The Tudor Secret - C. W. Gortner [109]
“She loves him!” I yelled. “She’s loved him since they were children! You knew that, and you deliberately set out to destroy it. Who are you to dictate her fate? Who are you to say where she may or may not give her heart?”
“Her friend,” was his reply, “the only one with the stomach to save her from herself. Robert Dudley was her downfall. Now she need never be tempted. Even if he can survive Mary’s wrath, which is most unlikely, he’s lost Elizabeth forever. She’ll never trust him completely again. It is a reward which, in my estimation, more than compensates her suffering.”
“You’re a monster.” My breath came in stifled bursts. “Did you ever stop to think that in your grandiose plan to put a crown on her head you might break her spirit? Or that Jane Grey, who never wanted any part of this, could lose her life because of it?”
Cecil’s gaze riveted me to my spot. “Elizabeth is more resilient than you think. As for Jane Grey, it wasn’t my idea to make her queen. I merely sought to benefit from it.”
I wanted to leave him there, with his papers and his machinations. Nothing he could tell me now would bring me anything other than revulsion, despair.
And yet I stayed, transfixed.
His smile was like slivered steel. “Have you nothing to say? We’ve reached the crux of the matter, the reason why you are here. So go on. Ask me. Ask what else I’ve been hiding from you. Ask me about the herbalist and the reason Frances of Suffolk had to surrender her claim to the throne to her daughter.”
He let out a small sigh. “Ask me, Brendan Prescott, who you are.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
“You know,” I whispered. “You have known from the start.”
“Not from the start,” Cecil said, with an air of reprove. “I only heard a rumor years ago, when I was younger than you are now—one of many scandals overheard in passing, like so much at court. I wouldn’t have paid it any mind had it not concerned Henry the Eighth’s beloved younger sister, whom so many knew as the French Queen—that headstrong princess who created an international uproar when she wed Charles of Suffolk, yet whose death at age thirty-seven caused nary a ripple.”
“It was June,” I said. A bone-deep chill enveloped me, as if I would never be warm again.
“Yes, June 1533, to be exact. King Henry had crowned Anne Boleyn in her sixth month of pregnancy, proof that God approved their union and the turmoil they’d wrought on England. Little did they know the child they awaited would be the beginning of Anne’s downfall.”
Cecil paced to the window. He stood staring out into his garden. Silence descended, laden like the pause before the opening of a well-thumbed book. Then he said quietly, “I was thirteen years old, serving as an apprentice clerk—another ambitious lad among hundreds, working my fingers to the quick. I got around; I was nimble and I knew how to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. Thus, I often heard a great deal more than my appearance suggested.”
He smiled faintly. “I was a bit like you, in fact—diligent, well-intentioned, eager to seek my advantage. When I heard the rumor, it struck me as a sign of the times that the king’s own sister had died alone, after months of seclusion in her manor at Westhorpe, allegedly having lived in terror that Anne Boleyn might discover her secret.”
The chill infiltrated my veins. I heard Stokes’s words in my head:
She was mad with fear; she begged her daughter to keep it a secret.…
“What secret?” I said, in a near-inaudible voice.
“That she was with child, of course.” Cecil turned back to me. “You must remember that many actually believed Anne Boleyn had bewitched the king. She was a strong-willed woman, with strong opinions. The common people detested her; so did most of the nobles. She had destroyed Katherine of Aragon, threatened to send Henry’s own daughter Mary to the block. Several of Henry’s oldest friends had fallen into disgrace or lost their heads because of his infatuation with her. Anne Boleyn had staked her entire future on the fact that the king’s first marriage was not valid and he had no legitimate