CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND
CHELSEA MANOR HOUSE, VILLAGE OF CHELSEA
May 1548
“J
ust think, a secret wedding! It must have been so romantic!” Princess Elizabeth said with a sigh. “I think love is so much more exciting when it’s forbidden, don’t you?”
I certainly had no desire to answer that, but she seemed to be talking to her cousin Lady Jane Grey anyway. As usual of late, Elizabeth looked absolutely transported, moonstruck. And she was the center of attention while her cousin Jane Grey, her governess, Kat Ashley, and I watched her antics. Frowning, Mrs. Ashley shook her head as if she’d heard it all before and did not approve one whit. I had heard her raise her voice to the princess in private but never around others.
“Lord Thomas loved Katherine Parr from afar all the years she was wed to my father,” Elizabeth went on. “Then he wed her in secret but five weeks after she was widowed, because he could not wait! I should like to be adored just like that someday, wouldn’t you?” she asked Jane more pointedly this time.
“Not I, Your Grace,” the girl replied, perched on a turf bench beside me, while Elizabeth paced in the new-budded rose bower where we sat outside Chelsea Manor House. “I’d fancy a wise tutor over an avid suitor.”
Ever since Queen Katherine, now called the dowager queen, had moved from court to her dower house, a lovely red-bricked manor on the Thames just southwest of London, her former ladies had been rotated in and out of her service. So I was here for a month while Anthony, pushed aside by the new men surrounding the young king, had mournfully retired from court to our house at Byfleet in Surrey. I preferred it here, for Byfleet was the place my baby boys had died, and that yet haunted my heart.
Elizabeth resided with her stepmother here and, like me, Jane Grey was visiting for a while. Lady Jane, now aged ten, though so serious and learned a child that she seemed much older, looked wistfully down at the book closed in her lap, as if she’d rather read it than listen to such dramatic outbursts from her royal cousin. Thin and plain, Jane reminded me of my sister Cecily when she was young, her nose always in a book, though Cecily’s choice would not have been Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
in Latin but a courtly romance more suited to Elizabeth’s raptures. I knew the princess was also a serious scholar and sat long hours at her lessons, so perhaps it was just spring fever that possessed her today.
Elizabeth had been fidgeting since the four of us had walked out along the velvet lawns that overlooked the Thames. “My parents were wed in secret just like the dowager queen Katherine and Lord Thomas, were they not, my Kat?”
“Indeed they were,” Mrs. Ashley said, “though I thought you fancied fine public weddings. I heard you begging Lady Browne for more details about Irish ones.”
“I didn’t mean public or secret weddings for myself, so I do agree with you on that, Jane,” the princess said, and came over to pat her cousin’s shoulder, though she smiled at me.
Just yesterday the two of us had shared the memory of my teaching her the Irish jig and even danced it together again. I had also regaled her with happy stories of my Irish childhood, ones I had recently recorded in my new manuscript, tales of rowing our
namhóag
on the River Lyreen with my brothers and sisters, stories of the times my father took us sailing in Dublin Harbor and much more. The recountings of the Fitzgerald tragedies I was saving for the right time, for I wanted Elizabeth on my side before I brought all that up. After all, my new plans to help my family and the Irish did not include direct revenge now that Elizabeth’s vile father was dead, but indirect persuasion of any future rulers. That was the way my father had once conducted himself with the Tudors, and I would take a page from that—except for that damned Dudley, whom I hated as much as I had the king.
As for later playing on Elizabeth’s sympathies, after all, her mother had been cruelly beheaded in her flush of life as many of my family had been, so I expected to use that tie. Oh, yes, I laid my schemes well for binding her heart to mine before I would ask for her aid. My dear stepdaughter Mabel was not here at Chelsea, but I had been practicing my tales of Irish triumph and tragedy on her for years. Her father didn’t know it, but I had turned her into a bit of a sympathetic Irish rebel, and I hoped to do the same with Elizabeth.
