by G Lawrence
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cheshunt
Summer
1548
By the time we reached the house of Sir Anthony Denny at Cheshunt, I was low in both mind and body. The guilt that lay on my heart had so crushed the spirit in me that my body seemed to take up its sorrow. I become ill.
I took to my bed almost immediately upon entering the house, and I allowed no one but Kat to come and tend to me in my chambers. A chill and a fever was enough for my new guardians to bring a doctor to me, and I swallowed his bitter potions along with the acid taste of my own disloyalty to those who had loved me.
I was brought low; entirely humbled by the recognition of the wrongness of my actions. Removed from Thomas, I could not now even recall why his face had been so pleasing to my eyes, nor why his attention was worth the loss of a friend and mother.
I wrote to Katherine, my letter humbled and asking for the continuance of our friendship even though I knew I had done little to deserve that from such a lady as she.
“I am replete with sorrow to depart from you highness,” I wrote from my bed, “and although I answered little, I weighed it deeply when you said you would warn me of any evils that you should hear of me, for if your Grace has not a good opinion of me you would not have offered me friendship in such a way.”
I sent the letter within days of arriving at the house of Denny and his wife Joan, Kat’s own sister. Kat was silent for the most part. She had lost the merry giggles and ready gossip which had so defined her nature until this time. We were, I think, both lost in the thoughts of what had happened, and what might have happened had this liaison continued with Thomas Seymour. If any had found out of the breadth of the liberties he had taken with a princess of the realm, it would not only be his head in danger of the axe. Kat, Katherine and myself could have also been placed in great danger, should the Council or my brother the King, ever come to know what had happened.
The worries that brought me to bed stole restful sleep from me and the fever replaced much-needed sleep with fragmented images of both the past and present. It warped friendly faces into those of rabid demons, and made me cry out and weep with fear of them. My father loomed in my half-sleep; his visage no longer merry and mighty, but monstrous. Through the gardens at Hever and Greenwich I ran from him, his great hands looming out of the darkness to catch me. And when he was gone, I chased a phantom of a laugh through those same gardens; running on legs that were slow and heavy as I sought to catch the green silk of a gown that was always out of reach, always slipping around another corner. The echo of my mother’s laugh sounded in my ears but it was distorted, eerie, strange… and I could not catch her. She disappeared at my footfall.
For days I battled against the fever, the strength of my youth drained by the fearful images I saw. I barely drank and could not eat. My body was taken with its sickness and my mind was lost in its dreams. Until one day, the fever broke and I awoke to the grey fingers of dawn stroking my clammy skin. It was more than a week before I could rise, I was so weak and feeble; but with the end of my illness so came the revival of my guilt.
Even once the fever was gone, I kept to my rooms. I had other demons to face than just those of my fevered dreams. My face was drawn with the strain of entering the adult world for which I had been unprepared, and my skin pallid with the lack of sun. I went to my lessons and to my books, escaping the present in the words of those long dead, and far wiser than I should ever be.
I bent a dutiful and guilty head over my work, and I tried to forget the tingle of feeling when a stray remembrance of Thomas’ touch entered my mind. I tried to shake him from my head. But some images and feelings are too strong to be denied. I would admit to myself that I had done wrong and sinned against my own conscience and my own sense of right. But in those memories of his whispers of love for me, in dreams where I felt his hands move over my face and my body, it felt so right, that it was almost like a sense of coming home.
But I tried to put him from my thoughts. I wanted to be good. I wanted to forget. I wanted to be forgiven above all other things. I was a child, and for all my wisdom, I had been a fool.
When I received Katherine’s response to my letter, I could not help but pause before I broke her seal. I dreaded what lay beneath the cream parchment. I breathed in, and I read.
But her letter contained none of the reproofs and recrimination I had expected. The black ink spoke of love, friendship and how much she missed me. It was the warm letter of a mother to her daughter, and it spoke of nothing that should make me feel worse.
I was heartened by her tender voice, which spoke through the letter to me. It was a measure of her love for me, that this awful experience had not mitigated that love. Perhaps she could not trust me entirely, but she still loved me.
I wrote to her again and again whilst we were separated. Letters of love and loyalty, professing gratitude and affection, and they were heartfelt. During those first few months at Cheshunt, we restored the bounds of our love together using only the ink and pen, the parchment and the seal. Such is the power of words and distance, to bring two hearts back together once again.
She had been wise to send me away. In the miles between us there was enough distance to remind her of her love for me, and to take away the sourness of betrayal.
It was a surprise to me when another letter arrived, this time carrying the seal of Thomas Seymour. I quaked as I opened it in private. In his bold, thick hand he wrote to me that Katherine had asked him to write, to assure me that all was well between the two of them, and that his feelings of loyalty to me as a daughter had not wavered “in this late season of our parting.”
