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
y run out the gangplank and I walk steadily towards him, my head high. He bows very low as he sees me, and I see his face is pale and strained. He takes my hand to help me to the steps, and as he moves forward I see the boy who was hidden behind him. I see him, and I recognize him, and my heart stops still at the sight of him as if I have been jolted awake and I know that this is not a dream but the worst thing that has ever happened in a long, long life.
It is my grandson Harry. It is my grandson Harry. They have arrested Montague’s boy.
He is whooping with joy to see me, that’s what makes me weep as his arms come round my waist and he dances around me. He thinks I have come to take him home, and he is laughing with delight. He tries to board the barge, and it takes me a few moments before I can explain to him that I am imprisoned myself, and I see his little face blench with horror as he tries not to cry.
We grip each other’s hand and go towards the dark entrance together. They are housing us in the garden tower. I fall back and look at Sir William. “Not here,” I say. I will not tell him that I cannot bear to be imprisoned where my brother waited and waited for his freedom. “Not this tower. I cannot manage the stairs. They’re too narrow, too steep. I can’t go up and down them.”
“You won’t be going up and down them,” he says with grim humor. “You’re just going up. We’ll help you.”
They half carry me up the winding circular stair to the first-floor room. Harry has a little room above mine, overlooking the green. I have a larger room, overlooking the green out of one window and the river through a narrow arrow-slit. There is no fire made in either grate, the rooms are cold and cheerless. The walls are bare stone, carved here and there with the names and insignia of previous prisoners. I cannot bear to look for the names of my father or my brother or of my sons.
Harry goes to the window and points out his cousin, Courtenay’s boy, in the narrow streets below. He is housed with his mother Gertrude in the Beauchamp Tower; their rooms are more comfortable, Edward is very bored and very lonely but he and his mother get enough to eat and were given warm clothes this winter. With the high spirits of an eleven-year-old boy, Harry is more cheerful already, pleased that I am with him. He asks me to come to visit Gertrude Courtenay and is shocked when I say that I am not allowed to leave my room, that when he comes in to see me, the door will be locked behind him, and he can only go out when a guard comes to release him. He looks at me, his innocent face frowning, as if he is puzzled. “But we will be able to go home?” he asks. “We will go home soon?”
I am almost brave enough to assure him that he will go home soon. There may be evidence, real or pretend, against Gertrude, they may concoct something against me, but Harry is only eleven and Edward is thirteen years old and there can be nothing against these boys but the fact that they were born Plantagenets. I think even the king cannot be so far gone in his fear of my family as to keep two boys like this in the Tower as traitors.
But then I pause in my confident reckoning, pause and remember that his father took my brother at just this age, for just this reason, and my brother came out only to walk along the stone path, to Tower Hill, to the scaffold.
THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1539
The Parliament meets and Cromwell puts before it an Act of Attainder, which declares all of us Plantagenets to be traitors, without trial or evidence. Our good name is a crime, our goods are forfeit to the Crown, our children disinherited. Gertrude’s name and mine are listed among those of dead men.
They produce the dozens of letters that Gertrude is said to have written, they produce one letter which I wrote to my son Reginald to assure him of my love which was never delivered, and then Thomas Cromwell himself lifts a satchel and like a street magician draws out the badge that Tom Darcy gave me, the white silk badge embroidered with the five wounds of Christ with the white rose above it.
The house is silent as Thomas Cromwell flourishes this. Perhaps he hoped that they would clamor in an uproar, shouting for my head. Cromwell offers it as conclusive evidence of my guilt. He does not accuse me of any crime—even now, having an embroidered badge in an old box in your house is not a crime—and the houses of the commons and the lords barely respond. Perhaps they are sated with attainders, perhaps they are weary of death. Perhaps many of them have a badge just like it, tucked away in an old box in their country houses, from the time when they thought that good times might come, and there were many pilgrims marching for grace. At any rate, it is all that Cromwell has for evidence and I am to be kept in the Tower at His Majesty’s wish and my grandson Harry and Gertrude and her little boy must stay too.
