by Susan Kay
“The tide,” whispered Sussex anxiously as they reached the barge at last, “the tide is still unsuitable—”
“We dare not delay any longer,” snapped Winchester. “We leave at once.”
Elizabeth gathered from the indignant protests of the boatmen that something was very wrong. The grey, rain-splattered river rushed by the barge as they swerved towards London Bridge and there was a sudden cry as they struck a whirlpool which rocked all the occupants to the floor. Soaked with dirty water, Elizabeth was flung into Sussex’s arms for a moment as the barge struck against the bridge supports, while the rotting heads impaled on spikes above glared down upon them sightlessly. And when at last the bargemen had regained control, they were washed up at the grim portal of Traitor’s Gate, bumping against the landing steps that were submerged with black water.
Soaked to the skin, with her hair hanging loose down her back in damp snarling curls, she stood at Traitor’s Gate filled with such rage that she felt she could fell old Winchester with one blow. How dared they half drown her in their haste!
“I will not be landed here,” she cried furiously. “I’ll be over my shoes in water.”
“Madam, you have no choice,” grunted Winchester. He had hurried back in annoyance to discover she was making more trouble, but suddenly found himself so horrified by her appearance—so like a proud but bedraggled tawny cat—that he pulled off his own cloak and flung it round her shoulders.
But she was in a blazing temper and blind to all chivalry. She dashed off his cloak and stepped into the icy water, her voice ringing through the rain with a shout of defiance.
“Here lands as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs. Before you, oh God, I speak it, having no other friend but you alone.”
“If that is so, then so much the better for you,” sneered the Marquis who had already regretted that unaccountable act. He bent down, fished his cloak out of the filthy water, and shook it out angrily.
She turned from him and looked beyond him to the rows and rows of guards and officials. There was an angry laugh in her voice now.
“What—all these harnessed men for one weak woman?”
Her scornful gaze swept their ranks and to the fury of the Lord Lieutenant, Bridges, the men began to fall to their knees murmuring, “God save Your Grace,” and there was absolutely nothing he could do to prevent it.
The rage died in her eyes then and suddenly she looked up, seeming to see the Tower for the first time. Somewhere within that beautiful stone fortress what was left of her mother’s headless body lay buried in an arrow chest, picked clean by countless maggots. The sound of the river had lapped in her dreams for seventeen years, waiting to sweep her home to this moment of reunion with her mother’s blood.
She sank down upon the streaming stones and bowed her head. No force in this world would make her enter that place, no, not if they chose to kill her on this very spot.
There was a moment of horrified silence, during which all the men exchanged uneasy glances, for none of them had been prepared for this. After a minute, the Lord Lieutenant came forward uncomfortably and knelt beside her.
“Madam, you had best come in,” he said anxiously, uncertain what the effect upon his men would be if they were obliged to resort to physical force, “for here you sit unwholesomely.”
“Better sit here than in a worse place,” she muttered darkly, tracing one long finger across the wet stone.
Little rivulets of water were running past her, soaking into her gown, and her mind like a boat gently slipping its mooring rope drifted with them, aimless, thoughtless, towards oblivion. If, in that critical moment, they had dared to lay hands upon her and drag her inside the fortress, they would have found it necessary to restrain her in chains.
But no one dared. The rain hammered down and as she floated swiftly and painlessly to the very brink of insanity, one of her young men servants began to weep noisily.
Slowly, incredulously, she raised her head and looked round: Cornwallis, her gentleman usher, a shy, sensitive young man, who blushed and was overcome with stupid confusion every time she had cause to address him.
“Stop it!” she ordered, getting to her feet and giving him a gentle poke in the ribs. “Stop it, do you hear? I’m not in such a plight that I need to be wept over yet.”
“No, madam,” he mumbled and little knew what service he had just rendered to her. She was in command of herself once more, able to give her hand to Sussex and sweep haughtily into the fortress, even to smile graciously when the Earl whispered brokenly, “Madam, I am sorry I ever lived to see this day.”
At length she stood in a bare, semi-circular, stone chamber, listening to the turning of the key in the outer door.
“See her doors are locked straightly at all times,” said Winchester’s nervous voice, addressing the guards.
There was a sudden angry jangling of heavy keys in the lock and Winchester’s voice became a whine of protest.
“My lord of Sussex. They must be locked—for safety’s sake.”
“There’s nothing in our orders that says anything about locked doors,” retorted Sussex heatedly. “You talk of safety? Then let us take heed that we do not go beyond our commission. She was our king’s daughter and is the prince next in blood. By God, let us deal with her now that we do not have to answer for our dealings hereafter.”
Winchester was silent.
And Elizabeth’s door remained unlocked.
* * *
The outer world had ceased to exist for her; there was nothing to do except embroider quietly with her women before a petulant fire and wait for the daily interrogations from the Council. Once they brought her face to face with the prisoner, James Croft, hoping the sight of her would loosen his stubborn tongue.
