The Crown

by Nancy Bilyeau

  I stared at it, at the evidence of Sister Elizabeth Barton, who experienced such prophecies that the whole of Christendom marveled.

  Bess asked, “Did you know her?”

  “No, she was a Benedictine, I am a Dominican,” I said carefully. “She was executed before I even entered my priory.”

  “I knew her. I spoke to her three times in her prison cell.” Bess glowed with pride. “She was the holiest woman in England and the bravest, don’t you think? To speak publicly against the king’s divorce?”

  I bowed my head. “She paid a terrible price.”

  “Yes, they hanged her. I saw.” Bess laid her hand on my shoulder. “That’s what they’re wondering about you. If you see visions about the king. If that’s why you went to Smithfield. Remember, Lady Kingston was very interested in your dream.”

  I shook off her hand. “I don’t have visions, I am not used by God in that way.”

  More men shouted. I hurried to the windows, but they were a foot too high for me to see from.

  “Bring me the chair,” I called to Bess. “This could be my father, or Geoffrey Scovill.”

  “Oh, no, you can’t look out the window dressed in a shift,” she said.

  “Only my face will be visible.”

  Bess looked at me, fearful, and then made her choice. She dragged the chair over to the window.

  My room faced a well-kept green and a group of buildings. The largest by far was an ancient square white castle. On the green a line of six men shuffled by, their hands chained. Yeomen warders, all shouting, surrounded them.

  “Some prisoners are being led away,” I said.

  “Yes, more northern rebels are to be transferred to Tyburn for execution,” Bess said, standing next to me. “Do you see Sir William and Lady Kingston?”

  My eyes scanned the green until I spotted the tall, officious pair. “Oh, yes.”

  “He was a yeoman of the guard in his youth, did you know?” Bess said. “The king has promoted him a dozen times. He’ll do anything that is required. Sir William cried on the day they executed Sir Thomas More. He was his friend. But he led him to the ax all the same.”

  My attention was on the prisoners. “Do you know these men?” I asked. “Could any of them be Sir John Bulmer?”

  “I don’t know, mistress. But Sir John is a tall man with a white beard.”

  I scanned the line. A man with just that description stood near the end. But I was surprised—he looked to be almost sixty years old. Twice Margaret’s age. Still, this was the husband she loved so much. Soon they would be reunited, in God’s mercy.

  A horse whinnied on the other side of the Kingstons. I could see Lady Kingston curtsy. The horse trotted along the line of prisoners, and as I looked at the man riding it, a sickness rose in my belly. He was an old man, older than Sir William Kingston and Sir John Bulmer, but he rode his horse like a young buck. The yeomen warders bowed low.

  Suddenly, the horseman looked over. Although he was a fair distance away, his gaze met mine, and he started with recognition. He wheeled and kicked the sides of his horse as I stumbled down from the chair.

  “Who else did you see?” Bess asked.

  I saw the man who had led the king’s army to defeat the rebels in the North, who was wretchedly married to my cousin Elizabeth, who was the highest-ranking peer of the kingdom.

  “It is the Duke of Norfolk,” I said. “And I expect he’s coming to see me.”

  7

  Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, was angry before he even looked at me.

  I heard the rapid stomp of footsteps outside my prison cell, and then he came through the door, pushing aside the yeoman warder who’d unlocked it for him. “What is she doing in here, Kingston?” the duke said over his shoulder, his voice a raspy growl.

  Sir William and Lady Kingston hurried in after him, but paused near the doorway, hesitant to get too close, to overstep.

  “Your Grace, at present there are very few unoccupied rooms in any part of the Tower,” Sir William offered from his safe distance.

  “I had to walk past a damned lion pit to get here,” the duke retorted. “I don’t care who you had to remove or where you had to put them, Mistress Stafford should never have been locked inside a bloody menagerie.”

  I knew him, all England knew him, as a man of high color, subject to rages. To my shame, a quick temper was one of my most grievous faults, too. My mother had chastised me for it; at Dartford, our prioress had prayed with me over it. “Humble and faithful, humble and faithful,” I whispered, eyes cast down, clinging to the words of holy Catherine of Siena.

