by Karen Harper
Ha, Cromwell, I thought perversely. Your vaunted power with the king is slipping, but he is asking me for advice.
“I know not, Your Grace, and would leave such judgments to you, of course,” I said, deciding to try to get my way by a feminine wile and not to stand up to him as I longed to do. My words came in a rush. “But I do know that I have seen only one man who rides as smoothly as you do, and that is John Ashley, who I have heard serves with your Master of the Horse here at court.”
I was afraid again. What if John had become ambitious in my absence and no longer wanted to escape the hothouse of the court? What if he would curse me for having him assigned to rural places in service to the daughter of the disgraced Anne Boleyn? No, John had cared deeply for the Boleyn heritage. Surely, I could pay him back for his kindnesses to me this way. I prayed he had not formed an attachment to another woman. How deeply I longed to see him.
“I’ll arrange it forthwith and look forward to a pretty piece of needlework from your lovey,” the king told me with a dismissive wave.
I thanked him, curtsied and backed a few steps away before turning toward the door. My love for my royal charge—and, yes, fear for my own well-being—had kept my contempt for this man from my face and voice. Yet now I understood how Anne Boleyn had stomached saying the words on the scaffold to praise the cruel and brutal king who had ruined her and could ruin any of us, even my Elizabeth.
That very evening, after Elizabeth fell asleep while a maid slept in a truckle bed nearby, I stepped out into the corridor at Greenwich. I was instantly on edge, for it was dim and deserted. Ever since Tom had attacked me when I was alone in the hall at Westminster Palace, I was wary of such situations. But my chamber was just next door so I hastened toward it, hearing only the swish of my own skirts and footsteps and—“Kat! Kat!”
I nearly bolted, until I recognized that voice. My hand to the door latch, I hesitated. “John?”
He appeared at the top of the servants’ staircase and gestured to me. I quickly recalled what I had rehearsed all day since my interview with the king. If John was pleased with his new assignment, I would be modest, or if he did not know I had put his name forth, I would not mention how it came about. If he was unhappy, I would apologize and beg his forgiveness. If—
As I stepped closer, in the shadows between the top balustrade and the wall, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me.
Any words, any thoughts, went sailing into the wild blue. His hands anchored me to him breast to chest, soft thighs to his rock-hard ones. His codpiece thrust my petticoats against the bottom of my belly. I was quickly so dizzy I thought I must be tumbling down the stairs with him. It went on and on until we both came up for air, breathing in unison.
“Did the king ask you?” I gasped out.
“Told me, more like, and told me who suggested it.”
“Yes, I thought—”
He was kissing me again, his hands roving my waist and back, then tipping my head to possess my mouth fully again. I tilted into him, any will of my own gone as yielding as water.
When we finally broke the next kiss, he whispered, “The king is in a roaring good mood because of the young girl he’s enamored with—his next wife, no doubt—but he’s not my concern. Kat, I’ve waited for some real sign from you that you cared for me, especially after you avoided me when I first pursued you. So you had not a bit of self-interest in getting me appointed to the same household you are in?” Laughter mellowed his deep voice. “You did it only for the Lady Elizabeth, of course.” Holding my chin in his big callused hand, he looked deep into my eyes, demanding the truth and all I longed to give him.
“Why, what could there be in it for me?” I teased back, my voice shaky. As much as I wanted John Ashley, his passion almost frightened me—or, rather, my own did. I wanted to lie with him here and now, whoever came upon us be damned. “I did it for Hatfield’s horses, which are in dire need of care,” I told him with a low laugh. “Besides, you told me you want to write a book about the art of riding, and I am writing a book about my life, so late into the evenings, we can write side by side, that is all.”
He chuckled, then sobered when we heard voices echo down the hall. “We will serve Elizabeth well together, Kat,” he whispered hotly against my ear. “And I pray there will be fewer people about in the country to catch us together, sunny days outside away from prying eyes, for do you not need riding lessons too?” he asked with a crooked grin and a soft double-bump against my hips.
