He stumbled and fell to his knees, inches from Sabine's feet. Their
eyes locked and she froze in terror. Her mouth tried to form words
that just would not come.
He shook his head briefly as if to warn her away. She hid Topaz
behind her skirts as she choked off her own protests, sobs.
The guards violently jerked Edward Plantagent, the young Earl of
Warwick, back to his feet and shoved him forward. Their swords
clinked against their belt buckles, their keys swung from metal
rings. They yanked their prisoner toward the stairs, oblivious to
the woman's wide-eyed horror. Watching him suffering like this tore
at her heart, rendering her speechless with grief.
But her daughter was not so silent. "Papa!" she shrieked, and bolted
after the bruised, bleeding young man.
"No, Topaz!" Sabine clutched her daughter's arm. "Stay back!"
"Where are they taking Papa?" Her cries echoed off the stone walls.
The torches in their sconces pulsated in unison with her demand.
"I know not, little one. I know not."
But Sabine
did
know. This was the day she had dreaded most.
Her beloved Edward, imprisoned in this foul, stinking prison by the
cruel King Henry, was going to die.
Her mind spun her back through the years: their passionate
courtship, their blessed marriage, God's gift of their two precious
children and their joy at the expectation of the impending third
arrival.
As the dark maw of the stairwell finally swallowed her husband,
Sabine grasped her rounded belly and slid to the floor, overcome by
her heart-rending sobs.
Seeing her mother like this, Topaz began to weep, too. Something was
horribly wrong. She couldn't fully understand what. All she knew was
that her mother's sobs and the look on her father's face as he had
been led away would haunt her for the rest of her days.
CHAPTER ONE
Marchington Manor, Buckinghamshire, 1509
"Prince Hal and Princess Catherine's coronation is in two weeks, on
Midsummer's Day," Lady Margaret Pole announced to her nieces, Topaz,
Amethyst, and Emerald, as they sat in the solar tuning their lutes
for a musicale. "You girls should attend. 'Tis a once-in-a-lifetime
event."
Topaz looked up, knowing her aunt had emphasized that last sentence
for her benefit. She stared the plump matron squarely in the eye.
"Aunt Margaret, how can you expect any of us to attend that travesty
of a ceremony? After all we have been through!"
Tears stung her eyes at the memories of her childhood in the stark
and haunted Tower, where she had seen her father dragged away in
chains to his execution. A stab of grief pierced Topaz's heart as
she remembered hearing of his death the next day. She'd collapsed on
the floor, writhing under the plunging dagger of shock. Her Papa was
gone, and for what cause?
"Why" asked Topaz. "Why did King Henry have to kill Papa? He
wouldn't have tried to take the throne away. All he wanted to do was
play his lute and sing."
"Simply because he was his father's son. No other reason."
Topaz knew Margaret was trying to appease the young girls with this
simple explanation, to protect them from the evil thoughts that
threatened their innocent minds. Topaz had spent hours searching
through worn and brittle books, studying the previous descents of
the Crown, trying to justify it all, despite the injustices that
scarred their heritage.
"Your father was a gentle, harmless soul. The King was simply
afraid..."
Margaret hesitated, her words trailing off as she fingered her
brooch.
"That was a bad choice of words, Aunt Margaret. The King—afraid?"
Topaz laughed mockingly. At fourteen, she was the most outspoken of
the family, but heedless of the warnings always given her.
"Not in that way... Your father was a threat to the throne, to
Henry's kingship. He never did anything wrong. But Henry was the
King, and a king can do whatever he pleases."
"A cruel twist of fate, was it not, Aunt Margaret?" asked
twelve-year-old Amethyst. "Henry killed King Richard. Had Richard
won that final battle, then Topaz would now be queen. But God did
not decree it so. So here we all are."
"How can you just sit and accept all this!" Topaz blazed. "It should
have been
our
father! The throne was
his
birthright!
