The Last Tudor Read online

  I close the door behind me, and I see someone stir in the big four-poster bed. “Oh, welcome!” Dudley says, a chuckle in his voice, and he throws off the covers and stands beside the bed, stark naked as if he is expecting a lover. When he sees it is me, he starts back at my astounded face, pulling some of his bedding to tie around his waist. His naked shoulders are broad and his chest is muscled and strong. I cannot help but wonder who he was expecting, naked in his bed, so darkly handsome, dozing till she could come to him. I cannot help observing that he is well made, and I think any woman would be glad to have Tamworth show her to this bed, as he is obviously used to doing.

  “You can go, Tamworth,” Dudley says shortly. “Wait outside, keep the door.”

  Tamworth throws his cloak around his night robe and goes out of the door. I hear the chair creak as he sits down in the gallery to guard our privacy, and I note that he knows exactly what to do.

  Robert glances to the other door to his bedroom. “Keep your voice down,” he says.

  “Is that the queen’s room?” I can hardly believe that even on progress they are given adjoining bedrooms, and so all the gossip must be true.

  “Never mind. Keep your voice down.” He goes quietly to the adjoining door and slides an oiled bolt to lock it shut. “What do you want, Lady Katherine? You should not be here.”

  “I am in trouble, I am in terrible trouble,” I tell him.

  He nods. “What?”

  I hardly know where to begin. “Ned Seymour and I were secretly betrothed,” I start.

  His dark eyes are on my face. “Foolish,” he says shortly.

  “Then we married in secret.”

  His gaze narrows. “Madness.”

  “Then he went to France and now Italy with Thomas Cecil.”

  Now he says nothing, he just watches me.

  “And I am with child.”

  His jaw drops. “Good God.”

  “I know.” My voice trembles, but for once I don’t weep. I think I have got to a place that is beyond tears. I am as low as I can be brought, telling a shameful secret to the queen’s lover, in his bedroom after midnight. And this is the only way that I can think to survive this terrible series of events.

  “Does William Cecil know?”

  I think—this is how it is. I have become a counter to be played by great men.

  “No, I came to you. Only you.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have come to me,” he says bluntly. “Not for a matter like this.”

  “Who then?” I demand. “For I have no friends, and I am an orphan.” I meet his critical dark gaze. “I have no older sister to advise me,” I remind him, the man whose plotting led to her death. “I have no father.” Thanks to you too, I think.

  He takes a turn around the room, pulls a linen shirt over his head and a pair of riding breeches over his nakedness. “You should have gone to the queen long before now.”

  “Yes, but I can’t go now,” I protest. “I thought that you might let me live in one of your smaller houses, somewhere far away, and have my child.”

  “Never,” he says. “The scandal that would break about your head would be beyond your imagining. Everyone would think that it was my child, or that you were the queen giving birth in secret to my bastard. You would bring down the throne. Do you think—” He breaks off with a curse. “No. You don’t think, do you?”

  He is right. I had not thought of that. I am incapable of thinking.

  “You could not have chosen a worse moment,” he says almost to himself. “The Queen of Scots returning to Edinburgh, the peace treaty not even signed by her . . .”

  “It’s coming,” I say flatly. “Whether the Queen of Scots takes her throne or not. The baby is coming. I have to go somewhere.”

  He runs his hand through his dark curly hair. “When?”

  I look at him. “When what, Sir Robert?”

  “When is your baby due? When will it be born?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know for sure. Soon, I think.”

  “For God’s sake!” He forgets himself and raises his voice. “You must know when you were wedded and bedded. You must have a general idea.”

  “We were married in December, at his house,” I say. I smile at the memory of Janey and me slipping and sliding in the mud as we walked along the foreshore to Ned’s house.

  “Next month then,” Robert says.

  “Will it be?”

  “Something like that. It’s usually nine months or so.”

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t know? For the love of God! Have you not seen a midwife?”

  I can’t confess that we were lying together before we were married. “How could I see a midwife?”

