The Last Tudor Page 5

  “When are you due to have your course?”

  I never have any idea—sometimes it comes late, sometimes it does not come at all. “I think it is this week, or perhaps it was last week.”

  Her cross face does a strange convulsion, I understand she is moved. She takes my hand. “You shall rest,” she says with sudden gentleness. “Rest, my dear.”

  There is a clatter from the courtyard outside my window as the Dudley horsemen all come into the yard and shout for grooms and for the men-at-arms. The noise pounds into my head and I turn my face from the bright window.

  “You can go to the manor at Chelsea and rest,” she offers. “You like it there, don’t you?”

  I lived there with Queen Kateryn when she was newly widowed and writing her book. It is my favorite place in all the world. “I love it there,” I say. “But I thought your husband said that I have to be here?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. You can go there, while we wait for news,” she says. “Guildford can visit you, and my husband can send you news. Your ladies can go with you.” She is smiling as she pats my cold hand. She has never been so gentle with me before. “You can be quiet there, and eat well. I have had thirteen babies,” she confides. “I know all about it.”

  Does this mad woman think I am with child? Bearing her grandson? Well, whatever she means, I am not going to argue with her, not if she is sending me to Chelsea without Guildford.

  “I’ll tell them to prepare your rooms at the old manor,” she says. “You can go by our barge as soon as they are ready for you. See how well I look after you! But rest for now.”

  I close my eyes and when I open them, she has gone.

  THE OLD MANOR, CHELSEA,

  JULY 1553

  I can hardly believe that my friend, my teacher, my almost-mother Queen Kateryn is not here with me at Chelsea. Every time I raise my eyes from the page I expect to see her, at her table, reading and taking notes.

  This was her house, and I was her favorite ward, a little girl she was making in her own image, as beloved as a daughter. We walked together in the gardens, we played in the orchard, we sat beside the river, and every day, without fail, we studied in the beautiful rooms that look down on the gardens and out to the river. If she missed the crowds and the excitement of the royal court, she never gave any sign of it. On the contrary, she lived as she had always wanted: as a scholarly lady, remote from a sinful world, happy with the man she loved, free at last to devote herself to study and to prayer. It was from this library that she sent her book to the printers. Here, she invited the greatest scholars of the day to preach. Now I feel as if she has just stepped into the garden, or walked along the gallery, and that I may see her at any moment, and it comforts me. The life that she made for herself here is the life I want for myself: this scholarly peace.

  In this period of quietness, I choose to read all that I can about dwarfs, as I think that my sister Mary is not just bird-boned, or underweight, or slow to grow—my father has used all these excuses to keep her at home. I fear that she may never grow any bigger; and I wonder why such a thing should be. I learn almost nothing from the Greek philosophers, but in ancient Egypt there were dwarf gods, and some high-born courtier dwarfs. I write to tell Mary all about this but I don’t mention the behavior of dwarfs at the Roman courts. None of that is suitable information for a young woman who is the daughter of an heir to the throne. Indeed, I am surprised to find it in Kateryn Parr’s library at all.

  I live here almost alone except for my ladies. Every other day Guildford rides out to see me, gives me what news he knows—which is never much—and then returns to the court where they are keeping a selfish vigil over my poor cousin the dying king. Sometimes Guildford dines with us but usually he eats his dinner with his parents and sleeps at their house. My ladies ask me if I miss him—a husband so handsome and so newly wed—and I show them a thin smile and say “not particularly.” I never say that it is a great relief to be without his heavy presence in my bed, sweating under my thick covers, weighing down his side of the bed. He has to attend me, just as I have to endure him; we are bound to lie together by the law of the Church and the command of our parents; but why a woman would do it for pleasure, or even seek it, I cannot imagine.

