by Jeane Westin
“Aye, lady. It be also said that the queen is not so much scarred, though she be wearin’ a veil before her face.”
Kate smiled. Perhaps Robin’s Bess would not lose her beauty and he would have queen, beauty and all, though neither she suspected. He must know that Elizabeth would make him ruler if she died, but not while she lived. Except, did any man ever truly believe a woman could withstand her own heart? He would hope still; he would hope forever.
“And she be meetin’ with her council,” Sybil went on, breathless with the court news.
Kate nodded. Though the queen would give all thanks to God, she would believe herself saved because she was indestructible. Kate could not help but wonder if the queen thought herself God’s servant or He hers.
“Oh, my lady,” Sybil said, “to see yer smile again be answer to my prayers.”
“You are good, Nurse. When I am with Lord Edward at Eltham, you will remain servant to my body with ten marks a year . . . for your life long, Nurse.” It was a handsome sum, but loyalty and devotion were priceless.
Sybil bowed her head. “I thank ye, Kate. I would be with ye always.”
Kate felt Sybil take the bowl from her hands as she drifted into a dream of Ned holding her to him, both astride his horse and flying across the countryside of Hertfordshire before all others.
She had received no summons from the queen. Had she been discovered? Saintloe had told Her Majesty after all. It was worse to wait than to know.
The next day she was up from bed and dressing in a gown grown once again too tight for her, though she’d had little to eat these last days. Desperate to speak to Dudley, she went to the queen’s apartments, the gentlemen ushers opening the doors, only to be stopped by Saintloe.
“On your life, do not enter. There is further disaster come from France. If the queen discovers your . . .” Her eyebrows said the rest.
“Is my lord Dudley with her?” Kate asked, wishing for once to be a man with a sword, or a Medici with poison in her ring, to be rid of this damnable lady.
“Nay, she has sent him to his bed and—” Saintloe answered, shutting the door on her own words.
Kate stood for a moment, rage filling her. She forced her anger to leave her. Resentment always caused her babe to kick, and now he had moved lower. She was sure of it. The babe was dropping. Birth was near. Oh, God, help me! She moved quickly along the hall toward Lord Robert’s rooms nearby.
Now a full moon followed her through the high mullioned windows of Hampton Court. Was the heavenly light sent to guide her, or to rebuke her? She came to Robert’s rooms and knocked before she could puzzle an answer.
Tamworth, the poorer by five hundred pounds, answered. “My lady Katherine, our lord is sleeping, faint with exhaustion.”
Two of his other servants tried to block her way, but she knew how to deal with servants. She rushed past them and opened Robert’s bedchamber door and shut it softly, approaching his bed, lanterns and candles guttering low.
“My lord,” she whispered. He did not move, snoring softly, his chest scarcely rising.
She knelt beside the bed, not wishing to startle him when he woke to see a woman in a wide farthingale casting a huge shadow over him. “Robert,” she said again, and gently shook his arm.
He sat up suddenly and reached for the sword that he was not wearing.
“Who—”
“Robert, it’s me, Katherine. I need your help. You must take me away from here for Edward’s sake. You know we are married and I am with child.”
“Kate! What in the name of all good sense are you doing here?” He jumped from his bed and hastily pulled on breeches and doublet, though not hose, since she could plainly see the dark hair on his legs. “If the queen finds you here, you’ll need the devil’s own help to save you. You must leave!” He jerked away from her. “If she hears of this, as she hears of everything, she may believe we are lovers and that the babe you carry is mine.”
“But, brother . . .” On her knees, she looked up at him, her hands clasped, praying harder than she had ever prayed before the cross.
“Stop it! Kinship won’t save me or you.” He grabbed her by the arm and forced her to her feet, moving her quickly toward his outer door. “I must think what to do.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“The strength to harm is perilous in the hand of an ambitious head.”
