The

Confession

of Katherine

Howard

SUZANNAH DUNN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

November 2nd, 1541

November 3rd

November 4th

November 5th

First at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox…

November 6th

Also Francis Dereham by many persuasions…

November 7th

Master Culpeper, I never longed so much…

November 7th, late afternoon

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Praise for Suzannah Dunn

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Comet-like, brilliant yet transitory, Catherine Howard blazed

across the Tudor sky.’

Lacey Baldwin Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: The life and times of Catherine Howard, 1961

November 2nd, 1541

The second of November was the last time when everything was all right, and of all days it was All Souls, the day of the dead. The day when, back in the old world, the bells rang for hours into the darkness to reach the souls in purgatory, to tell them we’d never forsake them, never stop pleading with God to take them in. Those bells clamoured on our behalf, too, though, I’d always felt: calling to the dead - so much more numerous than us - to spare a backwards glance. They couldn’t resist it, creeping back to steal a look at us: we, the hapless living, ignorant of what was to come. They pressed in on us, after dark, coming in on the night air despite the closed doors, hovering among the rafters despite the flaring wicks, and drawing deep on our exhaled breaths. Much was made of their mischief, back in the old days, but all I’d ever detected in the air on that one night of the year was despair.

As All Souls came to a close, that year, we were in the queen’s private chamber. Soon to be free again of the doleful reproaches of the dead for a whole year, we’d already been reclaiming the world for the living. Life was never so much for the young as on the day that was soon to dawn and we in the queen’s retinue were so much younger than everyone else at the palace, which the king and his company had acknowledged, leaving us to our dancing.

By around eleven o’clock we were reeling. Only a handful of us remained with the queen, having retreated at her invitation to her gorgeous private chamber, where we reclined on cushions around her vast, gold-canopied chair. Our pale faces were flushed with fireglow but the room could’ve been lit by our pearls and gems alone, the hundreds of them worked into the fabrics of our gowns and sleeves, collars and cuffs. England: firelight and fireblush; wine-dark, winking gemstones and a frost of pearls. Wool as soft as silk, in leaf-green and moss; satins glossy like a midsummer midnight or opalescent like winter sunrise.

To see us there, no one would ever have guessed that we were barely free of a decade of destruction: the stripping of churches and dismantling of monasteries, the chaining of monks to walls to die, the smash of a sword-blade into a queen’s bared neck. None of it had actually happened to us, though; it’d passed us by as we’d sat embroidering alongside our housekeeper. Our parish church had been whitewashed, the local priory sold to a rich man, and we’d celebrated fewer saints’ days, but that, for us, had been the extent of it. The tumultuous decade had passed, the reforming queen was long gone and the reformations had ceased if not reversed, and there we were, grown up and at the palace as if nothing had ever happened: English girls, demure and bejewelled; Catholic girls, no less, half-asleep around an English Catholic queen.

My friend Kate: the queen. Little Kate Howard, my girlhood friend, who’d been nobody much: she’d become England’s queen. Just over a year on the throne, but from how she sat there under that shimmering canopy, she might’ve been born to it. Just nineteen years old, but doing a perfect job. At last, the king was happy again and life at the palace was, once again, fun: that’s what everyone was saying. It was as if we’d gone back twenty years, people were saying, to the days of the first Catherine, the king’s first queen, before all the trouble began. Before all the wives. And whoever would’ve believed that was possible? Kate looked to have a lifetime of queenship ahead of her: easing the king through his latter years before living on as dowager queen and - God willing - mother of his successor. Kate was the happy ending, of which - even better - we were, so far, only at the beginning.

Tiny Kate, in poppy-coloured silk, in the gold-glow of the canopy. With her eyes closed and head back, the Norfolk-family chin gave her — in spite of her repose — a teasing, testing look. Her silk-clad legs, outstretched, were crossed at the ankle and the sole of the uppermost shoe was visible: softest Spanish leather which was scuffed beyond repair by just one evening of dancing. Her fingers were laced in her lap, the rings numerous and their jewels so big that her little hands disappeared beneath them.

I was resting back on Francis; he was turning a skein of my hair in his fingers, his breath warm on the top of my head. Across the room, Alice and Maggie, my other girlhood friends, were gazing into the smouldering sea-coal in the brazier. All of us were lost to the exquisite playing of one of Kate’s favoured musicians, a doe-eyed boy of sixteen or seventeen, his head low over his lute.

It felt, to me, like the beginning, that night: finally, the real beginning of our future. I’d never had any reason to doubt it but - if truth be told - I’d always been sceptical of our sudden, unexpected success. That was the evening, though, when I finally let myself believe it, when I allowed it to work its magic on me. What I was thinking as I looked around that room was, This is who we are: the perfect queen and her faithful retinue. Now, I wish I could go back, patter over the lavish carpets to tap us on the shoulders, whisper in our ears and get us out of there alive. Little did we know it, but, that night, we were already ghosts in our own lives.

Just after the strike of eleven, Thomas Culpeper swaggered through the door, cloaked in raw night air but otherwise as polished as ever. He’d been around earlier but had gone off to see someone or do something and here he was again, with a sharp, meagre bow towards Kate. She slid down in her chair to reach him with her toes, to poke his shin, her playful kick an admonishment - Don’t - because so perfunctory a bow was a provocation. He sat down at the foot of her chair, a halo of candlelight slipping on his chestnut hair as he looked up to whisper to her, ‘You been sent for?’

The slightest shift of her head, the merest suggestion of a shake; and if the king hadn’t sent for her by this time in the evening, he wouldn’t do so. Strange, perhaps, that the king didn’t want her on this night of all nights, when he’d spent the evening at a special service of his own devising to give thanks to God for his wonderful wife, for his late-flowering happiness. After four months on the road, showing her off around the country, he’d chosen for his homecoming this celebratory Mass from which modesty had demanded that she stay away. Yet he hadn’t sent for her, afterwards.

Perhaps he wanted to think of her for that one night as God-given, as something like a miracle, which would’ve been tested by a tussle in the bed. And a tussle was surely what it would’ve been. Extraordinary though he was, whenever Kate was summoned to his bed I could only think of him as huge and old. To me, back then, he was already huge and old, even though actually he was only in his forties and not yet in particularly bad shape, only thickening as muscle softened to fat. He was more than twice my age, though, and had been ruler for longer than I’d been alive. To me, back then, older people seemed to have accumulated disappointment, to be weighed down by their disapproval for the rest of us - not unlike how I imagined the dead to be - and this was indeed the look of the king: the tight mouth; the eyes narrowed with distrust. The exception for him was Kate: he shone whenever he looked at her; his features lifted and he looked alive, he looked relieved.

They made the oddest pair in every respect but most obviously in their physical mismatch: Kate tiny, and the king twice her size. She was only shoulder-high to most of the ladies at court but her husband was a head and shoulders taller than most of the men and half as wide again. He was twice as wide as Francis, who might’ve been considered girlish by those who didn’t know him as I did. Francis’s bones rose high in his silky boy-skin and I’d cupped each and every one. My hands had explored the configuration of him, edging along the shield of skull behind his ears, stroking down his breastbone, circling the knots of his wrists, spanning his hips, as if unwrapping a gift.

I couldn’t help but wonder how Kate felt whenever she was summoned from her own bedroom to the one adjoining the king’s apartment, the one they shared on those occasions when he asked for her and to which he came with a pair of attendants who’d wait outside for him. It seemed, to me, a hefty price to pay for all the deference, the egg-sized diamonds, the acres of cloth of gold that she wore and in which she draped her rooms - those river-view rooms occupied by the most talented young musicians and most knowledgeable chaplains and physicians. Then again, most of her ladies and maids would end up settling for situations that weren’t so dissimilar, but for far less recompense. Not me, though: I was going to marry Francis, I’d make sure that happened and, now that he was the queen’s private secretary, I was confident my parents could be persuaded.

There’d been no way, I knew, for Kate to refuse the king. He’d hadn’t ordered her to marry him and he’d been careful to court her - for appearance’s sake, for the sake of his pride - but all the same she could never have said no: he and her family would’ve seen to that. Whenever she went off to that shared bedroom, I didn’t quite know what I was witnessing: coercion or compromise. She’d have known that it was what everyone was thinking but she let nothing slip, never even acknowledged the curiosity, which was quite something for a girl of knowing looks, the mistress of the cryptic confidence. She acted blithe when leaving for that shared bedroom and again when she returned, making clear that as far as she was concerned - and, thus, as far as everyone else should be concerned - it was nothing. I supposed she had to think of it that way for her to be able to endure it.

She lifted her head to catch my eye, and spoke quietly but emphatically: ‘Room going free.’ Thomas Culpeper’s: she was offering me - and Francis - his bed for the night, as she did whenever she could. Thomas Culpeper would stay with her, and Francis and I would be able to spend a whole night alone together in his bed. Behind me, Francis tensed, making as if to decline. I knew why, I knew what he was thinking: Not Thomas Culpeper’s, anyone but Thomas Culpeper’s. But, as ever, I was quicker: ‘Good, thank you.’ Anyway, the offer had been made to me, not to Francis. Dutifully, I smiled my gratitude in Thomas Culpeper’s direction but avoided meeting his eye, which wasn’t hard because a glance at the likes of me was beneath him.

I, too, would’ve preferred that it wasn’t Thomas Culpeper’s bed, but it was his or none. And although I’d over-indulged at supper and was tired from the dancing, and although I’d have loved to close my eyes and slide into oblivion, I wasn’t going to turn down an all-too-rare night with Francis. Opportunities for even the swiftest encounter had been few and far between during the four long months on the road, but even in the palaces we too often had to suffer the embarrassment of begging time alone from room-mates or risk being discovered in the Office of Revels’ storage rooms among papier-mâché unicorns. A couple of times, we’d even taken our chances in a window recess at the far end of the Queen’s Gallery, flinching from distant footfalls. Very occasionally, when Kate and all her ladies were being elaborately entertained, she’d dare to slip me her bedroom key so that Francis and I could miss the show for some fun of our own. We’d sneak away to brave the line of yeomen on guard at the door to her apartment - the pair of us ostensibly on separate duties to prepare for the queen’s eventual return - and hurry through room after room, ignoring any chamberers, until we reached the door of the most private room of all, and there we’d slip inside unseen. The first time, the bed itself almost did for us, that immense bed piled with furs and hung with gold cloth: we’d hardly dared clamber up on to it. And then there’d been the distraction of the star-gilded ceiling.

That night, All Souls, I rose and took Francis by the hand to draw him to his feet, keen not to waste time, anxious in case the offer was for any reason withdrawn. I led him out past the guards, down the stairs and into the gloom. We were in step by the time we were skirting the inner courtyard, heading for the courtiers’ rooms on the boundary of Fountain Court. We could’ve found Thomas Culpeper’s rooms with our eyes closed, we probably knew the way better than he did: he was so rarely there. As a favoured Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, he was often required to sleep alongside the king’s bed. If he wasn’t, then - unbeknown to the king - there was a good chance he’d be in the queen’s.

