The Queen's Governess

by Karen Harper

  “You are not the same one,” was all I could manage at first. “And—is that for me?”

  It was not the usual greasy broth but a piece of capon and a thick hunk of bread with cheese and a pewter mug of what looked to be claret. Hell’s gates—which was how I had come to think of this place—this new man was confused and this fare was not for me.

  My stomach growled so loud, it sounded like thunder from a coming storm.

  “Yes, mistress,” he said, keeping his voice low and steady. “Someone is now paying for coal, wash water and a chamber fee, too, for linens which will be coming soon.”

  “But who?”

  He shrugged as if he didn’t know, but he also winked. Had John found a way to send money already? How did he learn I was here? Or was it Elizabeth? Or Queen Mary with a change of heart?

  “My wife’s name is Cecily,” he said. “A nice name, is it not?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Cecily. Cecil? Could William Cecil and Mildred be behind this kindness? If he did not tell, I dared not ask. And Cecily had been my dear mother’s name—a sign from God to trust this man?

  “I am desperate, sir, for word of my mistress, the Princess Elizabeth.”

  He shrugged again but, as he bent toward me to put the wooden tray of food and drink on my knees, whispered, “Today is March 19.

  Yesterday, she was sent to the Tower after her health improved enough.”

  “Dear Lord, protect her, for she is innocent!”

  “Indeed she is. I will get you word when I can. Queen Mary is to formally wed Prince Philip of Spain next June, for she has already done so by proxy. And the burning of heretics is to start soon at Smithfield.”

  “Right here in London? In the very heart of London?”

  “Cecily and I fear the ground will be red with martyrs’ blood and the air—well, even worse than it is here.”

  He sounded to be a man of learning, well-spoken. Was he telling me about the coming martyrs just to inform me of the terrible times, or because he knew I would be one of them and needed time to prepare myself?

  Money was the grease in the wheels of everything at the Fleet, so I came to see how my new turnkey, Tiler, his name was, could replace the first one I had had. But in this world of lies and spies, I told myself at first not to tell him too much. I realized that my early deprivation here could have set me up to trust any kindness, and for all I knew he reported straight to Queen Mary or her advisers. After all, it was common knowledge in the Fleet that Bishop Gardiner had been a prisoner here during the reign of King Edward, so he would know all the ins and outs. Sadly, I had learned to trust no one.

  Still, each time Tiler brought me food or coal or, every so often, fresh linens, he always told me something or other about his “dear Cecily” including that she was born in Stamford, where Cecil was from and was living now, so in my desperate heart, I trusted him.

  “Hold on,” he oft told me when he came back for my tray or emptied my slop bucket. Or sometimes “Hold tight.” When I asked him if I could be on the list of martyrs to be burned, he simply said, “Not if Cecily and I can help it. Elizabeth may be a state prisoner and is being questioned by the Council, but they know not to step over a line with the possible future queen.”

  The possible future queen! My Elizabeth! But still, I had seen the worst of Mary, and with a powerful Catholic and Spanish husband coming soon to help her rule, I feared for my princess as well as myself.

  Even with Tiler’s care, I had trouble sleeping. But, as I drifted off, I saw her then again, like many nights, not Elizabeth but Anne, floating in through my window, despite the thick panes and the grate there. Imprisoned. I was in the Fleet, but she was in the grave, so we were both imprisoned. Another thing we shared . . . why did I always feel close to Queen Anne, even before I tended and loved her daughter?

  “Take care of her for me. Keep as close as she keeps her ruby ring.”

  It was Anne with a ruby stain around her slender neck, holding her hands out to me, beseeching me. How she had hated Mary, so now that she was queen, I knew Anne could not rest well. I wanted to comfort Anne, to tell her to hold on, to hold tight, but I was terrified to touch her. She was dead, dead, in her arrow-box coffin under the stones of St. Peter in Chains in the Tower, near where my lovey was in prison.

