Brazen (28 page)

F
OUR
MEN
ARE
TRIED
FOR
ADULTERY
AND
TREASON
. N
ORRIS
, Weston, Smeaton, and William Brereton. Only Smeaton pleads guilty. But all are given the full sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering.

The gossip is that she confessed.

The reality is that if
they
are guilty, then so is she.

The queen’s household is dissolved and we are all cast adrift. Discharged from allegiance to their queen, the maids and ladies are free to go. Free to speak against her if it so pleases them—and Cromwell.

Margaret moves quietly to St. James’s Palace, under the auspices of the king. Fitz moves to Whitehall.

Hal and I move into Father’s rented lodgings on the Strand. Half the court is living on this street, waiting to hear the verdict. Waiting to testify. Waiting to pass judgment.

The night before Anne’s trial, Hal writes. And drinks. His script is illegible, his eyes bloodshot; his hair stands in thick swirls from running his hands through it.

“You should sleep,” I tell him. “Clear your head. You want to make a sound judgment.”

Hal scowls and gulps his wine. “I don’t want to make any judgment, Sister. But I am a peer of the realm and compelled to be there by my king.”

“You could say no.”

Hal looks up at me. “No one says no to the king.”

He leaves early for the Tower. For her trial and George Boleyn’s. They are nobility, and therefore can expect a jury of peers. The streets are silent. Waiting.

The murmurs come in waves, long before Hal ever returns. Like the gentle lap of the river on a boat. I close my ears and wait for my brother.

Hoping.

Hal collapses by the fire when he comes. He can’t stop rubbing his hands on his breeches. As if trying to remove blood that no one else can see.

“What happened?” I ask.

“It is treason for a queen to commit adultery,” he says quietly. “It puts the succession under suspicion. Puts a pretender on the throne.”

I hold my breath. I want him to say he doesn’t believe it. That she never did such a thing.

“The attorney-general said she solicited them. All those men. Even her brother. That she’d promised to marry Norris. That she’d told George Boleyn the king couldn’t . . . that he was impotent.”

That’s what Madge said.

“That she made fun of the way he dressed and the songs he writes.” Hal barks a laugh. “That’s probably what hurt him most.”

He slumps against the wall.

“She was condemned before she even came into the room,” he snarls, taking yet another goblet of wine to the window. “The damned ax should have pointed toward her as she entered. She knew she’d be found guilty.

“She denied every accusation, and then said she was willing to die. That we all die eventually. She was so calm. So reserved. But her fingers were dead white on the arms of her chair. Her voice only broke when she said she was sorry that others would die with her. She spoke so well.”

I can hardly feel my lips when I speak. “What did you do?”

“As the youngest peer there, I had to vote first.” He pours more wine. “We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.”

I hardly know what I’m doing as I stride across the room and push him. Wine slops from his goblet.

I wrench it from his hand and throw it across the room.

“You knew it was wrong! And you did it anyway?”

“I had no choice!”

He’s trying to convince himself. But the doubt is scribbled all over his face.

“There’s always choice, Hal.” I push him again. It feels good. “You have a mind. A title. You have a responsibility!”

“I have a responsibility to
keep
my title,” he growls.

“And that’s more important than someone’s life?”

“She was going to die, anyway. Whichever way I voted.”

He won’t look at me, so I push him again. He spins and grabs me by both arms, gripping me tightly as if pressing me back together.

“I will not fight with you, Mary,” he says, his voice low and dark with pain. “But I will lock you up if you continue to assault me.”

He means I’m acting like our mother. All aggression leaves me, but he doesn’t let go.

“You say I should speak out,” he says. “That I should stand up for what I think is right. But you never did, Mary. Throughout our childhood, you never once told Mother she was wrong. You did exactly as she said. Quietly and without argument.”

I am tremulous and broken by any reference to my mother.

“That’s exactly the kind of power the king has over all of us. The power to take what’s most important and grind it into insignificance.”

He finally lets me go and turns back to the window. “Father cried when he announced the verdict. Henry Percy fainted.”

The Duke of Northumberland. The one rumored to have slept with the queen before she married.

