“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
eginald. He knew it wasn’t about the price of wheat in Berkshire last summer. He knew we warned him that Francis Bryan had been sent to capture him. He accused Geoffrey of disloyalty.”
“But not treason?”
“No, not treason. It’s not treason to tell a man, your own brother, that someone is coming to kill him.”
“And Geoffrey confessed?”
Montague sighs. “He denied it to start with, but then it was obvious that Holland had told Cromwell both messages. Geoffrey’s message to Reginald, and Reginald’s replies to us.”
“But still they are not treason.” I find I am clinging to this fact.
“No. But obviously he must have tortured Holland to get the messages.”
I swallow, thinking of the round-faced man that came to my house, and the bruise on his cheek when he was hurried past us on the road. “Would Cromwell dare to torture a London merchant?” I ask. “What about his guild? What about his friends? What about the City merchants? Don’t they defend their own?”
“Cromwell must think he’s on to something. And apparently, he does dare, and that’s why, yesterday, he arrested Geoffrey.”
“He won’t . . . he won’t . . .” I find I can’t name my fear.
“No, he won’t torture Geoffrey, he wouldn’t dare touch one of us. The king’s council would not allow it. But Geoffrey is in a panic. I don’t know what he might say.”
“He’d never say anything that would hurt us,” I say. I find I am smiling, even in this danger, at the thought of my son’s loving, faithful heart. “He’d never say anything that would hurt any of us.”
“No, and besides, at the very worst, all we have done is warn a brother that he is in danger. Nobody could blame us for that.”
“What can we do?” I ask. I want to rush to the Tower at once, but my knees are weak, and I can’t even rise.
“We’re not allowed to visit; only his wife can go into the Tower to see him. So I’ve sent for Constance. She’ll be here tomorrow. And after she’s seen him and made sure that he’s not said anything, I’ll go to Cromwell again. I might even speak with the king when he comes back, if I can catch him in a good mood.”
“Does Henry know of this?”
“It’s my hope he knows nothing. It might be that Cromwell has overreached himself and that the king will be furious with him when he finds out. His temper is so unreliable these days that he lashes out at Cromwell as often as he agrees with him. If I can catch him at the right time, if he is feeling loving towards us, and irritated by Cromwell, he might take this as an insult to us, his kinsmen, and knock Cromwell down for it.”
“He is so changeable?”
“Lady Mother, none of us ever knows from dawn to dusk what mood he will be in, nor when or why it will suddenly change.”
I spend the rest of the evening and most of the night on my knees in my chapel, praying to my God for the safety of my son; but I can’t be sure that He is listening. I think of the hundreds, thousands of mothers on their knees in England tonight, praying for the safety of their sons, or for the souls of their sons who have died for less than Geoffrey and Montague have done.
I think of the abbey doors banging open in the moonlight of the English summer night, of the sacred chests and holy goods tumbled onto shining cobbles in darkened squares as Cromwell’s men pull down the shrines and throw out the relics. They say that Thomas Becket’s shrine, which the king himself approached on his knees, has been broken up and the rich offerings and the magnificent jewels have disappeared into Lord Cromwell’s new Court of Augmentations, and the saint’s sacred bones have been lost.
After a little while I sit back on my heels and feel the ache in my back. I cannot bring myself to trouble God; there is too much for Him to put right tonight. I think of Him, old and weary as I am old and weary, feeling as I do, that there is too much to put right and that England, His own special country, has gone all wrong.
L’ERBER, LONDON, AUTUMN 1538
Constance goes straight to the Tower as soon as she arrives in London, and then comes to L’Erber. I take her into my privy chamber and give her a cup of mulled ale, take her gloves from her cold hands, and unwrap her cape and her shawls from her thin shoulders. She looks from me to Montague as if she thinks the two of us can save her.
“I’ve never seen him like this before,” she says. “I don’t know what I can do.”
“What is he like?” Montague asks gently.
“Crying,” she says. “Raging round the room. Banging on the door but no one comes. Taking hold of the bars of the window and shaking them as if he thinks he might bring down the walls of the Tower. And then he turned and fell on his knees and wept and said he could not bear it.”
I am horrified. “Have they hurt him?”
She shakes her head. “They’ve not touched his body—but his pride . . .”
