When all is quiet again, the door to the priory opens and the two visitors come out. I feel quite triumphant over their nervous sidle to the door of the church and the way they look around at the traces of unrest, the mud on the floor, the bell ropes hanging, and frown at the echo of the ringing.
“These are a very troubled people,” Legh says to me as if I have stirred them to rebellion. “Disloyal.”
“No, they’re not,” I say flatly. “They are completely loyal to the king. They misunderstood what you were doing, that is all. They thought that you had come to steal away the church’s gold and close down the priory. They thought that the Lord Chancellor was closing down the churches of England for his own benefit.”
Legh smiles at me thinly. “Of course not,” he says.
Next day, Prior Richard comes to me in my records room at the manor. I am seated at a great round rent table, with each drawer labeled with a letter. Every tenant’s deeds are in a drawer labeled with the right letter and the table can spin from A to Z so that I can draw out, in a moment, the document that I need. The prior’s arrival distracts me from my pleasure in the well-run business that is my home. “They are speaking with the nuns today.”
“You don’t think there will be a problem?”
“If your daughter-in-law complains . . .”
I close a drawer and push the table a little to the right. “She can say nothing that is critical of the priory. She might say that she has changed her mind about being a nun, she might say that she wants to come out and draw her dower from my rents, but that is not the sort of corruption they are charged to find.”
“It’s the only thing where we might be seen as at fault,” he says tentatively.
“You are not at fault,” I reassure him. “It was Montague and I who urged her to go in, and Montague and I who have kept here there.”
Still, he looks worried. “These are troubled times.”
“None worse,” I say, and mean it. “I’ve never known worse.”
Thomas Cromwell’s men, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, take their leave of me with perfect civility and mount up to go. I note their good horses and their fine saddlery; I note Legh’s men and their smart livery. The king’s Church is a profitable service, it appears. Judging poor sinners seems to pay extraordinarily good wages. I wave them off, knowing that they’ll be back with a prompt decision, but even so I am surprised that a mere four days later, the prior comes to the manor and tells me that they are returned.
“They want me to leave,” he says. “They have asked for my resignation.”
“No,” I say flatly. “They have no right.”
He bows his head. “Your ladyship, they have a command with the king’s seal, signed by Thomas Cromwell. They have the right.”
“Nobody said that the king should be head of the Church to destroy it!” I burst out in sudden anger. “Nobody swore an oath saying that the monasteries should be closed and good men and women thrown into the world. Nobody wanted the stained glass taken from the windows, nobody wanted the gold taken from the altars, nobody in this country swore an oath calling for the end of the Catholic communion! This is not right!”
“I pray you,” he says, white as his linen, “I pray you be silent.”
I whirl to the window and I glare out at the sweetness of the green leaves on the trees, at the bobbing white and pink of the apple blossom over the orchard wall. I think of the child that I knew, of the little boy Henry who wanted to serve, who shone with innocence and hope, who was, in his childish way, devout.
I turn back. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I say. “Send them to me.”
The visitors, Layton and Legh, come into my privy chamber quietly, but without any signs of apprehension. “Close the door,” I say, and Legh closes it and they stand before me. There are no chairs for them, and I don’t move from my seat in the big chair with the canopy of state over my head.
“Prior Richard will not resign,” I say. “There is nothing wrong with the priory, and he has done nothing wrong. He will stay in his post.”
Richard Layton unrolls a scroll, shows me the seal. “He is commanded to resign,” he says regretfully.
I let him hold it towards me so that I can read the lengthy sentences. Then I look at him. “No grounds,” I say. “And I know you have no evidence. He will appeal.”
He rolls it up again. “There is no form of appeal,” he says. “We need no grounds. The decision is final, I am afraid, your ladyship.”
I rise to my feet and I gesture to the door to tell them that they are to go. “No, my decision is final,” I say. “The prior will not resign unless you can show that he has done something wrong. And you cannot show that. So he is staying.”
They bow, as they have to. “We will return,” Richard Layton says.
This is a testing time. I know that some monasteries have become lax and their servants a byword for corruption. I know—everyone knows—of the pigeon bones and the duck’s blood relics, and the bits of string that are offered to the gullible as the Virgin’s girdle. The country is full of fearful fools and the worst of the monasteries and nunneries have battened off them, misled them, exploited them, and lived like lords while preaching poverty. Nobody objects to the king appointing honest men to discover these abuses and stop them. But I shall see now what happens when the king’s visitors come to a priory that serves God and the people, where the treasures are used for the glory of God, where the rents taken by the prior are used to feed the poor. My family founded this priory and I will protect it. It is my life: like my children, like my princess, like my house.
Montague writes to me from London, unsealed and unsigned:
He says that he sees that God will not give him a son with her.
I hold the letter in my hand for a moment before I push it deep into the heart of the fire. I know that Anne Boleyn will not call herself queen for long.
In the hour before dinner, when I am sitting with my ladies in my privy chamber and the musician is playing the lute, I hear a great knock on the outer door.
“Go on,” I say to the musician who lets the notes die away as we listen to the sound of feet walking through the hall and coming up the stairs. “Go on.”
He strikes a chord as the door opens and Cromwell’s men Layton and Legh come into the room and bow to me. With them, like a ghost risen from the grave, but a triumphant ghost in new clothes, is my daughter-in-law, the grieving widow of my son Arthur, Jane, last seen clawing at the door of the family crypt and crying for her husband and son.
“Jane? What are you doing here? And what are you wearing?” I ask her.
She gives a little defiant laugh, and tosses her head. “These gentlemen are escorting me to London,” she says. “I am betrothed in marriage.”
I feel my breath coming faster as my temper rises. “You are a novice in a priory,” I say quietly. “Have you quite lost your mind?” I look at Richard Layton. “Are you abducting a nun?”
“She has spoken with the prior, and he has released her,” he says smoothly. “No novice can be held if she changes her mind. Lady Pole is betrothed to marry Sir William Barrantyne and I am commanded to take her to her new husband.”
“I thought William Barrantyne just stole goods and lands from the Church?” I say viciously. “I am behind the times. I didn’t know he captured nuns also.”
“I am no nun, and I should never have been put in there and kept there!” Jane shouts at me.
My ladies jump to their feet, my granddaughter Katherine scuttles towards me as if she would stand between me and Jane, but I gently put her to one side. “You asked, you begged, you cried to be allowed to withdraw from the world because your heart was broken,” I say steadily. “Now I see your heart is mended and you beg to come out again. But be very sure to tell your new husband that he takes a poor novice, not an heiress. You will get nothing from me when you marry and your father may leave your inheritance away from a runaway nun. You have no son to bear your name or inherit. You can return to the world if you wish; but it will not return everything to you. You will not find matters as you left them.”