Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  I ran into the hall and a man caught me as I headed for the stairs, I pushed him away and then I realised it was the one man in the whole world that I wanted. ‘William!’

  ‘Love, my love. You know, then?’

  ‘Oh my God, William. They have taken Catherine! They have taken my girl!’

  ‘Arrested Catherine? On what charge?’

  ‘No! She is with Anne. As maid in waiting. And Anne is ordered to the Privy Council.’

  ‘In London?’

  ‘No, meeting here.’

  He released me at once, swore briefly, took half a dozen steps in a small circle and then came back to me and caught up my hands. ‘We’ll just have to wait then, until she comes out.’ He scanned my face. ‘Don’t look like that, Catherine is a little lass. They’re questioning the queen, not her. They probably won’t even speak to her, and if they do she has nothing to hide.’

  I took a shuddering breath and nodded. ‘No. She has nothing to hide. She has seen nothing that is not common knowledge. And they would only question her. She is gentry. They wouldn’t do anything worse. Where is Henry?’

  ‘Safe. I left him at our lodgings with the wet nurse and the baby. I thought you were running because of your brother.’

  ‘What about him?’ I said suddenly, my heart hammering again. ‘What about George?’

  ‘They’ve arrested him.’

  ‘With Anne?’ I said. ‘To answer to the Privy Council?’

  William’s face was dark. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They have taken him to the Tower. Henry Norris is there already, the king himself rode with him into the Tower yesterday. And Mark Smeaton – you remember the singer? – he is there too.’

  My lips were too numb to frame any words. ‘But what is the charge? And why question the queen here?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nobody knows.’

  We waited until noon for any further news. I hovered in the hall outside the chamber where the Privy Council were questioning the queen but I was not allowed into the antechamber for fear that I might listen at the door.

  ‘I don’t want to listen, I just want to see my daughter,’ I explained to the sentry. He nodded and said nothing, but gestured me back from the threshold.

  A little after noon the door opened and a pageboy slipped out and whispered to the sentry. ‘You have to go,’ the sentry said to me. ‘My orders are to clear the way.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked.

  ‘You have to go,’ he said stubbornly. He gave a shout down the stairs to the great hall and an answering shout came ringing up. They gently pushed me to one side, away from the Privy Council door, away from the stairs, away from the hall, away from the garden door, and then out of the very garden itself. All the other courtiers encountered on the way were thrust to one side too. We all went as we were bid; it was as if we had not recognised how powerful the king was before that moment.

  I realised that they had cleared a way from the Privy Council room to the river stairs. I ran to the landing stage where the common people disembarked when they came to the palace. There were no guards on the common landing stage, no-one to stop me standing at the very end of it, straining my eyes to see towards the Greenwich Palace stairs.

  I saw them clearly: Anne in her blue gown that she had worn to watch the tennis, Catherine a pace behind her in her yellow gown. I was pleased to see that she had her cloak with her, in case it was cold on the river, then I shook my head at the folly of worrying if she would catch cold when I did not know where they were taking her. I watched them intently, as if by watching I could protect her. They went in the king’s barge, not the queen’s ship, and the roll of the drum for the rowers sounded to me as ominous and as doleful as the roll of drums when the executioner raises his axe.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I shouted as loudly as I could, unable to contain my fear any longer.

  Anne did not hear me but I saw the white shape of Catherine’s face as she turned towards my voice, and looked all around for me in the palace garden.

  ‘Here! Here!’ I shouted more loudly and I waved to her. She looked towards me and she raised her hand in a tiny gesture, and then followed Anne on board the king’s barge.

  The soldiers pushed off in one smooth motion the moment that they had them on board. The lurch of the boat threw them both into their seats and there was a moment when I lost sight of her. Then I saw her again. She was seated on a little chair, next to Anne, and she was looking out over the water towards me. The oarsmen took the barge into the middle of the river and rowed easily with the inflowing tide.

  I did not try to call again, I knew that the rowers’ drum would drown out my voice, and I did not want to frighten Catherine, hearing her mother crying out for her. I stood very still and I raised my hand to her so that she could see that I knew where she was, and I knew where she was going, and I would come for her as soon as ever I could.

  I sensed but did not look round as William came behind me and raised his hand to our daughter as well. ‘Where d’you think they’re taking them?’ he asked, as if he did not know the answer as well as me.

  ‘You know where,’ I said. ‘Why ask me? To the worst place we can think of. To the Tower.’

  William and I did not delay. We went straight to our room and threw a few clothes into a bag and then hurried to the stables. Henry was waiting with the horses, and he had a quick hug and a bright smile for me before William threw me up into the saddle and mounted his own horse. We took Catherine’s horse with us, newly shod. Henry led her alongside his own hunter while William led the wet nurse’s broad-backed cob. She was waiting for us and we had her up in the saddle and the baby strapped safely at her breast and then we went quietly out of the palace and up the road to London without telling anyone where we were going nor how long we would be gone.

  William took rooms for us behind the Minories, away from the riverside. I could see the Beauchamp Tower where Anne and my daughter were imprisoned. My brother and the other men were somewhere nearby. It was the tower where Anne had spent the night before her coronation. I wondered if she remembered now the great gown that she wore and the silence of the City which warned her then that she would never be a beloved queen.

  William ordered the woman of the house to make a dinner for us and went out to gather news. He came back in time to eat and when the woman had served dinner and got herself out of the room he told me what he knew. The inns around the Tower were all buzzing with the news that the queen had been taken up, and the word was that her charge was adultery and witchcraft and no-one knew what else.

  I nodded. This sealed Anne’s fate. Henry was using the power of gossip, the voice of the mob, to pave the way to an annulment of the marriage, and a new queen. Already in the taverns they were saying that the king was in love again and this time with a beautiful and innocent girl, an English girl from Wiltshire, God bless her, and as devout and sweet as Anne had been over-educated and French-influenced. From somewhere, someone had gathered the certainty that Jane Seymour was a friend to Princess Mary. She had served Queen Katherine well. She prayed in the old ways, she did not read disputatious books nor argue with men who knew better. Her family were not grasping lords but honest honourable men. And it was a fertile family. There could be no doubt but Jane Seymour would have sons where Katherine and Anne had both failed.

  ‘And my brother?’

  William shook his head. ‘No news.’

  I closed my eyes. I could not imagine a world where George was not free to come and go as he pleased. Who could accuse George? Who could blame him for anything, so sweet and so feckless?

  ‘And who is waiting on Anne?’ I asked.

  ‘Your aunt, Madge Shelton’s mother, and a pair of other ladies.’

  I made a face. ‘No-one she likes or trusts. But at least she can release Catherine now. She’s not alone.’

  ‘I thought you could write. She could have a letter if it was left open. I’ll take it to William Kingston, the constable of the Tower and ask him to give it t