by Karen Harper
“You mean, once I am in his inner circle, try to seduce the king—at least to trust me—so I can bring him down?”
Edward’s grip on my hands tightened. “When the queen falls, he will be furious, then crushed. Despite his age and failing health, he will be looking quickly elsewhere for a wife or a mistress to assuage his grief. He’s taken mistresses before from among his friends’ wives, clear back to Mary Boleyn when she was wed to his friend Will Carey. I loyally serve my king and country, but I know what it is to be a royal ward with a father dead and be dependent on those in power. I know what it is to yearn for place and position, and for someone to truly trust and love—”
“He certainly loves her, and she’s so pretty!” Mabel whispered, knocking me out of my daydream as she elbowed me. She sighed so heartily that Anthony leaned into me, over me, and rapped his daughter on her knee with another, “Hush!”
At least all that covered my own sigh, one of exasperation that the so-called King of Ireland could be such a dolt, standing on the precipice of shame and grief he did not see coming. And I sighed inwardly, shamed and grieved by my fierce longing for the man I missed and would never have.
But soon the storm clouds at court gathered, full to bursting. The king, they said, had suddenly gone hunting. The queen, informed of that, was surprised and kept to her chambers, most annoyed. The royal party—Anthony Browne was one who supposedly went hunting with him—was gone nigh on three days. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, came to visit the queen and tried to lure her from her foot-stomping frets with chatter, compliments, and sweet sonnets, but to no avail. As he left her suite of rooms, he snagged me and pulled me aside, looking in quite a foul mood himself.
“Something’s afoot,” he muttered. “I know your hoary-headed suitor rode out with the king, but do you know where they went or what’s going on?”
“I believe each time you have come to court since I have lived here, you are the one who knew the inner workings of it all. Are you surprised you could not cheer your royal cousin, then?”
“They must have had a spat, but she can’t recall over what, the silly chit. And after such a triumph on the great northern progress. Strange, for I heard His Majesty made a pretty speech before the court and God himself—the heavenly God, not the earthly one we must put up with—”
“Surrey,” I interrupted, “the walls have ears here. You’d best watch your mouth.”
“I’d rather watch yours—”
“Because there’s been talk you have been overbearing about your Howard family claims to the throne if the Prince of Wales would have died—”
“Ha! The rebel Fitzgerald pot calling the rebel Surrey kettle black. I only—Now what in heaven’s name are those guards here for?” he muttered as eight yeomen marched down the long gallery past us with their halberds held at the ready.
I spotted Mabel and saw her father had returned from the long hunt with the king to parts unknown. I excused myself from the distraught Surrey and hurried toward them.
“Ah, my dear,” Anthony greeted me, with a quick kiss on my mouth.
“Is the king back?” I asked. “But why the show of his yeomen guards?”
“Disaster has struck His Majesty—and the queen,” he told us, pulling both Mabel and me back into a windowed alcove. “The queen is going to be arrested for the worst of crimes to her royal lord, for we have solid evidence she’s been unfaithful to him.”
“No!” Mabel cried in disbelief, wide-eyed as she clapped both hands over her mouth.
Afraid to show my expression—a mingling of relief and sadness yet joy that the king would suffer—I put both hands over my face as if I would cry.
“Gera, Gera,” Anthony crooned, and pulled me close with one arm, Mabel with the other. I saw he had not even removed his riding cape, which was covered with road dust and made me want to sneeze. “Now listen, my dears. All the evidence against the queen for her licentious past—even as a young maid reared by her Howard grandmother—has been laid out before the king through an anonymous note sent to the council.”
I started at that: It was as if I had wished it done. Evidently thinking I was just shocked at his news, he plunged on. “Even since she’s been wed, she has been unfaithful to her lord with at least two men, her privy secretary, Dereham, and the king’s own favored Thomas Culpeper. I cannot bear to relay to you maidens the rest of it. I am to conduct more of the investigation and help bring the charges.”
“He will put her away?” Mabel asked.
“Permanently. We talk treason here, for, adultery aside, she could have got herself with child, and the king could be led to believe it was his own. He was seduced by her youth and beauty, the vile, plotting little whore.”
