The Queen's Governess (24 page)

THE TOWER OF LONDON

 

 

 

T
he sound of the key grating in the door of my cell pierced my soul. I had never been more frightened by what had been and what was yet to come.

“Ah, Mrs. Ashley,” the man who was my examiner intoned as he peered into the dimly lit cell that had been my prison for nigh on six weeks. At first they had just let me sit and stew—and freeze in this wretched place. “I give you good day and bid you to join us for a tour of the Tower. The Lord Lieutenant has told me that has made more than one pretty bird sing. And, I warrant, such a learned woman as to have been the Lady Elizabeth’s governess and councilor all these years is no simpleton, but a keen and able learner.”

I thanked God for full petticoats, else my shaking knees would have betrayed me.
Betrayed me . . .
Her Grace had whispered, “Don’t betray me!” to her closest confidantes before we were taken from her at Hatfield House.

“This way,” Sir Thomas Smith went on, frowning. He beckoned me forward as if I would dare to gainsay his command.

Wrapped in a fur-lined cloak draped with his chain of office, he was the Privy Council’s secretary, no doubt come to torment me again with endless questions I had refused to answer. Had the Lady Elizabeth encouraged Tom Seymour to gather forces to overthrow her brother, the king? Did she know aught of rumors that Seymour had poisoned his wife so that he could wed Elizabeth? Had she hoped to make Seymour king or at least Lord Protector in place of his brother? And had I, Katherine Ashley, as the closest friend, the substitute for the deceased mother of Her Grace, the Lady Elizabeth, promoted lewd enticements in Chelsea, even under the nose of Tom Seymour’s wife, the widow of King Henry?

As I stepped into the corridor, I saw that Sir Thomas was not alone. The beef-witted turnkey Gib, who brought my daily sustenance, waited just down the hall to tag along as a guard. Also glowering at me, the big-shouldered Sir Leonard Chamberlain, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, stood at the ready, as if one lone, hedged-in woman of forty-two years would dash for escape through these mazes of halls and corkscrew stairs in dim, damp Beauchamp Tower.

The Tower of London was not one but a series of towers. My place of imprisonment was a semicircular structure of three stories with inscriptions of its many victims carved into the walls. Out my narrow, deep-set window I could see Tower Green to the east, the very place where Elizabeth’s mother and King Henry’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard, had been beheaded. It amazed me to think that I, Kat from rural Devon, had known those Tudor-bred, Tudor-wed, even the Tudor dead. But more than the loss of them all, I grieved my separation from my fifteen-year-old charge, whom I dearly loved and desperately feared for.

“Exactly where are we going?” I asked, trying to summon a steady voice. I had been arrested under orders that I be “seriously examined,” which was coded talk for the Privy Council’s permission to use torture to extract my confession. Though they had not yet done so, I was wary, forever teetering on the jagged edge of outright terror. Barely sleeping each night, I had wandered through memories, tormenting myself with sins of my past and shattered hopes for my future.

God save me, women were not exempt from torture here and, as the so-called weaker sex, were considered easy marks to talk. I knew the once bold Queen Anne when brought here babbled much out of fear for her life. Last week a guard had made a cruel jest that Queen Anne and, later, Queen Catherine Howard had “talked their heads off ” once they were enclosed within these walls. I fought such temptation every moment I was entombed here.

In faith, I knew far too much of the history of this place. Now not just I but the only two men I had ever loved—may the one be cursed, the other blessed—were imprisoned somewhere here beside the misty, murky Thames.

The cold river wind slapped me as we walked the green toward the White Tower. The gray sky—all was gray upon gray in this wretched place—shuddered with sleet. When I blinked, my eyelashes were wet—from tears or the weather, I knew not. At least out here I could breathe fresh air and hear city sounds. The bells of several churches clanged the time—three of the clock. Carters and peddlers shouted their wares from across the moat and tall walls, much sweeter sounds than the rattle of keys, or worse, the echo of disembodied voices from the dungeons of this place.

How I wished for an omen I would soon be safe and free. But one of the black-as-night Tower ravens screeched at me. A fierce beast from the royal menagerie in the Lion Tower roared just before the iron portcullis at the end of the Middle Tower slammed its teeth into the pavement as if to keep me in and salvation out. When I stumbled on a crooked paving stone, Sir Thomas put his hand to my elbow and spoke.

