The Boleyn Inheritance Read online

  “Well, I never laugh about Thomas,” I say. “I never mention his name. I don’t even say his name in the confessional. I don’t even say his name to myself.”

  “That is wise,” she says. “Keep it a secret. Keep it a complete secret.”

  She is brushing my hair, and she gives a little pause and looks at me in the mirror. “When is your course due?” she asks.

  “I can’t remember.” I never keep count. “Was it last week? Anyway, it hasn’t come.”

  There is a sort of bright alertness in her face. “It has not come?”

  “No. Brush at the back, Jane, Thomas likes it smooth at the back.”

  Her hand moves, but she does not do it very carefully. “Do you feel at all sick?” she asks. “Are your breasts any bigger?”

  “No,” I say. Then I realize what is in her mind. “Oh! Are you thinking I might be with child?”

  “Yes,” she whispers. “Please God.”

  “But that would be dreadful!” I exclaim. “Because, don’t you see? Don’t you think? Lady Rochford, it might not be the king’s child!”

  She puts down the brush and shakes her head. “It is God’s will,” she says slowly, as if she wants me to learn something. “If you are married to the king and you conceive a child, then that is God’s will. It is God’s will that the king has a child. So it is the king’s child; as far as you are concerned, it is the king’s own child, whatever has happened between you and another.”

  I feel a little muddled by this. “But what if it is Thomas’s child?” At once I have a picture of Thomas’s little son, a brown-haired, blue-eyed rascal like his father, a strong boy from a young father.

  She sees my face, and she guesses what I am thinking. “You are the queen,” she says firmly. “Any child you bear will be the king’s child, as God wishes. You cannot think for one moment anything different.”

  “But-”

  “No,” she says. “And you should tell the king that you have hopes of being with his child.”

  “Is it not too early?”

  “It’s never too early to give him cause for hope,” she says. “The last thing we want is to have him discontented.”

  “I will tell him,” I say. “He is coming to my room tonight. You will have to fetch Thomas to me later. Then I will tell him, too.”

  “No,” she says. “You won’t tell Thomas Culpepper.”

  “But I want to!”

  “It would spoil everything.” She speaks very fast, persuasively. “If he thinks you are with child, he will not lie with you. He will find you disgusting. He wants a mistress, not a mother of his children. You say nothing to Thomas Culpepper, but you can give the king hope. That’s the way to handle this.”

  “He would be pleased…”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “He would be kind, I am sure, but he would not come to your bed again. He would take a mistress. I have seen him talking to Catherine Carey. He would take a mistress until your time was over.”

  “I couldn’t bear that!”

  “So tell him nothing. Tell the king you have hopes, but tell Thomas nothing.”

  “Thank you, Lady Rochford,” I say humbly. If it were not for her advice, I don’t know what I would do.

  That night the king comes to my rooms, and they help him into my bed. I stand by the fire while they labor to heave him in, and they leave him tucked up with the sheets under his chin like an enormous baby.

  “Husband,” I say sweetly.

  “Come to bed, my rose,” he says. “Henry wants his rose.”

  I grit my teeth on the stupidity of his calling himself Henry. “I want to tell you something,” I say. “I have some happy news.”

  He heaves himself up, so that his head with the nightcap askew bobs up a little.

  “Yes?”

  “I have missed my course,” I say. “I may be with child.”

  “Oh, rose! My sweetest rose!”

  “It is early days,” I warn him. “But I thought you would want to know at once.”

  “Before anything else!” he assures me. “Dearest, as soon as you tell me it is true, I shall have you crowned queen.”

  “But Edward will still be your heir?” I query.

  “Yes, yes, but it would be such a weight off my mind if I knew that Edward had a brother. A family cannot be safe with only one son: a dynasty needs boys. One small accident and everything is finished; but if you have two boys, you are safe.”

  “And I will have a grand coronation,” I specify, thinking of the crown and the jewels and the gown and the feasting and the thousands of people who will come out to cheer me, the new Queen of England.

  “You will have the greatest coronation that England has ever seen, for you are the greatest queen,” he promises me. “And as soon as we get back to London I shall declare a day of national celebration for you.”

  “Oh?” This sounds rather wonderful, a day to celebrate my existence! Kitty Howard: voilà indeed! “A whole day for me?”

  “A day when everyone will go to church and say prayers of thanksgiving that God has given you to me.”

  Just church, after all. I give a faint, disappointed smile.

  “And the Master of the Revels will prepare a great feast and celebration at court,” he says. “And everyone will give you presents.”

  I beam. “That sounds lovely,” I say with satisfaction.

  “You are my sweetest rose,” he says. “My rose without a thorn. Come to bed with me now, Katherine.”

  “Yes.” I make sure I do not think of my Thomas as I go to the bloated figure in the big bed. I have a wide, happy smile on my face, and I close my eyes so I need not look at him. I cannot avoid the smell of him or the feel of him, but I can make sure that I do not think of him at all while I do what I have to do, and then lie beside him and wait for the little snuffles of satisfaction to turn to wheezy snores as he goes to sleep.

