Legacy

by Susan Kay

  The unearthly cries shuddered across the schoolroom where Robin Dudley, staring at the Princess Elizabeth, saw a look he never wished to see again on the face of any human creature. Suddenly, the screams were mingled with the shouts and footsteps of guards. Katherine had almost reached the King in the Chapel when they took her and, still screaming, dragged her away.

  She never saw the King again. There was no trial. An Act of Attainder was passed against her and on the 13th of February little Katherine Howard followed Anne Boleyn to the block.

  When it was all over a great quiet spread over the palace, an air almost of desertion. Courtiers kept themselves to themselves, revels ground to a halt, corridors stood silent.

  In the quiet of the countryside Katherine Champernowne watched her charge with increasing concern. For what seemed an unnatural length of time Elizabeth showed no outward sign of grief. And then the nightmares began and the childish roundness fell away from her cheeks. She was pale and sullen and aggressive, less readily affectionate than before and the spectacular tantrums of her early years returned.

  “I can’t deal with it any longer—she’s quite beyond me!” sobbed the governess one evening, when a particularly irrational and violent outburst from her charge had reduced her to tears. “I’m going to write to the King.”

  Blanche Parry stared at her steadily in the firelight.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, madam. She’s the last person the King wants to be reminded of under the circumstances. He might have you removed from your post and then—God forgive me for saying this—I wouldn’t trust that child alone in a room with a length of rope.”

  Kat turned deathly pale. “She’s only eight!”

  “She can tie a knot, can’t she?—that’s all it takes. She may not show it, but she’s very fond of you, madam.”

  “I’m fond of her,” admitted Kat, “more than fond. But when she screams like that I’m damned if I know what to do.”

  “Let her scream,” said Blanche wisely, “until she learns how to cry.”

  * * *

  The clock in the schoolroom ticked steadily, for life continued and so did lessons. Katherine’s death had left small impression on the Dudley boys and the little Prince was young enough to lose an unpleasant memory in the pressing urgency of daily concerns.

  But Elizabeth harboured a strange obsession with the gallery that led to the Royal Chapel at Hampton Court. She faithfully collected the morbid snippets of conversation drifting around and embroidered tales that made the younger children wide-eyed with fear.

  “The gallery’s haunted!” she said with grim authority. “That’s why no one cares to walk there alone after dark.”

  The silence which greeted this remark, profound and very satisfying, lasted roughly ten seconds, the time it took for Robin Dudley to retrieve a soggy pellet of paper from the inkwell with a ragged quill.

  “Father says there’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said derisively. “And I wouldn’t be afraid to go there after dark even if there were!”

  Elizabeth closed her copy of Terence and returned her own quill to the central stand on the table.

  “Tonight,” she said softly, “we’ll see just how brave you are.”

  * * *

  They stood in the silent gallery, huddled in their sable-trimmed night robes, with their cold feet tucked inside velvet house shoes and their huge shadows spreading over the panelled wall behind them.

  “I don’t like it here, Rob,” said Guildford Dudley in a tremulous whisper.

  “Well, you would come,” snapped his brother, who didn’t like it either, but was certainly not going to admit it. “I told you not to.”

  “Aren’t you afraid we might see—her?”

  “Nobody’s ever seen her. They only say that you can hear her voice crying here at night.”

  They both shivered, moved closer together, and were silent. At the far end of the gallery they could see the distant, bobbing light of a solitary candle. For a moment it paused by the door of the Chapel, where the Queen had been captured, then it came slowly, flickering and swaying, back towards them. In her long white nightgown, Elizabeth looked like a small ghost herself, with the light shimmering over her pale face and glinting on her red hair. Guildford clutched his brother’s arm and was roughly shaken off.

  “Don’t be stupid, Gil.”

  “I want to go back, Robin—I’m scared!”

  “Cry-baby,” said Elizabeth sharply as she reached them. “What did you bring him for?”

  “I didn’t bring him,” said Robin furiously, “he followed me—he’s always following someone, like a silly sheep.”

  Guildford began to snivel softly into his furred sleeve. Elizabeth turned away impatiently to set down her candle and beside it the little doll she carried beneath her arm. After a moment she made the sign of the cross above the flame and began to speak softly in Latin. They could not catch what she said, but she looked so uncannily like a witch repeating the words of an incantation that Guildford began to sob in good earnest.

  “I want to go back, I want to go back. Come with me, Robin.”

  “I can’t leave her here by herself,” said Robin sharply. “She’s only a girl. Look—take my candle and go back if you want to—but don’t let the guards see you.”

  Guildford fled silently down the corridor and after a moment Robin went over to her and touched her arm.

  “What are you doing?” he asked uneasily. “What did you say just then?”

  She picked up the candle and looked at him through the dancing yellow flame.

  “I said that I would never marry.”

  He laughed outright. “Why did you say that?”

  Turning, she glanced once more down the empty gallery and shivered.

  “Because I meant it.”

  “Oh,” he said uncomfortably and picked up the doll, turning it over in surprise. “Why do you play with this?” he asked slowly. “It’s broken!”

  “It’s not broken!” she said strangely and took it from him.

