B009RYSCAU EBOK (38 page)

“I saw the most beautiful white silk—fine as a spider’s web.”

“Perfect. Perhaps we can use it to catch her goodwill for poor Kate.”

* * *

A
FEW DAYS AFTER HER VISIT WITH
F
RANCES,
B
ESS RECEIVED A
letter from her brother Jem and one from her mother. She opened her brother’s first, feeling a pang of guilt that she had not written to him lately, and growing more worried as she read. Jem wrote that he was very ill—still the trouble with his lungs—and in desperate financial condition. In halting and embarrassed language, he asked if Bess could lend him money, with his coal mine at Heth as collateral, or whether she might want to buy a piece of land he owned at Auldwerk. Things must be bad at Hardwick indeed, she thought, for Jem to swallow his pride and come to her, cap in hand. She broke the seal on the letter from her mother.

My dear Bess, I pray that this letter finds you well. The girls and all here are in health, but the same cannot be said for your brother. I know that he has written to you, and I urge that if you are in a position to do so, you buy the land he offers. It is very good land, and it would be worth much to my comfort that you should have it before any other.

“Your mother is a good judge of property,” Will said when Bess read him the letters that night. “She put you onto Chatsworth, after all. It would be better to have a sight of the land, though. I hate buying a pig in a poke.”

“I don’t suppose there is any question that you can go?”

“I wish it were so, but not just now. I’m sure the queen can spare you for a bit, though. Why not go and stay at Chatsworth until the spring?”

“The roads will be dreadful at this time of year. But it would do me good to see the girls.”

“You could be there for Bessie’s tenth birthday.”

Bess’s mind immediately turned with pleasure to what delights she could bring her daughter.

“Oh, you know me too well, my heart. Very well, that settles it. I shall go, hard as it is to be away from you.”

* * *

B
ESS HAD BEEN AT
C
HATSWORTH ONLY A FEW DAYS, AND HAD NOT
yet had time to inspect Jem’s land, when her steward James Crompe came to her chamber as she was visiting with her mother and Aunt Marcella one evening after supper, appearing agitated.

“What is it?” she asked in alarm.

“My lady, I’m most sorry to disturb you, but your husband’s man Greves has just arrived from London. He says that Sir William is ill, and that he must speak with your ladyship urgently.”

Bess jumped to her feet, her heart pounding with fear. Will had been fine when she had left him less than a fortnight before. It was not the season for plague. Smallpox then? He would not have sent for her if he wasn’t seriously ill. She raced down the stairs and to the kitchen, her mother and aunt at her heels and Crompe following behind. Greves paced there, his cloak and boots spattered with mud and his face red with the cold.

“Oh, your ladyship!” Greves bowed hastily when he saw Bess. “My master fell suddenly ill a few days after you left London and was in a most grave case when I left him. You must come back to London, my lady.”

“What happened?” Bess cried. “What signs of illness did he exhibit? A fever? Is it smallpox? Did he send a letter?”

“He was out of his senses, madam, and could not write. The sickness came upon him most suddenly—a griping in the guts, and bloody flux.”

“Dear God.” Bess turned to Crompe. “I must leave in the morning—see to everything. I’ll ride and take only two men with me besides Greves.”

“What else?” she demanded of Greves. “Had he doctors? Who is caring for him?”

“Oh, yes, madam. Two doctors, and Sir William’s own brother was most solicitous of him, sitting by his bedside into the night.”

A wave of terror and nausea swept over Bess.

“His brother?”

“Yes, my lady, Edward St. Loe. He arrived but a day or two after you left and had been in the house some days when my master was taken poorly.”

Bess staggered with the shock of it and clutched her mother’s arm.

“Oh, dear God. Surely he is poisoned! Ned tried it once before.”

“Come, sit,” her mother murmured, guiding her to a chair. She turned to Crompe. “Fetch some brandy for her ladyship, if you please.”

“Mother, what shall I do?” Bess cried. “How can I wait until morning? Perhaps I should leave tonight.”

She threw her arms around her mother’s waist, burying her face in her mother’s skirt as if she were a child and her mother could make all well.

“You would take your life in your hands to travel these roads by night,” her mother said, stroking her hair. “We’ll get you packed and you can leave at sunup. Perhaps by the time you reach him he will be quite recovered. We must hope for the best.”

