The Last Tudor

  Of course he could be true and still make some mistake that allows the archbishop to find against us. If Ned has forgotten the minister’s furred robe or his foreign accent, then his account will not tally with mine. If he thinks to protect my reputation by denying that we were lovers before our marriage, then they will seize on his lie. If we differ on any point, then they will try to make out that the marriage was false and our story concocted to save face.

  I can’t help but fear this. It is such a long time ago! A year ago, and we snatched at the time together and were so rushed. I have lost the papers, and Ned never knew the name of the minister. We have lost Janey, who was our only witness and only friend. It is so likely that Ned will forget something—he has been to France and Burgundy and Italy since last year, and then suffered the shock of being summoned home. But I have his two rings, and I have his poem by heart. No one could truly think that this was all invented. But no one really cares for the truth. All they want to do is to make my son a bastard so that Ned and I and Teddy can be bundled out of sight and shamed and forgotten.

  They keep Ned all day. It is fully dark by the time they bring him back, and then they don’t return him to the lieutenant’s house. I am waiting for him to turn in at the gate, and I have a candle at my window and I am going to wave to him. But I cannot see him at all at first, only the bobbing flames of the torches of his guards as they lead the way from the dark archway towards the high White Tower, where it stands, bleak against the night sky. But he halts as he comes out from the archway, and puts back his hood and looks directly up to my window. I hold my candle out of the window so he can see the tiny light guttering in the wind and know that it shines for him, that I am true to him as I trust that he is true to me.

  They speak to him to make him go on, and he raises his hand to me and goes past the lieutenant’s house, past my doorway, and across the green to the looming tower. Up the steps he goes to the entrance doorway, and it opens as he comes near and bangs shut behind him, and I know that he has said something, or they have made something up that allows them to keep him in the royal prisons, confined in a cell. He’s not in the lieutenant’s house anymore, like an honored lord confined under house arrest. Now he is in the Tower where they keep the traitors, and torture them, too.

  For four days we go back and forth to the archbishop and each time that he has seen Ned he asks me about another detail: some of them are real, some of them fabricated, I am sure, and some I simply cannot remember or never knew. I feel more and more troubled and my early defiance melts into fear. I beg him to understand that we were married, that we undertook a marriage in good faith before God. I beg him to understand that if I cite God as my witness, I cannot lie. I am sister to Jane Grey—am I likely to take the Word of God in vain? I hear my voice change from scorn to pleading. The archbishop looks less and less anxious, and more and more like a man who is getting the answers he wants. The clerk scribbles faster and faster. I dare not think what is going to happen next.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1562

  Nothing happens. Painfully, nothing happens at all. I just have to wait. I think of Jane, living in the Partridges’ house, waiting and waiting for Queen Mary to forgive and release her, certain that Her Majesty would be bound to forgive and release her—and then the priest coming to tell her she would die the next morning. Some nights I wake in tears dreaming that I am Jane, and that my time of waiting is ending, and that this dawn I will have to make the short walk to the green. But then I roll over in my bed and reach for my baby in his cradle, rosy from crying, hungry for his feed, his feet kicking with impatience, and I put him to my breast and feel him suckle and know that here is powerful innocent life that cannot be murdered, and that one morning, one day, I am going to take this little baby out to his freedom.

  My little sister Mary visits me with a basket of new asparagus. “Someone gave me this from his garden,” she says vaguely, heaving it up on the table. “I thought the lieutenant’s cook might steam it for you with some fresh butter.”

  “He will, thank you,” I say. I bend to kiss her and she hauls herself up onto the window seat. “Is that Ned’s window?” she asks, looking across at the White Tower where a blue scarf flutters from one of the hinges.

  “Yes. He puts out a scarf to show me he is well in the morning, and I do the same,” I say. “If he was ill, he would put out a white scarf, and if he is released, he will fly nothing.”

