by G Lawrence
I saw Wolsey laughing in my mind. I saw Fisher, More and the monks. I saw Katherine and her daughter. Justice would not be served. It never had before.
Henry had sent me here to be rid of me. Cromwell had granted him the means. No more would England have to stand for a queen who could not bear a son. No more would Cromwell have to fear being removed. No more would my foes have to scrape and bow to me.
No more. No more.
I was undone.
My mind was warped and frayed… broken and bent… my enemies had taken a stick to the sand, merging stories that did not belong together into one of their own creation. The sands of my story were flowing into that of another.
Once my mouth opened, it would not close. Many times had I thought that my tongue was my greatest enemy, and now it proved itself. Trying to find light in the shadowlands of my mind, I babbled incoherently, saying that Henry meant to test me; that Henry wanted proof of my love. I spoke of Norris. I spoke of Smeaton and my encounter with him in Henry’s chambers.
I talked and I talked, trying to find a reason for my imprisonment. In the corner of my eye I could see Mistress Aucher watching, silently commanding me to stop. Voices in my mind told me the same, told me to be quiet, for all that I said would be used against me.
But I could not.
I garbled on. It was all nothing. Nothing more than words exchanged at court. Of meaningless, chance encounters. But it would all be used against me.
As I cast my face from the women who stared at me, I thought I saw a movement. Draughts blew in the chambers, moving the tapestry from the wall. I saw eyes. Fisher and More. Wolsey and Katherine… they were all there, as real as the women sent to guard me.
I was not alone.
Ghosts and spies surrounded me.
Chapter Seventy
The Tower of London
May 3rd 1536
Kingston had lied. My brother was in the Tower.
The women who sat with me told me that my brother arrived on the same day as I, and was imprisoned in one of the towers. Norris and Smeaton, too, were here. George was the third man with whom I stood accused.
I was not only an adulterer in the eyes of these people. I was guilty of incest.
When they told me George was, too, under arrest, I thought I might fly apart. There was nothing that could have horrified me more, nothing that could have scared me as that did. The thought that George was in danger and I could not reach him, could not even speak to him, was sickening. I tried to tell them of all the goodness in him, but they just watched me with blank eyes. What were they to do? They were not my judges.
When I failed to convince them, I fell upon a stool.
How could anyone think this? I thought. How could the thought have even reached anyone’s mind?
I knew not how anyone had come to these conclusions. I was surrounded by my women at court, guarded by them as much as I was tended to. How I could have lain with even one man, let alone three, was unknown to me, and to accuse me of having sex with my brother was obscene. There was nothing perverse in our relationship. He was my brother and I loved him as such. How could anyone think I would do something that went against everything of faith and honour within me?
Do you know me so little, Henry? I wondered. That you would think this of me?
But I wondered if he did believe it. He was a jealous man. Ample proof of that had I had over the years. Jealousy can lead to all kinds of false nightmares being produced by the mind. Or, as Katherine had whispered, did he simply want to believe? Was he so desperate to be rid of me that he would take any story, no matter how wild, and accept it?
My guards had ceased to try to stop me talking. It was not in their interests. Despite the warning, ringing sound of clamouring voices inside me telling me to hush my mouth, on and on I talked; a dam broaching its defences; a lamb bleating as the wolf bears down upon her.
They realised that Mistress Aucher was trying to send me eye signals to stop me talking. They had her removed.
Within twelve hours of coming to this grim, stark Tower, I had told them much. I spoke of Norris and Smeaton. I told them of my brother’s love, no more to me than the love of a sibling; chaste and proper, without hint of scandal, but as I spoke of George they could see the naked fright in my heart. They took note of all I said, hoping to report it to their masters, to gain rich rewards by incriminating me only further in this fantasy.
And they told me much. I was accused of adultery, incest and treason, and my husband believed I was guilty. They told me that Henry had gone to his mistress, and become enfolded in her warm arms. Jane’s family of vipers kept him close. They said I would be divorced on the basis of my pre-contract with Percy. They said on the night I was taken, Henry had called Fitzroy to him, and wept upon his shoulder, telling his son I had been about to poison him, and that I had had more than one hundred lovers.
“I fear Weston,” I burbled. “I spoke to him because he loved my kinswoman, Mary Shelton, and not his wife.”
On and on I rambled. I did not know my enemies had not formulated their plans; that my incoherent burbling would condemn more innocents.
“Weston said that he loved one amongst all I named better than the rest,” I said, wringing my hands. “And that was me.”
Soon, Weston would join our gathering in the Tower.
*
“What of my father?” I asked Kingston and his wife that night.
I sat at their table. A gross parody of honour was enacted as servants waited upon me. Prisoner I was, but still was I Queen. There had to be at least a feeble offering of respect.
