The Crown

by Nancy Bilyeau

  I needed a sign to tell me where the door was, just as the lion and ivy carvings over the door at Norfolk House revealed it to be the one leading into the great hall.

  It hit me, with such force I gave a loud cry.

  Young Catherine Howard said: “Most of the time, the ivy is in front of the lion. But atop that door, the lion is in front. That’s how I remember which door to use.”

  All over Dartford Priory, I’d seen the carvings of a crown and lilies. Always the crown was behind the symbol of the Dominican Order. Except for one place. The room where outsiders were allowed to sit with sisters—or with the prioress herself. In the locutorium.

  I could hear men shouting outside the priory as I scrambled into the room where I’d sat with Brother Edmund and Brother Richard and been questioned by commissioners Layton and Legh.

  I had only minutes before they’d find me.

  I went to the half-empty bookcase directly under the carving of the crown in front of the lily. I ran my hands up the shelves. I pushed against the sides hard, searching for something that opened, something that slid.

  On the top shelf, it gave way. There was a click. I pushed hard, and the bookshelf eased open several inches.

  My taper held high, I stepped into the opening, and then closed the shelf behind me.

  It was a narrow opening behind the shelf. No more than two feet wide. And very dirty. This was not the well-kept passageway of Malmesbury. My candle alighted on a pile of rotting crumbs. It was a yellow cake. With a start, I realized it was one of the soul cakes gathered by the Westerly children. This was how they moved around Dartford Priory so stealthily.

  I came to a set of rickety stairs and descended.

  At the bottom was a wider passageway, not much more than a tunnel. I followed it, scanning the walls for another sign of the crown.

  I heard a woman’s voice. Someone was talking down here. Perhaps I’d find the prioress . . . and Brother Richard. Obviously, they had located this entranceway, too, but I couldn’t understand why they’d remained down here so long. Didn’t they know Gregory and the others would sound the alarm?

  The dirty tunnel met with a wider passageway. Its walls were lined with bricks. The woman’s voice was a bit louder. I didn’t hear anyone else; who was she talking to? The voice died away. I kept walking.

  When I rounded the end of the passageway, I saw three things in sequence.

  A man in blood-soaked friar’s robes lay on the ground, very still. A woman was tied up in ropes and gagged, sitting on a short barrel against the wall. Next to her stood my fellow novice, Sister Christina. She was half-turned away from me and held a long knife in her right hand.

  I stood there for a while before Sister Christina noticed me. I could not move; I could not speak. I was struck motionless, dumb, by the tableau before me.

  I realized the man was Brother Richard. His eyes were open. He was most definitely dead.

  Prioress Joan saw me. She shook her head, very slightly. That movement made Sister Christina turn around quickly.

  “Sister Joanna,” she said in a hoarse voice. And then louder, with her usual vigor, “Sister Joanna.”

  “What is happening?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “I had to do this,” she said, very earnest. “You must understand, I had to. The prioress found the door in the locutorium; she came down here, to the tunnels. She was looking for it, the crown. I came at her from behind with this”—she brandished her knife—“and I tied her up.”

  “Is the crown here—now?” I asked, my eyes scanning the floor.

  Sister Christina laughed, and the sound of it brought me into the reality of what was happening. I had been too shocked and confused until that moment. With my eyes I could see Brother Richard was dead and the prioress was in ropes and gagged—and Sister Christina was free with a knife. But I could not accept what it meant.

  But the laughter, the bitter, angry laughter, made me understand, finally, that Sister Christina was a murderess. And she was, most likely, within the next few minutes, going to attempt to murder me.

  “The crown! The crown! The crown!” she shouted, mockingly. “Is that all that matters to you, even now? It’s all that mattered to her”—she swung her knife at the prioress—“and to Brother Richard. He came looking for her, but he wanted to find the crown, too. Instead, he found me.”

  “You imprisoned the prioress two days ago?” I asked, trying to calm her.

  “Yes, and it caused me no regret to do so,” she said. “If it weren’t for her, none of it would have happened, Sister Joanna. She invited my father to the priory. She defiled our chapter house with his presence.”

  “Your father?”

  “I killed him,” she said defiantly. “God will not punish me for it. He was a despoiler—a demon. He was not human. Did you know that?”

  I did not dare to bring up her mother. But a shiver of torment crossed Sister Christina’s face. “I didn’t kill my mother. I went to her that day, using the tunnels. I’ve known about them since the day Prioress Elizabeth died. But the Westerly children must have found out how to get to them, too, and I knew that if you found the children that day and spoke to them, all could be discovered. They’d finally know how someone would get from the cloister to the guest bedchamber, and that it was I who killed him. I had to be the one to tell my mother; I wanted to explain myself.” Sister Christina began to weep. “She went mad when I told her why I’d done it. She said that it was her fault, and that she had failed me. After I left, she wrote that letter and took her own life to remove any suspicion from me.”

  Sister Christina slammed her other hand against the wall, inches from the prioress’s head. The prioress shrank back from the novice’s rage.

  I tried again to calm Sister Christina. “The tunnels go far?”

