The Queen's Governess (9 page)

“I have asked Mary Percy and Dorothy Cobham to call me Kat, but the others do not.”

“Back to your new life,” he’d said and turned away, reading the lady’s note as he climbed the stairs. But now, even as gaming went on in the king’s apartments after dancing, I had slipped away to meet Tom Seymour at the maze. I wasn’t going into it with him, I’d vowed to myself. From the second-story windows, the huge hornbeam maze could be seen in the distance, tall, thick and daunting.

Tom emerged instantly from the dark mouth of the maze when I ventured toward it. He pulled me inside, directly into his arms for a long kiss, one in which he slanted his head, then moved it so his lips caressed mine, coaxing them open so his tongue could plunder my mouth. I had never been kissed like that and I liked it immensely. His hands were busy on my waist and hips, but that felt reassuring as well as arousing. His cheek pressed to mine, he whispered, “Kat, Kat, I have dreamed of this, such a sweet kiss.”

Perhaps Wyatt wasn’t the only poet on the premises, I thought. When the next kiss finally ended and we were both breathing raggedly, I tugged back a bit to restore my control. “But you are so young,” I blurted foolishly.

“Which means I have no experience at this?” he countered with a low laugh that sent my stomach into even faster cartwheels. “Have you not heard of country matters, sweet, coupling in the hay and such? Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, I warrant, is as fine a place for such schooling as is your Devon.”

“You’re teasing me.”

“No, you’re teasing me—your face, so calm which hides such unleashed passion, your beautiful body. Kat, more kisses . . .”

While he kissed me again, however tightly I was laced in back, he managed to tug my low, square bodice off my shoulders and down to bare my breasts. While I gasped and fought to calm my trembling knees, he used his wicked fingers, then his tongue to awaken them and me. I became aware of myself in a whole new way. The world spun; the hedge seemed to swallow us. He actually had me on the ground under him and was ruffling up my petticoats when we heard voices close by.

We froze. Sanity smacked me. I was not such a green girl I did not know where my tumble with Tom could take me—to the heights of joy but also to the depths of shame, censure and banishment from all I’d worked so hard for, especially if I caught a child from him. And I knew whose voices those were just one width of hedge away. Jane Rochford was arguing with her husband, George, Anne’s brother.

“I followed you!” she said, hardly keeping her voice down. I pulled away from Tom and sat up, tugging my bodice back in place.

“If I favor a solitary walk in the moonlight, I don’t need you about!” he countered.

“Meeting someone for a tryst?” she hissed. My face flamed. As much as I was attracted to Tom, I could not let my passions rule me.

“And if I am?”

“If you are, I warrant it is another man. Married to a sodomite, I am, now wouldn’t your father and the king, too, like to know that? I swear, the only woman you ever loved was your precious, spoiled sister Anne!”

Their voices were beginning to fade. At least they weren’t coming in here, where they could see us or force us to retreat farther into the maze. More secrets of the Boleyns, I thought. Secrets on secrets, all dangerous, even for someone simply to know.

“Leave Anne out of this!” George demanded. I had to strain now to hear their words over the rustle of my gown as I got to my feet. “How do I know you’re not out here, playing the doxy, meeting someone?” he ranted on. “No wonder I could not get you with child when we Boleyns are prolific, our Howard kin too!”

“George, blast you, you can’t get a woman with child unless you lie with her, and you haven’t been in my bed for . . .”

They were gone. Before the brazen Seymour could seize me again, I started away. “Kat,” he said, still sitting on the ground but snatching at my ankle to hold me there a moment more, “I know where there is a room not being used, clear up under the eaves on the north side. And it has a truckle bed.”

“I can’t,” I told him.

“I’ll let you know when the coast is clear,” he said as I pulled my ankle loose. “I adore you, sweet, and want to prove it in every way.”

I almost made a wrong turn, but I saw lights from the palace through the leafy wall and fled.

 

 

 

What saved me
from being seduced to lie with Tom, on the grass, no less—and loving every moment of it, I suppose—was his being called home from court when his youngest brother died: not the eldest one, the heir whom he had wished did not exist. After that, either his father or Sir Francis Bryan sent him to the Continent, so he was gone for nigh on two years, and I admit I missed him sorely and feared he’d die abroad. I learned Cromwell’s wife had died; perhaps that was another reason besides his raw ambition that his work consumed him: he became the king’s chief secretary and took on more duties than ever.

Yet thirteen months after I first arrived at court, the divorce dilemma dragged on. The Campeggio proceedings at Blackfriars, which the king thought would free him, were challenged by Queen Catherine’s dramatic appearance and pleas. The king finally banished her from court, sending her to various distant old castles and forbidding her to see her beloved daughter, the Princess Mary. In October of 1529, Wolsey was stripped of his powers, leaving the Boleyns and their kin, the powerful Howard clan, especially the Duke of Norfolk, greatly in control of the court, and they thought, the king. Wolsey was arrested for treason—Henry Percy was sent by the king to do the deed, no less—and was heading to London for trial when he died in October 1530. His Majesty quickly took York Place that I had so admired in London for his own, began massive renovations and renamed the wondrous building Whitehall Palace.

But perhaps, most amazing of all that happened in my early years at court, Cromwell suggested to the king that, if the Pope would not grant him an annulment or divorce, he should become head of the church in his kingdom and declare himself free to wed the Lady Anne. It might mean his excommunication from the Holy Mother Church he had once championed, it might mean religious rebellion in his kingdom, but the king would not be denied Anne at any price.

