I sat so close to him that I felt him shudder. I wanted to fling my arms around him and soothe him, but there were eyes everywhere at court. I dared do no more than keep one hand over his.
“You must warn your sister.”
“She is already well aware of the danger.” He squeezed my fingers, then stood, tugged me to my feet, and released me. We had spent long enough “alone.”
“There must be something I can do to help the queen.”
“Look to your own safety first. I do not want to lose both of you.”
“I am sworn to serve the queen, Will.”
He sent me a sweet, swift smile that melted both my resistance and my heart. “But are you not my wife, too, sworn to obey your husband in all things?”
I dropped into a quick, saucy curtsy, forcing away dark thoughts of heresy, treason, and torture. My fingers sought the gimmal ring pinned to the inside of my bodice. “I do not believe we included the words ‘love, honor, and obey’ in our vows.”
“An oversight we must be sure to correct when we repeat them. My part, I believe, is to promise you love, honor, and protection.”
24
Anne Askew was burned at the stake for heresy on the sixteenth day of July in 1546. A week passed, then two. No one came to arrest any member of the queen’s household. Then we moved to Hampton Court for the month of August.
I was on my way to the stair turret that led to the queen’s apartments when I noticed a gentleman in the king’s livery loitering in the shadows. His hood kept me from recognizing him, even when he looked directly at me, but I could not help but notice when he dropped an official-looking document, rolled and tied with ribbon. Instead of retrieving it, he left it lying on the cobbles and hurried away.
I did not call out to him. It had been no accident that he’d let that roll of parchment fall directly in my path. The move had been made with deliberate precision, and only after he was sure that I’d seen him. I stopped beside the tightly rolled document, regarding it as if it were a snake coiled to strike. It took all my courage to pick it up. I glanced around to be sure no one else had seen. When I was satisfied that I was alone in the southeast corner of the courtyard, I hastily removed the ribbon, unrolled the parchment, and read its contents.
For a moment I fought to breathe. This was as bad as could be. It was a copy of a warrant for the queen’s arrest.
The roll rustled as I hid it in my sleeve. Feeling unsteady on my feet as a newborn foal, I entered the stair turret.
To escape the cooking smells that had invaded the apartments used by Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, and Catherine Howard, Queen Kathryn had asked the king for new lodgings. Within a year of her marriage, she had been installed in newly renovated, sweet-smelling chambers. She’d chosen rooms facing south, so that she had a view of the pond gardens with their flower beds surrounded by low walls and flanked by neat rows of striped poles supporting a variety of heraldic beasts.
When I reached the queen’s privy chamber, where ceilings had been raised and new partitions and wainscoting installed, creating a spacious, luxurious living space, I did not attempt speak to Her Grace directly. Instead, I sought out Jane Lisle and passed the document to her. “Do not let anyone see you read this,” I whispered.
Jane left the chamber, using the excuse of a visit to the privy. When she returned a few minutes later, her face was pale as whey. A determined gleam in her eyes, she moved purposefully among the queen’s ladies, speaking briefly to a select few. Less than a quarter of an hour later, I was summoned to the queen’s private withdrawing room. Jane Lisle, Anne Hertford, Joan Denny, and Elizabeth Tyrwhitt were there already. The queen entered through another door a moment later, attended by her sister, Anne Herbert.
When Queen Kathryn held out her hand, Jane placed the warrant in it. Disbelief warred with shock in the queen’s expression as she read the words. “Lord be merciful! His Grace means to have my head.”
The warrant passed from hand to hand to be read and exclaimed over while Queen Kathryn regained her composure. Her Grace was too strong minded to let fear paralyze her, and too intelligent to give up without trying to find a way out of her plight. She began to pace, her fingers toying with the small clock suspended from a gold chain at her waist.
She stopped in front of me. “How did you come by this, Bess?”
“You have a friend, Your Grace,” Jane said when I’d told my story. “Someone wanted you to be warned of your danger.”
“Perhaps it was the king himself,” I suggested.
Everyone turned to stare at me. I had been bold to speak without the queen’s permission. I swallowed hard, but Jane sent a reassuring smile my way. “Bess may be right. Shortly before Your Grace’s marriage, my husband heard that Bishop Gardiner was plotting to bring about Archbishop Cranmer’s downfall. The king knew of his plans but made no move to stop him. Instead His Grace played one minister against the other for his own amusement. King Henry gave Cranmer a ring, without explanation, saying only that should he ever need to prove he had His Grace’s love, he should produce it. Shortly thereafter, faced with soldiers who had arrived with a warrant for his arrest, the archbishop did just that and so won his freedom. King Henry amused himself at the expense of both prelates.”
“A cruel jest,” Lady Denny murmured, “but a true story. My husband shared this same tale with me.” Her husband, Sir Anthony Denny, was as close as any man to the king and was even authorized to sign documents with His Grace’s stamp when King Henry was unavailable to write his own name.
“Is it possible,” Jane asked, “that the king intends to toy with Your Grace in a similar way?”
“If you have offended His Grace with plain speaking,” Lady Hertford chimed in, “he may wish to punish you. But not, I think, with imprisonment or death.”
“I pray you are correct,” the queen said, “but this warrant . . .” Her voice trailed off as her hands crept to her throat.
I shivered, remembering that two of King Henry’s previous wives had been beheaded on His Grace’s orders.
“You have never betrayed the king,” Elizabeth Tyrwhitt said. “Not by word or deed.” She was a tall, thin woman, and utterly devoted to her royal mistress.
“But I have annoyed him,” Queen Kathryn whispered.
“His Grace encouraged you to dispute with him on matters of religion,” Anne Herbert reminded her. The queen’s sister, and Will’s, was a quiet little woman, adept at fading into the background, but she was flushed with anger on Queen Kathryn’s behalf.
“The truth is of little worth against the king’s whim,” Her Grace said, and resumed pacing.
“You must convince him that you are contrite,” Jane said.
“And give him cause to pity you,” Joan Denny added.
“Take to your bed, Your Grace,” Lady Tyrwhitt suggested. “Give out that your health is in a dangerous state.”
The queen sent a rueful smile her way. “Under the circumstances, that is no lie.”
“But the king has an aversion to illness,” Lady Denny objected. “Hearing that you are ill will only drive him farther away.”
“What if Your Grace’s physician tells him that your illness is caused not by some physical ailment but by distress of the mind,” I suggested.
The queen stopped pacing, her forehead creased in thought. “That ploy might succeed, especially if His Grace did arrange for you to find the warrant. He will delight in imagining me struck down by terror . . . and he will want to see the results of his little game for himself.”
It was incomprehensible to me that a man who claimed to love his wife should do such a thing. Perhaps he would not send her to the Tower and the rack, but this was torture, too, deliberate and cruel.