Thus darkly nodding and pursing her lips, Cat Ashley overshot her mark, and knew no peace till Bess had coaxed and bullied the secret out of her.
‘The Queen was only second-best to him; he’d have had you if he could. But the Council wouldn’t hear of it, so he fell back on his old sweetheart – oh, he’s very fond of her, all the world can see that—’
Yes, Bess could see that; but she was seeing other things too; the garden at Chelsea nearly a year ago, and the Admiral standing watching her as she played at ball with her pomander; he had asked her to marry him, he had taken her chin in his hand, he had been just going to kiss her, and not, she was sure, in the casual hearty way he had so often kissed her since, as one kisses a child – and then his Cathy, her Pussy-Cat Purr, came out, and he turned it all into a joke. Watching them together, straight on top of that moment in the garden, she had been quite sure it had only been a joke; and then within four days had come the dreadful damning confirmation of it, when Catherine told her she had just been formally betrothed to him. Bess had shrugged it off, of course, she owed it to herself (but she owed the phrase to the Ash-Cat, she realised in sudden annoyance at its vulgarity). She had laughed and played with him all this year; but, as she was now suddenly aware, all the time her heart had been broken.
She made up her mind to be very grave and dignified with him, rather distant, but not in obvious displeasure, only wistfully aloof. The result was that the Admiral asked her if she had a stomach-ache. And it was impossible to go on being wistfully aloof when you were tickled almost into hysterics.
Mrs Ashley had to look round for a third person to whom to complain; and ended, where she had better have begun, with the Admiral’s wife.
Here naturally she dropped no dark hints (she had indeed been doubtful of their prudence the moment she had uttered them to Bess), but based her warning on the danger of tittle-tattle from the maids; people would say she oughtn’t to allow the Admiral to come into her young mistress’s room in his bedgown and with bare legs, and the Princess herself in bed. She knew, of course, that he saw no harm in it; she knew what sailors were; she knew – but she did not need to know any more, for Catherine at once agreed quietly and said she would see to it.
It was very tiresome, Catherine thought; she had been so delighted with the jolly easy friendship between Tom and Bess, who had almost stopped being that odd difficult girl since he had come into their household, and become more of a real child than Catherine had ever seen her; indeed, that was why she had failed to realise that she was beginning to grow up.
Now she looked at her with awakened eyes and saw how much taller she had grown lately and prettier, and how the curves of her breasts just showed like small apples above the stiff front of her bodice. The girl was in her fifteenth year – and she herself was thirty-five. That gave her a shock, for it was the first time she had ever thought of comparing herself with Bess.
A plague on these women and their solemn unctuous airs, they spoilt everything. It was not that Cat Ashley had spoken any evil, nor probably thought any, but she had made her conscious of herself, of her husband, of Bess. Once a thing was thought, you could not stop it; it was like throwing a stone into a pond, the ripples went further and further out and must go on till they reached the very edge.
And what should she do? What could she do that would not look suspicious, jealous, the very things she most hated? ‘Nothing will ever be the same again,’ she told herself miserably, as she held her mirror close to her face and wondered if it had not begun to look thinner lately, even rather hollow under the eyes. But there might be a happier reason for that than her age; it might well be that at last, after all these years, she had begun to be with child. The hope restored all her happiness and confidence, and she knew suddenly what she should do.
Next morning when the Admiral came into Bess’s room Catherine came too, and together they woke her, laughing, together they tickled and teased her while she defended herself with the bolster and there was a brief pillow-fight.
But it was not nearly so exciting for Bess.
After that, Catherine was nearly always there as a third partner in the romps, and a very lively one, even destructive on one bright morning in early February, when Bess came out with great dignity towards them as they walked by the little fishpond in the Chelsea garden, came slowly, like the tragedy Queen Herodias, down the terrace steps, attired in a black silk dress.
Her mother, she knew, had had a penchant for black; it was French and chic, and emphatically grown-up; it would remind the Admiral both of Nan Bullen, who had driven men mad for her, and of her own advancing age.