  She nods. She does not ask what standard will be flown from the window for bad news. Nobody in the Tower wants to prepare for bad news. Only my sister Jane had the courage to look forward to her death and write to me of learning to die.

  “The court is leaving London,” she says. “I’m to go, too. She’s not being unpleasant. You would think I was nothing to do with you and no kinswoman to her at all. She treats me as any one of her ladies. She likes any one of them better than me; she gives Thomasina the dwarf more attention. I go everywhere with the court and I dine with the ladies. She barely speaks to me and she often fails to see I am there. But she treats others far worse.”

  “Oh, who does she treat worse?” I ask, intrigued.

  “Our cousin Margaret Douglas for one,” Mary says quietly. “She’s under house arrest at the Charterhouse at Sheen, suspected of treason.”

  I muffle my gasp with a hand to my mouth. “Another cousin under arrest? And in our old house?”

  “They say that she was trying to get her son Henry Stuart married to Mary Queen of Scots.”

  “Was she?”

  “Almost certainly; but why should she not? It would be a wonderful match for him, an adequate match for her, and an English king consort in Scotland would be better for us than a Frenchman.”

  “Is the whole family arrested?”

  “Her husband is held here, I think, in the Tower. But her son has disappeared.”

  I put my hands to my head, as if I would pull my own hair. “What? This is madness.”

  “I know,” Mary says gloomily. “Elizabeth is crazed with fear like her father. And I have to serve her. And I have to go wherever she fancies.”

  “If only you could get away,” I whisper.

  Mary shakes her head. “They’d use it against you. No, I’ll go on progress and pretend to enjoy it.”

  I put my hand over hers. “Where are you going this year?”

  “North. We’re to stay at Nottingham, and she’s commanded a masque. Everyone is in it. Me, too. I play an angel of peace on a swing. The masque is called Britain and the King. It goes on for three days.”

  “Heavens.”

  “It opens with Pallas on a unicorn,” she says. “Elizabeth, I suppose. Followed by two women on horseback, Prudence and Temperance. Next day: Peace. Last day: Malice is thrown down and we all sing.”

  I can’t help but laugh at her gloomy expression and dour description. “I am sure it will be beautiful.”

  “Oh, yes, there are to be lions and elephants and all sorts. But the point of it is two women united, the friendship between two women. And the other message is that British kings inherit by blood, they’re not chosen.”

  “What does she mean? Is she sending a message to Mary Queen of Scots?”

  “She’s trying to. Elizabeth is telling Queen Mary that they are monarchs of Britain together, they can rule together: Mary in the north, Elizabeth in the south, and that Mary will be a sister queen and heir. She’s practically promising her the throne. She says it is passed by inheritance to the closest heir. Not by choice, not by religion, not by will.”

  I take three strides across the little room till I am brought up short by the table. “Finally, she dares to openly deny me.”

  “Still not open, still not denial,” Mary says angrily. “The masque is not to be performed before the people. Nobody would understand it unless they had a classical education—I’ve had to explain it to half the ladies. She doesn’t have the courage to declare herself. She is putting you aside by getting that spaniel Archbi
shop Parker to do her work for her; she is announcing it in a masque. She wants the court to know that you are not her heir, that you are shamed, that your son is a bastard; but she does not dare tell the country.”

  “Oh dear God, Mary, has the archbishop declared that my marriage is invalid?”

  “He has. And called that poor baby a bastard.” Mary nods grimly towards the cradle, where my innocent son sleeps quietly, not knowing that he is being robbed of his name. “God forgive him. She hopes that nobody will speak in support of a woman taken in lust, and nobody will turn out for a bastard baby. You are ruined, and he is disinherited. Ned, of course, is shown to be dishonorable.”

  I pick up one of the puppies, and hold it under my chin for comfort. “The archbishop is a liar” is all I say.

  Mary nods. “Everyone knows it.”

  For a moment we sit in grim silence.

