Jeane Westin

by The Virgin's Daughters (v5)

  Exhausted from reliving her mother’s visit, her mind leaping at every possibility, Kate decided to wait in her bed for young Edward’s feeding.

  She closed her eyes and quickly became drowsy.

  The sound of her door creaking open on its rusty hinges sent Kate lurching up in her bed. In the dim light, she saw a man’s outline and opened her mouth to scream as his shadow moved quickly toward her.

  “Hush, my love.”

  It was a voice she heard nightly in her dreams, the voice she’d longed for when so terribly alone, fearing a sovereign’s wrath could fall on her neck at any moment. “Ned, my love,” she murmured, and held out her arms to him.

  “My sweet, my dearest, my blessed wife.” His voice came closer and closer. Then he was sitting beside her, his arms holding her, one hand on the back of her head, which she buried against his doublet, inhaling the remembered scent of him, which set her to trembling.

  “Sweetheart,” he breathed against her ear. “I have longed for this moment, though I thought to hold you in front of the queen and the court, as the hero of Calais, triumphant. . . .”

  She shook her head, planting kisses against his unshaven cheek. “Calais was not to be, husband. Our son is our triumph now.”

  His arms tightened. “Does the queen know of our marriage? The Lord Lieutenant is slow, telling me nothing, taking two weeks to decide if we should be allowed together as man and wife.”

  “The queen knows, Ned, though she would never have believed it until I told Dudley the whereabouts of our contract.”

  “You—”

  “Yes, dearest. It proves our son’s legitimacy.”

  His body went rigid under her hands. “But can we trust him?”

  “I had to, or your life was surely forfeit. . . .”

  “Ah, the blood-royal virgin,” he added. “Since I pay the price, I’ll have the pleasure, wife. All this past month since I left France I have thought of nothing but you next to me.” He raised her blanket and she felt his warm and well-remembered body slide into the narrow bed beside her.

  Her breath came quickly. “Ah, my sweet lord, will the Lord Lieutenant allow us to live together, as God commands?”

  “Nay, he cannot go further than an hour or two in the late night, and he risks himself doing this much. Yet he promises more meetings like this.”

  “Did you bribe him?”

  Edward shrugged. “I didn’t have to. The queen made a mistake in her Lord Lieutenant of the Tower. He has a soft, romantic heart.” Edward shifted his injured leg. “Although he has no such soft bed.”

  She laughed, her face buried against his chest, surprised at the sound, not having heard her own laughter since he left for France. “But your wound, Ned . . .”

  “Your touch has healed it more completely than my French doctor,” he whispered. “Your maid sleeps sound?”

  “Sybil sleeps like one dead,” Kate answered. “Can you not hear her snore?”

  “I thought it thunder.”

  Now they were both laughing, trying to make it inaudible against each other’s body. And she thought them quite possibly lunatic: laughing and loving, for she hoped that was soon to follow, in the Tower of London, where they might be waiting to die. No one but a Bedlamite could achieve such folly.

  It was too cold to disrobe, so she opened her nursing shift to him, not needing to guide his hands to caress her full breasts. When he touched her nipples she flinched away, and he lowered his head to lick at the trickle of her milk.

  “Nay, sweeting,” he said when she started. “I should not take what will break my son’s fast.”

  “They were yours first,” she whispered, pulling his head back to her breasts, surprised at her own daring bed sport. She had thought to feel shy as a wife after so many months, but she felt only mounting desire.

  “You are only a little more than a month from birthing, Kate. I will take great care,” he said, his breath coming fast and hot, his need shaking him, shaking them both. “I must not get a babe on you.”

  She twisted under him until she could put her legs around his back, inviting him to enter her, indeed, the pressure of her legs demanding it. “Husband, we have done right according to God’s ordinance. Our souls are safe in His hands. Besides, if we are to die for one child, we cannot die twice for two.” The words were clipped short and even, like a formal privet hedge, until broken by a sharp intake of her breath as she felt him dip into the center of her.

