How very wrong I was! And what a terrible price I paid for my mistaken confidence!
* * *
I must now write of the worst time of my life. I dread to choose the words. I dread to write them. But without this unbearable piece of my story, all that came afterward would not have made sense. So write it I must.
May the mercies of heaven follow me as I write these bitter, bitter words.
When I returned to London I waited until nightfall, then slipped into the stables, to the loft where I had left Galyon. I called his name softly. There was no answer. I waited, then called again. But no sound came back to me.
Awkwardly, in my long skirt and petticoats, and without Galyon’s strong arms to support me, I climbed up into the hayloft and found there nothing but a pile of clothing and the remains of many plates of food, with rats swarming over the bones and scraps.
I shuddered, recoiling at the sight and fearing what it might mean. Where was my Galyon? And where was Henry?
Late as the hour was, I went in search of Will. He would know. Perhaps he had moved Galyon to a safer place while I was away.
But Will, I was told, had taken Henry Fitzroy into the country on a hunting trip, and would not be back for several days. I assumed that Henry, as the prince’s constant companion and defender, had gone with them.
Sick with fear, I returned to the queen’s apartments and prepared for bed. I was tired. I knew I could do nothing more that night. I tried to sleep.
In the morning we maids of honor were summoned into Anne’s bedchamber. One of the windows, I noticed, was covered with a thick curtain of black velvet, which blotted out the light and drained the color from our faces.
Anne was in bed, wearing a soft woolen bedgown and over it, a warm fur mantle. The room was cold despite the flames that leapt in the fireplace. I shivered, as much from fear as from the chill in the spacious room.
Anne gave us our instructions. We were to prepare ourselves for a visit by the French ambassador and other notables from the court of Francis I. They were expected within a day or two and there was much to be done before they arrived, for the king hoped to strengthen England’s bonds with the French against the renewed menace of Emperor Charles.
“I am unwell,” Anne said wearily.
“Are we to hope that Your Majesty may once again be with child?” Bridget asked.
“It is possible. Meanwhile another bedchamber must be prepared. I cannot stay here in this ice house.” Servants were sent to make another bedchamber ready.
“Why is that window covered?” asked the ever inquisitive Anne Cavecant.
Anne shook her head in annoyance. “One of the workmen fell out of it yesterday. A foolish fellow, a Frenchman.”
My heart stopped.
“But those workmen are always so careful,” Anne Cavecant insisted. “I have never known one to fall. They strap themselves to the scaffolding.”
“This one didn’t!” Anne snapped. “He was trying to run away, or to escape his superiors. He had been hiding in the stables, when he was needed here! Not that it mattered, but it seems he was the only one of the entire work crew with the skill to repair this window and install my falcon badge. I had him found and brought back. But he fell.”
“Is he—did he survive the fall?” I heard myself ask, my voice tremulous.
Anne shrugged. “As it happens, he didn’t. The king is annoyed. It will take weeks to find a replacement for him, and meanwhile we will not be able to show off this room to the French.”
I thought I would die where I stood. I couldn’t breathe. The hammering in my chest was so loud I imagined everyone in the room could hear it. My cheeks were wet.
I felt an arm around my shoulders, and heard Bridget saying, “Jane, you look pale. Come, take some wine.” The maids of honor were dispersing, and I let Bridget lead me into an adjoining room.
“It was my Galyon, it was my Galyon,” I kept whispering. “My Galyon is dead. And Anne killed him!”
For I had no doubt about what had happened, as surely as if I had been there to witness it. Anne had sent her spies to find Galyon, and to bring him to her. She had renewed her offer of a bribe—or perhaps it had been not an offer but a demand. Galyon had refused to do what she asked. And then—I still feel the horror of it now—in desperation he had jumped to his death. Or she had cornered him beside the window opening, and in her fury, pushed him out.
I cried out, and made a dash for the doorway. What did I mean to do? I had no clear plan, only the overwhelming need to destroy Anne. Had I been a man, and armed, I believe I could have run her through with my sword.