  “Of course it is,” he insisted. “It’s got no—” The word died on his lips as he saw her face. As he watched she took the doll and the candle and began to walk away down the gallery.

  He was forced to run after her, to avoid being left in the dark.

  * * *

  Months passed and the King, climbing out of a dark abyss of self-pity, began to search for a new wife. Foreign princesses were conspicious by their sudden absence in the matrimonial stakes, and a number of women averted their eyes nervously whenever they felt the King’s gaze heavy upon them. Among these anxious ladies was Lord Latimer’s widow, Katherine Parr, who stared uneasily across the banqueting table to meet Tom Seymour’s eyes and and look hastily away one more. The King watched this interesting little side play and suddenly knew he had found what he was looking for. He admired his brother-in-law’s taste in women and very soon was making his intentions clear, amused by the opportunity to get one up on Tom, that notorious ladies’ man.

  Unaware of the momentous decision her father had made, Elizabeth closed her book and went out to the stables with Robin, down the kitchen stairs and past the tennis court, hitching up her skirts among the dirty rushes. Beside a bale of hay lay a sleek bitch, suckling half a dozen greedy puppies.

  “Caesar’s litter,” said Robin proudly.

  “Caesar again! Does he ever stop to eat?”

  Robin grinned and they exchanged the furtive snigger of children with a little worldly knowledge.

  “Mother says he ought to be castrated.”

  “If I were your mother,” said Elizabeth wickedly, “I’d castrate more than poor old Caesar. She’s always pregnant.”

  Robin laughed. “Father says Dudleys will inherit the earth.”

  “They certainly ought to—they breed like rabbits.” Elizabeth shuddere
d. “It must be awful to have a baby every year.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Robin, cheerfully heartless. “It’s only like shelling peas. It’s much worse for a horse. They let me watch Black Cherry foal the other day and the foal’s head was stuck so far back that old Wilks had to get his whole arm inside and—”

  “Be quiet!”

  He turned to look at her in astonishment.

  “Listen!” she said curtly.

  Footsteps were crunching heavily across the courtyard and they exchanged a look of alarm. There would be trouble if they were caught together here, without her attendants.

  “Over here!” said Robin and pulled her down behind the bale of hay.

  The fat puppies waddled after them and the bitch growled as a tall man came quickly through the door. They recognised Tom Seymour at once from his golden beard and arrogant swagger, and Elizabeth, relaxing in the sudden knowledge that they had nothing to fear from him, would have stood up and shown herself in quick delight, but Robin held her back. Almost immediately there was another sound outside, the sound of frantic running footsteps and the swirl of a heavy train across the dried straw.

  A woman dressed in unrelieved black burst suddenly into the barn and fell into the arms of the waiting man, laughing and crying in a wild panic, repeating over and over again, “What can I do—oh God, what can I do?”

  “Be quiet, be calm, Kate—my poor Kate. It can’t be for long. The King is old—the King is often sick. Our time will come if you are wise and careful now.”

  “Wise! As wise as Katherine Howard or Anne Boleyn? Oh, Tom, Tom, how can I bear it?”

  “You must bear it, Kate, you must! If you refuse him now it will mean both our heads, for he knows about us—oh yes, he knows! There’s nothing misses the old devil’s eye! He told me this morning that I was to go to Flanders as his ambassador. He’s clearing the stage, Kate—for your sake and mine I must go without a word of protest. And when he asks for your hand, as he will do any day now, you must say yes.”

  “I won’t, I can’t! Oh, Tom, take me with you—we could go to France, to Germany, anywhere, we would be safe.”

  Tom Seymour shook his great head and his voice was bitter.

  “He spares neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust. We would be hunted down before we reached Dover. Marry him now with a brave heart and know that in a year or two he will be dead—he rots before our eyes with that leg. And when you’re free you’ll find me waiting—”

  Savagely he closed her protesting mouth with his own and they clung together in an agonised moment of passion.

  “Go now,” he said softly as they broke away from each other at last. “You must not be missed. God keep you, God help you, Kate—my Kate.”

  Crushed and apathetic she went to the door in silence and slipped away and after a few minutes he followed her. The barn was silent again except for the restless stamping of horses’ hooves and the soft cooing of the pigeons who sat on the rafters.

  Robin knelt up, picked the clinging straw from his apricot hose, and whistled softly through clenched teeth.

  “It looks,” he said calmly, “as though Katherine Parr will shortly be your new stepmother.”

  Elizabeth said nothing for so long that he looked round in surprise and found that she was crying. Two big tears had rolled down her white little face and she was staring at the puppy who had curled asleep on her velvet skirts.

  He sat on the bale of hay, swinging his long legs and feeling oddly uncomfortable, as he would feel perhaps to find another boy crying at his side. A steadily increasing line of sisters inured him as a rule to girlish tears, but this furtive grief affected him like a premonition of tragedy. He felt a curious need to make her stop.

  Hunting for a handkerchief, he discovered that as usual he hadn’t got one. Instead he found the apple he had been saving for some appropriate moment of privacy. He polished it against his doublet, eyed its round rosiness with regret, and after a moment’s hesitation he offered it to her.

