The duchess rose. She walked over to Kathryn and stood by her, looking down with that glare. "You have a tongue in your head, girl. And if you want to keep both head and tongue, you'll learn to control it." She looked around the room, with its rich hangings, and the fifteen girls crammed into it. Kathryn and Mary sharing the window seat, others in benches, and a half dozen on the floor, all working some form of sewing, or at least doing so in appearance—in truth they'd been keeping Her Grace amused with gossip about the court and the various rumors crisscrossing London, until the matter of the queen's labor was resolved.
But the duchess who'd been smiling and nodding to their chatter had gone, all at once becoming grim and brooding. The walking stick, which she'd rarely used lately and not used at all during Queen Anne's coronation, was sought for with the questing hand. One of the girls ran out and returned almost immediately carrying it. The duchess took it in her hand and leaned her weight into it. "We are," she said. "Going back to Horsham. I have had enough of the court for the nonce."
She left the room, and the frenzy started. Mary jumped up immediately and said, "Come, Kathryn, we have trunks to pack. And to be traveling in this weather, too. How dreary it will be. If only you'd kept your mouth shut!"
"Why should I?" Kathryn asked. "And how could I, when the duchess is saying that the king will now love Queen Anne less for not having given him an heir? Surely . . . I have many siblings, and I have heard talk in the kitchen, too." Various kitchens, including some of the rooming houses where they'd lodged between her father's marriages. She wasn't about to tell Mary that whole story. "And forsooth, if there were, indeed, something a woman could do to determine she has a boy, all women would know it."
Mary sighed. "Perhaps you're right," she said. "And yet you had no business speaking to the duchess on it, for you must know that everyone will blame the queen for not giving the king an heir. It is just the way of the world."
"Well," Kathryn said, as they entered their dormitory and Mary started gathering arms full of dresses that had been scattered all about. "Well, then the world is wrong."
This brought a peal of laughter from Mary, laughter of the kind that Kathryn had often brought to her when she'd first come to live in the duchess's household. The beauty mark on the side of Mary's mouth wiggled up and down. "Indeed, Kathryn. Wouldst though change the world? Most of us," she continued, the mirth subsiding, "would be glad enough to change our station. Particularly now as we must go to Horsham, and Horsham is so deadly dull in winter. There's nothing to do and nothing to see, it's all mud and fields all around, and more . . ." She sighed. "There isn't even a good New Year celebration. I'd hoped we'd stay at court . . ."
"We're not at court," Kathryn said sensibly. "We are only some miles from London proper, close enough, I trow, to visit, but no has asked us to visit." In fact, since the events of the coronation night, Kathryn had not been out of the house, though Mary Tilney and her sister Katherine, Alice Restwold and Dorothy Baskerville had often been out together and often spoke to each other when they returned from the city as though they had shared some great secret or some wonder they could not communicate to the rest of the household.
"Do you perhaps leave friends behind?" Kathryn asked, and looking up, was surprised to see that Mary Tilney was blushing dark and looking around, as if to see if anyone was close enough to hear them.
"Have I said ought—?" Kathryn started, but Mary, having asserted there was no one nearby, shook her head and nearing Kathryn spoke into her ear in a fierce whisper, "Speak not of friends, Kathryn, for those are such as we are not allowed to have."
"Oh, but . . . are we not friends?" Kathryn asked back curiously.
Mary sighed as though she were speaking with the feebleminded, and shook her head hard, then hissed again, her breath hot against Kathryn's ear, "Kathryn Howard, no maiden is supposed to be friends with men."
"Men!" Kathryn said, thinking of the night of the coronation and the way the maids of honor of the duchess had met the men at the dock when they came forth to the coronation. She remembered the smiles, the easy looks, and the way she'd been foisted off with Henry Manox, as though all the other ones were spoken for. She felt her own cheeks heat, both at the thought of what might have gone on the rest of the night—while she was wandering lost about London and being squired by Thomas Culpepper. Not that she resented being escorted by Thomas, even if he had not yet visited or brought her the desired oranges.
