The Boleyn Inheritance Read online

  In only a few moments, Amelia opens the door. “You’re to go to Mother’s rooms,” she says triumphantly.

  “Tell her I’m ill. You should have said I’ve gone to bed.”

  “I told her. She said you have to get up and put on a cloak and go. What have you done now?”

  I scowl at her bright face. “Nothing.” I rise unwillingly from the bed. “Nothing. As always, I have done nothing.” I pull my cloak from the hook behind the door and tie the ribbons from chin to knee.

  “Did you answer him back?” Amelia demands gleefully. “Why do you always argue with him?”

  I go out without replying, through the silenced chamber and down the steps to my mother’s rooms in the same tower on the floor below us.

  At first it looks as if she is alone, but then I see the half-closed door to her privy chamber and I don’t need to hear him, and I don’t need to see him. I just know that he is there, watching.

  She has her back to me at first, and when she turns I see she has the birch stick in her hand and her face is stern.

  “I have done nothing,” I say at once.

  She sighs irritably. “Child, is that any way to come into a room?”

  I lower my head. “My lady mother,” I say quietly.

  “I am displeased with you,” she says.

  I look up. “I am sorry for that. How have I offended?”

  “You have been called to a holy duty; you must lead your husband to the reformed church.”

  I nod.

  “You have been called to a position of great honor and great dignity, and you must forge your behavior to deserve it.”

  Inarguable. I lower my head again.

  “You have an unruly spirit,” she goes on.

  True indeed.

  “You lack the proper traits of a woman: submission, obedience, love of duty.”

  True again.

  “And I fear that you have a wanton streak in you,” she says, very low.

  “Mother, that I have not,” I say as quietly as her. “That is not true.”

  “You do. The King of England will not tolerate a wanton wife. The Queen of England must be a woman without a stain on her character. She must be above reproach.”

  “My lady mother, I-”

  “Anne, think of this!” she says, and for once I hear a real ring of earnestness in her voice. “Think of this! He had the Lady Anne Boleyn executed for infidelity, accusing her of sin with half the court, her own brother among her lovers. He made her queen, and then he unmade her again with no cause or evidence but his own will. He accused her of incest, witchcraft, crimes most foul. He is a man most anxious for his reputation, madly anxious. The next Queen of England must never be doubted. We cannot guarantee your safety if there is one word said against you!”

  “My lady-”

  “Kiss the rod,” she says before I can argue.

  I touch my lips to the stick as she holds it out to me. Behind her privy chamber door I can hear him slightly, very slightly, sigh.

  “Hold the seat of the chair,” she orders.

  I bend over and grip both sides of the chair. Delicately, like a lady lifting a handkerchief, she takes the hem of my cloak and raises it over my hips and then my night shift. My buttocks are naked; if my brother chooses to look through the half-open door, he can see me, displayed like a girl in a bawdy house. There is a whistle of the rod through the air and then the sudden whiplash of pain across my thighs. I cry out, and then bite my lip. I am desperate to know how many cuts I will have to take. I grit my teeth together and wait for the next. The hiss through the air and then the slice of pain, like a sword cut in a dishonorable duel. Two. The sound of the next comes too fast for me to make ready, and I cry out again, my tears suddenly coming hot and fast like blood.

  “Stand up, Anne,” she says coolly, and pulls down my shift and my cloak.

  The tears are pouring down my face; I can hear myself sobbing like a child.

  “Go to your room and read the Bible,” she says. “Think especially on your royal calling. Caesar’s wife, Anne. Caesar’s wife.”

  I have to curtsy to her. The awkward movement causes a wave of new pain, and I whimper like a whipped puppy. I go to the door and open it. The wind blows the door from my hand, and, in the gust, the inner door to her privy chamber flies open without warning. In the shadow stands my brother, his face strained as if it were him beneath the whip of the birch, his lips pressed tightly together as if to stop himself from calling out. For one awful moment our eyes meet and he looks at me, his face filled with a desperate need. I drop my eyes; I turn from him as if I have not seen him, as if I am blind to him. Whatever he wants of me, I know that I don’t want to hear it. I stumble from the room, my shift sticking to the blood on the backs of my thighs. I am desperate to get away from them both.

  Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth,

  November 1539

  “I shall call you wife.”

  “I shall call you husband.”

