by Susan Kay
“Madam, any change in the itinerary of your studies is quite out of the question at the moment. The programme you propose would be too taxing for—”
“For a girl,” she smiled. “Roger Ascham, you got this post under false pretences. I understood you were a man with advanced ideas.”
He blushed furiously and thought: A little too advanced, if only you knew, madam!
Aloud he said stiffly, “Even at Cambridge mathematics is not considered a serious subject.”
“Then it ought to be. Any man of the future—yes, even Robin Dudley—will tell you that mathematics and science are the keys to it.”
The colour left his face, leaving him stiff and formal.
“Lord Robert Dudley? You know him well?”
“Well enough, we were children together.” A thought struck her. “Were you not his tutor before you were mine?”
“That dubious honour was mine,” Ascham observed drily.
She smiled again “So—how’s his Latin syntax? Still as abysmal as ever, I’ll be bound.”
“It would be a good deal better if he didn’t waste valuable time chasing every new fad and fancy in learning,” said Ascham severely. “Science, astrology, mathematics—he’s off up each track like a rabbit running wild in an empty warren.”
Her laugh rang out, clear as a bell on the still air.
“Poor Robin! That’s too cruel and apt. And highly unprofessional etiquette. I hope you speak more highly of me behind my back, sir.”
“I cannot speak highly enough of you, madam.” The colour rose in his cheeks again and he shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. “Oh, mathematics are well enough in their place, but I’ve already told Lord Robert he’ll never make a politician if he abandons Cicero for Euclid’s pricks and lines. He’s a bright enough lad, but lacks Your Grace’s perseverance and perception. He’ll be a jack of all trades and master of none—no match for you, madam, I fear.”
She threw her gloves up into the air and caught them deftly.
“Shall I ever find my match?” she asked with a mixture of coquettishness and sincere interest.
He stopped and looked at her with a curious thoughtful stare.
“No, madam,” he said slowly, reflectively. “I don’t believe you ever will.” And that, he added silently to himself, may be your real tragedy, so you need not look so pleased about it. A pedestal is a lonely place.
It was bitterly cold and their breath made little feathery clouds in the nipping air as they approached the low brick palace. The sound of stamping hooves was carried to them from the courtyard, and suddenly Elizabeth stood stock still, staring up at the house as though she could not believe what she heard.
Parry had said that the Lord Admiral would visit her soon. Had he dared to come at last? And what would she say to him after all these months? What would she say now when he asked her to be his wife?
Her heart gave a wild lurch beneath the stiff bodice of her shooting gown and suddenly all the doubts and fears and caution flew out of her like little bats from a dark cave. There was nothing left but her love for him, the desire to run into his arms as she had done so many times as a child, to look up into his bold teasing eyes and answer his question now without fear or guilt—yes. Yes!
She spun round, and tossed her gloves to the bewildered man beside her. Ascham caught the flash of anticipation in her eyes and knew for certain that not only had she forgotten him—he might as well be an educated mouse!—she had also for once forgotten herself. Picking up her heavy green skirts she began to run towards the house. A mad gust of icy wind blew the silver snood free from its pins and her hair fell unbound to her waist. Ascham saw her stoop swiftly and reclaim it with a careless gesture, saw her run on past the stables and disappear beyond the open double doors into the house. He stood holding her bow and her gloves, like a lackey, and thinking of the Lord Admiral with a twinge of envy, knowing that never in a thousand years would she ever look or run like that for himself.
Beyond the oaken doors, the Great Hall was full of strangers and frightened servants. Elizabeth pulled up short and stared at the tall, rather sharp-faced gentleman who immediately approached her.
“Sir Robert Tyrwhitt?”
“Your Grace.” He inclined his head curtly.
“I demand to know what this unpardonable intrusion signifies.” For a moment he did not reply and she stamped her foot to cover her rising terror.
“What has happened? What are you doing here?”
“I come on the King’s business, madam, by order of the Council. I have my written authority here if you should wish to see it. I think you will find it quite in order.”
The silver snood dropped from her cold fingers and she turned away into the adjoining solar. He followed, shutting the door on the chaos outside.
In the centre of the floor she swung round upon him with a great deal more bravado than she felt.
“What is your business here? Answer me!”
Still he said nothing, merely looked her up and down with a steady contemptuous glance, then ensconced himself behind a table, setting down a sheaf of papers. She was aghast and frightened that he should dare to behave with such pointed disrespect. It could only mean one thing, that her position was suddenly deadly serious. But why—why?
He indicated the chair in front of her.
“Perhaps Your Grace will be seated.”
“I will stand in my own house if I choose, Sir Robert.”
“As you please,” he said mildly. He adjusted the papers fussily and ignored her for a moment as though she were a mere serving maid; then abruptly looked up and fired a statement at her.
“The Lord High Admiral is at this present moment in the Tower of London.”
