Gilt (35 page)

“Were you aware of Mistress Howard’s activities in the evening while the court was on progress to the north?” Wriothesley asked.

“Of course,” I said. “I was her chamberer. It was my duty to know what she was doing, when she went to bed, and to ensure her comfort.”

“Did her comfort include Culpepper?”

“No.”

“What happened in Lincoln?”

“Lincoln?” How did he know these things?

“Yes. It’s a cathedral city on the River Witham in Lincolnshire. The King’s progress spent some days in the Bishops’ Palace there.”

I nodded, pondering, hoping I looked as if I was struggling to place the city amongst the many we visited.

“The guard said he had to lock the back stairs to the queen’s apartments that night. That anyone might have entered.”

I allowed my face to lighten.

“I remember!” I said. “I answered the door. He told me and I thanked him for keeping us safe.”

“Yes,” Wriothesley coughed.

“The queen.” I hesitated. “She sent me down the stairs to check. I was afraid.”

His dark eyes glowed keen with interest.

“And when I returned, I remember asking Joan Bulmer, ‘Is the queen asleep yet?’ And she answered, ‘Yes, even now.’”

The absolute truth.

Wriothesley stood up and moved behind my chair. He gripped my shoulder with one hand, and my hair beneath my hood with the other. He tugged, the tension pulling my head back and to the side so that I looked up at the ceiling. His pallid and heavy eyelids appeared in the corner of my vision.

“Don’t play games with me, Mistress Tylney,” he said, his wine-soaked breath slippery on my cheek. “I know more games than you have ever considered. I know the games of the king’s master inquisitors. I know how to get answers.”

I didn’t doubt him.

“But are those answers the truth, my lord?” I asked, feeling the fear convulse in my throat. “Because answers called forth by torture are expedient, but often false.”

He pulled harder, my neck wrenched painfully, and stars burst across the ceiling.

“You know better than that, Kitty,” he said, and let go.

I rubbed my neck. I had no script, no way of knowing what I would say or when. Perhaps the closeness and sureness of death really did addle a person’s judgment.

“Did you ever carry messages to Culpepper from the queen?”

“No.”

“Between the queen and Lady Rochford?”

I hesitated.

“I often relayed messages between the queen and her ladies,” I said carefully. “I was her chamberer. It was my duty.”

“Do you remember any in particular?”

“She once asked Lady Rochford for something that was promised her,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

“You never sought out secret hiding places.”

“No.”

“Not even for a game?” he asked, a slyness to his question.

Hide-and-seek.

“Only for myself.”

“Did Lady Rochford?”

“Have you asked her?” I regretted the question as soon as I asked it, and shrank from the fury on his thin lips.

“Jane Boleyn is not in a fit state to answer questions at the moment. In fact, she appears to be quite mad. You may have heard her screaming from the Wakefield Tower.”

I thought it was only my dreams. But if she was insane, she could not be executed. It was the king’s law.

“It may be real. She may be pretending,” he said. It was as if he, too, could read my mind. “The king’s own physicians are attending her. And his councilors are attending to the law.

“Thomas Culpepper says the affair was Jane Boleyn’s idea,” he continued. “Mistress Howard confirms this.”

Oh, Cat.
I sagged, no longer able to fight the implications of his words.

“For this, Jane Boleyn faces the scaffold. And she knows it. It is her guilt that sends her into madness. But you don’t face the same fate.

“At
best
, Mistress Tylney,” he said, reverting to my last name and striding across the floor to the tiny window, “you will be charged with misprision of treason.” He turned, practically snapping his heels together. “Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head.

“It means that you had knowledge of treason in the form of the queen’s former relationship with Francis Dereham. You didn’t bring it to the king’s attention, when he thought he was marrying an innocent girl with no marital entanglements.”

He had had annulments from three of his wives for “marital entanglements.” Only Queen Jane escaped that by dying before he was ready to get rid of her.

“You had no part in the act of concealment,” he went on. “You were not present when the king was courting. This is a feeble way of saying that you knew and did nothing, and you walked away from responsibility.

“However,” he continued, “at worst you will be convicted of treason. You had knowledge of the affair with Dereham and promoted it. You had knowledge of the affair with Culpepper and purposefully concealed it.”

I stayed silent. He waited for me to admit to one or the other. But I could do neither. Did he expect the young to be stupid as well?

“Would you like to know what sentence you may expect?” he asked with the air of a man asking which sweet I would like from the tray at a banquet. “In both cases, you will be attainted and stripped any titles, land, or money you possess or stand to inherit. I gather that none of this applies to you?”

He looked at me from under his eyelashes, a cunning smile splaying his lips. He knew very well that being attainted would have no effect on my status.

