But the murmurous voice rumbled on imperturbably, ‘Yes, Queen Jane’s new seal leaves him no time for sealing old friendships. I wish I had trained my little dog to leap at lower game than a bishop’s square cap – he’ll snatch one off at sight. But it should have been deans. That Dean of the Devil, Goodman, nay rather, Badman, is the cause that I cannot go to my book for the crying of childer in my chamber. Never bear childer, gracious Princess. They cry to you to provide their sustenance – and prevent your doing it.’
He shuffled over to the silver mugs of flowers. ‘You have a fine tussie-mussic here, what is the newfangled name for it – a “posy”? a word of naught, a chambermaid of a word – no reason, nor rhyme neither in misnaming flowers as poesie. Aha, here are outlandish rarities – Damask roses, my old colleague Dr. Liniker brought you from Syria. But what’s this gypsy gang doing from the heath outside?’
‘The village children brought me wild flowers and wood strawberries when they heard of my sickness,’ said Elizabeth with something of a smirk. ‘They know my love for harebells. Beautiful even when they fade and their blue turns white, like the eyes of the children murdered by Gilles de Rais, that foul sorcerer. Yet once he rode with de Gaulle to fight for Joan of Arc, and did not betray her as did others, her own countrymen. Civil war is the curse of France.’ She slid him a sharp glance from under her tawny eyelashes but he was impervious. Obtuse? Or merely cautious? She tried once more, sighing piously. ‘Pray heaven it will not be that of England yet again!’
But he was touching the thin flower stems, tossing their whispering bells. ‘Yes, they are Your Grace’s flowers – fine-drawn as hairs but wiry, upspringing when trodden. Your eyes at times have their blue. Here is one faded white indeed but with a line of blue rimming its edge, carrying beauty into death – as you will do, Princess, at whatever age you die, for your bones are delicate, yes, their shape will shine with noble understanding in a death-mask, even in a skull.’
‘You pay a grisly compliment. You may soon prove it.’
‘No, Lady, your sickness is not so grave.’ (The old rascal must know her mortal danger was not from sickness!) And there was an odd glimmer behind his thick spectacles as he humbled on among the wild flowers, now twirling a dog-rose from the hedges. ‘Impostor, you won your name falsely! I have proved you no cure for a mad dog’s bite.’
‘The mad dog has not yet bitten me. I have snatched my hand back from his jaws,’ she added boldly.
But now he was looking at a small pansy. ‘Here’s a wanton, Love-in-Idleness, though some call it Johnny Jump-Up, which suits these upstart days of the new gentry.’
And he must know that Johnny Jump-Up was the nickname that the common people gave to John Dudley the lawyer’s son who had jumped to Sir John, then Viscount Lisle, then Earl of Warwick, and now Duke of Northumberland, Duke Dudley as he was always called. But his globed eyes did not turn in her direction. ‘Aha, my gay fellow, Ragged Robin! Many a Johnny Jump-Up’s son may become that, and so may you, my bold Cock Robin, if you ride too fast on your father’s errands.’
An oath snapped out from the bed. ‘Stop your teasing, you ancient villainy. Tell me what young Robin Dudley has done.’
‘Ridden out from London at the head of three hundred horses, as fine a troop as you could see on a summer morning clattering over Tower Bridge, with my bold Cock Robin at their head, and the sun just coming up over the house-tops to glint on his scarlet waistcoat. Aye, I saw ’em all go past with these old eyes at four o’clock yesterday morning, and, thinks I, there’s a gallant company of young men, all for one old maid! – For my bonny sweet Robin was riding to fetch back my Lady Mary a prisoner.’
‘And has he?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Where is Mary?’
‘Nobody knows.’
Had Mary been as astute as herself? Impossible, she decided, somewhat piqued. Mary must have had secret warning that their brother was already dead. It flashed on her that it must have been Mary’s refusal to come to London that had forced Duke Dudley’s hand; that he had had to come out in the open before he had intended; declare the King dead, and Jane as Queen.
‘And with Jane as Queen,’ she said, ‘your bold Cock Robin will be no ragamuffin but an elder brother to King Guildford, God save the mark!’
