in the gallery, where I’d got drawn into music practice with Alice and Anne Basset. He came slinking over, all smiles, attempting to slide his way back into my favour. ‘Hello, you.’
I said nothing although I did tilt my face for his kiss, which then struck me as a gesture typical of Kate - that showy petulance that she affected with men.
‘Been busy?’ He was keen to make amends.
Was I ever? But he’d asked, he’d given me the opportunity to knock him back, so I launched laboriously into a list of the day’s decidedly unspectacular activities: I’d written to my cousin and my father; tackled a new piece on the virginals; been entrusted to choose a gown and some jewellery for Kate from The Wardrobe and The Jewel House, settling on an indigo satin gown and sapphire-and-pearl necklace; managed to catch Liz Fitzgerald’s favoured tailor when he was visiting her, to ask if he could make a cloak for my little cousin in time for New Year; and dropped in at the Duchess of Richmond’s rooms to check the progress of the puppies, one of which, when weaned, would be Kate’s. I related all this in a deliberately flat tone, staring him down as I did so. Understandably, when he’d listened politely, he backed off.
Later still, when the evening’s dancing began, I relented and took him aside, finally asking him outright, ‘So, where were you, yesterday?’
He turned his big eyes to mine. ‘My mother wasn’t well.’
‘What’s wrong?’ It must’ve been something serious, I thought, for him to have gone all the way to London, and my stomach clenched at the prospect of what he might be facing. Then again, he’d come all the way back, so whatever was wrong hadn’t been serious enough to detain him.
‘I don’t really know.’
That struck me as vague, but, then, Francis was so often vague.
‘Well, is she any better?’
‘A bit.’
I began to suspect he was lying, so I delved: ‘Were your brothers there?’
He nodded.
‘Both of them?’
‘Yes.’ A touch of impatience, now: I said so, didn’t I?
And thus I had him: ‘You told me your younger brother was in York.’ He’d told me that his brother had gone up there the previous week for a month of work.
He narrowed his eyes, he was cross. ‘Well, he came back,’ and he protested, ‘I don’t tell you everything.’
I sighed. ‘Clearly not, Francis.’ York and back inside a week? There’d barely have been time to turn around. He was definitely lying.
‘Look…’ but then he dropped whatever further protest he was about to make and settled instead for, ‘I’ve had a really, really long day,’ and I saw how that, at least, was the truth. He looked exhausted. Tenderness washed over me and I let it drop.
I shouldn’t have, though, because in the early hours of the following morning a couple of handfuls of soil hissed at my window. Alice didn’t stir but both Thomasine and I were woken. Thomasine occupied the side of the bed nearest the window and with a lot of muttering - Bound to be Mr Dereham, what’s the betting it’s Mr Dereham - she raised herself to it, prised it open, and peeked - ‘Yup’ - before flopping back down and yanking the bedclothes over her head. Anxious to put a stop to the disturbance, I rose and - nightgown over nightshirt, and shoes on - hurried down there.
He’d ducked inside the stairwell to hide from the night-watch. Despite the darkness, somehow I could see he was huge-eyed. His breathing skittered over the silence. He said nothing. He was terrified, I realised, and terror of my own leapt up inside me to meet his because I’d never seen him like this. He was here on the run from something or someone. This - here, this dark stairwell - was his refuge, yet clearly it was no refuge at all.
I couldn’t - just couldn’t - take him in my arms; something held me back, a dread perhaps of making him vulnerable. And he, too, held himself separate, trying to hold himself together. And so we stood there, looking at each other in the darkness. Still he said nothing - he couldn’t say it, I understood, he couldn’t bring himself to say that earlier he’d lied to me. It was obvious now but it had been obvious at the time, too, and I had to quell my fury that we’d ever had to go through that charade of his mother’s supposed illness.
He confided, ‘It was Wriothesley,’ his breaths uneven and raucous in the silence.
Thomas Wriothesley, secretary of state to the king. I didn’t understand: ‘What was Wriothesley?’
‘Had me in for questioning.’
Still nothing: it made no sense whatsoever, to me. ‘About what?’ Why on earth would Thomas Wriothesley be questioning Francis? And all day? And in such a way as to cause this terror in him? Francis was no one, he’d know nothing about anything. He was harmless: he was an innocent if I’d ever known one.
He urged, ‘About before’, as if that should mean something.
‘Before?’
‘When we lived at the duchess’s.’
What was there to know? What could possibly be of interest to a man such as Wriothesley? Or indeed anyone. I could barely recall our time there, myself, not least because there was nothing to remember: that was its distinguishing feature, for me. Nothing had ever happened at the duchess’s. ‘What about the duchess’s?’
Despite the darkness, I knew he’d given me a very direct look: loaded, in warning. ‘Kate,’ he whispered.
‘Kate?’ Kate had been nobody when she’d lived at the duchess’s: she was just a girl. That was her virtue. All those previous complicated queens with their connections, but Kate was no one - a Howard, yes, but a minor one - and she had no history.
‘Kate and me,’ he said, and then suddenly I knew what he meant and my heart shrank. I tried to keep myself steady. He was looking at me - of course he was - and I resented it, I wanted not to be there under his scrutiny; I wanted to be away, by myself, alone.
‘And’ - he sounded wondrous - ‘he knew it all.’
All: well, I didn’t want to think about that. A tiny word encompassing so much, none of which I wanted to remember. I’d assumed we’d left it long behind.
‘I don’t know how’, he continued. ‘But it was just, “We have information.’”
‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’ I said, because that was the point, pure and simple, and we needed to keep to the point. ‘She wasn’t married to the king, then.’ Why, though, then, had Wriothesley questioned him about it? ‘You did nothing wrong, there’s no law against it.’
I was right, I knew I was right, so Francis’s scepticism - a puff of dismissal - riled me. There was some reluctance from him — a held breath — before he ventured, ‘But if there was pre-contract -’
‘But
