The Last Tudor Read online

  Lucy comes to me, white-faced, and tells me that her mother, who lives outside the walls of the Tower and does my washing, has taken to her bed. She has the terrible swelling in her armpits and the buboes in her groin that indicate the plague. Lucy is shaking with fear. “She washed your linen only yesterday,” she says. “I brought it in myself. I put it on the baby.” She is trembling with distress. “God spare us, your ladyship. I would never have done it! I did not know! What if the baby takes the plague?”

  Lucy’s home is nailed up and marked with a red cross on the door. Lucy is not allowed in to see her mother; everyone is barred out. The sick woman tosses and turns on her bed, alone in her house. She will live or die in a lonely vigil; but she knows that she is most likely to die, and her daughter cannot even take her a mug of clean water. Sufferers with the plague pray for death as their fever rises and the swellings on their body make them cry with pain, but nobody can go to them.

  “I have not seen my brother,” Lucy says fretfully. “He’s in service to the Duke of Norfolk.”

  “Then perhaps he’s out of the city with the court,” I say helplessly. “Perhaps they’re safe at Windsor with the queen.”

  “Shall I take the baby’s linen off again? And wash it again?”

  My newborn child has been in linen from a plague house for half the day. “Yes, do,” I say uncertainly, “and burn herbs, Lucy, at the doorway and windows.”

  Elizabeth, the heartless queen, takes no risks with her own health, though she leaves me and my little boys in the heart of the pestilential city. She locks herself up at Windsor Castle, and no one is allowed to go from London to her court. She even has a gallows built on the edge of the town to hang anyone who dares to approach. A gate and her giant sergeant porter is not enough for Elizabeth—she has to be guarded by a hangman—but she leaves me and my babies here, in the most diseased place in England.

  The worst thing is never knowing why one person catches the illness and another is spared. In a good year a whole street can be well, and one person, perhaps in a little house in the very middle, will die. But in a bad year the whole street will go dark and only one little house, surrounded by death, will burn a candle and use whatever preventatives they can buy. As the heat of August goes on and on, it becomes clear that this is a bad year, one of the very worst. The parishes have to send out carts to fetch and bury the dead every night, and they report that perhaps as many as a thousand people are dying every week.

  Every day I am more terrified for myself and for my boys, and for Ned in the Tower. “Keep away from the boys,” I say anxiously to Mrs. Rother and to Lucy, to anyone who comes into the Tower from the diseased city. “I will care for them today. And throw away all the linen that has come from the Thames washerwomen. And clean up the room, sweep the floors and make it sweet.”

  Lucy looks at me with sulky resentment. Her grief for her mother has soured her. “Your son Thomas slept with his wet nurse,” she says. “The clout he has on was hemmed by my dead mother. If you think the plague comes from touch, the boys may have it already.”

  I give a little moan of fear. I think that if I lose either of my sons, I will die of grief. I think: this is what Elizabeth was hoping for. She has prayed that I will die, and my sons will die, and nobody will be able to fix the blame at her door. I will be like Amy Dudley, her victim whom everyone has forgotten.

  I put out a blue scarf from the window so that Ned can see that we are well, and I stand by the window till I see the answering flutter of blue on his wall. I know he will be pacing the floor in his fury, writing to all of our friends at court. A bad year for plague makes imprisonment in the Tower a death sentence. Here, in the very heart of the city, encircled by a stinking drain, every cloth that we wear and everything that we eat comes from the diseased city and is handled by half a dozen people before it gets to us.

  I write to William Cecil myself and beg him to send Ned and me and our babies out of the Tower to the country. I have never, in all my life, willingly spent the summer in London. I dare swear that neither has he. Nobody with a country house or even a little cottage stays in the city during the plague months.

  All day long I wait for an answer; but none comes. I think that Cecil must have already left the city, gone to his beautiful new house at Burghley, or perhaps he is safe in Windsor Castle with the merry court, hiding behind the guards at the entrances to the town, the gallows waiting for anyone who seeks shelter with the privileged few. How shall I survive this summer if everyone goes away and forgets about me? How happy Elizabeth would be to come back to London in the autumn and find that I am dead and buried in a plague grave, my babies’ little swaddled corpses thrown in with me.

  I don’t know whether to close the windows against the dangerous miasma that breathes off the river, or fling them open to try to keep the stuffy room cool. In the evening, when the babies are asleep, I wrap my head and shoulders in a shawl and walk in the lieutenant’s garden. The newly appointed man, Sir Richard Blount, who has replaced poor Sir Edward, watches me from his window. A guard stands at the gate. I feel terribly tired, and I wonder if it is a sign of the plague. If exhaustion and a sense of foreboding swell up before the buboes, then I may not see the dawn.

  I am about to turn and go back into the house when I hear a clanging noise. It is not the tocsin bell of alarm, it is a deeper tone with a crack in it, clattered by an irritable hand. I can hear the creak of cartwheels as the sound comes closer, as if a cart, ringing a bell as it goes, has entered the gateway and is making its way around the guardhouse and the little village of the Tower where the servants live. Again and again the bell rings and then I hear the cry that comes between each clang of the clapper.

  “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”

  God help us, the plague cart has come inside the Tower itself. There must be plague in the servants’ cottages, or among the grooms at the stables. I pull the shawl over my mouth and I go quickly indoors and bolt the door as if I would lock out death itself.

  I get a note from Mary, it is damp with vinegar. Someone has sprayed it with stale wine in the hope of preventing the plague clinging to the paper.

  We are at Windsor; but you are not forgotten. The lords insist that you are not kept in the Tower in a plague year. They tell Elizabeth that it is a hidden death sentence. Keep everyone at a distance and let no one touch the boys but yourself. I believe you will be freed within a few days.

  I wash the boys’ linen myself. I take Teddy out to play in the early morning: the midday sun is dangerously hot for a Tudor like him, with his fair skin and copper hair, and the evening mists carry disease. I wash our own plates, but the water comes from the well in the Tower, sometimes I can see it is cloudy with dirt, and there is nothing I can do about the dinners that come from the lieutenant’s kitchens. The baby suckles from a woman who may have tainted milk. I have no way of knowing, but I dare not starve him by sending her away now. Lucy continues to be well and I watch her for any sign of faintness or fever and discourage her from coming and going. Mrs. Rother sends a message that her sister is ill, and that she is going with her to the country. She says she is sorry to abandon me but she dare not delay. The villages outside London are closing their doors to anyone from the city, and if she does not leave now, she will have to sleep in outhouses with sick people fleeing sickness.

  I watch Ned’s window and every day there is the blue handkerchief that shows me that he is well. I give one of the guards a silver penny to tell Ned that none of us is sick, and we hope to be released. He sends me back a poem:

  My love is not blighted by plague

  Nor burnèd by the sun

  My love is constant through all days

  Until our freedom’s won.

  I sprinkle it with powder before I take it from the guard’s hand and I read it at arm’s length. The words I hold in my heart. I burn the paper.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1563

  In the early morning, while it is still