Even though I felt so warm, I blushed. At the age of thirty-four, I was blushing! But I had been so busy that suitors of any sort—a plague on Tom Seymour—had not been part of my experience. Yet I could not allow our banter and heady feelings to cloak reality. “Jesting aside, I’ve no doubt Cromwell still has spies in rural houses too,” I insisted.
“Soon, I think, he’ll have no more need of spies,” he said, looking right, then left, as if the walls had ears. I recall once, in Devon, Cromwell had said that very thing. “I scent it in the air,” John added, standing me back a bit as the voices of at least two women came closer. “I hear Humpty Dumpty is heading for a fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put him back together again—or want to. Even his so-called friends hate Cromwell for climbing too far. I must go now, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart !No one had ever called me that, nor had a pet name been so precious. He kissed me yet again, quickly, hard, and was halfway down the first flight of stairs when Lady Joan and a chambermaid passed in the corridor. I heard them open then close a door. Silence again.
Touching my sweetly bruised, tingling lips with two fingertips, I was almost brazen enough to call down the staircase to John that the coast was clear now. But I did not want him to think I was an easy mark, however much I might have acted like one just now. Strangely, as ever, despite initially being seduced to desire Tom years ago, my feelings for John were not only wilder but deeper than that. Yes, he and I would flee this world and rear Elizabeth safely in the country, almost as if she were our own.
Shortly thereafter, before we were allowed to leave London, word came that Cromwell had been arrested for treason—bribes, dispensing heretical books, and nefarious plans to wed Mary Tudor and become king. It was like the charges against Anne all over again, I thought, everything thrown in to besmirch the accused and assure conviction. Well, for all I knew, he was guilty. Selfish as I was, I prayed continually that he would not be forced to give up the names of those who had spied for him. Seven weeks in the Tower, who knew what he would say?
I feared, too, from what John had said, that Cromwell had somehow recruited him, so he could be named too. Why were we not released forthwith to return to Hatfield? Was everything at a standstill now that the king’s fourth marriage had been annulled and he was prepared to wed Catherine Howard, his “virtue personified,” as he’d put it?
He married her on July 28, 1540, and rode off on a long honeymoon progress beginning at his rural palace of Oatlands. In His Majesty’s usual exquisite timing, it was the very day that, on Tower Hill where had died the men accused of treason with Queen Anne, Cromwell was beheaded.
I went through the motions of the normal agenda with Elizabeth that day, listening to her chatter, sitting in on her lessons with her tutor, William Grindal, then rehearsing Latin and French with her, even pretending I was happy for her when she was allowed to visit her three-year-old brother, who was also visiting at court with his protective uncles, Edward and Tom. I was sure the Seymour brothers were elated about—perhaps even the cause of—Cromwell’s shameful, grisly fate. Although Cromwell had manipulated me as if I were a puppet, he had saved me from obscurity and obtained my initial placement at court, so I was sad for his dreadful demise.
Late in the day, morose and exhausted, I sat on a turf bench overlooking the Thames flowing past Greenwich Palace and watched John work with Elizabeth on a graveled circle as she sat proudly on her pony, elegant and serious for her nearly seven years. I wished he wo
uld not let her make too much progress lest the king keep him here when we departed, for John had told me that His Majesty’s Master of the Horse was loath to let him go. He had left John in charge of the royal stables here because he had gone to Oatlands with the king.
I heard a hissing sound behind me and turned. Surely, not a snake! No, a disembodied voice whispered, “Mistress! Mistress!’
From behind a hedge, Master Stephen, Cromwell’s man, gestured to me. My first impulse was to shake my head and walk closer to John. Could this man, who had never quite risen above being a loyal lackey to Cromwell, plan to take over for him? I stood and moved closer, though not around the corner of the hornbeam hedge. In my quick glimpse of him, I thought he looked harried and hounded.
