Catherine thought better of saying that Thomas appeared as healthy and magnificent as ever. She knew there was something more behind his words. Henry had been more explosive than normal these past two days, and she tried to tread softly in all things. Before their honeymoon was even over, he had been forced to consult with his privy counsel on complex matters of state. France was pushing its borders into English territory. A more direct act of aggression could not be far off.
It was not difficult for Catherine to see how swiftly and randomly those around Henry paid the price when he was under pressure. She squeezed his hand tightly and leaned nearer until she felt the tension in his body begin slowly once again to fade.
Later that evening, Henry’s entourage met again in his former privy counsel rooms, decorated now with the banner of Cleves. Norfolk, his son Surrey, Seymour, the new member Cranmer, Southampton, Brandon and Wriothesley sat at the long, polished oak table with the king at its head. Catherine sat beside Henry, though it was the sort of meeting that was never attended by the queen. But Catherine was different. Everyone could see that Henry meant to make her a different sort of partner.
“We have no choice but to act against such a blatant act of hostility,” Norfolk calmly advised him.
“Have we the manpower to quell the French threat?” Henry asked, rubbing his bearded chin with his thumb and forefinger in a contemplative gesture.
“I do not believe it shall come to that,” the younger Howard replied. “Because of Lord Lisle’s weak performance in the region and his consignment to the Tower, I believe they are only pressing to see how far they can get.”
Norfolk turned away as the king began to nuzzle Catherine’s earlobe.
Brandon bit back a groan.
“Considering all that is at stake, I would advise Your Majesty to send a contingent to Calais for a bit of English saber rattling. I believe my lord of Surrey here is more than up to the task,” Norfolk said.
There were only slight grumblings of surprise that Norfolk would propose his own son for the honor. Seymour shot Henry Howard a jealous glare, then looked away.
The king kissed Catherine’s cheek for the dozenth time. “Very well. The lot of you go. Southampton and Surrey, give the French a good scare. I’ve dealt with them before, and they do not frighten me.”
“Indeed you have, sire.” Norfolk nodded just as he caught another angry glare of disapproval, this time from Cranmer, his new rival. Cranmer had been at court for years, but only now, after Cromwell’s demise, had he made himself a much greater force and threat.
“And, Norfolk, when we leave for Greenwich tomorrow morning, see that Master Culpeper is not among us. It seems he might have a touch of the ague. I cannot allow anyone, no matter how fond of them I might be, to inflict that risk upon my court, or my queen.”
Culpeper, Norfolk thought in surprise, rolling the name around in his mind. It was a name he had not contemplated for weeks. There were enough complications ahead without looking backward to the old ones. Catherine is not foolish enough to dally with Culpeper now that she is queen, he thought. She would be risking not only her own life, but the entire Howard family, and Culpeper as well. If only he had a niece with beauty and half a brain. But no one got everything in life. No one, that was, but him.
“I shall see to it myself, Your Majesty,” Norfolk promised without looking at Cranmer or Seymour.
Cromwell was dead, and his minions were no threat to Norfolk now.
Well, well, well. Master Culpeper, is it? So perhaps the great Howard family has an Achilles’ heel after all, Cranmer thought. So taken was he by the revelation that he was the last to leave the counsel table. He steepled his hands and watched as every man stood, acknowledged the king and queen, and backed out of the room. His thin lips were stretched tightly into a sneer as he digested the new information. He saw it as a final message from Cromwell. Or God. Or both. Such must be the glorious perspective from heaven.
The only question was what to do with the gift. Time, he was quite certain, would tell him that. But he would be on the watch, just like all the other Protestants at court, to unseat the little Catholic queen when the time was right. They had all come too far to let the king’s lust, and thus his poor judgment, trump the true path for England.
Thomas Cranmer silently swore that oath to himself.
It was ten days before Catherine dared to write a letter to Thomas, who had been sent to London amid a drought and a plague. She sat alone beneath a trellis heavy with musk roses and honeysuckle vines just beyond the timber-framed tennis courts, reading her words one final time and missing him all the more.
Master Culpeper,
I was told you are sick, which troubles me very much, and will until I hear from you. I pray that you send me word on how you are, for I never longed so much for anything as I do to see you and speak with you, which I trust will happen shortly. The thought comforts me very much, and when I think of you departing from me, it makes my heart die.
I pray that you will come to me through Lady Rochford, for then I shall thank you for that which you have promised me. I take my leave of you now, trusting that I will see you shortly. I would you were with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.
Yours as long as life endures,
Catherine
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Jane asked as she came up and stood before Catherine under the trellis. She had enlisted Jane’s help in securing a messenger who would hold his tongue for the right price. To that end, Catherine held up the necklace that her mother had given her. The small, precious ruby at its center glistened in the soft sunlight.
“No, I am not certain. But there is no other way. I need to know that he is all right. I saw the way Henry looked at him. You did as well. We both know his temper.”