  “At this moment, my dearest love, I care not for my life . . . only you.” He settled deeper into her with a groan that became words. “Do you have regrets?”

  “I love you more this moment than ever I thought I could,” Kate said, holding him with all her strength, as they again became one burning flesh. He was as she remembered him and as she had thought of him in all those lonely, buried months of secrecy . . . her beloved.

  There was no room to turn on the narrow bed, little more than a straw pallet on ropes slung between poles, but she did not need the luxury of a huge bed with rich tapestry hangings. Ned’s body was enough, all taut, smooth velvet and searing, pushing demand. She had wanted him this way, and now, despite her mother and even the queen of England, Kate had him. Such was Katherine, Countess of Hertford’s power over a ruler; she was a woman who could give herself, all of herself, to a man’s love.

  A wondrous agony was building inside her and she lifted herself to meet it, once, twice, thrice . . . until the tempest inside her overwhelmed her counting.

  His mouth met hers. “Ahhh.” Edward’s cry passed her lips and she met his cry with her own.

  The snoring across the cell stopped.

  “Dearest Kate,” he choked out against her ear, “I didn’t mean for you to . . . You know a woman can’t get a child without pleasure.”

  Kate realized her fingers were dug into his arms and loosened them. “Oh, my sweetest lord, Ned,” she whispered, panting a little for air, “I did never truly believe that old witch’s tale.”

  “But the doctors say—” he began.

  “They are men,” she answered, almost laughing, but not wanting to offend him with knowledge that only women shared.

  Instead, she held him, loving the weight of his long body against hers. They lay joined until the snoring began again across the room and their breathing was slow and even; they lay that way, whispering their dreams without moving, until finally a soft knock announced their time was gone.

  He left her, kissing his son, then kissing her hand, holding hard to it. “Kate, hear me. If the Tower cannot separate us, no earthly power, not queen nor man, can keep us apart forever.”

  “I pray God it is so, husband,” she said as the worried face of the Lord Lieutenant appeared in the open door, and her lord was gone.

  She lay awake remembering every word Ned had said, sensing him still part of her body. She smiled to think that Elizabeth would soon rise to celebrate her Accession Day with a tournament at Whitehall, a reigning queen, but not as full of happiness with her throne and adoring courtiers as a woman locked in the Tower of London.

  Then Kate turned to praying for her babe, for Ned and for their future together, until the pale wintry light of day crept through the high tower window and into the hard corners of her cell that had so recently been a stone paradise.

  The Queen’s Next Birthday

  September 7, 1563

  Elizabeth sat under the canopied throne in her Whitehall presence chamber, her crowned red hair in a mass of tight curls, Robin noted as he approached. He knelt, kissed his gift and presented her with her favorite jewel, a large teardrop pearl, twice the size of the one he’d given her for last Twelfth Night.

  “Oh, Robin,” she said, holding the glowing gift in the air for all the courtiers and petitioners to admire. “It is the most perfect pearl—”

  “For the most perfect queen of my heart . . . and body,” he said, whispering the last two words just for her ears.

  She bent toward him and, for a long moment, whil
e he held his breath, he thought she would kiss his mouth in front of all, but at the last moment she pulled back. He could hear feet shuffling in the chamber, as she must have heard. He didn’t need to look behind him to know that shocked faces were everywhere, and ambassadorial letters detailing the queen’s brazen behavior would be flying to courts of the Continent by the first couriers.

  The consort’s flutes and citterns were playing a French country dance, which the young Robin and Bess had sung at play.

  “ ‘I saw the wolf, the fox, the hare,’ ” he sang, nodding in time to the lively tune and looking up into her face.

  Laughing, she sang the next line: “ ‘Saw how the wolf and fox did dance.’ ”

  He joined her sweet voice with his best baritone and they sang the last line together: “ ‘And I myself yet spun them around.’ ”

  She handed the pearl to him. “Place it here on my crown so that it hangs—”

  His gift was dangling over her fair forehead before she finished asking for it. He always knew what she wanted, and was about to whisper an invitation in her ear when she gave him a warning glance, a rare heeding of what others thought, gaily lifting the small silvered mirror tied about her waist to admire his gift.

