The Queen's Governess

by Karen Harper

  “Yes, I—”

  “We’re to fetch you too. If Her Grace be well enough to refuse the royal physician, a half an hour now, that’s all, and we’ll be off with her and you in tow. We brought a litter and more men wait outside.”

  “I am unwell and weak,” Elizabeth, still abed, insisted, “but want my own physician!” The pale moon of her face peeked through the curtains of her bed. John had backed the men off and was now guarding her door. The physician, in his befurred robes and eared cap, looking most insulted, huffed out of the room. I edged past them all and went in, then tried in vain to close the door.

  “No closed doors, for the Crown must have answer for the treason!” the burly one in charge yelled.

  “There is no treason in this house!” I shouted back. I swear but I would have cuffed him, had I not been trying to keep my unlaced gown up on my shoulders so I would not bare my bosom. “And how dare you tell the sister of the queen she cannot have a door closed while she prepares herself to answer your questions right here, for, as she said, she is weak and cannot go abroad in this raw weather! It is the green sickness at best and something far more dire at worst, perhaps even a contagion! And do you think either of us would just fly out these upstairs windows to escape?”

  “We are not interrogators, mistress, but the messengers,” he insisted, but, with John’s help, I closed the door on all their faces.

  “If she does not present herself in the hall as I said, I have orders to drag her out!” came only slightly muffled through the oaken door. “And this royal physician is to examine her!”

  “Kat,” she cried in a low voice once we were alone, “I will not go, cannot, for my monthlies are painful, and my swelling is worse. Cannot we convince them I can’t be moved, stall for time?”

  “I think he means it, so the queen must too,” I muttered, digging in her coffer for her warmest gown and cloak. Even if she could stall them, we must be prepared.

  “She’s been looking for an excuse. I kept to my bed, as during the upheaval over the Jane Grey rebellion, and I can’t help it that madman Wyatt wrote me a letter. My answer was noncommittal to his cause.”

  I had not told her of that “madman’s” father’s love for her mother. Perhaps I should have, but I still had never admitted I was at Anne’s beheading and saw him sobbing there. Besides, if my princess was to be questioned, best she truthfully say she had no ties to the Wyatts and did not even know the rebel’s father had gone to the Tower because he loved her mother. Surely, his son’s trying to put Anne Boleyn’s daughter on the throne was partly caused by his father’s old passion. The queen’s hatred of Wyatt must be doublefold, since she still detested Anne Boleyn and anyone who had loved her. Why could people not let the past rest in peace?

  “I don’t want them dragging you out into the cold,” I told her, “but we can hardly refuse. Those men are armed, and there’s a goodly number of them.”

  “Kat, I have cramps, I’m bleeding, weak and bloated and I hurt to my very teeth!”

  I rounded on her, arms on my hips. “Am I speaking to Princess Elizabeth of England?”

  “Not anymore. Mary’s going to bastardize me again when she annuls my parents’ vows so she can wed that Spaniard. We’re all doomed.”

  “Get up. We will get you dressed and make a last stand here together. Let that physician of the queen see how poorly you look. Mayhap we can gainsay them, but, if not, I will be with you all the way, thank God, for she has told them to bring me too.”

  Putting her head in her hands, then pulling at her hair, she cried, “Oh, Kat, not this again, not questionings and suspicions and everyone at court staring at me with distrust and disdain!”

  But the queen’s men would not be refused. Despite how terrible Elizabeth looked, the royal physician said she could travel. At least they let John ride a horse behind our bouncing litter on the grueling journey to London, but even at the plodding pace of seven or eight miles a day, it was hellish for Her Grace, who began to vomit, mayhap from fear. She got worse, weaker, and looked more ashen pale and swollen.

