Six of One

by Joann Spears

  “Once, Tom and I stole away to do it in the privacy of the stables. I think that was the time that did it.”

  “There’s nothing like a nice, healthy roll in the hay,” I agreed.

  Anne of Cleves just kept on knocking at the bedpost while Jane continued her tale.

  “Exactly nine months later, I delivered my son, the future King Edward VI. Tom was quite chuffed by the fact that a son of his would be king of England, even if no one else realized it; I was overjoyed to have ensured my life. Then the childbed fever set in and snuffed out my own candle in a matter of days. You will have the good taste, Dolly, not to inquire if there was a pun intended.”

  “I will mind my own beeswax.”

  “And I will get to the nub of my discourse.”

  This time, I wasn’t even going to ask.

  “Dolly, you said earlier that no one had ever called you acute; but, clearly, you are a clever girl.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “You pride yourself on that cleverness.”

  “I must confess that I do.”

  “Has your cleverness served you well, Dolly?”

  “My cleverness got me a grand slam: fulfilling career, wealthy husband, dream life in England. It will get me there when I get away from here, anyway.”

  “I did not ask you about where your cleverness might take you in the future. I simply asked how it had served you already.”

  I had no immediate answer to that question.

  “Dolly, for all your cleverness, you can be quite the fool sometimes,” chided Jane.

  “I could say, Jane, that for all your foolishness, you are sometimes quite clever.”

  Jane was pleased with that. “Touché! Let’s leave off with those respective thoughts for each of us to ponder—and with a kiss on the cheek.”

  Jane’s kiss was the first I had received that night, and I thanked her for it heartily. “‘How far that little candle throws its beams! So’—as the Bard said—‘shines a good deed in a naughty world.’”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Catherine Howard’s Tale of How Snow White

  Drifted and What She Set Adrift

  Jane Seymour had made me realize that I was not as clever as I thought I was. If I were, I would have stopped wondering, long ago, where Harry’s boy Neddie got his black hair and bronze complexion. The latter-day Jane’s story that her great-great-grandmother was part Cherokee had always seemed a bit suspect to me. Had I been as clever as I thought, though, I would have seen what was now obvious; that they came from Korumilli, Harry’s very talented former business partner. Harry always said that Korumilli was the original Renaissance man, up to any and every job—which just goes to show that there is many a truth told in jest. There’s likewise many a truth couched in crib notes; everything I know about that, I learned from Henry VIII’s fifth wife.

  Catherine Howard, having tasked herself to preparation way back at the beginning of the interviewing, now stepped up to the proverbial mic with notes in hand and head held high. For all the world, she looked ready to go out a youngster but come back a star—which is exactly what her politically powerful uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had had in mind when he’d thrown his juicy, young niece headlong at Henry VIII.

  How wrong he had been, though, how very sadly wrong, about the girl’s preparedness. As for her sexiness, however, he was bang on. In terms of “classic” beauty, she really would not have held a candle to the other wives in their primes, but her uncle intuited correctly that her combination of overbite, boobs, and artlessness would be just the ticket for Henry VIII—and for lots of other guys as well, judging by the sheer volume of her crib notes. Ann Boleyn, for one, had a problem with the potential prolixity.

  “Katharine of Aragon, I must complain! Catherine Howard has a lot of material there. I do not see how she can cover that much ground in time for me to have enough time for my say. You are in charge tonight. It is up to you to see to it that we keep on schedule. Dolly agrees with me, I can tell.”

  Ann was right; I did agree with her and said so.

  “Back in my world, there is a white bridal carpet that will be strewn with rose petals and awaiting my dainty tread first thing tomorrow morning. I can’t be dillydallying. We have got to move this thing along, you know—chop-chop!”

  It took a few minutes for the din from the knocking on wood to subside. Then Catherine Howard, confidently nodding reassurance to Ann Boleyn, ran her eye over page one and took charge.

  “Not to worry, ladies! I know what I want to say and am quite prepared to say it in the time allotted to me. I have made extensive notes for reference, but I won’t need to read them verbatim.”