  Jane Boleyn, Ampthill,

  October 1541

  Her course started something like a week late, but I was not too disheartened. The mere thought of it had been enough to make the king more in love with her than ever, and she had at least agreed that though the sun rises and shines only on Thomas Culpepper, he does not have to be privy to every little secret.

  She has behaved very prettily with the people whom she has met on this progress; even when she has been bored and inattentive, she has kept a pleasant smile on her face, and she has learned to follow a little behind the king and to maintain an appearance of demure obedience. She serves him in bed like a paid whore, and she sits next to him at dinner and never shows by a flicker of expression that he has broken wind. She is a selfish, stupid girl, but she might, given time, make quite a good queen. If she conceives a child and gives England a son, she might live long enough to learn to be a queen that is admired.

  The king, at any rate, is mad about her. His indulgence makes our task of getting Culpepper in and out of her bedchamber so much easier. We had a bad night in Pontefract when he sent Sir Anthony Denny to her room without announcement, and she was locked in with Culpepper. Denny tried the door and went away without saying anything. There was another night when the king stirred in her bed while they were at their business only on the other side of the door, and she had to go flying back in to the old man, still damp with sweat and kisses. If the air had not been heavy with the stink of his wind, he would have smelled the scent of lust for certain. At Grafton Regis the lovers coupled in the jakes – Culpepper crept up the stairs to the stone-walled chamber that overhangs the moat, and she told her ladies that she was sick as a dog and spent the afternoon with him in there, frantically humping while the rest of us made possets. If it were not so dangerous, it would be funny. As it is, it still makes me breathless with a mixture of fear and lust when I hear them together.

  I never laugh. I think of my husband and his sister and any laughter dies in my mouth. I think of his promising to be her man through any trouble. I think of her, desperate to conceive a son, sure t
hat Henry could not give her one. I think of the unholy pact they must have made. Then, with a little moan, I think that all this is my fear, my fantasy, and perhaps it never happened. The worst thing about the two of them being dead is that now I will never know what happened. The only way I have borne the thought of what they did, and the part I played, in all these years has been to put the thought far from me. I never think of it, I never speak of it, and no one ever speaks of them in my hearing. It is as if they never were. That is the only way I can bear the fact that I am alive and they are gone: to pretend that they never were.

  “So when Queen Anne Boleyn was accused of treason, did they really mean adultery?” Katherine asks me.

  The question, so sharp on the point of my own thinking, is like a stab. “What d’you mean?” I ask.

  We are riding from Collyweston to Ampthill on a bright, cold morning in October. The king is ahead, galloping with the young men of his court, thinking he is winning a race as they hold their horses back, Thomas Culpepper among them. Katherine is ambling along on her gray mare, and I am at her side on one of the Howard hunters. Everyone else has dropped back to gossip, and there is no one to shield me from her curiosity.

  “You said earlier that she and the other men were accused of adultery,” she pursues.

  “That was months ago.”

  “I know, I have been thinking about it.”

  “You think very slowly,” I say nastily.

  “I know I do,” she says, quite unabashed. “And I have been thinking that they accused Anne Boleyn, my cousin, of treason only because she was unfaithful to the king, and they beheaded her.” She glances around her. “And I have been thinking that I am in the same situation,” she says. “That if anyone knew – they would say that I am unfaithful to the king. Perhaps they would call it treason, too. Then what would happen to me?”

  “That is why we never say anything,” I reply. “That is why we take care. Remember? I have warned you from the beginning to take care.”

  “But why did you help me meet Thomas? Knowing as you do what a danger it is? After your own sister-in-law was killed for just the same thing?”

  I am lost for an answer. I never thought that she would ask me this question. But her stupidity is such that she does, sometimes, go straight to the most obvious. I turn my head as if I am looking over the cold meadows where the river, swollen with the recent rains, shines like a sword, a French sword.

  “Because you asked me to help you,” I say. “I am your friend.”

  “Did you help Anne Boleyn?”

  “No!” I exclaim. “She would have no help of mine!”

  “You were not her friend?”

  “I was her sister-in-law.”

  “Did she not like you?”

  “I doubt she ever saw me from start to finish. She had no eyes for me.”

  This does not halt her speculation, as I intended, but feeds it. I can almost hear the slow revolving of her thoughts.

  “She didn’t like you?” Katherine asks. “She and her husband and her sister, they were always together. But they left you out.”

  I laugh, but it doesn’t come out well. “You make it sound like children in the school yard.”

  She nods. “That is just how it is in a royal court. And did you hate them for not letting you join them?”

  “I was a Boleyn,” I say. “I was a Boleyn as much as they. I was a Boleyn by marriage; their uncle the duke is my uncle. My interests are in the family as theirs were.”

  “So why did you give evidence against them?” she asks.

  I am so shocked at her directly accusing me, I can hardly speak. I look at her. “Where did you hear of this? Why would you speak of this?”

  “Catherine Carey told me,” she says, as if it is unremarkable that the two girls, all but children, should share confidences about treason and incest and death. “She said that you bore witness against your husband and his sister. You gave evidence to show that they were lovers and traitors.”

