The Last Tudor Read online

  “We can be together?” I don’t care if we spend the rest of our lives in the Tower if we can sleep in each other’s arms and he can see his son.

  “It’s not how I hoped we would live, but it is the best we can do for now,” he says. “And still I have hopes. Elizabeth cannot defy all her advisors, and William Cecil and Robert Dudley know that we are innocent of everything but love. They are our friends. They want a Protestant heir to the throne, and we have him. They will work against Mary Queen of Scots; they will never accept her. I don’t despair, my love.”

  “Nor do I,” I say, my courage leaping up at his words. “I don’t despair. I will never despair if I can be with you.”

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1562

  Against all the odds, against the royal malice, we are happy. Ned’s mother sends him his rents and fees from his lands and interests, and so he is a wealthy prisoner. He bribes the guards and orders whatever we want. He comes to my rooms every evening and we dine together, play with our baby, and make love. The daytime becomes a time of waiting, when I study, care for our child, and write letters to my friends at court. Sir Edward, the lieutenant of the Tower, allows me to walk in his garden and I take the baby with me and put him down on a shawl on the sun-warmed grass so that he can kick his feet and watch the seagulls circling in the blue sky above him.

  The night is when my real life begins, when the guard quietly admits Ned to my room, and we talk and read together. He watches me feed our son, swaddle him on his board, and hand him to the maid for the night, and then we dine well on delicacies that his mother has sent from Hanworth and treats delivered to the Tower for free, gifts from the people of London.

  Every day Ned or I have a note or a letter from someone promising their support if we appeal against our sentence. Some of them promise that if we escape we shall find a haven. One or two even offer to raise an army and free us. All of them we burn at once, and never even speak of them. Elizabeth has ruled that we are sinners: she must not invent any worse crime to pin on us. We will not give her any excuse for a trial for treason.

  But in any case, she is not attending to us this summer. Perhaps she thinks she has done all she can to ruin us and has turned her attention to other quarrels. She has arrested her dearest friend and lady-in-waiting Kat Ashley for recommending the suit of Prince Erik of Sweden. Elizabeth is more offended now by Kat recommending marriage than she was when Kat warned her that she was seen as a whore. Who can predict what will alert Elizabeth’s fears? Nobody knows what she will do next. She has become so frightened and so cruel that she has imprisoned her own beloved governess, the woman whom she says was like a mother to her.

  “On what charge?” I demand of Ned.

  “No charge,” he replies. “There is no charge. Elizabeth does not live within her own law. Kat Ashley is arrested on a whim. God knows what will become of her. Perhaps Elizabeth will name her crime, or perhaps she will be held for a few days and then released and restored to favor. Maybe Elizabeth will order our release in the same letter.”

  There are several of us, held for no reason, charged with nothing, victims of Elizabeth’s jealousy or fears. My cousin Margaret Douglas is suffering interrogation, accused in a dozen muddled reports of spies, kept under close house arrest. Her husband, Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, is held here, somewhere in the Tower. We have never even seen him, either walking on the roofs or even looking out of a window. I am afraid that he is kept alone, and I know that he will fail under that sort of treatment. He has never been a favorite of the queen and his wife is a rival heir. He has not the spirit to survive the enmity of Elizabeth. Their son Henry Stuart is also too fragile to face her; it is as well for him that he has escaped to France. The court is buzzing with gossip that Cousin Margaret hired necromancers and soothsayers, that she has predicted Elizabeth’s death, that she urged Mary Queen of Scots to marry Henry Stuart and unite England and Scotland under his rule—

  “What?” I interrupt Ned. “How does Elizabeth tolerate this? If Margaret has done all this, why is she kept at Sheen, as if she were guilty of some minor rudeness, while we are under lock and key in here, for doing so much less?”

  “If they prove the necromancy charge against her, they could burn her for a witch,” he says soberly. “I don’t begrudge her Sheen, if they are building such a case against her. They can take her from the Charterhouse at Sheen to Smithfield without even a trial if they prove she has used a witch to predict the death of the queen.”

  The baby is in my arms, suckling and sleeping. He stirs as I tighten my grip on him. “Could Elizabeth really bring herself to kill her own cousin?” I ask him very quietly. “Could she bring herself to do such a thing?”

  He shakes his head. He does not know what she might do. We none of us know what she might do.

  “I have news for you,” I say, breaking the silence. “I have something to tell you tonight. I hope it will make you happy.”

  He serves me some early strawberries, a gift from a nameless friend, from the fields of Kent.

  “Tell me.”

  “I have missed my course and I think I am with child.” I try to smile but my lips are trembling. I am so afraid that he will be angry, that this will bring us into more trouble. But he drops his spoon, comes around the table, kneels at my side, and takes me in his arms. This time his joy is unalloyed. He holds me, and little Teddy, in one warm embrace.

  “This is the best news, the best news I could hear,” he says. “To think that you are so well and so fertile, and I am so strong that we should conceive a child inside this terrible place that has seen so much death. Thanks be to God who has brought light out of darkness! It’s like a miracle. It’s like pushing back death itself to make a baby inside the prison walls.”

  “You are really happy?” I confirm.

  “God be my witness! Yes! This is wonderful news.”

  “Shall we tell Sir Edward?”

  “No,” he decides. “We’ll tell no one. We’ll keep it a secret like you did before. Can you hide it from your maid? From your ladies?”

  “If I stay as slim as I did before, then nobody will know until the last months,” I say. “I hardly showed at all before.”

  “Let’s choose when and where we tell,” he says. “This is a powerful secret that you hold; let’s save it to use as best we can. Oh, my love, I am so glad. Do you feel well? Do you think it is another boy?”

  I laugh. “Another heir for Elizabeth? Do you think she will be pleased to have another little royal kinsman?”

  His smile hardens. “I think she cannot go on denying our sons, and if we have two that makes the point twice over.”

  “And if we have a girl?”

  He takes my hand and kisses it. “Then we will call her Katherine-Jane for her beautiful mother and her sainted aunt, and God bless all three of you, my daughter, her mother and her aunt, all wrongfully imprisoned here.”

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1562

  It gets hotter in the city and I am afraid of the plague. There is always illness in the summer, this is why the court goes on progress—so that the palaces can be cleaned and Elizabeth can hurry her barren body far away from any sickness. This is the first year that I have spent in London in summertime, and the stink from the river and from the moat around the Tower fills me with dread. You don’t need to be a great physician to recognize the smell of disease. London smells of death, and I am afraid to breathe the air.

  Elizabeth’s childhood friend and lady-in-waiting Kat Ashley is moved from the Tower for her safety. She is still in disgrace but Elizabeth won’t let her beloved Kat be in the least danger. But we are left here to take our chances with the pestilential mists from the drains and the river. She leaves my baby here—where she knows there is disease.

  “Should I write to William Cecil and ask him to move us?” I ask Ned one evening.

  He has the baby in his arms and is singing him a little poem of his own making. The baby is cooing wit