  Catherine Howard seemed a completely different girl from the one who had had to steal away and rehearse her lines just a little while ago. I complimented her on being able to muster for a filibuster so handily. Katharine of Aragon just clucked like a mother hen and crowed with pride, if it is possible to do both at the same time, “The time young Catherine spent with me in purgatory wasn’t entirely wasted! She may still be a tearaway, but when she puts her mind to a task, she’s got a good head on her shoulders.”

  About time I get to knock on wood, I thought.

  “Get out of my way, ladies! This time, I’m the one headed for the bedpost!”

  “Really; silly Dolly!” Katherine Parr muttered condescendingly. “She did say on her shoulders, you know.”

  Catherine Howard very kindly came to my defense.

  “I do not think you silly, Dolly; I think you are very clever—prescient, in fact.”

  “Now, really! Acute and prescient in the same night? You’re embarrassing me!”

  Catherine Howard could be quite the flattering minx; I was beginning to see why Norfolk had trotted her out for Henry VIII.

  “Dolly,” young Catherine continued, “you are a scholar who has made our history her life’s work. You said so yourself.”

  “Guilty as charged on the scholarship part. As for ‘prescient,’ I’m not so sure.”

  “You know how history has judged me, Dolly: unchaste, foolish, and of easy virtue,” said Catherine.

  “I believe it was Sir William Paget who said that you had done ‘wondrous naughty’; I think that about summed it up.”

  “There is more to me than that, Dolly. History knows nothing of the most important thing about me.”

  “Something to do with one of your lovers, I presume?”

  “Not ‘one of my lovers,’ Dolly. The one love of my life.”

  I voiced my educated guess that the love of her life had been her music instructor, Henry Manox.

  “I know how things like that can happen; I saw Dirty Dancing,” I quipped. “Youth, music, rhythm, hormones—and suddenly, it’s all happening.”

  “Wrong, Dolly,” replied Catherine calmly. “Manox was my lover but not the love of my life.”

  “Then perhaps the love of your life was Thomas Culpepper. The attractions of a simpatico young man when your husband is old enough to be your grandpa would be considerable. It would be just like The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

  Catherine informed me that my second guess was also in error. “Wrong on Culpepper being the love of my life, Dolly, but spot on about his ‘postman’—to use your word for it—always ringing twice. In fact, three or four times was not unusual.”

  I was starting to run out of material but still had one guess left.

  “Perhaps it was Francis Dereham, then? He was the boy fiancé you jilted when marriage to Henry loomed large. It would have been just like ‘Lyin’ Eyes.’ The rich, old man, the fiery boy, the falling together…”

  “I had several grass-stained bumrolls to show for the times Dereham and I fell together—and one other thing, as well.”

  “And that would be?”

  “That would be a child. A son. He was named Francis, after his father.”

  With so many bad guesses behind me, I knew I would be taking my chances conjecturing on baby Francis. In th
e end, I decided it would be best to speak up and be perfectly frank.

  “Baby Francis had to have been born when you were single and living in the country with your step-grandmother. If he had arrived after you were married, you could have passed him off as Henry’s.”

  “You’ve got it right this time, Dolly. I gave birth in 1540 at Lambeth, where I was living in the household of my step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.”

  “The Dowager Duchess’s establishment was supposed to have been just like Animal House.”

  Catherine smiled. “There was no shortage of bucks and stallions, that’s for sure! The Dowager Duchess ran a lax-enough establishment for me to have lovers in, and what I did in that line mattered little to me, or to her, until my uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, started scheming to make me queen. Then, all laxity ceased, but it was too late: I was already pregnant by Francis Dereham.”

  “It must have been difficult for you; who did you turn to?” I asked.

