were sure of hour and place.
Around him were hounds and huntsmen. This night the hunt would end at Wolf Hall whether the stag led them there or not. But the waiting was long, and try as he might he could not forget Anne Boleyn.
He spoke to his conscience, “Thank God I can now leave Mary without constant fear that she will meet a horrible end. Thank God I discovered the evil ways of this harlot.”
He had done right, he assured himself. Katharine had suffered through her; Mary had suffered. Thank God he had found out in time! Thank God he had turned his affections on a more worthy object!
What would the people say when they heard the gun booming from the Tower? What would they say of a man who went to a new bride before the body of his wife was cold?
Along the river came the dismal booming of the gun. He heard it; his mouth twisted into a line of mingling joy and apprehension.
“The deed is done!” he cried. “Uncouple the hounds and away!”
So he rode on, on to Wolf Hall, on to marriage with Jane Seymour.
No Other Will Than His
THE DOWAGER DUCHESS of Norfolk was in bed and very sad. A new queen reigned in the place of her granddaughter; a pale-faced creature with scarcely any eyebrows so that she looked forever surprised, a meek, insipid, vapid woman; and to put her on the throne had the King sent beautiful Anne to the block. The Duchess’s dreams were haunted by her granddaughter, and she would awaken out of them sweating and trembling. She had just had such a dream, and thought she had stood among those spectators who had watched Anne submit her lovely head to the Executioner’s sword.
She began to weep into her bedclothes, seeing again Anne at court, Anne at Lambeth; she remembered promised favors which would never now be hers. She could rail against the King in the privacy her bedchamber offered her. Fat! Coarse! Adulterer! And forty-five! While Anne at twenty-nine had lost her lovely head that that slut Seymour might sit beside him on the throne!
“Much good will she do him!” murmured the Duchess. “Give the King a son quickly, Mistress Seymour, or your head will not stay on your shoulders more than a year or two, I warrant you! And I’ll be there to see the deed done; I swear it!” She began to chuckle throatily, remembering that she had heard but a week or so after his marriage to Jane had been announced, the King, on meeting two very beautiful young women, had shown himself to be—and even mentioned this fact—sorry that he had not seen them before he married Jane. It had not been so with Anne. She had absorbed his attention, and it was only when she could not produce a son that her enemies had dared to plot against her. “Bound to Serve and Obey.” That was the device chosen by Jane. “You’ll serve, my dear!” muttered the Duchess. “But whether you produce a son or not remains to be seen, and if you do not, why then you must very meekly obey, by laying your head on the block. You’ll have your enemies just as my sweet Anne did!” The Duchess dried her eyes and set her lips firmly together as she thought of one of the greatest of those enemies, both to Anne and herself, and one with whom she must continually be on her guard—her own stepson and Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk.
Some of the Duchess’s ladies came in to help her dress. Stupid girls they were. She scolded them, for she thought their hands over-rough as they forced her bulk into clothes too small for it.
“Katharine Tylney! I declare you scratch me with those nails of yours. I declare you did it apurpose! Take that!”
Katharine Tylney scowled at the blow. The old Duchess’s temper had been very bad since the execution of the Queen, and the least thing sent it flaring up. Katharine Tylney shrugged her shoulders at Mistress Wilkes and Mistress Baskerville, the two who were also assisting with the Duchess’s toilet. When they were beyond the range of the Duchess’s ears they would curse the old woman, laughing at her obscenity and her ill-temper, laughing because she who was so fat and old and ugly was vain as a young girl, and would have just the right amount of embroidered kirtle showing beneath her skirt, and would deck herself in costly jewels even in the morning.
The Duchess wheezed and scolded while her thoughts ran on poor Anne and sly Jane and that absurd fancy of the King’s, which had made him change the one for the other; she brooded on the cunning of that low-born brute Cromwell, and the cruelty of Norfolk and Suffolk, until she herself felt as though she were standing almost as near the edge of that active volcano as Anne herself had stood.
She dismissed the women and went slowly into her presence chamber to receive the first of her morning callers. She was fond of ceremony and herself kept an establishment here at Lambeth—as she had at Norfolk—like a queen’s. As she entered the chamber, she saw a letter lying on a table, and going to it, read her own name. She frowned at it, picked it up, looked at the writing, did not recognize this, unfolded it and began to read; and as she read a dull anger set her limbs shaking. She re-read it.
“This is not true!” she said aloud, and she spoke to reassure herself, for had she not for some time suspected the possibility of such a calamity! “It is not true!” she repeated fiercely. “I’ll have the skin beaten off the writer of this letter. My granddaughter to behave in this way! Like some low creature in a tavern!”
Puffing with that breathlessness which the least exertion aroused in her, she once more read the letter with its sly suggestion that she should go quietly and unannounced to the ladies’ sleeping apartments and see for herself how Catherine Howard and Francis Derham, who called themselves wife and husband, behaved as such.
“Under my roof!” cried the Duchess. “Under my roof!” She trembled violently, thinking of this most sordid scandal’s reaching the ears of her stepson.
She paced up and down not knowing what it would be best for her to do. She recalled a certain night when the key of the ladies’ apartment had not been in its rightful place, and she had gone up to find the ladies alone, but seeming guilty; she remembered hearing suspicious creaking noises in the gallery. There had been another occasion when going to the maids’ room she had found Catherine and Derham romping on the floor.
She sent for Jane Acworth, for Jane had been present and had had her ears boxed in the maids’ room for looking on with indifference while Catherine and Derham behaved so improperly.
Jane’s eyes glinted with fear when she saw the wrath of the Duchess.
“You know this writing?”
