The Last Tudor Read online

  William Cecil is kinder and more attentive to me than he has ever been, as if he fears that Robert Dudley will persuade the queen to marry him, and the country will turn to me as her successor. People would far rather have me as queen than any woman married to a Dudley.

  “You look very pale,” William Cecil says to me gently. “Are you missing your beloved friend so much?”

  I have to swallow my little gasp as I think he is speaking of Ned, but he has Janey in mind. “I miss her very much,” I manage to say.

  “You must pray for her,” he says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that she will have gone straight to heaven. There is no such thing as purgatory and no souls can be prayed out of it—but it is still a comfort to pray for the happiness of our friends in heaven, and God hears every prayer.”

  I don’t tell him how fervently I pray that Ned will come home soon. I just lower my eyes to the ground and hope that he will let me go away from him to the queen’s rooms. Nobody cares how I look there. Actually, Elizabeth prefers it when I am pale and quiet.

  “And do you miss her brother, the Earl of Hertford, too?” Cecil asks archly.

  It is such an odd tone for such a serious man that I risk a quick upward glance. He is smiling down at me, his dark eyes searching my face. I can feel that I am blushing, I know that he will see it, and he will make up his own mind.

  “Of course,” I say. “I miss them both.”

  “Nothing that you should tell the queen . . . or me?” William Cecil hints gently.

  I flash a glance at him; I will not be teased about this. “You told me I should wait for the right time to speak to her.”

  “I did,” he says judicially. “And now would not be the time.”

  I press my lips together. “Then I will speak to her when you tell me that I may,” I say.

  I will find the courage to speak to the queen, and summon Ned home so that we can face her together, as soon as William Cecil says the time is right. Until then, I am dumb with fear of her. I dare not tell William Cecil how far we have gone without either his permission or the support of Robert Dudley. Of course, Ned was sure that both William Cecil and Robert Dudley have a pretty good guess what we are about, and anyone would wager that a handsome young man like Ned and a beautiful princess like me would fall in love if they are allowed to spend every day together. So perhaps I should speak out soon, with the hope that William Cecil will take my part.

  But what if William Cecil is not inviting my confidences but, on the contrary, warning me off marriage to Ned with this teasing tone? I wish he had been clearer before we were wedded and bedded and Ned gone away.

  Worse still, I find that I am a little queasy in the morning and I cannot eat meat, especially meat with fat, until the evening. It turns my stomach and that is odd, as I have always been hungry at breakfast time, coming to it ravenous after chapel and fasting. My sister Jane used to say that I was gluttonous, and I would laugh and say . . . but it doesn’t matter now what I used to say, since I will never say it to her again, and now I can only face bread and milk and sometimes not even that. Jo the pug sits on my lap at breakfast and eats most of my portion. I believe that my breasts are warmer and a little tender, too. I don’t know for sure, and still there is no one that I can ask, but I think these are signs that I might be with child. And then what will I do?

  Lady Clinton, my lady aunt Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a kinswoman of mine who loved my sister Jane, stops me in the gallery and remarks that I am less merry without my friends the Seymours. She waits as if I should say something in reply. Lady Northampton, who comes behind her, says openly to my face that if I am in love with Ned Seymour, then I would do better to tell the queen and have her order him to make an honest woman out of me. They stand side by side, Elizabeth’s friends, Elizabeth’s confidantes, a pair of harpies, as if they know everything, as if my precious secret is anything like their horrible old flirtations in the reign before this one, in the years before that, long ago when they were young and pretty and tenderhearted.

  My cheeks blaze with shame that they should speak of Ned and me as if we were an ordinary couple, a pair of fools holding hands at the back of the court. They cannot know, they cannot understand, that we are deeply in love and, in any case, married.

  “If he promised you marriage and left you, we should tell the queen,” Lady Clinton whispers. “Everyone saw that you were inseparable, and then he suddenly goes away. I will speak out for you.”

  I am horrified that they should think that I should have been a loose woman. I am furious that they think that I should be such a fool as to be abandoned by a faithless lover. I am heir to the throne of England! I am sister to Jane Grey! Is it likely that I would lower myself to lie with a man not my husband and have to rely on my aunts to bring him home to me? But I cannot tell them that we are married and that he went away with my permission. And I cannot bring myself to confide in either of the two old harpies (who are at least thirty) that I am a married woman with child. I choke back my rage and I just smile prettily, and say that I am missing Janey very badly indeed. They take the tears of rage for grief and they both say that she was a lovely girl and it is a terrible loss, and so we none of us say anything more about Ned.

  It seems that everyone is in full summer happiness but me. Everyone is courting but me. Elizabeth and Robert Dudley are open lovers: they go everywhere together, sometimes they even hold hands where everyone can see. She treats him like a husband and an equal, and everyone knows that if they want an allowance, a pension, or forgiveness for some crime, then a word from Robert Dudley is as good as the word of the queen since the one follows the other as if she had no choice in the matter, and no tongue of her own for anything but for licking his amorous lips.

  He is lordly with his favor. She has given him huge sums of money, and licenses to tax profitable trades. She has stopped short of giving him a dukedom, but she pats his cheek and swears his family will rise again. Nobody now remarks that his wife died in the most suspicious of circumstances less than a year ago and that everyone blamed him. Nobody remembers that his father was executed for treason and his father before him. I remember it—but then it was my sister that Robert Dudley’s father forced onto the throne and so on to the scaffold. Everyone else at court chooses to behave as if Dudley comes from the greatest of families and has always been trusted and beloved.

  It’s not so in the country, of course. I get secret messages from people assuring me that if there is an uprising against Elizabeth and her adulterous lover, then they will support me. I barely even read them. I give them at once to William Cecil, who says quietly: “Her Majesty is blessed in so loyal an heir. She loves you for this.”

  I want to say smartly: “Well, she gives little sign of her love.” Or I want to ask: “Does she love me enough to allow me to be happy? Or does she only love me so much that she keeps me on this rack of uncertainty?”

  For though everyone knows I am the heir she still does not name me as such in an act of parliament, and now that Mary Queen of Scots has announced that she is coming back to Scotland, many people are saying that Elizabeth should name her as the heir and so make peace with her and with Scotland and France.

  “Your friend Ned is well received in Paris and he writes to me that Queen Mary of Scotland will not ratify the peace treaty and insists on returning to Scotland, upholding her claims against the English throne,” William Cecil tells me. “He has been a great intelligencer in the court of France for me. He has been greeted like a prince. He and my son Thomas have met everyone who matters in France, and Ned has told me much that I didn’t know about the secrets of the court.”

  “And when are they coming home?” I try to make my voice as light and as casual as I can.

  “Soon, I hope. I have never known two young men to spend more money,” Cecil says, telling me nothing.

  I have to know that he is coming soon. I write to him, and when I get no reply, I worry that he has forgotten his promises to me, that he is in love with