Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

I can feel myself grow icy with terror, as if my breath is snow. “I?” I repeat. “I?”

The duke laughs. “Oh, don’t look like that, Lady Rochford. No one will accuse you while you are under my protection. Besides, you don’t have a cat, do you? No familiar tucked away? No wax dolls? No midnight Sabbaths?”

“Don’t joke,” I say unsteadily. “It is not a laughing matter.”

At once he sobers. “You are right; it is not. So who is the witch who is unmanning the king?”

“I don’t know. None of her ladies. None of us.”

“Perhaps it might be the queen herself?” he suggests quietly.

“Her brother would defend her,” I gabble. “Even if you do not need his alliance, even if you have come home from France with a promise of their friendship, you surely cannot risk her brother’s enmity? He could raise the Protestant league against us.”

He shrugs. “I think you will find he may not defend her. And I have indeed secured the friendship of France, whatever happens next.”

“I congratulate you. But the queen is the sister of the Duke of Cleves. She cannot be named as a witch and strangled by a village blacksmith and buried at a crossroads with a stake through her heart.”

He spreads his hands as if he had nothing to do with these decisions. “I don’t know. I merely serve His Majesty. We will have to see. But you should watch her closely.”

“I am to watch her for witchcraft?” I can hardly keep the incredulity from my voice.

“For evidence,” he says. “If the king wants evidence, of anything, then we Howards will give it to him.” He pauses. “Won’t we?”

I am silent.

“As we always have done.” He waits for my assent. “Won’t we?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Thomas Culpepper, my kinsman, in the king’s service and high in his favor for no better reason than his pretty face and his deep blue eyes, is a rogue and a promise breaker, and I shall see him no more.

I first saw him years ago, when he came to visit my step-grand-mother at Horsham and she would make a fuss over him and swear he would go far. I daresay he didn’t even see me then, though now he swears that I was the prettiest maid at Horsham and always his favorite. It’s true that I saw him. I was in love with Henry Manox then, the nobody; but I could not help but notice Thomas Culpepper. I think even if I were betrothed to the greatest man in the land, I would notice Thomas Culpepper. Anybody would. Half the ladies of the court are driven mad for love of him.

He has dark curly hair and eyes that are very blue, and when he laughs his voice cracks on his laughter in a way that is so funny it makes me want to laugh, just for hearing it. He is the most handsome man at court, without doubt. The king adores him because he is witty and merry and a wonderful dancer and a great huntsman and as brave as a knight in a jousting tournament. The king has him at his side night and day, and calls him his pretty boy and his little knight. He sleeps in the king’s bedchamber to serve him in the night, and he has hands so gentle that the king would rather he dress the wound on his leg than any apothecary or nurse.

All the girls have seen how much I like him and they swear that we should marry, being cousins, but he has no money to his name and I have no dowry and so how would that ever serve us? But if I were to choose one man in the world to marry, it would be him. A naughtier smile I have never seen in my life, and when he looks at me, it feels as if he is undressing me and then stroking me all over.

Thank God that now I am one of the queen’s ladies and she such a strict and modest queen there will be none of that, though if he had come to the dormitory at Lambeth, I swear he could have come to my bed and found a warm welcome there. I should have thrown my handsome Francis back to Joan Bulmer if I had been given a chance at a boy like Tom Culpepper.

He is back at court after resting at his home from his wounding in the joust. He took a bad blow, but he says he is young, and young bones mend quickly. It is true, he is young and as filled with life as a hare, leaping for no reason in a spring field. You only have to look at him to see the joy going through his veins. He is like quicksilver; he is like a spring wind blowing. I am glad he has come back to court; even in Lent he makes the place more merry. But just this very morning he has made me wait an hour for him in the queen’s garden when I should have been in her rooms, and when he came late, he said he could not stay but had to run to wait upon the king.

This is not how I am to be treated, and I shall teach him so. I shall not wait for him again; I shall not even agree to meet him next time he asks me. He will have to ask me more than once, I swear it. I shall give up flirtation for Lent, and it will serve him right. Indeed, perhaps I shall grow thoughtful and serious and never flirt with anyone again.

Lady Rochford asks me why I am in such a temper when we go in to dine, and I swear to her that I am as happy as the day is long.

“Mind your smiles then,” she says as if she doesn’t believe me for a moment. “For my lord duke is back from France, and he will be looking for you.”

I lift my chin at once and smile at her quite dazzlingly, as if she has just said something very witty. I even give a little laugh, my court laugh, “ha ha ha,” very light and elegant, as I have heard the other ladies do. She gives a little nod.

“That’s better,” she says.

“What was the duke doing in France, anyway?” I ask.

“You are taking an interest in affairs of the world?” she asks quizzically.

“I am not a complete fool,” I say.

“Your uncle is a great man in the favor of the king. He went to France to secure the friendship of the French king so that our country is not faced with the danger of the Holy Fa – I mean the Pope, the emperor, and the King of France all in alliance against us.”

I smile that Jane Boleyn herself should nearly say “Holy Father,” which we can’t say anymore. “Oh, I know about that,” I say cleverly. “Because they want to put Cardinal Pole on our own throne, out of wickedness.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t speak of it,” she warns me.

“They do,” I insist. “And that is why his poor old mother and all the Poles are in the Tower. For the cardinal would call on the Papists of England to come against the king, just as they did before.”

“They won’t come against the king anymore,” she says dryly.

“Because they know they are wrong now?”

“Because most of them are dead,” she says shortly. “And that was your uncle’s doing, too.”

I was told the court would observe the period of Lent with great solemnity. I was assured that we would eat no red meat at all. I was expecting to dine on fish for the whole of the forty days, but I discover, the very first night at dinner, that English consciences are easy. The king is tender to his own needs. Despite the fast of Lent there is an enormous range of dishes marching into the hall held high above the heads of the servers, and they come first to the royal table and the king and I take a little from each, as is the custom, and send them out to our friends and favorites around the hall. I make sure I send them to my ladies’ table and to the great ladies of court. I make no mistake about this, and I never send my favorite dish to any man. This is no empty politeness; the king watches me. Every word I speak at dinner, everything I do, his bright little eyes almost hidden by his fat cheeks follow everything, as if he would like to catch me out.

To my surprise there is chicken, in pies and fricassees, roasted with mouth-watering herbs, carved from the bone; but in this season of Lent it is not called meat. For the purposes of the Lenten fast, the king has ruled that chicken counts as fish. There are all the game birds (also not meat, according to God and the king) beautifully presented, enfolded one within another for the flavor and tenderness. There are rich dishes of eggs (which are not meat), and there is indeed fish: trout from the ponds and wonderful fish dishes from the Thames and deep-sea fish, brought by the fishermen who go far out to sea to feed this greedy court. There are freshwater cray-fish and stargazy pies with little tasty whitebait heads all peeping out through a thick pastry crust. And there are great dishes of spring vegetables that are rarely served at court, and I am glad to have them on my plate in this season. I shall eat lightly now, and anything that I especially enjoy will be brought to me again for a private dinner in my chamber later. I have never been fed so richly or so well in my life. My Cleves maid has had to let out the stomacher of my gown, and there was much arch comment about my growing and blooming, as if to suggest that it is a baby making me fatter. I cannot contradict them without exposing myself, and the king my husband, to even worse comment, so I had to smile and listen to them tease me as if I were a wife wedded and bedded and hoping to be with child, and not a virgin untouched by her husband.