The Last Tudor Read online

  “When are you due to have your course?”

  I never have any idea—sometimes it comes late, sometimes it does not come at all. “I think it is this week, or perhaps it was last week.”

  Her cross face does a strange convulsion, I understand she is moved. She takes my hand. “You shall rest,” she says with sudden gentleness. “Rest, my dear.”

  There is a clatter from the courtyard outside my window as the Dudley horsemen all come into the yard and shout for grooms and for the men-at-arms. The noise pounds into my head and I turn my face from the bright window.

  “You can go to the manor at Chelsea and rest,” she offers. “You like it there, don’t you?”

  I lived there with Queen Kateryn when she was newly widowed and writing her book. It is my favorite place in all the world. “I love it there,” I say. “But I thought your husband said that I have to be here?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. You can go there, while we wait for news,” she says. “Guildford can visit you, and my husband can send you news. Your ladies can go with you.” She is smiling as she pats my cold hand. She has never been so gentle with me before. “You can be quiet there, and eat well. I have had thirteen babies,” she confides. “I know all about it.”

  Does this mad woman think I am with child? Bearing her grandson? Well, whatever she means, I am not going to argue with her, not if she is sending me to Chelsea without Guildford.

  “I’ll tell them to prepare your rooms at the old manor,” she says. “You can go by our barge as soon as they are ready for you. See how well I look after you! But rest for now.”

  I close my eyes and when I open them, she has gone.

  THE OLD MANOR, CHELSEA,

  JULY 1553

  I can hardly believe that my friend, my teacher, my almost-mother Queen Kateryn is not here with me at Chelsea. Every time I raise my eyes from the page I expect to see her, at her table, reading and taking notes.

  This was her house, and I was her favorite ward, a little girl she was making in her own image, as beloved as a daughter. We walked together in the gardens, we played in the orchard, we sat beside the river, and every day, without fail, we studied in the beautiful rooms that look down on the gardens and out to the river. If she missed the crowds and the excitement of the royal court, she never gave any sign of it. On the contrary, she lived as she had always wanted: as a scholarly lady, remote from a sinful world, happy with the man she loved, free at last to devote herself to study and to prayer. It was from this library that she sent her book to the printers. Here, she invited the greatest scholars of the day to preach. Now I feel as if she has just stepped into the garden, or walked along the gallery, and that I may see her at any moment, and it comforts me. The life that she made for herself here is the life I want for myself: this scholarly peace.

  In this period of quietness, I choose to read all that I can about dwarfs, as I think that my sister Mary is not just bird-boned, or underweight, or slow to grow—my father has used all these excuses to keep her at home. I fear that she may never grow any bigger; and I wonder why such a thing should be. I learn almost nothing from the Greek philosophers, but in ancient Egypt there were dwarf gods, and some high-born courtier dwarfs. I write to tell Mary all about this but I don’t mention the behavior of dwarfs at the Roman courts. None of that is suitable information for a young woman who is the daughter of an heir to the throne. Indeed, I am surprised to find it in Kateryn Parr’s library at all.

  I live here almost alone except for my ladies. Every other day Guildford rides out to see me, gives me what news he knows—which is never much—and then returns to the court where they are keeping a selfish vigil over my poor cousin the dying king. Sometimes Guildford dines with us but usually he eats his dinner with his parents and sleeps at their house. My ladies ask me if I miss him—a husband so handsome and so newly wed—and I show them a thin smile and say “not particularly.” I never say that it is a great relief to be without his heavy presence in my bed, sweating under my thick covers, weighing down his side of the bed. He has to attend me, just as I have to endure him; we are bound to lie together by the law of the Church and the command of our parents; but why a woman would do it for pleasure, or even seek it, I cannot imagine.

  But I do remember that Queen Kateryn was happiest in the mornings when Thomas Seymour came bare-legged out of her rooms. I know that my mother relishes her time with my father, and Lady Dudley is obviously ludicrously devoted to my father-in-law. Perhaps it is something I will grow into when I am taller and stronger. Perhaps, as a pleasure of the flesh, you have to have a lot of flesh to feel the pleasure. If I did not feel so sick in my belly and so feverish, it would perhaps be better. But I cannot imagine being so fat and so healthy that I would long for Guildford’s clumsy thrusting, or giggle when he slapped my bottom.

  This is the only time I have ever found that my books fail me. There are some Greek papers about the conception of children but they are all about the phases of the moon. There are some terrifying pictures of a baby being cut from a dead mother, and a lot of theology Our Lord being conceived by the Holy Ghost on a virgin—and there are some thoughtful writers who question how this could be. But nobody seems to have written anything about a real woman. It is as if I, and those of my sex, exist only as a symbol. The books say nothing about the strange mixture of pain and shame that Guildford and I suffer wordlessly and awkwardly together. They say nothing about how a baby is made from this painful coupling. I don’t think anyone exactly knows, and, of course, I cannot ask.

  Guildford talks to me in the morning, he tells me that the king’s illness has been announced to the parliament and the churches are praying for his recovery. Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth have been invited to court, and they are both waiting in their country houses for news.

  “Will they come?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “My father will know.”

  “What is going to happen?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know. My father will know.”

  “Can’t you ask him?”

  He gives a funny little scowl. “No. Do you ask your father what his plans are?”

  I shake my head.

  “He talks to John and Ambrose or Robert.” Guildford names his older brothers. “They all talk together, they know what’s happening. But they’re much older than I; they have been at court and they’ve been in battles. They can advise him, he listens to them. I am just . . .” He trails off.

  “What are you?”

  “Bait to catch you,” he says, his voice hard as if he is insulting us both. “A fat fly for a stupid trout.”

  I hesitate, ignoring his rudeness and the hurt in his voice. “But how will we know what we are to do?”

  “Someone will tell us,” he says. “When they want us, they will send for us. Dead fly and trout together.”

  It is the first time that I have had a sense of him as a young man, not yet twenty, who has to obey his family, as I have to obey mine. It is the first time that I have seen he is anxious about what is planned for us. It is the first time that I have thought: we are in the same situation, together. Our future will be together, we will grow up together, we have to face whatever is going to happen together. I give him a shy little smile. “We just have to wait?”

  Surprisingly, he touches my fingers with his, as if he shares my sense of being caged, like the bear at Bradgate, waiting for the dogs to come. “We have to wait,” he agrees.

  It is Mary Sidney, Guildford’s older sister, who comes one afternoon, cloaked and hooded as if she were a heroine of one of the poems that she loves so much, her dark blue eyes bright with excitement, her slim frame trembling.

  “You have to come!” she says, whispering though we are alone in my private chamber, except for my ladies, seated in the window, catching the last light of the setting sun on the books they are reading.

  “Did your father send you for me?”

  “Yes!” she says excitedly. “You are to come at on