The King's Curse Read online

  “No! No! No! Don’t you hear me? He’s not trying the marriage, he’s putting the woman on trial. He’s going to try her for adultery. And her brother, and some other men, God knows who, God knows how many. God knows if they are even our friends or our cousins. Surely only God knows why!”

  “Any of us?” I demand urgently. “Not any of our family or those who are working with us? None of the princess’s supporters?”

  “No. Not as far as I know. Not arrested yet. That’s what’s so strange. All those who are missing are those of the Boleyn party who are in and out of her rooms all day.” Montague makes a little face. “You know the ones. Norris, Brereton . . .”

  “Men that Cromwell doesn’t like,” I remark. “But why the lute boy?”

  “I don’t know!” Montague rubs his face with his hands. “They took him first. Perhaps because Cromwell can torture him till he confesses? Cromwell can torture him till he names others? Till he gives the names that Cromwell wants?”

  “Torture?” I repeat. “Torture him? The king is using torture? Against a boy? The little musician?”

  Montague looks at me as if the country we know and love, our heritage, is tumbling to hell under our feet. “And I have agreed to be on the jury,” he says.

  Not just my son Montague but twenty-five other peers of the realm have to sit in judgment on the woman whom they called queen. The panel is chaired by her uncle, grim-faced at the fall of the woman whom he pushed onto the throne, who became the queen whom he hated. Near him is her former lover, Henry Percy, trembling with ague, muttering that he is too sick to attend, that he should not be forced to attend.

  All the lords of my family are there. A good quarter of the jury are of our affinity or party, who support the Princess Mary and have hated the Boleyn woman ever since she usurped the throne. For us, though the accounts of kissing and seduction are shocking enough, the accusation that she poisoned the queen and was planning to poison the princess is a bitter confirmation of our worst fears. The rest of the panel are Henry’s men who can be relied on to hate or love as he commands. She made no friends while she was queen, no one says one word in her defense. There is no possibility of justice for her, as they study the evidence that Thomas Cromwell has so persuasively prepared.

  Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, who attended the queen’s funeral with me at Peterborough, has turned against her friend Anne and provides a report of flirtations and worse in the queen’s bedchamber. Someone speaks of something that someone said on their deathbed. It is a mess of petty gossip and grotesque scandal.

  Montague comes home, his face dark and angry. “The shame of it,” he says shortly. “The king says that he believes that up to a hundred men have had her. The disgrace.”

  I hand him a glass of mulled ale, while I watch him. “Did you say ‘guilty’?” I ask him.

  “I did,” he says. “The evidence was inarguable. Lord Cromwell had every detail that one might question. For some reason, which is beyond me, he allowed George Boleyn himself to tell the court out loud that the king was incapable of fathering a child. He announced the king’s impotency.”

  “Did they prove that she murdered our queen?”

  “They accused her of it. Seems that’s enough.”

  “Will he imprison her? Or send her to a nunnery?”

  Montague turns to me and his face is filled with a dark pity. “No. He’s going to kill her.”

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1536

  I leave London. I cannot bear to hear the speculation and the gossip, the constant retelling of the obscene details of the trial, the unending wondering what will happen next. Even the people who have hated the Boleyn woman cannot understand why the king does not call his marriage invalid, name his daughter Elizabeth a bastard, and put the mother away in some distant cold castle where she can die of neglect.

  Some of this is done: the marriage is annulled, the child Elizabeth declared a bastard. And yet still the woman is kept in the Tower and the plans for an execution go on.

  I am glad to be away from the city but I cannot put the woman in the Tower out of my mind. In the closed and derelict priory I go into the cold chapel and kneel on the stone floor facing east, though the beautiful cross and altar silverware have been taken away. I find myself praying to an empty altar for the woman whom I have hated, whose agent stole my holy things.

  There is no precedent for the execution of a Queen of England. It is not possible for a queen to be beheaded. No woman has ever walked from the Tower to the little patch of grass before the chapel to her death. I cannot imagine it. I cannot bear to imagine it. And I cannot believe that Henry Tudor, the prince whom I knew, could turn against a woman he had loved like this. He is a king whose courtly lovemaking is a byword at his court. He cannot be brutal; it is always love, true love, for Henry. Surely, he cannot sentence his wife, and the mother of his child, to death. I know that he turned against his own good queen, that he sent her away and neglected her. But it is a different thing, a different thing altogether, to ride away from a disappointing woman and ignore her, than to change overnight and command a lover’s death.

  I pray for Anne, but I find my thoughts turning again and again to the king. I think he must be in a fury of jealous rage, shamed at what men are saying about him, exposed by the spiteful wit of the Boleyns, feeling his age, feeling the good looks of his youth blurred by the fatness of his face. Every day he must look in his mirror and see the young, handsome prince disappearing behind the bloated face of an old, laughable king, the golden child becoming the Moldwarp. Everyone adored Henry when he was a young king; he cannot understand that his court, the wife whom he raised from nothing, could have turned against him and—worse—laughed at him as a fat old cuckold.

  But I am mistaken in this. While I think of the sensitive man recoiling with shame, raging at the loss of the woman for whom he destroyed so much, Henry is repairing his pride, courting the Seymour girl. He is not looking in the mirror and mourning his youth. He is going upriver in his barge with lute players twanging away, to dine with her every night. He is sending her little gifts and planning their future as if they are a bride and groom betrothed in May. He is not mourning his youth, he is reclaiming it; and just a few days after the cannon shot from the Tower tells all of London that the king has committed one of the worst crimes a man can do—killed his wife—the king marries again and we have a new queen: Jane.

  “The Spanish ambassador told me that Jane will bring the princess to court, and see her honored,” Geoffrey tells me. We are walking in the fields towards Home Farm, looking at the greening crop. Somewhere among the white hawthorn of the hedgerow there is a blackbird singing defiance to the world, lilting notes, filled with hope.

  “Really?”

  Geoffrey is beaming. “Our enemy is dead, and we have survived. The king himself called Henry Fitzroy to him, took him in his arms, and said that the Boleyn woman would have killed him and our princess, and that he was lucky to still have them.”

  “He’ll send for the princess?”

  “As soon as Jane is proclaimed queen, and sets up her household. Our princess will live with her new mother, the queen—within days.”

  I tuck my hand in the crook of my favorite son’s arm and rest my head briefly on his shoulder. “You know, in a life of such reverses, I find I am almost surprised to still be here. I am very surprised to see it all coming right again.”

  He pats my hand. “Who knows? You might yet see your beloved princess crowned.”

  “Shh, shh,” I say, though the fields are empty but for a distant laborer digging out a blocked ditch. It is now treason even to speak of the death of the king. Every day Cromwell makes a new law to protect the king’s reputation.

  I can hear the sound of hooves on the road and we turn back to the house. I see Montague’s standard rippling above the hedgerows and when we walk into the stable yard he is dismounting from his horse. He comes quickly towards the two of us, smiling, drops to his knee for m