The Last Tudor Page 14

  “I can’t wait,” I wail. “I have been waiting every day since Father named Jane as queen. All I ever do is wait for something to happen to me, and hope that this time it’s nice. Janey Seymour says—”

  “I’ve heard more than enough of Jane Seymour,” my mother says brusquely. “Are you staying with them again this month? Aren’t they tired of your company?”

  “No, they’re not, and yes, I am staying at Hanworth unless you order me to be with you at court,” I say, defying her to forbid me the company of my best friend. “It’s not as if we will be drowning in favors from Elizabeth and should be there early to catch the bounty. I don’t see why I should be there as all Elizabeth’s friends come out of wherever they have been hiding. I don’t see that I should have to stand and watch all day as Elizabeth orders new gowns from the wardrobe that should have been mine.”

  “It’s not about gowns; gowns are not important,” my mother says, wrong again.

  HANWORTH PALACE, MIDDLESEX,

  SPRING 1559

  Instead of watching Elizabeth glorying in the treasures and the throne that once belonged to my sister and should have come to me, I go to stay with Janey and her mother, Lady Anne Seymour, at their lovely house in the country. I take Mr. Nozzle the monkey and the little cat Ribbon and the new puppy Jo, and everyone loves them at Hanworth, and nobody tells me to put them in their cages. I am sure that nobody at court misses me at all, except perhaps Henry Herbert, whose lingering glances tell me that now he thinks he made a big mistake when he let them part him from the queen’s cousin. My other former admirer, the Spanish ambassador, is very subdued, waiting to see how his royal master—safely far away on his own lands—manages the new queen and if she will have him in marriage as she promised.

  I doubt that she even notices that I am absent. Of course it is exciting that suddenly all the serious Spanish have vanished and the sorrowful Queen Mary is dead, and everyone is young and reformist and flirtatious. Elizabeth, in the plumb center of it all, with her head turned by her sudden safety and importance, goes everywhere with Robert Dudley, my sister Jane’s brother-in-law, as if they were sweethearts, suddenly given the keys to their own palace. They are practically hand in hand; they must be dizzy with relief. It is a miraculous transition from the prison rooms of the Tower to the royal apartments overnight. They both must have thought that they would put their heads down on the block and now they rest their cheeks on the finest of linen embroidered with coronets. Her mother was beheaded, so was his father. Both of them have carved their names on the walls of a Tower cell and counted the days till their likely trial. It must be heaven to come through that darkened gateway and find yourself on the road to court. My sister, of course, took the opposite journey—from royal rooms to the scaffold—and it was Robert’s father who was the cause of her imprisonment. The plot for Elizabeth was the final straw and reason for Jane’s execution. I don’t forget this when I see their triumph: beggars’ triumph. I wonder that they are not ashamed.

  But nobody thinks of it but me, and I try not to think of it at all. Elizabeth’s new court is crowded with people dashing back from Switzerland or Germany, or wherever they have been hiding from the Inquisition. The horses must be foundering on the roads all the way from Zurich. Our great friend Lady Bess Cavendish, widowed, married to another rich man, and a convinced Lutheran, turns up at court and is best of friends with us again, and a great adherent of Elizabeth. The Duchess of Suffolk, our young and beautiful stepgrandmother Catherine Brandon, reappears from exile with her commoner husband and two adorable little children. The whole world wants places and fees and favors, all of them suddenly the best friend of the loneliest girl in England. Elizabeth’s lady governess, Kat Ashley, is back at her side after a spell in the Fleet Prison for treason. No longer is Elizabeth the despised half-bred sister: she is the Protestant princess who has restored the reformed faith to England; she is the heroine of all reformers, as if my sister Jane had never been, as if I—a born reformer, born royal—did not exist.