—Elizabeth Regina
St. Crispin’s Day
October 25, 1562
After leaving Dudley’s apartment, heedless of the obvious stares and whispers from courtiers and servants alike, Kate rushed through Hampton Court’s halls and connecting grand rooms toward her chamber, holding hard to her kirtle especially, which was necessary, since the strings were now loosened as much as she dared.
As Kate burst through the door, Sybil started up from the chest where she was placing the last of the summer lavender. “Lady?”
“Quickly, Nurse,” Kate said, her mind settling on the one option that seemed to hold any hope. “I want you to find a sheep barge, a pig boat . . . any floating thing to get us to London in all haste.”
Alarmed, Sybil seemed frozen where she stood. “But, my dear, I be not knowin’ how to—”
Kate, hardly aware of her own actions, grabbed her nurse’s arm. “If I am arrested, you will be on the streets of London with no bread and only your body to sell for it. Is that what you want?” Immediately Kate regretted her harsh words. She sat down, unable to stand any longer. “Sorry . . . so sorry.”
“My babe, you are overwrought,” Sybil said, hugging Kate’s head to her breast. “How will I find a boat and men to row it?”
“Ask one of the fowlers in the privy kitchens. They will know. Pay them for their silence.” Kate unlocked her jewelry box at her bedside and withdrew several shillings, thrusting them into Sybil’s hand, trying hard to calm herself. “Now,” she said, forcing her nearly hysterical voice lower by an octave, “I know you will do this for me and all will be well.” She watched as Sybil left swiftly with one backward glance of her loving face.
There was little time remaining. She had seen alarm in Robert’s eyes and a tightening about his mouth. Would he betray her?
Kate firmly locked her door against Saintloe, who would surely come to snoop or gloat. Donning her own cloak, Kate knelt to wait at her prie-deux. Prayer was all that was left to her. Surely God, having saved Elizabeth from death and disfigurement, could spare a thought for Katherine, Countess of Hertford, lawfully married by His priest and ordinance.
Waiting to be exposed was the hardest of all trials. She could not imagine the Tower would be worse, though her sister, Lady Jane Grey, could probably have told her that waiting for the ax was far worse.
Would Her Majesty dare to imprison her, to treat her ill so soon after her own near death when her council had thought to name Katherine Grey heir to the throne? Perhaps for that very reason. Elizabeth would never believe she had no desire to rule. The queen had no knack for such a belief.
Kate clasped her face in her hands as she bent over her prie-deux. Instead of prayer, her mind swung between the surety that the queen would not dare to deal harshly with a kinswoman, who had cared for her night and day through the pocks, and the certain knowledge that Elizabeth feared all possible claimants as much as death. Hers was a terror born of the fearful plots and accusations that had landed her in the Tower and too near the headsman during her sister Mary’s reign.
Marrying Edward and carrying his babe had made Kate’s claim too strong to be ignored. And Elizabeth was not a queen to ignore a threat to a throne she’d waited her life long to claim.
Ned had thought Elizabeth would have no alternative once they were joined in God’s eyes, but a ruler always had an alternative.
Kate’s head sank lower, the candle guttering before her, and Sybil still did not return. Though she’d thought to pray for her own rescue, to remind God in heaven that she was in need of His intercession, Kate found herself praying instead for Ned, think
ing before she could stop the blasphemous thought that the sensation of his arms about her and the babe in her belly were what she needed before God’s attentions. And needed at once.
“I must speak with Her Majesty,” Robert Dudley announced to the gentleman usher in the outer chamber, having been admitted without question to the queen’s apartments.
“Her Grace is with her councilors, my lord.”
“How does she fare this morn?”
“The doctor is most pleased with her progress.”
“Has the queen seen other than her councilors and doctor?”
“My lord?”
