“My home?” I ask. “You are seizing Warblington Castle?”
“Yes,” William says. “Please be ready to leave at once.”
I think of Hugh Holland’s white face as his horse was dragged from Bockmer to London with him strapped to the saddle. “I shall need a litter,” I say. “I cannot ride all that way.”
“You can ride pillion behind my commander,” William says coldly.
“William Fitzwilliam, I am old enough to be your mother, you should not treat me so harshly,” I suddenly burst out, and then I see the quickening of interest in his face.
“Your sons are far worse than me,” he says. “For they are confessing that they are rebels against the king. That is harsh treatment to a mother for they will be your undoing.”
I draw back, smooth my gown, and bite back my temper. “They are not saying any such thing,” I say quietly. “And I know nothing against them.”
It takes us two days to ride south to Midhurst, the roads are so bad with mud and flooding, and we lose our way half a dozen times. Only last year we would have been able to stay in comfort at one of the great monasteries on the way, and the monks would have sent a lad with us to put us on the right road, but now we ride past a great abbey church and it is dark, with the stained-glass windows smashed for the lead, and the slates stolen from the roof.
There is nowhere to stay at night but a dirty old inn at Petersfield, and the beggars at the kitchen door and in the street bear witness with their hunger and their despair to the closure of the abbey kitchens and the abbey hospital, and the abbey charities.
COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, WINTER 1538
It is a beautiful frosty evening as we reach the broad fields before Cowdray and ride beneath the leafless trees. The sky is palest pink as the sun sinks behind the thick forested folds of the Rother valley. I miss my own fields as I see the resting pastures of Cowdray. I have to trust that I will see them again, that I will get home, that my sons will come home to me, that this cold sunset will pass into darkness and then a dawn and tomorrow will be a better day for me and mine.
This is Fitzwilliam’s new house, and he has all the pride of a man who has entered into a new property. We dismount stiffly before the open door which leads into a dark paneled hall and there is Mabel Clifford, his wife, with her ladies around her, in her best gown, an English hood crushed low on her head, her face dark with bad temper.
I give her the slightest of curtseys and I watch her begrudgingly reply. Clearly, she knows that there is no need for her best manners; but she does not know exactly how she is to behave.
“I have made the tower rooms ready,” she says, speaking past me to her husband as he comes into the hall, throwing off his cape and pulling off his gloves.
“Good,” he says. He turns to me. “You will dine in your rooms and you will be served by your people. You can walk in the gardens or by the river if you wish, as long as two of my men are with you. You are not allowed to ride.”
“Ride where?” I ask insolently.
He checks. “Ride anywhere.”
“Obviously, I don’t wish to ride anywhere but to my home,” I say. “If I had wanted to go overseas, as you seem to suggest, I would have done so long ago. I have lived at my home for many years.” I let my gaze go to his wife’s flushed, angry face and the new gilding on their woodwork. “Many years. My family have been there for centuries. And I hope to live there for many years yet. I’m no rebel, and I don’t have rebel blood.”
This enrages Mabel, as I knew it would, since her father was in hiding for most of his life as a traitor to my family, the Plantagenets. “So please show me to my rooms at once, for I’m tired.”
William turns and gives an order and a server of the household leads the way to the side of the building, where the tower rooms are set one above the other around a circular stair. I mount it wearily, slowly, every bone in my body aching. But still, I am not allowed to go alone, and I will not hold the handrail and haul myself upward when someone is watching. William comes with me, and when I am longing to sit before a fire and eat my dinner, he asks me again what I know of Reginald, and whether Geoffrey was planning to run away to him.
