Her course started something like a week late; but I was not too disheartened. The mere thought of it had been enough to make the king more in love with her than ever, and she had at least agreed that though the sun rises and shines only on Thomas Culpepper, he does not have to be privy to every little secret.
She has behaved very prettily with the people that she has met on this progress, even when she has been bored and inattentive she has kept a pleasant smile on her face, and she has learned to follow a little behind the king and to maintain an appearance of demure obedience. She serves him in bed like a paid whore, and she sits next to him at dinner and never shows by a flicker of expression that he has broken wind. She is a selfish, stupid girl but she might, given time, make quite a good queen. If she conceives a child and gives England a son she might live long enough to learn to be a queen that is admired.
The king, at any rate, is mad about her. His indulgence makes our task of getting Culpepper in and out of her bedchamber so much easier. We had a bad night in Pontefract when he sent Sir Anthony Denny to her room without announcement, and she was locked in with Culpepper. Denny tried the door and went away without saying anything. There was another night when the king stirred in her bed while they were at their business only on the other side of the door, and she had to go flying back in to the old man, still damp with sweat and kisses. If the air had not been heavy with the stink of his wind he would have smelled the scent of lust for certain. At Grafton Regis the lovers coupled in the jakes – Culpepper crept up the stairs to the stone-walled chamber which overhangs the moat, and she told her ladies that she was sick as a dog and spent the afternoon with him in there, frantically humping while the rest of us made possets. If it were not so dangerous it would be funny. As it is, it still makes me breathless with a mixture of fear and lust when I hear them together.
I never laugh. I think of my husband and his sister and any laughter dies in my mouth. I think of him promising to be her man through any trouble. I think of her, desperate to conceive a son, sure that Henry could not give her one. I think of the unholy pact they must have made. Then, with a little moan, I think that all this is my fear, my fantasy, and perhaps it never happened. The worst thing about the two of them being dead is that now I will never know what happened. The only way I have borne the thought of what they did, and the part I played, in all these years has been to put the thought far from me. I never think of it, I never speak of it, and no-one ever speaks of them in my hearing. It is as if they never were. That is the only way I can bear the fact that I am alive and they are gone: to pretend that they never were.
‘So when Queen Anne Boleyn was accused of treason did they really mean adultery?’ Katherine asks me.
The question, so sharp on the point of my own thinking, is like a stab. ‘What d’you mean?’ I ask.
We are riding from Collyweston to Ampthill on a bright, cold morning in October. The king is ahead, galloping with the young men of his court, thinking he is winning a race as they hold their horses back, Thomas Culpepper among them. Katherine is ambling along on her grey mare, and I am at her side on one of the Howard hunters. Everyone else has dropped back to gossip and there is no-one to shield me from her curiosity.
‘You said earlier that she and the other men were accused of adultery,’ she pursues.
‘That was months ago.’
‘I know, I have been thinking about it.’
‘You think very slowly,’ I say nastily.
‘I know I do,’ she says, quite unabashed. ‘And I have been thinking that they accused Anne Boleyn, my cousin, of treason only because she was unfaithful to the king, and they beheaded her.’ She glances around her. ‘And I have been thinking that I am in the same situation,’ she says. ‘That if anyone knew – they would say that I am unfaithful to the king. Perhaps they would call it treason too. Then what would happen to me?’
‘That is why we never say anything,’ I reply. ‘That is why we take care. Remember? I have warned you from the beginning to take care.’
‘But why did you help me meet Thomas? Knowing as you do what a danger it is? After your own sister-in-law was killed for just the same thing?’
I am lost for an answer. I never thought that she would ask me this question. But her stupidity is such that she does, sometimes, go straight to the most obvious. I turn my head as if I am looking over the cold meadows where the river, swollen with the recent rains, shines like a sword, a French sword.
‘Because you asked me to help you,’ I say. ‘I am your friend.’
‘Did you help Anne Boleyn?’
‘No!’ I exclaim. ‘She would have no help of mine!’
‘You were not her friend?’
‘I was her sister-in-law.’
‘Did she not like you?’
‘I doubt she ever saw me from start to finish. She had no eyes for me.’
This does not halt her speculation, as I intended, but feeds it. I can almost hear the slow revolving of her thoughts.
‘She didn’t like you?’ Katherine asks. ‘She and her husband and her sister, they were always together. But they left you out.’
I laugh but it doesn’t come out well. ‘You make it sound like children in the schoolyard.’
She nods. ‘That is just how it is in a royal court. And did you hate them for not letting you join them?’
