‘They sent for Prince Edward’s tutor to persuade her. But she quoted them verse after verse from the Bible and proved them wrong.’
‘Could you not save her?’ I burst out. ‘William, could you say nothing to save her?’
‘She confounded me,’ he says miserably. ‘She looked me in the face and said that it was a great shame on me that I should advise her, against my own knowledge.’
I gasp. ‘She accused you of thinking as she does? She’s going to name the people who believe as she does?’
He shakes his head. ‘No! No! She was very careful in what she said: meticulous. She named nobody. Not me, not a word against you or your ladies. She accused me of advising her against my own knowledge; but she did not say what my knowledge might be.’
I am ashamed of my next question. ‘Did anyone mention me at all?’
‘They put it to her that she preached in your rooms, and she said so do many preachers of many different beliefs. They tried to get her to name her friends in your rooms.’ Carefully he looks at the floor so no-one can say he exchanged a glance with anyone. ‘She would not. She was stubborn. She would not give any names.
‘It was clear, sister, very clear, that the only thing they wanted from her was proof of your meetings, heretical meetings. They would have released her, then and there, if she had named you as a heretic.’
‘You’re saying that it’s me they want, not her,’ I say quietly through stiff lips.
He nods. ‘It was obvious. Obvious to everyone. She knows.’
I am silent for a moment, trying to push down my fear into my churning belly. I try to be brave, as Anne Boleyn was brave. She protested the innocence of her brother, of her friends. ‘Is there any way we can get her released?’ I ask. ‘Does she have to go to trial? Should I go to the king and tell him that they have wrongly imprisoned her?’
William looks at me as if I have lost my wits. ‘Kat – he knows already. Don’t be stupid. This is not Gardiner running ahead of the king, this is Gardiner doing only what the king wants. The king himself signed the warrant for her arrest, approved her being sent for trial, ordered that she be held at Newgate until she is tried. He will have prepared an instruction for the jury. He will have decided already.’
‘A jury should be independent!’
‘But it is not. He’ll tell them what verdict to bring in. But she’ll have to stand trial. Her only safety would be to recant at her trial.’
‘I don’t think she’ll do that.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘What will happen then?’
He just looks at me. We both know what will happen then.
‘What will happen to us?’ he asks miserably.
To my surprise, the king comes to my rooms with the gentlemen of his household and some of the Privy Council to escort us in to dinner. It has been a long time since the king was well enough to lead me in to dine. They come in noisily as if celebrating his return to court. He cannot walk, he cannot even stand on his ulcerated leg, but comes in his wheeled chair with his thickly bandaged leg extended before him. He is laughing at this, as if it were a temporary injury from jousting or hunting, and the court takes its cue from him, and laughs too, as if we expect to see him dancing tomorrow or the day after. Catherine Brandon says she will commission a rival chair and there can be a chair joust with the king in the lists, and he swears it must be done and we shall have chair jousting tomorrow. Will Somers dances before him as he is wheeled into the room, pretends to fall and be run over by the inexorable progress of the huge chair and the massive man half reclining inside it.
‘Moloch! I have been run over by Moloch!’ Will mourns.
‘Will, if I had run you over, you wouldn’t be here to shout about it,’ the king warns him. ‘Keep away from the wheels, Fool.’
Will responds with a somersaulting dive that throws him out of the way just in time. My ladies shriek a warning and laugh as if it is extraordinarily funny. We are all on edge, all anxious to keep the king in his sunny mood.
‘I swear I will mow you down in my chariot,’ Henry shouts.
‘Can’t catch me,’ Will replies cheekily, and at once Henry bellows at the two pages, sweating behind the handles of the chair, that they must pursue Will around my presence chamber as he dances and leaps, balancing on benches, springing up to the window seat, darting round my ladies, snatching them by the waist and spinning them round so the king charges at them and not him, sending them screaming and giggling out of the way. It is a romp with everyone running in one direction or another and Henry at the centre of it all, red-faced, bellowing with laughter and shouting, ‘Faster! Faster!’ At the end, Will collapses in a heap and snatches up a piece of white embroidery above his head, waving it in a sign of surrender.
‘You are Helios,’ he tells Henry. ‘And I am just a little cloud.’
‘You are a great Fool,’ Henry says affectionately, ‘and you have disrupted my wife’s rooms, frightened her ladies and caused endless confusion with your folly.’
‘We are a pair of young fools,’ Will says, smiling up at his master. ‘As foolish as we were when we were twenty. But at least Your Majesty is wiser than you were then.’
‘How so?’
‘You are more wise and more kingly. You are more handsome and more brave.’
Henry smiles, anticipating the joke. ‘I am indeed.’
‘Your Majesty, there is more of you altogether,’ Will crows. ‘Much more. The queen has more of a husband than most women.’
Henry bellows his deep-throated laugh and loses his breath in coughing. ‘You are a varlet; go and get your dinner with the hounds in the kitchen.’
Will bows gracefully and retires out of the way. As he passes me I catch a quick smile from him, almost as if he was acknowledging to me that he has done his best; all I have to do is to get through dinner. Not for the first time, I wonder how much of a fool Will Somers can be: a long-term survivor of this knife-edge court.
‘Shall we go in to dinner?’ the king asks me.
I smile and curtsey, and we proceed, a strange awkward procession, headed by the king in his chair and the panting pages, with me walking beside my husband, my hand on his, resting on the arm of his chair, while he wheezes, sweat pouring from his huge body, staining the armpits of his gold silk jacket and soaking his collar, and I wonder how long this can go on.
‘Did you have a sermon this afternoon?’ he asks courteously as the server pours water from a golden jug over his hands and another pats his fingers dry with a white linen napkin.
‘Yes,’ I say holding out my hands for fresh scented water. ‘We had Your Majesty’s chaplain talk to us about grace. It was very interesting, very thought-provoking.’
‘Nothing too wild,’ the king says with an indulgent smile. ‘Nothing that would make young Tom Howard argumentative, I hope. He is released from the Tower but I can’t have him upsetting his father again.’
I smile as if it means nothing to me but an afternoon’s entertainment. ‘Nothing wild at all, Your Majesty. Just the Word of God and a churchman’s understanding of it.’
‘It’s all well and good in your rooms,’ he says, suddenly irritable. ‘But they can’t go on discussing it in the streets and the taprooms. It’s one thing for scholars to debate, it’s quite another when it’s some girl from a farm and some fool of an apprentice trying to read and wrestle with ideas.’
‘I quite agree,’ I say. ‘That is why Your Majesty was so gracious when you gave them a Bible in English, and they so wish they could have it back again. Then they can quietly read and learn. Then they have a chance of understanding. They don’t have to gather to have one recite and another explain.’
He turns his big face towards me. His neck is so thick and his cheeks are so fat that his face is quite square from the white embroidered collar at the neck of his jacket to the sparse fringe of his hair at the top of his forehead. It is like being glared at by a block of stone. ‘No. You misunderstand me,’ he says coldly. ‘I didn’t give them the Bible for that. I don’t think that a farm girl from Lincoln should be reading and learning. I don’t think she should be studying and thinking. I have no desire to advance her understanding. And I am very sure she should not be preaching.’