Blood Ties (25 page)

‘What day is this?’

His raspy voice carried to the black-browed man ahead, the Ram’s Irish landlord and Uriah’s lieutenant, Magonnagal.

‘Eh?’ he grunted. ‘Some saint, isn’t it? Always some bloody saint. Clear the way there!’ he bellowed ahead, then, turning back, he added, ‘Saint Experious, patron of the plough and bloody planting. Nineteenth of May.’

He’d known. Of course he’d known. But something inside him had tried to force that knowledge away.

‘Father! What is it?’

The concern on Anne’s face showed him the anguish that must be on his.

‘Nothing, child, it’s nothing. Help him push. I’ll catch up.’

The nineteenth of May! The day itself? How was that possible?

Nineteen years to the very day when last he’d been in the fortress he approached now. Nineteen years since he’d taken Anne Boleyn’s head, more, sworn a vow, taken her fabled hand, begun that journey. How many lives had that vow affected, how many deaths had it brought? As well as the birth of the girl now looking back anxiously along the bridge and of the boy Uriah had told them awaited ahead. Nineteen years and the circle complete, the journey back at its beginning, the hand returned. All that suffering – in vain.

Frozen there, as the crowds cursed and surged around him, his whole life suddenly seemed to him mere mockery, a hideous masque performed for random and capricious gods. He was their puppet, a plaything. And of this, above all else, he was suddenly certain – the masque approached its climax. He had been summoned back to this stage to die.

Jostled and knocked, he lurched forward, took one step and then another. The cart had been held in a duel for the roadspace, Jean catching up as Magonnagal threatened another carter with a whip. The man conceded the way to the huge Irishman, and they moved on.

Anne touched her father’s arm. ‘Are you all right? Should we rest, go back?’ The greyness of his face frightened her. ‘Maybe we should return another day?’

‘This is the day, child. The only day.’

She turned away, couldn’t look at him any longer. Not when she couldn’t separate his fears of what lay ahead from her own.

As they left the bridge, the crowds got denser, as ways merged, and all headed to the fortress. Uriah had told them that there had been disturbances when burnings were held the week before on the hill outside the Tower’s walls. Sympathizers had almost freed the heretics, so the authorities had decided not to take that chance again.

‘So they’ll burn ’em inside, before an invited audience,’ the Englishman had said. ‘Which is better for me. Outside, it’s like a fairground, anyone can set up a food stall. Within the walls, that’s my little manor, with a richer crowd who will pay well for their pleasures. Know the funny thing?’ His smile grew. ‘I have to cater to different tastes each time. At a beheading, they want pastries, sweetmeats, all manner of sugared goods. At a burning, now, all they crave is roasted meat! The blacker the better. Must be the savour in the air, eh?’

Anne hadn’t liked the man, was glad when he went ahead long before the dawn ‘to get the spits turning’. Still, they had no choice but to trust him. Her father was determined that it must end now, this day, that they had to get to Gianni, get the hand if possible, flee again. It was as if he sensed the limits of what he could do and knew they fast approached.

The crowd was thickest at the first gate, where warders turned many away. Magonnagal showed them the barrels on the cart, passed one over and they were admitted, following others of the privileged across a small drawbridge to another gateway. Beyond this, a larger drawbridge led to a much larger Tower.

‘The Byward,’ Magonnagal muttered. ‘Through that, and we’re a short push to the Green. Then I can rest my bloody shoulders.’

While most of the crowd surged forward, parallel with the river, the Irishman led them left, bringing the cart to a small wooden door set in the wall beside a large rectangular tower.

‘The Beauchamp,’ he said, rapping three times on the wood. ‘Brings us out beside the Green and we don’t have to shove through the bloody crowd.’

Bolts slid within, two of Uriah’s men appeared and immediately began rolling the barrels into the darkness ahead. Jean, who’d paused in the doorway at Magonnagal’s words, now grabbed a barrel and followed the men into the tower.

‘Too many ghosts,’ he muttered as he entered. ‘I can’t stop and acknowledge every one!’ Nevertheless, as he followed the men down the flagstoned corridor, he could not help but remember. Anne Boleyn had spent her last night in the Beauchamp. He had sworn his vow to her within these flagstone walls.

