PRAISE FOR THE CROWN
“Nancy Bilyeau’s polished, inventive debut has all the ingredients of the best historical fiction: a broad cast of characters, well-imagined settings, and vivid storytelling. . . . In Joanna Stafford, Bilyeau has given us a memorable character who is prepared to risk her life to save what she most values, while Stafford’s desperate search for a lost religious relic will satisfy even the most ardent mystery fans.”
—DEBORAH HARKNESS, AUTHOR OF A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES
“An amazing first novel, filled with excitement, intrigue, espionage, and set against the background of one of the bloodiest periods of British history: the schism between Church and State. It’s an action-packed tale of one nun’s dangerous quest to discover the secrets of a relic that dates back centuries.”
—KATHERINE NEVILLE, AUTHOR OF THE EIGHT
“The events of the period come to life in Nancy Bilyeau’s dazzling and heart-wrenching novel. The Crown is evocative, provocative, and full of intriguing characters—gorgeously written, it has mystery and history, pathos and depth. This is a stunning debut about a woman whose spirit shines through and deeply moves the reader.”
—M.J. ROSE, AUTHOR OF THE REINCARNATIONIST
An aristocratic young nun must find a legendary crown in order to save her father—and preserve the Catholic faith from Cromwell’s ruthless terror.
The year is 1537. . . .
Joanna Stafford, a Dominican nun, learns that her favorite cousin has been condemned by Henry VIII to be burned at the stake. Defying the sacred rule of enclosure, Joanna leaves the priory to stand at her cousin’s side. Arrested for interfering with the king’s justice, Joanna, along with her father, is sent to the Tower of London.
The ruthless Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, takes terrifying steps to force Joanna to agree to spy for him: to save her father’s life she must find an ancient relic—a crown so powerful, it may hold the ability to end the Reformation. Accompanied by two monks, Joanna returns home to Dartford Priory and searches in secret for this long-lost piece of history worn by the Saxon King Athelstan in 937 during the historic battle that first united Britain.
But Dartford Priory has become a dangerous place, and when more than one dead body is uncovered, Joanna departs with a sensitive young monk, Brother Edmund, to search elsewhere for the legendary crown. From royal castles with tapestry-filled rooms to Stonehenge to Malmesbury Abbey, the final resting place of King Athelstan, Joanna and Brother Edmund must hurry to find the crown if they want to keep Joanna’s father alive. At Malmesbury, secrets of the crown are revealed that bring to light the fates of the Black Prince, Richard the Lionhearted, and Katherine of Aragon’s first husband, Arthur. The crown’s intensity and strength are beyond the earthly realm and it must not fall into the wrong hands.
With Cromwell’s troops threatening to shutter her priory, bright and bold Joanna must now decide who she can trust with the secret of the crown so that she may save herself, her family, and her sacred way of life.
This provocative story melds heart-stopping suspense with historical detail and brings to life the poignant dramas of women and men at a fascinating and critical moment in England’s past.
NANCY BILYEAU is a writer and magazine editor who has worked on the staffs of InStyle, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Visit her website at www.nancybilyeau.com, friend her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter.
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• THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •
JACKET DESIGN BY CHRISTOPHER LIN
JACKET ART: THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN (OIL ON CANVAS), VERONESE, (PAOLO CALIARI) (1528–88)/SAN SEBASTIANO, VENICE, ITALY/
CAMERAPHOTO ARTE VENEZIA/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY INTERNATIONAL
COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER
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Touchstone
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Nancy Bilyeau
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Touchstone hardcover edition January 2012
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Designed by Akasha Archer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bilyeau, Nancy.
The crown / Nancy Bilyeau.
p. cm.
“A Touchstone book.”
1. Great Britain—History—Tudors, 1485–1603—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.I49C76 2011
813‘.6—dc22
2011003384
ISBN 978-1-4516-2685-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-2687-2 (ebook)
For my husband, who believed
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part Three
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part Four
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Reading Group Guide
‘The Chalice’ Excerpt
PART
ONE
1
London, May 25, 1537
When a burning is announced, the taverns off Smithfield order extra barrels of ale, but when the person to be executed is a woman and one of noble birth, the ale comes by the cartload. I would ride in one of those carts on
Friday of Whitsun week, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, to offer prayers for the soul of the condemned traitor, Lady Margaret Bulmer.
