The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  Janey has made up her own bed for us, and the fire is lit in the grate and a little supper is laid out on the table before the fire for two people. Once again, she is our good angel. Ned comes in quietly, closing the door behind him, and looks from his sister to me, his wife.

  “What’s happening?” he asks. “What’s going on?”

  There is silence. “Katherine has something to tell you,” Janey prompts me.

  I try to smile, but I am trembling. “I think I may be with child,” I say. “Ned, I hope you are happy? I think I may be with child.”

  I cannot mistake the panic in his face. “Are you sure?”

  “Not at all! I’m not sure,” I say, as frightened as he is. “Janey thought it so. I might be wrong.”

  “Of course she’s sure,” Janey says. “She missed her course in January.”

  “But sometimes I do miss one,” I say. “And I forget to count. So I might miss one or two.”

  “So you’re not sure?” he repeats.

  “Are you not pleased?” I can feel that my mouth is trembling. I so want him to be delighted, as Janey was delighted. For I am afraid of what this is going to mean for us, and I don’t know what we are going to do.

  He crosses the room in one stride and he takes my hand and kneels at my feet as if I were going to dub him a knight. “Of course I am pleased,” he says, his face hidden from me. “I am delighted. There is nothing that I want more than our child, and how wonderful that he should come so soon.”

  “The heir to the throne,” Janey reminds him. “The only Tudor boy of this generation. I don’t count Margaret Douglas’s boys.”

  “If it’s a boy. And if I’m not mistaken altogether,” I remind them.

  “Boy or girl, I shall love this baby for his beautiful mother,” Ned says. He kisses my hand and then he rises up and kisses me on the mouth. Jane moves tactfully towards the door, but he gestures that she shall stay.

  “Wait, Janey, we need to talk. And besides, we can’t use your bed now.”

  He smiles at me and I realize that if I am with child, we cannot lie together until after I am churched after childbed. This is months and months away.

  “I am not sure,” I say again. I cannot bear the thought that we will not make love when I feel the same urgent desire as always, when I am not even sure that I am with child. Surely, this too is an outworn superstition that we need not observe?

  “Of course,” Janey says delightedly. “And we have to plan what we do.”

  “We’ll have to tell the queen,” Ned says.

  “We have to tell her before I start to get fat,” I say. “But not before then. There’s no need for us to tell her before then, is there?”

  “Perhaps we should. Then we could space it out, so it’s not such a shock for her. First, we could tell her that we are married, and later tell her that you are with child.”

  I say nothing. I feel quite sick with fear at the thought of telling Elizabeth that we are married.

  “She should be pleased,” Janey says. “It leaves her free to stay unmarried for all her life, if there is a boy baby in the royal cradle.”

  “She should be pleased,” I say cautiously. “But what if she isn’t?”

  “Oh, what’s the worst she can do?” Janey demands boldly. “Send you from court for a while? You’d be going into confinement anyway, and if she sends you into exile you can go to Hanworth for the birth, and Ned and I can come, too.”

  “If she is furious . . .”

  “Why would she be furious?” Ned asks me. “All we have done is marry without her permission. That’s not illegal since Queen Mary repealed the law. There can be no doubt that she would have given permission if we had asked her. She had no grounds for refusal, and she has no reason for displeasure. People will blame us for being in a hurry, but nobody can blame us for honorable love. Our parents agreed! There can be no objection.”

  I find my courage. “We’ll tell her,” I agree. There is a little silence. “When will we tell her?”

  “We’ll have to choose our moment,” Ned says. “Let’s not say anything till the end of Lent. Perhaps at the Easter feasting when the court is merry again. There will be some music and dancing—there’ll be a masque—she loves a masque and dancing. We’ll tell her when she’s enjoying herself.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” Janey says. She gives a little cough. “At Eastertide.”

  If I had not been so absorbed in watching to see what Ned truly thought of my news, trying to look past his well-acted joy to whether he is afraid as I am afraid, I would have seen that Janey is paler than ever. She coughs in her sleeve and there is a little spatter of red blood.

