The Last Tudor Read online

  “Yes,” the man says. “I’ll get back to Hampton Court and tell my lord that you understand. You’ll hear as soon as there is any more news.”

  “We live in extraordinary times,” Ned says, almost to himself. “Times of wonders.”

  Of course we cannot sleep. We don’t even lie on the bed together and kiss. We can’t eat. We are both of us incapable of doing anything but walking fretfully around the two rooms and looking out of the window into the dark garden in case there is a torch bobbing towards us. I change my gown so that I look my best when the lords come with the crown. I put a cloth over the linnets so that they go to sleep and don’t sing. The dogs are quiet in their box and I put Mr. Nozzle into his cage. Without a presence chamber, without a court, we are as dignified as we can be. I sit in the one good chair and Ned stands behind me. We cannot stop ourselves posing, like actors in a masque, playing the part of majesty even while the messenger may be riding towards us to tell us that the script is ready, the playacting has become real.

  “I will reward the lieutenant of the Tower,” I remark.

  “Not a word,” Ned cautions me. “We are praying for the recovery of the queen, God bless her.”

  “Yes,” I agree. I wonder if it is wrong to outwardly pray for someone and secretly hope that she dies. I wish I could ask Jane: it is just the sort of thing she would know. But really, how can I want Elizabeth to live, when she has been such an enemy to me, and to my innocent son?

  “I am praying for her,” I tell Ned. I think I will pray that she goes directly to heaven, and that there is no purgatory; for if there were, she would never escape.

  We hear the first trill of birdsong, loud in our silent room, and then one by one the songbirds start to call for the day. A thrush sings a ripple of song, loud as a flute. I stir in my seat, and see that Ned is looking out of the window. “It’s dawn,” he says. “I have to go.”

  “With no message!”

  “Any messenger will find me easily enough,” he says wryly. “I’m going nowhere. I will be locked into my cell in the Tower. And if the message comes for you, then they will send for me as soon as they have told you . . .” He trails off. “Remember, if anyone asks, you prayed all night for her health,” he says. “You were here alone.”

  “I will say that. And really, I did.” I cross my fingers behind my back on the half lie. “Will you come tomorrow night?”

  He takes me in his arms. “Without fail. Without fail, beloved. And I will send you any news that I hear. Send your lady-in-waiting to me at dinnertime and I will whisper to her anything that I have heard from Hampton Court.” He opens the door and then hesitates. “Don’t be misled by gossip,” he says. “Don’t leave your room unless the Privy Council themselves come to you. It would be fatal if you were seen to accept the crown, and then Elizabeth recovered.”

  I am so afraid of her that I actually feel a shudder at the thought of making such a mistake and having to face her with a genuine accusation of treason against me. “I won’t! I won’t!” I promise him. I swear to myself that I will never be queen for nine days like my sister. I will be queen for the rest of my life or not at all. I cannot make it happen one way or another. Everything depends on the strength of a sickly woman of nearly thirty years old, fighting one of the most dangerous diseases in the world.

  “And pray for her health,” Ned says. “Make sure that people see you praying for her.”

  We hear the door below open and the guard whisper hoarsely up the stairs: “My lord?”

  “Coming,” Ned replies. He gives me one hungry kiss on the mouth. “Till tonight,” he promises me. “Unless something happens today.”

  I have to wait all day. The lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward, comes to visit me and finds me on my knees before my Bible. “You will have heard that the queen is sick,” he says.

  I get to my feet. “I have been praying for her all day. God bless her and give her strength,” I say.

  “God bless her,” he repeats, but his half-hidden glance towards me shows me that we both know that if she slides from unconsciousness into death then there will be a new Queen of England and the little boy in the cradle will be Edward Prince of Wales.

  “You may like to walk in the garden,” Sir Edward offers.

  I incline my head. “We’ll go now.”

  I cannot sit still, and I may not go anywhere. I cannot concentrate on reading and I don’t dare to daydream. “Lucy, bring Teddy’s ball.”

  I wait and I wait, starting up every time I hear the challenge from the gatehouse and the big gates creak open, but there is no more news from Hampton Court. Elizabeth is locked in a long silent battle for her life, and the Privy Council are trading favors to choose the heir to the throne. Nobody will consent to Elizabeth’s nomination of Robert Dudley for Protector. Dudley himself—with his own father buried in the Tower in the chapel, beheaded for treason—knows that it cannot be, though I swear that his eager ambition, Dudley ambition, must have leapt up when he first heard of it.

  He will be favoring his family’s candidate: Henry Hastings, who married the Dudley girl in the round of weddings that saw Jane and me married off to reinforce Dudley power. Even now, eight years after Jane’s death, the old Dudley plot for the throne rolls on like a great watermill wheel incapable of stopping, that turns one wheel and then another and then the great grinding stone that shakes the whole building. The plot is set in motion, the water flows, the mill wheel turns; but nobody will support Dudley.

  Nobody will openly support Mary Queen of Scots. She is a papist and her kinsmen are making war on Huguenot Protestants and mustering to fight English soldiers in Le Havre. Overnight she has become England’s enemy, and she will never recover her reputation as a ruler who will tolerate our religion. Very few people favor Margaret Douglas. For all that she is of the royal family she is widely known as a papist, imprisoned for the most diabolical of crimes. Nobody would accept such a woman as Queen of England. There is no one else of blood royal and of the reformed religion but me. No one else whose line was named by the king’s will. I shall wear my sister’s crown.

  All day I hear this, like plainsong, in my head, as I play with Teddy in the garden and help him to stand and let him jump on my lap. All day I hear over and over again: “I shall wear my sister’s crown, I shall fulfill her dream. I shall complete the task that Jane started and there will be rejoicing in heaven.”

  At dinnertime I send my lady-in-waiting to wait on my husband. I send a basket of peaches by way of a gift, and she takes them to his dinner table. She comes back to me, her lips compressed as if she is holding in a secret.

  “My lady, I have a message.”

  “What is it?” I hear in my head: I shall wear my sister’s crown, I shall fulfill her dream.

  “My lord said to tell you—thank God—that the queen has recovered. She has come out of her swoon and the spots have broken on her skin. He said God be praised she is better.”

  “God be praised,” I repeat loudly. “Our prayers have been answered. God bless her.”

  I turn and go into the house, leaving Teddy with the maid, though he calls after me and raises his arms to be lifted up. I cannot let anyone see the bitterness in my face. She has recovered, that false kinswoman, that evil queen. She has recovered and I am still here in prison and no one is going to come and set me free. Nobody is coming to crown me today.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  WINTER 1562

  Elizabeth recovers as if the devil himself was nursing her with satanic tenderness. Jane’s sister-in-law, who was Mary Dudley, nearly dies taking the pox from Elizabeth, and loses her famous beauty. I have no pity for her. It was she who took Jane by barge to Syon on the night that they made her queen. It was an ill-advised journey: and now Jane is dead and Mary will spend the rest of her life hiding her scarred face from the world, as if Dudley ambition has blasted their daughter’s beauty.

  The queen has recovered, but the country is in turmoil. Everyone knows that she was near dea