The Taming of the Queen (67 page)

I nod. Of course he will marry Elizabeth if the king gives permission. Then he will be married to the third heir to the Tudor throne. Then I can dance at his wedding. Then I will have to think of him as my son-in-law.

‘Who knows?’ I say lightly. I nod to my ladies to open the doors and we walk from my bedroom into my privy chamber, and into my presence room, and there he is. He turns as he hears the doors open and I realise he has been waiting for me; and there he is.

When I see him a strange thing happens. It is as if I can see no-one else. I don’t even hear the usual noise of the room. It is almost like a dream, like a slip in time, as if all my clocks freeze and everyone has gone and there is nothing but him and me. He turns and sees me, and I am blind to everything but his dark eyes, and his smile, and his gaze upon me as if he too can see no-one else, and I think – ah, thank God, he loves me as I love him, for there could be no smile so warm, so directed, except from a man who loves the woman walking towards him, glowing, her hand outstretched.

‘Good evening, Sir Thomas,’ I say.

He takes my hand, he bows over it, he kisses my fingers. I feel the light touch of his moustache and the warmth of his breath on my hand and the slightest squeeze on my fingers as if to say ‘Beloved . . .’ and then he straightens up and lets me go.

‘Your Majesty,’ he says. ‘I am so happy to see you looking so well.’

As he says the ordinary words his dark gaze is searching my face and I know that he will know that I have put on my best gown and reddened my lips. He sees the shadows under my eyes; he will know that I am grieving for Anne Askew. And he will also know, as a lover always knows, that something very grievous, very bad has happened to me.

He offers me his arm and we walk together, through bowing courtiers, to the window where he gestures with one hand as if to indicate the setting sun and the rise of one penetrating bright star on the horizon.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asks simply. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I can’t tell you here and now,’ I say honestly. ‘But I am not hurt or ill.’

‘The king?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he do?’ His face darkens.

I pinch the inside of his sleeve, the inner part of his elbow. ‘Not here. Not now,’ I remind him. I smile up at him. ‘Is that the pole star? Is that the one that you steer by?’

‘Are you in danger now?’ he demands. ‘Not now,’ I say.

‘Edward says that you were within a hair’s breadth of arrest.’

I tip my head back and laugh. ‘Oh, yes! I saw the warrant.’

His gaze is admiring. ‘You talked yourself to safety?’

I think of my stretching my lips to the bloodstained riding whip. I think of the ivory satin codpiece thrust into my mouth, banging against my teeth. ‘No. It was worse than that.’

He makes a little exclamation. ‘God—’

‘Hush!’ I say rapidly. ‘We’re not safe. Everyone is watching. What’s going to happen to the Howards?’

‘Whatever he wants.’ He takes two impatient steps on the spot, as if he would fling himself out of the room but remembers that there is nowhere that he can go. ‘Whatever he wants, of course. I expect he will kill them. They were planning treason, without a doubt.’

‘God help them,’ I say, though they would have sent me to the scaffold. ‘God help them.’

The double doors are flung open and the king’s enormously bandaged foot comes in first, his great chair and his beaming smile next.

‘God help us all,’ Thomas says, and steps back like the courtier he is, so that my husband can be wheeled towards his possession, his chattel, his smiling wife.

Father and son, Thomas Howard and his son Henry, wait in the Tower to hear what charges they will face. No-one visits them, no-one speaks up for them. Suddenly this old man and his heir, who ruled all of Norfolk, and owned most of the South of England, who rode at the head of thousands of men, who lived their lives like fat spiders in a network of friendships, kinship and obligations, know no-one. They are completely friendless and without allies. The evidence of treason against Henry Howard is overwhelming. He was fool enough to boast that he had a great claim to the throne. His own sister Mary Howard, still smarting from his command that she must whore herself out to the king, accuses him. She swears on oath that he ordered her to marry Thomas Seymour to get to court, and to become the king’s mistress. She told him that she would rather cut her throat than be so dishonoured. Now she is cutting his.

Even his father’s mistress, the notorious Bess Holland, gives evidence against him. The young man, well-hated by those who should love and protect him, is incriminated daily by his friends and lovers, and finally by his own coat of arms, which Thomas Wriothesley, son of a herald, grandson of a herald, declares has been fraudulently based on the arms of Hereward the Wake – a leader of England five hundred years ago.

‘Isn’t this rather ridiculous?’ I ask the king, as we sit beside the fire in his room after dinner. ‘Surely Hereward the Wake had no coat of arms to leave to the Howards, even if they are descended from him, which nobody can prove. Does this matter at all?’

Around us the court murmurs and plays cards. I can hear the rattle of dice. Soon the king will assemble his cronies, and my ladies and I will withdraw.

Henry’s face is mean, his eyes squinting. ‘It matters,’ he says shortly. ‘It matters to me.’

‘But for him to claim descent from Hereward the Wake . . . this is like a fairy story.’

‘It’s a very dangerous story,’ he says. ‘No-one has royal descent in this country but me.’ He pauses. He will be thinking of the former royal family, the Plantagenets. One by one he has sent them to their deaths for nothing worse than their fathers’ name. ‘There is only one family that can trace themselves back to Arthur of England, and that is ours. Any challenge is going to be met with extreme punishment.’

‘But why?’ I ask, as gently as I can. ‘If it is an old shield that he has shown many times before. If it is the silly pride of a young man. If the college of heralds saw it years ago, and you have not objected before?’