* * *

B
ESS MADE THE JOURNEY TO
L
ONDON IN ONLY FOUR DAYS, EVERY
minute of it a torment of anxiety. When at last she arrived at her house she slid from the saddle without waiting for a groom to help her dismount and pounded at the door. The porter opened it, his face wet with tears.

“Your ladyship.” His voice choked. “Alas, my master . . .”

“No,” Bess cried, rushing up the stairs to the bedchamber. The steward met her at the door, blocking her way.

“My lady, I pray you, don’t enter . . .”

She pushed past him and stopped in her tracks, clapping a hand over her mouth in grief and shock. For the face of the figure on the bed was draped and the stench of death was in the air.

“Will!”

She went to the bed and threw back the cloth and then started back and screamed. It was Will’s face, but scarcely recognizable, his lips drawn back over his teeth in a grimace of pain, eyelids half-closed over lifeless jelly, skin blackened with decay.

Then Jenny was at her side, taking her by the arm. “Oh, Bess, come from here, come away.”

“Oh, God!” Bess keened, collapsing against her sister, sobbing. “How came it so? What was Ned doing here? Why would Will have let him in the house?”

“I will tell you all,” Jenny promised, leading her from the room. “Come, the best bedchamber is made ready for you. Let me make you as comfortable as you may be. Oh, Bess, I’m so sorry.”

* * *

B
ESS GOT THROUGH THE DAY OF
W
ILL’S FUNERAL FEELING AS IF SHE
were in a nightmare. Surely she would wake and find that this horror was not true. She tried to listen to the priest but his voice seemed to be first loud and then to fade to nothing, to be overwhelmed by the buzzing in her head.

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery: he cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he flieth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay . . .”

She watched as Will’s coffin was lowered into the ground beside his father’s at the church of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, heard the dull thud of the clods of earth on the lid. Around her Will’s friends were gathered—so many people, the highest in the land, come to do him honor. But surely he couldn’t be gone. It made no sense.

“I shall rise out of the earth in the last day, and shall be covered again with my skin, and shall see God in my flesh . . .” But how was that possible, when his skin was rotted away? “And I myself shall behold him, not with other but with these same eyes.” No, not with those dead-fish eyes rolled back beneath their lids.

“Of whom may we seek for succor, but of Thee, O Lord?”

But it is Thou who hast taken my most beloved husband from me . . .

“Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts: shut not up Thy merciful eyes to our prayers.”

God, help me, for if I cannot turn to Thee, then who can I turn to? And yet I have such rage in me for what Thou hast taken from me. This is a loss more than I can bear . . .

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .”

God help me . . .

“. . . he is able to subdue all things to himself . . .”

If it is so, then make it so, Holy Father. Take my grief unto Thee and show me how to bear it, or take me into the black earth as well, for I cannot bear this pain.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Tenth of August, 1565—Chatsworth, Derbyshire

B
ESS STOOD AT HER BEDCHAMBER WINDOW, LOOKING OUT OVER
the countryside. It was good to be back at home—her whole body seemed to relax and her mind to become more serene once she was at Chatsworth, despite the depth of her grief.

She had remained in London for some weeks after Will’s death, but the house was too full of echoes of him—alive and dead—to be comfortable, and being at court, where he had been such a fixture for so long, was even worse. Then poor Lizzie had died in April, and her death had sent Bess into an even deeper feeling of profound loss and awareness of her own mortality and the fragility of life.

She was sure that Ned St. Loe had been responsible for Will’s death, and suspected that he had given him poisoned water, but there was no proof, only her suspicions, and no official action had been taken. Besides, Ned had been long gone from London by the time she arrived.

Her rage and pain had only increased when, less than a fortnight after Will died, she received a letter from Ned’s lawyer claiming that on his deathbed Will had signed an indenture giving Ned and his wife Sutton Court. Forged, no doubt, but she had not seen the actual document. Then Ned had stopped sending her the tenants’ rents, and she in turn had stopped sending him the payment due under the settlement of their last suit. So back to court they had gone, in Somerset once again, with the same judge as before, and once more, a decision hung in abeyance. Bess had taken some satisfaction in the fact that through her connections at court she had managed to have Ned sent to a post in Ireland where he could cool his heels for a time.

Ned was surely also behind Margaret St. Loe contesting the will that left all of her father’s property and income to Bess and her heirs. Will had considered that Margaret was well provided for, as her husband Thomas Norton was wealthy, and the will had been upheld, but it made Bess sad to think that Margaret resented her, and that many at court took Margaret’s side and thought she had been ill used.