That Taffy pretender had no business taking it! He was a usurper, as
is his son, and Hal will never be my king!" Topaz's hazel eyes
filled with fire and her budding breasts heaved under her tight
bodice.
"No, no, Topaz," Margaret scolded her oldest niece. "It matters not
what you believe. It happened the way it happened, and Prince Hal is
to become King Henry the Eighth next week. And we're all going to
join in the festivities."
"Well, I shall not go!" Topaz rose, stamping her foot. Twirling
round, she stepped inside the empty hearth arching just above of her
head. "How can you, Aunt Margaret!" she cried into the gaping space.
Her voice rebounded through the solar, and no doubt right up the
chimney. "How can you celebrate the crowning of a king whose father
killed your own brother! I want no part of this undeserving
pretender. I hate Prince Hal and his dead father! I hate all the
Tudors! It should have been me!" She pounded the wall with clenched
fists. "I should be queen! Taffy Harry should have been bludgeoned
and Father crowned king, even after Richard was killed! Tudor has no
place here! It just isn't fair!"
She fled the chamber in a whoosh of satin, her copper hair flying
out behind her.
Amethyst started to go after her, but Margaret grabbed her by the
sleeve. "Let her go. There is naught you can do when she flies into
one of her rages," she said.
Amethyst sat back down and shuddered at a sudden thought. Topaz had
once told her a particularly gruesome tale of a prisoner being
tortured on the rack to extricate a confession. She had recounted
the sound of bones cracking and flesh tearing, the victim wailing in
unbearable agony as the guards tightened the ropes, streams of blood
oozing from the victim's eyes, nose and mouth, dripping onto the
floor.
Topaz was not supposed to have been there—she'd wandered away from
her mother while strolling the ramparts, and had groped her way into
the Black Tower, up a winding staircase, down a narrow hall, to find
her way back. She'd followed the wailing cries and found herself at
the entrance to an alcove, lit by the harsh glare of torches in
their sconces.
The muscled backs of two hooded torturers had been at each end of a
prisoner lying prone, naked, his arms and legs stretched out before
him. She had turned and fled, but the victim's agonizing screams
burned in her mind forever.
"Aunt Margaret, Topaz thinks of naught but this!" Amethyst said.
"The news of Prince Hal's accession to the throne has just made it
worse. She tells Emerald and me of the horrors of the Tower...the
moans of starving prisoners, the clanking of chains, the stench of
body dirt and excrement. I am glad I was so tiny when we were freed,
and remember none of it. But she does recollect, and she relives it,
again and again, relaying it all to us so clearly. 'Tis as if we,
too, remember it all. It is that which drives her to such a passion.
The quest for justice, for our father and for all who have suffered
at the hands of the Tudors ever since Henry VII usurped the throne."
Margaret nodded and sighed. "I know. But this is a man's world and
might makes right. She would do better to accept this now than end
up like all the other rightful claimants to the throne."
They both shuddered. So many dead, all for one mere crown…
Amethyst glanced over at the music scores on the brass stand before
her, graced with the swirling treble clef. The black points
brandished dainty flags dancing on their staves, sprinkled with
rests. Her gaze bounced up and down, following the playful jots
across the score to the harmonious language as she translated the
notes into the pretty tones ringing in her head. Music was such a
joyous comfort, such a healing blend of concordance and harmony. Her
fingers itched to strum her lute and fill the room with delicate
strains. She had envied her sister in many ways, but she was glad
she was not burdened with such a past, nor a mind tormented by a
present and future that could never be.
"Aunt Margaret, will nothing ever make her forget?"
"Only time will heal her, Amethyst," Margaret said, her eyes still
fixed on the doorway through which Topaz had fled. "Time, that
immortal force with neither beginning nor end, can comfort and heal
as no physician or devout prayers or magic potions ever will. By
morning she will have regained her appetite and be the first at the
breakfast table as usual."