Robert nodded. The man said nothing but by order. And yet he hoped no guard had seen a woman leave his rooms in the dark of night and rushed to tell it. Since his mind could not settle to prayer, he crossed his thumb and forefinger in the sign of the cross and began to pace from one wall to the other. He ignored the giant Holbein portrait of Elizabeth’s father that she carted in its own conveyance from one castle to another. He had always understood her need to wave her royal claim under everyone’s nose. Yet he often thought there might be more to this need of hers. Was she forcing her father, a man of vast girth and charm and even vaster cruelty, to take heed of her? In life, Henry had ignored and coddled in turn, and more than once declared her a bastard. Yet today she was more the old king’s daughter than her older sister, Mary, had ever been, and, yes, more his son than poor, sickly Edward VI.
Robert was certain Bess still hated Henry VIII for all his malice, the chiefest among them keeping a mother’s love from her forever. Yet Robert had seen Elizabeth from her childhood in that same hand-on-hip, haughty, commanding-the-world stance that Holbein had captured so well in the painting. But when was his Bess not all contradiction? Perhaps he faced the greatest one now: Though she could love intensely, and he felt that love deep in his soul, could she forgive such love in others, love that could compel them to defy her and England’s law, risking life and freedom?
He stopped before the usher. “You’ll announce me when the council is gone?”
“Aye, my lord, immediately.”
Robert sat on a velvety chair for a moment, but found it too soft to suit his mood. He needed steel to sit upon, to harden his spine. And his heart.
He closed his eyes, lost in some childhood place with the young Bess, her hair like fire shining on gold tumbled about her sweet face, her skin flushed with the heat of their game of Duck, Duck, Goose. He had been the goose she’d never tired of capturing, and her merry laughter had pealed throughout the courtyard at Greenwich and rang still in his heart. Had he loved her since that day when they were both but eight years from the cradle? Or had he been born with his love, a part of his heart already hers at his first sight: so small, so pretty, but with the regal look of a true princess in Henry’s mad court, and ever after the princess of his heart? Had she been plain Elizabeth, would he have loved her? How could he know? He knew only what tore at him night and day.
The doors to the privy chamber opened and he rose to bow as the councilors, led by Lord Secretary Cecil, a stack of signed documents under his arm, hurried away, Elizabeth’s distinctive, circling signature still shining damp on the topmost charter.
“My lord, the queen commands your attendance,” the usher announced in a loud voice, as if he were half the court away.
Robert strode inside, sweeping his hat to the floor. She stood before the hearth, dressed simply in dark velvet robes with long oversleeves and a small lace ruff. An embroidered white cap sat snug to her head to cover the hair she’d lost during the pocks, her face showing only faint pink marks now that the scabbing had fallen away. God be praised, she had escaped the deep pitting that had destroyed his sister Mary Sidney’s face so that she must hide it forever under a thick black veil even from her poet husband, Sir Philip.
Dudley knelt before the queen.
“Robin, rise, rise, sweetheart,” she said, and gave him her hand to raise him up.
“Majesty,” he said, standing, wanting to take her in his arms, but as ever careful to show her every respect in private until her words and body unquestionably invited more. “I pray God always favors you as He has surely done these last weeks.”
“And why should He not?” she asked teasingly, a tinkle of mirth breaking forth at her own audacity.
She came close to him, and he smelled the Tudor rose scent she wore, heated now to high summer’s warmth by the fire. He could have had her in his arms, but he did not, knowing that it would go the worse for him if she didn’t believe he was innocent of what he must be the first to tell her.
“Madam, please seat yourself, for it is my duty to report unpleasant information.”
Elizabeth, seeming to stand a foot taller, swept past him to the center of the room and spun back toward him. “We need not sit like some fainting dame. Let us hear this news. More of the pocks at our court? The French Catholics have won another battle against your brother, Warwick?”
“Nay, Bess.” He came close and said it outright before he choked on it. “Katherine Grey, your mistress of the wardrobe, is pregnant.”
Had it been a cannon in one of her warships, the queen’s face would have spewed black powder smoke, fire and ball at that moment. She struck out in all directions, flailing wildly, blindly. Robert took the hurts as they came, saying nothing, doing nothing to protect himself.
Spent after using energy she had only recently regained, Elizabeth sank into a high-backed chair. Her hoarse whisper enveloped him. “Is it yours?”