  I wanted to tell her I had tried to protect the princess, but I could not form the words. I tried to move back from her cold embrace, but my feet were leaden, dead. Did this visitation mean I would soon be dead too? Mary had ordered heretics burned at Smithfield in the heart of London, in . . . the . . . heart. . . .

  Anne embraced me, icy cold. “Save her, help her . . .” When she pressed her temple to mine, her head tottered and fell and rolled . . .

  I sat up and screamed. The shrill sound echoed in my cell, in my brain. John! Where was he, where was I?—and then it all rushed back to me. John gone, mayhap forever. Elizabeth in the Tower, near where her mother had died, in mortal danger of not only losing any path to the throne but her very life.

  Half awake, half asleep, I tried to brush Anne’s cold embrace away, but saw that I had shoved my sheet, blanket and cloak to the floor. Surely, that’s why I’d had the dream she was so cold.

  That spring it bucked me up to hear Elizabeth had been released from the Tower, though she was sent to house arrest to Woodstock, the only one of her country houses she could not abide. No doubt she had told that once to Mary. What did it matter? I thought. My girl had outlasted the Tower.

  Woodstock was a small old royal house, most lately a mere hunt lodge, and Tiler said she was enclosed in the small gatehouse there and was most vehemently protesting. That made me smile, the first time I’d done so in months. Mary and all she had brought to bear had not broken that Tudor temper or Boleyn backbone. And I could not help but wonder if my lovey had seen her secret love, Robin Dudley, when she was in the Tower.

  But a few weeks later I was removed from prison and given over into the care of a Sir Roger Cholmley’s household in the country, a man and area I did not know. I was relieved to escape the Fleet, but I had lost my lifeline in Tiler and longed to know outside news. The Cholmley daughter, Meg, finally mentioned that the queen was to wed her Spanish prince at Winchester Cathedral in late July, and that all England rejoiced. That—and being forced to attend Mass in a chapel in the Cholmley house—reminded me of what I already knew, that my hosts were not to be trusted. I did pity Meg, though, for her face had been so horribly scarred and deeply pitted by the smallpox that it grieved me to look at her.

  But my soft feelings for my hosts halted with that. What a lie that all England rejoiced over that marriage bond with Spain. Be hanged to Mary and her Spanish prince and English king! And here I was with naught but popish tracts to read in a backwater rural house where I might as well be a cloistered nun. Alack the day I ever helped Mary Tudor in any way!

  Bored, bereft, terrified, traitorous. . . I passed much of my days playing word games in my head or writing imaginary epistles—to John, of course; to Elizabeth; to my father; to myself, though I was not permitted to have pen and paper. I was allowed to walk in a small walled garden, if I would say a rosary. I went so stir-crazy that I finally acquiesced, though I was skilled at saying, “Hail, Mary, Mother of God, pray for us . . .” and thinking far other thoughts.

  But then one day in crisp September 1554, true salvation arrived with a knock on the wooden gate of the garden, which the steward who served as my guard opened, still keeping a wary eye on me as if I would bolt.

  Tiler stood there, holding two horses, and handed my gaoler a letter with a large seal on it. My heartbeat kicked up; my eyes met Tiler’s and held.

  “I’ll have her things fetched, then,” the steward told him. “ ’Tis but two gowns and her proper reading matter. Take that rosary now, too, Mistress Ashley.”

  I couldn’t hold back my tears as Tiler helped me up on the second horse, then stuffed my things in my saddlebags, except for the Catholic papers and rosa
ry, which I held to me as he thrust them up with a dour face and a wink. I could hardly believe I was free, free at last.

  “But where are we going?” I asked him as we pushed our horses from a walk to a trot.

  “Your mistress—now disinherited to be only the Lady Elizabeth again—is free from Woodstock and has gone to Hatfield. We are stopping the night at the Cecil house in Wimbledon—ah, I believe you have heard of my dear wife Cecily, have you not? I can’t promise yet you are to be returned to your mistress, but she is ranting and raving about it.”

  “And John? Is there any news of my husband, John?”