  “And I have to dance in her rotten masque,” she spits. “I am in the train of Pallas on the first day, and I sit on my swing and then dance for Peace on the last. She knows what she is doing when she makes my dancing send a message to that papist Mary. Me! Jane Grey’s sister sending a message of hope to a papist heir of England.”

  “She knows what she is doing,” I agree. “She has cured herself of her fear of us. You will never have a son, she’s sure of that. And now nobody will support my son, named as a bastard to an unchaste mother.”

  “Oh, she’s won,” Mary says dismissively. “We weren’t even conspiring against her and she has worked against us as if we were the vilest of enemies. Margaret Douglas was nothing but fanciful talk and ambition for her son, but she is named as a traitor, too. She’s not much of a kinswoman, our queen. There’s little joy in being close to her. D’you think she will free you, now she has ruined you?”

  I get up and go to the window.

  “What are you doing?” she asks as I swing open the casement.

  “I am hanging out a black ribbon,” I say quietly. “For bad news. Because nobody is going to call for my release now.”

  The court leaves London and I think of Mary sitting on her swing as an angel of peace, and dancing for Elizabeth in the masque, which tells Mary Queen of Scots that she—a papist, a Frenchwoman—is to be Elizabeth’s heir and that we are to be forgotten. I think it is hard for me, here in the Tower with the man I love imprisoned a hundred yards from my window; but it is perhaps even harder for my sister Mary, in smiling service to a woman that she knows is my enemy, her enemy, the vindictive enemy of every woman that she sees as a rival.

  The weather grows warmer and I open my windows at night and hear the blackbirds in the orchards singing sweetly later and later every evening, as they court and build their nests. I put bells around Ribbon’s neck so that she cannot hunt the nestlings, and I put my crumbled breakfast bread on the windowsill every morning and watch for the robin that swoops in and struts before the pane of glass, showing his red breast and claiming his place.

  In the evening I study, reading the books that Jane left behind here in the lieutenant’s library, studying the Bible that she sent to me, rereading her letter to me, to her friends and teachers, seeing her as both my sister and a heroine. I am trying to find her courage, her sense of destiny, in myself. She always knew that her feet were on a holy road, whether they led her to the throne or the scaffold; she always knew that she was walking towards God. I am afraid she must have found me very light and foolish. I know better now, and I wish I could tell her that I know better now.

  Teddy is thriving and wakes only once in the night to feed. I ask the lieutenant if we can go outside in the warm summer air, so that he can feel the sunshine on his skin, and he says that my lady-in-waiting can walk him in the garden or by the river every day.

  “Nobody has told me that the innocent babe is under arrest,” he says, and I think I hear the note of resentment in his quiet voice and I think—this is what it is to be in the service of Elizabeth. You start hopefully on a course and then you find that she goes further than makes sense, further than you can bear.

  I go to bed early, and I lie in the twilight as the room slowly darkens, and I wonder what will happen when Mary Queen of Scots replies to the message of Elizabeth’s masque. Can those two determined rivals really make peace together? Will they be—as Mary once offered—two queens in one isle? Will they really make a great meeting together, and become friends? Might Elizabeth finally have found the one person, an equal, that she can trust?

  And if they do meet, make friends, fall in love with each other’s majesty, will I decline into such obscurity that Elizabeth releases Ned and me from our imprisonment? Is my greatest ambition now to be forgotten by everyone who said that I should one day be a queen?

  There is a tap on the outer door, and the key turns noisily in the lock. I get up from my bed, throw my robe around my shoulders, and go to unbolt it. My maid sleeps with Teddy, and my lady-in-waiting comes in every day. There is no one to open my door from the inside through the night but me. This is no hardship—nobody ever comes at nighttime after the dinner has been served. This must be a guard with a message; I dare not hope it is a pardon.

  “Who’s there?” I call a little nervously, but I cannot hear the reply as I slide back the bolts, and when I open the door, there is a guard and a taller man with his hood pulled so far forward that I cannot see his face.