  His irritation suddenly leaves him as he realizes how very alone I am. I have no mother to advise me, my sister is dead, and I have not found a friend to replace Janey. I am brought so low that I have had to come to him. “Yes, of course,” he says quietly. “Poor little wench.”

  “I hoped you would help me,” I say humbly. “For my sister Jane’s sake. She married your brother. It was your father’s plan. Nothing has gone right for us since then.”

  His gesture cuts me short. “Not another word about her,” he says. “And it doesn’t behoove you to cite her name. Not in your condition.”

  “I am a married woman,” I say staunchly. “She would not have condemned me for marrying for love.”

  “Then where’s your husband?”

  I stammer. “You know that I don’t know.”

  “Not heard from him at all?”

  I shake my head.

  Robert Dudley flings himself into a chair beside the fireside, but he does not invite me to sit down. I hold on to the high back of the other chair and lean against it. He picks up a knife from a side table and turns it this way and that, to catch the light, as he thinks.

  “No question but that it is Ned’s child,” he says. “Tell me the truth now, absolutely.”

  “No question,” I say, swallowing the insult.

  “And when he comes home, he will own it?”

  “He cannot deny it.”

  “And you have proof of your marriage?”

  In answer I show him the chain around my neck, my betrothal diamond and my wedding ring of five links.

  “I see you have a ring,” he says dryly. “Who were your witnesses?”

  “Janey,” I say. “But she is dead.”

  “But there were others present?”

  “Just the minister.”

  “A proper minister, with a parish?”

  “One that Janey knew.”

  He nods. “And you have letters from Seymour. Did he give you money? Did he give you deeds to land?”

  “I have a letter of betrothal and his will names me as his wife and his heir,” I say proudly.

  Robert nods.

  “I have a poem,” I say.

  He puts his hand over his forehead and rubs his eyes, as if he is trying not to laugh. “Never mind that. Now listen, Katherine. I cannot send you into hiding. That would make things worse for you and very bad for me. I will tell the queen what you have told me and you will have to face her. She will be very angry. You should not have married without her permission—as an heir to the throne your husband is of tremendous importance to the safety of the realm. But it’s done, and thank God, you could have done a lot worse. He’s not a Spanish spy or a papist, he’s got no claim in Scotland. He’s of a good family—a reformer, thank God, and well liked—and you are with child, and if you have a boy, then it eases some of the pressure on her.”

  “She could marry who she liked, if she had a Protestant English boy heir,” I observe.

  Dudley’s dark eyes flash at me. “So she could,” he agrees. “But it is not for you to observe. Don’t try to be clever. It is very evident that you’re not that. So you are going to go to your room and, in the morning, wash your face and dress and do your hair and wait for me to send for you. I am going to wake the queen ear
ly, and tell her what you have told me.”

  I am about to say that he cannot wake the queen, that no one can enter her bedroom in the morning until she orders it. But then I remember the interconnecting door and I see that Robert Dudley can come and go as he pleases.

  “Will you tell her that I am very, very sorry?” I say quietly. “Ned and I fell in love. I love him still. I will never love anyone but him. I did not do it to offend her. I thought of nothing but how much I love him.”

  “I’ll do my best to explain,” Robert says shortly. “But I can tell you now, she’ll never understand. Go now.”

  All morning I wait in my room for the summons to Elizabeth. I am sick with fear. I have been sick in the morning for months from the baby; now I am sick with fear of the queen. I wonder if I am ever going to feel well again, if I am ever going to be happy again. I think of my poor sister and how she waited to hear from this queen’s sister whether she was to live or die, and I think that it is odd, and cruel, and incomprehensible that Jane should have died for her faith and that I should be scared to death for love, and that we will never be able to talk about this. I will give birth to her nephew, and he will never know her.

  At midday one of the ladies, Peggy, puts her head round the door and says: “She’s asking for you. We’re going on the river. You picked a bad day to take off!”

  “She wants me?” I am out of my chair and on my feet in a moment, ignoring the swimming sensation in my head.

