Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2)

by V. E. Lynne

  Sir Edward Neville was having none of it. He strode up to the jack, performed his own measurements and came up with a different answer. “Majesty, you are mistaken. My ball is the closest. I am the victor—again.”

  The king’s already small eyes narrowed even further and two patches of scarlet appeared on his cheeks. Neville, usually so fearless in both word and deed, shrank into himself a little and cast a pleading look at the Marquess of Exeter. The marquess started toward the pair, but the king bade him to halt. “I see that Sir Edward thinks that I am not a trustworthy opponent. Let us therefore have an unbiased observer decide the matter. Lord de Brett!” the king bellowed, his gaze never leaving Neville’s, “you are an honest man. Come forth and measure these bowling balls. You shall decide who is right and who is wrong.”

  Sir Richard walked up and did as he was bid, seemingly quite oblivious to all but the task at hand. He measured the two balls swiftly and when he was done he looked up at his sovereign with a smile. “Your ball is the closest, Your Majesty. You are indeed the winner.”

  The king laughed, a conceited, boastful laugh, and clapped his meaty hands together in triumph. Sir Edward Neville opened his mouth, as if he meant to challenge the result once more, but was speedily stopped by the timely intervention of the Marquess of Exeter.

  “Congratulations, Your Majesty,” he offered unctuously, “it is clear, now that I have had a closer look, that your ball is indeed the closest to the jack and therefore superior to Sir Edward’s, an indisputable fact that I am certain he will now acknowledge.” The two exchanged a glance before Neville, his voice barely above a whisper, conceded the game to his king.

  Henry nodded in satisfaction, accepted their grovelling bows, and then waved them away, smirking at their backs as they hurried off. “Now then, who will play an end?” he demanded. “How about you de Brett? Are you game?” Sir Richard gladly agreed he was and he moved quickly to take away Neville’s bowl from the green, studiously avoiding the venomous looks Sir Edward was sending him over his shoulder as he departed.

  Exeter and Neville’s hasty path of retreat took them a little way past where Bridget was standing and she overheard some of their furious conversation when they stopped to catch their collective breath.

  “My ball was nearer to the jack!” Neville raged. “A blind man could have seen that! The king is naught but a knave, a knave, a churl and a liar, and I wish to God it was all over with him! All he does is seek for ways to bring us down and promote those base-born nobodies he loves so much, especially that emissary of the devil himself, Thomas Cromwell. That man sends a shiver down my spine every time I am forced to behold him. He just stares and stares at me, that’s all he does. Just stares and stares, as if he is half mad. Have you ever noticed, Exeter? Lord, what I wouldn’t give to take my dagger and gut him like the pig he is. Just pull out his entrails and strangle him with them. And as for that crawler, de Brett, how dare he speak against me. Has he forgotten who he is? He is of an old family, brought low by the Tudors, just like us; he ought to be on our side!”

  Exeter exhaled deeply and spoke rapidly in response. “De Brett is in a difficult position. We all know that the king is after his wife, therefore he is forced to say what Henry wants him to, as he dare not provoke his wrath, which is a lesson for us all. As for Cromwell, do not allow yourself to become so agitated over his presence. He is the son of the most notorious criminal, brawler, shearman and blackguard ever seen in London. He even watered down the beer when he was a brewer he was that dishonest!” Bridget closed her eyes at Exeter’s revelation, in shock but also in weary acceptance. Cromwell was the brewer’s son. Of course he was, it was so obvious, he was the only man at court whose origins were obscure enough to be the son of a brewer, but even so she felt her chest tightening as she absorbed the knowledge.

  “Such a man cannot last,” Exeter went on “he can barely move for the press of his enemies as it is, both at court and in the country at large. All we must do is bide our time and wait. Wait and hope and pray that our time will come again, but such displays as you put on today, Neville, help our cause not one bit. Quite the contrary in fact. We have already lost a deal of standing with the king; we dare not lose any more else I fear the ground beneath us may be cut away completely.”

