‘Lady Ursula was a murderess,’ I croaked.

  ‘So my Captain of the Guard told me that you told to him. Explain.’

  I swallowed. My throat was dry. Dryer than the deserts of the Holy Land. ‘And so … I shall try to explain it all. Lady Ursula was the lover of Don Gonzalo. But she was jealous of his other lovers, for she thought – possibly mistakenly – that she and he were to be betrothed.’

  ‘I never would have allowed that. No more Spanish marriages.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ I said feebly, ‘but this was her thinking. She discovered he had a lover and so, in a fit of jealous rage, she killed Don Gonzalo. And she tried to kill his varlet for … for …’ Think fast, Will! ‘For hiding this lover from her, for bringing the lover secretly to Don Gonzalo.’

  Henry’s brows unloosed, became not so gnarled. For this game of secret lovers, he knew well. And he relied on the silence of his groomsmen to keep it a secret.

  ‘Where is this varlet now?’

  ‘He … Rodrigo Muñoz was sent back to Spain.’ Should I tell him about Marion and how her father tried to marry him to her? No, best not to tangle my own lover into it if at all possible. ‘But Brother Fulke with the Observant Friars can attest to his injuries, for it was he who nursed him in his hour of need.’

  Henry’s brow ticked again, for I knew that the Observant Friars were staunch supporters of the queen. It couldn’t be helped.

  ‘We will see about that anon. Go on with this tale.’

  I latched on to his word, ‘tale’. ‘Aye, Harry, for it is an exciting tale, alongside that of Roland or Gawain.’ I fell easily into my prattling role. For now I was trying my mightiest to entertain Henry. For an entertained Henry was a generous one, a forgiving one. ‘I pursued this murderer of Don Gonzalo—’

  ‘Why?’ he interrupted.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Why were you set to pursue the murderer of a man you didn’t know from a foreign court?’

  ‘But I did know him, sire. Earlier, after I had played for the court, he asked me to teach him some English songs. For his lover – Lady Ursula, you will remember – is English, a maid of honor to Lady Anne. We spent nearly a whole evening making music.’ Not quite a lie, but in the manner of a tale, after all.

  I saw Henry visibly loosen his distress. For music was something he well understood. He composed his own music, and good tunes they were.

  I saw my opening. ‘I taught him some of your songs, Harry. How could I not? They are very popular here.’

  And with that, Henry was mine.

  ‘And so she killed poor Don Gonzalo and tried to kill his servant Rodrigo, for we had become friends, saddened over the Spaniard’s death. But Ursula wasn’t done with her murderous jealousies. For she was the lover of yet another. A man of … high estate.’ I raised my brows.

  Henry shuffled uncomfortably and turned away from me. He sat in his great chair and waved for me to go on.

  ‘A man of … very high estate. But alas, this man, though promises he did make to her, had no intention of fulfilling them. Well, that is neither here nor there. Men are always doing such for the love of a lady, true? And so Lady Ursula got herself yet another lover, the priest Father John Kendrick.’

  ‘What?’ He leapt to his feet.

  ‘It is true, Harry. This Kendrick was likely Spanish. In Wolsey’s office, no less. He had a Spanish mother and ties to Spain. He was working against you, sire.’

  Henry fumed but waved at me to continue.

  ‘This woman was as fickle as they came. This man of very high estate was well rid of her, for in her jealousy, I am certain she would have tried to kill him next.’

  He put a hand to his throat and slowly lowered back to his chair.

  ‘I see your distress. It is a distressing notion. But with this priest-lover who was besotted with her, she convinced him to kill the person she believed was yet another rival for the affections of this man of very high estate … and he then killed Lady Jane Perwick for her.’

  ‘This is outrageous,’ he growled.