But it did not seem to do any of these things. He stood with his legs apart and his thumbs in his belt and rocked backwards and forwards roaring with laughter, until at last he had breath enough to ask her why on earth she was play-acting in that hideous dress. And Catherine said, ‘It doesn’t suit you at all, my darling. Do go and take it off.’
She stamped with rage. ‘I won’t. It’s a most suitable dress. Why shouldn’t I wear black? I’m in mourning for—’ but black was not the royal mourning, and the Admiral finished it for her. ‘For your poor dear husband, I’ll be bound. You look a brisk young widow.’
Bess went more tragic than ever, for it was all too true. She was indeed a widow, in mourning for the husband she had never had. How heartless and obtuse he was not to see it! Instead, he snatched the scissors that dangled from his wife’s girdle, and chased her round the pond, swearing he would cut that preposterous frumpery into ribbons. All her indignant sorrow went to the winds; she picked up her solemn skirts and ran squealing, plump into Catherine’s arms, who in fits of laughter held her while Tom slit up the dress this way and that.
‘Now go and take it off, you monkey,’ said Catherine, kissing her, ‘and put on your prettiest colours for this spring day.’
She ran back into the house, laughing now as much as they, to meet Cat Ashley’s horrified exclamations and scoldings at the damage to her new dress, ‘and such beautiful stuff’.
‘It’s not, it’s hideous,’ said Bess airily. ‘And anyway it’s not my fault. It was two against one, for the Queen held me while the Admiral cut it up.’
‘Well!!’ said Mrs Ashley, looking unutterable things and then apparently swallowing them, for she jerked her head back, then forward, like a hen with a large pea, and pursed her lips tight as if to prevent anything ever escaping through them again. What did at last emerge was a very dry thin note: ‘The Queen knows her own business best, I suppose.’
‘She does,’ said her charge, suddenly flaming. ‘And that business is not yours, you prying, prowling old Ash-Cat. Get out of my sight, I’m sick to death of your mimsey face.’
Her governess took the hint.
CHAPTER NINE
The stone had fallen into the pond, the ripples were spreading, and not all Catherine’s gallantry could stay them.
But she did not know this at once. For her hopes of being with child had become certainty and Tom’s delight was uproarious. He was very careful of her and gave her tender instructions as solemnly as a village midwife, so she told him, mocking him with equal tenderness. She must go walks every day to strengthen their boy (they never doubted it would be a boy and all his names were chosen), but she must not get tired, and plenty of country air would be good for her. So they moved about from house to house, and Bess went too.
She too was delighted that there would be a new baby step-stepbrother for her to play with, and she would embroider a shirt for him too. She kept Catherine amused, reading Italian romances to her or playing her lute or the virginals; she had a real ear for music and a delicate light touch. Then, suddenly bored and cramped with sitting still, she would spring up and go running down the garden paths with her greyhound and break into the steps of a gipsy dance, she and Catherine both singing the tune.
Tom, hot and dusty after riding back from London, Court life, and a fresh quarrel with his brother, would come upon some such idyl
lic scene and reflect anew on the advantages of domestic life among the Turks. ‘When I was in Buda Pest’ became a rather frequent note of nostalgia. They managed these things better in Hungary; it was reasonable and natural for a man to have at least two wives, so as to amuse himself with the one while the other was occupied with bearing his child. He adored his Cathy, there was no other woman like her, but Bess was not a woman, she had all the contrast of crude, budding girlhood, the sharp sweet flavour of a not quite ripe apple. ‘Lord, how I wish I had an apple! Have you such a thing as an apple about you, my sweet Tom?’ He had such a thing about him, and he must not taste it.
One evening at Chelsea when a soft gusty wind was tossing the pear blossom over the red brick wall, and the new moon had just begun to show like a ghostly flower caught in the topmost branches, he came back from Westminster in a teasing mood that had a tang in it of bad temper, and chaffed Bess on her matrimonial prospects. Had she any fancy for a cold climate, for sleighing and skating, and a moody young Northern giant for a husband?