  It is so dark that I cannot see him smile; but I feel the curve of his lips as he kisses me again.

  “I shall buy you a ring and you can wear it on a chain around your neck and keep it hidden.”

  “I shall give you a velvet cap embroidered with pearls.”

  He chuckles.

  “For God’s sake be quiet, and let us get some sleep!” someone says crossly from elsewhere in the dormitory. It is probably Joan Bulmer, missing these very same kisses that I now have on my lips, on my eyelids, on my ears, on my neck, on my breasts, on every part of my body. She will be missing the lover who used to be hers, and who now is mine.

  “Shall I go and kiss her good night?” he whispers.

  “Ssshhh,” I reprove him, and I stop his reply with my own mouth.

  We are in the sleepy aftermath of lovemaking, the sheets tangled around us, clothes and linen all bundled together, the scent of his hair, of his body, of his sweat all over me. Francis Dereham is mine as I swore he would be.

  “You know that if we promise to marry before God and I give you a ring, then it is as much a marriage as if we were wed in church?” he asks earnestly.

  I am falling asleep. His hand is caressing my belly. I feel myself stir and sigh, and I open my legs to invite his warm touch again.

  “Yes,” I say, meaning yes to his touch.

  He misunderstands me; he is always so earnest. “So shall we do it? Shall we marry in secret and always be together, and when I have made my fortune, we can tell everyone, and live together as man and wife?”

  “Yes, yes.” I am starting to moan a little from pleasure. I am thinking of nothing but the movement of his clever fingers. “Oh, yes.”

  In the morning he has to snatch his clothes and run, before my lady grandmother’s maid comes with much hustle and ceremony to unlock the door to our bedchamber. He dashes away just moments before we hear her heavy footstep on the stairs, but Edward Wald-grave leaves it too late and has to roll under Mary’s bed and hope the trailing sheets will hide him.

  “You’re merry this morning,” Mrs. Franks says suspiciously as we smother our giggles. “Laugh before seven, tears before eleven.”

  “That is a pagan superstition,” says Mary Lascelles, who is always pious. “And there is nothing for these girls to laugh about if they considered their consciences.”

  We look as somber as we can, and follow her down the stairs to the chapel for Mass. Francis is in the chapel, on his knees, as handsome as an angel. He looks across at me, and my heart turns over. It is so wonderful that he is in love with me.

  When the service is done and everyone is in a hurry for their breakfast, I pause in the pew to adjust the ribbons on my shoe and I see that he has dropped back to his knees as if deep in prayer. The priest slowly blows out the candles, packs up his things, waddles down the aisle; and we are alone.

  Francis comes across to me and holds out his hand. It is a most wonderfully solemn moment, it is as good as a play. I wish I could see us, especially my own seriou
s face. “Katherine, will you marry me?” he says.

  I feel so grown-up. It is I who am doing this, taking control of my own destiny. My grandmother has not made this marriage for me, nor my father. Nobody has ever cared for me; they have forgotten me, cooped up in this house. But I have chosen my own husband, I will make my own future. I am like my cousin Mary Boleyn, who married in secret a man whom no one liked and then picked up the whole Boleyn inheritance. “Yes,” I say. “I will.” I am like my cousin Queen Anne, who aimed at the highest marriage in the land when no one thought it could be done. “Yes, I will,” I say.

  What he means by marrying, I don’t know exactly. I think that he means I will have a ring to wear on a chain, which I can show to the other girls, and that we will be promised to each other. But to my surprise he leads me up the aisle toward the altar. For a moment I hesitate; I don’t know what he wants to do, and I am no great enthusiast for praying. We will be late for breakfast if we don’t hurry, and I like the bread when it is still warm from the ovens. But then I see that we are acting out our wedding. I so wish that I had put on my best gown this morning, but it is too late now.

  “I, Francis Dereham, do take thee, Katherine Howard, to be my lawful wedded wife,” he says firmly.

  I smile up at him. If only I had put on my best hood, I would be perfectly happy.

  “Now you say it,” he prompts me.

  “I, Katherine Howard, do take thee, Francis Dereham, to be my lawful wedded husband,” I reply obediently.

