The Baker's Daughter Volume 1

by Bonny G Smith

  “He is in the barge just behind,” replied Brandon. “He…”

  Just then they heard shouts, and suddenly the hull of the barge scraped stone. They were docking.

  Katherine stood up and with the cat-like movement with which Henry was so familiar, she was through the curtains and onto the deck in an instant. It was full dark, but the Tower was lit with torches inside and out, and made a formidable vision to one so frantic with dread and fear.

  “Where is he?” she cried, but she was not facing the Tower now; her eyes were searching the bridge. “I cannot see him!”

  Sir John Gage, the Constable of the Tower, was making his way hurriedly down the water steps towards the barge. Now that the vessel was docked, the ex-queen was his responsibility. He was prepared for hysterics; the Tower had that effect on people. Either they arrived numb with fear and were silent, or they were hysterical and barking mad. He noticed that Katherine was leaning dangerously over the edge of the craft, and was in imminent danger of falling into the icy waters. The icy drizzle had at last changed to snow, and visibility was reducing quickly. They must get her inside.

  “For the love of God,” he shouted as he ran, “Seize her!” He had meant to be there waiting when the flotilla arrived; but the weather was so foul, and he had no wish to catch his death waiting in the sleet to escort the disgraced queen to hers.

  Brandon reached her and now took hold of both her arms. She was crying and screaming incoherently. Katherine was a very small woman, almost as small as a child, and Brandon lifted her as though she weighed no more than dried leaf. He held her by the waist, she thrashing and kicking, and carried her up the slippery steps. The further away they got from the barge the more frantic she became, struggling to get free.

  “Thomas! Thomas!” she wailed, so broken-heartedly that finally Brandon, who had not given up on wringing a confession of adultery from her, stood her on her feet and holding her firmly by her upper arms in his iron grip, he said, “My lady, he is not there. His head is not on Tower Bridge. It is on London Bridge, at the South end by the gatehouse. But good lady, hark thee; Master Culpeper being dead these two months past, there is nothing left. Do you hear what I say? Even if it were not full dark, and even if his head were right here, you would not know him. Now, my lady, we must away, and get inside where it is warm.” His eyes searched hers in the wavering torchlight. The wind was picking up, and every so often the flames of the torches would douse momentarily, only to re-illuminate from the sticky pitch on the linen when the gust quietened.

  Katherine stood in Brandon’s grip, soaked to the skin, her hair hanging in long, limp strings. She was exhausted and practically swooning with fatigue. It was against all etiquette, but suddenly Brandon lifted her up into his arms and took the rest of the steps two at a time. He strode to the doorway where the Tower attendants waited to guide them to Katherine’s rooms. The distance was short, but by the time they arrived, Katherine was fast asleep.

  The Tower of London, February 1542

  The wood was smooth and hard, and yet it felt strangely soft to the touch. It was the color of honey, and had knots and burls throughout its surface. She had tried to shift the wooden block herself, but she found that it was so heavy that she could not do so. So now she sat on the floor next to it, this instrument of her death, and ran her hands over its surface once more. She still could not believe…not really…that in a few short hours, she would lay her head on this very block and an axe would strike her head off. Surely the king would relent at the last minute; he was just trying to scare her. Maybe he was trying to make her sorry. Well, she was sorry…but not that she loved Thomas. She was sorry that life could not have gone on as it had, with her being queen, being rich, having wonderful dresses and beautiful jewels, all to wear for Thomas. The king was simply a means to an end. And now it was to be her end.

  She could see now what a mistake it had been to quarrel with her uncle. Had she not done so, perhaps now in her extremity he would have tried to save her. She pondered the difference between how helpless and alone she felt at this moment compared to the power she had wielded as queen of England, and the pampered darling of the king. The difference was certainly vast. At the pinnacle of her power over the aging king she felt she could defy the world. Now she was powerless to save herself, let alone anyone else.

  All of her nearest relatives save her powerful uncle were somewhere in the Tower, charged with misprision of treason; they were to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives and all their lands and goods were forfeit. The servants who had extracted favors, money and positions at court from her for their silence had betrayed her, and were charged as well; if they had thought that betraying her would buy their own freedom, they had certainly been mightily fooled! For Lady Rochford there was no hope; that lady was to die with her, but from what she had gleaned from listening at the door of her rooms, the lady had lost her wits and was quite mad. Would the king execute a madwoman? She shrugged. What difference did it make, after all?

  In the end the king’s Council had asked her if she wanted to say anything in her own defense. She had had no trial, for which she was grateful; such a public ordeal may have driven her as mad as poor Jane. She had declined. After all, what was there to say?

  Even if she would not confess to adultery with Thomas, which was surely what they wanted her to do, she knew that she was guilty. The entire Council were very frustrated with her. They simply did not understand that her love for Thomas was all she had left and even though he was gone, irretrievably so, her memories of him were the one thing she wanted to keep for her own until the end. Even if Thomas had not admonished her to silence, she would never have admitted to it. It was all she had left of him and she did not want to share those memories with anyone. It was true that the king had promised her mercy if only she would confess, but for some reason she simply could not believe him. She had heard that Lady Rochford had confessed to abetting their clandestine meetings in order to save herself, and she had been condemned to die anyway. Why should the king do any differently with her confession, if she made it?