“The audience. There must have been two thousand people watching. They didn’t agree with us. The murmurs were deafening.”

I heard them.

“What was the sentence?” I ask.

Hal looks up at me, blinded by haunted eyes and memories.

“She’s to be executed by burning or beheading. At the king’s pleasure.”

The king’s pleasure. Three years ago, he loved her enough to brave controversy and excommunication to be with her.

Today, his love is demonstrated by his choice for her manner of execution.

Hal and I don’t speak again. We just watch while the fire dies in the hearth.

We hear later that the king celebrated, long into the night, on a brightly lit barge on the Thames. Jane Seymour at his side.

F
IVE
MEN
HAVE
BEEN
EXECUT
ED
.

Mark Smeaton. Francis Weston. William Brereton. Henry Norris. And George Boleyn. The king took pity on them and they were executed by ax. It took three strokes to kill the queen’s brother while the others watched. Hardly merciful.

Their heads are not impaled on pikes on London Bridge but instead are buried with them. Even the king wants no reminders of this treason.

Thomas Wyatt is left in the Bell Tower. Awaiting the king’s pleasure.

The king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was annulled the same day the executions took place. She is now nothing but Marquess of Pembroke. Not crowned. No one. Not a queen, but a mistress. A whore.

No one asks the obvious question: If she was never married to him, how could she commit adultery?

Anne Boleyn’s death is scheduled for Thursday, and all morning I sit. Watching my hands do nothing. Waiting for the roar of cannon on Tower Wharf. Or news of a pardon.

What comes is delay. The king in his great mercy and out of the vestiges of his love for her has requested an expert headsman from Calais. A man who can take a head off clean with a sword. Who never misses.

The night is unbearably long. Frightfully long. I don’t sleep, but dream waking. Of going far away. To France. To Scotland. To the New World. Anywhere but here.

Here, all I can do is wait.

I imagine Anne in that Tower room. Having waited all day to die. And I imagine her facing the horde of spectators. All of them waiting for her death.

She needs someone in that crowd who doesn’t wish her ill. Someone to wish her peace.

I pull myself out of bed and dress in my drabbest clothes. Brown kirtle, gray sleeves. A simple coif. I don’t want to be recognized by anyone. I don’t want to be another court voyeur.

The streets are teeming and smell of sweat and manure, fish and offal. The atmosphere is like a festival. Like Anne’s coronation. Merchants are selling pies and wine. Priests yell themselves hoarse on the street corners. I hear men taking bets on how many swings the swordsman will require. A tune and snatches of lyrics catch my ear. That the king is a cuckold. That Anne was condemned by spite. That Jane Seymour is the next royal whore, and one who has screwed half the court already.

That almost makes me laugh.

Part of me hopes I’ll never get to the Tower. That I’ll somehow feel better just for trying, knowing that someone who loves her tried to be there when she dies. Someone who doesn’t wish for her death, but wishes for her redemption.

The closer I get, the more I shiver and sweat. I am in the shadow of the gate, the stink of the moat lapping at its base, when I hear a familiar voice.

I turn around and we lock eyes. For an instant, Fitz’s face shows no recognition, then he shakes his head. Once. As if trying to get a shock of hair out of his face. I know what he means.

I reach for his arm and he shrinks away.

Only then do I see Hal behind him. Hal frowns at Fitz, then looks at me, and his face darkens with anger.

“This is no place for a girl,” he says.

I turn and stride ahead of them. I am like Margaret walking the halls of Greenwich. I do not dodge around the knots of people. I do not slow my pace. I walk steadily, and a path clears. Each gap I see is there for me and me alone. I’m meant to be here.

I walk through the alley beneath the Bell Tower and into the belly of the Bloody Tower gate, vaulted like a crypt. The throng is packed more tightly here, and my progress slows almost to a standstill. I am shoulder to shoulder with merchants. Courtiers. City men.

Tower Green is even more crowded, and the sky presses down as heavily as the vault of the gate. Stinking bodies are packed up against one another, everyone striving for a better view. There must be a thousand people here. Just to watch someone die.