  She looked up, drew the long hanging sleeve of her dress across her nose in what he considered to be a most vulgar fashion and climbed up beside him on the bale of hay.

  “I don’t want it.” After a moment she remembered to thank him.

  He began to eat it himself before she could change her mind; he was always hungry. But all the time he ate he was horribly aware of those silent tears rolling faster and faster. At last he said uncomfortably, “I wish you wouldn’t cry like that.”

  “I’m not crying—there’s something in my eye.”

  He turned to look at her with open disbelief. “What—both of them?”

  She made no reply to his gross impertinence and refused to look at him. He finished the apple and threw the core away into the straw, supposing with rough sympathy that she wept for her last stepmother. Perhaps she was afraid the same thing would happen again.

  “I expect,” he said, intending to be cheerful, “that the King will just divorce this one when he’s tired of her—then your uncle can have her after all.”

  That did not appear to comfort her at all. She began to get off the bale in a monstrous hurry.

  “He’s Edward’s uncle, not mine,” she sobbed, hunting furiously for the slipper she had lost in her hasty descent. “And he won’t marry her—he won’t marry anyone except—” She broke off so abruptly that her mouth snapped shut like the spring of a trap. He heard no more of whom she expected Tom Seymour to marry and it was to be four years before malicious rumour supplied the missing name to his by then unwilling ears.

  But for the time being he quickly forgot it.

  * * *

  So the King married Katherine Parr and Elizabeth’s favourite step-uncle sailed away to sanctuary in Flanders. It was almost three years before he judged it safe to return to court, a court paralysed with fear and uncertainty under a sick tyrant’s rule. He felt the oppressive atmosphere as soon as he arrived and his bold laugh rang through the whispering corridors like a breath of fresh air. “He’s back!” said the gay glances of all the unmarried girls at he court; “He’s back!” said his brother’s sombre stare with a flicker of dislike and distrust; “He’s back!” said the King’s jaundiced eye as it roved over that bronzed figure, and remembered with envy how many years it was since he had looked like that.

  The new Queen folded her hands in her lap and carefully averted her gaze, afraid to betray herself by looking at him too directly. It had been the longest three years of her life, full of alarms and fears which had aged her. Tom could see in that first moment that she was not the gay laughing widow she had been when the King first set eyes upon her. Poor Kate!

  All around him Tom felt the nervous shifting glances of men who wondered how much longer they would keep their heads these days. And those few who did not fear the block, being spotless in their honour, were anxious lest their religious leanings should shortly lead them to the stake.

  Heresy had been a delicate subject for Catholics and Protestants alike ever since the break with Rome. Too orthodox a Roman Catholic and you were a traitor; too vigorous a reformer and you were a heretic. Either way Henry had the majority of his courtiers in a cleft stick and fear pulsed through the palace like a tangible force. He could not bear the doctrinal controversy spreading through England, nor could he accept that he was largely responsible for its growth. To suit his personal convenience, he had pushed open the door to the Reformation one necessary chink; now he found himself unable to close it once more and he was equally savage in his reprisals to offenders on either side of the religious fence. All he had done was to remove papal authority from the land, along with iniquitous monasteries—he’d never had much time for monks and nuns anyway—and now this insufferable spiritual chaos! Had he not made the position clear, simple and unquestionably right? Who dared to raise the voice of dispute in England? He would root it out with axe and rope and fire. He
was King; he was Pope; was he not, perhaps, even God? Paranoid with suspicion, the small eyes ran here and there seeking treason and heresy behind every face, while the little mortals around him trembled like autumn leaves in a fierce wind, torn between worship and hate for this ageing Zeus from whose hands had fallen so many thunderbolts.

  It was a relief and a pleasure for Tom Seymour to escape at last to the apartments of the royal children, where at least a man did not need to watch his every look and word. He strode down the familiar corridors with a tiny monkey dressed in imitation of a courtier swaying on his shoulder and a host of childish foreign trinkets in his hands. They danced around him with undignified delight, swamping him with a wave of genuine affection which touched his broad but shallow heart.

  “Get back, you little vultures! Never saw such a clutch of cupboard lovers in all my life! And that’s God’s truth.” He swung Edward over his shoulder and capered round the room until the little boy crowed with delight. It was strange just how much he had missed this ill-assorted collection of young creatures, the pale delicate little Prince, the grave-faced Grey sisters, and the “Little Bastard” herself.

  His eyes fell at last on the boys who stood embarrassed and forgotten on the edge of the family circle. Who were those lads? Ah yes, he remembered now, two of Dudley’s considerable brood—that fellow was like a tom cat! How many was it, twelve, thirteen? Could be more by now, of course. There was a man who’d bear watching, too smooth by half, always with an eye on the next rung of the ladder, not averse to rising on the backs of his own offspring, he’d be bound. What was behind the apparently innocuous presence of these two disturbingly handsome and well-grown lads? Two boys and a choice of three girls, the Lady Jane, the Lady Katherine—the Lady Elizabeth. God’s blood, what a conniving devil! Was it possible the King couldn’t see what Dudley was after?