I replied, answering him and thanking him for his letter, but assuring him that I was well-served where I was, and that I was glad for his coming happiness as a father. The letter I wrote was quite clear that I wanted and needed no further correspondence from him. There were two reasons for this: the first, to ease the guilt in my heart, and the second, to protect me, in case Katherine was using this as a test to see if I was truly loyal to her. I did not want to be tripped into further disgrace than I was already.
In late August, Katherine removed herself and her household to Sudeley Castle. It was late in her pregnancy to move to another house, but perhaps the memories of me with Thomas proved too much for her to endure in the latter stages of her pregnancy. In the last days of August her pains began, and after a short confinement, she gave birth not to the expected boy, but to a little girl; christened Mary… for my own sister. But for this turn of events, but for my betrayal of her, would her child have been named Elizabeth? I wondered, but I did not know for sure. Katherine made it through the trial of childbirth well enough; we were told the news of her safe delivery by letter of her steward. Thomas rushed from meetings with the Council at court to her side, to see his daughter and his wife.
But then, barely two weeks later, we had other news.
Katherine was dead.
A few days after the birth, after her safe delivery, she had taken childbed fever. She tossed and sweated in her birthing bed. She cried out that she had been evilly treated by those she loved. “I am not well handled, for those that be about me care not for me, but stand laughing at my grief and the more good I will to them, the less good they will to me.”
She was delirious, they said, clinging to her attendant’s hand and saying that those she loved only wanted her out of the way so that they could be together.
When I heard that, I flushed with shame all over again. Was that what Katherine had really thought? Brought low, sick unto death of childbed fever and thinking that her husband and beloved stepdaughter wanted her dead so that they could be together?
The messenger said that the more Thomas tried to pacify and placate Katherine, the more she rounded on him with feverish anger and rage.
After days of being in this state, she fell into a stupor where the doctors could not calm her fever any more. She soon passed away, her body shaking with pain and
roasting with the heat of her delirious blood.
Katherine Parr, wife, stepmother, mother, Queen and most learned author, was buried on the same day she died at Sudeley Castle with my little cousin Lady Jane Grey brought to be the chief mourner. Thomas Seymour shut himself up in the castle and mourned for his wife. In his way, he did love her after all, it seemed.
It was he who sent the messenger to me, with all the news of Katherine’s last hours, and recriminations also. Was Thomas seeking, as I had before, to mitigate his own guilt by offering a portion to me? If so, it worked. When I heard of Katherine’s death, I fell once again into sickness. It seemed that my body, only so recently recovered from the fever that had struck when I left Katherine’s household, could not sustain itself against the onslaught of grief that losing her brought to me.
Death is always sudden, and it is always a shock.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cheshunt
Winter
1548
In the weeks that followed the death of my stepmother, I was ill and kept to my chambers. Perhaps it was not the thought so much that Katherine was forever gone from this earthly world, but the thought that she had left this mortal life thinking ill of me that made me so low.
I thought, as one often does when one loses another person that made life richer, of all those I had loved and lost in this short life. My great father, my mother, my father’s other wives, and now Katherine. Would time render the memories I had of Katherine, now so sharp and distinct into ones like those of my mother…. Wispy… ghostly?
Were all memories of those I had loved and lost bound to fade from my mind whilst the pain of losing them did not? It did not seem fair that we should be left with the pain of losing someone and fail to keep the image of them in our minds.
My appetite was poor after Katherine’s death. Kat worried after me all the time, trying to feed me up. I succumbed to her hen-like flapping around me as a grateful child falls into the arms of a parent to sleep. I needed someone to care for me, to treat me like a child again, to defend me against the onslaught of the world. My hosts at Cheshunt, Sir Anthony Denny and his wife Joan, Kat’s own sister, were kind and thoughtful to me. They did not pry into the nature of my illness, but must have seen how low I had been brought by the events of the last months. I was sure Kat would have informed them of what had passed at Chelsea; my loose-tongued governess could never be trusted to keep a secret from those she believed to be her intimates. So, within the understanding of the house at Cheshunt, I started to settle into a routine once more, and to think that perhaps with time, I could find peace within me once again.
That was, until Kat started, with unseemly haste, to question where Thomas Seymour might marry again, now that his wife was dead.
“The dowager Queen is not yet cool in her grave, Kat,” I said grimly. “And yet you make plans to marry off her husband? Besides, this is and always has been; a matter for the Council and King to decide.”
Kat shook her head. “The Lady Katherine would not want him to be alone,” she said. “All men re-marry if their wives have left them for the arms of God. It is not unheard of…. And now, mistress, he is in a position to make an honourable offer for your hand. There will be no scandal attached to such a match, after all he is a great lord and you a great lady. Why should it not come to pass now? After all we have been through before… this could be the happy ending of the tale.”