THE TOWER, LONDON, WINTER 1539
It is as though our lives become motionless as the cold weather freezes the water in our jugs and the drips from the slates become long pointed icicles. Harry is allowed to attend Edward’s lessons, and stays in the Courtenay rooms for dinner, where there is a better table than mine. Gertrude and I exchange messages of goodwill but we never write one word to each other. My cousin William de la Pole dies alone in the cold cell where he has lived a prisoner, an innocent man, a kinsman. He has been in here for thirty-seven years. I pray for him; but I try not to think about him. I read when the light is good enough, I sew, sitting beside the window overlooking the green. I pray at the little altar in the corner of my room. I don’t wonder about my release, about freedom, about the future. I try not to think at all. I study endurance.
Only the outside world moves on. Ursula writes to me that Constance and Geoffrey have a baby, to be called Catherine, and that the king is to marry a new wife. They have found a princess who is prepared to marry a man she has never seen and of whom she can only have heard the worst reports. Anne of Cleves is to make the long journey, from her Protestant homeland to the country that the king and Cromwell are destroying, next spring.
THE TOWER, LONDON, SPRING 1540
We endure a long year and a bitterly cold winter as prisoners in our cells, seeing the sky only as slats of gray framed by iron bars, smelling the wind from the river in cold drafts under the thick doors, hearing the single call of the winter robin and the ceaseless lament of the seagulls at a distance.
Harry grows taller and taller, out of his hose and out of his shoes, and I have to beg the warder to request new clothes for him. We are allowed a fire in our rooms only when it gets very cold, and I see my fingers thicken and redden with chilblains. It grows dark very early in the little rooms, it stays dark for a long time, dawn comes later and later through this cold winter, and when there is a mist coming off the river or the clouds are very low it never gets light at all.
I try to be cheerful and optimistic for Harry’s sake, and read with him in Latin and French; but when he has gone to sleep in his little cell and I am locked in mine, I pull the thin blanket over my head and lie dry-eyed in the fusty darkness and know that I am too beaten by grief to cry.
We wait as spring comes to green the trees in the Tower garden and we can hear the blackbirds singing in the constable’s orchard. The two boys are allowed out on the green to play, and someone sets up a butt for them and gives them bows and arrows; someone else gives them a set of bowls and marks out a green for them. Though the days get warmer, it is still very cold in our rooms, and so I ask the warder to allow me to send for some clothes. I am served by my lady-in-waiting and by the master controller’s maid, and I am ashamed that I cannot pay their wages. The warder presents a petition for me and I receive some clothes and some money, and, then, surprisingly, for no reason, Gertrude Courtenay is released.
William Fitzwilliam himself comes in with the warder to tell me the good news.
“Are we to go too?” I ask him calmly. I put my hand on Harry’s thin shoulder and feel him shudder like a captive merlin at the thought of freedom.
“I am sorry, your ladyship,” Thomas Philips, the warder, says. “There are no orders to release you yet.”
I feel Harry’s shoulders slump, and Thomas sees the look on my face. “Maybe soon,” he says. He turn
s to Harry. “But you are not to lose your playmate, so you won’t be lonely,” he says, trying to sound cheerful.
“Is Edward not going with his mother?” I ask. “Why would they release Lady Courtenay and keep her little son prisoner?”
As he meets my eyes he realizes, as I do, that this is the imprisonment of the Plantagenets, not of traitors. Gertrude can go for she was born a Blount, the daughter of Baron Mountjoy. But her son, Edward, must stay for his name is Courtenay.
There is no charge, there can be no charge, he is a child and had never even left home. It is the king gathering the Plantagenet sons into his keeping, like the Moldwarp undermining a house, like a monster in a fairy tale, eating children, one by one.
I think of little Harry and Edward, their bright, eager eyes and Harry’s curly auburn hair, and I think of the cold walls of the Tower and the long, long days of captivity, and I find a new level of endurance, of pain. I look at William Fitzwilliam, and I say to him: “As the king wishes.”
“You don’t find this unjust?” he says wonderingly, as if he is my friend and might plead for the boys’ release. “You don’t think you should speak out? Appeal?”
I shrug my shoulders. “He is the king,” I say. “He is the emperor, the supreme head of the Church. His judgment must be right. Don’t you think his judgment is infallible, my lord?”
He blinks at that, blinks like the mole his master, and gulps. “He’s not mistaken,” he says quickly, as if I might spy on him.
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