  I get no credit for having been sister to a queen, a queen of only nine days but proclaimed by everyone who is now crowding into the Protestant court. Elizabeth has no sense of family feeling: she was terrified of her father, nervous around her half brother, King Edward, who loved Jane so dearly, and the declared enemy to her half sister, Queen Mary. While I was raised by a mother who spoke every day of our royal kinship, Elizabeth was raised alone, her mother dead, her father marrying other women. So I am not surprised that she doesn’t greet me with any pleasure, and I allow myself to raise my chin, to raise my eyebrows, and to speak to her as a near-equal. To outshine her in grace and beauty every day in these hours of her loudly acclaimed triumph is my only revenge. She is ridiculously vain, quite desperate to be thought the most beautiful girl at court, in England, in the world—but here am I: slim where she is dropsical, bright-eyed where she is tired, lighthearted where she has every day new responsibilities and learns of new things to fear, a survivor just as she is, but fair-skinned and blond where she is—to tell the truth—swarthy and ginger. I can drive her mad just by walking across the room, and so I do.

  It’s as well for me that she is surely too busy worrying about supporting the Protestants in Scotland, settling the religion of the English, struggling to get herself named as Supreme Governor of the Church of England—as if a woman could be such a thing!—to object to my little acts of defiance. It’s as well for me that I have Hanworth to run to, for my mother rails at me and calls me a fool to torment an anxious young woman newcome to her throne, but I think of it as Jane’s throne, and mine, and I think of Elizabeth as the vain scramblingly ambitious daughter of a lute player and a whore.

  She promises that she will name her heir, but she does not. She should name me, but she avoids my name. Until she behaves as a queen should do—marries and gets an heir or names one—she will win no respect from me, and for sure, she returns me none.

  “You’re so right,” Janey Seymour says emphatically. She turns her head to cough into her sleeve and her whole body shakes with the strength of the spasm. But she is smiling when she turns back to me, her eyes feverishly bright. “You’re right, everyone knows that she is not the true heir, everyone knows that she is illegitimate, but there is nobody to take your side. All the reformers believe that Elizabeth is the best that they can get, and not even the papists dare to suggest Mary Queen of Scots, half French as she is.”

  I have Mr. Nozzle on my lap and I am tickling his fat little tummy. His eyes are closed with pleasure. Every now and then he gives a little yawn or perhaps it is a silent laugh. “If I had been married . . .” I think of the Dudleys planning, campaigning, and fighting for Jane. Where might I be now, if I had a powerful family to conspire for me, if my father were still alive? If I had a husband and his father saw what we could be?

  “Oh, yes, but the Herberts aren’t going to risk anything against Elizabeth.”

  “I never think of Henry Herbert,” I lie, and Janey catches my eye and goes off into a peal of laughter that ends in a coughing fit.

  “Of course you don’t. But you’re still heir to the throne, and his father doesn’t forget that! He’s always so polite to you now!”

  “I don’t care!” I toss my head, and sit Mr. Nozzle up on his little bottom so he watches us with his serious eyes.

  “But you have to marry,” Janey says, when she has her breath back. “Elizabeth isn’t going to find you a good match. She wants nobody courting but her. She’d make us all into nuns if she could. Does your mother plan nothing for you now that Queen Mary did not name you as heir after Elizabeth, now that Elizabeth does not promise you?”

  “She’s hoping that Elizabeth will come to favor us,” I say. “I’d get a better match if Elizabeth would only recognize us, her family. But obviously, she thinks only of herself. I have been quite forgotten. I don’t even have my rightful place in the privy chamber. I’m not in the inner circle. You would think I am a complete stranger, waiting about outsid
e in the presence chamber like some unknown petitioner, when my place is inside like a kinswoman. Queen Mary would never have treated us so.”

  Janey shakes her head. “It’s just jealousy,” she says as the door to her privy chamber opens and her handsome brother Ned puts his head into the room and, seeing that Janey and I are alone, comes in.

  “What webs are you spinning, little spiders?” he asks, and throws himself down on a stool at the fireside between our two seats.

  I can feel myself sit up a little in my chair, and lift my face to the light and tilt it to the best angle. I have adored Edward Seymour ever since he was betrothed to my sister Jane and I told her then that he was the most handsome young man in the world, with the kindest eyes; but she would have none of it. Now I see him almost every day, and he teases me with the familiarity of an old friend, but I still think he is the most handsome young man in the world.