I shook my head and refused to enter the conversation. I knew where it was headed. Since she had recovered from the sudden shock of Katherine’s death, Kat’s mind had been clanking away like a little water wheel with thoughts of the future. She once had been unable to realize her desire to see me married to Thomas… Could this not be an opportunity to see it fulfilled and without the stain of adultery?
I wanted none of it. Tempting though the thought of Thomas Seymour still was, I was sickened by the loss of Katherine, saddened by the gap she left in my world. I wanted no talk of marriage to her husband, especially after all the things she had said at her deathbed about Thomas and me.
Eventually, as things spoken are wont to do, comments and musings such as Kat’s spread, and servants talked. There were rumours abroad in the countryside that I had indeed had an affair with Thomas Seymour, and even, that I had been delivered of his child whilst at Cheshunt. When these things were relayed to me gently by a most reluctant and embarrassed Denny, I wrote immediately to the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour to ask that these allegations be refuted by parliament. That I be brought to court, so that all could see I was a maid who had borne no child. It was scandalous and ridiculous. I wrote with an indignant fury to him, but no such proclamation was made, and no such refutation.
Even though I felt nothing like it, I had to ride out, through the countryside and into the towns, to let people see me, to see that my maiden’s waist was still thin as a whip; to bare myself to the people to show that I had borne no child to Thomas Seymour.
I was starting to learn that my actions, however private they may feel to me, were not private, and never would be, in truth.
Kat, however, would not leave the matter alone. She talked to me of Thomas as she had once before, extolling his virtues, his handsome face and his love for me. It was not long before my turncoat heart started to listen to her instead of my own head. Kat persuaded me that whilst I could not write to Thomas, nor be seen to contact him, she could go and find out in truth if he was interested in my becoming his second wife.
At first I denied her this. “The Council and the King will never approve of such a match,” I said. “And besides, he is in mourning for Katherine, as I am… and as you should be too!”
Thomas Parry, my chief accounting officer, or Master of Coin, relayed to Kat that Thomas Seymour had once more been enquiring by letter as to the lands and properties that would come to me when I became old enough to inherit them. It seemed, for Thomas Seymour, that marriage was as much a matter of business as it was romance. But Kat was only encouraged by this to believe that Thomas was in love with me still. She sent messengers to him without my permission. Some of those messages were written down which I raged at her for when she told me of them. “You should never have committed those thoughts to paper, Kat Astley!” I said, wringing my hands and looking at her with horror. “For then people will think I know of this insane proposal. They will see me as part of this plan!”
But when those messengers came back, I could not but help ask them of Thomas… How was he? Did he look well? What was he doing in his days?
My head was talking to me of dignity and reason, as my heart spoke to me of want, of love … and of an end to loneliness.
It was getting out of hand all over again. By Christmas 1548 there was a new rumour that seemed to have grown out of the land like a beast, roaming the country and dropping hints everywhere like pellets that I was going to be the wife of Thomas Seymour. It did not help that Thomas had not yet dismissed the ladies that made up the household of his late wife; he said they were there to take care of his ward Lady Jane Grey. But now that this rumour was abroad, everyone suspected he was keeping them in place to wait on me... when I became his wife.
And then, in the middle of January 1549, amidst all these rumours, Thomas was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, upon the orders of the
King.
Charged with High Treason, and of conspiring to marry the King’s sister without permission of the King, or the Council, Thomas was in peril of his life. He had got wind of the impending charges before being arrested, and he had broken into my brother’s chambers determined to take Edward into his power. Perhaps he could have persuaded the King to be on his side, had he not killed Edward’s favourite spaniel in the process. The valiant hound had barked, alerting guards to the intruder in the King’s rooms, and Thomas had killed the little beast; hardly something that was going to endear him or his cause to Edward.
Once the guards got there, he was overcome by force, and was arrested. The King, enrage
d and sorrowed by the loss of his favourite hound, would hear no pleas of his uncle as they took him away.
All of this would have been enough to scare our household. We had been often in contact with Thomas’ house, and to be considered affiliated in any way with one under arrest for treason was bad enough. But then, on the same morning this news arrived by messenger, a company of the King’s guard arrived at Cheshunt.
They took Kat, Thomas Parry, and several other members of my household.
They took them to the Tower.
I was to be taken by armed guard to Hatfield. As Kat and Parry were led off to face the royal prison where my own mother and many others had entered and never left, Kat was in hysterical tears as they pulled her away from me. “I will say nothing,” she said.
“There is nothing to say,” I reminded her grimly as they led her off. I hoped she understood me. We were all in the greatest of dangers now. My governess, the closest members of my household and the man I loved were imprisoned in the Tower. I was under house arrest. If they could find me complicit in the plan to marry Thomas Seymour, then I and my servants were at risk of being also accused of High Treason, a charge punishable by death. My body and my marriage were the legal property of the crown, and I was not allowed to offer or promise my hand or any other part of me to a man without the consent of the Council and King.