Next morning, before breakfast, while I am saying my prayers, he comes to me again, and this time he has papers in his hand. As soon as we left my home at Warblington, they searched my rooms, turning them upside down for anything that might be used against me. They found a letter that I was in the middle of writing to my son Montague; but it says nothing but that he should be loyal to the king and trust in God. They have questioned the clerk of my kitchen, poor Thomas Standish, and made him say that he thought that Geoffrey might slip away. William makes much of this, but I remember the conversation and interrupt him: “You are mistaken, my lord. This was after Geoffrey had hurt himself while held in the Tower. We were afraid that he might die, that was why Master Standish said that he feared Geoffrey might slip away.”
“I see you chop and change words, my lady,” William says angrily.
“Indeed, I don’t,” I say simply. “And I would rather have no words at all with you.”
I am ready for him to come to me again after breakfast but it is Mabel who comes to my privy chamber where I am listening to Katherine reading the collect for the day, and she says: “My lord has gone to London and will not question you today, madam.”
“I am glad of it,” I say quietly. “For it is weary work telling the truth over and over.”
“You won’t be glad of it when I tell you where he has gone,” she says in spiteful triumph.
I wait. I take Katherine’s hand.
“He has gone to give evidence against your sons at their trials. They will be charged with treason and sentenced to death,” she says.
This is Katherine’s father; but I keep her hand in a steady grip and the two of us look straight at Mabel Fitzwilliam. I am not going to weep in front of such a woman, and I am proud of my granddaughter’s composure. “Lady Fitzwilliam, you should be ashamed of yourself,” I say quietly. “No woman should be so heartless towards another woman’s grief. No woman should torment a man’s daughter as you are doing. No wonder that you cannot give your lord a child, for since you have no heart you probably have no womb either.”
Her cheeks flame red with temper. “I may have no sons, but very soon, neither will you,” she shouts, and whirls out of the room.
My son Montague goes before his friends and kinsmen sitting as his jury and is charged with speaking against the king, approving Reginald’s doings, and dreaming that the king was dead. It seems that now Cromwell may inquire into a man’s sleep. His confessor reported to Cromwell that one morning Montague said to him that he dreamed that his brother had come home and was happy. They have interrogated Montague’s sleep and found his dreams guilty. He pleads his innocence but is not allowed to speak in his own defense. Nobody is allowed to speak for him.
Geoffrey, the child whom I kept at my side when I sent his brothers away, my favorite child, my spoiled son, my baby, gives evidence against his brother Montague, and against his cousins Henry and Edward, and against us all. God forgive him. He says that his first choice was to kill himself rather than bear witness against his brother but that God so wrought on him that if he had ten brothers, or ten sons, he would bring them all to the peril of death rather than leave his country, his sovereign lord, and his own soul in danger. Geoffrey addresses his friends and kinsmen with tears in his eyes. “Let us die, we be but few, according to our deserts rather than our whole country be brought to ruin.”
What Montague thinks when Geoffrey argues in favor of his death, and for the death of our cousins and friends, I don’t know. I don’t think at all. I try very hard not to hear of his trial, and I try not to think what it means. I am on my knees in the little room at Cowdray where I have put my crucifix and my Bible, my clasped hands against my face, praying and praying that God will move the king to pity and that he will let my innocent son go, and send my poor witless son home to his
wife. Behind me, Katherine and Winifred pray for their father, their faces dazed and fearful.
I live in silence in my rooms, looking out over the river meadows towards the high green of the South Downs, wishing I was at my home, wishing my sons were with me, wishing I was a young woman again and my life was constrained and my hopes were defined by my dull, safe husband, Sir Richard. I love him now as I failed to love him before. I think now that he set himself his life’s task to keep me safe, to keep all of us safe, and that I should have been more grateful. But I am old enough and wise enough to know that all regrets are futile, so I bend my head in my prayers and hope he hears that I acknowledge what he did, when he married a young woman from a family too close to the throne, and that I know what he did when he spent all his time moving us further and further away from its dangerous glamour. I too tried to keep us hidden; but we are the white rose—the bloom shines even in the darkest, thickest hedgerow; it can be seen even in the dark of night like a fallen moon, palely gleaming among thrusting leaves.
COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, DECEMBER 1538
In my room in the tower at Cowdray, I hear the household start to prepare for Christmas, just as we do at Bisham, just as the king will be doing at Greenwich. They fast for Advent; they cut the boughs from the holly and the ivy, the brambles and the gorse, and weave a green Christmas crown; they drag in a mighty log that will burn in the grate until the end of the Christmas feast, they rehearse their carols and they practice dances. They order special spices and they start the long preparation of the seasonal dishes for the twelve days of feasting. I listen to the household bustling outside my door and I dream that I am at home, until I wake and remember that I am far from home, waiting for William Fitzwilliam to come from London and tell me that my sons are dead and my hopes are ended.
He comes in early December. I hear the clatter of his troop of horse on the track and their shouts for the stable lads, and I crack open the shutter of my bedroom window and look down to see William and his men around him, the bustle of his arrival, and his wife going out to greet him, the horses’ breaths smoking in the cold air, the frost crackling on the grass under their feet.
I watch him as he dismounts, his bright cape, his embroidered hat, the way he thumps his fists one against the other as his hands are cold. His absentminded kiss for his wife, his shouted commands at his men. This is the man who is going to bring me heartbreak. This is the man who is going to tell me that it was all for nothing, that my whole life has been worthless, that my sons are dead.
He comes straight to my room, as if he cannot wait to relish his triumph. His face is solemn, but his eyes are bright.
“Your ladyship, I am sorry to tell you, but your son Lord Montague is dead.”
I face him, dry-eyed. “I am sorry to hear it,” I say steadily. “On what charge?”
“Treason,” he says easily. “Your son and his cousins Henry Courtenay and Edward Neville were brought before their peers and tried and found guilty of treason against the king.”
“Oh, did they plead guilty?” I ask, my voice sharp between my cold lips.
“They were found guilty,” he says, as if this were an answer, as if this could ever be a just answer. “The king showed them mercy.”
I can feel my heart leap. “Mercy?”
“He allowed them to be executed on Tower Hill, not at Tyburn.”
“I know that my son and his cousins were innocent of any treason to our most beloved king,” I say. “Where is Henry’s wife, Lady Courtenay, and her son, Edward?”
He checks at this. Fool that he is, he had almost forgotten them. “Still in the Tower of London,” he says sullenly.
“And my son Geoffrey?”
He does not like questions. He blusters. “Madam, it is not for you to interrogate me. Your son is a dead traitor and you are suspect.”
“Indeed,” I say swiftly. “It is for you to interrogate me, so skillful as you are. They all pleaded guiltless and you found no evidence against them. I am guiltless and you will find no evidence against me. God help you, William Fitzwilliam, for you are in the wrong. Interrogate me as you wish, though I am old enough to be your mother. You will find that I have done nothing wrong, as my own dear son Montague had done nothing wrong.”
It is a mistake to say his name. I can hear that my voice has grown thin and I am not sure that I can speak again. William swells in his pride at my weakness.
“Be very sure that I will interrogate you again,” he says.
Out of sight, behind my back, I pinch the skin of my palms. “Be very sure that you will find nothing,” I say bitterly. “And at the end, this house will fall down around you, and this river will rise against you, and you will regret the day that you came against me in your pomp and stupidity and taunted me with the death of a better man, my son Montague.”
“Do you curse me?” he pants, all white and sweating, shaking with the knowledge that his house is already cursed for the putting down of Cowdray Priory, cursed by fire and water.
I shake my head. “Of course not. I don’t believe in such nonsense. You make your own destiny. But when you bear false witness against a good man like my son, when you put me to the question, when you know that I have done no wrong, you are on the side of the evil in the world and your friend and ally will draw you close.”
Mabel comes to taunt me with the full list of deaths. George Croftes, John Collins, and Hugh Holland have been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, their heads set on London Bridge. My son Montague, my precious son and heir, was beheaded on Tower Hill, his cousins Henry Courtenay and Edward Neville followed him to the scaffold and the axe.
