The Boleyn Inheritance Read online

  Dear God, she must have thought she would die in here. It has been only a few days and already I feel like carving my name on the stone walls. The rooms face down over the long gardens; I can see the sunlight on the pale grass. This was an abbey, and the nuns who lived here were the pride of England for the strictness of their order and the beauty of their singing. Or so Lady Baynton says. But the king drove the nuns away and took the building into his own keeping, so now it is like trying to live in a church, and I swear the place is haunted with their sadness. It is not a fit place for me, at all. After all, I am Queen of England, and if not Queen of England then I am Katherine Howard, and a member of one of the greatest families in the kingdom. To be a Howard is to be one of the first, after all.

  Now, let me see, I must cheer myself somehow. So, what do I have? But, oh, it’s not very cheering. Really, not very cheering at all. Six gowns, which is not much, and in very dull colors, old-lady colors. Two rooms for my own use and a small household to serve me. So to see the best of it, I am really in a better case than when I was little Mistress Katherine Howard at Lambeth. I have a man who loves me and whom I love with my whole heart, and a very good chance of being released to marry him, I should think. I have a faithful friend in Lady Rochford, who will give evidence in my favor. Tom would die to save me so all I have to do when the archbishop comes again is go on confessing to Francis Dereham and Henry Manox and never say a word about Tom. I can do that. Even a fool like me can do that. And then everything will come out right and when I next count I shall have many lovely things again. I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it at all.

  But all the while I am reassuring myself of this, the tears are just pouring out of my eyes and I am sobbing and sobbing. I can’t seem to stop crying, though I know I am in a most hopeful state. Really, things are quite all right for me, I have always been lucky; I just can’t seem to stop crying.

  Jane Boleyn, the Tower of London,

  November 1541

  I am in such terror I think I shall go mad in truth. They keep asking me about Katherine and that fool Dereham, and I thought at first that I could deny everything. I was not there at Lambeth when they were lovers, and for sure they were never lovers after that. I could tell them all I know and with a clear conscience. But when that great wooden gate banged shut behind me, and the shadow of the Tower fell cold on me, I felt a terror that I had never known before.

  The ghosts that have haunted me since that day in May will take me for their own now. I am where they walked. I feel the chill of the same walls, and I know the same terror; I am living their deaths.

  Dear God, it must have been like this for him, for George, my beloved George. He must have heard that gate bang; he must have seen the stone bulk of the Tower block out the sky; he must have known that his friends and his enemies were somewhere inside these walls, lying their heads off to save themselves and to condemn him. And now I am here walking where he walked, and now I know what he felt, and now I know fear, as he knew it.

  If Cranmer and his inquisitors look no further than Katherine’s life when she was a girl, before she came to court, they have enough to destroy her; and what more do they need than that? If they rest on her affairs with Manox and Dereham, then they need nothing from me. I did not even know her then. It is nothing to do with me. So I should have nothing to fear. But if that is the case, then why am I here?

  The room is cramped, with stone-paved floors and damp stone walls. The walls are pocked with the carved initials of people who have been held here before me. I will not look for GB, “George Boleyn”; I think I should go mad if I saw his name. I will sit quietly by the window and look out to the courtyard below. I will not go over the walls for his name, fingering the cold stone looking for “Boleyn,” and touch where he carved. I will sit quietly here and look out of the window.

  No, this is no good. The window looks out onto Tower Green; my prison chamber looks down on the very spot where Anne was beheaded on my evidence. I cannot look at that place; I cannot look at the bright greenness of the grass – surely it is more verdant than any autumn grass should be? – if I look at the green, I will surely lose my mind. It must have been like this for her when she was waiting, and she would have known that I knew enough to have her beheaded. And she must have known that I would choose to have her beheaded. She knew that she had tormented me and teased me and laughed at me until I was beside myself with jealousy; she must have wondered how far I would follow my evil rage, even to seek her death? Then she knew. She knew I gave witness against the two of them, that I spoke out in a clear voice and condemned them without remorse. Well, I feel remorse now; God knows that I do.

  I feel as if I have been hiding myself from the truth for all these years, but it took that hard man the Duke of Norfolk to spell it out to me, and it took these cold walls to make it real for me. I was jealous of Anne and her love for George and his devotion to her, and I bore witness not from what I knew to be a fact, but from what would harm them the most. God forgive me. I took his tenderness and his care and his kindness for his sister, and I made it into something dirty and dark and bad because I could not bear that he was not tender or careful or kind to me. I brought him to his death to punish him for neglecting me. And now, like some old play in which the gods are furious, I am still neglected. I have never been more alone. I have committed the greatest sin a wife could do, and still I have no satisfaction.

  The duke has withdrawn to the country; neither Katherine nor I will ever see him again. I know him well enough to know that his sole care will be to protect his own old skin and guard his well-loved fortune. And the king needs a Howard to march and fight and execute for him. The king may hate him for this second adultery, but he will not make the mistake of losing a commander as well as a wife. Katherine’s step-grandmother, the duchess, may lose her life for this. If they can prove that she knew that Katherine, in her care, was little more than a slut, then they will accuse her of treason: for failing to warn the king. She will be tearing open documents, swearing servants to secrecy, sacking old retainers, and cleaning out her rooms, if I know her. She may be able to hide enough to save herself.

  But what about me?

  My way is clear. I shall say nothing of Thomas Culpepper, and the evidence I can give of Francis Dereham is that he was secretary to the queen at the request of her step-grandmother, and that nothing passed between them under my eye. If they discover about Thomas Culpepper (and if they look only a little, they are certain to discover all about Thomas Culpepper), then they will see it all. If they see it all, I shall tell them that she lay with him at Hampton Court, when the king first was ill, all through the royal progress when she thought she was with child, till the very day that we all went down on our knees and thanked God for her. That I knew she was a slut from that first day, but that she ordered me, and the duke ordered me, and I was not free to do what I thought right.

  This is what I shall say. She shall die for it, and the duke may die for it; but I will not.

  This is all I should consider.

  My room faces east, the sun rises in the morning at seven, and I am always awake to see it rise. The Tower throws a long shadow across the bright grass of the green where she died, as if it is pointing a dark finger to my window. If I think of Anne, in her beauty and her allure, in her cleverness and her wit, then I think I shall go mad. She was in these rooms, and she went down those stairs, and she went out to that piece of grass (which I could see if I went to the window, but I never go to the window) and put her head down on the block and died a brave death, knowing that she was betrayed by everyone who had benefited from her rise. Knowing that her brother and his friends, the little circle who loved her so well, had died the day before, knowing that I gave the fatal evidence, her uncle gave the death sentence, and the king celebrated it. I cannot think of this. I must take good care of myself and not think of this.

  Dear God, she knew that I betrayed her. Dear God, he went to a traitor’s death on the scaffold knowing th