The Queen's Governess (32 page)

“Well?” she said, folding her arms over her breasts. “I know how much you love my sister, but how much do you love your husband?”

“You are torturing me, but I pray you will not torture your sister.”

“My half sister,” she spit out. “May the sins of the mother be visited upon the daughter!”

I could have struck her. It was exactly what I had feared from her. The persecuted had become the persecutor. I saw why she gave me a choice now. She knew me well enough to know I would save my husband over myself. John was to be shoved out of the way so I had no support but myself—or my queen. She was making me choose not only between prison for John or me but between her and Elizabeth.
Anne,
I thought, as if addressing the ghost who haunted my dreams,
Anne, I will not let you or your daughter down.

“I’ll go to the Fleet,” I told her, staring straight into those narrowed eyes, “for I know you will be fair and honest with both my husband and my mistress, for, like us all, even kings and queens answer to the Lord.”

She glared at me but turned away. No rejoinder to that but no pity or remorse either. Just power. And something even more frightening—a righteous belief in herself and her Catholic cause at all costs.

“Your Majesty, may I not bid him farewell?” I dared to ask her. After defying her so, choosing to stay near Elizabeth at great danger to myself, I knew she would say no, but I would humble myself for the chance at one farewell glimpse of him.

She turned back again. “Yes, in honor of the love I shall owe my husband when he comes and we have a family, I shall grant you that, Kat Ashley.” She lifted her right arm stiffly, pointing at me. “You see, even heretics deserve time to get their souls right with God before He settles with them for all eternity.”

After she went out, I stood in that small chamber, waiting to bid farewell for a while—or for all eternity, I did not know—to my beloved John. And, in doing so, I would have to lie to him again, or he would never go.

“Sweetheart!” he cried,
and hugged me hard, ignoring the guard in the room and the open door to the hall with even more guards. For all I knew, Mary hovered just outside, listening, suspecting we might say something incriminating to each other.

“Did they tell you?” I asked. In our mutual hug, I whispered in his ear, “They not only suspect us of collusion in the Wyatt plot but have our books.”

“They showed them to me. So I’m being exiled, and you are to stay here with Elizabeth.”

So that was what he had been told. Then I would not be lying to him directly. In a way, I was staying here with Elizabeth. But after he had forgiven me for not telling him all about the Tom Seymour mess years ago, I’d vowed to him—even without his prompting—that I would never lie to him again.

“Yes. Yes—so you get to see sunny Italy after all.”

“It won’t be sunny without you. And how long I’ll be away—they’re taking me to the docks at first light—I don’t know. I’ll write you through Cecil, but if you’re at the palace with the princess, I don’t know if he can get news to you.”

So, to make him go, they had not told him Elizabeth was going to the Tower. “How will you live?” I asked him, almost choking on my words.

He gave me a gentle shake, then clamped me to him again as we kept whispering. “You know I can make my way anywhere there are horses. I will find a patron if I must, since many supporters of our cause have already fled abroad.”

Our cause. Yes, we were rebels now indeed, like poor Thomas Wyatt, captured and tormented ones. And now I was losing both the loves of my life and was going to a dreadful place while Elizabeth suffered in the Tower.

We kissed and held tight, whispering love words and promises. They had to drag us apart. For all I knew, I would never see him again, and if the queen began to burn heretics, I might be first in line. Damn the queen for her perverted sense of favors and justice, her overweening power and pride I had seen in her father too.

When they took John out and slammed and locked my door, I collapsed at last, holding nothing back, not trying to be strong for him or Elizabeth or even myself. I sat in the pool of my skirts on the floor and sobbed until I could barely breathe.

Bereft, devastated . . . I was a little girl losing my mother all over again, burned, battered and drowned as she was as I knelt by her body. It was seeing Anne Boleyn ripped from this life again, her lips moving in desperate prayers for her soul. My John and my girl—gone. And I alone and afraid, not only for myself but for them, the only ones I loved above all life in this brutal Tudor world.

 

 

 

 

 

THE FLEET PRISON, LONDON

 

 

 

It was bitter cold that winter, but, at first, I hardly noticed. I was devoid of all feeling but that of impending doom and death. I huddled under a threadbare blanket and my single cloak on the wooden cot in my solitary cell in the queen’s ward of the Fleet Prison. The cell had a small fireplace with a coal grate, but that, like everything else in here, cost money. I hid my mother’s garnet necklace in my bodice, but I would starve before I would sell it or trade it, even for food. I ate little, until the warden threatened to put me in ankle irons if I didn’t eat. And so, hardly tasting how vile was the tepid beef broth with a bare bone in it, I ate, and drank some of the small beer I was allotted.

The place smelled to high heaven even in the winter, though the fetid moat into which refuse was dumped and sewers spewed, was partly frozen. The Fleet River, which emptied farther south into the Thames, the turnkey said, was frozen, too.

As was my heart. The worst was not knowing how John was faring—though I feared less for him than I did my princess. When I asked if she had been sent to the Tower, all I got was shrugs.

I lost weight and my skin dried; I picked at the cracks of my fingers and bit my nails. Somehow the first long hours and days passed and blurred. I wore my hair down, dragging in my face. I understood now how Elizabeth had made herself sick with grief. My two gowns they’d brought to my cell hung on me as if I were a scare-the-crow from fields at home. At home—Devon,
Devon in wind and rain, when will I see my loves again?
At home, with our little family around my lovey at Hatfield or better yet at John’s and my beloved Enfield where we walked the gardens and kissed . . .

I sat bolt upright. The man with my food was not the usual turnkey.

