Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2) (34 page)

Bridget drew back.
She
had not kept her word? Was he just seeking to deflect her accusations, or was he in earnest? She searched his face for the answer. He kept his expression tightly shuttered, but his eyes gave him away. They burned with a ferocity that was barely controlled.

“Oh
, yes, my lady, you were the one who went outside the terms of our covenant, not I. You were supposed to confine yourself to two things and two things only: sleeping with the king and promoting my causes, namely the Cleves marriage. But that was not enough for you, was it? You could not stop there—you suddenly found that you commanded a little bit of power, and when Lady Exeter came to you with her tale of woe you could not help yourself. You had to go to the king and try to exercise it. Without so much as a by your leave, you pleaded for leniency for the marchioness. And, what is more, you succeeded.”

Bridge
t stared at him incredulously, then she burst out laughing. “I succeeded, sir? By what possible measure did I succeed? Lady Exeter’s husband and their kinsmen are dead, while others of her family, including herself and her son, are imprisoned and furthermore she is under an attainder. That means, as you well know, legally speaking, that she no longer exists. How on earth does any of that constitute a success? I would have thought it was a rather good description of a catastrophe.”

Cromwell smiled mirthlessly
and looked her directly in the eye. “Then once again, madam, you have it wrong. Yes, Exeter, Montague and Neville are dead. Carew is dead. But they were
all
supposed to die. The whole, worthless lot of them. None to be spared, including your beloved marchioness. I care nothing for her fate, nor for the fate of her son, Edward, that she is so agitated about. It is the fate of another Edward that entirely preoccupies me. Prince Edward, the king’s son, his sole heir. Nothing and no one must ever prevent his accession. As long as any of the White Rose remain alive, with their Plantagenet pretensions and their dreams of Cardinal Pole as king and the Lady Mary as his queen, he is not secure. Neither is his father. The marchioness was always supposed to follow her husband’s path to the block. As you say, she is attainted. All that is needed is the king’s signature on her death warrant. But he won’t sign it. ‘She is in the Tower, let her rot there,’ were his last words on the subject before he forbade all mention of it. And so that is where she sits, day after day, still drawing breath, still alive, whatever the law says. I would call that a success, madam, and I would also call it not keeping your word.”

Bridge
t shook her head in disbelief. It was all absolutely, dreadfully clear to her now.

“Do you mean to say
that because the Marchioness of Exeter’s heart still beats you blame me, and thus Mistress Welles must pay the price for it? My God. I knew you were ruthless, but you have surpassed yourself. You did not dare to try to make me pay—the king holds me in too high regard for that. You could not be certain of his reaction, therefore, you determined to take out your desire for revenge on a pathetic, old woman who wrote a letter that never even reached the marchioness in the first place! You told the king that no correspondence from Mistress Margaret was found amongst Lady Exeter’s possessions, correct? Therefore, there was no compact between them, there was no danger. And how did you come by the letter in the first place? One of your informants must have intercepted it, some creature of yours, some false cur you have planted in my household to spy on us and do your bidding. Probably the same person who fished the scrap of the Five Wounds banner out of the Thames for you. Have I hit the mark, my lord? Am I right at last?”

Cromw
ell crossed his arms defensively. He did not blink. “Good God, you really think me the devil’s henchman, don’t you? Intercepting letters, spies placed in your home, bits of cloth pulled out of the river in the dead of night. You do have a lively imagination, perhaps I will utilise it one day. As it happens, my lady, nothing as fantastical as your version of events took place. Mistress Welles indisputably wrote a treasonable letter, perhaps one of many she penned; after all, her opposition to the king is well known. She never had the wit to hide it. It was brought to my attention by the one person who had the most to lose if your family was disgraced. Your husband, the Viscount de Brett himself. Mistress Welles chose the wrong person to deliver her ill-starred missive, a man called Walters. He brought the letter straight to his master and in turn his master brought it to me and left it in my capable hands. As for the banner, well you may be closer to the mark there. John Walters is a man I have known for a long time. He is a useful person I find. In many ways.”

Bridget looked away, the disgust writ large on her visage; Cromwe
ll smiled at her more in sorrow than in satisfaction.

