“Indeed,” I say swiftly. “It is for you to interrogate me, so skillful as you are. They all pleaded guiltless and you found no evidence against them. I am guiltless and you will find no evidence against me. God help you, William Fitzwilliam, for you are in the wrong. Interrogate me as you wish, though I am old enough to be your mother. You will find that I have done nothing wrong, as my own dear son Montague had done nothing wrong.”
It is a mistake to say his name. I can hear that my voice has grown thin and I am not sure that I can speak again. William swells in his pride at my weakness.
“Be very sure that I will interrogate you again,” he says.
Out of sight, behind my back, I pinch the skin of my palms. “Be very sure that you will find nothing,” I say bitterly. “And at the end, this house will fall down around you, and this river will rise against you, and you will regret the day that you came against me in your pomp and stupidity and taunted me with the death of a better man, my son Montague.”
“Do you curse me?” he pants, all white and sweating, shaking with the knowledge that his house is already cursed for the putting down of Cowdray Priory, cursed by fire and water.
I shake my head. “Of course not. I don’t believe in such nonsense. You make your own destiny. But when you bear false witness against a good man like my son, when you put me to the question, when you know that I have done no wrong, you are on the side of the evil in the world and your friend and ally will draw you close.”
Mabel comes to taunt me with the full list of deaths. George Croftes, John Collins, and Hugh Holland have been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, their heads set on London Bridge. My son Montague, my precious son and heir, was beheaded on Tower Hill, his cousins Henry Courtenay and Edward Neville followed him to the scaffold and the axe.
“Dead like traitors,” she says.
“Death instead of evidence,” I reply.
COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, SPRING 1539
I spend the day, from dawn till dusk, in the chapel at Cowdray, the de Bohun tomb before me, and the gray quietness of the winter daylight around me. I pray for Montague, for his cousins Edward and Henry, taken out onto Tower Hill, where his uncle laid down his innocent head and died. I pray for all our kinsmen who are in danger, today. I pray for their sons, especially Henry Courtenay’s son, Edward, who may have watched from his window and seen his father’s last walk across the frosty grass to the outer gate, and beyond that, up to Tower Hill and the block and the black-masked axeman and his death.
I pray for Montague’s children, his son, Harry, safe with his mother at Bockmer, his daughters Katherine and Winifred, who have come with me to this miserable vigil, and more than anyone else I pray for Geoffrey, who has brought us to this tragedy and will—for I know my son—be wishing himself dead tonight.
They keep me here, as the winter turns, though my son is in his grave and my boy Geoffrey is left in the Tower. They tell me that he tried to suffocate himself, crushing himself under his bed with the quilt against his face. This is how, it was said, that his cousins the princes in the Tower died, stuffed between two mattresses. But it is not fatal for my son; and perhaps it was not true of the princes either. Geoffrey remains, as he has been for all this winter, a traitor to his king, to his brother, and to himself, a terrible betrayer of his family and me, his mother. They leave him inside the cold walls of the Tower, and I know that if they leave him there long enough he will die anyway, of the cold in winter, or of the plague in summer, and it will hardly matter whether his testimony was true or false because this boy, this boy who promised so much, will be dead. As dead as his brother Arthur, who died in the prime of his handsome youth, as dead as his brother Montague, who died keeping the faith, and trying to save his cousins.
They take Sir Nicholas Carew into the Tower and give it out that he has been planning to destroy the king, seize the throne, and marry his son to Princess Mary. William Fitzwilliam tells me this, his eyes all bright, as if I am going to fall to my knees and say that this has been my secret plan all along.
“Nicholas Carew?” I say disbelievingly. “The king’s Master of Horse? That he has loved and trusted every single day these forty years? His best-loved companion in joust and war since they were boys together?”
“Yes,” William says, the glee fading from his face because he was their companion too, and he knows what folly this is. “The same. Don’t you know that Carew loved Queen Katherine and disagreed with the king about his treatment of the princess?”
I shrug, as if it does not matter much. “Many people loved Queen Katherine,” I say. “The king loved Queen Katherine. Is your Thomas Cromwell going to put every one of her court to death? For that would be thousands of people. And you among them.”
William flushes. “You think you’re so wise!” he blurts out. “But you will come to the scaffold at last! Mark my words, Countess. You will come to the scaffold at last!”
I hold my temper and my words, for I think there is more here than a young man’s frustration at an older woman knowing more than he will ever learn. I look at his face as if I would read the red veins, and the thinning hair, the fat of self-indulgence under the chin, and the petty pout of his face. “Perhaps I will,” I say quietly. “But you can tell your master Cromwell that I am guilty of nothing, and that if he kills me, he kills an innocent woman and that my blood and that of my kinsmen will stain his record for all eternity.”
I look at his suddenly pale face. “And yours too, William Fitzwilliam,” I say. “People will remember that you held me in your house against my will. I doubt that you will hold your house for long.”
All through the cold weather I mourn for my son Montague, for his honesty, for his steadfast honor, and for his companionship. I blame myself for not having valued him before, for letting him think that my love for Geoffrey was greater than my love for all my boys. I wish I had told Montague how dear he was to me, how I depended on him, how I loved watching him grow and rise to his great position, how his humor warmed me, how his caution warned me, that he was a man his father would have been proud of, that I was proud of him, that I still am.
I write to my daughter-in-law, his widow, Jane; she does not reply but she leaves her daughters in my keeping. She has, perhaps, had enough of letters sealed with a white rose. My chamber in the Cowdray tower is small and cramped and my bedroom even smaller, so I insist that my granddaughters walk with me by the cold river in the gardens every day, whatever the weather, and that they ride out twice a week. They are constantly watched in case they send or receive a letter and they become pale and quiet with the caution of habitual prisoners.
Strangely, the loss of Montague recalls the loss of his brother Arthur, and I grieve for him all over again. I am glad in a way that Arthur did not live to see his family’s tragedy and the madness of his former friend, the king. Arthur died in the years of sunshine when we thought everything was possible. Now we are in the cold heart of a long winter.
I dream of my brother, who walked to his death where my son walked to his, I dream of my father who died in the Tower too. Sometimes I just dream of the Tower, its square bullying bulk like a white finger pointing up, accusing the sky, and I think that it is like a tombstone for the young men of my family.
Gertrude Courtenay, now a widow, is still held there, in a freezing cell. The case against her gets worse rather than obscured by time, as Thomas Cromwell keeps finding letters that he says are hers in the rooms of others that he hopes to convict. If Cromwell is to be believed, my cousin Gertrude spent her life writing treason to everyone whom Cromwell suspects. But Cromwell cannot be challenged, since he forges the king’s whims into reality. When Nicholas Carew comes to trial this spring, they produce with a flourish a sheaf of Gertrude’s letters as evidence against him, though no one looks at them closely but Cromwell.