The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  William Cecil is kinder and more attentive to me than he has ever been, as if he fears that Robert Dudley will persuade the queen to marry him, and the country will turn to me as her successor. People would far rather have me as queen than any woman married to a Dudley.

  “You look very pale,” William Cecil says to me gently. “Are you missing your beloved friend so much?”

  I have to swallow my little gasp as I think he is speaking of Ned, but he has Janey in mind. “I miss her very much,” I manage to say.

  “You must pray for her,” he says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that she will have gone straight to heaven. There is no such thing as purgatory and no souls can be prayed out of it—but it is still a comfort to pray for the happiness of our friends in heaven, and God hears every prayer.”

  I don’t tell him how fervently I pray that Ned will come home soon. I just lower my eyes to the ground and hope that he will let me go away from him to the queen’s rooms. Nobody cares how I look there. Actually, Elizabeth prefers it when I am pale and quiet.

  “And do you miss her brother, the Earl of Hertford, too?” Cecil asks archly.

  It is such an odd tone for such a serious man that I risk a quick upward glance. He is smiling down at me, his dark eyes searching my face. I can feel that I am blushing, I know that he will see it, and he will make up his own mind.

  “Of course,” I say. “I miss them both.”

  “Nothing that you should tell the queen . . . or me?” William Cecil hints gently.

  I flash a glance at him; I will not be teased about this. “You told me I should wait for the right time to speak to her.”

  “I did,” he says judicially. “And now would not be the time.”

  I press my lips together. “Then I will speak to her when you tell me that I may,” I say.

  I will find the courage to speak to the queen, and summon Ned home so that we can face her together, as soon as William Cecil says the time is right. Until then, I am dumb with fear of her. I dare not tell William Cecil how far we have gone without either his permission or the support of Robert Dudley. Of course, Ned was sure that both William Cecil and Robert Dudley have a pretty good guess what we are about, and anyone would wager that a handsome young man like Ned and a beautiful princess like me would fall in love if they are allowed to spend every day together. So perhaps I should speak out soon, with the hope that William Cecil will take my part.

  But what if William Cecil is not inviting my confidences but, on the contrary, warning me off marriage to Ned with this teasing tone? I wish he had been clearer before we were wedded and bedded and Ned gone away.

  Worse still, I find that I am a little queasy in the morning and I cannot eat meat, especially meat with fat, until the evening. It turns my stomach and that is odd, as I have always been hungry at breakfast time, coming to it ravenous after chapel and fasting. My sister Jane used to say that I was gluttonous, and I would laugh and say . . . but it doesn’t matter now what I used to say, since I will never say it to her again, and now I can only face bread and milk and sometimes not even that. Jo the pug sits on my lap at breakfast and eats most of my portion. I believe that my breasts are warmer and a little tender, too. I don’t know for sure, and still there is no one that I can ask, but I think these are signs that I might be with child. And then what will I do?

  Lady Clinton, my lady aunt Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a kinswoman of mine who loved my sister Jane, stops me in the gallery and remarks that I am less merry without my friends the Seymours. She waits as if I should say something in reply. Lady Northampton, who comes behind her, says openly to my face that if I am in love with Ned Seymour, then I would do better to tell the queen and have her order him to make an honest woman out of me. They stand side by side, Elizabeth’s friends, Elizabeth’s confidantes, a pair of harpies, as if they know everything, as if my precious secret is anything like their horrible old flirtations in the reign before this one, in the years before that, long ago when they were young and pretty and tenderhearted.

  My cheeks blaze with shame that they should speak of Ned and me as if we were an ordinary couple, a pair of fools holding hands at the back of the court. They cannot know, they cannot understand, that we are deeply in love and, in any case, married.

  “If he promised you marriage and left you, we should tell the queen,” Lady Clinton whispers. “Everyone saw that you were inseparable, and then he suddenly goes away. I will speak out for you.”