  “We’re speaking of marriage,” says Janey, daring me to disagree.

  “Not of our marriages,” I say hastily. “I have no interest in marriage.”

  “Oh, how cruel!” Ned says with a wink. “There will be many broken hearts at court if you live and die a virgin.”

  I giggle and blush and can think of nothing to say.

  “Of course she must marry,” Janey says. “And someone of the best family. But who? What d’you think, Ned?”

  “A Spanish prince?” he asks. “Isn’t the Spanish ambassador your great admirer? A French milord? Surely, a girl like Lady Katherine Grey, so close to the throne, so beautiful, can look as high as she likes?”

  “Really!” I say, trying to look modest but completely thrilled by this improper conversation. “It is for my friends and family to decide.”

  “Oh, not a Spaniard! She doesn’t want to go away to Spain,” Janey says airily. “I can’t let her go. She must have a handsome Englishman, of course.”

  “I don’t know even one,” Ned asserts. “No one handsome enough. I wouldn’t know where to begin. All my friends are plain as bullocks, and I—” He breaks off and looks directly at me. “You wouldn’t consider me? I am wonderfully well connected.”

  I can feel the color rising in my cheeks. “I . . . I . . .”

  “What a question!” Janey clears the little catch in her throat. “Are you proposing marriage, Ned? Beware, for I am a witness!”

  “In the absence of anyone worthy . . .” His eyes are on my burning cheeks, on my mouth. I almost think that he might lean forward and kiss me, he is so close and his gaze is so intimate.

  “You speak in jest,” I manage to whisper.

  “Only if you like the jest,” he replies.

  “Of course she likes it!” Janey says. “What girl does not like a joke about love?”

  “Shall I write you a poem?” he asks me.

  He is a wonderful poet; if he were to write a poem about me, I would be famous just for that. I really think that I will faint from the heat in my face and the pounding in my ears. I can’t look away from his warm, smiling eyes, and he goes on staring at my mouth as if he would lean forward, closer and closer to a kiss.

  “Have you been hunting?” I ask at random. “How is the horse?”

  How is the horse? I was embarrassed before; now I wish I could simply die. It is as if I can think of nothing to say but nonsense, as if my lips want to betray me to him, to assure him that I can think of nothing when he is so close. Janey looks at me with a mystified gaze, and Ned laughs shortly, as if he understands completely the whirl of foolishness that I am in. Lazily, he gets to his feet.

  “The horse was very helpful,” he says, smiling down on me. “You know: trotting about here and there, galloping when needed. He is a very good horse. He stops when he is bidden, which is pleasant too.”

  “I know.” I swallow, while Janey watches both of us with a sudden attentive interest.

  “I’ll come back to take you both into dinner,” Ned offers. Standing at his full height, he is magnificently handsome, tall, brown-haired, hazel-eyed; he looks lean and strong in his riding breeches and high boots. He pulls down his jacket so it fits around his slim waist and bows to me and to his sister and goes from the room.

  “Oh my God! You love him!” Janey crows and makes herself cough again. Mr. Nozzle jumps from my lap and goes to the door as if he would follow Ned. “You sly little thing! All this time I was thinking of Herbert and yet you love my brother, and kept it secret all this time! ‘How is the horse?’ Oh Lord! ‘How is the horse?’ ”

  I am near to tears with laughter and shame. “Oh, don’t say anything! Don’t say another word.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking at all!” I confess. “I was just looking at him. I couldn’t think of anything while he was looking at me.”

  She puts a hand to her heart. “Well,” she says, snatching at a breath, “I think that answers our question. You shall marry Ned, and I will be your sister-in-law. We Seymours are the equal of any family in England, your own father picked out Ned for your sister Jane. Now you can marry him and how happy we will be! And I will be aunt to a little heir to the throne. Nobody can deny your importance when you have a Tudor-Seymour boy in the cradle! I expect Elizabeth will be his godmother and name him as her heir until she gets her own boy.”

