Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(34)

“Tea?” Izzy suddenly popped up off the floor and grabbed some dirty plates. “Anyone? I’ll make tea.”

She hurried out of the room.

“You’re going to the Tower tomorrow?” Angela asked. “That’s where they tortured him. I’m going to be doing some filming there in a few weeks. I’m one of those people who host historical documentaries, or I appear in them. Izzy may have mentioned that. This one is another program about the wives of Henry the Eighth. There is an insatiable appetite for things about the wives of Henry the Eighth. Everyone loves them. Sex and murder.”

“Murder?” Stevie said.

“How else would you describe killing two of your wives?”

It was a good point, and Stevie felt stupid for having said the word like it was a question. Her brain was slow.

“It’s the thing people always want to know about,” Angela said. “Here’s a king so smitten by a woman that he smashes everything to marry her, and he does so, in November 1532. She doesn’t give him a son. Within about two years, he’s discussing how to get rid of her. He takes a mistress—he’s already got her successor picked out. In order to have this new wife, the old wife has to go. And she’s not going to go with all the fuss of the first one. I mean, he’s just blown the world apart, ripped religion and world order to shreds, so he can’t just admit that she didn’t work out for him. He’s got to erase Anne. . . .”

She said it with genuine distaste.

“So she was arrested on mostly, if not entirely, trumped-up charges of infidelity, including the charge that she was in a relationship with her brother.”

“Yikes,” Vi said.

“Yikes, indeed. The king wanted her gone, so she was going to be gone, no matter what it took. The more disgraceful, the better. There could be no questions. Anne was taken to the Tower after her arrest. They’ll probably tell you in the tour she came in by the Traitors’ Gate, but that’s not right. In any case, she’s imprisoned there. Henry’s already off having a good time with his new love. It all ended quickly, within about two weeks, in May 1536. She was arrested on the second. All the men she was accused of having affairs with were taken off for questioning—that means they were tortured. Anne was tried and found guilty on the fifteenth. The men were executed on the seventeenth, and she was set to die on the nineteenth. Seventeen days. That’s all it took from being a queen to being accused, imprisoned, tried, and executed. The king gave her a going-away present, so to speak. The punishment for the crime that she’d been convicted of was burning at the stake—for women. Because she was a queen, he decided that wasn’t appropriate for her. She would be beheaded. But a simple beheading also wasn’t enough. He sent for a special executioner from France who used a sword. He did this, mind you, before she was found guilty—almost as if he knew how it was all going to end.”

Another, smaller, flash and pop outside.

“Here’s a little grim fact,” Angela went on. “The Tower is big on those. With beheadings by axe, you had to put your head down on a block, like this . . .”

She demonstrated by leaning forward and tilting her head to the side, like she was setting it down on something.

“. . . but beheadings by sword were different. You knelt, but you kept your head up. When Anne climbed the scaffold after she spoke—and she gave a moving speech—she had to remove her cloak, her headdress, all her jewels. She even had to pay her own executioner with a bag of money she had been provided and formally forgave him. That was all procedure, but it always affects me when I think about it. They put a cap on her head, knelt her down, put a blindfold over her eyes. Now she can’t see. The executioner, to his credit, is good at what he does. He has a method he uses to get his victim’s head in the right position. He calls to his boy to bring him his sword, except, there is no boy. He’s already got the sword. He does this because the victims will naturally turn their head in the direction he’s calling, waiting to hear the sword being brought to the scaffold. It seems so simple, this little misdirection, but it works. A little bit of fakery did so much. One swing of the sword was all it took. What’s odd is after all that—the trials and torture and bringing a swordsman from France—no one planned for the body. The body they knew would be there. No one had arranged for a coffin. One of the yeoman had to go to the armory and find a box.”

Izzy came in with a tray full of steaming mismatched mugs, along with a wrapped roll of chocolate Hobnob cookies. She distributed the mugs, handing Stevie a pink polka-dotted one.

“As a coda to all of that,” Angela said, accepting a mug of tea, “Henry didn’t bother with the swordsman for the murder of his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, six years later. He let them use the axe.”

The word axe seemed to be the perfect jumping-in point. Stevie saw Izzy reaching for the conversational baton.

“You know,” she said, passing teas to the others, “I was telling Stevie—because she’s done work in this area, real work, like I said—here’s milk, Vi, do you take sugar? I’ll leave it here—about what happened to you. With your friends. You know. The murders.”





9


ANGELA STIFFENED HER GRIP ON HER MUG. IT WAS NOT A GRACEFUL transition of topic.

One did not simply mention the murders.