For the Protector had decided to marry her either to the Danish or Swedish prince. ‘Good for trade,’ said Tom; also of course she must take a Protestant, and that narrowed the field; best of all, it would get her out of England and lessen her chances of ever becoming Queen of it.
Catherine looked up, startled, for no one spoke of those chances; the loyal notion was that Edward, though possibly rather delicate, would grow up, marry and have children; and even if he did not, there was Mary. But Bess took it very coolly. She only said in a low tone as though to herself, ‘I shall not leave England, however many husbands I may marry.’
He tweaked her ear. ‘Here’s a large-hearted lass. How many are on the list?’
‘I’ve no list. It’s you, my Lord Admiral, who should have a wife in every port.’
‘And a port in every storm?’
‘Not you! But you make a storm in every posset-cup.’
‘She’s put you down!’ exclaimed his wife.
‘If I put her, she’d give birth to vixens. Her tongue’s sharper than a tooth, even her hair’s aflame with malice. Go and quench that foxy red brush of yours or I’ll cut it off and hang it in the hall as a trophy among the other wild beasts’ heads.’
It flashed on Catherine that people were sometimes rude like this when they had begun to fall in love but did not yet know it – yes, and looked at each other like that, with a curious new awareness, their eyes casual and mocking on the surface, yet with a stranger lurking in their depths, intent, watchful, defiant, as though a challenge had gone out between them and had been accepted.
There was nothing she could do; she sat stunned, feeling a little sick, and did not dare look at them again. She heard nothing more that they said; her mind was talking too loud to herself, arguing, disputing.
‘But he loves me, I know it. He loves me now, not merely in the past, nor in the future as the mother of his child.’
‘Fool! That man could love several at the same time, it’s his nature to make any number of women happy. And at the moment you are not his lover, only the mother of his child.’
‘But she’s not fifteen yet, not for five months.’
‘Fool! She’s older at times than you have ever been. Do you ever know what she’s thinking, feeling, deep down beneath her pert chatter, her budding airs and graces? They are those of a child pretending to be a woman; but all the time beneath them there is a mind at work, the mind of a woman pretending to be a child.’
A wave of hysteria was surging up over her; in another moment she would scream her thoughts aloud, make wild and horrible accusations. Whatever happened, that must not. She murmured that it was getting chilly and slid away.
Tom did not notice her going. Bess did, and thought that she ought to run after her, but had an odd fear of doing so. She had not seen Catherine’s face, but had felt that someone quite different had risen silently from the bench beside her and stolen away into the chill evening air.
She shivered and told herself that she did not want to go after her, so why should she? She was sick of doing what she ought to do, of being the good little girl. Besides, she was no longer a little girl; princes were making offers for her hand; they had done so since she was a few years old, but then it had not mattered personally to anyone; now it did. It mattered to Tom Seymour, she was sure of it; and it mattered much more to herself. Her pert answers to his banter had served to gain time while she turned this new project over in her mind and discovered what she thought of it. She discovered that it had put her in a smouldering rage. Not for worlds would she show this to Tom, who had so lightly betrayed his own anger at the plan; so she appeared to consider it with pleased curiosity, while she longed to order the Protector to the block for daring to dispose of her without even consulting her first. How dared he, or any man, treat her as a mere property of the State, an appanage of the Crown, a bargaining asset? It was what all princesses were, as a matter of course, yet her knowledge of this made no odds to her; she was different.
But to Tom she only laughed when he said she might as well marry a turnip as a Swede. ‘And why not?’ she said. ‘There ought to be roots in matrimony. Perhaps I’ll strike mine in new soil after all, and see the world.’
He looked quite hurt as he answered, ‘But you said just now you didn’t want to leave England.’
He had taken that to mean that she didn’t want to leave him! A delicious new sense of power thrilled through her as she realised it; she too could tease him, then, more exquisitely than he had ever teased her, and she flung back her head and laughed.