People were stunned and, depending on their religious leanings, were either gladdened or horrified, especially by the charges that the great abbeys, monasteries and nunneries of the land were corrupt and must be rooted out, with their vast properties and funds going to the king and those he favored. I must say that was a clever move, for it kept many nobles quiet in the purge of those who opposed the king. How could they argue with all that while they were building their new manors on former church lands? But the king’s daring move hardly surprised me: I had seen where Secretary Cromwell got that idea years before. It had been set in place by His Eminence Cardinal Wolsey when he had Cromwell close a few small rural monasteries so he could take the money to dedicate two colleges to himself.

What shocked and saddened me was that I, who never took ill, was laid low with a fever and could not go to France in the large entourage that met with the French king, Francis, in Calais; His Grace took Anne and her ladies with him. I was so downhearted, especially because everyone said it was a great success in many ways—including that, for some reason, the Lady Anne had at last decided the king needed an extra fill-up to keep him totally in thrall and had finally let him share her bed.

“I have a passion for eating apples!” she crowed to a crowd of us in late autumn when the court was back in London. “His Majesty needs me and he needs a son, and I shall see to both!”

I seldom carried messages between her and Cromwell anymore, for the Boleyns had so inserted themselves into the politics of the land that she oft summoned Cromwell to her as if she were England’s ruler. Cromwell was rising farther and faster: he was named Privy Councillor to the king, on equal footing with Anne’s father and uncle.

Still, I was bound to report to Cromwell—usually now through Master Stephen—when I found something new about the Boleyns, whom he yet thought bore watching. But today, when Master Stephen came down the back stairs at Whitehall where I used to meet with Cromwell, I said, somewhat petulantly, “I suppose he knows the lady is with child, but he might want to know she’s flaunting it, and those about the court who detest the Boleyns for being climbers are seething.”

“The first, he knows; the second, he assumes, but will care for,” Stephen told me with a tight smile. He was so much like his master. Both spoke quickly and concisely almost without moving their mouths. “So, how are you getting on after several years here and wherever the court progresses, mistress? You know, our mutual master was greatly impressed that you did not get snared by that young cub Seymour when you first arrived at court.”

I gaped at him. I had learned to assume certain facial expressions to dissemble my true feelings as well as the next courtier, but his mention of Tom—and that he knew of us—took me off guard. When I just stared at him, he added, “As young as Seymour is, he has a reputation as a bed swerver, so let that be a word to the wise, because he’s coming back to court; his older brother Edward too.”

“So, our mutual master, as you said, spies on his spies?”

Stephen only smiled, waved and started back upstairs. “Oh,” he called to me, and came back down, “I forgot to tell you the biggest surprise of all—though not to those who are as watchful as you. Of course, you know the Lady Anne is with child. His Grace desperately wants their son to be born legitimate, so he intends to wed her privily, and soon. Keep an eye out for signs of that, lest we miss it somehow.”

Astounded at all I had heard, I leaned against the stairwell wall until my legs steadied, then went back out into the biting winter wind blowing off the Thames.

GREENWICH PALACE, NEAR LONDON

 

 

 

L
ook, a boat with a moving dragon, one belching smoke and fire!” Queen Anne called to her ladies. Before us, coming up the Thames toward Greenwich Palace, where we stood waiting at the water stairs, were at least fifty boats decorated by the merchant guilds of London. In her royal barge, Anne, accompanied by her ladies, was to be escorted by the flotilla into the city. Tonight, as was tradition, we would stay at the palace within the Tower walls to prepare for her coronation parade the next day before her crowning in Westminster Abbey.

Music flowed around us as we set off in the queen’s barge, which had hastily been stripped of Queen Catherine’s crests and colors and replaced with Anne’s. Gay tunes from sackbuts and crumhorns, trumpets and drums, serenaded us from various watercraft. The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Stephen Peacock, had outdone himself for this first part of the great public play in which the new queen would enter London and be shown to all the people.

It was a wonderful time to serve her, and I felt so excited that I could have flown. Granted, Their Majesties had arguments at times, some over his attentions to other ladies while Anne was six months gone with child. Last week, when she had dared to scold him in public for his roving eye, he had turned on her and spewed out, “You had best wink at such things, madam, and put up with them, as your betters have before you!”

Though she dared not answer, I warrant his calling other queens her betters set her back, for Anne was on a crusade to outdo her predecessor. For a while after that she seemed to coddle the king. If she threw a tantrum, in light of her condition, the king forgave her. After all, soothsayers and astrologers alike had promised His Majesty the babe would be a boy. Mostly, with plans for her coronation, they had been cooing doves.

My life was better too, for no more did I carry notes between Anne and Cromwell. The king’s chief secretary was now Master of the Jewels, a symbolic position of power, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, a real position of power. If Anne dared to send billets-doux to Wyatt or even to Percy, I, thank the Lord, was not involved.

But I cannot say the same for my woman’s heart: for the first time in my life, it was involved. Though Tom Seymour was seldom at court, for he was yet oft sent on errands both in England and to the Continent, when he was about I took a page from Anne Boleyn’s book and kept him at bay. Kisses, yes. Caresses I craved, but I refused to be alone with him. It was working wonders. The idea of romance he once mocked now kept him on his toes: he brought me gifts from France, he even wrote me very bad sonnets, but I treasured them, and wrote him love letters back. I had no title, but neither did he. At least I was one of the queen’s court, so perhaps I could wed him someday and then I would deny him nothing. Yes, I looked to the queen for my inspiration on how to deal with men.

For besides Tom Seymour, I had a new man in my life, one of those who had swelled Her Majesty’s entourage after the king secretly wed her at Whitehall in January. Even as I watched and was part of the parade of boats, the sounds and sights of my first meeting with John Ashley floated through my mind again.