Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

They will bring me another tray of food in a moment. I shan’t touch it. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t do anything but walk around these two rooms and think that Lady Margaret Douglas walked here too, missing the man she loved. She didn’t have half her friends telling the world about her. She didn’t have every enemy of the Howards turning the king against her. She is the most unfortunate woman I know, and she is lucky compared to me.

I know Lady Rochford will stay my friend; I know she will. She knows what Thomas is to me, and I to him. She will keep her head. She’s been in danger before, and she knows how to answer questions. She is an older woman, a person of experience. Before we parted she said to me, “Deny everything,” and I shall. She knows what should be done. I know she will keep herself safe, and me with her.

She knows everything, of course; that’s the worst of it. She knows when I fell in love with Thomas, and she managed all the secret meetings and the letters and the times we could steal together. She hid him for me behind wall hangings, and once in the shadows on the stairs at York. She smuggled me to him down winding corridors in strange houses. He had a room of his own at Pontefract, and we met there after hunting one afternoon. She told me where we might meet, and one night when the king himself tried the outer door, thinking he would come to my bed, she kept her nerve and called out that I was ill and was asleep and sent him away. She did that! She sent the King of England away, and her voice did not quaver for one second. She has such courage; she will not be crying and confessing. I daresay even if they rack her she will just look at them with her cold face and say nothing. I am not afraid of her betraying me. I can trust her to deny everything they ask. I know I can trust her to defend me.

Except… except I keep wondering now that she could not save her husband when he was accused. She never likes to talk about him, and that makes me wonder, too. I always thought it was because she was so very sad about him, but now I wonder if it was something worse than that. Catherine Carey was certain that she had not given evidence for them but against them. How could that be? And she said that she had saved their inheritance, and not them. Yet how could they die and she get off scot-free if she had not made some kind of agreement with the king? And if she betrayed one queen – and that her own sister-in-law – and condemned her own husband, why should she save me?

Oh, I get these fearful thoughts because of the situation I am in, which is not an easy one. I know that. Poor Margaret Douglas must have gone half mad walking from one room to another and not knowing what would become of her. Fancy spending a year here, walking from one room to another and not knowing if you will ever be released. I can’t bear the waiting, and at least, unlike her, I am sure to be released soon. I am sure everything will come out right, but I do worry about things, about everything really. And one of the things I worry about is how come Anne Boleyn was killed, and George Boleyn was killed, and Jane his wife just walked away? And how come nobody ever said anything about it? And how come she could save his inheritance, but her evidence couldn’t save him?

Now I must stop this, for I start to think that she might give evidence for me, and it might take me to the same place as Anne Boleyn. That is ridiculous, for Lady Anne was an adulteress and a witch and guilty of treason. And all I have done is go a bit too far with Henry Manox and Francis Dereham when I was a girl. And since then, nobody knows what I have done, and I will deny everything.

Dear God, if they take Thomas for questioning, I know he will lie to protect me, but if they rack him…

This is no good. The thought of Thomas on the rack makes me howl out like a baited bear as it goes down before the dogs. Thomas in pain! Thomas crying out as I am crying out! But I won’t think of it. It cannot happen. He is the king’s beloved boy; the king calls him that: the beloved boy. The king would never hurt Thomas, and he would never hurt me. He has no reason to suspect him. And I daresay, if he did know that Thomas loves me and I him, he would understand. If you love someone, you understand how they feel. He might even laugh and say that after my marriage to him is ended we can be married. He may give us his blessing. He does forgive people, especially his favorites. It’s not as if I were Margaret Douglas and married without his permission. It’s not as if I defied him. I would never do that.

Dear God, she must have thought she would die in here. It has been only a few days and already I feel like carving my name on the stone walls. The rooms face down over the long gardens; I can see the sunlight on the pale grass. This was an abbey, and the nuns who lived here were the pride of England for the strictness of their order and the beauty of their singing. Or so Lady Baynton says. But the king drove the nuns away and took the building into his own keeping, so now it is like trying to live in a church, and I swear the place is haunted with their sadness. It is not a fit place for me, at all. After all, I am Queen of England, and if not Queen of England then I am Katherine Howard, and a member of one of the greatest families in the kingdom. To be a Howard is to be one of the first, after all.

Now, let me see, I must cheer myself somehow. So, what do I have? But, oh, it’s not very cheering. Really, not very cheering at all. Six gowns, which is not much, and in very dull colors, old-lady colors. Two rooms for my own use and a small household to serve me. So to see the best of it, I am really in a better case than when I was little Mistress Katherine Howard at Lambeth. I have a man who loves me and whom I love with my whole heart, and a very good chance of being released to marry him, I should think. I have a faithful friend in Lady Rochford, who will give evidence in my favor. Tom would die to save me so all I have to do when the archbishop comes again is go on confessing to Francis Dereham and Henry Manox and never say a word about Tom. I can do that. Even a fool like me can do that. And then everything will come out right and when I next count I shall have many lovely things again. I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it at all.

But all the while I am reassuring myself of this, the tears are just pouring out of my eyes and I am sobbing and sobbing. I can’t seem to stop crying, though I know I am in a most hopeful state. Really, things are quite all right for me, I have always been lucky; I just can’t seem to stop crying.

I am in such terror I think I shall go mad in truth. They keep asking me about Katherine and that fool Dereham, and I thought at first that I could deny everything. I was not there at Lambeth when they were lovers, and for sure they were never lovers after that. I could tell them all I know and with a clear conscience. But when that great wooden gate banged shut behind me, and the shadow of the Tower fell cold on me, I felt a terror that I had never known before.

The ghosts that have haunted me since that day in May will take me for their own now. I am where they walked. I feel the chill of the same walls, and I know the same terror; I am living their deaths.

Dear God, it must have been like this for him, for George, my beloved George. He must have heard that gate bang; he must have seen the stone bulk of the Tower block out the sky; he must have known that his friends and his enemies were somewhere inside these walls, lying their heads off to save themselves and to condemn him. And now I am here walking where he walked, and now I know what he felt, and now I know fear, as he knew it.

If Cranmer and his inquisitors look no further than Katherine’s life when she was a girl, before she came to court, they have enough to destroy her; and what more do they need than that? If they rest on her affairs with Manox and Dereham, then they need nothing from me. I did not even know her then. It is nothing to do with me. So I should have nothing to fear. But if that is the case, then why am I here?