Francis went on ahead while I took cover in an adjacent stairwell. He was up the first two or three stairs with a single stride, then disappeared from view; but the rooms were on the first floor and I heard his knock, the answering cry and the opening of the door. Thomas Culpeper’s attending man sounded disgruntled at having to shift so late. ‘You’re in here tonight?’ No reply that I could hear from Francis; I pictured his apologetic shrug and lopsided smile, which in turn had me smiling. Then a clattering of footfalls on the steps: more than one pair; the attendant had had company. Two men bounced down into the stairwell but the laggard drew his companion back into shadow and they kissed. It was a momentary embrace, but savoured. A long moment, in which I couldn’t quite make myself look away because I so envied them their passion, coming ahead of my own. Then they were crossing Fountain Court, heading for Base Court, as if it hadn’t happened, and I was half-wondering if I’d imagined it.

I hurried up the stone steps. The door was closed, safeguarding the warmth. Inside, the fire was down to embers but the heat had built up solid. I took off my cloak, unaware until then of how I’d been tensed against the riverside chill. The inner door was open so that the bedroom could benefit from the fire. Thomas Culpeper was so privileged as to be allocated a pair of rooms, but still there was little space to accommodate two grown men. The rooms were in dire need of an airing, and I had to fight the urge to clear up the tankards and clothes that were strewn around. That wasn’t what I was here for, I reminded myself.

I was here for Francis. My heart was thumping; it seemed to be saying, Just us, just us. He stood tall in front of the fireplace, yet also slightly hunched as if to make himself inconspicuous. As if that were possible. Which made me laugh, and then he was laughing, too, in response, although he couldn’t have known why. He was already uncloaked; the top half of him a linen-clad glow. Brighter still was his hair. I had the sense again of knowing him to the very bones, his body given over to me in all its beguiling, disarming complexity so that I never knew where to start. I could take his face in my hands, feel how its smoothness was deceptive, detecting its invisible graininess: that daily undoing of him. Or I could cap his shoulders, relish their nudge into my palms. Ease my fingers through his tangled hair and rest the tips in the groove at the back of his neck. Lay a hand against his breastbone, the satisfying flatness of it.

I took a step towards him, picking up and breathing in his particular scent: piquant, like rainfall but not quite. We kissed. I’d only ever kissed one boy before Francis, but I knew - I just knew - that no one kissed as Francis did. No one made love as he did, either: that, too, I knew. I’d heard plenty of talk which gave the impression that what others did together in bed was boisterous and fun. But for Francis and me, the act that brought us closest did so by pitching us against each other. Whenever I took him inside me, he’d move very slowly, edging his way towards my pleasure, resisting any rush, refusing to be swayed: his eyes on mine, almost defiant. I’d be hanging on his every move, matching him inch for inch in that slow dance, ekeing every sliver of sensation from his flex into me, a kind of despair assuaged but reinstated with each heartbeat. And it worked: his timing was faultless, which I knew - from talk - was far from the case for most men.

No one, I knew, had ever had what we had. Oh yes, he’d been the lover of a girl before me, but she was a carefree, curvy girl and their times in bed would’ve been bouncy and giggly. I was narrow-hipped and sharply articulated, and my heart, unlike hers, was diamond.

November 3rd

I don’t know what time the men came for him, the next day; I didn’t even know, until a whole day later, that anything untoward had happened. Odd to think how discreet an investigation it was, at first, in view of how rapid and brutal it became.

We’d parted at dawn, Thomas Culpeper arriving back and throwing open the bedroom door. Having dressed hurriedly, we’d left the rooms - still unacknowledged by Culpeper, who, in the absence of his attendant, made himself busy with the fireplace - and gone our separate ways from the foot of the stairs.

Back in my room, Alice and our irritatingly madonnafaced maid, Thomasine, were still asleep, so I slipped beneath the bedclothes for an extra hour. Kate wasn’t an early riser, particularly after a night spent with Thomas Culpeper.

Later, when I arrived at Kate’s apartment, I couldn’t spot Francis. He didn’t turn up for Mass, either, and, when there was no sign of him by late morning, I assumed he’d been sent on an errand.

The king hadn’t been evident in chapel, either, and I’d glimpsed Kate register his absence. No surprise in itself, his absence: on days that weren’t feast days, he preferred to worship in private in his closet adjoining the chapel. Which meant work, mostly, if rumour was correct: catching up on papers whilst only half-listening to Mass. Usually, though, Kate would’ve been informed of his absence - of the fact of it, if not the reason, unless the reason was ill-health. She wasn’t expected to trouble her pretty little head with matters of state, and she made quite clear that she had no interest in doing so. All she ever wanted to know of the king was his whereabouts, even if only vaguely. Actually, what she wanted to know was when to anticipate his return.

Whenever he came to her rooms to see her, he’d eschew the royal chair that was there for him, lowering himself instead on to a bench - his huge thighs braced - so that she could settle herself beside him. She’d rest her head against his fur-rich shoulder and he’d ask her, ‘What have you been doing, today?’ the miracle being that he sounded genuinely interested, if not in the substance of what she had to say, then in her telling of it. He hung on her every word. She might have very little to say, but she could make something of nothing with her eye for detail and her word-perfect recall (‘So then he said -’). She made it funny for him, with that dry delivery of hers. He even giggled - he did have a giggle, that great big man. Or with her, he did. So, there he’d be: a king with decades of rule, interested in the daily doings of a girl who professed no interest in anything much but clothes. Often he’d have a new acquisition to show her, perhaps a wind or string instrument or some ingenious item of percussion that he’d explain and demonstrate, and she’d just laugh at the nakedness of his enthusiasm, but he didn’t seem to mind and in no time he’d be laughing, too.

Watching him with her, it was unimaginable to me that the jocular, twinkly man had, within the past five years, exiled one wife to a lonely death and signed an execution order for her successor.

That day, dinner was cleared away by twelve, and still no word from the king. I could see that Kate was dithering, unsure whether she should remain available, even less able than usual to make something of the daylight hours left to us. It looked a fine day, too: ripe for having something made of it outside the confines of her rooms, such as a game of bowls on the green down by the river or perhaps even a trip on the water. We couldn’t be sure that this wouldn’t be the last sunshine of the year.

I had no time for Kate’s procrastination on such an afternoon. I was biding my time before my escape, planning a walk through Kate’s private garden and then back along the moat and through her orchards. I wasn’t needed, and could slip from under the expectation that I’d be around. I was good at that. The proper ladies-in-waiting did enough waiting around for the rest of us. I doubted that I’d ever get the hang of it. I was a maid-in-waiting in name only.

Of my fellow maids-in-waiting, Maggie, was poring over her little Book of Hours, as she so often was - I had no idea how she found so much in it - and Alice was ostensibly sewing but more often staring into space, an activity for which she had an extraordinary capacity. On the far side of the room, Lady Margaret - head of we maids and ladies - was in discussion with Sir Edward, head of Kate’s household: in full flow, she was talking and nodding, frowning and smiling all at once as only she could do. She was the king’s niece and the family resemblance was strong except in size: she was a slip of a girl. She looked scrappy in whatever finery she wore, a fault not just of her skinniness and pallor but also her anxious manner and its physical counterpart, the sore hands and abrasions beneath her collar and band of her hood. Hers was an onerous position for someone so young, no doubt foisted upon her as rehabilitation after her disgrace of a few years ago, the romantic entanglement for which, after her lover’s death in the Tower, she’d apologised and been pardoned.

At the fireside, the Parr sisters were reading. My mother had taught me to read but then, when I’d grown up alongside Kate in the Duchess of Norfolk’s house, there’d been little tutoring and I’d never progressed, had perhaps even regressed. I had no trouble with individual words but became lost if there were a lot of them: I could read a letter, but not a book. Kate sometimes ridiculed the Parr sisters to me for their book-reading, catching my eye and raising her eyebrows, referring to them in private as the po-faced Parrs, although in fact they were a cheerful enough pair. As queen, Kate had books of her own, but for her they were decorative, leather- and silk-bound, gold-enamelled, studded with turquoise and rubies. I didn’t understand the precise nature of Kate’s objection to the Parr sisters’ absorption in books: she might’ve regarded it as a waste of time, she might’ve regarded it as presumptuous. Both, probably. For me, it was a source of fascination: how a book could hold them absorbed as if they were praying but with none of the subjugation of prayer. They had their heads bowed but I had a clear sense of them rising to those printed words with pleasure.

In the middle of the room, Jane Rochford was playing the lute in a business-like way. I kept waiting for Kate to say, That’s enough for now, thanks, Roch, but she didn’t; she didn’t seem to hear it, whereas, unfortunately, it was all I could hear. There was never any respite from Jane Rochford: that dissatisfied but self-satisfied face was ever present in the queen’s rooms. She never went off as everyone else sometimes did, for dog-walks or flower-picking or bowls-games, and - understandably - no one ever asked her along to any music practice. She was forever hanging around, imposing herself on whomever she could find and sighing hugely as she did so, under the mistaken impression that her affected languor was comical. She was never off duty because unlike all the other ladies she had no home to go to; no one had re-married her in the four years since her husband’s execution.

Kate was mooching at the windows, sunlight snagging on her new brooch — a lover’s knot of diamonds which the king had given her - but suddenly, ‘Oh!’ and she whirled around, finding me first. ‘Look!’

I laid aside the letter I was writing to my cousin, and rose, craning to see the king’s party beyond the moat.

‘Looks as if he’s off hawking, but why didn’t he say?’ She had no love of the outdoors, and probably would’ve declined an invitation to join him, but she resented not having been asked. Also, Thomas Culpeper would be gone all day because not only was he one of the king’s favoured gentlemen, but he was a skilled hawker and even though we couldn’t spot him at such a distance, we knew he’d be there.

‘Where’s Francis?’ I asked her.

‘Well, not there,’ she replied, cocking her head towards the hawkers, amused by the prospect, the absurdity of it. Francis was firmly in her retinue, as I was; we were unknown to the king’s household. Francis’s place, like mine, was here, in her household. We’d come with her from home: we were hers.

I persisted: ‘So, where is he, then?’

She didn’t know. ‘Perhaps he’s ill.’

‘He was fine, this morning.’

She gave me a look - I bet he was - but her flippancy rankled. ‘I’m serious.’

She shrugged, expansively, turning it into a hugging of herself, turning herself away from the window.

Later, increasingly intrigued by Francis’s whereabouts, I slipped into the second sitting of dinner in the Great Hall in search of his room-mate, Rob, who was able to tell me that Francis hadn’t ever returned, that morning, to his room. Not ill, then, but up to something. There’d been mention, I recalled, of some clothes that he was considering buying from someone: perhaps that was what he was doing, busy trying to raise or retrieve the cash. Back in Kate’s rooms, I spent a while longer expecting him to arrive before giving up and going for my walk. Maggie asked if she could come, and as always I was glad of a chance to lose myself in her cheery company. She tripped along at my side, chattering endearingly about some of the New Year gifts that she’d soon be sewing, and impressing upon me the various achievements of her little godson, before embarking upon a lengthy account - to which, admittedly, I only half-listened - of her family’s dispute with the mason who was supposed to be building her grandfather’s tomb. Maggie: two years my junior but in many ways old for her years. There was a gem-like shine to the river and cloud cover was no heavier than breath condensing on the surface of the sky.