‘Not so,’ said the doctor placidly. ‘They had a to-do persuading little Lady Jane to be Queen,’ (‘Mighty modest of her!’ came with a snort from the bed) – ‘but when it came to her young bridegroom as King, she refused as flat as my foot. Who was Guildford Dudley to be King, says she, and he with not a drop of the blood-royal in him? She’d consent to his being made a Duke so as not to demean herself through her husband – but never King! Phew, what a family squabble! Both the old cats yowling their heads off, his mother and her mother, and the boy bursting with rage at being downed by a girl. Off he goes in his tantrums, he and his mother, to sulk in their own house, and if they think that will bring the bride to her senses, they’re clean out, for she can’t abide him. ’Tis said she’s not yet gone to bed with him, for all her mother’s thumps. Little Miss ‘Seventeen come Sunday’ – nay, she’ll not be that for some months yet – has a good dollop of the Tudor blood in her!’
‘’Tis no news to me. Give me fresher.’
‘Fresh as hot bread. For she was proclaimed Queen Jane – a newfangled name, but Joan is now held to be coarse and homely – yesterday at five in the afternoon, and walked in the procession to the Tower, clattering on cork-soled wedge shoes a foot high under her long robes, for she’s so small no one could see her else – and the heralds cried “Queen Jane” to the crowds as I rode down Cheapside – I saw all their heads waving this way and that with the sun slanting on ’em like a field of waving corn, but, lord! they stayed as mum as that field – not a cheer raised among ’em, only the archers of the guard to shout “Long live Queen Jane!” Eh, lass, but her proud mother had to bear her train – think of that now!’
‘Eh, lad, I’ll swear it did more than all else to make Jane consent to be Queened!’
Dr. Turner stood abashed at his familiarity. ‘I forget, I forget,’ he murmured. ‘I grow an old man now, and you be a sharp young thing, sharp as a needle. Don’t be so sharp as you’ll cut yourself. Your Grace has a hard row to hoe, whichever way it goes now, Queen Jane or Queen Mary.’
Jane the gentle, studious schoolgirl, Mary the modest, simple, kindly old maid, far more akin to each other than to herself; both so conscientious, so anxious to do right, so rigidly certain they were right, both were of the stuff to be martyrs – and to make them! A duel between those two quiet women would be to the death – and of many.
Aloud she said coolly, ‘Do you put their chances as equal? But Johnny Jump-Up holds the Tower, manned and gunned; he still has an army from putting down the last rebellion; he has ships—’
‘Aye, a score of ’em riding at anchor in the Thames, been there three weeks past now, all ready, they say, to sail for Barbary and the Spice Islands.’
‘Spice Islands my nose! It smells gunpowder, not spices.’
‘Sharp as a needle, I say. But Your Grace has left out one thing, the hearts of the people.’
‘Are they for Mary and her Mass?’
‘They are for fair dealing. They’ll not have an innocent woman done out of her rights, and after all the long years she’s been bullied and put upon. It’s a shame, they say. As I rode here this morning there were copies of the Proclamation all new-printed, still wet and smelling of printers’ ink, being stuck up at every cross-road and market square, saying the King’s sisters were both bastards – if you’ll excuse my saying so! – and that it was King Edward’s will and testament that Jane should be Queen.’
‘Edward’s testament – but Dudley’s will!’
‘Not the people’s. Now I must jog on my way back to Wells, and do you stay still. Do not go to London, it would not be healthy for you. I will write out some prescriptions for your worthy governess to make up in the still-room.’
There was a sharp rustle from the window-curtain as Mrs Ashley’s alert and wary back swung round from her pretended scrutiny of the garden.
‘Some draughts of rhubarb and water-lily roots to cool the blood, and of acanthus leaves whose subtle parts dry up the moisture of a cold brain and cut ill humours, dispersing them to their appointed places. And let Your Grace,’ his voice dropped an octave, ‘take the advice of the Latins, A fabis abstineto.’
‘Abstain from beans – why beans?’
‘“Bean-belly Leicestershire” they say, and your cousin Jane is a Leicestershire lass, the more’s the pity, for her. You have only to hold up a Leicestershire man by the collar to hear the beans rattle in his belly.’
‘Have you tried it with my Lady Jane?’
