Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

I am home, and it is such relief to be here, I could laugh at myself for being a dull old spinster, shying away from society. But it is not just the pleasure of coming home to my own rooms and my own view from my windows and my own cook – it is the pleasure of escaping from the court, that court of darkness. Good God, it is a poisonous place that they are making for themselves, I wonder that anyone can bear to be there. The king’s mood is more unreliable than ever. In one moment he is passionate to Kitty Howard, fondling her like a lecher before everyone so that she blushes red and he laughs to see her embarrassment, then half an hour later he is raging against one of his councillors, flinging his cap to the ground, lashing out at a page, or silent and withdrawn, in a mood of quiet hatred and suspicion, his eyes darting round, seeking someone to blame for his unhappiness. His temper, always indulged, has become a danger. He cannot control it himself; he cannot control his own fears. He sees plots in every corner and assassins at every turn. The court is becoming adept at diverting him and confusing him; everyone fears the sudden turning of his moods into darkness.

Katherine runs to him when he wants her, and she shies away when his temper is bad, as if she were one of his pretty greyhounds. But the strain must tell on her in time. And she has surrounded herself with the silliest and most vulgar girls who were ever allowed in a gentleman’s house. Their dress is incredibly ostentatious with as much bare flesh and jewels as they can afford; their manners are bad. They are sober enough when the king is awake and in the court; they parade before him and bow to him as if he were a brooding idol. But the moment he is gone, they run wild like schoolgirls. Kitty does nothing to control them; indeed, when the doors of her rooms are shut, she is the ringleader. They have pages and young men of the court running in and out of her rooms all day, musicians playing, gambling, drinking, flirting. She herself is little more than a child, and it is a great joy to her to have a water fight in a priceless gown and then change into another. But the people about her are older and less innocent, and the court is becoming lax, perhaps worse. There is a great scurry into decorum when someone dashes in and says the king is coming, which Kitty adores, the schoolchild that she is; but this is now a court without discipline. It is becoming a court without morals.

It is hard to predict what will happen. She said she was with child in the first month of marriage, but she was mistaken; she seems to have no idea how grave a mistake this can be, and there have been no hopes since. As I came away the wound on the king’s leg was giving him terrible pain, and he had taken to his bed again, seeing nobody. Kitty tells me that she thinks he cannot give her a child, that he is with her as he was with me, incapable. She tells me that she works such tricks on him that he has some pleasure, and she assures him that he is potent and strong, but the reality of the matter is that he rarely manages the act.

“We pretend,” she told me miserably. “I sigh and groan and say it is such bliss for me, and he tries to thrust, but, truth be told, he cannot move, it is a pathetic mime he does, not the real thing.”

I told her that she should not speak of this to me. But she asked me, very trustingly, who should advise her? I shook my head. “You can trust no one,” I said. “They would have had me hanged for a witch if I had said half what you have told me. If you say the king is impotent, or you predict his death, that is treason, Kitty. The sentence for treason is death. You must never speak of this to anyone, and if anyone asks me did you speak to me, I shall lie for you and say you did not.”

Her little face was white. “But what shall I do?” she asked me. “If I cannot ask for help, and I don’t know what to do? If it is a crime even to tell someone what is wrong? What can I do? Who can I go to?”

I gave her no answer for I had none. When I was in the same trouble and danger, I never found anyone who would help me.

Poor child, perhaps my lord duke has a plan for her, perhaps Lady Rochford knows what can be done. But when the king is tired of her – and he must tire of her, for what can she do to create a lasting love? – when he is tired of her, if she does not have a child, then why would he keep her? And if he has a mind to be rid of her, will he make as generous a settlement on her as he did for me, given that I was a duchess with powerful friends and she is a light, slight-witted girl with no defense? Or will he find some easier, quicker, and cheaper way to be rid of her?

Let me see, what do I have?

My winter gowns are all completed, though I have some more for spring in the making, but they are of no use, for the season of Lent is coming and I cannot wear them.

I have my Christmas and New Year gifts from the king; that is, among other things that I have already forgotten or given away to my women, I have two pendants made of twenty-six table diamonds and twenty-seven ordinary diamonds, so heavy that I can hardly hold up my head when they are round my neck. I have a rope of pearls with two hundred pearls as big as strawberries. I have the lovely horse from my dear Anne. I call her Anne now, and she still calls me Kitty when we are alone. But the jewels make no difference for those, too, have to be put aside for Lent.

I have a choir of new singers and musicians, but they cannot play merry music for me to dance when Lent comes. Also, I will not be allowed to eat anything worth having during Lent. I may not play cards or hunt; I may not dance or play games. It is too cold to go out on the river, and even if it were not, it will be Lent soon. I will not even play jokes with my ladies or run around the apartments or play catch or bowls or bat and ball as soon as it is dreary, dreary Lent.

And the king, for some reason, is making Lent come early this year. Out of sheer ill humor he has taken to his rooms since February, and now he doesn’t even come out to dine, and never sees me, and is never kind to me, and has not given me anything or called me pretty rose since Twelfth Night. They say he is ill, but since he is always lame and always costive and since his leg constantly rots from the wound, I can’t see what difference it makes. And besides, he is so cross with everyone, and there is no pleasing him. He has all but closed up the court, and everyone tiptoes around as if they were frightened to breathe. Indeed, half the families have gone home to their houses since the king is not here, and no business is being done by the Privy Council. The king won’t see anyone, so a lot of the young men have gone away, and there is no amusement at all.

