Despite the wind buffeting us, Elizabeth, John and I made it outside to Cecil just as he began to untie his saddlebags. “My lord Cecil!” she greeted him as the Tyrwhitts scrambled to keep up, turning back only to tell a servant to fetch their cloaks. [Once, I recall, when Lady Tyrwhitt came out with a cloak, Elizabeth thanked her for her kindness and put it on herself, forcing the woman to run back inside for another while Elizabeth learned what privy news and advice Cecil brought.]
But on this day, he frightened the three of us, the only ones who could hear what he whispered in the whipping wind, especially as John managed to turn four horses into a snorting, stomping fence around us.
“Somerset is no doubt going to follow his brother Tom Seymour from the Tower to the block,” Cecil said without ado after he bowed to Elizabeth and she hastily raised him. “I have just been knighted to keep me in line, and Warwick has convinced the king to elevate him to the title Duke of Northumberland.”
“He dares?” Elizabeth whispered. “He dares to take the dukedom of the powerful Percys for his own? I feared his hail-fellow-well-met appearance was a guise, so I fear for my brother who admires him. Is treason against Somerset the charge?”
“Yes,” he said as the Tyrwhitts managed to finally work their way in among the horses. Elizabeth turned away from them, her arm now through Cecil’s as she mimed showing him the bounty of fallen leaves they scuffed noisily through. “But the thing is,” Cecil said, still speaking quickly as John and I fell in behind again to cut the Tyrwhitts off, “he’s elevated Jane Grey’s father to a dukedom too, Duke of Suffolk. He’s obviously planning more than Somerset’s demise, and making certain that I am not privy to those plans. By the way, the charges against Somerset are not that he threatened the king’s life months ago but that he was plotting to assassinate Warwick this time. Your Grace, whatever chance we have to talk today, keep this in mind. If Warw—I mean, if Northumberland summons you to London, lie low. Feign illness, find a way, but do not go! I fear he would like to get you and the Princess Mary in his clutches too.”
“I shall take that to heart, my friend Cecil, now Sir William Cecil,” she said, turning toward the Tyrwhitts as they hurried around John and me. “Good news,” she told them, “for I have just been informed that this is now Sir William Cecil, elevated for service to the king and to John Dudley, the newly created Duke of Northumberland!”
“And more good news from the new duke, Your Grace,” Cecil said, falling right in with her playacting. “Northumberland bids me inform you that he greatly regrets that Somerset took your London residence, Durham House your father left you, but he now offers you Seymour House instead, should you go to London soon.”
I feared Elizabeth’s countenance would betray emotion at that. It had been Tom Seymour’s house, and we had all spent time there together. Was some hidden message in that offer, other than a bribe to stay in her favor? For it was a fine, large house in the Strand, close to Whitehall Palace.
“How kind and generous of him!” she said only, smiling and clasping her hands together. “You bring us naught but good news today, Sir William!”
She kept up that facade until long after dark, when I went in to bid her a good night.
“Cecil’s right,” she told me, keeping her voice down. “The former Earl of Warwick, now the vaunted Duke of Northumberland, is planning something, and he’s buying us all off to favor him. But what could he have in mind, what higher honor and post than that historical dukedom and as favorite adviser to my brother? And why did he elevate Jane Grey’s father to a dukedom too? Oh, I hope Robin and his brothers have no part in this, but something’s coming. Those winds battering this house today are winds of change, betrayal and death!”
I comforted her, even chided her, as I recall, that she was over-reading the signs. Which soon only proved to me, and probably to her, that, as educated and well read as was her Kat, I was sometimes still unlearned and stupid too. For within a fortnight, she received a letter from the imprisoned Somerset begging that she plead for him. Her reply, written to avoid angering Northumberland, whom we all now feared, read:
Being so young a woman, I have no power to do anything in your behalf.
Not only had Cecil taught her to avoid involvement, but she told the truth: the king’s sister or not, she had no power but was yet a pawn on a chessboard with shifting rules.
