Once the Queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new, and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned.
The officers of the Tower have found, in lieu of a coffin, an arrow chest. The narrow body fits it. The woman who holds the head genuflects with her soaking parcel. The man turns away and begins cleaning his sword. He does it lovingly, as if the weapon were his friend. “Toledo steel.” He proffers it for admiration. “We still have to go to the Spaniards to get a blade like this.”
NOW the elm chest is carried toward the chapel, where the flags have been lifted so she can go in by the corpse of her brother, George Boleyn. “They shared a bed when they were alive,” Brandon says, “so it’s fitting they share a tomb. Let’s see how they like each other now.” Kingston laughs heartily. Presumably because he thinks he’s making a joke. “Here, my lord Suffolk,” he says to Charles Brandon. “Cromwell says I need more practice in lopping heads.”“I’d have put her on a dunghill,” Brandon says. “And the brother underneath her. And I’d have made their father witness it. I don’t know what you are about, Cromwell. Why did you leave him alive to work mischief?”
He glances sideways at his son. We are three years older, less a month, than at Anne’s coronation. Some of us are wiser; some of us are taller. Gregory had said he could not do it, when told he should witness her death: “I cannot. A woman, I cannot.” But his boy has kept his face arranged and his tongue governed. Each time you are in public, he has told Gregory, know that people are observing you, to see if you are fit to follow me in the king’s service.
“My wife observed,” says Constable Kingston, “that this morning the lady left aside her usual headdress, and chose the style the late Katherine favored. She wonders what she meant by it.” “You’ll find that was my lord Suffolk,” the duke says shortly. “Another useless dotard, eh, Gregory? That’s Charles Brandon over there—the mighty fellow with the big beard. I am the stringy fellow with the bad temper. See the difference?”
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