Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“Is Katherine to try to save them?” I ask.

“Yes. It’s worth a try,” he says carelessly. “It’s a great gamble for a great prize,” and he steps up the gangplank into the waiting barge. I watch them cast off the ropes and I see the barge swing into the current. The rowers’ oars are held upward, like lances, and at the command they lower them in one smooth sweep into the green water. The Norfolk standard at the stern ripples out, and the barge leaps forward as the oars bite. In a moment the duke has gone.

Like a fool I am in the privy garden at half past nine. I cannot trust anybody with the secret that I am meeting Thomas Culpepper, so I send my ladies to my rooms ahead of me as soon as I hear the clock strike ten. Within a minute of their leaving, the door in the wall opens, and he comes in.

He walks like a young man. He does not drag his fat leg like the king. He walks on the balls of his feet like a dancer, as if he is ready to run or to fight at a moment’s notice. I find I am smiling in silence, and he comes to my side and looks at me, saying nothing. We look at each other for a long time, and for once I am not thinking what I should say, or even how I look. I just drink in the sight of him.

“Thomas,” I breathe, and his name is so sweet that my voice comes out all dreamy.

“Your Grace,” he says back.

Gently he takes my hand and raises it to his lips. At the last moment, as he touches his lips to my fingers, he looks at me with those piercing blue eyes and I can feel my knees go quite weak, just at this slight touch.

“Are you well?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Oh, yes. Are you?”

He nods. We stand, as if the music has just stopped in a dance, facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes.

“The king?” I ask. For a moment I had forgotten all about him.

“Better this morning,” he says. “The physician came and purged him last night, and he labored painfully for some hours, but now he has passed a great motion and is better for it.”

I turn my head away at the very thought of it, and Thomas gives a little laugh. “I am sorry. I am too accustomed; all of us in his rooms are accustomed to talk in much detail about his health. I did not mean-”

“No,” I say. “I have to know all about it, too.”

“I suppose it is natural, once one reaches such a great age…”

“My grandmama is his age, and she does not talk about purges all the time, nor does she smell of the privy.”

He laughs again. “Well, I swear that if I ever get to forty, I shall drown myself. I couldn’t bear to grow old and flatulent.”

I laugh now at the thought of this radiant young man growing old and flatulent. “You will be as fat as the king,” I predict. “And surrounded by adoring great-grandchildren and an old wife.”

“Oh, I don’t expect to marry.”

“Don’t you?”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“Why ever not?”

He looks at me intently. “I am so much in love. I am too much in love. I can only think of one woman, and she is not free.”

I am breathless. “Can you? Does she know?”

He smiles at me. “I don’t know. D’you think I should tell her?”

The door behind me opens, and Lady Rochford is there. “Your Grace?”

“Here is Thomas Culpepper come to tell me that the king has been purged and is better for it,” I say brightly, my voice high and thin. I turn back to him; I dare not meet his eyes. “Will you ask His Grace if I may visit him today?”

He bows without looking at me. “I will ask him at once,” he says, and goes quickly from the garden.

“What d’you know of Lady Margaret and your brother Charles?” Lady Rochford demands.

“Nothing,” I lie at once.

“Has she asked you to speak to the king for her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to?”

“Yes. I am hoping that he will be pleased.”

She shakes her head. “Take care how you do it,” she warns me. “It may be that he is not pleased.”

“Why should he not be pleased?” I ask. “I think it is lovely. She is so pretty and a Tudor! It is such a high match for my brother!”

Lady Rochford looks at me. “The king may think it a high match for your brother, too,” she says. “He may think it too high. You may need to use all your charm and all your skills to persuade him to allow them to marry. If you want to save your brother and advance your family, you had better manage him as well as you have ever done. You had better choose your time and be very persuasive. You must do this; your uncle would like it.”

I make a little face at her. “I can do it,” I say confidently. “I shall tell the king that it is my wish that they be happy, and he will grant my wish. Voilà! ”

“ Voilà perhaps,” she says sourly, the old cat.

But then it all goes wrong. I think I shall tell the king when I see him that night, and Lady Margaret agrees to follow me in and beg for his forgiveness. Actually, we are both quite excited, certain that it will go well. I am going to plead, and she is going to cry. But before dinner Thomas Culpepper comes to my rooms with a message to say that the king will see me on the morrow. I agree and go to my dinner – why should I care? The king has missed dinner so many times I don’t think that it matters. Certainly he’s not going to fade away in a hurry. But poor me! It does matter, for while I am at dinner, and dancing actually, someone pours poison in the king’s ear about his niece and even about me and the poor management of my rooms, and voilà !

The king marches into her private rooms and jerks his head at the three of us ladies-in-waiting, and says, “Outside,” as if we were dogs for his ordering. We scuttle from the rooms like whipped hounds and linger at the half-closed door and hear the terrifying rumble of royal rage. The king, out of bed for only half a day, knows everything and is most displeased.

Perhaps Lady Margaret thought that Katherine would intercede for them before they were caught and that she could be persuasive enough. Perhaps the lovers thought that the king, rising out of his sickbed, returning to wallow in his own uxorious joy, would be forgiving to other lovers, to other Howard lovers. They are sadly mistaken. The king speaks his mind briefly and to the point and then strides out of her room. Katherine comes running after, white as her collar, flooded with tears, and says that the king is scenting plots and conspiracies and lush unchastity at the court of his rose, and he is blaming her.

“What shall I do?” she demands. “He asks if I cannot keep control of my ladies. How should I know how to keep control of my ladies? How should I command his own niece? She is the daughter of the Queen of Scotland; she is royal and six years older than me. Why would she ever listen to me? What can I do? He says he is disappointed in me and that he will punish her; he says the two of them will face his extreme displeasure. What can I do?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. “You can do nothing to save her.” What can be easier to understand than this?

“I cannot let my own brother be sent to the Tower!”

She says this, unthinking, to the woman, me, who saw her own husband go to the Tower. “I’ve seen worse happen,” I say dryly.

“Oh, then, yes.” She flaps her hand dismissively, and twenty diamonds catch the light and dazzle away the ghosts of them, Anne and George, going to the Tower without a word to save them. “Never mind then! What about now? This is Lady Margaret, my friend, and Charles, my own brother. They will expect me to save them.”