“No more cobbled-up excuses. Time to tell true, and you know it, Mrs. Ashley.” He squeezed my arm before he let loose. His eyes seemed to pierce through me. Whatever abilities had brought him to the young king’s Privy Council, I knew what talents made him their examiner: the man’s mere presence chilled one to the bone, and he could twist and record the merest sigh or slip of the tongue faster than summer lightning. I drew back; they pushed me on. I feared—I knew—they were taking me to torture. I would be maimed for life; I would never live through such; I would blurt out all.

Just ahead of us sat the stone church of St. Peter in Chains, a name so perfect for this place. Under the paving stones within, Anne Boleyn’s body lay yet today, stuffed in an old wooden chest for arrows because no one had thought to bring a coffin for her. St. Peter’s lay just across the now frost-blighted green where had stood the scaffold for beheadings.

Even now I could see the swing of the sword that cleaved Anne’s head from her body. I felt the bile rise in my throat again. Though I had only served Anne off and on in my earliest years at court, I had felt a bond with her, for she had needed me and trusted me with her confidences, with the ring for her child—and with Elizabeth’s well-being. That time she had ordered Cromwell to bring me to the Tower she had demanded the promise of him that I be sent where Elizabeth went, at least until her majority. Though Anne and Cromwell were long gone, I had taken Anne’s wish as my passion to protect Elizabeth. I felt close to Anne because I had become the mother Elizabeth had lost. Oh, yes, Anne Boleyn had given Elizabeth Tudor life, but I had given her love.

And so, in my deepest dreams, I had somehow been haunted by Anne. Worries I would let her down kept me awake some nights, and I fancied she sometimes spoke to me in my sleep, desperately, passionately, even as she had that last moment when she hugged me farewell in her prison room here at the Tower and I vowed to be her girl’s good teacher and friend always.

But what was to become of us now? Would my lovey’s interrogators charge her and imprison her? What if I shared Anne’s fate here in the place she died? For indeed, it was now my turn to face the terrors of the Tower, ones I could not escape even in sleep.

For, though Anne had died more than twelve years ago, in a dream last night, I had seen her again. She’d come into my cell, crying, “I beg you, tend my girl. Red-haired, the hue of my martyr’s blood spilled for her—see?” she’d cried, touching her neck, then holding out beseeching crimson hands to me. “Innocent, I was innocent. I praised the king from the scaffold when I should have cursed him . . . all, all so he would not harm Elizabeth. Innocent . . . tell them you are innocent and she is, too . . . take care of my girl. . . .”

I shook my head to clear it, so exhausted I was seeing apparitions even now. Light-headed, I was floating, barely putting one foot before the other.

We entered the White Tower, which stood in the very center of the walls, then down we went, down narrow, twisting stairs below the ancient chapel. I gasped when they swung open the small, creaking door of a fetid-smelling cell, small and dark as an arrow-box coffin. The short, narrow door had no grate; all was dark within. I expected to be shoved inside and ducked to avoid banging my head.

Behind me, the Lord Lieutenant’s voice boomed out, “We call it the Little Ease, so small no one can stand erect in it nor sit, and ’tis as black as the pit of hell down here. So easy for one to be forgotten . . .”

His words struck me hard. One of my worst fears, even long before I made a devil’s bargain to be brought to court from distant Devon, long before I began to serve the magnificent and terrible Tudors, was that I would be of no account in this life. I was living my life on the fringes of Dartmoor, which I now longed for with all my heart. Its mists could hide one, its desolation, loneliness and hauntings were naught compared to this looming horror.

Instead of Anne Boleyn’s singsong pleas in my head, I heard a voice chant words I used to sing as a child:
Devon, O Devon, in wind and rain, my heart returns to you again.
Was I going mad in this place?

