Gilt (33 page)

Judge and jury, all in one cassock.

He sat back and waited. If there was one thing Cat couldn’t stand, it was silence when she was expected to fill it. She tried valiantly. I watched her jaw moving as she chewed her lower lip. She stared into the fire with what I’m sure she hoped was a tragic expression for a good five minutes and then she broke down.

“I knew Francis Dereham when I lived with my grandmother in Lambeth,” she began.

“In what way?” Cranmer inquired.

“As a friend.”

Cranmer waited. Again, Cat failed to wait him out. She began to sob.

“More than a friend.”

“So you knew him . . .” Cranmer let his question trail off, obviously expecting her to continue.

“We kissed in the gallery,” Cat said with an impatient shrug. “And in chapel. You can ask any of my friends.” And with a single gesture, implicated all of us with an airy insouciance that took my breath away.

“Was there no talk of marriage?” Cranmer asked.

“No.”

“Surely, in a household of girls, there would be some mention of marriage?” he pursued.

“No.”

Cat met his eye and held firm.

“You never talked to your friends about it. Forgive me if I do not understand, but don’t girls discuss these things? Carry locks of hair like holy artifacts?” His mouth turned down in a sneer of distaste. “There was no gossip? No girlish, fanciful discussions of dresses and flowers and the future?”

“No,” Cat insisted. “None. We never spoke of those sorts of things because we knew our families would find the best husbands for us.”

Her attempt at ingenuousness failed and she just looked desperate.

“All of you?” Cranmer asked. “You, Mistress Tylney? Did you trust your parents to find you a husband?”

“Of course,” I forced myself to say. “And I am betrothed to Lord Graves.”

Cranmer made a note.

“None of you attempted to make a match on your own?” Cranmer pursued. He sounded so mild, so kindly, like a priest. A father confessor. None of us responded.

“But you, my lady,” he turned back to Cat, “chose your own husband in the end. Or he chose you. It wasn’t your family’s doing at all. It was a love match, is that right?”

Cat swallowed. I saw her Adam’s apple swell delicately at her throat.

Cat didn’t believe in love. Her match with the king had nothing to do with it. And everybody knew it.

“Yes,” she said.

“So I can infer that perhaps it was always in the back of your mind to do so. Then what did you think of this dalliance with Francis Dereham?”

“I thought nothing!” Cat cried and broke into fresh sobs. “I was young, impressionable. He was older and I thought him handsome. I thought he would know better than I. I had been brought up to trust my elders, to listen and obey.”

“Listen and obey,” Cranmer repeated, making a note.

“My will is not my own,” Cat said.

“So you believed that Dereham would think of your best interests.”

“He said he would.”

“It is my information that he shared your bed.” Cranmer fixed Cat with a beady eye. No longer grandfatherly, he now looked like a hawk going in for a kill.

Cat crumpled like the sail of a ship that has turned against the wind. She lost her voice in her skirts. Cranmer leaned forward to catch a whisper of confession. But the fabric muted Cat so thoroughly that the sounds she made could just have been sobs. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stand to see Catherine Howard debased. Despite her treatment of me, she was still my friend.

“Can’t you ask her later?” I pleaded. “She isn’t well.”

“Fine,” Cranmer made a note. Turned to me.

“Did he share your bed, Mistress Tylney? The one you occupied with Mistress Howard?”

I could have cried, too. My intention was for him to leave, not turn his interrogation on me. But he posed the question in such a way that I could tell the truth and yet not all of it. Yes, Francis Dereham shared my bed. It just so happened that he also shared it with Cat. I didn’t have to distinguish with whom he
chose
to share it.

“He did,” I said.

I thought that perhaps Cat had stopped breathing, as the sounds coming from her skirt suddenly diminished. But she looked up at me, a flash of hate in her eyes. She thought I condemned
her. A stab of guilt rent through me, though my intention hadn’t been to indict her. She dissolved again in pathetic tears.

