The Last Tudor Read online

  “All well?” my uncle inquires. “You don’t look too happy? A lover’s tiff?”

  “It’s all well,” I say, stammering on the lie.

  If Henry does not get his letters back and he announces that I am Ned’s lover, then I will fall from royal favor and my uncle and all my kinsmen will fall with me. Mary will have to leave court, and where will she go? We will not be paid as the queen’s ladies: we will not receive bribes from petitioners, nor her favors. My ruin will be the ruin of my entire family. And where will this baby be born, and who will pay for its keep?

  “It’s all well.” I bare my teeth in a joyless smile. “All quite well.”

  “Good, good,” he says cheerily. “We’ll ask the queen for permission for you and Henry Herbert to marry, perhaps while she is staying here. If tonight goes well, and she is in a good mood, eh? You should see the size of my marchpane castle! If only they can carry it in from the subtlety kitchen without dropping it! I tell you, my heart will be in my mouth! It’s time you were wed, young Katherine.”

  “Not yet.” I swallow down bile. “Don’t speak to the queen yet, I pray you. My lord Henry is displeased with me about a little thing. I have to send him a token. If I could send my maid to Westminster, she could find it for me.”

  He laughs. “Oh, young love! Young love! You make such difficulties for yourselves! You send him a pressed rose from my hedgerow and that will be more than enough for him, you’ll see. And I will speak to the queen for you when she is in a good humor as soon as you give me the nod.”

  “I’ll nod,” I say foolishly. “Don’t speak till then. I will nod.”

  He pats my shoulder. “Go and change into your prettiest gown,” he says. “We are going to give Her Majesty a dinner and an entertainment that she will remember for all her reign.”

  “I’ll go,” I say obediently. “Thank you, Uncle. I thank you very much.”

  “And put all your pets in the stables,” he says. “I won’t have them dirtying my new house.”

  I keep Ribbon in his traveling box because he is terribly inconstant and will wander off, but I smuggle Jo the dog and Mr. Nozzle the monkey into my rooms and give them the run of my chamber. God bless them, they are the only creatures in the world who care for me. I am not going to leave them in the stables, whatever my uncle says.

  I get through the evening like a tired old actor, playing my part as my uncle’s beloved niece, the queen’s second-favorite cousin—after Mary Queen of Scots—her named heir, with the mindless accuracy of a sleepwalker. I cannot think what I can do. I cannot think who will help me. I cannot stop Henry Herbert naming my shame to his father, and then to the rest of the court. Even if I could find his damned keepsakes and send them to him in time, I doubt that would silence him, his pride is so wounded, his vanity so stung. So I have to think—if he speaks out and shames me, then the queen will know at once, and so will William Cecil and Robert Dudley and Lady Clinton and my uncle, and Catherine Brandon my stepgrandmother and my aunt Bess St. Loe; and everyone who has promised me their goodwill in the past will hate me for being a lewd girl and a liar.

  I think: I have to tell someone who might be my friend and stand between me and the queen. I have to choose someone, from all these time-serving, two-faced, self-interested courtiers. I have to find one person that I can burden with my terrible secret, and hope that he will stand by me.

  I could tell William Cecil—he is the best advisor to manage the queen, and he supports me as a Protestant princess and heir. He is opposed to any papist, so he will always prefer me to Mary Queen of Scots or Margaret Douglas. I am the only Protestant princess. He is promised to my cause. But I cannot tell him. I simply cannot. I could not look into those brown eyes, as trusting and sad as a spaniel, and tell him that I have been lying to him for months, that I married in secret and lay with my husband and now I have lost him and he has gone off—who knows where, with Cecil’s own son—leaving me to face the anger of the queen alone. It’s too much. I can’t say it. I cannot make myself speak the words. I am too shamed to confess to a man like William Cecil.

  “Are you all right?” My sister Mary is at my elbow, looking up into my face. “You look green.”

  “Queasy,” I say. “Don’t look at me. I don’t want anyone to look at me.”

