THE TOWER, LONDON,
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1554
John Feckenham comes at dawn, as he promised, carrying with him his box of tricks of bread and wine and goblet and stole, candles and incense and all the furniture and toys that he can bring out to confuse the unwary like a village mountebank making merry for silly children. I look at his wooden box and I look at his honest face.
“I am not going to change my religion to save my neck,” I say. “I am thinking about my soul.”
“I, too,” he says gently. “And the queen has given us three days to talk of holy things.”
“I always liked to study and debate.”
“Then talk to me now,” he says. “Explain to me what you understand by these sacred words . . . Take ye, and eat ye, this is my body, which is broken for you. This do in the remembrance of me.”
I nearly laugh. “Do you not think I have been disputing the meaning of this almost all my life?”
“I know it,” he says steadily. “I know you were raised in error, my poor sister.”
“I am not your sister,” I correct him. “I have two sisters only. If there was a brother, I would not be here now.”
I can hear the clatter of a guard at the Lion Gate and the noise of many men coming into the Tower. I hear the shout to stand, and the noise of men allocating cells. I know that I look startled. “I’d like to see . . .”
He doesn’t move from his seat so I suppose that he knows who they are bringing into the Tower under arrest. I go hastily to the window and look across the garden. I recognize my father, my poor father, and a ragtag of men, arms gone, standards down, horses gone, clearly defeated.
I turn back to Feckenham. “My father is arrested again?” I ask him. “You came here with words of advice but you didn’t tell me this, the one thing that I didn’t know, that I need to know!”
“He was treasonous again,” he says bluntly. “He and Sir Thomas Wyatt tried to enter London at the head of their army.”
“To save me!” I say with sudden anger. “Who could blame him for trying to save me when I am under sentence of death and he has loved me for all my life? I have been his favorite daughter, devout like him, a scholar like him. How could a man like that leave his daughter to die without lifting a finger to save her? Nobody could ask it of him.”
We are quiet for a moment. I am facing him, flushed and with tears in my eyes, and he looks resentful, like a pork butcher, cheated in the market over the price of sausages. He drops his head and his ready color spreads over his broad cheeks.
“He didn’t rise up for you,” he says gently, and his words are like a bell tolling the death knell. “Not for you, my dear. He rose up to put Princess Elizabeth on the throne. But it is because he rose for her that they are going to execute you. I am sorry, my child.”
“He raised an army for Elizabeth?” I can’t believe it. I have told my father what sort of girl Elizabeth is. Why would he rise for her, so malleable in her faith and so unreliable as a house guest?
“He did.”
“But why kill me, if my father rose for Elizabeth?” I whisper. And then, scholar that I am: “It makes no sense. There is no logic.”
His wry smile tells me that he agrees. “The queen’s Spanish advisors want to show that no one can survive rebellion against them,” he corrects himself, “against Her Majesty.”
I hardly care. All I care about is my father. “He was not coming for me? He was never intending to save me? It was all for Elizabeth, and not for me?”
Feckenham knows that this is the worst thing. “You would have been released, I am sure.” He sees the downturn of my mouth, and the angry tears in my eyes. “We cannot know what the conspiracy planned until they confess. Shall we pray to your Father in heaven who loves you? You always have Him.”
“Yes,” I say brokenly, and we kneel together to pray the Pater Noster in English, the prayer that Jesus taught us Himself, where we all are told that God is “Our Father.” I have a Father in heaven even if I don’t have one on earth. Brother Feckenham prays in Latin, I speak the words in English. I don’t doubt that I am heard. I don’t doubt that he is heard, too.
THE TOWER, LONDON,
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1554
They charge my father and he will stand trial for his part in the plot. It was a big, treasonous conspiracy, and it might well have succeeded. They were going to put Elizabeth on the throne and marry her to Edward Courtenay, our Plantagenet cousin, one of our family and one of our faith. Elizabeth denies all knowledge of this, of course. For a girl so well educated she manages to be impressively ignorant when it suits her. But this conspiracy means that our cousin Queen Mary must regard all her kinswomen as a threat. Elizabeth, me, Katherine, even little Mary, Margaret Douglas, and Mary of Scots in France—any one of us could be named as Queen of England in preference to her. We all have an equally good claim; we are all suspect.
I am so anguished that it is a relief when there is a tap on the door and John Feckenham comes in, his big red face creased in a tentative smile, his fair eyebrows upraised as if he is afraid that he is not welcome.
“You can come in,” I say ungraciously. I take a breath and give my prepared speech: “Since I have been granted these days of life to talk with you, though I do so little lament my heavy case that I account it more a manifest declaration of God’s favor towards me than ever He showed me at any time before.”
“You have prepared,” he says, recognizing at once the opening words for a debate, and he puts his books down on the table, and seats himself, as if he knows that wrestling with my soul will be hard work for a misguided heretic like him.
THE TOWER, LONDON,
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1554
My lady mother and Katherine are allowed to visit Father; and Katherine leaves our father and mother to be alone together—as they always want to be—and comes to my room.
She does not know what to say to me, and I have nothing to say to her. We sit in awkward silence. She cries a little, stifling her sobs in the sleeve of her gown. While she is sitting so close, gazing at me with her tear-filled eyes, I cannot study, write, or pray. I cannot even hear my own thoughts. I am just gripped in a whirl of her regrets and fear and grief. It is like being churned in a butter tub; I feel myself going rancid. I don’t want to spend my last day like this. I want to write an account of John Feckenham’s discussion with me, of my triumph over his wrong thinking. I want to prepare my speech for the scaffold. I want to think; I don’t want to feel.
We can hear the noise of the carts bringing the wood to build the scaffold and the workers shouting for their tools, and guiding the carts to the green. At every rumble of the wood being tipped on the paving stones, at every rasp of the saws and tapping of a hammer, Katherine flinches, her pretty face white as skimmed milk, her eyes the color of ink.
“I will die for my faith,” I say to her suddenly.
“You will die because Father joined a rebellion against the crowned queen,” she bursts out. “It wasn’t even for you!”
“That may be what they say,” I reply steadily. “But the queen has turned her back on those who believe in the true way to God, broken her promise that people might worship according to their conscience, and is throwing the country under the command of the Bishop of Rome and the hidalgos of Spain. So she has turned against me because of my faith and that is why I shall die.”