I was surprised not to see Francis on my return. Still no one remarked on his absence, but, then, despite his position as usher to Kate’s rooms, he did tend to come and go. Loyal to Kate though he was, he often disappeared - horse-riding, tennis-playing, tavern-frequenting with friends or his brothers - and managed to square it with her afterwards. I wasn’t overly concerned. If anything was amiss, he would - I was sure - have told me.

Prayers, supper, and some music-making: the afternoon and evening drifted on. At six o’clock, as usual, Sir Thomas Heneage came along with news of the king for Kate. He was a funny little man, goofy and chinless; Kate didn’t often take to funny little men but Sir Thomas was an exception and she always invited him to stay for a drink and a gossip. This evening he told her that the king had gone off to London. London, suddenly, by barge, late on a November afternoon: something had come up, we might’ve surmised. Someone, perhaps: a troublesome nobleman or cleric; someone fallen from favour and being taken to task. But that was if we thought about it at all, and it’s just as likely that we didn’t.

Eventually, the evening livened up. Only a few of the king’s gentlemen had accompanied him to London and just before eight o’clock the others turned up at Kate’s door, ring-led by her brothers who were as delighted as ever with themselves. Their merry band was vying for an invitation, which, as usual, was forthcoming, albeit being issued under the ever-watchful eye of Lady Margaret. The men were eager to be entertained, although the day’s hawking had helped deplete some of the ebullience that was often a problem after the end of the hunting season. In the end, good-natured gambling sufficed, the knight-marshal kept busy with the tallies.

November 4th

The following morning, Francis was back in attendance, carrying on as if he’d never been away. I felt I was owed an explanation. Kate was keeping him busy, presumably with the usual mix of tasks. He was both her usher - gatekeeper to her rooms — and her secretary. The pair of them never worked together in a closet - that would’ve been too serious for her - but would merely retreat to a corner of whichever room we were all in. There, he’d read aloud the clutch of letters that arrived daily for her, and they’d discuss how he should respond on her behalf. They’d go through any appointments that needed to be made, and he’d set about making them. Then there were the thank-you letters for gifts - from silverware and sumptuous fabrics to baskets of fruit and jars of preserve - which came from people in every walk of life who, for their various reasons, were anxious to curry favour. Then perhaps they’d work on formal renditions of any pleas for clemency which the king had already heard from her in private and indicated that he’d permit. I’d never anticipated what a soft touch she would become in that respect, although, upon reflection, there was nothing soft about it. She was genuinely unnerved to think of the hard and fast nature of the law: its drastically impersonal, inflexible nature. What drew her to particular cases - what she had a feeling for - was the minutiae of personal circumstances, and I could well imagine that she made them compelling when relaying them to her husband.

All that morning, she and Francis made quite a spectacle with their industry. She was elaborately pinned and tucked, every inch the girl-queen, as good as gold, and he had an officious air. Habitually, he listened to her with only half his attention, polite but vague, but that particular morning he was frowning with concentration. He’d often make much, to me, of how he’d have been nothing without her, of how he owed his success to her - here he was, private secretary to the queen of England - but I wasn’t so sure. When we girls had first come across him, he was a gentleman pensioner of the Duke of Norfolk’s, an enviable position, and had he stayed in the duke’s household, he’d have done very well for himself. He was following Kate’s lead in that her own rise had been something of a fairytale, but she too, I sensed, had chosen to believe in the inevitability of it. For her, the obscurity of her earlier life had been the mistake and the recent elevation her due. A natural enough attitude to take, I supposed, but I’d expected something different from her — from her of all people, so impatient with others’ pretensions.

At last, late on during the afternoon - too late, in my opinion — Francis came to find me in the gallery, where I’d got drawn into music practice with Alice and Anne Basset. He came slinking over, all smiles, attempting to slide his way back into my favour. ‘Hello, you.’

I said nothing although I did tilt my face for his kiss, which then struck me as a gesture typical of Kate - that showy petulance that she affected with men.

‘Been busy?’ He was keen to make amends.

Was I ever? But he’d asked, he’d given me the opportunity to knock him back, so I launched laboriously into a list of the day’s decidedly unspectacular activities: I’d written to my cousin and my father; tackled a new piece on the virginals; been entrusted to choose a gown and some jewellery for Kate from The Wardrobe and The Jewel House, settling on an indigo satin gown and sapphire-and-pearl necklace; managed to catch Liz Fitzgerald’s favoured tailor when he was visiting her, to ask if he could make a cloak for my little cousin in time for New Year; and dropped in at the Duchess of Richmond’s rooms to check the progress of the puppies, one of which, when weaned, would be Kate’s. I related all this in a deliberately flat tone, staring him down as I did so. Understandably, when he’d listened politely, he backed off.

Later still, when the evening’s dancing began, I relented and took him aside, finally asking him outright, ‘So, where were you, yesterday?’

He turned his big eyes to mine. ‘My mother wasn’t well.’

‘What’s wrong?’ It must’ve been something serious, I thought, for him to have gone all the way to London, and my stomach clenched at the prospect of what he might be facing. Then again, he’d come all the way back, so whatever was wrong hadn’t been serious enough to detain him.

‘I don’t really know.’

That struck me as vague, but, then, Francis was so often vague.

‘Well, is she any better?’

‘A bit.’

I began to suspect he was lying, so I delved: ‘Were your brothers there?’

He nodded.

‘Both of them?’

‘Yes.’ A touch of impatience, now: I said so, didn’t I?

And thus I had him: ‘You told me your younger brother was in York.’ He’d told me that his brother had gone up there the previous week for a month of work.

He narrowed his eyes, he was cross. ‘Well, he came back,’ and he protested, ‘I don’t tell you everything.’

I sighed. ‘Clearly not, Francis.’ York and back inside a week? There’d barely have been time to turn around. He was definitely lying.

‘Look…’ but then he dropped whatever further protest he was about to make and settled instead for, ‘I’ve had a really, really long day,’ and I saw how that, at least, was the truth. He looked exhausted. Tenderness washed over me and I let it drop.

November 5th

I shouldn’t have, though, because in the early hours of the following morning a couple of handfuls of soil hissed at my window. Alice didn’t stir but both Thomasine and I were woken. Thomasine occupied the side of the bed nearest the window and with a lot of muttering - Bound to be Mr Dereham, what’s the betting it’s Mr Dereham - she raised herself to it, prised it open, and peeked - ‘Yup’ - before flopping back down and yanking the bedclothes over her head. Anxious to put a stop to the disturbance, I rose and - nightgown over nightshirt, and shoes on - hurried down there.

He’d ducked inside the stairwell to hide from the night-watch. Despite the darkness, somehow I could see he was huge-eyed. His breathing skittered over the silence. He said nothing. He was terrified, I realised, and terror of my own leapt up inside me to meet his because I’d never seen him like this. He was here on the run from something or someone. This - here, this dark stairwell - was his refuge, yet clearly it was no refuge at all.

I couldn’t - just couldn’t - take him in my arms; something held me back, a dread perhaps of making him vulnerable. And he, too, held himself separate, trying to hold himself together. And so we stood there, looking at each other in the darkness. Still he said nothing - he couldn’t say it, I understood, he couldn’t bring himself to say that earlier he’d lied to me. It was obvious now but it had been obvious at the time, too, and I had to quell my fury that we’d ever had to go through that charade of his mother’s supposed illness.

He confided, ‘It was Wriothesley,’ his breaths uneven and raucous in the silence.

Thomas Wriothesley, secretary of state to the king. I didn’t understand: ‘What was Wriothesley?’

‘Had me in for questioning.’

Still nothing: it made no sense whatsoever, to me. ‘About what?’ Why on earth would Thomas Wriothesley be questioning Francis? And all day? And in such a way as to cause this terror in him? Francis was no one, he’d know nothing about anything. He was harmless: he was an innocent if I’d ever known one.

He urged, ‘About before’, as if that should mean something.

‘Before?’

‘When we lived at the duchess’s.’

What was there to know? What could possibly be of interest to a man such as Wriothesley? Or indeed anyone. I could barely recall our time there, myself, not least because there was nothing to remember: that was its distinguishing feature, for me. Nothing had ever happened at the duchess’s. ‘What about the duchess’s?’

Despite the darkness, I knew he’d given me a very direct look: loaded, in warning. ‘Kate,’ he whispered.

‘Kate?’ Kate had been nobody when she’d lived at the duchess’s: she was just a girl. That was her virtue. All those previous complicated queens with their connections, but Kate was no one - a Howard, yes, but a minor one - and she had no history.

‘Kate and me,’ he said, and then suddenly I knew what he meant and my heart shrank. I tried to keep myself steady. He was looking at me - of course he was - and I resented it, I wanted not to be there under his scrutiny; I wanted to be away, by myself, alone.

‘And’ - he sounded wondrous - ‘he knew it all.’

All: well, I didn’t want to think about that. A tiny word encompassing so much, none of which I wanted to remember. I’d assumed we’d left it long behind.

‘I don’t know how’, he continued. ‘But it was just, “We have information.’”

‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’ I said, because that was the point, pure and simple, and we needed to keep to the point. ‘She wasn’t married to the king, then.’ Why, though, then, had Wriothesley questioned him about it? ‘You did nothing wrong, there’s no law against it.’

I was right, I knew I was right, so Francis’s scepticism - a puff of dismissal - riled me. There was some reluctance from him — a held breath — before he ventured, ‘But if there was pre-contract -’

‘But there wasn’t.’ My insides were tight. ‘Was that what Wriothesley was asking about?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there wasn’t.’

We stood staring at each other in the darkness. I was listening hard to his silence; I could hear he was thinking of saying something. Then it came, tentatively: ‘Some people would say there was.’

I held my temper, and was straight back at him: ‘Some people will say anything, but Wriothesley’s not asking them, is he. He’s asking you. What did you tell him?’

‘I said no, of course.’ Now making something of being offended that I should even ask.

If he and Kate had been pre-contracted - if they’d promised themselves to each other - then they’d have been as good as married, they’d have been married in all but name and the king’s marriage to her, coming afterwards, would be no marriage at all. Francis would be married to the queen, and - worse - he’d have known it. Kate would be a bigamist, and Francis would at the very least be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the king. So, the answer had to be no.

He and Kate had been a couple, at the duchess’s, and almost everyone in the household had, in the end, known it. Here, now, Maggie and Alice - our old housemates - knew. Francis and Kate had been lovers. He used to call her ‘wifey’, ‘wifelet’: it was a joke, but also it wasn’t. A joke and no joke. I said, ‘You should’ve been more discreet,’ regretting it even as I said it because it was ridiculously unhelpful and even in the shadows I detected him giving me a despairing look. Quickly, I changed the subject: ‘Kate doesn’t know, does she, that Wriothesley had you in?’ I didn’t think so because - I was pretty sure - if she knew, I’d know.

‘No.’

