The Last Tudor Read online

  I smile, thinking of my indomitable sister. “Yes, I remember it all.”

  He sees the smile and takes it for himself. “You are the queen’s heir now . . .” he begins.

  “She has not named me to parliament,” I caution him, one eye on the throne where Dudley has almost inserted himself beside her, so they are all but entwined like snakes, she almost sitting on his lap.

  “You are the only Protestant heir,” he amends. “And the most liked by all the country. She called you her heir before all the court.”

  I incline my head.

  “If we were to marry,” he says very quietly to me. “If we were to marry again, as we did before, and to have a boy, then that boy would be King of England.”

  I have a strange feeling as he says this, as if my stomach had turned over with a sudden grip of nausea or bubble of wind. I think—can this be the quickening of the child as he is named to his great place? Like Elizabeth in the Bible? Saints and sinners save me, I think! If that was my baby moving, then I have to be married, at once! And it might as well be Herbert as anyone. In fact, better Herbert than anyone, since he has come to me, since his father wants us to be married again, and Elizabeth can hardly forbid it since we were married before. It was an excellent match then; it is still good now. He wants it, his father wants it, the queen cannot forbid it . . . and I have to marry someone. Christ knows when Ned is coming home. Only His mother the Virgin knows why he does not answer my letters. She, like me, looked for a man to be the father of her child. She, like me, knew that she couldn’t be too choosy. I have to marry someone if I have a baby quickening inside me.

  The lurch in my belly is so powerful that I cannot believe that he does not see it. I reach out to him, he does not know that I am gripping his hand for support. “Indeed, we have happy memories,” I say at random. I am sweating: he will see beads of sweat on my white face.

  He takes my hand. “I have never thought that we were not married,” he says. “I have always thought of you as my wife.”

  “I too, I too,” I say randomly. I wonder with sudden terror if this is the baby actually about to be born, if it is coming right now, before everyone. I must get to the back of the barge and find somewhere that I can sit down and grit my teeth and try to hold on, praying that this voyage of pleasure is over soon, and I can get to my room. I can’t let it come here. I can’t just void myself before the court! On the barge! On the royal barge! In my best dress!

  He dips his head and shows me something in the palm of his hand. It is my old wedding ring, from our long-ago wedding day. “Will you take this back, for our betrothal?” he whispers.

  “Yes! Yes!” I say. I almost snatch it I am so desperate for him to go.

  “And I will send you my portrait.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And you will send me yours?”

  “Yes, of course. But please excuse me now . . .”

  “We are betrothed again.”

  “We are.”

  I am such a fool. That great heave was not birth but was quickening—but who knew that it felt so terrible? There’s nothing in the Bible to warn you that it feels as if you are about to die. But now it has happened to me, I know what it is. I am definitely with child, there is no denying it even to myself. Often now, I have this strange sensation of stomach-churning terror. The baby moves without my will, so sometimes I am lying in bed and my swollen belly gives a little jump and squirm and I can actually see the belly move as if I had a kitten hidden under my nightgown. But it is not a kitten—I would know what to do with a kitten, there would be no objection at all to a kitten—it is a baby and one that I am not allowed to conceive or grow or birth. But whether I am allowed or not, whether I want it or not, this child is coming, like a terrible unstoppable force, like a cloud of rain that rolls across open countryside, dark and forbidding and quite uncontrollable.

  “Are you all right?” Mary asks me, with the frankness of a younger sister. “For you look as bloated as the queen when she is ill, and you are so bad-tempered these days.”

  I long to tell her that I am in love with Ned but that I have heard no word from him. That he was supposed to go away for weeks but he has been gone for months. I long to tell her that we married, but he has deserted me and now I am with child and I can’t even complain of his treatment of me, since the marriage was a secret, and the baby an even more terrible secret, and I cannot bear to keep it secret any longer. And, in any case, sometime it must be born and then my secret is over and I am shamed as low as a strumpet whipped at the cart tail.

  “I feel ill,” I say miserably. “I feel so very ill. Oh, Mary, I wish I could tell you how very ill I am.”

  She hauls herself up to sit on the window seat beside me, her little feet sticking out. “You’ve not got a fever?”

  “No, no, not an illness,” I contradict myself. “I just feel ill.”

  “You are missing Ned?”

  “Not at all.”

  She frowns at me, her pretty face puckered as if she cannot understand me at all. “I have a friend, a secret friend, and I will not tell you his name; but I would never deny him.” She offers me her secret in return for my own. “He says that he loves me and I know that I love him. I won’t say more. This is just to show you that I can keep a secret, that I am a fully grown woman though very small. You can tell me that you love Ned and I can add it to my secret hoard. You can share your secret with me.”

  I give a little moan of despair at the thought of my sister getting herself into the same terrible state that I am in. “Don’t speak of him,” I tell her. “Whoever he is, your secret friend. And don’t speak to him. Don’t keep him secret. Forget him. Don’t even dream of him. And if he wants to marry you, then tell him you can never marry without the queen’s permission.”

  “She’s never going to let me marry.” Mary dismisses the suggestion with a sulky little shrug. “She’d be too afraid of me giving her a little heir to the throne. She doesn’t want a Tudor prince four feet tall.”

  I am so horrified at the thought of this that I gasp at her. “But would you not have a child of normal size?”

  “Who knows?” She shrugs her rounded shoulders again, a miniature coquette. “Who knows how these things happen? At any rate, I shall be sure to pick a tall lover to even things up.”

  “Mary, you cannot have a lover! You cannot even joke about it. Swear to me that you will meet nobody. That you will put aside your secret.”

  “Is this about Ned? Did you make a secret marriage?”

  I clap my hand over her mouth and I glare at her. “Don’t say another word,” I say. “Really, Mary. Don’t say another thing. I have no secret and you must never have any.”

  She pushes my hand away. “Hey-ho,” she says indifferently. “I’m not the flea in your bedding. No point pinching me. But I don’t gossip either. The secret that you don’t have is safe with me.” She wriggles to the edge of the window seat and makes a little jump to the floor. “But Henry Herbert is no match for you, mark my words. He’s a weathercock, that one: he goes wherever the wind blows. He does what his father tells him, and his father thinks of nothing but their family. Right now they think you will be named as heir by parliament, rather than Queen Mary, and take the throne when Elizabeth dies. That’s why they’re all round you as if they loved you. Don’t think that they do.”

  “I don’t think anyone does,” I say bleakly.

  Mary catches my hand and puts it to her cheek. “I do,” she says. “And I have a big heart. Bigger than Henry Herbert’s, anyway.”

  “He’s my only hope,” I say bleakly.

  “Are you really going to marry him?” she asks me incredulously. “Because, I warn you, he is showing a picture of you all round court, and saying that the two of you are betrothed. People ask me. I have denied it.”

  My baby stirs as if to disagree. I give a little gasp. “I don’t dare refuse him.”

  “Has he given you a ring?” Mary inquires.

  “