“A message for the Countess of Worcester,” he says.
Elizabeth Somerset hurries forward, and takes the letter sealed with the falcon crest. I let the other women crowd around her as she breaks the Boleyn woman’s seal, and leans towards the torches so that she can read in their flickering light; but no one else can see her message.
I step out into the road and smile at the messenger.
“You’ve had a long, cold ride,” I observe.
He tosses the reins of his horse to a stable boy. “We have.”
“And I am afraid there is not a bed to be had in the inn, but I can send your men to a farm nearby where my guard is sleeping. They will see that you get food and somewhere to rest. Are you to return to London with us?”
“I am to take the countess to the court at dawn tomorrow, ahead of you all,” he grumbles. “And I knew that there would be nowhere to sleep here. And I suppose nothing to eat either.”
“You can send your men to the farm, and I can get you a place at a table here in the hall tonight,” I say. “I’m the Countess of Salisbury.”
He bows low. “I know who you are, your ladyship. I’m Thomas Forest.”
“You can be my guest at dinner tonight, Mr. Forest.”
“I’d be very grateful for dinner,” he says. He turns and shouts to his men to follow the stable boy with the torch who will show them the way to the farm.
“Yes,” I say, leading the way inside where the trestle tables are being laid out for dinner and the benches drawn up. He can smell meat roasting in the kitchen. “But what’s the hurry? Does the queen need her lady so urgently that she sends you riding cross-country in winter? Or is it just a pregnant woman’s whim that you have to serve?”
He leans towards me. “They don’t tell me anything,” he says. “But I’m a married man. I know the signs. The queen has taken to her bed and they are hurrying in and out with hot water and towels and everyone from the greatest of them to the youngest kitchen maid speaks to every single man as if we are fools or criminals. The midwives are there. But nobody is carrying a cradle in.”
“She is losing her child?” I ask.
“Without a doubt,” he says with brutal honesty. “Another dead Tudor baby.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1536
I leave the ladies to scurry back to court where the king is recovering from his fall and coming to terms with the news of the death of yet another child, and I ride at my leisure to my home. The question now, the only question, is how the king will take the loss of his son—for the baby was a boy. Will he see it as a sign of the disapproval of God and turn against the second wife, as he turned and blamed the first?
I spend some hours on my knees in the priory chapel thinking on this. My household, God bless them, give me the credit to believe that I am praying. Alas, I am not really at prayer. In the quietness and peace of the priory I am turning over and over in my own mind what the boy whom I once knew so well will do, now that he is a man and faced with a crushing disappointment.
The boy I knew would recoil in pain from such a blow, but then he would turn to the people he loved and those that loved him and in comforting them, cheer himself.
“But he’s not a boy anymore,” Geoffrey says quietly to me as he joins my vigil one day and kneels beside me, and I whisper these thoughts to him. “He’s not even a young man. The blow to his head has shaken him deeply. He was going bad, no doubt that he was spoiling like milk souring in the sun; but suddenly, everything is even worse. Montague says it is as if he has realized that he will die just like his wife the queen.”
“Do you think he grieves for her at all?”
“Even though he didn’t want to go back to her, he knew she was there, loving him, praying for him, hoping that they would be reconciled. And then suddenly, he is near death, and then the baby dies. Montague says that he thinks God has forsaken him. He’ll have to find some explanation.”
“He’ll blame Anne,” I predict.
Geoffrey is about to reply when Prior Richard comes in quietly and kneels beside me, prays for a moment, crosses himself, and says: “Your Grace, may I interrupt you?”
We turn to him. “What’s the matter?”
“We have a visitation,” he says. He speaks with such disdain that for a moment I think that frogs have come up from the moat and are all over the kitchen garden. “A visitation?”
“That’s what they call it. An inspection. My Lord Cromwell’s men have come to see that our priory is well run according to the precepts of its founders and our order.”
I rise to my feet. “There can be no question of that.”
He leads the way out of the church towards his private room. “My lady, they do question it.”
He opens the door and two men turn and look at me impertinently, as if I am interrupting them, though they are in my prior’s room, in my priory, on my lands. I wait for a moment, without moving or speaking.
“Her Ladyship the Countess of Salisbury,” the prior says. Only then do they bow, and at their grudging courtesy I realize that the priory is in danger.
“And you are?”
“Richard Layton and Thomas Legh,” the older one says smoothly. “We are working for my Lord Cromwell—”
“I know what you do,” I interrupt him. This is the man who interrogated Thomas More. This is the man who went into Sheen Abbey and interrogated the monks. This is the man who gave witness against the Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton. I don’t doubt that my name and the names of my sons and my chaplain have been written several times on papers in the little brown satchel that he carries.
He bows, quite without shame. “I am glad of it,” he says steadily. “There has been much corruption and wickedness in the Church, and Thomas Legh and I are proud to be instruments of purification, of reformation, of God.”
“There’s no corruption or wickedness here,” Geoffrey says hotly. “So you can be on your way.”
Layton makes a funny little nodding gesture with his head. “You know, Sir Geoffrey, that is what everyone always assures me. And so we will confirm it, and be on our way as fast as we can. We have much to do. We don’t want to be here any longer than is necessary.”
He turns to the prior. “I take it we may use your room for our inquiries? You will send the canons and the nuns in one at a time, the canons first and then the nuns. The oldest first.”
“Why would you speak with the nuns?” Geoffrey asks. None of us wants my daughter-in-law Jane complaining to strangers about her decision to join the priory, or demanding her release.
The quickly suppressed smile that crosses Layton’s face tells me that they know of Jane, and they know that we took her dower from her when we encouraged her to enter the nunnery, and they know she wants to be released from her vows and get her fortune back into her own keeping.
“We always speak with everybody,” Richard Layton says quietly. “That’s how we make sure that not a sparrow falls. We are doing God’s work, we do it thoroughly.”
“Prior Richard will sit with you, and hear all that is said,” I assert.
“Alas, no. Prior Richard will be our first interview.”
“Look,” I say, in sudden fury. “You can’t come in here to my priory, founded by my family, and ask questions as you like. This is my land, this is my priory. I won’t have it.”
“You did sign the oath, didn’t you?” Layton asks negligently, turning over the papers on the desk. “Surely you did? As I recall only Thomas More and John Fisher refused to sign. Thomas More and John Fisher, both dead.”
“Of course My Lady Mother signed.” Geoffrey speaks for me. “There is no question of our loyalty, there can be no question.”
Richard Layton shrugs. “Then you accepted the king as the supreme head of the Church. He orders that it be visited. We are here doing his bidding. You are not questioning his right, his divine right, to govern his Church?”