  “They go all the way to the barns,” she said. “There was a foolish prioress, a hundred years ago, who feared someone would try to take the crown by force. She had workmen dig another tunnel and connect it to the dark-house passageway. They added another entrance, from a hidden door in the passageway just outside the church. That way, she thought, if the priory were set upon, they could smuggle out the crown and themselves. She swore all the workmen to silence. But someone didn’t stay silent.”

  There was a noise behind her, at the end of the passageway. A man’s voice said, “That was how Lord Chester found out about the tunnels.”

  Sister Christina sprang away from the wall, waving her knife with a snarl.

  And Geoffrey Scovill stepped around the corner.

  With a quick darting of the eyes, he took in my position and the prioress’s. But mostly he stared at Sister Christina. He held a long stick at his side; I recognized it as a baton.

  “Lord Chester found a way to send a message to a young novice named Sister Beatrice he’d seen at the priory. He lured her down here. He seduced an innocent girl, a lonely, confused girl.”

  Sister Christina screamed, “How do you know that?”

  “Because I found Sister Beatrice, and she told me how to find the entrances to the tunnels,” he said. “I finally forced the old porter, Jacob, to tell me where she was hiding.”

  I started. That was why we ran across Geoffrey in town that day—he was searching for Jacob.

  “When the commissioners came, Sister Beatrice said she wanted to leave. The prioress had no choice but to allow it. Jacob took her to the house of her mother. She was sick twice on the way. When he returned to the priory, he told Prioress Elizabeth about her vomiting, and she realized Sister Beatrice was with child. The prioress was horrified, and she went to the family house. The mother had already driven out her daughter, called her a whore. The prioress and Jacob found her living in the forest, half dead, and hid her in a small farm far from here. The prioress gave her an income for all her expenses. Sister Beatrice had to hide from Lord Chester, you see. If he knew of the pregnancy, he’d have taken the child. Her baby was born before its time; it never drew breat
h. But she still wanted to hide. She was so afraid of Lord Chester.”

  Geoffrey took a step closer to Sister Christina.

  “You know why she was afraid of him, don’t you? The last time she met him down here, he was drunk and told her something evil. Something about you.”

  Sister Christina waved the knife at him and screamed, “Stop!”

  Geoffrey edged closer.

  “Your father meddled with you, didn’t he, Sister Christina?”

  I winced. “No,” I groaned. But no one noticed, for Sister Christina screamed. Bent over and screamed, like a rabid beast.

  Geoffrey took two steps toward her. “You found out about Sister Beatrice in the letter that Prioress Elizabeth wrote to her successor. Sister Beatrice left a few months before you came to Dartford. But you must have heard or suspected something, or you wouldn’t have stolen the letter. The prioress had banned Lord Chester from the priory and wanted to make sure the next head of the priory did the same. She wrote in the letter about the tunnels, too. That’s how you discovered them.”

  Sister Christina stared at him, her chest heaving.

  “What your father did to you was a crime against nature, Sister Christina. It is not to be wondered that you went mad yourself. But it is not an excuse for taking lives. You must now put down your knife and come with me.”

  She straightened up, eyes blazing, and ran back to the prioress. “No,” she said with a terrible smile. “If you try to touch me, I will slit her throat.”

  The prioress’s eyes bulged in terror.

  I moved toward Sister Christina.

  “Please,” I begged. “Please. Do as Geoffrey says.”

  “Sister Joanna, do not forsake me,” she said. “You must help me escape.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” I whispered.

  “But you are the one who understands. The only one. I know that what happened to me, happened to you. I could tell, after all the time that we’ve been at Dartford together. Your father violated you.”

  I shuddered, revolted.

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t lie to me now,” she screeched.

  “I am not lying. I love my father. He is a good, loving father. He would never do that to me.”

  Her face contorted with that terrible rage that had killed two people. Sister Christina threw her knife down and rushed toward me, her hands out like claws.

  I backed against the wall. She was on me in seconds. She grabbed my throat and banged my head against the bricks with all her strength. I felt a sharp, terrible, hot pain in the back of my head.

  The passageway under Dartford Priory slid down and went black.

  46

  Greenwich Palace, June 1527

  The first thing that George Boleyn said to me was “Mistress Stafford, I am certain that you’d look better in French fashion.”

  He’d come into the queen’s rooms with my second cousin, the king. I had been presented formally to Queen Katherine as her new maid of honor. I was sixteen years old. It was one of the proudest moments of my mother’s life. All of her frustrated hopes would now be fulfilled, through my service. My rise in court would bring her back into the orbit of the queen.

  Katherine of Aragon was gracious, dignified, and warm. I already felt comfortable in these rooms, inhabited by the woman who was my mother’s age and had my mother’s Spanish accent. Her somber dress and tasteful decor also reminded me of my mother. The other ladies welcomed me; one girl, not much older, offered to show me the rituals she performed for the queen after supper.

  “We will take good care of your daughter; I know she is your jewel,” the queen said to my mother.

  “No, no, Your Highness,” my mother said quickly. “It is now up to her to take care of you.”

  They smiled at each other. The strength of the friendship, forged in the Spanish court, was undamaged by the last six years of exile. All was understood.