Poor Bridget, not knowing what else to do, called for the guards, who restrained me and then held me down, keeping me from any further rash acts, until a physician had come and given me a drink that addled my wits and made me senseless, and I fell into a whirling, dizzying sleep filled with dreams of loss and hopelessness.
* * *
Tears! Tears of rage, tears of sorrow, such deep sorrow, all the deeper for being kept to myself. I wanted to kill Anne, I planned to do it in a thousand ways. But I did not. Ever since that terrible time, I have asked myself why I did not. Was it because from childhood I had been told “Thou shalt not kill” and “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord”? Was it because I feared to suffer the king’s vengeance, and the pain he would be sure to inflict on me and those I cared about if I harmed Anne?
Or was it because, since I am not after all a creature of impulse—at least not entirely so—I had, in the horrible days following Galyon’s death, begun to form the first faint outlines of a more devious plan. A way to take vengeance on Anne that would leave me free of suspicion, but would ensure that in time, my beloved Galyon would be avenged.
* * *
Hardly had the first frosts set in before Anne’s baby daughter, given the name Elizabeth, was put in the care of her nurse and rockers and sent off to Hatfield. Her birth had mortified Anne and angered King Henry, and her presence was an unwanted reminder of how chance governed the affairs of men—even of kings.
“Why couldn’t young Fitzroy have been a girl—and this one a boy!” I overheard the king say as he passed, limping on his sore leg, through Anne’s new bedchamber, shaking his head and sighing. “What have I done, that the Almighty should cross me so!”
He was wrapped up in his own thoughts, but not so preoccupied that he did not nod to me and smile as he passed me. I made a small half-curtsey.
“Ah, Jane,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Jane, the only one I can trust.”
It was not the first time I had heard him greet me with those words. I wondered that he should single me out as uniquely trustworthy. To be sure, the court was rife with deception, but I was hardly free of that taint. I was no innocent. And if the king had known what elaborate deceits and harms I spun out in my fantasies, he would surely have taken back his trust. Still, I valued his confidence, and did not abuse it. And I liked the warm comradeship I saw in his smile.
His smile! Something we saw all too rarely in that troubled time following the birth of the little princess, when the king complained loudly of feeling besieged on all sides—by ill fortune, by the Emperor Charles and his armies, by the new pope, Paul III (the king’s old nemesis Pope Clement having died and an equally uncompromising successor having been elected), and above all, by his lordly, nagging wife.
For Anne had triumphed over her disappointment, to become more irksome than ever.
“I am carrying within me the next king,” she announced to her household, her face aglow with triumph, her hands over her stomach. “He should arrive, God willing, with the harvest. Prepare the birth chamber.”
Greatly surprised, we scurried to do her bidding. We sewed yards and yards of purple velvet to make new hangings for the bed. We had the carved, gilded royal cradle brought in—the cradle fit for a prince. At Anne’s command I sent for a statue of St. Margaret, patron saint of safe childbirth, and had it placed prominently in the room, even though
some of the other maids of honor objected, saying the worship of saints was popish and therefore wicked.
“The Nun of Kent would rejoice in that statue,” Anne Cavecant said when she saw the smiling blue-gowned figure. “The saint would probably talk to her.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said another of the maids. “Statues can’t talk.”
“And lice can’t suddenly appear in their thousands, I suppose. But it happened. I saw them. Lice everywhere. I say the nun has powers, great powers. She could destroy us all.”
“And idle talk could make the king angry at us,” I said, hoping to divert the flow of gossip, “which would be even worse.”
“Bridget,” I went on, “where have you put the queen’s counterpane? She will be asking for it.”
“Demanding it, you mean. I will have one of the grooms fetch it.”
In preparing Anne’s birth chamber we kept in mind that an exceptionally cold winter was expected. The royal gardeners cautioned us that the onions they were pulling that fall had very thin skins and the thinner the onionskin, the harsher the winter to come. We piled warm bedcoverings over the pallet beds for the six midwives that would attend Anne. We had braziers brought in and ordered a larger supply of coals than usual.