He stood for a moment staring at her white face, then fell on his knees at her feet and declared her innocent.
“I have been marvellously tossed and examined touching Your Highness, but I take God to record I know nothing of the crime which is laid to your charge. If they bring me to trial, madam, I will take my death upon that oath.”
Her hand went out in helpless rage to the broken wretch at her feet and she wondered how many they would have to torture before they found one willing to testify against her. She wanted to say she would pray for him, but that could be twisted, misunderstood, and so she said nothing; but her eyes were soft with compassion.
Gardiner, enraged by this dismal failure, returned to the subject of Donnington. Could she deny there had been talk among her household of moving there?
“What if there was!” she snapped, turning on him suddenly. “May I not go to my own house whenever I choose?”
Evidently the logic of that was too much for the elderly Earl of Arundel who, likewise, went down on his knees before her and declared, “Your Grace speaks the truth and we are very sorry to have troubled you.”
We! It was unbelievable. From the corner of her eye Elizabeth saw Gardiner’s face suffuse with purple fury and his lips contort into a twisted line. She lowered her eyes demurely, held out her hand to Arundel, and said on a maddening note of ineffable sweetness, “May God forgive you all.”
James Croft’s dirty shivering form was instantly bundled out of the room and Gardiner, barely able to speak, all but threw the rest of the Council after him. When the door had slammed, Elizabeth found she had begun to shake with wild laughter.
Gardiner stormed away to inform Renard that as long as Elizabeth lived he had no hope of seeing the kingdom in peace.
“A reasonable conclusion,” said the Ambassador testily. “I’m surprised it took so long for you to reach it.”
He was truly astonished at the laxity with which the English government conducted its affairs. Mary assured him that fresh proof against the Princess was arriving every day, but he saw little evidence of it. And now that Lord William
Howard had taken up his great-niece’s cause in good earnest, it began to look as though they might actually be forced to let the young bitch go. “Unless—” said Gardiner; and let the sentence hang significantly. Unless…
* * *
April had touched the Tower garden with little riots of spring flowers and a blustery wind. Tucked in the shelter of the high wall, three children knelt on the gravel path beside Elizabeth and watched as she traced her name with a stick.
“Do you always write it like that, Madam Elizabeth?” Henry Martin was a sturdy, opinionated five-year-old. “With all those twirls and loops?”
“Every time.”
“But it takes you so long.”
“I know—that’s why I hate writing letters and have a secretary.”
Henry sighed. “I wish I had a secretary.”
She tapped him playfully on the tip of his nose with the stick.
“Even if you had one it would still be necessary to add your signature. A signature is a unique part of yourself, it tells people things about you.”
“Like whether you are full of loops and twirls?”
She laughed and would not answer.
“Do dragons have singy-tunes too?” demanded Susanna suddenly.
“Oh yes,” said Elizabeth cheerfully. “They all write in a fine Italian script. Some of them even write books. I knew one once, his name was Remnarc—Remnarc the Coward.”
They settled around her avidly in the pale April sunlight while she drew Archbishop Cranmer for them, making him a timorous weedy little dragon cowering in a dark cave for fear of burning himself with his own flames. And burn he might in good earnest, she thought dispassionately, if Gardiner had his way and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer became an outlawed heresy.
She liked her dragons; they were fuel for her starved imagination, by-products of a frivolity which had surprised her. And if the children missed the finer points of her malicious characterisations, it hardly seemed to matter. They loved the simple adventures and the subtle innuendo was her own private delight.
A week is a long time in the Tower; this one had transformed her life. It was her first experience of children, her first real opportunity to discover how infinitely preferable their company was to that of adults. And her first discovery of her own unique affinity with the infant mind. It had cost her very little conscious effort to make these children worship her. They were only Tower brats, offspring of the officials who lived and worked here, but they were suddenly the centre of her world, bringing her gaiety and hope; and—inadvertently—contact with a fellow prisoner.
It was little Henry Martin who began it all, a lively, chatty child welcomed in more than one dull cell by the more respectable inmates. When he began to arrive daily in the garden with a posy of flowers, Elizabeth was touched and amused, but hardly suspicious. Then one day she unloosened the bundle of stems and found a tiny pellet of paper concealed there.
It was not a letter, just a short list of names which she instantly recognised as her dragons’ alter egos, accredited with an impertinent postscript.
“Not very subtle! Robin Dudley.”
The blood rushed into her cheeks with a sharp mingling of anger, alarm, and pleasure. She tackled Henry next morning with some care, but it was soon evident he knew nothing about the note. Certainly he had been often to visit Lord Robert and repeated her stories.
“…he said Trebor the Brave was the best.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed and put her hands up to her burning cheeks. “Did you have to tell him that one?”
Henry looked bewildered.
“But it was a good story, Madam Elizabeth—I liked it best too.”