“Dead like traitors,” she says.
“Death instead of evidence,” I reply.
COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, SPRING 1539
I spend the day, from dawn till dusk, in the chapel at Cowdray, the de Bohun tomb before me, and the gray quietness of the winter daylight around me. I pray for Montague, for his cousins Edward and Henry, taken out onto Tower Hill, where his uncle laid down his innocent head and died. I pray for all our kinsmen who are in danger, today. I pray for their sons, especially Henry Courtenay’s son, Edward, who may have watched from his window and seen his father’s last walk across the frosty grass to the outer gate, and beyond that, up to Tower Hill and the block and the black-masked axeman and his death.
I pray for Montague’s children, his son, Harry, safe with his mother at Bockmer, his daughters Katherine and Winifred, who have come with me to this miserable vigil, and more than anyone else I pray for Geoffrey, who has brought us to this tragedy and will—for I know my son—be wishing himself dead tonight.
They keep me here, as the winter turns, though my son is in his grave and my boy Geoffrey is left in the Tower. They tell me that he tried to suffocate himself, crushing himself under his bed with the quilt against his face. This is how, it was said, that his cousins the princes in the Tower died, stuffed between two mattresses. But it is not fatal for my son; and perhaps it was not true of the princes either. Geoffrey remains, as he has been for all this winter, a traitor to his king, to his brother, and to himself, a terrible betrayer of his family and me, his mother. They leave him inside the cold walls of the Tower, and I know that if they leave him there long enough he will die anyway, of the cold in winter, or of the plague in summer, and it will hardly matter whether his testimony was true or false because this boy, this boy who promised so much, will be dead. As dead as his brother Arthur, who died in the prime of his handsome youth, as dead as his brother Montague, who died keeping the faith, and trying to save his cousins.
They take Sir Nicholas Carew into the Tower and give it out that he has been planning to destroy the king, seize the throne, and marry his son to Princess Mary. William Fitzwilliam tells me this, his eyes all bright, as if I am going to fall to my knees and say that this has been my secret plan all along.
“Nicholas Carew?” I say disbelievingly. “The king’s Master of Horse? That he has loved and trusted every si
ngle day these forty years? His best-loved companion in joust and war since they were boys together?”
“Yes,” William says, the glee fading from his face because he was their companion too, and he knows what folly this is. “The same. Don’t you know that Carew loved Queen Katherine and disagreed with the king about his treatment of the princess?”
I shrug, as if it does not matter much. “Many people loved Queen Katherine,” I say. “The king loved Queen Katherine. Is your Thomas Cromwell going to put every one of her court to death? For that would be thousands of people. And you among them.”
William flushes. “You think you’re so wise!” he blurts out. “But you will come to the scaffold at last! Mark my words, Countess. You will come to the scaffold at last!”
I hold my temper and my words, for I think there is more here than a young man’s frustration at an older woman knowing more than he will ever learn. I look at his face as if I would read the red veins, and the thinning hair, the fat of self-indulgence under the chin, and the petty pout of his face. “Perhaps I will,” I say quietly. “But you can tell your master Cromwell that I am guilty of nothing, and that if he kills me, he kills an innocent woman and that my blood and that of my kinsmen will stain his record for all eternity.”
I look at his suddenly pale face. “And yours too, William Fitzwilliam,” I say. “People will remember that you held me in your house against my will. I doubt that you will hold your house for long.”
All through the cold weather I mourn for my son Montague, for his honesty, for his steadfast honor, and for his companionship. I blame myself for not having valued him before, for letting him think that my love for Geoffrey was greater than my love for all my boys. I wish I had told Montague how dear he was to me, how I depended on him, how I loved watching him grow and rise to his great position, how his humor warmed me, how his caution warned me, that he was a man his father would have been proud of, that I was proud of him, that I still am.
The King's Curse Page 57
