The King's Curse Read online

  I write to my daughter-in-law, his widow, Jane; she does not reply but she leaves her daughters in my keeping. She has, perhaps, had enough of letters sealed with a white rose. My chamber in the Cowdray tower is small and cramped and my bedroom even smaller, so I insist that my granddaughters walk with me by the cold river in the gardens every day, whatever the weather, and that they ride out twice a week. They are constantly watched in case they send or receive a letter and they become pale and quiet with the caution of habitual prisoners.

  Strangely, the loss of Montague recalls the loss of his brother Arthur, and I grieve for him all over again. I am glad in a way that Arthur did not live to see his family’s tragedy and the madness of his former friend, the king. Arthur died in the years of sunshine when we thought everything was possible. Now we are in the cold heart of a long winter.

  I dream of my brother, who walked to his death where my son walked to his, I dream of my father who died in the Tower too. Sometimes I just dream of the Tower, its square bullying bulk like a white finger pointing up, accusing the sky, and I think that it is like a tombstone for the young men of my family.

  Gertrude Courtenay, now a widow, is still held there, in a freezing cell. The case against her gets worse rather than obscured by time, as Thomas Cromwell keeps finding letters that he says are hers in the rooms of others that he hopes to convict. If Cromwell is to be believed, my cousin Gertrude spent her life writing treason to everyone whom Cromwell suspects. But Cromwell cannot be challenged, since he forges the king’s whims into reality. When Nicholas Carew comes to trial this spring, they produce with a flourish a sheaf of Gertrude’s letters as evidence against him, though no one looks at them closely but Cromwell.

  Nicholas Carew, dearest friend to the king, loving courtier to Queen Katherine, loyal constant friend to the princess, goes to the scaffold on Tower Hill, walking in the footprints of my son, and dies like him, for no cause.

  Poor Geoffrey, the saddest of all of my boys, living a life worse than death, receives a pardon and is released. His wife is with child at their home, so he staggers out of the postern gate, hires himself a horse, and rides back to her at Lordington. He does not write to me, he sends no message, he does not try to release me, he does not try to clear my name. I imagine that he lives like a dead man, locked inside his failure. I wonder if his wife despises him. I imagine that he hates himself.

  This spring I think that I am as low as I have ever been. Sometimes I think of my husband Sir Richard and that he spent his life trying to save me from the destiny of my family and that I have failed him. I did not keep his sons safe, I did not manage to hide my name in his.

  “If you were to confess, you would have a pardon and could go free,” Mabel says on one of her regular visits to my little rooms. She comes once a week as if to ensure, like a good hostess, that I have everything I need. In reality, she comes at the bidding of her husband to question me and to torment me with thoughts of escape. “Just confess, your ladyship. Confess and you can go back to your home. You must long to go to your home. You always say that you miss it so much.”

  “I do long to be at home, and I would go, if I could,” I say steadily. “But I have nothing to confess.”

  “But the charge is almost nothing!” she points out. “You could confess that you once dreamed that the king was not a good king, that’s enough, that’s all they want to hear. That would be a confession of treason under the new law and they could pardon you for it, like they have done Geoffrey, and you could be freed! Everyone that you loved or plotted with is dead anyway. You save nobody by making your life a misery.”

  “But I never dreamed such a thing,” I say steadily. “I never thought such a thing or said such a thing or wrote such a thing. I never plotted with any man, dead or alive.”

  “But you must have been sorry when John Fisher was executed,” she says quickly. “Such a good man, such a holy man?”

  “I was sorry that he opposed the king,” I say. “But I did not oppose the king.”

  “Well then, you were sorry when the king put the Dowager Princess Katherine of Aragon aside?”

  “Of course I was. She was my friend. I was sorry that their marriage was invalid. But I said nothing in her defense, and I swore the oath to declare it was invalid.”

  “And you wanted to serve the Lady Mary even when the king declared that she was a bastard. I know you did, you can’t deny that!”

  “I loved the Lady Mary, and I still do,” I reply. “I would serve her whatever her position in the world may be. But I make no claim for her.”

  “But you think of her as a princess,” she presses me. “In your heart.”

  “I think the king must be the one to decide that,” I say.

  She pauses, stands up, and takes a short turn around the cramped room. “I won’t have you here forever,” she warns me. “I’ve told my husband that I can’t house you and your ladies forever. And my lord Cromwell will want to make an end to this.”

  “I would be happy to leave,” I say quietly. “I would undertake to stay quietly at my home and see no one and write to no one. I have no sons left to me. I would see only my daughter and my grandchildren. I could promise that. They could release me on parole.”

  She turns and looks at me, her face alive with malice, and she laughs outright at the poverty of my hopes. “What home?” she asks. “Traitors don’t have homes, they lose everything. Where do you think you will go? Your great castle? Your beautiful manor? Your fine house in London? None of these is yours anymore. You won’t be going anywhere unless you confess. And I won’t have you here. There’s only one other place for you.”

  I wait in silence for her to name the one place in the world that I most dread.

  “The Tower.”

  THE ROAD TO THE TOWER, MAY 1539

  They take me, riding pillion behind one of William Fitzwilliam’s guard. We leave before dawn as the sky slowly lightens and the birds start to sing. We ride up the narrow lanes of Sussex where the verges are starred with daisies and the hawthorn is foaming white with blossoms in the hedges, past meadows where the grass is growing thick and lush and the flowers are a tumble of color and the songbirds are ripple of notes as if delighting in life itself. We ride all day, as far as Lambeth, where a plain barge is waiting for us with no standard flying at the pole. Clearly, Thomas Cromwell does not want the citizens of London to see me follow my sons into the Tower.

  It is a strange, almost dreamlike journey on the water. I am alone in an unmarked barge, as if I have shed my family standards and my name, as if I am at last free from my dangerous inheritance. It is dusk and the sun is setting behind us, laying a long finger of golden light along the river, and the waterbirds are flying to the shore and settling down, splashing and quacking, for the night. I can hear a cuckoo somewhere in the water meadows and I remember how Geoffrey used to listen for the first cuckoo of spring when he was a little boy and we lived with the sisters at Syon. Now the abbey is closed, and Geoffrey is destroyed, and only that faithless bird, the cuckoo, is still calling.

  I stand at the stern and look back at the swirling gray waters of the wake and watch the setting sun turning the mackerel sky pink and cream. I have sailed down this river many times in my life; I have been in the coronation barge, as an honored guest, a member of the royal family, I have been in my own barge, under my own standard, I have been the wealthiest woman in England, holding the highest of honors, with four handsome sons standing beside me, each of them fit to inherit my name and my fortune. And now I have almost nothing, and the nameless barge goes quietly down the river unobserved. As the muffled drum sounds and the rowers keep the beat and the barge moves forward with a steady swishing thrust through the water, I feel that it has been like a dream, all of it a dream, and that the dream is coming to an end.

  As the dark figure of the Tower comes into sight, the great portcullis of the water gate rolls up at our approach; the Constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, is waiting on the steps. The