I wondered if Queen Catherine had watched the icy dawn from the Tower three days before, the morning of her beheading. Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham had been executed back in December but legal necessities had kept the Queen alive for two more months. They said in London she had been too weak with fear to mount the scaffold unaided; they had had to half carry her up the steps. Poor little creature, she must have been so cold, there on Tower Green with her head and neck bare, exposed for the executioner. Lady Rochford had followed her to the block; she had gone quite mad when she was arrested and the King had passed a law allowing insane persons to be executed. Yet the balladeers said that at the end Jane Rochford had composed herself and made a speech confessing a lifetime of faults and sins, standing bravely before the block from which the Queen’s blood still dripped. It had been a long speech and the crowd had grown bored. I remembered her at York, that strange mixture of arrogance and fear. Poor woman, I thought. What drove her to weave those endless meshes of deceit which in the end could only trap her too? I hoped they had found peace now, she and the Queen.
BARAK AND I had left London the day after the executions. It was a cold ride to Kent but fortunately the frost kept the roads dry and we reached Ashford by evening. We had spent the next day nosing through various archives, and I had been pleased to find evidence to back Sergeant Leacon’s claim that his parents’ land was indeed held under a valid freehold grant. I suspected the landlord had falsified a document somewhere, and I was looking forward to meeting the landlord’s lawyer tomorrow in Ashford, along with young Leacon and his parents. That left a free day, which I had told Barak I needed for some private business. I had left him in Ashford the previous afternoon and ridden the ten miles to the village. A small, poor place like a hundred such hamlets in England; a few houses straggling along one street, an inn and a church.
I stepped quietly outside, pulling my coat around me tightly, or at least as tightly as I could for it was loose now; I had lost weight in the fever I had caught in November. I had spent three weeks in bed, delirious at first. When the fever subsided it had amused and touched me to see how Joan and Tamasin argued over who should bring my food.
It was bitterly cold. My breath steamed in front of me as I crossed to the little church and stepped round the side to the graveyard. My feet crunched in the frozen grass as I walked among the headstones, searching.
It was a small, poor stone, hidden right at the back and shaded by trees from a little wood behind. I bent and studied the faded, lichened inscription:
In memory of Giles Blaybourne
1390-1446
his wife Elizabeth
1395-1444
and their son Edward
died in the King’s service in France, 1441
I stood there, lost in thought. I did not hear the light footsteps approaching, and jumped violently at the sound of a voice.
‘So Edward Blaybourne gave his son his father’s name. Giles.’
I turned to find Barak grinning at me.
‘God’s death,’ I demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I guessed where you must have been going. It wasn’t that difficult. Somewhere less than a day’s ride from Ashford. It had to be Braybourne village. I left before sun-up this morning and rode down. Sukey is tied up behind the church.’
‘You nearly gave me a seizure.’
‘Sorry.’ He looked around him. ‘Not much of a place, is it?’
‘No.’ I looked at the gravestone. ‘Poor Blaybourne’s parents, they did not live long after their son disappeared. Cecily Neville must have had him declared dead.’ The import of his words earlier suddenly struck me. ‘Wait – you said – you know Giles Wrenne was Blaybourne’s son?’
‘I guessed. And there were some things you said, when you were delirious.’
My eyes widened. ‘What things?’
‘Once you shouted out that Wrenne was England’s true King, and should be set on a great throne. Then you wept. Another time Tamasin said you were shouting out about papers that burned in Hell. I remembered you sitting poking at the fire when Tamasin and I came in that night, and put two and two together.’
I looked at him seriously. ‘You know how dangerous that knowledge is.’
He shrugged. ‘Without those papers, who can prove anything? You burned them all, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I did not want to tell you, it is better no one else knows the truth.’
He nodded slowly, then looked at me again. ‘You killed him, didn’t you? Wrenne?’
I bit my lip and sighed deeply. ‘It will haunt me till I die.’
‘It was self-defence. There was no alternative.’
‘No.’ I sighed again. ‘I held his head under the water until he drowned. Then I turned the body over so he lay face down and it would look as though he had fallen in and drowned himself. That was how you found him, Jack. With the great lump they found inside him, it was enough for the coroner.’
‘Who was Wrenne going to give the papers to?’
‘He was going to look for supporters of the conspiracy in London. Ironically his original contact was Bernard Locke.’
‘I suppose there still are some conspirators in London.’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose so. Perhaps the King in his foolishness and tyranny will create another opportunity for them to gain support. Perhaps not. Either way I want nothing to do with it.’
We stood looking in silence at the old gravestone. Then Barak asked, ‘Why come here? Curiosity?’
I laughed sadly. ‘When I recovered from my fever and learned Wrenne had been buried in London with none but you and Tamasin and Joan at his funeral, I had a crazed idea of having the body exhumed and burying him again down here. Guilt, I suppose.’ I pointed at the gravestone. ‘They were his grandparents, after all. And King Edward IV’s,’ I added.
‘You owe him nothing,’ Barak said.
‘It was a crazed notion, as I said; perhaps I was still a little delirious.’
‘You should feel no guilt over him.’ Barak paused. ‘Nor over your father.’
I nodded slowly. ‘No. You are right. I have paid my father’s mortgage, put a fine marble headstone over his grave. I shall visit it soon. But I see now that we were always distant, always apart. That was the way it was and there is no point in regretting it now.’
‘No.’
‘But I wanted to come here. To see. I still cannot quite come to terms with how Giles lied to me, tried to kill me at the end. But that is foolish, people betray each other all the time and for far lesser causes than he believed he had.’
‘What will you do with his library?’
‘I do not know.’ We had found Wrenne’s will with his possessions. No mention of his dead nephew, of course. He had bequeathed everything to Madge except the library, which he had left to me as he had promised. ‘I do not want it. But there are certain things – a picture, perhaps some other items – that should be destroyed.’ I looked at him. ‘Will you do that? Go to York again for me, now the winter is ending? Madge plans to keep living in the house, her attorney’s letter said.’
He made a face. ‘Visit the damp demesne of York again? Eat her pottage? Only if I must.’
‘After you have done that I think I will get in touch with Master Leland the antiquarian, see if there is anything he wants. I suppose you had better bring back the old lawbooks. Gray’s Inn library could use those.’ I smiled mirthlessly. ‘There may be some old forgotten cases there that I can quote in court.’
‘I might see Maleverer there. Now he has lost his place on the Council of the North I can thumb my nose at the arsehole.’
I laughed. ‘That he would not like. I suspected him for a while, you know. But you were right, he was too stupid to plot anything. There was nothing behind that bluster of his, he was an empty vessel. Yes, thumb your nose if you see him.’