“Misprision can garner a sentence of death or perpetual imprisonment. Treason is punishable by death, unless the king extends his mercy. Either way, you’re looking at the end of your career at court, the end of your youth, and the end of your life as you know it.”

He waited for this information to register in my mind and trigger an emotional outburst or tearful confession. I struggled with the tears, but kept them at bay. I wanted nothing to do with his manipulation.

“Thank you for telling me,” I managed.

“My pleasure.”

I’m sure it was.

“Culpepper and Dereham have confessed. They have already been tried and found guilty of high treason. Sentenced to death. Do you know what this means?”

I couldn’t move. Not to speak. Not even to nod my head.

“It means that unless the king grants their pleas for clemency, they will be hanged by the neck, cut down alive, their members removed.”

My body found its ability for motion and shuddered violently. Wriothesley stepped closer and whispered in my ear like a lover.

“Their members will be removed before their very eyes,” he said softly. “Their bowels will be removed as well. They will still be alive when this happens. They will see their innards trailing on the ground and burned before them.”

I couldn’t beg him to stop. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth.

“Their still beating hearts will be removed. Their heads will be stricken off, their bodies cut into quarters and the pieces hung high on the London Bridge so all may see the fate of traitors to the king. They will be left there until the gulls and ravens have feasted on every morsel of flesh. And there, their bones shall remain, bleached by the sun, buffeted by the wind, until they fall into the Thames or into the road and are trampled to dust and forgotten.”

I wanted to cover my ears. I pictured Francis, his cocky swagger, faced with the gallows. I saw Culpepper, his blond good looks shrouded in blood. Even after all he had done, I could not wish such a fate on him, or anyone.

“Their only hope is for the king’s leniency,” Wriothesley murmured. “To be merely decapitated. I imagine the king’s past
fondness for Culpepper may lead him to mercy, but Dereham? Dereham has no hope.

“Women, however, do not attract such a punishment.” Wriothesley spoke casually, as if discussing the difference between boning a goose and roasting it whole.

“Queens and nobility like Jane Boleyn are dispatched by the ax. Common women convicted of treason are burned at the stake. Their skirts erupt into flames around them. On a windy day, it could take hours to die as the flames lick and char the delicate skin only to be teased away by the breeze carrying ash throughout the city.”

I feared I would remain mute until that day, when at last I would find my voice as it screamed over the cheering of the bloodthirsty crowd. And the tears finally won.

Wriothesley smiled again.

“I shall leave you now.”

I
N THE NEXT FEW WEEKS THE
T
OWER GREW GLUTTONOUS ON THE INCARCERATION
of traitors.

They brought in the dowager duchess after she burned a coffer full of papers said to belong to Francis Dereham. The rest of the Coven came, too. The number of prisoners soon exceeded Tower capacity. Lower-ranking and obviously innocent members of the duchess’s household were shipped off to other prisons. But not I.

The duke stood outside the Tower gates, outside the prison, outside the very law itself and exclaimed loudly and constantly that he knew nothing of his slatternly niece’s dubious conduct. He vilified her. Condemned her. Stood free upon the back of her guilt.

The Howard men groveled at the feet of the king, swearing loyalty. And were allowed to go free.

And Edmund Standebanke continued in the king’s service.

Men,
I thought.
Even guilt can’t shackle them.

But then Francis and Culpepper were executed. Pulled from the Tower by an ox-drawn cart, met with the jeers and silent judgment of Londoners. Culpepper’s sentence was commuted to decapitation. Francis was not so lucky.

W
ITH
C
ULPEPPER’S DEATH, MY HORRIFYING DREAMS ENDED
. B
UT THE
long winter nights loomed black and empty. I woke each morning, my muscles cramped from cold, shocked anew at my situation. At the mistakes and betrayals that got me there.

Gossip moved even faster in the Tower than it had at Norfolk House. I got snippets of news from the guards, from the charwoman, from the gardener who fixed a loose stone in the corner outside my door. Cat was imprisoned in Syon House, a monastery suppressed by the reformation, the nuns dispersed and the property relinquished to the crown. Joan languished somewhere in the Tower, far distant from me. Alice remained outside the prison, a star witness. Traitor to our family of girls. The circle broken.

We saw each other briefly at our indictment. Each of us was brought singly through the crowded room, through the press of bodies to the bar. Each of us pled guilty. Lady Margaret Howard. Edward Waldegrave. Alice. Joan. Me. Condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Goods and titles forfeit. The room rocked with weeping—from grief for a future behind stone walls or relief for keeping our heads, I knew not which. I sat on
the bench, my head bent, and looked at no one. Utterly isolated in a place where the walls dripped with the moisture of collective breath. Alone.

Christmas came and went, bringing with it nothing but more rain and endless dark days. It seemed nobody kept Christmas that year. The king, they said, too heartbroken for festivities, brooded and wept, and the entire country followed suit.