I heard the cartsman’s cry go out as I made my way on Cheap-side Street, clutching the London map I’d sketched from a book in secret two nights before. I moved faster now that I’d reached such a wide and cobbled street, but my legs throbbed. I’d spent the morning trudging through mud.
“Smithfield—are ye bound for Smithfield?” It was a cheerful voice, as if the destination were a Saint George’s Day fair. Just ahead, in front of a tannery, I saw who had shouted: a burly man flicking the backs of four horses hitched to a large cart. A half-dozen heads peeked above the rails.
“Hold!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “I wish to go to Smithfield.”
The cartsman whipped around; his eyes searched the crowd. I waved, and his face split into a wet smile. As I drew nearer, my stomach clenched. I’d vowed I would speak to no one this entire day, seek no assistance. The risk of discovery was too great. But Smithfield lay outside the walls of the city, to the north and west, still a fair distance away.
When I reached him, the cartsman looked me up and down, and his smile sagged. I wore a heavy wool kirtle, the only one available to me for the journey. It was a bodice and skirt made for the dead of winter, not spring, and not a day when bursts of warmth were anchored by sheets of billowing mists. Mud soaked my tangled hem. I could only be grateful no one could see beneath the heavy fabric, to my shift drenched with sweat.
But I knew it wasn’t only my disheveled garments that gave the cartsman pause. To many, I look strange. My hair is black as polished onyx; my eyes are brown with flecks of green. My olive skin neither reddens by Saint Swithin’s Day, nor pales by Advent. Mine is the coloring of my Spanish mother. But not her delicate features. No, my face is that of my English father: a wide forehead, high cheekbones, and strong chin. It’s as if the mismatch of my parents’ marriage fought on the foundation of my face, plain for all to see. In a land of pink-and-white girls, I stand out like a raven. There was a time when that troubled me, but at twenty-six years of age, I was no longer subject to such petty concerns.
“A shilling to ride, mistress,” the cartsman said. “Pay up and we’ll be off.”
His demand took me by surprise, though, of course, it shouldn’t have.
“I am without coins,” I stammered.
The cartsman barked a laugh. “Do ye think I do this for amusement? I’ve run low on ale”—he pounded a wooden barrel behind him—“and I must earn enough to pay for the cart.” On the far side of the barrel, I could see his passengers craning to get a look at me.
“Wait,” I said, and fished for the small cloth purse in the pocket I’d stitched into my dress. Swirling my fingers around the purse, I found a slender ring. I didn’t want to give him anything finer. Some important bribes lay ahead.
I held out the ring. “Will this do?” In an instant his scowl turned to delight, and the slight golden ring of my dead mother disappeared into the driver’s dirty palm.
When I climbed into the back of his cart, I could see pity and contempt playing across the faces of the other passengers. My ring must be worth more than the ride. I found a clean pile of straw in the corner and looked down, trying to avoid their curious stares, as the cart resumed its journey.
An elbow poked my side. A sturdy woman sidled closer, one of middling years, the only other female in the cart. Smiling, she held out a piece of brown bread. I’d had nothing to eat since last night’s supper. Ordinarily, I gloried in the pangs of hunger, the mastery over my weak mortal flesh, but my mission required a certain vigor. I took the bread with a grateful nod. A mouthful of food and a gulp of watery ale from her wooden tankard brought strength to my dazed body.
I leaned back against the railing. We passed a small market that appeared to sell nothing but spices and herbs. Now that the rain had stopped, the sellers threw off the blankets keeping their narrow stalls dry. A rich mix of borage, sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and chives surged in the air, and then dissolved as we rumbled on. The urgent smells of the city rose again. A row of four-story buildings came into view—more prosperous than any I’d seen so far. The sign of the goldsmith hung from a street corner.
A young man sitting across from me grinned and said, loudly, to the whole cart, “We’re grateful to King Hal for burning a young beauty at Smithfield. Last person killed was an ugly, old forger.”
A knot of swallowed bread rose in my throat, and I covered my mouth.
“But is she a beauty?” demanded someone else.
An elderly man with milky blue eyes twisted a long hair that sprang from the middle of his chin.
“I know someone who has seen Lady Bulmer in the flesh, and yes, she is bonny,” he said slowly. “More so than the queen.”
“Which queen?” one of the men shouted.
“All three of them,” answered another. A nervous laugh raced around the cart. To mock the king’s marriages—the divorce of the first wife and the execution of the second to make way for the third—was a crime. Hands and ears had been lopped off for it.