  And so she would take her knowledge of Thomas to the grave with her. After all, Thomas had not confessed, even when he was racked. Oh, yes, she had found out about that, too. His silence had availed him nothing; the Council had decided that he would not be in such a position unless he had intended to commit adultery with the queen, and that, in the end, had been enough to condemn him.

  She was lying on the floor with the back of her head resting against the block. Suddenly she realized that tears were streaming down her face. This happened often lately. She would sit and cry long before she realized that she was doing so. Then a pleasant memory found its way through the bleak ones; she remembered Thomas laughing at her so hard one night that the tears ran down his face. Suddenly she was laughing through her tears. She could not see the absurdity of it at the time, but she could now. She had begged Thomas not to confess their adultery to a priest, because the king, as Supreme head of the Church of England, would be sure to know about them if he did. She was beginning to doubt Henry’s ecclesiastical powers.

  She looked about her and yawned. The candles were burning very low. It must be near dawn. She would practice one more time and then try to sleep just a little. She braced herself on the block and rose to her knees. She placed her hands on either side of the sturdy wooden cube. She bent forward and expertly placed her chin into the scooped out portion on the far side, settling her chest in the depression on the near. The block fit her well.

  She knew that Sir John, the Constable of the Tower, had thought it peculiar that she had asked for the block to be brought to her room so she could practice laying her head on it. But if Thomas were watching her on the morrow from Heaven, she wanted him to see that she was not afraid, and that she was glad to die for love of him.

  Chapter 21

  “The high destiny Mary had envisioned for herself was to be thwarted by obstacles beyond her control.” – Carolly Erickson,
“Bloody Mary”

  Kenninghall, Norfolk, February 1542

  Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, sat in the sun and surveyed the vast expanse around him. Kenninghall was just one of many Howard holdings, but it was his secret favorite. The name meant “king’s palace” in the ancient Saxon tongue; he knew because he had studied that language, for his own amusement, as a boy. His love of language and words had grown to make him a renowned and much-revered poet not only at the Tudor court, but throughout Europe.

  In addition to its many features, Kenninghall boasted a bowling green, the privilege for which the Howards paid a fee of six shillings and eight pence per annum to the crown. The fee was exacted to ensure that there were few such bowling greens, for fear that the game would distract men from practicing their archery, an essential weapon of war, and one for which the English were justly famous.

  His sister Mary, Lady Richmond, was playing a game with their guest, the Lady Margaret Douglas, niece to the king. Surrey watched as his sister held the small, smooth wooden ball up to the front of her face with both hands. Her eyes narrowed as she assessed the position of the distant jack. It was uncanny how accurate his sister was at the game of bowls; no one could touch her at it. He smiled as he recalled that several of their friends had refused to play with her because she always won. It intrigued him that his gentle, quiet sister seemed to become a different person when she played bowls; so competitive and argumentative! It was not like her at all.

  Not so with the Lady Margaret Douglas; she simply laughed at her own inability to hit Mary’s balls and knock them away, or to come close to the jack without hitting it. Margaret never minded losing, and was very gracious about it; so much so that Mary chided her for not even trying. But Margaret would just laugh and shrug. Surrey suspected that after being under house arrest at Syon for so long, any excuse to be in the out-of-doors was a good one for Margaret, win or lose.

  The day was sunny and very fine for February. It still held a chill, but it was nothing compared to the bitter cold of earlier in the month. There was just a hint, perhaps a promise, of spring in the air. One of the servants had brought out a jug of mulled ale. It was hot, very sweet, and smelt of cloves. How he wished he had had such a drink on the day of his cousin’s execution! He gave an involuntary shudder. He was not squeamish, far from it, but the battlefield and the tiltyard were a far cry from the executioner’s block. There was something so cold, so calculating, about an execution that was absent from death or injury in the heat of the fray.

  The day of Katherine’s execution had dawned gray, dull and frosty. The ground was frozen and had a ringing quality when one trod upon it. His cousin Katherine, of whom Surrey had been fond, had seemed very confused and helpless when she was brought out of the Tower onto the green. She had been so seized with fright that she had barely been able to stand. The Constable of the Tower, Sir John Gage, had to practically carry her to the waiting scaffold, which was draped in black cloth and strewn with straw. Lady Rochford followed close behind, but her expression was so vacant that it was hard to believe that she understood why she was there. She kept wandering off in the wrong direction and the priest had to keep pulling her back into the solemn procession.

  Sir John had seen Katherine safely up the steps to the platform where the block was placed; once there, she seemed to shed her fear. Standing erect, her head now held high, Katherine spoke quite clearly and distinctly, admonishing all Christian people to take regard unto her worthy and just punishment. She confirmed that for her heinous offences against God from the time of her youth, she had been justly condemned to death. Surrey was relieved that even in her extremity, Katherine had the presence of mind to say these things. No one ever went to block shouting their innocence and the unjustness of their sentence; this was necessary in order to save their families from the repercussions of their crimes, whatever those happened to be.