  But I do remember that Queen Kateryn was happiest in the mornings when Thomas Seymour came bare-legged out of her rooms. I know that my mother relishes her time with my father, and Lady Dudley is obviously ludicrously devoted to my father-in-law. Perhaps it is something I will grow into when I am taller and stronger. Perhaps, as a pleasure of the flesh, you have to have a lot of flesh to feel the pleasure. If I did not feel so sick in my belly and so feverish, it would perhaps be better. But I cannot imagine being so fat and so healthy that I would long for Guildford’s clumsy thrusting, or giggle when he slapped my bottom.

  This is the only time I have ever found that my books fail me. There are some Greek papers about the conception of children but they are all about the phases of the moon. There are some terrifying pictures of a baby being cut from a dead mother, and a lot of theology Our Lord being conceived by the Holy Ghost on a virgin—and there are some thoughtful writers who question how this could be. But nobody seems to have written anything about a real woman. It is as if I, and those of my sex, exist only as a symbol. The books say nothing about the strange mixture of pain and shame that Guildford and I suffer wordlessly and awkwardly together. They say nothing about how a baby is made from this painful coupling. I don’t think anyone exactly knows, and, of course, I cannot ask.

  Guildford talks to me in the morning, he tells me that the king’s illness has been announced to the parliament and the churches are praying for his recovery. Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth have been invited to court, and they are both waiting in their country houses for news.

  “Will they come?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “My father will know.”

  “What is going to happen?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know. My father will know.”

  “Can’t you ask him?”

  He gives a funny little scowl. “No. Do you ask your father what his plans are?”

  I shake my head.

  “He talks to John and Ambrose or Robert.” Guildford names his older brothers. “They all talk together, they know what’s happening. But they’re much older than I; they have been at court and they’ve been in battles. They can advise him, he listens to them. I am just . . .” He trails off.

  “What are you?”

  “Bait to catch you,” he says, his voice hard as if he is insulting us both. “A fat fly for a stupid trout.”

  I hesitate, ignoring his rudeness and the hurt in his voice. “But how will we know what we are to do?”

  “Someone will tell us,” he says. “When they want us, they will send for us. Dead fly and trout together.”

  It is the first time that I have had a sense of him as a young man, not yet twenty, who has to obey his family, as I have to obey mine. It is the first time that I have seen he is anxious about what is planned for us. It is the first time that I have thought: we are in the same situation, together. Our future will be together, we will grow up together, we have to face whatever is going to happen together. I give him a shy little smile. “We just have to wait?”

  Surprisingly, he touches my fingers with his, as if he shares my sense of being caged, like the bear at Bradgate, waiting for the dogs to come. “We have to wait,” he agrees.

  It is Mary Sidney, Guildford’s older sister, who comes one afternoon, cloaked and hooded as if she were a heroine of one of the poems that she loves so much, her dark blue eyes bright with excitement, her slim frame trembling.

  “You have to come!” she says, whispering though we are alone in my private chamber, except for my ladies, seated in the window, catching the last light of the setting sun on the books they are reading.

  “Did your father send you for me?”

  “Yes!” she says excitedly. “You are to come at on
ce.”

  “I am not well,” I tell her. “I am sick all the time, as if I am being poisoned.”

  “Of course you’re not being poisoned. You have to come now.”

  I hesitate. “My things, my books . . .”

  “Come, it’s just for a visit. You won’t need anything. Come now.”

  “As I am? Without anything?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  My ladies bring my cloak and my hat. There is no time to change my gown. I take a fur to wrap around me on the barge for the wind is cold on the darkening water.

  “Come on!” Mary Sidney says. “Hurry up.”

  The Dudley barge is waiting for us, but the ducal pennants and the standard are furled and tied. We go on board without a word and they cast off in silence and start to row, swiftly and smoothly. At once, I think that they have made a mistake and are going the wrong way—upriver, away from the city, westward. I cannot understand this. If my poor cousin is worse, we should be going to him at Greenwich Palace, downriver. But the flowing inward tide is with us and the boat springs forward with each splash of the oars in the water, so that Mary and I, sitting side by side on the seat under the awning, rock forward and back with every movement. I put my hand to my belly where I feel a grip of fear or nausea, or both.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Syon House,” she says.

