“Sir William Cecil’s new title.”
I nod. I see my old friend is rewarded for his unending enmity to the Scots queen.
“You are to stay in your rooms,” she confirms.
“As you have said.”
“And make no noise.”
I widen my eyes at her rudeness. “I did not intend to dance,” I say. “Or sing.”
“You are not to try to attract her attention,” she stipulates.
“My dear Lady Gresham,” I say, speaking down to her, though the top of my hood reaches her armpit, “I have spent my life trying to avoid the attention of my cousin the queen, I am not likely to bellow out to her when she is attending a banquet in your house. I only hope that you can do everything as she prefers. You have not been much at court, I think? Being a city wife, as you are? And not noble?”
She gives a muted shriek of fury and rushes from the room, leaving me laughing. Tormenting Lady Gresham is my principal entertainment. And a royal visit will give me much scope.
In fact it goes off perfectly well. Elizabeth eats her dinner in the Greshams’ banqueting hall and watches a play that praises her majesty and her greatness. Then she walks around Sir Thomas’s great folly of his merchants’ hall. The merchants do not gather here, as they do at the Bourse in Bruges. The goldsmiths and jewelers and sellers of goods have not moved into his little shops, preferring their traditional stalls or the front rooms of their houses on the busy city streets. Sir Thomas has begged all his tenants to bring all their stock for the queen to see, and he gives her gifts at every shop. Elizabeth laps up the presents and the flattery like a fat ginger cat, and calls for a herald to announce that hereafter the hall will be called the Royal Exchange, and Sir Thomas will finally make money here and his grasshopper emblem can hop all over London.
“And you are to be freed,” Lady Gresham says, poking her disagreeable face through the door of my privy chamber at the end of the day. She is flushed with triumph and wine. “Sir Thomas asked the queen and she said that you could leave us.”
“I shall be glad to go,” I say, keeping my voice steady before this unattractive bearer of good news, a most unlikely herald angel. “Am I to join my husband?”
“I don’t know,” she says, unable to taunt me with a refusal. “But you are definitely leaving.”
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, AUTUMN 1571
I wait for the order to pack my books and put Mr. Nozzle into his traveling cage, but none comes. Then I learn that William Cecil has been busy with other matters. He has uncovered a great plot to capture Elizabeth the queen. Thomas Howard is accused of working with Spain to raise an army to put Mary on the throne in her place. The court is in an uproar of fear, and nobody is going to release another heir, another Mary, even if it is only me, and everyone knows I have done nothing. Thomas Howard is returned to the Tower, the guards are reinforced at my aunt Bess’s house, and once again Elizabeth has three cousins in captivity.
I write to Thomas:
I thought I was to come to you, but it is delayed. I pray that it is nothing more than a delay. I am with you every day in my heart and my prayers. Your loving and constant wife, MK
I have no reply from him, but this does not trouble me for perhaps he has not yet had my letter, or cannot get a secret note to me. I am sitting at the window overlooking the London street when I see the doctor arriving and being admitted in the front door below my window. I have not complained of any ill health, and so I wonder who has summoned him and if Lady Gresham has poisoned with bile.
Sir Thomas himself opens the door and Dr. Smith comes into the room. So he has come to visit me. I get to my feet, filled with unease. If this is my freedom, why have they sent my physician? Why do they both look so grave?
I don’t wait for him to be announced or for him to make his bow. “Please tell me,” I say quickly. “Please tell me at once whatever it is you have come to tell me. Please tell me at once.”
The two men exchange a look, and, at that, I know that I have lost the love of my life.
“Is it Thomas?” I ask.
“Yes, my lady,” says the doctor quietly. “I am sorry to tell you that he is dead.”
“My husband?” I say. “My Thomas, Thomas Keyes? The queen’s sergeant porter, the biggest man at court? Who married me?”
I keep thinking, there is bound to be a mistake. My Thomas could not survive the Fleet in winter, get himself back to Kent, write that he will come to me, and then fail and die before we are reunited. It is not possible that our love story, such an odd unlikely story, could end so unhappily. I keep thinking, it is another Thomas, not my Thomas who stands as tall as a tree with his shoulders back and his kind eyes scanning everyone who comes to his gate.
“Yes, my lady,” the doctor says again. “I am afraid that he is dead.”
OSTERLEY PARK, MIDDLESEX,
SPRING 1572
Later, a long time later, they told me that I collapsed at the words, that I went white and they thought that I would never open my eyes. I did not speak and they thought that the news had killed me. When I did wake in my bed, I asked if it was true and when they told me, “Yes, yes, Thomas Keyes is dead,” I closed my eyes again and turned my back on the room. Facing the wall, I waited for death to come to me. It seemed to me then that I had lost everyone that I had ever loved, and everyone who belonged to me, that my life was pointless, a waste of time, that it served only to anger the queen more, that she has become a monster, the Moldwarp like her father, a great beast that lives in the bowels of England and devours her brightest children.
That Elizabeth’s malice should have broken the heart of the greatest man in England, that great man with that great spirit, does not prove her power but it shows the strength of evil when a woman thinks of nothing but herself. Elizabeth is empowered by her vanity. Anyone who suggests to her that another woman is preferable must die. Any man that prefers another woman to her must be exiled. Even someone like Thomas, who loyally served her and whose preference fell on a little woman who came no higher than his broad leather belt, even Thomas could not be suffered to live happily once he looked away from Elizabeth to someone else—to me.
They move me to Osterley Park, Sir Thomas Gresham’s country house, as if they are moving a corpse. They think that I will die on my own in the country and that all the inconvenience will be over. And this is my silent wish. It must be God’s will and I am not going to blaspheme Him by killing myself; but I don’t eat and I don’t speak. I lie with my eyes closed and the pillow beneath my head is always damp as the tears constantly seep from under my closed eyelids as I cry for my husband, Thomas, whether I am awake or asleep.