‘Good. Look, this is nothing, Francis, is it. They just have to check. If someone’s said something, they have to check, that’s all.’ And they’d have had to go to him because no one would dare approach the queen with it.

‘Who, though?’ he urged. ‘Who’s the someone? And why, and why now?’

That, I didn’t know and didn’t want to contemplate and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was no pre-contract and that Wriothesley was able to establish the fact. What a blessing, in a sense, that he was investigating the past, his attention turned hard from what was currently happening with Thomas Culpeper. This was the luckiest escape ever, for Kate. She should stop what she was doing with Thomas Culpeper, though; she really had to stop it and I was going to have to say so.

He read my mind. ‘Don’t tell her,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t say anything. Wriothesley said I’m to tell no one at all, no one, understand? Or this’ll get nasty: that’s what he said.’

‘Nasty?’ I was taken aback. Nasty? How dare he! Suddenly I felt sick to think of how the questioning might’ve been for Francis: the tone and the content of it. Yet in a sense the threat was a good sign, surely: under no circumstances was the queen to hear of any of this; it could be resolved without her ever having to hear of it. I returned to what mattered: ‘Did he - Wriothesley - believe you? About the pre-contract?’ - the lack of one.

‘I don’t know.’

Not the answer that I’d wanted, but at least he was being honest with me. ‘Francis, listen: he has to believe you. You have to tell him. You have to tell him it was nothing, that you were just two silly kids…’

He said, ‘Yes,’ but I heard the anger in it. He didn’t like me being dismissive of whatever it was that he’d had with Kate in the past. Look at us, I despaired: it wasn’t each other with whom we should be angry. Then the realisation, ringing with the clarity of a bell: I must protect him. He was incapable of doing it himself: he didn’t think ahead. But I did, it was as natural as breathing to me and now I could do it for him. I’d do anything to protect him. I took his arms, ran my hands up and down his arms: not much of a touch, but something, and enough, because he gave in, stepped forward and folded himself down over me. ‘Go back to bed,’ I whispered against his chest. ‘Get some sleep.’ And saying so, I could make an end to it, at least for now. ‘Whatever this is about,’ I said with utter certainty, ‘it’ll blow over.’

And I believed it, absolutely I did. I was right to think that Francis had done nothing illegal, and I was naïve enough, back then, to believe that what mattered was the truth. Worried, though: yes, I was, and of course I was. Wriothesley was secretary to the king: he was the man who, effectively, ran everything. Not, presumably, someone with time to waste on anything unimportant. But I’d heard nothing to suggest he was an unreasonable man, as some of the king’s men were known to be. He was one of the new men: a capable administrator. Presumably, his hands were as good as any for Francis to be in, although I didn’t like what those hands had already done to him, he who was usually so sweetly devil-may-care. But, I reminded myself, Wriothesley would’ve had to be thorough. Someone had let something slip and it’d come to the attention of the king’s own secretary who was duty-bound to investigate and then, finding it unsubstantiated, get rid of it. Which he would, because Francis had done nothing. Yes, he and Kate had messed about, but who hadn’t? Well, to some extent, anyway. What mattered was the future: that’s what I kept reminding myself, all through that night. The king adored Kate. Even if he did ever hear of what she’d got up to in her earlier years, he’d turn a blind eye because he was looking to the future, to - at long last - a successful marriage and, God willing, a second male heir. He was getting on in years; he hadn’t the time for quibbling over details of the past. He’d finally found what - or who - he’d been looking for. He’d never been happier - everyone said so - and Kate was doing such a good job. She was ideal: uncontroversial, with no strong religious affiliation - simply a traditional girl - and the Howards were stalwarts, not newcomers. And in any case her ties to her family were comfortably loose. And she was English, too, not foreign like the first queen and the latter. She was everything he needed. True, she wasn’t yet pregnant, but these were still fairly early days and she was young and healthy. She was entirely trouble-free except for what went on, sometimes, in her bed behind her closed door on nights when the king hadn’t asked for her. But no one knew about that, except me and Francis and Jane Rochford, and anyway it’d stop, soon enough, despite what Kate claimed; I knew it would; it always did, although probably she’d then take up with someone else. I wished she’d stop it, now that she was queen. Why couldn’t she stop it?

I did manage some sleep, in the small hours - I must’ve, because before I knew it, I was up against the morning and there was nothing for it but to drag myself out of bed. I was slower than the brisk, ever-organised Alice: she was gone even before I’d placed both feet on the floor. Dressing under Thomasine’s brisk supervision, I was dogged by unease, slipping free of it only whenever she snared my attention. Francis had been terrified: the fact was inescapable. I didn’t want to think about how he’d looked; I’d never seen him like that before. Every time I closed my eyes, there he was, but he wasn’t the Francis I knew.

Outside, a fine rain pulsed in gusts. Again I arrived at Kate’s rooms later than usual; later than everyone, I established instantly, except Francis. No Francis. I steadied myself in the doorway, told myself that perhaps he was sleeping late, as I’d done. Perhaps, like me, this morning, he was befuddled and slow to emerge. Perhaps, though, he’d gone on the run. Would he? If he ran, they’d chase him. I willed him: Be sensible. But that was a lot to ask of Francis.

I was barely across the threshold before Kate was heading for me, which had my heart catch before I registered her expression. Amused, she looked, and my blood surged because perhaps she was going to laugh and say, You’ll never guess what… and, I told them…, and everything would be fine and she’d given Francis the day off to recover. I hardly dared hope it. She gestured that I should join her in the gallery: we were to talk privately. I followed her train of rosy velvet stitched with gold-thread swirls and studded with pearls, and the others in the room barely glanced our way; they’d think nothing of Kate going off to gossip with her oldest friend.

In the gallery, she led me into a window recess hung with a cage of songbirds.

‘Francis is in for questioning about tax,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘Did you know?’

My heart contracted. Something else, something more? Was someone, for some reason, out to get him?

‘They sent a man to tell me,’ and it was this, apparently, that had amused her, the formality of it. She quoted the officious man: ‘“He will be unavailable for duties, today.’” I understood it differently, though, this despatching of a messenger. This was nothing to do with tax. Wriothesley had Francis for a second day and had gone to the trouble, this time, of putting Kate off the scent. A second day of it? How many ways were there to ask the same question?

‘What’s he been up to, then?’ she was asking, affectionate. As if she cared. ‘I hope they don’t drag me into it, because he did give me that money, once, to look after.’

What money?

‘When he went off to Ireland, that time.’ She smirked. ‘I’m queen, see: good strongboxes.’

Yes: as queen, she’d have been the safest option. I’d said it before I could stop myself: ‘You should be careful, Kate.’

She tipped her head to one side, teasing. ‘About what?’

I glanced around, first. ‘About -’ I didn’t even like saying his name - ‘Thomas.’ ‘Thomas Culpeper’ would’ve sounded ridiculously formal, but I’d hated having to say the familiar ‘Thomas’. He wasn’t ‘Thomas’ to me.

‘Thomas?’ A whispered, incredulous laugh. ‘But I am. You know I am.’ In the same tone, ‘What’s brought this on?’

A pinch of panic, because, of course, I’d promised not to say. ‘I don’t know, just -’

Francis was mine, Thomas Culpeper was hers: that’s how, I hoped, she’d account for it.

And presumably she did, because she didn’t pursue it. ‘Of course I’m careful.’ She dipped her head, quizzical, to bring my gaze back up to hers. ‘There’s only you who know.’

I was about to correct her but she said it for me, dismissively, as a kind of chant: ‘Oh, and Francis, and Jane Rochford,’ I know, I know. ‘And -’ laughing again in that whispered way as she swept back across the gallery to the door - ‘it’s not as if any of you are going to tell, are you.’

All morning I waited with mounting disbelief for Francis to appear, sometimes thinking he might’ve been released but gone elsewhere: to chapel, or to his room. Several times I came close to confiding in Maggie - sweet Maggie, who’d have been so concerned for me, I knew, and would’ve tried her very best to reassure me - but I couldn’t face explaining everything. Kate didn’t mention Francis again. She decided to hold a tennis tournament on the covered courts. While the king was away, she’d keep his gentlemen busy. Summoning Oliver Kelly, keeper of the courts, she made him cancel all prior bookings. Francis was on his list: ‘Your Mr Dereham,’ as Mr Kelly referred to him, scanning the page.

So, I spent most of that long afternoon sitting on a hard bench between equally bored Maggie and Alice with rain puffing through the wire-netted window at my back while, in front of me, various gentlemen exerted themselves on opposing sides of a taut, fringed rope. Despite the pretence of playfulness, they took themselves seriously: red-faced and clamp-jawed as they wielded their leather racquets and disputed points. Thomas Culpeper was down to his cambric shirt in no time. Kate cheered him on whenever he played; and whenever he scored a point, she blew him a kiss. She was enjoying scandalising the more staid of her ladies but I was in no mood for such games.

As soon as I could, I went directly to Francis’s room - but there was no sign of him. Then, just as I’d done two days before, I went in search of Rob, his room-mate, when I was fairly sure where he’d be: dining in the Great Hall. He told me that the last he’d seen of Francis was when they’d left their room together in the morning, and he’d assumed Francis was on his way to the queen’s rooms. (‘Didn’t he —? Is something up?’) I returned to their room and used some of their firewood ration, hoping they wouldn’t mind, and sat there, then lay there on the bed that he and Rob had to share.

Francis turned up sometime after the strike of six. I’d expected him to be pleased or at least relieved to see me, but he didn’t even look at me - bar one stinging glance - and turned his back to tend the fire, which needed no tending. I held my breath and steadied myself; there was nothing else I could do. This was new to me, this contempt from him, and I was going to have to feel my way. He was obviously exhausted: whey-faced, and his eyes red-tinged. I supposed he was dreading any further questioning. I had to question him, though, if I were to be able to help; I had to know what had happened.

He, though, was the first to speak: ‘It was Mary.’ He was hunkered down on the little hearth, poking his fire-iron into the incandescence. I’d got to my feet and was standing awkwardly behind him, above him, longing to put my fingers into his hair, to soothe him, to crouch down and cover him with myself.

‘Mary?’

‘Wriothesley’s information comes from Mary.’ Still he didn’t look around; still jabbing into the fire.

Which Mary? I knew countless Marys.

‘From the duchess’s,’ he said.

Mary Lassells. My old room-mate Mary. But she’d been gone for years. Gone back home and probably into some marriage, pity her poor husband. And anyway, no one ever listened to Mary: that was who Mary was, the girl to whom no one ever listened. True, she’d be quite likely to want to cause trouble for Kate, and certainly she’d know enough to be able to do so, but how on earth would she - silly Mary Lassells — ever get her information to Wriothesley?

‘Her brother,’ Francis said, answering my unasked question. He turned around but made no other move towards me; on the contrary, he sat back on the hearth and hugged his knees. My hovering over him felt even more conspicuous and, reluctantly, I returned to the edge of the bed. ‘Mary Lassells?’ I said, pointlessly. ‘Her brother?’