  ‘Oh, Harry. You don’t know the half of it. Now. I saw John Kendrick slay the lady. I saw him running away and he dropped the crossbow. I saw him with my own eyes almost as close as we are to each other. I might have lied at the time about it to the Captain of the Guard, to keep the honor of a priest and the Church out of it. But I confessed that to Wolsey. Well, to Cromwell, who no doubt is hot on his trail. He will be brought to justice if he has not slain himself. A true sinner of the vilest kind, ignoring his vows of his office and committing, oh, several sins against the Ten Commandments; murder, coveting, bearing false witness … so many. And with the evidence of these women, lovers of the man of high estate—’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘I reckoned the woman had to be Lady Ursula Marbury. I sent her a missive telling her she had better confess all and she sent one back, telling me to meet her on the parapet. I left that message in my quarters so that someone could find them as witness to … well. If I had succumbed to her. And when I confronted her with all the evidence – all of which she never denied, as God is my witness – then she rushed me, first with her dagger, and then with mine. We fought. And she was so possessed of a devil that she had preternatural strength and she tried to push me off the battlement, but with the help of the Almighty Who Rights All Wrongs in Heaven and on Earth, I was given the strength to finally subdue her and … and …’ It was finally catching up to me. I had killed someone. True, it was in self-defense, but I was no killer. I sobbed the rest. ‘I threw her off. Oh God, Harry! I had to do it …’

  I don’t know how it happened but he had suddenly enclosed me in his arms. I was enwrapped by furs and silks and sweat and ruffles, by His very Majesty, and he comforted me, seeing how distressed I was. I wept onto his silk-covered breast.

  ‘There, there, Will. You are so gentle, aren’t you? And you fought for your life as anyone would have.’

  ‘I couldn’t let her get to you, Harry,’ I sobbed. ‘She was the Devil. You would have seen it.’

  ‘It’s all right, Will. The Captain of the Guard said they found her with your dagger in her hand.’

  ‘Harry, Harry …’

  He held me, rocked me like a babe. I felt a kiss on the top of my head. And I felt loved as no one had ever been in the realm. Loved by the king himself, and instantly in my mind, I felt the same as Ursula must have felt. If, for only one night, the King of England had loved you, and there was nothing as magnificent as that. I empathized … for only a moment. For her motivations were all born of evil, and for that, I could not ever condone it.

  ‘You are blameless,’ he said, his voice bold and steady. He lifted me up and took me with him to the door. He opened it and all the faces of guards, privy council, grooms, and other courtiers waited without in his presence chamber. ‘He is blameless!’ the king declared in a loud voice to shake the rafters. ‘Will Somers is innocent and saved the life of the king.’

  I sat in Marion’s withdrawing room, crowded with servants and friends. I told the tale again, leaving more out of it this time, and lifted my cup to slack my dry throat. Everyone had their cups, both wooden goblets and pewter, as they anxiously listened and drank, listened and drank.

  I felt better in telling it a second time … well. It was the third, for I had had to tell the Captain of the Guard first before he would have ever taken me to the king. Will Somers was exonerated, and his secret would be kept, and that was what was needed.

  ‘How come you had such a hard time fighting her off, Will?’ asked one of the lower courtiers.

  ‘She was possessed, that’s how. She was strong in her embrace of the Devil, she was. Oh, I could see it in her eyes, the hellfire, the demons. I almost went over m’self. God Almighty reached out of Heaven to keep me in the palm of His hand is what saved me. Verily.’

  I glanced over at Marion, and though she was enrapt as any of the others, there was just the merest glint in her eye that said, ‘Just how much of this tale is true, Will Somers?’ And I could honestly tell her, ‘Too much, my love. Far too much.’

  There was a commotion at the door and everyone parted for some courtier. I jumped to m’feet when I recognized Lord Heyward.

  Quickly, the crowd dwindled and they all disappeared, closing the door after them. With the room emptied, I glanced about and saw that the people had been sitting on Marion’s coffers and other luggage. She was still leaving.

  I whipped my head toward her. I’m certain I was bleached white, for I could feel my cheeks drawing colder.