  At Highgate, a mere five miles from Whitehall, she collapsed completely and was bedridden for a week. I almost despaired for her life, despite three royal physicians attending her. On February 22, we went on. Though we had been told not to open the curtains of the litter wherein the two of us rode, she drew them back so the London crowds could see her hollow-eyed and white as a corpse. Even in her disease and despair, Elizabeth Tudor had learned to use high drama to promote her cause. People shouted out their blessings and some cursed the queen. When I heard that, fearful of even more retribution, I slapped the curtains closed.

  My princess seemed to rally a bit when we neared Whitehall. “At least,” she whispered, leaning back against a bolster, “it isn’t the Tower and we are together, all three of us.”

  I almost said, “Famous last words,” but I just nodded and blinked back my tears.

  Elizabeth was immediately given over into the care of some of the queen’s “loyal ladies,” as it was put to me.

  “No, Mistress Ashley stays with me,” Elizabeth protested. “I must have her with me!”

  At their refusal, it broke my heart that she clung to my hand, even as we were roughly separated by guards. I tried to push one man aside to hug her, but they pulled me away. How I wished John were there to help us fight them, for they had sent him with the horses to the stables, and then he was to join us. But I did not even trust that now. The queen was baiting traps.

  “All will be well, Your Grace!” I called to Elizabeth as her voice faded down the hall. “All will be well because you are innocent of all vile charges and loyal to the queen!”

  I was escorted to a small but well-appointed waiting room which I knew to be at the very edge of the queen’s suite of rooms. The door was not only closed behind me but loudly locked.

  I paced and prayed. Dear Lord, am I to be imprisoned and interrogated again? Please, Lord, not the Tower, not any of us to the Tower! And please, don’t let them take my John away too.

  I know not how long I waited for something to happen, someone to come. I ended up using a ewer of drinking water to wash road dust from my face and hands and then to squat over it for a chamber pot because I could hold my water no longer. Had I been forgotten? What was happening to my princess and my John?

  Daylight began to wane. I saw no candles or lamps in the room. My stomach growled from hunger and twisted in terror. Sleet began to pepper the thick panes of the chamber’s single window. Were they going to just leave me here until I broke and screamed for someone? In their desire to break Elizabeth, had they forgotten me? And, as during my dreadful days in the Tower, was John imprisoned somewhere nearby?

  At last, voices in the hall! I was going to call out, but they came closer. Guards, then another man’s low, commanding voice. No, not a man’s. I knew that voice.

  The lock rattled, the latch lifted. Queen Mary stood there, frowning.

  CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

  WHITEHALL PALACE

  February 22, 1554

  I curtsied as the queen came in. Without further ado, she said,

  “You did not obey me, to keep her from complications and disloyalties! Nor did you heed my words to go to Holy Mass, and, by implication, abandon your heretical ways.”

  Spies! I knew Mary must have spies in Elizabeth’s household. Perhaps that was my just retribution for having been one myself.

  “I—Your Majesty, the princess is innocent of any disloyalty, and I too.”

  “Bring the books,” she called over her shoulder. A guard came in with a stack of books—John’s and mine we had read and discussed, Elizabeth’s too—on the new religion. So, I assumed this meant that even if we were not even guilty of complicity in the Wyatt Rebellion, we were still in peril of life and limb—as heretics.

  “Do not shame yourself by denying these are yours, Kat Ashley, for several bear your name and notations and several your lord John’s. We were not searching for th
em at his chambers near Charing Cross nor in your rooms at your mistress’s Somerset House. We were looking for correspondence from Thomas Wyatt, who tried to overturn my righteous rule, with the Protestant princess’s help and encouragement, no doubt. But,” she added, enunciating each word, “we found these. You have defied your queen and one who has done you good!”

  “Your Majesty, you above all understand being true to one’s beliefs. I honored and respected you for your strength in your darkest days, and supported you, did you good, too—”

  “For which you have been repaid by a favor—a previous reunion with your mistress. However, you do not support me now but her.”

