She unfolds the letter. “It is your sister. It is your poor dear sister.”
It is a letter from the executor of the old man’s will, a man of no importance, caught up in great events. He writes to William Cecil to say that the widow Wentworth cannot take the charge of Katherine and her son, though she loves her as dearly as a daughter. Tentatively, Mr. Roke Green says that he has no instructions as to where Katherine should go, or what the queen wishes for her. He is too poor himself, he lives in too small a way to house such a great lady. He himself is a widower, though if he had a wife they might offer her a poor refuge. Surely, nobody could allow her to come to him without a lady of the house to attend her, and his house is small and cramped and he himself is a poor man. But still—but still—this is his third letter and no one has told him what is to be done! While Katherine’s next destination is being decided by the great men of the queen’s court, while Katherine has literally nowhere to go—shall he invite her to his own house? This is not to suggest any sympathy, any prejudice for or against her cause or her claim. But she is young and frail, beautiful and terribly thin, starving herself and in despair of ever seeing her husband and child again. She hardly gets out of her bed, she rarely stops crying. May Mr. Roke Green put a roof over her head while the queen, in her wisdom, decides what shall be done with this poor weak lady? Because she cannot stay where she is, and she will die if they continue to neglect her.
I hold the letter out to my lady stepgrandmother. “She has nowhere to go,” I say flatly.
Her face is alight. “So he says.”
“Yet you look pleased?”
“Yes, because this is our chance to free her, I think.”
I can feel my heart suddenly race. “You think they might allow it? Will you invite her here?”
She smiles at me. “Why not? As we have been warned, she has nowhere else to go.”
My lady grandmother writes to the queen, writes to William Cecil, writes to Robert Dudley. The court is at Windsor Castle. They are delaying their return to London, the weather is so fine, everyone is unwilling to come back to face the demanding question of how to support the Scots queen—a cousin! a monarch!—without opposing the Scots lords, our coreligionists. Elizabeth does not know what to do and would rather avoid the problem by staying at Windsor and flirting with Robert Dudley. My lady stepgrandmother has to write to a court that has no appetite for thorny difficulties. So she offers them a solution, a simple solution: that Katherine shall come to live with her grandmother and bring her little boy with her. Ned shall be released to his mother’s care at Hanworth. Thomas Keyes will be sent to his family in Kent. We should all be bound over to make no trouble, to send no letters, to correspond with no powers or factions; but that we should live as private citizens, and—since we have committed no crime—we should be free.
She sends the letters: to William Cecil at his beloved new home, Burghley House; to Robert Dudley, dancing attendance on Elizabeth at Windsor; and to the holidaying queen herself, and we wait, with hope, for a reply.
It comes promptly from William Cecil. The two secret lovers Dudley and Elizabeth must have decided that they will leave it to him to write to us. Their happiness, their freedom in the harvested dusty gold fields of England, shall not be troubled. The weather is fine, the hunting good, they neither of them want to deal with affairs of state. Elizabeth is celebrating that she has another year of keeping Dudley in thrall. I know Robert Dudley will speak in favor of Katherine’s release, but only when he feels that he can do it without causing trouble. He will not allow anything to disturb the queen’s happiness when she is happy with him.
William Cecil writes in his own hand that Katherine may not come to us yet. He writes “yet” and he underlines. For this season she is to be housed with a good loyal man, Sir Owen Hopton at Cockfield Hall, Suffolk.
“Good God, who is he?” my stepgrandmother demands irritably. “Where do they keep finding these hopeless nonentities?”
“At Cockfield Hall, Suffolk,” I say, reading the letter over her shoulder. “Look at this . . .”
I point to a brief sentence. Her Majesty insists that Lady Katherine and her son are kept totally isolated. Neither receiving letters, gifts, guests, visitors, or emissaries from foreign powers.
My stepgrandmother looks at me. “What do they imagine she would do?” she demands of me. “Don’t they know that she is so sad as to barely speak? That she is eating so little that she is exhausted? That she rarely gets up from her bed, that she weeps all the time?”
I gulp down my grief at the thought of my sister, alone again, and moved even farther away from me. “Did you tell them?”
“Of course I told them. And anyway, Cecil knows everything.”
“What does the queen want of us?” I demand. “Does she just want us to die in confinement and silence, in some little out-of-the-way place where no one will complain if we just die of sorrow?”
My stepgrandmother does not answer me. She looks blankly at me as if she has nothing to say. I realize that I have spoken the truth in passion, and she has no will to deny it.
The court returns to Hampton Court, but my stepgrandmother is not ordered to attend.
“I don’t want to be the cause of your disgrace with the queen,” I say to her. “I know you have to think of your own children, Peregrine and Susan; I know that you have to keep them safe. You can’t have your household being tainted with the disfavor that follows Elizabeth’s cousins.”
She tilts her head on one side and gives me her wry smile. “I have faced worse, you know,” she says. “I served the queen who taught Elizabeth all the scholarship that she now demonstrates with such pride. I served the queen who showed Elizabeth how to rule. I served the queen who wrote the prayer book and taught Elizabeth—and your sister Jane—their theology. I served her when she faced a charge of heresy and treason. I never forget Kateryn Parr, and I am not going to be afraid of Elizabeth now.”
“I’m afraid of her,” I confess, and I feel a sudden strange release from the defiance that has been a thread through the weave of my life since I was first deployed as a pawn in my family alliances, a little girl too young to give consent, given away in an alliance with Arthur Grey. “I won’t pretend to be brave. I am afraid of her. I think that she will be my undoing. I think that she already has been. I think that she wishes my death and that of Katherine, and that she always has done.”
My redoubtable stepgrandmother gives me her brightest smile. “Survive,” she reminds me. “Survive and hope for better times.”
These are not better times for those of our religion in France. The king, dominated by his family—the Guise family—persecutes those of our faith until they rise up in a holy religious uprising. Of course, England, the primary Protestant power, should send the Huguenots arms and money, should send them an army to overthrow their papist rulers. But Elizabeth, as always, can go only halfway in any duty. She knows that she should prevent the papist rulers of France from murdering and destroying her coreligionists. But the Protestants of Scotland have overthrown her cousin the Guise French queen, and she cannot tolerate that threat to royal power. She knows she should be the enemy of the Pope who—it is said—will declare her anathema: a figure to be despised, who can be legally killed. But it is a Protestant leader in Scotland, John Knox, who calls her and Mary Queen of Scots a “monstrous regiment of women” unfit to rule, and urges all right-thinking men to rise up against them. Elizabeth is so piqued by this disrespect, so muddled in her thinking, that she hates John Knox worse than the Pope, and thinks that she should stand in sisterhood with Mary Queen of Scots as a fellow queen against him.