My breath comes in fugitive gasps and I suddenly—frantically—want to get away.

But the crowd pushes me forward and eddies up near the scaffold. Cromwell is there, close enough to catch the blood when it spills. He turns and sees me and I stop, the mob pulsing around me, my lungs utterly frozen in my chest. I feel Fitz’s hand close around my upper arm, but I cannot look away from the king’s master secretary. Not until Cromwell smiles.

Fitz is pressed up against my back. Like we were in bed. I can breathe again.

“Why are you here?” he growls in my ear.

“For her.”

“You don’t know what it’s like. You have to leave now.” He says the last word as a command. A duke, giving orders.

I turn to look at him. I can smell him. Taste him. I also taste the anger like bile rising in my throat.

“Why are
you
here?” I spit.

He flinches. “I am here at the king’s command.”

“You represent him,” I press. “You’re here for
him
.”

I will make him say it.

“He’s my father.” He is adamant. His shoulders are still very straight and his head is held high.

But something inside him breaks. I hear it shatter. It’s the only time I’ve heard him call the king his father. But what kind of father asks a boy to do such a thing?

Hal catches up to us and stands belligerently at Fitz’s side.

“Make her go, Fitz,” he says.

Like I’m not even here. Not a person. Like I’m a servant. Or worse. A wife.

“I will not leave.” My voice carries more courage and conviction than I feel.

I see, suddenly, in Hal’s face, a cross between Mother and Father. The war that went on between them our entire lives. The one that always ended with a blow and a curse.

Because he can’t hit me—won’t hit me—he lands a thump on Fitz’s shoulder.

“Now, Fitz!”

Fitz won’t look at me. Won’t look at either of us.

“It’s not under my control.”

“It’s your responsibility!” Hal shouts. “
She’s
your responsibility. As are every single one of her actions.”

I step between them. Square up to Hal, pressed so close I can see the stubble on his chin.

“I am responsible for my own actions,
Your Grace
. I am no one’s possession. I have a mind of my own.”

“Then you are just like our
mother
,” Hal snarls, and it would knock me to my knees if I had room to move.

Hal turns to Fitz. “I pity you, my friend. I’ve seen how this ends up. Make her do what you say now, or you will always regret it.”

“I’m not my mother,” I whisper, my breath coming in gasps. “I’m nothing like her.”

Hal just turns and walks into the crowd that parts before the Earl of Surrey and swallows him back up again.

Fitz grabs my arm and pulls me away from the scaffold. He doesn’t speak, his silence more condemning than anything he could say. He stands me directly behind a behemoth of a man dressed in faded leather breeches and a reeking leather jacket.

So I can’t see. So she can’t see me.

Then the crowd begins to move like the Thames against the incoming tide. It shifts and turns and murmurs like an approaching wave as the yeomen of the guard march between the enormous towers of the Coldharbour Gate, followed by a tiny figure dressed in a long black robe and wide fur collar. She is accompanied by four women.

Four
girls.
Maids of honor brave enough to be there with her. Madge is the last. I can see, even at this great distance, that she’s already weeping.

As they approach the black-draped scaffold, the crowd shifts again, suddenly surging forward. I’m pushed and drawn around the leather-clad giant, away from Fitz, sucked into the center of a crowd as if it’s a whirlpool. I can’t breathe. The darkness starts to close in from the sides. I feel Fitz grab for me once, and when I turn to reach for him, his face is stricken, as if he’s losing me to the crowd.

Losing me to the sword.

Then I’m swallowed up and spit farther forward, surrounded by a gang of boys barely older than I am. Apprentices, already drunk.

I gasp a breath, wishing I had the space to put my head between my knees. I gasp again, and my vision begins to clear.

“I’ve never seen a witch die!” one of the lads cries gleefully to his mates. “Unless you count the Nun of Kent, but perhaps she really was holy. She predicted this, didn’t she?

“I’ve seen monks die and men who didn’t take the oath and those five scoundrels the other day.” He is close enough to me that I can smell the rancid, sour stink of his breath. “But never a
queen
. Who’d a thought?”