To my shock and utter relief, they turned me about and led me up and away from the dungeon of Little Ease to another of the towers. There they showed me the rack, which pulled one’s joints asunder, the very rack where they had broken the Protestant martyr Anne Askew before her death. In other soot-smoked chambers, they paraded past my wide eyes dreadful instruments they called thumbscrews, obscene-looking knives, pincers and pokers heating in a brazier full of glowing coals. I dry-heaved when they displayed for me the collection of gleaming teeth that had been extracted from hapless prisoners. I began to shake so hard my own teeth chattered.

Worse even were what they boasted would be best for a “woman’s tender mercies, for they are named for womankind.” The Scavenger’s Daughter was an iron ring that brought the head and feet and hands together in a backward circle of wrenching bones and muscles. The Iron Maiden, a life-sized case hammered out in a female form, pierced the person with iron spikes until their screams echoed “clear across the green to my very lodgings hard by the Bell Tower,” the Lord Lieutenant observed with a sad shake of his hoary head. I could hear the very Tower walls echo with silent screams of lost souls.

“I will brook no excuse, so I pray our guest takes these things to heart—a word to the wise, Sir Thomas,” the Lord Lieutenant said as if trying to keep a naughty child in line or as if I were not even present. How often had men treated me thus, speaking in my earshot as if what I thought was of no matter in the grand scheme of things. “And, no doubt,” he went on, “the governess of a Tudor has learned to be wise, however dense they both have pretended to be of late.”

“Aye, appointed to the Lady Elizabeth by King Henry himself, weren’t you, Katherine Champernowne Ashley?” Sir Thomas asked, using my whole name as if he were familiar with the entire record of my life. “With a nod from clever Cromwell, I hear.”

Now I could only nod. That question I could answer with impunity, at least. Lord Cromwell’s sharp visage floated before me, then Henry Tudor’s florid face—even my father’s, as if I were reviewing my life before my impending death. Why did men ever seem to rule my life, rule the world? From my first days it had been so, but I had fought it and had helped my sweet, strong Elizabeth learn to fight it too. Even the Lord Jesus valued women, for to whom did He first appear after His resurrection but a woman? And three women boldly kept a vigil near the cross as he was tortured and died . . . was tortured and died. . . .

I shook my head to clear it. I must cling to the vow we, Her Grace’s loyal friends who had been her family in her cruel exile, had made. We would not answer their vile, accusatory interrogations. John, I knew, would hold to that, no matter what, so—through my death or his—I might lose him for good. Parry, Her Grace’s treasurer, had sworn wild horses would pull him apart before he would divulge the goings-on he had seen between our royal charge and that blackguard Tom Seymour. And therein, in all that I knew about Tom, all I had buried deep within me—not only of him and Her Grace, but of him and me—lay my deepest terrors. What would I blurt out if they tortured me?

But again, to my utter shock and relief, they escorted me away, back to my own cell. Despite the dank straw I had stuffed in the cracks around the window in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, despite the moldy walls and reeking chamber pot, it had never looked so grand or welcoming. I assumed these men meant to give me one last chance before they used their horrid instruments upon my tender woman’s body.

“Such a beautiful body, full breasts, lush hips and strong legs to ride a horse—or a man,” John had whispered once, when he was wooing me. Unlike John, Tom had always just taken what he wanted and never with pretty words, for he thought women on their backsides at his feet were his birthright. I could hurt him now for all he had done with but a few comments, yet then my Elizabeth might be pulled down even more into the mire, her slim prospects ever to sit England’s throne forever gone.

“Sit,” Sir Thomas said, and shoved me onto one of the two stools in the room. He perched behind a portable desk that had not been there today, though he had brought it with him twice before. “I believe you see what awaits you if you refuse to answer our queries. I would read this to you, but I hear you are not only a fast reader but a good one—one who reads from the heart, I heard Queen Mary herself say once. Do not think to so much as bend that paper, Mrs. Ashley, for we have two copies already, one en route to the Lord Protector to share with the Council. Quick, now. I’ll brook no more of your delays or clever bantering. Here is the confession.” He held out to me a piece of parchment, written top to bottom, and I took it from his hand.

Whose confession?
I thought, fearful at first they had forged one for me to sign. Surely not one from Her Grace or my lord John.
No, Parry’s signature was here at the end, his writing indeed, but shaky. Dear Lord, had they tortured Parry to get this confession, and now they will do the same to me?