Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (47 page)

“It will not be,” Cecil said, as I pretended to warm myself near the hearth.

“You promised the queen you would see her wishes carried out,” Pembroke accused. “Hellfire, we all promised her!”

“Let the woman go to her maker believing she has made Dudley a king in all but name. I have no intention of honoring that promise. Do any of you?”

A murmur rose from the other councilors, agreeing with him.

“Then who will you have take the throne? Mary Stuart?”

“A Catholic who might as well be French as well as Scots? No. There is an obscure edict from the time of Edward III that I will use against her—an English monarch must be born on English soil.”

“Will you support Huntingdon, then? The Countess of Lennox?”

“Lady Katherine Grey is the wisest choice,” Cecil said in that low, persuasive voice. “She is of royal blood, is already wed to an Englishman of noble family, and she has produced a son. The future succession would already be secured.”

“You would have another woman rule?” someone scoffed.

“One who has a husband to guide her in making decisions,” Cecil said.

“Better if we could avoid the woman altogether,” someone suggested. “We might make her son king and declare a regent. Then we could mold the boy as we wished.”

I thought of Cousin Edward. How small he had seemed—a spindly, pale doll, helpless at the mercy of Northumberland. The devil duke had maneuvered him into ordering the execution of one uncle, then a second. When the boy-king was coughing up bits of blackened lung and death would have been a blessed relief, Northumberland had fed him arsenic to postpone death long enough to put evil plots in place.

I thought of my nephew, who loved to cuddle sweetly against Kat’s breast. Protectiveness reared up in me as fierce as any lion. No boy-king had ever found happiness or safety in his crown. Kat knew that as well as I.

My sister, there in her Tower prison, had been almost luminous when last I visited her, at peace for the first time since our sister Jane had died. “Ned came to my rooms, Mary, for two precious, precious nights,” she told me. “Ned and I spoke, we loved, we made a vow. We do not wish for any crown. We only wish to retreat to one of his small manor houses, to live there in peace with our child.”

These powerful men would not allow Kat peace, I knew with sick certainty. Not if Elizabeth died. I hastened to the chapel to do what I never believed I would. I prayed for a miracle—for my hated cousin to live.

It was a prayer God granted, and one I would live to regret come New Year. Misfortune seemed to boil like a witch’s cauldron, each calamity more distressing than the last. France exploded into civil war. Catholics under Mary Stuart’s uncle the Duc de Guise slaughtered Protestants in the streets of Paris.

The queen lost flesh, as she ever did when stress beset her, and her gowns hung on her frame, her cheeks gaunt. Fear—I could smell it on her. She must be imagining the worst—the cauldron boiling over onto English soil, sweeping her away. She could not even guess from which direction the deadly flow might come. From the northern Scottish wilds, backed by the treacherous French de Guises? From the Spanish, who seemed to be scheming with the pope himself? Or from inside her own council as they pressured her to wed and battered her with demands to secure the succession, insisting that if she had no child of her own, Robert Dudley was not an acceptable choice?

As the tumult built, I never expected to be pulled into the center of that maelstrom or suffer its fury. Near midnight on the happiest day of my life, just as the January winds began to howl, the queen had me summoned.

W
HITEHALL
P
ALACE
J
ANUARY
1563

The rooms over the water gate glowed with candlelight, and the bits of holly and ivy sent to Thomas by his children gleamed green and lustrous. He folded his big frame into a chair that looked small, dwarfed as it was by his long legs and arms. I smiled, leaning against his knee as he spread a linen shirt across his lap and showed me the small stitches, with a pride that touched my heart.

“Cecily, my eldest girl, sewed it with Margaret trying to grab the needle at every turn. They are but six and two.”

“The stitches are crooked. Would you like me to reset them?”

Thomas gave a gasp bordering on horror. “Never touch them! I would not change a single one.”

I wished the words back. “I do not mean to be critical, Thomas. It is just that when I was Cecily’s age, my nurse would have made me tear such work out and begin again until it was perfect.” I made a wry face. “My father would never have worn anything that was not the finest.”

