The Queen's Governess

by Karen Harper

  “And?”

  “Marley, the grizzle-headed one. He said he thought he recognized you from when you came down to the water stairs to greet me each time at Chelsea, but he could not place you at first.”

  “Place me how?”

  “He says when he saw Tom Seymour one morning getting on a royal barge to go upriver, he recalled that you and Tom met on his barge twenty years ago. And that he thought you were a ‘pretty couple’ and so kept an eye out over the next years and heard the two of you were fond lovers.”

  He had said all that so calmly—typical of my John—but a fierce tenor underlay his words. How long had he harbored this knowledge, perhaps biding his time until I would tell him all that on my own? I longed to scream my denial, my hatred of Seymour. I had told my husband all the details of what had passed between Elizabeth and Tom but none of what had passed between me and Tom.

  I sank onto a wooden bench in deepest moon shadow. For a moment, I thought he would continue to stand, towering over me, but he sat too, giving me a bit of space. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, not looking at me, and waited.

  “I wanted to pretend it never happened. I detest him,” I said.

  “I would not like to think you are protesting overmuch. He was—your first love? You never mentioned him that way. It makes me think there was something between you still.”

  I almost burst into tears. Stay calm and rational, I told myself. That is what John counseled you to do when Tom tried to ruin Elizabeth’s life. “That is precisely what he told me he would tell you if I was not his ally with the princess.”

  “And would it have been true? I have seen how he works, how women adore him.”

  “No!” I turned to face him before I realized that I was already crying, tears streaking my face, making my cheeks icy in the breeze. I was getting cold all over, shivering. “It would have been another of his foul lies,” I plunged on. “I thought if you knew, you would go after him, forsake me—oh, I do not know what I thought, but that he would ruin me and Elizabeth!”

  He turned toward me, took my hands and pressed them in my lap. I was grateful; I needed something to prop me up, for I wanted to throw myself at him or upon the ground and scream and cry. “And were you lovers—physically too? Kat, I trusted you, thought I knew you so well when we were wed that I waited months, years, to possess you and, when I did, gave no thought to the fact you were not a virgin. It is well-known among those who teach riding that, even if a woman rides sidesaddle, she can break the hymen.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry, so sorry, my love.”

  “I too. That you did not trust me to tell me.”

  “He—it was only once. I know that sounds lame. It was the evening of Anne’s coronation banquet at Westminster and—”

  “Spare me the details at least. You know, I would like to take on the braggart, bastard cockscomb, even with my bare hands, but I am trusting him to ruin himself the way he has others.”

  “Including me? Including me ruined for you now?”

  “I did not say that. I need some time. You did not trust me enough to tell me, and that pains me sore, so—”

  We both jolted as a man—it was Thomas Parry, who kept the princess’s books—called out in a frenzied voice, “John! Kat! Another messenger has ridden in from London. You are to come at once!”

  Unspeaking now, not touching, we both hurried in. I swiped at my tears; John looked like a thundercloud. Elizabeth stood at the bottom of the steps to greet us. “I see you already heard,” she said with one look at us as she threw herself into my arms. “My dear stepmother Katherine is dead of childbed fever, just like Queen Jane! And they say the Lord Admiral is so heartbroken he has ridden back to London and left the little child with her wet nurse.”

  She tugged me upstairs, where we sat for a good hour, both crying, both bearing the burden of unspoken guilt. When I finally coaxed her into bed and went to find John, for I knew I must tell him the rest of my sordid Seymour story, Tom Parry told me John had set out for London with the other messenger, even in the dark.

  Thus began that awful autumn and the worst winter of our lives. I wrote a letter to John that Her Grace had given me permission to come to him in London to talk. I had no answer from him, though I tried to tell myself that such hand-carried missives sometimes went astray. I longed to tell him the rest, that Tom had raped me that night.

