The Last Tudor Read online

  “All well?” my uncle inquires. “You don’t look too happy? A lover’s tiff?”

  “It’s all well,” I say, stammering on the lie.

  If Henry does not get his letters back and he announces that I am Ned’s lover, then I will fall from royal favor and my uncle and all my kinsmen will fall with me. Mary will have to leave court, and where will she go? We will not be paid as the queen’s ladies: we will not receive bribes from petitioners, nor her favors. My ruin will be the ruin of my entire family. And where will this baby be born, and who will pay for its keep?

  “It’s all well.” I bare my teeth in a joyless smile. “All quite well.”

  “Good, good,” he says cheerily. “We’ll ask the queen for permission for you and Henry Herbert to marry, perhaps while she is staying here. If tonight goes well, and she is in a good mood, eh? You should see the size of my marchpane castle! If only they can carry it in from the subtlety kitchen without dropping it! I tell you, my heart will be in my mouth! It’s time you were wed, young Katherine.”

  “Not yet.” I swallow down bile. “Don’t speak to the queen yet, I pray you. My lord Henry is displeased with me about a little thing. I have to send him a token. If I could send my maid to Westminster, she could find it for me.”

  He laughs. “Oh, young love! Young love! You make such difficulties for yourselves! You send him a pressed rose from my hedgerow and that will be more than enough for him, you’ll see. And I will speak to the queen for you when she is in a good humor as soon as you give me the nod.”

  “I’ll nod,” I say foolishly. “Don’t speak till then. I will nod.”

  He pats my shoulder. “Go and change into your prettiest gown,” he says. “We are going to give Her Majesty a dinner and an entertainment that she will remember for all her reign.”

  “I’ll go,” I say obediently. “Thank you, Uncle. I thank you very much.”

  “And put all your pets in the stables,” he says. “I won’t have them dirtying my new house.”

  I keep Ribbon in his traveling box because he is terribly inconstant and will wander off, but I smuggle Jo the dog and Mr. Nozzle the monkey into my rooms and give them the run of my chamber. God bless them, they are the only creatures in the world who care for me. I am not going to leave them in the stables, whatever my uncle says.

  I get through the evening like a tired old actor, playing my part as my uncle’s beloved niece, the queen’s second-favorite cousin—after Mary Queen of Scots—her named heir, with the mindless accuracy of a sleepwalker. I cannot think what I can do. I cannot think who will help me. I cannot stop Henry Herbert naming my shame to his father, and then to the rest of the court. Even if I could find his damned keepsakes and send them to him in time, I doubt that would silence him, his pride is so wounded, his vanity so stung. So I have to think—if he speaks out and shames me, then the queen will know at once, and so will William Cecil and Robert Dudley and Lady Clinton and my uncle, and Catherine Brandon my stepgrandmother and my aunt Bess St. Loe; and everyone who has promised me their goodwill in the past will hate me for being a lewd girl and a liar.

  I think: I have to tell someone who might be my friend and stand between me and the queen. I have to choose someone, from all these time-serving, two-faced, self-interested courtiers. I have to find one person that I can burden with my terrible secret, and hope that he will stand by me.

  I could tell William Cecil—he is the best advisor to manage the queen, and he supports me as a Protestant princess and heir. He is opposed to any papist, so he will always prefer me to Mary Queen of Scots or Margaret Douglas. I am the only Protestant princess. He is promised to my cause. But I cannot tell him. I simply cannot. I could not look into those brown eyes, as trusting and sad as a spaniel, and tell him that I have been lying to him for months, that I married in secret and lay with my husband and now I have lost him and he has gone off—who knows where, with Cecil’s own son—leaving me to face the anger of the queen alone. It’s too much. I can’t say it. I cannot make myself speak the words. I am too shamed to confess to a man like William Cecil.

  “Are you all right?” My sister Mary is at my elbow, looking up into my face. “You look green.”

  “Queasy,” I say. “Don’t look at me. I don’t want anyone to look at me.”

  “What is the matter with you these days?” she demands. “You’re as nervous as a foundling.”

  I blink the sudden tears from my eyes.

  “And you’re always crying!” she complains. “Has Ned left you?”

  “Yes,” I say, and the word falls from my mouth like a stone as I realize the truth. “He said that he would write; and he hasn’t written. He said that he would go for weeks; and he has been gone months. He doesn’t reply to my letters; and I don’t even know where he is. So, really, I have to say that he has left me. He left me ages ago. And I don’t know what to do without him.”

  “Henry Herbert?” she suggests.

  “He’s furious with me for being in love with Ned. He knows all about that.”

  She purses her pretty mouth. “Can’t you be happy without either of them?”

  “We were promised to marry,” I say. Even now, I can’t even tell the truth to my sister. “I feel compromised.”

  Mary laughs up at me. “For God’s sake! Our own sister died on the block for God’s Word. That’s what being compromised means. She died because she had given her word to God and would not retract it. Are you going to let your life be ruined for one little promise? A love promise? To a man? Just forget your promise! Break it!”

  “This is nothing like Jane,” I say.

  “Of course! We should try very hard to be nothing like Jane. We should live for joy and seek pleasure. The one thing that Jane’s death should teach us is that life is precious and every day is a gift that we should treasure. Turn your coat! Turn your collar! Retract your promise!”

  “That’s not what she wanted to teach us,” I say, thinking of “Learn you to die.”

  “I don’t think she was a very good teacher or a very good example,” Mary says boldly.

  I am as shocked as if Jo the pug suddenly stood on her hind legs. I had no idea that my little sister had thought of this at all. I had always thought that she was too young to understand what happened to Jane and—to my shame—I had thought that her little stature meant that she did not hear all the discussions and debate that rage so far above her pretty hood.

  Her dark eyes spark with irritation and then she smiles. “I shall find my own philosophy and live my own life,” she tells me. “And I shall fear nothing.”

  She walks past me and someone asks her to dance. I see her lining up with the other girls who are twice her height but not nearly as pretty, and none of them as wise. I think of her, not four feet tall but fearing nothing, and I think—I can’t tell the queen, I can’t bear to ruin Mary.

  I think I will tell our aunt Bess—Lady St. Loe. She’s not the most tenderhearted woman in the world, but she loved my mother and she promised me her friendship. She said at my mother’s funeral that I could turn to her. She’s a woman of vast experience, married to three men, and I have lost count of the number of her children. She will know the signs of pregnancy and when a baby is due. She must understand how love can drive you forward beyond where you should, perhaps, have gone. And she is friend and confidante to Elizabeth. If she takes my news well, then surely she can confess for me and make it all right?

  I have taken my decision, but I can’t find the right moment, or even the right words. I don’t dare speak out while we are under my uncle’s roof: I cannot bear to risk the shame to him. If Elizabeth is angry, she will be furious with everyone and I can’t expose him to the whiplash of vitriol that she can unleash when she thinks she has been unfairly treated. So I wait, as the progress winds its slow way east, day after day, through humid days and summer storms—one night a thunderstorm so powerful that the chimneys rock on the roofs and everyone thinks that the world is ending—until we get to Ipswich,