Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (169 page)

She shook her little hooded head. ‘Let me stay,' she said. ‘I want to stay until Aunt Anne is released to the nunnery and it is over.'

‘Is she well?'

‘She is. She prays all the time and she prepares herself for a life behind the walls. She knows that she has to give up queenship. She knows that she has to give up the Princess Elizabeth. She knows that she won't be queen now. But it's better since the trial is over. They don't listen to her and watch her the same way. And she is more settled.'

‘Have you seen George?' I asked. I tried to keep my voice light but my grief choked me.

Catherine looked up at me, her dark Boleyn eyes filled with pity. ‘This is a prison,' she said gently. ‘I can't go visiting.'

I shook my head at my own stupidity. ‘When I was here before it was one of the many castles of the king. I could walk where I wanted. I should have realised that everything is different now.'

‘Will the king marry Jane Seymour?' Catherine asked me. ‘She wants to know.'

‘You can tell her it is a certainty,' I said. ‘He is at her house every night. He is as he was, in the old days, when it was her.'

Catherine nodded. ‘I should go,' she said, glancing at the sentry behind her.

‘Tell Anne …' I broke off. There was too much to send in one message. There were long years of rivalry and then a forced unity and always and ever, underpinning our love for each other, our sense that the other must be bested. How could I send her one word which would acknowledge all of that, and yet tell her that I loved her still, that I was glad I had been her sister, even though I knew she had brought herself to this point and taken George here too? That, though I would never forgive her for what she had done to us all, at the same time, I totally and wholly understood?

‘Tell her what?' Catherine hovered, waiting to be released.

‘Tell her that I think of her,' I said simply. ‘All the time. Every day. The same as always.'

The next day they beheaded my brother alongside his lover Francis Weston, with Henry Norris, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton. They did it on the Green, before Anne's window, and she watched her friends and then her brother die. I walked on the muddy foreshore of the river with my baby on my hip and tried not to know that it was happening. The wind blew gently up the river and a seagull called mournfully over my head. The tideline was a mess of intriguing flotsam: bits of rope, scraps of wood, shells encrusted on weed. I watched my boots and smelled the salt in the air and let my pace rock my baby and tried to understand what had happened to us Boleyns who had been running the country one day and were condemned criminals the next.

I turned for home and found that my face was wet with tears. I had not thought to lose George. I had never thought that Anne and I would have to live our lives without George.

A swordsman was ordered from France to execute Anne. The king was planning a last-minute reprieve and he would extract every drop of drama from it. They built a scaffold for her beheading on the Green outside the Beauchamp Tower.

‘The king will release her?' I asked William.

‘That's what your father said.'

‘He will do it as a great masque,' I said, knowing Henry. ‘At the very last moment he will send his pardon and everyone will be so relieved that they will forgive him for the deaths of the others.'

The swordsman was delayed on the road. It would be another day before he was on the platform, waiting for the pardon. Catherine at the gate that night was like a little ghost. ‘Archbishop Cranmer came today with the papers to annul the marriage and she signed them. They promised that she would be released if she signed. She can go to a nunnery.'

‘Thank God,' I said, knowing only now how deeply I had been afraid. ‘When will she be released?'

‘Perhaps tomorrow,' Catherine said. ‘Then she'll have to live in France.'

‘She'll like that,' I said. ‘She'll be an abbess in five days, you'll see.'

Catherine gave me a thin smile. The skin below her eyes was almost purple with fatigue.

‘Come home now!' I said in sudden anxiety. ‘It's all but done.'

‘I'll come when it's over,' she said. ‘When she goes to France.'

That night, as I lay sleepless, staring up at the tester over the four-poster bed, I said to William, ‘The king will keep his word and release her, won't he?'

‘Why should he not?' William asked me. ‘He has everything he wants. An adultery charge against her so no-one can say that he fathered a monster. The marriage annulled as if it never was. Everyone who impugned his manhood is dead. Why should he kill her? It makes no sense. And he has promised her. She signed the annulment. He is honour-bound to send her to a nunnery.'

The next day a little before nine o'clock they took her out to the scaffold and her ladies, my little Catherine among them, walked behind her.

I was in the crowd, at the back, at Tower Green. From a distance I saw her come out, a little figure in a black gown with a dark cape. She
lifted off her French hood, her hair was held back in a net. She said her final words, I could not hear them and I did not care. It was a nonsense, a piece of the masque, as meaningless as when the king was Robin Hood and we were villagers dressed in green. I waited for the watergate to roll up and the king's barge to rush in with a beat of the drummer and the swirl of oars in the dark water and for the king to stride forward amongst us, and declare Anne forgiven.

I thought he was leaving it so late that he must have ordered the executioner to delay, to wait for the blast of royal trumpets from the river. It was typical of Henry to use this moment for its greatest drama. Now we had to wait for him to make his grand entrance and his speech of forgiveness and then Anne could go to France and I could fetch my daughter and go home.

I watched her turn to the priest for her final prayers, and then take off her French hood, and her necklace. Hidden in my long sleeves I was snapping my fingers with irritation at Anne's vanity and Henry's delay. Why could not the two of them finish this scene quickly and let us all go?

One of her women, not my daughter Catherine, stepped forward and tied a blindfold over my sister's eyes, and then steadied her arm as she kneeled in the straw. The woman stepped back, Anne was alone. Like a field of corn bowing down in the wind, the crowd before the scaffold kneeled too. Only I stood still, staring over their heads to my sister where she kneeled in her black gown with the brave crimson skirt, her eyes blindfolded, her face white.

Behind her the executioner's sword went up and up and up in the morning light. Even then, I looked towards the watergate for Henry to come. And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.

William pushed me unceremoniously in to one of the alcoves of the wall and thrust his way through the people who were gathering around to see Anne's body wrapped in linen and laid in a box. He scooped Catherine up as if she were no more than a baby and he brought her back through the chattering shocked crowd towards me.

‘It's done,' he said tersely to us both. ‘Now walk.'

Like a man in a rage he forced us before him, through the gate and out into the City. Blindly, we found our way back to our lodgings, through the crowds which were seething around the Tower and shouting the news to one another that the whore had been beheaded, that the poor lady had been martyred, that the wife had been sacrificed, all the different versions that Anne had carried in one ill-lived life.

Catherine stumbled as her legs gave way and William picked her up and carried her in his arms like a swaddled infant. I saw her head loll against his shoulder and realised that she was half asleep. She had stayed awake for days with my sister as they had waited for the clemency which had been inviolably promised. Even now as I stumbled on the cobbles of the road into the City I realised that it was hard for me to know that the clemency had never come and that the man I had loved as the most golden prince in Christendom had turned into a monster who had broken his word and executed his wife because he could not bear the thought of her living without him and despising him. He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.