  I agonized over the fact it seemed John did not need me, but Elizabeth did. More than once she wakened from nightmares about her dead stepmother accusing her of perfidy and betrayal. I knew those fears had been awakened by the terrible news about Katherine’s death. Racked by puerperal fever, in her delirium, we heard that she had accused Tom of wanting her death, even of poisoning her, so he could wed Elizabeth. Although he lay down with his wife and held her on her sweat-soaked bed, she said she feared him. Perhaps it was only the fever talking, but my girl suffered so from it. And all that fed the London gossip mills and made the Privy Council, so we heard later, begin to gather evidence against Tom.

  And through all this mental, moral torment, I wondered if poor, dead Queen Katherine—like Anne, another victim of Elizabeth’s dreadful father—had spoken her fear and hatred of Tom Seymour from mere delirium, or like me, had she finally seen the man for what he was?

  “Lovey,” I said to Elizabeth when I could not bear John’s not knowing the whole truth about Tom and me, “I know you need me right now, but I must beg you to give me a day or two in London to find John and speak with him. You see, we had a falling-out that night before he left.”

  “Oh, Kat! I did not know. Shall I write to him for you?”

  “Just give me a few days in London, where I can stay with Lady Berkley in Fleet Street and then go to find him.”

  “Yes, yes, all right, but I shall miss you sorely. For years we have not been parted.”

  “And I vowed I would not leave you unless I had no choice. Please, Your Grace, I need to talk to my husband.”

  And so I rode to London, setting out from Hatfield at the break of dawn three weeks before Christmas, accompanied by a messenger returning to court. But a dreadful sleet storm made us put up in a house on the way. It was midafternoon the next day, with the winter sun plunging, when the man left me at the narrow three-story house of the now retired Lady Berkley, who had served Queen Anne. Though I learned to my dismay that she was in Sussex, visiting a daughter, her servants took me in with much goodwill.

  I was there but a quarter of an hour before I set out on my weary horse for Charing Cross, for there lay the royal mews. For obvious reasons, hundreds of horses were not stabled near the palace itself. Whitehall and its outbuildings sprawled over twenty-four acres along the Thames, and the mews were at the northeastern reach of it, near Charing Cross.

  Other buildings crowded around a central area where an aqueduct brought in water, which poured out of huge brass taps shaped like leopards’ heads. John had said the maze of buildings also included dovecots to provide food for the royal falcons housed here and kennels for hunting dogs. If John was not here in this busy place, at least some of his fellows would know where to find him, I told myself.

  As I approached the vast stable blocks and riding rings, my heart beat so hard I fancied I must be shaking my mount. I, who had ridden into nearly all the palaces and castles of the Tudors, into most of their country estates and manors, was terrified to ride toward the royal mews.

  “Madam,” one man ahorse called out to me, “may we be of help or you be lost?”

  I prayed that all was not lost between my beloved John and me but said only, “I am Mrs. Ashley, looking for my husband John.”

  “Indispensable,” he said with a gap-toothed grin, “that he is. Talks to horses, you know, and they obey him. But I warrant, he’s gone by now to his house just down the way, but you know where. Been away, then?”

  “I serve the Princess Elizabeth in the country.”

  “Oh, that right? Is it true she’s wi’ child by the Lord Admiral?
”

  I gasped and jerked the reins so hard my horse almost reared. “That is a bold-faced lie, sirrah, and see you tell everyone so!”

  I was appalled. London rumors! But it made me realize I must hurry back to my princess. She must show herself, she must disprove such lies or all could be lost in her efforts even to be near her brother’s throne.

  I hurried to John’s house, actually the sprawling top story above an apothecary, and rode around in back where the crooked outside stairs twisted up. I gave a neighbor boy a groat to guard my horse, lifted my skirts and hurried up the slightly slippery steps. In the fading light, made dimmer by the shadows cast by other tiled or thatch-roofed houses, I could see John through a back window bent over a writing table lit by four fat candles.

  I prayed he was writing to me. Suddenly shy and afraid, for I knew I could not do without him, even to help Her Grace get along in life, I screwed up my courage and tapped my fingernail on the thick pane of glass.

  He looked up and jumped up. “Kat!” he cried, and hurried to the door.

