‘About £50 still unpaid,’ he said. ‘It was the dice, soulless little monsters. I could no more be mistaken over a cock than over a fellow at the long bow. But Your Grace mustn’t think of it,’ he added confusedly.
‘I’m not thinking of it. Parry will see to it.’
‘Parry back again!’ he exclaimed, then tried to cover his astonishment by expressing his gratitude. But beneath it his thoughts would go racing on in question – and suspicion. Parry had betrayed to her enemies the confidences of her governess, Mrs Ashley, concerning the familiarities between the Princess and the Admiral, Thomas Seymour.
Why then was Parry back in his former position as steward in her household? Was it to show that she disregarded all the scandal he had aided, as beneath her notice? Or was it because there was further, darker scandal that she feared he might divulge if he were not kept favoured and propitiated?
What was the truth about her; which the real Elizabeth? This was not the one – or two or three – that he had known. Even her hair was different from when he had last seen it, then strained back, brushed as smoothly as a tight-fitting satin cap down on either side of her strained face. He could not believe it had been of the same texture as the fiery cloud of gossamer that now tossed loose about her head. The very bee that had been crawling up and down the silver mirror seemed to share his doubts as to its nature, and investigating became entangled in its shining net, buzzing furiously. He dashed to the rescue, praying heaven she would not shriek and so bring her women running. What woman would not shriek with a bee caught in her hair? But she did not. She lay quite still and smiled up at him as he disentangled the insect.
Once he had thought her smile that of a pagan goddess carved centuries ago by some man who had never heard of Christ. He thought so now. He still bent over her head; he felt dizzy, a little drunk. What would happen if he kissed her?
The bee stung him and he swore. The pagan goddess hooted.
‘Let that teach you to be a knight-errant rescuing distressed damsels!’ she said ungratefully. ‘But you will be revenged – it’s the bee who will die of it.’
He could believe anything of her, say anything to her. Was it true that Duke Dudley’s eldest son wanted to divorce his wife to marry her, and take the throne together? That, he had heard out in Austria, had been the first plan, and the Duke had proposed it, but on her refusal had hastily married a younger son, Guildford, to the Lady Jane Grey and substituted her as Queen. He asked her if the first plan had been true.
‘Young Jack Dudley? What if he did? That’s never the one I’d choose.’
‘You’d fancy jolly Cock Robin rather, like all the other women?’
‘What women?’ she demanded quickly.
‘His marriage to Amy Robsart hasn’t stopped them,’ he answered evasively.
‘That melancholy insipid semi-invalid! How can he look at her!’
‘He’s looking for another at the moment, the Lady Mary.’
‘He’ll be luckier if he fails to find her,’ said Elizabeth grimly.
The dazzling moment of intimacy had slipped. He wondered what had possessed him. Yet the next instant she invited it again by her flippant questions of that nest of foreign refugees, with the dreadful names, scholars who had had to flee from Germany because of their opinions, and were harboured by Jane in her parents’ home – ‘Messrs. Shturmius,’ she stuttered, ‘and Bull – Ball – no, Bollinger – it makes one bubble at the mouth to say it. Even the English ones are called Skinner or Wallack. What a Lost Tribe they look in their moth-eaten black gowns and mouldy beards like last year’s nests!’
‘Yet we owe them a debt,’ he reminded her. ‘If Italy brought us the New Learning, Germany has brought the New Religion. The German mind may be ponderous, but that it is profound—’
‘Profound as a bog. Dull as a fog. And I suppose we’ll have a profoundly guttural-speaking German for chief minister, since Mr Bollinger has dedicated his new work on “Christian Perfection” to Jane and her father, and she’s returned the compliment with thanks for such ‘little books of pure and unsophisticated religion.’
‘Did she show you that?’ he asked with a faint uneasiness, he did not know why.
‘And her filial excuses for her father, who “as far as his weighty engagements permit is diligently occupied in its perusal.” “My most noble father would have written to you had he not been summoned by most weighty business.” Well, hunting and gaming are very weighty!’