  Cecil, the Lord Secretary, approached, his face somber, his eyes steady. “Your Grace,” he said as if Dudley weren’t there, “the Austrian ambassador has presented a marriage contract from the grand duke, and your councilors wait to hear your wishes.”

  A little angry, Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Anon, my good Lord Secretary, the business of our people must be attended before the Austrian can be heard.”

  Dudley watched the Austrian ambassador flush, bow briefly and leave the chamber without permission. Cecil remained stoic at the queen’s side while she listened to two petitioners.

  Dudley’s mind held a dozen questions. Did she mean to reject the grand duke? Was this a public encouragement for him to press his case? Was it true that she had made him Earl of Leicester to marry him, as everyone hinted? Yet marriage was the one thing on which he could not know her changeable mind. This was a woman who loved to be endlessly courted, but had recoiled from marriage.

  The queen waved away the rest of the petitions and, with her retinue trailing after her, she left the presence chamber on Dudley’s arm. Cecil walked before them with his white staff of office. “Marriage, marriage!” she complained, and Robin was certain she meant Cecil to hear her displeasure so loudly voiced. “Is that the sum of the business of my realm? I tell you, Robin, I am sicker of the word than the pocks ever made me.”

  “They say the Archduke Charles is a Catholic.”

  “We hear not a strong, unreasonable one, Robin,” she replied, now teasing.

  “He is said to have a very large, misshapen head. A monster head!” Robert bent and whispered in her ear. “He would need two pillows in your bed, Bess.”

  She laughed softly. “His ambassador says that such a tale is but their enemy France’s rumor put about to work against our union.”

  “The ambassador could say nothing less, my queen, so you must set your fowlers to plucking your largest, softest swans, and at once. Would you have me tend to it?”

  He could feel her shake with mirth. He put his hand over her hand where it rested on his arm. “Bess, would you rid yourself of the marriage problem for all time?” He had bent close again to her ear, certain that he had sensed an invitation in her complaints. Her every action today pointed to it. His heart knew it; the warmth of his surety spread through him.

  “My lord of Leicester, I would knight the man who—”

  “No need, Bess. The better man, an earl, walks by your side, where he would ever be. Marry me, Bess, and end your torment . . . and my own.”

  He felt her arm stiffen and she wrenched it away, leaving him behind.

  She moved swiftly to Cecil’s side, and when Robin heard her harsh words spoken so all could hear, his heart almost stopped its beating.

  “My lord Cecil, do you think me so unlike myself and unmindful of my royal majesty that I would prefer for husband my servant, whom I myself have raised high?”

  “Majesty, I pray not.”

  Cecil and Elizabeth swept into the council chamber, and Robin walked in after, his steps firm and of the same length, taking his customary seat, his face numb from the effort to show nothing of his sinking emotions. Fool! Idiot! Right time, wrong place. You gave her what she needed to convince the court gossips that she would consider the Austrian marriage, consider any foreign prince rather than the Earl of Leicester, suspected yet of his wife’s death. Or did she truly mean those hurtful words? Did she think an earldom enough when he would have her love for his lifetime and . . . her body? He held his hands tight together under the council table, one thought repeating: The first to laugh at Robert Dudley is a dead man!

  When the Austrian contract was passed around the council table, he looked at it dutifully, his eyes sweeping to and fro as if he read the words. But he saw and remembered nothing.

  Cecil was deep in the problem of the Catholic grand duke’s desire for a private Mass in Protestant England when the yeoman officer of the guard knocked and entered. “Majesty, the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower craves urgent audience on an important matter.”

  Elizabeth was annoyed. “Welladay, then, as a fair sovereign we must give the Lord Lieutenant what he craves,” she said with a shrug.

  Robin breathed easier. He knew what would be reported and also that this event would take precedence with the gossips over the queen’s snub of him.

  The man, his eyes bulging, knelt three times when approaching the queen’s chair and would have thrown himself prostrate had Elizabeth not motioned him to stand and bade him speak.