The old man twisted his chin hair harder. “Lady Bulmer must have offended the king grievously for him to burn her out in the open before commoners, not to order the ax for Tower Hill or hang her at Tyburn.”
The young man said, “They’ve dragged all the nobles and gentry down to London, the ones who followed Robert Aske. For king’s justice. She’s just the first to die.”
My breath quickened. What would these Londoners say, what would they do to me, if they knew who I was and where I came from? One thing was certain: I would never reach Smithfield.
I searched my prayers for something to uphold me. O Lord my God, help me to be obedient without reserve, poor without servility, chaste without compromise.
“The Bulmer woman’s a foul rebel!” shouted the woman who’d shared with me her bread. “She’s a Papist northerner who plotted to overthrow our king.”
Humble without pretense, joyful without depravity, serious without affectation, active without frivolity, submissive without bitterness, truthful without duplicity.
The old man said mildly: “In the North, they gave their lives for the old ways. They wanted to protect the monasteries.”
Everyone erupted in scorn.
“Those fat monks hide pots of gold while the poor starve outside their walls.”
“I heard of a nun who had a priest’s brat.”
“The sisters are whores. Or else they’re cripples—idiots, all cast off by their families.”
I heard a ragged noise. It was my own laugh, a bitter, joyless one—and unheeded, for there was a shout just then outside the cart. An urchin ran alongside, so fast he shot ahead of our horses. A panicky look over the shoulder revealed the child to be not a boy but a smudge-faced girl, her hair chopped short.
A clod of dirt sailed through the air and hit her shoulder. “Awww,” she howled. “Ye curs!”
Two large boys, scrambling up along the side of the cart, laughed. Within a minute, they’d have her. The men in the cart cheered on the chase.
The boys’ prey darted out of the street and toward a row of shops.
Another girl beckoned from a doorway. “This way!” she shouted. The urchin darted inside, and the door slammed shut behind them. The boys reached it seconds later and pounded, but it was locked.
I closed my eyes. A different girl was running. Eight years old, breathless, a stitch in my side, I charged down a narrow path between tall hedges of yew, searching for a way out.
I could hear people calling my name, but I couldn’t see them. “Hurry, Joanna, hurry—we’re to play tennis next!” shouted my boy cousins, so strong, so hard. “Come now, girl, you can manage it,” boomed the careless voice of my uncle, Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham and head of the family. “You must find your own way out. We can’t send anyone after you and risk the loss of another child.”
I wa
s trapped in my uncle’s maze. He’d just had it built—“I hired better monks to design mine than Cardinal Wolsey used,” he said again and again. Today, September 4, the annual birthday celebration of the second Duke of Buckingham, my long-dead grandfather, the maze was put to use. We cousins were blindfolded and led to the center. Then they whipped the cloths off and told us to race out, to see who’d be first. “Tread the maze! Tread the maze!” my uncle cried from outside the tall winding hedges.
I was one of the youngest and immediately fell to the back of the pack. Soon I was alone. I ran this way and that, hoping to see the hedge walls open to the gardens, but my instincts were always wrong and just led me deeper into the maze.
“What’s wrong with you, Joanna?”
“Think, girl, think!”
The voices grew louder, more impatient. “Joanna, don’t be such a doddypoll,” shouted one Stafford boy. An elder hushed him.
I’d become the center of attention, something I always hated. Had I turned right at this corner, or left? Panic made me forget which paths I’d already tried.
How my head spun with the smell of the roses. Dozens of sternly tamed red bushes dotted the maze. It was almost the end of the season; the rose petals had frayed and loosened. And the hour of the day had passed for peak freshness. But there were so many bushes, and I had passed them so many times. I could almost taste those cloying, dusty, imperious roses.
I turned a corner, fast, and slammed into Margaret.
We both fell down, laughing, the beads of our puffy sleeves hooked together. After we’d disentangled, she helped me up: Margaret was a year older and two inches taller, and always a hundred times cleverer and prettier. My first cousin. My only friend.
“Margaret, where have you gone to?” bellowed the Duke of Buckingham. “You better not have slipped back in the maze for Joanna.”
“Oh, he’s going to be angry with you,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done it.”
Margaret winked. She brushed the dirt off my party finery and hers and led me out, holding my hand the whole way.
The Crown Page 1