Cranmer calmly made a note.

“Did you ever share a bed with Francis Dereham when he was naked?” he asked.

Yes. Though I wished to forget that particular night.

“No.”

“Did Mistress Howard?”

The room fell silent.

“No,” I whispered.

“No, no more did I!” Cat sobbed. “He came to our rooms and . . . and . . .”

“He used to grab my breast beneath the covers,” I said over the noise of Cat’s renewed sobbing. It had been an accident. The last time I’d tried to pretend he wasn’t there. After that, I’d always found another place to sleep. Cat let up slightly, to be better able to hear my confession.

“Dereham?”

“Yes.”

“Was he naked at the time? Were you?”

“No!” Cat cried. “Never! How can you keep asking?”

“Because he said he was. He said he came to your bed without his doublet. Without his hose.”

We stared. At Cranmer. At Cat. As if watching a silent, frozen tennis game.

“Sometimes he came without his doublet,” Cat admitted.
“And once . . . maybe twice, he came without his hose. But not fully naked. Never like that.”

“And you never called him husband. He never called you wife.”

“No,” Cat said in a throaty whisper. “He forced me.”

I could have throttled her. Because that one question could be her salvation. Perhaps salvation for all of us. Commitment, consent, and consummation amounted to a legal marriage. It would make her marriage to the king invalid. Give him a reason to divorce her, like the duchess said. To let her go. To let her live. But if Cat had not been betrothed to Francis, then she was a slut and possibly an adulterer. A calculating, manipulative harlot who used her wiles and abilities to dupe the aging, romantic King and then bring her lover into her household, committing high treason just like her cousin, Anne Boleyn. Bigamy was preferable to the alternative.

“But how?” Cranmer asked. “The doors to the maidens’ dormitory were locked, were they not?”

“Not in the beginning,” Cat said, casting a fleeting look my way. I held my breath. It was one thing knowing about Cat’s affairs. It was something else entirely to facilitate them. I looked at Cranmer, who flicked his glance back to his notes.

“I see.”

Cranmer packed up his pen and ink and stood.

“You would be best advised to stay in your rooms,” he declared, pointedly scanning each face in turn. “All of you.”

We bowed our heads in assent. What else could we do?

Cranmer paused at the door.

“Don’t think this is the end of the matter,” he said. “The truth will out. In the end. And the end is nigh, my lady.”

And he didn’t know the half of it. Yet.

“
T
HAT BASTARD
!” C
AT SHRIEKED WHEN
C
RANMER WAS OUT OF EARSHOT
.

“Your Majesty!” Joan gasped.

“Not Cranmer,” Cat said scornfully. “No, not the perfect image of God on earth. Dereham! The bloody waste of a pirate!”

She slammed the door to her bedchamber and started throwing everything that came to hand. A half-sewn shirt. A wooden box full of embroidery silks. A small mirror of Venetian glass that shattered, sending fragments like raindrops all over the hearth.

Joan ducked out of the way and tried to hide behind the bed. I leaned back up against the door.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Cat screamed. “He forced me! And now he’s ruined me!”

I was staggered by the strength of her adherence to a falsehood that would be her ruin.

Cat picked up an inkpot from the desk and made to hurl it into the fire. Jane stepped smartly up to her, grabbed her wrist and held the inkpot still.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jane said.

“How dare you manhandle me!” Cat roared. “As if I were a common wench!”

“Did you not hear Cranmer?” Jane demanded. “You
are
a common wench, Mistress Howard.”

“Until the king says otherwise, I am queen,” Cat said imperiously.

“Fine,” said Jane, letting go. “But you throw that ink to your own hazard.”

Cat set it down carefully.

“Why do you say so, Lady Rochford?” she asked.

“Because now is the time to write your letter of confession to the king. Beg his mercy. You have said more than once that the king loves you, perhaps to the point of delusion. If he still loves you—and he must still love you—then you can appeal to his feelings. Tell him everything.”