Bess wondered if she would ever be free of lawsuits, and reflected that it was particularly hard that every time she had lost a husband, her grief and pain had been compounded by the need to fight a battle in court. Especially as in each case, her husband had taken pains to make arrangements so that matters would go smoothly if she were left a widow.

The sound of laughter below brought Bess’s mind back to the present. Bessie and May, the only children left at home now, were giggling and crying out in delight as they tried to get their two puppies to race. They were well on their way to grown up now; Bessie was ten and May eight and a half, and Bess thanked God for their blooming health, as she did every day.

The thought of children reminded her of Frances Brooke, who was expecting another baby in December, and she took up the letter she had received from Frances the day before and read it over.

The news that the Scottish queen has married Lord Darnley has sent Her Majesty into a rage,
Frances wrote.
For of course the fact that his grandmother was the sister of King Henry gives him a claim to the throne to match that of Mary’s own, as granddaughter of Henry’s other sister.

Had Darnley learned nothing from the disastrous outcome of the marriage of Kate Grey and Edward Seymour? It seemed not, although the two marriages were in exactly the same case—matches of two heirs to the throne, sure to attract plotters who would rather see them and their heirs on the throne than a childless woman. The Papist rulers of France and Spain would be all too likely to back the Scottish queen’s claim to the English throne with their military might, and even Darnley himself might raise an army from the Papist northern counties of England.

They have assured Her Majesty that they will take no action against her, and ask in return that she declare them to be her heirs. But as you may imagine, she will not be dictated to. She has thrown her support to the Earl of Moray, the half brother of the Scottish queen, in what looks like will soon be civil war in Scotland. And she has put Darnley’s mother in the Tower again—such is the satisfaction that Lady Lennox has got from her scheming so long to make her son a king! I hardly think Her Majesty will ever make Mary Stuart her heir now. And of course this is the end of her plan of marrying the Scottish queen to Robert Dudley, which seemed to me plain madness, and likely to please no one.

Bess shook her head with grim amusement. No, Mary Stuart had not wanted to wed the queen’s own beloved, though he had been made Earl of Leicester to make him a suitable match. Dudley had not wanted the marriage—or to be sent to live in Scotland. And Bess doubted that when it came down to it, Elizabeth would have been willing to part with her dear Robin. She thought of Will and wondered how the queen could even have contemplated marrying Dudley off to someone else.

This marriage of the Scottish queen only serves to make our queen’s advisors more frantic in their determination that Her Majesty must be married,
Frances’s letter continued.
I saw her reduced to tears—a sight I never thought to see and that amazed me much, I promise you—at the combined haranguing of Dudley, Cecil, and Throckmorton that she must have a husband.

Bess recalled that in the wake of Cat Howard’s death, the eight-year-old Elizabeth had declared she would never marry. An understandable sentiment, and one Bess had shared at the time. But would the queen finally evade all plans to have her husbanded? It seemed inconceivable that she could hope to rule on her own and keep her throne with no husband or the prospect of children, but so far she was proving most expert in promising much and doing only what she wanted. She had inherited her father’s strength, that was certain.

But it would take more than strength to face the prospect of a life alone, Bess thought. Especially a life fraught with the challenges that a ruler faced. It would take a shutting down, a walling off, of some deep-set need for love and emotional sustenance, would it not? She tried to imagine committing herself to a life of such isolation and could not. Of course a marriage did not promise love, either, especially if it were a marriage of state such as the queen was pressed to make. And if she could not marry Robin Dudley, would it not be an unbearable torment to wed someone else, knowing that she cut the thread of possibility that bound them, casting him adrift to be taken up by someone else?

Bess looked out the window again and saw that Aunt Marcella was with the girls now and had got them back in their bonnets against the sun. It wouldn’t be long before she would need to start thinking about getting them married. And with the money and property she had inherited from Will, she was in a better position than ever to find husbands from wealthy and powerful families, and to weigh carefully what would make her daughters happy. Soon she would have to consider wives for Harry and Willie, too. Yes, with God’s help her children would all be raised as high as she could manage, and never have to worry about money as she had done.

Bess realized that she was pacing rapidly. Thinking of Lord Darnley’s marriage to the Scottish queen, and her own children’s prospective marriages, seemed to have lit some fire within her, for she suddenly felt more animated than she had since Will died.