  He bends and kisses me. I can feel my knees go weak at his touch; all I want is for the kiss to last forever. Already, I am wondering if we were to slip into my lady grandmother’s high-walled pew, we could go a little further than this. But he stops. “You understand that we are married now?” he confirms.

  “This is our wedding?”

  “Yes.”

  I giggle. “But I am only fourteen.”

  “That makes no difference; you have given your word in the sight of God.” Very seriously he puts his hand in his jacket pocket and pulls out a purse. “There is one hundred pounds in here,” he says solemnly. “I am going to give it into your safekeeping, and in the New Year I shall go to Ireland and make my fortune so that I can come home and claim you openly as my bride.”

  The purse is heavy; he has saved a fortune for us. This is so thrilling. “I am to keep the money safe?”

  “Yes, as my good wife.”

  This is so delightful that I give it a little shake and hear the coins chink. I can put it in my empty jewel box. “I shall be such a good wife to you! You will be so surprised!”

  “Yes. As I told you. This is a proper wedding in the sight of God. We are husband and wife now.”

  “Oh, yes. And when you have made your fortune, we can really marry, can’t we? With a new gown and everything?”

  Francis frowns for a moment. “You do understand?” he says. “I know you are young, Katherine, but you must understand this. We are married now. It is legal and binding. We cannot marry again. This is it. We have just done it. A marriage between two people in the sight of God is a marriage as binding as one signed on a contract. You are my wife now. We are married in the eyes of God and the law of the land. If anyone asks you, you are my wife, my legally wedded wife. You do understand?”

  “Of course I do,” I reply hastily. I don’t want to look stupid. “Of course I understand. All I am saying is that I would like a new gown when we tell everybody.”

  He laughs as if I have said something funny and takes me in his arms again and kisses the base of my throat and nuzzles his face into my neck. “I shall buy you a gown of blue silk, Mrs. Dereham,” he promises me.

  I close my eyes in pleasure. “Green,” I say. “Tudor green. The king likes green best.”

  Jane Boleyn, Greenwich Palace,

  December 1539

  Thank God I am here in Greenwich, the most beautiful of the king’s palaces, back where I belong in the queen’s rooms. Last time I was here I was nursing Jane Seymour as she burned up with fever, asking for Henry, who never came; but now the rooms have been repainted, and I have been restored and she has been forgotten. I alone have survived. I have survived the fall of Queen Katherine, the disgrace of Queen Anne, and the death of Queen Jane. It is a miracle to me that I have survived, but here I am, back at court, one of the favored few, the very favored few. I shall serve the new queen as I have served her predecessors, with love and loyalty and an eye to my own opportunities. I shall once again walk in and out of the best chambers of the best palaces of the land as my home. I am once again where I was born and bred to be.

  Sometimes I can even forget everything that has happened. Sometimes, I forget I am a widow of thirty, with a son far away from me. I think I am a young woman again with a husband I worship, and everything to hope for. I am returned to the very center of my world. Almost I could say: I am reborn.

  The king has planned a Christmas wedding, and the queen’s ladies are being assembled for the festivities. Thanks to my lord duke, I am one of them, restored to the friends and rivals I have known since my childhood. Some of them welcome me back with a wry smile and a backhanded compliment; some of them look askance at me. Not that they loved Anne so much – not they – but they were frightened by her fall, and they remember that I alone escaped. It is like magic that I escaped; it makes them cross themselves and whisper old rumors against me.

  Bessie Blount, the king’s old mistress, now married far above her station to Lord Clinton, greets me kindly enough. I have not seen her since the death of her son Henry Fitzroy, whom the king made a duke, Duke of Richmond, for nothing more than being a royal bastard, and when I say how sorry I am for her loss, shallow words of politeness, she suddenly grips my hand and looks at me, her face pale and demanding, as if to ask me wordlessly if I know how it was that he died? Will I tell her how he died?

  I smile coolly and unwrap her fingers from my wrist. I cannot tell her because truly I don’t know, and if I did know I would not tell her. “I am very sorry for the loss of your son,” I say again.

  She will probably never know why he died nor how. But neither will thousands. Thousands of mothers saw their sons march out to protect the shrines, the holy places, the roadside statues, the monasteries and the churches; and thousands of sons never came home again. The king will decide what is faith and what is heresy; it is not for the people to say. In this new and dangerous world it is not even for the church to say. The king will decide who will live and who will die; he has the power of God now. If Bessie really wants to know who killed her son, she had better ask the king, his father; but she knows Henry too well to do that.

