The dark barge comes for me in February, and I don’t bother to caper or sing. Whether I am mad or sane, the king is going to kill me, as he has killed hundreds of others: from the pilgrims, starved to death in their metal cages hanging at crossroads in Yorkshire, to those that waited obediently for their deaths in the Tower, as I do.
I am not alone in here. Sir John Gage could not give me my old room when I came again to the water gate. The place is as busy as an inn; he could not reserve my usual rooms for me. Kitty’s step-grandmother the dowager duchess is in my old room, her daughter the countess with her. Kitty herself is in the rooms where Anne waited for her death. Others of her family and her maids-of-honour are in cells in the White Tower and in the nearby buildings. Dozens of usare charged with treason, because the king cannot bear to think that a wife nearly young enough to be his granddaughter might have fallen in love with a young man who was deeply in love with her.
We are not waiting for trial. The lords will use the device of my spymaster, the writ of attainder, so we can be proclaimed guilty without being heard. It is – as he told me – so much more efficient than a public trial. Kitty chooses not to defend herself – how could she? She would have had no idea that there was anything to say in her own defence. She would not playGuinevere– but she will play the dying queen –Polyxena– and they tell me she has the block brought to her chamber so she can practise kneeling and laying down her head. It gives me a little shock to think that I will have to kneel where she knelt just minutes before, lay down my cheek on the block where she laid hers. They’ll never clean it properly; I will die with Kitty’s blood on my cheek.
Or perhaps we will just wait in the Tower, wait for years, like Margaret Pole, like Lord Lisle, as the king’s fickle attention scampers elsewhere – war with France, the marriage of Lady Mary, an alliance with Scotland, the return of the Church? He could be thinking of anything but us. I doubt he will kill Kitty until he wants a new wife, as he usually does. The longer that we wait – all the first week of February and into the second – the more sure I am that he has forgotten about us.
‘The king dined with some ladies,’ my maid tells me one cold grey morning. ‘He held a great dinner, and sixty-one ladies attended.’
Choose your partner – I would have foreseen this if I had been still mad. But it is the ladies who paraded themselves at dinner for the king to choose who are the mad ones.
‘Was the king happy?’ It’s all that ever matters. ‘Was he happy? Was he pleased? Did he favour anyone? Is he well?’
‘They say he was pleased with Lady Cobham, Elizabeth Basset, and she who was the wife of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Elizabeth Brooke, oh – and Kateryn Parr.’
‘Old friends,’ I say, smiling at the revival of the ambition ofElizabeth Basset and the return to court of the others. Three of them were fellow spies with me for my Lord Cromwell. ‘Dear old friends.’
It is now a race, and if I were a gambling woman, I should put money on the king becoming urgent in his desire for a new wife before the ulcer on his leg kills him. If he wants to clear the Tower of the friends and kinsmen and -women of his fifth wife before his wedding to the sixth, then the executioner will be busy. But if he tries to dance on his one leg, in his one-sided courtship, then he may kill himself before he can kill us. It is a race, and my life is the stake.
I think I am amused by this until I hear the noise of hammering wood, and I look from my window. Just out of the corner of the window, only visible if I press my face to the cold little panes of old glass, I can see Tower Green, and they are building a scaffold, and I know I have lost my bet, and little Kitty Howard has lost hers. The tyrant is clearing the way for another wife. Whoever she is, she will have to keep her wits about her.
We should have said ‘no’. We should have said ‘no’ at the first sign of madness – the dismissal of Queen Katherine of Aragon. We should have said ‘no’ to the deaths that followed. All that is needed to defeat a tyrant is the courage to say ‘no’.
I see little Kitty, head bowed, walk under my window to the green. It is a new walk for her; she will have rehearsed it. Her head droops like a tired lily on its stem; she sways a little, as if she is hearing the music of a dance in her head. Her new walk is a slow lilting pace, like theVolta, her scaffold walk.
Even pressed against the window, I can only see the ladder up to the platform and the waiting headsman. But I hear the silence fall on the small invited crowd as she climbs the steps, and the silence as she speaks – she will have rehearsed her speech but it will be quite nonsensical – then the silence as they wait for her eyes to be masked and for her to kneel before the block, and then the roll of the drums, and the thud of the axe and the ‘oh’ as the crowd witnesses a death prettily done, well done by Kitty who liked to do things well. But they should have said ‘no’.
There is a knock at my door, and Sir John Gage comes in, his face grave, his eyes on the ground. ‘Are you ready, Lady Rochford?’ he asks.
‘I’m ready,’ I say.
But I should have said ‘no’.