  I am horrified that they should think that I should have been a loose woman. I am furious that they think that I should be such a fool as to be abandoned by a faithless lover. I am heir to the throne of England! I am sister to Jane Grey! Is it likely that I would lower myself to lie with a man not my husband and have to rely on my aunts to bring him home to me? But I cannot tell them that we are married and that he went away with my permission. And I cannot bring myself to confide in either of the two old harpies (who are at least thirty) that I am a married woman with child. I choke back my rage and I just smile prettily, and say that I am missing Janey very badly indeed. They take the tears of rage for grief and they both say that she was a lovely girl and it is a terrible loss, and so we none of us say anything more about Ned.

  It seems that everyone is in full summer happiness but me. Everyone is courting but me. Elizabeth and Robert Dudley are open lovers: they go everywhere together, sometimes they even hold hands where everyone can see. She treats him like a husband and an equal, and everyone knows that if they want an allowance, a pension, or forgiveness for some crime, then a word from Robert Dudley is as good as the word of the queen since the one follows the other as if she had no choice in the matter, and no tongue of her own for anything but for licking his amorous lips.

  He is lordly with his favor. She has given him huge sums of money, and licenses to tax profitable trades. She has stopped short of giving him a dukedom, but she pats his cheek and swears his family will rise again. Nobody now remarks that his wife died in the most suspicious of circumstances less than a year ago and that everyone blamed him. Nobody remembers that his father was executed for treason and his father before him. I remember it—but then it was my sister that Robert Dudley’s father forced onto the throne and so on to the scaffold. Everyone else at court chooses to behave as if Dudley comes from the greatest of families and has always been trusted and beloved.

  It’s not so in the country, of course. I get secret messages from people assuring me that if there is an uprising against Elizabeth and her adulterous lover, then they will support me. I barely even read them. I give them at once to William Cecil, who says quietly: “Her Majesty is blessed in so loyal an heir. She loves you for this.”

  I want to say smartly: “Well, she gives little sign of her love.” Or I want to ask: “Does she love me enough to allow me to be happy? Or does she only love me so much that she keeps me on this rack of uncertainty?”

  For though everyone knows I am the heir she still does not name me as such in an act of parliament, and now that Mary Queen of Scots has announced that she is coming back to Scotland, many people are saying that Elizabeth should name her as the heir and so make peace with her and with Scotland and France.

  “Your friend Ned is well received in Paris and he writes to me that Queen Mary of Scotland will not ratify the peace treaty and insists on returning to Scotland, upholding her claims against the English throne,” William Cecil tells me. “He has been a great intelligencer in the court of France for me. He has been greeted like a prince. He and my son Thomas have met everyone who matters in France, and Ned has told me much that I didn’t know about the secrets of the court.”

  “And when are they coming home?” I try to make my voice as light and as casual as I can.

  “Soon, I hope. I have never known two young men to spend more money,” Cecil says, telling me nothing.

  I have to know that he is coming soon. I write to him, and when I get no reply, I worry that he has forgotten his promises to me, that he is in love with
someone else. I order that the servant Glynne is to be admitted to my rooms the moment that he arrives, but he never comes. I write again to Ned to tell him that still I know nothing for sure, but my queasiness has got better and this makes me think that I imagined it, and it meant nothing. He does not reply to that letter either. I have not had another course and certainly, I am fatter. I tie my stomacher more and more loosely and I swear that the curve of my belly gets greater every day. But I cannot believe that there is a baby in there. It seems like months and months since Ned lay with me and ran his covetous hand down my sleek flanks. It is half a year; for sure it has been so long that I cannot believe that there is a baby, yet I cannot stop myself fearing that there is.

  My lady-in-waiting, Mrs. Leigh, remarks upon my bigger breasts and my thicker waist, and I ask her how a woman knows that she is with child, and how soon a baby comes after a wedding night. She is so appalled that she frightens me, shock makes her eyes bulge and she whispers: “My lady! For shame! My lady!”

