No Will But His

by Hoyt, Sarah A.

  At night, she sometimes played for him before they went to bed. And the bed itself, though it would never be the same as the passion she’d at first experienced with Dereham, was pleasant enough. She didn’t, at least, suffer from the fear of being caught that she’d lived through with Manox.

  It was at Ampthill that Kathryn noticed that Margaret Douglas was acting very oddly. She blushed and smiled and seemed at once ten years older and far sillier than she’d ever been.

  To her amazement, by dint of much observation, at banquets and dances—where the king danced but little, yet enjoyed watching his wife amuse herself—she realized that Margaret Douglas’ eyes, and often her whole attention, fell upon Kathryn’s own brother Charles.

  Charles and Tom—Henry had, after all, died—as well as Mary had come to join Kathryn’s household as soon as it was formed. She liked them well enough but had found them so different from the brothers and sister she remembered as a girl that she could not fully give up on her mourning for the siblings she had known nor rejoice, like Joseph in Egypt, at the recovery of her errant family. Instead, she’d arranged for them to have places at court—as she should have, since they were her own blood—as she had for some of her Leigh brothers and sisters and left them to their own devices otherwise.

  But though Charles had grown tall and strong, a black-browed man who was quick with his words and quicker at the dance, she was still used to thinking of him as that over-stretched, russet-haired young man to whom she’d bid good-bye when she’d been the one chosen to live with the duchess at Horsham. Or at least, she saw nothing attractive about him.

  If she had been looking before, she realized, she’d have been aware that many of the ladies in court were making plays for Charles and that he, either out of genuine love or calculation, was playing for the highest born of them all, the king’s niece herself.

  Kathryn remembered how the lady’s last marriage had happened, and she trembled for her brother. But Lady Margaret Douglas seemed so happy and her brother seemed to be treating her so kindly that she dared not say anything.

  Month long, she watched the lovers. She was aware—how could she not be—when Lady Margaret Douglas was late to attend her and suspected sometimes from Lady Margaret’s panting and disheveled state that she came from Charles’s bed. And she feared for Charles’ life and his position, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to blight their love. Well she remembered being caught at her own loves, and the shock and horror of it, even when she hadn’t been in love with Manox.

  She watched in a growing sense of fear, and then woke one morning to a voice like thunder outside the curtains in her room. It was screaming so loudly that she could not make out what it said. After putting on her chemise, she wrapped a blanket about her shoulders and opened the curtains.

  Her heart was racing madly, and her head was spinning in all directions at once. Had the king found out about Manox and Dereham? Perhaps Joan Bulmer, whom she still took care to see as little as possible, had told. Or perhaps it had been that luckless creature Dereham himself.

  But instead, when she opened the curtains, she found the king screaming at a man and a woman who were surrounded by the king’s gentlemen.

  “Impudent, disobedient wretch,” he said to the woman in whose disheveled, crying-marred countenance, Kathryn could only with great difficulty recognize the features of the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas. “Twice you seek to play this trick on me.” He glared at Charles, who was being held by two men, next to his lover. “As for you, sir, I should send you to the Tower and let you rot there, as another Howard has before you!”

  He wheeled around, as though sensing that Kathryn had opened the curtains. He could not have heard her, he was shouting so loudly. As he turned to her, Kathryn almost didn’t recognize him. He was red faced and seemed to have swollen, causing his eyes to become tiny, hard pits on his face. He looked more like a devil of the pantomime than like her bridegroom. “Do not interfere, madam,” he said. “For I will not be moved in this.”

  Kathryn looked at her brother’s desperate expression, his eyes fixed upon her face in a mute appeal for her intercession. But what did he think she could do, except perhaps end up arrested beside him? Did he not know the king and the king’s wrath, which could be death?

  She looked at her husband and at her brother, and the king thundered, “They were caught, if you please, in the wretch’s chamber in full and complete intercourse, as though they were married.”

