The Last Tudor Read online

  Janey has made up her own bed for us, and the fire is lit in the grate and a little supper is laid out on the table before the fire for two people. Once again, she is our good angel. Ned comes in quietly, closing the door behind him, and looks from his sister to me, his wife.

  “What’s happening?” he asks. “What’s going on?”

  There is silence. “Katherine has something to tell you,” Janey prompts me.

  I try to smile, but I am trembling. “I think I may be with child,” I say. “Ned, I hope you are happy? I think I may be with child.”

  I cannot mistake the panic in his face. “Are you sure?”

  “Not at all! I’m not sure,” I say, as frightened as he is. “Janey thought it so. I might be wrong.”

  “Of course she’s sure,” Janey says. “She missed her course in January.”

  “But sometimes I do miss one,” I say. “And I forget to count. So I might miss one or two.”

  “So you’re not sure?” he repeats.

  “Are you not pleased?” I can feel that my mouth is trembling. I so want him to be delighted, as Janey was delighted. For I am afraid of what this is going to mean for us, and I don’t know what we are going to do.

  He crosses the room in one stride and he takes my hand and kneels at my feet as if I were going to dub him a knight. “Of course I am pleased,” he says, his face hidden from me. “I am delighted. There is nothing that I want more than our child, and how wonderful that he should come so soon.”

  “The heir to the throne,” Janey reminds him. “The only Tudor boy of this generation. I don’t count Margaret Douglas’s boys.”

  “If it’s a boy. And if I’m not mistaken altogether,” I remind them.

  “Boy or girl, I shall love this baby for his beautiful mother,” Ned says. He kisses my hand and then he rises up and kisses me on the mouth. Jane moves tactfully towards the door, but he gestures that she shall stay.

  “Wait, Janey, we need to talk. And besides, we can’t use your bed now.”

  He smiles at me and I realize that if I am with child, we cannot lie together until after I am churched after childbed. This is months and months away.

  “I am not sure,” I say again. I cannot bear the thought that we will not make love when I feel the same urgent desire as always, when I am not even sure that I am with child. Surely, this too is an outworn superstition that we need not observe?

  “Of course,” Janey says delightedly. “And we have to plan what we do.”

  “We’ll have to tell the queen,” Ned says.

  “We have to tell her before I start to get fat,” I say. “But not before then. There’s no need for us to tell her before then, is there?”

  “Perhaps we should. Then we could space it out, so it’s not such a shock for her. First, we could tell her that we are married, and later tell her that you are with child.”

  I say nothing. I feel quite sick with fear at the thought of telling Elizabeth that we are married.

  “She should be pleased,” Janey says. “It leaves her free to stay unmarried for all her life, if there is a boy baby in the royal cradle.”

  “She should be pleased,” I say cautiously. “But what if she isn’t?”

  “Oh, what’s the worst she can do?” Janey demands boldly. “Send you from court for a while? You’d be going into confinement anyway, and if she sends you into exile you can go to Hanworth for the birth, and Ned and I can come, too.”

  “If she is furious . . .”

  “Why would she be furious?” Ned asks me. “All we have done is marry without her permission. That’s not illegal since Queen Mary repealed the law. There can be no doubt that she would have given permission if we had asked her. She had no grounds for refusal, and she has no reason for displeasure. People will blame us for being in a hurry, but nobody can blame us for honorable love. Our parents agreed! There can be no objection.”

  I find my courage. “We’ll tell her,” I agree. There is a little silence. “When will we tell her?”

  “We’ll have to choose our moment,” Ned says. “Let’s not say anything till the end of Lent. Perhaps at the Easter feasting when the court is merry again. There will be some music and dancing—there’ll be a masque—she loves a masque and dancing. We’ll tell her when she’s enjoying herself.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” Janey says. She gives a little cough. “At Eastertide.”

  If I had not been so absorbed in watching to see what Ned truly thought of my news, trying to look past his well-acted joy to whether he is afraid as I am afraid, I would have seen that Janey is paler than ever. She coughs in her sleeve and there is a little spatter of red blood.

  “Janey!” I say in dismay.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “A blister on my lip.”

  Next day she takes to her bed, and now Ned and I meet in her room without pretense. Every day after chapel we come to see how she is, and now for the first time I see she is very ill, and that her flushes and high spirits have been those of a girl beside herself with fever.

  The physicians say that she will get better with the good weather, but I don’t see why they are so hopeful as the sun rises earlier every day, and the birds start to sing outside her window, but Janey gets no better. One morning I go to her room straight after chapel, but the door is closed and Janey’s lady-in-waiting is sitting outside, her eyes red from crying.

  “Is she sleeping?” I ask. “What’s the matter?”

  Mrs. Thrift shakes her head, her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my lady!”

  “Janey! Is she sleeping?”

  She swallowed. “No, my lady. She’s gone. In the night. I have sent for the physicians and her brother, and he will have to tell the queen.”

  I don’t understand. I won’t understand. “What d’you mean?”

  “She’s gone, my lady. She’s died.”

  I take hold of the cold stone frame of the door. “But she can’t have died. I saw her just after dinner last night, I left her when she was going to sleep. She was feverish; she is always feverish, but not dying.”

  The woman shakes her head. “Alas, poor lady.”

  “She’s only nineteen!” I say as if that means she cannot die. I should know better: my own sister died at the age of sixteen and our cousin the king at fifteen—sick like Janey.

  Mrs. Thrift and I look at each other blankly, as if neither of us can believe she is gone.

  “What am I going to do without her?” I say, and my voice is as plaintive as a lost child. “How am I ever going to face all this without her?”

  She looks alarmed. “Face what, my lady?”

  I lean my forehead against the wooden carved door as if my need for her will bring Janey back to me. I have lost my sister, I have lost my father, I have lost my mother and now my best friend. “Nothing,” I whisper. “Nothing.”

  Ned is heartbroken at the loss of his sister. She was his greatest counselor and his most enthusiastic admirer. She was the first audience for his poems; she used to read them to him and suggest changes. She told him that I was in love with him before I told her myself. She was his friend and confidante, as she was mine.

  “She found the minister!” he says.

  “She made me brave,” I say.

  “She showed us that love is dauntless,” he agrees. “Dauntless.”

  “I don’t know what I will do without her,” I say, thinking of this court, which is so filled with enemies and half friends and pretend friends; with Elizabeth, the great pretender, at the head of it all, turning her two-faced face this way and that.

  “William Cecil says he thinks I should go to France,” Ned remarks. “To attend the new king’s coronation. It’s a great honor for me, but I don’t want to go now.”

  “Don’t leave me!” I say instantly. “My love, you can’t leave me! I can’t be here without either of you.”

  “Janey said I should go,” he says. “She said that Cecil’s favor is as good as a pension. His friendship will help us, Ka