The vile, seducing, plotting, unfaithful whore—that was what they had said of Anne Boleyn. I pulled away from Anthony’s embrace as the huge impact of what had happened assailed me. My desire to see the king suffer—it came with a huge price for a young woman, however foolish, and the young men who must have loved her. In my mind’s eye, I saw Thomas Culpeper return to Cat Howard for yet another quick kiss and recalled how he twirled her so happily in his arms. . . .
“Gera, I believe we should find you a chair,” Anthony said. “You look ashen, my dearest.”
“No need,” I assured him. “Just the shock, the shame of it all.”
“I am sending both of you away from court on the morrow to Mary Tudor’s household for a while—with His Majesty’s permission,” he told us. “Gera, I know you have served the queen, but I am one of four men the king has entrusted with the examinations of the queen’s ladies, and since you left the northern progress early and could know naught of all this, I am taking you out of this hornets’ nest.”
Hornets’ nest, yes, that was what it was. But so easily accomplished to escape all this?
In a quick, quiet voice, Anthony went on. “The queen and her accomplice Rochford are to be sent to Syon House on the Thames eight miles from London, where they will be kept close confined and questioned, then mayhap to the Tower.”
“The Tower . . .” I said, feeling sicker by the minute. Of course, that would be anyone’s fate—even a young woman’s—for crossing this king. My father languishing there, my uncles taken from there to their terrible deaths . . .
When shrieks shredded the air, I almost thought they could be mine.
We heard men’s voices down the way near the entrance to the queen’s rooms, then a woman’s strident tones, arguing, cursing, wailing.
“The king’s praying in the Chapel Royal,” Anthony told us. “Go to your rooms, both of you, and keep your heads down until I fetch you early on the morrow.” He pushed us in the direction we should go and vaulted away, shoving courtiers back to reach the ruckus.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder—though I think Mabel was too short to see it all over the heads of others—we watched as Catherine Howard, queen of England, ran screaming from her presence chamber and careened down the long gallery toward the Chapel Royal, where the king had publicly blessed their union but three days ago. Her frenzied words were hard to discern amidst her cries of terror as Anthony and several of the king’s guards ran after her.
“He will see me! My husband will see me! He’ll forgive me, save me—no, no, unhand me; I am the queen, the quee-eeeeeen!”
I could not catch another glimpse of her as she was dragged back into her chambers amidst the horrified courtiers. Some of her ladies burst into tears. For once, I did not see Jane Rochford. Surrey shoved past us, running down the hall, perhaps to report that another Howard family queen was on the royal road to destruction, with all his family’s hopes destroyed as surely as the Fitzgeralds’ had once been.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
I was pleased enough to escape the chaos at court with Mary Tudor and Mabel, though I admit I would have liked to have stayed to see the king shamed and suffering. He was in a fierce rage and wildly vindictive to boot, at first screaming that the woman who had defied him should h
ave “torment in her death.” Yes, we Fitzgeralds had long known the black heart of the man who was king.
Outside in the clock courtyard, Anthony kissed Mabel and me farewell in much different ways: He gave his daughter a peck on the cheek but bent me back in a long kiss and embrace with whispered words of not being parted ever again “when the king is quite recovered.”
Truly, I wished for neither of those things, but I did then get my wish to someday confront John Dudley, Lord Lisle. For, unbeknownst to me, he stood there in the flesh, wrapped in fur and leather on this brisk autumn morn, the man given the charge of seeing we were safely delivered to Ashridge Manor in the countryside.
Anthony introduced me to Dudley before we mounted. “My Lord Lisle, I am pleased to present to you Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald. My dearest, the king’s loyal servant, John Dudley, Lord Lisle.”
I gripped my fingers together in my fur muff to keep from leaping at him to claw at his eyes. Shuddering—I warrant they thought it was from the chill wind—I stood my ground without a word. Dudley’s hard, dark eyes assessed me; I glared at him, and it was not like me to be tongue-tied.