Oh, what was the use? She looked at her latest posy, lying in splendid isolation where she had left it under a bush. It contained another stupid note, she knew it did, and suddenly she didn’t care about the risk. Not since her disastrous love affair with the Admiral had she felt such wildly happy anticipation. She was young, she was still alive, and this long, breathless moment, stolen from Time’s bleak march, had made her curiously reckless.
Her guard was coughing discreetly, delicately attempting to indicate that her hour of exercise had ended some time ago. The children danced around him, protesting vigorously.
“Aw, Will—five more minutes.”
“Five and twenty you’ve had already,” he grumbled. “Your Grace—if you please now.”
She clapped her hands and the children ran to her; one by one she hugged them and swung them round in the air until they squealed with glee. She watched them sidle out through the gate, then ran up the stairs in the Governor’s house to her room in the Bell Tower.
When she was alone, she slit the binding round the posy with her fingernail and spread the stems across the table. There between the leaves lay another tightly folded pellet of paper, containing one line in the old familiar writing she remembered from her childhood.
“Dismiss your dragons tonight.”
Between the Bell Tower where she was lodged and the Beauchamp Tower where Robin Dudley was held captive under sentence of death was a narrow walk known as the Leads. It stretched roughly seventy feet from one door to the next, between the battlements of the outer walls and the gables of the King’s and the Yeoman Gaoler’s houses. From that high vantage point she had seen the far sweep of the Essex marshes and freedom, for it was there that they had first allowed her to walk for exercise, before she gained the greater freedom of the Tower garden. She remembered glancing at the door to the Beauchamp Turret and thinking how strange it was to be so near and yet so far from her childhood’s best friend.
So—he would come to her tonight! It could be done, she knew that, knew that stranger, darker, and more mysterious things had taken place before now in this stone kingdom where money talked with a louder and more persuasive voice than anywhere else in England. Meetings could be arranged easily enough for those who were not out of reach in the dungeons and she was not there yet, though she could think of some who would like to see it arranged. But Robin Dudley, even committing rank treason at his father’s command, was not among them.
Now, in the darkest moment of their lives, when they were both too near to death to fear the consequences, they could afford to be reckless. They were neither of them likely to see another spring, so what the devil did it matter anyway if they met once more to say goodbye?
“What the devil!” she said softly to herself and dropped the small pellet of paper into the fire with a little smile.
* * *
And so it had come to this. Her life had turned the full circle of love and death and she was waiting for life to end or begin that strange circle again, waiting in the Tower, listening to the wind and staring at the unlocked door.
Death was all around her in this place of dark memories. Anne Boleyn; Katherine Howard; the Lord Admiral. All had met their violent ends within the confines of the fortress which now held her captive.
She sat very still in the cold, stone window-seat and rain drummed heavily into the moat outside.
Who would come to her through that door which was scarcely visible in the half gloom—a living breathing young man, or a gay, teasing, reckless ghost?
As she watched, the door creaked open and shut again, and a tall figure stood at last with his face in the shadows. She rose from the window-seat and they stared at each other for a long moment in the twilight, before he came across the room and knelt to kiss the hem of her gown. He lifted his head to look at her and the light of the single candle fell not on the golden beard and hair of the Lord Admiral, but on a face as darkly handsome as a gypsy’s.
In that moment, when she held out both her hands to Robin Dudley, it seemed to her that she held them out to life itself.
Part 2
The Woman
“I hate the very idea of marriage for reasons I would not divulge to a twin s
oul.”
—Elizabeth
Chapter 1
The Lady Elizabeth was one admirer short on her morning walk in the little Tower garden and found herself disproportionately distressed by the lack.
It was not as though Katherine was her favourite. She was not high-spirited like Henry, or half so amusing as Susanna; in fact she was a dull little thing, with hardly a word to say for herself, a child one might easily overlook in a crowd. But her solemn, tongue-tied adoration had been a trophy, a tribute to Elizabeth’s power, and she was shaken by this unexpected desertion.
Where’s Katherine?
The nagging little question gnawed at the back of her jealous mind, and neither hide and seek nor a vigorous game of tag shifted her growing depression.
“Madam Elizabeth!”
She turned eagerly towards the gate and held out her arms in welcome to the little figure who came running towards her.
“Look what I found for you, Madam Elizabeth. Look!”
Flushed and animated, the child held up a bunch of keys with a triumphant flourish. Never in all her life would Elizabeth have believed it possible that the plain, rather plump little face could look so beautiful.
“Where did you find them, sweetheart?”
“Where indeed, madam?” The guard was at her side. “Forgive me, Your Grace, but I must see.”
He held out his hand for the keys and Katherine, that quiet, colourless, well-behaved little girl, suddenly let out a scream of fury that almost made him drop them.
“No! The keys are for the lady so she may unlock the doors and go abroad. Give them back to her—give them back!”
Elizabeth swung the child up into her arms and straddled her on her hip.
“Are you always so full of tact?” she demanded of the guard, who flushed uncomfortably.