We were careful in making all these arrangements knowing how superstitious Anne was about the coming birth of her child. She had her old bedchamber—the one in which Galyon had died—shut up tightly and sealed. It was bad luck, she said, to sleep in a room where a life had ended through accident. Only it was no accident, I felt sure, and Anne’s reluctance to enter that room was the result of a guilty conscience and fear of retribution.
Not only was Anne “pregnant with the king,” as she often said, she was about to repeat her triumph at the French court. The emperor had renewed his threat to invade England, and had the firm support of the new pope; because of this, and to ensure that his fragile ties with King Francis remained firmly in place, King Henry had decided to take his courtiers to the continent once again, for another meeting with the French.
Nothing delighted Anne more than the prospect of a new wardrobe, and she insisted on having one made for the journey to France. Mr. Skut and his assistants were kept busy all day and long into the night preparing new gowns, in Anne’s preferred shades of deep rose and rich murrey, soft cinnamon and russet brown. There were petticoats and kirtles in the newest style, longer and wider than those in fashion when Catherine was queen, and lace-trimmed, angel-wing sleeves to go with them, soft bedgowns, velvet slippers and a curious kind of new headdress voluted at the sides. Every garment was made with Anne’s rounding shape in mind, even the shell-like headdresses. (“To draw attention to the ears, and away from the belly,” said Mr. Skut, and Anne had to agree.)
With Anne’s quickening, in the depth of winter, came a renewed frenzy of activity—and a squabble. For Henry, ever changeable and unpredictable, had ordered that Princess Mary, Queen Catherine’s eighteen-year-old daughter, join Queen Anne’s household.
“I will not have this!” Anne cried in exasperation. “I will not have that stubborn, mulish girl near me, with her airs and her popish ways!”
Mary, ever loyal to her mother, refused to accept the outcome of her father’s nullity suit and the official change in her mother’s status to that of “princess dowager.” Mary continued to regard her mother as a queen, and herself as a princess, and was not reticent in calling Anne’s tiny daughter Elizabeth a bastard. I thought Mary very brave, and quietly admired her for standing up for what she believed—yet I could not help thinking her a fool. As I was learning in the months following my loss of Galyon, confronting a powerful enemy only led to self-destruction; far better to find a way to win by attacking the enemy secretly, behind the scenes, by indirection.
As I predicted, Mary’s obstinate insistence on being called princess and refusing to accept any subordinate role to baby Elizabeth (who was not even present at court in those days) made Anne furious.
“That girl needs a beating!” Anne shouted. “She will be taught to obey, or she will be shut up in a dungeon!” There were quarrels between Anne and the king, long silences, estrangements. Mary gloated—she was enjoying her brief triumph as a source of anxiety to her mother’s hated rival Anne—but in the end, Anne won out. She was, after all, pregnant with England’s next king, as she never ceased to say. And King Henry, though capable of loud and frightening anger, was a beleaguered man with a sore leg who very much wanted his wife to give him a son.
Mary was sent away. And Anne, in her moment of triumph, made yet another demand. The Nun of Kent, she said, must be executed at once, before she could do any harm to the boy who would soon be born.
Too weary of arguing to resist, Henry agreed. The nun was put to the rack, her frail flesh tormented, until she shrieked with pain and begged to be allowed to die. In her agony, so King Henry said, she confessed that she was no visionary and that the Lord did not speak to her or through her. She was in the pay of Ambassador Chapuys. She was paid to prophesy doom for the house of Tudor, to stir up the English against their ruler and to punish him for putting aside his Spanish wife.
The execution of Elizabeth Barton, known as the Nun of Kent, was set to take place toward the end of April, and Anne announced that she, and all her maids of honor, would attend.
NINETEEN
Though the sun was high and bright in the spring sky, the air was cool. A faint wind blew toward us across the river as we took our places in the innermost courtyard of the Tower, beside the gallows. Thin clouds raced past. Beside me, Anne shivered. She was determined to watch the Nun of Kent die. But she disliked discomfort, and she did not like to be kept waiting. She wrapped her fur-lined cloak tightly around her and tapped her foot on the dusty cobbles, a frown of discontent on her harried features.
