Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  Ross – greetings to you and to the Northern lords and their army. Bid them hurry to me. Elizabeth has sent her dogs and they will take me from here if they can. Tell Norfolk I am in terrible danger. M

  1569, October, Tutbury Castle: Bess

  They can have her. They can take her and damn well have her. She has brought us nothing but trouble. Even if they take her now the queen will never pay us what she owes. To Wingfield and back, with a court of sixty people, perhaps forty more coming in for their meals. Her horses, her pet birds, her carpets and furniture, her gowns, her new lute player, her tapissier; I have kept her household better than I have kept my own. Dinner every night with thirty-two courses served, her own cooks, her own kitchens, her own cellar. White wine, of the best vintage, just to wash her face. She has to have her own taster in case someone wants to poison her. God knows, I would do it myself. Two hundred pounds a week she costs us against an allowance of fifty-two; but even that is never paid. Now it will never be paid. We will be thousands of pounds the poorer when this is finished and they will take her away but not pay for her.

  Well, they can have her; and I shall manage the debt. I shall write it at the bottom of the page as if it were the lost account of a dead debtor. Better to be rid of her and us half-bankrupt, than she stays here and ruins me and mine. Better that I account of her as dead and there is no reckoning.

  ‘Bess.’ George is in the doorway of my accounting room, he is leaning against the door, his hand to his heart. He is white-faced and shaking.

  ‘What is it?’ I rise at once from the table, put down my pen, and take his hands. His fingers are icy. ‘What is it, my love? Tell me. Are you ill?’ Three husbands I have lost to sudden death. This, my greatest husband, the earl, is white as a corpse. At once I forget I have ever thought badly of him, at once dread of losing him clutches me like a pain of my own. ‘Are you ill? Do you have a pain? My love, what is it? What’s the matter?’

  ‘The queen has sent Hastings and Devereux to take her away,’ he says. ‘Bess, I cannot let her go with them. I cannot send her. It is to send her to her death.’

  ‘Hastings would not …’ I start.

  ‘You know he would,’ he interrupts me. ‘You know that is why the queen has chosen him. Hastings is the Protestant heir. He will put her in the Tower, or in his own house, and she will never come out. They will announce that she is in frail health, and then that she is worse, and then that she is dead.’

  The bleakness in his voice is terrible to me.

  ‘Or they will kill her on the journey and say she fell from her horse,’ he predicts. His face is wet with sweat, his mouth twisted with pain.

  ‘But if the queen commands it?’

  ‘I cannot let her go out to her death.’

  ‘If it is the queen’s order …’

  ‘I cannot let her go.’

  I take a breath. ‘Why not?’ I ask. I dare him to tell me. ‘Why can you not let her go?’

  He turns away from me. ‘She is my guest,’ he mutters. ‘A matter of honour …’

  I turn a hard face to him. ‘You learn to let her go,’ I say harshly. ‘Honour has nothing to do with it. You command yourself to let her go, even to her death. Bring yourself to it. We cannot stop them taking her, and if we protest we only look worse. They think you are disloyal already, if you try to save her from Hastings they will be certain that she has turned you to her side. They will know you for a traitor.’

  ‘This is to send her to her death!’ he repeats, his voice breaking. ‘Bess! You have been her friend, you have spent day after day with her. You cannot be so heartless as to hand her over to her murderer!’

  I glance back to my desk to the figures in my book. I know to a penny what she has cost us so far. If we defend her against the queen we will lose everything. If the queen thinks we are overly fond of this other queen she will destroy us. If she charges us with treason we will lose our lands and every single thing we own. If we are found guilty of treason it is a hanging offence; we will both die for my husband’s tender heart. I cannot risk it. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, who cares? Who cares if they take her and behead her in a field, and leave her body in a ditch? Who cares about her?’

  There is a terrible silence in the room. My husband looks at me as if I am a monster. The Fool and the Monster face each other and I wonder at what we have become. Twenty-one months ago we were a newly married man and wife, well-pleased with the contract we had made, enjoying each other, the joint heads of one of the greatest families in the kingdom. Now we are ruined in our hearts and our fortunes. We have ruined ourselves.

  ‘I’ll go and tell her to pack,’ I say harshly. ‘We can do nothing else.’

  Still he won’t leave it. He catches my hand. ‘You cannot let her go with Hastings,’ he says. ‘Bess, she is our guest, she has sewed with you and eaten with us and hunted with me. She is innocent of any wrongdoing, you know that. She is our friend. We cannot betray her. If she rides out with him, I am certain that she will never get to his house alive.’

  I think of my Chatsworth, and my fortune, and that steadies me. ‘God’s will be done,’ I say. ‘And the queen has to be obeyed.’

  ‘Bess! Have pity on her as a young woman! Have pity on her as a beautiful friendless young woman.’

  ‘God’s will be done,’ I repeat, holding tight to the thought of my new front door and the portico with the plasterwork flowers, and the marble entrance hall; thinking of the new stable block that I want to live to build. I think of my children, well-married, and well-placed at court in good positions already, of the dynasties I will found, of the grandchildren I will have and the marriages I will make for them. I think of how far I have come and how far I hope to go. I would go to hell itself, rather than lose my house. ‘Long live the queen.’

  1569, October, Tutbury Castle: Mary

  The countess comes into my rooms, her face as kindly as flint. ‘Your Grace, you are going on a journey again. You will be glad to be away from here, I know.’

  ‘Going where?’ I ask. I can hear the fear in my voice, she will hear it too.

  ‘Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Leicestershire,’ she says shortly. ‘With the Earl of Huntingdon.’

  ‘I prefer to stay here, I will stay here.’

  ‘It must be as the queen commands.’

  ‘Bess …’

  ‘Your Grace, I can do nothing. I cannot deny my sovereign’s commands for you. You should not ask it of me. Nobody should ask it of me.’

  ‘What will Huntingdon do with me?’

  ‘Why, he will house you better than we can do here,’ she says reassuringly, as if she is telling a fairy story to a child.

  ‘Bess, write to Cecil for me, ask him if I can stay here. I ask you – no, I command you – to write to him.’

  She keeps the smile on her face but it is strained. ‘Now, you don’t even like it here! You must have complained of the smell from the midden a dozen times. And the damp! Leicestershire will suit you far better. It is wonderful hunting country. Perhaps the queen will invite you to court.’

  ‘Bess, I am afraid of Henry Hastings. He can wish me nothing but harm. Let me stay with you. I demand it. I command you. Write to Cecil and tell him I demand to stay with Lord Shrewsbury.’

  But the way I say her husband’s name, ‘Chowsbewwy’, suddenly triggers her rage.

  ‘You have spent half my husband’s fortune, my own fortune,’ she spits out. ‘The fortune I brought to him on my marriage. You have cost him his reputation with his queen; she doubts our loyalty because of you. She has ordered him to London for questioning. What do you think they will do to him? They think we favour you.’ She pauses, and I see the evil flash of her jealousy, the envy of an older woman for my youth, for my looks. I had not thought that she felt this. I had not known that she saw how her husband is with me. ‘They think that my husband favours you. It will not be hard to find witnesses to say that he favours you. Exceptionally.’

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