However, she thought what her friends had been about had, force, been far more interesting than her own adventures. "Men," she said again lower, and as Mary moved to step away and resume her task, Kathryn reached over and held onto her sleeve, pulling her close. "But Mary," she said, whispering back. "You're the one who told me that the woman is to blame if she displeases her husband and that . . ."
Mary shrugged her shoulders and threw her head back. "Listen to me, Kathryn Howard, for if you're going to get any joy out of life, you must know this—there is but one thing certain—after marriage a woman is her husband's and his every whim is to her like God's upon the Earth. Which is why she must do what she can to have a life and enjoy it before marriage. Understand you this, Kathryn?"
Kathryn nodded, but was not sure at all she understood. After all, what life could she have—she who was all but a prisoner of the temperamental duchess's household, taken here and there as suited that noble lady's mood, and never her own woman? How could she have her own life, then? Oh, perhaps Mary and Alice and Catherine had managed it, but faith, they weren't Howards and they weren't the cousin of the queen—whom, though she'd seen her only once, Kathryn inexplicably felt herself linked to.
It was as though a thread united their fortunes, and one must rise and fall as the other did.
Chapter Seven
If her fortunes were tied to Queen Anne's, they looked bleak indeed. Oh, no one told Kathryn everything, but even after they retreated to Horsham, where the countryside was a sea of mud, news filtered to them.
There were rumors that all was not well at court. The king avoided the queen. He showed impatience at her. There were rumors about various young ladies who had captured his fickle majesty's interest. There was no more talk among the maids, or even among the staff, who were ever more apt to talk of romance and intrigue than the household, of a romance such as would be immortal to history. And no songs filtered down from the court when the rare visitor came—or at least no songs that were said to have been composed by the king for the queen.
Songs became very important to Kathryn that winter. The masters at Horsham were shared by all the ladies, and—she thought—not all that knowledgeable. At least, she had some vague idea her Leigh sisters had Italian masters for the spinet and virginal, for the lute and harpsichord.
Kathryn was one of many under the tutelage of these masters, who seemed to have gotten their learning of music from their church choirs—or else perhaps from itinerant jugglers.
But they did well enough to teach her the basics: how to pluck the lute in a fashion pleasing enough to accompany her still-piping little girl's voice to the tune of the current songs from court. And while she sometimes noticed that Alice or Mary spent a goodly amount of time waiting for a particular rider from the court or another, she herself cared only to know what songs were sung at court now.
It was her amusement, picking up a lute from the practice room and finding a solitary place in which to sing all her newly learned songs, while accompanying herself with the lute.
And when spring took too long to turn warm, much less acknowledge the nearness of summer, on a dank, dark day when the rain wept against the mullioned windows and all outside was an indifferent sodden mingle of grey sky, brown mud, and trees caught halfway between the two, with their branches raised up to the sky like penitents imploring in vain for mercy, Kathryn had taken the lute and walked to the corner of a far-off hallway.
Gone were all her dreams of ever marrying a prince. It would be lucky enough, she thought, if Queen Anne didn't get divorced and end up put away in some forgotten castle, as old Queen Katherine had. Kathryn had heard in one of the recent bits of gossip from court that one of the foreign ambassadors had called the queen "that old, thin woman."
Kathryn recalled the radiant face surrounded by rich fabrics on that coronation procession and could not reconcile it to such a description, but perhaps that was how things worked, and everyone now would say bad things about Queen Anne who had once praised her. If that were true and the queen were to be divorced, then what would become of her young and penniless cousin?
Alice, who now shared Kathryn's bed, had teased her by saying that if all else failed, the Howards would at least arrange Kathryn's marriage to some wealthy country squire. Kathryn wished she could be sure of this. Her childhood, now that she knew a little more of the world, had come as though into sharp relief. She could see in her mind's eye how abandoned by the whole family—how forsaken—her father had been.
