Legacy

by Susan Kay

He still read those verses and others that Wyatt had written for Anne, all dominated by images of hunting and passionate entreaty to: Forget not yet.

  Yet Anne had forgotten Wyatt, as she forgot young Harry Percy and many others, trivial, insignificant conquests along her road to power. She had loved none of them, loved no one at all except herself and her daughter; and even Elizabeth she had abandoned at the end. Katherine of Aragon had gone to her death refusing to sign annulment papers; Anne had hoped to save that precious little neck of hers. Yet she had gone laughing to the block and the knowledge troubled him, for what in this world or the next could have given her amusement at such a time? Sometimes when he looked at Elizabeth, he was afraid he knew the answer to that.

  Wyatt’s words still mocked him across the years. Forget not yet. For he could not forget, that was the bitter irony, he remembered every detail of his miserable enslavement to that witch. The tears he had shed for her, the abject grovelling letters he had written in desperation each time she flounced away from court to sulk at the endless delay of the Divorce.

  “My heart and I surrender themselves into your hands—absence has placed distance between us, nevertheless fervour increases, at least on my part.”

  Even now, four years after the axe had fallen, he was still a prisoner in a cage of memories and as his glance fell upon Elizabeth he knew why. Exchange those red-gold tresses for a raven crown and it might have been Anne kneeling at his feet, the same quick turn of her head, the same sudden spurt of mocking laughter. In certain moods or a certain light he could have sworn her amber eyes were black; and then he must dismiss her abruptly, wherever they were, whatever they were doing and it would be days, weeks—once even a whole year—before he could bear to look at her again.

  But now there was Katherine to dam the flood of his destructive desire and channel it to safer waters. Under Katherine’s gentle tuition he was learning to love his daughter as a child, and the nerve-jerking moments of conflicting hate and indecent interest came less often to shake his composure. His hand wandered from Elizabeth’s bright head to Katherine’s thigh, plump and soft beneath her stiff gown. He squeezed it with obscene gratitude, welcoming the healthy tide of desire rising steadily in his veins. Katherine cut him free from the shackles of past horrors—horrors of his own making, it was true, but none the less horrible for that. And it was always the same. An innocent hour with Elizabeth—then that sudden, savage need which Katherine so sweetly slaked, enabling him to emerge from his chamber at peace with the world, and at peace with Anne’s child.

  Hastily he sent Elizabeth away with a coin. For all his lechery he had a curious narrow-minded primness where the morality of the young was concerned. He desired to keep his younger daughter in the same state of cloistered innocence which had shrouded his eldest into her early teens. He would have died a thousand deaths rather than allow her to watch as he fondled Katherine.

  Elizabeth curtsied and ran to the other end of the gallery, where her governess stood staring discreetly out of a window, feigning great indifference, but watching everything avidly from the corner of a roving eye.

  “Your Grace’s coif!” scolded the young woman, as they hurried away. “How many times have I told you not to take it off?”

  The King took it off,” said Her Grace pertly, “because Queen Katherine said my hair is like spun silk and too beautiful to stay hidden.”

  The governess repressed a sigh of irritation. Privately she considered Queen Katherine to be an interfering little busybody who ought to know better than to make other people’s jobs more difficult than they need be. It would take at least a week of coaxing to get a coif back on Elizabeth’s head. All this spoiling, following hard on years of virtual neglect, was making the child quite insufferable.

  “Look, Kat.” Elizabeth held out the palm of her hand to display the single gold coin. “The King gave me this to buy ribbons. What will Jane say?”

  “Now, madam,” said the governess severely, “you’re not to tease your cousin with it. The lord knows that poor child never receives anything from her parents except a beating.”

  Elizabeth frowned. She was weary of considering the feelings of Lady Jane Grey and wished she would go home to Bradgate, where she belonged. But at least she could make her little brother Edward jealous—

  “Just give that coin to me and don’t be a little troublemaker,” said Kat, reading her expression accurately.

