Legacy

by Susan Kay

  The corners of Renard’s mouth began to curl up in a rather cruel little smile.

  “Sick and swollen, heh?” he echoed softly. “Then depend upon it, madam, Wyatt’s contact with her has gone considerably further than a letter.”

  Mary stiffened and a slow purplish flush mounted in her cheeks.

  “I know you to be my friend,” she said uncomfortably, “but was that really necessary?”

  “Very necessary.” Renard twisted the end of his moustache with quiet enjoyment. “I would ask Your Majesty to remember that Wyatt’s father was the Concubine’s lover.”

  “That was never proved.” The memory twisted deep in Mary like a sword thrust in an old wound. “Wyatt was a gentleman and my father was satisfied with his personal integrity.”

  “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,” quoted Renard slyly in his impeccable English and was rewarded by seeing the Queen flinch as though from a physical blow. “Are you satisfied now with the integrity of Wyatt’s son and Boleyn’s daughter?”

  “You know I am not.”

  “Then I humbly and most desperately beg Your Majesty to act. Bring the Lady Elizabeth to London by force and commit her to the Tower for examination.” He waved the letter in his hand, in what was almost a threatening gesture betokening his angry despair. “You have every justification. A copy of this letter of hers was found in de Noailles’ mail to the French King. I tell you plainly, madam, as I have told you before, she is working with France.”

  “That might be difficult to prove. And of her involvement with Wyatt we still have no evidence that will stand up in court.”

  “Under your brother’s laws we would have circumstantial evidence sufficient to hang the lady three times over.”

  Mary turned away.

  “But as you are so fond of saying, my friend—these are not my brother’s days. And I have never regretted the repealing of those tyrannical acts.”

  I have! thought Renard bitterly. Aloud he said smoothly, “May you never have cause to regret it, madam!” and tried a new line. “She has set an armed guard around Ashridge—do the implications of that act not strike you as sinister?”

  The Queen shrugged thin shoulders. “With Suffolk encamped so near, it is quite conceivable that Elizabeth fears attack.”

  Renard choked back a curse and took the Queen’s hands in his urgent grasp.

  “The only thing Madam Elizabeth fears,” he said evenly, “is the failure of this attack on you. For the love of God and His mother, bring her to London now, before it is too late!”

  * * *

  At the first breath of danger, Courtenay bleated all he knew to the Queen’s chief minister, Bishop Gardiner, who had been both friend and father-figure to him during the long years of their mutual imprisonment. The news of his betrayal reached Kent four days later, forcing Wyatt to act alone, seven weeks before their original schedule. The church bells rang the alarm, rousing all who feared the heel of Spain and the wrath of the Inquisition. Wyatt raised his standard in Rochester, seizing vital arms and ammunition from the Queen’s own ships, and began the march to Greenwich.

  In London, those who had dismissed the Queen scornfully as a tear-sodden old maid, Renard included, watched the metamorphosis with amazement as once again the natural warrior kicked aside the vacillating middle-aged woman and Mary Tudor rose in defence of her crown. She ignored the pleas of her councillors to take refuge in the Tower or better still flee to Windsor Castle, ordered the arming of her capital city, and rode out to the Guildhall to appeal to the goodwill of the people, to assure them of her love and devotion and to ask theirs in return.

  They listened, and they gave it. At the end of the most stirring speech she would ever make, the loyalty of London spoke back in a sudden deafening roar.

  “God save Queen Mary! God save the Queen!” And suddenly, inexplicably, unbelievably, the cry of support for he who was now her dearest hope, “God save the Prince of Spain!”

  She rode through the cheering, waving crowds to take her barge to Westminster, and then, in the sudden flush of triumph, ordered her oarsmen to row her as near as possible to London Bridge.

  Across the Thames, an army of two thousand rebels sprawled along the Southwark banks, their banners fluttering defiantly in the wind.

  Mary stood beneath the canopy and smiled the challenge of a Tudor prince.