‘Tut, child – and Your Grace a scholar! Have you forgot that the ancients gave their vote by casting in a bean? So that to tell us to abstain from beans is not merely to say they are windy and discompose the tranquillity of men’s minds by their flatuous evaporation. Nay, it gives a graver warning: “Do not meddle with affairs of state”.’
‘That’s special pleading. Pythagoras said he might have had calmer sleeps had he totally abstained from beans.’
‘That is to say, from affairs of state. So do you sleep as calmly as you can, fair Princess?’
The fear came back into her eyes. ‘With Dudley coiled like a snake about to strike?’
‘Then take the sour herb of grace, the strong and bitter rue—’
‘Rue? Ugh!’
‘—for when,’ said he, impressively, looking down on the slender tawny head and pointed face, ‘that swift creature of enchantment, the weasel or Dandy Dog, is to fight the serpent, she arms herself by eating rue against his might.’
‘Have you proved that too?’
‘No, Lady – but you may do so.’
He took his leave, ducking his way backwards to the door in a succession of clumsy bows, the last of them towards the window.
‘See to it, good Mrs Ashley, that Her Grace takes full doses of all I prescribe, for I know well her habit of obedience to you.’
Then finally out he flumped and ‘good Mrs Ashley’ swung forward in a passionate crackle of skirts. ‘What a clown, what a clod! “Bean-bellies” – is it possible! And he as good as called Your Grace a weasel!’
Elizabeth flung herself back on the pillows, laughing uncontrollably as a schoolgirl and mimicking the bell-like whimper of young weasels in chase. ‘How do I know they sound like that? How do you know I am not one? Watch me at night and you’ll see me slip out to hunt the hare in the dark with a Chime of Dandy Dogs!’
Ashley crossed herself inadvertently. They said Nan Bullen had been a witch – was her child one too? She recovered herself with an uneasy giggle and a reminder of the other parent. ‘Fie on your royal father’s daughter! You should scorn to belong to less than a Pride of Lions.’
‘Oh, the cub can roar too.’
‘That she can!’ muttered Ashley, adding hastily, ‘Is that old man to be trusted?’
‘Is any man? There’s my very good friend Mr Cecil busy writing “Jana Regina”!’ She laughed again with, to Ashley, a maddening insouciance. ‘I liked his training his dog to fly at bishops’ caps.’
‘Yet he gets ordained so as to get a Deanery, the old hypocrite!’
‘I think I have seldom met an honester man.’
Mrs Ashley pursed up her lips as if to prevent herself bursting with exasperation.
‘At the least it shows what King Edward’s tutor, Sir John Cheke, has always said, that the fellow’s no gentleman.’
‘Cheke should know. His mother kept a small wine-shop in a back street in Cambridge.’
Cat Ashley exploded out of the room, to inform the steward, Mr Parry, that when it came to a man, however elderly, ill-favoured or ill-bred, the Lady Elizabeth—
CHAPTER THREE
‘There’s a man coming to the Lady Elizabeth now,’ said Mr Parry, wheeling a heavy eye towards the little turret window. ‘I think it’s her former tutor, Mr Ascham.’
‘He back again! I thought he was in Germany. How these ambassadors’ secretaries do gad about!’
‘His master probably had an early secret wind of the crisis here and came hurrying home. Ambassadors, even abroad, know most of the game.’
‘And what’s Mr Ascham’s? He’d cooled off the Lady Elizabeth, left in a hurry – and a huff-and was all for the Lady Jane. So what’s he doing here unless to crow over the success of his precious little bookworm in snatching the Crown from her?’
‘From her elder sister, the Lady Mary,’ he corrected, patting his belly.
‘A Papist! The people will never have that now. And she was bastardised after her mother’s divorce.’
‘So was the Lady Elizabeth after her mother’s beheading.’
‘Be hanged to your logic. The bastardy is only the thinnest excuse for Duke Dudley to seize the Crown for himself, in the person of that undersized brat with the freckled nose. There go the church bells now again for her in the distance. Pray heaven Her Grace does not hear them on t’other side of the house or I shall get another wigging.’
‘Mr Ascham is dismounting in the courtyard,’ said Mr Pray over his shoulder. ‘A pretty nag!’
‘I’ll never let him in on her. It’s not safe.’