Anthony looked taken aback and became desperate to fill the brisk air with words. “Lady Elizabeth has served the lady Mary before, and is a special friend to me,” he told Dudley, making me realize again how much power Dudley must have, this king’s henchman, as he had been called. “She’s lived in England for years now, first at Beaumanoir near the Greys. She is guardian and friend of my own daughter Mabel while they are under the aegis of the king’s daughter Mary.”
I recall not what else he said that day, but I do remember that John Dudley told him, “I know her past, even that she was a guest at the home of my niece Ursula and her husband, Lord Clinton, in Lincolnshire this last summer. I assure you, Sir Anthony, I shall take care of her.”
I hoped Ursula had not told her uncle that I had seen the queen with one of her lovers. I still thought, as Anthony helped me mount my horse, that Dudley looked like the very devil, with his pointed beard, sleek, slanted eyebrows, and fiery stare. Perhaps I read too much into his so kindly couched but, to me, ominous words: I shall take care of her.
I suppose it was best that John Dudley avoided me like the plague during our sojourn to Ashridge in Hertfordshire, where Mary and her ladies were to stay until the upheaval at court was dealt with, for I am not certain what I would have said to him. I longed for a dagger to stick in his ribs, but he was not my ultimate target. I did, however, glare daggers at his back as he escorted us through the frost-blighted countryside. But I knew I must bide my time, as with the king, and find some worthy way to make him pay.
So I watched him continually, without turning my head, trying to learn his weaknesses and ways. I overheard him speaking in a most polished, ingratiating, entertaining way to the lady Mary. He was obviously proud of his children, especially his five sons, for whom he said he had great plans. When he rode farther back in the entourage with our guards, he had the habit of hawking up phlegm and spitting, of boasting and cursing, as if he were a cruder, different person altogether, a hail-fellow-well-met at their level. He seemed content to avoid me too, yet I felt he also watched me.
We finally dismounted, sad and saddle-weary, before a gray stone manor house all clasped in the claws of brown, dead ivy. As I was about to follow Mary and Mabel inside, Dudley appeared suddenly around the front of my horse and put out one arm to stay me.
“I regret,” he said, “that I was the one assigned to oversee the sad execution of your half brother and uncles.”
I gasped. I had not expected such a direct broaching of that or anything smacking of an apology.
“Is it,” I countered, “an excuse for horror and injustice to say you serve the king and so must do the unspeakable in his name?”
“Lady, the Bible says we are to serve those in power, even be loyal to an unjust master—which, of course, this king is not.”
“Oh, of course not! Two of my uncles did not so much as lift a hand against him! And my father and his sires kept Ireland calm for years for this king and his father before him, so—”
“Enough!”
“It is not!”
“It had better be, or you will drag yourself and those Fitzgeralds left down with you. Fair warning now,” he said, shaking a gloved finger nearly in my face. “Best marry Anthony Browne and breed English children who will learn where their loyalty must lie.”
Mabel’s voice called out from the doorway, “Gera, are you coming in?”
“She’ll be there soon!” Dudley answered for me, then turned back to where he had me hemmed in between my horse and his. “You know,” he went on, “I understand your loyalty to your family, for I am building a dynasty, and I regret to see your male lineage decimated, though you yet have two brothers, one hiding on the continent, one easily available—he is a ward of the Greys, I believe.”
“Are you threatening me to behave so that my brothers will be safe?”
“Not threatening you at all. Your beauty, cleverness, and passion will take you far if they are not used amiss. Take that as advice, not a threat, Lady Fitzgerald, a Geraldine called Gera. And—oh, yes—one more thing,” he said as he took a step away, then turned back. “I couldn’t place where I had seen you, but your fierce spirit just now and your unforgettable face have reminded me. We’d never met, and yet your image was burned in my brain. You dared to be there that day in High Holborn on the way to Tyburn, didn’t you? A young woman, wild with courage and rage, shouted out that battle cry that caused such chaos. I wondered for years, but it was you. And, to a man, your uncles and half brother shouted that same thing—on the scaffold before their ends.”
I lifted my chin and stared up at him unflinching, unblinking. “A Geraldine will rule again someday in Ireland, but no longer for this king,” I told him. “A Geraldine,” I said, not raising my voice. “A Geraldine.”
