The Last Tudor Read online

  We make love, and then we doze, and then we wake and are filled once again with desire as if we will never again sleep. I am dizzy with pleasure when I hear, as if from a long way away, a tap on the door and Janey’s voice calling me: “Katherine! We have to go! It’s late.”

  Shocked, Ned looks at me. “It feels like minutes,” he says. “What’s the time?”

  I look to the window. I came here in the cold bright light of a frosty winter dawn and now I can see the yellow of the setting sun. “Ned! Ned! It’s nearly sunset!”

  “Fools that we are,” he says indulgently. “Come up, my countess. I shall have to be your maid.”

  “Hurry,” I say.

  I pull on my clothes and he laces me, laughing at the intricacy of the fastenings. My hair is falling down and I want to wear my wife’s kerchief over it, but he says I cannot; I must keep it with his two rings close to my heart until we are allowed to tell everyone that we are wedded and bedded.

  “I shall wear my rings on a chain around my neck,” I promise him. “I will put them on when I am alone in bed at night and dream that I am with you.”

  He pulls on his breeches. “It will be soon,” he promises me. “I know Robert Dudley takes my side. He will speak for us.”

  “William Cecil does, too,” I say. “He told me so. And Elizabeth will forgive us. How can she not? How can anyone say it is a bad thing to do? Our own mothers gave their permission.”

  “Ned!” Janey calls from behind the door.

  I hand him the key and he opens it. Janey is bright-eyed, laughing. “I fell asleep!” she cries out. “No need to ask what you two were doing. You look as if you had died and gone to heaven.”

  “I did,” Ned says quietly. He puts my cape around my shoulders and we go out through the garden gate and down the little garden to the watergate. The incoming tide laps at the steps that were dry when we came, and Ned shouts for a wherry boat, which turns and comes to us. Ned himself opens the doors for the watergate and then hands me into the boat.

  “Till tomorrow,” he says passionately. “I will see you tomorrow and I won’t sleep tonight for thinking about you and today.”

  “Tomorrow,” I say. “And then every tomorrow for the rest of our lives.”

  I slip into the palace, hopping through the little wicket gate that is set into the enormous double doors, waving an apologetic hand to the queen’s enormously tall sergeant porter, Mr. Thomas Keyes, for not waiting for his ceremonial opening. “I’m late!” I call to him and I see his indulgent smile. Janey trails behind me, her hand to her chest as she catches her breath. I am desperate to change my dress and be in the queen’s rooms when we process to dinner, but then I notice that something is wrong, and I pause and look around me.

  People are not hurrying to dress; nobody is making their way to the queen’s presence chamber. Instead, it seems as if everyone is chattering on every corner, at every window bay.

  For one terrible moment I think they are speaking of me, that everyone knows. I exchange one aghast look with Janey, and then Mary breaks away from a knot of ladies and comes towards me.

  “Where have you been?” she demands.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “It’s the little King of France,” she says. “He’s been ill, terribly ill, and now he is dead.”

  “No!” I say. This is so far from my guilty dash to get into the palace in time for dinner, so discordant with my pleasure-drenched day. I look at Mary and I realize that I simply have not understood what she is saying.

  “What?”

  She shakes my wrist. “Wake up! The King of France has died. So our cousin Mary Queen of France is now dowager queen. It’s not her throne anymore. She doesn’t have the French army behind her. She doesn’t have a little dauphin in the cradle and she’s not the most powerful woman in Christendom. Everything is changed again. She is not Queen of France; she is only Queen of Scotland.”

  I glance at Janey, who is leaning back against a stone pillar, catching her breath.

  “Then I am Elizabeth’s heir without a rival,” I say slowly. “Elizabeth has nothing to fear from Mary now she’s only Queen of Scotland, and Cecil’s treaty excludes her from the throne of England.”

  I see the gleam of ambition in Janey’s eyes and I smile at her.

  “You’re Elizabeth’s heir,” Mary agrees. “There is no other.”

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

  DECEMBER 1560

  I live in a dream. The palace seems to me a wonderland of beauty as they bring in the great boughs of fir trees and pines for the winter season and they light the candles earlier every day. They raise the kissing bough—the woven willow stems twisted with green ribbons and the effigy of a little baby Jesus at the heart of it. They tie it over the door to the presence chamber, and Ned and I manage to meet, as if it is a surprise, under the bough at least twice every day and he takes my hands and kisses me on the lips for the good fellowship of the season. Only he and I know that we are drunk with the scent of each other, that our lips are soft and tender, that each touch is a promise of a later meeting.

  The windowsills are lined with greenery and bright with candles, and the dried oranges give off a sharp perfume, which mingles with the smell of pine sap so I think myself in a winter wood. We practice dances every day, and the dancing master scolds me and says that I must be in love, for my feet are all astray, and everyone laughs, and I laugh, too, for joy. I so want to tell all of them that it is true. I am in love, and I am beloved. Better than that: I am married, I am a wife. I have illuminated the terrible darkness that Jane’s death laid on our family, and I am free from grief and guilt at last. My name is no longer Grey. I am Katherine Seymour, the Countess of Hertford. I am the wife of one of the most handsome and wealthy young men in England, and when we tell everyone of our secret marriage, we will become the leaders of the court, the proclaimed heirs, and everyone will admire us.

  Ned steals me away to Janey’s rooms and we snatch at moments for hurried lovemaking. I don’t care if we have no longer than a minute. I am in such a fever to be held by him that I don’t care if he has me like a girl of Southwark, up against a wall, or if he has no time for anything more than a swift kiss in a darkened corner.

  One day he takes me to a quiet window bay out of the way of the noisy court and says: “I have something for you.”

  “Here?” I ask flirtatiously, and am rewarded by a warm smile.

  “Here,” he says lovingly. “Take this.” Into my hands he puts a parchment document.

  “What is it?” I unfold it and read. It is a deed of gift. I scan it quickly and see that he has given me a fortune in land.

  “It is your dower lands,” he says. “We had no parents or guardians to draw up our marriage contract so I am giving you this now. See your name?”

  He has named me as his dearly beloved wife. I hold the document to my heart. “I shall love it for that alone,” I say. “The land doesn’t matter.”

  “Nothing matters,” he agrees. “Not land nor fortune nor titles. Nothing but us.”

  The court has more news from France. The young dowager queen, my cousin Queen Mary, has gone into deep mourning for her young husband, but it does not save her from being excluded from the royal family of France. She is not to marry the second son, she is not even to stay in France. Elizabeth has no sympathy for her at all, even though our beautiful cousin has lost her mother, and now her young husband is dead. All Elizabeth cares about—all I hear as I stand behind her chair during her low-voiced mutterings with William Cecil—is that if Mary decides to come to Scotland, how will that affect the Scots? Will they rise up against their new queen, as they rose against her mother, or will they take her to their hearts in a rush of sentiment like the savages they are?

  Either way, I have become essential to the safety of England. It has never been clearer that Elizabeth must name me as her heir to parliament, to prevent her cousin Mary from claiming the position. Elizabeth turns to me with a sweeter smile