As if he fears losing his nerve, Henry will not wait for the jury to take their places in the capital’s Guildhall. Impulsively, he summons his Knight Marshall and the Marshall of the Household to Whitehall in Westminster to give sentence. There is no evidence brought against the boy; oddly, they don’t even call him into court by name. Though Henry worked so hard to give the boy the dishonorable name of a poor drunk man on the watergate in Tournai, they do not use it on this one important document. Though they find him guilty, they do not inscribe the name of Perkin Warbeck on the long roll of the treasonous plotters. They leave his name a blank. Now, as they sentence him to death, they give him no name at all, as if nobody knows who he is anymore, or as if they know his name but dare not say it.
They rule that he shall be drawn on a hurdle through the city of London to the gallows at Tyburn, hanged, cut down while still living, and his innards torn out of his stomach and burned before his face. Then he shall be beheaded and his body divided into four parts, the head and quarters to be placed where the king wishes to put them.
Three days later they try my cousin Teddy before the Earl of Oxford in the great hall at Westminster. They ask him nothing, he confesses to everything that they put to him, and they find him guilty. He says that he is very sorry.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SATURDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 1499
“You can come in,” I say shortly. I am alone, seated on a chair at the window, looking outwards to the river that my mother loved, listening to the low buzz of talk from my rooms behind me, and the distant cry of the seagulls over the water as they swoop and wheel, their white wings very bright against the gray of the sky.
She looks around the empty room for a companion and sees that I am solitary, though a queen is never on her own.
“Can I sit with you?” she asks, her pale face like a desolate child’s. “Forgive me, I cannot bear to be alone.”
She is wearing black again, anticipating widowhood. I feel a swift unfair pang of envy; she can show her grief, but I, about to lose a cousin and the boy who said he was my brother, have to maintain the illusion of normality in a Tudor-green dress with a smiling face. I cannot recognize the boy in death any more than I could in life.
“Come in,” I say.
She enters and pulls up a stool to sit beside me. She has her lace making with her, his beautiful white collar is almost complete, but for once her hands are still. The collar is nearly made but the throat that it was going to encircle will wear a rope halter instead. She looks from her work to me and she sighs, and leaves it aside.
“Lady Margaret Pole has arrived,” she remarks.
“Maggie?”
She nods. “She went straight to the king to ask for mercy for her brother.”
I don’t ask her what the king said. We wait until I hear the challenge at the presence chamber door, the opening of the inner doors, the embarrassed silence that falls as Margaret crosses my privy chamber and the women watch her pass by to my bedroom door. No one can find anything to say to a woman whose brother is to be executed for treason. Then she taps on the door, and I rise up and in a moment we are holding each other, clinging together and looking into the other’s strained face.
“His Grace says there is nothing he can do,” Margaret remarks. “I went down on my knees to him. I laid my face on his shoe.”
I put my wet cheek against hers. “I asked him too, Lady Katherine as well. He is decided. I don’t see what we can do but wait.”
Margaret releases me and sinks to a stool beside me. Nobody says anything, there is nothing to say. The three of us, still hoping like fools, clasp hands and say nothing.
It grows dark, but I don’t call for candles; we let the gray light seep into the room and we sit in the twilight. Then I hear a knock on the outer door, and the ring of riding boots on the floor, and one of my ladies peeps around the bedroom door to say: “Will you see the Marquis of Dorset, Your Grace?”
I rise to my feet as my half brother, Thomas Grey, great survivor that he is, comes into the room and looks around at the three of us. “I thought you would want to know at once,” he says without introduction.
“We do,” I say.
“He’s dead,” he says, before we have time to build any false hopes. “He died well. He confessed and died in Christ.”
Lady Katherine makes a little choking noise and puts her face in her hands. Margaret crosses herself.
“Did he confess the imposture?” I ask.
“He said that he was not the boy that he had pretended to be,” Thomas says. “He had been commanded, if he wanted a merciful death, to tell the crowd, to tell everyone that there was no hope of a living York prince. So he told them that: he was not the boy.”
I can feel a little scream of laughter growing inside me, bubbling in my throat. “He told them he was not the boy that he had pretended to be?”
Thomas looks at me. “Your Grace, he swore he would leave no one in any doubt. The king allowed him to be hanged and not gutted, but only if he made everything clear.”
I can’t help myself, my peal of laughter fights its way out of my grim lips and I laugh aloud. Katherine looks shocked. “He admitted he was not the boy that he had said? When earlier, at Exeter, in his written confession, they made him say that he was the boy Perkin!”
“It was clear to everyone what he meant, if you had been there—” my half brother checks for we all know I could not have been there “—but if you had been there you would have seen him penitent.”
“And what name did they call him?” I ask, recovering myself. “As they led him to the scaffold?”
Thomas shakes his head. “They didn’t name him, not that I heard.”
“He died without being given or acknowledging a name?”
Thomas nods. “That’s how it was.”
I rise to my feet and open the shutters to look out over the dark river. A few lights are bobbing, reflected on the water, as I listen to hear any noise, any singing. It is the feast of St. Clement, and I can hear a choir, very faintly in the distance, a sweet sad singing like a lament.
“Was he in pain?” Lady Katherine rises to her feet, white-faced. “Did he suffer?”
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