  The duke walked to the middle of the vast room. Nervous, uncertain, I remained where I was, by the wall of windows. The chair that had helped me peer out onto the green was now shoved back by the table.

  I took in his plain riding clothes, his muddy boots. Something quivered in his right hand. It was a horsewhip, I realized. He’d brought it inside. I finally looked up, into the Duke of Norfolk’s face. He was scowling; his eyes scanned the walls, the bare floor, the bed in the corner, until finally, they came to rest on me.

  Not sure what else to do, I slowly slid into a full court curtsy, sitting for a second on my bent left leg, bowing my head until my chin touched my breastbone.

  When I came back up, the duke had closed in. He looked much older than when I’d last seen him: dark hair thickly salted with white, narrow face scored with wrinkles. His eyes, moving up and down my form, were younger than the rest of his countenance. It was an unsettling sight, those flickering black eyes, set deep in a worn parchment of a face.

  There was recognition, of course; we had been in each other’s presence a half-dozen times. I saw disapproval, too. I was sorely conscious of my shabby gray kirtle; my mismatched bodice, too big for me, showing another woman’s stains under the arms, and barely laced by Bess before she scrambled out of my cell. There’d been no time to dress my hair, and my wavy black tresses spilled everywhere—onto my shoulders, down my back.

  “She could be taken for a chambermaid,” the duke hissed. “Kingston, what is your purpose in this? She’s been locked up for two days. Why does she look such a slattern? This girl descends from King Edward the Third!”

  Sir William apologized and bowed before the duke, and his wife dropped a curtsy, but not before shooting me a resentful glare. I was the cause of embarrassment for my jailers. No doubt it would make everything all the worse for me.

  With a muttered oath, the duke lowered himself into the chair. “So let us hear it, Mistress Stafford. What were you about at Smithfield?”

  I clasped my hands before me. “Your Grace, I deeply regret the trouble I have caused. I only wished to be present at the execution of my cousin, Lady Bulmer.”

  “Ah, Lady Bulmer, Lady Bulmer. My saintly sister-in-law.” His thin lips stretched in a smile. “You know that Margaret had no right to call herself that, eh? She wasn’t married to Bulmer.”

  I blinked in shock. “That is not true.”

  The duke exchanged a look with Sir William, who by now had come over to us, accompanied by his wife. “You think I lie to you, mistress?” The first edge of a threat crept into his voice.

  I bit my lip. “No, Your Grace.”

  “Her real husband, William Cheyne, the man I arranged for her to marry ten years ago, he was still alive when Margaret began to live with Bulmer up in the North. You weren’t aware of that?”

  “Master Cheyne died,” I insisted.

  “He went and died of the French pox in April of 1535. The worthless whoremonger. But the fact is, Cheyne was her legal husband and he was still alive in 1534, when she took up residence with Sir John Bulmer. That cankered rebel. My people have not unearthed any record of her remarriage up there.”

  “I am sure one exists,” I said, trying my best not to sound quarrelsome.

  “Well, they may have married after 1535, but by that time she’d already given birth to Bulmer’s son.” He waited for this to sink in. “You seem qui
te unaware of your cousin’s corrupt behavior. You were still at Stafford Castle, correct? You were not professed yet at Dartford Priory, were you?”

  I shook my head.

  “So you didn’t know the details of her recent life, we see. Could not have been a close companion. Regardless, you left your Dominican Order, without the permission of the prioress, I’m told, and you came to London and made a spectacle of yourself at her execution, you and your father. Interfered with the administration of king’s justice, which is a crime.”

  “I felt it necessary, Your Grace.”

  “But why, Mistress Stafford?” he demanded, his voice louder. “Why was it necessary?”

  No words came out. It was impossible for this hardened courtier and commander to understand me, what I had sought to do for Margaret, the importance of my sacrifice.

  “And your father?” pressed the duke. “Why was it necessary for him?”