With a heavy, anxious heart, Catherine folded the missive and handed it to Jane, along with the last connection she had to her mother. She was giving away a part of herself to ensure that another part was safe, she told herself.
“You are certain, Jane, that your messenger will wait for Thomas’s reply?”
“He agreed to, yes,” Jane confirmed.
Catherine let out a small sigh. “Then go now, please. I will not be able to breathe until your man returns.”
AUTUMN
The Third Season
“No Other Will But His.”
—MOTTO OF CATHERINE HOWARD
Chapter Seventeen
December 1540
Greenwich Palace, Greenwich
The English victory over the French at Calais was swift and thorough. Indeed, winning had taken no more time than it had for the French to deliver the threat in the first place. The French ambassador, the Duke of Vendôme, gave Henry Francis I’s assurance that no aggression had been intended. Surrey and Southampton returned victoriously to England, just in time for Christmas.
Catherine busied herself with the organization of the Yuletide festivities. Two of the king’s three children, Elizabeth and Edward, as well as the princess of Cleves, had just arrived at Greenwich for the holiday celebrations. Only Mary had declined the queen’s invitation with a polite but cold explanation that her physicians believed it unwise for her to risk travel during the harsh months of winter.
Catherine put a brave face on for her husband’s sake, but bringing everyone together for the new year had been intended as a wedding gift for Henry. Catherine knew how much it would have pleased him.
Mary had known it as well.
At the end of November, Thomas had been admitted back to court, but he and Catherine rarely saw each other and did not interact beyond the occasional polite nod or glance. The king’s arm was always tightly linked with hers as she and Thomas passed in the corridor. She knew Henry was sending a message for the entire world to see—particularly Thomas.
But she was glad he had returned. A painful glimpse of the man she still loved was better than no glimpse at all, she reasoned, trying her best to be happ
y and see the good in life.
She remembered even now how her anxiety about him, during his absence, had tortured her, and it was painful still to recall his response. He had sent an impersonal note assuring her only of his safety. That had been so much worse, she thought, than even a glimpse of him at a distance.
As Christmastide approached, Catherine decided to turn her failure with Henry’s daughter into a victory with another relative.
She could never get over the idea that an old woman like the poor Countess of Salisbury, cold, alone and frightened for her life, had been consigned indefinitely to the Tower. Margaret Pole was Henry’s nearest blood relative and the last of the Plantagenet line. She was a frail woman of sixty-seven and had been in the Tower for nearly two years. Catherine did not understand how a venerable relation and the last tie to his much-adored mother could be treated with such cruelty. Treason was a term that was easily bandied about and used to dispose of anyone objectionable. It was the charge that had brought down Anne Boleyn and Cromwell. Now the same fate loomed for the countess. Catherine shook off a little shiver of fear, seeing a pattern to her husband’s anger.
But perhaps she could change the pattern.
Catherine needed to prove to herself that she could bring out Henry’s gentleness for all the world to see. She wanted to be a positive force in his life and mend his reputation for cruelty. Accomplishing that, she believed, would give her the reason her heart craved to make peace with this marriage.
Those thoughts weighed heavily on her mind and heart, even as she let him chase her naked around their bedchamber early one evening before Christmas. She used a large chair as a barricade between them, her hair long and wild around her shoulders.
“Come on, Hal,” she said, giggling. “Don’t be slow.” They were playing a seductive version of blindman’s buff, and Henry could barely walk straight with the blindfold on.
“If you catch me, I shall give up the notion,” she said, though she was serious at heart. “And if you surrender, then you shall allow me to send a Christmas parcel to the Tower for the countess. Only a few warm clothes for the winter.”
Henry laughed with a great bellow, barely able to catch his breath. His breathing was as heavy as his laughter. “If we are going to play rough, I shall demand a great deal more than your surrender of a notion, my little Cat.”
“It is a deal. I shall surrender anything you like, if there is anything left of me you wish to have.”
“All of you! You are deep in my blood, woman!” he declared, dodging and weaving around the furniture. “I can never get enough!”
She tipped over the chair, and he finally capitulated, sinking down, flushed and out of breath, onto the edge of the great feather bed. As he tore off the blindfold, her smile was open and genuine.
“So, will you allow me to send some things to the countess?”
He slumped, then sighed, his smile fading. “Why must you press me so, Catherine, on things you know nothing about?”
“I know an old woman will be cold this winter, and we have the power to change that.”
“Why do you concern yourself? She is a traitor to England, to me, and thereby a traitor to you.”
“She is your blood relation, Hal. It just seems wrong. The poor woman has been locked up there for two years already.”
For a moment he seemed angry, until he saw the tears in her eyes. They were genuine tears, not just for the prisoner, but for the notion that the gentle man she had come to care for was capable of brutality against his own family. She wanted desperately to prove the world was wrong. Finally, Henry pulled her into his arms and pressed a kiss onto her forehead.
“You have a heart too tender for your own good, dearest one,” he said.
“Oh, I am not finished. I plan to ask you to spare her life as well in a grand show of mercy from a great and beneficent king.”