  * * *

  Silence hung over the Thames, silence deep and penetrating, and Wyatt stood in his camp, scorning the £100 price on his head by wearing a velvet cap boldly stamped in large letters with his name. Having sworn he came “only to resist the coming in of the Spanish King” he was proud of the orderliness of his men who had obeyed his stern commands. There would be no rape and pillage on this campaign! But for three days now he had puzzled over the silence of that barricaded city which he had been led to believe would welcome him with open arms. Five hundred of the Queen’s guard had deserted to him at Strood, but since then, nothing. Not a single shot had yet been fired as each side waited for the other to make the first move.

  Integrity, which had once saved the father, now betrayed the son. By the time Wyatt accepted the need for an assault upon the city, the fatal delay had already lost him the offensive. His nightmare march led him through rain and ice and confusion to a muddled furore at Charing Cross. And there, as his followers were mown down by cannon fire, he came face to face with the traitor, Edward Courtenay, fighting now on the Queen’s side. Courtenay panicked at the sight of him and fled to the Queen at Whitehall crying that all was lost. And for a moment his panic threatened to sweep the whole palace. Men and women ran like frightened rabbits until Mary’s voice rang out above the pandemonium like the lash of a whip; she swore to take up arms herself before she would “yield one iota to such a traitor as Wyatt…God will not deceive me.” The panic died; the palace held firm; God had not deceived her—not yet!

  Wyatt struggled to Ludgate only to find the city gates locked against him, and it was there in the rain, staring at the impenetrable thickness of wood, that he suddenly realised he was beaten. He sat on a bench at the Belle Sauvage inn and watched his men slip away down the side streets. The day had gone against him and further resistance would be a senseless bloodbath. He surrendered his bedraggled person to Sir Maurice Berkley and rode through a bristling, insulting mob to the Tower, where the Lord Lieutenant greeted him contemptuously.

  “If it were not for the law which will pass just sentence on you, I would dagger you myself, sir.”

  Wyatt drew his hand across his face, wiping away blood, mud, and tears. “It is no matter now,” he said sadly, and stepped inside.

  * * *

  Renard said grimly, “Madam, the time has come for you to cut out the cankers of this realm. They must all die—all of them.”

  Mary hunched a little further down in her chair; her face in the candlelight was an old woman’s.

  “Not Jane,” she muttered dimly, “not Jane.”

  “Show mercy again and the heretics will call it weakness. Madam—do you want bloodshed for the rest of your reign? What are three lives when the safety of your realm and the preservation of your faith are at stake?”

  Three lives. Jane, Guildford—and Elizabeth. She had heard the same argument from countless sources: What were three lives…?

  The candles burnt low and had to be renewed; she agreed at last to sign the warrants for Jane and Guildford.

  “And Elizabeth?” Renard prompted coldly.

  She shielded her face with her hands.

  “I will leave my husband to deal with her.”

  “Husband?” he echoed blankly.

  She looked up at him wildly and felt suddenly cold with apprehension. Renard spread his beautiful hands in a helpless gesture of frustration.

  “Madam, is it possible that the precious person of Prince Philip could set foot on English soil wh
ile Elizabeth still lives?”

  “But he would have every conceivable protection!”

  Renard shrugged and made a slight bow.

  “No protection would be adequate in the Emperor’s eyes, madam. I fear our business is concluded and by your leave I shall retire.”

  He was not more than halfway across the room when she called him back and promised to despatch doctors, her personal litter, and an armed guard to Ashridge.

  He came back, concealing a wry smile, and reflected with unkind amusement that Philip was in for a most unpleasant surprise.

  * * *

  The state bedroom at Ashridge was dominated by an enormous carved bed, and Elizabeth lay in its cavernous depths, playing chess in the yellow candlelight. She made two shrewd moves in succession, then lunged suddenly across the mattress and was violently sick into the big silver bowl at her side.

  “Play on,” she commanded cheerfully in the panting pause before the retching convulsed her again, but Isabella Markham had risen in alarm.