  “When I could no longer conceal my condition, I confided in my step-grandmother, and she consulted my uncle the duke. They did all that was necessary to keep the pregnancy secret. When it came time for my confinement, after the Christmas revels of 1539, they moved me to a remote part of the castle, and there I gave birth to my boy, Francis, in January of 1540. I had a few precious days with the child, and then my uncle the duke took him to be spirited away to safety and obscurity in the country. I was distraught, but my uncle and step-grandmother pointed out to me that there was every reason to hope that I could reclaim the child in the future.”

  “But Catherine, ‘future’ was something fate did not give you a lot of, unfortunately.”

  “You’re right, Dolly, but no one could have known that before my marriage. My uncle and step-grandmother pointed out to me that if I did marry gouty old Henry VIII, it was much more likely than not that I would outlive him. As dowager queen, I would have the resources and the freedom to adopt a child—my child—into my household and raise him as my own if I cared to. I could shower him with every advantage. Once Henry was dead, it would not matter whether such an adoption raised eyebrows or not. It seemed like a sound plan to me, so I let my baby go. None of us expected me to be facing the executioner when the child had barely turned two.”

  “So you never saw your son after those first few days? Do you even know if he survived babyhood?” I asked. “Tudor times were so treacherous for the little ones.”

  “My son Francis did survive. And he knew whose child he was.”

  “Since there are only ladies here, he could not have told you so himself. How do you know?”

  “I pieced the story together over the years, starting with what little I knew and adding to my hoard of knowledge as the ladies of my stepdaughters’ generation eventually found their ways here to join us. With your knowledge of our lives and our times, it will all seem obvious to you once you have heard the whole story. But I will try to be as succinct as possible, for Ann Boleyn’s sake.”

  The way she was shuffling that sheaf of papers, I couldn’t imagine know how she was going to manage the ‘succinct’ part. My hope of a ‘long story short’ was fading fast.

  “My uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, took charge of my baby boy initially,” Catherine said. “But he was much too busy as Lord High Treasurer to see personally to the details of placing the baby. He handed baby Francis off to his son, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey.”

  Surrey, I thought, one of England’s great poets, left holding the baby for the likes of Catherine Howard.

  “What did Surrey do with the baby?” I asked.

  “He said he knew just the man who would be motivated to keep my baby safe: his great friend, the poet Wyatt the Elder. He was the same Wyatt who had been so in love with Ann Boleyn and wrote her all that poetry. The manner of Ann’s death absolutely haunted the man; when it was explained to Wyatt that I might suffer the same fate as Ann if my secret got out, he was very sympathetic and willing to help. He said he would do anything in his power to prevent a thing like Ann’s death from happening a second time.”

  “That may have been alright for awhile, but by 1540, Wyatt the Elder himself was up on treason charges,” I said.

  “Yes, but fortunately, I was able to talk Henry into showing mercy and sparing Wyatt’s life. Of course, we had to move the baby after all that again anyway, just for safety’s sake. And the perfect situation presented itself almost immediately.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

  “It’s funny you should say that, Dolly, because we threw the baby to someone who was actually in hot water: Wyatt the Younger.”

  “He was quite a wild one, as I recall. What was he in hot water for at that particular time?”

  “He was in hot water for abandoning his wife and taking a mistress named Elizabeth Darrell. After awhile, there was a son in their ménage, also named Francis.”

  “So, Wyatt’s illegitimate son Francis never really existed!” I exclaimed. “It was really your son Francis that appeared in the extramarital Wyatt household.”

  “Correct,” said Catherine.

  “I can see why you need notes to keep track of all this. What happened next with Wyatt the Younger?”

  “It wasn’t long before he was designated to go to Spain on a diplomatic mission. He passed the baby to his young friend Francis Russell, the son of my Uncle Norfolk’s friend the Earl of Bedford. Young Russell had the child christened and stood as his godfather. He also found him an adoptive home with a nautical family in Devon—the Edmund Drakes.”

  “Wait just one stinkin’ minute!” I said. “Drake! 1540! Francis! You’re telling me that your son was the Sir Francis Drake! The man who defeated the invincible Spanish armada, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, was your son! I don’t believe it; it has to be impossible to verify. You simply cannot be certain that it’s true.”

