The King's Curse Read online

  “I had a copy of a sermon,” he says suddenly. “But it was preached before the king! There can be no harm in that. And anyway, Collins will have burned it.”

  “Peace.” Montague looks up at him.

  “I had some letters from Bishop Stokesley, but there was nothing in them,” he says.

  “You should have burned them the moment that you got them,” Montague says. “As I told you. Years ago.”

  “There was nothing in them!” Geoffrey exclaims.

  “But he, in turn, may have written something to someone else. You don’t want to bring trouble to his door, nor for his other friends to bring trouble to yours.”

  “Oh, do you burn everything?” Geoffrey suddenly demands, thinking that he will catch out his brother.

  “Yes, as I told you, years ago,” Montague replies calmly. He looks at me. “You do, don’t you, Lady Mother?”

  “Yes,” I say. “There is nothing at any of my homes for them to find, should they ever come to look.”

  “Why should they ever come to look?” Jane says irritably.

  “Because we are who we are,” I answer her. “And you know that, Jane. You were born a Neville yourself. You know what it means. We are the Plantagenets. We are the white rose, and the king knows that the people love us.”

  She turns her bitter face away. “I thought I was marrying into a great house,” she says. “I didn’t think that I was joining a family in danger.”

  “Greatness means danger,” I say simply. “And I think you knew that then, as now.”

  Geoffrey walks to the window, looks out, turns back to the room. “I think I’ll go to London,” he says. “I’ll go and I’ll see Thomas Cromwell and find out what he is doing with Hugh Holland, and tell him,” he snatches a breath, he has quite run out of air, “tell him,” he says more strongly, “that there is nothing against Holland and nothing against me, and nothing against any of us.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Montague says, surprisingly.

  “Will you?” I ask, as Jane suspends her needle and looks up at her husband as if she would forbid it. Her gaze flicks to me as if she would ask me to send my youngest son without a protector, so that she can keep her husband safe at home.

  “Yes,” Montague says. “Cromwell needs to know that he cannot play cat and mouse with us. He is a great cat in the king’s barn, none greater. But still, I think we have credit that we can draw on. And he needs to know he does not frighten us.” He looks at Geoffrey’s aghast expression. “He does not frighten me,” he corrects himself.

  “What do you think, Lady Mother?” Jane prompts me to forbid my two sons going together.

  “I think it’s a very good idea,” I say calmly. “We have nothing to hide and we have nothing to fear. We have done nothing against the law. We love the Church and honor the princess but that’s no crime. Not even Cromwell can compose a law that makes that a crime. You go, Son Montague, you go with my blessing.”

  I stay at Bockmer House for a week, waiting for news with Jane and the children. Montague sends us a letter the moment that he arrives in London, but after that there is silence.

  “I think I’ll go to London myself,” I say to her. “And I will write to you as soon as I have news.”

  “Please do, Lady Mother,” she says stiffly. “I am always glad to know that you are in good health.”

  She comes down with me to the stable yard and stands by my horse as I wearily climb from mounting block to the pillion saddle behind my Master of Horse. In the stable yard my companions mount their horses: my two granddaughters, Jane’s girls, Katherine and Winifred. Harry will stay home with his mother, though he is fidgeting from one foot to another, trying to catch my eye, hoping that I will take him with me. I smile down at her pale face. “Don’t be frightened, Jane,” I say. “We’ve got through worse than this.”

  “Have we?”

  I think of the history of my family, of the defeats and battles, the betrayals and executions which stain our history and serve as fingerposts to our ceaseless march on and off the throne of England. “Oh yes,” I say. “Much worse.”

  L’ERBER, LONDON, SUMMER 1538

  Montague comes to me the moment that I arrive in London. We dine in the hall as if this was an ordinary visit, he talks pleasantly of the court and the good health of the baby prince, and then we withdraw to the private room behind the high table and close the door.

  “Geoffrey’s in the Tower,” he says quietly the moment that I am seated, as if he feared I would fall at the news. He takes my hand and looks into my stunned face. “Try to be calm, Lady Mother. He’s not accused of anything, there is nothing that they can put against him. This is how Cromwell works, remember. He frightens people into rash words.”

  I feel as if I am choking, I put my hand to my heart and I can feel the hammering of my pulse under my fingers like a drum. I snatch at a breath and find that I cannot breathe. Montague’s worried face looking into mine becomes blurred as my eyesight grows dim, I even think for a moment that I am dying of fear.

  Then there is a gust of warm air on my face, and I am breathing again, and Montague says: “Say nothing, Lady Mother, until you have your breath, for here are Katherine and Winifred that I called to help you when you were taken faint.”

  He holds my hand and pinches my fingertip so that I say nothing but smile at my granddaughters and say: “Oh, I am quite well now. I must have overeaten at dinner for I had such a gripping pain. It serves me right for taking so much of the pudding.”

  “Are you sure that you are well?” Katherine says, looking from me to her father. “You’re very pale?”

  “I’m quite well now,” I say. “Would you bring me a little wine and Montague can mull it for me, and I shall be well in a moment.”

  They bustle off to fetch it, while Montague closes the window, and the sounds of evening on a London street are cut off. I straighten a shawl around my shoulders and thank them as they come back with the wine and curtsey and go.

  We say nothing while Montague plunges the heated rod into the silver jug and it seethes and the scent of the hot wine and spices fills the little room. He hands me a cup and pours his own, and pulls up a stool to sit at my feet, as if he were a boy again, in the boyhood that he never had.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “Behaving like a fool.”

  “I was shocked myself. Are you all right now?”

  “Yes. You can tell me. You can tell me what is happening.”

  “When we got here, we asked to see Cromwell, and he put us off for days. In the end I met him as if by accident, and told him that there were rumors about us, contrary to our good name, and that I would be glad to know that Gervase Tyndale had his tongue slit as a warning to others. He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, but he asked me to bring Geoffrey to his house.”

  Montague leans forward and pushes the logs of the fire with the toe of his riding boot. “You know what the Cromwell house is like,” he says. “Apprentices everywhere, clerks everywhere, you can’t tell who is who, and Cromwell walking through the middle of it all as if he is a lodger.”

  “I’ve never been to his home,” I say disdainfully. “We’re not on dining terms.”

  “Well, no,” Montague says with a smile. “But at any rate, it is a busy, friendly, interesting place, and the people waiting to see him would make your eyes stand out of your head! Everyone of every sort and condition, all of them with business for him or reports for him, or spying for him—who knows?”

  “And you and Geoffrey saw him?”

  “He talked with us and then he asked us to dine with him, and we stayed and ate a good dinner. Then he had to go and he asked Geoffrey to come back the next day, as there were some few things he wanted to clear up.”

  I feel my chest become tight again, and I tap the base of my throat, as if to remind my heart to keep beating. “And Geoffrey went?”

  “I told him to go. I told him to be completely frank. Cromwell had read the message that Holland took to R