Page 49 of Boleyn Traitor
‘And you rescue the whole thing! Anne retires, and the king can marry Jane Seymour.’
‘It’s not going to be easy,’ he concedes. ‘But think of it! The Spanish party ruined forever and exposed as madmen and -women, Anne’s marriage annulled as the king wishes, but nothing against her as a woman or queen, the Boleyns without shame, and you and George can keep your places at court. You can keep Beaulieu Palace and your fortune. Anne can even visit you if she wishes.’
The fear leaves me in a gust of giggles. ‘I don’t think anyone would want that! She’ll be safe, but she won’t thank you!’
His laughs with me. ‘No, you’re probably right.’
ANOTHER NIGHT ALONEin my bed as Henry Norris’ big horse backs through my dreams, forever refusing to go forward. When I wake, I am so haunted by the memory of the charger’s hooves tearing up the tiltyard that I go down to the stables to see his big head nodding over the door. I thought for a moment that the king might have had him beheaded for disobedience, just as he executed his own horse for falling. I reach out a hand, and he sniffs at me with his sweet oaty breath; then he backs off again, away from the door, as if he can smell bad luck on my fingers.
A messenger in the livery of the Archbishop of Canterbury, our old friend Thomas Cranmer, rides into the yard. I open the door of the stable and slip inside with the restless horse to hear Cranmer’s man say to the groom: ‘Give him hay and water. I have a message for the Master Secretary, and I’ll wait for a reply.’
‘Don’t tell me the archbishop is locked up in the Tower as well!’ is the lame attempt at a joke.
‘No – His Grace is safe in Lambeth Palace. But anxious. Praying. Weeping. He says over and over: “How can it be? How can such a woman be?” ’
‘He’s the only one’ll weep for her,’ the groom replies truculently. ‘She were a false wife to the king and no good queen to us. Not like good Queen Katherine.’
‘False?’ the messenger asks.
‘A dozen times over with a dozen men,’ the groom says with certainty. ‘In two places at once, on a witch-wind, to have her will.’
They go their separate ways – the messenger to the Cromwell’s rooms; the groom leads the horse to an empty stall, and I creep out. I wish I had not listened. I wish I had not heard that. It is a sample of what we are going to have to endure as we let the Spanish party exaggerate and overreach themselves.
In the afternoon, I sit in the queen’s half-empty privy chamber with a handful of ladies: all Boleyns. Everyone else has melted away. Someone says that Francis Weston, the king’s favourite, was missing from his place at dinner and that the king, who was drunk, told someone – who immediately repeats it to everyone – that Anne bedded up to a hundred men. I think: this is good news, this isad absurdio– a claim so extreme that it makes the point ridiculous. Our enemies are overreaching themselves as Master Cromwell said they would, and we are entrapping them. All we have to do is wait.
THE NEXT DAYThomas Cromwell’s clerks come to the queen’s rooms and take every book from her shelves and every piece of paper, even scraps of poems and riddles and letters. I watch them pack every note from her writing table into the green sacks that lawyers use – as if any of this will be used as evidence in court! The books are dangerously Lutheran; but Anne has read every single one of them to the king himself, and Thomas Cromwell has his own copies of most of them. The safest man to hold them is Thomas Cromwell, who will defend her and George against a charge of heresy, which the Spanish party are certain to bring along with other mad exaggerations.
After the clerks, come the grooms of the royal wardrobe, who take all her clothes: gowns, capes and hoods and sleeves. The grooms of the treasury collect the jewels, even the pieces that are her own; they don’t listen to me when I say that I know that this bracelet or these pearls are Boleyn family treasures. It’s all to be stored forsafekeeping in the treasure house at the Tower and I make sure everything is properly labelled. When this is over, she will want her personal treasures back.
I finish tidying and clearing the queen’s rooms and then, while I am waiting for a groom of the household to lock the great double doors behind me, Elizabeth Somerset comes past with a wooden ribbon box in her hand. ‘It’s my own things!’ she says quickly. ‘Things that I lent her.’
I take her word for it, though I think her a thief.
She drops her voice to a whisper. ‘What did you say to the inquiry?’
‘They haven’t called me yet.’
‘I said nothing about my brother-in-law William Brereton.’ She is anguished. ‘William would never do anything. Why would they arrest him? And I said nothing about Anne but what is common knowledge...’
‘What did you say?’ I demand.
‘Nothing to the inquiry, just – earlier – to my brother Anthony. He was shouting at me – you know how strict he is. He was reviling me – you know how we quarrel! I said I had done nothing worse than the queen herself. And he took me up on it – you know how he is – and next thing I know he and Thomas Wriothesley – as if he has any right to question me! – are asking me what I mean! And saying that they will have to take it further.’ She breaks off as she sees my face. ‘I said nothing. I meant nothing. I told him it was nothing. It’s all just courtly love.’ She gestures at her growing belly. ‘What more can I do than talk? All Anne and I ever did was talk!’
I try to smile and agree with her, but my whole face feels quite frozen. ‘If she gave you that hundred pounds for you to keep silent, then she got a bad deal,’ I say nastily.
She turns without a word and hurries away, down the gallery, away from the locked doors of the queen’s rooms where nothing happened.
The court is buzzing with gossip like a troubled beehive, a low angry murmur that falls silent when I walk past. There’s no doubtthat my family and I are the centre of the scandal. But I know courtiers, and I know that when Anne is cleared, they will all be my greatest friends again. The Spanish party will overreach themselves, and the inquiry will be led into ridiculous claims. But then I think: my father will never be led into ridicule. I should warn him that this is a conspiracy by the Spanish party and that they should be encouraged to hang themselves. I send an urgent message to him for permission to visit him at Westminster – I have something that I want to tell him.
He replies at once:
Daughter,
Information from ladies has already been submitted in writing, and nothing more is needed. Since you know nothing, you need not visit. Say nothing to anyone – especially not to the king, who is rightly much offended. The inquiry has arrested Thom Wyatt and Richard Page and summoned Sir Francis Bryan.
Morley
My father never signs his letters to me with his title, and from this I know that he is writing a letter to be read by any spy. Even so, he manages to give me much information. That I am to say nothing, and especially that I know nothing. That Sir Thomas Wyatt is arrested, who has loved Anne since she was a girl and is certain to defend her. Richard Page has no enemies and must be here as a strolling player to swell the scene. Sir Francis Bryan is Jane Seymour’s host and sponsor, a blatant friend to the Spanish and enemy to us: his spite against Anne will tempt him into telling a cartload of lies, winking at them behind his eye patch. He will betray their conspiracy – just as Master Cromwell promised. A conspiracy against the queen is treason, punishable by death. They will regret starting this hare which will circle as hares always do.