  Kathryn didn’t even know which of the wretch’s chambers the king meant nor, she realized, did it matter. Instead, she inclined her head to his wrath. “Then Your Majesty should deal with them as your heart commands,” she said, even as she felt a stab of fear that this would end with Charles dead in the Tower. They’d been children together. True, since she’d been left at Horsham, he’d not written her, but he’d never been one to write much to anyone. But he was her brother, and they’d loved each other when they were little, in their innocence—even living out of boarding houses and in utter penury. But what could she do for him? Her pleading was more likely to hurt him more and destroy her. “For you are the king,” she said, submissively, “and you know better than anyone how to govern your kingdom. I am only a small, weak woman, and though he be my brother, he is first your subject.”

  The effect of her words surprised her. They caused the king’s face to calm down on the instant, as it was said that the waters of the Sea of Galilee had calmed at the voice of the Christ. Like that, the red blotches were smoothed, and his face resumed its normal appearance, though it still looked stern.

  He said, “You are, as always, the most excellent of women,” then turned to his niece. “As for you, madam, you are to be taken to the old Abbey at Syon and there be kept, in seclusion, while you meditate upon your sins. You are to consider whether your continuous rebellion is what is due of my majesty and the excessive kindness with which I have treated you.” Then he turned to Charles, and it seemed to Kathryn that she saw fear clench tight at the bottom of Charles’s eyes, making his pupils into tight, dark pinpoints. “You will not contact my niece in any way. Not through letter and not through messenger, and never go yourself and speak to her. She is to be for you, from this day forward, as one dead. For now, in love of my dear wife, your sister, I am holding myself in forbearance and not sending you to the Tower or to that well-deserved traitor’s death that comes to those who court my near relatives without my consent. But my hand will not be stayed again should you sin once more. Is that clear?”

  Charles, clearly still unquiet in his mind, had given his babbling assent that he indeed would never see Margaret again, and he thanked the king’s majesty more than he could express and marked well the goodness of His Majesty toward the wretch that he was.

  It seemed to Kathryn that, as he spoke, she saw a look of disdain on Margaret’s face. It was sure that her feelings had been true and that she felt betrayed by the lover who so quickly disavowed them. But she didn’t know yet how authentic her brother’s feelings had been, and she didn’t have a chance to talk to him for some weeks.

  The chance came when both of them stepped out of a crowded room during a dance, and found themselves alone in a little place in the garden, between two statues. Kathryn had smiled and he had nodded, and she didn’t know from where her question came. “Do you miss her terribly, Charles?” she asked.

  He had looked at her in full surprise, then had spoken very softly, “Margaret, you mean?”

  She’d nodded. “Margaret Douglas.”

  “I only miss her as I’d miss my own heart had it been torn from my chest,” he said. The way he said it, each word carefully enunciated, made Kathryn realize that his seeming lack of feeling wasn’t, in fact, because he’d not cared about his paramour but that he cared so much that he dared not say anything, for fear that once it flowed out he’d not be able to stop.

  He was tightly controlling a roiling pit of emotion trying to burst out, but she had to ask him, “Wha
t made you do it, then? I know she would be a great catch, but sure you know the king would never let you have her! Surely you know it would be death to attempt her. You’re lucky to have escaped with your life.”

  His answer had been a laugh, short and hollow, like the tolling of a bell telling of death. “Lucky, little Kathryn? Lucky? Know you not that being dead is much easier than living with a broken heart.”

  “Charles!”

  He shook his head and looked ahead of him at the darkness of the trees in the garden. A little wind had started up, stirring dust from the long-dry ground and hitting upon Kathryn’s exposed face and hands like tiny stinging slaps.

  “I would do it again, you know,” Charles said. “Tomorrow if opportunity presented.”

  “But why, if you knew you could never marry her?”

  “Ah, for the time with her, that’s why. Even if it had been no more than a few hours …” He shook his head and looked at her. “You’ve never loved, have you, Kathryn? Not loved like that, not loved madly. If you had, you would understand. When two souls knit together at first sight, any risk is worth it for one minute, one hour with the one you love. Even if you know that you must die for it.”

