Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“What has he confessed?” I ask.

“Never you mind. You tell me. What did you do?”

“I was very young,” I say. I peep up at him in case he is disposed to be sorry for me. He is! He is! His eyes are actually filled with tears. This is such a good sign that I feel much more confident. “I was very young, and all the girls in the ladies’ chamber were badly behaved, I am afraid. They were not good friends and advisors to me.”

He nods. “They allowed the young men of the household to come into the girls’ chamber?”

“They did. And Francis came in at night to court another girl; but then he took a fancy to me.” I pause. “She wasn’t half as pretty as me, and I didn’t even have my lovely clothes then.”

The archbishop sighs for some reason. “This is vanity. You are supposed to be confessing your sin with the young man.”

“I am! I am confessing. I am very distressed. He was very pressing. He insisted. He swore he was in love with me, and I believed him. I was very young. He promised me marriage; I thought we were married. He insisted.”

“He came to your bed?”

I want to say no. But if that fool Dereham has told them everything, then all I can do is make it seem better. “He did. I did not invite him, but he insisted. He forced me.”

“He raped you?”

“Yes, almost.”

“Did you not cry out? You were in the room with all the other young ladies? They would have heard you.”

“I let him do it. But I did not want it.”

“So he lay with you.”

“Yes. But he was never naked.”

“He was fully dressed?”

“I mean, he was never naked except for when he took his hose down. And then he was.”

“He was, what?”

“He was naked then.” Even to me this sounds weak.

“And he took your virginity.”

I cannot see a way to avoid this. “Er…”

“He was your lover.”

“I don’t think…”

He rises from his feet as if he would go. “This does you no good at all. I cannot save you if you lie to me.”

I am so afraid of his walking away that I cry out and run after him and catch his arm. “Please, Archbishop. I will tell you. I am just so ashamed, and so sorry…” I am sobbing now, he looks so stern; if he does not take my side, then how shall I explain all this to the king? I am afraid of the archbishop, but I am utterly terrified of the king.

“Tell me. You lay with him. You were as husband and wife to each other.”

“Yes,” I say, driven to honesty. “Yes, we were.”

He lifts my hand from his arm as if I have some infection of the skin and he does not want to touch me. As if I am a leper. I, who only two days ago was so precious that the whole country thanked God that the king had found me! It is not possible. It is not possible that everything could have gone so wrong so quickly.

“I shall consider your confession,” he says. “I shall take it to God in prayer. I have to tell the king. We will consider what charges you will have to face.”

“Can’t we just forget that it all happened?” I whisper, my hands twisting together, the rings heavy on my fingers. “It was so long ago. It was years ago. Nobody can even remember it. The king doesn’t need to know; you said yourself, it will break his heart. Just tell him that nothing important happened, and can’t everything be as it was?”

He looks at me as if I am quite mad. “Queen Katherine,” he says gently. “You have betrayed the King of England. The punishment is death. Can you not understand that?”

“But this was all long before I was married,” I whimper. “It wasn’t betraying the king. I hadn’t even met him. Surely the king will forgive me for my errors as a girl?” I can feel the sobs coming up into my throat, and I can’t hold them back. “Surely he won’t cruelly judge me for my childhood errors when I was nothing but a little girl with poor guardians?” I gulp. “Surely His Grace will be kind to me? He has loved me, and I have made him so happy. He thanked God for me, and this, this is nothing.” The tears are pouring down my face. I am not pretending to be sorry; I am absolutely appalled to be here, facing this awful man, having to twist myself up in lies to make things look better. “Please, sir, please forgive me. Please tell the king that I have done nothing that matters.”

The archbishop pulls away from me. “Calm yourself. Calm yourself. We will say no more now.”

“Say you will forgive me, say that the king will forgive me.”

“I hope he will; I hope he can. I hope you can be saved.”

I grab onto him, sobbing without control. “You cannot go until you promise me I will be safe.”

He drags himself to the door though I am clinging to him like a wailing child. “Madam, you must be calm.”

“How can I be calm when you tell me that the king is angry with me? When you tell me that the punishment is death? How can I be calm? How can I be calm? I’m only sixteen, I can’t be accused, I can’t be-”

“Let me go, Madam; this behavior does not serve you.”

“You shan’t go without blessing me.”

He pushes me from him and then crosses the air rapidly above my head. “There. There you are, in nomine… filii… There, now be quiet.”

I throw myself down on the floor to sob, but I hear the door close behind him, and even though he is not there to see me, I cannot stop crying. Even when the inner door opens and my ladies come in, I am still crying. Even when they flutter round me and pat me on the head, I do not sit up and cheer up. I am so afraid now, I am so afraid.

That devil the archbishop has terrified the girl half out of her wits, and now she does not know whether to lie or confess. My lord the duke has come with him for another visit, and while they try to pull the sobbing queen from her bed, he pauses beside me. “Will she confess to Culpepper?” he whispers, so low that I have to lean against him to hear it.

“If you let the archbishop work on her, she will confess to anything,” I warn him in a hurried whisper. “I cannot keep her quiet. He torments her with hope, and then he threatens her with damnation. She is only a silly girl, and he seems determined to break her. He will drive her mad if he keeps threatening her.”

He gives a short laugh, almost like a groan. “She had better pray for madness; it could be the only thing that saves her,” he says. “Good God. Two nieces as Queens of England, and both of them end on the scaffold!”

“What could save her?”

“They can’t execute her if she is mad,” he says absently. “You can’t stand trial for treason if you are mad. They would have to send her away to a convent. Good God, is that her screaming now?”

The eerie cries of Kitty Howard begging to be spared are echoing through her rooms as the women try to pull her in to face the archbishop.

“What will you do?” I demand. “This can’t go on.”

“I’ll try to keep clear of this,” he says bleakly. “I hoped to see her with her wits about her today. I was going to advise her to plead guilty to Dereham and deny Culpepper, then she has done nothing worse than marry with a precontract in place, as Anne of Cleves. She might have got away with that. He might even have taken her back. But at this rate she will kill herself before the axeman gets her.”

“Keep clear?” I demand. “And what about me?”

His face is like a flint. “What about you?”

“I’ll take the French count,” I say to him rapidly. “Whatever the contract is, I’ll take him. I’ll live with him in France for a few years – wherever he likes. I’ll lie low until the king has recovered from this, I can’t go back into exile, I can’t go back to Blickling. I can’t stand it. I can’t go through it all again. I really can’t. I’ll take the French count even without a good settlement. Even if he is old and ugly, even if he’s deformed. I’ll take the French count.”