  “What is the matter with you these days?” she demands. “You’re as nervous as a foundling.”

  I blink the sudden tears from my eyes.

  “And you’re always crying!” she complains. “Has Ned left you?”

  “Yes,” I say, and the word falls from my mouth like a stone as I realize the truth. “He said that he would write; and he hasn’t written. He said that he would go for weeks; and he has been gone months. He doesn’t reply to my letters; and I don’t even know where he is. So, really, I have to say that he has left me. He left me ages ago. And I don’t know what to do without him.”

  “Henry Herbert?” she suggests.

  “He’s furious with me for being in love with Ned. He knows all about that.”

  She purses her pretty mouth. “Can’t you be happy without either of them?”

  “We were promised to marry,” I say. Even now, I can’t even tell the truth to my sister. “I feel compromised.”

  Mary laughs up at me. “For God’s sake! Our own sister died on the block for God’s Word. That’s what being compromised means. She died because she had given her word to God and would not retract it. Are you going to let your life be ruined for one little promise? A love promise? To a man? Just forget your promise! Break it!”

  “This is nothing like Jane,” I say.

  “Of course! We should try very hard to be nothing like Jane. We should live for joy and seek pleasure. The one thing that Jane’s death should teach us is that life is precious and every day is a gift that we should treasure. Turn your coat! Turn your collar! Retract your promise!”

  “That’s not what she wanted to teach us,” I say, thinking of “Learn you to die.”

  “I don’t think she was a very good teacher or a very good example,” Mary says boldly.

  I am as shocked as if Jo the pug suddenly stood on her hind legs. I had no idea that my little sister had thought of this at all. I had always thought that she was too young to understand what happened to Jane and—to my shame—I had thought that her little stature meant that she did not hear all the discussions and debate that rage so far above her pretty hood.

  Her dark eyes spark with irritation and then she smiles. “I shall find my own philosophy and live my own life,” she tells me. “And I shall fear nothing.”

  She walks past me and someone asks her to dance. I see her lining up with the other girls who are twice her height but not nearly as pretty, and none of them as wise. I think of her, not four feet tall but fearing nothing, and I think—I can’t tell the queen, I can’t bear to ruin Mary.

  I think I will tell our aunt Bess—Lady St. Loe. She’s not the most tenderhearted woman in the world, but she loved my mother and she promised me her friendship. She said at my mother’s funeral that I could turn to her. She’s a woman of vast experience, married to three men, and I have lost count of the number of her children. She will know the signs of pregnancy and when a baby is due. She must understand how love can drive you forward beyond where you should, perhaps, have gone. And she is friend and confidante to Elizabeth. If she takes my news well, then surely she can confess for me and make it all right?

  I have taken my decision, but I can’t find the right moment, or even the right words. I don’t dare speak out while we are under my uncle’s roof: I cannot bear to risk the shame to him. If Elizabeth is angry, she will be furious with everyone and I can’t expose him to the whiplash of vitriol that she can unleash when she thinks she has been unfairly treated. So I wait, as the progress winds its slow way east, day after day, through humid days and summer storms—one night a thunderstorm so powerful that the chimneys rock on the roofs and everyone thinks that the world is ending—until we get to Ipswich,
and then I have a pain, a new pain, which shoots from my crotch to my ribs, and I think, oh God, now I am splitting apart, and I have to tell Aunt Bess and get a physician or I will die of this secret as the baby bursts out of me.

  MR. MORE’S HOUSE, HIGH STREET,

  IPSWICH, SUMMER 1561

  I wait till the nightime, though the court is so joyous and carefree in this summer season that Elizabeth does not go to her bed till nearly midnight. But when it is finally quiet and the servants are sleeping on the trestle tables in the great hall of the townsman’s house, or wrapped in their cloaks at his great fireside, I leave Jo snoring on my pillow, Mr. Nozzle beside her, and the cat in his basket, and I creep to the St. Loe rooms, tap on the door, and when I hear Aunt Bess say: “Who is it?” I tiptoe in.

