The Crown A Novel

The Crown A Novel - By Nancy Bilyeau




PART


ONE





1


London, May 25, 1537

When a burning is announced, the taverns off Smithfield order extra barrels of ale, but when the person to be executed is a woman and one of noble birth, the ale comes by the cartload. I would ride in one of those carts on Friday of Whitsun week, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, to offer prayers for the soul of the condemned traitor, Lady Margaret Bulmer.

I heard the cartsman’s cry go out as I made my way on Cheap-side Street, clutching the London map I’d sketched from a book in secret two nights before. I moved faster now that I’d reached such a wide and cobbled street, but my legs throbbed. I’d spent the morning trudging through mud.

“Smithfield—are ye bound for Smithfield?” It was a cheerful voice, as if the destination were a Saint George’s Day fair. Just ahead, in front of a tannery, I saw who had shouted: a burly man flicking the backs of four horses hitched to a large cart. A half-dozen heads peeked above the rails.

“Hold!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “I wish to go to Smithfield.”

The cartsman whipped around; his eyes searched the crowd. I waved, and his face split into a wet smile. As I drew nearer, my stomach clenched. I’d vowed I would speak to no one this entire day, seek no assistance. The risk of discovery was too great. But Smithfield lay outside the walls of the city, to the north and west, still a fair distance away.

When I reached him, the cartsman looked me up and down, and his smile sagged. I wore a heavy wool kirtle, the only one available to me for the journey. It was a bodice and skirt made for the dead of winter, not spring, and not a day when bursts of warmth were anchored by sheets of billowing mists. Mud soaked my tangled hem. I could only be grateful no one could see beneath the heavy fabric, to my shift drenched with sweat.

But I knew it wasn’t only my disheveled garments that gave the cartsman pause. To many, I look strange. My hair is black as polished onyx; my eyes are brown with flecks of green. My olive skin neither reddens by Saint Swithin’s Day, nor pales by Advent. Mine is the coloring of my Spanish mother. But not her delicate features. No, my face is that of my English father: a wide forehead, high cheekbones, and strong chin. It’s as if the mismatch of my parents’ marriage fought on the foundation of my face, plain for all to see. In a land of pink-and-white girls, I stand out like a raven. There was a time when that troubled me, but at twenty-six years of age, I was no longer subject to such petty concerns.

“A shilling to ride, mistress,” the cartsman said. “Pay up and we’ll be off.”

His demand took me by surprise, though, of course, it shouldn’t have.

“I am without coins,” I stammered.

The cartsman barked a laugh. “Do ye think I do this for amusement? I’ve run low on ale”—he pounded a wooden barrel behind him—“and I must earn enough to pay for the cart.” On the far side of the barrel, I could see his passengers craning to get a look at me.

“Wait,” I said, and fished for the small cloth purse in the pocket I’d stitched into my dress. Swirling my fingers around the purse, I found a slender ring. I didn’t want to give him anything finer. Some important bribes lay ahead.

I held out the ring. “Will this do?” In an instant his scowl turned to delight, and the slight golden ring of my dead mother disappeared into the driver’s dirty palm.

When I climbed into the back of his cart, I could see pity and contempt playing across the faces of the other passengers. My ring must be worth more than the ride. I found a clean pile of straw in the corner and looked down, trying to avoid their curious stares, as the cart resumed its journey.

An elbow poked my side. A sturdy woman sidled closer, one of middling years, the only other female in the cart. Smiling, she held out a piece of brown bread. I’d had nothing to eat since last night’s supper. Ordinarily, I gloried in the pangs of hunger, the mastery over my weak mortal flesh, but my mission required a certain vigor. I took the bread with a grateful nod. A mouthful of food and a gulp of watery ale from her wooden tankard brought strength to my dazed body.

I leaned back against the railing. We passed a small market that appeared to sell nothing but spices and herbs. Now that the rain had stopped, the sellers threw off the blankets keeping their narrow stalls dry. A rich mix of borage, sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and chives surged in the air, and then dissolved as we rumbled on. The urgent smells of the city rose again. A row of four-story buildings came into view—more prosperous than any I’d seen so far. The sign of the goldsmith hung from a street corner.