  I did not wait to see if he would spurn me but threw myself into his arms, clamping my own arms hard around his narrow waist and turning my head against his chest where I could hear the thudding of his heart. Thank God, this time he returned the embrace.

  “John, please, I cannot bear life without you,” I said in a rush as my tears started. “I love you, only you. I swear to you on my mother’s grave I lay with the Seymour wretch only once and by force. Please, I—”

  He drew me inside and sat down, pulling me into his lap, but not before I saw he was writing his riding book, sketches of horses and all. “I started to tell you that night,” I rushed on, fearful if I stopped that he would turn cold again, “but then everything happened at the worse moment, and I wrote to you that there was more to tell. That night of Anne’s coronation he attacked me after he saw us talking at my table and followed me out into the hall, thinking I had planned a tryst with you. I—as you may have seen, I had too much to drink. I was so dizzy, but I still fought back. I was afraid to tell you he had ravished me and that at Chelsea he tried to blackmail me into helping him get close to the princess, or he said he would tell you we had been lovers all these years. John, I never coupled with him, and avoided him for years—and then I found and loved you and realized what real love could be. That night he took me by force, he was raving jealous.”

  “Raving jealous,” he repeated, gripping my upper arms and seeming to look through me, as if he saw it all. “Yes, I, too, when I heard about you and him. I could kill Seymour, but now I may not have to.”

  We both got very still. He cupped my face, wiped at my tears with his thumbs, then gently kissed my nose and mouth. It finally sank in what he had told me last. “What else has he done besides try to ruin my life and Elizabeth’s too?” I asked.

  “First, we will not let him ruin yours, though he may try to bring her down in his fall. I heard but an hour ago—and rejoiced—that he has just been arrested. He had evidently hatched some mad plot to wrest control of the king from his brother, perhaps even declare himself king. Late last night he got past Edward’s guards and into the boy’s bedroom. When Edward’s spaniel barked at him, he ran the dog through with a sword.”

  Picturing that—the boy’s horror—I gasped. “Which,” I said, “makes his drawn dagger slicing Elizabeth’s skirts apart seem mere child’s play. John, some man at the mews where I went to find you said there are rumors Elizabeth is carrying Seymour’s child. That is blasphemy. How have such things been noised about?”

  “Can someone who worked with Cromwell so long ask that? The rise of one spymaster only breeds others, even if the first is dead. Besides the Lord Protector hating him, the bombast of Tom Seymour is its own trumpet of bad tidings.”

  “My dear lord, I only want the princess safe and everything between you and me to be healed. After you left that night, I wrote you a letter—”

  “You said you did. I pray it did not say what you just told me in it, for I never had it.”

  “No, I just wrote that there was much more to tell of Seymour. But now I must get to the princess, warn her.”

  “I will send you back in the morning and would go myself but the Lord Protector has summoned me to him. I have trained horses for him before. Maybe I will learn something that can help. But tonight, my love, I would say your time and body belong only to me.”

  “And my heart. Always, my heart only for you.”

  He stood me up, lifted me in his arms, and carried me straightaway to his neatly made bed. Indeed, we mussed it up. He made dusty, tear-salted, windblown and shaken me feel like a queen, one who is beloved. With our eager bodies, even, I believe, our joined souls, we sealed again the marital pact between us. It was a second wedding night, only sweeter since he now knew all and still wanted me. After we had risen for wine and meat pies, we tumbled back in bed and loved so hard and long that no one else even existed.

  But when cruel dawn came, he sent me home with his servant William; a man named Hornby, a yeoman of the chamber; and another friend, Will Russell, a gentleman of the chamber. I could not bear to be parted from him and sobbed silently halfway back. I would have surely been hysterical had I known that, when he reached the Lord Protector’s Somerset House, John was detained and questioned about what he knew of my time at Chelsea.

  But worse greeted me at Hatfield. I had barely changed my gown and told Elizabeth all was well between John and me. Before I could tell her that the Lord Admiral had been arrested and that vile rumors about her were abroad in London, a large contingent of men rode in, as if they had been at my heels.

  Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, who was to be Elizabeth’s examiner, informed us that, after refusing to answer the Privy Council’s questions in his usual high-handed manner, Tom Seymour had been charged with treason and taken to the Tower. Though the Princess Elizabeth was only under house arrest here, some who had served her were to be taken away and interrogated about a possible plot of Seymour’s to wed the princess and seize the throne.

  If I had not been so terrified for Elizabeth—and yes, for myself and John—I would have done a dance that Tom was ruined. But those to be dragged off to the Tower included Thomas Parry, my husband and me. With a burly guard standing over me, I was given ten minutes to gather a saddlebag of clothes. I could hear Elizabeth below, protesting in a nervous, strident voice, “We have done nothing wrong, nothing against His Majesty, my brother. Katherine Ashley is my appointed governess and cannot be taken away!”

  She and I managed one quick hug and a few whispered words. The last thing I recall hearing as I was roughly boosted up on a horse was Tyrwhitt’s voice informing Her Grace, “The Lord Protector of the realm has appointed my wife, Lady Tyrwhitt, your new governess and, by all that is holy, you will tell one or the other of us all you know about this plot!”

  CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

  THE TOWER OF LONDON

  January 28, 1549

  The sound of the key grating in the door of my cell pierced my soul. I had never been more frightened by what had been and what was yet to come.

  “Ah, Mrs. Ashley,” the man who was my examiner intoned as he peered into the dimly lit cell that had been my prison for nigh on six weeks. At first they had just let me sit and stew—and freeze in this wretched place. “I give you good day and bid you to join us for a tour of the Tower. The Lord Lieutenant has told me that has made more than one pretty bird sing. And, I warrant, such a learned woman as to have been the Lady Elizabeth’s governess and councilor all these years is no simpleton, but a keen and able learner.”

  I thanked God for full petticoats, else my shaking knees would have betrayed me. Betrayed me . . . Her Grace had whispered, “Don’t betray me!” to her closest confidantes before we were taken from her at Hatfield House.

  “This way,” Sir Thomas Smith went on, frowning. He beckoned me forward as if I would dare to gainsay his command.

  Wrapped in a fur-lined cloak draped with his chain o
f office, he was the Privy Council’s secretary, no doubt come to torment me again with endless questions I had refused to answer. Had the Lady Elizabeth encouraged Tom Seymour to gather forces to overthrow her brother, the king? Did she know aught of rumors that Seymour had poisoned his wife so that he could wed Elizabeth? Had she hoped to make Seymour king or at least Lord Protector in place of his brother? And had I, Katherine Ashley, as the closest friend, the substitute for the deceased mother of Her Grace, the Lady Elizabeth, promoted lewd enticements in Chelsea, even under the nose of Tom Seymour’s wife, the widow of King Henry?

  As I stepped into the corridor, I saw that Sir Thomas was not alone. The beef-witted turnkey Gib, who brought my daily sustenance, waited just down the hall to tag along as a guard. Also glowering at me, the big-shouldered Sir Leonard Chamberlain, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, stood at the ready, as if one lone, hedged-in woman of forty-two years would dash for escape through these mazes of halls and corkscrew stairs in dim, damp Beauchamp Tower.

  The Tower of London was not one but a series of towers. My place of imprisonment was a semicircular structure of three stories with inscriptions of its many victims carved into the walls. Out my narrow, deep-set window I could see Tower Green to the east, the very place where Elizabeth’s mother and King Henry’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard, had been beheaded. It amazed me to think that I, Kat from rural Devon, had known those Tudor-bred, Tudor-wed, even the Tudor dead. But more than the loss of them all, I grieved my separation from my fifteen-year-old charge, whom I dearly loved and desperately feared for.

  “Exactly where are we going?” I asked, trying to summon a steady voice. I had been arrested under orders that I be “seriously examined,” which was coded talk for the Privy Council’s permission to use torture to extract my confession. Though they had not yet done so, I was wary, forever teetering on the jagged edge of outright terror. Barely sleeping each night, I had wandered through memories, tormenting myself with sins of my past and shattered hopes for my future.