He said nothing; I’d got it right. I didn’t remember any brother of Mary’s, but why would I? I’d lived alongside Mary for years, but only alongside: she’d been nothing, really, to me; I hadn’t ever known her and if she’d mentioned a brother, I wouldn’t have been listening.

‘He’s come to Wriothesley with these stories of what Kate was up to.’

‘But why?’ The risk he’d taken was unthinkable: allegations about the adored queen.

He shrugged.

Mary’s revenge, at last, and she’d found someone who’d listen to her, if only via someone else. Whatever his reasons, this brother of hers had gambled on finding an ear for his allegations. And, worryingly, he had.

‘Wriothesley told you, though.’ He hadn’t had to tell Francis of the source. Was it a good sign, then, that he had? Wouldn’t he have been in a stronger position if he hadn’t - if he’d stuck with that mysterious, We have information. But, then, perhaps he had no need for any added strength.

‘Oh, we’re pretty frank with each other,’ Francis said. ‘We’ve no secrets from each other.’ This was in a bitter tone - the like of which I’d never heard from him and of which I’d never have guessed he was capable. He stared at me as if with a challenge.

I guarded against rising to it. ‘What did he want to know about, today?’

‘When it stopped.’

I didn’t like that, either: the bluntness of it. But, anyway, the fact was that it - their romance, or however else Francis liked to think of it - had stopped when she’d lost interest and moved on.

‘And why she gave me the job here.’

‘But she gave us all jobs here.’ Her family - sister and stepmother, aunt and cousin - and her old friends: me, Maggie and Alice.

He splayed his hands - exactly - but there was defeat in the gesture.

‘What?’ - it dawned on me - ‘he thinks it was…’ but I didn’t know how to put it, ‘… more than that?’

Francis said nothing.

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ I protested. ‘And in fact she gave you your job because of me, so I could have you here with me —’

He frowned and I saw that he’d never thought of it that way.

‘— and I’m going to go and tell him.’

He snapped, ‘Don’t go anywhere near him.’

‘But if I -’

‘Remember what he said: no one else should know, or it’ll get nasty. It’s not just me who’s in trouble, here, it’s Kate, too, and I won’t do anything to endanger her, do you understand that?’

Oh, perfectly. He’d made himself quite clear. I doubted his loyalty would be reciprocated if the situation were reversed, but he’d never been able to see that. Anyway, would I go to Wriothesley? He should be coming to me. But he wouldn’t even know of my existence. I was no one.

Francis asked, ‘Who’s Manox?’

The name shot through me. ‘Henry Manox?’

He shrugged. ‘Manox’ was evidently all he knew.

Wriothesley knows about Henry Manox. But of course he did, because Mary knew about Henry Manox.

Francis said, ‘He’s brought him in for questioning, that’s what he said. Manox. Who is he?’

Why would Wriothesley be interested in Manox? Did he think Kate might’ve been pre-contracted to him, as well? ‘He was our music teacher. At the duchess’s. Before you came.’ To my shame, I couldn’t quite resist making it clearer: ‘He was before you.’ Did you really think you were the first?

Poor Manox - it hadn’t ended all that well for him at the time, and now this, years later. But what was Wriothesley looking for? Why on earth would it matter, a long-ago dalliance with Henry Manox? I dreaded to think that Wriothesley’s enquiries might not be solely about precontract but Kate’s conduct in general.

Then Francis was asking me to stay, his rancour gone all of a sudden as if it had never been, replaced by a heartbreaking hopefulness. Rob wouldn’t mind, he said: he’d go over to one of his friends when he found us here together. My instinct, though, was to rush to warn Kate. Questions were being asked of more than one man, now, and there had to be a way - if only I could think of it - to warn her while protecting Francis from any more trouble. I needed time to think, though. What else could happen before morning? All that would occur, if I told her now, was that she’d suffer a bad night’s sleep. There’d be nothing she could do, at this hour. And, anyway, Francis did need me. Besides, I was exhausted: I doubted I could even make it over to her rooms or, if I did, make much sense when I reached there.

So, I ended up crawling into bed with Francis, stepping out of my clothes and leaving them where they fell. We didn’t talk; I’d thought we might, but we didn’t, not a word. I’d assumed that sleep would elude him but within a few breaths he was dead to the world. Perhaps an hour or so later, the door opened, then closed: Rob, presumably, gone on his way to someone else’s room to cadge some space in a bed or, unfortunately more likely, on a floor. I stayed awake for hours longer, listening to Francis’s breaths, guardian of them, all the time conscious of lying very still as if under observation and afraid of giving myself away. Conscious of it, but unable to remedy it. Nor did I seem able to use the time to think through what I could say, in the morning, to Kate. Instead, I pondered what she might do when she knew that questions were being asked about her past. What could she do? Go to the king? She’d been told he was in London. Was Wriothesley taking the opportunity of the king’s back being turned? Or had the king absented himself to allow this to happen, in the hope that it’d be cleared up before his return? His departure, I recalled, had been unexpected and Kate had been offered no explanation for it.

I lay there thinking how the king was Kate’s only supporter. She’d come from nowhere. The king had chosen her, to everyone’s complete surprise. No one could’ve predicted it; she’d been no one’s project. The king alone had chosen her - liking what he saw and not looking any closer - and he’d championed her: she was only here on his whim. She had no friends with influence. Family, yes: her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, was the country’s most powerful nobleman and the king’s right-hand man; but that was all the more reason for him to drop her fast if she were in trouble, and he was wily and heartless enough to do so. Five years previously, he’d done exactly that to his other queen-niece, Anne Boleyn: turning prosecutor, even, in that case; conducting the trial and then, at its conclusion, declaring the death sentence.

First at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox…

First at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox…I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body…

Never had I thought that Kate would one day become queen - she was a Howard but from the bottom of the Howard pile, the motherless tenth child of the disappointing second son, and empty of ambition. At the duchess’s, though, she was queen of a kind from the day she arrived.

When I first ever saw her, I’d been momentarily blinded from a dash indoors and only as my eyes adjusted did I see that I’d run in on our Mrs Scully and that she was standing beside a girl. The girl wasn’t quite standing but reclining against a hefty wooden chest. One hip on, one off. I recognised her as about my own age - twelve - but otherwise she was unlike any girl I’d ever encountered. The sling of that hip, perhaps. None of we girls at the duchess’s would’ve dared sit like that, or indeed sit at all in the presence of an adult who was standing, even if that adult was only our own dear Mrs Scully.

Mrs Scully said to me, ‘This is Katherine,’ and she sounded very correct, as if addressing me in the presence of another adult.

She hadn’t said, Catheryn, this is Katherine.

‘The new girl,’ she said. I was the new girl, though. Or had been, until now.

Any other girl, having dimpled, would’ve bitten her lip and glanced away, but this Katherine held me in her gaze, the glitter of which, I understood, was to be taken as a smile. Faintly amused, was how she looked. It struck me, even at the time, as an adult look, knowing and appraising. Unnerved, I’d murmured the requisite greeting and scarpered back to my friends.

I’d been at the duchess’s for six months, by that time. It would be the making of me, my parents had said, to grow up in the household of Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, the widowed matriarch of England’s foremost family. We were so lucky that she’d agreed to take me on. The duchess had been plain Agnes Tilney before she’d become the old duke’s second wife, and she and my grandfather had been second cousins. We were the poor relations.

Aim high, my mother had been telling me ever since I could remember: Don’t settle, she’d say. There were no lullabies, for me: only Aim high. Don’t settle.

‘I didn’t settle,’ she’d say, and look at me.

Back in those days I did only have eyes for her; there was no one else in my little world. What I saw of her, usually, was that long straight back of hers as she strode busily around our house. If she’d have settled, she - farmer’s daughter - would’ve become a farmer’s wife; she’d have married a tenant farmer and had a big, busy farmhouse to run. But she’d aimed high and married a gentleman’s son who himself was aiming high and had become a successful lawyer. So, she had a big, busy manor house to run, with tenants to farm our land.

I grew up with the belief that there was work to do in the world: the work of bettering oneself. Our chaplain talked of having one’s God-given place in the world, yet we as a family seemed intent on leaving our place behind. My mother’s way around it was to believe that it was our place to better ourselves. Bettering ourselves, she said, was what God intended for the poor-relation Tilneys. ‘God has been kind to us,’ she’d say, ‘and enabled us to work hard and we’ve done well, we’ve been able to make a good life for ourselves.’ She never looked happy when she said it, though, she never looked pleased; she looked as if there was always so much more to do.

‘All this,’ she’d say sometimes, in wonder, when she paused in the garden and looked back at our house. But try as I might, I couldn’t see what she saw. The house was all I’d ever known, and, beautiful though it was, it was just a house. If there was no house, what would there be? Nothing: just grass and mud; openness, emptiness, a clearing. The wonder in her voice scared me, the implication that what we had - all this - was unexpected, accidental, just as likely to not be. Grass and mud and wind and no shelter were just as likely. From how she said it, all this had been built by my parents’ will alone, and the strength of their will alone kept it standing. But for how much longer? Whenever my father was home from his lodgings in London, I overheard tense exchanges on the rising cost of the stables, the expense of ordering new livery for the servants.

I grew up knowing that I had a part to play in keeping that house standing: I could make a good marriage, make connections. A good marriage - mine - would shore us up; we’d no longer be the poor relations isolated in our beautiful house in that clearing. I was my parents’ only child and their fear for me was that I’d slide away into obscurity. Little did they know that there’d come a time when my obscurity was all we’d wish for.

Back then: Watch and learn, they urged me of my forthcoming time at the duchess’s; soak everything up and do your utmost best at all times. I’d be working hard to help run a big household, as well as learning Latin and Greek, mathematics, music and astronomy, but the reward, ultimately, would be my own wealthy, well-connected household in which - God willing - I’d be raising my husband’s heir and our many other eminently marriageable children. It all sounded good to me, or certainly good enough. At eleven years old, I knew of nothing else to wish for.

Make people want you, Catheryn, my mother said. Make yourself the girl who people want for their family, she said. Because, yes, it’s all down to money, in the end, to dowry and social standing and there’s nothing, she’d tell me, that you can do about any of that: that’s for us to worry about, and we’re doing the very best for you that we can. But there is something else: character. There are so many girls, Catheryn - more and more, these days - and so little to choose between those of you with your kind of dowry and background, but you can tip the balance in your favour. You can make yourself the girl who people want as their daughter-in-law, their son’s wife, the mother of their grand-children. You can be the girl who lights up the room, catches eyes, warms hearts. Make yourself the girl that people want to be running their son’s household. You’ll need to show an eye for beauty and quality, she said, but a nose for value. A head for figures and a good hand for letter-writing. You’ll need to give the impression you can deal with servants - keeping them in line whilst winning them over — and keep a good name with merchants and suppliers. Don’t stand for nonsense but curb your tongue and keep your temper, and never take sides. Have a ready smile, be quick to lend an ear, a helping hand, and have an eye for who’s to be trusted. Keep your counsel, but don’t be secretive.

Be respectful to your elders and betters, she insisted. Never waiver in that, never be tempted for a single moment to think that you’re quicker-witted or clearer-eyed than your elders and betters, because once you start that, you’ll never be able to stop, and no one’s interested in clever girls. Wittiness never got a baby to sleep, or a draper paid.

