Chapter 4
Morley Hallingbury, Norfolk, Spring
THE SNOWDROPS COME out like little fingernails of green and white, pushing through the dead leaves as if they will never grow tall and droop their pretty heads like bells.
I think the winter has been long for them, but still they rise.
The people in the cottages at Hallingbury have eaten up all their winter stores, and Mother says they must go to the abbeys for charity: the king’s new church must take care of the king’s poor as the old one did.
Someone breaches the wall of the park and kills a deer; my father says that he will hang him.
The game in our park is for sport – the king might want to come and kill our stags one day – it is not meat for stew pots of hungry people.
It has been a long cold winter for the traitors in the Tower, too: four monks, a priest, and Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher have gone all season without fires or hot food.
I suppose that the king is leaving them there to die of cold and hunger, but Father says no: Master Secretary Cromwell is wrestling with them.
‘Wrestling?’ I ask, as if they have a booth on Tower Green.
‘Entrapping them,’ he says. ‘But I don’t think even Thomas Cromwell will trick Thomas More.
He’s a learned man, and he loves his family.
He’s not going to make a slip of the tongue that could cost him his head.
He’s going to want to get home to that funny little wife of his and his great library in that beautiful house by the river. ’
‘But who wants the house by the river?’ my mother asks, coming in at the end of the conversation and getting the wrong idea, as usual. ‘Who gets the library?’
SLOWLY, THE DAWN comes earlier and earlier each morning, and the birds start to sing at seven by the church bell, and then six and then five, and the woods turn green; but still, I wait for an invitation to return to court.
At church on Sunday, the sunshine streams through the stained-glass window, and when I enter, early, for mass, I find our priest working on his missal with a knife and glue like a spy on a letter.
He is sticking a piece of paper over the name of the pope every time it occurs in the prayers for blessings.
‘What are you doing, Father Pierce?’
‘Obeying an instruction from my bishop.’ His pale face is flushed with irritation.
‘I am to cut out the name of the . . . of the Bishop of Rome . . .’ The title sounds oddly in this church that has prayed for our Holy Father since it was built five hundred years ago.
‘Cut it out of my prayer book! And we are no longer to pray for . . . him. See—’
He shows me the bishop’s letter. It says that instead of the pope and the cardinals, the prayers are to be for the whole Catholic Church and for the Catholic Church of Rome, for the king – only Supreme Head of the Catholic Church of England – for Queen Anne and the princess, Lady Elizabeth, for the whole clergy and temporality.
He looks at me, indignant. ‘What will your father say to this, Lady Rochford? What would he have me do? For my bishop commands it – but the people won’t like it, and I . . .’ He breaks off.
‘He’d want you to obey the law. The king’s will,’ I say firmly.
‘But is it the king’s own will?’ the vicar asks me in an undertone. ‘For it’s not what he swore at his coronation, and it’s not what I swore when I was ordained? Is it the king’s will or that of bad advisors?’
I shake my head. We both know this is Anne’s will, and the law is written at her bidding. Who but Anne would command the people of England to pray for her and order every priest to name her in royal prayers in every parish instead of the pope?
‘My father obeys the law,’ I say shortly. ‘As do we all.’
He bows his head; he turns away, as if he is disappointed in me, and he goes back to defacing his missal. We both know it is the vandalising of the books that will upset my father more than anything.