The Last Tudor Read online

  And then I remember, with a gulp of horror like ice in my belly, that her hood is off her head already, and her head is off her body, and if I pulled her plait, then her head would swing like a ball on a rope in my hand, and I find I am screaming and I put my hands over my panting mouth until I choke down my retching sobs.

  I sleep out of sheer weariness in my bed in the quiet house. My husband, Henry, does not come to lie with me. I suppose that he never will. I think he is probably forbidden even to see me. Certainly we have not been left alone together since Queen Mary returned in her triumph to London. I imagine the Herberts are desperate to get the marriage set aside, and free him from the terrible disadvantage of a wife whose sister was beheaded for treason. They will be writing out confessions and swearing that they hardly knew us Greys at all. It was such a brilliant marriage only nine months ago; then I was a catch, now I am an embarrassment. I stay in my rooms and when I go to dinner, I sit at the ladies’ table and I keep my head down and hope that no one speaks to me, for I don’t even know what my name is: am I Katherine Herbert still? Or am I Katherine Grey again? I don’t know who I am supposed to be, I don’t know what I am supposed to say. I think it safer to say nothing.

  I would pray for my father but I don’t know what prayers are allowed. I know we’re not to pray in English anymore, and absolutely forbidden from doing anything that is not part of the old Mass. I understand the Latin well enough—I’m not completely ignorant—it just seems odd to me to be praying in a language that most people can’t understand. The priest turns his back on his congregation and celebrates the Mass as if it were a secret, between him and God, and this is so odd to me, who has been brought up with the communion table on the chancel steps and everyone coming up for bread and wine. The people mumble the responses, uncertain of the strange words. Nobody knows what is holy, nobody knows what is right, and nobody knows who I am—not even me.

  They take my father to trial and they find him guilty again. I think that since the queen pardoned him once before, surely she is certain to repeat the pardon? Since it is the same offense? Why would she not? If treason was not too bad the first time, is it that much worse being done again? I can’t see my mother to ask her if she hopes to save her husband as she did last time, because I don’t go anywhere. I don’t leave Baynard’s Castle. I don’t know if I am allowed out. I think not.

  Nobody is going to ask me if I would like to go on a visit; nobody takes me anywhere in the barge or even invites me to come out with them. Nobody ever asks me if I want to ride out. Nobody speaks to me at all but the servants. I don’t even know if the guards on the outer gate would open the great doors for me if I walked towards them. For all I know I am a prisoner in my husband’s house. For all I know I am under house arrest, facing a charge of treason myself. Nobody tells me anything.

  Actually, nobody goes anywhere. Nobody goes out at all except my father-in-law, who huddles on his best jacket and hurries to court to sit in public judgment on the very many men who were his allies only weeks ago. Now they are charged with treason and hanged one after another at every crossroads in the city. Elizabeth herself, the half sister, the heir, and for all I know, the best-hidden plotter, is suspected of treason, and I can’t say I care very much if they behead her too. Since they could behead Jane, who never wanted the throne in the first place, I don’t see why they should hesitate over Elizabeth, who has always wanted it so very badly and is a very nasty girl, so vain and such a center of gossip.

  I can’t even see my little sister Mary, who is with my mother in our London house, Suffolk Place. I don’t see anybody except my father-in-law and my so-called husband at dinner and at chapel, where we pray four times a day, whispering strange words over and over again in the candlelit dusk. They don’t speak to me then, but my father-in-law looks at me as if he is surprised I am still there, and he can’t quite remember why.

  I give him no cause for complaint. I am as devout as if I were an enclosed nun—a very reluctant enclosed nun. It’s not my fault! I was born and bred into the reformed religion and I learned Latin for my studies, not to mutter with a priest. I know grammar, but I never learned the prayers by rote. So the psalms and the blessings are as meaningless to me as if they were in Hebrew. I keep my head down and I mutter pious-sounding noises. I bob up and down and cross myself when everyone else does. If I were not so terribly sad, I would be bored to death. When they tell me quietly, just before Matins, that my father has been beheaded with the other traitors, I feel more exhausted than unhappy, and I don’t know what prayers should be said for him. I think that since Queen Mary is on the throne, he must have gone to purgatory and we should buy Masses for his soul, but I don’t know where you would buy Masses while the abbeys are still closed, and if they would do him any good, when Jane said there was no such place as purgatory anyway.

  I feel only how very, very tiring this all is, and all I really care about is when can I go out, and if I will ever be happy again. I think this must mean that I am, as Jane said, totally without the gift of the Holy Spirit, and for a moment I think I shall tell her that she is right and I am a very worldly ninny, but inexplicably sad; and then I remember that I shall never tell her anything, ever again, and I remember that is why I am sad.

  Unbelievably, my mother—the most unlikely angel in the world—delivers a true miracle. She has been constantly attending court, begging the queen that we, the innocent victims of my father’s ambition, his surviving little family of three, be forgiven his treason. My lady mother pursues the queen’s goodwill as if it were a plump deer, and in the end brings it to bay and cuts its furry throat. Once Jane is gone and can no longer be the unwilling center of any rebellion, once my father is dead and buried, the queen gives us back one of our houses, Beaumanor, near Bradgate Park, and the whole beautiful park of Loughborough stocked with our game, and we are allowed to live richly once more.

  “What about the bear?” I ask Mother when she tells me of this extraordinary reprieve.

  “What bear?”

  “The Bradgate bear. I was taming him. Will we move him to Beaumanor?”

  “For God’s sake, we have been an inch from the scaffold and you are talking to me about a bear? We’ve lost him with Bradgate, and the hounds and the horses. They’ll all go to someone in the queen’s favor. My life is ruined, I am a heartbroken widow, and you talk to me about a bear?”

  Jane would have stood up to her and insisted that the bear should come with us to Beaumanor. I can’t. I don’t have the words and I cannot tell her that I feel that the bear, like Mr. Nozzle, like every living thing, deserves to be seen and considered, is fit for love. I should like to tell her that I am heartbroken too; but I can’t find the words for this and she is, anyway, not interested.

  “Go to the Herberts,” she snaps. “Fetch your things from them.”

  BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,

  SPRING 1554

  I feel that we have got home safe, ducked our heads as the scythe passed over us. Mary and Mother and I, Mr. Nozzle and Ribbon the kitten, the horses and hounds (but not the bear) are home but not home, close to the park, near enough to see the tall chimneys of our old house, missing our old house—but at any rate alive, and living together in a state of constant mild bickering that tells us that we can speak, that we can hear, that we are safe.

  And we are lucky—far luckier than the others. My father never comes home, I will never see my sister again. They bury her in pieces in the chapel, and Elizabeth our cousin enters the Tower as a prisoner suspected of treason in the rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt and my father. Only the queen can say if Elizabeth will come out or if more Tudor blood will water the green, and she is not telling. For sure, I will never go there if I can help it. Never. Never.

  I am glad to be safely far from London but I wish we could have gone back to Bradgate House. I miss Jane’s room and her library of books, and Mr. Nozzle misses my bedroom and his little bed on the window seat. I miss the poor bear. It is a relief to be away from th