The Last Tudor Read online

  I close the door behind me, and I see someone stir in the big four-poster bed. “Oh, welcome!” Dudley says, a chuckle in his voice, and he throws off the covers and stands beside the bed, stark naked as if he is expecting a lover. When he sees it is me, he starts back at my astounded face, pulling some of his bedding to tie around his waist. His naked shoulders are broad and his chest is muscled and strong. I cannot help but wonder who he was expecting, naked in his bed, so darkly handsome, dozing till she could come to him. I cannot help observing that he is well made, and I think any woman would be glad to have Tamworth show her to this bed, as he is obviously used to doing.

  “You can go, Tamworth,” Dudley says shortly. “Wait outside, keep the door.”

  Tamworth throws his cloak around his night robe and goes out of the door. I hear the chair creak as he sits down in the gallery to guard our privacy, and I note that he knows exactly what to do.

  Robert glances to the other door to his bedroom. “Keep your voice down,” he says.

  “Is that the queen’s room?” I can hardly believe that even on progress they are given adjoining bedrooms, and so all the gossip must be true.

  “Never mind. Keep your voice down.” He goes quietly to the adjoining door and slides an oiled bolt to lock it shut. “What do you want, Lady Katherine? You should not be here.”

  “I am in trouble, I am in terrible trouble,” I tell him.

  He nods. “What?”

  I hardly know where to begin. “Ned Seymour and I were secretly betrothed,” I start.

  His dark eyes are on my face. “Foolish,” he says shortly.

  “Then we married in secret.”

  His gaze narrows. “Madness.”

  “Then he went to France and now Italy with Thomas Cecil.”

  Now he says nothing, he just watches me.

  “And I am with child.”

  His jaw drops. “Good God.”

  “I know.” My voice trembles, but for once I don’t weep. I think I have got to a place that is beyond tears. I am as low as I can be brought, telling a shameful secret to the queen’s lover, in his bedroom after midnight. And this is the only way that I can think to survive this terrible series of events.

  “Does William Cecil know?”

  I think—this is how it is. I have become a counter to be played by great men.

  “No, I came to you. Only you.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have come to me,” he says bluntly. “Not for a matter like this.”

  “Who then?” I demand. “For I have no friends, and I am an orphan.” I meet his critical dark gaze. “I have no older sister to advise me,” I remind him, the man whose plotting led to her death. “I have no father.” Thanks to you too, I think.

  He takes a turn around the room, pulls a linen shirt over his head and a pair of riding breeches over his nakedness. “You should have gone to the queen long before now.”

  “Yes, but I can’t go now,” I protest. “I thought that you might let me live in one of your smaller houses, somewhere far away, and have my child.”

  “Never,” he says. “The scandal that would break about your head would be beyond your imagining. Everyone would think that it was my child, or that you were the queen giving birth in secret to my bastard. You would bring down the throne. Do you think—” He breaks off with a curse. “No. You don’t think, do you?”

  He is right. I had not thought of that. I am incapable of thinking.

  “You could not have chosen a worse moment,” he says almost to himself. “The Queen of Scots returning to Edinburgh, the peace treaty not even signed by her . . .”

  “It’s coming,” I say flatly. “Whether the Queen of Scots takes her throne or not. The baby is coming. I have to go somewhere.”

  He runs his hand through his dark curly hair. “When?”

  I look at him. “When what, Sir Robert?”

  “When is your baby due? When will it be born?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know for sure. Soon, I think.”

  “For God’s sake!” He forgets himself and raises his voice. “You must know when you were wedded and bedded. You must have a general idea.”

  “We were married in December, at his house,” I say. I smile at the memory of Janey and me slipping and sliding in the mud as we walked along the foreshore to Ned’s house.

  “Next month then,” Robert says.

  “Will it be?”

  “Something like that. It’s usually nine months or so.”

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t know? For the love of God! Have you not seen a midwife?”

  I can’t confess that we were lying together before we were married. “How could I see a midwife?”

  His irritation suddenly leaves him as he realizes how very alone I am. I have no mother to advise me, my sister is dead, and I have not found a friend to replace Janey. I am brought so low that I have had to come to him. “Yes, of course,” he says quietly. “Poor little wench.”

  “I hoped you would help me,” I say humbly. “For my sister Jane’s sake. She married your brother. It was your father’s plan. Nothing has gone right for us since then.”

  His gesture cuts me short. “Not another word about her,” he says. “And it doesn’t behoove you to cite her name. Not in your condition.”

  “I am a married woman,” I say staunchly. “She would not have condemned me for marrying for love.”

  “Then where’s your husband?”

  I stammer. “You know that I don’t know.”

  “Not heard from him at all?”

  I shake my head.

  Robert Dudley flings himself into a chair beside the fireside, but he does not invite me to sit down. I hold on to the high back of the other chair and lean against it. He picks up a knife from a side table and turns it this way and that, to catch the light, as he thinks.

  “No question but that it is Ned’s child,” he says. “Tell me the truth now, absolutely.”

  “No question,” I say, swallowing the insult.

  “And when he comes home, he will own it?”

  “He cannot deny it.”

  “And you have proof of your marriage?”

  In answer I show him the chain around my neck, my betrothal diamond and my wedding ring of five links.

  “I see you have a ring,” he says dryly. “Who were your witnesses?”

  “Janey,” I say. “But she is dead.”

  “But there were others present?”

  “Just the minister.”

  “A proper minister, with a parish?”

  “One that Janey knew.”

  He nods. “And you have letters from Seymour. Did he give you money? Did he give you deeds to land?”

  “I have a letter of betrothal and his will names me as his wife and his heir,” I say proudly.

  Robert nods.

  “I have a poem,” I say.

  He puts his hand over his forehead and rubs his eyes, as if he is trying not to laugh. “Never mind that. Now listen, Katherine. I cannot send you into hiding. That would make things worse for you and very bad for me. I will tell the queen what you have told me and you will have to face her. She will be very angry. You should not have married without her permission—as an heir to the throne your husband is of tremendous importance to the safety of the realm. But it’s done, and thank God, you could have done a lot worse. He’s not a Spanish spy or a papist, he’s got no claim in Scotland. He’s of a good family—a reformer, thank God, and well liked—and you are with child, and if you have a boy, then it eases some of the pressure on her.”

  “She could marry who she liked, if she had a Protestant English boy heir,” I observe.

  Dudley’s dark eyes flash at me. “So she could,” he agrees. “But it is not for you to observe. Don’t try to be clever. It is very evident that you’re not that. So you are going to go to your room and, in the morning, wash your face and dress and do your hair and wait for me to send for you. I am going to wake the queen ear