Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (304 page)

“Are you sure that he said he was coming at once?” David Hyde asked his sister, Elizabeth Oddingsell, the second week in May.

“You saw the letter as well as I,” she said. “First his clerk wrote he was busy but that he would come as soon as he could, then in the second sentence he corrects the first and says that he will come at once.”

“My cousin in London, who is kin to the Seymour family, says that he is all day every day with the queen,” Alice Hyde observed. “She went to the St. George’s Day joust and she heard someone say that he carried the queen’s glove in his breastplate.”

Lizzie shrugged. “He is her Master of Horse; of course she favors him.”

“Mr. Hyde’s cousin says that in the evening he sailed with her in the royal barge.”

“As he should be, honored among others,” Lizzie maintained stoutly.

“She visited him for a May Day breakfast at his new house at Kew and stayed all the day.”

“Of course,” Lizzie said patiently. “A court breakfast might well last for most of the day.”

“Well, my cousin says that the word is that she never lets him out of her sight. He is at her side all day and they dance together every night. She says that the queen’s own kinsman the Duke of Norfolk has sworn that if he dishonors her, he is a dead man, and he would not make such a threat lightly or for no reason.”

Lizzie’s look at her sister-in-law was neither sisterly nor warm. “Your cousin is obviously well informed,” she said irritably. “But you can remind her that Sir Robert is a married man about to buy land and build his first house with his wife and that this will happen at any day now. Remind her that he married his wife for love, and that they are planning their life together. And you can tell her that there is a world of difference between courtly love, which is all show and fol-derol and poetry and singing, done by every man at court to please the queen, and real life. And your cousin should bite her tongue before she gossips about her betters.”

*  *  *

The Spanish ambassador, Count Feria, deeply weary of the dance of Elizabeth’s courtship which he had gone through once on account of his master, Philip of Spain, did not think he could bear to watch it played out all over again with a fellow ambassador and another suitor: the Hapsburg archduke. At last, King Philip responded to his pleas and agreed to replace him with another ambassador: the astute Bishop de Quadra. Count Feria, barely able to hide his relief, asked Cecil for permission to take his leave of Elizabeth.

The experienced ambassador and the young queen were old adversaries. He had been the most loyal advisor to Queen Mary Tudor and had recommended consistently and publicly that she execute her troublesome heir and half-sister, Elizabeth. They were his spies who over and over again brought evidence of Elizabeth plotting with English rebels, plotting with French spies, plotting with the magician Dr. Dee, plotting with anyone who would offer to overthrow her sister by treason, by foreign armies, or by magic.

He had been Mary’s truest and steadiest friend and he had fallen in love and married her most constant lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer. Queen Mary would have released her beloved friend to no one but the Spanish ambassador, and she gave them her blessing on her deathbed.

Obeying tradition, the count brought his wife to court to say her farewell to her queen, and Jane Dormer, holding her head very high, walked into Whitehall Palace once more, having walked out of it in disgust the day that Elizabeth became queen. Now a Spanish countess, her belly curved with pregnancy, Jane Dormer returned, pleased to be saying good-bye. As luck would have it, the first person she met was a face from the old court: the royal fool, Will Somers.

“How now, Jane Dormer,” he said warmly. “Or do I call you my lady countess?”

“You can call me Jane,” she said. “As ever. How are you, Will?”

“Amusing,” he said. “This is a court ready to be amused, but I fear for my post.”

“Oh?” she asked.

The lady-in-waiting who was escorting Jane to the queen paused for the jest.

“In a court in which every man is played for a fool, why should anyone pay me?” he asked.

Jane laughed out loud. The lady-in-waiting giggled. “Give you good day, Will,” Jane said fondly.

“Aye, you will miss me when you are in Spain,” he said. “But not miss much else, I would guess?”

Jane shook her head. “The best of England left it in November.”

“God rest her soul,” Will said. “She was a most unlucky queen.”

“And this one?” Jane asked him.

Will cracked a laugh. “She has all the luck of her sire,” he said with wonderful ambiguity, since Jane’s conviction would always be that Elizabeth was the child of Mark Smeaton, the lute player, and his luck was stretched to breaking point on the rack before he danced on air from the gallows.