The view, nineteen years on, as he emerged into the light again, was different. Then, there had been a bare hundred people, the elect of the elect, who had fought to be present at the killing of the Queen. Now, at least five hundred heads bobbed on the Green, between the south wall and the squat, massive White Tower opposite. His view was different too, for then he’d stood with his back to the chapel, on a straw-strewn scaffold, the small crowd reaching right up to it. Now, the chapel was to his left with no wooden stage before it, just four stakes thrust into the grass in a rough semi-circle, a huge pile of chopped wood at their centre, warded by a double line of soldiers that stretched all the way across to the White Tower. Beside three of the stakes stood men in besmirched leathern aprons, crude, sack-like masks over their heads, oval slashes for their eyes. Each held a hammer, nails, and a hoop of iron.

‘Now where’s that bloody man at, then?’ Magonnagal peered over the crowd, shading his eyes from the morning sun. ‘Ah!’ he cried and Jean followed his outstretched arm to the corner of the White Tower, where smoke was already rising, blown across the crowd by a strong easterly, carrying the first scent of roasted flesh. At the centre of the swirl, he could see the huge figure of Makepeace, stripped of his doublet, moving between two spits, cajoling the spit boys, larding the sheep carcasses, the fat lifted from a trough within the fires with a large ladle. He saw Uriah see them, see Magonnagal anyway, who was waving a scarlet cloth on a pole above his head. Raising the ladle in acknowledgement, Uriah turned to talk to someone beside him, but Jean could not see who it was through the smoke.

‘Ale!’ bellowed the Irishman, rapping the pole on a hogshead. ‘Finest sweet ale from the Ram, in Southwark.’ Those nearest began to press upon them, waving wooden cups and small coin. Jean and Anne, squeezed to the side, mounted the stairs that led to the upper level.

He had just turned to her to say, in vain hope, ‘Do you see Gianni?’ when a blast of trumpets overcame his words. It issued from the White Tower, whose massive, iron-studded doors swung open to the sound, as if the braying had hitherto been contained within them. The single blast still bounced off the walls when another sound joined it, the deep trump of a single drum. All eyes, including theirs, fixed upon the dark entranceway, as the head of the procession emerged. It was led by pikemen, dressed in the scarlet doublets and black hose of the Tower guard, advancing in four ranks of five, their weapons lowered so that the crowd parted before the points, forming an avenue as wide as the squad’s front. To their rear, the single drummer walked alone, his beat dictating the procession’s pace. Behind him came five trumpeters, their instruments now at rest to their sides. These were followed by the priests, six of them, in white surplices, three carrying banners of black silk split with a white cross, the lamb of Christ couched in the top right quarter. One waved a censer that issued forth clouds of fragrant sandalwood smoke, two clutched huge altar candles with sheltered flames, a fourth tolled a heavy bell; each of the six chanted, as they walked, the Latin
Misere
in harmony and dirge-like solemnity.

The crowd began to shout, for behind the priests emerged those they had come to see die. The four prisoners were dressed in simple contrast, like pilgrims in their plain smocks, barefoot; three had their hands bound before them, one huge man and two women, while the fourth, a youth, the only one of them who wept, clutched a piece of firewood in his un-yoked hands. Beside each of them a cowled figure held a book of prayer, their hooded faces leaning in, lips moving in the shadows. Only the man in the black cloak beside the weeping boy did not speak, a hand resting on his shoulder.

‘Why does he carry wood, Father? What does it mean?’

‘He has repented. So he “carries his faggot” as a sign. The boy will not burn today.’

As the end of the procession emerged – a company of archers following a few richly dressed men, members of the council – the head of it reached the rank of soldiers before the execution ground. They parted to admit them and warders and priests spread out among the stakes. The weeping youth threw down his wood and was led away by his black-cloaked comforter. The remaining three prisoners were seized by the masked men, who girdled them with the iron hoops, fastening these with rivets to the centre of the stakes. They began to build a rough pyramid of logs around each stake over a core of dried bracken while the trumpets sounded. As their call died away, as the priests ended their dirge, the drum struck, once, twice, again.