  Chapter Forty

  In October they came to London, and Kathryn glided into town at night on a very grand barge surrounded by her own people. At a banquet, afterward, all the worthy of London paid their respects to her.

  In the morning, the king asked her if she felt equal to receiving Anne of Cleves. “For I promised her,” he said, “that she’d come to court whenever she so wished, and if I keep her at bay, people will invent some infamy or other and her party will go. It must be seen, my lady, that you two are friends and like sisters.” He looked at Kathryn with a worried expression. “But I know you have so open and frank a nature and are so shy of dissimulation that I am afraid of asking you to undertake this and in public yet.”

  Kathryn was forced to smile. She could not imagine why the king thought she needed dissimulation, except that during these months she’d come to know him somewhat. He joined to his fear that people would find him, himself, not the king—Harry without the crown, as he called his natural self—repulsive, a strange and great illusion that every woman on whom he deigned to rest his favor came to love him madly. She thought that was what he thought—that she must be jealous of Anne of Cleves because Anne of Cleves had spent all those nights by his side and, therefore—even if she’d left him as good a maiden as she’d arrived—Kathryn might resent her.

  She forced her smile and bowed her head and tried to reassure him without lying too openly and without offending him. “It is true,” she said, “that I find it very hard to pretend that which I do not feel, but Your Majesty knows my sole care is for your happiness and to make you rejoice that you chose me as your wife. If Your Majesty needs me to be kind and gracious and to behave to my Lady of Cleves as though we were close friends, then we shall do so.” Latching onto a memory of the past and knowing that the two of them had most often talked during walks in the garden or while petting the royal court’s excessively large number of pet cats and dogs, she added, “Only perhaps, if it were possible to procure two young spaniels of the kind the ladies at the court favor, for my Lady of Cleves loved them exceedingly and I do not think that she took any of them with her. A good breeding pair, perhaps, so she can treasure them and enjoy the company of their offspring.”

  The king had smiled. “You are graciousness itself, Kathryn. I shall arrange for my gentlemen to seek those dogs out. Also, if you will permit me, my sweetheart, I will arrange for two gentlemen to attend you and her, should you wish to dance or in otherwise to do as will amuse you with music or dainties or whatever you ladies do in private. If I spend overmuch time with her, people will say that I am contemplating bringing her back into my bed. It is best you two be seen to be as close as sisters.”

  And so it was that Anne of Cleves came to court. While Kathryn felt no trepidation at all over the reception of the queen she had displaced, yet the situation must be awkward. She did not know how Anne of Cleves felt. She remembered the former queen’s innocent joy in her position, her certainty that the king loved her, though he never made love to her, and she wondered if perhaps the older woman resented her.

  On the appointed day Kathryn waited in her chamber, seated upon a chair that wasn’t a throne and yet gave the impression of one, and surrounded by her closest maids when the door opened and Anne of Cleve’s was announced.

  Kathryn didn’t know what she expected, but she did not expect for the other woman to fall upon her knees and, on her knees, approach the throne.

  It was partly because she wanted to obey the king and be seen to love this woman as her sister, but partly because she felt a horrified sense that this was wrong, that Kathryn jumped up and met Anne of Cleves halfway up the chamber, taking her by the hands, kissing her on each cheek—which with the taller woman on her knees was at a very convenient height indeed. “Rise, Lady of Cleves, rise, for you embarrass me. You must not be so humble before me. What am I, but the most humble of your maids? And you the daughter of a prince and the adopted sister of my lord. Rise, please, rise.”

  Hesitantly, as though shocked at such emotion from her hostess, Anne of Cleves rose slowly and spoke in English that was no longer halting, even if it was marred still by a strong German accent. “Your Majesty,” she said, “must understand that I was very afraid of offending you.”

  “Offending me, you? You, who had ten times the reason to be angry at me?”