But the best thing in my life right now was that, with Henry Tudor gone, my brother and I had finally corresponded after thirteen years apart. Magheen had at last admitted that Collum had sent word to her from time to time over the years. She had not told me so that, if I were questioned under duress, I could truly say I knew naught of Gerald’s location. Currently he lived on the fringes of the French court, longing to come to England, and then, like me, to go home!
“Dear Jane, I did not mean to put you on the spot.” Elizabeth’s voice interrupted my plotting.
Despite her high spirits, at least she always took a care for Jane’s shyer and quieter nature. I had heard Jane’s parents beat her to their will, so she was no doubt grateful to be invited to Chelsea for a respite. When she arrived here the same day I did, I noted bruise marks on her fair skin, and recalled how rude and overbearing her parents had been when they came upon us during their stag hunt years ago. Like the surrounding orchards and gardens here, Jane seemed to blossom, but compared to her cousin Elizabeth, she was still a pale bloom.
We kept busy at Chelsea, and that helped immensely. It was much a women’s household, since Katherine’s new husband, recently raised to the title of Baron Sudeley, came and went from duties in London, where he sat on the Privy Council with his brother, now the Earl of Hertford. Seymour had also replaced Dudley as Lord High Admiral, so he was overburdened with duties. As far as I could tell, Tom Seymour stayed at Chelsea only at week’s end. I had been in his presence but two days, and this was my sixth day here, so he would be back soon.
And now that Seymour was to relinquish the title of Lord High Admiral, Lord Edward Clinton would soon take that lofty, powerful position! Though I had not heard from him in months—as in Surrey’s mariner poem, he probably never gave me a thought—I was so proud of him.
“So, you would like to be adored.” The dowager queen repeated Elizabeth’s words as she joined us in the shady arbor. I had not seen her lurking nearby. How long she had been eavesdropping? “By whom, pray, dear Bess?” she asked.
“Why, by everyone,” Elizabeth answered, blinking in obvious surprise at her stepmother’s sudden appearance and her pointed question. “Though I mean not to be selfish about it, I should like to be loved by you, by my friends here, by my dear royal brother and—”
“And by my lord Thomas?”
Jane shrank back as if she’d been slapped, and I started at the unusual edge to the woman’s sweet voice. It was no secret in the household that Elizabeth adored the handsome, brazen Tom Seymour. Most women did, but for Kat Ashley and me. I found vulgar his flirtatious nature, his bravado, and the fact that he swore great oaths in nearly each sentence, as if to make his words seem important, but his wife was besotted with him.
Seagoing character though he was, Seymour seemed so different from Edward Clinton, who exuded a smoldering strength rather than a bombastic personality. But what made someone desirable—even to the point of adoration—was in the eye of the beholder.
A few days later, the next Saturday evening, my eyes beheld the real reason for Elizabeth’s raptures and the dowager queen’s unease. It was twilight, and through a mist coming off the Thames, as I looked out my bedchamber window to watch boats on the river, I gasped.
“Damn him!” I muttered.
“Still fuming over the dead king or the fact that the Privy Council hasn’t yet answered your petitions for your brother Gerald’s return?” Magheen asked from near the hearth, where she was using the firelight to sew a snagged hem.
“No—nothing.”
But it was something indeed. Elizabeth had run out to meet Seymour in the bower where we women had sat the other day. Even from this height and distance, I knew it was the princess, for she reminded me so of myself in coloring, face, and form. Seymour swept her off her feet, whirled her about, and gave her a huge, back-bending kiss on the mouth, grinding his lips against hers. Why, I felt that kiss in the pit of my stomach.
Rumors of Seymour were that he was ambitious for power, which he felt his brother, Lord Protector of their young royal nephew, hogged for himself. Power, deceit, and betrayal hardly made me blink an eye after the things I’d seen. But I was surprised how much I cared for the English princess. Though she was Tudor through and through, I could not hate her as I had her father. I was dedicated to making her my friend and ally in pleading with her brother to permit my brother to come to England to sue for the return of his rightful place. I needed to protect her, but I needed her goodwill too.