  “I did not,” I whisper. “I did not.” I cannot bear her naming this; I never think of it. I will not think of it today. “It wasn’t like that,” I say. “You don’t understand because you are only a girl. You were a child when all this happened. I tried to save him; I tried to save her. It was a great plan of your uncle’s devising. It failed, but it should have succeeded. I thought that I would save him if I gave evidence, but it all went wrong.”

  “Is that how it was?”

  “It was heartbreaking!” I cry out in my pain. “I tried to save him, I loved him, I would have done anything for him.”

  Her pretty young face is filled with sympathy. “You meant to save him?”

  I dash the tears from my eyes with the back of my glove. “I would have died for him,” I say. “I thought I would save him. I was going to save him. I would have done anything to save him.”

  “Why did it go wrong?” she whispers.

  “Your uncle and I thought that if they pleaded guilty, she would be divorced and would be sent away, to a convent. We thought that he would be stripped of his title and his honors and banished. The men who were named with her were never guilty; everyone knew that. They were George’s friends and her courtiers, not lovers. We thought they would all be forgiven, as Thomas Wyatt was forgiven.”

  “So what happened?”

  It is like a dream, this retelling. It is the dream that comes to me often, that wakes me in the night like sickness, that sends me from my bed to walk and walk in the dark room until the first gray light comes into the sky and I know my ordeal is over.

  “They denied their guilt. That was not part of the plan. They should have confessed, but they denied everything except saying some words against the king. George had said that the king was impotent.” Even on this bright autumn day, five years after the trial, I still lower my voice and glance around me to make sure that no one can hear. “Their courage failed them, they denied their guilt and did not ask for mercy. I stayed with the plan, as your uncle said I should. I saved the title, I saved the lands, I saved the Boleyn inheritance, I saved their fortune.”

  Katherine is waiting for more. She does not understand that this is the end of the story. This is my great act and my triumph: I saved the title and the lands. She even looks puzzled.

  “I did what I had to do to save the Boleyn inheritance,” I repeat. “My father-in-law, George and Anne’s father, had built a fortune over his lifetime. George had added to it. Anne’s wealth had gone into it. I saved it. I saved Rochford Hall for us; I kept the title. I am Lady Rochford still.”

  “You saved the inheritance, but they didn’t inherit it,” Katherine says, uncomprehending. “Your husband died, and he must have thought you were giving evidence against him. He must have thought that while he was pleading not guilty, you were accusing him. You were a witness for his prosecution.” Slowly she thinks, slowly she speaks, slowly she says the worst thing of all. “He must have thought that you let him go to his death so that you could keep the title and the lands, even though you had killed him.”

  I could scream at her for saying this, for putting words to this nightmare. I rub my face with the back of my glove as if I would scrub my scowl away. “No. Not so! Not so! He won’t have thought that,” I say desperately. “He knew that I loved him, that I was trying to save him. As he went to his death, he would have known that I was on my knees before the king, asking him to spare my husband. When she went to her death, she will have known that at the very last moment I was before the king, asking him to spare her.”

  She nods. “Well, I hope you never bear witness to save me,” she says. It is a miserable attempt at humor; I do not even accord it a smile.

  “It was the end of my life,” I say simply. “It was not just the end of their lives, it was death to me, too.”

  We ride in silence for a while, and then two or three of Katherine’s friends kick their horses forward to ride beside her and chatter to her about Ampthill and the greeting we are certain to have
, and whether Katherine has finished with her yellow gown and will give it to Katherine Tylney. In a moment there is a quarrel breaking out because Katherine had promised it to Joan, but Margaret is insisting that it should go to her.

  “You can both hold your peace,” I rule, dragging myself back to the present moment. “For the queen has worn that gown not more than three times, and it will stay in her wardrobe until she has had more use out of it.”

  “I don’t care,” Katherine says. “I can always order another.”

  Anne, Richmond Palace,

  November 1541

  At church I enter, cross myself, curtsy to the altar, and take my place in my high-walled pew. Thank God that no one can see me in here; the high door closes behind me, the walls guarantee my privacy, and even the front of the pew is paneled with a lattice so I can see but not be observed. Only the priest, if he is standing high up in the choir stalls, can look down on me. If I glance away from the Host, or fail to cross myself at the right time, or use the wrong hand, or do it the wrong way round, I will not be reported for heresy. There are thousands in this country who now guard their every movement because they do not have my privacy. There are hundreds who will die because they got it wrong.

  I stand, and bow, and kneel, and sit, as I am bidden by the order of the service; but I can take little pleasure today from the liturgy. This is the king’s order of service, and in every rolling phrase I hear the power of Henry, not the power of God. In the past I have known God in many places; in small Lutheran chapels at home, in the great soaring majesty of Saint Paul’s in London, and in the quiet of the royal chapel at Hampton Court when I once knelt beside the Princess Mary and felt the peace of heaven descend around us; but it seems that the king has soured his church for me and for so many others. I find God now in silence: when I walk in the park or beside the river, when I hear a blackbird calling at midday, when I see a flight of geese arrowing overhead, when the falconer releases a bird and I see her mount up high and soar. God no longer speaks to me when Henry allows it, in the words that Henry prefers. I am in hiding from the king, and I am deaf to his God.