“I will ignore your sharp tongue for now. We are on the same side—the same side, I daresay, that Edward Clinton is on.”
My eyes widened. Had Dudley seen us together at the king’s wedding banquet? Could Dudley have been the one who told Anthony of that? Surely Edward himself would not have spoken of me, so perhaps Dudley’s niece Ursula had. Were our unrequited desires so obvious then? Alice’s fears that I cared for Edward were one thing, but it dirtied my desires if this man knew of my feelings for his man Clinton.
When I gave Dudley no rejoinder, he plunged on. “I have not told anyone of your continued rebellious female nature, for you seem to be handling loyalty to your husband well. But sometimes what ‘seems’ is not what ‘is,’ especially with a beautiful woman to distract one from her true purpose.”
Despite the chill in the hall, I began to perspire. There was no way under heaven this man could know of my plans, for I had not even told Magheen. I decided not to protest or argue but continued to stare him down. That obviously disconcerted him, for he shifted from foot to foot and hit his leather gloves repeatedly in the palm of one hand as he went on. “Lest it—by some far stretch of circumstance—could have been you—again—behind such defiance to urge the common people to cry out for enemies of the king, I am warning you to stay in line.”
“Stay in line? Stay in line to be the next person to be dealt with cruelly and unfairly?”
“You speak treason to criticize the king, however enfeebled he is now.”
I cared not that this man was supposedly my better. I shook my finger in his face. “Best, my lord, you too heed what happens to families on the rise, lest your precious Dudley family should overstep in Tudor times and pay the price.”
He grabbed me by the upper arm and gave me a little shake, speaking now through gritted teeth. “You’ll not threaten me, girl. My father died on the block for treason charges under this king’s father, and I have been fighting my way, my family’s way, back for years. I—Ah, Sir Anthony,” he said, loosing me and changing his expression and tone in a trice as my husband emerged from the king’s suite and the yeomen guards quickly closed the door behind him.
“Gera, dear, were you waiting for me?” Anthony asked as he came over to us. Now that someone had emerged from the inner sanctum, people shifted closer, trying to overhear what my lord would say.
“Just passing by when the lord admiral wished me well,” I said, praying that Dudley would not want him to know of our conversation any more than I did.
“I must go back in to His Grace,” Anthony told me rather loudly, perhaps so others heard him. He turned to Dudley. “His Majesty will see you briefly. Since the middle of the month, he has swerved in and out of reason, but he is in good form right now, his old self.”
His old self
, I thought. That was the self I must censure and attack and make pay. Meanwhile, like anyone given leave to enter the royal rooms, Dudley quickly divested himself of his sword and dagger, placing them on a long table in the hall that held several others. Anthony squeezed my shoulder and kissed my cheek, then motioned to the guards to open the doors again before he led Dudley inside.
Garments rustled and whispers hissed as the onlookers shifted their attention back to the double doors again. Several of the same people had approached me earlier, hoping I would speak to my husband to arrange admittance to the king for them. Now no one looked my way. Although I had been a part of the Tudor courts for years, I was yet viewed as something of an outsider.
As a new thought struck me, I lingered for a moment near the array of weapons, including my own husband’s. I had decided against poisoning the king, for I knew naught of such and would have to trust someone else to obtain some. I planned to use a dagger to stab him or cut his throat, then leave it in the king’s own hand, as if he had decided to take his own life, burdened, broken, unable to suffer more. But, lest someone decided to investigate, unable to accept that the king would imperil his soul by suicide—when, in truth, as far as I could see, he had burdened his soul with sins his entire brutal life—I would take Dudley’s dagger and use that.
In one quick move, I seized Dudley’s fine, shiny dagger clearly marked with the inscription
Lord High Admiral
, hid it in the folds of my skirt, and strolled away.