Two of the cowled companions who had prayed and exhorted beside the sinners until that moment now moved to places behind the council. The third, who had stood beside the huge heretic, went the opposite way, toward the brazier, where a torch was lit and passed into his hand. Raising it high above him, he picked up the drum’s beat and walked slowly toward the first stake, the man he’d just left, whose lips moved in ceaseless prayer. A silence now gripped the throng, one so profound that all that could be heard beyond the drumbeat, beyond the snapping of silk banners in the breeze, beyond the whisper of the martyrs, was the crackling of flames.

It was when the torchbearer threw back his cowl that Anne gripped Jean’s arm, crying out as if she had been stabbed. He could not penetrate the smoke that swirled between him and the killing ground, could not see what she had just seen. But there was no mistaking the voice he next heard, though he had not heard it in three years, though it had deepened and lost its Tuscan coarseness.

‘Observe the justice of the Lord!’ cried Gianni Rombaud as he thrust the flames into the pyre.

That voice took away all other sounds, those words breaking something inside Jean. Time slowed, as it always had at Death’s approach, but now he was no longer at the centre of that vortex of power, he was at its edge, unable to channel it, scarcely able to move, only able to watch as his daughter went past him, lifting one foot, setting it down, lifting the other, setting it down, lips forming a name, her brother’s name, as if his name, screamed out, would be enough to stop the horror. He knew that in her world sounds existed, exploding from a frenzied crowd moving forward for a better view, that in her world the hand he raised – too slowly, too late – might stop her. Yet even though she seemed to barely move she was gone, the black hair glimpsed now and then as she somehow passed through the throng.

‘No!’

It was Jean’s turn to scream, for once more a Rombaud stood at the darkest centre of this dark realm, wielding death. Yet all that despair was a whisper in a storm, snatched up, blown away, by the noise of the crowd returning in full fury. He turned to his right, to where Uriah was forging, as if through a sea of caps, toward him. He turned left, to see Magonnagal pick up a club from behind a hogshead and take the first step his way. Suddenly, he knew, he recognized his betrayal and he turned away; but his children were before him and, at just that moment, another surge in the crowd pushed those behind Jean forward. Somehow, the shadow of the gap Anne had opened was still there. He let himself be swept into it, people flooding behind him into the channel, like the tide carving into a cliff face.

‘Anne!’ he screamed, to no avail.

Each step was harder, the wall of flesh ahead of her denser, but she had to break through. For it was not her brother who stood there exalting death. It was not he who pushed the brand into the wood, nor he who had stabbed the German at the crossroads. A demon possessed him, that was clear, and she only had to part this crowd, to reach the centre of the swirling smoke, to wrench that demon from Gianni’s soul.

Gianni prayed for the wind to return and clear the smoke away. He had heard that heretics would choke and faint, that they were smoked to death rather than burned. That seemed like an evasion of God’s will, for only in fire was that will made manifest, representing both the purging of all impure elements, the scouring away of these heretics’ dreadful sins and the awful warning of what awaited such sinners in the eternity of hell. He had himself pulled the sacks of gunpowder from around their necks that some kind or bribed person had tied there to end their pain more swiftly. God would not be so cheated! The flames felt like an extension of himself. They did not start when he pushed the brand into the brazier, they ran from within him, his holy spirit flowing from his heart, transforming wood into tongues of fire.

It is all so simple
, he thought,
As simple as faith. These sinners would bring the Antichrist. These sinners must die
.

Jean saw the torch raised in triumph, then thrust into the last of the pyres, just as the smoke from the first, fast billowing now, snatched away his view both of his daughter pushing through the dense crowd and his son aglow with the ecstasy of sacrifice. Sounds were clear within the smoke, the coughing of both victims and spectators, frantic prayers turning to shrieks as the heat reached the heretics’ bare feet, the beat of the drum, the tolling of the bell, the dirge of the
Misere
all undernotes to the baying of the crowd. Somehow he had closed the gap to his daughter, she was two arm’s lengths ahead of him, five people between, the rank of soldiers buckling as far ahead again. Jean knew that his pursuers were not much further behind.

‘Anne!’ he screamed again, knowing it was futile.

He’d all but reached her when she hit the line of breastplated guardsman, ducked down, disappeared into the thrust of legs. He saw her again as she appeared on the other side, running the short distance now between the soldiers and the last of the pyres.