The Fourth Queen

Chapter 1

‘Sir William Sharington is requesting to see you, Marris.’ Rose’s words were very formal and she bobbed her head to her older sister.

‘I have asked him to wait in the warming room, thinking that perhaps that would be best…’ Her voice trailed away into uncertainty.

She folded her hands neatly into her sleeves.

Marris noted the gesture. It looked like a sign of humility but in fact it merely signified how cold it was in the abbess’s chamber on a winter morning when there was ice around the window casements.

‘Requesting, is he?’ Marris said, raising an eyebrow. ‘He steals my priory and then he politely requests to speak with me?’

Their other sister, Bridget, who was curled up on the window seat, deep in a book, looked up and laughed. ‘Would you have Rose pass that message to him?’ she asked. ‘I’ll wager it will be well received.’

Rose looked terrified. Ever since the first rumours had reached the convent that King Henry had designs on the wealth of the Church and would send his accursed commissioners to evict every last monk and nun in the kingdom, she had been jumping at shadows.

‘Don’t make me say that,’ she entreated, chalk-white.

Bridget laughed again. ‘You are such a child, Rose,’ she said.

‘Of course Marris would never be so indiscreet.’ Her eyes flashed with mockery.

‘None of us wish to end up in the Tower of London or on the executioner’s block.

Besides…’ She stretched suddenly, long and supple, a movement that looked far too sensuous for a novice nun in a habit.

‘It is not Sir William who is the thief. He is paying handsomely to buy the Winterhill estate. It is King Henry and that devil Thomas Cromwell who want to overturn our world and profit from it.’

‘Bridget,’ Marris said sharply. She turned to Rose with a reassuring smile. ‘Please tell Sir William that I shall join him shortly.’

Rose bobbed her head again and departed, her footsteps noiseless on the stone stairs leading down to the cloister.

‘Is he here to force us to leave?’ Bridget asked.

‘I imagine so,’ Marris agreed. She felt the weight of loss settle on her, as heavy as the stones of the priory themselves.

‘We should have gone sooner,’ Bridget groused, ‘and taken all the books with us.’ She put aside the one she was reading, one of the very fine collections of illuminated manuscripts from the priory’s library, which Marris knew she had expressly asked her sister not to remove.

The ink appeared slightly smudged, the colours blurring into one another.

Marris sighed. Did it matter now, when every object that Winterhill Priory possessed was being sold off to Sir William Sharington?

Bridget had told her that she should hide the silver and burn everything else: vestments, papers, furniture.

The library, Bridget would take for herself.

Bridget was the scholar, as hungry for learning as Rose was for love.

Both in their own ways were ill-fitted to be nuns.

As was Marris, if she were honest. She was an excellent administrator but somewhat lacking in the required humility and holiness.

Bridget had always been the child who had asked questions from an early age: ‘How far is the moon?’, ‘Why is the grass green?’, ‘Who is God?’ As she grew older, she had only become more questioning, her sharp, bright mind grasping after knowledge.

Now, though, she was miserable. Marris saw a tear plop onto the manuscript, making the colours of the ink blur and run.

‘I wanted to live in a library forever,’ Bridget said. ‘I wanted to study and learn. I wanted to write – words, music…’ Her shrug held nothing but hopelessness.

Marris wanted to embrace her, but Bridget was not affectionate.

Unlike Rose, she did not seek love but was as prickly as a hedgehog.

Marris thought of the modest plans she had made for their future.

They had no close family left alive who would give them shelter, which was why they had come to the nunnery in the first place.

Their family was an old and well-respected one but the distant cousins who held the Northey title now would not want another mouth to feed, let alone three, and Marris was too proud to ask anyway.

It was a besetting sin of hers and another reason why she was probably not a good nun, but there had been no one else left who could run Winterhill when the last prioress had died two years before.

She smoothed her nun’s habit in a slight, nervous gesture.

She knew that in a moment she would need to go down to meet Sir William Sharington, the priory’s new owner.

She could not afford to antagonise him by keeping him waiting too long.

They had already outstayed their welcome at Winterhill – the other nuns and novices had departed weeks before – and she had no desire for him to throw the three of them out on the street without further ado.

She just needed a few more weeks to find new lodgings for herself and her sisters, and plan their futures.

She had been so busy taking care of the other nuns and the estate’s tenants that she had neglected herself and her family.

‘Perhaps when you are a little older,’ she said, trying to find the words to comfort Bridget, ‘you might go abroad where the religious climate is different and there are still priories with great libraries you could live and work in.’ Even as she offered Bridget the comfort, though, she knew she was lying.

Bridget’s future was more likely to involve scrubbing pots in an inn or waiting on the gentry than it was travelling to distant countries to fulfil her own ambitions.

A woman had to eat; she had to survive. That came before the luxury of reading.

But Bridget, at sixteen, had never had to make those choices.

Marris sighed, slipping her feet into her sandals.

She had surreptitiously been warming them under her tunic, and the cold touch of the leather on her skin made her wince now.

She tightened the cincture about her waist. She assumed that her wimple and veil were straight.

There was no mirror in the chamber so she had no way of knowing.

Nor should she care, of course. Vanity was another sin.

‘Bridget,’ she said, ‘is my wimple straight? No hair showing?’

‘Yes and no.’ Bridget did not look up from the book.

With a sigh, Marris crossed to the door and let herself out.

She had left Sir William alone long enough.

She doubted that he was a man who was accustomed to waiting for anything.

He was a courtier, a close friend of the King’s brother-in-law Thomas Seymour, and even a nun knew what sort of a man Seymour was.

Both of them were influential and in high favour at court.

The closing of Winterhill Priory was an opportunity for Sir William to take the estate and build a house he felt befitted his worldly status, and he would do it from the ruins of a holy way of life.

Marris made her way down from her chamber and out into the cloisters.

With their stone arcades and traceried arches, they were silent because almost all the nuns had gone back to their families, or been pensioned off ahead of the sale.

Only that morning Marris had had to explain to the parents of a young girl that she could not give their daughter a place at the priory because there would soon be no priory.

The old ways were ending and the old certainties with them.

The priory was no longer a place of refuge for those seeking sanctuary, least of all for women of good but poor families looking for a safe future, or even a profession.

Bewildered, unable to conceive of a world where the Church no longer provided the structure of their lives, many of the villagers simply did not understand that this mainstay of their lives would soon be gone.

Marris thought of the soaring arches of the priory church, the way that the music entwined around those high pillars and the light fell on the tiles of the floor, where over the course of hundreds of years, pilgrims’ feet had muted the colours with their devotion.

She could not be here when the walls fell.

She knew she would not be able to bear it.

Winterhill Priory might be small compared to so many of the great religious houses, but it was not insignificant to her, nor to any of those who had lived their lives in its shadow.

She paused, her hand on the latch of the warming room door.

She needed to compose herself. Perhaps Sir William had some queries on the documents she had left for him – the ledgers and records of land yields and profits from rents, the inventories of estates and buildings and their contents.

She needed to keep a cool head and not be moved by anger and resentment.

Sir William was standing before the fire, his back turned to the room, something impatient in his stance.

Marris had a few seconds in which to study him before he turned on hearing the lift of the latch.

He would, she thought, have caused a flutter in the priory dovecote, had it not been empty of birds these two months past. He brought a sense of masculine energy to the place that was deeply unfamiliar since the parish priest who led their services possessed not a smidgen of it.

She had known a number of men during the course of her life – she had been briefly a wife, then a widow – and she understood men’s ways and, to a degree, how to deal with them.

The nuns of Winterhill Priory, however, had they met Sir William Sharington, would have been like chickens when a fox got in the hen house.