He stared; a slow flush was mounting to his forehead; she had never seen him look like this. He said, ‘You are like your mother when you laugh.’
‘Oh!’ came on a pettish note of disappointment. ‘Was all the world in love with my mother?’
‘Half of it was. The other half hated her.’
‘Will that be like me too? And you—?’ She paused, looking at him sidelong in desperate coquetry, then said breathlessly, ‘Of which half are you? I think you do not hate me.’
‘No, Bess, I don’t hate you.’
His voice sounded thick, he looked at her as though he did not see her, the Bess he had always known, but some thought of her that lay within his mind. And it was she who had done this, had laughed and looked and spoken so as to make him lose hold of that moment; she too, then, like her mother, might drive men mad for her, and had begun even earlier to do it. She felt drunk with triumph. This moment was hers; he should do what she wished with it.
She stood up, with a gesture of command rather than invitation, and said, ‘You were going to kiss me once, in this garden – it was over a year ago. Will you do it now?’
Did he hear her – see her even? It seemed he was staring too hard to see her. Her heart thumped furiously against the whaleboned case of her bodice as though it were trying to get out; panic swept over her, it was all she could do to keep from turning and running headlong into the house. But no, she must not, she would not lose this moment, it was hers, and she clenched her hands together as if to clutch it to her.
But it was no use, she was going to lose it, she was losing it, something was happening that would tear it away, a sound, a movement seen in the tail of her eye.
Little Jane Grey was walking sedately down the path towards them, her freckled face composed into a set pattern of solemnity.
‘I have just returned from Westminster,’ she told Bess on a note of anxious awe, ‘and have a message for you from the King. Mr Cheke is very ill.’
Bess slipped her a look full of loathing. ‘Is that all?’ she said.
‘But it’s Mr Cheke. He’s ill.’
‘Well, I can’t help it. Why have you got to come running to tell me at once? You’re always thrusting yourself in everywhere – little nuisance!’
This brutal attack on top of her cousin’s astounding heartlessness was too much for Jane.
‘It’s not fair – I wasn’t running – I d
on’t thrust in – I’m always trying to keep out of everybody’s way—’ Two large tears rolled down her cheeks.
‘Cry-baby! You’ll always say everything isn’t fair – you’ll never love anyone but old dons and tutors – you – Ow!’ she ended on a yelp, for the Admiral had lunged forward and dealt her a thumping smack, and there was nothing exciting or tantalising about it. It hurt.
‘You young bully,’ he roared, ‘I won’t have you unkind to my Jane.’
He sat on the bench and took the little girl on his knee, and she put her head on his chest and sobbed. Bess knew he had fallen clean out of love with her; she was only a child to him again, and an unpleasant child at that. She could have killed her small cousin.
Jane conscientiously raised her tearful face from the Admiral’s waistcoat and gave Edward’s message: ‘The King told me – to tell you – “Tell my sweet sister Temperance,” he said—’ Pause for effect, Bess was certain, but again unfairly, for Jane was choking back her sobs. ‘The doctors thought Mr Cheke will die, but Edward has prayed for him and knows his prayer will be answered. He asks you to pray too.’
She drew a deep sniff and laid her head down against the Admiral’s arm.
‘There, there, my pretty,’ he said. ‘All will be well, you’ll see. God’s sure to listen to our sweet sister Temperance.’
Bess walked past them with her nose in the air, and as she passed gave a vicious tug at Jane’s long hair that hung over the Admiral’s arm, then ran for her life.
She would never speak to her cousin again, nor the Admiral; she would marry the Swede or the Dane and leave England for ever and never see any of them again; and when she heard Catherine was feeling ill and had had to go to bed she was not a bit sorry. Catherine had the Admiral to love her and would soon have a jolly baby to play with, his baby. Catherine had everything, it wasn’t fair. But no, only silly little girls thought that, and she wasn’t going to be a cry-baby, so she only sulked like a thundercloud all the next day, until suddenly she remembered that there was going to be a banquet that evening, and scampered off to choose her prettiest dress for it.
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