  Elizabeth ducked out of her grasp and ran. Nothing in the world was going to deprive her of this singular triumph. She pushed open the door to the schoolroom and stopped, immediately aware from the discrete, childish hush which reigned, that intruders were present.

  In front of the hearth an arrogantly handsome man stood with fine legs astride and hands clasped behind his back in the masterful stance favoured by the King himself. She knew him vaguely as Sir John Dudley, one of the up and coming men about the court, but the two sulky little boys, one dark and one fair, she had never seen before.

  “…in addition to the inestimable honour of his Royal Highness’s company,” continued the gentleman in the cold manner of one who considers himself rudely interrupted, “you will both make acquaintance of the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace.”

  The slight, ironic emphasis on the final word was not wasted on the girl, or the flustered governess, who came forward with the missing head-dress and fastened it with mortified haste. The taller boy—the dark one—suppressed a snigger of amusement and received a sharp poke in the small of the back from his father.

  “Manners, Robin! Bow to Her Grace—you also, Guildford.”

  The two boys did as they were told and Elizabeth responded with the most perfunctory curtsey they had ever seen.

  When Dudley had gone, Guildford went to sit in the window-seat with Lady Jane Grey and the little Prince, whose timid smiles suggested friendly overtures. But neither Robin nor Elizabeth moved a muscle. In the centre of the room they stood and stared at each other, as wary and suspicious as two young cubs from alien packs. Instant antagonism and reluctant interest pulsed in the air between them.

  Sudden and violent, like sheet lightning, it lit the flame of a long, long candle, a candle that was to burn for nearly half a century.

  Chapter 3

  No one who knew John Dudley well had ever doubted he was a man who would go far, in spite of formidable obstacles in his path. And they were right, for by 1541 he had overcome most of them and was cutting a fine figure at court.

  Men called him a traitor’s son, but the insult was largely academic. His father, the hated tax collector of Henry VII, had been executed at the beginning of the present King’s reign in a cheap bid for popular acclaim, and the bereaved son, a practical man, would have been the first to admit the astonishing success of the ploy. A man was a fool who made a personal affront out of pure political expediency. Whenever Henry, surveying a shrinking treasury with regret, sighed and made some wistful reference to Edmund Dudley’s sound head for business, John Dudley neither winced nor felt anger at the memory of that sound head decorating the ramparts of London Bridge. There was no place for pride or sentiment in the serving of a Tudor prince.

  Positively cordial relations now existed between King and courtier and Dudley was quick to milk Henry’s guilty conscience, seizing the first opportunity to manoeuvre two of his sons into the company of the royal children. The possibilities accruing from a politic cultivation of childhood acquaintance were endless and when Dudley closed that nursery door he did so with quiet satisfaction, convinced that he had made yet another shrewd move. But the first meeting was not a success and he knew it the moment the two boys sidled into his closet an hour later.

  “May we go to the stables now, Father?” asked Robin stiffly.

  Dudley turned in his chair, and Guildford leaned on his shoulder confidingly.

  “We don’t have to go back do we, Father? She doesn’t like us.”

 
It was not necessary for a man as astute as Dudley to inquire who she might be.

  “Surely the little Prince made you welcome?” he insisted irritably. He turned to Robin for confirmation and suddenly noticed a blazing, swollen patch on his forehead. Getting up to take a closer look he demanded to know how it came to be there.

  “She hit him with a book,” piped Guildford solemnly. “She hit him ever so hard.”

  “What’s that?” roared Dudley, glaring at them both. “Is it true?”

  Robin stared at the floor; his father shook him furiously.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dudley pushed him away with a curse.

  “My own son! God’s blood, is it possible? Can’t you be trusted out of my sight for five minutes?”

  “She said I was a low-born Dudley,” Robin burst out hotly in defence. “She said my grandfather was a traitor! She asked for it!”

  “Asked for what?” inquired Dudley, ominously calm.