He fell to his knees before her and took her lovely hands in his own, holding them against his pounding heart. “Before my God, no, sweetheart. Never mine. On our love, never mine.”
Her breathing quieted and he saw a tear of relief quickly blinked away. “Who has dared defile her?”
“Edward, the Earl of Hertford, Bess.”
Her hands turned to ice under his touch. “The false rogue! Pretending to woo another. I’ll have his head for taking a virgin of the blood royal.”
Robert turned her hands over and kissed each rigid palm. “There is worse, Bess.”
She slumped forward and he caught her, cradling her head on his shoulder.
“Worse? There is no worse.”
“They are married, Bess.”
He felt her shake and feared she’d faint. “They are plotting for the throne,” she gasped. “She has been seen talking with the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra. They plot, or why would Edward want such a dull-witted, flat-arsed ninny?”
He held her hard, but as her fear mounted, she escaped him, bursting out of her chair. “Guards! Guards!”
A yeoman officer and three men appeared instantly, kneeling. “Captain,” she shouted, “take my lady Katherine Grey to the Tower at once under guard! She may not come to us, nor send us her begging scribbles.” Elizabeth took a much-needed breath. “And send to Cecil that the Earl of Hertford is to be recalled from France in chains . . . in chains! . . . and taken to the Tower.”
“Majesty,” Robert ventured, “the earl is wounded.”
“Bring him on a litter!” Her furious response was final. “Send also to the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower with these our instructions that the two traitors are to be ever separated . . . completely!”
The captain rose and bowed. “It is done as you command, Your Grace.”
Elizabeth whirled about to face Dudley. “Robin, don’t you dare plead for them.”
Robert thought it best to say nothing, lest she suspect him again. She was in a mood that allowed her no hearing, but what her own fearful mind conjured.
He watched her pacing back and forth in the privy chamber, her fists clenched by her side, stirring clouds of dried herbs strewn on the floor. “Hertford and his whore are guilty of high treason by my father’s will, and all know the king named it treason for an heir to marry without their sovereign’s consent.”
Elizabeth gave a bitter laugh. “But she has damned herself in higher eyes. She swore an oath to God o
n her soul that she would ever serve me and never marry.” The queen’s face reddened so that her faint pock scars became bright spots on her cheeks. “She is a lying, hell-bound slut, and so she is proved for all time!”
“Bess,” Robert said quietly, but soon realized that she would not hear him. Her hands were on her ears, shutting out all she could not bear to hear.
“Mistress Ashley,” he called loudly enough to reach to the anteroom, “tend the queen.”
“Robin,” Elizabeth said, sagging against him, “they must lose their heads, though she pleads her belly.”
“Bess,” he whispered, feeling her fear shake her.
“They have left me no choice. No choice at all.”
Ashley rushed in, gathering Elizabeth into her arms and guiding her toward the bed, cooing as to a child.
Robert bowed himself out, walking through the outer chambers and out into the great hall, as Cecil rushed toward him.
“My lord, is it so?” Cecil asked, catching his breath.
“Yes,” Dudley said softly. “The queen has taken to her bed. Come later, Sir William, but delay any death warrants, if you can, until Her Majesty has time to think again upon what she does.”
“The council—nay, Parliament itself—will petition to save Lady Katherine,” Cecil replied, obviously worried.
“That will only assure her that there is a plot. You might relieve her mind that she faces nothing more than foolish youth led by the heat of their loins.”
Cecil eyed him, and Robert saw a smile playing just inside the councilor’s mouth.
From the direction of Kate’s room, Robert heard the sound of a battering ram smashing against solid oaken doors.
Cecil looked saddened. “Ah, the lady Grey will soon be taken.” He bowed and hurried away toward his rooms.
Dudley walked in the opposite direction. There was little he could do for her, or could ever have done. The young fools! As all lovers, they had been determined to believe what they wanted to be true: that their love could overcome all obstacles.