  “She just wants to know where you are. I said you had overslept. But you’d better show your face.”

  I take a glance at myself in my little beaten-silver looking glass. The gentle tones of the reflection show me a beauty: creamy skin, golden hair, dark eyes.

  “Come on,” says Peggy disagreeably. “They’re getting into the boats now.”

  “She wants me to come out on the river?”

  “Didn’t I just say?”

  I hurry behind her and the two of us go to the quayside. I cannot believe that Elizabeth is going to interrogate me while sailing on the river. I thought she would send for me the moment that Robert Dudley spoke to her. I cannot understand what is happening. Elizabeth has been in a bad mood since her arrival in Ipswich. The town is passionately in favor of the reformed religion, and Elizabeth has a hankering for the old ways of the Church. The ministers here have wives, and Elizabeth longs for a celibate clergy dressed in the richest of robes. She is such a silly mix of reform and papistry; she is not serious about her faith like Jane. They have promised her a water masque of boats, to take her mind off her complaints, and we all have to take our places on one of the great trading ships, to dine and watch the display that has been prepared for Elizabeth’s amusement.

  Robert Dudley is at her side and he meets my anxious inquiring look with an expression of complete blankness. Clearly, I am to seek no help from him. Elizabeth inclines her head to my curtsey but does not summon me to her side. She is neither angry nor sympathetic, she is like she always is—frosty. It is as if nothing has been said about my condition. For a moment I think that he cannot have told her anything, that his nerve failed him at the last moment. A little quieting gesture of his hand behind her throne warns me to say nothing and do nothing, and I curtsey again and step back.

  The ship is anchored and the outgoing tide makes it pull against the hawser and rock and twist. It’s a horrible movement, both side to side and up and down at the same time. It’s far worse than rowing in a barge. I can feel the bile rise in the back of my throat and my mouth is filled with brine.

  “We will dine,” says Elizabeth as if she can read my white face and knows that I am afraid that I will not make it through the day without vomiting. “Ah,” she says. “Oysters!”

  The famous Colchester oysters are offered to the queen and she slides her eyes to Robert Dudley and says: “Is it true that they inspire lust in the unwary?”

  “Not only in the unwary,” he replies, and the two of them laugh together.

  “Perhaps virgins like Lady Katherine and I should not taste them?” she says. The server, taking the hint, immediately proffers Elizabeth’s great platter of oysters to me. With her dark gaze on me, I have to take one.

  “It depends if you like the taste,” Robert explains. “I, myself, can’t get enough of it.”

  She laughs and slaps his hand away from another shell, but she is watching me. I cannot refuse to eat a gift from the queen’s platter, and I raise the shell to my mouth. The smell of seaweed and the sight of the gluey shell is going to be too much for me. I know I am never going to be able to eat it. I know I am going to disgrace myself before the court. I can taste the salt of hot bile in my mouth, I can feel my stomach churn and heave.

  “Bon appétit!” the queen says to me, her sharp eyes on my green face.

  “And to you, Your Majesty,” I say, and I open my mouth and pour it down and swallow it down. I close my mouth like a trap and I hold it.

  The queen laughs so hard that she has to cling to Robert’s hands. “Your face!” she exclaims. “Have another!” she begs me. “Have more.”

  I cannot speak to Robert Dudley privately till the evening after chapel. I manage to get beside him as we take our places in the great hall. “Did you tell her?” I demand.

  “I told her; but she won’t speak of it till we are back in London,” he says. He glances forward to the top table, where the queen’s bronze head turns back to look for him. “Excuse me.”

  “Is she not angry? Will she forgive me?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “She says that she won’t speak of it till London. What d’you think?”

  I don’t know what to think, except that every day of the progress must bring me nearer to my confinement and the only person who has an opinion on the matter—Robert Dudley (of all the midwives a young woman might choose)—thinks that it must be September. Thank God we will be back in London by September and the queen will tell me then what I am to do. Nothing could be worse than this daily ordeal of travel, these miserable nights of amusement, and this terror of discovery every day.