  “Your Grace . . . Majesty . . . my queen . . .”

  “God’s sacred son! Speak your urgency, man.”

  Dudley saw the terrified man dribble from his mouth and swipe it away with his sleeve, to Elizabeth’s disgust. She turned her face away from him.

  “Lady Katherine, Majesty . . . has been delivered of another son.”

  “A son. Another son!” Elizabeth leapt from her chair. “God is a supreme jester to make that traitorous whore so fertile!”

  The man crumpled before the rising color in Elizabeth’s face. She looked at Dudley. “Did you know of this?” The words were spat.

  “Nay, Your Grace.” He had long ago learned the art of telling an unblinking lie.

  Elizabeth towered over the cringing man, the matter of her marriage to the grand duke of Austria quite forgotten. She did not rage as yet, her voice even and dead of emotion, which Robin knew was all the more frightening to those in attendance. “My Lord Lieutenant, take you to the Tower at once and send the Earl of Hertford under guard with his two illegitimate sons to his manor of Eltham, there to stay until I give him leave.” The queen took a much-needed breath, though her breast had been heaving from the first word. “Then, sir, Lady Katherine is to be taken under guard and lodged with her mother’s cousin, Sir William Rogers, in Somersetshire, with instruction that she is never again to see the earl or her bastards. Let her be gone forever from our sight and hearing!”

  Even Cecil looked pained at this vindictive sentence.

  “It is done at once, Your Grace,” the Lord Lieutenant said, finding his voice.

  “And then, sir, you are to remove my badge from your doublet, place yourself under arrest and lodge in that same lady’s cell, awaiting my further pleasure.”

  “Majesty, I beg you—”

  “Have a care, sir. I will decide later whether you lose only your office, or be the shorter by a head!”

  “But, Your Grace, for pity, they . . . Edward and Katherine . . . are so much in love, so much in love. Their letters—”

  “Love. Love!” Her fair face turned as red as her formal wig, her eyes wide. “Love does not rule in my realm. . . .”

  Dudley watched as Elizabeth’s rage broke over the man’s head, first in the form of the flung Austri
an marriage contract and then a sound pounding about his ears, with curses few stable hands could better on so short a notice. He smiled to himself, as satisfied as when his brothers had been punished and he’d escaped. He wasn’t the only fool for love in the room. The Lord Lieutenant had lost his position and the young idiots in the Tower had lost each other. The second son had doomed them. Elizabeth could not take their heads for fear of rousing Londoners who were buying penny ballads on street corners about the doomed lovers in the Tower. People wondered out loud over their drink if the true male heirs of the Tudor line slept behind those forbidding walls. One overloud ale maid, Hannah Barnes, had been hauled before a magistrate for saying so and suffered a tongue slitting.

  Still, Elizabeth could not stop her people’s sympathy for Edward and Kate. She must be satisfied with taking their young love forever.

  The Lord Lieutenant and his wife came to Kate’s cell early the next morning, as she was feeding her newborn, Thomas William, with her wobbly firstborn, Edward, clinging at her knee, fussing to be fed with a steady cry of, “Mama, mama, ma-ma . . .”

  The cell’s heavy door swung open on rusty hinges, and the Lord Lieutenant entered. Kate wondered at this early visit, then smiled a greeting. He and his wife had been most kind for more than a year, making her imprisonment in the Tower as gentle as possible. Seeing yeoman guards crowd in behind him, Kate felt her smile waver. Was this the day of her trial? Why had she not been told to prepare, been allowed a priest? Elizabeth would not be so cruel.

  But with her babe so warm at her breast, she could not hold such horror for long. Perhaps she and her boys were to be moved to Ned’s quarters . . . or, Jesu be more blessed, allowed to retire together to Eltham. Both of these possibilities traveled quickly from her heart to her mind, like brightly colored paintings, clearly drawn so that for a moment they were real.

  “Lady . . . Katherine,” the Lord Lieutenant began haltingly, “the queen has ordered that you be sent to your mother’s distant kin in Somerset . . . you alone.”