The Queen's Governess (34 page)

I hesitated. Not only had I never told her that I saw her mother die but I had actually lied to her years ago, when she asked me if I had been there.

“If I were queen now, I would command you to tell me,” she said, almost pouting. “You must tell me what you are thinking, what you know. If you love me, you will tell me—I know you loved her too!”

I put my arm around her shoulders, surprised anew she was taller than I by half a head. We leaned together, looking out over the blowing meadow with the guards a ways back. “I believe she always loved Wyatt but was not untrue to your father with him, or surely they would have ferreted it out of Wyatt in her downfall. His sister was one of her attendants on the scaffold, and I saw Queen Anne give the woman something at the last minute—for him, I think.”

She gasped and turned to me, pulling away. “You—but you said once you weren’t there.”

“Only to keep from having to tell about it to a little girl who was not ready to hear it. Anne Boleyn was brave and beautiful that day, and resigned to her fate. She wanted me there—John went, too, and practically held me up—because she had given me the ring for you and wanted it there—your portrait. So I held it up to her, though too far for her to see it. But she was reminded of you just before the end, and I’m sure it gave her strength, her love for you. And I had vowed to her I would do all I could to take care of her little girl.”

She swayed on her feet; I held her tight to me again. The guards came closer, but I motioned them back. Amazingly, they stood away.

“You—you saw her die,” she whispered.

“And it’s haunted me ever since.”

“But I’m so glad you were there. And, with the ring, in a way, I was too. Maybe now the sad dreams of her will stop. Kat, thank you for being loyal to her and to me all these years.” She threw her arms around me but did not cry.

“Sad dreams?” I asked, stroking her back. “Bad dreams?”

“A sort of nightmare, but I didn’t used to mind because that way I could see her. She looks just like the woman in the ring portrait, of course. She drifts in the window and watches me, hugs me with her icy arms and tells me she loves me, so it’s not so very bad. I was afraid if I told anyone, the dream would stop and I wouldn’t see her anymore.”

I began to shake. Nearly the same dream—or nightmare—I had suffered for years. Anne. Anne haunting us both. When would she be at rest?

“What is it?” she asked. “You’re trembling.”

“Since it seems we have no more secrets, I will tell you that is much the same dream I have had for years, where she asks me to care for you.”

She took a step away and turned to stare at me. Her head bobbed in surprise; her eyes widened before she blinked. She glanced at the guards, then whispered so silently I had to read her lips. “She will rest when I am queen. She said so.”

“I pray so.”

“And that’s why my sister’s marriage and coming child do not sadden or frighten me. God willing, it must be true that I shall rule. That must be why I have escaped the lion’s den in the damned Tower. Oh, I know I’ve been disinherited again, and I know my royal sister and her advisers hate and fear me, but I think it may be God’s will that I have the throne someday.”

Still stunned, I nodded.

“Whatever happens,” she said, looking out over the meadow, “I will always love you, Kat. You have been my other mother, the one of the real world. Yes, I will ever say that Anne Boleyn gave me life, but Kat Ashley gave me love.”

In May 1555,
we were sent for to Hampton Court where the queen was lying in, awaiting the birth of her heir. For miles as we approached on horseback, we heard the distant tolling of bells and cannon shots from time to time. We could see celebration bonfires hastily being built on hills.

Trying desperately to cloak our alarm at the possible import of the ruckus—for that was the way royal births were announced—Elizabeth and I looked grimly at each other.

“The queen has been delivered of a prince!” someone along the road cried. Huzzahs followed, from the queen’s guards in our entourage at least, though some along the road just shook their heads. But before we reached the Thames and the palace, the news was different. The birth of a royal son was a rumor which had somehow spread like wildfire. How shameful for Their Majesties, I thought, and what a blessing for Elizabeth, albeit a temporary one.

At the palace, we were greeted by more guards and led without ado to a small suite of guarded rooms far from the royal chambers. “We have been sent for to see the queen,” Elizabeth protested before they closed the door on her and her four ladies. But it was not Elizabeth who received a royal summons the next afternoon but I.

My escort was Susan Clarencieux, the queen’s Mistress of the Robes, a lofty position of intimacy and trust. “How fares Her Majesty?” I dared to ask.

“It has been a difficult pregnancy, as you will see.”

“On the road, rumors were abroad she was already delivered of a son.”

“Unfortunate—the rumors, I mean,” the attractive woman, who looked quite hurried and harassed, said. “Her Grace did not need that too. Speak softly in her presence, for she has splitting head pains.”

“Why has she sent for her sister if she will not see her?”

“Hers is to command and I to obey. I,” she said, putting undue emphasis on that word, “do not meddle in my mistress’s business.”

I said no more, but trod carefully with feet and tongue as we traversed a series of withdrawing rooms to the royal bedchamber. I found it not unusual that the room was dim. But it seemed dreary too—silent as a tomb, unlike what I recalled of Anne Boleyn’s lying-in, at least before everyone knew the child was a girl. We had heard that Mary had chosen to have her heir here because the country air was salubrious, but this room was closed and the air stale. Yet through the shuttered windows I could hear the ever-present droning of the priests and bishops who walked in the courtyard below chanting their rosaries for the safe birth of the royal child. It reminded me of the buzz of bees behind our house when I was a girl.

Several women moved away from the huge canopied bed as Lady Susan brought me closer. The queen sat within, propped up by pillows. She, too, looked like a fat white pillow. Yes, far gone in a pregnancy indeed, but she seemed swollen all over.

“So, Kat Ashley,” she said in her deep voice as I curtsied to her, “now I have a husband with me and you do not.”