  Neville grumbled his reluctant acquiescence and they walked off, their voices fading into the distance. Exeter, by far the more level headed of the two, had spoken the truth but such was their shared sense of grievance as well as their famous inability to govern their tongues that Bridget doubted whether either of them would be able to act on it. Cromwell would be counting on it that they couldn’t and, just as she thought his name, like a good emissary of the devil he appeared. The brewer’s son. Her initial shock when Exeter had said that had already subsided. In her heart, she had known the truth. It had been the only real possibility. She looked at him but he did not notice - he was engaged in conversation underneath the shadiest of the trees in the park with Richard Rich, one of his most devoted associates. Rich was listening to him with rapt concentration, his blond head angled close to Cromwell’s dark one. After a few moments, he nodded once at Cromwell and set off after Exeter and Neville, keeping himself close to them but not too close. The two lords were still so absorbed in their own discussion that they did not notice they had acquired a new and unwelcome shadow.

  They did, however, see Joanna walking towards them and stopped to doff their caps to her in polite acknowledgment before continuing onward. Joanna, for her part, barely sighted the gentlemen, let alone returned their greeting, so intent was she on reaching her destination. Her visage was arranged into lines of disquiet, and Bridget thought it could only mean one thing—the king had sent yet another gift to her chamber or worse, a second summons to ‘Mireflore’. Her eyes strayed to Joanna’s hands, which were clenched, and her spirits sagged at the prospect of making another moonlit foray into the park at the behest of the monarch.

  She broke away from where she stood, at the very back of a group of courtiers who were watching her husband dutifully losing another end to His Majesty, and met Joanna halfway across the grass. “Is something amiss?” she asked. “You look as if you’ve had a fright. Has the king favoured me with a new addition to my collection of velvet pouches? Or is another visit to ‘Mireflore’ in order?”

  “No,” Joanna answered, “nothing like that. I wish I could say it was. I was in our quarters, writing to the abbess and Sister Margaret, when I noticed something. There was an object lying on the floor, an object that had not been there this morning, nor when I sat down later to begin the letter. Someone must have slid it under the door without my observing it. I went and picked it up . . .” She unclenched her right hand and showed Bridget its contents. “I do not rightly know what it is. I asked Will, but—”

  She might have finished her sentence, but Bridget did not hear her. The piece of cloth, slightly muddied and stained, that Joanna held upwards so innocently and yet so anxiously commanded her attention to the fullest extent. All else died away. She picked it up delicately, as though it was so brittle it might disintegrate at the slightest touch. She recognised it, of course she did, and yet she must be mistaken. She had to be mistaken, because nothing else made sense. She held in her unwilling hands a piece of the banner that Sister Margaret had sewn during the Pilgrimage of Grace, the banner that depicted the Five Wounds of Christ. Bridget had cut that banner up herself and thrown the remnants into the waters of the Thames. She had watched as the tide carried them far away from the Manor of Thorns. Now it was back again, a little vestige of it staring up at her, its colours still vividly, nay mockingly, bright.

  Bridget’s mind teemed with possible explanations. Had she failed to get rid of all the pieces of the banner into the river? Had she dropped one on the ground where some unseen hand had retrieved it? No, that could not be. The cloth showed obvious signs of having been in water. Someone must have fished this out of the river, knowing it had come from Thorns, and then delivered
it into the hostile keeping of another. Had one of the servants betrayed them? Had the abbess lied and this was in fact from another banner, one unknown to Bridget? If so, how did it get from Thorns to here and, more importantly, who pushed it under her chamber door? Questions chased themselves around Bridget’s brain, with no answer in sight to any of them.

  “Bridget?” Joanna said. “I can see from your reaction that you know what this is, but more to the point, I can see that you know what this means. Please tell me. Does this scrap of fabric betoken some awful secret you are concealing? Are we in trouble? If so, then I must know why. You must not keep it from me.”

  Bridget sighed deeply. She flicked her glance in the direction of the ongoing game of bowls, just to check that everyone was still paying attention to its progress and not to them. Thankfully, all eyes remained trained obediently on the king who was still happily trouncing an equally obedient Sir Richard de Brett.

