The Boleyn Inheritance

Katherine, Norfolk House, Lambeth,
July 1539

Now let me see, what do I have?

I have a small gold chain from my long-dead mother that I keep in my special jewelry box, sadly empty but for this one chain; but I am certain to get more. I have three gowns, one of them new. I have a piece of French lace sent by my father from Calais. I have half a dozen ribbons of my own. And, more than anything else, I have me. I have me, glorious me! I am fourteen today, imagine that! Fourteen! Fourteen, young, nobly born though, tragically, not rich; but in love, wonderfully in love. My lady grandmother the duchess will give me a gift for my birthday, I know she will. I am her favorite, and she likes me to look well. Perhaps some silk for a gown, perhaps a coin to buy lace. My friends in the maids’ chamber will give me a feast tonight when we are supposed to be asleep; the young men will tap their secret signal on the door, and we will rush to let them in and I will cry, “Oh, no!” as if I wanted it to be just girls alone, as if I am not in love, madly in love, with Francis Dereham. As if I haven’t spent all day just longing for tonight, when I shall see him. In five hours from now I will see him. No! I have just looked at my grandmother’s precious French clock. Four hours and forty-eight minutes.

Forty-seven minutes.

Forty-six. I really am amazed at how devoted I am to him, that I should actually watch a clock tick down the time until we are together. This must be a most passionate love, a most devoted love, and I must be a girl of really unusual sensitivity to feel this deeply.

Forty-five; but it’s dreadfully boring, just waiting, now.

I haven’t told him how I feel, of course. I should die of embarrassment if I had to tell him myself. I think I may die anyway, die for love of him. I have told no one but my dearest friend Agnes Restwold, and sworn her to secrecy on pain of death, on pain of a traitor’s death. She says she will be hanged and drawn and quartered before she tells anyone that I am in love. She says she will go to the block like my cousin Queen Anne before she betrays my secret. She says they will have to pull her apart on the rack before she tells. I have told Margaret Morton as well, and she says that death itself would not make her tell, not if they were to fling her in the bear pit. She says they could burn her at the stake before she would tell. This is good because it means that one of them is certain to tell him before he comes to the chamber tonight, and so he will know that I like him.

I have known him for months now, half a lifetime. At first I only watched him but now he smiles and says hello to me. Once he called me by name. He comes with all the other young men of the household to visit us girls in our chamber, and he thinks he is in love with Joan Bulmer, who has eyes like a frog; if she were not so free with her favors, no man would ever look twice at her. But she is free, very free indeed; and so it is me whom he does not look twice at. It isn’t fair. It’s so unfair. She is a good ten years older than me and married, and so she knows how to attract a man, whereas I have much still to learn. Dereham is more than twenty as well. They all think of me as a child; but I am not a child, and I will show them. I am fourteen, I am ready for love. I am ready for a lover, and I am so in love with Francis Dereham that I will die if I don’t see him at once. Four hours and forty minutes.

But now, from today, everything must be different. Now that I am fourteen, everything is certain to change. It has to, I know it will. I shall put on my new French hood, and I shall tell Francis Dereham that I am fourteen and he will see me as I truly am: a woman now, a woman of some experience, a woman grown; and then we shall see how long he stays with old froggy face when he could come across the room to lie in my bed instead.

He’s not my first love, it is true; but I never felt anything like this for Henry Manox and if he says I did, then he is a liar. Henry Manox was well enough for me when I was a girl just living in the country, a child really, learning to play the virginal and knowing nothing of kissing and touching. Why, when he first kissed me, I didn’t even like it very much, and begged him to stop, and when he put his hand up my skirt, I was so shocked I screamed aloud and cried. I was only eleven years old; I couldn’t be expected to know the pleasures of a woman. But I know all about that now. Three years in the maids’ chamber have taught me every little wile and play that I need. I know what a man wants, and I know how to play him, and I know when to stop, too.

My reputation is my dowry – my grandmother would point out that I have no other, sour old cat – and no one will ever say that Katherine Howard does not know what is due to her and her family. I am a woman now, not a child. Henry Manox wanted to be my lover when I was a child in the country, when I knew next to nothing, when I had seen nobody, or at any rate nobody who mattered. I would have let him have me, too, after he had bribed and bullied me for weeks to do the full deed, but in the end it was he who stopped short for fear of being caught. People would have thought badly of us since he was more than twenty and I was eleven. We were going to wait till I was thirteen. But now I live in Norfolk House in Lambeth, not buried in Sussex, and the king himself could ride past the door any day, the archbishop is our next-door neighbor, my own uncle Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, calls with all his great train, and he once remembered my name. I’m far beyond Henry Manox now. I’m not a country girl who can be bullied into giving him kisses and forced to do more; I am a good deal too high for that now. I know what’s what in the bedroom, I am a Howard girl, I have a wonderful future before me.

Except – and this is such a tragedy that I really don’t know how to bear it – although I am of an age to go to court, and as a Howard girl my natural place should be in the queen’s chambers, there is no queen! It is a disaster for me. There is no queen at all. Queen Jane died after having her baby, which seems to me to be just laziness really, and so there are no places at court for maids-in-waiting. This is so terribly unlucky for me; I think no girl has ever been as unlucky as I have been: to have my fourteenth birthday in London, just as the queen has to go and die, and the whole court droop into mourning for years. Sometimes I feel that the whole world conspires against me, as if people want me to live and die an old lady spinster.

What is the point of being pretty if no nobleman is ever going to know me? How will anyone ever see how charming I can be if nobody ever sees me at all? If it were not for my love, my sweetest handsome love, Francis, Francis, Francis, I should utterly despair, and throw myself into the Thames before I am a day older.

But thank God, at least I do have Francis to hope for, and the world to play for. And God, if he truly does know everything, can have made me so exquisite only for a great future. He must have a plan for me? Fourteen and perfect? Surely he in his wisdom won’t let me waste away in Lambeth?