‘Best find out what Her Grace wishes first. “When it comes to a man,” however faithless in transferring his devotion to another, the Lady Elizabeth—’
‘Oh, to hell with you!’ said Mrs Ashley.
She ran out of the room to the top of the great staircase and stood listening to voices in the hall below. Dr. Turner, going out, was speaking with Mr Aschim coming in.
‘It’s too late,’ she hissed to Mr Parry, who had followed softly at his discretion; ‘that old busybody has told him she may receive a visitor. Look, for the love of heaven, at Master Schoolmaster’s short cloak in the Spanish fashion! He’s put your new sleeveless coat clean out of date. And one of those little Austrian caps like an oyster patty at the side of his pate, glued to it, I’ll swear, or it would never stay on. How fast they climb, these rising young men!’
Through all her gibes she was busy adjusting her own dress and hair in a wall mirror of polished steel, the size of a sixpence she complained, as she smacked her cheeks and sucked in her lips to redden them, then shot them out again in a succession of sharp comments like peas from a pea-shooter. ‘What’s he think of the whole queer business I’d like to know, and I will know, too, in the shake of a posset cup. Send for some of that cooled Tokay, Parry, from the lower cellar that the Lord Admiral laid down, God rest his soul! That will loosen his tongue as to which of the three young women – one not so young, and one so young she’s scarce a woman – is most likely to sit on the throne of England. And after all King Harry’s efforts to get a male heir, and no one can say he didn’t do his best, with six wives, two divorced and two beheaded! Yet after all there’s got to be a woman on the throne, is it possible!’
‘It is not possible,’ pronounced Mr Parry as though from the seat of judgment; ‘all the best legal authorities are agreed that it will be declared against the laws of England to have a woman sovereign.’
But Mrs Ashley had not waited to hear the opinion of the best legal authorities. With a pleasant excitement flushing her already smarting cheeks she was pacing in impressively stately fashion down the great staircase into the hall to play the gracious hostess on Her Grace’s behalf and the welcoming old friend on her own.
The bells had swung through the lime-scented air as Roger Ascham rode up the long avenue.
‘Long live Queen Jane,
Long may she reign.’
That was what they sang to him as he thought of her and of the Lady Elizabeth, but, like nearly everybody else at the moment, not of the Lady Mary.
Two crowded years he had spent in Germany, in Spain, in Italy, learning to be a courtier and a diplomat and a statesman, and here he was embarking on
the most important test of his new career; he must cross swords in diplomacy with the Lady Elizabeth, with whom as her tutor he had crossed swords so often, and then once too often.
What had happened? He had never been sure. You never could be sure with Elizabeth. Which Elizabeth?
A lively precocious child had stood beside him at the archery butts and shown off the gay colours of her long shooting-gloves while she bent her supple body as he had taught her to the bow; had laughed, yes, and flirted with him across the schoolroom table. Would he find her now at Hatfield? – or the ghostly stranger who had taken her place after the Admiral’s execution and her long illness – a stranger who sat white and tense in a nunlike gown, her eyes only for her book?
Yet even then there had still been a hint of something fiery and provocative, dangerous and baffling, of the wild charm that her mother had swayed over men, to her own destruction. Elizabeth had surely inherited that, together with the vein of poetry from her mother’s brother, George Lord Rochford, who had been beheaded for his supposed incest with Nan Bullen. Ascham remembered the lines of broken verse like a torn-off cry of pain that he had found among a mass of papers Elizabeth had destroyed in some frantic fit of nerves or temper:
‘I am and am not, freeze and yet I burn,
Since from myself my other self I turn;.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying – flies when I pursue it;
Stands and lives by me, does what I have done.’
Yes, she had become her own shadow. But she would not stay so; the fire still burned beneath the frozen face, within her ash-grey shroud.
As he had found to his cost when it blazed out against him for no apparent reason.
The Lady Jane would never have so treated her tutor, Mr Aylmer. ‘Oh happy Aylmer to have such a scholar – so divine a maid – best adorned virgin!’ So he had written to Aylmer, the very words he had once used for his own happiness in teaching Elizabeth – ‘but to you I can repeat them with more truth.’
Elizabeth, Captive Princess Page 2