with the queen’s brother Charles.

Another Howard, of course, and a favorite: a member of the Privy Council and high in the family command. What did he think he would gain from such a betrothal? The Howards are ambitious, but even he must have considered that he might be overreaching himself. Good God, did he think he might get Scotland by this girl? Did he fancy himself as King Consort? And she? Why would she not see her own danger? And what is it about these Howards that is a magnet for the Tudors? You would think it was some kind of alchemy, like jam for wasps.

But I should have warned her that she would be discovered. It was a certainty. We live in a house of glass, as if the Venetian glass blowers of Murano had devised a special torment for us. In this court there is not a secret that can be kept; there is not a curtain that can conceal; there is not a wall that is not transparent. Everything is always discovered. Sooner or later, everyone knows everything. And as soon as it is known, everything splinters into a million jagged shards.

I went to my lord duke and found his barge ready to sail and he himself on the pier. “May I see you?”

“Trouble?” he asked. “I have to catch the tide.”

“It is Lady Margaret Douglas,” I say shortly. “She is in love with Charles Howard.”

“I know,” he says. “Are they married?”

Even I am shocked. “He is a dead man if they are.”

The thought of the queen’s brother, his own nephew, dead for treason does not disturb him. But then, it is a familiar thought. “Unless the king, in honeymoon mood, is minded to forgive young love.”

“He might,” I concede.

“If Katherine were to put it to him?”

“He has refused her nothing so far, but all she has asked for has been jewels and ribbons,” I say. “Should she ask him if another member of her family can marry another of his? Won’t he suspect?”

“Suspect what?” he asks blandly.

I look around us. The boatmen are too far away to hear; the servants are all in Norfolk livery. Even so, I step closer. “The king will suspect that we are planning to take the throne,” I say. “Look what happened to Henry Fitzroy when he was married to our Mary. Look what happened to our Thomas Howard when he was married to Lady Margaret. When these Tudor-Howard marriages take place, a death follows thereafter.”

“But if he was in a generous mood…” the duke starts.

“You have planned this.” I suddenly see.

He smiles. “Surely not, but I can see an advantage if it happens to come about. We hold so much of northern England, it would be such a pleasure to see a Howard on the throne of Scotland. A Howard heir to the Scots throne, a Howard grandson on the English throne. Worth a little risk, don’t you think? Worth a little gamble to see if our girl can pull it off?”

I am silenced by his ambition. “The king will see this,” is reluctantly forced out of me by my own fear. “He is in love, but he is not blinded with love. And he is a most dangerous enemy, sir. You know this. He is at his worst when he thinks his inheritance is threatened.”

The duke nods. “Fortunately we have other Howard children if dear Charles is snatched from us; and Lady Margaret is a fool who can be locked up at Syon Abbey for another year or two. At the very worst we do not lose much.”

“Is Katherine to try to save them?” I ask.

“Yes. It’s worth a try,” he says carelessly. “It’s a great gamble for a great prize,” and he steps up the gangplank into the waiting barge. I watch them cast off the ropes and I see the barge swing into the current. The rowers’ oars are held upward, like lances, and at the command they lower them in one smooth sweep into the green water. The Norfolk standard at the stern ripples out, and the barge leaps forward as the oars bite. In a moment the duke has gone.

Like a fool I am in the privy garden at half past nine. I cannot trust anybody with the secret that I am meeting Thomas Culpepper, so I send my ladies to my rooms ahead of me as soon as I hear the clock strike ten. Within a minute of their leaving, the door in the wall opens, and he comes in.

He walks like a young man. He does not drag his fat leg like the king. He walks on the balls of his feet like a dancer, as if he is ready to run or to fight at a moment’s notice. I find I am smiling in silence, and he comes to my side and looks at me, saying nothing. We look at each other for a long time, and for once I am not thinking what I should say, or even how I look. I just drink in the sight of him.

“Thomas,” I breathe, and his name is so sweet that my voice comes out all dreamy.

“Your Grace,” he says back.

Gently he takes my hand and raises it to his lips. At the last moment, as he touches his lips to my fingers, he looks at me with those piercing blue eyes and I can feel my knees go quite weak, just at this slight touch.

“Are you well?” he asks.