  “Janey!” I say in dismay.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “A blister on my lip.”

  Next day she takes to her bed, and now Ned and I meet in her room without pretense. Every day after chapel we come to see how she is, and now for the first time I see she is very ill, and that her flushes and high spirits have been those of a girl beside herself with fever.

  The physicians say that she will get better with the good weather, but I don’t see why they are so hopeful as the sun rises earlier every day, and the birds start to sing outside her window, but Janey gets no better. One morning I go to her room straight after chapel, but the door is closed and Janey’s lady-in-waiting is sitting outside, her eyes red from crying.

  “Is she sleeping?” I ask. “What’s the matter?”

  Mrs. Thrift shakes her head, her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my lady!”

  “Janey! Is she sleeping?”

  She swallowed. “No, my lady. She’s gone. In the night. I have sent for the physicians and her brother, and he will have to tell the queen.”

  I don’t understand. I won’t understand. “What d’you mean?”

  “She’s gone, my lady. She’s died.”

  I take hold of the cold stone frame of the door. “But she can’t have died. I saw her just after dinner last night, I left her when she was going to sleep. She was feverish; she is always feverish, but not dying.”

  The woman shakes her head. “Alas, poor lady.”

  “She’s only nineteen!” I say as if that means she cannot die. I should know better: my own sister died at the age of sixteen and our cousin the king at fifteen—sick like Janey.

  Mrs. Thrift and I look at each other blankly, as if neither of us can believe she is gone.

  “What am I going to do without her?” I say, and my voice is as plaintive as a lost child. “How am I ever going to face all this without her?”

  She looks alarmed. “Face what, my lady?”

  I lean my forehead against the wooden carved door as if my need for her will bring Janey back to me. I have lost my sister, I have lost my father, I have lost my mother and now my best friend. “Nothing,” I whisper. “Nothing.”

  Ned is heartbroken at the loss of his sister. She was his greatest counselor and his most enthusiastic admirer. She was the first audience for his poems; she used to read them to him and suggest changes. She told him that I was in love with him before I told her myself. She was his friend and confidante, as she was mine.

  “She found the minister!” he says.

  “She made me brave,” I say.

  “She showed us that love is dauntless,” he agrees. “Dauntless.”

  “I don’t know what I will do without her,” I say, thinking of this court, which is so filled with enemies and half friends and pretend friends; with Elizabeth, the great pretender, at the head of it all, turning her two-faced face this way and that.

  “William Cecil says he thinks I should go to France,” Ned remarks. “To attend the new king’s coronation. It’s a great honor for me, but I don’t want to go now.”

  “Don’t leave me!” I say instantly. “My love, you can’t leave me! I can’t be here without either of you.”

  “Janey said I should go,” he says. “She said that Cecil’s favor is as good as a pension. His friendship will help us, Ka
therine. He will tell the queen of our marriage.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I agree uncertainly. “But I can’t think of this now. I can’t think like a courtier, with Janey just gone!”

  “I shall have to make arrangements for her funeral,” Ned says sadly. “I’ve sent a message to my mother and I’ll speak again to my brother. And I’ll tell William Cecil that I will go if I can; I’ll tell him I’m not sure now.”

  “I’ll come to the funeral,” I decide. “Everyone knows that I loved her like a sister.”

  “You were her sister,” Ned says. “In every way. And you are her sister by marriage. She was so happy about that.”

  It is an impressive funeral. Elizabeth puts the court into mourning for Janey, acknowledging in death the kinship through King Edward that she mostly ignored in life. Bitterly, I think that Elizabeth does not want cousins, she does not want heirs, she wants all her relations to be as dead as her mother. But she does love a big funeral. She buries her kinswoman with all the honor that she withholds in life.