“Do not condemn him. Lord de Brett acted entirely properly. He is loyal to the king
, and he does have his own position, as well as his sister’s and yours, to consider. I gather he never wanted the Welles woman in his house to begin with; it was done as a favour to Mistress Joan. Once he realised the poison he had allowed to take root within his walls he acted to vanquish it. After the discovery of the letter, he kept her under close observation until I gave the order to act. When that was given, the woman had to be literally dragged out of the place, crying and shrieking invective all the way, mostly against me. She wants martyrdom, I believe. Well, she shall have it. As for revenge, do not be ridiculous. If I had wanted to ‘move against’ you, I could have done so. At any time. No desire could be further from my heart. I merely wanted to offer you a reminder.”

“A reminder?”

“Aye.” Cromwell sighed, and before Bridget could react, he touched her face with a gentleness she had never seen him display before. “I have told you this before, but you seem oddly incapable of remembering it, let alone of truly comprehending it.
You
work for
me.
After all, you owe everything to me and to my munificence. It was I who ensured your return to court after you climbed down off Anne Boleyn’s scaffold in your blood-soaked dress. It was I who ensured your husband’s smooth return to favour, despite his family’s less than illustrious history. From that flowed all the new titles and lands and jewels you now enjoy. All because of me. Why, you ask yourself? Why bother with you, a little nobody who can bring me nothing? The answer is simple and you already know it, though you struggle to admit it, even to yourself. I am captivated by you, madam, mesmerised one might say. I have been ever since the first day I saw you in the tiltyard at Greenwich. You have stirred something in me I thought was long dead, something I have not felt for many years. At times, you have felt it too.” He traced the length of her collarbone; she jerked away. “But despite my . . . feelings, there are limits. Limits to what I can allow—there always are. You must learn them. I have found that a harsh lesson in brutal reality is the only way anybody truly learns anything. My father taught me that. Perhaps, at long last, you have learnt it too.”

He cupped the
side of her cheek. Bridget kept her face, now flushed with shame and impotent rage, resolutely turned away. “The king will summon you back to court in a few months,” he said, “though your time in his bed is up. I am sure that that news is not unwelcome to you. Hopefully, the marriage contract with Cleves will be signed by the end of summer and we shall have a new queen ere long. You will join her household; in fact, I anticipate you will ride quite high in her favour. You will serve her and you will serve me. This episode, this . . . unpleasantness between us, will be utterly forgotten. It does no good to dwell on the past, not when there so much to look forward to. A new marriage for the king, a new prince in the royal cradle. An entirely new England to make. Until then, keep yourself quiet at Thorns and wait for the tempest to blow itself out. ’Twill not take long and then we shall embark upon a new future. Together.”

She
did not look at him as he bid her farewell and walked away down the corridor. She could not bear to. Instead, she lifted her hand and turned it over. The line of fate glared out at her, its narrow path turned a rosy red from where she had struck her palm against the stones, making the deep channel it cut across her skin seem even more pronounced. “Beware of the brewer’s son,” the gypsy had told her. “You have beguiled him, and he seeks to entwine his path with yours.” Well, he had. Thomas Cromwell had won; he had beaten her utterly. God, she had been a fool. A sad, deluded, wretched fool. And for that, for that sin, a woman would die.

Epilogue

November 1539

The Manor of Thorns, London

It was three months since Sister Margaret had gone to her death at Tyburn. After her arrest in May, she had been left to languish in the Tower in the hopes no doubt that she would die and save the authorities the time and trouble of hanging her. Despite being locked up in a small, nearly airless cell during the height of summer, she had not expired. In fact, she had clung to life. The abbess had managed to see her on a handful of occasions, as the guards allowed only one visitor, and they had demanded a handsome bribe for the privilege.

Sister Margaret
had been in good spirits on those days, the best that the abbess had ever seen her. “I go to my death on the same spot where the Holy Maid, Sister Elizabeth Barton, suffered. It is God’s will and I am ready and willing to accept it. In fact, I long for it. I have had enough of this world.” She had smiled when she said that. Smiled and laughed. It was just as Cromwell had said. She was determined to become a martyr.