What to do, what to do? I must warn Elizabeth’s governess, though I didn’t put it past the astute woman to know already of this illicit liaison. From the queen dowager’s snide comment a few days ago, I surmised even she must have suspected. I blamed Seymour for the seduction. How far had it gone or would it go? Elizabeth, poor girl, was about to ignite a powder keg here, one I was sitting on, when I could not afford a misstep in my campaign to get Gerald back. Saint Brigid, but this reminded me all too well of glimpsing Cat Howard with her illicit lover. I was not going to turn tail and keep quiet this time.
I saw Elizabeth bolt toward the house, though she went around to a side or back door. Had Seymour sent her in or had he overstepped and she had fled?
I made an excuse to Magheen and hurried out into the hall and down the back servants’ stairs, thinking she might come up that way. I heard feet pounding up from below and waited by the small window on the top-floor landing.
“Oh!” she cried, and stopped stone-still when she saw me. “Gera, I thought you were Kat.”
“No, but I happened to be looking out a south window just now.”
“And thought you saw what in this twilight mist?” she said, defiantly propping her hands on her waist. How quickly her mind worked, I marveled. How she emanated strength even when she was snared.
“Your Grace, I see clearly that your face is flushed—”
“Just from running up three flights of stairs, so—”
“And your hair is in disarray, and your skirts have rose thorn pulls in them.”
“From the other day when I paced past the roses.”
“It’s a different dress, a very pretty, fancy one for a solitary stroll.”
“Leave off! Whatever you think, you are wrong.”
“I only think I want to be your friend, so I must warn you. I do know about young hearts yearning—I mean not to sound like a poet or a scold, Your Grace. It is just if I saw you with him, others may too, especially your stepmother, dear to us all.”
“But you won’t tell.” She stated a fact, not a question.
“I am only telling you that you are risking much.”
“But you do that too, do you not—risk much? They say if your family had not rebelled, you would be an Irish princess, and there’s still an Act of Attainder against your family, so you must walk on eggshells too.”
Too
, she had said. Then, despite our differences, she saw our similarities. I tried to choose my words very carefully. “You see, Your Grace, people gossip and usually cast the worst light on things. I know that, but you do too.”
“You said you understand a young, yearning heart. And you will not tell Kat or my stepmother?” A question this time, a plaintive one.
I held out my hands to her from two stair steps above. She took them in her perspiring ones and came up to my level so we stood eye-to-eye, our petticoats pressed together.
“The English princess and the Irish one have a bargain,” she said.
“Yes,” was all I could manage, for this was not the bargain I sought, but perhaps it was another step toward mutual trust. I felt then, more strongly than ever, the impact of Elizabeth Tudor’s personality, yet how much of a pawn she must be in the clutches of a skilled seducer. As she gave my hands a quick squeeze and passed me to hurry up the last flight of stairs, I leaned in the window, looking out again at the thickening dusk, this time down toward the side door, where the girl had evidently come in.
I saw someone striding up the lawn, two men, Seymour following a cloaked man, tall with broad shoulders. Perhaps that was why Elizabeth had rushed in. Foolish as ever when I glimpsed the back or silhouette of such a one in the street or heard fast hoof beats as I walked outside or saw a sailboat putting in here or anywhere, my heart—my young, yearning heart—beat harder. But each time, as now, I was disappointed, for I heard Seymour’s voice boom out, “Your name, sirrah?”
The man’s words were muffled. How I longed to tell Seymour what I had seen and warn him off from Elizabeth, but she would see that as my breaking my vow. Now that I really knew the man, no wonder his own brother and the Privy Council thought him a hotspur, and not only for eloping with the queen five weeks after the king’s death. I had once considered getting Seymour on my side in my quest to help Gerald, but I could not trust or stomach the man now.