  She is sitting up in bed in a nightgown, reading her Bible by candlelight, a nightcap tied under her chin. Thank God, she sleeps alone. If she had a companion, I could not have said a word. Her husband has gone ahead of the court. He is the captain of the queen’s guard and chief butler, and he has to make sure that the next night’s dwelling exceeds Elizabeth’s demanding standards. So Bess, a wife of only two years, is parted from her husband so that Elizabeth can be with her lover in the greatest luxury that Sir William St. Loe can organize. So do we all run around her, this difficult queen, as if she had not been raised in a little house, glad of hand-me-down clothes, with no name or title or friends.

  “Who is it?” Bess asks, and then when she sees me, she smiles: “Oh, Katherine, my dear. What is it? Are you unwell?”

  I close the door behind me and I go to the bedside.

  “Aunt Bess . . .” I begin, and then I think, I cannot say anything. I cannot tell her anything. I cannot bring myself to say a word.

  “What is it, Katherine? What is it, dear?” she asks. She looks concerned. I think, if I had a mother who looked at me like that, I would be able to tell her anything.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  Her gaze narrows. “What?” she demands. “Are you in trouble?”

  In answer, I part the heavy folds of my night robe. Underneath it, my white linen nightgown clings to my plumper breasts, my swollen waist. She can see the unmistakable curve of my swollen belly, the little pronounced dimple of the button of my belly, which has popped out despite my strapping myself down.

  She claps both her hands over her mouth, and above her fingers her brown eyes widen in a silent scream.

  “Good God, what have you done?” she whispers.

  “I am married,” I say desperately.

  “What? To Henry Herbert?”

  “No, no, I only promised him when I was desperate, but he knows about this.”

  “Good God!”

  “I am married to Ned Seymour.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. But he has gone away and does not write to me.”

  “He denies the marriage?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not.”

  “Does he know of this?”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t sure. Janey knew.”

  “What good is that to anyone?” Lady Bess demands furiously. “She’s dead and he’s missing. Does anyone else know? William Cecil?”

  “No, no, I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell Lady Clinton either, and I—”

  “Why the hell tell me?” she hisses, her hands still at her face. “Why the hell would you come and tell me?”

  “I thought you would help me?”

  “Never!” she says flatly.

  “But, Lady St. Loe—my mother—your old friendship? You promised me . . .”

  “I loved your mother and she was good to me when I married my second husband at your house, and then again when I married my third. Note that, child: married. Publicly married. She would kill you rather than see you in this state and no husband to be found. She would not ask me to help you; she would bundle you out of court to somewhere in the country and pray to God that the baby is stillborn and that you can hide your shame.”

  “Lady Bess . . .”

  “I don’t have credit,” she says as flatly as a Genoese banker refusing a loan. “I don’t have credit to carry you through this. Nobody does. Nobody has enough. You’ll have to go away.”

  “I don’t want money . . .”

  “You do,” she says. “Desperately. And a home, and a husband, and a sponsor to explain it to the queen. I have none of these for you, and if I did, I am not sure that I would extend all the credit I have in the world, for a stupid, stupid girl like you.”

  I start to cry, weakly. “But I have nowhere to go . . .” I did not dream that she would be angry with me. “Where can I go? Aunt Bess, please! Don’t you have somewhere that I can go? Can’t I go to your house?”

  Again she slaps her hand over her mouth to stifle the scream. “A Tudor heir born in my house? A child half Tudor and half Seymour? Don’t you know that she will see that as a plot? No! No! Don’t you hear what I am saying? Elizabeth would throw me out of the court if she even knew we had been speaking, if she even knew that I know of this. Go. Go now, and don’t tell anyone that you have spoken to me, for I will simply deny it.”

  “But what am I to do?” I demand of her.

  The shadows leap and fall on her frightened face as she reaches for her bedside candle. “Go and hide somewhere, have the child, give it away—throw it away if you have to—and come back to court pretending that it never happened,” she counsels. “And never tell anyone that you spoke to me. And be sure that I will never confess it.”