  “I don’t know,” I stammered. “We did not communicate with each other before the . . . the burning. Or afterward. I was surprised to see him at Smithfield. And he to see me.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, his hand clutching his whip so tight the skin of the knuckles stretched white. “Your father nearly blew himself up with gunpowder. Why the hell would he do that for his dead brother’s bastard?”

  I flinched at the ugly words.

  “If your father did not order you to Smithfield, then did anyone else?”

  “No, Your Grace.”

  “You experienced no visions directing you?” The duke glanced over at the Kingstons. She must have swiftly shared our conversation with Sir William, just as Bess told me she would.

  “My decision was one made with the benefit of prayer, but I am not receiving any sort of holy visions, no.”

  The duke shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense to me or to anyone else. Unless there is another purpose to your actions, a political purpose. You and your father were trying to make a statement about the rebellion, to incite disaffection?”

  “No, Your Grace, that was not my intent,” I said firmly. “I am a loyal subject. I was guided by private concerns.”

  The duke remained silent for a long moment. A bird squawked outside the window, on the green. Another answered. Then a third. There were quite a few birds. Someone must be feeding them close by.

  When the Duke of Norfolk spoke again, his words were careful and measured: “I don’t think you forthcoming, Mistress Stafford. It would be far better for you to disclose everything to me, now, your kinsman by marriage. The next man to ask the questions may not be so considerate of your birth and station.”

  I twisted the fabric of my dress in my hands. What was it they imagined me guilty of? “I have told you everything there is to know, Your Grace,” I said.

  It happened very fast. He sprang out of the chair, his arm raised high, in a streaking blur. Whack. The whip hit the wooden table a few feet from where I stood.

  “God’s blood, I don’t have time for this!”

  I did not move. The Kingstons did not move. The duke stood there, quivering. “Very well, Kingston, we shall proceed as planned,” he said finally.

  My heart beat faster as the Kingstons hustled out of the room. I heard men’s voices in the passageway, a chain of orders being given. But the duke did not leave. Nor did any yeomen warders remain behind. It was just the two of us. He paced back and forth by the windows, frowning, as if thinking of something else. Something unpleasant.

  Keeping my voice as humble as possible, I said, “Your Grace, may I ask you something?”

  His gaze returned to me, but unwillingly, annoyed.

  “You spoke of my father,” I pressed on. “Have you seen him?”

  He grunted. “I have.”

  “And what is his condition?”

  “His condition?” The duke considered his answer, and then a smile twisted his gaunt features. “Let’s just say he’s not the handsomest Stafford anymore.”

  At first I felt pain, as if I’d been kicked, and hard. But then came the anger, flooding my heart, my mind, every inch of me. I could hardly breathe or see or hear. My fingertips were numbed by it.

  From a muffled distance, I heard the door swing open, and Sir William returned, without his wife, carrying something. The duke held out his hand for it.

  “Mistress Stafford, I show you this,” he said curtly.

  The duke set down on the table before me Margaret’s letter, the one I had carried with me to Smithfield. Yes, of course, they had searched my dress.

  The duke read Margaret’s letter aloud. His harsh voice made a mockery of her words, the way she congratulated me for seeking to become a nun and lamented the suppression of the monasteries and priories of the North.

  As he read it, I thought of the hunt. When my father tracked boar in the forest, a group of young menservants followed. Boars are hard to kill. So after my father sighted one, the servants would chase, harry and confuse it, one after another, in stages, until, weakened and frightened, the animal stumbled into a thicket and met with sharpened weapons, the spears and knives.

  Silence thickened in the Tower room. I realized the duke had stopped reading, and he and Kingston waited for me to respond.

  “Yes, I brought my cousin’s last letter to Smithfield,” I said coldly.

  The duke dangled something else in his fingers; it was the necklace with the Thomas Becket pendant that Margaret had given me years ago. I’d stitched it into the lining of the purse, to keep it safe, the day before I came to Smithfield.

  “What is the significance of this?” he asked.

  I shook my head, aching to rip the pendant from his worn fingers.