Make sure you’re always looking neat and tidy and clean, she’d say, but other than that, don’t worry about your appearance. You’re not bad-looking, as it happens, she’d tell me, but looks fade before you know it, and then what are you left with? Beauty draws the eye but for all the wrong reasons. Keep your eyes down, Catheryn. Don’t look at boys. Don’t even look. Don’t get distracted. Don’t let any silly girls fill your head with talk of romance. Girls can be very silly, Catheryn, when they haven’t had what you’ve been lucky enough to have: a proper upbringing. It’s a silly girl who gets her head turned. Get your head turned, she said, and you’re lost.

You’re no one’s fool, she’d say to me, and there was something in how she said it that suggested it was a secret between us and, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, not an entirely comfortable one. A burden, almost, perhaps.

There was such a lot to remember about how I should be; I worried I’d never remember it all, let alone one day actually manage to be it. None of this would ever have been said to Katherine: she had no mother to say it and, because she’d been born into England’s principal family, there was no need anyway for it to be said. And so she came unencumbered to the duchess’s; whereas for me, my mother had spoken so compellingly that, in my mind’s eye, I could see the woman I was to strive to become, the calm and capable, well-loved and much-valued lady, warm-hearted and cool-headed. She was a wonderful prospect, that lady, but always at a distance from me; such a distance that she seemed to have nothing to do with me, striding away into the future, and when I arrived at the duchess’s I didn’t know if I’d ever keep up or even ever dare take a step in her direction.

All that talk at home of the Howards’ wealth, but when, on my journey from home to the duchess’s, the leading rider called back that we’d arrived, I assumed we were stopping off somewhere for an overnight stay of which I hadn’t been informed. We were approaching a timber gatehouse, behind which was a moat and what appeared to be a jumble of barns. Hours earlier, we’d ridden away from the family home that my father had had built: a symmetrical, brick-built house gazing big-windowed over formal gardens. Clattering over that old drawbridge, I craned enquiringly towards my old nursemaid, Mrs Kent, but received only a smile in return. The drawbridge took us to a porters’ lodge, beyond which was a courtyard like a farmyard: a flock of ewes being shepherded across it, and a dozen or so labourers yelling and hammering, hauling and slamming down plough-shafts, scythes, cartwheels and crates.

A couple of labourers took our horses, and a liveried man arrived to greet us, requesting that we accompany him. Duly, we tottered across cobblestones, avoiding the smears and dollops of dung. The man’s grey jerkin had a subtle shimmer to it. My own servants were dressed in a flat, glaring blue. Someone wealthy, then, was staying here: a party from the duchess’s, perhaps, to meet us and then take us on with them in the morning to her splendid, elegant house. I asked Mrs Kent, ‘Where is this?’

‘It’s where the duchess lives.’ She sounded surprised that I’d asked.

I was weary from the ride, lacking patience. Servants will believe anything, I’d been told often enough. ‘No, it isn’t,’ and I laughed to muffle my irritation.

She laughed, too. ‘Yes, it is.’

Poor old Mrs Kent, I felt, who knew so little of the world.

We and our handful of attending men followed the well-dressed servant down a passageway into a courtyard which, to my relief, was serene. This, then, was where people lived, although I noticed that the windows, which were unshuttered, had linen in the frames instead of glass. Still, the place would do for an overnight stop, and, anyway, I was won over by the rich aroma of roasting meat. The servant ushered us through vast double-doors into a hall: a Great Hall, no less, the hammerbeam roof holding its decorative detail - coats of arms and sparring beasts - high above us, and the walls fortified by tapestries, their silken characters wan and fey among vines and waterfalls. The room could’ve come from stories that Mrs Kent used to tell me: stories of knights and damsels. No doubt this place had once been home to a noble family. Our own Hall was merely a room in which our staff put up a couple of tables at mealtimes for themselves and anyone visiting on household business, while my mother and I dined in the privacy of an adjacent parlour. This old Great Hall, although as yet deserted apart from a skulking wolfhound, was about to seat perhaps as many as a hundred people at several long tables: we’d stumbled upon a feast. At the far end, up on a platform, a linen-bright table bristled with silverware. ‘The duchess’s table,’ Mrs Kent whispered, delighted. She’d know, I realised: she was old enough to have grown up in just such a house. Was this the duchess’s house, then? It was impressive in here, but barely over the threshold was that farmyard with its mud and flies and indignant livestock. I would have to get word to my parents: they should know that the duchess had been misrepresented. We’d been tricked, hoodwinked. My mother’s plans for me didn’t include my growing up in a house no better than those of which she’d spoken as haunting her own childhood, the olden times before the coming of our bright new king and his subjects so keen to make better lives for themselves.

Distraction, though, came in the form of the household steward who blundered in, twinkly-eyed and bulbousnosed, to introduce himself - ‘Mr Scully’ - and, having apprehended the hound, congratulated us on arriving just in time for supper. I wondered whether I’d be sitting with any of the other girls. My mother had told me there were four other girls in the duchess’s care but she didn’t know exactly who they were. She’d explained to me that any who weren’t Howards - daughters, instead, of family friends - were in the household to be companions to those who were: that was how it worked, she’d said, as it had for hundreds of years in all the important households. Which, though, I now wondered, was I - family or friend? My parents considered me to be a blood relation of the duchess’s, but, standing there in that huge old room, stroking a hound whose collar was embroidered with the Howard coat-of-arms, the relationship seemed so tenuous as to be negligible.

Nothing in how the duchess addressed me was enlightening on the matter. She’d followed her steward; I hadn’t known whether to expect personal word from her but suddenly there she was, stepping from behind rotund Mr Scully to express polite concern for my welfare after the journey. I’d know now to describe her as a handsome woman: lean, with strong features, the most striking being her bird-black eyes. At the time, her silvered hair had me thinking of her as old; in fact, she probably wasn’t even fifty. Wiry and brisk, she wore a gown of serviceable fustian and her fingers were stained with berry-juice. Presumably she’d come from the kitchen or still-room.

The girls were a further surprise: I would never have guessed them to be my companions if they hadn’t been introduced as such, on their way into supper. I’d been anticipating composed, exquisitely dressed young ladies; but these were wide-eyed girls in barely passable worsted. Alice, Dottie and Mary were about my own age and Maggie looked to be a couple of years younger. To my relief, no distinction was made as to whom was related to the duchess, and all four were ushered to places on the high table, as was I.

Supper was plain fare - bird pie - which was welcome after the ride, and, as soon as we’d finished, the steward’s wife - dumpy and smiley like her husband, but much younger - asked the girls to show me to their bedroom, waving us off with her babe-in-arm snatching at her coif. On the way across the courtyard to the staircase, the girls buzzed around me, full of questions. Their concerns were my horse at home — her name, her temperament — and whether I had brothers and sisters, and what was the latest I’d ever stayed up. I’d been anticipating serious-minded young ladies with firm marriage plans in place, ladies about to step up into their future lives; and me joining the ranks, the back of the queue, falling into line and following in their footsteps. Instead, there was Dottie telling me that Alice had been unwell and had an invalid’s licence allowing her to eat meat on fish days and fast days, and Alice raising her eyebrows in acknowledgement of her good fortune. That, it seemed, counted as the big news around here.

And that I didn’t mind, but when I saw the bedroom, it was all too much - or, rather, too little. My bed at home was cosy inside hangings, deep with covers and cushions, but here were five straw mattresses on the floor, each bearing a single blanket. Moreover, the suspiciously clean fireplace was clearly seldom - if ever - lit, and skimpy bolts of ox-blood-coloured fabric failed to hide bare-plastered walls. Detecting my disappointment, Dottie asked, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ Ashamed of myself, I couldn’t quite say, and merely gestured at the room. Dutifully, her big brown eyes followed my hand, but - I saw - she just couldn’t see it, the drabness. Confounded, she tried to reassure me with, ‘But we’re all in here together,’ and, giving me my first glimpse of that lovely, guileless smile of hers, ‘It’s great, you wait and see.’

My first full day at the duchess’s began no differently from how my days began at home: prayers at six. No Mrs Kent, now, though, to get me dressed. Harried by the tolling bell, we girls fumbled with one another’s pins and ribbons, Mary complaining vociferously that no one was helping her enough or not fast enough, then scrunching her hair up under her hood with the furious admission that she’d just have to plait it later. By the time we arrived at the duchess’s closet, the lady herself was already kneeling at the little altar. I’d soon learn that she was always well into her day before the opening of the house gates at five. After prayers came the basic household tasks - the emptying of chamberpots, and the sweeping of our own room and the Scullys’, the duchess’s bedchamber and her day room, the long gallery and Hall. Everywhere in the house bloomed the heady fragrance of baking bread. It was a bake day but not a Mass day, so, after a breakfast of rolls and cheese fetched to our room by Alice, we were to go to the duchess’s day room for some tutoring by Mrs Scully. She despatched her stepdaughter, Trudie - a scrappy, nine-year-old redhead - to take care of her various babies (I’d counted four, so far) before giving us a passage from Aesop’s Fables to copy. My companions began on it laboriously, each individual letter a challenge, but I plucked up courage to whisper to Mrs Scully that I already knew how to write and to ask if I could perhaps write a letter home, a request which was gladly granted. I settled to it for an hour - but then that was it, apparently, for schoolwork, for the day. No reading, no translation, no maths, no music.

What there was, instead, was dancing tuition from a well-dressed girl who sauntered into the room on the stroke of nine and introduced herself to me as Polly. She’d not been at supper the previous afternoon, she said, because she’d been locked in her room for being naughty. When everyone else laughed, I realised she was joking. ‘Kidding,’ she confirmed: ‘Headache.’ Clearing a little dance floor by kicking aside the rushes, she informed me that in the duke’s Norfolk home the rushes were scented with saffron - ‘Nice touch’ - and explained that that was where she’d lived until the previous year: she’d been a Howard ward since the age of seven, and she was now sixteen. I wondered why she’d been moved at this late stage to the duchess’s. Possibly for exactly this, though: to teach the duchess’s girls to dance. It would have to be done, but the duchess wouldn’t have danced for decades and Mrs Scully - a housekeeper, not a noblewoman - would never have learned the finer points. Polly, though, seemed very much in the know. I wondered why she was still unmarried. She’d have been a considerable catch for her quick wits and prettiness - wide-spaced eyes, snub nose and full lips - let alone for the prized Howard connection. Most likely the duke was holding out for the best price; perhaps he was in the very process of driving a hard bargain and that was why she’d been sent to the duchess, safely out of the way while her future was decided, tantalisingly beyond the reach of whoever was bidding for her. During the hour before dinner, she put us through our paces, clapping rhythms and bellowing instructions, unstinting in her enthusiasm, laughing good-naturedly at our ineptitude, until we were flushed and exhilarated and Mary had slipped over and had had to be sat to the side on cushions and wrapped in a blanket.