  “Dear Aunt Bess, I beg you! Please don’t blow out the candle!”

  There is a puff and the room is in darkness.

  Incredulously, I stand in the dark, and then I stumble towards the door.

  I go to my bed but I don’t sleep. The baby has shifted again, I think it has dropped lower, for the swell of my belly is not so high. I think for a moment that perhaps it has died and is shrinking and that this might be the best thing for me. But then it squirms and kicks against me so strongly that I cannot pretend for even a moment that it is dead.

  Besides, I have a sudden rush of love for the poor little thing. I don’t want it dead. I can’t wish it dead. When Lady St. Loe said I should hope for a stillbirth, I thought her a monster. I thought she was beyond cruel. I will not give this poor little being away. I would not dream of putting a pillow over its little face and throwing it into a ditch. I will remember the puff of the candle and the darkness till I die. How could she? But there is no point in crying about Lady Bess when I have to think what I can do and where I can go.

  I wipe my eyes and sit up in my bed. I have to do something at once: the pain is like a vise gripping my belly; something must be happening. Although Aunt Bess was clear that she would do nothing for me, she has given me an idea—I should get away from court and give birth to this child in secret, perhaps leave him with a kindly family and return to court. When Ned comes home, if he ever comes home, and if he still loves me, if all this has been a terrible mistake, then we can ask for permission to marry, announce that we are husband and wife, and produce the baby, the new heir to the throne.

  Robert Dudley at least would be glad of that. It would give Elizabeth a male heir that she can nominate for the throne; it would leave her free to marry him. William Cecil would be happy to have a Protestant heir in the cradle. But I have to find somewhere to go into confinement where my secret will be safe.

  I long to go to my old home of Bradgate, but everyone knows me there, and the news would get back to court as fast as a spy could ride. I wish I could go to Hanworth and be at Ned’s home; but his mother would not support our marriage when we asked her, I doubt she would welcome me on my own, and Janey would not be there, where she promised to be. I dare not go uninvited and I dare not tell Ned’s mother why I need a home. I cannot tell my uncle, I cannot bring myself to tell him the truth, and I will not bring my disgrace to his new front door. I need someone who has vast lands, and many houses, who can give me a hideaway until m
y baby comes. Someone who can pay for a wet nurse, and bribe people to keep my secret. Someone who has the courage to hide me from the queen, someone who would take the risk of her displeasure to give her a Protestant heir.

  I think it can only be William Cecil or Robert Dudley; no one else has what Lady Bess calls “credit,” as if we were all misers, hoarding our reputations. I cannot bring myself to speak of courtship and secret promises to William Cecil. He is so old and so very respectable, he talks to me like a fond uncle. I would sooner confess to my real uncle Grey than tell William Cecil. Besides, he has asked me already and I have lied to him, barefaced, throughout this long pregnancy, and he will not forget that. But Robert Dudley has always been kind to me. He befriended Ned, he acknowledges my importance as the heir to the throne. He has recovered his reputation after murdering his wife; his credit at the court is the best in the land. He owns dozens of houses that the queen has given him—surely he can tuck me away in one of them? I decide that I will tell him in the morning, and I lie down again and try to sleep.

  I turn around, and then around again. It’s pointless lying in my bed. I heave myself like a beached whale to one side and then to another, but I cannot get comfortable with the baby pressing down on my heart so I can barely breathe, and leaning on my belly so I have to get up again to piss in the night pot. My mind is racing and there is a thudding in my ears as if I am in danger. I will never sleep until I have confessed to Robert Dudley and he has promised me a sanctuary. He sleeps late, I am sure. I think that I will go to him at once, and tell him at once, and throw my fortune into his hands and my fate to his mercy.

  My determination takes me to his door, and I tap on it quietly. It opens quickly, as if someone was alert on the other side, and Robert’s manservant, Tamworth, looks out into the gallery.

  “Lady Katherine!” he exclaims softly, and he steps out and takes my hand and draws me inside. “Don’t wait there, someone might see you.”