“Do not press me too far, Catherine. You may not like what you see.” A dark, ominous look passed over his face as he spoke the warning, but in spite of the shiver she felt, Catherine remained composed. Henry had already yielded more than she had expected. And that was when she realized that she really could use her status as queen for more than her family’s advancement.
She tried to understand things from Henry’s point of view. Perhaps murder was like a Pandora’s box: Once one opened it to solve one’s problem, one could not close the lid. But Catherine refused to let Henry succumb to it. She was his wife now, and under her influence those days would be over. She could lead her husband. She could guide him back to what was right and good. She would no longer be a pawn, but a true queen, she told herself. Her newfound ambition gave her a strange sense of peace. This, she believed, was the era of Catherine Howard.
After Christmas Day, Catherine found Francis in her cozy little study one afternoon, sitting, as usual, at her desk. She paused in the doorway, still angry that she had been forced to adopt him as her private secretary. The entitled manner with which he riffled through her private papers did not help.
“What do you think you are doing in my chair?” she asked with a note of irritation.
Francis did not miss a beat. His smile was suggestive. “Waiting for Your Grace, of course, as always.”
He meant the double entendre, and she knew it. When they were forced to work together, Francis’s words were always laden with innuendo. Though she was disgusted by him, she had to tolerate it. Queen or not, she knew she could not trust Francis, because, like the three women from Horsham, he still held the power to destroy her. She did not know if he was vengeful enough to do such a thing, even though ruining her would certainly spoil his own position at court, if not jeopardize his life.
“Your Grace wishes to send a letter?” he asked. He had been called by her servants early New Year’s Day to meet her.
She advanced and stood over him haughtily until he was forced to surrender her chair. She sat down and gave her instructions as he moved into one opposite her. “You are to craft a letter to Princess Mary asking after her health during this cold spell of weather and telling her she was missed here at Christmas.”
“Were not both of the king’s daughters stripped of that title?” Francis challenged her.
She glared at him. “They are both princesses as far as your queen is concerned, and that is all you need worry yourself about.”
“And if you bear the old king a child? Will you worry about it then?”
“If I am blessed by God to bear His Majesty a son, the child shall be his second heir, after Prince Edward. My son will have no bearing on the role of the king’s daughters in his life or this country.”
“My, but Your Grace has matured much in a year’s time. You are scarcely the girl I chased around the attic at Horsham.” He smiled wickedly.
“Master Dereham, you know me not at all. You knew a simple, bored country girl, but she is gone forever.”
“The one who made me this?” He drew forth the lace-edged scarf she had stitched with their initials, with which he enjoyed taunting her from time to time. Unfortunately, the girl she had left behind had the same initials as the woman she had become. The FD and CH would be damning evidence with a jealous husband, and she knew it.
Her eyes widened as he pressed the fabric to the tip of his nose dramatically. “Your scent lingers still.”
She scowled at him. “What do you really want, Francis, to keep you quiet?”
“Only what, and who, was promised to me.”
“Is this post not enough?”
“It is a respectable beginning,” he admitted.
“Do you want more money than what you currently earn here? Is that not truly it?”
His smile twisted as he met her eyes. “It is enough to know you remember what was between us when we—”
Before he could finish the words, Catherine saw a lily white hand clamp down on the nape of his neck and draw him from his chair with little effort. The element of surprise had worked in Agnes Howard’s favor.
&nbs
p; Her voice was as cold as her hand. “Listen to me very carefully, Master Dereham. You are here at court because I desire a smooth transition for the queen. But do not press me too far, sir. This is a powerful family, and we know how to devour vermin like you and spit out your bones without a single thought.”
He arched a brow at her. “And what of the things I might reveal before you do?”
“It is possible you could create a problem for us, but any damage you could cause would be on the way to your own demise,” the dowager reminded him.
He shrugged. “That might prove worth the sacrifice.”
“I do not believe you will decide that in the end. You were always too selfish to be a martyr.”
“Are any of you Howards really different?”
Her onyx eyes hardened in contempt as Catherine sat in stunned silence, watching them. The dynamic between them was beyond master and servant.
“You certainly could push any one of us and see. But do remember that we have been at this court game for decades, and we have promoted two of our own blood to Queen of England. The only power you have is some gossip about the king’s beloved wife. Also, while you are contemplating your next move against the lot of us, do consider the recent fall of Lord Great Chamberlain Cromwell. It would be far simpler, albeit less gratifying, to destroy a country boy for threatening my granddaughter.” She smoothed out the front of her dress. “Have I made myself clear?”
“Quite,” Francis said sulkily.
“Splendid. Now get out of my sight. I cannot tarry with gutter-snipes on an empty stomach.”
Once he was gone, Agnes raised Catherine from her chair and, for the first time in Catherine’s life, drew her tenderly against her bony chest. Unaccustomed to such familial shows of affection, Catherine’s body tensed, but her grandmother did not release her. She patted her back gently and whispered a “Hush.” It was only then that Catherine realized she herself was weeping.