“Have they a hue and cry out for you?” I asked.
“They released me after rough questioning. I’m heading home—to York. But I swore to my lord I would deliver messages to some. They let me see him briefly yesterday.”
“A message for me?”
Suddenly, the man was racked with huge, gasping sobs. His balled fists propped on his knees, he bent over, looking as if he would be ill on the ground. I took a step closer, around the hedge, and touched his shoulder.
“Were you there today?” I asked.
“It was awful,” he choked out without looking up at me. “Bungled, too many blows—inept axman or intended, I know not. I kept thinking, Cromwell never could stand incompetence of any sort.”
He straightened and brushed his sleeve across his face to wipe away mucus and tears. “He said—tell you that, when we met that first day in Devon—even if he knew what fate lay in store for him—ruination and a shameful death”—he sniffed again—“that he would not have turned back. That it was worth it.”
“Yes. That sounds like him. Each one of us must decide what is worth great risk,” I whispered, turning the ring on my finger around and around with my thumb.
“If there’s more to tell, I can’t recall. He said so much in the little time they gave us, and I—I was terrified they wouldn’t let me leave, but—they only wanted him.”
“Yes, that is so. I hear his son will even inherit his father’s old title of baron, but then he is wed to a Seymour.” My knees were shaking; my stomach clenched. As much as I had detested and feared Cromwell over many of the fifteen years I had known him, I grieved for him and this man. Once again, I wanted to flee this place and its rulers, not only my dear little charge’s father she adored but Sir Thomas Seymour. I had not seen him for years, but did not want to.
“Go with God, Stephen,” I called to Cromwell’s faithful man as he turned and strode away. Then I mouthed silently, “Go with God, because devils still reign here.”
But my heart lifted when I saw John striding toward me, holding on to Elizabeth’s pony’s bridle while she held the reins. “Some good news and some ill,” he told me, gesturing behind him at a man walking back toward the palace who must have brought him information.
I clasped my hands between my breasts. “We can go to Hatfield?”
“I will tell my Kat, Master Ashley,” Elizabeth declared. “I and my household are to leave on the morrow, but Master Ashley is not to join us until my father and the new queen return from their progress, mayhap in the autumn. That is because the Master of the Horse is with my father and so Master Ashley is needed here to oversee all in his absence.”
I nodded and blinked back tears, not only in my disappointment that John would be held here longer. Not only because I was moved by how logically and regally the child had relayed that information. It had finally hit me hard how careful John and I must be not to be caught together in compromising positions—that is, situations— including by my beloved little mistress. Perhaps my long years of keeping Cromwell’s secrets would now be useful, for one sniff of the things His Majesty had warned me about could ruin our relationship with Elizabeth—if and when John ever came to live with us at all.
CHAPTER THE TENTH
HAMPTON COURT
July 12, 1543
I stood in the back of the chapel, listening to the wedding vows of King Henry and his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, Lady Latimer. Craning her neck to see, Elizabeth perched next to her sister in the second pew, directly behind Prince Edward and his uncle, Edward Seymour. I could only pray that my talk to the nine-year-old about sober, calm decorum had sunk into that bright brain, for at times she was a highly excitable child.
Yesterday, I had been forced to chase her and young Edward Tudor through some of the dusty privy passages connecting the king’s suite to the outside. They had somehow discovered the privy door from the clock courtyard and, shrieking like banshees, had played tag on the stairs within the dark walls. Servants could hear their voices but not locate them, for few knew the secret. [I would not have known either, but Queen Anne had told me of the hidden stairs and narrow passages years ago, and I had more than once peeked behind the arras to note the outlines of their small doors.]
So I deduced how the two clever children had given their little entourage the slip. Holding a lantern aloft, trying not to trip on my skirts, out of breath, I pursued them up two flights of twisting stairs to the king’s—thank the Lord—empty bedchamber and retrieved them there, running madly about, all sweaty and dusty and as happy as two young children could ever be.