  Ned’s mother attends the burial of her daughter, although she leaves her low-born second husband at home. I think for a wild moment that I can talk to her, that this is a woman who married for love, without permission, as I have done. But she is rigid in her grief. She does not melt into tears, she does not turn to me as a daughter-in-law that she might have had, she does not even speak to her sons. She takes her place in the procession and she goes through the motions of mourning as if she wishes it were not happening, and she leaves court as soon as she can.

  Ned has no time for anything but the planning of the funeral, the chariot for the coffin, the rehearsing of the choir at Westminster Abbey. Nearly three hundred mourners follow the coffin, me among them, and I see Ned’s pale strained face illuminated by grief in the darkness of the great abbey. He looks towards me as if he feels my loving gaze on him, and he gives me a small sad smile. Then the great anthem that he chose rings out from the choir, and Janey is laid to rest in her family vault next to ours. Janey and my mother’s tombs are side by side, which is a comfort, though it makes it worse that my sister Jane is buried far away, in pieces in the Tower chapel.

  Ned accompanies his mother to Hanworth for a few weeks after the funeral, and although I write to him, he replies only once. He says that he is praying for Janey’s soul and helping his mother box up her clothes and her few little things. I write at once and say that I will look after her linnets that she kept at Hanworth. But he does not even reply to that.

  WHITEHALL PALACE,

  LONDON, SPRING 1561

  While I wait for him to come back to court nobody is surprised by my quiet sorrow. Everyone knows that Janey and I were dearest friends, nobody suspects that I am missing Ned, too. The only event is news that my cousin Margaret Douglas has sent her pretty son to France to take their family condolences on the death of the French king. As though anybody cares what the Lennox family does! But the gossip is that she has ordered her son Henry Stuart to propose marriage to the widowed queen. If Mary Queen of Scots wants another pretty mother’s boy to take the place of the one that she has lost, then she will have one conveniently to hand. But I imagine that she will want a man for a husband, and not a cat’s paw. Certainly all her cousins prefer men they can respect: Margaret Douglas worships her husband, Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox; Elizabeth’s taste for adventurers is a disgrace; and I would never consider a man that I could not truly respect.

  A few days after the funeral I find some blood on my linen nightgown and I suppose it is my course, come at last, come late. There is not much, and there is nobody that I can ask. I wish Janey were here. She would count the days with me and confirm that my course came late and there never was a baby. I feel such a fool to be uncertain and yet I don’t have a wise woman or some old matron to tell me what to do. I have no friends with nurseries full of children, and I dare not consult anyone who might know, like the old ladies who keep the gowns in the royal wardrobe, because they are terrible gossips in a court that lives for gossip.

  It is the first thing that Ned asks me when he comes back to court. He hands me the cage of linnets and I exclaim over them and take them to my room and hang them on a hook near the window, where they can have some sunshine on their pretty freckled wings.

  “Katherine, my love, leave them,” he begs me. “I have to talk to you.”

  “We’ll go into the gardens,” I say.

  I walk a little ahead of him and we go to our favorite knot garden where the little gravel paths wind round and round the low hedges. But the walled garden is full of gardeners, raking the gravel and cutting the hedges.

  “Not here!” Ned says in irritation. “Let’s go to the orchard.”

  The blossom is pink and white, as thick on the boughs as if they were bowed down with rosy snow. Bees hurry like anxious dairymaids from one opening bud to another. I can hear a cuckoo calling, and I look for her gray back. I love cuckoos. I hear them so often and see them so rarely.

  “Listen,” Ned says urgently. “I have my passport from Elizabeth to travel to France.” He shows me her signature, the affected “E” and all the scrolling lines. “But I will not go if you are with child. If there is any chance that you are carrying our baby, I will stay, and we will tell the queen together.”

  My dread of facing Elizabeth without Janey’s support is almost worse than my dread of Ned going away. “I don’t know,” I say, distracted by the cuckoo that is calling so close that it must be almost overhead, hidden in the branches. “I don’t think so. I can’t be sure. I think I had a course, just after Janey’s . . .” I can’t say the word “funeral.”

