He took my cold hand and tucked it into his elbow. “Here we are,” he said. “We’ll go in the stable door. I know some of the lads. I’d rather see how the land lies before we go in.”
We went quietly into the stable yard but before William could shout “Holloa!” up at the window there was a clatter on the cobblestones and my father himself rode into the yard. I darted toward him out of the shadows and his horse shied and he swore at me.
“Forgive me, Father, I must see you.”
“You, is it?” he said abruptly. “Where have you been hiding this last week?”
“She’s been with me,” William said firmly, from behind me. “Where she should be. And with our children. Catherine is with the queen.”
“Aye, I know,” my father said. “The only Boleyn girl without a stain on her virtue, and that’s only as far as we know.”
“Mary wants to ask you something and then we must go.”
I paused. Now it came to it, I hardly knew what I should ask my father. “Are George and Anne to be spared?” I asked. “Is Uncle working for them?”
He gave me a dark bitter glance. “You would know as much about their doings as anyone,” he said. “The three of you were as thick as sinners, God knows. You should have been questioned along with the other ladies.”
“Nothing happened,” I said passionately. “Nothing more than you yourself know about, sir. Nothing more than Uncle himself commanded. He told me to teach Anne, to tell her how to enchant the king. He told her to conceive a baby whatever the price. He told George to stand by her and help her and comfort her. We did nothing more than that was ordered. We only ever did as we were commanded. Is she to die for being an obedient daughter?”
“Don’t you bring me into it,” he said quickly. “I had nothing to do with ordering her. She went her own way, and him and you with her.”
I gasped at his treachery and he dismounted, passed his reins to a groom and would have walked away from me. I ran after him and caught his sleeve. “But will Uncle find a way to save her?”
He put his mouth to my ear. “She has to go,” he said. “The king knows she is barren and he wants another wife. The Seymours have won this round, there’ll be no denying them. The marriage will be annulled.”
“Annulled? On what grounds?” I asked.
“Affinity,” he said briefly. “Since he was your lover, he cannot be her husband.”
I blinked. “Not me, again.”
“Just so.”
“And what happens to Anne?”
“A nunnery, if she’ll go quietly. Otherwise, exile.”
“And George?”
“Exile.”
“And you, sir?”
“If I can survive this, I can survive anything,” he said glumly. “Now, if you don’t want to be called to give evidence against them you’ll make yourself scarce and keep out of sight.”
“But could I give evidence for their defense, if I come to court?”
He laughed shortly.
“There is no evidence for them,” he reminded me. “In a treason trial there is no defense. All they can hope for is the clemency of the court and the forgiveness of the king.”
“Should I ask the king for forgiveness for them?”
My father looked at me. “If your name isn’t Seymour then you’re not welcome in his sight. If your name is Boleyn then you’re due for the axe. Keep out of the way, girl. If you want to serve your sister and your brother, let the business be done as quietly and as quickly as possible.”
William drew me back into the shadow of the stable as we heard a troop of horsemen on the road. “That’s your uncle,” William said. “Come out this way.”
We went through a stone archway to the double doors where they brought the hay wagons in. A smaller door was cut into the big timbers and William opened it and helped me through. He shut it behind us as the torches flickered into the yard and the soldiers shouted for grooms to help his lordship unsaddle.
William and I went home by dark ways, unseen in the hidden streets of the City. The nurse let us in and showed me the baby asleep in the cradle and Henry in his little pallet bed, the gingery Tudor curls in ringlets around his head.
And then William drew me into the four-poster bed and closed the curtains around us and undressed me, laid me down on the pillows and wrapped himself around me and held me, saying nothing, while I clung to him and could not get warm all night.
Anne was to be tried by the peers in the King’s Hall inside the Tower of London. They were afraid to take her through the City to Westminster. The mood of the City which had sulked at her coronation was now turning to defend her. Cromwell’s plan had overreached itself. There were few people who could believe that a woman could be so gross as to seduce men when she was pregnant with a baby from her own husband, as the court had claimed she had done. They could not credit that a woman would seek two, three, four lovers under the nose of her husband when her husband was the King of England. Even the women at the dockside who had shouted “Whore!” at Anne during Queen Katherine’s trials now thought that the king had run mad again and was setting aside a legal wife on a pretext, for yet another unknown favorite.
Jane Seymour had moved into the City into the beautiful house of Sir Francis Bryan in the Strand, and it was common knowledge that the king’s barge was tied up at the river stairs till well after midnight every night and that there was music and feasting and dancing and masquing while the queen was in the Tower and five good men held as well, four of them under sentence of death.
Henry Percy, Anne’s old love, was among the rest of the peers, sitting in judgment on the queen at whose table they had all feasted, whose hand they had all kissed, who had danced with each and every one of them. It must have been an odd experience for them all when she walked into the King’s Hall and took a seat before them, the gold “B” at her throat, her French hood set back to show her dark shining hair, her dark gown setting off her creamy skin. The constant crying and the praying before the little altar in the Tower had left her calm for the day of her trial. She was as confidently lovely as she had been when she came from France, all those years ago, and was set on by my family to take my royal lover from me.