Today Elizabeth was nearly beside herself with joy to be near her father, to be treated kindly by his new wife and to be attending her first wedding. Besides, although the three Tudor children had been with their sire from time to time since Queen Jane’s death, Elizabeth was also thrilled to be with Mary, now twenty-seven, and Edward, now five. Mary made a show of fussing over her, so Elizabeth had never quite yet grasped the fact her older sister deeply resented her. Despite my love for my royal charge and the little family of her intimate servants we had gathered about her in the country, she ached for affection from her royal family and longed to please them.
“I vow to be buxom in bed and board,” the bride was saying. Her voice trembled slightly. “In sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part . . .”
It had been a challenging three years. The king’s previous young wife, his “virtue personified,” had lied to cover up her licentious past. Worse, abetted by George Boleyn’s widow, Jane Rochford, who had been the first person to greet me when I arrived at court, Catherine Howard had taken a lover behind her besotted royal husband’s back. Like her cousin Anne, she had died on the block in the Tower shortly after her lovers—actually guilty ones, unlike with Anne— had been hanged, drawn and quartered. Though I had not known His Majesty’s fifth queen nor had I attended her execution, all that had brought back to me the horror of Elizabeth’s mother’s death.
How grateful I was that my little charge and I were not living at court then, for, to tell true, Catherine Howard’s trial for adultery and death brought back memories of losing Elizabeth’s mother as well as memories of how I could not help but admire Anne Boleyn. Ah, how I used to study her way with men, her cleverness and, indeed, her love for her daughter. My little lovey had lost her mother so young, and I could fully sympathize with how she longed for her and was passionate to know about her.
“Did you know my mother well?” she had asked me recently.
“She was kind to me, and I did favors for her too. She was a lovely and well-read woman, just as you shall be if you concentrate on your studies. Now read me that passage again,” I had said, pointing to the page, “because you must learn how to pronounce several of the words—Plan-tag-e-net, see here?”
“But if she was so lovely and learned, why did my father put her away and then she died?”
“You know your sire, lovey. He—they disagreed on some things, and one must not disagree with a king.”
“But she was a queen and that’s second best. I heard he had her head chopped off, just like Catherine Howard’s!”
“Who told you such things? You come to me if you have questions like that!”
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“But, my Kat, that is what I am doing!”
More than once we had gone in such circles. Despite my rehearsing what to say, conversations about her mother always went awry, and I agonized about how to best frame my answers. Should I tell her exactly what happened but, of course, lay no blame? I, too, had come from a bitter past where my young mother died tragically, even amidst my suspicions of murder. I knew precisely how it felt to have a stepmother, half siblings and an indifferent father.
I had to be so careful, for in truth I did blame the king for Anne’s loss, though she had been foolish too. But things like adultery, incest—witchcraft and sorcery? I feared that, however intelligent Elizabeth was, she was not yet prepared to hear any of that. So I concentrated on telling her of happy times her mother had, of her firm belief in the new religion and how, while her parents were wed and she was born, they loved each other. Each time, I came closer to the truth, closer to giving her Anne’s ring, but I held back.
“Your Majesty, please repeat after me,” Bishop Gardiner intoned, dragging me back from my agonizing to the joyous occasion at hand.
“With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship and with all my worldly goods I thee endow. . . .”
The king’s voice droned on. John Ashley had been with us for nearly two years at Hatfield, and we were desperately in love. But with the increased household staff—Elizabeth’s retainers in and about Hatfield or the other rural homes we stayed in now numbered nearly one hundred twenty—it was difficult for us to be unseen alone, though we managed at times. It was a dangerous courtship but a wholesome one, lest we be discovered and chastised or dismissed, or lest I find myself with child. But how badly we wanted a bed of our own, a marriage of our own, so that . . .
The king was kissing his blushing bride, loudly, soundly. They turned and walked toward the back of the chapel, he beaming, she looking dazed and even apprehensive, and why not?