The room rocked around her and she took hold of the back of the chair, but all she said at last in a thin whisper was, “What has that to do with me?”
He was annoyed at the failure of what he had expected to be a telling shot, one which would bring her defence down in ruins.
“Your servants Parry and Ashley,” he snapped, “are on their way to the Tower, there to confess the practices between Your Grace and the Admiral.”
“What practices?” she gasped. “I know nothing of—”
He sprang to his feet and banged his fist on the table; the papers scattered to the floor.
“You planned to marry the Admiral without the Council’s consent…”
“That is a lie.”
“…and seize the crown. Such a charge is high treason.”
“No!”
“Oh, come, Your Grace, these dealings are very widely known.” He paused and added spitefully, “Indeed it is generally said that you are with child by the Admiral.”
“How dare you repeat such a vile and filthy lie!” Her voice trembled and she steadied it with a furious effort of will to say calmly, “I am quite willing to disprove that, to show myself as I am before the court physicians. I have done nothing and have nothing to fear.”
He decided to change his tactics. Pushing back his chair he came to stand beside her, laying a gentle hand on her arm, his voice soft, insinuating, almost fatherly.
“Come, be sensible, there’s no call for you to distress yourself.” His voice became larded with tenderness. “You are extremely young and the Council will take that into account if you confess your dealings fully. All the blame will be taken by Parry and Mrs. Ashley who—”
“Who are the King’s good subjects and my true and loyal servants,” she said fiercely. She flung off his arm and rubbed away the tears which had rolled down her white face.
He lost his temper at this ungrateful rebuff and controlled a very strong desire to give her a good shaking.
“When we came to arrest Parry he took his chain of office from his neck and threw it down. He said, ‘I would to God I had never been born. I am ruine
d.’ Madam, those were not the words of a true and loyal subject. The man’s a traitor and so are all who seek to shelter him.”
She turned away from Tyrwhitt in stubborn silence and he was put to the undignified measure of placing himself between her and the door.
“By God, madam, your guilt shows in your face—I will have your confession in the end.”
“If my guilt is so manifest you’ll have no need of a confession. Kindly stand out of my way.”
“Madam, I would ask you to remember that you are in no position to give commands. You are under house arrest and your servants are to be kept from you until further notice. I advise you for your own safety to consider your honour and your great peril, for you are but a subject—as indeed was your mother before you.”
He wished he had thought of that earlier; the effect upon her was quite remarkable. For a moment he thought she was going to faint. It was as though the full significance of her hopeless plight had struck her like a blow across the face, as though she understood at last that she was utterly alone and friendless and in real danger of her life. She clenched her teeth, but could not bite back the choked sob of terror which escaped them, and suddenly her bold front crumpled and she began to cry wildly, like the child he suddenly remembered that she was.
“What have they said?” she sobbed. “What have my servants said?”
He was not by nature a harsh man and he was confident now that he had the upper hand at last. Putting one arm around her shaking shoulders he guided her to a chair, offered his own handkerchief and smiled down benignly on the bent red head.
“Come,” he said gently, “you had better tell me everything.”
* * *
Sir Robert’s moment of triumph proved remarkably short-lived and hollow. Having come down to Hatfield confident that a day or two would see his business at a satisfactory end he felt he had made an excellent beginning and wrote to tell the Protector, “I begin to grow in credit with her.” But in the weeks that followed he discovered that breaking her will was not after all to be the easy task he had initially hoped it would be and soon his reports were less hopeful and frankly baffled: “She has a very good wit and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy.”
He began to resort to underhand tricks, a false letter, a false friend, daily brow-beating interrogations, which in return produced nothing but a host of trifling incidents told in great detail, not one word of which could be used against her.
Within weeks he was in a state of baffled irritation, writing to inform the Protector: “I believe there has been a secret promise between my lady, Mrs. Ashley, and the steward never to confess to death and if that is so, it will never be gotten out of her…”
The Protector took the hint and the savage barrage of questions was repeated on the wretched prisoners in the Tower. Under the intolerable pressure brought to bear on them, first Parry, then Mrs. Ashley, broke down and wrote their confessions, twin documents which in the right hands might be used to take their mistress to the block.
Now “I have good hope to make her cough out the whole,” wrote Tyrwhitt gleefully on receiving them.
Elizabeth stood quite still as he marched into her apartment, waving the papers in a threatening gesture. “All is lost, madam,” he announced. “Your servants have confessed everything. You can have nothing to gain now by your continued stubbornness.”
Panic closed in on her, making her breath come in a panting gasp, but she managed to take the documents and pretend to study the signatures carefully, hinting at forgery.
He was infuriated by the gesture. “Your Grace knows your servants’ hand with half a sight!” he snapped.