  The duke roared: “You will tell me why you brought this to Smithfield.”

  Now, instead of being a sin and a hindrance, my anger was a helpmate. I would not cringe before Thomas Howard, no matter his actions. I said, “The pendant was her gift to me ten years ago. I thought that after she died, if I could lay claim to her body as her kinswoman, I would see Margaret buried with it.”

  “That’s very touching. But we suspect it has another meaning.”

  The duke began to pace: half-dozen steps away, then back around toward me, while Kingston watched, tense. “Thomas Becket defied his king. He put pope before king, just as Margaret and all the other rebels did, and just as you are doing now. You brought this to Smithfield as a symbol of your defiance.”

  I shook my head, but he didn’t notice. His pacing grew quicker; his words came faster. They rang off the long walls of my cell. “When the king ordered me to lead his army to the North, to defeat the wicked traitors who took up arms against their sovereign, he gave me a special charge, Mistress Stafford. Do you know what his letter commanded? ‘To cause such dreadful execution to be done on a good number of the inhabitants of every town, village, and hamlet that have offended that they may be a fearful spectacle.’ ”

  His last two words hung in the air.

  “The crows are busy in the North, mistress. They make a feast of the men—and the women, too, aye, the women, too—who hang from the trees and the gibbets we raised along the road. Those stupid peasants, at the end they begged me to spare them. They were wrong, they cried. Couldn’t the king forgive? I showed no mercy to a single one, mistress, not a one.”

  The spit had gathered in the corners of the duke’s mouth, and I watched it slide down his chin as he ranted.

  “Why did they do it? Why did they defy His Majesty, their anointed monarch?”

  He rounded on me. “They did it for you, Joanna Stafford. They did it for all the nuns and the monks and the friars. They wanted their abbeys restored and their feast days reinstated. They never accepted the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon or his new queen. They would not swear oath to him as head of the Church of England. They went into battle with banners of Jesus on His Cross—the soldiers wore badges of the five wounds of Christ. A holy pilgrimage, they said. A Pilgrimage of Grace. How dare these vermin take on holy
airs? Their leader . . . Robert Aske. That foul lawyer—he will hang in chains in York while I stand watch, Mistress Stafford. But they had other leaders from the northern gentry, like Sir John Bulmer and his ‘wife.’ My damned sister-in-law. I heard the evidence at her trial. She encouraged her husband to lead men in rebellion against the king. She said to him, ‘The Commons want but a head.’ And that if the Commons did not rise, the family must flee to Scotland. She said she’d rather be torn to pieces than go back down to London.”

  Such desperate words did not sound like Margaret. I suspected false testimony. And there was something else I wondered as well.

  “I observed Margaret at Smithfield, and it was obvious she had been roughly handled,” I said.

  “She wasn’t tortured, if that is what you suggest,” the duke said quickly. “And these statements of hers were made in the North, before her chaplain and others, men who freely gave testimony at trial. Do you know what she said about me?” He bared his yellow teeth. “She said not once but twice she wanted my head off. What family loyalty. Ah, but she paid for her crimes. She died a terrible death. You saw it with your own eyes.”

  I flinched at his cruelty but refused to cower. “Yes,” I said, “and even if this ‘evidence’ is true, if it constitutes the worst of her offenses, I still don’t understand why her punishment was so severe, why she alone, of all the wives of the northern rebel leaders, was condemned to be burned at the stake before a mob.”

  Something moved in the duke’s eyes, and I knew at once there was more to Margaret’s arrest and execution, another set of truths behind the ones I’d been told.

  But before I could say anything more, he bore down on me, his black eyes smoking, his narrow chest rising and falling. “Your beloved cousin is gone now. You are now our concern, Joanna Stafford. And you want me to believe that a novice at a priory, a girl raised in a noble family that’s a nest of traitors to the crown, could be a loyal subject to King Henry the Eighth?”

  I stood mute.

  “Look at this girl, Kingston,” he called out. “They say Howard women are troublesome, but it’s the Stafford females, like my accursed wife and this girl here, who are the worst in the land.”