I could have gone along with the common people and taken a place behind the Lord Mayor and the guildsmen and the aldermen, but William was too afraid that I would be seen, and I knew I could not bear to hear the lies they would tell about her. I knew also that I could not bear to hear the truths. The woman from the lodging house went to see the greatest show that London would ever be offered and came home with a garbled account of the list of times and places where the queen had seduced the men of the court by inflaming their desires by kissing with tongues, that she gave them great gifts, that they tried to outdo each other night after night; a story which sometimes touched the truth and sometimes veered off into the wildest of fantasies which anyone who knew the court would have realized could not be true. But it always had that fascination of scandal, it was always erotic, filthy, dark. It was the stuff that people wished that queens might do, that a whore married to a king would be sure to do. It told us much, much more about the dreams of Secretary Cromwell, a low man, than it did about Anne or George or me.
They called no witnesses who had ever seen her touching and blandishing, they called no witnesses to prove that Anne had ill-wished Henry into illness, either. They claimed that the ulcer on his leg and his impotence were her fault too. Anne pleaded not guilty and then tried to explain, to the peers who knew it already, that it was normal for a queen to give little gifts. That it was nothing for her to dance with one man, and then another. That of course poets would dedicate poems to her. That naturally the poems would be love poetry. That the king had never complained, not for one moment, against the tradition of courtly love which ruled every court in Europe.
On the last day of the trial the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, her love from so long ago, went missing. He sent as his excuse that he was too ill to
attend. That was when I knew that the verdict would go against her. The lords who had been in Anne’s court, who would have sold their own mothers to the galleys to have her favor, gave their verdict, from the lowliest peer to our uncle. One after another, they all said: “Guilty.” When it came to my uncle he choked on his tears and could barely say the word “guilty,” or speak the sentence: that she should be burned or beheaded on the Green, at the king’s pleasure.
The lodging-house woman found a scrap of cloth in her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. She said it did not seem much like justice to her, if a queen had to be burned at the stake for dancing with a couple of young men.
“Very true,” William said judicially, and directed her from the room. When she was gone, he came back to me and took me onto his knee. I curled up like a child, and let him put his arms around me and rock me.
“She will hate to be in a nunnery.”
“She’ll have to tolerate whatever the king rules,” he said. “Exile or a nunnery, she will be glad of it.”
They tried my brother the next day, before they could lose their stomach for the lies. He was accused, as the other men had been, of being her lover and plotting against the king, and like them, he denied it completely. They accused him also of questioning the paternity of the Princess Elizabeth and of laughing at the king’s impotence. George, speaking on his sacred oath, fell silent: he could not deny it. The strongest evidence against him was a statement written by Jane Parker, the wife he had always despised.
“They would listen to an aggrieved wife?” I asked William. “On a hanging matter?”
“He’s guilty,” he said simply. “I’m not one of his intimates but even I’ve heard him laugh at Henry and say that the man couldn’t mount a mare in season, let alone a woman like Anne.”
I shook my head. “That’s bawdy and indiscreet but…”
He took my hand. “It’s treason, my love,” he said gently. “You wouldn’t expect it to come to court, but if it does, it is treason just as Thomas More was treasonous to doubt the king’s supremacy in the church. This king can say what is a hanging offense and what is not. We gave him that power when we denied the Pope the right to rule the church. We gave Henry the right to rule everything. And now he rules that your sister is a witch and that your brother is her lover, and that they are both enemies of the realm.”
“But he’ll let them go,” I insisted.
Every day my boy Henry went to the Tower and met his sister and saw that she was well. Every day William tracked him there and tracked him back, always watching that no one else was watching. But there were no spies on Henry. It was as if they had done their worst in listening to the queen and entrapping her, in listening to George and his ridiculous indiscretions, and entrapping him.
One day in the middle of May I went with Henry and met my little girl as she walked out of the Tower of London. From where we stood, outside the gate, I could hear the knocking of the nails into the scaffold where they would execute my brother and the four men with him. Catherine was composed. She was a little pale.
“Come home with me,” I urged her. “And we can go to Rochford, all of us. There’s nothing more you can do here.”
She shook her little hooded head. “Let me stay,” she said. “I want to stay until Aunt Anne is released to the nunnery and it is over.”
“Is she well?”
“She is. She prays all the time and she prepares herself for a life behind the walls. She knows that she has to give up queenship. She knows that she has to give up the Princess Elizabeth. She knows that she won’t be queen now. But it’s better since the trial is over. They don’t listen to her and watch her the same way. And she is more settled.”
“Have you seen George?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice light but my grief choked me.
Catherine looked up at me, her dark Boleyn eyes filled with pity. “This is a prison,” she said gently. “I can’t go visiting.”