  Heyward paced slowly about the room, fingers trailing over clothing and goods in some of the open coffers still to be packed. ‘Word has traveled through the court, Somers,’ he began, ‘about your miraculous fight for good over evil.’

  ‘It was a miracle true, sir. The hand of God, it was, that saved me.’

  ‘You have not boasted of it. I have heard enough to know that. That is … very commendable.’

  ‘Aye, my lord.’

  ‘And you saved the king from harm.’

  ‘I … I took a life, sir. I … my heart is sore on it.’

  He glanced at me then, his brow questioning. And then like the king, he came over to me and laid a hand on my shoulder consolingly. ‘It is not an easy thing to take a life, Somers. No man should be proud of it, either in battle or in any other circumstance. God gave each of us the gift of life, and who are we to take it? But in the course of doing our duty to our king, it sometimes becomes necessary. You did not shirk your duty. And in this, I am … proud of you.’

  For the second time that day, my throat choked with a warm lump, and I could not speak.

  He patted my shoulder and finally dropped his hand to his side. ‘I think, under the circumstances, if my daughter still wishes to remain at court, then I give my leave for her to do so.’

  ‘My lord,’ she gasped and rushed to him, embracing him. He easily curled his arm around her, and kissed her forehead. He truly did love his daughter. It was there on his face.

  ‘And … I have agreed to … to consider this betrothal between the two of you. Consider it, I said. I have not yet given my leave for it.’ And he pinned me with his narrowed eye.

  ‘My Lord Robert!’ I gushed.

  He set his daughter aside and looked me over. ‘See that you conduct yourself well, Somers, and I may have a decision by the end of the year.’ Keeping his eyes on me, he withdrew from the room and a servant closed the door after him.

  I turned to her. ‘Did you hear that, Marion!’

  ‘By God, Will! You are a miracle worker!’ She threw herself into my arms.

  Good Christ. And all it took was a little murder.

  AFTERWORD

  Will Somers was Henry VIII’s real court jester. He came from Shropshire to Henry’s court in 1525 at about twenty years old, and stayed there the rest of his life, through all of Henry’s wives, through Edward VI’s brief reign, through Mary I’s, and into Elizabeth I’s. He was beloved by the whole family and loyal to the last. A jester could get away with quips no other courtier could. It was understood. They were allowed to. Oh, they could be beaten or kicked for it as other men in high places treated their fools, but the most that could happen was being sacked from the job.

  Little else is known about him. How old he was exactly, if he ever married, or anything else. And no, we don’t know if he had a dog though there is a painting with him and a dog. There is also a painting of him with a monkey. I’m sure we’ll see that creature in later volumes.

  A man who could be anywhere in court, privy to some of the court’s highest secrets? What better person could there be as an amateur sleuth?

  Henry was a difficult man to parse. There is the outer Henry, the one most of us see in history books or depicted for good or ill in dramas – a vain, vicious man, and absolute monarch, single-minded in his need for a male heir. But as with most people, there is the inner Henry, a much more complicated individual. He was staunchly religious, even being called Fidei Defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith’, by Pope Leo X. He wrote treatises on the Catholic religion, and even against Martin Luther and his Protestantism. That soon waned when Henry’s ‘Great Matter’ – that of his divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon – could find no foothold in Rome. Henry had received a papal dispensation specifically to marry Catherine in the first place because she had first been married to Henry’s older brother Arthur, who died not long thereafter. But Catherine couldn’t give Henry a son as heir, and this became what he felt was an obstacle to a successful reign; that he couldn’t leave a king after him, only a woman to be queen. (And why was this a problem? It hadn’t been done in England, except for the twelfth-century Empress Matilda, the daughter of Henry I, William the Conqueror’s son – and a civil war ensued to depose her. A queen might also be at the mercy of whatever husband she chose, the man being the head of the household. Naturally, Englishmen didn’t want to be ruled by a foreign prince, especially if the queen died in childbed. Probably chiefly one of the reasons Elizabeth I never married.)