  Bridget drew Joanna toward the trees, safely out of the sight line of any courtier who might grow weary of the game and decide instead to take up an interest in them. Once she was certain that they were unobserved, Bridget said, “when you were sick, you remember that you saw me burning some letters in the fireplace in your room? You thought that they were letters from Will that I no longer wanted.” Joanna nodded. “Well, the truth is that I was not entirely honest with you. They were not letters from Will; in fact, they were not my letters at all. They were missives that the abbess had received during the rebellion last year. They were letters from Robert Aske.”

  For a split second, Joanna did not comprehend the name, and then recognition spread over her face. An amazed kind of horror filled her eyes. “Aske?” she exclaimed, so loudly it caused a few heads to turn. “My aunt was writing to the man who was the leader of the rebellion against the king? The man who was hanged in chains for it? Why was she doing that? Who knows about this? How did you—”

  Bridget pulled her away and shushed her frantic questions. “She was sympathetic to his cause and wished to support him. I think she would have marched with him were it not for her age and infirmities. I do not think there was anything overtly treasonous in the epistles, but their very existence would have been enough to see her thrown in prison at the very least. I found the letters because I went looking for them. Lord Cromwell had mentioned to me that there was rumours about ‘my household,’ as he phrased it. Talk of suspect sympathies. He scared me sufficiently that when I was caring for you I searched the casket in your room, and found the letters. I also found that the cloth was originally part of a banner that Sister Margaret had stitched showing the Five Wounds of Christ.”

  Joanna looked down at the remnant, her face full of confusion. She ran a hand across her brow and breathed deeply. “Let me fully understand all this. The abbess was involved in a correspondence with Robert Aske, a man later executed for treason, a correspondence whose existence you discovered after Lord Cromwell told you of rumours he had heard about our household at Thorns. You also found a banner, made by Sister Margaret, with the Five Wounds on it, a symbol of the rebellion that has somehow now found its way under our door. Do I have it right?”

  “Yes, although I do not understand how any of the banner remains—I cut it into pieces and threw it into the river myself. I thought that would be safer than burning it. Evidently I was wrong.”

  Joanna crossed her arms and lowered her head, as if she were deep in thought. “You must have been seen,” she murmured. “Cromwell has his men placed everywhere, perhaps even at Thorns. I’ve seen him talking to my uncle’s man, Walters, a few times and I’m sure he must have more than a few boatmen in his pocket. One of them must have retrieved the pieces of the banner and handed them over to him. Now he seeks to use them against you. Against us.”

  Bridget considered Joanna’s theory, tried to find a flaw in it, and could not. God, how could she have been so utterly stupid? She should have burnt the banner until nothing remained of it but a handful of cinders. But it was too late for that. Through her carelessness, she had exposed them all to danger, most especially the abbess and Sister Margaret if, indeed, Thomas Cromwell was the prime mover behind all of this. But was it him? And if so, what did he want?

  “You must tell my uncle,” Joanna said over the sound of applause emanating from the bowling green. The man in question, Sir Richard, was bowing to general acclaim in a particularly oleaginous fashion to the king who, as the victor, was graciously accepting the gesture. He slung his arm around Sir Richard’s shoulder, as though they were long-lost brothers, and together they walked away from the green, the king talking all the while in Sir Richard’s ear. The courtiers fell in behind them at a respectful distance, and soon Bridget’s husband was lost to her sight.

  “I cannot go to your uncle. The king has claimed his company and I dare not approach that quarter, not after the events of last week. I would prefer to keep a low profile as far as His Majesty is concerned, at least for the present. But none of that applies to you. Go to the Watching Chamber. Stay there until your uncle emerges and tell him that I must speak to him urgently. Tell him it involves Thorns but mention nothing to do with the banner, the abbess or Sister Margaret. He knows nothing of any of that, and therefore we must be careful of what we say. The walls have ears in this place.”

  Joanna listened intently, bobbed her head in silent agreement, and departed without a backwards glance. Bridget, however, was left behind in a state of indecision. Was it right to send only Joanna? Should Bridget herself follow her and risk attracting the eye of the king? Should she seek out Will and endeavour to find out what, if anything, he knew? No, she dismissed that idea before it even fully formed. If Cromwell were enmeshed in this, Will would never reveal to her that information. She had been down that road with him before. His loyalty to his first, and ultimate master, was absolute.