  I swear her to secrecy. She has been my lady-in-waiting for years; she should know that I would never be dishonored. I tell her that I am a married woman and I show her my ring and my wife’s kerchief. I tell her that I have Ned’s letter of proposal safely in my jewel box, and his will in which he names me as his wife. I explain that the baby will be the next heir to the throne and she tells me that a woman can count how long it takes. She says it is ten months from your last course, and I will be able to tell if it is a boy or a girl by how it lies in the belly, and whether I crave sweet things or salt. If I feel seasick in the first months, the baby will not die at sea. If I put away my kittens from my rooms, he will be an honorable man. I think half of this must be nonsense, but it is all the help I have to hand.

  I have to count on her to help me. She can work out with me when the baby would be born, if there is a baby there at all; she can help to hide my sickness. She tells me that there will be no difficulty in that, but right now, her sister is ill at home and they need her there. I give her leave to go for a week to help with the haymaking, and then she simply vanishes.

  Like that! She never comes back to me, though she has been in my service for years, and this makes me realize that I am in very great trouble indeed. If Mrs. Leigh leaves me without warning, runs away from the court and profitable service because of my secret, then it must be a dangerous burden. I would have paid her a fortune to stay with me and help me—I would have given her all of Ned’s purse of gold—but she would rather be far away. She must think me either horribly shamed or truly endangered, and either way she wants nothing to do with me, and I am all on my own once again.

  If only I had someone to help me decide what I should do! I write again to Ned under cover of the English ambassador at Paris, though I don’t even know if he is still at Paris. I tell him that the linnets are well and that Jo the pug is comically faithful to me, as if she knows I need a friend. She has started sleeping on my bed, and I cannot stir without her coming to sniff my face. I tell him that the queen and Robert Dudley are as man and wife in the first dizzy months of marriage. I tell him that Mrs. Leigh has run away and I have no one to advise me. I say that I don’t know for sure what condition I am in, but that I would be so much happier if he were here. I don’t want to sound pitiful, as if I am pleading for him to come home, but I really feel that I am alone with my worry and without a husband; and now I need him so much.

  I get no reply.

  I know that there are dozens of reasons why he should not reply, but of course I fear that he has forgotten me or fallen in love with one of the French papists. What if the beautiful Dowager Queen Mary has taken a fancy to him and will take him to Scotland as her king consort, and I will never see him in London again? I write again, and though I wait and wait, there is no answer.

  “My boy and your friend Ned Hertford are going on to Italy,” William Cecil remarks to me, as if it is pleasant news. “Unless we summon them home. What do you think, Lady Katherine? Shall we tell them to come back and leave their amusements?”

  I want to say: command him to come! Instead, I look at the bows on my shoes over the smooth line of my stomacher, and I feel my itchy belly squeezed tightly against the boning. “Oh, tell them to enjoy themselves!” I say generously. “We are all happy here, are we not?”

  William Cecil is not happy here. I can tell by the deep groove between his eyebrows, by the way that he sounds as if he is lying when he joins the lighthearted chatter of the court. He fears the coming of Mary Queen of Scots to her kingdom. He fears that Elizabeth, a queen, is planning to hand her throne on to another queen, as if there had been no Adam made in Eden, as if women can name their heirs, as if their heirs should be women. He hates the idea of a papist heir to England—it will overthrow his life’s work of bringing England to peace as a Protestant kingdom—but Elizabeth is entranced by the thought of her beautiful cousin so near to her. Cecil suspects that Queen Mary of Scots—or any papist—is his enemy in religion, determined to reverse his life’s work. But he knows he has reached the limit of his power. He cannot persuade the queen to think of her cousin Mary as an enemy. He cannot persuade her to marry a suitable suitor. He cannot force her to be with child. She will not give the country a son. And I am so afraid that I will. I am so afraid that I am about to give the country a royal son and heir, and nobody knows but me. And I am not sure.

  For a moment, I almost think I can tell him the truth. He keeps me from the other ladies with a gentle hand on my arm. “Shall we send for the Earl of Hertford?” he asks me gently. “Do you need him home, Lady Katherine?”

