Free The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau Page A

Those stupid peasants, at the end they begged me to spare them. They were wrong, they cried. Couldn’t the king forgive? I showed no mercy to a single one, mistress, not a one.”
    The spit had gathered in the corners of the duke’s mouth, and I watched it slide down his chin as he ranted.
    “Why did they do it? Why did they defy His Majesty, their anointed monarch?”
    He rounded on me. “They did it for
you,
Joanna Stafford. They did it for all the nunsand the monks and the friars. They wanted their abbeys restored and their feast days reinstated. They never accepted the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon or his new queen. They would not swear oath to him as head of the Church of England. They went into battle with banners of Jesus on His Cross—the soldiers wore badges of the five wounds of Christ. A holy pilgrimage, they said. A Pilgrimage of Grace. How
dare
these vermin take on holy airs? Their leader . . . Robert Aske. That foul lawyer—he will hang in chains in York while I stand watch, Mistress Stafford. But they had other leaders from the northern gentry, like Sir John Bulmer and his ‘wife.’ My damned sister-in-law. I heard the evidence at her trial. She encouraged her husband to lead men in rebellion against the king. She said to him, ‘The Commons want but a head.’ And that if the Commons did not rise, the family must flee to Scotland. She said she’d rather be torn to pieces than go back down to London.”
    Such desperate words did not sound like Margaret. I suspected false testimony. And there was something else I wondered as well.
    “I observed Margaret at Smithfield, and it was obvious she had been roughly handled,” I said.
    “She wasn’t tortured, if that is what you suggest,” the duke said quickly. “And these statements of hers were made in the North, before her chaplain and others, men who freely gave testimony at trial. Do you know what she said about me?” He bared his yellow teeth. “She said not once but twice she wanted my head off. What family loyalty. Ah, but she paid for her crimes. She died a terrible death. You saw it with your own eyes.”
    I flinched at his cruelty but refused to cower. “Yes,” I said, “and even if this ‘evidence’ is true, if it constitutes the worst of her offenses, I still don’t understand why her punishment was so severe, why she alone, of all the wives of the northern rebel leaders, was condemned to be burned at the stake before a mob.”
    Something moved in the duke’s eyes, and I knew at once there was more to Margaret’s arrest and execution, another set of truths behind the ones I’d been told.
    But before I could say anything more, he bore down on me, his black eyes smoking, his narrow chest rising and falling. “Your beloved cousin is gone now.
You
are now our concern, Joanna Stafford. And you want me tobelieve that a novice at a priory, a girl raised in a noble family that’s a nest of traitors to the crown, could be a loyal subject to King Henry the Eighth?”
    I stood mute.
    “Look at this girl, Kingston,” he called out. “They say Howard women are troublesome, but it’s the Stafford females, like my accursed wife and this girl here, who are the worst in the land.”
    He leaned in even closer. “I could horsewhip you now, and no one would blame me. No one would stop me. You know that, don’t you?”
    The words came out before I could stop them. “And I know you would enjoy it.”
    Seconds later, I was lying flat on the floor, facedown, my ears ringing, a burning pain in my jaw. The duke had hit me with his fist. I waited for more blows to rain down on me, for him to employ the whip. Would he kill me with his bare hands, here in the Tower, while Kingston watched?
    Nothing came. I looked up, and Sir William Kingston had moved between us. He said nothing, raised no hand against the duke or hand to help me, but simply stood there, his face grave and pale. Norfolk had turned his back to me, his shoulders