“I think this the finest shirt a man will ever wear. It was no small task for those little hands to stitch. She might have made a knight’s pavilion with the same amount of work as she put into a shirt for her giant of a father.”

I fingered the hem, my throat feeling tight. I wondered if Cecily Keyes knew how lucky a daughter she was. “Do your children look like you, or do they favor your wife?”

How I envied the woman who had been wed to Thomas Keyes.

“Margaret is like me, Cecily fair like her mother. The boys, Tamkin and Roger, are a mixture of both.”

“Do they miss their mother?”

“She has been dead since Margaret was born, but Cecily remembers her, and Roger, perhaps. Tamkin was barely toddling himself.”

I could not help but ask, “Do you miss her, Thomas?”

“I used to miss her very much. Got used to it really, like shoes that are too tight or door lintels that are too low. It hurt, but I expected the pain.”

“Was she pretty?”

Thomas’s finger hooked beneath my chin and gently forced me to look up at him. “Why does it matter when all I want to see now is you?” He ran his thumb over my cheekbone. “I love you, my little elf, more than all the fairies in the world.”

His words struck me as lightning strikes a tree, splitting the last hard trunk and revealing the soft white within. “You love me?”

“I do, and if you were not so far beyond my reach, I would have you for my wife. But a commoner cannot hope to wed a Tudor, no matter how much he loves her.”

“He can if the Tudor says yes! In fact, a commoner should obey a princess of the blood if she commands him, should he not?”

“What are you saying?” Thomas asked. I knew what it felt like to hardly dare to hope for something—did he feel that way now?

“I am saying that I love you. That I will marry you. That you will take me to your farm and let me meet your children.”

Joy flared in his gaze, but he dampened it with gentle regret. “That course would not be wise. Look what the queen has done to your sister and her husband. The queen would hardly give permission for us to wed.”

“It is different with Ned and Kat. They are both noble, both perfect in heritage and body. We are not. You, my beautiful commoner, and me—a dwarf with a twisted back. No, Elizabeth would have nothing to fear from us.” I laughed and held my arms up to him. He stood and swept me up high over his head. I near could touch the ceiling.

“Thomas, do you want to know something strange?”

“What, my heart?”

“I am glad I was born this way. We can be happy, and it will be a threat to no throne.”

Thomas kissed me. “It is true,” he said. “Our love can harm no one at all.” He stopped for a moment, thinking.

“What is it?” I asked.

“We cannot be wed right away. I must dispatch workers to make the farm ready for you. The children must be prepared, and then there is the queen.”

“I thought we agreed she will have no reason to thwart us.”

“Royalty does not always need a reason. Let the queen herself find a husband. Then she will be more kindly disposed toward us.”

“She has not taken a husband yet. I am not sure she ever will. I do not want to wait.”

Thomas smiled. “Neither do I, but it will only make the wedding night sweeter. Let me do what I can to shield you, Mary. It is a husband’s most important duty.”

“And a sergeant porter’s,” I said wryly. “Keep the palace safe, keep the peace, quell any disturbance, and keep the rabble outside the gates. Only this time you are the rabble, sir, and my gates are willingly and most entirely flung open to welcome you.”

“Things will grow better between your sister and the queen as well.”

“You cannot still believe that.”

“It grows wearying to hold a grudge overlong. It is a burden the queen will want to put down.”

“I rather think the queen will decorate it with pearls and cloth of gold and wear it as a headdress,” I joked. “She does not easily forgive, and she never forgets.”

“Have faith, Mary. All will end well if we are patient.”

“I hate patience,” I said. “I want you now!”

He laughed and kissed me and teased me until I had lingered there as long as I dared, the two of us spinning dreams and making plans.

When at last I returned to the maids’ quarters, a guard was waiting for me. The other maids looked fearful, as if I were to be carried to hell. “You are to wait upon Her Majesty the Queen at once.”

Foreboding washed over me. Had the queen discovered my love for Thomas Keyes? Or had something befallen my sister at the Tower? “The Lady Katherine. Is she well?”

He would not answer. I followed him to where the queen awaited.

