The Last Tudor Read online

  She gives a little snort of laughter. “Hush,” she says. “If you can laugh, then you can eat. They tell me your sister is in deep grief and starving herself. That’s not the way to victory. I shall write to her and give her this advice, too. It is what my friend the queen Kateryn knew; it is what your mother knew. A wise woman lives long and hopes for change.”

  GREENWICH PALACE,

  AUTUMN 1567

  My rooms at Greenwich are adequately furnished and the queen herself sends me some silver pots for the ale and wine, after my stepgrandmother provides William Cecil with a list of the things that we need. I don’t think she minces her words as she rails about my poverty. I don’t think she spares her assurances of our good housekeeping skills. My stepgrandmother lost all her good things in the years of exile while she traveled in Europe, one step ahead of the papist spies who would have dragged her back to England for a heresy trial. Now she is determined that neither she nor her family will suffer again. She is high in favor at Elizabeth’s court and she awaits the return of the court to Greenwich when she will argue for my freedom. She is confident that I will be released, that Ned will be allowed to go to Hanworth, that my sister Katherine and Thomas will join him and Teddy, that the family will be freed and reunited. She believes that Elizabeth’s genuine devotion to the Protestant faith will overrule Elizabeth’s perverse, persistent love for her papist cousin, her lingering family loyalty to Mary Queen of Scots, her fearful defense of the rights of queens, even for one who has done so little to deserve it.

  “Be brave!” the duchess says brightly to me when she sees me wearily walking in the gardens, looking out at the river where the ships spread their sails and drop the tow ropes and look as if they are ready to fly away, free as the birds that circle their masts. “Be brave! You will go where you please next spring, I swear it. I will speak for your husband, for your sister, for your brother-in-law, and for those two innocent little boys. Your life will not end in prison, like that of your poor sister Jane. You will be freed, believe it!”

  I do believe her. Her husband, Richard Bertie, bends down and kisses my hand and tells me that good times will come. Everyone suffers in this troubled world, but God rewards those who are faithful to Him. He reminds me that my stepgrandmother was summoned home when her religion became the faith of England, and overnight she was no longer a damned heretic but one of the chosen.

  “Besides,” my lady grandmother tells me, “Elizabeth cannot create a force for Mary Queen of Scots. She has given the Clan Hamilton a great bribe, but they will not raise an army for Mary. She has demanded that the countries of Europe starve Scotland out. But not even the French, Mary’s former family, will support a trade blockade on Scotland. Without Spanish support, without the French, Elizabeth can do nothing for her cousin: she cannot act on her own.”

  “Or at any rate she dare not,” Richard Bertie supplements quietly.

  My lady grandmother laughs and slaps her husband’s hand. “It is not in the interest of England to restore the papist queen to her throne,” she says. “The queen, our queen, will never work against the interest of her Protestant country. Wherever her heart yearns to be, she always has a steady head. You can be sure of that.”

  “I can be sure of William Cecil,” Richard Bertie says. “His heart doesn’t yearn for a papist in trouble.”

  “And in the meantime,” I ask, “what is happening to Mary, the former Queen of Scotland?”

  My stepgrandmother shrugs her shoulders as if to say “Who cares?” “She is imprisoned,” she says. “She must miss the son that she handed over; she must grieve for the babies that she lost. She must know that she has been a fool. My God, she must regret with all her soul that she married that vicious boy and then allowed his murder, and then married his killer.”

  “I don’t know that there is any evidence that she murdered Lord Darnley,” I put in.

  My stepgrandmother raises her eyebrows. “Then who did?” she asks. “Whoever benefited from the death of that worthless young man if not his abused wife and her lover?”

  I open my mouth to argue, but I fall silent. I don’t know the truth of the matter, I don’t know what my dangerous and beautiful cousin might or might not have done. But I know that she, like Katherine and me, will hate her prison, beating against the bars like a frightened bird. I know she will be like us, determined to be free. I know that she, like us, will do anything to be free. In that is our only power. In that we are a danger to ourselves.

  I think that Katherine and I have a chance. The luck that has run against us ever since Jane went upriver to Syon in the Dudley barge, and did not resist them when they crammed the crown on her little head, has turned at last. My sister is suddenly liberated by the death of her old guardian and keeper. This event comes as a surprise only to those who hoped to put my sister away and never think of her again. Poor old Wentworth was more than seventy years old: he objected to the cost of her keeping, he pleaded that he could not be expected to do it, and now he has escaped his duty into the long rest of death.

  I am so accustomed to bad news that I feel only dread when I see my lady grandmother come towards me, down the raked gravel path in early September with a single sheet of paper in her hand. I fear at once that something is wrong. My first thought is of my husband, Thomas Keyes, imprisoned in the Fleet, and my second is for my sister Katherine and her little boy.

  I run towards her, my little boots crunching on the stones. “My lady grandmother! Is it bad news?”

  She tries to smile. “Oh, Mary! Do you read minds like a dwarf in a fair?”

  “Tell me!” I say.

  “My dear, sit down.”

  I grow more and more frightened. We go to a little stone seat in a bower of a golden-leaved hedge. I clamber onto the seat to satisfy her, and I turn to her. “Tell me!”

  She unfolds the letter. “It is your sister. It is your poor dear sister.”

  It is a letter from the executor of the old man’s will, a man of no importance, caught up in great events. He writes to William Cecil to say that the widow Wentworth cannot take the charge of Katherine and her son, though she loves her as dearly as a daughter. Tentatively, Mr. Roke Green says that he has no instructions as to where Katherine should go, or what the queen wishes for her. He is too poor himself, he lives in too small a way to house such a great lady. He himself is a widower, though if he had a wife they might offer her a poor refuge. Surely, nobody could allow her to come to him without a lady of the house to attend her, and his house is small and cramped and he himself is a poor man. But still—but still—this is his third letter and no one has told him what is to be done! While Katherine’s next destination is being decided by the great men of the queen’s court, while Katherine has literally nowhere to go—shall he invite her to his own house? This is not to suggest any sympathy, any prejudice for or against her cause or her claim. But she is young and frail, beautiful and terribly thin, starving herself and in despair of ever seeing her husband and child again. She hardly gets out of her bed, she rarely stops crying. May Mr. Roke Green put a roof over her head while the queen, in her wisdom, decides what shall be done with this poor weak lady? Because she cannot stay where she is, and she will die if they continue to neglect her.

  I hold the letter out to my lady stepgrandmother. “She has nowhere to go,” I say flatly.

  Her face is alight. “So he says.”

  “Yet you look pleased?”

  “Yes, because this is our chance to free her, I think.”

  I can feel my heart suddenly race. “You think they might allow it? Will you invite her here?”

  She smiles at me. “Why not? As we have been warned, she has nowhere else to go.”

  My lady grandmother writes to the queen, writes to William Cecil, writes to Robert Dudley. The court is at Windsor Castle. They are delaying their return to London, the weather is so fine, everyone is unwilling to come back to face the demanding question of how to support the Scots queen—a cousin! a monarch!—witho