The Boleyn Inheritance

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court,
November 1541

That devil the archbishop has terrified the girl half out of her wits, and now she does not know whether to lie or confess. My lord the duke has come with him for another visit, and while they try to pull the sobbing queen from her bed, he pauses beside me. “Will she confess to Culpepper?” he whispers, so low that I have to lean against him to hear it.

“If you let the archbishop work on her, she will confess to anything,” I warn him in a hurried whisper. “I cannot keep her quiet. He torments her with hope, and then he threatens her with damnation. She is only a silly girl, and he seems determined to break her. He will drive her mad if he keeps threatening her.”

He gives a short laugh, almost like a groan. “She had better pray for madness; it could be the only thing that saves her,” he says. “Good God. Two nieces as Queens of England, and both of them end on the scaffold!”

“What could save her?”

“They can’t execute her if she is mad,” he says absently. “You can’t stand trial for treason if you are mad. They would have to send her away to a convent. Good God, is that her screaming now?”

The eerie cries of Kitty Howard begging to be spared are echoing through her rooms as the women try to pull her in to face the archbishop.

“What will you do?” I demand. “This can’t go on.”

“I’ll try to keep clear of this,” he says bleakly. “I hoped to see her with her wits about her today. I was going to advise her to plead guilty to Dereham and deny Culpepper, then she has done nothing worse than marry with a precontract in place, as Anne of Cleves. She might have got away with that. He might even have taken her back. But at this rate she will kill herself before the axeman gets her.”

“Keep clear?” I demand. “And what about me?”

His face is like a flint. “What about you?”

“I’ll take the French count,” I say to him rapidly. “Whatever the contract is, I’ll take him. I’ll live with him in France for a few years – wherever he likes. I’ll lie low until the king has recovered from this, I can’t go back into exile, I can’t go back to Blickling. I can’t stand it. I can’t go through it all again. I really can’t. I’ll take the French count even without a good settlement. Even if he is old and ugly, even if he’s deformed. I’ll take the French count.”

The duke shouts with sudden laughter like a baited bear, bellowing in my face. I recoil, but his amusement is horribly sincere. In these terrible rooms filled with women crying to Katherine to compose herself and her awful, high-pitched wailing, and the archbishop praying loudly over the noise, the duke roars out his merriment. “A French count!” he bellows. “A French count! Are you mad? Are you run as mad as my niece?”

“What?” I demand, quite baffled. “What are you laughing at? Hush, my lord. Hush. There’s nothing to laugh at.”

“Nothing to laugh at?” He cannot contain himself. “There never was a French count. There never could have been a French count. There never would be a French count or an English earl or an English baron. There would never be a Spanish don, or an Italian prince. No man in the world would ever have you. Are you such a fool that you don’t know that?”

“But you said-”

“I said anything to keep you at work for me, as you would say anything to suit your own cause. But I never thought you really believed me. Don’t you know what men think of you?”

I can feel my legs starting to tremble; it is like the time before, when I knew that I would have to betray them. When I knew that I would have to hide my falseness from my own face. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t want to know.”

His hard hands come down on my shoulders, and he drags me to one of the queen’s expensive gilt-edged looking glasses. In the soft silver reflection I see my own wide eyes looking back at me, and his face as hard as the face of Death himself. “Look,” he says. “Look at yourself and know what you are: you liar, you false wife. There is not a man in the world who would marry you. You are known the length and breadth of Europe as the woman who sent her husband and her sister-in-law to the axeman. You are known in every court in Europe as a woman so vile that she sent her husband to be hanged” – he gives me a shake – “to be cut down while still living, in his piss-wet breeches” – he shakes me again – “to be slit from cock to throat, to see his belly and his liver and his lights pulled out and shown to him, to bleed to death while they burned his liver and his heart and his belly and his lungs before his face” – he shakes me once more – “and then finally to be sliced up like a beast on the butcher’s block, the head, the arms, the legs.”

“They didn’t do that to him,” I whisper, but my lips barely move in the reflection.

“No thanks to you,” he says. “That’s what people remember. The king, his worst enemy, spared him the torture that you had sent him to. The king let him be beheaded, but you sent him to be disemboweled. You, on the witness stand, swearing that he and Anne had been lovers, that he had mounted his own sister, that he was a sodomite, a bugger, with half the court, swearing that they had plotted the king’s death, swearing his life away, sending him to a death that you would not give to a dog.”

“It was your plan.” In the mirror my face is green with sickness at the truth being spoken out loud at last, my dark eyes bulging with horror. “It was your plan, not mine. I shall not be blamed for it. You said that we would save them. They would be pardoned if we gave evidence and they pleaded guilty.”