  Robin was silent.

  “What’s a Little Bastard?” asked Guildford suddenly.

  Dudley’s hand suddenly shot out and cuffed Robin smartly across the ear.

  “You oaf! You clod! You surely were not such a fool as to call her that!”

  “It’s only what everyone calls her,” muttered the boy, tenderly feeling his ear.

  Dudley put his hands resolutely behind his back and strode to the window. It was perfectly true of course. Even the ambassadors called her that—but not to her face!

  He imagined the scene. And suddenly, in spite of his annoyance, his lips began to curl beneath a trim moustache. He turned to look at his son.

  “What did she hit you with?”

  “A Bible, sir—I think.”

  Dudley laughed shortly.

  “Well—there are worse ways of spreading God’s word, I suppose.” He came back and rubbed the boy’s red ear with rough affection. “So! The little lady made a lasting impression on you, hey? Will you retire from the field or live to fight another day?”

  Robin lifted his head and shared his father’s smile without resentment.

  “If it please you, sir—I should like to fight.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Dudley put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and walked him to the door. “Take my advice and leave insults to the women, Robin, a sharp tongue is the only weapon they have. Get out the broadswords and show her what a low-born Dudley is made of. I fancy when the two of you are done with fighting you’ll be the best of friends—”

  Dudley was a remarkably clever man; when he made a calculated prediction of events it was usually shrewd and accurate. Within a month Robin was actively seeking her spiteful company. She was quick and abrasive and more full of mischief than any boy he knew. He was not ashamed to call her friend and as a mark of his respect, he admitted her to his secret retreat in the bushes at Hampton Court.

  “It’s not very big, is it?” she complained. They were sitting like two peas in a pod, with her gown billowing over his muddy boots.

  “It’s big enough,” he said sulkily. “You didn’t expect an anteroom, did you?”

  She looked up at the central branch.

  “Is that what holds it in place?”

  “Yes—don’t do that!”

  She was swinging on the branch with all her weight and a second later the whole fragile structure collapsed on top of them.

  “You mean rat!” he burst out. “You’ve ruined it.”

  “I didn’t know that would happen,” she said innocently. “I’m only a girl.”

  Slightly mollified he sat down again, clearing a path in the debris first. After a moment she began to collect up the branches.

  “I’m going to build a better one,” she announced. “Are you going to help me?”

  “No,” he said sullenly. “Why should I?”

  She gave him a push with her foot.

  “Get out of my way then, you’re sitting in the entrance.”

  For the rest of the afternoon he sat and watched and jeered; when she had finished he was quietly amazed; it was more than half as big again. Flushed with triumph she came to stand beside him.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said modestly.

  “It’s all right, I suppose, for a first attempt. But it won’t last. One gust of wind and the whole thing will fall to pieces.”

  She smiled and said, “We’ll see.”

  Buoyant as a cobweb, the thing stood there week after week, defying the laws of gravity and several storms. Years later, when he heard the accusations of “no human agency” applied to the fantastic, fragile substance of her vast success, he remembered that secret place and how he had thought, It isn’t possible. Tomorrow it’s sure to be down.

  They went there often, holding their breaths when Henry’s courtiers passed to and from within a few feet of them, but they were never discovered, not even by Guildford Dudley who spent many wasted hours searching for them.

  “Guess what!” said Robin, one cold October morning when they sat on his cloak because the grass was damp. “John brought a kitchen maid to our bedroom last night. I saw him take her.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “Where did he take her?”

  “On his bed of course. You don’t suppose they did it on the floor like peasants, do you?”

  There was a blank, bewildered look on her face and understanding burst upon him in a delightful thunderclap. So she didn’t know everything, after all!

  “Do you want me to tell you how a man takes a woman?” he inquired loftily.

  “Thank you,” she said, stiff and defensive, “I already know.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “I don’t believe it,” he said slowly. “You really don’t know, do you? You don’t know the first thing about it. You—ow!”