  I give a little gasp. Syon House is where Katherine Howard was held before she was taken to the Tower and beheaded.

  “It’s my father’s house now,” Mary says impatiently, as if she guesses that I am afraid. “He just wants to meet us there.”

  “What for?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.” She settles back, folds her hands inside her cape and stares over the heads of the laboring rowers, over the darkening river as the wooded banks and fields slide by. We pass water meads where heron flap slowly up out of the flooded fields and fold themselves into high trees; we pass wet pasture where the cattle squelching in the mud look at us reproachfully as if we are to blame for spoiling their cloudy drinking water and not their own heavy hooves. We pass thick woodland where the trees bend down to their own reflections and all I can see is branch meeting reflected branch, and green leaves to greener weed. The last glow of the sun turns gray, Mary straightens the fur around my shoulders and a thin waning moon rises behind us, throwing a pale yellowish light on the glassy waters like a will-o’-the-wisp urging us onward to our destruction.

  “Do you really not know why they have sent for me?” I ask Mary, very quietly, as if the darkening sky must not hear.

  She shakes her head as if she too does not dare to break the silence, and an owl hoots and then I see it, white as a ghost, thick wings spread, as it weaves from one tree to another, and then we hear again that mournful call.

  It is hours before she says: “There!” and I can see the lights. It is Syon House.

  SYON HOUSE, ISLEWORTH,

  JULY 1553

  They berth the barge precisely at the pier, make it fast, run out the gangplank, and bow to us as we disembark. There are servants with torches, and they light the long allée up to the great house. My lord father-in-law has rebuilt the old abbey into a private house, but he has left whole walls and the stone tracery of beautiful windows standing bleak and pale in the moonlight, so I can almost hear the whisper of plainsong and the chant of the nuns weaving around the skeleton of their home.

  We go past the stones as if they were nothing: the teeth of a skull on an old battlefield. We ignore fallen statues, a gold arrow in the grass, a piece of stone carved like an ivy branch, the top of a sarcophagus. Mary Sidney looks to neither right nor left, and nor do I as we walk through the rubble of the old faith, up a small flight of steps, through the big doors, and inward and inward until we are in a long gallery, gloomy with dark wooden paneling, perhaps the old room of the abbess when she sat among her devout ladies. Now it is echoey and empty, there are cold embers in the huge stone grate, and the only light comes from a wrought candelabra with bobbing candle flames placed beside a heavy chair. There are bleached panels on the wooden walls where the pictures of holy scenes have been taken away, rightly so, for Cursed be he, that maketh any carved idol or molten image, an abomination of the Lord; but it makes a gloomy room look wretched.

  I look at Mary and say: “Where is everyone? Why have we come here?”

  “I don’t know,” she says; but now I am certain she is lying.

  She goes to the door and opens it to listen. From the distant kitchen we can hear the clatter of pans and the sound of voices, but the great rooms that open off the huge hall are silent. Mary closes the door and looks at me, as if wondering what she should do with me. I wrap my cloak tighter round my thin frame and look back at her.

  “Your eyes are huge,” she says irrelevantly. “Don’t be so frightened. You have to be brave.”

  “I’m not frightened,” I lie.

  “You look like a doe at bay.”

  My faith should support me as strongly now as it does when I am safe in my bed at Bradgate. I know that God is with me. “O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me,” I say quietly.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mary says impatiently. “You’ve just come for dinner with your father-in-law!” She drags a stool to the massive fireplace. After a moment’s hesitation I copy her and we sit like a pair of old gossips on either side, and she throws on some kindling and a little log. It gives out no heat but a flickering light that drives the dark shadows to the corners.

  “Is it about the king?” I whisper.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Has he named me as queen?”

  She compresses her lips as if to keep the words in her mouth.

  “Will it be . . . soon?”

