The Last Tudor Read online

  Of course he could be true and still make some mistake that allows the archbishop to find against us. If Ned has forgotten the minister’s furred robe or his foreign accent, then his account will not tally with mine. If he thinks to protect my reputation by denying that we were lovers before our marriage, then they will seize on his lie. If we differ on any point, then they will try to make out that the marriage was false and our story concocted to save face.

  I can’t help but fear this. It is such a long time ago! A year ago, and we snatched at the time together and were so rushed. I have lost the papers, and Ned never knew the name of the minister. We have lost Janey, who was our only witness and only friend. It is so likely that Ned will forget something—he has been to France and Burgundy and Italy since last year, and then suffered the shock of being summoned home. But I have his two rings, and I have his poem by heart. No one could truly think that this was all invented. But no one really cares for the truth. All they want to do is to make my son a bastard so that Ned and I and Teddy can be bundled out of sight and shamed and forgotten.

  They keep Ned all day. It is fully dark by the time they bring him back, and then they don’t return him to the lieutenant’s house. I am waiting for him to turn in at the gate, and I have a candle at my window and I am going to wave to him. But I cannot see him at all at first, only the bobbing flames of the torches of his guards as they lead the way from the dark archway towards the high White Tower, where it stands, bleak against the night sky. But he halts as he comes out from the archway, and puts back his hood and looks directly up to my window. I hold my candle out of the window so he can see the tiny light guttering in the wind and know that it shines for him, that I am true to him as I trust that he is true to me.

  They speak to him to make him go on, and he raises his hand to me and goes past the lieutenant’s house, past my doorway, and across the green to the looming tower. Up the steps he goes to the entrance doorway, and it opens as he comes near and bangs shut behind him, and I know that he has said something, or they have made something up that allows them to keep him in the royal prisons, confined in a cell. He’s not in the lieutenant’s house anymore, like an honored lord confined under house arrest. Now he is in the Tower where they keep the traitors, and torture them, too.

  For four days we go back and forth to the archbishop and each time that he has seen Ned he asks me about another detail: some of them are real, some of them fabricated, I am sure, and some I simply cannot remember or never knew. I feel more and more troubled and my early defiance melts into fear. I beg him to understand that we were married, that we undertook a marriage in good faith before God. I beg him to understand that if I cite God as my witness, I cannot lie. I am sister to Jane Grey—am I likely to take the Word of God in vain? I hear my voice change from scorn to pleading. The archbishop looks less and less anxious, and more and more like a man who is getting the answers he wants. The clerk scribbles faster and faster. I dare not think what is going to happen next.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1562

  Nothing happens. Painfully, nothing happens at all. I just have to wait. I think of Jane, living in the Partridges’ house, waiting and waiting for Queen Mary to forgive and release her, certain that Her Majesty would be bound to forgive and release her—and then the priest coming to tell her she would die the next morning. Some nights I wake in tears dreaming that I am Jane, and that my time of waiting is ending, and that this dawn I will have to make the short walk to the green. But then I roll over in my bed and reach for my baby in his cradle, rosy from crying, hungry for his feed, his feet kicking with impatience, and I put him to my breast and feel him suckle and know that here is powerful innocent life that cannot be murdered, and that one morning, one day, I am going to take this little baby out to his freedom.

  My little sister Mary visits me with a basket of new asparagus. “Someone gave me this from his garden,” she says vaguely, heaving it up on the table. “I thought the lieutenant’s cook might steam it for you with some fresh butter.”

  “He will, thank you,” I say. I bend to kiss her and she hauls herself up onto the window seat. “Is that Ned’s window?” she asks, looking across at the White Tower where a blue scarf flutters from one of the hinges.

  “Yes. He puts out a scarf to show me he is well in the morning, and I do the same,” I say. “If he was ill, he would put out a white scarf, and if he is released, he will fly nothing.”

  She nods. She does not ask what standard will be flown from the window for bad news. Nobody in the Tower wants to prepare for bad news. Only my sister Jane had the courage to look forward to her death and write to me of learning to die.

  “The court is leaving London,” she says. “I’m to go, too. She’s not being unpleasant. You would think I was nothing to do with you and no kinswoman to her at all. She treats me as any one of her ladies. She likes any one of them better than me; she gives Thomasina the dwarf more attention. I go everywhere with the court and I dine with the ladies. She barely speaks to me and she often fails to see I am there. But she treats others far worse.”

  “Oh, who does she treat worse?” I ask, intrigued.

  “Our cousin Margaret Douglas for one,” Mary says quietly. “She’s under house arrest at the Charterhouse at Sheen, suspected of treason.”

  I muffle my gasp with a hand to my mouth. “Another cousin under arrest? And in our old house?”

  “They say that she was trying to get her son Henry Stuart married to Mary Queen of Scots.”

  “Was she?”

  “Almost certainly; but why should she not? It would be a wonderful match for him, an adequate match for her, and an English king consort in Scotland would be better for us than a Frenchman.”

  “Is the whole family arrested?”

  “Her husband is held here, I think, in the Tower. But her son has disappeared.”

  I put my hands to my head, as if I would pull my own hair. “What? This is madness.”

  “I know,” Mary says gloomily. “Elizabeth is crazed with fear like her father. And I have to serve her. And I have to go wherever she fancies.”

  “If only you could get away,” I whisper.

  Mary shakes her head. “They’d use it against you. No, I’ll go on progress and pretend to enjoy it.”

  I put my hand over hers. “Where are you going this year?”

  “North. We’re to stay at Nottingham, and she’s commanded a masque. Everyone is in it. Me, too. I play an angel of peace on a swing. The masque is called Britain and the King. It goes on for three days.”

  “Heavens.”

  “It opens with Pallas on a unicorn,” she says. “Elizabeth, I suppose. Followed by two women on horseback, Prudence and Temperance. Next day: Peace. Last day: Malice is thrown down and we all sing.”

  I can’t help but laugh at her gloomy expression and dour description. “I am sure it will be beautiful.”

  “Oh, yes, there are to be lions and elephants and all sorts. But the point of it is two women united, the friendship between two women. And the other message is that British kings inherit by blood, they’re not chosen.”

  “What does she mean? Is she sending a message to Mary Queen of Scots?”

  “She’s trying to. Elizabeth is telling Queen Mary that they are monarchs of Britain together, they can rule together: Mary in the north, Elizabeth in the south, and that Mary will be a sister queen and heir. She’s practically promising her the throne. She says it is passed by inheritance to the closest heir. Not by choice, not by religion, not by will.”

  I take three strides across the little room till I am brought up short by the table. “Finally, she dares to openly deny me.”

  “Still not open, still not denial,” Mary says angrily. “The masque is not to be performed before the people. Nobody would understand it unless they had a classical education—I’ve had to explain it to half the ladies. She doesn’t have the courage to declare herself. She is putting you aside by getting that spaniel Archbi