  She had seized his little finger and bent it backwards.

  “Tell me then, master high and mighty Dudley, who can’t decline the simplest Latin noun—tell me what you know, if anything.”

  He pulled his finger away and looked at her, suddenly sly.

  “Knowledge is expensive,” he said. “What’s this piece worth to Your Grace?”

  She considered a moment. “I’ll do your Latin translation tomorrow.”

  “And the next day?”

  “Oh, all right!” she said ungraciously. “Now get on with it.”

  When he had told her all she needed to know she gave him a derisive nudge.

  “I don’t believe you. Love isn’t like that. Who would want to do anything so disgusting?”

  “It’s true,” he said angrily, “every bit of it. Even kings and queens do it like that.”

  She flushed to the roots of her hair.

  “They don’t! My father and Queen Katherine—they do not.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, she began to cry wildly. “I hate you, Robin Dudley, I hate you. Go away!”

  He went. They did not speak again for over a week, a long tense week during which the younger children, quick to sense the hostility between them, sided pointedly with Elizabeth, as experience had taught them it was wise to do. Even Guildford Dudley decamped to the enemy with the half-shamed explanation that he had never expected a princess to pinch so hard. It was Robin’s first experience of royal disfavour, and he found it every bit as uncomfortable and humiliating as he was to find the real thing in later life. The only attention he received in the schoolroom was from their tutor, and that was more unwelcome than ever.

  “I am a patient man, Master Robert,” said Dr. Cox sanctimoniously, examining a dog-eared piece of Latin prose with distaste, “but there is a point where unrequited patience and discipline cease to meet. Be pleased to accompany me into the next room at your earliest convenience.”

  The children stared as Robin got up and sauntered with feigned nonchalance after the tutor, but o
nly Elizabeth looked up from her work when he returned with clenched teeth. She watched him walk gingerly to the window-seat and lower himself with care on to a cushion. After a moment she slipped off the wooden bench and joined him.

  “Did it hurt?”

  He unclenched his teeth just sufficiently to say, “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.” She went back to the table and fetched the sheet of parchment she had been working on. “Here—you can copy it if you want.”

  “Can I?” His strained face relaxed and lit up; he held out his hand and she withdrew the paper just beyond his reach, looking at him with a curious suppressed excitement.

  She said very softly, “It’s not true, is it?”

  There was a moment of silence while he looked from her face to the paper and shifted his throbbing body on the cushion.

  “No,” he said at last, “it’s not true. I made it all up to annoy you.”

  As he watched, the corners of her mouth curled slowly up into a smile of delight.

  “Liar!” she said, and dropped the paper down beside him.

  He never forgot the absurd incident, trivial as it seemed at the time, a child’s quarrel in which she had had the last word after all. Years later, when her name had blazed a trail of flaming light across Europe, he would recall that moment when he first acknowledged her superior will.

  Their friendship healed after its breach, as it would later heal time and time again, and life resumed its petty round of study and play, giving neither warning nor preparation for the tragedy which was less than a month away.

  * * *

  In November the tranquil Indian summer of the King’s fifth marriage erupted with a violence that devastated several lives.

  The King was the first casualty. When Archbishop Cranmer pushed that piece of paper into his pudgy hand at morning service, he thought his head would burst with rage and grief. Others had loved his Rose, even as he had done. Names were before him, dates—oh God, they would pay for this.

  Winter descended, like a curtain upon a stage, and the court, touched with frosty fears, huddled in small whispering groups to talk of the little Queen’s crimes. In the forgotten nursery, a terrified silence reigned. Robin Dudley from the height of his superior knowledge had elucidated “adultery and high treason” for the benefit of the youngest. There was nothing more to be said; they all knew what would happen now. Even so, no one was quite prepared for the screaming. Peal after peal of it went shivering through the gallery of Hampton Court, screams born of blind terror which splintered through the palace on the day Katherine Howard tried to reach Henry and beg for her life.