Nobody is going to ask me if I would like to go on a visit; nobody takes me anywhere in the barge or even invites me to come out with them. Nobody ever asks me if I want to ride out. Nobody speaks to me at all but the servants. I don’t even know if the guards on the outer gate would open the great doors for me if I walked towards them. For all I know I am a prisoner in my husband’s house. For all I know I am under house arrest, facing a charge of treason myself. Nobody tells me anything.
Actually, nobody goes anywhere. Nobody goes out at all except my father-in-law, who huddles on his best jacket and hurries to court to sit in public judgment on the very many men who were his allies only weeks ago. Now they are charged with treason and hanged one after another at every crossroads in the city. Elizabeth herself, the half sister, the heir, and for all I know, the best-hidden plotter, is suspected of treason, and I can’t say I care very much if they behead her too. Since they could behead Jane, who never wanted the throne in the first place, I don’t see why they should hesitate over Elizabeth, who has always wanted it so very badly and is a very nasty girl, so vain and such a center of gossip.
I can’t even see my little sister Mary, who is with my mother in our London house, Suffolk Place. I don’t see anybody except my father-in-law and my so-called husband at dinner and at chapel, where we pray four times a day, whispering strange words over and over again in the candlelit dusk. They don’t speak to me then, but my father-in-law looks at me as if he is surprised I am still there, and he can’t quite remember why.
I give him no cause for complaint. I am as devout as if I were an enclosed nun—a very reluctant enclosed nun. It’s not my fault! I was born and bred into the reformed religion and I learned Latin for my studies, not to mutter with a priest. I know grammar, but I never learned the prayers by rote. So the psalms and the blessings are as meaningless to me as if they were in Hebrew. I keep my head down and I mutter pious-sounding noises. I bob up and down and cross myself when everyone else does. If I were not so terribly sad, I would be bored to death. When they tell me quietly, just before Matins, that my father has been beheaded with the other traitors, I feel more exhausted than unhappy, and I don’t know what prayers should be said for him. I think that since Queen Mary is on the throne, he must have gone to purgatory and we should buy Masses for his soul, but I don’t know where you would buy Masses while the abbeys are still closed, and if they would do him any good, when Jane said there was no such place as purgatory anyway.
I feel only how very, very tiring this all is, and all I really care about is when can I go out, and if I will ever be happy again. I think this must mean that I am, as Jane said, totally without the gift of the Holy Spirit, and for a moment I think I shall tell her that she is right and I am a very worldly ninny, but inexplicably sad; and then I remember that I shall never tell her anything, ever again, and I remember that is why I am sad.
Unbelievably, my mother—the most unlikely angel in the world—delivers a true miracle. She has been constantly attending court, begging the queen that we, the innocent victims of my father’s ambition, his surviving little family of three, be forgiven his treason. My lady mother pursues the queen’s goodwill as if it were a plump deer, and in the end brings it to bay and cuts its furry throat. Once Jane is gone and can no longer be the unwilling center of any rebellion, once my father is dead and buried, the queen gives us back one of our houses, Beaumanor, near Bradgate Park, and the whole beautiful park of Loughborough stocked with our game, and we are allowed to live richly once more.
“What about the bear?” I ask Mother when she tells me of this extraordinary reprieve.
“What bear?”
“The Bradgate bear. I was taming him. Will we move him to Beaumanor?”
“For God’s sake, we have been an inch from the scaffold and you are talking to me about a bear? We’ve lost him with Bradgate, and the hounds and the horses. They’ll all go to someone in the queen’s favor. My life is ruined, I am a heartbroken widow, and you talk to me about a bear?”
Jane would have stood up to her and insisted that the bear should come with us to Beaumanor. I can’t. I don’t have the words and I cannot tell her that I feel that the bear, like Mr. Nozzle, like every living thing, deserves to be seen and considered, is fit for love. I should like to tell her that I am heartbroken too; but I can’t find the words for this and she is, anyway, not interested.
“Go to the Herberts,” she snaps. “Fetch your things from them.”
BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,
SPRING 1554
I feel that we have got home safe, ducked our heads as the scythe passed over us. Mary and Mother and I, Mr. Nozzle and Ribbon the kitten, the horses and hounds (but not the bear) are home but not home, close to the park, near enough to see the tall chimneys of our old house, missing our old house—but at any rate alive, and living together in a state of constant mild bickering that tells us that we can speak, that we can hear, that we are safe.
And we are lucky—far luckier than the others. My father never comes home, I will never see my sister again. They bury her in pieces in the chapel, and Elizabeth our cousin enters the Tower as a prisoner suspected of treason in the rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt and my father. Only the queen can say if Elizabeth will come out or if more Tudor blood will water the green, and she is not telling. For sure, I will never go there if I can help it. Never. Never.
I am glad to be safely far from London but I wish we could have gone back to Bradgate House. I miss Jane’s room and her library of books, and Mr. Nozzle misses my bedroom and his little bed on the window seat. I miss the poor bear. It is a relief to be away from the chilly silence of the Herberts’ house, and I learn that my marriage has been put aside and can be forgotten as if it never happened. Mary and my mother and I live together, as the three survivors of a great family of five, and Adrian Stokes, our master of horse, comes with us to Beaumanor, carves the meat at dinner and is attentive to my mother and kindly to Mary and me.
At least I can sit beneath the tree where Jane and I used to sit and read, and listen to the nightingale high in the branches at dusk, and my mother can gallop around and hunt as if none of this had ever happened, as if she had not lost a husband and a daughter, as if I never had an older sister.
So much for the loss “of your woeful father’s lands’—I think of Jane’s letter and think how I will tease her that we have got most of the lands back, woeful or not. I shall ask her what is worth the most now—an old book or hundreds of acres?—and then I remember, just as I remember with a jolt every day, that I can’t tell her that she was wrong, that land is bound to be worth more than an old Bible. That I will never tell her anything again.
Mary has grown hardly at all in the months that we have been in London. She is still a tiny thing, a pretty child. She has learned to stand straight, denying the little twist in her spine, so at least her shoulders are level and she walks and dances with miniature grace. I think that perhaps she has simply stopped growing from unhappiness and will never be older, just as Jane will never grow old either. It’s as if my two sisters are frozen in time, one a bride and one a child. But I don’t say anything to Mary about this, as she is only nine years old, and I don’t say anything to my mother, who has drowned the runt of every litter that her hounds have ever had.
BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,
SUMMER 1554