After what seemed an endless wait, soldiers began to file out from the inner ward, sharp halbards gleaming in the sun, and formed a half-circle around the prisoner they guarded. She was a small woman, her dirty grey-green garment in rags, her feet bare. She stumbled as she walked, looking down as she went, her long dark hair veiling her face. She was much thinner than she had been when I saw her first in the convent of St. Agnes’s, thin as a broomstick, one emaciated arm stretched out in front of her as if beseeching aid or trying to keep from falling.
To the loud beat of drums, she left the ring of soldiers and made her way slowly and shakily up the steps to the platform where the gallows waited: two upright planks supporting a crossbar—the stark, fearsomely simple structure that would soon end her life. A priest mounted the steps after her and stood behind her as she faced the murmuring crowd.
Then something remarkable happened. With a dramatic gesture, the nun threw back her head, revealing her face—a face covered in purple bruises, yet seemingly lit from within by an odd radiance. At the same moment there came a brilliant burst of lightning and, just afterward, a sharp clap of thunder. The first fat, heavy drops of rain splattered on the gallows, the cobbles, the soldiers and the nun herself. The dust beneath our feet turned to mud as more rain fell, until the spattering became a shower and then a torrent. Thunder rumbled ever louder. We were soon drenched, but Anne stayed where she was, next to me, the hem of her gown growing black with mud, her slippers ruined, and the rest of our party—ten maids of honor in all—remained with her.
“Rain from a clear sky!” I heard people exclaim. “The nun is working a miracle!” “It is a sign!”
A herald appeared on the platform, sheltered from the rain by a thick cloth held over his head by two servants as he read from a document.
“Elizabeth Barton, known as the Nun of Kent, you have been found guilty of treason. Though you have recanted your false visions, and admitted to having been paid by enemies of this realm to harm and subvert the authority of His Majesty King Henry, you are sentenced to be hanged for your wicked misdeeds. Have you anything to say before the sentence of execution is carried out?”
“I have,” the nun shouted i
n response, her voice strong and resonant, “and may the power of the Lord sustain me as I speak His message!”
I felt those around me draw back in awe as the nun went on speaking, the rain letting up just enough to ensure that her words could be heard. It seemed to me, though I’m sure it was merely an illusion, that she stared right at Anne as she spoke.
“Plagues shall harm you! Disaster shall follow you, dishonor smite you, and in the end, death shall find you!” she chanted. “I say to you, Jezebel, that your firstborn son shall not live!”
I felt Anne trembling, and I knew that it was not only from the cold, but from terror.
“Look!” The nun was pointing upwards, into the dark sky. “I see—I see an angel.”
Everyone around me followed her pointing finger, including Anne. I could see nothing but low overhanging clouds, sluicing rain. I was aware of feeling very wet and uncomfortable, and wishing that the nun would end her peroration, and that the execution would proceed.
But instead, the nun seemed to be gathering the onlookers more and more into her vision—the vision she described as an angel, wings outspread, descending upon London. I heard gasps, sobs, cries of wonderment, as if others near me were sharing the nun’s vision, though it was plain to me that the sky was just sky, the clouds mere clouds. There were no heavenly visitors to be seen.
“I forgive you all,” the nun was saying, relaying, so she said, the words of the angel. “Though you take part in wickedness, in the silencing of a holy woman who is a divine messenger. I forgive you all!”
I heard the herald’s voice barking an order. Two of the soldiers seized the nun and placed the noose around her neck. Yet she spoke on, undeterred.
“She is coming for me, to take me up to the Lord.” She smiled. “I see a green field—” she began, but then her voice was choked off, for the planks beneath her feet had given way and her body dropped, suddenly, rudely. Her neck was snapped.
Many in the crowd dropped to their knees in the mud, crossing themselves and murmuring prayers. Others pointed to the sky. Still others rushed forward to touch the nun’s body and tear off pieces of her garment, precious relics to be preserved.
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