The King's Curse Read online

  “Of course not,” I say.

  THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1540

  It is easier in summertime, for though I am not allowed out of my cell, Harry and Edward can come and go as long as they stay within the walls of the Tower. They try to amuse themselves, as boys always will, playing, wrestling, daydreaming, even fishing in the dark depths of the water gate and swimming in the moat. My maid comes and goes from the Tower every day and sometimes brings me the little treats of the season. One day she brings me half a dozen strawberries and the moment I taste them I am back in my fruit garden at Bisham Manor, the warm squashy juice on my tongue, the hot sun on my back, and the world at my feet.

  “And I have news,” she says.

  I glance at the door where a jailer may be passing. “Take care what you say,” I remind her.

  “Everyone knows this,” she says. “The king is to put his new wife aside though she has been in the country only seven months.”

  At once I think of my princess, Lady Mary, who will lose another stepmother and friend. “Put her aside?” I repeat, careful with the words, wondering if she is to be charged with something monstrous and killed.

  “They say that the marriage was never a true one,” my maid says, her voice a tiny whisper. “And she is to be called the king’s sister and live at Richmond Palace.”

  I know that I look quite blankly at her; but I cannot comprehend a world where a king may call his wife his sister and send her to live on her own in a palace. Is nobody advising Henry at all? Is nobody telling him that the truth is not of his making, cannot be of his own invention? He cannot call a woman wife today, and name her as his sister on the next day. He cannot say that his daughter is not a princess. He cannot say that he is the Pope. Who is ever going to find the courage to name what is more and more clear: that the king does not see the world as it is, that his vision is unreal, that—though it is treason to say it—the king is quite mad.

  The very next day I am gazing out of my arrow-slit window over the river when I see the Howard barge come swiftly downriver, and turn, oars feathering expertly to rush into the inner dock as the water gate creaks open. Some poor new prisoner, taken by Thomas Howard, I think, and watch with interest as a stocky figure is wrestled from the barge, fighting like a drayman, and struggles with half a dozen men onto the quay.

  “God help him,” I say as he plunges this way and that like a baited bear with no hope of freedom. They have guards ready to fall on him and he fights them, all the way up the steps and out of sight, under the lee of my window as I press against the stone and push my face against the arrow-slit.

  I have a solitary prisoner’s curiosity, but also I think I recognize this man who flings himself against his jailers. I knew him the moment that he pitched off the barge, his dark clerkly clothes in the best-cut black, his broad shoulders and black velvet bonnet. I stare down in amazement, my cheek pressed to the cold stone so that I can see Thomas Cromwell, arrested and imprisoned and dragged, fighting, into the same Tower where he has sent so many others.

  I fall back from the arrow-slit, and I stagger to my bed and fall to my knees and put my face in my hands. I find I am crying at last, hot tears running between my fingers. “Thank God,” I cry softly. “Thank God who has brought me safe to this day. Harry and Edward are saved, the little boys are safe, for the king’s wicked councillor has fallen, and we will be freed.”

  Thomas Philips, the warder, will tell me only that Thomas Cromwell, deprived of his chain of office and all his authority, has been arrested and is held in the Tower, crying for pardon, as so many good men have cried before him. He must hear, as I hear, the sound of them building the scaffold on Tower Hill, and on a day as fine and as sunny as the day they took out John Fisher or Thomas More, their enemy, the enemy of the faith of England, walks in their footsteps and goes to his death.

  I tell my grandson Harry and his cousin Edward to keep from the windows and not to look out as the defeated enemy of their family walks through the echoing gate, over the drawbridge, and slowly up the cobbled road to Tower Hill; but we hear the roll of the drums and the jeering roar of the crowd. I kneel before my crucifix and I think of my son Montague predicting that Cromwell, who was deaf to calls for mercy, mercy, mercy, would one day cry out these words, and find none for himself.

  I wait for my cell door to be flung open and for us to be released. We were imprisoned on Thomas Cromwell’s Act of Attainder; now that he is dead we shall surely be released.

  Nobody comes for us yet; but perhaps we are overlooked as the king is married again, and is said to be half mad with joy in his new bride, another Howard girl, little Kitty Howard, young enough to be his granddaughter, pretty as all the Howard girls are. I think of Geoffrey saying that the Howards to the king are like hare to a Talbot hound, and then I remember to not think of Geoffrey at all.

  I wait for the king to return from his honeymoon brimming with a bridegroom’s goodwill, and for someone to remind him of us and for him to sign our release. Then I hear that his happiness has ended abruptly, and that he is ill and has shut himself away in a sort of mad desolation and has imprisoned himself, just as I am confined, inside two small rooms, maddened with pain and tormented with failed hopes, too tired and sick at heart to attend to any business.

  All summer I wait to hear that the king has come out of his melancholy, all autumn, then when the weather starts to get cold again, I think that perhaps the king will pardon and free us in the new year, after Christmas, as part of the celebrations of the season; but he does not.

  THE TOWER, LONDON, SPRING 1541

  The king is to take the bride whom he calls his “rose without a thorn” on a great progress north, to make the journey that he has never dared to show himself to the people of the North and to accept their apologies for the Pilgrimage of Grace. He will stay with men who have houses newly built with stone from the pulled-down monasteries, he will ride through lands where the bones of traitors still rattle in the chains on the wayside scaffolds. He will go blithely among people whose lives were ended when their Church was destroyed, whose faith has no home, who have no hope. He will dress his hugely fat body in Lincoln green and pretend to be Robin Hood and make the child he has married dance in green like Maid Marian.

  I still hope. I still hope, like my dead cousin Henry Courtenay once hoped, for better days and a merry world. Perhaps the king will release Harry and Edward and me before he goes north, as part of his clemency and pardon. If he can forgive York, a Plantagenet city that threw open its gates to the pilgrims, surely he can forgive these two innocent boys.

  I wake at dawn in these light mornings and I hear the birds singing outside my window and watch the sunlight slowly walk across the wall. Thomas Philips, the warder, surprises me by knocking on my door, and when I have got up and pulled a robe over my nightgown, he comes in looking as if he is sick. “What’s the matter?” I ask him, anxious at once. “Is my grandson ill?”

  “He is well, he is well,” he says hastily.

  “Edward then?”

  “He is well.”

  “Then what is the matter, Mr. Philips, for you look troubled. What is wrong?”

  “I am grieved,” is all that he can say. He turns his head away and shakes his head and clears his throat. Something is distressing him so much that he can barely speak. “I am grieved to say that you are to be executed.”

  “I?” It is quite impossible. The execution of Anne Boleyn was preceded by a trial in which the peers of the realm were convinced that she was an adulterous witch. A noblewoman, one of the royal family, cannot be executed, not without a charge, not without a trial.

  “Yes.”

  I go to the low window that overlooks the green and look out. “It cannot be,” I say. “It cannot be.”

  Philips clears this throat again. “It is commanded.”

  “There’s no scaffold,” I say simply. I gesture to Tower Hill, beyond the walls. “There’s no scaffold.”

  “They’re bringing a blo