His jaw fell open at my audacity. Even as he shoved his horse’s flank to open up an exit for me and I moved toward the manor door, I heard him say, “Then perhaps, Irish she-wolf, the Geraldines will rule for a Dudley heir someday.”
I did not so much as look back as I heard him hawk and spit. I was tempted to stride back and spit at him in turn. Though I wanted to both flee and fight him, I walked slowly to join Mary Tudor’s ladies in our exile at Ashridge. I hoped my father would have been proud of me for such restraint and for walking regally, head high, as the princess of Ireland he once vowed that I would be.
We passed dreary weeks at Ashridge, all of us feeling on the brink of some deep, dark chasm. I wondered how the queen’s other ladies, who had not been spirited away from harsh examinations, were faring. Mary Tudor was tense and always tired, and, as the daylight fled early in December, she kept to her bed. Sir Anthony sent messages that the queen had been stripped of her entourage, jewels, and gifts and removed to Syon House, a former nunnery, in the city. Her lovers were examined under duress—that is, tortured—for information and to obtain confessions. Her promiscuous past was paraded before a tribunal, and she, with Jane Rochford, her panderer, was adjudged guilty, taken to the Tower, and condemned to die.
I did not wish that on anyone, except the king himself, and Dudley, of course, but no longer Edward Clinton, whom I missed fiercely. Thank God, Dudley had ridden back to London after delivering us here and posting guards. And I was so wrapped up in my own agonizing that I did not realize until she told me that Alice, too, had her own fears.
“Lady Gera,” she said one day, when the two of us were sitting in the bedchamber, now deserted, that I shared with Mabel, “I realize Jane Rochford deserves to die with her mistress for what she has done, but it sets a dangerous precedent, does it not?”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, poking my needle through a piece of embroidery. I was bored to death and had to do something to keep myself busy.
“That the queen’s companion and confidante—her closest ally in all that, who no doubt took her orders and kept h
er secrets—should fall with her, even to death by beheading. I know you do not like to even think of beheadings, but . . .”
“Indeed, I do not. Both of us have lost loved ones to that dreadful fate. But what are you suggesting? You and I have become good and honest companions, I believe, so tell me plain.”
She lowered her voice and glanced at the closed door. “If you wed Sir Anthony, you must let go all other loves. I will keep your past secrets, but, once you are wed, there must be no others. . . .”
“Lord Clinton, you mean? Night and day to this Cat Howard mess. I care for him not—not that way.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know you have not been with him that way, and I do not mean to speak out of turn. Only,” she said with a shudder, “to think they are questioning and torturing people who have information on her lovers, even her closest friends and servants . . .”
“Enough! ” I said, standing so fast my embroidery hoop rolled off my lap. “I said there is no comparison. Sir Anthony may be a longtime boon companion to the king, but he is not the king, and punishment for adultery would hardly be beheading. I’ll not be lectured to. I have no lovers and never will. Saint Brigid, I don’t even want a husband!”
“I’m back,” Mabel cried as she swept open the door, for she had just run to the jakes. Behind her came Lady Susan, Mary Tudor’s closest confidante, and I prayed neither of them had heard my hasty words.
Susan said, “We’re all to assemble in the solar downstairs to hear of the queen’s demise. Lady Gera, your lover, Sir Anthony, just rode in to tell us all the sad news.”
I knew she meant suitor when she said lover. I also knew I’d lied to Alice, if no longer to myself, that I cared not for Edward Clinton.
Sir Anthony spared us no detail of the tragic story of the king’s fifth wife. How she had been a wanton from her early years, Dereham’s lover, loose with her body and morals. How she had to be manhandled to get her into the barge that took her to the Tower. How she finally accepted her fate and called for the beheading block so she could practice laying her neck upon it the night before she and Rochford met their fates. How the queen’s own cousin, the Earl of Surrey, was ordered to attend her beheading both as proof of the Howards’ loyalty to the king and—perhaps, I thought—as a warning to Surrey himself not to overstep.