“You knew that was a lie.” He shakes me like a terrier shakes a rat. “You knew, you liar. You never took the stand to save him. You took the stand to save your title and your fortune; you called it your inheritance, the Boleyn inheritance. You knew that if you turned evidence against your own husband, then the king would leave you with your title and your lands. That’s all you wanted in the end. That’s all you cared for. You sent that young man and that beauty, his sister, to the gallows so that you could save your own yellow skin and your paltry title. You sent them to their deaths, a savage death, for being beautiful and merry and happy in each other’s company and for excluding you. You are a byword for malice, jealousy, and twisted lust. D’you think any man would trust you with a title again? D’you think any man would risk calling you wife? After that?”

“I was going to save him.” I bare my teeth at the two of us in the mirror. “I accused him so that he could confess and be pardoned. I would have saved him.”

“You are a killer worse than the king,” he says brutally, and throws me to one side. I rebound off the wall and grab at the tapestry to steady myself. “You testified against your own sister-in-law and husband; you stood by the sickbed while Jane Seymour died; you testified against Anne of Cleves and would have seen her beheaded. Now, without a doubt, you will see another cousin go to the gallows, and I confidently expect you to bear witness against her.”

“I loved him,” I say stubbornly, going to the only charge that I cannot bear to hear. “You shall not deny that I loved George. I loved him with all my heart.”

“Then you are worse than a liar and a false friend,” he says coldly. “For your love brought the man you love to a most pitiable death. Your love is worse than hatred. Dozens hated George Boleyn, but it was your loving word that took him to his death. Don’t you see how evil you are?”

“If he had stood by me, if he had cleaved to me, I would have saved him,” I cry out from my own pain. “If he had loved me as he loved her, if he had let me into his life, if I had been as dear to him as she was-”

“He would never have stood by you,” the duke says with contempt like poison in his voice. “He would never have loved you. Your father bought him for you with a fortune, but nobody and no fortune could make you lovable. George despised you, and Anne and Mary laughed at you. That’s why you accused them; none of this high-flying, self-sacrificing lie has a shred of truth. You accused them, because if you could not have George, you would rather have seen him dead than loving his sister.”

“She came between us,” I gasp.

“His hounds came between you. His horses. He loved the horses in his stable, he loved his hawks in his mews more than he loved you. And you would have killed every one of them – horse, hound, and hawk – from sheer jealousy. You are an evil woman, Jane, and I have used you as I would use a piece of filth. But now I am finished with that foolish girl Katherine, and I am finished with you. You can advise her to save herself as best she can. You can bear witness for her, you can bear witness against her. I don’t care for either of you.”

I feel the wall behind me, and I push myself forward to glare into his face. “You will not treat me so,” I say. “I am no piece of filth; I am your ally. If you turn against me, you will regret it. I know all the secrets. Enough to send her to the gallows, enough to send you there, too. I will destroy her, and you with her.” I am panting now, flushed with rage. “I will bring her to the scaffold and every Howard with her. Even if I die myself this time!”

He laughs again, but now he is quiet, his anger spent. “She is a lost cause,” he says. “The king has finished with her. I have finished with her. I can save myself, and I will. You will go down with the slut. You cannot get off twice.”

“I shall tell the archbishop about Culpepper,” I threaten. “I shall tell him that you meant them to be lovers. That you told me to throw them together.”

“You can say what you like,” he replies easily. “You will have no proof. There is only one person who was seen carrying messages and letting him into her rooms. That would be you. Everything you say to incriminate me will point to your guilt. You will die for it, and God knows, I don’t care one way or another.”

I scream then, I scream and fall to my knees and clasp him around the legs. “Don’t say that! I have served you, I have served you for years; I have been your most faithful servant, and I have had next to no reward. Get me out of here, and she can die and Culpepper can die, but I shall be safe with you.”

Slowly the duke leans down and detaches my hands as if I were some kind of sticky weed that has tangled unpleasantly around his legs. “No, no,” he says, as if he has lost all interest in the conversation. “No. She cannot be saved, and I wouldn’t lift a finger to save you. The world will be a better place when you are dead, Jane Boleyn. You will not be missed.”

“I am yours.” I look up at him, but I dare not grab him again, and so he walks away from me, to tap on the door to the outside world, where the sentries, who used to stand on the outside to keep everyone out, are now keeping us locked in. “I am yours,” I shout. “Heart and soul. I love you.”

“I don’t want you,” he remarks. “Nobody wants you. And the last man you promised to love died because of your testament. You are a foul thing, Jane Boleyn; the axeman can finish what the devil has started, for all I care.” He pauses with his hand on the door, as a thought strikes him. “I should think you will be beheaded on Tower Green, where they killed Anne,” he says. “There’s an irony for you. I should think she and her brother are laughing in hell, waiting for you.”