  Surrey had to smile to himself at Katherine’s declaration that she had been a sinner since her youth; Christ on the Cross, what was she now, if not young, and was not that what had ultimately condemned her? She had not been raised at the French court as their worldly cousin Anne had been, accustomed to intrigue, and cunning enough to wend her way through the dangerous morass that was a royal court. Poor Katherine had been doomed from the start, for she was almost as witless on a good day as Lady Rochford was since she had lost her reason.

  But one aspect of his little cousin’s last speech from the scaffold struck him strangely. Even though it was expected that every condemned person agreed wholeheartedly with their sentence and spoke well of the king who had condemned them, there was no reason to confess to the breaking of all the commandments. And what were those, after all? It was unlikely that Katherine had broken them all, but there was one of particular interest, and that must have been the one weighing most on her mind; adultery. She had confessed her sins to Bishop Longland the night before she was to die, but no man knew what she had told him. Why confess on the scaffold, on the very brink of death and oblivion, if she were not guilty? Suffolk later told the Council in open session that Katherine had confessed her adultery to him in confidence on that dark, cold journey on the barge to the Tower, but Surrey simply did not believe that to be true. Why should she have confessed to Suffolk, who had no power of absolution, after all the parties involved had steadfastly denied the charge, even on the rack? It made no sense. The only explanation was that Suffolk, who was not present at Katherine’s execution, had heard of Katherine’s subtle words on the day of her death, and had lied when he said such to the Council.

  Katherine had laid her head on the block in such an expert manner that one would have thought she had performed the act a dozen times before. Without preamble and without a whimper she knelt, steadied herself by gripping the wooden block on both sides, laid her head down, spread her arms as if they were wings, and in less than a second the pretty head lay on the bloody straw. The sight must have sobered Lady Rochford, for suddenly she seemed to regain her senses. She made much the same speech Katherine had, urging everyone to pray for the king and to obey him in all things. But even he, inured to battle and war, had felt his stomach lurch when at last Lady Jane knelt to lay her head on the block that was already covered in Katherine’s slippery blood. But she made no fuss and in no time her weeping women were wrapping her headless body in a rough blanket, much as Katherine’s women had done just a few moments before.

  Surrey was brought out of his reverie when Mary and Margaret finished their game and arrived at the little oasis the servants had set up for them. Surrey sat in the shy winter sun on a velvet-covered chair, which had been placed on a Turkey carpet along with the table bearing the silver service and the jug of mulled ale.

  “Margaret,” cried the Duchess of Richmond in exasperation, “you are hopeless at bowls. Let us repair to the archery butts.”

  Lady Margaret laughed. “I am afraid you shall be even more disappointed in me should we do that,” she replied, as she helped herself to the ale. “I am a miserable shot. Only one arrow in a dozen even hits the target.”

  Lady Mary rolled her eyes. “Brother, what pastime, then? Shall we sit at your feet whilst you read us your latest rhyme?”

  Surrey was justly famous for his versifying; he and Sir Thomas Wyatt were the premiere poets of the court. But just lately all of his verse had been written for his latest love, the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald. He was married, and the Fair Geraldine, as she was known at court, would have none of him. He had found that one wrote one’s best poetry when one was aching with love for something unattainable.

  “There is no need to read,” he said. “I shall recite.” Once he had written a verse, it was committed to his memory and he never forgot it. He took a sup of ale and began, “With eyes cast up into the maiden’s tower…”

  Mary loved to listen to her brother recite. She liked to pretend that he had written such lovely lines for her. Her husband, the king’s bastard son, had been dead for almost six years, and still her f
ather had found no new bridegroom for her. For that blessing she thanked God fasting; one marriage had been quite enough. She loved her brother with a passion that bordered on the unnatural, and had the laws of God and man not been against it, she would have been content to marry him. It was an absurd thought, but one she often entertained. It made her wonder if it wasn’t simply another inexplicable foible of the Howard clan; her cousins, Anne and George Boleyn, whose mother had been a Howard and Lady Mary’s own aunt, had been accused of incest, hadn’t they? There, she had not shrunk from the word, from the reality of what it meant. She often wondered if, among all of the absurd charges against Anne, that perhaps that one had been true.

  Lady Mary had been very much aware of the king’s interest in her after Richmond’s death, and had experienced many an uncomfortable moment in that regard; she would rather have killed herself than marry such a one as he. The king had now murdered two of her cousins; she had no doubt that had her father been amenable to casting her into such unholy bondage with her erstwhile father-in-law, the king would have found some excuse to do away with her as well. Had her father been agreeable to the match, which thank St. Michael and all his angels, he had not been, she would simply have thrown herself into the nearest moat. After all, her persistent thoughts of incest were as wicked as actually doing the deed; she was bound for hell in any case. Suicide would hardly have mattered.