Jane gleamed at the private, treasonous joke, and then followed the lady-in-waiting toward the queen’s presence chamber.

“You’re to wait here, Countess,” the lady said abruptly, and showed Jane into an anteroom. Jane rested one hand in the small of her back and leaned against the windowsill.

There was no chair in the room, no stool, no window seat, not even a table that she might lean on.

Minutes passed. A wasp, stumbling out of its winter sleep, struggled against the leaded window pane and fell silent on the sill. Jane shifted her weight from one foot to another, feeling the ache in her back.

It was stuffy in the room, the ache in the small of her back traveled down to the calves of her legs. Jane flexed her feet, going up and down on her toes, trying to relieve the pain. In her belly, the child shifted and kicked. She put her hand on her stomacher and stepped to the window embrasure. She looked out of the window to the inner garden. Whitehall Palace was a warren of buildings and inner courts; this one had a small walnut tree growing in the center with a circular bench around it. As Jane watched, a pageboy and a serving maid loitered for five precious minutes whispering secrets and then scampered off in opposite directions.

Jane smiled. This palace had been her home as the favorite lady-in-waiting of the queen, and she thought that she and the Spanish ambassador had met by that very seat themselves. There had been a brief, joyful time, one summer, between the queen’s wedding and her triumphant announcement that she was with child, when this had been a happy court, the center of world power, united with Spain, confident of an heir, and ruled by a woman who had come to her own at last.

Jane shrugged. Queen Mary’s disappointment and death had been the end of it all, and now her bright, deceitful little half-sister was sitting in her place, and using that place to insult Jane by this discourteous delay.
It was,
Jane thought,
a petty revenge on a dead woman, not worthy of a queen.

Jane heard a clock strike from somewhere in the palace. She had planned to visit the queen before her dinner and already she had been kept waiting for half an hour. She felt a little light-headed from lack of food and hoped she would not be such a fool as to faint when she was finally admitted to the presence chamber.

She waited. More long minutes passed. Jane wondered if she could just slip away; but that would be such an insult to the queen from the wife of the Spanish ambassador that it would be enough to cause an international incident. But this long waiting was, in itself, an insult to Spain. Jane sighed. Elizabeth must still be filled with spite, if she would take such a risk for the small benefit of insulting such a very unimportant person as herself.

At last the door opened. The lady-in-waiting looked miserably embarrassed. “Do forgive me. Will you come this way, Countess?” she asked politely.

Jane stepped forward and felt her head swim. She clenched her fists and her nails dug into the palms of her hands so the pain of it distracted her from her dizziness and from the ache in her back.
Not long now,
she said to herself.
She can’t keep me on my feet for much longer.

Elizabeth’s presence chamber was hot and crowded, the lady-in-waiting threaded through the many people and a few of them smiled and acknowledged Jane, who had been well liked when she had served Queen Mary. Elizabeth, standing in blazing sunlight in the center of a window bay, deep in conversation with one of her Privy Councillors, seemed not to see her. The lady-in-waiting led Jane right up to her mistress. Still there was no acknowledgment. Jane stood and waited.

At last Elizabeth concluded the animated conversation and looked around. “Ah, Countess Feria!” she exclaimed. “I hope you have not been kept waiting?”

Jane’s smile was queenly. “Not at all,” she said smoothly. Her head was thudding now and her mouth was dry. She was very afraid of fainting at Elizabeth’s feet; there was little more than determination holding her up.

She could not see Elizabeth’s face, the window was a blaze of white light behind her, but she knew the taunting smile and the dancing black eyes.

“And you are expecting a child,” Elizabeth said sweetly. “Within a few months?”

There was a suppressed gasp from the court. A birth within a few months would mean that the child had been conceived before the wedding.

Jane’s calm expression never wavered. “In the autumn, Your Grace,” she said steadily.

Elizabeth fell silent.

“I have come to bid you farewell, Queen Elizabeth,” Jane said with glacial courtesy. “My husband is returning to Spain and I am going with him.”