“He’s missing Queen Anne,” Agnes Restwold says, because she is a spiteful cat.

“He is not,” I say flatly. “Why should he? He put her aside by his own choice.”

“He is,” she insists. “For see? As soon as she went away he went quiet, and then he became ill, and now see, he has withdrawn from court to think about what he can do, how he might get her back.”

“It’s a lie,” I say. It is a terrible thing to say to me. Who should know better than me that you can love someone and then wake up and scarcely be troubled with them? I thought that was just me and my shallow heart, as my grandmother says. But what if the king has a shallow heart, too? What if he thought – actually as I did, as obviously everyone did – that she had never looked better or appeared better? Everything about her that had been so foreign and stupid was somehow smoothed away and she was – I don’t know the word – gracious. She was like a real queen, and I was, like I always am, the prettiest girl in the room. I always am the prettiest girl in the room. But I am only that. I am never more than that. What if he now wants a woman with grace?

“Agnes, you do wrong to presume on your long friendship with Her Grace to distress her,” Lady Rochford says. I adore how she can say things like that. The words are as good as a play, and her tone is like a shower of February rain down your neck. “This is idle gossip about the king’s ill health, for which we should be praying.”

“I do pray,” I say quickly, for everyone says I go into chapel and spend all my time craning my head over the edge of the queen’s box to see Thomas Culpepper, who glances up at me and smiles. His smile is the best thing in church; it lights up the chapel like a miracle. “I do pray. And when it is Lent, God knows, I will have nothing to do but pray.”

Lady Rochford nods. “Indeed, we shall all pray for the king’s health.”

“But why? Is he so very ill?” I ask her quietly, so that Agnes and the rest of them can’t hear. Sometimes I wish, indeed, that I had never allowed them all to join me. They were good enough for the maids’ chamber at Lambeth, but really, I don’t think they always behave as proper ladies at the queen’s court. I am sure Queen Anne never had a rowdy ladies’ room like mine. Her ladies were better behaved by far. We would never have dared to speak to her as my ladies speak to me.

“The wound on his leg has closed up again,” Lady Rochford says. “Surely you were listening when the physician explained it?”

“I didn’t understand,” I say. “I started listening, but then I didn’t understand. I just stopped hearing the words.”

She frowns. “Years ago, the king took a dreadful injury in his leg. The wound has never healed. You know that much, at least.”

“Yes,” I say sulkily. “Everyone knows that much.”

“The wound has gone bad and has to be drained; every day the pus from the flesh has to be drained away.”

“I know that,” I say. “Don’t talk about it.”

“Well, the wound has closed,” she says.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It has healed? He is better.”

“The wound closes over the top, but it is still bad underneath,” she explains. “The poison cannot get away; it mounts to his belly, to his heart.”

“No!” I am quite shocked.

“Last time this happened we feared that we might lose him,” she says most seriously. “His face went black as a poisoned corpse; he lay like a dead man until they opened the wound again and drained off the poison.”

“How do they open it?” I ask. “You know, this is really disgusting.”

“They cut into it and then they hold it open,” she says. “They wedge it open with little chips of gold. They have to push the chips into the wound to keep it raw, otherwise it will close over. He has to bear the pain of an open wound all the time, and they will have to do it again. Cut into his leg and then cut again.”

“Then he will be well again?” I ask brightly; I really want her to stop telling me these things.

“No,” she says. “Then he will be as he was, lame and in pain, and being poisoned by it. The pain makes him angry, and, worse than that, it makes him feel old and weary. The lameness means he cannot be the man he was. You helped him to feel young again, but now the wound reminds him that he is an old man.”

“He can’t really have thought he was young. He can’t have thought he was young and handsome. Not even he can have thought that.”

She looks at me seriously. “Oh, Katherine, he did think he was young and in love. He has to be made to think that again.”

“But what can I do?” I can feel myself pouting. “I cannot put ideas in his head. Besides, he does not come to my bed while he is ill.”

“You will have to go to him,” she says. “Go to him and make something up that will make him feel young and in love again. Make him feel like a young man, filled with lust.”

I frown. “I don’t know how.”

“What would you do if he were a young man?”

“I could tell him that one of the young men of the court is in love with me,” I suggest. “I could make him jealous. There are young men here,” I am thinking of Thomas Culpepper,“that I know I could really, truly desire.”

“Never,” she says urgently. “Never do that. You don’t know how dangerous it is to do that.”

“Yes, but you said-”

“Can you not think of a way that would make him feel in love again without putting your neck on the block?” she demands irritably.

“Really!” I exclaim. “I only thought-”

“Think again,” she says, quite rudely.

I say nothing. I am not thinking; I am purposely not speaking to show her that she has been rude, and I will not have it.

“Tell him that you are afraid he wants to go back to the Duchess of Cleves,” she says.

This is so surprising that I forget to sulk, and I look at her in astonishment. “But that is just what Agnes was saying, and you told her not to distress me.”