As if my confrontation with Dudley weren’t enough to stoke my courage, hearing sections of the king’s will that day urged me on too. “The crown and the realms of England, Ireland, and the title of France will go directly to Prince Edward—you understand that, of course,” Anthony explained to me as he hurriedly changed clothes in our chambers without summoning his tiring servant. Before I could say aught, he added, “I know you had hopes for an independent Ireland, dearest, but it’s best for it to be under the English ruler’s aegis
ad aeternam.
As for the throne, only in default will it go to Mary and her heirs, or lastly be settled upon Elizabeth.”
He was in a rush to return to the king’s side. Though he had said the monarch hardly slept for long, still plunging from alert periods to strange, waking dreams, my lord was exhausted and on edge too. Yet I think he was bolstered by his own self-importance to be so near and dear to the king.
“The navy now numbers nearly seventy ships, and is in good hands under the Earl of Warwick as Lord High Admiral, as well as others, sea captains like Thomas Seymour—and others,” he repeated, evidently, I thought, so he did not have to use Edward Clinton’s name. “And I,” he said, thrusting out his chest as I helped him don his padded velvet doublet, “am a beneficiary in the will, to inherit three hundred pounds, which I shall use to build myself a fine tomb at Battle Abbey. The king has great plans and designs for his own resting place at Windsor next to Queen Jane. Queen Jane, Queen Jane—when he plunges into one of his non compos mentis stages, he continues to speak to her as if she were alive, the only wife he’s ever deeply loved; he raves on and on.”
“I cannot believe he did not once feel deeply for the other wives he so brutally set aside,” I argued. “He surely loved Catherine of Aragon in his youth, and Anne Boleyn too, to wait all those years to wed her, to ruin the holy houses and break with the pope. Anne of Cleves was a mistake and poor Cat Howard a disaster, but our current queen has been a loving nurse and loyal helpmeet to him.”
“The thing is,” he went on, “it’s long been treason to predict or so much as speak of the sovereign’s death, but Anthony Denny plans to broach it to him soon, mayhap on the morrow. He must prepare himself, call in Bishop Cranmer for the last rites. It would be a horror for our liege lord to die unshriven.”
My husband shuddered as he spoke a torrent of words. I wondered if he saw his future fate in the king’s present predicament. Despite his self-importance, he seemed shattered by his friend’s approaching death. I felt so much the opposite that I had to keep my mouth—mostly—shut.
“His Majesty can’t even sign his name to documents now,” Anthony went on, “and there are a raft of them. We use the dry stamp, which impresses his signature on the parchment, then is inked in and witnessed by as many of us are in the room.”
How, I thought, I’d love to get my Irish hands on that dry stamp, on his will in general, and free Ireland from English rule,
ad aeternam
, as Anthony had put it.
“Well, I must go back to him, my dear. He wants peace and quiet—only one man at a time before he sleeps this evening, and we’ve even moved him to his back rooms, where he’s retreated for years when he wants to really be alone.”
“As if,” I whispered, half to myself, “death could not find him there.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. My woman’s whims are of no account when it comes to the import of your service at this extraordinary time.”
“Just so. I shall be off then, for I must ask if His Grace meant to leave Bishop Gardiner out of the will. Oh, so many details, so many requests. After all, Gardiner performed the marriage service for the king and queen. I’m sure His Majesty will reinstate him. I don’t see why it always has to be Bishop Cranmer he turns to, except that Cranmer’s been ever willing to go along with any shift in the royal winds. He is still at his house at Croydon, not allowed to so much as come to the palace yet to give the last rites.”
He pecked a kiss on my cheek and was out the door. When he returned, I knew he would fall into a deep sleep, but I could not even spare the time to wait for that. I wrote him a note saying I had gone out for a walk in the winter gardens. I did that whatever the weather, just to escape the suffocating feel of this place. But I would be waiting on the other side of the secret door to the king’s back bedchamber, listening for when he was alone and all was silent. In their pride of being the king’s closest friends, neither Anthony nor the king’s other cronies had used the secret door lately, but always the public one. I guessed that few others even knew of the back way in, and Anthony had no notion I was aware of it and had once been inside the royal inner sanctum.