A young man sitting across from me grinned and said, loudly, to the whole cart, “We’re grateful to King Hal for burning a young beauty at Smithfield. Last person killed was an ugly, old forger.”

A knot of swallowed bread rose in my throat, and I covered my mouth.

“But is she a beauty?” demanded someone else.

An elderly man with milky blue eyes twisted a long hair that sprang from the middle of his chin.

“I know someone who has seen Lady Bulmer in the flesh, and yes, she is bonny,” he said slowly. “More so than the queen.”

“Which queen?” one of the men shouted.

“All three of them,” answered another. A nervous laugh raced around the cart. To mock the king’s marriages—the divorce of the first wife and the execution of the second to make way for the third—was a crime. Hands and ears had been lopped off for it.

The old man twisted his chin hair harder. “Lady Bulmer must have offended the king grievously for him to burn her out in the open before commoners, not to order the ax for Tower Hill or hang her at Tyburn.”

The young man said, “They’ve dragged all the nobles and gentry down to London, the ones who followed Robert Aske. For king’s justice. She’s just the first to die.”

My breath quickened. What would these Londoners say, what would they do to me, if they knew who I was and where I came from? One thing was certain: I would never reach Smithfield.

I searched my prayers for something to uphold me. O Lord my God, help me to be obedient without reserve, poor without servility, chaste without compromise.

“The Bulmer woman’s a foul rebel!” shouted the woman who’d shared with me her bread. “She’s a Papist northerner who plotted to overthrow our king.”

Humble without pretense, joyful without depravity, serious without affectation, active without frivolity, submissive without bitterness, truthful without duplicity.

The old man said mildly: “In the North, they gave their lives for the old ways. They wanted to protect the monasteries.”

Everyone erupted in scorn.

“Those fat monks hide pots of gold while the poor starve outside their walls.”

“I heard of a nun who had a priest’s brat.”

“The sisters are whores. Or else they’re cripples—idiots, all cast off by their families.”

I heard a ragged noise. It was my own laugh, a bitter, joyless one—and unheeded, for there was a shout just then outside the cart. An urchin ran alongside, so fast he shot ahead of our horses. A panicky look over the shoulder revealed the child to be not a boy but a smudge-faced girl, her hair chopped short.

A clod of dirt sailed through the air and hit her shoulder. “Awww,” she howled. “Ye curs!”

Two large boys, scrambling up along the side of the cart, laughed. Within a minute, they’d have her. The men in the cart cheered on the chase.

The boys’ prey darted out of the street and toward a row of shops.

Another girl beckoned from a doorway. “This way!” she shouted. The urchin darted inside, and the door slammed shut behind them. The boys reached it seconds later and pounded, but it was locked.

I closed my eyes. A different girl was running. Eight years old, breathless, a stitch in my side, I charged down a narrow path between tall hedges of yew, searching for a way out.

I could hear people calling my name, but I couldn’t see them. “Hurry, Joanna, hurry—we’re to play tennis next!” shouted my boy cousins, so strong, so hard. “Come now, girl, you can manage it,” boomed the careless voice of my uncle, Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham and head of the family. “You must find your own way out. We can’t send anyone after you and risk the loss of another child.”

I was trapped in my uncle’s maze. He’d just had it built—“I hired better monks to design mine than Cardinal Wolsey used,” he said again and again. Today, September 4, the annual birthday celebration of the second Duke of Buckingham, my long-dead grandfather, the maze was put to use. We cousins were blindfolded and led to the center. Then they whipped the cloths off and told us to race out, to see who’d be first. “Tread the maze! Tread the maze!” my uncle cried from outside the tall winding hedges.

I was one of the youngest and immediately fell to the back of the pack. Soon I was alone. I ran this way and that, hoping to see the hedge walls open to the gardens, but my instincts were always wrong and just led me deeper into the maze.

“What’s wrong with you, Joanna?”

“Think, girl, think!”

The voices grew louder, more impatient. “Joanna, don’t be such a doddypoll,” shouted one Stafford boy. An elder hushed him.

I’d become the center of attention, something I always hated. Had I turned right at this corner, or left? Panic made me forget which paths I’d already tried.