"Another tantrum. I do hope they lessen as she grows up, she is so
old already," ten-year-old Emerald said to no one in particular.
"Her tantrums used to frighten me. Now they simply bore me."
Shaking her head, she returned to tightening the strings on her
lute. "If she is indisposed again, does that mean I can sing soprano
tonight, Aunt Margaret?"
Midsummer's Day brought forth a dazzling sun in a cloudless azure
sky, enveloping London in welcoming warmth and the promise of a new
reign. The city gates were flung open and the narrow, winding
streets were thronged with crowds. Shouting joyously over their new
King, rich and poor stood side by side, in drunken ecstasy from the
wine flowing through the public conduits for the occasion. The
gutters were swept free of the usual rotting filth. No slop pails
would be spilled onto any heads today. People nearly tumbled out of
the second and third-story windows of their crowded and crooked
dwellings whose opposite rooftops nearly touched at the top.
Lady Margaret, Sabine, and the girls had all been invited to the
coronation, but Topaz was staying behind. "I shall stay here and
watch the grass grow and the sun sink and the moon rise," she'd
insisted when asked for the last time to join the party setting out
for London. "Those are natural, honest acts. What you are going to
witness is a travesty. And God won't smile down upon any of you!"
she shouted, shaking her fist as her family members and their
servants began entering their carriages. "Hal Tudor be cursed, and
may he meet a torturous end to his ill-gotten reign, spitting blood
upon himself, just like his doomed father, that murderer!"
Topaz watched the carriages disappear around the bend of the
wheel-rutted path. "May he never bring forth an heir," she muttered
to no one but the twittering birds around her. "May he sire nothing
but bastards! He'll be the last of the Tudors, either way, if I have
anything to do with it!"
The carriages jounced amongst the clatter of hoof beats. "I should
have talked to her. I could have convinced her to join us," Amethyst
voiced her thoughts, sadly watching as Topaz's figure shrank into
the distance.
No one had paid heed to Topaz's wearisome tirade, just as no one was
listening to Amethyst. They were all tittering, in short spurts of
half-complete sentences, of the splendid festivities they were about
to witness.
"I wonder what Queen Catherine will be wearing...I haven't seen
London in so long...I hear Henry the Seventh's Chapel is just
magnificent..." all the way down the dusty road to London.
The procession marched into Westminster Abbey as the brassy tones of
trumpets from the lofts above rang through the air. Lady Margaret,
Amethyst, Emerald and Sabine were at the head of the procession
which included squires and knights in ceremonial livery and Knights
of the Bath draped in purple robes, followed by the peerage: dukes,
earls, marquises, barons, abbots, and bishops in crimson velvet. The
officers of rank followed: the Lord Privy Seal, Lord Chancellor, and
assorted archbishops, ambassadors, and lord mayors.
Amethyst had never seen anything quite so grandiose as Westminster
Abbey. The church in their cozy Buckinghamshire village was adequate
to accommodate the villagers for Mass, but it was simple and modest,
in need of repair, a mere reflection of their own austere
surroundings. Westminster Abbey looked like the gateway to heaven
itself. She vowed to walk through Henry VII's Chapel and pay homage
to her late King, to kneel at one of these splendid altars and pray
for her new King.
Someday I shall come back here, she vowed. No matter how long it
takes, I shall see all of it. I must.
The little party took their seats which had been set up along the
North Aisle, facing the great nave, where the King and Queen would
make their entrance.
Amethyst made sure her seat was on the aisle, to get an unobstructed
view of this once-in-a-lifetime event—and of Henry. Her picture of
him was clear in her mind from the many times Aunt Margaret spoke of
him... The flaming hair that framed his intelligent face, the
graceful gait of his stride, like a colt breezing over the
landscape, that was Prince Hal. He was also a talented musician, a
lute virtuoso, a master of the organ and recorder, and was blessed
with a melodious singing voice.