  “For God’s sake, madam, let me fetch Mrs. Ashley.”

  “Don’t be silly, Markham, there’s nothing she can do for me.” Elizabeth leaned back on her pillows, white with exhaustion, and pressed a handkerchief to her lips. “There are some sweets in that cabinet over there—fetch me one of those instead.”

  “You’ll be sick again.”

  “So?” Elizabeth shrugged carelessly. “We’re not short of bowls, are we?”

  Markham sighed and went across the room to pull out a box of sugared violets and marchpane. Over her shoulder she said severely, “All your teeth will go black one day.”

  “Only if I live to be old,” remarked the invalid smugly, “and under the present circumstances, that prospect hardly seems likely to concern me.”

  Isabella bit her lip and was aware of a sudden tightness in her throat. It was a moment before she had schooled her face sufficiently to return to the bed in a brisk and uncompromising manner.

  “Medicine first,” she said and put a tiny goblet firmly into Elizabeth’s hand.

  “Be kind to me, Belle,” wheedled the younger girl. “You know how I hate physic. I’ll take it later before I go to sleep.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Isabella bluntly, “you’ll throw it in the chamber pot—the doctor warned me not to trust you.”

  “Oh, did he?—the impertinent old fool! You could balance the sum total of his medical knowledge on the head of a pin.”

  “He may not know much about medicine, madam, but he certainly knows a good deal about you!”

  Elizabeth shrugged her thin shoulders against the pillows.

  “Well, what if I am a poor patient? My father was too. It’s part of my royal inheritance.”

  “Madam, your royal brother bore all manner of unpleasant treatments in his last illness with saintly patience.”

  “Much good it did him!” muttered Elizabeth, pushing the goblet to the back of the bedside table. “And for your information, Markham, when that little painted saint was four years old he once kicked old Doctor Butts and yelled: ‘Go away, fool!’”

  Markham looked up in astonishment, with a knight suspended in her hand.

  “Why, madam, the late King never put a foot amiss in all his life! You’re making it up.”

  “I’m not! And I’ll tell you something more—Butts fell on his knees with joy and swore that if he tarried till the child called him knave he would say Nunc Dimittis. It’s the first rule they teach at the College of Physicians—as long as the patient can still kick you there’s every chance you’ll be paid for your services.”

  “You’re a dreadful cynic, madam.”

  “So I am and so was Butts in the end. So would you be if someone took the most spectacular achievement of your career and threw it on the dung heap.”

  Isabella looked at her curiously.

  “What was that? Oh come, madam—you have to tell me now!”

  Elizabeth was silent for a moment, staring at the tester of the bed, as though she half regretted embarking on this tale. Her eyes were pits of ebony and Isabella for no accountable reason felt suddenly chilled and uneasy. The door was shut, they two were unquestionably alone in the room, and yet…and yet…

  Markham’s trembling fingers crept up to her throat.

  “Why,” said Elizabeth at last, in a voice which seemed to come from a distance, “did you never hear how Butts was sent to cure my mother of the sweating sickness—and how my father wrote to her: ‘I would willingly bear half of what you suffer to cure you?’” Elizabeth laughed, and the dreadful splintered sound made Isabella shiver. “People openly prayed that she would die—but she didn’t die, not then. Butts had rather more skill than most doctors—too much perhaps. God knows, half the world called it the worst day’s work he ever did.”

  She smacked her greyhound playfully on the rump to make him jump down off the bed and lay back with candlelight making an amber glory of her eyes. Isabella released her breath in a slow sigh of relief, freed from the crazy, fleeting sensation of something lurking in her mistress’s steady gaze.

  “Checkmate,” announced Elizabeth calmly and began to collect her winnings from Isabella’s hanging pocket. “Three games in a row, that’s fifteen crowns. You play a miserable game of chess, Markham, do you know that?”

  “I was the victim of devastating strategy, madam.”