How my head spun with the smell of the roses. Dozens of sternly tamed red bushes dotted the maze. It was almost the end of the season; the rose petals had frayed and loosened. And the hour of the day had passed for peak freshness. But there were so many bushes, and I had passed them so many times. I could almost taste those cloying, dusty, imperious roses.

I turned a corner, fast, and slammed into Margaret.

We both fell down, laughing, the beads of our puffy sleeves hooked together. After we’d disentangled, she helped me up: Margaret was a year older and two inches taller, and always a hundred times cleverer and prettier. My first cousin. My only friend.

“Margaret, where have you gone to?” bellowed the Duke of Buckingham. “You better not have slipped back in the maze for Joanna.”

“Oh, he’s going to be angry with you,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

Margaret winked. She brushed the dirt off my party finery and hers and led me out, holding my hand the whole way.

At the mouth of the maze, they’d gathered, what looked like the entire Stafford clan and all of our retainers and servants. My uncle the duke, the preeminent peer of England, wore cloth of silver and a long ostrich feather in his hat. His youngest brother, Sir Richard Stafford, my father, stood at his side. A long shadow stretching across the garden almost reached them. It was cast by the square tower that soared above us all. Thornbury Castle, in Gloucestershire, was built to withstand attack. Not from a foreign enemy but from generations of covetous Plantagenet kings.

Margaret walked right up to the duke, unafraid. “See, Father, I found Joanna,” she said. “You can play tennis now.” He looked us both over, eyebrows raised, as everyone waited, tense.

But the Duke of Buckingham laughed. He kissed his cherished daughter, his bastard, raised alongside the four children of his meek duchess. “I know well that you can do anything, Margaret,” he said.

My father hugged me tight, too. He’d been sporting all day, and I remember how he smelled of sweat and soil and dry, flattened grass. I felt so relieved, and so happy.

The London cart lurched and shuddered, throwing me down on the straw. My reverie was finished.

We’d left the city walls and taken a side street. The cart’s wheels were trapped in the muck. The cart horses whinnied, the driver cursed, the boisterous men moved to the back of the cart.

“No matter,” the woman said to me. “We are almost at Smithfield.”

I followed the group to the end of the street and then down another one lined with taverns. It opened into an enormous flat clearing, teeming with people already arrived and awaiting the day’s execution. There were hundreds of them: men and women, sailors and seamstresses, children as well. A family pushed ahead of me, the mother carrying a basket of bread, the father with a boy sitting on his shoulders.

Without warning, a foul stench filled my nose, my throat, and my lungs. My eyes watered. It was worse than anything I’d breathed in London so far. With a cry I clutched my burning throat.

“That’s the butcher yards to the east,” said the woman I had ridden with. “When ye catch the wind, the blood and offal can be rank.” She touched my elbow. “Ye be unused to Smithfield, I can see that. Walk with me, stay close.”

I shook my head, blinking. I wouldn’t bear witness to the end of Margaret’s life with such a heartless creature. She shrugged and melted into the mob. I stood alone.

Trembling, I reached into my pocket once more and removed the letter, the one Margaret wrote to me days before the outbreak of the Northern Rebellion, what we call the Pilgrimage of Grace. I unfolded the tight rectangle of cream-colored paper and admired, as always, her sloping, delicate script.

My most entirely beloved Joanna:

I have learned from my brother that you plan to enter the Dominican Order at Dartford Priory and take vows to become a bride of Christ. I admire you so much for your choice of a holy life. I lit extra candles at morning Mass to honor you, dear cousin.

I only wish that somehow you would find a way to know my second husband, Sir John. He is a good, honest, true man, Joanna. He loves me. He cherishes me. I have finally found peace in the North, the same peace I hope you will find at Dartford Priory.

I cannot but think these are hard, wretched, frightening times. Those who serve God as our Holy Father ordains are scorned and persecuted. There is heresy everywhere. It is different in the North. Every night I say three prayers. I ask God to protect our monasteries. I seek salvation for the soul of my father. And I pray that someday I will see you again, Joanna, and that you will embrace me and forgive me.

Written at my manor in Lastingham in York, the last Thursday of September



Your cousin and dearest friend for eternity



Margaret Bulmer



I replaced the letter, pulled my hood over my head as far as it could go so that not a single strand of hair showed, and stepped into Smithfield.