  “Your Majesty, I fervently believe I can be true to you as my queen, yet chose to worship in another way so—”

  “Say no more, for you only dig yourself in deeper!” She was shouting; spittle flecked her lips. “You are ever loyal to my wayward, stubborn sister just as you were to her mother—as, evidently, are all the Thomas Wyatts of this land—and do not deny it! But now, I give you a choice—a gift, as it were. As soon as she stops puking, Elizabeth is going to the Tower for questioning—”

  “No, not there! Please, she cannot abide—”

  “She will abide it and bide there too, just as her mother did before her, the Boleyn whore! Would you like to go with her?” she taunted, her tone and expression ugly.

  I knew I should show humility, even grovel as I had before the Duchess of Somerset five years ago, but I squared my shoulders. “To be with her? Yes.”

  “Ha, I knew it! Even there, the place you must hate. You’d follow her to fiery hell, would you not, and mayhap shall!”

  At the flick of her wrist, the man with the books went back out, but several guards still blocked the door. I recalled it was whispered that Mary’s advisers were insisting heretics be burned at the stake. Cecil had written that she was coming to see fiery public executions as the only way to save Catholicism in “her” country. My knees almost buckled as she said, “One of you—you or your lord John—are going not to the Tower but to the Fleet Prison. The other to exile, and the choice is yours alone, Kat Ashley.”

  The Fleet! It was a noisome, old stone prison encompassed by a moat here in London, which held those committed by the monarch’s personal decree as well as debtors and offenders of the royal courts. It also held minor political prisoners, which I feared I was in these terrible times with worse to come. But why was she giving me the choice? At any rate, I knew better than to try to bargain my way out of it, for veins pulsated in her temples and her hands were balled into fists.

  Despite my horror, I tried to clear my mind. John, of course, would insist on going to prison while I fled to safety abroad, but I must stay near Elizabeth, even though she would be in the Tower to the east of the city and I in a prison to the west. And mayhap John could go to Italy, his sunny Italy. I had let him down years before when I did not tell him about my past with Tom Seymour, so maybe I could make it up to him now.

  “Well?” she said, folding her arms over her breasts. “I know how much you love my sister, but how much do you love your husband?”

  “You are torturing me, but I pray you will not torture your sister.”

  “My half sister,” she spit out. “May the sins of the mother be visited upon the daughter!”

  I could have struck her. It was exactly what I had feared from her. The persecuted had become the persecutor. I saw why she gave me a choice now. She knew me well enough to know I would save my husband over myself. John was to be shoved out of the way so I had no support but myself—or my queen. She was making me choose not only between prison for John or me but between her and Elizabeth. Anne, I thought, as if addressing the ghost who haunted my dreams, Anne, I will not let you or your daughter down.

  “I’ll go to the Fleet,” I told her, staring straight into those narrowed eyes, “for I know you will be fair and honest with both my husband and my mistress, for, like us all, even kings and queens answer to the Lord.”

  She glared at me but turned away. No rejoinder to that but no pity or remorse either. Just power. And something even more frightening—a righteous belief in herself and her Catholic cause at all costs.

  “Your Majesty, may I not bid him farewell?” I dared to ask her. After defying her so, choosing to stay near Elizabeth at great danger to myself, I knew she would say no, but I would humble myself for the chance at one farewell glimpse of him.

  She turned back again. “Yes, in honor of the love I shall owe my husband when he comes and we have a family, I shall grant you that, Kat Ashley.” She lifted her right arm stiffly, pointing at me. “You see, even heretics deserve time to get their souls right with God before He settles with them for all eternity.”

  After she went out, I stood in that small chamber, waiting to bid farewell for a while—or for all eternity, I did not know—to my beloved John. And, in doing so, I would have to lie to him again, or he would never go.

  “Sweetheart!” he cried, and hugged me hard, ignoring the guard in the room and the open door to the hall with even more guards. For all I knew, Mary hovered just outside, listening, suspecting we might say something incriminating to each other.

  “Did they tell you?” I asked. In our mutual hug, I whispered in his ear, “They not only suspect us of collusion in the Wyatt plot but have our books.”