“Good day, Mistress Ashley,” he bid me kindly. He did not slam the tray down on the floor and leave. He was a portly man, which looked odd in this place, where even the better folk with fees for extra food looked gaunt. He had a gentle voice. A scar marked his mouth, almost as if he had two half pairs of lips, and several front teeth were missing.

“You are not the same one,” was all I could manage at first. “And—is that for me?”

It was not the usual greasy broth but a piece of capon and a thick hunk of bread with cheese and a pewter mug of what looked to be claret. Hell’s gates—which was how I had come to think of this place—this new man was confused and this fare was not for me.

My stomach growled so loud, it sounded like thunder from a coming storm.

“Yes, mistress,” he said, keeping his voice low and steady. “Someone is now paying for coal, wash water and a chamber fee, too, for linens which will be coming soon.”

“But who?”

He shrugged as if he didn’t know, but he also winked. Had John found a way to send money already? How did he learn I was here? Or was it Elizabeth? Or Queen Mary with a change of heart?

“My wife’s name is Cecily,” he said. “A nice name, is it not?”

“Yes, but—”

Cecily. Cecil? Could William Cecil and Mildred be behind this kindness? If he did not tell, I dared not ask. And Cecily had been my dear mother’s name—a sign from God to trust this man?

“I am desperate, sir, for word of my mistress, the Princess Elizabeth.”

He shrugged again but, as he bent toward me to put the wooden tray of food and drink on my knees, whispered, “Today is March 19.

Yesterday, she was sent to the Tower after her health improved enough.”

“Dear Lord, protect her, for she is innocent!”

“Indeed she is. I will get you word when I can. Queen Mary is to formally wed Prince Philip of Spain next June, for she has already done so by proxy. And the burning of heretics is to start soon at Smithfield.”

“Right here in London? In the very heart of London?”

“Cecily and I fear the ground will be red with martyrs’ blood and the air—well, even worse than it is here.”

He sounded to be a man of learning, well-spoken. Was he telling me about the coming martyrs just to inform me of the terrible times, or because he knew I would be one of them and needed time to prepare myself?

 

 

 

Money was the grease
in the wheels of everything at the Fleet, so I came to see how my new turnkey, Tiler, his name was, could replace the first one I had had. But in this world of lies and spies, I told myself at first not to tell him too much. I realized that my early deprivation here could have set me up to trust any kindness, and for all I knew he reported straight to Queen Mary or her advisers. After all, it was common knowledge in the Fleet that Bishop Gardiner had been a prisoner here during the reign of King Edward, so he would know all the ins and outs. Sadly, I had learned to trust no one.

Still, each time Tiler brought me food or coal or, every so often, fresh linens, he always told me something or other about his “dear Cecily” including that she was born in Stamford, where Cecil was from and was living now, so in my desperate heart, I trusted him.

“Hold on,” he oft told me when he came back for my tray or emptied my slop bucket. Or sometimes “Hold tight.” When I asked him if I could be on the list of martyrs to be burned, he simply said, “Not if Cecily and I can help it. Elizabeth may be a state prisoner and is being questioned by the Council, but they know not to step over a line with the possible future queen.”

The possible future queen! My Elizabeth! But still, I had seen the worst of Mary, and with a powerful Catholic and Spanish husband coming soon to help her rule, I feared for my princess as well as myself.

 

 

 

Even with Tiler’s care,
I had trouble sleeping. But, as I drifted off, I saw her then again, like many nights, not Elizabeth but Anne, floating in through my window, despite the thick panes and the grate there. Imprisoned. I was in the Fleet, but she was in the grave, so we were both imprisoned. Another thing we shared . . . why did I always feel close to Queen Anne, even before I tended and loved her daughter?

“Take care of her for me. Keep as close as she keeps her ruby ring.”

It was Anne with a ruby stain around her slender neck, holding her hands out to me, beseeching me. How she had hated Mary, so now that she was queen, I knew Anne could not rest well. I wanted to comfort Anne, to tell her to hold on, to hold tight, but I was terrified to touch her. She was dead, dead, in her arrow-box coffin under the stones of St. Peter in Chains in the Tower, near where my lovey was in prison.

I wanted to tell her I had tried to protect the princess, but I could not form the words. I tried to move back from her cold embrace, but my feet were leaden, dead. Did this visitation mean I would soon be dead too? Mary had ordered heretics burned at Smithfield in the heart of London, in . . . the . . . heart. . . .

Anne embraced me, icy cold. “Save her, help her . . .” When she pressed her temple to mine, her head tottered and fell and rolled . . .

I sat up and screamed. The shrill sound echoed in my cell, in my brain. John! Where was he, where was I?—and then it all rushed back to me. John gone, mayhap forever. Elizabeth in the Tower, near where her mother had died, in mortal danger of not only losing any path to the throne but her very life.

Half awake, half asleep, I tried to brush Anne’s cold embrace away, but saw that I had shoved my sheet, blanket and cloak to the floor. Surely, that’s why I’d had the dream she was so cold.

 

 

 

That spring
it bucked me up to hear Elizabeth had been released from the Tower, though she was sent to house arrest to Woodstock, the only one of her country houses she could not abide. No doubt she had told that once to Mary. What did it matter? I thought. My girl had outlasted the Tower.

Woodstock was a small old royal house, most lately a mere hunt lodge, and Tiler said she was enclosed in the small gatehouse there and was most vehemently protesting. That made me smile, the first time I’d done so in months. Mary and all she had brought to bear had not broken that Tudor temper or Boleyn backbone. And I could not help but wonder if my lovey had seen her secret love, Robin Dudley, when she was in the Tower.