She considers this, her eyes lost for a moment in the flames. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I suppose you are right.”
IN YORK, THOMAS utilizes a secluded back stairway to gain entrance to my bedchamber at the top of the stairs: a tower room with tall, cloudy windows draped in dusty velvet. The room is dark when he appears in the doorway, closing the door quietly behind him.
“Joan will guard the stairway,” Lady Rochford tells me. My gaze is locked with Thomas’s. He smiles, and moves a step closer to the bed. “But it is too dangerous for me to leave this room unguarded. Are you listening, Catherine?”
“Can you stand guard within the main chamber?”
“Will it not seem suspicious that I am not in here, in bed? I must stay here, for your safety.” With these words she sits upon a chair, close to the door. “I’m sure that the duchess would agree.”
Lady Rochford’s presence is not enough to dissuade me from spending a night in Thomas’s arms. The room is shadowy already, but I put a damper on the flames in the hearth.
“I never thought you to be so concerned with privacy, Catherine,” she remarks, “with what I’ve heard about your trysts at Lambeth.”
I ignore this comment and walk over to Thomas.
“Your guard is at her station, I see?” he says with a grin, sitting upon the great carved bed. I blow out a few of the candles lit beside the bed, but he takes my hand in his and pulls me toward him.
“Yes, she has insisted on staying.”
“Do not think about it.” His voice is deep, rich. “We are alone here. Tonight is about you and me.” He pulls me closer, to sit on the bed beside him.
“Did you receive my letter?”
“Yes, I did,” he tells me, brushing his lips against my neck.
“You did not write me back,” I whisper in his ear. “I was hoping that you would write so that I may replace all of your old letters that I lost so long ago.”
“I will give you something better than a letter.” He smiles, and moves in for a kiss.
But I want a letter,
I think in the midst of the kiss. How do I explain it to him? Why do I want one so desperately? I follow the trail of this desire all the way down to the pit of my heart, my being: because a letter will be something that I can keep, and touch, and reread. It will remain real once all of this dream is over, and we are back at court and must resume our real lives.
“Catherine? What’s wrong? You’re shivering.”
“Nothing,” I tell him, and pull him close to me. “Nothing, my little sweet fool.” I hold him so tightly that my arms begin to ache.
The world consists of only this chamber, this bed, and the two of us upon it. As he pulls me free of my corset, I can only wonder if he, too, realizes that this will end soon, when the progress is over and we return to London. I try to banish the thought from my mind, focusing instead on the feeling of his skin against my skin.
Lying naked together in the dark, Thomas whispers to me: “I love you, Catherine.”
My eyes snap open. Jane snores softly in a corner of the room.
“Marry me, Catherine,” he whispers. “Marry me.”
“I am married.” My voice is barely a whisper. “You know that I am married. You cannot ask me that.”
“But I love you,” he tells me. “You were meant to be with me.”
“
He
says I was meant for him, too. And he is king, there is no refusing.”
“So you will refuse your own heart, instead?”
“You know that it is not my decision to make, and it never was. Neither of us can make our own decisions—we were fools to think otherwise.”
I cut my eyes at his, angry at the thoughts he is dredging up within me. I do not want to think of the king now, nor of our sad predicament.
“Did you not know what you were doing, putting me in the king’s path all the time? Lady Rochford said you helped them arrange all of this. Is that true?”
His gaze breaks away from mine, fractured.
“You cannot accuse me of refusing my heart now, when you had a hand in it all along.”
“No, no, please don’t. I’m sorry. You’re right—neither of us has ever been offered a question without first being given the response. I did what I was told, just as you did.”
“We are obedient children.”
“Indeed, we are,” he says, moving his hand up my thigh. I elbow him softly, a bit annoyed. I prefer not to think of this love affair as yet another of the duchess’s schemes.
“Listen to me, Catherine. Please, just listen to me. There will be a time when you will be given the opportunity to decide for yourself. There might not be long to wait.”