“Everything?”

Jane paused. “Perhaps not. But everything about Dereham.” She made a moue of distaste.

“You judge me, Lady Rochford?” Cat said. “You, who sent your husband to the gallows without a breath of hesitation? You, who let it be believed that he and Queen Anne committed the unnatural sin of incest? You dare judge me for a childish infatuation?”

“No,” Jane muttered. I saw her fingers close around the pocket that hung from her waist.

The room lapsed into silence.

“So what do you think?” Cat turned to me. “When I give it
to him, should I go down on my knees and kiss the hem of his cloak?”

“Cranmer?” I asked. “He doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who would respond well to such a thing.”

“The king,” she scoffed, as if I were the stupid one.

“The king has left Hampton Court, Cat. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“He must come back,” Cat said. “I have to see him. Make my confession. Beg for his mercy. He’ll come back.”

“No, he won’t,” Jane assured her. “He let Catherine of Aragon suffer illness and death alone in Kimbolton. He left Anne Boleyn at a tournament, and never saw her again. He sent Anne of Cleves to Richmond, only allowing her to return when she was his beloved sister and no longer his wife. He will not see you again.”

“But he has to,” Cat insisted.

“He won’t.” Jane’s voice sliced like a sword through the still room. “You must make your confession and beg for mercy on paper.”

“But that’s not fair!” Cat cried. “My writing is chaos! I need to see him in person. I need to practice. I must see him.”

“You won’t.”

“But I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Her brazen denial stupefied me. Despite knowing her, sleeping with her, being her mirror for most of my life, I couldn’t understand her now.

“I’ll just have to beg forgiveness of Archbishop Cranmer,”
she said. “Kitty, come here and pretend to be him. Should I face him with my head bowed? Or clasp him around the knees?”

She knelt before me and reached for my skirts.

I stepped aside, disgusted by her desire to practice. To find a way to tug the heartstrings of Archbishop Cranmer instead of face up to the truth. Terror rose within me. If Cat didn’t clutch at the one possibility that might save her—that she was betrothed before she married the king—she could face worse than the loss of her throne.

“You should tell him to his face that you were married to Francis.”

“I wasn’t,” Cat replied stonily. “He forced me.”

“It would render your marriage to the king invalid,” Jane interjected.

“It would render me a nobody! Mistress Dereham instead of Queen Catherine! I will not consider it. I will not even participate in a conversation about it.”

She turned her back on us, arms folded across her chest. I knew there would be no way to persuade her, and the tiny hope I had harbored died.

“Then you should find a way to explain why you brought Francis Dereham into your household.”

“Because the dowager duchess told me to.”

“Which she may deny!” I cried. “Besides, you’re the queen. You don’t have to do what she says anymore.”

“You mean people will think I brought him here because I
loved him?” Cat asked, incredulous. “People will think that I would actually prefer
him
to the king? I care
nothing
for Francis. I never did.”

I almost laughed, but choked on a sob instead.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Once a rumor gets started, everyone believes it. You of all people should realize that.”

It was what she had threatened me with: a rumor that would ruin my life. But now it was the truth that would ruin us all.

“Francis will tell the truth,” Cat predicted, ignoring all that I implied. Ignoring the fact that Francis had already told the truth.

“It only takes a little torture to make a man say only what his inquisitors wish to hear,” Jane said, her eyes glittering dangerously. No doubt she was remembering the musician Mark Smeaton, tortured to confession of adultery with Anne Boleyn.

We paused to consider this. Francis on the rack, his bones popping, chin dimple receding into his screams.

“Very well,” Cat sniffed. “So what should I say in this letter? God, I hate writing! Can’t someone else do it for me?”

“Who?” I asked, finally giving in to my frustration. “Your secretary? Oh, maybe not, as he’s locked up in the Tower spilling his guts to the king’s men.”