He raises one fat finger and instantly I am silent. ‘Do you remember what the dog-master does?’ he asks me quietly.

I nod.

‘Tell me.’

‘He sets one dog against another.’

‘He does. And when any single dog becomes big and strong, what does he do with it?

He snaps his fingers when I don’t answer.

‘He lets the others pull it down,’ I say, unwillingly.

‘Of course.’

I am silent for a moment. ‘It means that you will never have great men about you,’ I remark. ‘No thoughtful advisors, no-one that you can respect. No-one can stay with you and grow great in your service. No-one can be rewarded for loyalty. You can have no tried and tested friends.’

‘That’s true,’ he agrees with me. ‘Because I don’t want anyone like that. I’ve had men like that before, when I was a young man, friends that I loved and men who were brilliant thinkers, who could solve a problem the moment they heard it. If you had seen Thomas Wolsey in his prime! If you had known Thomas More! Thomas Cromwell would work all night, every night – nothing ever stopped him. He never failed at anything he set his hand to. I could set him a problem at dinner and he would bring me a warrant of arrest at chapel before breakfast.’

He breaks off, his little eyes under the pink swollen eyelids look towards the door as if his friend Thomas More might come in at any moment, his thoughtful face warm with laughter, his cap under his arm, his love for the king and for his family the greatest influence in his life, but nothing in the world greater than his love of God.

‘I want Nobody now,’ the king says coldly. ‘Because Nobody gives nothing away, Nobody loves no-one. The world is filled with people seeking only their own ambitions and working for their own causes. Even Thomas More—’ he breaks off with a little self-pitying sob. ‘He chose loyalty to the church over his love for me. He chose his faith over life itself. You see? No-one is ever faithful till death. If anyone tells you anything different they are playing you for a fool. I will never be a fool again. I know that every smiling friend is an enemy, every advisor is pursuing his own interest. Everyone wants my place, everyone wants my fortune, everyone wants my inheritance.’

I can’t argue against this intense bitterness. ‘But you love your children,’ I say quietly.

He looks across at Princess Mary, who is quietly talking to Sir Anthony Denny in a corner. He looks for Princess Elizabeth and sees her peeping upwards into the smiling face of Thomas Seymour.

‘Not particularly,’ he says, and his voice is like cold glass. ‘Who loved me as a child? No-one.’

The young man Henry Howard, dearest friend of Henry’s dead illegitimate son, sends an imploring letter to the king from his prison in the Tower, reminding him that he and Henry Fitzroy were like brothers, that they spent every day together, that they rode and swam and played and wrote poetry together, that they were all in all to each other. They swore loyalty to one another and he would never, ever conspire against his best friend’s father, who had been a father to him.

Henry tosses the letter to me. ‘But I have read his interrogation,’ he says. ‘I have sifted the evidence against him. I have looked at his heraldry and I have heard what he said about me.’

If I let him recite his wrongs he will get angrier and angrier. He will raise his finger and point it at me, he will speak to me as if I am the guilty young man. He draws an intense pleasure in enacting his rage. He prompts himself like an actor to play the part for the thrill that it gives him. He likes to feel his heart race with bad temper; he likes a fight, even if it is in an empty room with a white-faced woman trying to calm him.

‘But you are not taken in by all this,’ I say, trying to appeal to Henry’s scholarly, critical mind before he unleashes his temper. ‘You are sifting the evidence, studying it. You are not believing everything that they tell you?’

‘It is you that should be afraid of what they tell me!’ he says in sudden irritation. ‘For if this treasonous dog that you speak for so sweetly had got his way, it would have been you in the Tower, not him; and his sister would have your place. He is your enemy, Kateryn, far more than he is mine. He plotted to inherit my power; but he would have killed you.’

‘If he is your enemy, then he is mine,’ I whisper. ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

‘He would have had you dead on some trumped-up charge of heresy or treason,’ the king goes on, ignoring the fact that it would have been his signature on the warrant. ‘And he would have put his sister in your place. We would have had another Howard queen. I would have had another of their whores thrust into my bed! What do you think of that? How can you bear to think of that?’

I shake my head. Of course there is nothing I can say. Who would have signed the warrant? Who would have sent me to my death? Who would have married the Howard girl?

‘You would be dead,’ Henry says. ‘And then at my death the Howards would have commanded my son . . .’ He takes a little breath. ‘Jane’s son,’ he says mistily. ‘In the grip of the Howard family.’

‘But, my lord husband. . .’

‘That was the prize. That’s the prize for them all. That’s what they all want, however they gurn and gloze. They all want command of the regency on my death and control of the new king. That is what I have to defend Edward against. That is what you will defend him against.’

‘Of course, husband, you know—’

‘Poor Henry Howard,’ he says. His voice quavers and the easy tears come quickly. ‘You know I loved that boy as if he were my own? I remember him as such a beautiful boy playing with Fitzroy. They were like brothers.’

‘Can’t he be pardoned?’ I ask quietly. ‘He writes very sorrowfully, I cannot believe that he does not regret . . .’

He nods his head. ‘I will consider it,’ he says grandly. ‘If I can pardon him, I will. I will be just. But I will be merciful too. I loved him; and my boy, my beloved Henry Fitzroy, loved him. If I can forgive Howard for the sake of his playmate, then I will.’