  She nods, as if it is too terrible to say, and we sit in silence after that and then the door is opened and a manservant comes in, wearing the Dudley livery. “His Grace wishes to see you in the great hall,” he says.

  Mary and I follow him down the stairs, he throws open the double doors, and we go into the brightly lit room. At once I am dazzled by candles and firelight; the room is crowded with the great men of the kingdom and their unending trains of hangers-on. There is a blaze of wealth from jewels on the hats, and the thick gold chains sprawling over a dozen broad chests, fat as pouter pigeons. I recognize half a dozen of them. My sister Katherine’s sickly husband is missing, but his father, William Herbert, is here; his brother-in-law, William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, is standing beside him. Francis Hastings and Henry FitzAlan are talking together in a huddle but fall silent when they see us. We walk into the sudden hush of the room and my father-in-law, John Dudley, nods at Mary as if to thank her for a service, and then, one after another, they all pull their hats from their heads and stand in silence. I look around, half expecting that the king has come in behind me, or perhaps Princess Mary. But then John Dudley himself, the Duke of Northumberland, greatest man in the council, sweeps off his pearl-encrusted hat and bows very low to me. “The king is dead,” he says. “God save his immortal soul. He named you as his heir. You are queen, God bless and keep Your Majesty.”

  I look at him blank-faced, and I think, stupidly, that this must all be a dream: the evening sail on the river, the silent house at the end of the long journey, the cold hearth, and now these great men looking at me as if I should know what to do, while they pin a treasonous title on me.

  “What?” is all I say. “What?”

  “You are queen,” John Dudley repeats. He looks around the room. “God save the queen!”

  “God save the queen!” they all bellow, their mouths wide open, their faces suddenly flushed, as if shouting all together can make a thing true.

  “What?” I say again. I think I will wake up in a moment and this will seem ridiculous. I will be in my bed at Chelsea. Perhaps I will tell Guildford of my terrible dream and he will laugh.

  “Fetch my wife,” John Dudley says quietly to the man at the
door, and we wait in awkward silence. Nobody meets my gaze but everyone is looking at me. I keep thinking: what do they want me to do? I say a little prayer: “Holy Father, tell me what to do. Send me a sign.” Then my mother-in-law, Lady Dudley, comes in and my mother is with her. This should comfort me but seeing those two rivalrous enemies united in a sudden determination frightens me worse than before. Elizabeth Parr comes in too and stands beside her husband the Marquess of Northampton, and her face is bright and hard.

  My mother takes my cold hands in an unkind grip. “Jane, the king my cousin is dead,” she says loudly, as if announcing her royal blood to the room.

  “Edward dead?”

  “Yes, and he named you as the new queen.” She can’t stop herself from adding: “Through my right.”

  “Poor Edward! Oh! Edward!” I say. “Was it peaceful for him at the end? Was it his illness? Did he have a preacher with him?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” my mother-in-law says, wasting no time on the soul of my cousin. “He named you as queen.”

  I look into her determined face. “I can’t be,” I say simply.

  “You are,” my mother repeats. “At the end, he named our line. You inherit through me.”

  “But what about Princess Mary?”

  “She was named as a bastard by her own father in his will, and besides, we will never accept a papist queen,” Lady Dudley interrupts. “Never.”

  “Princess Elizabeth?” I whisper.

  This time, neither of them troubles to reply. I don’t even name Mary Queen of Scots, though her claim is as good as ours.

  “I can’t do it,” I whisper to Lady Dudley, and I look askance at the room filled with men. “I really can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  One by one the councillors drop to their knees till they are all at the height of my shoulders and I feel as if I am besieged by determined gnomes, no taller than my little sister.

  “Don’t!” I say miserably. “My lords, I beg you, don’t.” I can feel the tears running down my face, for my poor cousin, dead so young, and for me, alone in this terrible room with these terrifying men on their knees, and these women who will not help me. “Don’t, I can’t do it.”