Page 47 of Boleyn Traitor
‘No, your ladyship; he is lodging with the other lords at Westminster Palace.’
I nod as if this is what I expected and go down the gallery to my own rooms, the Rochford rooms. I don’t know what else I can do. If Anne’s father is at Westminster, sitting with the other lords on the inquiry, then he will be guarding the family interest: his son George and his daughter Anne. I have nothing to worry about, since all four of our allies: my mentor Cromwell, my father, George’s father, and even our uncle Thomas Howard, are judges on the inquiry. It is packed in our favour, and I don’t even know the subject. I have nothing to fear.
It’s not yet noon, and I am as tired as if I have been up all night watching for an enemy from the tower of a besieged castle. But I don’t know who the enemy is, and I don’t know who is in the castle and who is without.
IGO ON KNOWINGnothing all day and all night until the next day, when Thomas Cromwell comes back to Greenwich alone, without the king, or George, or my father, or the other lords. But my heart leaps to see the familiar big cob horse in his stall, and at the end of the day, I wait for my spymaster at the door to the stable.
‘You startled me,’ he says as I step out of the early evening dusk.
I know I did not. ‘I wrote to you yesterday. I asked you what I should do.’
‘I could not then tell you. I was as much in the dark as you are.’
‘Not in the dark now,’ I observe.
He nods. ‘But there is great darkness,’ he says piously.
I feel a wave of impatience, like a disregarded daughter. ‘Master Cromwell, if I am to work for you then I have to know what is happening, to avoid accidental error.’
He smiles. ‘I am sure you would make no error, Lady Rochford. You have already been very helpful. Matters moved rather swiftly and unexpectedly; but I can tell you everything now.’
I know he will never tell me everything. ‘Where is my husband?’
‘At the Tower. He is under arrest.’
I gasp and put my hands behind my back, my palms flat against the roughness of the bricks, as if I need the walls themselves to support me. ‘And Anne?’
‘The same.’
‘What for? What for?’
He clears his throat. ‘As I say, it has become rather complicated. I was instructed by the king to set up an inquiry into the validity of the royal marriage. Obeying his command, I summoned reputable lords – your father one of them – to rule that the king is in forbidden intimacy with the sister of his former lover. As everyone knows, he married Queen Anne though he was her sister Mary Boleyn’s lover, and so he has offended God.’
‘They got a dispensation from the pope,’ I point out.
‘Yes. But – remember? – the pope has no authority to give adispensation in England. And two dead-borns are proof to the king that the marriage is an offence to God.’
‘One,’ I maintain stubbornly. ‘Only one.’
‘Two,’ he says gently. ‘One was wrongly denied.’
I am silent; he meets my eyes as guileless as a child.
‘This issuperstitio– a belief standing over a fact,’ I tell him.
‘But it is the king’ssuperstitio. And the king’s belief comes from God Himself.’
‘Like Moses?’
Thomas Cromwell hides his smile in a nod. ‘God speaks to the king and that overrules everything, even the facts as we – er, lesser men – might think them.’
For a moment, I could almost laugh. Here are Thomas Cromwell and Lord Morley’s scholarly daughter agreeing that Henry Tudor’s fears are more true than reality. This is to take courtier work to an extreme. But these are extreme times.
‘Oh, that’s why they were singing the old song of Henry Percy’s betrothal to Anne!’ I exclaim, as this part of the puzzle falls into place. ‘To discredit her marriage to the king.’ Suddenly, it is all clear to me. ‘Master Cromwell – this is the work of the Spanish party! Francis Bryan insulted Anne to her face – called her Henry Percy’s leavings. It was the very day they got the Garter for Nicholas Carew! They have been stirring up the king to think his marriage invalid – they must be telling him there was no dispensation for his affair with Mary Boleyn and that Anne was married to Henry Percy.’
From his silence, I know I am right.
‘And that’s why you were meeting Dr Sampson: to prove invalidity!’ I say triumphantly. ‘I saw him outside your door that day. Dr Sampson advised the first marriage, Katherine of Aragon’s marriage was invalid. Now you’ve brought him back to deny this one.’