I bit my lower lip, for I was tempted to say something tart and bitter, such was the taste this woman always left in my mouth and thoughts now.

“I am pleased,” I told her, “you find such happiness in your marriage.” Though Elizabeth and her women had been cloistered here so far, that had not kept us from overhearing tittle-tattle from servants that Philip was bored with his dour, much older wife and anxious to get away from the country his Spanish companions thought of as “barbarous.” And en route here, we had heard and seen that ridicule and derision against Mary and Philip ran rampant in English villages and towns.

“I sent for you,” Mary said, “because I still cannot bear to greet my sister, not after that rebellion.”

“For which accusations your Council found her innocent. She wishes you well. She has worked diligently on a gift for your heir and hopes to be able to present it to you in person.”

“Yes, when I bear the babe, of course. Did you hear that my ladies showed me triplets born in London of a mother of my age, and that she is fine and out of danger? Three healthy babes for her, but, this time, I shall just bear one.”

She sounded on the edge of desperation, but I had seen that before in royal childbed. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw dark circles hung under Mary’s eyes like half-moons; her skin looked grayish. She shifted her bulk and pointed to something behind me. I turned to behold a beautifully crafted cradle with a carved and gilded crown at its head.

“Read me the inscription, Kat,” she said, as if we were the best of friends after all she’d done to me and mine. “I remember you always read things with measure and meaning, and the verse comforts me.”

I had to bend close to it in the wan light to see. I read to her, “‘The child which through Mary, O Lord of Might, did send, / To England’s joy, in health preserve, keep and defend.’”

“God’s will be done,” she intoned and clasped her hands across her distended belly. “Tell my sister that.”

“I will, Your Majesty, for she believes that too. But will you not see her and tell her yourself?”

I thought she would be angry, but she said with a sigh, “My beloved husband wishes to see her, so tell her he will call upon her in her withdrawing room in an hour or so. I am sending her a gown to wear, for I will not have her face the King of England in some unadorned, grim garb as if she were here for a funeral and not a birthing.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“He fancies a foreign wedding for her, one in the true faith, of course.”

My insides cartwheeled. I almost retorted that my mistress fancied no such thing and would never have one foisted upon her, foreign or domestic, but I held my tongue on that. “She will be honored to meet the king,” I managed, when I longed to say so much more. But when had standing up to Tudor queens or kings ever brought me anything but trouble?

 

 

 

“So do you think
he is the puppet master behind the throne?” Elizabeth whispered to me after she was gowned and coiffed to meet the king. She still wore her hair long as she had for several years, in the style of a virgin or a bride. The others had left us, and I waited with her in the small withdrawing room which led to the corridor, where a guard ever stood.

“Yes, best to whisper. Someone told me once the very walls have ears, and I don’t doubt it around here. I recall, too, that both this palace and Whitehall have secret passageways, like you and your brother rampaged through years ago. But anywhere the queen and king live, ’tis said that His Majesty seems to know things he wouldn’t unless he’d been peeping through keyholes or mouse holes or some such.”

She laughed. Such a change in mood, but then she was thrilled to be wearing the first new gown she’d had in two years and a beautiful one. She was excited to meet the king, I could tell, however much grief he and his Catholics had caused her and the country. She preened, twirling to watch the huge embroidered skirts of fine canary-hued brocade bell out. The natural vanity of my girl had been buried deep for years, but it was still there. I weighed whether or not to warn her that Philip might hope to marry her off for royal advantage, but she had faced such before with no result. Besides, a knock sounded on the door, and it swung open. Elizabeth turned slowly and feigned flustered surprise, then curtsied gracefully. I followed suit, then backed quickly from the room, though I left the door slightly ajar.

Philip entered alone and raised Elizabeth to her feet. I saw them in silhouette, like a shadow play, for light spilled in the door behind him. He kissed both her cheeks, then her mouth. The man was fingering her red-gold hair, I could tell that much!

“They say, dear sister,” he commented in heavily accented English, “that King Henry had hair of flame too.”

“He did, indeed, Your Majesty. It is a great honor to meet you.”

“Time hangs heavy now—for the queen and for me too.”

“But soon your joy will be complete,” she replied, this time in Spanish.

“I heard you are as well educated as you are lovely,” he said, no doubt pleased to converse in his native tongue, which I had learned years ago, though his speed and different accent took me by storm. Surely, his presence was not affecting Elizabeth the same way. His soothing words sounded as if he wanted to seduce her. I had heard noblewomen in Spain had
duennas
who never let them out of their sight, and now I knew why. Was he not going to mention a possible foreign marriage to her?

“I told the queen,” he was saying, his large, square jaw dominating his profile as he walked around my girl, looking her over as if he would a filly to buy, “that closer relations between us should be encouraged, even cultivated. What a joy to find I am related to such a delightful young woman and what sadness to hear there have been family troubles.”

I rolled my eyes. Was this some sort of trap or indirect inquisition? This man was deadly dangerous. He’d insisted, I’d heard, that Mary not pardon a thirteen-year-old apprentice who was to be burned at Smithfield for his faith, along with other common folk, a butcher and a barber. It was one thing to rid the country of those who had led a rebellion against her, but Their Majesties were alienating and angering the backbone of the nation. And I swear, speaking of burnings, I could scent the hiss of passion coming from the king each time he touched Elizabeth. I had expected harshness at the worst from him or disdain at the best, but not this—caresses and kisses.

I was even more angered when he closed first the door that he’d come in and then the one I’d been listening and peeking through.