  “Safe and sound, in Padua, so I hear, and I think dear Cecily’s seen to his room and board too. But, however much we all rejoice for our safety, there are good, common English folk being burned at the stake for believing as we do—and for our loyalty to England’s hope during these dread times.”

  England’s hope—my Elizabeth. I had learned the hard way that life brought the bitter with the sweet. As my father used to say, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Yet I could not help myself, but when we rode over a humpbacked bridge above a spring-swollen brook, I dropped my rosary into its depths and tossed the torn popish papers after them.

  In the closed - up Cecil home in Wimbledon, Mildred and I picked up exactly where we had left off, as friends and supports to each other. It turned out that it was she who had come closer to London to be my hostess, while Cecil, ever wary of Mary’s increasing net [though the Cecils, like many who wished to stay alive, had taken a Catholic oath], remained in rural Stamford.

  “Tell me what else the princess has written to you,” Mildred prompted as she quickly worked her needle on a piece of crewel and I read a letter from Elizabeth aloud.

  “That she vows she will have me back with her soon—but then, she’s said that before. That I am not to worry about my lord John, ‘for he and his horses can fend for themselves anywhere.’ ”

  “And my lord said he is writing his book. Still, it seems our letters do not reach him so that he knows you are safe.”

  That was what bothered me the most. Cecil had received only two letters from John, ones I had read to death until they were tattered. Was he no longer in Padua? Was he well? Or—God forbid—had he found a life more suited to his heart there—found someone else?

  Although I was going to return with Mildred to Stamford far from London and far from Elizabeth at Hatfield, I had a wild scheme that as our entourage passed in that area, I would ride off to see her. But just as we were to set out for the north, I finally received good news, not of my beloved husband but from my girl.

  “Oh, my,” Mildred said as she read the missive from her husband, then held it out to me. “Queen Mary must be in a good mood from her marriage: ’tis said here she is head over heels for King Philip, though he seems bored with her and is buttering her up to get English troops and funds so he can go to war with France. But look, she grants Elizabeth her wish to have back her Lady Katherine Ashley!”

  I seized the letter. “I’m to go to Hatfield and then attend Elizabeth at court? Oh, why cannot we just stay at Hatfield, away from that beehive? But why is the queen letting us come back to court? You are not smiling. What is wrong?”

  “Read on,” she said. “She has relented toward you both, but I warrant it is because she wishes to do to you what Anne Boleyn once forced her to do. You were there then, were you not, when Anne Boleyn demanded Mary come to court for Elizabeth’s birth, which would displace her in the royal line and take away any hope Mary could ascend the throne? See there—at the bottom of the missive in my lord’s smaller writing? You and the princess are to be summoned to court in the spring to attend the queen for the birth of her and King Philip’s half-Spanish, all-Catholic heir.”

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

  HATFIELD HOUSE

  October 1554

  Kat! My Kat!”

  We ran into each other’s arms and held tight. It had been eight months since we had been dragged apart by Queen Mary’s guards in London.

  “You have lost weight!” she said, and hugged me harder.

  “Better I than you! At least I did not lose you.”

  “I cannot wait for you to scold me again and make me eat and tell me what to wear.”

  We held each other at arm’s length. We were both crying like green girls. “I’m so sorry about John being sent away,” she gasped out, “but we will have him back.”

  “Not if he would be safer there. I pray he’s writing his book and making his way by training the horses of his sunny Italy.”

  “Ah,” she said as we wiped tears from our faces, “would that we all could be spirited away from Mary’s England. She’s burning people for their faith, Kat. And when I was finally sent away from London, I glimpsed the quartered, headless bodies of some of Wyatt’s men nailed up on gates and even along the wharfs. And all the way here, people cheered and cheered me. The queen should recognize the power of her people, for she is angering them with all this unjust bloodshed.”

  “And, they say, King Philip is draining our treasury to raise an army of our men for a war against France.”