  Henry said he had no right under God’s eyes to marry his brother’s wife (and that’s why God punished him by not giving him lawful sons. He did have at least one bastard son, Henry Fitzroy, who died when he was about seventeen). This sentiment might have been heartfelt … at first. But Catherine’s opposition to the divorce, that she was lawfully wed to Henry and their daughter Mary was not a bastard, caused the Tudor monarch to double down. When the pope refused him his divorce, Henry broke with Rome and became the head of his own Church, the Church of England, as monarchs of England have been ever since (except for Mary I’s reign, when she tried to bring Catholicism back to England, and for King James II, who was the last Catholic king. Having become Protestant, there was no going back.)

  We mustn’t forget that at this stage of his life, Henry was not the fat man of the famous painting, nor the tyrant he was yet to become. But instead, a very handsome man, six foot one, young and strong, a poet, a composer of music, a patron of the arts. ‘His goodly personage, his amiable visage, princely countenance, with the noble qualities of his royal estate, to every man known, needeth no rehearsal, considering that for lack of cunning, I cannot express the gifts of nature that God hath endowed him withal.’ So said lawyer and Tudor chronicler Edward Hall. Henry was the last medieval monarch and the first Renaissance one in England, spanning the two eras. I’ll be exploring the many changing human faces of Henry as the series goes on.

  As for Anne Boleyn, there were many spellings of her surname, ‘Bullen’ being one of them, as spelling was not yet codified. But courtiers – as well as Will in this book – refer to her somewhat derisively and call her ‘that Bullen woman’ or ‘Nan Bullen’ in a familiar, rustic, and insulting way. There is no proof to the myth that Anne ‘Frenchified’ her name from ‘Bullen’ to ‘Boleyn’ to be fancier, because both spellings were in use in letters and documents of the time.

  As you can imagine, there are fictional people in this book. Fictional people who murdered fictional people. There must naturally be leeway when concocting a murder mystery. Don’t be looking for Father Kendrick, the Spanish gentleman Don Gonzalo de Yscar, Anne’s ladies-in-waiting Lady Ursula and Jane Perwick, Brother Fulke, or Marion Greene and her father Lord Robert Heyward in any documents. They are fictional. I tried, to the best of my ability, to populate this series with the real people of Henry’s court. I promise to point out the false ones in future afterwords.

  Let’s get back to Will. My imagination has always been captured by the figure of Will Somers, ever since I was a kid. ‘A Jester? A Jester? A funny idea a Jester.’ That’s a quote from the Danny Kaye film The Court Jester, a film known for its humor and clever patter songs, but not the least bit of historical accuracy. No, I’ve known about Will a long time (because I was a nerd kid and consumed with historical novels and history because my family were rabid Anglophiles).

  Some of the nonsense Will spouts in this novel is indeed attributed to him, and some I made up. You can have fun deciding which is which. But never let it be said that the Tudors would ever pass up a good fart joke.

  I know what you’re thinking. Was Will Somers bisexual? It’s purely my own speculation on his character. He had to have been an extraordinarily interesting individual, with a lot of wit, verve, and confidence. Does this make him bisexual? Quoting bestselling author Louis Bayard on his book Courting Mr. Lincoln where he poses the question that Abraham Lincoln was gay, he said, ‘When all is said and done, do I need Abraham Lincoln to be gay? No. I just need him to be something more complicated than he’s been allowed to be. I would argue we all need that.’

  Thanks, as always, to my hubby Craig for the encouragement and suggestions. Thanks also to my readers for making sure I did, finally, write this series. And grateful thanks to Kathie Dapron for giving my Will Somers mascot the coat and jester hood he deserves. You have magical fingers!

  The next book in the series, The Lioness Stumbles, finds Will with another murder a little too close to Queen Anne Boleyn. She fears the killer is trying to implicate her, and begs Will to solve the crime. Read more about this and my other series at JeriWesterson.com.

 

 

  Jeri Westerson, Courting Dragons

 

 

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