Afternoons at the duchess’s were mainly given over to sewing, again under Mrs Scully’s supervision but with the added good company of cheerful, know-all Polly. The duchess’s was a big household so there was a mound of patching and darning to be tackled, lots of buttons and hooks-and-eyes to be re-attached, all to be rushed through, which was a relief because I’ve never been anything but poor with a needle. During these sessions, we gossiped. Dottie’s sister was due to be married, that autumn, so, for those first afternoons of mine, the talk was of the match and the eagerly anticipated celebrations. Occasionally we’d be interrupted by Trudie and the trio of household pages with the more mobile of the Scully toddlers in tow, but they’d be sent back soon enough to the gallery or gardens.

After the daily load of repairs, we moved on to more challenging needlework, supposedly of better quality and intended by Mrs Scully to be improving for us. I’d come with something that I’d been working on: a little bag for dried lavender which I was stitching, slowly and badly, with a simple, repeating lavender-head design in blackwork. Luckily, no one even so much as glanced at it. Mrs Scully and Polly were working together on a superb altar cloth, and of my companions some were better at embroidery than others. Alice, working on a pair of sleeves, was unadventurous with her geometric pattern, but neat. Mary was stitching a whitework feather pattern on to a coif and was bitterly vocal on the subject of her own perceived shortcomings, which kept Mrs Scully and Polly busy issuing reassurances. Dottie was mired in a complicatedly florid cushion cover, but her frequent declarations of helplessness - ‘Oh, I just can’t do this!’ - gave the impression that being unable to do it made it all the more fun. Maggie loved to tidy up the sewing box of silks and needles, and Mrs Scully left her to it.

Every few days, Mrs Scully would remember that we should practise the lute and virginals and then there would be an afternoon of music. What we very rarely did was ride. My own horse had gone back home with Mrs Kent but I’d assumed that the duchess would have extensive stables. Hers was a thrifty household, though, and she didn’t travel - never going to court because, Mrs Scully cheerfully said, ‘She has no time for all that nonsense’ - and disapproved of girls riding to hunt. The only way we ever had venison on the table, unless it came as a gift, was if servants went into the parkland and drove the deer into nets. Except for gifts, I’d soon learn, we had no fresh meat at all in winter - only salted - because, to save the cost of winter feed, the household followed the old tradition of the annual Martinmas slaughter. Indeed, most of the few horses that the duchess did own were released into the woods to fend for themselves in winter, the survivors re-captured in the spring.

The duchess spent her days busy either with household business - consulting with her secretary and steward, her caterer and the cooks - or spiritual matters with a bevy of chaplains. Sometimes there were visits from her stepson - the small, wily-looking duke, who was actually older than her - or her own two sons, one of whom had a lot of her in how he swung himself down from his horse and strode smiling into Hall, but the other pallid and pained-looking. Whenever the duchess came across us, we had to curtsey, which I loved to do, having the notion that I curtseyed particularly well. Most days, she took a couple of us with her into her meetings with senior household staff so that we’d learn about purchasing and menu-planning. She’d also take one of us on visits to those on the estate who were sick or in need, delivering them firewood, milk and bread, eggs and perhaps a hunk of cheese, perhaps some cast-off clothing and her famous tonic of breadcrumbs and rose-water. I savoured those rare opportunities for a ride.

Dottie was probably my favourite of the girls: shy, spindly and sparkly-eyed Dottie with her silk-scarf rosy-brown hair. Alice was the opposite - matronly and taciturn - but she was dependable. Mary, unfortunately, was hard work: so nearly appealing, bouncy and rosy-cheeked, keen to please and quick to laugh but, unfortunately, quicker to cry, easily riled and noisily aggrieved, perpetually on the crest of indignation. Maggie was a joy, the smallest of us but the biggest character. I loved her sometimes comical efforts to keep up with us, and anyway I only had to look at her to laugh: that unruly black hair, thick and wiry, growing outwards rather than down.

Yet for all it was wonderful to have companions, I was unused to it. It was a surprise, to me, how much solitude I could find for myself in that big, busy household, and how much - despite my newfound love of company - I still wanted it. It was there for the taking and I got better at finding it and bolder at taking it. The best times for going alone were just before or just after supper: two of the busiest times but coming when everyone’s energy was running low, and so there was a slipping and sliding, the household unravelling a little, a hint of abandon in the air and, later, a resignation. A lurching and drifting towards nightfall. A good a time as any for cutting loose.

I’d cross the drawbridge and head for the gardens. That first autumn of mine at the duchess’s was wonderful, a St Luke’s Little Summer. Crusty sea-green lavender heads bobbed under burly bees, and everywhere was strung with barely visible spider webs of improbable spans, individual threads turned into tiny lightning bolts by the low sun. The air was somehow always cooler than I’d anticipated, like water, and moving through it gave me the pleasurable sensation of being dowsed. High above me and above the indignant rooks, birdsong tweaked at the sky as if pulling it flat in readiness for lowering it down, and dusk rose around me as rich as woodsmoke. Secluded at the far end of the flower garden was a banqueting house where, in the grand old days, favoured guests would have retreated after feasts for confectionery and spiced wine. It had long since fallen into disrepair, and my friends avoided it. I, though, found myself drawn to it. Its oak pillars and posts - now woodbine-clogged and fringed with tatty blossoms - were carved with sprightly little fleur-de-lys, sinuous vines and bold bunches of grapes; it had once been really quite something. It was even glazed, and, sometimes, having eased open the door and braved the cloth-like webs to climb the ladder-staircase, I’d peer through those sea-green diamonds of glass at the duchess’s house: buildings that, despite their decrepitude, didn’t look in any danger of falling down, not least because there was nowhere much further to fall. I used to fantasise that over the years I’d furnish that banqueting house with a cosy bed and carpets and no one would know. It’d be for me alone and I felt something of a princess, I suppose, to have even the faintest possibility of it.

Evenings were nothing much at the duchess’s. Apart from on the eve of an important feast day and then on the day itself, she eschewed the dancing and masques that were popular in most noble households and instead we had to be content with card and board games in the company of Polly and Mrs Scully and whichever Scully-children had yet to be put to bed. Later, though, in the privacy of our own room, gazing up at roofbeams barely visible in the glow of the solitary wick, and ignoring Mary’s snores (mercifully, she fell asleep as soon as her head went down), the rest of us talked about boys. We discussed our future husbands: what we hoped they’d be like and what our lives with them might be like. It was as if we imagined those husbands - whoever they were - waiting patiently for us; as if, by having to take our time to grow up, we were inadvertently keeping them waiting. My mother might not have despaired, because there was nothing silly in our talk. We were careful to speak respectfully of those men: it was a serious undertaking even to speak of them, these men to whose selection our parents would give so much consideration. There was nothing resigned in our attitude towards the marriages for which we were heading. We had expectations of which we spoke spiritedly understanding ourselves to be taking them along with us into the future - if not meeting our spouses halfway, then at least part of the way.

We all pitied Mary’s future husband.

We didn’t only talk, at bedtime: sometimes we sang. Or Dottie, Maggie and I did; Alice was no singer, she maintained a dignified silence. Dottie, Maggie and I sang love songs that we’d filched from the adult world and which we didn’t fully understand, but we’d picked up threads from visiting musicians and from Polly and managed to make something of them, something that captivated us. In our bedroom and also sometimes when we were left alone in the gallery, in the gardens or the stillhouse, we offered up these little incantations - even Mary, sometimes, welcoming the opportunity to make a noise - as if trying to summon futures for ourselves.

Despite the talk of whom our parents would choose for us, we didn’t shy away from speculating which boys in the household or neighbourhood we’d marry if by some chance we had the choice. Harmless, this talk, and liberating: a choice unburdened by the various considerations which, we knew, our parents had to take into account. Liberating, but never frivolous: we relished the choice that in fact we would never have, and chose carefully. Careful, as well, to avoid any conflict between one another. By negotiation, we parcelled out the better of the boys in the household and the neighbourhood: the trio of pages, and the sons of the higher-status members and retainers of the duchess’s household such as her secretary and doctor. Not so much a choice, then, perhaps, as an allocation. Mine, that first autumn and winter, was the doctor’s second son, fourteen-year-old Rufus: a watchful lad, by all accounts a clever boy. We kept our boys to ourselves and even they themselves - especially them — knew nothing of our interest in them.

We didn’t idolise them. Our attitude to them was one of tolerance - as if they were merely, in some way, necessary. We took an interest in them, but there was no passion. What was important to us was the act of choosing. Looking back, I’m struck that our attitude to them was rather superior. In my daydreams, Rufus would be struck down, it didn’t matter how, it mattered only that he was in desperate need and that I, grave and efficient, worked wonders. I found, in my daydreams, that I had a talent for it.

Bright-button-eyed Dottie had been right, that very first night: It’s great, you wait and see. The only problem was that, in so enjoying myself, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I was betraying my mother: my mother, by whose very best efforts I was there at the duchess’s. It wasn’t only the talk of boys of which she would’ve disapproved, or the lack of schooling. Worse than that: she’d drummed into me that I’d have to be on my best behaviour at the duchess’s, but to my surprise, I realised that it was at home that I’d been on my best behaviour. Both of us - my mother and me - had been forever on our best behaviour, whereas life in the duchess’s household wasn’t the ceremonial business that she’d believed it would be. At the duchess’s, I was free of all that: I was free and every day was one long sigh of relief freighted with the shame of my disloyalty. However happy I was, I lived day by day with a catch in my breath, a lump in my throat, a hitch to my heartbeat: the sense that I was getting away with something and the day would come when I’d have to answer for it.

Katherine Howard arrived at the duchess’s six months after I did, on the eve of Lady’s Day. That first evening, she said very little; just regarded us all with that gaze of hers, that half-smile, answering our questions which, from shyness, were limited to practical considerations. Only Mary was more personal - ‘Are your parents alive?’ - but was answered at first less readily and then rarely, Katherine giving an impression of being unable to hear while she unpacked her chest and her bags. When we woke in the morning, Katherine’s mattress lay square on to the wall in our higgledy-piggledy room and, shutting the door behind us, glancing back, I saw that it was our five that looked out of place.

Her first morning, she showed a similar effortless efficiency in the day room, copying letters as if it were nothing and gazing into space while waiting for the others to catch up. Mrs Scully was full of praise for her - ‘Very good, Katherine!’ - which rather dismayed me because it was only copying, after all, and she showed no signs of actually being able to write. When Mrs Scully left the room at the end of the lesson, Katherine remarked expressionlessly and to no one in particular, ‘What do you think she was thinking when she put that dress on this morning? “Oh, this blue’ll look good”?’

It’d been phrased as a question, but I knew full well that no actual response was required. Or none that wasn’t in accord. The new girl’s opinion was that the colour of Mrs Scully’s dress was wrong and Mrs Scully should not only have known it but also cared.

Infuriatingly, ever-eager Dottie rushed in with an excuse: ‘Not much else fits her -’ as if Mrs Scully had lots of dresses from which to choose - ‘because she’s expecting again.’

‘Yes.’ Katherine bit a nail, then examined it. ‘I can see she’s been busy.’

Busy?

