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Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Alison Weir
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Family Trees
Part One: Acts of Usurpation
Part Two: I
Part Three: Knots of Secret Might
Part Four: Greedy Death
Afterwards
Author’s Note
Copyright
About the Book
A Dangerous Inheritancetells the dramatic story of two heroines, separated by time, but intriguingly linked by history’s most famous murder mystery.
Lady Katherine Grey has already suffered more than her fair share of tragedy. Eight years ago, her older sister, Lady Jane Grey, was beheaded for unlawfully accepting a crown that was not hers. Now, in risking all for love, Katherine incurs the wrath of her formidable cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, who sees her as a rival for her insecure throne.
Interlaced with Katherine’s story is that of her distant kinswoman, Kate Plantagenet, the bastard daughter of Richard III. Kate loves her father, but all is not well at court, and before long she hears terrible rumours that threaten all she holds dear. Like Katherine Grey, she falls in love with a man who is forbidden to her. Then she embarks on what will prove to be a dangerous quest, covertly seeking the truth about the fate of her cousins, the Princes in the Tower.
But time is not on Kate`s side – or on Katherine’s either …
Alison Weir’s new novel skilfully mixes fact and fiction, telling a page-turning story within a framework of historical authenticity.
About the Author
Alison Weir is one of the best-selling historians in the United Kingdom, and has sold over 2.3 million books worldwide. She has written sixteen history books, including The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Katherine Swynford, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of A
Also by Alison Weir
Fiction
I
The Lady Elizabeth
The Captive Queen
Non-fiction
Britain’s Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
The Princes in the Tower
Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses
Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII 1547–1558
Elizabeth the Queen
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Henry VIII: King and Court
Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley
Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England
Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and his Scandalous Duchess
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of A
Mary Boleyn: ‘The Great and Infamous Whore’
Quick Reads
Traitors of the Tower
A Dangerous
Inheritance
ALISON WEIR
To Kezia Jane Marston and Persephone Gipps-Williams with lots of love
‘As circles five by art compressed show but one ring to sight,
So trust uniteth faithful minds with knot of secret might,
Whose force to break, but greedy Death, no wight possesseth power,
As time and sequels well shall prove, my ring can say no more.’
Lines engraved on Katherine Grey’s wedding ring
‘Love is a torment of the mind,
A tempest everlasting …’
Samuel Daniel, ‘Hymen’s Triumph’
‘Love is blind.’
William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Table 1: The Royal House of Tudor
Table 2: The Royal Houses of Lancaster and York
Table 3: The Herbert Family
Table 4: The Seymour Family
1568
I CAN NEVER forget the day they brought me the news that my sister’s head had been cut off. I was not yet thirteen, too young fully to understand why she had to die, but old enough to imagine the horrific scene at the end. They said she had committed treason, the foulest of all crimes, but it didn’t make any sense to me, for Jane had only done what she was forced to do. And by that reasoning, I too had been an i
We had none of us girls been born to inherit a crown, and yet it has overshadowed us all our lives – and blighted them. I thought once that it would be a wonderful thing to be a queen, to wield power and wear the coveted diadem – but I know differently now. Tangling with princes rarely brought anyone anything but ill-fortune and grief. I have learned that lesson too, in the hardest of ways. I am no longer the i
If, in the future, there is to be any remnant of that kind of happiness for me in this world, it remains in the gift of Almighty God alone, for I can hope for little from my earthly sovereign.
In the meantime, I must languish here, in this fine house that is really my prison, having little to distract me from my trials but the routines of everyday life and the stilted exchange of pleasantries with my unwilling hosts. The only pleasures – if that is the right word – that are left to me are writing daily in this journal that I began so many years ago, and gazing yearningly from my window across the flat green parkland and skeletal trees to the forbidden distance, beyond which lives the man I love more than life itself.
Part One
Acts of Usurpation
Katherine
25th May 1553. Durham House, London.
TODAY IS OUR wedding day. My sister Jane and I are to be married; all has been arranged so that the one ceremony will serve for both the daughters of my lord the Duke of Suffolk and my lady the Duchess. It has come upon us so quickly that I have scarce had time to catch my breath, and am somewhat stu