I roll over and face him. The chamber is dark; all of the candles have burned out. Only a pale slice of moonlight permeates the room. His dark eyes glitter in the silvery light.
“Promise me that you will choose me then, when it is for you to choose.”
When the king is dead.
That is when I will be able to choose. Somehow the danger of the words he dares not say makes clear to me the graveness of our current actions. The hard glitter in his eyes frightens me. I touch his face, I kiss him, but I dare not answer him.
“What you are saying is treason.”
“We already share treason, Catherine. We harbor it in our hearts each day. We enjoy it upon this bed at night.”
I close my eyes in shame but he presses his lips to mine, passionately.
“Will you marry me?”
“You know that I will,” I tell him.
At the sound of these words coming out of my mouth, I suddenly feel that I am falling. I wrap my arms around Thomas but the sensation only persists: we are both falling, spiraling through the great black void.
XXXI
By the torchlight in the banquet hall, I am wary of Thomas’s presence. Tonight I sit beside the king and abstain from dancing. I am glad to be here, surrounded by people, with so many things to look at and distract me from my own thoughts. I pretend to be entertained by the antics of fools and minstrels. One fool reads a long, bawdy rhyme that makes the whole hall echo with laughter. The king laughs heartily and pats my hand.
In my chamber, Malyn brushes my hair. Joan approaches, dropping a hasty bow.
“My queen, you have a visitor.”
Her voice sounds odd, stilted. I look up; her face is blanched. Her eyes dart furtively, as if acknowledging the other ladies in the room.
“Of course,” I tell her, and manage a small smile to hide my wariness. “We will meet in the main chamber. Ladies, you are dismissed. Joan will stay with me.”
Emerging into the main chamber with Joan, I find myself face-to-face with Francis Dereham. He smiles at my approach, then sweeps an elaborate, mocking bow.
I knew it was him—that red-and-black mask! I curse myself for not doing anything, but what could I have done? I did not want to admit it. I wanted to imagine it was a bad dream. It is a bad dream.
“I’m sure you are surprised to see me.” His voice is loud, brazen. I can tell that he is drunk. “Perhaps you assumed I was murdered by pirates, or lost at sea?”
“I am pleased to see you, of course.”
“Of course you are.” His voice is thick with mockery. “I thought this the perfect time to present myself to my queen, seeing as you’ve now appointed all of our old friends to positions in your household.” He stares at me, smiling. “Now we can all be together again.”
“Indeed. I expected that you would visit me, soon.”
“You have always been very adept at guessing the intentions of men, Your Majesty. I suppose that’s how you’ve managed such impressive conquests.”
I hold out my hand, beseeching calm. He looks at me, his blue eyes full of spite.
“You know there was nothing that I could do, Francis.”
“There was nothing you wanted to do.” He laughs bitterly. “You rejected me long before the king was involved. Don’t deny that—at least, don’t deny that to me. If you could have your way, I’m sure you would put both me and King Henry aside for your chance at Culpeper.” I flinch at his words and he steps closer, reaching out quickly and grasping one of my full velvet sleeves. “Or is it someone new these days, my queen?”
I strike out at his hand, snapping my gown from his grasp. He only smiles.
“Regardless of what you may have wanted, remember this, Queen Catherine: you are still my wife, and all of this royal marriage is a sham.”
“You must not say such things, for your own good as well as mine.”
“It only matters to me that
you
know it. That you are still my wife. We are precontracted to one another, rendering whatever union you have made with that beast of a man null and void. It is a tack Henry has taken before in matters of divorce.”
“Henry does not intend to divorce his wife,” I state carefully. I rest my hands protectively over my belly; the gesture is not lost on Francis. Though I can’t yet be certain, there is a possibility. “I must warn you, Francis, of your treason.”
“Then I shall likewise warn you of your own. After all, the king thought he married a virgin when he married you.”
I stare at him for a moment, mute with terror. This proud boy from Lambeth, who once pledged his heart to me, now stares at me and bares his vicious teeth.