’Twas bitter winter
weather but with no snow upon the ground the day I heard I had a visitor. John looked up from writing a letter for Elizabeth as I said to the servant standing at our bedchamber door, “You mean, Her Grace has a visitor, and I’m to come down too?”
“No, Mistress Ashley,” the kitchen lad said. “The man come to the back door and says his last name in Champer . . . Champer—something.”
I gasped and dropped my needlework. I had not heard my maiden name spoken for years. Sir Philip Champernowne of Modbury had been dead nigh on six years, so had one of his sons come calling—perhaps Arthur, who had favored me once?
John and I went downstairs together. The moment I saw the man, whom they had put in the great hall by the hearth and, thank the Lord, had given a steaming mug of cider, I knew who it was. Older, stooped, gray-haired, it was my father.
“Father!” I choked out, and hurried to him.
“My Kat,” he said only, and banged his mug down so hard on a bench, some of the cider sloshed out. He hugged me hard and swept me off my feet for a spin. The years flew away; tears blurred my sight of him when we stepped apart to behold each other.
I introduced him to John, and they eyed each other before a hearty handshake. “Is all well?” I asked him as we three huddled by the hearth. “How are Maud and the children? It has been—let’s see, nigh on twenty-six years now.”
“Aye. All of them wed, glad for you too, Kat,” he told me, with a nod at John. “I’m a grandsire, seven times over. I had to see you afore I die.”
“You’re not ill? You don’t look ill.”
“No. Maud’s dead.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.”
“ Course you didn’t, living with the Tudors all these years.”
“When—how did she die?”
“A tumor inside her last summer. But she told me you’d accused her once of—of harming your mother.”
“I was young and bitter that you had married again so soon, and—”
“On her deathbed, she said it was true.”
Frozen in place, I stared at him. John’s big hand reached out to squeeze my knee through my skirts. “She—she,” I stammered with a voice not my own, “hit her over the head, then drowned her, didn’t she?”
He nodded. “I shoulda knowed, maybe did, but we got on like cats and dogs, Cecily and me, and—God forgive me—I wanted Maud. Kat, I’m asking if you can forgive me. God as my judge, I’m glad you got away from Maud, from us. I can never make it up to you, but wanted you to have this.” He dug in the pouch he had belted to his waist and extended to me, dripping through his gnarled fingers, my mother’s garnet necklace I had loved, her final gift to me before she died. Ninnyhammer that I was, I burst into tears again.
Both men let me cry. Finally, with a nod from my father, John clasped the necklace around my throat, and I thought again about the ruby ring I’d saved for Elizabeth from her mother, and the red ring of blood around Anne Boleyn’s neck the day she died. The nightmare of her ghost had not haunted me for several years, but that night she was back, begging me to protect and tend her girl.
My father stayed that night. Her Grace kindly ordered a fine dinner for us in her withdrawing room and stopped by to meet him afterwards, shook his hand and even tried and praised the honey he had brought in pottery jars in his saddlebags. Though she looked plain and pale, I could tell he was bedazzled by her. After she left, Father, John and I talked much of the night and, more than once, he told me he was proud of me. I assured him I forgave him for not knowing Maud was a murderess. The fact my mother had her life cruelly and unjustly taken made me feel even closer to Elizabeth.
She came back in to bid us good night and, the next morn, as I brushed her long hair, she said, “Kat, you have come much farther in life than I.”
“But, lovey, you have much farther to go.”
“But I heard your father say he was proud of you.” Her voice broke. “I vow I would have given anything in Christendom to have heard my father say that of me.”
When my father said he must leave, she gave him a gold sovereign, for he would not take anything from us. She insisted it was payment for the delicious honey, carried all those miles. A fine snow was falling when I waved good-bye to him, but John rode with him part of his long way home. And ever after, each time I fingered my mother’s necklace about my throat, I thought how sad it is that some people leave the earth before their sins can be forgiven them and family amends can be made. Despite my father’s humble life and his faults, I felt he was a far better man than Her Grace’s royal sire had ever been.