I had seen the queen angry. I had seen the queen spiteful. I had seen the queen cunning and subtle and brave. But she had never looked more overwrought than she did now—not even during the reign of Cousin Mary, when Elizabeth was one stroke of a pen away from execution.

Fear, fury, and an air of being betrayed swabbed hot spots of color on her ice-white cheekbones, which were sharpened almost to blades, she was so thin. Her eyes frightened me most of all—the black depths frantic and dangerous, like those of a cornered beast. What had made her feel so hunted? What did it have to do with me?

I curtsied deep, longer than I needed to, grateful to blot out that royal visage that boded so ill. But the brief moment it gave me to think dredged up a memory that chilled me. Mary Tudor in those wild, desperate hours before she died, when she realized her most hated enemy would triumph. I had begged her not to make my sister queen.

Elizabeth’s shrill voice made my body prickle with sweat. “Groveling in the dirt will not save you this time or your traitorous whore of a sister! Get up and face me. You will answer my questions here and now, or I will send you to the Tower and hand you over to Master Topcliffe and his rack!”

It was an empty threat, and we both knew it. No noblewoman had ever been tortured, and Kat and I were of blood royal. “I am willing to answer any question you ask, Majesty. I have no secrets to tell worthy of such harsh methods of extraction.”

“Liar! Do you mean to tell me you know nothing of your sister’s plotting? She has been communicating with the Spanish these past two years. That fiend de Quadra has been sending things to her in the Tower.”

“Nothing of value,” I protested. “Some oranges, playthings for the baby. Many people send my sister what few comforts they are able, to make her stay less harsh.”

“Harsh? Is she in a cold cell as I was? No. She is in the lieutenant’s own house, with more comforts than she deserves at her disposal. As for these ‘people’ you speak of who interfere in the queen’s justice, perhaps I should have them hunted like the rats they are! See what they have to say about the plot being raised against me.”

“Your Majesty, you say there is a plot—I cannot believe my sister would be part of such a thing. She is so enamored of her babe, she would never risk leaving him motherless. I have heard her say so herself. She wants nothing more than to retire to one of her husband’s smaller manors and live in obscurity.”

“She told you that, did she? Well, she might have shared that information with Ambassador de Quadra. He and his master hope to put her on the throne.”

My heart plunged to my toes. I felt as if my knees might give way. “Majesty, I do not believe my sister would have anything to do with such a plan. She is an Englishwoman through and through. She saw the grief the Spaniards brought into Queen Mary’s reign.”

“I say she does know! She is sneaking and false enough for anything! I will not brook such interference in my kingdom from anyone—not de Quadra, not the pope or the emperor, and certainly not from a nasty piece like your sister. She dares to defy me? I will teach her a lesson she will never forget!”

Terror filled me, and I remembered the metallic stench of blood soaking into straw as Jane’s head fell. I pleaded for my sister’s life.

“Majesty, Lady Katherine can no more help what people say about her than you could prevent such talk during your sister’s reign. There are so many enemies to speak against her, and she can say nothing in her own defense. I beg you to remember Thomas Wyatt—he rebelled against the queen, but that did not mean you were party to his scheme. I swear on my life she is innocent.”

Was she? The question dug its barbs into my mind. I remembered times I had caught Kat trying on the queen’s jewelry. I thought of her petulance, saying it was a waste for Jane to be queen. I thought of how many times our father had told her what a fine monarch she would be. She was Ned Seymour’s wife now, and I had always believed Seymour hungered for a crown.

“Innocent?” The queen paced the room, near rending one of her gossamer sleeves when it snagged on a chair. “You dare claim her innocent after what she has done?”

“You have told me what others have done, perhaps in her name. She has done nothing.”

“Is she not imprisoned for the crime of licentious behavior with the Earl of Hertford? Did she not bear him a bastard son? That is proof of her rebellious temper, is it not?”

“They do have a child,” I said carefully, knowing it would be too dangerous to argue that they were wed. God alone knew what such defiance on my part would drive the queen to do. I thought of what Thomas had said about babes healing rifts between people. Sucking in a steadying breath I said, “The little Viscount Beauchamp is a beautiful, strong boy, Your Majesty, with red hair and the look of a Tudor about him.”