I shook my head at my own stupidity. “When I was here before it was one of the many castles of the king. I could walk where I wanted. I should have realized that everything is different now.”
“Will the king marry Jane Seymour?” Catherine asked me. “She wants to know.”
“You can tell her it is a certainty,” I said. “He is at her house every night. He is as he was, in the old days, when it was her.”
Catherine nodded. “I should go,” she said, glancing at the sentry behind her.
“Tell Anne…” I broke off. There was too much to send in one message. There were long years of rivalry and then a forced unity and always and ever, underpinning our love for each other, our sense that the other must be bested. How could I send her one word which would acknowledge all of that, and yet tell her that I loved her still, that I was glad I had been her sister, even though I knew she had brought herself to this point and taken George here too? That, though I would never forgive her for what she had done to us all, at the same time, I totally and wholly understood?
“Tell her what?” Catherine hovered, waiting to be released.
“Tell her that I think of her,” I said simply. “All the time. Every day. The same as always.”
The next day they beheaded my brother alongside his lover Francis Weston, with Henry Norris, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton. They did it on the Green, before Anne’s window, and she watched her friends and then her brother die. I walked on the muddy foreshore of the river with my baby on my hip and tried not to know that it was happening. The wind blew gently up the river and a seagull called mournfully over my head. The tideline was a mess of intriguing flotsam: bits of rope, scraps of wood, shells encrusted on weed. I watched my boots and smelled the salt in the air and let my pace rock my baby and tried to understand what had happened to us Boleyns who had been running the country one day and were condemned criminals the next.
I turned for home and found that my face was wet with tears. I had not thought to lose George. I had never thought that Anne and I would have to live our lives without George.
A swordsman was ordered from France to execute Anne. The king was planning a last-minute reprieve and he would extract every drop of drama from it. They built a scaffold for her beheading on the Green outside the Beauchamp Tower.
“The king will release her?” I asked William.
“That’s what your father said.”
“He will do it as a great masque,” I said, knowing Henry. “At the very last moment he will send his pardon and everyone will be so relieved that they will forgive him for the deaths of the others.”
The swordsman was delayed on the road. It would be another day before he was on the platform, waiting for the pardon. Catherine at the gate that night was like a little ghost. “Archbishop Cranmer came today with the papers to annul the marriage and she signed them. They promised that she would be released if she signed. She can go to a nunnery.”
“Thank God,” I said, knowing only now how deeply I had been afraid. “When will she be released?”
“Perhaps tomorrow,” Catherine said. “Then she’ll have to live in France.”
“She’ll like that,” I said. “She’ll be an abbess in five days, you’ll see.”
Catherine gave me a thin smile. The skin below her eyes was almost purple with fatigue.
“Come home now!” I said in sudden anxiety. “It’s all but done.”
“I’ll come when it’s over,” she said. “When she goes to France.”
That night, as I lay sleepless, staring up at the tester over the four-poster bed, I said to William, “The king will keep his word and release her, won’t he?”
“Why should he not?” William asked me. “He has everything he wants. An adultery charge against her so no one can say that he fathered a monster. The marriage annulled as if it never was. Everyone who impugned his manhood is dead. Why should he kill her? It makes no sense. And he has promised her. She signed the annulment. He is honor-bound to send her to a nunnery.”
The next day a little
before nine o’clock they took her out to the scaffold and her ladies, my little Catherine among them, walked behind her.
I was in the crowd, at the back, at Tower Green. From a distance I saw her come out, a little figure in a black gown with a dark cape. She lifted off her French hood, her hair was held back in a net. She said her final words, I could not hear them and I did not care. It was a nonsense, a piece of the masque, as meaningless as when the king was Robin Hood and we were villagers dressed in green. I waited for the watergate to roll up and the king’s barge to rush in with a beat of the drummer and the swirl of oars in the dark water and for the king to stride forward amongst us, and declare Anne forgiven.
I thought he was leaving it so late that he must have ordered the executioner to delay, to wait for the blast of royal trumpets from the river. It was typical of Henry to use this moment for its greatest drama. Now we had to wait for him to make his grand entrance and his speech of forgiveness and then Anne could go to France and I could fetch my daughter and go home.
I watched her turn to the priest for her final prayers, and then take off her French hood, and her necklace. Hidden in my long sleeves I was snapping my fingers with irritation at Anne’s vanity and Henry’s delay. Why could not the two of them finish this scene quickly and let us all go?
One of her women, not my daughter Catherine, stepped forward and tied a blindfold over my sister’s eyes, and then steadied her arm as she kneeled in the straw. The woman stepped back, Anne was alone. Like a field of corn bowing down in the wind, the crowd before the scaffold kneeled too. Only I stood still, staring over their heads to my sister where she kneeled in her black gown with the brave crimson skirt, her eyes blindfolded, her face white.
Behind her the executioner’s sword went up and up and up in the morning light. Even then, I looked toward the watergate for Henry to come. And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.