‘I was a Boleyn,’ I say. ‘I was a Boleyn as much as they. I was a Boleyn by marriage, their uncle the duke is my uncle. My interests are in the family as theirs were.’
‘So why did you give evidence against them?’ she asks.
I am so shocked at her directly accusing me, I can hardly speak. I look at her. ‘Where did you hear of this? Why would you speak of this?’
‘Catherine Carey told me,’ she says, as if it is unremarkable that the two girls, all but children, should share confidences about treason and incest and death. ‘She said that you bore witness against your husband and his sister. You gave evidence to show that they were lovers and traitors.’
‘I did not,’ I whisper. ‘I did not.’ I cannot bear her naming this, I never think of it. I will not think of it today. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I say. ‘You don’t understand because you are only a girl. You were a child when all this happened. I tried to save him, I tried to save her. It was a great plan of your uncle’s devising. It failed, but it should have succeeded. I thought that I would save him if I gave evidence, but it all went wrong.’
‘Is that how it was?’
‘It was heartbreaking!’ I cry out in my pain. ‘I tried to save him, I loved him, I would have done anything for him.’
Her pretty young face is filled with sympathy. ‘You meant to save him?’
I dash the tears from my eyes with the back of my glove. ‘I would have died for him,’ I say. ‘I thought I would save him. I was going to save him. I would have done anything to save him.’
‘Why did it go wrong?’ she whispers.
‘Your uncle and I thought that if they pleaded guilty that she would be divorced and would be sent away, to a convent. We thought that he would be stripped of his title and his honours and banished. The men who were named with her were never guilty, everyone knew that. They were George’s friends and her courtiers, not lovers. We thought they would all be forgiven, as Thomas Wyatt was forgiven.’
‘So what happened?’
It is like a dream, this re-telling. It is the dream that comes to me often, that wakes me in the night like sickness, that sends me from my bed to walk and walk in the dark room until the first grey light comes into the sky and I know my ordeal is over.
‘They denied their guilt. That was not part of the plan. They should have confessed but they denied everything except saying some words against the king, George had said that the king was impotent.’ Even on this bright autumn day, five years after the trial, I still lower my voice and glance around me to make sure that no-one can hear. ‘Their courage failed them, they denied their guilt and did not ask for mercy. I stayed with the plan, as your uncle said I should. I saved the title, I saved the lands, I saved the Boleyn inheritance, I saved their fortune.’
Katherine is waiting for more. She does not understand that this is the end of the story. This is my great act and my triumph: I saved the title and the lands. She even looks puzzled.
‘I did what I had to do to save the Boleyn inheritance,’ I repeat. ‘My father-in-law, George and Anne’s father, had built a fortune over his lifetime. George had added to it. Anne’s wealth had gone into it. I saved it. I saved Rochford Hall for us, I kept the title. I am Lady Rochford still.’
‘You saved the inheritance, but they didn’t inherit it,’ Katherine says, uncomprehending. ‘Your husband died, and he must have thought you were giving evidence against him. He must have thought that while he was pleading not guilty, you were accusing him. You were a witness for his prosecution.’ Slowly she thinks, slowly she speaks, slowly she says the worst thing of all. ‘He must have thought that you let him go to his death so that you could keep the title and the lands, even though you had killed him.’
I could scream at her for saying this, for putting words to this nightmare. I rub my face with the back of my glove as if I would scrub my scowl away. ‘No. Not so! Not so! He won’t have thought that,’ I say desperately. ‘He knew that I loved him, that I was trying to save him. As he went to his death he would have known that I was on my knees before the king, asking him to spare my husband. When she went to her death she will have known that at the very last moment I was before the king, asking him to spare her.’
She nods. ‘Well, I hope you never bear witness to save me,’ she says. It is a miserable attempt at humour; I do not even accord it a smile.
‘It was the end of my life,’ I say simply. ‘It was not just the end of their lives, it was death to me too.’
We ride in silence for a while, and then two or three of Katherine’s friends kick their horses forward to ride beside her and chatter to her about Ampthill and the greeting we are certain to have, and whether Katherine has finished with her yellow gown and will give it to Katherine Tylney. In a moment there is a quarrel breaking out because Katherine had promised it to Joan but Margaret is insisting that it should go to her.
‘You can both hold your peace,’ I rule, dragging myself back to the present moment. ‘For the queen has worn that gown not more than three times and it will stay in her wardrobe until she has had more use out of it.’
‘I don’t care,’ Katherine says. ‘I can always order another.’