Her reckless joking flattered Ascham, it showed her trust in him as an old friend and implied the contrast between him and these fusty scholars; but it made him wince for poor little Lady Jane, too innocent to realise how odd her taste in men must seem to this mocking girl three years her senior. He tried to show her Jane as he had seen her in that last interview that had so absorbed his mind on the ride here, to tell her how she had answered him, as Plato himself might have done, on earthly pastimes as the mere shadows of heavenly pleasures.
‘I’m sure my cousin’s answers to you were platonic,’ Elizabeth observed drily.
He tried to engage her sympathy with Jane for her cruel treatment by her parents, ‘things which she would not name for the honour she bears them.’
‘Much honour it does ’em to hint at things too dreadful to name! Is that “Christian Perfection”? My cousin’s such a scholar that she seems a saint, but scratch that saint and you’ll catch a Tartar – or a Tudor! Some would say it’s the same!’
He inwardly agreed – for some Tudors.
And Jane’s straight little nose was prettier than Elizabeth’s – you could see what an authoritative beak hers would be in old age. He wished he could tell her so. He wished she could have seen that letter of his to Aylmer comparing Jane so favourably with her.
A sudden awful notion struck him – had she seen it?
He had written it ostensibly to Aylmer but really to Jane; and Jane seemed to like showing her correspondence – this then was the reason for that uneasy quiver he had felt just now when Elizabeth had quoted from it. If, as was more than likely, the two girls had ever had a tiff, that letter of his would have provided Jane with some trenchant weapons in the complaints he had hinted against Elizabeth after a furious quarrel with ‘his most illustrious pupil,’ complaints ‘which prudence makes it necessary I should conceal even to myself. I have no fault to find with the Lady Elizabeth, whom I have always found the best of ladies.’ (Poor praise compared with that of the ‘divine maid,’ etc.!) ‘But if ever I shall have the happiness to meet my friend Aylmer again, then I shall repose in his bosom my sorrows abundantly.’
Were those words standing out as sharply in her mind now as they were in his? He looked at her and she looked back at him, smiling, inscrutable – the pagan goddess? Say rather an imp of Satan! A wickedly teasing magic was at work; under its dancing light all his ingenuous enthusiasm for Jane, and Jane’s for her tutor, stood revealed as calf-love. It was suddenly plain to him that he was in love with the Queen, and the Queen with Mr Aylmer, and that there was not the smallest chance of the three of them ‘keeping this mode of life among them’ however ‘freely, sweetly and philosophically’ they wrote about it.
‘You and I and Amyas,
Amyas and you and I,’
Not ‘to the greenwood,’ but ‘to London
must we go, alas,
You and I, my life, and Amyas.’
No the only rational mode of life did not seem in the least rational now.
And it dawned on him that it had not been the height of worldly wisdom to praise one rival lady to another.
Suddenly he confessed his defeat with a shy, charming smile. ‘I thought I was a very clever fellow, but learning is not wisdom. Your Grace has had a dunce for her tutor.’ But he had to make a last attempt to assert himself as a man of the world.
‘I dare say I had my head a trifle turned with all my business at the Emperor’s Court,’ he added airily. ‘Within only three days I had to write letters to forty-seven differ
ent princes, and the meanest of them a cardinal!’
‘You have an exquisite discrimination as a scholar,’ she said softly. ‘Not forty-seven princes could rob you of it.’
She, so much younger than he, seemed older than the Serpent. And he was blushing like a schoolboy, chaffed for showing off. She took pity on him and said quickly, ‘What o’clock is it?’
He stared at the elaborate structure of wrought-gold and enamel made to show the phases of the moon and ebb and flow of the tides as well as the time, but did none of these things.
‘The clock is stopped.’
‘True. I could not bear to hear time’s footsteps hurrying past.’
‘You will have all time!’ he exclaimed, suddenly seeing her as immortal.
‘Nevertheless I want an hour now to rest.’
He took his leave, and, at the door, remembered.
‘And – Duke Dudley?’
‘Say to him what I say to you too, Roger Ascham. Abstain from beans.’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘How travel improves a man! I’d never have thought it could do so much for young Master Schoolmaster whom I’d always thought a conceited head-in-air. But now—’
‘What’s he given you this time, Cat? Another silver pen?’