  “Oh, but it is true!” interjected Ann Boleyn, drawing herself up to full height and holding her head high. “My daughter Elizabeth was able to furnish the confirming details. She’s such an intuitive girl!”

  Catherine Howard explained.

  “Elizabeth said that she knew Francis was my son as soon as she clapped eyes on him for the first time. It was upon the occasion that she had him knighted aboard his ship in 1581. She said that there was no mistaking it: he had my eyes, my cheekbones, my smile, and my coloring. The resemblance, taking her by surprise as it did, disturbed her for a moment. You may recall from your studies, Dolly, that on that occasion, Elizabeth allowed the French ambassador to perform the actual knighting and dub Francis with the ceremonial sword. Elizabeth was so shaken for a moment that she feared hurting Francis if she dubbed him herself.”

  “I have read about that!” I said. “Elizabeth has been widely credited with conceiving that bit of ceremonial business as a political ploy in order to cement relations with the French.”

  Ann Boleyn was not having any of that.

  “Balderdash! It was not like that at all! My daughter told me so! She conceived that bit of business with the French ambassador on the spot as an opportunity to collect her wits!”

  “I can see why she would have needed to play for time,” I commented. “It must have been quite a shock to her, discovering she had a semi-stepbrother that way.”

  “My daughter discovered more than a stepbrother that day; she discovered a twin spirit,” said Ann Boleyn. “Elizabeth told me she was ‘knocked for six,’ confronted, without warning, by another person who shared the destiny she thought was hers alone, another child of a wife executed by Henry VIII. You can imagine how overcome with emotion Elizabeth was. It took her breath away, but she recovered in short order while the Frenchman did the dubbing. My daughter showed such equipoise!”

  I agreed that there is nothing handier than a little equipoise when you find yourself on a rolling wooden ship, face-to-face with your soul brother. From there, Catherine Howard picked up the threads
of the tale.

  “Elizabeth told me that after the knighting ceremony was over, she spoke with my son Francis for some time aboard his ship,” said Catherine. “Francis told her that he had learned seamanship from his father, but that he got his wayward, wandering streak from his mother. Then he winked at her meaningfully. She said it was the most meaningful wink she had ever seen.”

  I was still not entirely convinced. I pointed out that a passing resemblance and a sailor winking at a good-looking woman was hardly conclusive evidence.

  “There’s more, Dolly. After that wink, Francis spoke pointedly to Elizabeth of his first ship. He told her how that ship had been his first and dearest love, and that by sailing to glory in her, he had redressed long-forgotten wrongs. Then he winked at her again—even more meaningfully than the first time.”

  I recalled that the name of Drake’s first ship was the Judith.

  “Yes, Dolly, it was—after the biblical Judith of Bethulia,” Catherine reminded me.

  My Bible history was rusty compared to my Tudor history, but I did know that the story of the Jewish heroine Judith was the focus of more than one Renaissance work of art.

  Holophernes had been a general of the Assyrians, who were the enemy of Judith’s people. The lovely Judith insinuated her way into Holophernes’s good graces and his tent. Using her considerable feminine wiles, she got him passed-out drunk and decapitated him with his own sword; then she stuffed his head into her handbag and walked with it past his own guards and back over to the Jewish-army camp. Judith’s valor and the head of the enemy in the bag galvanized the home troops. It just goes to show that the importance of having the right handbag for the occasion goes back a long way.

  “So, there they were,” said Catherine with her eyes closed, looking as if she enjoyed the mental picture she had conjured up. I told her that I could see why the image of Judith and Holophernes appealed to her.

  “Talk about poetic justice!” I said.

  “It wasn’t Judith and Holophernes I was thinking of, Dolly; it was my son, Sir Francis Drake, and my stepdaughter Elizabeth—the children of the wives Henry VIII had decapitated, sharing a moment of glory together, both knowing they had redressed wrongs that had been forgotten by everyone except themselves.”