She knew, had heard often enough, that when he was young, he had been heroic enough at Flodden Field to have a poem written about him and to still be talked about in admiring fashion. But much good that had done him. He had married none but widows, and though they be wealthy widows, none had been wealthy enough to support him in the lifestyle other Howards took for granted. Even when royal favor had descended upon the family, nothing had happened to make Edmund Howard's life better but the post of comptroller at Calais, which had by itself been unable to provide for his numerous family, so that he'd had to ask the duchess to take one of his many superfluous children.
For that matter, it was quite possible he had managed to dispose of most of his other children to other relatives. Kathryn did not know. None in the family were inclined to write, and none saw it fit to send her letters. She might as well be forgotten as living with the duchess.
When it came to a marriage for her, who would make it? The duchess? This was most unlikely, as her main preoccupation seemed to be the running of her vast estate. Tenants and lands and various responsibilities consumed her wholly when she was not taken up with the affairs of her step-granddaughter the queen or with her own advancement in courtly favor. Those of her maids who married did so through the arrangements of their family. And Kathryn, when it came to arrangements, had no family. If her father or brothers were still living—and as much as she'd heard of them, they might be dead—they had forgotten her. She was probably thirteen. Her confusion came from being none too sure, because her father hadn't been sure. Her mother had been sure, but her mother had died before Kathryn had a good idea how old she was. She'd grown up hearing her father give her age as "Six, perhaps seven, or yet she might be eight." And on through the years. She was now thirteen by the highest of those estimations, which was how old she felt when comparing herself to the other girls about her. Alice would be the same age or a little bit more. It wasn't Kathryn's fault that she was by nature small and of little stature so that she would, perforce, seem younger than her mates.
If she were thirteen . . . Well, then she was more than a year older than her mother had been when she'd married her first husband. And she would be one year short of what was called "the full fire of fourteen," a woman's most desirable age.
And she was—she paused by a window and tapped the glass pane with her cold finger tips—immured here, in a house in the middle of nowhere, trapped in the heart of a winter that refused to depart, though it already be late May.
In this mood, forlorn, feeling like the last person in the whole world and all but forgotten by man and fate, too, she walked a long time, taking random turns into little used parts of the house, along the yellow-mosaic floors of the hallway.
She came, quite without knowing how, to a place where the hallway ended in a sort of rounded alcove where a window seat stood by a large mullioned window. It was a handsome window seat, carved in oak, and a handsome window through which a lot of light came, despite the driving wind that was tapping upon the window like a living thing. Like the fingers, Kathryn thought, of all those who had died out in a storm and had come back seeking the warmth of humanity.
There was a layer of dust on the seat and it was quite devoid of coverings, so Kathryn thought it hadn't been used in very long. Gingerly, she brushed the dust off with her hand, then sat with one of her legs bent and folded under her body, and her skirts disposed in a wide fan about her. Thus disposed, she turned her attention to the lute.
She started with the ballad of the king who had found the naked nymph—Melusine—in the forest, and had taken her home to be his own. From Margaret Bennet she'd heard the rest of that story, which, as she had predicted, did not end well. The lady, like many of a supernatural nature, seemed to partake in demon kind and, upon being discovered in her bath—though Kathryn never understood what was shocking about that—had taken her two younger children and flown out a castle window,, leaving behind the fiery marks of her feet upon the stone.
Of this the ballad spoke, and this Kathryn sang with all her heart, even though she tried not to think about what Catherine Tilney said, that the child that Melusine had left behind was an ancestor of the kings of England. It seemed very unlikely, for the king didn't seem at all to be in the nature of a nymph. What would half-demon kind have to do in the world, much less on the throne.
She played, satisfying herself with the chilly notes of the ballad and its chillier conclusion. And then she wound into the next one, almost without thinking—a ballad the king had written for Queen Anne when he was still courting her, called "Greensleeves."
Though it was a courting song and it could be merry, there was something about it that spoke of haunting sadness, of unattainable dreams—like Kathryn's erstwhile fancy of marrying a prince and being loved by all.