  Ned squeezes my hand. “I won’t go unless you allow it,” he says.

  “I suppose you want to go,” I say irritably. “Paris and Rheims and everywhere.”

  “Of course I’d like to see these cities, and attend the new French king’s coronation. I want to learn about the world,” he says fairly. “And it would do us no harm for Cecil to find me reliable. Of course it is a great opportunity for me. But I won’t go if you are with child. I won’t leave you. I promised. I am yours, Katherine, I am yours till death.”

  I shake my head. I am so afraid of confessing to Elizabeth, and certain that Janey was wrong and there is no baby. I feel that I have lost everything in this sorrowful spring: my best friend, Janey, and the chance of her brother’s baby, and now he is going away too. “It’s gone. I don’t think it was ever there,” I tell him.

  “Can a woman not tell such a thing?”

  “I don’t know what I am supposed to feel!” I exclaim. “All I feel is frightened and terribly sad about Janey, and I don’t dare to face Elizabeth. But I don’t feel anything else. I am no fatter or anything.”

  He looks at me as if I should know such mysteries, as if every girl in the world knows it by nature, and I am very silly that I do not.

  “How am I supposed to know?” I demand. “If everyone knew we were married, I could ask your mother or some midwives. It’s not my fault.”

  “Of course it’s not your fault,” he says quickly. “Nor mine. It would just be so much better if we knew for sure. If you knew for sure.”

  The cuckoo calls directly over our heads and I look up and see a flash of beautifully barred breast feathers.

  “Are you even listening to me at all?” he demands hotly.

  “You might as well go, and come back as quick as you can,” I say sulkily. “Nothing is going to change much within a month, I suppose. And people will only wonder if you refuse such a chance.”

  “If you send for me, I’ll come back at once,” he promises. “For whatever reason. The moment you send for me I will come to you. Wherever I am. I have a new servant and he will carry messages for me, between you and me, without telling anyone. His name is Glynne, you will remember that? And trust him when he comes to you?”

  “I’ll remember, but you will promise to go to the French coronation, and come straight home?” I ask him. “No running af
ter the dowager queen like that puppy Henry Stuart, Margaret Douglas’s son.”

  “I will,” he promises. “I won’t be long, a few weeks only.”

  “All right then,” I say unhappily. “Go.”

  He produces from behind his back a small scroll and a purse of gold. “This is for you,” he says sweetly. “My dear wife. For any expenses you have when I am away. And this is my will. I leave you a thousand pounds’ worth of land. A thousand!”

  “Oh, don’t say it!” At once I am in floods of tears again thinking of Janey dying in the night, alone, without even saying good-bye to me. “Don’t say it. I don’t want to inherit anything from you. I just want to live with you, not die. Everyone that I love dies, and now you are going away!”

  “Keep it safe anyway,” he says, pressing it into my hands, “and I will be back within the month to reclaim it from you.”

  GREENWICH PALACE,

  SUMMER 1561

  The court hardly notices when Ned bids farewell to the queen, everyone is so busy with amusement. This is Elizabeth’s favorite time of year, and every day there are balls and hunts and picnics. We ride out of Greenwich Palace down to hunt the water meadows that run beside the river. We walk in the gardens in the evenings and watch the early swifts and swallows fly round and around the high turrets and swoop over the waters. They dip into their own reflections, making a little splash as they part from their mirrored selves.

  Elizabeth is as much in love with Robert Dudley as ever, quite unable to resist his outstretched hand to dance or to walk beside him, quite unable to resist his bullying when he threatens to go and live in Spain if she does not consult him as if he were her husband. He has regained all the ground he lost on the death of his wife with the queen, though he never will with the court. The country will never accept him as her husband, and the great game of Elizabeth’s life is to promise him enough to keep him close to her, without revealing to anyone else what she swears to him. I think her deception is far more disloyal and far worse than mine. At least I don’t lie to Ned, though I have to lie to everyone else.