The weather broke and the heavens opened on the da
y that her ascent to martyrdom finally came. With the rain beating down on the heads of all those who had gathered to witness the spectacle, they had brought her out in a rough cart through the muddied streets to Tyburn. Sir Richard had forbidden them all to attend, but that was one order none of them could not obey. They had all gone to see it, the rain fortunately allowing them to don their heaviest cloaks, and thus hide their identities from any prying eyes. Bridget was sure she’d spied her husband’s old retainer, and Cromwell’s spy, John Walters, amongst the multitude, no doubt there to provide a report to his masters. She drew her hood as far over her head as she could and shrank back against the shadows of a house when she saw him loitering on the other side of the street. He crossed over and passed her by without as much as a glance.

In the midst of th
e summer downpour, Sister Margaret was pulled unceremoniously out of the cart and hustled up the steps to the scaffold. Once there she was permitted to say a few words. Taking a deep breath, and looking openly about her, she recited the Apostles Creed in Latin: “
Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentum, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in lesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum
.” The crowd joined in and recited the words along with her. The officials in charge, embarrassed and clearly ill at ease at having to put to death a woman, particularly an old former nun, cut short her recitation. They put the halter over her scrawny neck, and then the men charged with killing her moved swiftly. Cromwell had kept to his word—she was spared the full rigours of a traitor’s death. She would not be drawn and quartered, only hanged. The executioner did his job well. By a miracle, her neck broke almost as soon as she was launched, the sound of it breaking echoing around the scaffold like cannon fire. She was left to hang there for some while, her body twisting slowly in the warm breeze. Once she was dead, Bridget noticed something drop from her hand and fall between the boards. Pushing her way to the front, she reached down in the dirt and grabbed. It was very small and ragged but she still recognised it. It was the fragment of St Veronica’s veil that had once been kept, as a precious relic, in a golden chest at Rivers. The fragment that had been thrown down into the dust and retrieved by Sister Margaret on the day Rivers had been suppressed. She had always wondered what had become of it. Now she had her answer.

In the wake of the
execution, Bridget kept close to Thorns. She hardly left her rooms and received no visitors. No summons from the king arrived; her husband ignored her as well and made it plain he had no desire for her company. That suited her—she had no desire for his, not after everything he had done and had caused to be done. In September he ordered the abbess and Joanna to go to their estate in Lincolnshire. Joanna’s marriage to Will was to be discussed and terms reached. “My wife may stay in London,” he had written. “I have no use for her here.”

And so at Thorns
Bridget had remained with only a small contingent of servants for company and only one activity left available to her. Thinking. The days were long and provided ample opportunity for Bridget to go over mentally all her life’s preceding events, from the end of her time at Rivers Abbey, to what felt like the end of her existence here at Thorns. The more she ruminated the further she tumbled into a deep well of melancholy.

She tried writing lengthy, chatty letters to Joanna and the abbess, full of talk of the weather and how pretty the gardens were
, but her heart was not in them. They fooled no one. Relations between herself and those two ladies were stilted now; she could not forgive the abbess for hiding her knowledge of Sister Margaret’s letters and she could not forgive Joanna for wanting to marry Will. Their letters to her, in contrast, were brimming over with concern and apologies and promises, chiefly that Sir Richard would soon send for her. But he never did. The only happiness that she allowed herself to experience each day was that it brought no message from him. The rest of the time she wallowed in her sadness, isolation and loneliness. She wanted to do so; it was the least she could suffer. She wanted to be consumed by despondency. Drowning in self-pity was the only way her dreams were kept at bay—dreams of Anne standing on the scaffold in the shadow of the White Tower, the executioner creeping up behind her, sword in hand. Dreams of Sister Margaret being strung up at Tyburn, her neck snapping in two like a dry twig. Dreams of Thomas Cromwell, his eyes boring into hers, his hands stroking her face and then snaking themselves around her throat. She never failed to wake with a start, her body drenched in sweat, her heart pumping with fear and with something else: pure, unadulterated rage. Directed mostly at herself, but also at him. She wanted to make him pay. She had to. She desired it above anything.