The Confession of Katherine Howard

I began catching myself thinking in asides, but mine were merely reflex, nothing but tics: Nice one, Mr Scully; Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Barber; Is that really necessary, Mr Wolfe? With the exception of Mary, who could never reign herself in, we girls began talking together in asides, too - our girlish exuberance dampened down. Within a week, we’d become watchers, turning self-conscious, guarded, judgemental. What had happened to the ready smile that my mother had insisted was so important? What had happened to Be respectful?

And still none of the adults seemed to notice; on the contrary, they regarded Katherine as the very model of diligence. Something to do with how high she held her head, perhaps; her meeting of their eyes with her own, and the confident half-smile. She hoodwinked everyone. See that it’s done, please, Katherine: they were addressing everything to her, as if she were in charge of us. And thus she became so. Certainly my friends seemed to concur: there was a seriousness to their gathering around her, a respect in it - even from Mary, sometimes, in the early days - as if something important were to be gleaned from her very presence.

One morning, heading along the gallery towards the household office with a letter to my mother, I glanced down through a linen-screened window to see my friends following Katherine across the courtyard. Not that she was actually leading them, nor even walking in front of them: her pace was too stately for that, her swaying hips partnered by her swirling of a lavender head by its long stem. She was in the middle of them and it was Alice who was ahead, although turned around and pacing backwards. Still, I knew that whatever they were doing had been Katherine’s idea - perhaps a casually thrown Let’s go to the gardens - and even from a distance, and through that thick cloth, my friends’ readiness was palpable. To my mind, everyone was being taken in, as I might so easily have been when I’d first set eyes on her. What pained me particularly was that Dottie was falling for those superior-sounding asides. I could understand it of Maggie, because she was young and thereby could be said to be impressionable, although actually she wasn’t; and Alice because, as far as I could tell, despite her seriousness she was - frankly - empty-headed; and, well, anything could be expected of Mary. But Dottie: I was angry at Katherine for taking advantage of Dottie’s readiness, and disappointed with Dottie for being naïve. For no reason that I could fathom, I’d expected more of Dottie. I, alone, was standing my ground. My mother was wrong again, and this time spectacularly so: Be the girl who warms hearts. Well, despite her cold eyes and cutting comments, it was Katherine whom everyone wanted.

My mother had claimed that character was what distinguished a girl: she’d said not to pay attention to mere appearances. Yet Katherine did and everyone was in thrall to it. Each day, there was something different in how she dressed, so minor as to escape notice and censor by busy adults but for that reason looming large in our little world. A plaited ribbon slung around her wrist. Her sleeves rolled back as if she’d just finished doing something, which she hadn’t. Her hood worn further and further back, and a loose knot in its veil which could’ve been there by mistake except that she didn’t make mistakes. For me, it rankled: she’d given thought to how she dressed, as if it mattered, when - I knew, I just knew - that it didn’t. Because how could it? Clothes were just cloth. Yet we looked for them, found ourselves looking for them, these additions and adaptations: I saw my friends sneaking looks, even as I did. Her own studied lack of regard, by contrast, implied they were nothing much, a momentary diversion: it was we who were in thrall to them, said her indifference, not she. Even noticing them - let alone commenting on them — should be beneath us, said that indifference of hers. So, we were reduced to a surreptitious keeping track of them, which was how they established their hold.

One morning, Dottie fixed a band of red cloth across her forehead, under the front of her hood, covering the parted hair that would usually be visible. She looked lovely - but, then, she always did; she didn’t need a piece of cloth to make her so. Presumably she’d taken it from the basket of scraps. It was what Katherine had done earlier in the week - hers had been black satin - but Dottie wasn’t wearing hers with Katherine’s insouciance. Instead, adjusting her hood, she shone with shy pride. Seeing this, my heart sank in anticipation of her exposure, and sure enough: ‘What’s that?’ asked Katherine, as we left for the duchess’s closet. Caught off-guard, Dottie stammered, ‘A piece of chamlet.’ Reduced to being spelt out as such, that little red sash lost any magic that it might possibly have possessed. A scrap of chamlet: why wear it? Katherine appraised it with those almost-smiling eyes of hers, before pronouncing, unconvincingly and damningly, ‘It’s nice.’ By dinner-time, it was gone and Dottie never again attempted anything similar.

My instinct, from the very first day, had been to resist Katherine, coupled in time by a stinging realisation that I’d be going it alone. She must’ve sensed my truculence, but never during that difficult first year when we lived alongside each other did she try to win me over. Nor, though, did she make any move to exclude me. It simply became accepted that I’d go for my walk in the gardens before supper while she and Dottie gossiped in our room, and that I’d loll on my mattress while, last thing, in their nightshirts, she, Dottie and Maggie practised their dance steps. I sensed that Katherine was keeping her distance from me: glittering back at me over the space that had opened up between us. But I didn’t feel any freer. In fact, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I remained my own person only because she was allowing it.

Mary was faring less well. Katherine took everything in her stately stride with the exception of Mary. Mary was her stumbling block. I’d seen it on her very first evening and it had only worsened. I’d once overheard Skid sighing to her husband that Mary would try the patience of a saint but, before Katherine’s arrival, our own tolerance of Mary had been less to do with saintliness than with being at an utter loss. Whenever she’d blundered in on us, bursting with greetings and expecting fulsome reciprocation, forgetting an appalling scene that she’d created a mere hour before, we’d find ourselves offering the required response just because she was impossible to ignore. Not for Katherine, though, and she showed us how easy it was. She simply didn’t look at her. She’d continue doing whatever she was doing, or talking or listening to whomever had been talking to her, fixing her companion with a stare so that there was a clear obligation to continue. Pausing and turning to Mary would have been to drop Katherine: a choice between Mary and Katherine, which, for anyone, even me, was no choice at all because Mary would give you no thanks and would be likely to give you grief. So, Mary had to weather her rejection and sit disgruntled, fuming, learning her place.

One evening at supper, that first spring of ours at the duchess’s, Katherine dipped a fingertip into the residue of sauce on her plate and began a sinuous sliding, rarely broken and then only with precision. She was writing. When finished, she looked momentarily pleased with it - head cocked, appreciative - before paying it no further mind. Quite a display in itself, her abandonment of it, as if this - writing in her sauce - was something she did all the time. And so there it was, the word, the name, staring up at us, staring us down: OTIS, and, framing it, the twin lobes of a heart.

Otis: charcoal-burner and - taking advantage of being out there in the woods - beekeeper. Long eyelashes and cowslick hair, and missing his two front teeth, which - happily - didn’t make him any less ready to smile. Otis was nice enough. But too old - perhaps as old as twenty - and anyway he was a charcoal-burner. Charcoal-burning was a skilled job, and there was the added attraction of his honey, but he’d never have been parcelled out, previously, in our negotiations because he was a labourer, which was a step too far.

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