  The other women have seen Bessie greet me, and they come forward: Seymours, Percys, Culpeppers, Nevilles. All the great families of the land have forced their daughters into the narrow compass of the queen’s rooms. Some of them know ill of me, and some of them suspect worse. I don’t care. I have faced worse than the malice of envious women, and I am related to most of them anyway, and rival to them all. If anyone wants to make trouble for me, they had better remember that I am under the protection of my lord duke, and only Thomas Cromwell is more powerful than us.

  The one I dread, the one I really don’t want to meet, is Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn, my mean-spirited sister-in-law. Catherine is a child, a girl of fifteen; I should not fear her, but – to tell the truth – her mother is a formidable woman and never a great admirer of mine. My lord duke has won young Catherine a place at court and ordered her mother to send her to the fount of all power, the source of all wealth, and Mary, reluctant Mary, has obeyed. I can imagine how unwillingly she bought the child her gowns and dressed her hair and coached her in her curtsy and her dancing. Mary saw her family rise to the skies on the beauty and wit of her sister and her brother, and then saw their bodies packed in pieces in the little coffins. Anne was beheaded, her body wrapped in a box, her head in a basket. George, my George… I cannot bear to think of it.

  Let i
t be enough to say that Mary blames me for all her grief and loss, blames me for the loss of her brother and sister, and never thinks of her own part in our tragedy. She blames me as if I could have saved them, as if I did not do everything in my power till that very day, the last day, on the scaffold, when in the end there was nothing anybody could do.

  And she is wrong to blame me. Mary Norris lost her father, Henry, on the same day and for the same cause, and she greets me with respect and with a smile. She bears no grudge. She has been properly taught by her mother that the fire of the king’s displeasure can burn up anyone; there is no point in blaming the survivors who got out in time.

  Catherine Carey is a maid of fifteen; she will share rooms with other young girls, with my cousin and hers, Katherine Howard, Anne Bassett, Mary Norris, with other ambitious maids who know nothing and hope for everything. I will guide and advise them as a woman who has served queens before. Catherine Carey will not be whispering to her friends of the time that she spent with her aunt Anne in the Tower, the last-moment agreements, the scaffold-step promises, the reprieve that they swore was coming and yet never came. She will not tell them that we all let Anne go to the block – her saintly mother as guilty as any other. She has been raised as a Carey, but she is a Boleyn, a king’s bastard and a Howard through and through; she will know to keep her mouth shut.

  In the absence of the new queen we have to settle into the rooms without her. We have to wait. The weather has been bad for her journey, and she is making slow progress from Cleves to Calais. They now think that she will not get here in time for a Christmas wedding. If I had been advising her, I would have told her to face the danger, any danger, and come by ship. It is a long journey, I know, and the English Sea in winter is a perilous place, but a bride should not be late for her wedding day; and this king does not like to wait for anything. He is not a man to deny.

  In truth, he is not the prince that he was. When I was first at court and he was the young husband of a beautiful wife, he was a golden king. They called him the handsomest prince in Christendom, and that was not flattery. Mary Boleyn was in love with him, Anne was in love with him, I was in love with him. There was not one girl at court, nor one girl in the country, who could resist him. Then he turned against his wife, Queen Katherine, a good woman, and Anne taught him how to be cruel. Her court, her clever young merciless court, persecuted the queen into stubborn misery and taught the king to dance to our heretic tune. We tricked him into thinking that the queen had lied to him, then we fooled him into thinking that Wolsey had betrayed him. But then his suspicious mind, rootling like a pig, started to run beyond our control. He started to doubt us as well. Cromwell persuaded him that Anne had betrayed him; the Seymours urged him to believe that we were all in a plot. In the end the king lost something greater than a wife, even two wives; he lost his sense of trust. We taught him suspicion, and the golden boyish shine tarnished on the man. Now, surrounded by people who fear him, he has become a bully. He has become a danger, like a bear that has been baited into surly spite. He told the Princess Mary he would have her killed if she defied him, and then declared her a bastard and princess no more. The Princess Elizabeth, our Boleyn princess, my niece, he has declared illegitimate, and her governess says that the child is not even properly clothed.