PROLOGUE
30 JANUARY 1661
We stand together, shoulder to shoulder, skirt to skirt, like a chain of paper dolls, come to see our father’s execution. Our hoods are pulled low over our faces although, in truth, few in the crowd would recognise us without our finery: we grace no coins, no medals or prints, and it is hardly likely any of them would have seen our portraits hanging, as they had, in the palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court.
A frosted blast of wind whips around my cloak and sends the three nooses hanging from the gallows before me swinging as if the condemned men already danced their deaths. I stare at the gibbet in blank horror. It is a terrible thing, vast and three-sided like a triangle, designed, Father once told me, to hold twenty-four souls at a time.
‘Why did it have to be here?’ I speak sideways to my sisters. It is somehow worse, much worse, that this is happening at Tyburn, the dirty, eerie crossroads outside London where they hang common felons: highwaymen, thieves, murderers.
‘Parliament settled on treason as the crime, so it should have been the Tower.’ ‘They wish to make a point, I suppose,’ Mary answers. ‘Some warning against men rising so far above their station.’ Fear creeps up my back like a spider and I feel it crawl along my arm and onto Mary’s. She shivers against me. ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ I say. Mary stiffens.
‘We were right to come, Frances. Father would want us to be here; we were his soldiers too.’ Her words conjure images of the russet-coated Ironsides of the old days and, as I watch them march through the air, I am surprised again by the resolve Mary has shown in these past days; it used to be me who was the brave one. ‘We are here for Henry too,’ Bridget says quietly on my other side, her voice breaking over his name. And that is when we hear them coming.
A slow drumbeat parts the crowds and a dragging, catching sound behind it takes me back instantly to my early childhood when the boys drove the ploughs up and down the marshy fields outside Ely. But this is no plough. I know, without turning, that it is a hurdle, a great gnarled gate on which the horses have drawn the prisoners all the way along Holborn.
It is a strange route to take from Westminster Abbey but, once again, symbolic – a final pretence that the men had come not from the sanctified chapel of kings but from Newgate prison, as most come to Tyburn.
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