‘Nothing, a mere toy from Venice such as the ladies there carry against the sun.’ Mrs Ashley flirted a painted fan. Elizabeth grabbed it.
‘That’s meant for me. He’d too much diplomacy to give it outright. All the same, I’d say old Dr. Dodderer’s got a sounder grasp of affairs here than the cleverest scholar in England. He’s got his finger where a doctor’s should be – on the pulse of the people.’
‘The people, faugh! What power have they?’
‘£50?’ said Mr Parry, rolling the white of his eye up at the former tutor. ‘£50 is a tall order!’
‘It’s Her Grace’s order.’
‘Ah, but she doesn’t know the state of her coffers.’
‘Why not?’ (She must have changed if she did not. Ascham had seen the household books signed by her at the foot of every page.)
‘It’s not a lady’s concern. I am here to save her such irksome toils.’
‘Devil doubt you!’ muttered Ascham. They had never got on well. He submitted himself to the inevitable. ‘Well, if you rake off £5 for your trouble—’
‘Twenty,’ said Mr Parry.
‘Then I shall tell Her Grace you demanded a score.’
‘And I that you demanded a hundred.’
Mr Ascham gritted his teeth, then smiled.
‘Come, Parry, remember old times and take a dozen – a baker’s dozen,’ he added, as the jellied eye coldly crystallised.
‘Thirteen,’ said Mr Parry, ‘is an unlucky number.’
‘Make it fifteen then. Why, with twenty off I only get thirty.’
‘Thirty pounds is thirty pounds,’ said Mr Parry unanswerably.
And with thirty pounds in his purse Mr Ascham rode back to London and the palace-fortress-prison of the Tower. The setting sun had turned the Thames to copper as he clattered through the gateway.
In the royal apartments of the Tower, Duke Dudley sat in his state room with three of his fine sons; they turned at Ascham’s entry with a cry of ‘Robin!’ ‘What news?’ then muttered in disappointment that it was ‘only the tutor.’ But the Duke did not stir; nor did he raise an eyebrow at Elizabeth’s message, but swore softly, melodiously, as though repeating a sonnet.
He did not look like a desperate adventurer; his slender form and delicate eyebrows, arched as in amused surprise, made him seem much younger than his age. And he still affected the dress of a young dandy in a subdued and exquisite taste – no jewels, not even a ring on his fine hands, and clothes of dark and subtly contrasting colours, cut with startling severity of line, in conformity with his dislike of any seams. Stuffs had to be specially woven for him so as to avoid the crude necessity of a seam, which set his teeth on edge, so he said, to the affectionate amusement of his beautiful wife and the seven children out of thirteen who had managed to keep alive, a fairly high rate of survival.
The three who now hung about the room, Jack, Ambrose and Guildford, were tall stalwart young men, the youngest of them, Guildford, not yet eighteen, his round rosy face still wearing a look of sulky astonishment at his bride’s failure to appreciate him. To make up for it he sat at a table in the window, to catch the light that was already dim within these massive walls, and busied himself with scribbling a rough draft of a dispatch recalling ‘his’ English Minister to the Netherlands. That would show them abroad, at any rate, that he was really King. His elder brothers stood in the other window-seat chattering in low tones with an occasional burst of excited laughter which made Guildford’s ears burn red in the sunset light lest they should be laughing at him.
Jack the eldest whistled admiringly when Ascham gave Elizabeth’s perfectly non-committal answer. ‘There’s the lass! You’ll never catch her out! “My elder sister is the only one concerned” indeed! As if Mary counted for anything! Robin should be bringing her in tow and a flood of tears by now. Can’t think what’s delaying him.’
‘Aye, Bess is the one we have to reckon with, sir, mark my words,’ Ambrose growled importantly. ‘We’ll have to send a body of horse for her too and fetch her in here by force.’
‘Her Grace is far too ill to be moved,’ said Ascham hastily. ‘I had a word with her physician, Dr. Turner.’