He raises a wineskin and slops a little down his chin when he drinks. I try to move away, but the crowd is too tight. Pushing forward. I feel a knee against the back of my leg. An elbow on my upper arm. A shoulder behind my head. Breath on my neck.

I keep my eyes on the queen. She reaches the stairs and hesitates minutely, looking over her shoulder. I follow her line of sight back to the Tower wall, the Bell Tower, the scrap of sky beyond.

The queen wears a simple gable hood, the peaks and corners of it shading her face from the morning light. My heart seizes. She hardly looks like the Anne I knew, who dressed in bright colors and always wore a French hood.

She steps up onto the scaffold, exposing a crimson kirtle beneath her gown. The color of blood. The color of martyrdom.

I realize I’m holding my breath and try to let it out slowly, but can only suck it back in again with a gulp. And another. I can’t get more than a mouthful of air into my lungs at a time.

Fitz was right. I shouldn’t be here.

I try to turn. To walk away. I can’t shift my weight without pressing against another body. Arms. Shoulders. Knees. Even the belly of the apprentice beside me. The codpiece of the man behind.

I look back up to see Anne addressing the crowd. Her words come on breaths of wind. “Judged to die. . . . Will of the king.” She speaks steadily, scanning the crowd as she does so, her eyes lighting on every person there.

When she sees me, she bows her head. Takes a visible breath. Lifts her chin.

“I blame not my judges, nor any other manner of person.”

My throat closes in on itself and I see Madge press her knuckles to her teeth. But Anne keeps her voice steady.

“Thus I take my leave of the world, and of you, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.”

The headsman kneels, asking for forgiveness. She touches his head once, absolving him. My heart squeezes to a stop.

The queen hands him a bag of gold.

Paying for her own execution.

She removes her hood, and a sheet of black hair cascades from it, around her shoulders and down her back. Madge brings her a coif and helps her tuck the hair up inside it and then remove the fur collar, revealing a low, square neckline that exposes her shoulders and a very slender neck.

Anne’s hands tremble a little as she reaches up to untie the ribbon that circles it. Madge steps forward again, her face blank, her lower lip clenched white beneath her teeth. Together, they untie the knot and Anne lifts it away from her throat. The bauble hanging from the ribbon glows dully in the light coming from the cloud-clotted sky. It’s a golden
A
, from which dangles a single pearl.

Anne looks back once more, to her lodgings, to the water gate, to the Bell Tower. Maybe hoping for someone to ride in at the last minute. Offer a reprieve. A pardon. She hands the necklace to Madge, whispers something in her ear, and lets go.

She bends to wrap her skirts around her ankles. Binding them.

“What’s she doing?”

I don’t realize I’ve asked it out loud until the apprentice beside me answers.

“The legs, they thrash when the head comes off. She doesn’t want her skirts to come up and be
indecent
.” He laughs.

I’m suddenly dizzy, my held breath no longer filling my lungs. My wobbly legs feel obsolete, like the very lightness of my head should keep me off the ground. The air before me starts to spark, and when I see her kneel, I turn.

High above the heads of others, three yards away, but completely unattainable, I see Fitz. He’s scanning the crowd, not looking at the scaffold. He sees me and holds my gaze and we stare at each other, neither of us looking one way or the other, not to the crowd or the queen or the man with the sword. And finally a breath comes easy. My gasp is more like a sob.

Fitz tries to push toward me through the thickening crowd and I turn away. He’ll never reach me. He cannot rescue me.

The crowd kneels and I sink to my knees. The queen kneels upright. There is no block. She lifts her left hand, holding the coif in place, her dark hair pulled back from her pale face, her gray lips moving. Praying. Her eyes open and scan the crowd. Dart once more upward. Toward the Tower walls. Toward the sky.

“Bring me the sword.”

Anne turns her head, looking at the scaffold stairs. Looking for the approaching sword. She does not see the executioner remove it from a heap of straw behind her. Before she can turn back, he swings it over his head. Once—twice—to gain momentum. The blade gleams dully, reflecting the motley gray sky above it.

“Have pity on my soul!” she cries.