  Her immediate options were limited. All she could do was write to the abbess and warn her in case she had held anything back from her. Bridget did not think so, but she could not be completely certain. The abbess had, after all, kept the correspondence with Aske a secret. Bridget screwed up the scrap of fabric in her small hand. Mother of God, if the abbess had lied, if she or Sister Margaret were deceiving her, if the house was searched and incriminating evidence was found, then the Tower beckoned once more, only they would be the prisoners this time.

  With that prospect looming before her, Bridget made up her mind to write to the abbess forthwith and notify her of events. She would hire a servant, not her husband’s man John Walters, to take the missive and then bring her back the reply. If she moved quickly, he could leave within the hour, on the next tide, and then she might have the latest news from Thorns by evening. With the decision reached, she hurried away from the green, across the park and straight into the path of Thomas Cromwell. She clutched the scrap of banner in her palm as tightly as she could and secreted it quickly up her sleeve.

  “Heavens, I just saw one member of the de Brett family, young Mistress Joanna, come hastening along here a few minutes ago and now I run into the viscountess herself in a similar hurry. Tell me, is something amiss? Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  Bridget regarded him as closely as she had the nerve to in an attempt to divine from his expression whether he was the one behind the mystery of the banner, but his countenance was clear and untroubled. It betrayed nothing.

  “I thank you for your offer, my lord, but there is naught that is amiss. I merely have some letters to write. I am afraid I have fallen behind on my correspondence. I am sure you understand. I would like to get these letters completed so that they can be delivered on the next tide; that is the only reason for my haste. I apologise if I alarmed you, sir. Now, if you will excuse me . . .” She made to sweep past him and she nearly managed it, but at the last moment he caught her sleeve and held her back, his strong fingers closing over the place where the piece of banner lay. Bridget did not blink.

  “Are you normally so eager to write a letter to your old abbe
ss? I can’t imagine why. The daily doings of an elderly former nun can hardly be of much interest or importance to you, nor would she be interested in your life at court. But then, perhaps I am mistaken.” He ran his hand over the outline of the banner remnant, letting his fingers linger. Bridget tried to pull her arm away, but it was impossible; Cromwell had the grip of ten men. He exercised it to its fullest extent now—he pulled her close and, pushing aside a stray tendril of her blonde hair, whispered, “The time for writing letters has passed, my lady. I shall be blunt - you have a stark choice before you. Either you conform yourself to the wishes of the king, as a true subject should, or your beloved Abbess Joan will pay the price. And that will not be the end of it. The de Bretts have a terrible penchant for picking the wrong side, from Bosworth Field to the present day. It is time for you to change that pattern; it is time for you to choose the right side. In fact, little sparrow, it is your last chance to do so.”

  Cromwell dug his nails into her arm, and Bridget bit her tongue to silence an exclamation of pain. She could have screamed with frustration that she had been so stupid and so short sighted, that she had not utterly destroyed the banner when she had the chance. Because of her carelessness, her lack of foresight, she had delivered not just herself but her family into the hands of Thomas Cromwell. Her mind jagged back two years to the river journey that she and Queen Anne had made to the Tower. Cromwell had sat behind her on the barge, whispering in her ear like the serpent had to Eve, tempting her to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. His object on that occasion had been to recruit her to spy on Anne. She had had the luxury of refusing him then, for she had not much to lose at that time and he had possessed nothing of value to hold over her. But that was long ago and circumstances had changed.

  An odd sort of calmness settled over Bridget as she finally accepted the choice she had to make. She gently placed her hand over Cromwell’s and loosened his grip, finger by finger, from her arm. He blinked at her touch, and a faint blush began to spread itself like a mantle over his dark countenance. Bridget locked her eyes with his and saw a competing range of emotions reflected in their shadowy depths: determination, fierceness, guilt, regret and, underneath it all, the flickering flame of the strange attraction that had always existed between them. Cromwell stood mesmerised for some moments, and then, as if realising he had revealed too much of himself, he took a step backward, and put some much-needed distance between himself and Bridget, both physically and mentally.