“Did he say what they put to him?” Montague asks patiently.
She shakes her head. “Don’t you hear me? He’s raving. He’s in a frenzy.”
“He’s not coherent?”
I can hear the hope in Montague’s voice.
“He’s like a madman,” she says. “He’s praying and crying, and then he suddenly declares that he’s done nothing, and then he says that everyone always blames him, and then he says he should have run away but that you stopped him, that you always stop him, and then he says that he cannot stay in England anyway for the debts.” Her eyes slide to me. “He says that his mother should pay his debts.”
“Could you tell if he has been properly questioned? Has he been charged with any offense?”
She shakes her head. “We have to send him clothes and food,” she says. “He’s cold. There’s no fire in his room, and he has only his riding cape. And he threw that down on the floor and stamped on it.”
“I’ll do that at once,” I say.
“But you don’t know if he has been properly questioned, nor what he has said?” Montague confirms.
“He says that he has done nothing,” she repeats. “He says that they come and shout at him every day. But he says nothing for he has done nothing.”
Geoffrey’s ordeal goes on another day. I send my steward with a parcel of his warm clothes and with orders to buy food from the bakehouse near the Tower and take in a proper meal for my boy, although he comes back and says that the guards took the clothes but he thought they would keep them, and that he was not allowed to order a meal.
“I’ll go with Constance tomorrow, and see if I can command them to take him a dinner at least,” I say to Montague, as I enter the echoing presence chamber at L’Erber. It is empty of anyone, no petitioners, no tenants, no friends. “And she can take in a winter cape and some linen for him, and some bedding.”
He is standing at the window, his head bowed, in silence.
“Did you see the king?” I ask him. “Could you speak to him for Geoffrey? Did he know that Geoffrey is under arrest?”
“He knew already,” Montague says dully. “There was nothing I could say, for he knew already.”
“Cromwell acted with his authority?”
“That we’ll never know. Lady Mother. Because the king didn’t know about Geoffrey from Cromwell. He knew from Geoffrey himself. Apparently, Geoffrey has written to him.”
“Written to the king?”
“Yes. Cromwell showed me the letter. Geoffrey wrote to the king that if the king will order him some comforts, then he will tell all he knows, even though it touches his own mother, or brother.”
For a moment I hear the words but I cannot make out the meaning. Then I understand. “No!” I am horror-struck. “It can’t be true. It must be a forgery. Cromwell must be tricking you! It’s what he would do!”
“No. I saw the note. It was Geoffrey’s hand. I am not mistaken. Those were his exact words.”
“He offered to betray me and you for some warm clothes and a good dinner?”
“It seems so.”
“Montague, he must have lost his mind. He would
never do such a thing, he would never hurt me. He must be witless. My God, my poor boy, he must be in a delirium.”
“Let’s hope so,” Montague says spitefully. “For if he is mad, he cannot testify.”
Constance comes back from the Tower supported by two manservants, unable to walk, unable to speak.
“Is he ill?” I take her by the shoulders and stare into her face as if I can see what is wrong with my son by the blank horror of his wife’s expression. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Constance? Tell me?”
She shakes her head. She moans. “No, no.”
“Has he lost his wits?”
She hides her face in her hands and sobs.
“Constance, speak to me! Have they racked him?” I name my worst fear.
“No, no.”
“He doesn’t have the Sweat, does he?”
She raises her head. “Lady Mother, he tried to kill himself. He took a knife from the table and he threw himself on it and stabbed himself nearly to his heart.”
Abruptly, I let her go and grab a tall chair to support myself. “Is it fatal? A fatal wound? My boy?”
She nods. “It’s very bad. They wouldn’t let me stay with him. I saw thick bandages around his chest, they had him strapped twice. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. He was lying on his bed, blood seeping through the bandages. They told me what he had done and he didn’t speak. He just turned his face to the wall.”
“He has seen a physician? They had bandaged him?”
She nods.
Montague comes into the room behind us, his face ghastly, his smile twisted. “A knife from his dinner table?”
“Yes,” she says.
“And did he have a good dinner?”
It is a question so odd, so strange to ask in the middle of this tragedy, that she turns and stares at him.
She does not know what he means; but I do.
“He had a very good dinner, several dishes, and there was a fire in the grate, and someone had sent him new clothes,” she replies.
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