  “Elizabeth would run mad if we married,” I say with pleasure.

  “Completely. But then she’d have to take you into her privy chamber, as one of her senior ladies. You would be her cousin twice over, like it or not. She’d have to make your son her heir; everyone would insist on it. Just think! My nephew for King of England!”

  “My Lady Hertford,” I say, trying the title on as I might drape a bolt of fabric against my face to see the color against my fair skin.

  “It suits you,” Janey says.

  It starts as little more than a joke. Janey and I must have proposed half a dozen suitors for each other in the years that we have been friends, but as Ned rides with us, and walks in the garden, takes us into dinner, and bets on the cards that we play in the evenings, he continues his warm flirtatious intimate tone with me, and I blush and giggle and slowly, slowly, find a reply. Gradually, carefully, it turns from a joke into a real courtship, and I know that I am, for the first and last time, really truly in love.

  Everyone can see it. It is not just Janey who remarks that we are a beautiful couple, matched in height and looks and breeding. The whole household conspires to leave us together, or direct us to each other.

  “His lordship is in the stable yard,” one of the grooms says to me as I come from the front door to go riding.

  “Lady Katherine is in the garden walking her pug,” they tell him when he rides in after an errand for his mother.

  “The ladies are in the library . . . the young ladies are sewing in the privy chamber . . . his lordship is at prayer, his lordship is coming home at midday . . .” Everyone directs Ned to me, and me to him, until we spend all day every day together, and every time I see him I feel a thrill as if it were the very first time I have ever seen him, and every time he leaves me I wish he would never go.

  “Do you love him truly?” Janey whispers longingly when we are supposed to be going to sleep, bedded down together in her big wooden bed with the curtains drawn around us, my pug and kitten and Mr. Nozzle the monkey all tucked up with us.

  “I can’t say,” I reply cautiously.

  “You do then,” she says with satisfaction. “For anyone can say no.”

  “I shouldn’t say,” I amend.

  “So you do.”

  Of course Ned and Janey’s mother, Lady Anne Seymour, sees this as well as anyone else, and she calls her two children into her private chapel one morning. I am not invited. I am certain that she is going to ban them both from seeing me anymore. We will be separated, I know it. I shall be sent home. I shall be disgraced. She will say that a sister of Jane Grey cannot be seen to be flirting with Jane Grey’s former betrothed. She is a redoubtable woman who thinks very highly
of herself. She may have married beneath her in her second marriage, but her first husband was the greatest man in England after the king, and she insisted on her position as wife of the lord protector. She will tell her son and heir that she has already planned his marriage with someone very important, and that he may not court me.

  “She did,” Janey confirms, dashing back from the chapel to the bedroom that we share. She gasps and puts a hand to her heart. “I came as quick as I could. I knew you would be desperate to know what she said.”

  I snatch Ribbon the cat off her chair so she can sit, but I have to wait as her color comes and goes, and she gets her breath. As soon as she can speak, she says: “She told Ned that he must not single you out, that he was not a suitable companion for you, nor you for him.”

  “Oh my God!” I say. I drop down onto the bed and clasp Janey’s hands. “I knew it! She hates me! What did he say? Is he going to give me up?”

  “He was wonderful!” Janey exclaims. “So calm. He sounded so grown-up. Not at all worried. I never thought he would stand up to our mother like that. He said that young people may well accompany each other, and that there was no reason that he should avoid you, either here or at court. My lady mother said that he should not single you out as he does, and he said that it was obvious that the queen had no objection to a friendship between the two of you, as she had never said anything against it, and she knows that you are here together.”

  “He said that?” I am stunned at his confidence.

  “He did. Very coolly too.”

  “And what did your mother say?” I ask faintly.

  “She looked surprised and she said that she had nothing against you, and nothing against our friendship, but that no doubt the queen has plans for both of you, and they will not be for you to marry Ned. She said that the queen would not want to bring a cousin like you even closer to the throne by making you a Seymour.”