  Queen Katherine turned to me. “I understand you are skilled at needlework. We will sew together—I have a batch of shirts for His Majesty that require finishing stitches.”

  I curtsied. “I would be honored, madame.”

  The queen smiled again, and then signaled for her Spanish confessor. Through all the years in England—marriages to two royal brothers; the birth of a daughter, Mary; and the sad procession of stillbirths and miscarriages—she had always clung to the service of a Spanish confessor.

  The short, stout figure of the queen moved to her private chapel, followed by the confessor.

  My mother was tactful and did not wish to hover over me. She had old friends to visit. “I will be back in an hour to say good-bye to you and the queen,” she told me. “Acquaint yourself with the other maids while the queen is in chapel.”

  She had been gone only ten minutes when the king appeared.

  There was a flurry of activity in the hall, a page appeared, and then King Henry himself strode into the room, followed by a half-dozen other men. I had not been in his presence since I was a young child.

  We all sank into deep curtsies. I stared down at the floor, coming up slowly.

  “Where is the queen?” His voice was surprisingly high-pitched.

  “Sire, she is making confession,” said Lady Maude Parr, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, a tall and dignified woman.

  He made an impatient noise; it unsettled me. I still did not look up.

  I don’t know exactly which man said it—it wasn’t Boleyn—but someone, a courtier, said, “The queen has a new maid of honor?” By asking that, he called attention to me, made me stand out from the two dozen other women, young and old, and by doing so changed my life.

  I could feel all eyes turn toward me. My heart hammering, I looked up.

  King Henry the Eighth was the tallest man I’d ever seen. Taller than my father or his brothers. He had red hair, just starting to thin at his temples; small blue eyes; and an immaculately trimmed beard that was more golden than red. He looked younger than his age, thirty-six. That day he wore purple and a shower of jewels: huge rings and two medallions, layered on each other. I knew that royalty alone could don purple, but I hadn’t expected him to wear it about the court on an ordinary day. Later it would become clear that this was not an ordinary day, and there was a reason he wanted to wrap himself in the color royal for what he meant to do. But no one knew anything of that yet.

  “Your Highness,” I murmured, and made another curtsy.

  “This is Mistress Joanna Stafford,” said Lady Parr, an edge of nervousness in her voice.

  He looked me up and down.

  I hated my kirtle passionately at that moment. It was a costly one, made of burgundy brocade, carefully selected to flatter my coloring. It had a low, square, Spanish-style neck, exposing the tops of my breasts, something I’d assiduously avoided at home, and so was quite unused to. I was felt undressed before these much older men.

  The king showed no lechery. That is the truth. I’d been warned about his lustful nature, not just by my mother but also every adult at Stafford Castle. He’d bred a bastard by one lady-in-waiting and seduced a slew of others, including one of my Stafford aunts, Catherine of Fitzwalter.

  I think there are two kinds of females, those who resent it when a lustful man does not leer at them and those who are relieved. I was very much in the second category.

  The king merely nodded at me and then gestured toward a young man in his party. He said something to him that I couldn’t hear, then turned and left.

  The young man sidled up to Lady Parr and said: “I am to take her to my sister.”

  Lady Parr grimaced. “There is another lady who serves the queen, and you will meet her,” she said, very reluctantly. “This gentleman will escort you; he is Sir George Boleyn.”

  The man bowed with a showy, mocking flourish. I was taken aback, and confused. If the lady served the queen, why wasn’t she here? But I did not see any other choice but to follow him.

  Boleyn was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty a
nd very dark, with huge black eyes. He wore an expensive doublet in a fashion I hadn’t seen before, tightly fitted. He was of medium height and very slim.

  Fashion meant a great deal to him. After criticizing my clothes, he pointed out the styles worn by other ladies as we walked through a long gallery. His tone was instructional. I said almost nothing during our walk; I had taken an intense dislike to him.

  He showed me into a large room off the gallery, sparsely furnished and flooded with light. The queen’s rooms had been dark, verging on musty. These were airy, with decorative touches I’d never seen before: colored ribbons strung along the window casements and a gaily embroidered cushion on a chair.

  A young woman stood by the window. She closely resembled George Boleyn—black eyes and hair and very slim—and looked to be his age. It occurred to me they might be twins.

  “Who is this?” she asked, unsmiling. She had a slight French accent.

  “The new maid of honor, the Stafford girl,” he said. “Remember? She’s the one the queen insisted on.”

  I shot him a furious look.

  The woman laughed, a low, throaty laugh. “She doesn’t like you, George.”

  “No, she doesn’t.” He sounded gleeful.

  She smoothed her skirts as she walked toward me. I had to admit she was graceful. They both were, but in a way that was strangely mannered. As if they were always on display, and reveled in it.

  “I am Anne Boleyn,” she said simply.

  “And you also serve the queen?” I asked.

  Her enormous black eyes danced with a joke I didn’t understand. “For now,” she said. George Boleyn burst out laughing.

  I turned on him. “Take me back to the queen’s apartments,” I said.

  “What spirit she has,” said Anne.

  “Yes, I know. And she has a good figure. Don’t you like her, Sister?”

  She looked at me for a moment and then wrinkled her nose. “No.”