I ate nothing. I could not even bear the smell. Everything made me sick.
“My father,” I pressed. “He is not also here, is he?”
Kingston’s eyes were troubled. It was his duty to tend to my needs, and to report to Cromwell and Henry, but my distress unnerved him. He did not want me to fall into chaos again. Perhaps that would have been to my advantage, for it was illegal to execute those whose minds had come unhinged.
“Your father is not here,” said Kingston. “Nor has he or any of your Howard kin been accused of anything.”
I understood. Father had bought his liberty. Would he dare trouble himself for me? For George, his heir? I doubted it.
I chuckled without humour. Kingston did not like my laugh. He feared it. It broke from my mouth like a greyhound coursing hares. The women who sat with me welcomed it not either. They thought it was the sound of the witch they had been told I was.
“The King sends me here to prove me,” I said. Kingston nodded. He had heard my desperate quest for meaning too many times to be astonished.
“Perhaps that is so, my lady.”
“He wants to know my love is true,” I went on. “I will show him it is.”
“I am sure, my lady.”
Kingston and his wife went back to their dinners. I began to eat, and found I was suddenly ravenous. I drank deep of the wine that was offered, ate until my plate was empty, but nothing filled me, not the meat, not the bread, not the wine.
There was an emptiness within me. It had been there for a long time. I had kept it hidden, but it had claimed me. I was not Anne Boleyn, the construct I had created to protect myself… I was the shattered soul, the defeated heart.
My head spinning with wine, I was taken back to my chambers, and there I burst out laughing again. “The King will kill me,” I announced to the grim faces of the watching women. “He will kill me, and yet I have done nothing to deserve this ill treatment.”
“You have done much,” one murmured.
“To whom?” I demanded. “To you? Tell me when I ever raised hand to you, and I will say I am sorry, good Mistress. Tell me whom I have offended and I will set it right.” I wrapped my arms around my body and began to weep.
“I am undone,” I murmured as they took my clothes from me. “I am undone and you would have me lose still more. You would take everything from me. My brother is here. What will they do
to us?”
My belief that Henry was testing me was receding swift as the flesh on a dead man’s hands.
They had no answer for me and again I laughed. “You cannot accuse me of anything,” I said. “The Lord God knows my innocence, and He will tell the King. They are close in mind and spirit. The Almighty will speak for me.”
They led me to the bed. “Someone will speak for me. Someone will. I am not alone, as you all think me.”
I fell into the bed and turned my face from them, staring at the wall. For a moment, a flash of memory danced before my eyes. Another wall. Another time. Another moment when I had stared at a wall, seeing crumbling plaster hidden behind the cloth of tapestry. The day I had lost my child.
The eyes returned. Fisher and More stared, their ghostly faces pale, unmoved by my distress. I could flee my demons no more. They were all around me.
“I am not alone,” I murmured.
Chapter Seventy-One
The Tower of London
May 4th 1536
“They say he wears his cuckold horns with merriness,” murmured Lady Shelton to Mistress Coffin.
Coffin… had they picked her for her name? To remind me of the fate of traitors? My ears pricked up. I had been silent for a few hours, lapsed into a state of numb disbelief, but as they spoke, I knew they were talking of Henry.
I looked around. Why here? Why send me to the chambers prepared for my coronation? To torture me with memories of happiness and joy? My cruel captors knew how to whip me with their chains. I looked down at my hands. They trembled no more. The shaking which I had thought might tear me apart when I first entered these rooms had subsided. Now, it was an inward tremor, a constant itch I could not scratch. Every now and then it would erupt, making my teeth shake.
“My daughter came to deliver clothes to me this morning,” Lady Shelton went on. “She said the King has announced he was seduced into marriage by witchcraft, and now is released.” She drew her needle through the cloth she was working on, thinking I was in such a stupor of dread that I could not hear. “But he gambols at court, feasting with ladies until midnight and spending time with his men upon his barge…” she smiled. “Or, at least, those who are left with him.”
“I have been told he will not marry again, unless his Council ask it of him,” said Mistress Coffin.
“He has moved Mistress Seymour to another house,” said Lady Shelton. “And he will marry her. The people know it. You have heard the ballads they sing… the ones from those pamphlets.”
The pamphlets… I had all but forgotten I had asked them to be issued. It must have gone ahead whilst I was busy being arrested. I forced myself to swallow the laughter that wanted to rise from within. So now everyone would know that Henry had a mistress, and he was seeking to put her on my throne. That was why he had moved Jane, as once he had sent me to Hever; he wanted to distance her from scandal… to pretend he was not simply switching one wife for another.
“He sneaks out of Greenwich to visit Mistress Seymour,” said Lady Shelton. “Mark my words, there will be a new Queen soon.”