  I go to slam the door, but he puts out a quick hand. “D’you not know me?” he whispers. “Wife?”

  It is Ned, it is Ned, it is Ned my husband, handsome and smiling. He gives a nod to the guard and pushes my door open. He sweeps me into his arms and kisses my face, my hair, my closed wet eyelids, my lips.

  “Ned,” I gasp. I cannot catch my breath.

  “My love. My wife.”

  “You are free?”

  “God! No! I have bribed the guard for an hour with you. Kitty, I love you so. I have never stopped loving you. God forgive me for leaving you. I should never have gone.”

  “Oh, I know! I know! I should have been clearer. But I knew you would come back. Did you not get my letters?”

  “No! I had no letters from you! I could not understand it! I had only one, when I was ordered back, and they told me you were with child and under arrest. I had no idea what to do. The French told me I was safer staying with them than going home to face Elizabeth. They begged me not to leave them, but I could not abandon you here.”

  “You did not get my letters? I wrote! I wrote often, begging you to come home. They cannot have gone astray.”

  We look at each other, the truth dawning on us, the realization that we have been surrounded by enemies.

  “Ned, I wrote so often, it cannot have been an accident. They must have been stolen.”

  “We’ve been surrounded by spies from the first,” Ned says, drawing me to the bedroom. He throws off his hooded robe, tears off his jacket, and shucks his shirt over his head. He is thinner from his imprisonment, and his skin is creamy pale in the twilight. I am at once breathless with a desire as urgent as his.

  “Oh, but you must see Teddy!”

  “I will, I will, but first I must see you. I have dreamed of you for so long.”

  We are through the doorway and at the side of my bed. I have not a moment of hesitation. I throw back the covers and get in. Ned leans forward, naked to the waist, and strips off my nightgown over my head. I fling up my arms and it ripples away.

  “You swore to the archbishop that we were married?”

  “I did! I never let him say we were not.”

  He laughs shortly. “So did I. I knew you would not betray me.”

  “Never. I will never deny you.”

  I reach for him and he pulls down his hose and comes towards me. We are urgent, passionate. We have been parted for more than a year; we were new lovers then, we could not get enough of each other. I have dreamed of this moment and ached for his touch. He hesitates above me, looking down into my rapt face.

  “My love,” I whisper to him, and he falls on m
e like a falcon stoops on a lure.

  We have only an hour together, and when he stumbles from my bed and I help him pull on his shirt, it reminds me of our wedding day when we dressed each other, fumbling with the laces, and Janey and I had to hurry home for dinner.

  “Now let me see my son!” he says.

  I lead him into the maid’s room, where our baby sleeps in his cradle beside her bed. Her hand is still outstretched so that she can rock him when he stirs. He sleeps sweetly, on his back, his hands clenched in little fists above his head, his cheeks flushed, a rosy little blister from sucking milk on his top lip.

  “Good God, he is so beautiful,” my husband whispers. “I had no idea. I thought babies were ugly. He has all of your beauty: he is like a perfect little doll.”

  “He is as stubborn as you,” I say. “He’s not much of a perfect doll when someone crosses him. He bellows for a feed like a hungry lord, and will not bear any delay.”

  Carefully, we tiptoe back to my chamber. “You feed him yourself?”

  “There was no one else to do it!” I laugh at his shocked face. “I have raised him as if I were a poor woman with a baby at the breast. I have given him my own milk and my own love, and he thrives on it.”

  He kisses my hands, my lips, my face, he kisses me like a starving man who would taste everything. “You are an angel. You have been an angel to him and to me. Tomorrow night I will come again.”

  “You can come again?” I can hardly believe it. “How?”

  He gives his adorable chuckle that I have not heard for so long. “Since we are publicly named as sinful lovers, it seems that we are allowed to be together, though we were parted when we were husband and wife. Sir Edward gave me the nod as if to say that since we are punished so cruelly for sin, we may as well enjoy it. I slip the guard a coin, and he brings me to you.”