I gripped my hands together and pressed them to my lips with my eyes tight shut to steel myself for what was to come. After years of longing for justice and revenge for the Fitzgeralds and Ireland, it was finally time to risk all, to risk my very life. I had no children to leave motherless. Even if I were discovered and arrested for regicide, Anthony would be protected by his position. I had my sister Cecily’s promise that she would take Margaret and Magheen into her and her husband’s household should anything happen to me, a vow she’d made when my life was nearly lost during my first son’s birth. Dear Mabel would have to do without me, and my brother find a way to return to Ireland on his own.
I could bear up to it if I were caught, I told myself. I would speak out for Ireland and the Fitzgeralds much as Surrey had defended his own cause so eloquently at his trial. If I must, I could die the way he would on the morrow, the way my uncles had. I could face the Tower, that very place my father had passed from this world. And Edward . . . My regrets would go no further. He was far away and would not warn or rescue or stop me this time from doing what I must. But how I would have loved to see him and Ireland again.
I pulled a shawl of finest lawn from my coffer and laid Dudley’s dagger in a pocket I had sewn for my own weapon. I wrapped the shawl around me, then over that my warmer furred one. I sniffed hard and shook my head to cast off self-pity and stepped out into our withdrawing room. I had told Magheen and Alice I intended to wait up alone for my lord this night. I could carry no candle, no lantern. Surely there would be a light in the king’s bedchamber at the end of the dark passage.
But I was barely two steps from our chamber door when Anthony came running toward me. “He snapped at me to get out!” he cried, and pulled me back into our rooms. Tears tracked clear down to his trembling jowls. “He told me, ‘Hold your peace!’ He said, ‘I remembered Bishop Gardiner well enough and of good purpose left him out my will for his lately troublesome nature.’ Oh, I am undone! What if His Grace never summons me again, after all these years as boon companions? What if he cuts me out of his will and the elaborate plans for his state funeral too?”
“Be calm, my lord,” I urged as he closed the door behind us and began to pace. “He knows of your friendship and good service to the crown. He sounds astute—in his own mind tonight.”
“He yet comes and goes, but I was appalled. I . . . I am so exhausted.”
“You must rest. You said the next day he oft forgets what came before. All will be well if you just get some rest yourself, my lord.”
I coerced him to lie down and, despite his agitated state, he was soon snoring. I left the note to him that he had not seen and tiptoed out again. It was barely dusk: It seemed we all lost track of hours and days, waiting for the king to die. This was Surrey’s last night on earth, hopefully the king’s too.
I hurried down the silent, darkening corridor and turned into the narrow servants’ hall. I put my ear to the panel entrance but heard no voice, no movement, so I pushed it inward. Silence. I gathered my skirts close and stepped into its dark depths, closing the panel behind.
The air in the passage was stale, so it must not have been used recently. It was black as the pit of hell, my fearful flight from besieged Maynooth as a child all over again. But no Magheen this time, no salvation by boat at the end of the tunnel.
A cobweb wove itself across my sweating face and snagged in my eyelashes. No matter if I kept my eyes open or closed, it was the same deep darkness.
I went slower, one hand along the wooden wall, one out ahead so I would not bump into the door at the end. A sliver jabbed into my finger, but I ignored it. My hand touched the door.
I froze, straining to hear. Yes, some strange sound on the other side, like a rhythmic hissing. I pictured a fat, coiled serpent within, the king of England I had so long detested. Snoring—that was it. He slept.
I pictured the arrangement of the two rooms I had walked through nearly three years ago, the shadows, the silence. Not silent now. As I pushed the panel inward but a crack, I saw wan light, though it nearly blinded me at first. If I were caught inside, I had a new plan, an excuse: My lord was so distressed that the king had scolded him over Bishop Gardiner that I had come in the back way to beg that my husband be forgiven.