Desperately she played for time, while her eyes roved from one hateful line to another, trying to decide through her sick confusion how bad this could truly be for her. Parry’s confession was a terrified rabbiting of slapped buttocks, of tickling, scuffling in bedchambers, of Queen Katherine’s jealousy and the banishment from Chelsea, of Kat Ashley’s muddled, indiscreet, and obviously inebriated conversation: “…she seemed to repent that she had gone so far with me and prayed me that I would not disclose these matters…and I said I would not…I had rather be pulled with wild horses.”
How could Kat have betrayed her to Parry? And what had been done to this pair of poor gossiping fools to make them break down like this? Her terror was knifed by sudden fury. Had they tortured her helpless servants? She would see the Protector hanged from the highest tree in the realm if she were Queen—if only she were Queen of England now.
But she was not Queen; and it began to look as though she never would be. The mere thought was treason; but were these confessions treason, after all? They were extremely damaging, they would certainly mean her reputation, possibly even her place in the succession, but as long as she stuck to her ground and denied everything it was just possible that they might not mean her life. Only a lawyer could pick his way through the legal niceties of her perilous plight and she had no one to advise or counsel her, nothing to rely on except her own instinct for survival, and that instinct told her to hold her tongue.
The tension in the room grew by the minute as they waited for her to speak, but she said nothing.
“Mrs. Ashley was at first staunch in her refusal to speak,” Sir Robert burst out at last, aware that he was losing once again in this war of nerves. “She and Parry were brought face to face. When he stood by what he had written she called him ‘False Wretch’ and reminded him he had promised never to confess it to death.”
Her eyes dropped to the final paragraph of Kat’s testament, a pathetic plea for removal from a cell where the window had no glass—Kat who could not bear the cold, who spent the winter months scurrying from one fireplace to the next. In her mind she saw that forlorn, harassed little woman stuffing the window with straw in a vain attempt to shut out the knifing February wind. And she saw Parry too, plump, complacent, garrulous Parry, framed in a muddle of account books with the chain of office swinging portentously. Parry, self-important at his furtive little dealings with the Admiral, wooing harmless tales from the governess on a cold Christmas evening assisted by a certain something to loosen tongues and keep out the cold. A domestic life where promises came easily and did not stand the threat of torture—“she prayed that I would not disclose these matters…and I said I would not…I had rather be pulled with wild horses.”
A fierce protective affection welled up in Elizabeth and swept away her own terror like driftwood before a mighty wave. She swore to herself that if it was the last thing she ever did she would get those two pitiful creatures out of their wretched plight.
Folding Parry’s confession, she handed it back with measured civility.
“It was a great matter for him to promise such a promise and then break it,” she said calmly.
A purplish hue rose in Sir Robert’s leathery cheeks as he listened to that cryptic little line and knew that the most powerful weapon in his arsenal had failed him miserably. Weeks he had been here, hounding, spying, threatening, an influential member of the Privy Council and as many agents and devices as he saw fit to employ, all the skill and cunning amassed during a lifetime of power politics to be used against an opponent who was still in the schoolroom, and it had gained him absolutely nothing. Without her own confession the signed testimonies of Ashley and Parry alone would be insufficient evidence to convict an heir to the throne. And now at last he saw she understood that, and he knew that for all the good his presence here would do he might as well pack his bags and ride back to court in humble defeat.
He still believed she was guilty, that the reason they all sang the same song was because they had set the note before, but somewhere beneath his fury and his indignation there moved the absurd impulse to salute her. Well, he had done his best and he could do no more. It was up to the Council now to find the means to break her will.
Personally, he was beginning to believe
it couldn’t be done.
* * *
The Duchess of Somerset rounded on her husband like a cat about to strike.
“What the devil do you mean, ‘nothing more can be done against her’? You’re surely not about to let a chit of fifteen get the better of you.”
The Protector threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration.
“I’ve done everything in my power to get the truth out of her.”
“Not everything. You’ve not appointed a new governess yet.”
The Protector frowned. “I can’t think that will make any difference. She defends the Ashley woman at every turn. Why, I doubt if she would even accept—”
“Accept?” screamed the Duchess. “God’s death, we’re talking about an accused traitor, a girl without a friend or an ounce of influence to her name and you concern yourself about what she will accept! Have you gone soft in the head with all your reforms?”
“My dear, you are too shrill—” the Duke protested nervously. “Do you want the servants to hear?”
The Duchess lowered her voice an octave in scale and came to stand over him.
“When you fight a cat you use a cat’s claws. She defends the Ashley woman, you say? Very well, then, make it plain to her by appointing a new governess that she’ll never see Ashley again. I have the very woman in mind.”
“You have?” He was startled.
The Duchess smiled unpleasantly. “Tyrwhitt’s wife would be admirably suited to the post.”
The Duke blinked and cleared his throat.
“But Lady Tyrwhitt was the late Queen Katherine’s devoted friend. It would hardly be fitting to appoint a woman who hates the sight of the girl.”