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1561

  I am given permission to go ahead of the royal progress and return to London. Nobody says why, but I take it as a favor won for me by Robert Dudley, though he says nothing and the queen is as lighthearted as if he had not spoken. I go at once to the royal treasury rooms to find the tokens that Henry Herbert gave me as his pledge, but the box where I keep my precious papers—Ned’s betrothal to me, his beloved will, and the Herbert love letters—is not where I left it.

  “You took them with you!” my maid says. “Because you said they were precious to you. So you took them on progress.”

  “But I wrote to Tabitha to find them here, and she said they were missing. They weren’t with me. We didn’t take them.”

  She looks puzzled. “I am sure that I packed them. Are all your jewels safe?”

  “My jewels are nothing to do with it!” I exclaim. “I clearly remember telling you to take the box of papers to the groom of the wardrobe and have them stored in the jewel house for me.”

  “Oh, that box!” she says, her face suddenly clearing. “Yes, I took that for you.”

  “Well, go and find it then. Why would you not fetch it at once?” Suddenly exhausted, I sink down to my bed and then there is a clattering knock on my door. I jump to my feet and open it myself. Outside is a captain of the yeomen of the guard and a couple of yeomen behind him.

  “Lady Katherine Grey,” he says.

  “Obviously,” I say sharply. “Who asks for me?”

  “You are under arrest,” he says. “You are commanded to come with me to the Tower of London.”

  “What?” I simply can’t understand what he is saying.

  “You are under arrest. You are to come with me to the Tower. You may bring three women to serve you. They are to follow behind us with whatever goods and clothes you require.”

  “What?”

  He steps
inside the room without answering me and he bows, his outstretched arm indicating that I should go out through the open door. My baby turns in my belly under the hard stomacher. I go where the captain indicates. He puts his hand in the small of my back and I flinch away. I cannot bear to be touched. I don’t want him putting his heavy hand anywhere near my belly, where my baby suddenly kicks out and makes me give a little gasp.

  “This way,” he says, thinking I am about to cry out. “And no disturbance, if you please.”

  I am very far from making any disturbance, I am blindly obedient, stunned like a heifer hammered between the eyes as it walks down the shambles towards the butcher. My ladies are gathered like a flock of startled hens at the doorway to my presence chamber, eyeing me in horror as if I were taken with the plague and they want to draw back their skirts for fear of infection; but I hardly see them at all. I am blinded by my own shock.

  “The Tower?” I say to myself, but there is no meaning in the words for me.

  The captain goes ahead of me, and his men come behind. It is like a scene in a masque. I follow him. I don’t know what else I can do. But I really don’t know what is happening.

  “I have to have my linnets,” I say suddenly. “And my little dog. And I have a cat, and I have a monkey, a very valuable animal.”

  “Your ladies will bring them,” he says solemnly, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that I am keeping up. I follow in his footsteps and he leads me out of the palace, through the privy gardens, and towards the river. I look around in case there is anyone I know who would take a message for me, but who would take a message? And, in any case, what would it say?

  “Is this about the Spanish?” I ask. “For I have not spoken with them, and I have told William Cecil everything that they have ever said to me.”

  We go in silence through the gate to the pier. The queen’s sergeant porter, Thomas Keyes, is on duty. He holds open the gate for us and he bows low from his enormous height to me. “My lady,” he says respectfully.

  “Mr. Keyes,” I say helplessly.

  The captain leads the way to the pier, and there is a barge at the steps, without livery. He puts out his hand to help me down the steps and I go carefully, conscious of my big belly and my weight tipping me forward. I walk up the gangplank and take my seat at the rear of the barge. An awning shades me from the afternoon sun and from anyone watching from the palace. I wonder wildly if William Cecil has fallen into disgrace, just as King Henry’s advisors used to fall, and if it is a mistake to mention his name. “I report to Robert Dudley also,” I say. “I never fail in my loyalty to the queen, and to her faith.”