The very next day,
we had a message for everyone from Cecil that Somerset had been beheaded and all his properties forfeit. What would become of his proud duchess now? I wondered. No doubt, her many enemies they had lorded over rejoiced. She had lost everything and gone into exile in the country. Worse, that spring, we saw clearly what we had been dreading from the Duke of Northumberland. The king had fallen ill, but worse, he had for some unfathomable reason struck down his royal father’s Act of Succession and disinherited both his sisters.
“I cannot believe it,” Elizabeth said over and over as she paced in her withdrawing chamber, flinging gestures. “Edward loves both of us. I knew Northumberland was up to something! No sign of this from either him or His Majesty, and then a strike out of the blue! Out of the blue, that is, except I feared for all of us—including my cousin Jane, when I heard Northumberland had elevated her father then wed her to his own son Guildford Dudley, and she most unwilling! So what does the damned duke have in mind now?” she demanded of John and me, then answered herself. “Will he declare Jane Grey as the king’s sister in our stead and Edward’s new heir? Blast him! My father would kill him for this, kill him with his bare hands!”
When I was a girl, there was an old wives’ saying in Devon that deaths or tragedies come in scores. I warrant that was true, for in July of 1553, His Royal Highness Edward Tudor, but sixteen years old, died a dreadful, painful, scabrous death, whether of the French pox or some other malady, we did not know. Some even whispered it was from poisoning, but that was never openly charged. Northumberland summoned Elizabeth to London both before and after her brother’s death, but she took to her bed, claiming to be ill as well as stricken with grief. She was careful, as Cecil had long counseled, not to fall into Northumberland’s clutches—or even into Mary’s, now that she would be declared queen.
But the last blow was that Northumberland produced a royal edict, signed and sealed by King Edward, naming the duke’s own daughter-in-law Jane Grey, who had royal blood, as queen and his son, Robin’s brother Guildford, King of England.
Mary, too,
sent for Elizabeth to rally to her righteous cause, for many Englishmen rose in arms to defend her right to the throne. It was greatly the Protestants against the Catholics again, a short civil war, but Elizabeth managed not to be embroiled for the nine precarious days Jane Grey was queen.
But when the false king and queen were captured and imprisoned in the Tower—with Northumberland and two others of his sons, one being Elizabeth’s friend Robin—she had no choice but to go to London for her sister’s coronation, for the snub of a refusal would have been too much. At least, in the English people’s rising to make Mary queen, Elizabeth was also temporarily swept back into the line of succession.
“I cannot go into the Tower, Kat, not even just to the palace there to await my sister’s parade through London and her coronation, I don’t care what royal tradition decrees,” Elizabeth declared as we made our final stop for sustenance in an inn before entering London. “I thought I could manage going to the place my mother was as good as murdered, but now I know I cannot. I will enter London, but not go to join Mary at the palace in the Tower grounds as she commanded.”
“But royal tradition matters, and you know it. Your mother went there in triumph before her crowning, so the place holds good memories too. Besides, everyone’s been cheering you,” I pressed on, taking her elbow and leaning close as we stood in the emptied-out common room of the inn. “Do you think I want to put one foot in that place again? But I will if it returns you to Mary’s goodwill and brings you back permanently in the line of succession after all these difficult years.”
Pressing my other hand between hers, she bit her lower lip and nodded. “But my cousin Jane is still imprisoned there, and Robin too. Perhaps they will even hear our merrymaking in the palace, poor souls.”
“You know, Your Grace,” I said, deciding not to coddle her as I longed to, “I believe Elizabeth Tudor can do whatever she must for the good of England and for the possibility to someday claim England’s throne.”
She looked at me hard, rather than staring out through the October sunshine at the crowds of people waiting for her reappearance. “She’ll try to turn me to Catholicism, but I’ll not bend on that,” she told me.
“My lord John and I are with you on that and all else.”
“My people,” she said with a decisive nod, and I knew not whether she was acknowledging that John and I were her people or the crowds outside. She kissed my cheek, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin and went out, waving and nodding to a roar of recognition.
“God save you, Princess!” “Bess Tudor, English through and through!” I heard among huzzahs and cheers and clapping.