What eminent young men were of an age to make suitable husbands for Bessie and May? There was Philip Sidney, the son of Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley—though being entwined with the Dudleys could have its drawbacks. The Earl of Shrewsbury’s second son was yet unmarried; she must inquire of Lady Shrewsbury when she saw her next. And Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, had been born only a few months before her own Harry and was of a suitable age for Bessie. Dare she hope for such a match? The young man lived in the household of William Cecil, who was certainly favorably disposed to her.

Perhaps George Carey, the eldest boy of Baron Hunsdon, Mary Boleyn’s son, who some believed to be the child of King Henry? He was in the full sunshine of the queen’s favor. And he had three or four younger brothers—she would have to look into the possibilities. Yes, there were plenty of young men, now she thought of it. Lord Rutland, Lord Sussex, Lord Wharton . . . Peregrine Bertie! He was the son of the Duchess of Suffolk, and the same age as Bessie.

Or could she aspire even higher for her girls? she wondered. There were young men of the royal blood who were not likely ever to sit on the throne, and so perhaps almost within reach. It was a pity, Bess thought, that the Countess of Lennox had earned the queen’s enmity, for her younger son Charles Stewart could have made a good husband for Bessie.

How, Bess mused, could she improve her daughters’ prospects? Now she would be able to provide very generous dowries for the girls, and everything about Chatsworth bespoke wealth and status. But what could make it even more grand—a place that would show her girls to be worthy matches for young men of the oldest and most exalted noble families of England?

What was needed was a suite of rooms worthy of the queen herself—and why could they not be used by the queen herself? Elizabeth went on progress every summer; why should she not visit Chatsworth?

The thought of the queen in residence at Chatsworth took Bess’s breath away. Yes, that was what she would do—she would make alterations to the house. Just thinking about it gave her a sense of purpose such as she had not had since the building of the house had been completed the previous year. And now she had ample money to do it.

Bess rang for her steward.

“I wish to see Robert Smythson,” she told Crompe. “As soon as he may be got.”

* * *

“
C
OULD WE ADD A THIRD STORY TO THE HOUSE?”
B
ESS ASKED.

Smythson, a mason who had supervised the recent work on the house and had also worked on Longleat, Sir John Thynne’s grand house, nodded thoughtfully.

“Certainly, my lady, it could be done. It would not be quick nor yet inexpensive, but it could be done.”

“What I want,” Bess said, “is a bedchamber and withdrawing chamber fit for a queen. Fit for the queen, in fact.”

Smythson’s brows rose and he grinned. “That would be something, indeed, my lady, to have Her Majesty lay herself down in rooms that I built.”

“Indeed it would.” Bess smiled back at him. “Come, sit. Let us think about this together.”

“Have you any paper, my lady? That I might sketch to catch the ideas as they fly.”

“Yes, at my desk here. Draw up a chair.”

Two hours later Smythson gathered up the heap of papers upon which, to Bess’s amazement, he had made corporeal the fancies that had lived only in her mind, sketching windows, walls, staircases, overmantels, ceiling medallions, and friezes.

“I will have some better drawings for your ladyship in a few days.”

“Excellent. How soon can we begin work?”

“Soon, my lady, as soon as you like. We’ll need to get the quarry operating again, and recruit laborers, but ready money works wonders.”

When Smythson had left, Bess laughed out loud in pleasure at the prospect of resuming work on the house.

“We’ll need to do an inventory,” she murmured. “So I truly know what is here and what will be needful to furnish the new rooms. Oh, that the building could begin today.”

Twenty-sixth August, 1565—Chatsworth, Derbyshire

Bess stared at the letter in numb disbelief and read Cecil’s words over again.

Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous. The Sergeant Porter, being the biggest gentleman of this court, has married secretly the Lady Mary Grey: the least of all the court.

“Oh, no!” Bess cried aloud.

The offense is very great and the queen in a rage. The Lady Mary is locked up at Windsor with only a groom and a waiting woman and forbidden to see anyone. Her husband, Thomas Keyes, is in a noisome and narrow cell at the Fleet.

What self-destructive madness was it that seized the Greys? Bess wondered. Could Mary, after witnessing Kate’s ruin, truly have thought the queen would turn a blind eye to her marriage? And the timing could not have been worse, for it had finally seemed that perhaps the queen was beginning to soften toward Kate and might let her return to court. Now Mary’s actions would likely doom them both.

Jane Grey’s face rose to Bess’s mind and she wept, grieving once more the senseless loss of that sweet and courageous soul, who had died for her parents’ ambitions.