  “They showed them to me. So I’m being exiled, and you are to stay here with Elizabeth.”

  So that was what he had been told. Then I would not be lying to him directly. In a way, I was staying here with Elizabeth. But after he had forgiven me for not telling him all about the Tom Seymour mess years ago, I’d vowed to him—even without his prompting—that I would never lie to him again.

  “Yes. Yes—so you get to see sunny Italy after all.”

  “It won’t be sunny without you. And how long I’ll be away—they’re taking me to the docks at first light—I don’t know. I’ll write you through Cecil, but if you’re at the palace with the princess, I don’t know if he can get news to you.”

  So, to make him go, they had not told him Elizabeth was going to the Tower. “How will you live?” I asked him, almost choking on my words.

  He gave me a gentle shake, then clamped me to him again as we kept whispering. “You know I can make my way anywhere there are horses. I will find a patron if I must, since many supporters of our cause have already fled abroad.”

  Our cause. Yes, we were rebels now indeed, like poor Thomas Wyatt, captured and tormented ones. And now I was losing both the loves of my life and was going to a dreadful place while Elizabeth suffered in the Tower.

  We kissed and held tight, whispering love words and promises. They had to drag us apart. For all I knew, I would never see him again, and if the queen began to burn heretics, I might be first in line. Damn the queen for her perverted sense of favors and justice, her overweening power and pride I had seen in her father too.

  When they took John out and slammed and locked my door, I collapsed at last, holding nothing back, not trying to be strong for him or Elizabeth or even myself. I sat in the pool of my skirts on the floor and sobbed until I could barely breathe.

  Bereft, devastated . . . I was a little girl losing my mother all over again, burned, battered and drowned as she was as I knelt by her body. It was seeing Anne Boleyn ripped from this life again, her lips moving in desperate prayers for her soul. My John and my girl—gone. And I alone and afraid, not only for myself but for them, the only ones I loved above all life in this brutal Tudor world.

  THE FLEET PRISON, LONDON

  March 19, 1554

  It was bitter cold that winter, but, at first, I hardly noticed. I was devoid of all feeling but that of impending doom and death. I huddled under a threadbare blanket and my single cloak on the wooden cot in my solitary cell in the queen’s ward of the Fleet Prison. The cell had a small fireplace with a coal grate, but that, like everything else in here, cost money. I hid my mother’s garnet necklace in my bodice, but I woul
d starve before I would sell it or trade it, even for food. I ate little, until the warden threatened to put me in ankle irons if I didn’t eat. And so, hardly tasting how vile was the tepid beef broth with a bare bone in it, I ate, and drank some of the small beer I was allotted.

  The place smelled to high heaven even in the winter, though the fetid moat into which refuse was dumped and sewers spewed, was partly frozen. The Fleet River, which emptied farther south into the Thames, the turnkey said, was frozen, too.

  As was my heart. The worst was not knowing how John was faring—though I feared less for him than I did my princess. When I asked if she had been sent to the Tower, all I got was shrugs.

  I lost weight and my skin dried; I picked at the cracks of my fingers and bit my nails. Somehow the first long hours and days passed and blurred. I wore my hair down, dragging in my face. I understood now how Elizabeth had made herself sick with grief. My two gowns they’d brought to my cell hung on me as if I were a scare-the-crow from fields at home. At home—Devon, Devon in wind and rain, when will I see my loves again? At home, with our little family around my lovey at Hatfield or better yet at John’s and my beloved Enfield where we walked the gardens and kissed . . .

  I sat bolt upright. The man with my food was not the usual turnkey.

  “Good day, Mistress Ashley,” he bid me kindly. He did not slam the tray down on the floor and leave. He was a portly man, which looked odd in this place, where even the better folk with fees for extra food looked gaunt. He had a gentle voice. A scar marked his mouth, almost as if he had two half pairs of lips, and several front teeth were missing.