  “Quite so,” agreed her mistress drily. “I seem to recall that every time I threw up it was your move. Pure coincidence, of course.”

  Markham smiled and said, “Shall I set the pieces out again, madam?”

  “No, put them away. You’re too tired to play again.”

  The girl’s head jerked up indignantly.

  “I’m not tired, madam, far from it.”

  “Look in your mirror, Markham,” said Elizabeth gently and saw the tears seep suddenly into her friend’s eyes. “Don’t cry for me, Belle,” she continued uncomfortably, “I’m not dead yet.”

  “No, of course you’re not.” Markham pulled herself up sharply. “Forgive me. It’s just that all this waiting and uncertainty are driving me out of my mind. None of us can bear not knowing from one day to the next if the Queen’s men will come. Oh, madam, we do nothing in the Great Hall now but listen for hoof beats in the snow.”

  For the last two weeks Elizabeth had been aware of the increasing tension that was slowly crippling the household. With nerves reduced to flapping strings, her close attendants snapped and quarrelled with each other when they believed themselves to be out of her hearing; even Kat, who seldom had a cross word for anyone, scolded the kitchenmaids without mercy.

  Why do they care so much what becomes of me, wondered Elizabeth idly, it’s not as though I were an easy mistress…

  Aloud she said kindly, “Everything seems worse at night, Belle. Put out the lights now and go to bed.”

  She lay in the increasing gloom as her friend moved quietly around the room, dousing the candles with a brass-capped pole. The familiar little ritual was strangely comforting with its unspoken promise of continuity and one by one the candles were snuffed out until at last the room was lit only by the red glow of the fire. Outside snow was falling softly, swirling against the uncovered windows which seemed to be made of black glass. She burrowed under the sheets, glad of their warmth and security against the cold hostility of the outer world, ready to fall asleep like a tired child.

  Markham turned to the bed and swept a deep curtsey.

  “Goodnight, Your Grace.”

  The outer door to the ante-room was abruptly flung open and the sudden tramp of boots, the jostling of spurs that announced the arrival of armed men, froze Markham to the floor in her graceful gesture of obeisance. Elizabeth sat up with a jerk and stared into the rosy half-light as Mrs. Ashley’s voice soared into an indignant wail of protest in the next room.

&
nbsp; “My lords! Her Grace is far too ill to be disturbed at this hour of the night.”

  “Madam,” said a gruff voice in reply, “the Queen’s business will not wait. Her Grace is to be examined immediately by Her Majesty’s own physicians—and I’m sure you will agree she cannot possibly be too ill to see a doctor.”

  Markham found her feet and fled to her mistress’s side.

  “Oh God, madam—they’ve come to take you! What shall I do?”

  “Be calm—you must be, Belle, for my sake. Any panic among my servants will be taken as a sign of my guilt. Be surprised, be indignant, but don’t be afraid.” She squeezed the older girl’s hand. “There—that’s better! Now you can go and let them in.”

  Markham turned away mutely, not trusting herself to speak again and went to light a taper. Elizabeth lay imperiously against the high pillows, ready to show affronted regality, but her heart was hammering beneath her ribs, making her breath come in painful jerks, threatening to spoil all her practised poise. Light-headed with fever and lack of food, she had a curious sensation of falling slowly into some nameless void—a little white pawn, with no hope left of being queened, tumbling quietly off the chessboard of life.

  Chapter 12

  The snow-bound countryside was filled with a white brooding silence as Elizabeth’s great-uncle, Lord William Howard, lifted the Queen’s prisoner into the waiting litter. They had been told to bring her back “either quick or dead” and everyone knew the examination by the Queen’s physicians which had pronounced her fit to travel had been a mere formality. Just as they were about to leave, there was a sudden anxious skirmishing of servants between the house and the litter; when Howard returned to poke his great head between the curtains, he discovered that she had been sick all over the velvet cushions.

  “The Queen’s personal litter,” he muttered, with a horror that quite robbed him of formality. “Oh, Elizabeth!”