“Ah yes, you are a Spaniard now,” Elizabeth said, as if it were a disease that Jane had caught.

“A Spanish countess,” Jane replied smoothly. “Yes, we have both changed our places in the world since we last met, Your Grace.”

It was a shrewd reminder. Jane had seen Elizabeth on her knees and weeping with pretended penitence before her sister, had seen Elizabeth bloated with illness, under house arrest, under charge of treason, sick with terror, begging for a hearing.

“Well, I wish you a good journey anyway,” Elizabeth said carelessly.

Jane sank to the ground in a perfect courtly curtsy; no one could have known that she was on the very edge of losing consciousness. She rose up and saw the room swim before her eyes, and then she walked backward from the throne, one smooth step after another, her rich gown held out of the way of her scarlet high heels, her head up, her lips smiling. She did not turn until she reached the door. Then she flicked her skirt around and left, without a backward glance.

*  *  *

“She did what?” Cecil demanded incredulously of an excitable Laetitia Knollys, reporting, as she was paid to do, on the doings of the queen’s private rooms.

“Kept her waiting for a full half hour, and then suggested that she had the baby in her belly before marriage,” Laetitia whispered breathlessly.

They were in Cecil’s dark paneled study, the shutters closed although it was full day, a trusted man on the door and Cecil’s other rooms barred to visitors.

He frowned slightly. “And Jane Dormer?”

“She was like a queen,” Laetitia said. “She spoke graciously, she curtsyed—you should have seen her curtsy—she went out as if she despised us all, but gave said not one word of protest. She made Elizabeth look like a fool.”

Cecil frowned slightly. “Watch your speech, little madam,” he said firmly. “I would have been whipped if I had called my king a fool.”

Laetitia bowed her bronze head.

“Did Elizabeth say anything when she had gone?”

“She said that Jane reminded her of her sour-faced old sister and thank God those days were past.”

He nodded. “Anyone reply?”

“No!” Laetitia was bubbling with gossip. “Everyone was so shocked that Elizabeth should be so . . . so . . .” She had no words for it.

“So what?”

“So nasty! So rude! She was so unkind! And to such a nice woman! And her with child! And the wife of the Spanish ambassador! Such an insult to Spain!”

Cecil nodded.
It was a surprising indiscretion for such a controlled young woman,
he thought.
Probably the relic of some foolish women’s quarrel that had rumbled on for years. But it was unlike Elizabeth to show her hand with quite such vulgarity.
“I think you will find that she can be very nasty,” was all he said to the girl. “You had better make sure you never give her cause.”

Her head came up at that, her dark eyes, Boleyn eyes, looked at him frankly. She smoothed her bronze hair under her cap. She smiled, that bewitching, sexually aware Boleyn smile. “How can I help it?” she asked him limpidly. “She only has to look at me to hate me.”

*  *  *

Later that night Cecil called for fresh candles and another log for the fire. He was writing to Sir James Croft, an old fellow-plotter. Sir James was at Berwick but Cecil had decided that the time had come for him to visit Perth.

Scotland is a tinderbox,
he wrote in the code that he and Sir James had used to each other since Mary Tudor’s spy service had intercepted their letters,
and John Knox is the spark that will set it alight
.

My commission for you is to go to Perth and do nothing more than observe. You should get there before the forces of the queen regent arrive. My guess is that you will see John Knox preaching the freedom of Scotland to an enthusiastic crowd. I should like to know how enthusiastic and how effective. You will have to make haste because the queen regent’s men may arrest him. He and the Scottish Protestant lords have asked for our help but I would know what sort of men they are before I commit the queen. Talk to them, take their measure. If they would celebrate their victory by turning the country against the French, and in alliance with us, they can be encouraged. And let me know at once. Information is a better coin than gold here.

R
OBERT FINALLY ARRIVED
at Denchworth in the early days of June, all smiles and apologies for his absence. He told Amy that he could be excused from court for a few days since the queen, having formally refused the Archduke Ferdinand, was now inseparable from his ambassador, talking all the time about his master, and showing every sign of wishing to change her mind and marry him.