  “But why would I be angry at you?” Anne of Cleves asked, confused. “For well I know that you did nothing to replace me. It was only that the king preferred you to me, and we all know what men are.” She smiled a little at that, as Katherine led her back to the chair that had now been set beside the one Kathryn had occupied. “You can no more control them than I could. I am glad the king, who was a gracious and kind lord to me in all but that he could not love me, has found a lady so suited to his temper, and I vow I hope for the longest and happiest life for both of you, and many children to gladden the kingdom.”

  After that, Kathryn had dismissed her maids, and she had sat with Anne of Cleves and talked. It should have been awkward, and they should have found their conversation halting and slow. But instead, Kathryn found that she was speaking to the one woman in the world who knew exactly the life she was living, and who understood her frustrations and distress at being always on display.

  Before they fully realized it, they were discussing the embarrassment of everyone prostrating themselves at their approach and the natural shame of having such things as their monthly cycles known to all.

  There was only one moment of sadness when the former queen asked Kathryn if she was quite sure that the king behaved to her as he should to a wife. Kathryn understood this to mean that Anne of Cleves was asking her if she was quite sure that she was no longer a maiden. Kathryn assured her of this and a fleeting shadow crossed Anne of Cleves’s face. Then she smiled and said, “I find it unlikely that I will ever marry, but I have asked the king if I can have the Lady Elizabeth with me at Richmond, for I feel like she’s as a daughter to me, and I’ve seen her there often.”

  From that they’d talked about the king’s children—that goodly babe, Edward, fussed over by an army of nurses and maids; Elizabeth, precocious, inquisitive and already showing signs of what the dowager duchess would doubtless call the Howard charm;, Mary, proud and reserved. “I do not think,” Kathryn said, “she gives me the deference due her mother.”

  At this Anne of Cleves had laughed. “But how can she, Your Majesty, when she is older than you?” And Kathryn’s humor, catching on that, made her laugh at her own pretensions. “I owe I’d not thought of it that way.”

  “She’s well enough, is Mary,” Anne of Cleves said. “We correspond and meet sometimes. She likes to speak of books and theology, and the theology she learned is so different from the one I learned that we find we have everything to talk abo
ut.”

  At that moment the two puppies were brought in, and Kathryn presented them to Anne of Cleves. They were full young, just removed from their mothers and very beautiful, with large, liquid eyes. Anne’s reaction was all Kathryn had hoped and for a while they played with and petted the puppies.

  “I think I’ll call this one William,” Anne said, at last, seizing hold of the little male. “Wilhelm. See how his mouth is set in such a scowl? He looks exactly like my brother when I displeased him, which I’m afraid happened very often. Though the puppy,” she continued as the little animal licked her, “seems by far the more affectionate.”

  They were both laughing over this when the king came in. Kathryn quickly asked a servant to take the puppies away for now, until my Lady of Cleves required them, then rose to greet the sovereign. He embraced her and kissed her, then embraced and kissed Anne of Cleves with perhaps more warmth than Kathryn had ever seen him show that lady.

  The three of them sat together at supper, and a right merry supper it was. Now that Anne knew enough English to make jokes, she proved a very suitable conversationalist. And now that the king was no longer forced to be married to her and thus kept from his heart’s desire, he seemed to genuinely enjoy her company.

  But after dinner he left them, saying he was too old to dance—an amusement both girls had expressed an interest in—and that he would send in two of his gentlemen to partner them. He ignored Kathryn’s protests that “Fie, my lord is not too old,” kissed them and embraced them, then left them.

  Musicians came in and set up their instruments.

  And then two gentlemen came in and bowed to them. One of them was Charles Howard, Kathryn’s brother. The other one …

  Momentarily, Kathryn couldn’t breathe. He was a tall man, with hair as red as the king’s own hair must have been in his spring. His features were perfectly regular and pleasant. His eyes oval, well cut, and expressive beneath his arched eyebrows. And his lips were sensuous and seemed to come to a resting position in a little smile. He was shapely of body, too, with muscular legs and a well-built chest that could not be hidden even by the richly broidered and ornamented doublet he wore.