The King's Curse Read online

  “Our clothes?”

  “No,” she says, bewildered. “Someone had sent him some comforts, new things; but they didn’t tell me who.”

  Montague nods and goes from the room without another word, without looking at me.

  Next morning, at a quiet breakfast in my chamber, the two of us close together at the little table before my bedroom fire, Montague tells me that his manservant did not come home last night, and nobody knows where he is.

  “What d’you think?” I ask quietly.

  “I think that Geoffrey has named him as a servant who takes letters and messages for me, and that he has been arrested,” Montague says quietly.

  “Son, I cannot believe that Geoffrey would betray us, or any of our people.”

  “Lady Mother, he promised the king that he would betray us both for warm clothes, firewood, and a good dinner. He was served a good dinner yesterday and they have taken his breakfast in to him today. Right now he is being questioned by William Fitzwilliam, the Earl of Southampton. He is leading the inquiry. It would have been better for Geoffrey, and better for us, if he had put the knife in his heart and driven it home.”

  “Don’t!” I raise my voice to Montague. “Don’t say that! Don’t say that foolish thing. Don’t say that wicked thing. You speak like a child who knows nothing of death. It is never, never better to die. Never think that it is. Son, I know you are afraid. Don’t you think I am too? I saw my brother go into that very Tower and he only came out to his death. My own father died in there, charged with treason. Don’t you think that the Tower is a constant horror to me, and to think that Geoffrey is in there is like the worst of nightmares? And now I think that they might take me? And now I think that they might take you? My son? My heir?” I fall silent at the sight of his face.

  “You know, sometimes I think of it as our family home,” he says very quietly, so quietly that I can hardly hear him. “Our oldest and truest family seat. And that the Tower graveyard is our family tomb, the Plantagenet vault where we are all, in the end, going.”

  Constance visits her husband again but finds him in a haze of fever from his wound. He is well nursed and well served, but when she goes to see him there is a woman in the room—the one who usually comes to lay out the dead—and a guard at the door and he can say nothing to her in private.

  “But he has nothing to say,” she says quietly to me. “He didn’t look at me, he didn’t ask after the children, he didn’t even ask after you. He turned his face to the wall and he wept.”

  Montague’s servant Jerome does not reappear at L’Erber. We have to assume that he is either under arrest or he is held in Cromwell’s house, waiting for the day when he will offer evidence.

  And then, just after Terce, the doors to the street are flung open and the yeomen of the guard march into the entrance hall, to arrest my son Montague.

  We were going to breakfast, and Montague turns as the golden leaves from the vine blow in from the street about the feet of the guards. “Shall I come at once, or take my breakfast first?” he asks, as if it is a small matter of everyone’s convenience.

  “Better come now, sir,” the captain says a little awkwardly. He bows to me and to Constance. “Begging your pardon, your ladyship, my lady.”

  I go to Montague. “I’ll get food and clothing to you,” I promise him. “And I’ll do what I can. I’ll go to the king.”

  “No. Go back to Bisham,” he says quickly. “Keep far away from the Tower. Go today, Lady Mother.”

  His face is very grave; he looks far older than his forty-six years. I think that they took my brother when he was only a little boy, and killed him when he was a young man; and now here is my son, and it has taken all this long time, all these many years, for them to come for him. I am dizzy with fear, I cannot think what I should do. “God bless you, my son,” I say.

  He kneels before me, as he has done a thousand, thousand times, and I put my hand on his head. “God bless us all,” he says simply. “My father lived his life trying to avoid this day. Me too. Perhaps it will end well.”

  And he gets up and goes out of the house without a hat or a cape or gloves.

  I am in the stable yard, watching them pack the wagons for us to leave, when one of the Courtenay men brings me a message from Gertrude, wife to Henry Courtenay, my cousin.

  They have arrested Henry this morning. I will come to you when I can.

  I cannot wait for her, so I tell the guards and the household wagons to go ahead, down the frozen roads to Warblington, and that I will follow later on my old horse. I take half a dozen men and my granddaughters Katherine and Winifred and ride through the narrow streets to Gertrude’s beautiful London house, the Manor of the Rose. The City is getting ready for Christmas, the chestnut sellers are standing behind glowing braziers stirring the scorching nuts and the evocative scents of the season—mulled wine, cinnamon, woodsmoke, burnt sugar, nutmeg—are hanging in trails of gray smoke on the frosty air.

  I leave the horses at the great street door, and my granddaughters and I walk into the hall and then into Gertrude’s presence chamber. It is oddly quiet and empty. Her steward comes forward to greet me.

  “Countess, I am sorry to see you here.”

  “Why?” I ask. “My cousin Lady Courtenay was coming to see me. I have come to say good-bye to her. I am going into the country.” Little Winifred comes close to me and I take her small hand for comfort.

  “My lord has been arrested.”

  “I knew that. I am certain that he will be released at once. I know that he is innocent of anything.”

  The steward bows. “I know, my lady. There is no more loyal servant to the king than my lord. We all know that. We all said that, when they asked us.”

  “So where is my cousin Gertrude?”

  He hesitates. “I am sorry, your ladyship. But she has been arrested too. She has gone to the Tower.”

  I suddenly understand that the silence of this room is filled with the echoes of a place that has been abruptly cleared. There are pieces of needlework on the window seat, and an open book on the reader in the corner of the room.

  I look around and I realize that this tyranny is like the other Tudor disease, the Sweat. It comes quickly, it takes those you love without warning, and you cannot defend against it. I have come too late, I should have been earlier. I have not defended her, I did not save Montague, or Geoffrey. I did not speak up for Robert Aske, nor for Tom Darcy, John Hussey, Thomas More, nor for John Fisher.

  “I’ll take Edward home with me,” I say, thinking of Gertrude’s son. He is only twelve, he must be frightened. They should have sent him to me at once, the minute his parents were arrested. “Fetch him for me. Tell him that his cousin is here to take him home while his mother and father are detained.”

  Inexplicably, the steward’s eyes fill with tears, and then he tells me why the house is so quiet. “He’s gone,” he says. “They took him too. The little lord. He’s gone to the Tower.”

  WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, AUTUMN 1538

  My steward comes into my private chamber, tapping on the door and then stepping in, closing the door behind him as if to keep something secret. Outside I can hear the buzz of the people who have come to see me. I am alone, trying to find the courage to go out and face the inquiries about rents, boundaries of land, the crops that should be grown next season, the tithe that should be paid, the hundred little worries of a great estate that has been my pride and joy for all my life but now seems like a pretty cage, where I have worked and lived and been happy while outside the country I love has slipped down to hell.

  “What is it?”

  His face is scowling with worry. “The Earl of Southampton and the Bishop of Ely to see you, my lady,” he says.

  I rise to my feet, putting my hand to the small of my back where a nagging pain comes and goes with the weather. I think briefly, cravenly, how very tired I am. “Do they say what they want?”

  He shakes his head. I force myself to stand very straight, a