The Queen's Mistake (3 page)

 

 

T
hey bade her to follow with their soft, lewd chuckles and their beckoning hands. Then they both disappeared in a swirl of skirts and linen petticoats as they raced around the carved landing post up ahead of her.

The stairs narrowed with each turn as Catherine followed, each landing darker than the one before. She gripped the banister, her heart racing. Joan Acworth and Katherine Tilney laughed at her and whispered behind their raised hands. They were mischievous fools, ladies-in-waiting and servants in the house and companions to the motherless noble girl of seventeen with no other friends, no allies but them. But they were also wild young women, and they put pleasure above all else.

“Hurry, or we shall be discovered,” Joan said with a giggle, her red hair like a flame as she disappeared around the next corner, where Catherine was meant to follow.

“She shall join in again once she has seen him,” she heard Katherine Tilney whisper of her with a muffled laugh. “She has the same Howard blood as the rest of that lot. She’ll not be able to help herself.”

They were waiting as she rounded the corner, just as she knew they would be, two young men from the village, standing with their hands on their hips. Both were wearing black hose, tunics, and white shirts beneath. Both were broad shouldered and, to Catherine, looked slightly foolish. One of the men, with a flat, freckled face and green eyes, took Joan and led her first through an arched doorway into an attic room. They went to a low table that dominated the room and was covered in draperies and dust-caked linen, and there they began to fumble with hose, petticoats and shoes.

“Watch and learn, Cat!” taunted the remaining boy as if she were one of them. “It is what your cousin knew well!”

“Pray, do not encourage her.” The freckle-faced boy chuckled. His expression was piqued with a disturbing combination of lust and concern as he drew off a painted leather belt at his waist. “This is the very thing that killed poor Mistress Boleyn!”

Catherine hung back for a moment, but she was still unable to turn away. What was it that made something so foul, yet so powerfully alluring? Groans and laughter cut through the silence and passed across the heavy thud of her heart. Desire topped the sounds like foam on warm ale. The freckle-faced boy drew Joan over to a corner of the room and pressed her down onto the floor, onto a pile of folded draperies, his honeyed phrases whispered desperately in the shadowy, paneled attic room. Catherine gripped the doorjamb, feeling her own excitement rise. She closed her eyes but they snapped open again.
Mother, what would you do if it were you? There is no one to tell me that now. . . .

“Shh!” bade the boy when Joan began to laugh too loudly.

She responded by playfully slapping his cheek. “Now, where is your spirit of adventure?” she teased.

“Consigned to hell with the rest of me, if the old crone catches us!”

But now the other couple had joined them, and Catherine stood silently watching. A pale shaft of moonlight through the row of attic windows cast the four of them in deeper shadows. Bending, moving, clutching . . . flesh against flesh . . . legs entwined.

And then, from the darkness and shadows, he emerged. He had been waiting for Catherine, as she knew he would be. It was not the first time any of them had played this game.

Francis Dereham moved toward her, tall and lean, his smile, as always, a slight sneer. Coils of honey-colored hair lay loose on his forehead. Even this part, the illicit nature of it, drew Catherine. There was something so dangerously appealing about being bad in such an otherwise dull existence. His lips brushed the nape of her neck. She felt her slender body tremble and a wild sensation rush through her. She had not liked him so much at first, as she had been overpowered by his self-confidence, and his always appraising eyes.

Then she had fallen in love with him.

Or so for a while she had believed.

He took her in his arms now and pulled her close. His sensual touch was a world apart from the awkward groping of Henry Manox and his fumbling, spindly fingers as they sat together practicing her lute, he pretending to teach her music. But those lessons were long over. That was before Francis had come to work at Horsham and everything had changed.

It was not long before Francis had her skirts raised and her embroidered linen drawers cast aside. It was not their first time. But the act seemed mechanical now that her love for him had begun to fade. Mechanical . . . and yet still there was a dark pleasure for Catherine in the act. It came from the knowledge that she had power over someone, or at least his lust, for a little while, if not over her own life.

She skillfully drew Francis to her, tightly wrapping her arms
around his neck as his mouth came down on hers. His bare flesh was warm and oddly reassuring.
Do not tell me you love me anymore,
she thought. Lust was one thing, and she found her ability to command his desire an irresistible pleasure. But love was something else. She did not want that complication any longer.

When it was over, he began to laugh. Catherine pushed him away in response, drew her drawers back on and smoothed down her plain green dress with a flourish of indignation. It might all be a game, but she still had a romantic heart.

“You
are
going to marry me, you know,” Francis declared, drawing up his own hose before he turned and stretched out beside her, his head balanced on his hand.

His laughter faded to the same sly smile that had won her so swiftly away from Henry Manox. Francis was arrogant and condescending, yet boldly sensual.

“You know that I cannot.”

“Do you not love me any longer?”

“Of course I do,” she lied.

“Then we are still troth-plighted, just as always.”

Catherine felt a smile curve her own lips. It was good to have someone love her. Even if she did not return the emotion any longer, it gave her the feeling that she had a life apart from the dowager duchess, her grandmother, who tolerated her here at Horsham only out of duty.

“So we are betrothed.” His smile grew. “But for now it must be a secret.”

“Bit too late for that!” The boy with the flat, freckled face laughed as he stood across the room to adjust his own hose.

“Don’t mind him, Cat,” Katherine Tilney soothed. “He is only jealous that it was Francis and not he who captured a Howard prize.”

