Suzannah Dunn - The Confession of Katherine Howard

Poor Manox - it hadn’t ended all that well for him at the time, and now this, years later. But what was Wriothesley looking for? Why on earth would it matter, a long-ago dalliance with Henry Manox? I dreaded to think that Wriothesley’s enquiries might not be solely about precontract but Kate’s conduct in general.

Then Francis was asking me to stay, his rancour gone all of a sudden as if it had never been, replaced by a heartbreaking hopefulness. Rob wouldn’t mind, he said: he’d go over to one of his friends when he found us here together. My instinct, though, was to rush to warn Kate. Questions were being asked of more than one man, now, and there had to be a way - if only I could think of it - to warn her while protecting Francis from any more trouble. I needed time to think, though. What else could happen before morning? All that would occur, if I told her now, was that she’d suffer a bad night’s sleep. There’d be nothing she could do, at this hour. And, anyway, Francis did need me. Besides, I was exhausted: I doubted I could even make it over to her rooms or, if I did, make much sense when I reached there.

So, I ended up crawling into bed with Francis, stepping out of my clothes and leaving them where they fell. We didn’t talk; I’d thought we might, but we didn’t, not a word. I’d assumed that sleep would elude him but within a few breaths he was dead to the world. Perhaps an hour or so later, the door opened, then closed: Rob, presumably, gone on his way to someone else’s room to cadge some space in a bed or, unfortunately more likely, on a floor. I stayed awake for hours longer, listening to Francis’s breaths, guardian of them, all the time conscious of lying very still as if under observation and afraid of giving myself away. Conscious of it, but unable to remedy it. Nor did I seem able to use the time to think through what I could say, in the morning, to Kate. Instead, I pondered what she might do when she knew that questions were being asked about her past. What could she do? Go to the king? She’d been told he was in London. Was Wriothesley taking the opportunity of the king’s back being turned? Or had the king absented himself to allow this to happen, in the hope that it’d be cleared up before his return? His departure, I recalled, had been unexpected and Kate had been offered no explanation for it.

I lay there thinking how the king was Kate’s only supporter. She’d come from nowhere. The king had chosen her, to everyone’s complete surprise. No one could’ve predicted it; she’d been no one’s project. The king alone had chosen her - liking what he saw and not looking any closer - and he’d championed her: she was only here on his whim. She had no friends with influence. Family, yes: her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, was the country’s most powerful nobleman and the king’s right-hand man; but that was all the more reason for him to drop her fast if she were in trouble, and he was wily and heartless enough to do so. Five years previously, he’d done exactly that to his other queen-niece, Anne Boleyn: turning prosecutor, even, in that case; conducting the trial and then, at its conclusion, declaring the death sentence.

First at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox…I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body…

Never had I thought that Kate would one day become queen - she was a Howard but from the bottom of the Howard pile, the motherless tenth child of the disappointing second son, and empty of ambition. At the duchess’s, though, she was queen of a kind from the day she arrived.

When I first ever saw her, I’d been momentarily blinded from a dash indoors and only as my eyes adjusted did I see that I’d run in on our Mrs Scully and that she was standing beside a girl. The girl wasn’t quite standing but reclining against a hefty wooden chest. One hip on, one off. I recognised her as about my own age - twelve - but otherwise she was unlike any girl I’d ever encountered. The sling of that hip, perhaps. None of we girls at the duchess’s would’ve dared sit like that, or indeed sit at all in the presence of an adult who was standing, even if that adult was only our own dear Mrs Scully.

Mrs Scully said to me, ‘This is Katherine,’ and she sounded very correct, as if addressing me in the presence of another adult.

She hadn’t said, Catheryn, this is Katherine.

‘The new girl,’ she said. I was the new girl, though. Or had been, until now.

Any other girl, having dimpled, would’ve bitten her lip and glanced away, but this Katherine held me in her gaze, the glitter of which, I understood, was to be taken as a smile. Faintly amused, was how she looked. It struck me, even at the time, as an adult look, knowing and appraising. Unnerved, I’d murmured the requisite greeting and scarpered back to my friends.

I’d been at the duchess’s for six months, by that time. It would be the making of me, my parents had said, to grow up in the household of Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, the widowed matriarch of England’s foremost family. We were so lucky that she’d agreed to take me on. The duchess had been plain Agnes Tilney before she’d become the old duke’s second wife, and she and my grandfather had been second cousins. We were the poor relations.

Aim high, my mother had been telling me ever since I could remember: Don’t settle, she’d say. There were no lullabies, for me: only Aim high. Don’t settle.

‘I didn’t settle,’ she’d say, and look at me.

Back in those days I did only have eyes for her; there was no one else in my little world. What I saw of her, usually, was that long straight back of hers as she strode busily around our house. If she’d have settled, she - farmer’s daughter - would’ve become a farmer’s wife; she’d have married a tenant farmer and had a big, busy farmhouse to run. But she’d aimed high and married a gentleman’s son who himself was aiming high and had become a successful lawyer. So, she had a big, busy manor house to run, with tenants to farm our land.

I grew up with the belief that there was work to do in the world: the work of bettering oneself. Our chaplain talked of having one’s God-given place in the world, yet we as a family seemed intent on leaving our place behind. My mother’s way around it was to believe that it was our place to better ourselves. Bettering ourselves, she said, was what God intended for the poor-relation Tilneys. ‘God has been kind to us,’ she’d say, ‘and enabled us to work hard and we’ve done well, we’ve been able to make a good life for ourselves.’ She never looked happy when she said it, though, she never looked pleased; she looked as if there was always so much more to do.

‘All this,’ she’d say sometimes, in wonder, when she paused in the garden and looked back at our house. But try as I might, I couldn’t see what she saw. The house was all I’d ever known, and, beautiful though it was, it was just a house. If there was no house, what would there be? Nothing: just grass and mud; openness, emptiness, a clearing. The wonder in her voice scared me, the implication that what we had - all this - was unexpected, accidental, just as likely to not be. Grass and mud and wind and no shelter were just as likely. From how she said it, all this had been built by my parents’ will alone, and the strength of their will alone kept it standing. But for how much longer? Whenever my father was home from his lodgings in London, I overheard tense exchanges on the rising cost of the stables, the expense of ordering new livery for the servants.

I grew up knowing that I had a part to play in keeping that house standing: I could make a good marriage, make connections. A good marriage - mine - would shore us up; we’d no longer be the poor relations isolated in our beautiful house in that clearing. I was my parents’ only child and their fear for me was that I’d slide away into obscurity. Little did they know that there’d come a time when my obscurity was all we’d wish for.