  I throw my head back and laugh as merrily as Elizabeth when she is pretending to be carefree. “Heavens, no!” I assure him. “I am in need of no man, least of all the earl!”

  We are boating on the river in barges, Elizabeth on her throne in the royal barge, musicians alongside, people watching from the banks. Robert Dudley is at her side as always, all her ladies, me included, are placed about the deck looking beautiful and privileged. Nobody notices the absence of Janey, nobody misses her but me. My sister Mary is like a dainty little doll, set on a high seat. She gives me a wink; nothing ever seems to trouble Mary. I think I might tell her that I am so afraid that I am with child and abandoned by my husband, but then I remember that she is my little sister, and that our older sister always tried to shield us from unhappiness and went to the scaffold, never speaking of doubts or fears, having written me a letter of good advice, the best advice she could give, under the circumstances. I will not be a lesser sister than Jane. I will not burden Mary with my worries.

  Ambassadors, earls, lords sit around the great barge, drinking the best of wine and gossiping. I see Robert Dudley lower his dark head to Elizabeth and whisper in her ear and I see her turn her head and smile. They are so powerfully, so vividly in love that I suddenly forget that she is my most difficult cousin and I feel for her as another young woman in love. I can see that she yearns for him, from the way her head turns, to the way that she clings to the carved arms of her chair to stop herself from reaching for him. I think—I know this. I understand this. I have felt this too. And I look away before she can see the dangerous knowledge in my face.

  “Indeed, it is a disgraceful spectacle,” someone says quietly in my ear, and I turn to Lord Pembroke, my onetime father-in-law, who stands beside me, observing me as I watch Elizabeth.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say, falling back on my reputation for innocence and ignorance, as if they were one and the same thing.

  “Well, God bless you for that,” says the man who hustled me out of his house without a blessing, without a farewell.

  From her perch on the chair, Mary gives me a smile and a nod, as if to advise me to do what I can with this unpromising material.

  “We have missed you, in the House of Herbert,” he says pompously. “I know my son regrets that he was parted from his pretty little wife.”

  I have nothing to say to this sudden barrage of lies. I widen my eyes and ke
ep mumchance, in order to see where he is headed.

  “And I know that you liked him,” he insinuates. “Childhood sweethearts, very pretty. Perhaps you could look on him with your favor once again. You are a great lady now, with perhaps a great future, but you will remember your youthful affections.”

  There is so much here to deny that I put my hand over my stomacher where my belly presses hard, and I feel a little flutter, like a gurgle. I bow my head.

  “So, here is my son Henry, as much in love as ever,” his father concludes and steps to one side to reveal, just as a masquer shows his dancing partner, Henry Herbert, healthier by far than the white-faced boy at our wedding day, handsome, smiling, and apparently deeply in love with me.

  “I didn’t expect this,” I say to him, as his father beetles away to kneel before Elizabeth.

  “Forgive me,” Henry says abruptly. “You know that I never wanted to leave you. You remember how quickly things happened, and that it was impossible to know what was right, and I was sick and I had to obey my father.”

  Briefly, I close my eyes. I remember the terror and the chaos, and knowing that Jane was lost and that nothing could save her. “I remember,” I say tightly. I remember well enough that they dropped me as fast as if I had burnt their fingers. But I remember that none of us knew what to do, certainly not the tentative youth that was my husband.

  “I never thought that they would part us,” he says earnestly. “I thought that our promises were real. I thought that we were married and that we would be husband and wife. I had no idea that we could be parted.”

  I remember desiring him as a girl desires the idea of a husband. I remember the wonderful glamour and beauty of the marriage, my elaborate gown and the two-day feast. I remember him, sick as a dog, but trying to walk with me behind Jane and Guildford Dudley to the altar. I remember Jane, drawn as tight as a lute string, not knowing what she should do, what was God’s ineffable will, her terror of the crown, her courage when she faced it.