The conversation was interrupted by a sudden thud, followed by the stamp of small feet on the ancient plank floor. Then they all heard the jangling of the old dowager’s heavy keys.

“Catherine Howard!”

The voice was cold, clipped and full of reproach. How well Catherine knew the sound of it! The six of them scrambled to their feet, all in fear of its forbidding tone. More footfalls, heavy, angry—and more keys jangling. She was checking every door below, and she was too near!

“Pray, Cat, go, or she shall discover us all!”

Dutifully, Catherine went to the door, not thinking, only acting. Self-preservation—that key trait of all Howards, ingrained in their souls—took over. Out the door, wide skirts flying, heart hammering, she fled down the hall.

“Catherine Howard, present yourself at once!”

“Coming, my lady grandmother!”

The dowager was waiting on the landing below, her spine stiff and her face all sharp angles and hollows in the candlelight. But there was not a hint of color on her gaunt cheeks to bespeak her anger. She stood waiting in her widow’s black dress, square-cut neckline hung with a chain of gold and pearls, her veined hand curled over the top of a carved ebony cane. Deep and heavy, the scent of ambergris swirled around the old woman in her gabled headdress bordered with pearls.

“I knew I should find you here. Were you not told to stay away from the attic rooms after dark?”

“I was, Grandmother.”

“Were you alone in your defiance?”

The truth was a hollow thing. It bore no protection. Her grandmother’s piercing black eyes sunken into hollows rattled Catherine as they bore down on her.
Confess the truth and save yourself . . . yet,
reveal it and there would be no one for me in all the world.
There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There was no choice.

“Alone, Grandmother.”

“And those girls, they did not lead you to something up there?”

“No, Grandmother.”

Black lace spilled back from her spindly wrist and wide bell sleeve as she pelted Catherine full-force across the shoulder, careful to avoid her pretty face. The blow from her hand sent Catherine tumbling back onto the steps, legs slipping out from beneath her. The back of her head hit the banister. Pain rocked her. She clamped her lips shut, refusing to make a sound. Her face blanched but otherwise there was no sign of the pain. Acknowledging weakness would only make things worse.

“Defiance shall
never
be tolerated in a Howard girl.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“You honor this family and at all times you do as you are bidden!”

Agnes Howard, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, widow of the family patriarch, did not actually care where her niece had been. Catherine knew that well enough. The gaunt old woman’s sole concern was the maintenance of order in the grim and sprawling household. An orphaned daughter of her husband’s fifth son, Catherine received a minimal education in court manners, etiquette, dancing and music, out of obligation to the noble family name. She had not, however, received any inheritance from her impoverished father, who was too far down the line of Howard sons to have any property to leave his children. Other than the few mandatory skills she was perfunctorily given, Catherine was left quite unkindly on her own. In her loneliness, the only freedom, the only happiness she enjoyed was in memories of her mother—and in promiscuity.

Catherine faltered, yet only slightly. No one would have noticed it. No one except, perhaps, her mother . . . Ghosts
. . .
they were still and always would be everywhere. As if she heard a voice, she turned to look down the hall behind her. And she saw her mother before she’d died . . . and herself.

“How much do you love me, Mother?”

“As much as the moon and the stars, and to the disturbing exclusion of all else,” Jocasta replied with devoted sincerity.

“But Margaret was your first, and Edward after that. Should you not love them just a little bit more?”

“You are special beyond words, Catherine. We are so alike, you and I. To me, you are the greatest joy in all the world, because in you I see all of the things I shall never be but shall watch in you with great pride.”

The vision of her mother vanished with those words, but she did not dare to stand until the dowager had gone and she was alone again. Submission was part of the respect the old woman demanded. She had not earned respect, but she demanded it nonetheless. As she stared at the now empty hallway, memories of her mother flared and slipped away again. They disappeared into the pain and the unbearable ache of being absolutely alone in the world.

The next morning, as the sky darkened for rain, Catherine escaped the drafty corridors and the cold, grand chambers, going alone outside and down the long flagstone path from the dining hall terrace. It led to the ordered parterre, with its rows of clipped yew trees fashioned into sentinel cones. From there, she began to run, going as fast as her legs could take her through the gardens and beyond. As she glanced back, she saw the manor become slowly smaller in the vista behind her against a broad expanse of gray sky. It sprawled on a hilltop, its many additions and infinite windows capturing and
reflecting back the emerald green of the vast wooded area and undulating hills of Norfolk.

Once she had reached the apple orchard on an opposite hill, Catherine sank against the trunk of a tree heavy with bobs of bright red fruit, then drew her knees to her chest. Her full auburn hair had fallen free from its twist with the running. Curls tumbled down her back and shoulders, an unruly red-gold wave. Her skirts pooled on the ground around her, part of a slightly worn dress of plum-colored linen, with large puffed sleeves edged in old ivory lace. It had been pretty enough once, when the style of it had been in fashion, back when it had belonged to her second sister. Her clothes were never new, and yet no matter what she wore, Catherine was still utterly beautiful. Her skin was smooth, her eyes large and pale gray, and her shape small and slim. There was more than a hint in her of the captivating beauty her cousin Anne had been.

“I thought I might find you here.”

She had heard no one approach. Catherine glanced up, feeling herself a million miles from the house, and even farther from the magnificent girl her mother had meant her to become. She looked up, shielding her eyes from a sudden steely shaft of sunlight that had broken through the clouds. Before her, Dorothy Barwick stood, stout and full cheeked. A Horsham servant, she was the only woman with even a modicum of tenderness for Catherine, and even that came in measured doses.