By God, the effort it was to contain my laughter! It was not happiness, but an expression of horror wanting escape. Henry was to wed again, and I was not yet gone. Would he take my life, or send me to the hallowed nunnery Katherine had never accepted?
How long had this been planned? How long had I sat with Henry, waited on him and shared his bed as he plotted against me? How had it come to this?
Mistress Aucher rose and went to the bag of silks which sat near me. Stooping, she rummaged in the bag, pretending to select a new thread. “Archbishop Cranmer has written to the King, protesting your innocence,” she whispered, her voice scarcely more than a breath as I continued to stare at the wall. “The people… they do not believe the charges either, Majesty.”
With that, she stood and went back to her seat.
Was it so? Did the people of England, who had never liked or supported me, know what was being done? Had they read the pamphlets and understood that Henry wanted rid of his wife, so he might take another? Did it matter? It had not before, with Katherine.
I stared at my hands. My long fingers. The rings upon them. The three I wore for my dead children shone. I thought of Elizabeth, and then tried not to. It was too much to bear to think that she might too be in danger.
I looked up as all the women moved to the window. Ghosting behind them, a frail shadow of myself, I followed. Looking down into the courtyard, I saw two new prisoners being brought in.
Weston… and Brereton.
More of my lovers? I had feared that my talk about Weston might have brought him here, but I had little expected he would come as a prisoner. I had thought he had spoken against me, and that was why I stood accused, but he, too, was a prisoner.
And Brereton? When had I even mentioned him as I rambled on?
“Weston and Brereton,” said Mistress Stoner, her tone rising with surprise.
“He opposed Cromwell in Wales,” I said numbly, making them start. They had not realised I was behind them.
“If he is here, it is because of you, madam, not Master Cromwell,” said Mistress Stoner.
“He is here to get him out of the way,” I said dully. “Another of my friends taken so that Cromwell might gather more power into his hands.” They stared at me and I chuckled. “You are fools to think otherwise,” I said. “Listen to the ditties sung in the streets, and you will find the true reason we are all brought here to die.” I laughed harder. “What?” I asked. “You will not take notes on what I say now? For what reason? Because you fear your master? Because you fear the truth?”
“You are losing your sense again,” she said.
“No, indeed,” I said. “I think at last I am restored.”
The smoke had cleared. The broken one fell back. I could see.
I could never have been brought down alone. Those who would speak for me, those who might reach Henry, they had to fall too. Norris, George, Weston, Brereton… They were all here because of me. Smeaton was the weakest link. He had vanished before the May Day celebrations, some said to play in a noble house. I would wager that house had been Cromwell’s, and once Mark was there, he was made to say much. Weston was here because I had spoken of him in my fevered angst, and Norris for my conversation with him. George was imprisoned because my brother would never rest if harm was coming for me. And Brereton? He was my ally, it was true, but we had never been so close that this pirate could be considered an intimate. He was a boon for Cromwell. Remove Brereton, and all Cromwell’s problems in Wales and Cheshire would fade away.
Smeaton had been the catalyst, but we would all be thrown into Cromwell’s crucible. From the molten fire of our destruction would Cromwell forge a new world, one where he owned all the power.
I watched them taken to their separate towers and went back to my seat. My mind was whirring, and although the fug of terror was still upon me, rationality was breaking through.
I would not be condemned without trial. I held small hope that this would aid me, for in the courts it was for the accused to prove their innocence, rather than for the court to prove guilt. Most who were brought to trial knew that their end was a foregone conclusion, and pleaded guilty in order to receive mercy.
I would not give Henry that satisfaction.
I would not go quietly to my death. I would stand. I would fight, if not for my life, for my good name.
*
“Your brother’s wife has sent a letter to the King,” said Mistress Aucher as she helped me in the privy. This was the only place we could talk without the others hearing. We had not much time. They would come looking if we tarried too long, and would stop her doing even this slight duty.
“Jane will do all she can for my brother,” I said, thinking at least we had one ally, no matter how insignificant, on the outside. “She loves him.”
“She sent a letter,” Mistress Aucher said, rustling my skirts so it sounded like we were busy. “And he wept over it
. Your cousin, Bryan, delivered it.”
A wash of coldness swept over me. “Bryan is no friend to us,” I whispered. “Why would Jane have asked him to bring the message?”
“I know nothing more, my lady.”
“Is she at court?”
“She is in the company of Cromwell, often, so I hear.”
Another wave of chilly cold. Was it possible Jane, like my father, had turned on us in return for clemency? I could not believe it. Me, she might abandon, but not George. Surely not George. He was her light in the darkness, her North Star. What would she do without him?
But as I remembered those green glinting eyes full of pain and jealousy, I had cause to ponder again. George had talked of setting her aside… was she doing that to him? Would she take revenge?