At that, Alice almost caught my eye but seemed to think better of it. I didn’t like it that this new girl - or anyone, but especially this blank-faced, glittery-eyed new girl - should be passing comment on Mrs Scully. What was wrong with blue, anyway? True, it was more often the colour of servants’ livery, and, true, it was more often worn by men than by women, but so what? What did it matter? The duchess’s wasn’t a fashionable household, and Mrs Scully was a busy countrywoman distracted by children.

More to the point, who was this girl to judge? From what I’d seen of her own clothes, they were plain and well used, handed down, even if she wore them as if they were something special, with cuffs turned back, buttons unfastened. In fact, she was plain herself, not that you’d know it from the way she walked around with that glittering half-smile. She walked tall despite her lack of stature. Purposefully, too, her pace measured. Like an adult. None of our scampering or dawdling. She was thin-lipped and big-nosed; her eyes were small and grey, her hair not Tudorgold but bronze. She wasn’t a patch on any of us, I didn’t think, with perhaps - if I was honest - the exception of double-chinned Alice. This colourless little new girl was nothing special but she acted as if she were. Polly would’ve put her in her place but she’d gone, having left us at Christmas to be married.

Later that morning, on our way into Hall for dinner, the new girl’s eyes trailed the imposing figure of Mr Wolfe, the caterer, and - again - to no one in particular, matter-of-fact, she remarked, ‘That one looks a lot like one of my sister’s ex-lovers.’ This time, no one responded. Little Maggie bit her lip. That one was a disturbingly casual way to refer to Mr Wolfe, who held considerable respect in the household. And lover? Not a word we used, probably not a word we’d ever heard. Ex-, too, which made clear that there’d been others. And, anyway, even to think of our respectable - indeed, married - Mr Wolfe in that way…

When we were leaving Hall, though, and passed Jay-jay, one of the page boys, just as he spat copiously on to the cobblestones, Katherine muttered, ‘You’re nice,’ for us to hear but for him to fail to catch, and it was this snipe of hers - pointless but pointed - that had us smiling among ourselves. The page boys were a wily trio and we’d never have admitted it but we were in awe of them, so it was good, for once, to feel superior.

Sewing, that afternoon, Katherine had barely clapped eyes on Mrs Scully’s stepdaughter before coming up with ‘Oddbod’, and nothing could’ve been more apt. Skin and bone, with birthmark-red hair and venous-blue eyes, Trudie was a girl of sudden revelations: a moth from the palm of her hand, a milk-tooth dredged from her pocket, a shrew’s skeleton shrouded in her handkerchief. ‘Oddbod,’ decreed Katherine, her tone neutral, just as it was safe to do so, just as Trudie flitted away over the threshold ahead of her stepmother, and in that instant, it was done: Trudie became - affectionately, and only among us - Oddbod. As for Mrs Scully herself: later that afternoon, having asked us to fetch cheeses for the Lady’s Day supper and rushing into the dairy to supervise us, she slipped but managed to correct it before it had properly happened, perhaps even before she’d consciously registered it. Respectfully averting my gaze, I came up against Katherine’s, which showed no such compunction. That evening, Katherine relayed a message to me with, ‘“Skid” Scully’s asking for you,’ and by bedtime, Mrs Scully was, to all of us, without discussion, as if she had never been anything else, simply ‘Skid’.

Despite myself, I began listening for Katherine’s asides, anticipating them. We all did. Desultory though they were, they drew us in, they drew us to her in our efforts to catch them. I don’t think it had ever occurred to us to pass judgement on anyone, but in the new girl’s eyes everyone was fair game. I saw how adults took the light in those eyes as evidence of keenness and interest. Little did they know she was on the lookout, and that the smallest detail was up for comment: for speculation, or dismissal, or ridicule. The smaller, the better: the bigger the prize. People’s appearance, their behaviour, their relationships, and what she saw - accurately - as their pretensions. Sometimes she was cutting, unkind, petty; sometimes, droll; often intriguing. Of the duchess’s maid, Mrs Barber: She needs one, and a single tap of a fingertip to her top lip (which, later, had me surreptitiously and anxiously dabbing my fingertip to my own). Of Mr Wolfe and his wife: No love lost there, bet the last time they did it was their wedding night. Did what? Danced together? Of the bad-tempered farrier’s wife, sometimes: Probably due her monthly. Monthly what? Confession? Of our chaplains, whispered in their wake: a flat-eyed, derisory, God loves you, Fathers, for which, I worried, we’d all be struck down.

I began catching myself thinking in asides, but mine were merely reflex, nothing but tics: Nice one, Mr Scully; Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Barber; Is that really necessary, Mr Wolfe? With the exception of Mary, who could never reign herself in, we girls began talking together in asides, too - our girlish exuberance dampened down. Within a week, we’d become watchers, turning self-conscious, guarded, judgemental. What had happened to the ready smile that my mother had insisted was so important? What had happened to Be respectful?

And still none of the adults seemed to notice; on the contrary, they regarded Katherine as the very model of diligence. Something to do with how high she held her head, perhaps; her meeting of their eyes with her own, and the confident half-smile. She hoodwinked everyone. See that it’s done, please, Katherine: they were addressing everything to her, as if she were in charge of us. And thus she became so. Certainly my friends seemed to concur: there was a seriousness to their gathering around her, a respect in it - even from Mary, sometimes, in the early days - as if something important were to be gleaned from her very presence.

One morning, heading along the gallery towards the household office with a letter to my mother, I glanced down through a linen-screened window to see my friends following Katherine across the courtyard. Not that she was actually leading them, nor even walking in front of them: her pace was too stately for that, her swaying hips partnered by her swirling of a lavender head by its long stem. She was in the middle of them and it was Alice who was ahead, although turned around and pacing backwards. Still, I knew that whatever they were doing had been Katherine’s idea - perhaps a casually thrown Let’s go to the gardens - and even from a distance, and through that thick cloth, my friends’ readiness was palpable. To my mind, everyone was being taken in, as I might so easily have been when I’d first set eyes on her. What pained me particularly was that Dottie was falling for those superior-sounding asides. I could understand it of Maggie, because she was young and thereby could be said to be impressionable, although actually she wasn’t; and Alice because, as far as I could tell, despite her seriousness she was - frankly - empty-headed; and, well, anything could be expected of Mary. But Dottie: I was angry at Katherine for taking advantage of Dottie’s readiness, and disappointed with Dottie for being naïve. For no reason that I could fathom, I’d expected more of Dottie. I, alone, was standing my ground. My mother was wrong again, and this time spectacularly so: Be the girl who warms hearts. Well, despite her cold eyes and cutting comments, it was Katherine whom everyone wanted.

My mother had claimed that character was what distinguished a girl: she’d said not to pay attention to mere appearances. Yet Katherine did and everyone was in thrall to it. Each day, there was something different in how she dressed, so minor as to escape notice and censor by busy adults but for that reason looming large in our little world. A plaited ribbon slung around her wrist. Her sleeves rolled back as if she’d just finished doing something, which she hadn’t. Her hood worn further and further back, and a loose knot in its veil which could’ve been there by mistake except that she didn’t make mistakes. For me, it rankled: she’d given thought to how she dressed, as if it mattered, when - I knew, I just knew - that it didn’t. Because how could it? Clothes were just cloth. Yet we looked for them, found ourselves looking for them, these additions and adaptations: I saw my friends sneaking looks, even as I did. Her own studied lack of regard, by contrast, implied they were nothing much, a momentary diversion: it was we who were in thrall to them, said her indifference, not she. Even noticing them - let alone commenting on them — should be beneath us, said that indifference of hers. So, we were reduced to a surreptitious keeping track of them, which was how they established their hold.

One morning, Dottie fixed a band of red cloth across her forehead, under the front of her hood, covering the parted hair that would usually be visible. She looked lovely - but, then, she always did; she didn’t need a piece of cloth to make her so. Presumably she’d taken it from the basket of scraps. It was what Katherine had done earlier in the week - hers had been black satin - but Dottie wasn’t wearing hers with Katherine’s insouciance. Instead, adjusting her hood, she shone with shy pride. Seeing this, my heart sank in anticipation of her exposure, and sure enough: ‘What’s that?’ asked Katherine, as we left for the duchess’s closet. Caught off-guard, Dottie stammered, ‘A piece of chamlet.’ Reduced to being spelt out as such, that little red sash lost any magic that it might possibly have possessed. A scrap of chamlet: why wear it? Katherine appraised it with those almost-smiling eyes of hers, before pronouncing, unconvincingly and damningly, ‘It’s nice.’ By dinner-time, it was gone and Dottie never again attempted anything similar.

My instinct, from the very first day, had been to resist Katherine, coupled in time by a stinging realisation that I’d be going it alone. She must’ve sensed my truculence, but never during that difficult first year when we lived alongside each other did she try to win me over. Nor, though, did she make any move to exclude me. It simply became accepted that I’d go for my walk in the gardens before supper while she and Dottie gossiped in our room, and that I’d loll on my mattress while, last thing, in their nightshirts, she, Dottie and Maggie practised their dance steps. I sensed that Katherine was keeping her distance from me: glittering back at me over the space that had opened up between us. But I didn’t feel any freer. In fact, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I remained my own person only because she was allowing it.

Mary was faring less well. Katherine took everything in her stately stride with the exception of Mary. Mary was her stumbling block. I’d seen it on her very first evening and it had only worsened. I’d once overheard Skid sighing to her husband that Mary would try the patience of a saint but, before Katherine’s arrival, our own tolerance of Mary had been less to do with saintliness than with being at an utter loss. Whenever she’d blundered in on us, bursting with greetings and expecting fulsome reciprocation, forgetting an appalling scene that she’d created a mere hour before, we’d find ourselves offering the required response just because she was impossible to ignore. Not for Katherine, though, and she showed us how easy it was. She simply didn’t look at her. She’d continue doing whatever she was doing, or talking or listening to whomever had been talking to her, fixing her companion with a stare so that there was a clear obligation to continue. Pausing and turning to Mary would have been to drop Katherine: a choice between Mary and Katherine, which, for anyone, even me, was no choice at all because Mary would give you no thanks and would be likely to give you grief. So, Mary had to weather her rejection and sit disgruntled, fuming, learning her place.

One evening at supper, that first spring of ours at the duchess’s, Katherine dipped a fingertip into the residue of sauce on her plate and began a sinuous sliding, rarely broken and then only with precision. She was writing. When finished, she looked momentarily pleased with it - head cocked, appreciative - before paying it no further mind. Quite a display in itself, her abandonment of it, as if this - writing in her sauce - was something she did all the time. And so there it was, the word, the name, staring up at us, staring us down: OTIS, and, framing it, the twin lobes of a heart.

Otis: charcoal-burner and - taking advantage of being out there in the woods - beekeeper. Long eyelashes and cowslick hair, and missing his two front teeth, which - happily - didn’t make him any less ready to smile. Otis was nice enough. But too old - perhaps as old as twenty - and anyway he was a charcoal-burner. Charcoal-burning was a skilled job, and there was the added attraction of his honey, but he’d never have been parcelled out, previously, in our negotiations because he was a labourer, which was a step too far.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.