“The question now is, what are you going to do for me?” He laughs, and his laugh frightens me, for he sounds a little mad. “What will you do for your husband?”
“All I can do is to offer you a position here. You will have the opportunity to work your way up at court. I am sure that you can do this, with my favor. It will be a very profitable life for you—more profitable than having married me.”
He opens his mouth as if to scoff at this, but I lift a hand to silence him.
“I have brought you in now, Francis, and I am showing you a queen’s favor and generosity, which may prove very agreeable to you. But in this new agreement you must make a vow, for your sake and for mine: take heed what words you speak. I know better the dangers of court than you do. You do not know the peril you put us both in just by speaking to me in this way, just by being here.”
With these words I turn away from him.
“You are dismissed,” I say, and Joan escorts him into the hall.
I walk to my chamber and dismiss my ladies. As they retreat, I pull Lady Rochford aside.
“Jane, I shall have no visitors tonight.” I would not put it past Francis to arrive again, unannounced, at midnight. “You must guard this door.” Jane nods assent. I shut the door behind me and stand before the fire breathing slowly, my heart pounding.
I do not know what else I could have done. I think of the duchess, how she told me to pull the ladies of Lambeth close to me when they requested positions in my household. Now I will have to do the same with Francis, and hope that I can reward him into submission and loyalty. Though I suppose I showed little to him, in the years since our tearful good-bye. That seems an entirely different life, lived by a different girl.
A creak, a scratch makes me jump. With wide eyes I see the hidden door in the back of my chamber open. Thomas enters.
“What are you doing here?”
“Please, Catherine, do not be angry with me.” He approaches me timidly, taking my hand in his. “It pains me not to see you. I was worried about you.”
“As well you should be. We should all be worried about me.”
“Catherine, what is wrong? You know that I will protect you.”
“Francis Dereham is here,” I whisper. But how will I explain? “He was—”
“I know,” he says, and pulls me into his embrace. “I know. The duchess told me, long ago. She feared that he might come back, sniffing around for money and favor. I will protect you, Catherine. You can trust me.”
I had wanted to be strong, but instead I fold easily into his embrace.
“You cannot stay here tonight,” I tell him, but he is already kissing my neck. “You should not stay here. If Francis were to see you—”
“I don’t care about Francis and neither should you. All I want is to be with you. I can’t bear not to be with you.”
It is like a sickness, this desire that I hold within me, that he ignites so easily in spite of my better judgment. It’s as if I’m dying, and Thomas is the only thing keeping me alive. Or perhaps it is his love that is killing me, causing me all of this pain and anguish and joy. I cannot separate my joy from my heartache: the two live side by side.
I STRETCH MY
bare limbs against his, then fold myself again in Thomas’s arms.
“This can’t go on,” I whisper. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Then you will give yourself to me, then take your love away just as easily?”
“None of this is easy, Thomas.”
“I know, I know,” he murmurs, running his fingers along my arm. “But I fear for you. I fear for both of us, and for all of England.”
“Why?” I lift my head from his chest, leaning on one elbow. “I may be already with child—with Henry’s child. And all will be well.”
“That may not be enough,” he says darkly. He looks at me steadily, slipping his arm around my bare back and pulling me close, his face inches away from mine. “Catherine, there are those who say the king is no longer fit to rule.”
“What are you saying?” My limbs freeze in his embrace.
“Do not act surprised, Catherine. I’m sure you’ve thought it, too. I have served the king longer than you, though in a different capacity, I’ll admit, but we can’t deny the evidence of his madness. You’ve heard what he did to the monasteries, to Becket’s tomb. Even old Margaret Pole was not safe from the king’s brutality.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” These words are treason, danger, death. I roll away from Thomas, pulling the sheets up to my chin. He rolls with me and wraps his arms around me, my back pressed against his chest. He lays his face upon my hair and whispers directly into my ear.
“We need to talk about this, for your own safety. The king has become—dangerous. More so as the years progress. He’s too easily swayed to violence, too easily swayed by his madness. You can’t tell me that you haven’t seen it.”