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CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Boleyn

B oleyn never had business in the Tower of Elben, so she never thought much on it. Her eyes slid over the building whenever she walked the grounds of High Hall, erasing it from her view of the kingdom, the king, and the power he wields.

The Tower is set on an island abutting the south-west gardens of High Hall.

Its exterior is coated in green enamel, so it gleams like poison.

It is also entirely smooth – a gilded cruelty – a beautiful way of preventing anyone from climbing up, or down.

Boleyn is led across the single bridge, over a moat filled not with water but with bubbling oil that leaves a greasy coat on her skin.

She once heard, in one of those fairy tales told by nurses to frighten children, that the oil is kept hot by a legion of dragons, held in caves beneath the moat and fed with prisoners of war.

Two of those dragons stand guard on either side of the bridge, their scales varnished with gimrodor , a precious oil that turns anything it is painted upon to stone.

Only the dragons’ eyes remain uncoated, and they roll and gleam with fear and fury at any who pass.

At the crossing, one of Boleyn’s guards produces a short knife from his belt and brandishes it at her, smirking when she flinches.

Silently, he hacks at her wedding dress, cutting the train until the gown sits raggedly just below her ankle.

He balls up the rest of the fabric and hurls it over the bridge into the oil.

Boleyn stares as the crimson velvet grows darker, the oil seeping into it, and is consumed and pulled beneath the surface.

She wonders at the hatred this stranger bears her, that he is willing to destroy material that could have paid his annual salary many times over, simply for the pleasure of seeing her distress.

The guard leads her onwards. The wall seems to fracture, and a door appears. A maw.

Inside the Tower, no care has been taken to make it look palatable.

The impressive door gives way to a windowless room filled with guards.

They stare at Boleyn, so expressionless that they could be statues rather than living beings.

At one side of the room, a narrow staircase winds up around a central pillar.

The space is oppressively hot. Her throat burns when she inhales.

A pit covered with iron bars sits in the centre of the space.

Roars and growls rise from its depths, and with each one the pit glows with a burst of flame.

The guard pushes her up the stairway. She climbs, her calves burning after only a few floors.

She tries to find mercy in the fact that the heat ebbs away as they go higher.

By the time her skin is prickled all over with sweat, she stumbles out of the stairway into a narrow corridor lit by candles. They are at the apex of the Tower.

Before her, a new guard stands next to a heavy oak door set with a small, iron-clad window. Silently, the guard unlocks the door and opens it for her. With nowhere else to go, Boleyn enters the cell. Behind her, the key turns in the lock.

The cell is almost circular, apart from a single straight wall containing the door.

It is bare except for a truckle bed and a pot for excretions.

There is one glassless window, too small for any but the smallest of children to slip through.

An icy wind snaps through the window. If she looks outward, she can see High Hall – the rooms that were, for a brief time, hers, and the dome where Henry might be, even now, deciding her fate.

Directly below her window is a courtyard, set across from the moat.

There, a dozen or so men carry planks of wood, assembling them into a stage, hammering them into place and jumping on them to test the sturdiness of the platform.

Fear and exhaustion have made Boleyn slow-witted, for it takes her some time to understand what they are making.

It is only when they bring the block, with its horseshoe divet, that she realises.

She screams, out into the mounting dusk, and the wind carries her scream far, far away, across the forest of her territory and out to the Sea of Hreonessa.

Once the sun has set, they bring torches.

Boleyn clings to the windowsill until her hands ache and her wrists smart.

Everything in her is numbed – her muscles, her mind, her heart.

Yet even as she mourns the loss of her love, she can’t help but acknowledge that part of the reason she fell in love with Henry was his ruthlessness.

He courted her with brutality, from the moment she urged her horse to overtake his in the woods.

This execution is the natural ending to their courtship, and better by far than the slow-wasting death she would otherwise have endured.

As the sun sets behind the king’s dome, the guard comes in with a dirty plate of rotting meat and stale bread, along with a tankard of warm perry. He pauses in the doorway.

“I can get you better, if you want,” he says.

Boleyn stares at a maggot crawling over the meat and swallows her pride.

“Really?”

“Certainly. I’ll want paying, mind.”

She drags her eyes up from rotting meat to rotten man, and he smiles slowly as he slides a hand down the front of his trousers.

“You’re disgusting,” she whispers.

In an instant, that hand is out of his trousers and around her neck. He pushes her against the wall and squeezes until she chokes.

“Don’t think you’re better than me, you whore,” he whispers. He stinks of ale and arousal. He bangs her head once against the wall, then releases her, letting her slide to the floor gulping in ragged breaths. He kicks the plate towards her.

“You’re not even attractive,” he says, as though it’s the worst insult he could possibly throw at her. He slams the door and the key turns in the lock.

Boleyn refuses to let him hear her sobs, but she cannot stop the tears from coming.

She covers her face with her sleeve to muffle the sound.

When the worst has subsided, she crawls over to the plate and cup.

She drinks the liquid but leaves the food, then returns, neck and head aching, to her position at the window.

The lights in the palace have all been lit now, each window a star.

She maps their constellations – that configuration belonging to Daven; that one to Hyde.

And then the candles in Brynd’s rooms are lit, and her heart clenches.

Who is occupying her rooms? Has Henry found another replacement, so soon?

Or is this an unknowing servant merely doing their rounds?

These questions torture her until renewed movement below catches her attention.

Someone is being brought into the courtyard, their hands tied behind their back.

Boleyn strains to see who it is, praying to the goddess, to Cernunnos, to whoever might grant wishes to a doomed woman, that it isn’t either of her siblings.

Then the prisoner is thrown onto the scaffold, and the torches illuminate their face.

Wyatt.

The man who would be her lover, the man who silently helped her commit treason without asking her why. Her hands slip on the windowsill, but she will not crumple. She will not look away. This is what she has done. This is where her blind pursuit of justice has led.

One of the guards points up at Boleyn’s window and says something to Wyatt. He looks up. Even from this distance, in the half-light, Boleyn can see that his face is a mess of bruises and cuts. He isn’t holding himself right either, his clothes hiding a litany of other injuries.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, knowing that he will never be able to hear her, even were she to scream it.

And yet, he does seem to hear her. Because he has always heard the beat of her heart, understood it better than the man she was married to.

He straightens, slowly, every movement costing him.

He tilts his head towards her, as though straining to glimpse the midday sun.

His hands are bound in front of him, but he brings them to his chest, where his heart lies. He thumps them there, once, twice.

A salute. A promise. Forgiveness.

He keeps looking at Boleyn as they force him to his knees, refusing to allow them to place his head on the block.

There’s some commotion that she cannot understand, and in it she takes the bottom of her dress and tears at the already ragged hem, stripping a piece of the red velvet from the rest of the garment.

She thrusts it out of the window, far enough that she hopes he can see it.

He does. He raises his hands once more to his chest, just as someone passes the executioner a sword, and the executioner swings it, and Wyatt looks no more.