Duke Dudley’s fine eyes, brown, glossy and rather blank, like chestnuts, fixed themselves on the former tutor in a disconcerting stare.
‘The girl’s always ill – when it’s convenient to her,’ he remarked.
‘My lord, she was dangerously ill for many months – the doctors despaired of her life after—’ Ascham’s voice faded out.
‘After the death of her lover, the Lord High Admiral,’ the Duke finished pleasantly. ‘Well, I’ve no doubt Tom Seymour made many women ill for months – nine to be exact. But as that was four years ago, she’s had time to recover.’
Ascham flushed. Nor did Jack Dudley look pleased. To revive a scandal that even her enemies had denied by public proclamation was a shabby way to wage war against a woman.
‘It’s women we have to fight now, and with their weapons,’ said his father, guessing the young man’s thought with the uncanny sympathy that made his family adore him. He rubbed his hand back over his head, rumpling the smooth hair with a comically rueful gesture. ‘D’you think after all my years of soldiering, fighting off the French from our shores, scarifying the Scots on the Border, that I want to march against a tiresome old maid? Not that Mary will show any fight; how could she? Who’d ever follow her? Who knows her or cares about her? She’s lived in a backwater ever since childhood, and for my part I’d be only too glad to let her stay there.’
He was lolling back in his chair, turning his jewelled penholder over and over on the table with a faint metallic click every time it met the polished wood. So he would loll when rattling the dice for the highest stakes, in affectation of perfect indifference as to the result of his throw. He chose his words with precision, as if considering a subject that was of no personal importance to himself. ‘She’s never had any requirements or capabilities beyond those of any simple country squire’s or parson’s wife. Let her have her Mass in the privacy of her household, give her pocket-money to buy gaudy clothes for her scraggy little body, presents for her women friends and jellies and baby-clothes for the country women round her, and she’d make no trouble on her own account.’
With a placid eye he watched the effect of this astonishing tolerance on his sons, and signed to Ascham to go. Ascham stole a look at them as he went. Were these gorgeous greedy young men in their lust for money and power really going to swallow such plausible self-deception?
Ambrose swallowed it whole. His round bullock eyes were glazed with astonished alarm. Beefier and stolider than his brothers, he could have no appreciation of such maunderings, nor any suspicion that they might b
e put up for a cockshy.
‘God’s body!’ he burst out, ‘you’ll never let her live, sir? Think of the danger to all of us! She’ll agree fast enough to forgo any claim to the throne, no doubt of that – but think of others who’ll make the claim for her and rise in her name, even if it’s not with her consent. As long as the King’s sisters are alive, our heads will sit loose on our shoulders.’
‘No need to wag yours as if it’s already coming off!’ cried Guildford with a shrill hysterical crow of laughter, but chimed in on the same note: ‘Think, sir, she may run to her precious cousin the Emperor and get him to come here and fight for her.’
‘She’d never have the wits nor the guts,’ said Jack. ‘She’s been trying to get aboard that ship for the Netherlands for years, and always bungled it. And the Emperor doesn’t want her – objected long ago that if she ran away to him he’d have to pay for her keep!’
‘But, God’s body, where is she? She sets out for London in answer to our summons—’
‘To her dear dead brother’s summons,’ his father corrected softly.
‘Well, yes, then!’ Guildford flushed, not caring to remember that ruse. ‘Anyway, she sets out, gets as far as Hoddesdon, and then all we know is that she there met a passing stranger who appears to have been a travelling goldsmith – and after that she’s disappeared off the face of the earth. Where? Why? What can have happened?’
‘What must have happened,’ said Duke Dudley, his deliberate voice quietening the excited lad, ‘is that she got wind somehow that the King’s dying message was a false lure, and fled. It’s exasperating, for I’ve had to come out from ambush, send Robin to arrest her, declare the King to be dead and Jane as Queen – all prematurely before we’ve secured the Princesses.’ He bit back the unpalatable admission that as long as he failed to secure them he had failed to make the chief move in the game.
But Guildford had got a taste of it. ‘Mary may be on board ship to the Netherlands even now! Wherever she is, she’s a danger.’
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