  “Enough of terrible topics,” Elizabeth declared. “You must wash and rest, then I’ll see that you have all your favorite foods. And then we must catch up with each other, for there is so much to say.”

  She linked her arm through mine and tugged me gently toward the main entrance to Hatfield, then kissed me on both cheeks and held me tight again. For once, I realized, she was comforting me and not the other way around.

  Late that afternoon, as the sun sent its pale October rays across the great park beyond the palace, we walked arm in arm with four guards trailing at a distance. We sat in the same place we had the day I had given her the ruby ring from her mother nearly a dozen years ago. How could the time have fled so fast? And yet I prayed it would go even faster so that I could have John back, so that Mary might not rule and my girl could have the throne. Treasonous thoughts. I had once pitied Mary Tudor, but now I was a rebel indeed to want her gone.

  “I worried so while you were in the Tower,” I told her.

  “When they took me in, I saw the scaffolding on which Jane Grey had died. Kat, they still had it up, and I was terrified it would be for me! Worse, I kept thinking it was where my mother died, and when they put me in the old palace my father had built not only for her coronation but for her imprisonment before her death—”

  Despite the slant of sun, she shuddered. I reached over to cover her hand with mine. “I know the place well,” I told her. “I was there with her in the happy days leading to her parade and coronation. Three years later, when she was there again, they did not break her, no matter what befell. And I see full well they did not break you either.”

  “Thanks not only to my own defiance of them but to two men.”

  “The constable and Cecil?”

  “Neither. I know Cecil saved you when I could not, but the constable nearly did me in, though not through a threat or intentional cruelty. Just before they let me go, he was ordered to raise a hundred men for the queen and he mustered them on the Tower grounds. Kat,” she cried, turning toward me and gripping both of my hands in hers, “I was certain they were there to keep the crowds under control during my beheading!”

  “Oh, my lovey.” I pulled her to me, with her head on my shoulder, tucked under my chin just as when she was small and haunted by some night fear. “Who were the men who helped you, then?”

  “Thomas Wyatt, of course, when he dared to declare—even on the scaffold before they beheaded him—that I was innocent of any of his plans.”

  “He owed you that. He had no right to raise his banners in your name! And the other man?”

  She sat up straight, and I saw her countenance change as from night to day. “Robin Dudley is still in the Tower. I glimpsed him up in a high window once, and he bowed his head and waved to me.”

  Vividly, the memory of my glancing up at the doomed Tom Seymour
as John and I left the Tower assailed me. But she was chattering on, her voice light now. “And when I finally obtained permission to walk in the privy gardens, he once sent me flowers brought by a small child. It was just some trailing ivy I think he might have pulled off the stone walls outside his window, and a few daisies, but I kept them and they heartened me. I pressed every one of those flowers and leaves in my Bible!”

  She sighed. Though she had said in our reunion she could not wait for me to scold her again, this was hardly the time to admonish her for yearning for a married man, especially one who was a traitor in the Tower. Instead, I said, “I was never so proud of you as when I heard you had stood up to the Council’s threats and badgering.”

  “But, Kat,” she said, sitting up straight and pulling her hands back from mine, “I was and am innocent of all conniving against my royal sister. I am happy that she will have an heir, and I am sewing an infant cap and gown for the child now. If ever anyone asks you, under duress or not, about my feelings toward my future royal niece or nephew, you must say I cannot wait for the child’s safe arrival and long life.”

  Her steady gaze held mine. Was she saying that to protect me or herself? Surely, she did not think I had been sent back to her on the condition that I spy. Yet could I blame her if she’d learned to trust no one?

  “When I was interrogated by the Council,” she said, her voice hardening—yes, I knew her tones of speech that well to realize something dire was coming—“one of them let slip that Thomas Wyatt the younger, the rebel, was the son of a man who had once loved my mother, a man of the same name. Why didn’t you tell me? Did you know of it or know him? Should I be ashamed of my mother as my father wanted? Kat, I am not some child to be protected at all costs. I am one-and-twenty and a woman grown!”